Almost Froze to Death Last Night

Last night there was a frost weather advisory for our area. The overnight temperature was supposed to be in the low 30's and a freeze was possible. The National Weather Service warned gardeners to cover anything that could be damaged by frost.

I've still got pear blossoms, apple blossoms, and lettuce, spinach, carrot, broccoli, and celery in the garden. Most of these vegetables are pretty cold hardy but the flowers on the fruit trees could be damaged. Something gets me every year so I figured this was probably the thing.

I had to get into work early this morning for a super secret project I'm working on so I left the house around 3:00...am. The temperature was 40º. The temperature rose slowly until the sun came up. We never had a frost.

I'm proud of that because I feel I had a part in protecting all of the gardens in my area. Thanks to the enormous carbon footprint I've endeavored to leave on the earth, I was able to do my part to thwart a damaging late spring freeze. I'm skeptical about global warming but if it turns out to be something, I want to do my part to usher in the new era of longer growing seasons, expanded crop land, and fewer icy highway fatalities.




Everyone wants to leave a legacy, some monument for mankind to remember that we were here, that we mattered. My legacy will be my footprint on the planet...my enormous carbon footprint.

Asparagus under attack

I found a spotted asparagus beetle in my asparagus. At least I thought I did. I did a little research and now I'm pretty sure it's really just a ladybug but it can be hard to tell the difference and you have to admit it does look like it's eating the asparagus.

NOT an asparagus beetle

And this one had an especially up-to-no-good look about her.

an especially ferocious ladybug

No harm done. I was ready to go all Malathion on his raster but some last minute sanity on my part kept her alive another day.

On an unrelated topic, some good news: We've got peaches. They're a little under ripe but they're starting to look juicy and delicious.

peaches

Giant Magic Marker O' Death V.2.0

I spent the last two evenings mowing the lawn. I've got a big 6' wide commercial mower that I bought used last year. The spindle bearings were worn when I bought it but I waited until just a month ago to order parts. They came and I rebuilt one of the 3 spindles and found out the other two were a different design and needed different bearings. I ordered bearings again. They came and I put the mower back together last weekend. I had the pulley height wrong on the shafts and broke a drive belt. I ordered that on Monday.

The result is that I was about 3 weeks late cutting the lawn for the first time and it was high, really high. It's a tough mower and I had to run it in 1st gear almost the whole time to keep it from stalling. I can usually mow in about an hour and a half but it took me two evenings this time. I'm probably going to need a bailer for all the grass clippings. (For you city dwellers, a bailer turns hay (cut grass) into hay bales (square or round blocks of hay...it was just a joke)

But the mowing's done so tonight, I got a chance to do a couple of things in the garden again.

I repaired/replaced/redesigned the irrigation for my strawberries. It's warming up and they need water pretty bad. I installed 3 soaker lines. Soaker hose is a loosely formed hose made of shredded tire rubber. Water oozes out all over and waters what ever's near the hose. I wanted 1/4" soaker hose and couldn't find it locally so I had to order that. It came Monday and I finally got around to installing it today. If you look carefully, you can see 3 pieces of hose running through the strawberries.

strawberries w/ soaker hose and freshly cut grass.

The two apple trees and the nectarine tree I planted earlier this spring are starting to get leaves. I'm probably 3 or 4 years from actually having any fruit but at least they're showing signs of having survived the trip across the country in a UPS truck.

new apple tree

We had some more asparagus with dinner this evening. This time my wife tried to hid it in a cheesy, shrimp and pasta dish she makes. Tonight, she substituted asparagus for the broccoli she usually adds. I'll be glad when asparagus season's done.

And finally, I think I have solved the initial problems with the Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death. A friend tipped me off to the weedball. a similar but clearely inferior product. If I wanted to massage the weeds away, I'd use a soothing rolling ball to do the job. But if you want to stab and jab the weeds to death, The Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death is the best tool for the job. But I'm still amazed that they saw my post Monday last week and were able to get a product to market so fast.

Well, my first design used a porous plug to keep the herbicide from running out and it didnt' work. I got thinking. The wick from an oil lamp sits above the oil and oil runs up the wick by capillary action. What if I had a small amount of herbicide at the bottom and a cotton wick stuck into the liquid. The herbicide would be drawn up the wick keeping the wick damp but not dripping. So I built it.

