Why gardening might not be for me

I know this electrician. He owns his own business and spends most of his time working alongside his electricians on job sites. I supervise a crew of maintenance mechanics is several trades and spend most of my time on different sites getting my hands dirty too.

He told me a story about his neighbor that has gotten me thinking about my gardening.

His neighbor comes home every day and spends an hour or more tending his lawn. Mowing, spraying, moving paving stones, shoveling mulch, hand pulling dandelions, and probably lots of other stuff. My friend has a perfectly acceptable lawn but not nearly as immaculate as his neighbor's.

So the two bump into each other one weekend while working on their lawns. The neighbor starts giving my friend lawn care tips. He tells my friend how to kill the weeds, how to a little fertilizer would help, and that a load of mulch would take care of the weeds growing up around the shrubs.

My friend tells his neighbor "You spend your day sitting down behind your desk in your office and when you get home you want to spend your evening doing something with your hands and getting dirty. I spend my day working with my hands and getting dirty. When I get home I want to spend my evening sitting down."

Vine Borers, Cabbage Stalks, and Pickles

Yesterday I spotted a vine borer moth flying around the lone pumpkin that sprouted on its own in a flower bed. I had pumpkins wiped out by this bug a couple of years ago. It lays eggs near the base of the vine and when they eggs hatch, the little worm eats its way inside. Once in the vine,it just keeps eating and growing. Eventually it's eaten so much that the vine wilts and dies. That's how I found out I had them...one morning all my vines were wilted and dead.

When I saw this moth yesterday, I watered the pumpkin and added a little imidacloprid at the base of the vine. This is one of my favorite chemicals. It gets absorbed by a plant and makes the plant poisonous to bugs but not to us. One bite and it's dead bug. I don't know if it's approved for pumpkins but I won't be eating these anyway so I'm not that worried. Hopefully it will work.

We've had hot dry weather for a long time. We finally got rain last night. According to my rain gauge we got an inch and 7/10. That's a lot of water.




This morning is the first time in weeks that I don't hear a dozen large diesel irrigation pumps running at full throttle in the far off distance. Also noticeably absent is tap-tap-tap of a dozen large irrigation guns that we've been hearing and seeing in all directions. It's oddly quiet.

I have been growing "Giant Walking Stick Cabbage" as an experiment this year. According to the info that was in the seed catalog, these things grow a tall stalk with something similar to a cabbage at the top. The dried stalk is supposed to make a good walking stick. Right now these things look like big kale, and are just growing at ground level. No stalk. I have been expecting these things to make some sort of stalk with a seed head just like lettuce, raddish, spinach, and other similar plants will when the weather gets hot. Turns out I was wrong.

I did some searching and found out that to get the stalk, you need to remove the lower leaves. as long as you keep removing the lower leaves, it will grow taller and make more leaves. So this morning I removed the lower leaves. Now it's looking more like I expected.




Something's been cutting the leaves off of my peppers. Probably a leaf cutter worm of some sort.



Now for some of the good news:

I had my first peach this morning. Not as soft and ripe as I prefer but good enough to eat and actually tasted like a peach. We'll probably only end up with a dozen actually etable peaches between the fungusus, insects, june drop, and other problems but this is my first year getting any peaches so a dozen's better than none. (I almost said 12x better but everyone knows you have to multiply 0 by ∞ to get 12 but somehow a dozen peaches just doesn't feel infinitely better)

The pear I thought I was going to loose hasn't shown any signs of fire blight in a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of summer left so I'm not out of the woods yet but I'm hopeful. It's even still got a few pears on it.


And finally, I had enough cucumbers and dill to make a batch of pickles. I made some last year that were not terrible but were too salty. This year I changed the recipe a little and increased the amount of vinegar and only used half the salt. I used my own cucumbers and dill and had to buy garlic. I did spears, flat round slices for burgers, and long flat slices for sandwiches. We'll know if they're any good in 8 weeks.

Quote of the Day

My wife:

"you won't be happy until this is a super fund site."

Dead Fuji?

My favorite apple is probably Fuji. I like Rome's too but fuji's are best. They're not a pretty as a the familiar red delicious but the red delicious apples were selectively bred for looks, not for taste. I ordered a few more fruit trees in the spring and one was a fuji apple.

For some reason, the best fruits and vegetables are always the hardest to grow. It's happens too often for it to just be a coincidence. Fuji apples are no exception. I've had a bad case of fire blight in my pears this year. I've been cutting blighted branches out, removing them from the area, and even dipping my pruning shears in bleach between cuts so I don't spread the bacteria. I havent' seen any fire blight in a couple of weeks and thought I might have been out of the woods. I wasn't.

Fuji's are very suseptable to fire blight. In general fire blight isn't really an apple disease. Apple trees can get it but it's not usually serious...unless you have fuji apples. I check my trees every day and didn't see anything on Sunday. Yesterday (Monday) evening I found this:

Fuji apple with fire blight

Every single branch is curled at the tip, and the leaves are turning brown.

close up of fire blight

It looks like fire blight. If it was one or two branches, I'd cut off the bad branches several inches below the damage. It's the whole top of the tree so I cut off the top of the tree. The worst part is that this proves it's still in my little orchard and will probably jump back into the other trees.

fuji apple stick

I don't know if it will survive. The blight might have already gotten into the trunk. If not, It might put out suckers and actually make it. I had a 12' tall walnut tree break off in a bad windstorm a month ago and had to cut it off 3' from the ground. It didn't have a branch on it and it came back pretty fast. Of course the walnut has 3 years worth of healthy roots and the fuji's only been in the ground for 4 months.

