Inorganic Gardening

Wildlife

2009-05-11T19:46:00.004-04:00

This morning, as I was pulling out of the driveway for work, I spotted something moving in the far corner of the property. The groundhog population has been on the rise and I've got holes in the ground all over the place so I first thought it was the groundhog I've been after for a few weeks.

I watched for a few seconds and it wasn't a groundhog. I wasn't sure what it was, I could only see the top half of it because the ground drops off right where it was standing. It didn't move quite like anything I was familiar with so I kept watching. A minute or so later I realized it was a raccoon. Odd to see a raccoon in the day time and this one wasn't acting very raccooney. Slow moving, almost staggering, didn't seem to notice the cat that was watching it from only 30 feet away, didn't seem to notice me. I called the house from the driveway and told my wife to keep the kids inside and call the cat in. We've had a few cases of rabies in our area in the past few months and I didn't want to take any chances.

I was trying to deciding if I had time to go back into the house and get a gun when the raccoon started across the field. By the time I got back it would have been gone so I just watched to make sure it kept moving. It did. I left for work.

Later, I got a call from home. Raccoon's back. Cat's in the house. Wife called the township to get in touch with animal control. Now we don't actually have animal control but there's an animal shelter not too far away and the guy that owns that will come out if the county calls him. Nobody at the township answered the phone so the next call was to me.

That's probably best, I called the guy a few years ago when I thought we might have a rabid skunk. He suggested calling the state police to shoot it. I told him I can shoot it, I just thought somebody might want to check to see if it's rabid once it's dead. He wasn't that interested so I just shot the skunk.

Animal control wasn't coming out and there wasn't much I could do about a sick raccoon from work so I suggested calling my dad to shoot it. I assume he did because my mom called and said that the crisis was over and I noticed a bunch of turkey vultures eating something in the back field this evening.

Which leads me to the real reason for today's post: We've got eagles. They've been a township over for 20 years but just started venturing out this far a couple of years ago. We see them more often every year and today there were two birds out at the carcass that didn't look like vultures. I got the camera and crept as close as I could get to get some pictures. I crept from tree to tree for cover and tried to hide behind a brush pile but eagles have good eyes and he spooked before I really got close enough to get a good picture but here they are.

Bald eagle in the field

spooked (by me)

perched in a dead tree waiting for me to leave

A slightly closer view of the tree

I Lost My Hidey Hole

2009-04-19T10:14:00.004-04:00

Years ago, when my wife's sister was staying with us, we put up a wall in our very large living room to make a temporary bedroom for her.

In the 6 or 7 years since then, that temporary room has been my permanent office. All it had in it was a book shelf, desk, and the computer. We left the door open but had a gate across the door to keep the 2 year old from breaking the computer.

The time has come when he needs his own room. And the only available room in the house is my office. So we moved me out and moved him in. He's got a new room with a fire truck big-boy-bed. I've got a desk in the middle of the dining room. It's a big dining room so there' s room but there's also people. I used my office to get away from the noise and wildness of a house filled with wives and kids. Now that's gone.

My old quiet office

In fact, I'm typing this now with one kid trying to wedge himself between me and the desk and another telling me over and over in my ear that there's somebody on TV doing something. I don't know what because I'm trying to pay attention to my typing. If I say "okay" over and over, I'm hoping she'll be satisfied and go back to watching TV. I can't act like I don't enjoy the other one wedging himself between me and the desk because if he realizes it annoys me, he'll make it his mission for the day. Since this move, he's started proudly announcing several times a day that he's "pestering dad now". I have to just wait for him to give up on his own.

This sucks. I want my hidey hole back.

my new office (children removed for the picture)

Not This Year

2009-04-17T13:55:00.004-04:00

I'm not going to garden this year. I did it for the past several years and I didn't like it. I did it to learn, not for fun or to eat. Like most projects I take on, I absorb all I can until I've reached the point of diminishing returns, the point where another year of trying it won't teach me enough more to make it worth the effort.

I could learn a lot more but I'm way too lazy. I only learn things during the steep part of the learning curve. I make up or guess at the rest.

scientific proof that gardening
is no longer worth the work

Even if I'm not putting in a garden, I've still got all of the fruit trees, grapes, blackberries, asparagus, strawberries, and rhubarb. This stuff will be around for a long time so I'll keep working at that. When the country eventually runs out of other people's money, I'll need to eat something.

The lone surviving pear tree has a lot of pear blossoms this year. I got 3 pears last year.

little pears

The peach trees are starting to drop flower petals.

peach blossoms

And we cut asparagus for the first time this morning.

asparagus and rhubarb in the background

A New Batch of Trees

2009-03-14T19:57:00.003-04:00

I was at a conference in Baltimore Md this week. I was sitting at a table taking a break between classes and a walk through the exibit hall. A guy walking buy asked if I minded if he sat down. Of course I said "No, have a seat." He was also waiting for the exibit hall to open and we started chatting.

This was a trade conference so he and I had work in common, even though he worked in Austin TX and I work in NJ. We had almost an hour to kill so the conversation eventually made its way to the economy, politics, and lots of other stuff. At one point, he confessed that he had bought several acres in Pennsylvania with a plan to farm if the economy really went south. I was suprised. I've got lots of close friends who are making similar plans: buying wood stoves, stockpiling supplies, buying small farm equipment, and stashing cash. But this was the first time I heard someone I had just met say the same.

I told him that I started planting fruit trees, grapes, and lots of other stuff a few years ago. At the time, I told my wife that I was worried about the economy. I had a bad feeling that Americans were letting themselves get too far into debt and that eventually the bottom would fall out.

I also told him that I had been planting a big garden every year, even though I don't enjoy it because I was concerned that I might need the skill sometime soon.

I really thought I was the only survivalist nut around. It was a surprise to hear it from somebody else.

Well, it's rare that I'm right. But it looks like I was right about this one. You can be sure that I'll be bringing that up for the rest of my life. I've got a few more crazy predictions but I don't want to sound too crazy so I'll just write them down somewhere so I can get the book out later and say I told you so.

As a continuation of my paranoia, I placed an order for several more trees. I got the delivery this week. I was away at the conference when the boxes arrived so I didn't get to really deal with the boxes until today. They sat for a few days in the cool attic stairwell but seemed to be in good condition.

new fruit and nut trees in the box

Most of what I ordered was bare root plants wrapped in saturated newspaper for delivery. A couple of the nut trees had the roots wrapped in plastic bags filled with peat moss. We measured and marked out the locations of a couple of new fruit trees with mark-out paint and planted everything this afternoon.

I'm still waiting for one more peach tree that hasn't shipped yet but the total order included:

Two peach trees. I already have two semi-dwarf peach trees. One was a late ripener and did very well since the peaches came on last year after most of the insects were gone. The other ripened in the heat of the summer and the insects got just about everything. So I ordered two late ripening varieties this time. I also ordered standard size trees instead of the semi-dwarfs I already have hoping that I'll eventually have more fruit.

One full size apple tree and one semi-dwarf. I've got two dwarf odd ball 5-in-1 apple trees with several varieties grafted onto one tree. All I've ever gotten off of those is golden delicious. I also put in a semi-dwarf Fuji apple last year that I almost lost to fire blight disease. One of the new apples is a full sized Jonafree red apple variety and the other is a semi-dwarf Red Rome which I planted in place of the pear tree I lost to fire blight last year.

I also ordered two more walnut trees and two pecan trees. I've got two Walnuts that I planted a few years ago and have gotten a couple of hundred walnuts the last couple of years. I don't know much about the pecans but I know there are a few in this area so it's another experiment. As for nut trees, I've also got two chestnut trees that I planted two years ago. These have been very slow to take off and aren't much more than 3 feet tall now. It will be a long time before I have any nuts if they ever take off.

So, when the rest of my predictions come true, I'll have fruit and nuts. I figure if it gets really bad, I can grow, build, or kill just about whatever I need to survive until the war's over...oops, wasn't supposed to say that out loud.

March Snow

2009-03-03T22:11:00.005-05:00

We got snow. It's not supposed to snow in March but it did.

I supervise a crew of guys that becomes the snow removal crew whenever it does snow so I'm not crazy about snow. I spend snow days handling phone complaints, welding broken plows, swapping parts, beating things with hammers and hacking together broken equipment to get it back on the road as quickly as possible, while checking road conditions, monitoring the weather, and managing minor disaster after minor disaster. Snow days are stressful days. I really love what I do but If we never had another snow day, I wouldn't complain. (Come on global warming!) At 5:30 in the afternoon, after 14-1/2 hours, it was all over and it was time to go home.

I live in a rural area about 20 miles from work, an area with open fields, high banks on the side of the road, minimal coverage by the county road department, and prone to high snow drifts. Really high snow drifts. I had to be back at work at 4:00am the next morning so I took on of our work plows home to make sure I could get in in the morning since I expected the 20mph winds to cover some of the roads with snow drifts overnight.

I had been so busy all day that I hadn't eaten anything since the apple I had on the way into work at 3:00 in the morning. I stopped and picked up a pizza on the way home. A few minutes later, I got off the highway and headed for my house. I reached my road okay and realized I couldn't turn right. There was a snow bank several feet high that was all the way across the road. The road was also drifted in to the left but not nearly as bad and looked passable as far as I could see. So I went left.

The road as it looked today, after the county got it cleared.

The snow was up to the truck frame in spots, I kept moving so I wouldn't loose momentum and was doing okay. Once in while, my raised snow plow blade would dive into a drift and send snow cascading over the hood and I'd travel a hundred feed completely blind but I was the only idiot on the road so that wasn't really a big problem. Then it happened. I spotted another truck facing my way.