GardenerX invents the (already
invented) capillary siphon

A piece of cotton rag acts as the wick and it works pretty well. However, there is a minor issue that still needs handling. By turning the wick back down again toward the ground, I ended up creating a capillary siphon. I had never heard of it either. As you probably remember from grade school science, if you put a hose in a bucket of water, suck on the hose to fill the hose with water, and then let the free end of the hose drop to a height lower than the bucket; the bucket will empty out through the hose. That's a siphon. In this case, the herbicide is being drawn up the cotton rag and then gravity is helping it down to the bottom where it's still dripping off the bottom of the rag. If it was allowed to drip for long enough, it would empty the small reservoir of herbicide. I filled the reservoir with water and let it sit on my desk for an hour or so. I just kept dripping. drip, drip, drip. I thought, "It almost acts like it's siphoning the water" and typed "capillary siphon" into Google. It turns out it's a real thing and, like all great ideas, someone else figured it out first. It drips really slow so it's completely usable but it could use some tweaking.

Another gardening innovation brought to you by GardenerX, but Stay tuned for Giant_Magic_Marker_O'_Death Version 2.1.

Asparagus: Not completely Awful

We had our first batch of asparagus this evening with dinner. Actually, it's my first asparagus ever. I've seen it on the menu before but with stomachs having limited room, it never made it high enough on the list to actually be tried. It's a fern and I'm not sure people are supposed to eat ferns. However, the same kind of thinking would have kept me from enjoying mushrooms on my pizza since fungus seems like it belongs on the "do not eat" list too. So, being an open minded kind of guy, I figured that after 37 years of avoiding it, I'd try Asparagus.

Wow, it looks like a picture in a magazine!
(until you notice the plastic disposable cup
in the upper right corner.
I moved the Styrofoam plates and the
Bounty paper towel "napkins" to make it look
more classy.)

I followed a simple recipe I found online and blanched the asparagus before cooking on the stove with a little butter and garlic. My wife said they were the best she's ever had. My 8 year old daughter had a second helping. My 15 month old son once ate a cricket so his opinion on food should be considered with skepticism but he ate it too. I didn't hate them as much as I thought I would.

Now, I went into this thing understanding it wasn't going to taste like a bacon cheeseburger, so in all fairness, the bar wasn't really set very high. Taking that into consideration, the asparagus really wasn't that bad. If they were served to me when I was a guest in someone's home, I could probably eat them to be polite and not even make yucky faces.

A few more garden notes: My strawberries are starting to flower. I put in the strawberry patch last spring and pinched off all the flowers last year so they'd put out runners and new plants instead of making fruit. This year, I get to have strawberries. This is another thing I've never grown and I'm curious to see how it pans out.

strawberry flowers

My grapes are starting to get some leaves. The vines are 4 years old this year. I had 3 vines last year and got grapes for the first time. I have a red seedless, purple seedless, and green seedless variety. The red seedless has seeds so who knows what that really is. We had more grapes last year than we could eat and I added 3 seeded varieties last spring so we should have even more this year.

grape vines getting leaves

The problem with grapes is they're only good fresh. I've never heard of freezing or canning grapes. Since you eat them fresh, you have to eat them when they're ripe and grapes ripen over about 2 weeks. If you only end up with 10 lbs of grapes, you've got 2 weeks to eat them so you better like grapes.

And finally, my apple trees are in bloom. These are the two 5-in-1 apple grafts that have 5 different varieties grafted onto one trunk and are supposed to produce 5 varieties on each tree.

Apple blossoms

Last year, only the golden delicious branches had any apples. This year it looks like almost every branch has flowers. Maybe I will get more than one variety. I was pretty skeptical about this working out. In fact, I was so skeptical that I put 2 regular apple trees in this year in case my 5-in-1's turned out to be a dud. We'll see.

A Slow Week

It's been a busy week. I'm not sure why. I don't think I had more to do than usual but I just didn't' have the time I wanted to spend working on the Garden. I planted a few things but overall not much got done. So there's not much to blog about this week.

It's gotten warm. Last week was mostly in the 70º's or close to it. It hit 84º yesterday. Today's in the upper 60's. The rest of the garden will go in in the next two or three weeks.

We ordered 25 more strawberry plants from the local Ag Extension office during the winter came in a few days ago. I put in 75 plants last year. Those 75 put out runners that grew more plants and those new plants did the same thing. By the end of last Summer, I had a pretty good matted row of strawberries 25 feet long and about 4' wide. It has a few thin spots here and there so I planted 25 more plants in those spots. I'm sure it didn't need it. It will fill in the bare spots on its own. But I'm very impatient.