the walnut recovering

Hot and Thirsty

It's been in the mid to upper 90's for a week and we haven't had any real rain in several weeks. It might have been a month since we've had more than just a brief evening thunderstorm. The grass crunches when you walk on it and everything around here looks parched. I've been watering every day and am having a hard time keeping up. The loofa gourds are looking especially thirsty. They got water overnight on Friday and they're already wilted again. I guess they'll get water again this afternoon.

luffa gourds

The grapes are looking pretty good. Even I have a hard time messing up grapes. The vines grow wild like weeds around here and they're hard to kill. Getting grapes from the vines takes a little work since grapes don't really make fruit unless you prune them but that's not too much work. They fruit to produce a second generation if they're in danger so you have to cut them hard enough to really scare them. A grape vine can grow to be 100 ft. long. I cut all of mine to about 6' long. I also cut off all the branches and just leave a few buds to make new branches. This jumble of vines will be just two little branches this winter.

grapes

To get supermarket quality grapes requires a lot of work but all I really need is grapes that are eatable and that's pretty easy.

We've got a volunteer squash of some sort growing in a flower bed around the house. I don't know what it is for sure yet but I'm guessing pumpkin. Maybe we dropped a seed there when making jack-o-lanterns. I don't know where it came from but we're letting it grow. We had to trail it up over the steps to the laundry room to save it from the mower.

volunteer pumpkin?

June Bugs

It's always something

I Hate Gardening

I'd like to start with a gardening truism. Let's call this gardening truism #1.

"Gardening is Stupid."

Yesterday, I pulled some of the onions. I chopped up about a dozen and put them into zip-lock bags and stuck them in the freezer. My eyes hurt so bad from the chopping that I couldn't see through the tears and had to feel my way to the bath room to rinse out my eyeballs with water twice so I could continue chopping.






Today, almost 24 hours later, the kitchen still smells like onions, the fridge smells like onions, The smell in the freezer is overwhelming, and my hands still smell like onions.

And what do I have to show for my trouble? Onions! If all this work resulted in a lasagna dinner with cheesecake it wouldn't have been worth it but I don't have lasagna or cheesecake, I have stinky little bits of onion.

I could have bought onions at the supermarket in stink-proof plastic bags that would not have made me cry. The amount of work I have to do to earn enough money to buy good chopped onions would have been less time than I had to work to end up with these crappy chopped onions.

This leads me to gardening trusim #2:

"Anything you grow yourself will be crappier than anything you can buy in the supermarket."

More good than bad.

Today the carrots are almost carrot sized.




I first noticed watermellons on the vines about a week ago. Now they're probably 6" across.





The tiny, sickly little pepper plants have more pepper than plant.





The celery looks just like the stuff in the store. I even used some in a pasta salad the other day. I plan to wrap them in paper soon for a couple of weeks to lighten the stalks and remove some of the bitter flavor.





The corn is as high as an elephant's eye today.





The cucumbers have cucumbers





The replacement tomatoes in the garden have a few tomatoes and even my hanging tomato has tomatoes.





And best of all, the Japanese Beetles keep dying.

Good news and bad news

The good news is the Japanese Beetle attack is just about over. The next morning, I went out to check the grapes by the headlights of my car (I left for work pretty early that day) and found hundreds of beetles laying upside down dead on top of the leaves. Victory! Unfortunately it was a windy day and by the time I got home from work, all the dead beetles had blown away so I couldn't get a picture.

More good news is that my peaches are looking good and just about ripe. I think I'll have peaches in a week or two.




The bad news is that the fire blight I had in my pears is still there.




I've had to cut out several more branches and some were pretty big. Since fire blight can reach several inches beyond the obvious infection, I'm hoping it hasn't made it all the way to the trunk of the tree but it seems like there's a good chance it has. There's really nothing that can be done at this point to control the disease other than to continue to cut out branches. I've only got two pear trees and I'd hate to loose one.

And to add insult to injury, it looks like the fire blight has jumped to my apple trees.




I've been cutting out a few branches here and there but the infection is still pretty small in the apples. Hopefully we can get through the rest of the summer and spray some streptomycin early next year.

Japanese Attack!

My computer's been down. I wanted to post that it had a bug but the problem really was that it didn't have a registry. I'm not an expert on computers but I learned this past weekend that if your computer has a corrupt registry, it won't work. It won't boot windows, it won't do anything. It becomes a paperweight with your life trapped inside.

So I had to reinstall everything from scratch. Fortunately I was able to recover most of our files but I expect that it will take me another month before everything's working the way it was working before.

There wasn't very much to post about anyway. It's been hot, and dry for several weeks. I'm running water somewhere in the garden almost every day trying to keep up. It's the time of the summer when things get a little bigger every week but nothing interesting happens. The spring fruits and vegetables are done and now we're just waiting for something to be ready in the fall.

Nothing interesting happened until today.





Today, at work, I noticed a couple of Japanese Beetles flying around. I made a mental note to check my grapes when I got home. I forgot the note. This evening, My wife mentioned that her roses were covered with beetles. So I went out to see and sure enough so were my grapes. I had this problem a couple of years ago, it only lasts a few days but these bugs can eat a grape vine bare in that time.




I sprayed some pyrethrin which knocks bugs down fast and some sevin which sticks around for a while. Hopefully they'll all be dead soon. They've already eaten lots of leaves down to the skeleton in just a day.




Japanese Beetles are immigrants to the us accidentally imported from Japan 90 years ago . They do a lot of damage but they will do jobs that American bugs won't do.