According to my wife, who had been home all day, the last time our road had been plowed was 9:30 that morning and the county had only made one pass opening up only one lane. With show piled up on both sides 4' high and snow drifted in up to 2 feet high in the only open lane. There wasn't much chance of me and this other guy passing each other. So we stopped, bumper to bumper. Stopping was bad. Stopping meant I lost my momentum. I was stuck, he was stuck. I called home to say I would be a little later than I thought and then my phone battery died.

Fortunately, he had shovels. He was traveling down my road to rescue his son-in-law who was stuck on the other end of the road. Like me, he was going to have to find another way around, assuming we could get ourselves out. We made a plan and dug my truck out first...by hand. It was windy, cold, and we were being pelted with stinging drifting icy bits of snow. It sucked. I don't know how long we dug but we eventually got me free. Since I had a plow, I was able to push my way past him and clear a path for him to get free with a lot more shoveling, pushing, and spinning of tires.

Back on the road, with my now cold pizza, I looked for another way home. I had to drive around through the next county over to find a passable road to get me out to the other end of my road. If I couldn't get in from one end, I might be able to get in from the other. I stopped at the other end to survey the scene. I saw 3 vehicles stuck in the snow. This wasn't going to work either. I don't get 3 vehicles in a hour on my road at 8:00 at night, especially on a snowy night, so I know these had been there for some time and they were blocking the only lane.

I abandoned my mission to drive home and headed for my parents' farm instead. I can see my parents farm across the field from my house. I got to the the farm, offered my parents some very cold pizza and warmed up for a few minutes inside.

I then started the long walk home. Across the field, through snow drifts, in the cold wind, being pelted with ice chunks. I didn't bother to bring my cold weather gear home from work since I was so confident I wouldn't get stuck in my work truck. Poor planning meant I trudged along in just my light coat dead reckoning for the yard light in the distance.

The walk wasn't so bad, the white snow made it just bright enough to see where I was stepping, even at 8:00 at night. Once home, I got a few hours sleep and was up to make the 3:00am walk back across the field to get the truck to go back to work this morning. Surprisingly, it's a lot darker at 3:00am than it is at 8:00pm. This time I wasn't having as much luck avoiding drifts. As I would walk blindly in the dark the snow would start getting deeper, sometimes up to my knees and then would start getting shallower again. At a few spots, I was obviously getting into some drifts that were too much to handle so I'd turn around and head back to the last manageable spot and randomly pick a new direction to go. I was glad to finally make it to the truck.

Another day at work plowing, salting, and cursing at equipment and it was again time to head for home. A call home verified that the road was better today. The county had been out with heavy equipment and had things clear enough for me to make it this time. The driveway wasn't passable yet but the road was. This time, I could take the car. There was no point going right home. When our driveway gets drifted in, it can be 5' deep. It can be 5' deep the full width and length of the driveway. I headed right for my parents again and this time borrowed a front end loader to open up the driveway and see if I could find my mailbox.

there's that mailbox.

Tonight, I'm warm at home, I found the mailbox but gave up on actually getting it uncovered, even with a front end loader it isn't worth the hours it would take. I don't like the mail anyway so I'll just do without mail until this all melts. I did get the car in the driveway. And now, I'm going to bed.

the driveway, almost clear

Pruning Day

2009-01-20T20:59:00.005-05:00

I checked the weather yesterday and it looked like it wasn't going to get really cold for the next several days. Fruit trees should be pruned in late winter, a few weeks from now but I'm not a patient person. And, I had a 3 day weekend and was looking for something to do. If it gets really cold soon after pruning, you can loose some flower buds but, like I said, the weather said it wasn't going to get real cold. So I did some pruning yesteday afternoon.

Of course it's 24º now, 16 wind chill, and it's supposed to get down to 20º overnight. Did I mention it wasn't supposed to get cold? This is my whole problem with the global warming thing. The same people that can't tell me if it's going to be cold tomorrow somehow know that the polar ice caps will be melted in 10 years. Of course it's not "global warming" anymore. Now it's "climate change". It's good to hedge your bets.

But I digress.

I pruned the peaches and apple trees.

The apples were the worst. I bought a couple of "5-in-1" apple trees a few years ago. Five different varieties are grafted onto one trunk and they're supposed to grow 5 varieties of apples. Not knowing which branch was which, I haven't ever pruned these the way they should be pruned. I was afraid of cutting off a whole variety. But I've only gotten golden delicious apples so this year I pruned. It will take a couple of years to get them right, if I ever do.

apple tree before and after

When trimming peach trees, the goals are to open up the middle to let sunlight in and allow air circulation, reduce the amount of fruit so the tree isn't overwhelmed, and keep everything at picking height. A wide, open, weird looking tree is what you're going for.

peach tree

The real trick is to just cut off almost everything that's growing upward. All of the branches pointing toward the sky were new growth last year. I'll cut the same off again next year.

another peach

I know the "after" picture looks worse than the "before" but that's how the experts do it and they must be right or they couldn't be experts...just like those weather guys.

Help Wanted

2009-01-12T11:10:00.010-05:00

Completely unrelated to gardening. But is is January and 32º outside.

I've got a position available for a maintenance mechanic at work. I'm reviewing the roughly 80 applications we've received so far for this position and thought I'd share a few job hunting tips while they're fresh in my mind.

This batch of tips is about filling out the application:

Tip #1: Never say "None"
You know that line on the application that asks you to list your skills? Well you must know how to do something. I would like to have you write that you can troubleshoot something, preferably stuff with important sounding names but I may settle for less. I know you have some skill. Obviously you can write if you're filling this out so write "read and write English" or anything. Don't write in that you have no skills. Even if it's true, leave this line blank.

Tip #2: You may have to embellish a little.
If you've had 6 jobs in the past 3 years, and were fired from each one, find a creative way to say that. Don't lie, I'll call your references and find out but at least a creative answer may get your foot in the door. That little box that says "Reason for Leaving" can be the end of your chances if you write the word "Terminated" six consecutive times on the same page. Tip #2a. Writing "Terminated because I don't have a ride to work" is also a poor idea.

Tip #3: Color inside the lines
I have 80 applications to look at. Each application is three pages. That's more reading than I did in my entire education from Kindergarten through College. If you write more, I won't read it. We give you enough space to make your point, be conservative. Don't waste paper, it doesn't grow on trees. If you make your three page application 6 pages long by adding more stuff than fits, I will assume you have a problem following directions or that you might not do well working in an environment with rules. But mostly I'm going to think that you're an awful bore and I don't want to work with you.

Tip #4 Don't confuse me
Writing "I grew up learning everything I know" makes me think that your learning may have stopped early. Both because you say so and because I can tell so.

Tip #5 Anticipate my questions.
If you live in a different state, not even one that's within a full tank of gas from the job, why are you applying?

The Worst Purchase Ever

2009-01-02T19:44:00.005-05:00

Not much gardening happening now. It's in the 30's on most days and 20's at night. We just came out of a few days in the teens so gardening is on hold. But I have something related to write about anyway. It may be a stretch but I'm going to write about a food chopper.

I bought this food chopper this evening at Walmart to chop vegetables so it is 's at least some what garden related; since my garden is where I fail to grow vegetables that I could, at least in theory, chop.

I've seen these on TV. You put an onion on the cutting board, slip this "handiest kitchen gadget you'll ever own" over the onion, hit the handle a few times and a matrix of blades turns the onion into minced onion in seconds. It's all done inside the chopper so there's no mess and I don't have to cry.

Well I got my $8 prize home and decided to give it a try. Had half an onion left over from dinner in the fridge, put it on the chopping board, and opened the box my new chopper came in. I spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where all these parts go. Me. I actually once attended college for engineering and I fix mechanical things for a living and I was practically beaten by a late night TV kitchen gadget.

After a couple of false starts, I figured out where all the parts went and started chopping. After the first chop, having spent 20 years fixing all sorts of things mechanical, I realized something wasn't right. My onion wasn't chopped, it was stuck in the blades going up and down with each press of the "soft grip" handle. A few more chops should free it I thought, it didn't. So I had to lift it up, spilling a few bits of onion that were no longer contained in the "easy to clean" container on the cutting board. A minute with a knife to free the stuck veggie from the blades and I was back in business, except the spilled pieces prevented me from getting it down where it belonged on the cutting board, but with the same skill it takes to get Rosie O'Donnell fitted at the Men's Warehouse, I tucked the loose pieces inside and chopped again.

Stuck again. And yet a third attempt: stuck again. What a piece of crap. Normally, when I buy something for $8 at Walmart, I know it might not be the Rolls Royce of kitchen gadgets. But this one makes me mad because it's so bad that it has to be on purpose. This thing is so awfully designed, in so many ways, that there is no way anybody at Farberware (oh yeah, I'm naming names) believed it was anything other than complete junk.

My list of complaints:

The convoluted blade design has a narrow little uncleanable area at each bend. I can't even get the tiny nipple brush from my son's bottles in there.
The blade falls off the shaft, both for cleaning and to frustrate the user.
There's a worthless, plastic thing with a cut out the exact shape as the blade that the blade has to be inserted through. Not a problem if the blade was a circle or square, or some shape other than a zigzag.
There are more parts than it needs, a lot more parts than it needs and when you "open for cleaning" it comes apart like a swiss watch.
Oh, and there's the little detail with it not chopping anything.

Farberware (Farberware, Farberware, Farberware) must have gotten a cheap batch of laid off Chernobyl engineers to design this one.