Strawberry plants don't look like much before they're planted. Actually they just look like roots. But they grow fast. These will look like strawberries in a few weeks.

strawberry plants

The asparagus I planted last year is starting to pop up. Each of the surviving 18 plants has at least one spear. The photo below is the biggest. I'm actually considering having some asparagus with dinner tonight. I've always wondered what asparagus tasted like but was pretty sure it was bad. Tonight we'll see for sure.

asparagus spears

I've got two varieties of asparagus. Last Spring, I planted 10 plants of an old variety called Mary Washington and 10 plants of a new variety called Jersey Knight. The Jersey Knight is supposed to be almost all male plants. Male plants don't expend energy making seeds and therefore grow into bigger plants that make more asparagus than female plants.

Yesterday, I picked up some celery plants and broccoli plants at a local garden center. I tried celery from seed last year and nothing even came up. I've never seen celery plants before and was looking for celery seeds to try again but found this instead.

celery and broccoli

Six celery and eight broccoli plants completed the 4th row in the garden. Last year, we grew 4 broccoli plants and harvested broccoli for a month. We don't eat a lot of broccoli but we still have broccoli in the freezer from last season.

celery and broccoli planted

I also picked up some onion sets from the garden center at the same time. Onion sets were $1.99 per pound. I ended up with 40 cents worth of onions sets. That's enough for a full row and more than I'll actually eat. I never have much luck with onions. I think our soil is just too heavy and onions don't do well if they're kept wet. They like sand because it drains easily. Add to that the fact that I should have had them in the ground a couple of weeks ago and the forecast for onions this year isn't so good.

I had planted the row of celery and broccoli yesterday and then left to work on my mower. By the time I got back out to the garden, the bag had been shredded and the onions were spread around the grass. I'm not sure what was after the onions but I'm sure whatever it was will find them in the garden and leave me with none.

The pear trees are in full bloom. If you look at the upper right of the photo below, you can see a small bee checking out a flower.

pears in full bloom.

I had posed here that my rhubarb was flowering. I did some reading and it's not supposed to. Rhubarb only flowers if it's under distress from poor soil, not enough water, or some other problem. It turns out that the flowering takes up so much of the plant's energy that it won't make many stalks. So I cut off the flower stalks yesterday morning. I've also fertilized and watered it well. We'll see if it starts to produce more stalks.

rhubarb sans flower stalks.

Rhubarb Flowers and the Giant Magic Marker of Death

Today was "spray day". This early in the spring, I've only planted a few rows in the garden. The rest of the garden has been sitting for three weeks and weeds are starting to pop up. That's a good thing. It gives me a chance to eliminate some of the weed seeds before they are competition with my plants.

I sprayed the entire un-planted part of the garden with Roundup this evening. Roundup is a non-selective (kills everything) herbicide. It's absorbed by the green parts of a plant and blocks one chemical involved in photosynthesis. The plant can't make sugar and starves to death in a few days. I also sprayed a circle around my fruit trees, between all my blackberries, blueberries, and grapes, and wherever I could spray in the asparagus and rhubarb without killing anything I want to keep.

Roundup in the garden

I hate to hand weed or hoe so I spray anything I can. In fact, most people mow the lawn and then trim the strips around stuff where the mower wouldn't go. Not me. Whatever I can't get with my riding mower gets sprayed with roundup. A 6" dead strip around the house, shop, shrubs, trees, and anything else that doesn't move saves me lots of time keeping the yard cut.

The rhubarb is really taking off. It's flowering now. It was a new planting last spring, I've never grown it before, and I just don't know much about rhubarb. I didn't realize it had such big flowers. I think I'll get quite a bit of rhubarb this year. I wonder what rhubarb is used for?

Rhubarb flowering

One place where I really have weed problems is my strawberries. I've got a strawberry patch that's probably 25' long and 4' wide and the weeds are almost uncontrollable. The problem is that strawberries grow so close together that you can't get in there to get rid of the weeds. Hand weeding is too much work and there's no way to work a hoe in the tiny spaces without damaging the strawberry plants. spraying is definitely out of the question.

