Tally hoe

As a matter of record keeping, I want to note that I fed the following plants on Friday May 25th with EB Stone’s organic vegetable food:

Sunflowers
Blueberries (was that a good idea? Not sure it was the correct food)
Radishes
Cucumbers
The accidental bean plants (I think they’re Italian rose beans)
Patty pan squash
Pumpkins

I don’t know if I ought to feed the kale. But I know I ought to feed the beets and strawberries. Perhaps tomorrow.

And speaking of kale, I need to look up how harvest this stuff. Do I cut down whole plants? Do I just harvest individual leaves that are large, leaving the centers? I will look it up, but if any of my readers have more clues than I have, please let me know.

Oh, and a lemon tree update - it seems ridiculously happy in its new location. It is putting out new leaves like nobody’s business. I’m very happy about that. I anthropomorphize citrus tress... aberrant psychology I know, but whatever. So anyway, I’d feel pretty terrible if I killed one through neglect or bad placement.

Proof that I'm tired.

My friend Ro pointed out that these are aphids... the same aphids that I dealt with last year. She said that I ought to hose them off with water and spray the plant with cayenne pepper and garlic.

These bugs don’t come off with a hose - not even set on high at close range. But I do remember those things now, so I did my best (they still don’t come off) and sprayed with a mix of cayenne pepper mixed in olive oil and dilute biodegradable dishwashing soap. I remember the concoction I used last year needed the dish soap. I didn’t have time to do the garlic, but I will add it in to the bottle so it will be garlic infused for next time.

Bird netting = people netting

I thought I would deliver a Public Service Announcement to all gardeners: If one is not careful, bird netting can double as people netting. If you, oh gardening public, do not heed my warning, you too may find yourself out among the sunflower seedlings struggling against bird predation... out there in your muddy clogs and newly ripped t-shirt, singing, “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Deliver Daniel? Deliver DAA-AA-AA-niel? Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? ... then why am I stuck in this &!#-#@$% %$#*&!^ net?!?!?!”

And speaking of &!#-#@$% %$#*&!^ things, those scaly pests are already attacking my hollyhocks. I suppose I’d figure out what they are and what to do about them.

On why T.S. Eliot is full of hooey

April is most certainly NOT the cruelest month. No, that honor goes to July or August. April is full of optimism justified. The prospect of marvelous success unrolls before you like a velvet carpet of green. The seeds spring up (yes, perhaps violently, but nothing compared to the carnage of later months) under their own power feeding off the stored nutrients in the cotyledon. As long as you put down Sluggo or beer traps, they’re too small to attract the notice of most pests. Rodents don’t care about them until they’re much larger. Aphids wait until plants have got a good vascular system to attack.

It’s too soon to find out that you planted the wrong variety for your climate, or that you chose vegetables impossible to grow in your location. You won’t realize you’ve got root maggots for at least a few more weeks if not longer. It’s too soon to realize that months of excessively heavy fog beyond even what’s normal for your area has caused the content of 90% of your beds to give up the ghost while handing the keys to the fungal kingdom on their way out. In April the spring storms sweep the sky clear and the cobalt blue expanse overhead whispers promises and love songs.

If only it stayed April for a little while longer. The treachery of summer lies just around the corner.

I came back from a weekend away to find the garden in order. I know that wouldn’t happen in July. In July I would have come home to a catastrophic die-off due to an onslaught of something from the insect world, or rodents would have spent the 48 hours recreating Toronto’s underground PATH in my yard. But it’s April, so all is dandy. I even had some sunflower sprouts to crow about. I keep seeing ladybugs and ladybug larvae, and can’t decide if that’s wonderful because they’re good to have in the garden, or an ominous sign because they love to eat aphids and their presence indicates a food source. But it’s only April so I’m an optimist... for now.

Peas, please! And radishes, too!

I’ve got sprouts! And that’s a very nice thing given how grueling this week turned out. I’m very excited, and it strikes me that germination occurred much more rapidly than last year. I have to think that’s due to duration of higher soil temperature and sun angle. No matter how mild the weather may seem, shorter days = shorter days and you can’t circumvent that short of using grow lights. And I’m not that desperate for sprouts.

Vegetable and Herb Fracas-see

We finished up setting out the garden for the summer today. I’m still nursing the head-cold, but at least I know I did my vitamin D duty. The weather’s supposed to turn foggy again tomorrow, so I’m glad we got stuff in the ground while the weather was nice for humans.

I decided to make a small herb bed. I have had herbs planted outside my kitchen door for the past year and a half, but they aren’t doing so well in that location. I thought perhaps they’d do better if they were with the rest of the garden and therefore got regular care. I chose French thyme because I use thyme quite a bit in my cooking, and evidently the French variety is not nearly as picky about it’s living quarters as the other varieties. Who knew? And I went with a kind of basil that is new to me: African basil. According to the guys at Sloat, this type of basil makes a respectable culinary basil and it is perennial in our climate and it isn’t nearly as fussy and heat-requiring as regular basil is. (Any plant that needs heat should go over the ridge behind our house and discuss their needs there, because I can’t help them. I learned that lesson last year and I’m not making the mistake twice.) And I planted regular old culinary sage because I really like sage and I am bummed I let my last plant die. I also put an oregano in a pot nearby. I’m a bit phlegmatic about it because I learned years ago that you absolutely MUST check oregano plants right there in the store before you buy because in a single batch of plants there will be some with loads of aroma/flavor and some with absolutely none and I couldn’t find a really good one when I went. (It could also be that I went when I had a head-cold and my sense of smell is still affected). I have a good oregano plant around my kitchen door but I need to find a way to get it consistently looked after because it’s suffering over there.