Email me if you'd like to buy a slightly used food chopper...only $10.

UPDATE: Just be fair, we tried chopping some carrot. Still a piece of crap!

The War Goes On

2008-11-27T16:19:00.007-05:00

I thought it was done, at least for a few months. It's been quiet. No insects and the diseases are dormant for the winter. except for the skunk and possum that I have to chase away from the cat's food dish every night, I thought my battle with nature was taking a break until Spring.

The whitest Skunk I've ever seen.

This morning I found two of my newest fruit trees rubbed by deer. They like to rub their antlers on small trees. I've heard that they do it to rub the velvet like fuzz off the antlers, I've heard they do it to mark their territory. I don't care why they do it but I want it to stop.

Fatally wounded Nectarine

They've gotten all the way around my only Nectarine and gotten half way around my Granny Smith apple tree. I 'm pretty sure the Nectarine's a goner. The apple might make it if the damage stops.

I had a couple of old signs in my workshop from a painting contractor we hired several years ago. One of those made a couple of field expedient tree guards this morning. With a thick band of duct tape to secure them, I hope at least one of these trees survives.

We've already had a couple of hard frosts.

Cold weather hit us early this year. I got out my mower this morning and cut down the few still standing corn stalks and cut down the Asparagus.

a tangle of asparagus before mowing

I'm home from work for a few days so I hope to get some winter work done in the Garden. The strawberries got a layer of straw mulch a few weeks ago from the majority of a bale left over from a scarecrow 4H project.

strawberries under straw

I've got grape vines that need to have all their vines removed down to just 4 short main branches. Once they're pruned, the vines are nothing more than 4 sticks with little barbs left along each one.

And the fruit trees will need a hard pruning. All of the branches growing up will be removed to help the tree grow spreading and as flat to the ground as possible. This keeps the fruit from overwhelming the roots and allows good sunlight and air penetration. 80% of the wood will be removed to grow back next year. I'll post before and after pictures when it's all done.

a peach tree that needs a hard pruning.

Hiding in my own house

2008-11-01T22:56:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was my 9 year old daughter's birthday. Or maybe yesterday it was my 8 year old daughter's birthday. Either way, she's 9 now and was 8 a couple of day's ago.

Today, Saturday, we had her birthday party. Mostly family and 4 girls from her class. Very nice girls, friendly, smart, and all confident and very polite. This is the first time I've met these girls and I'm glad to know that my daughter has such nice friends. But the news is not all good.

They're sleeping over tonight. A slumber party of 4th graders, in my living room. And I'm trapped hiding in my office. I want to go to bed, but I know they won't so I can't. The ruler of the roost, master of all I see, hiding from 9 year olds. Nice 9 year olds, but scary at the same time.

Every time I walk through the room, one of them tries to show me some amazing talent. It's late and they've already passed the sillies. I was hoping the next phase was sleep but it's not. The next phase is showing off. I've seen how good one of the girls is at making spring sounds with her mouth. I've seen how good another can touch her elbows together behind her back. Not to be outdone, her twin sister can do the same. Another can really spread her toes wide, another can point her big toe in an opposite direction of the others. If could do any of these things, I'd keep it to myself. I try to be encouraging and kind with phrases like "Way to go...touching your elbows together....that'll get you far." and "Nice freaky toes...way to hustle". But they see through it. They see my deer in the headlights stare as I look around for a way out. I think they're just messing with me.

So, here I am hiding in my office, posting because I've already read the whole internet to pass the time and I've run out of things to do.

David and Goliath

2008-10-26T20:12:00.005-04:00

The Methodist Church in Elmer held the pumpkin chucking competition today. Our church entered for the first time. We had no idea what to expect from the other churches, we had tried to do some recon but got nowhere. So with no idea what anyone else was building, we designed ours to fit in a pick up truck and really worked hard to get the most power we could out of our design. We were pretty proud of our little catapult and pretty excited to show it off today.

Then we saw the competition for the first time. They were not built to fit in a pickup truck. Most came in on flat bed trailers. If you look real close at the middle catapult, the tiny little one in the middle of the picture, that's ours. Click the picture for a larger image and with a magnifying glass, you might see it.

Two were so big, the teams brought a front end loader to hang the counter weights.

Them(left) us(right)

We hung our counter weight by hand.

It was a little intimidating. Being the new guys, having all the other churches commenting about the little catapult. But we had done our homework. We knew the weight of the pumpkins would be between 5 and 7 lbs. We had calculated moment of inertia of our throwing arm, we knew how much energy we were transferring to the pumpkin. We even watched video of our catapult frame by frame and calculated throwing angles, kinetic energy, and some other things. We had a well designed catapult.

As these things were towering over us, I kept thinking how much energy it would require to get a throwing arm that size rotating and how much faster our little throwing arm would accelerate. But still, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by the size of these monstrous machines.

The other teams started doing a few practice throws and their catapults sure looked slow compared to ours. But slow on a 25' arm might still beat our little 12' throwing arm. My team wanted to do a couple of practice shots too. I suggested that we just wait and see what the others could do. We already know what ours can do and I was starting to believe that if we didn't win, at least we'd make a good showing and I wanted to surprise people. There were a few comments in the crowd about the church with the little catapult not throwing any pumpkins.

team Shiloh

We nervously walked around for two hours waiting for the competition to start. There was a lot to do. There was a live band, hot dogs and hamburgers, baked goods, several kids games to play, a pumpkin seed spitting contest (the winner was over 29'...wow), and a skillet throwing contest. There were two hay rides running continuously. You could even enter a scare crow making contest where participants scrambled to stuff scattered clothes with straw. The church that put this on did a really great job.

It was finally 4:00, pumpkin chucking time. Each team got three throws. To make things go faster, every other catapult would fire together. That meant catapults 1,3, and 5 would be launching at the same time. We were catapult #3. After a 10 count, we pulled the release cord. The giant machines to our right and left slowly slung around while ours whipped the pumpkin down range. Our pumpkin sailed past the other two. The second and third rounds went just about the same.

I was tending the catapult but lots of people I knew in the crowd told me later that everybody was talking about the little catapult and how it was beating all the big catapults. We hadn't seen the numbers, they had three men in the field who would run to the landing spots of the pumpkins. Someone with a rangefinder would then measure the distance to the men and write it all down on a chart. We hadn't seen the numbers but we thought we were out in front. It seemed like the guys marking the landing spots kept running toward us when everybody else would fire and away from us whenever we fired.

for a very big (9M) full size video click here

The second part of the competition was the accuracy contest. They stood a scarecrow 50' from the catapults and each team had 3 chances to hit the scarecrow. It might sound easy to hit a target 50' away but keep in mind, these catapults were designed to throw hundreds of feet with trajectories going over 100' high. Hitting a 6' tall scarecrow at ground height right in front of you was completely different. We really weren't prepared.

Not knowing what to do, we dropped most of the weight off our arm, and moved our sling release pin forward about 15 degrees. We figured this would be a shorter throw and would throw pretty flat to the ground. Our first throw was a record setter...7 feet...the wrong direction.

We added some weight and tried again. It was a hard throw and a straight, flat throw just above the ground. We were the first team in the competition's 4 year history to actually hit the scarecrow. We barely nicked it's glove. It counted. We were told that we could skip our 3rd throw if we wanted to since we had our successful hit. No, we wanted a real hit. No glove nicks for us.

Our third throw took off at 50 or 60 mph and hit the scarecrow square in the middle of the chest. The pumpkin exploded, the scarecrow's 2x4 spine snapped in two. The crowd went wild. We tried to act like we felt bad about the scarecrow. We didn't, we felt great.

In the end, the little catapult from Shiloh came in first place for distance at 96 yards, came in first place for accuracy, being the only team to hit the thing (and we did it twice), and won "best all around" for winning the other two. We walked away with two trophies, and the big "best all around" trophy is on it's way to us soon.

When the competition was done, the other teams started disassembling their catapults for the ride home. The front end loaders were moving weights, winches and come-alongs were lowering timbers. Flat bed trailers and dump trucks were pulling onto the field to load the catapults for transport. Four guys picked ours up, put it in the back of a pickup and we drove away.

I think I have a plan for next year that will have twice the punch in an even smaller package.

team Shiloh with one broken scarecrow.

Moving On

2008-10-26T05:27:00.008-04:00

It's been almost a month since I've posted. That's because the garden's done for the year and this is a gardening blog. I still plan to sit down and make up a success and failure list of everything I grew this year but not today.

Today, I'm posting about a catapult.

I got a call from my friend's sister, and cousin's wife, Val. She wanted to know if I'd be interested in helping the teenagers at the church build a catapult to compete in a pumpkin throwing contest. What a ridiculous question. This was over the summer. I said sure as long as we have two things: 1) Enough time to build it, and 2) materials or a budget for materials.

I got a second call at the beginning of October, maybe it was the very end of September asking if I was still interested because the contest was in 4 weeks. So much for enough time to build it.

I went down to the church that evening and we all talked about catapults. We drew diagrams and by the end of the evening half a dozen high school and college kids and I had a pretty good working design on paper.

I put our sketches in Cad to let the computer do all the math and dimensions so I wouldn't have to.

We all spent the week trying to find materials. Everybody on the building team had a few scraps to bring, a couple of church members offered to let us look through their lumber piles, and Val's dad dropped off a load of everything we were missing from our materials list.

The following Sunday we started building. We got a lot done, had to make a lot of design changes as we went, and it really started looking like something. We did the same thing the next Sunday.