Always looking for an easier way to do something, I did something different this year. About a month ago, before any of the summer weeds had began to sprout, I sprayed the strawberries with a chemical called napropamide. Napropamide doesn't' kill anything that's growing but it does prevent any seeds from sprouting. The idea is that the winter weeds that were growing when I sprayed will die off when the weather warms up and the weeds that normally sprout in the Spring just won't.

strawberries (three leaves) and the weeds (everything else).

I actually think it's working. There's a lot more bare space between the strawberry plants than there was last year at this time. But I've still got some weeds in there that I have to deal with. I'd love to spray them with Roundup but I'd just end up killing the strawberries. What to do?

Not to worry, I came up with an idea. What if I had a giant magic marker, you know a 6 foot long felt tip pen that was filled with Roundup instead of ink? Then I could stick it in between the strawberries and draw the herbicide right on the weeds where I wanted it. So I built one. It's not fancy, just a few plastic pipe fittings and a 6' piece of 1/2" PVC pipe. A threaded cap on one end to allow filling the pipe with herbicide and some sort of wick on the other end to act like the felt tip.

The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death

The wick turned out to be the problem. I jambed a tightly rolled piece of cotton rag, a tightly rolled piece of felt, and a firmly compressed kitchen sponge into the end of the pipe. Each time, my test herbicide (plain water) just dripped out through the wick during each test. I can't have Roundup dripping , making little dead spots in the grass, as I walk out to the garden. The final experimental wick was a donation made by my wife. I'll just say it goes by the French word for plug. That turned out to be a failure too. I ended up just dipping the donated wick in Roundup and dabbing it on the weeds. That worked fine for today but my wick experiments are not over. It took Edison a thousand tries to find a suitable light bulb filament. When I perfect this, Maybe I'll patent the "wick hoe", otherwise known as The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death. Another garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX.

The French business end of The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death.

Salad Seeds

Earlier today I posted that it was just to wet to plant anything today. The sun and wind dried things out and My 8 year old daughter and I got a couple of rows in late this afternoon.




In my garden, some things get planted in distinct rows like corn and peppers. Other things get planted in swath's about a foot wide. That's what we did today with carrots, radish, spinach and several different types of lettuce. We raked out a flat, level row about 18 inches wide, stretched some strings across the garden to give us nice strait sides to our wide row and just broadcast the seeds on the ground between the strings. A pass with a rake to lightly cover the seeds with soil and we were done.

two new rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, and radishes

When these come up, everything will be growing too close together and we'll have to pull most of the lettuce and spinach to make room for full sized heads. As soon as the heads get just big enough to harvest, they will be eaten by deer. When we want lettuce, we'll go to a restaurant and get the salad bar. The stuff there is going to be better than anything I could grow anyway.

The carrots, on the other hand, will not be eaten by the deer. Carrots are clever vegetables and they hide underground where the deer can't see them. The carrots will, however, be overtaken by weeds. You can't hoe or spray weeds in carrots because I grow them too close together to be able to weed between them. But the radishes will do great. They grow so fast and in cool enough weather that weeds don't get a chance to take over. Yum, baskets full of radishes.

After we planted today, I wanted to lightly water everything in. It rained quite a bit over the past couple of days but It's good to be sure. I pulled my customized sprinkler out of the shop and set it up for the first time today. Irrigating a garden this time of year is easy but as the plants get taller, they block the sprinkler from getting everything wet. A few dense rows of corn between the sprinkler and cucumbers means wilting cucumbers. The solution I came up with last year is to put the sprinkler up on a post so it can spray over the tall stuff.



Since my garden's twice as long as it is wide, I can irrigate with two sprinklers. One waters one half and the other waters the other half. But I've only got one sprinkler. No problem. I made up customized sprinkler support posts with a sleeve I can slide my sprinkler into. I water from one post on the first night and move the sprinkler to the other post the second night. A garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX. It saves time and makes watering easy. Let's be honest...gardening sucks... why make it harder than it has to be.

Rain Day

I had garden plans but then it rained. I was planning to plant a few things but it was raining yesterday and the ground's too muddy today. According to my rain gauge, we got 7/10ths of an inch Saturday. I may try to get something in later this afternoon. The sun's out today and if the wind keeps blowing the way it is now, the ground may be workable in a few hours.


Not much to do at the moment but read a book.

Eat Your Peas

I know it's spring because plants are starting to sprout. The peas I planted on March 25th and 30th are staring to pop up. I saw the first one on Wednesday and about half the seeds were up this evening. Only 51 days till we have real peas. I can't wait to push these things to the side as I eat my dinner. Having peas with dinner is like going out to meet girls and taking your ugliest friend along. You bring the peas to make the rest of the food look eatable. I believe God was very clear with his intentions concerning peas when he failed to make them out of meat.