I finally did right by our long-suffering dwarf Meyer lemon tree. We took it out of it’s pot (it was a very large pot but the poor tree was still root bound) and found a good full-sun yet still sheltered place for it in the front yard by the driveway. That tree has lived through thick and thin despite our neglect. It stopped producing lemons awhile ago, but perhaps if it is in a good location and can settle in well it will stay happy enough to produce again.

We put in a small bed of parsley because we do use a lot of it in cooking and it’s also the lousiest bed in the garden sun-wise and it’s hard to know what else to do with it. Next to that we put in a bed of purple carrots - we loved those last year. And the beets went in a bed between the carrots and the strawberries. I went with the Bulls Blood beets again - they grew brilliantly last year and I want some “sure things”. If I have good success with the garden this year maybe I’ll get fancier beets for the next go around.

I read up on garlic and a number of sources said that it’s best grown interplanted - it chases away certain kinds of vermin and it’s happier that way, anyway. So I interplanted it with the peas - peas are nitrogen fixers so the soil oughtn’t to get too depleted that way. These are the bulbs that I pulled last year and stored in the fridge. Many had started sprouting. I’m not so sure they’re going to result in great garlic heads, but I thought since I went to the trouble I’d give them a try. The reason I wonder about them is that I don’t know their source - they were here when I bought the house. Lots of books and online sources say “don’t plant supermarket garlic” because it could carry diseases or be treated to prevent sprouting... and I wouldn’t put it past the previous owners to do just that. But on the other hand, these are sprouting like crazy and they do look healthy and they’ve already been in the ground here. So what the hey, and if the garlic fails there are at least peas in the bed.

One smaller bed next to the blueberries just got flowers this year - two California natives. One is Baby Blue Eyes, a very pretty annual, and the 'Rose Chiffon' variety of California Poppy. I only have four plants in there, I may want to get more. On the other hand, they’re native - maybe they’ll do well and spread around?

In the really big bed between the kale and the peas we mixed it up with interplanted Purple Dragon carrots and Watermelon Radishes. These are all seeds from last year - it will be interesting to see if there’s a drop in germination rate. The birds seem to like them just the same - I need to get some floating row covers in for those beds.

Finally... the reason for this blog entry’s name... I put a brawl in the little triangular bed in the very corner of the garden. You see, I planted English lavender and French lavender right next to each other, and I expect loud inebriated arguments coming from that quarter in very short order. Something about the vulgarity of fish and chips and how beer is infinitely better than some foppish chichi wine.

And, now for the hard part... maintaining it all! I hope the bad bugs take a vacation and the good bugs come hang out at my place. (I hope that I’ve stacked my deck a bit better than last year by planting certain kinds of flowers, and I’ll be buying nematodes prophylactically later this week.) Here’s to an uneventful summer!

So much for keeping my promises

My lingering head-cold did not keep me out of the garden today. I was able to get quite a bit done with the excellent assistance of Mr. Yak. I’ve sort of stuck to my guns about dialing back the garden this year... well, not really. A few things were brought to my attention that I didn’t consider when I made my goals list in the last post:

• Strawberries grow ridiculously well here with very little effort. Our problem has been in the past that they were not planted in mounds and they were put too closely together, so they got gross and mildewy and magotty... all the while producing buckets of strawberries we were too skeeved out to touch. Our solution: dig out the old strawberry bed, move one bed over (larger) and plant fewer plants on bonafide hills. We shall see! It’s a relatively new day-neutral variety developed up at UC Davis - Diamonte.
• Likewise, the cukes did brilliantly, producing “sneaker” cukes that I’d miss under the leaves that would wind up larger than Shaquille O’Neal’s feet. In fact, two of the plants over-wintered despite my neglect, so we kept them and planted more. Two varieties, in fact. One is the cleverly named “Homemade Pickles” variety, while the other is an interesting type - “Lemon” that looks for all the world like a lemon but supposedly tastes like an apple you can eat right off the vine.
• Evidently we MUST GROW PUMPKINS, even if we can’t. I upped my odds of success by choosing a miniature variety (“Baby Bear”) and planting it in the sunniest spot I could find in the garden. I didn’t want to devote an entire bed to failure so I co-planted it with another squash, this time of the summer variety - “Sunburst” patty pan squash.

I did plant two things from seed straight into the ground. (Actually, I put them in paper pots because I wanted to put down some mulch.) One is a row of mammoth Russian sunflowers - I took seeds from my flowerhead that grew so huge last year and double planted them - two per paper pot. I also used seeds from last year’s purchase for Burpeanna Early shelling peas. Yay for me - those two were on my “It’s not insane to plant these” list.

I also planted some dino kale (Toscano) in the same bed as the sunflowers, on the west side of them. They wouldn’t get morning sun anyway due to the shed.

And of course the blueberries are here from last year - they’re perennial and should last decades. Unbeknownst to me they’ve been quietly producing berries despite my neglect.

What’s left?

• I have a large quantity of garlic to plant dug up from last year.
• Beets
• Carrots?
• Radishes?

And I have one really large bed I’ve yet to think of what to do with... perhaps one of the above crops... perhaps something else entirely.

And then there are the ornamentals that attract beneficial insects, but I will save that for a later post. There’s only so much a girl with a head-cold can do.