For the second build weekend, I had the flu. I showed up to help but really wasn't much help. I am really impressed with the group of guys who worked on this. They had good ideas, and really took charge. I offered advice and helped a little but these are country kids, they knew what they were doing.

It stands about 7' tall, has a 12' throwing arm with a 9' sling attached to the end of the arm. I borrowed 540 lbs of Olympic weights from work as a counterweight.

The third weekend was last Sunday and we got together to test it and make adjustments to the weights, release angle, sling, and anything else that needed adjusting to get maximum distance for the contest. A crowd from the church showed up and brought things to throw, mostly pumpkins. I still had the flu so I showed up late and mostly just watched. The best throw was 242 feet. That's not bad. I don't think it's enough to win but for our first year entering the contest, I'm satisfied.

If you want to see the full sized video and don't mind a 7M download,
it's temporarily available here.

The competition is this afternoon. We have no idea what to expect from the other churches that are competing and we have no idea what types of catapults they'll have. Later I'll post how we did.

Clean up weekend.

2008-09-23T20:28:00.005-04:00

I did a lot of garden clean up this weekend. I rolled up the hoses I use to water everything and hung them. I pulled the posts for my climbing cucumber vines and the stakes for my garden sprinkler. I mowed down everything in the garden except for the corn and sugar sorghum. I tried to mow down the corn but my mower couldn't make it through so it still stands for the moment.

The only thing in the garden that was still producing was the two tomato plants. I always grow tomatoes in tomato cages to keep them growing up off the ground. This year, my first planting got a disease and died so I got my second planting in late, I never really got back to them to trellis them and they grew wild. I'm sure they were 10' across, and so dense you could barely see the tomatoes. In fact, when I ran the mower over them, there were so many ripe tomatoes down under the plants that I didn't know about, the mower got stuck in the slippery, slimy, smashed mound of tomatoes. I couldn't even get off the mower for fear of sinking in the goo. With some fancy mower driving, I was able to get out with clean shoes.

I turned my rain gauge over so it doesn't freeze and crack this winter and cut down all the string I was using to trellis my cucumbers, peas, and luffa sponges.

I de-headed all my sorghum and have the heads set aside to dry. I plan to remove the seeds, toast them and try millet porridge, something that's eaten as a staple in arid parts of the world.

I also cut a couple of sorghum stalks, stripped off the outer green layer to get to the white interior and chewed a piece. It is surprisingly sweet. It's not really edible because it's so course but it does contain a lot of sugar. Interesting.

I removed one more small and slightly green pumpkin from the mystery vine and mowed the vine down when I mowed the yard.

I pulled the last two pears off of the Bosc pear tree that did pretty good this summer and pulled the first apple off my 5-in-1 apple trees.

I'll probably end up with two dozen decent apples this year but most need a few more weeks.

I cut down my Bartlett pear tree that did not fair so well. I'll replace it with something else in the spring.

The luffa squash did well. I didn't know anything about these but we figured it out. If you let them dry on the vine they turn brown with a papery skin. Strip off the skin and you have luffa sponges. I don't really know why rubbing abrasive squash innards on your skin is good but my wife seems happy with the results.

I don't know what these stupid sponges sell for but they grow like weeds, in fact I have one that's sprouting in my burn pile right now from a rotten squash we threw in there over the summer. A half dozen vines will produce a hundred or more and other than needing lots of water, they're easy to grow.

I think I paid almost $5 for 15 seeds for this unusual plant. I might get into the luffa seed business. I could have easily had a hundred squash if I had wanted to go to the trouble to clean them all. Here's a picture of the seeds I got from one squash.

We opened a jar of pickles. I like them, wife thought they were too tart. We all thought they were a little soggy. I've got a big pressure canner and it took so long to get the canning jars and boiling water bath up to temperature that I ended up over cooking the pickles and now they're soggy. Still good to eat.

We also opened a jar of canned peaches. They were great. Much better than the ones that are picked early for commercial canning. Mine were much softer and tasted more like fresh peaches than what you'd buy in the store because they were canned ripe. If you want the "crunch" from canned fruit, this didn't have it.

The only thing left is apples. I hope I'll get a few a week into November but everything else is done.

I think I need to do a garden score card for each thing I tried to grow this year.

Almost done

2008-09-20T08:09:00.004-04:00

The season's almost over. I plan to mow just about everything down tomorrow. The only thing still producing are the tomatoes and we stopped picking any a month ago. I planned on posting this stuff last week.. I took these pictures last week but I got busy so here's what everything looked like last week. I've probably got apples that are ready by now. I'll have to get out there and check. I didn't get many but the trees aren't very big yet.

The mystery vine is definately a pumpkin. It's been cut off the vine and now it's on our porch hoping it lasts until Halloween.

The sorghum is definately ready and I'll be cutting it tomorrow to see if it actually tastes sweet. I'll even be trying a bowl of sorghum porridge. I'll let you know how it tastes. Since we are lucky to live in a country where we have food options and we don't choose sorghum porridge, my expectations are low but I could be suprised.

And the fire blight is back. Bad this time. I'll be cutting down the bartlett pear tree tomorrow. We actually got 3 good pears from this tree but it's been infected all season. My bosc pear tree had some fire blight and even a couple of apple trees had a little but I think this tree is the source. Every time this tree shows a bad branch, something else has a bad branch a few days later. If I get rid of this tree, I might get rid of the problem all together. I'll plant something less prone to disease next year. I guess this is why nobody grows pears commercially around here.

Country Living

2008-09-07T06:13:00.003-04:00

No gardening post today.

Friday, on the way home from work, I got a phone call from my brother. He had been cutting down some dead trees around his house. We were expecting the remnants of Hurricane Friday night and Saturday and he wanted to get these down before they were blown down onto his house.

When you cut down a tree, you can usually control the direction it falls by how you cut your cuts with the chainsaw. Unfortunately this tree was pretty rotten at the bottom and broke apart and fell the wrong way, toward his garage.

This tree was probably 60 feet high, 2 feet in diameter, and only 20 feet from the back of his garage. If it had fallen all the way, his 3 car garage and all it's contents would have been completely flat. Fortunately, it came to rest against another tree. But now he had a bigger problem than he had before.

We spent the evening trying to get a rope tied near the top of this 60' tree so we could pull it over the right way. We tried shooting an arrow through a notch in the tree with a fishing line attached. We then switched to a slingshot. My brother stood on the garage roof and I held the fishing pole from the ground. It took dozens of shots, but it worked. We used the fishing line to pull up some heavier string and then used that to pull up some rope. Everything takes longer in the rain when it's getting dark.

But we had the rope tied at the top of the tree right where we wanted it. My brother pulled his 4WD pickup out to the edge of the soybean field and with a few lengths of chain, we got the rope out to his truck and he pulled. The tree lifted about a foot and the rope snapped with a snap that sounded like a rifle discharge. The tree fell right at the end of the little branch that had been holding it before. It now looked like it would fall any second. We had not made it better.

We've got a friend in the tree cutting business. We called him. No answer. My brother drove to his house, not there. Stopped by his parents house, no body home. So it was just us.

We drove the 20 miles to Lowes to get a 150' foot length of heavier rope and some 500W flood lights. Drove 20 miles back to his house and worked until about 10:00 and gave up. We had run out of fishing line, masons line, and hitting the bullseye in the dark was not working very well.

The next morning, the tree was still standing, we started working at sun-up. It took us several hours to get the new rope in just the right spot. We had to weave it over and under several other branches of other trees , it kept getting tangled, We pulled up weights to get it over some branches and then let the weight fall, we shot string over others. It was kind of like knitting a sweater with a a slingshot from 50' away above the tree canopy, sometimes with binoculars. A friend of ours stopped by with a tractor do to the pulling this time but we took so long and he had to go.

It took us about 4 hours but we had the rope where we wanted it and tried to pull qwith my brother's truck again. It lifted off the other tree. He was out at the lane with the rope threaded around a couple of trees and couldn't see what was happening. I radioed my brother to keep moving, don't stop. The tree went over center and fell exactly where we wanted it to fall.

Done with the tree, I headed home. My grandmother passed away a week and a half ago and we were having the memorial service Saturday afternoon. I was pretty dirty and disgusting from the morning's work and despritely needed a shower before the service. When I got home, the wind and rain really started. My wife, thinking we might loose electric started to fill the bathtub with water. You can scoop a gallon of water out of the tub and at least you can flush the toilet when the electric's out. It's also nice to have some water for hand washing or other things. We don't have city water or sewer or gas. When the electric's out, everything is out.

She only got a few inches of water in the tub and we lost electric. I got a crappy sponge bath out of the 3" of water in the tub, got dressed and went to the service. The church didn't have any electric and it was hot and miserable in there. We got home hot, sticky, rain soaked, and with no shower. At dusk, I got out the oil lanterns and set one up in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bathroom we couldn't flush (fortunately I'm a guy and I've got an acre and a half), and one in my daughter's room.

After the kids were down, my wife and I went to bed, in our clothes, her in a recliner chair and me on the couch. We were just too disgusting to get into bed.

The electric came back on about 3:00am and woke us up. We got up and took showers and went to bed for real.

This morning, when I woke up, I headed out the kitchen door. I stopped just before getting a face full of spider.

I now have it in a plastic container. I'll move it somewhere else or it'll build a web in exactly the same place every night. After I took a few flash photos, it started cutting down the web. I guess it thought the flash was morning.

Mystery Solved and Bumpy Pears

2008-08-28T18:33:00.002-04:00

The mystery vine has another fruit. It grew fast after the last one was destroyed in an unsupervised toddler accident only 20 days ago. The new fruit is starting to turn orange so I'm officially going with pumpkin.