Peas, Punishment Food

The two peach trees have already peaked and are starting to drop petals. The Pears are just getting ready to bloom. Last year, I had a total of three pear flowers but no pears. This year, the two trees are completely covered with flower buds. I mean hundreds. I know you aren't supposed to count your pears before they hatch but it's looking good so far.

A tasty mouth-watering peach.

A Fruit Basket full of Bosc Pears

Everything in the Garden/orchard/fruit rows got fertilizer this evening. I bought a cheap bag of low quality fertilizer last year. Fertilizer is sold using 3 numbers that tell you how much actual nutrient is in the stuff. A typical formulation would be 20-20-20 which is 20% Nitrogen, 20% Phosphorous, and 20% Potassium. I bought a mix of 6-0-2. I actually bought it because I wanted something with lots of Iron and this stuff had Iron but as fertilizer it's pretty light.

So I dumped cup fulls of this stuff all around. Each tree got probably 5 lbs of fertilizer, the grapes, berries, asparagus, and everything else is growing out of a mound of fertilizer. If this was the good stuff, that much fertilizer would burn the plants and probably kill them but I think I'll be okay.

Remember the walking stick cabbage I planted in baby food containers? Well I did, and they're sprouting too. I'll soon have 8' tall cabbage-topped walking sticks to take on all my walks.

(Soon to Be) Giant Walking Stick Cabbage.

Cabbage on a Stick

Looks like I'll probably blog on the weekends. That makes sense since I'll mostly be working on the garden on the weekends.

The weather's finally warming up. It was in the 60's this afternoon and pretty comfortable. The peaches are in full bloom. In third grade science, I learned that each flower will eventually become a delicious peach. Growing my own peaches taught me that they'll all be eaten by bugs, infested with worms, or just fall off the tree for no apparent reason.


I spent a little time today fixing some things around the garden. It's still to cold and too early to do much actual gardening. I turned on all the irrigation stuff and found a few drip emitters that weren't dripping. Replaced those with new ones. The openings in these things are so tiny that a speck of dirt will plug them up. I buy the cheap ones so there's no way to take them apart for cleaning. Instead of wasting money on the good ones and keeping them forever. I save money buy buying new ones every few months. I'll have to rethink that.


Drip emitters drip water slowly right at the base of the plant. I turn the water on in the evening and by morning everything's been watered. I use some sort of drip irrigation for the grapes, blackberries, blueberries, asparagus, and strawberries. I've also got some small spray emitters for the fruit trees. I'm a lazy guy. Watering by hand is like work.



When testing everything, I also found some soaker hose that had been cut in several places. Oddly enough, the cut pieces were right in the same spots that I used a machete in the fall to cut my asparagus plants flush to the ground. Mysterious.

Every year, I like to grow some oddities. Last year it was sugar sorghum (like sugar cane but not tropical), birdhouse gourds, parsnips, and sugar beets. I killed the sorghum when I sprayed weedkiller between garden rows on a windy day. The birdhouse gourds did great. We ended up with over a hundred really big gourds. The parsnips never came up and neither did the sugar beets.

This year, I've ordered some oddities again.


I order weird seeds from seedman, the superhero of seeds. He's got a lot of weird stuff. This year I'm going with Anise, Luffa Sponge, more Sugar Cane (I'll just be more careful this time), Peanuts, and Giant Walking Stick Cabbage. I got my seeds in the mail just this week.

The Giant Walking Stick Cabbage was supposed to be started indoors a month and a half ago. Oops. I started it a few days ago in babyfood containers sitting in the laundry room window. If they make it, I'll transplant them outside in another month or so.



I've never seen Giant Walking Stick Cabbage but it's supposed to grow a straight stalk 8' high and then a cabbage like thing grows at the top. You can eat the cabbage like thing and if you dry the stalk it makes a great walking stick. no matter how you look at it, it's a win-win. You get cabbage which everybody hates and a walking stick you probably don't need.

On a non-gardening note: I was checking out my friend, Fairgirl's blog today (don't think just or reasonable. Think albino), and I see she's linked to my blog on hers. So it's only fair (just or reasonable) that I do the same. You can check out the post and her blog here. She gives a disclaimer about some blogs not being politically correct. I think she's talking about me.