The dead leaves all around the pumpkin are from a wicked case of downy mildew. A fungus that grew on most of the leaves and made them dull, white and fuzzy. Now they're dead. There are new leaves so I think we'll make it until this pumpkin is ready.

As I was checking out the garden today, I squeezed a pear. It fell off the tree in my hand. I guess that means it's ready to be picked but it seems awfully firm. I'll leave the rest for a few more days at least.

It's the bumpiest pear I've ever seen.

Just a Boring August Update

2008-08-24T10:39:00.004-04:00

My first batch of peaches in July were awful. The bugs had almost completely destroyed the fruit before it ever had a chance to get ripe. I got to eat a few but that was only because I was willing to eat around to cut out the damaged parts. I never would have bought any peaches that looked as bad as mine. I may have found the solution to my problem.

My other peach tree, the Belle of Georga, is starting to ripen now and there's no insect damage. It' s late enough in the season that there aren't as many bugs around now. I found a semi-soft peach yesterday and ate the softest half right off the tree just to see how they tasted. It was a little crunchier than I like but really sweet. White flesh instead of the yellow flesh on my Gala peach. The few I picked today will need a couple of days on the counter to ripen but they look great.

If these work out well, I might order a couple of more Bell of Georga peach trees in the spring.

As you can see, we've also got tomatoes, (on the bottom of the basket) and all the grapes are ripe now. 6 varieties. 3 seedless (one of which has seeds - I don't know why), and 3 with seeds. I prefer seedless grapes but had read that the seeded varieties produce bigger fruit so I tried both. I could fill this basket 10 times with just bunches of grapes but how many grapes can one family really eat? I've never heard of frozen or canned grapes so I guess the rest will go to waste.

The best in my opinion are the white Lakemont seedless (Just like the white grapes in the supermarket), the red Reliance seedless (same variety as the supermarket) and the dark purple Concord seeded grapes.

Concord are what's used to make grape juice and they taste just like grape juice. I also have a variety called Glenora that's dark purple. This tastes just like grape soda. I never realized that the grape flavor in grape juice was different than the grape flavor in grape soda until I tried these grapes.

The fire blight I haven't seen in a month or more has shown up again on a pear tree. Since the limb is dead all the way to the trunk, I had to cut several inches of the top of the trunk. This meant cutting off one of my 5 remaining pears. It's not ready yet but I took a bite anyway. Needs another month.

The sugar sorghum seed heads (say that 3 times fast) are starting to turn orange. I'm going to try to use the seedheads like any other variety of sorghum. Sorghum is grown in Africa and the Middle East as food for people and animals. My dad actually grew several acres of sorghum as a grain crop when I was a kid growing up on a farm. My parents had a bird seed store and mixed their own seed. Millet (sorghum seeds) was one of the ingredients in their mixed bird seed.

When this stuff is used as people food, they toast the seeds and then boil them with water to make a porage similar to oatmeal. Mixed with milk and sugar it's eaten in lots of places, just not here. I'll let you know how it turns out in a month or so.

No More Water

2008-08-17T08:27:00.005-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, I turned on the water in the bathroom sink and I heard the sound of air being sucked into the faucet instead of the sound of water coming out of the faucet. I tried the kitchen sink...same thing.

I checked the expansion tank pressure gauge: zero pounds. I checked the circuit breaker: On. Something was wrong with the well pump.

I had 240V to the controller in the basement. Good so far. I dug up the top of the well head and checked the wires there...240V. I then tried to start the pump from the controller. The pump should draw about 6 or 7 amps when it's running. Mine drew close to 50. I measured the resistance of the motor windings by using the wires leading to the pump motor at the bottom of the well. Both pump motor windings tested fine. For some reason the motor was stalled. Could be bad bearings, sand in the impeller, a small stone, or anything that was preventing the motor from turning.

So I pulled the pump.

Wanting to get a shower before going to bed, I went to buy a pump yesterday afternoon. We went to Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, and Tractor Supply. All had some type of pump or had the pump I needed but didn't have the controller. We showered at my parent's house last night. It's Sunday. I'm sitting at home waiting for some place to open this morning so I can go pump hunting again.

Hoping the pump was still under warranty, my wife searched through her warranty file. The warranty file is now a huge box of paperwork filled with warranties that expired when I was cool in my hawaiian shirts and velor sweaters.

Warranty for the pump was for 18 months and it's been 3 years since I installed it. Of course. A residential pump should last a lot longer than 3 years. but of course, mine gets a lot of use. I run the pump for lots of hours and thousands of gallons more than most people because I have a ridiculously large garden.

When I add the $300 for a new pump into the cost of having said ridiculously large garden, I'm now convinced more than ever of gardening truism #1.

"Gardening is Stupid."

Watermelons, Peppers, and Mowing Down the Garden.

2008-08-09T09:26:00.004-04:00

Late Summer into Fall is harvest time and we're finally there. Last weekend I cut a watermelon that wasn't quite ripe. Today I found one that was. Picking a ripe one is tricky. They all look the same on the outside so you're left to thumping them and listening to how they sound. Supposedly the spot that touches the ground turns from white to yellow when they're ripe but that happened weeks ago. Some people say the vine starts to turn a little brown when they're ripe. That hasnt' happend at all. So I was left to thump them and listen for the one that went "plunk" instead of "plink". Not very scientific but it seemed to work.

These watermellons are "sugar babies". Smaller than the regular watermellon at about 12" in diameter. They are very sweet.

We also picked the peppers today. That half of my garden was used for all the leafy stuff that was done back in June. It's been pretty much forgotten since then except for me pulling a carrot to eat once in a while while I was out there working. The carrots are past their prime so all that was left to tend to on that half of the garden was the peppers. We picked them all today so I can mow that half down and not worry about it anymore.

We cut them up and freeze them in big chunks. Whenever we're making something that could use pepper, we pull a chunk out of the freezer, chop it up and throw it in the dish. We don't eat a lot of spicy food so this basket will probably last us until we harvest again next summer. There are several varietis of mild peppers here, mostly bell peppers. If we had waited a few more weeks, they would be all shades of yellow, orange, and red but I'm tired of dealing with them and green tastes just fine.

The world's most amazing squash squashed!

2008-08-08T08:12:00.004-04:00

Fall's getting close and the garden's finally starting to pay off. I'm still eating grapes and expect there to be more varieties ripening over the next few weeks. The first round of peaches are gone and I got to eat a few.

Now the sweet corn is ready. I think we'll pick most of it this weekend and freeze what we don't use right away. Some of the ears have minor damage near the end from beetles but nothing that can't be trimmed off.

Still, I'm convinced gardening isn't worth it. I could have bought half a dozen peaches, a bunch of grapes, and a bushel of corn and been ahead.

The mystery vine growing along the house will probably remain a mystery. The only fruit growing on the vine was torn off of the vine yesterday. The details are sketchy but I know it involved an unsupervised toddler who, I was told, meant no harm.

It might have just been a boring old pumpkin. On the other hand, it might have been a new, undiscovered variety of cancer curing, anti-aging, unlimited fuel supply, high temperature superconductor squash. Now we'll never know.

Grapes

2008-08-05T18:33:00.003-04:00

A short post.

Some of the grapes are ripe or very close. My Glenora seedless variety are just about there. I pulled of several of the ripest and they were good. Very sweet. Another day or two and I'll pull the bunches.

Glenora seedless

The concords are also close. The concords are only two year old vines. They look sparse but for two year old vines, they look good. Concords are the American dark purple grapes used to make grape juice. I don't think they're great table grapes.

Concord

I'm still waiting for two more seedless varieties (one of which has seeds) and two seeded varieties to ripen.

Mostly Pictures

2008-08-01T18:55:00.005-04:00

It's been another busy week. I took a vacation week last week and spent this week at work catching up. Sometimes taking a vacation isn't worth it. I've neglected the garden even more than usual this week and it's a mess.

But here's an update anyway. Mostly just pictures.

The sugar sorghum I'm trying has put out seed heads. I'll cut it down in a few weeks and see if it's actually sweet.

I checked my garden this morning and set up some irrigation. My two remaining walking stick cabbage plants looked pretty good. They both had several large leaves at least 18" long and probably closer to 2 feet long. This afternoon, one of them has been eaten by something.

The vine that came up by itself in a flower bed is still unidentified. I thought it looked like a pumpkin but now it's got fruit and I don't know what it is. It's nothing I've ever grown before.

The fuji apple I cut down due to fire blight is putting out new suckers. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Something's been eating blackberries. I think it's a groundhog. At least he left me two.

The upside down tomato experiment on my porch is a limited success. It never got as big as I had hoped but it only gets a few hours of sun a day. It does have a red tomato.

The loofa sponge gourds are getting big. I'm not sure when to harvest or even what to do with them once I do harvest but this was my wife's idea so I'm off the hook. I also don't know how to spell "luffa" so I'll be trying out all possible spellings hoping I get one right.

And finally some of the grapes are almost ready. Several bunches are just raisins. I don't know why.

Why gardening might not be for me

2008-07-27T20:19:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-24T09:56:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-23T14:39:00.001-04:00

My wife:

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

Dead Fuji?

2008-07-22T08:13:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-21T10:35:00.004-04:00

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

2008-07-18T10:43:00.003-04:00

It's always something

I Hate Gardening

2008-07-12T15:19:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-07-08T20:38:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-05T20:27:00.005-04:00

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!

2008-07-01T20:53:00.006-04:00

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.

Mystery Wilt

2008-06-21T09:10:00.006-04:00

It was suggested that my tomatoes have Fusarium wilt, a fungus, and that's why they're looking bad. I did some reading and I don't think that's what I have. It could be, I'm not a plant pathologist and I don't have a lab but it doesn't look like the pictures and description on the net.

With fusarium wilt, the fungus moves into the plant through the roots and is does damage to the tissues in the stem that transport water and nutrients. There should be visible dark spots between the woody inner layer of the stem and the outer layer. Since they're in bad shape, I cut a couple down and looked inside. No dark spots.

no black spots

Although the whole plant just looks sickly, the tips of the new leaves look the worst and this doesn't seem like fusarium either.

mystery wilt

Just in case, I wanted to spray something. It seems like the right thing to do so I gave everything a good coat of Daconil fungicide. Hopefully I can stop whatever this is from spreading.

So I don't know what's really wrong but as long as it doesn't spread to other plants the point is now moot. I pulled the bad tomatoes out and bought a couple of nice big tomato plants yesterday at the garden center. These got planted at the other end of the garden so they don't get the same disease. So now I've got two plants instead of seven but I don't like tomatoes anyway so two is plenty.

new tomatoes, not dead yet

In other garden news: I couldn't' find any cucumber plants last weekend to replace my dead ones. I got lucky and found some yesterday while looking for tomatoes. I've finished the cucumber trellis and should have enough for pickles now.

cucumber trellis

The bush type peas in the garden didn't do very well. We got a few pods but they never really took off. I've had trouble with peas before. The vine type peas did well on their trellis and are just about done. If we want any more peas, we had better pick them in the next few days.

peas

I personally don't want any peas and I can't imagine anybody else going out to pick any so I guess we won't have to eat any peas. Peas are pretty bad, even for vegetables. My daughter ate a few pea pods when they were smaller with ranch dressing and like them that way. They don't have much flavor when they're small pods so the pods were really just a ranch dressing delivery system and I can appreciate that but now that they actually taste like peas, I'll pass.

peas

So far so good

2008-06-20T11:38:00.006-04:00

It's summer, it's hot, and a lot has happened since my last post on the 8th. Two weeks ago I was loosing peaches and my pears had what looked like fire blight.

The permanent plantings

So far, so good. The peaches stopped dropping and I've still got a lot left on the tree. I'm assuming there was just too much fruit ont he tree and it was natural thinning.

Peaches, almost full size

I've had to cut out a couple of more branch tips on my pears as they curl and turn black to keep the fire blight from getting a real foot hold but there hasn't been any new damage in a week so I'm hoping I'm out of the woods. The few pears that were on my two small trees are still there and starting to look like pears.

pears looking like pears

The apples have been doing well. They've got some brown spots but nothing that's really going to hurt them. They're not pretty enough for the supermarket but I'll eat them.

apples

The only other permanent planting that's doing anything interesting is my grapes. I've got grapes, lots of them. Most are hidden under the leaves but you can see a couple of bunches on the left side of this picture.

grapes

Now onto the garden.

You might remember that I'm trying some giant walking stick cabbage this year. I think they're doing well. I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing but they're not dead. This is one of this year's odd ball plants I'm trying. I should have walking sticks in no time.

The corn and sugar sorghum is looking good. Actually, only about half the sorghum came up but that half is looking healthy. Corn always does well until just before it's ready to be picked. Then beetles eat the silk, worms move into the husk, or earwigs take over.

The broccoli came on unusually early this year. I cut the first heads a couple of weeks ago and it was already full of worms. I'm going to let the rest go to seed without cutting any more. I just want to see how that happens and I can buy broccoli at the supermarket without worms. If I was starving, I could eat the broccoli. Thankfully I'm not.

The onions are looking great. I don't have much luck with onions so I don't know what's different this year. Usually, they get rotten right at the ground line in the early spring.

corn and a sparse row of sorghum

Celery is starting to look like celery, The lettuce and other greens are past their peak and should be sending up flowering stalks to make seeds soon. I've never tried planting lettuce from my own seeds but I have had them go to seed and ended up with a yard full of lettuce in the fall. There are hundreds of little 1/4" diameter carrots.

everything else (almost)

I planted 5 tomatoes. Three regular full size tomato plants and two grape tomatoes. They're not doing well. I don't know what's wrong. They haven't grown much, they look a little wilty and the color isn't really as green as they should be. There are a couple of diseases that can do this but they've been like this for three weeks and if it was a disease, they'd be dead.

I've still got some room left so I think I'll try some new tomato plants on the other side this weekend.

underachiever

I had planted 8 cucumbers. only two have survived. The two look good but I'm also growing dill and was hoping to can some dill pickles. I went looking for cucumber plants last weekend to replace the dead ones but no body had any left. It looks like I need to finish stringing the trellis for the cucumbers this weekend. I am going to try growing them up on a trellis to keep the cucumbers off the ground.

lonely cucumber

Farmer's Tan Challenge

2008-06-20T10:57:00.003-04:00

I've been challenged to a farmer's-tan-off. I have to admit, I don't get farmer's tans like I used to. I grew up on a farm and spent a lot more time in the sun than I do now. My job still has me outside for several hours a week but probably half my time is spent in an air conditioned office sitting at a desk. So I'm not in the competitive condition I was in when I was younger. Here's my entry in the Farmer's Tan Challenge:

That must be an older photo.

Here's a more current one.

Just not as distinct a tan line as in years past. People used to think I was wearing a t-shirt under my tank top even when I wasn't.

June Drop, Fire Blight, Squatters

2008-06-08T12:31:00.008-04:00

Last year, all my peaches fell off the tree in early June. This year, the peaches on the tree look bigger and healthier than they looked last year and I hoped I was in the clear. Yesterday, it started. June Drop. When peach trees have too many fruit, they do drop some fruit this time of year, I'm hoping that's all this is but after last year, I'm expecting the worst. No body knows exactly what causes it but competition for nutrients and water seems to have something to do with it. We've had plenty of rain and I fertilized earlier this week.

June Drop

I've had to cut two branches out of one pear tree. It looks like fire blight to me. Fire blight is a bacterial infection that works its way down the branch to the tree. There is no cure. The only thing to do is cut out branches as they start to show symptoms. You cut several inches below the obvious infection and hopefully it hasn't moved down past where you cut the branch off. A few days ago I was hoping that the 5 or 6 pears on the tree survived until they were ripe. Now I'm hoping the tree survives.

I can spray some preventative chemicals next year in early spring but it's too late to do anything now and it can spread into the rest of the fruit trees.

fire blight

Something's moved into my grapes. I don't know what it is yet. My wife thinks it's a Mocking bird.

squatters

Random Summer Stuff

2008-06-06T08:38:00.004-04:00

June's here, it's hot, and things are happening in the garden. The peaches are going through June Drop. That's when peaches fall off in June. Last year, I lost everything in June but this year, only the small peaches are falling off...so far. The peaches this year are also much bigger than they were last year. Most of the peaches are an inch across and last year they looked like almonds.

Everything got fertilizer this morning. Hopefully that will kick some of my slower stuff into gear like the peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

We've had a lot of rain in the past week. That's good it's less irrigation for me. We had a couple of rainy days, a few thunder storms and I've lost track but it was nearly 3 inches overall and may have been more.

The strawberries are just about done. We had so many that we didn't even pick them all. There are a few still ripening but the ripe ones are pretty small and not nearly as sweet as the first couple of rounds.

Strawberries no bigger than my thumbnail

I've got 3 decent sized heads of broccoli to cut today. Last year, the broccoli was at least twice as big as it is this year before it started producing heads. Maybe I've got a different variety, maybe the weather was different.

I'm waiting for the rhubarb. I've never grown rhubarb before but I've read that the stalks should turn red in late spring or early summer. I'm still waiting. A few stalks are slightly reddish but certainly not red. I've got a recipe I want to try. I had assumed that rhubarb and strawberries would be ready at just about the same time since the famous rhubarb recipe is strawberry rhubarb pie.

Big rhubarb, bigger asparagus, and strawberries

My hanging basket tomato experiment hasn't done much. I moved it to a location where it will get sun for half the day but there's no place on the porch where it can get full sun. It's trying very hard to grow up instead of down.

The apples are growing apples. I have been skeptical about these 5 in 1 apple tree grafts since I bought them 3 or 4 years ago. Gimmicks don't usually work out very well. It seems like I'll have at least 3 different varieties this year.

The white powder on the apple leaves is a fungicide. Fruit trees need a lot of spraying to make nice shiny fruit.

And finally, I'll sign off with a game called "find the pea pod".

Find the Pea Pod.

Shock and Awe Gardening

2008-05-29T19:05:00.005-04:00

The weeds started invading this week. We had a couple of very wet weeks and now it's warmed up and I've got thousands of small weeds everywhere. I could have kept up with the hoeing and I wouldn't be facing this problem but I don't have a garden so I can do work. It's even gotten beyond what I can manage with the Giant-Magic-Marker-o-Death.

check out the weeds around the broccoli

So last night, I sprayed everything that isn't a garden plant with Roundup herbicide. I was careful not to spray anything I wanted to keep alive, but there may have been some collateral damage. That's the sad reality of war. I learned the hard truth of war a long time ago, sitting on my couch watching war movies. War is not pretty. I won't know the casualty count for a few days but at least the weeds are going to be dead.

It's hard to tell what's a
weed and what's a spring green

The strawberries are still going strong. We've had strawberry shortcake, strawberry milkshakes, strawberry ice cream, and plain strawberries. I pick a few every morning on my way to the car and a few when I get home from work on my walk to the house. I figured out what's eating them on the vine, I've seen several birds helping themselves but they have only done a small bit of damage so far and If I kill a few there will always be more to take their place so for the time being, the birds get a pass.

My few blackberry bushes have been in full flower for a couple of weeks. I think there will be a good crop of blackberries when they come on.

a blackberry bush (hard to see because of
all the weeds... they'll all be dead
in a few days though.)

Something's been taking nips out of my peaches. Several had small holes weeping sap last night where some bug must have bitten through the skin. I have no idea what did this but I knew I had to take decisive action. I carefully mixed a cocktail of malathion, benefrin, and imadicloprid. The only approach that works when dealing with garden terrorists is my "kill em' fast, kill em' hard, and kill em' all" approach to gardening.

bugs that mess with me wish they were dead.

There was no more insect damage this morning so whatever it was, it isn't anymore.

wounded peaches recovering comfortably at home

Jetting in a Trellis

2008-05-25T16:25:00.005-04:00

It's a 3 day weekend and one of the few weekends we've had lately without a full schedule. I've had time today to play outside. I got some spraying done this morning. Roundup to kill weeds everywhere I don't want weeds. I sprayed a mix of pytherin insecticide and daconil fungicide on just about everything this morning to keep fungus and insects from getting all my tree fruits and grapes. I sprayed some of my fruits with imadicloprid, remember that stuff?

I did some minor plumbing this afternoon and added a hose faucet to the irrigation pipe near the strawberries. This will let me hook up a hose at the far end of all my plantings to water a patch of watermelons I put in next to the strawberries.

The cucumbers plants I transplanted to the garden a couple of days ago need a trellis. Cucumbers vines cover a lot of ground. I don't have that much area in my garden. Last year, I tried to grow the cucumbers on a trellis and in tomato cages but I put up the trellis and cages after the vines were already out of control and it didn't work very well. This year I'm starting with the trellis earlier. The trellis is a couple of posts stuck in the ground and I'm going to tie some string between them to give the vines something to climb. Driving the posts in the ground is always work. Not liking work, I came up with another garden innovation.

One method of driving pilings into the ground when doing construction of piers and marinas is to use a jet of water to bore a hole in the sand as you drive the piling. If it works for them, it should work for me. My home built jet is nothing more than a piece of 1/2" plastic pipe and a fitting on one end to attach to a garden hose.

using a water jet to drive a post

with the water on, I was able to easily push the jet pipe nearly 3' into the ground in under a minute. Dirt ahead of the water jet washed up, around the pipe to the surface. Once I had the hole, I started to work the post into the hole using the jet pipe to clear a bigger hole. With almost no work at all, I was able to "Drive" two posts two feet deep in under 5 minutes. Another garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX.

the water jet in action

And finally, my strawberries are starting to get ripe. We've had a strawberry or two every day for a week but today was the first day there was enough to do something with. We probably picked two quarts of strawberries today and there are many, many more to ripen over the couple of weeks. A lot of the ripe ones were a little fuzzy or had soft spots. We've had a lot of rain lately and fruit sitting in water gets fungus but there were still a lot of good ones. I'm planning on having strawberry shortcake tonight with dinner.

the first strawberries of the season

Upside Down Tomato

2008-05-25T12:06:00.004-04:00

I've read about this and decided to give it a try. I picked up a patio cherry tomato plant this morning and a hanging basket. I drilled a 1-1/4" hole in the bottom of the hanging basket with a hole saw and made my own hanger for it since the one that came with it was nearly 18" long.

I then planted the tomato upside down in the basket so it's sticking out the bottom of the pot. This is supposed to grow normally, just upside down and produce tomatoes like any other plant.

I'm not exactly sure what "patio" tomato means but this one is determinate, which means it will grow to a certain size and stop growing. Most garden tomatoes are indeterminate and they will continue to get bigger as long as the weather is good. It seemed like a determinate tomato plant makes more sense growing in a hanging basket.

Another garden experiment brought to you by GardenerX

I can win the battle, can I win the war?

2008-05-23T20:24:00.005-04:00

We were chased from the garden last Sunday evening by a thunderstorm with several rows left to plant. The live plants survived the week in my dark shop and I got some planting done tonight. I finished up the corn and now have three rows. I may plant another couple of rows in a few weeks to extend the harvest. I always plan on doing that and get tired of gardening by then. Maybe blogging will keep me going just so I don't look like the quitter I am.

Half a row of dill and half a row of cucumbers finished up tonight's planting. The dill was planted from seed...tiny, paper thin, impossible to manage seed. The instructions on the pack said to plant 2" apart and thin to 6". The row is more of a continuum of seed than individual seeds. In fact, the wind picked up slightly while I was trying to get some of the extra seeds back in the packet and now my garden is a continuum of dill seeds.

I bought the cucumber plants last week. 4 pickling cucumbers and 4 "tasty green" cucumbers. cucumbers take up a lot of room on spreading vines that take over the garden. Last year I tried growing the vines on a trellis, I'm going to see if I can improve on that this year and grow them up instead of out.

I canned a few jars of pickles last year. The bread and butter pickles were pretty good. The regular dill pickles came out way too salty.

There's still more I plan to plant this weekend so I'll probably have another blog soon.

COLORADO POTATO BEETLE AND HOW I WON A BATTLE
My wife found a Colorado potato beetle walking through the garden tonight. These things are the worst. They eat potato, tomato, and other plants down to the ground some years and they've developed resistance to just about every pesticide there is. The home owner remedy is to spray B.t. or Bacillus thuringiensis, a bio-pesticide based on the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. Even that only works if ingested by the beetle and only when it's in the larval stage. Not really much help when a thousand beetles are chomping on your garden.

Colorado Potato Beetle.
AKA Potato Bug

Always looking for a better way, I came up with something last year that worked against the Colorado Potato Beetle. Before I share, I want to let you know that according to the pesticide label, "It is against federal law to use any product in a manner that is inconsistent with its labeling." And I always respect federal law, even the really really stupid ones. So consider the following a fictitious story.

There is a fairly new (not much more than a decade old) pesticide that Potato Bugs aren't resistant too yet. Yes, that's what we call them...potato bugs. This new chemical is sold under a couple of different names. One that's used for the Potato Bug is Admire. Admire is sold only to licensed commercial growers and is only sold in quantities that would be ridiculous for a guy with a garden to own. But the same chemical ingredient (imidacloprid) is sold in garden centers under the name "Bayer advanced Tree and Shrub Insect Control".

And yes, that's the same Bayer that makes aspirin. It seems that chemical companies are chemical companies and when you discover one that makes you better, you market it as a medicine. When you discover one that kills stuff, you just market it as a pesticide.

Although the chemical is the same, the concentrations of the Bayer Tree and Shrub pesticide and Admire are very different so I had to do some math and mix the stuff with water to get the concentration right. Converting Admire's listed "active ingredients per acre" rate to the little 18 inch circle I'm spraying around a plant took some figuring and I'll have to do the math again this year but I ended up with such a small amount of chemical needed that I mixed it with an eye dropper. But this stuff worked well and worked immediately. I had dead potato bugs within hours.

There's more good news. This chemical isn't just for potatoes. The same chemical is also sold for use on lots of fruits and vegetables under the name Provado. With a little more math, I was able to figure out the right mix and protect just about everything in my garden last year. Last year was the first time I actually let my garden grow all season. Every year before that, I gave up and just mowed it down my mid-summer because of all the damage done by insects, weeds, and disease. But I've mostly tackled the insect problem.

And the best part is Imidacloprid is systemic. It's drawn into the plant through the roots and gets into the entire plant making the entire plant poisonous to bugs so once it's applied it works for a long long time.

Now I just need to find out a way to kill whatever's eating my strawberries.

The strawberry patch massacre.

Finally past the frost free date

2008-05-19T21:17:00.005-04:00

Saturday was busy but Sunday was planting day. I've been waiting for May 15th for a long time. May 15th is our "Frost Free" date, supposedly the last day frost can happen. We actually haven't had a frost for a month or so.

I picked up a flat of plants. Two six-packs of green bell pepper plants, two six-packs of yellow bell pepper plants, two varieties of cucumbers for canning pickles, half a dozen regular tomatoes and half a dozen grape tomatoes, and 4 watermelon plants.

I've never seen chocolate peppers before and I like trying odd-ball stuff so I had to get them. Last year I had 4 tomato plants and we had 30X more tomatoes than we could use or give away. I only really want two plants this year but they come in packs of 4 or 6. To get two different varieties, I ended up with more than I can use.

It's looking like I'm going to run out of room in my garden. I've only planted just under half the space so far but I've got big plans, so I need to save space. I planted the peppers and tomatoes between the rows of lettuce, spinach, peas, and other greens. Since the leafy vegetables and peas will be done before the weather gets really warm, and tomatoes and peppers are subtropical plants that really take off in the heat of summer, I'm hoping the leafy stuff will be gone just as the tomatoes and peppers start to take over the space. Another garden experiment.

After planting a row of a dozen peppers and 5 tomatoes, my 8 year old daughter and I marked out, raked smooth, trenched, planted, and covered a row of silver queen sweet corn. I plan on doing 4 rows of corn. We were starting to mark out the second row when a storm blew up. We grabbed everything and ran for the shop. So now I've got a flat of cucumbers, watermelon, and the extra peppers and tomatoes sitting in the shop waiting to be planted.

Thinning Fruit

2008-05-13T19:29:00.008-04:00

After last week's warm up, it got cold again this weekend. It also rained...a lot. My rain gauge showed 3-1/2" of rain. The wind blew over several trees in the area and knocked out our electricity for a few hours Sunday night into Monday morning. No damage to the garden other than a few broken branches on the fruit trees and some of the asparagus is now growing with a slight tilt.

The peach, pear, and apple trees all have lots of fruit. Too much fruit. If the trees were allowed to grow that much fruit, the tree couldn't keep up. The fruit would be small and not very good to eat. Fruit trees need to be thinned to produce big, juicy apples, pears, and peaches.

peaches too close on the branch

The rule of thumb is to have one peach about every 6 inches on a branch. That means most of the fruit has to come off. It took me about 45 minutes to thin two peaches and two pears. I'll work on the apples on another day.

Thinned Peaches

Apples and pears grow fruit in clusters. To thin apples or pears, you leave the biggest fruit in any cluster and remove the rest. The picture is apples. Peaches look exactly the same, just a little more green.

Commercial growers thin fruit in different ways. Most thin flowers since they come off easier than fruit. Fruit tends to hold on for dear life. Flowers are weak. There are big machines that smack the trees with ropes to knock off some of the flowers. I saw one of these in action breaking branches and damaging trees. There are chemicals that will cause flowers to fall off. By being very careful how much you spray, you can only kill a percentage of the flowers. You don't want to mix too much. And some thin flowers by hand, often with toilet brushes. I was worried that frost might get some of my flowers so I waited until there was fruit to thin.

The garden greens are starting to really take off. I planted spinach, lettuce, mixed greens, radishes, carrots, and probably other stuff. I wrote the names in marker on plastic row marker stakes and stuck them in the rows. Apparently I didn't use a permanent marker and now I'm not sure what's growing where. No problem I didn't plan on eating anything green anyway.

garden greens

My wife's seen a groundhog hanging around the garden. It must be eying up the leafy stuff because there isn't anything else to eat yet. Last year she watched him steel tomatoes.

And finally, I've got red strawberries. Most of the berries look like the tiny green ones at the top of this picture but I found two that are getting red. I think I'll have strawberries next week. Finally something from the garden I like.

a lonely red strawberry

Getting Hot

2008-05-07T19:45:00.006-04:00

It's finally getting warm. For the last week, it's been in the 70's and even hit the low 80's a couple of times. After a month of slow progress, these warm temperatures have gotten things jumping in the garden.

I've been doing my regular weeding with a 1 gallon sprayer and roundup. The Giant-Magic-Marker-O-Death has seen some use too. With the the magic of chemistry and some warm weather, I've got nice dead patches around just about everything now.

Over last weekend we planted a couple of my odd ball seeds. A row of sugar sorghum and a row of peanuts. Sugar cane grows in tropical areas only so in the old days, northerners like me, used sugar sorghum as a sweetener. Sorghum is still grown as a grain and the stalks are used for animal fodder but no body really grows the sweet varieties anymore. I found a source on the internet. I tried sugar sorghum last year but killed it when I was "hoeing" my garden with herbicide. I should have know better since I learned as a little boy not to spray into the wind.

oddities: peanuts and sorghum

Peanuts are only an oddity because they're grown down south and not in New Jersey. Our growing season is too short and too cold. I was hoping to start these under plastic to get an earlier start but never got around to it. Maybe I'll get peanuts anyway. Probably not.

Since I only put in my rows of asparagus last spring, I didn't want to harvest too hard this year. We cut asparagus a couple of times and then let it grow. It's getting pretty big already. We can cut as much as we want next year but I can't imagine wanting to cut very much.

asparagus gone wild

I bought three more blackberry plants at Lowe's this year. Since they sit on shelves indoors in plastic bags and never get watered, I figured they wouldn't be in very good shape for very long so I picked them up a month ago, as soon as they hit the shelves. There were no leaves but the little sticks had some green inside so I thought they would be okay.

The sticks turned out to be dead. But two of the three are putting out new leaves from the roots. If you want quality, buy from somewhere other than a home center.

back from the dead.

The grapes are starting to flower. Grape flowers don't look like much, they're easy to miss. But each of these flower clusters will become a bunch of grapes.

grape clusters

For the last couple of years, my pear trees have done nothing. This year they flowered like crazy and now I've got pears. I'm not sure if you pick pears under-ripe to ripen on the shelf or let them ripen on the tree. Either way, I'm going to give these a little time.

pears

And finally, I've even got strawberries. My Giant-Magic-Marker-O-Death is working very well at keeping weeds to a minimum in my strawberries and I've actually got berries. I'm not a fan of vegetables. The stuff that I'll grow in the actual garden, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, peas, broccoli, peppers, and the other vegetables can feed everybody else. The fruits are mine.

strawberries

That's enough for one post. Radishes, lettuce, spinach, peas, onions, broccoli, and other stuff is really starting to take off but I've typed enough and you've read enough.

Almost Froze to Death Last Night

2008-04-30T21:02:00.006-04:00

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

2008-04-24T18:57:00.006-04:00

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

2008-04-23T20:40:00.008-04:00

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

2008-04-20T21:09:00.007-04:00

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

2008-04-20T12:59:00.007-04:00

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

2008-04-14T19:35:00.009-04:00

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

2008-04-13T21:13:00.006-04:00

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

2008-04-13T13:21:00.008-04:00

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

2008-04-11T21:09:00.009-04:00

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

2008-04-05T20:57:00.010-04:00

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.

Cold enough for peas.

2008-03-30T13:02:00.010-04:00

Today is the last day of a week's vacation at home. Wife says it was 11 days. Felt like more. So this is the last chance I've got to do some more with the garden while I'm off from work but there isn't much to do.

We're on our 9th day of spring and the mercury wasn't out of the 30's at 10:00 this morning.
I think the Nobel people really jumped the gun on giving my buddy Al Gore a prize for global warming. But I guess it makes up for the prize he should have won for inventing the internet.

I did plant another row of peas today. They like the cold. This is the first row of anything in the actual garden. Below you can see the string I used to keep the row straight.

I went to buy some fruit tree spray yesterday. There's a product called...wait for it..."Fruit Tree Spray". It includes a fungicide and a couple of insecticides. Fruit trees need to be sprayed several times during the growing season and the first spray is supposed to be now. One of the insecticides listed in Fruit Tree Spray is Carbaryl. Carbaryl causes "thinning" of peaches. Thinning means some of the fruit falls off.

Last year, I used this stuff and it just happened that all my peaches fell off the peach trees in June. When this started to happen last year, I took a peach over to my friend Russ. Russ has a masters in plant science, spent 3 years doing research on peach trees, and worked for several years as a agricultural extension agent for the state university. If anybody could figure out what was happening to my peaches, Russ could.

"What's this" I asked as I handed him a little peach that had fallen off the tree.
"That's a messed up peach"
"Yeah, but why?"
"Because whoever's growing this doesn't know what he's doing."
"What made them fall of the tree?"
"Probably June Drop."
"What's June Drop?"
"That's when peaces drop off the tree in June."
"What causes June Drop"
"Don't know."

I don't know what I'd do without Russ. Well now, I'm wondering if this stuff was the problem or at least part of it. I think I'll find something else to use to spray my trees this year.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-27T15:39:00.006-04:00

Our 8 year old daughter to our 14 month old son: "It's okay, it's just Daddy, he's wearing his gas mask".

Preparing the Battlefield

2008-03-25T19:40:00.007-04:00

It's been a busy day. Three posts. It is, of course the first day on this blog. I'm sure my enthusiasm will wane eventually.

The battlefield is prepared. I borrowed a roto-tiller from my parents and tilled the garden this afternoon. I live across the field from the farm where I grew up. The past few years, I've loaded the rototiller on a truck and unloaded it at my place and then did the loading/unloading thing again when I was done. It's a heavy rototiller and it doesn't like to be loaded. This year I got smarter and I just "drove" it the quarter mile across the field. It's self propelled so it wasn't that difficult to walk behind. I do wish it steared more easily but it was still better than loading and unloading.

The garden's roughly 20ft x 40ft. This size worked last year because I can divide the garden into two 20ft squares and water it with two impact sprinklers each doing a 20ft diameter circle. Actually it's one sprinkler that I move back and forth. And actually it's the diameter of the diagonal of a 20' square which happens to be 1.41 (square root of 2 ) times 20 ft or exactly 28.2 feet in diameter. Credit goes to Pythagoras of course.

The ground's too cold to plant anything now except peas. As I mentioned earlier, I planted a row of vine type peas yesterday and I'll probably do a row of dwarf peas over the next few days but the rest of the garden will sit for a month or so. This will let some of the newly exposed weed seeds germinate and I'll kill them off with a healthy dose of glyphosate before I plant anything. Hopefully this will help to keep the weeds down. Easier to spray now than hoe later.

IRRIGATION
I also had time this afternoon to finally extend my underground drip irrigation to the three new trees I planted a week or so ago. Three new 20' lenghts of poly pipe from the old system to the new with 1/4" drip tubing to each tree. I'll eventually add some sort of drip emitter or mini sprinkler to the tubing at the trees. I've still got to fill in the trenches to cover the poly pipe but that's going to be a lot less work than it was digging the trenches.

Boring Garden Layout

2008-03-25T11:15:00.008-04:00

Here's a sketch of the layout of my permanent plantings. I started putting this stuff in in 2005, adding a row or two each year. I think I'm done now. I can't think of anything else to put in.

I hate gardening (I know...I don't know why I do it either) so I have tried to make my plants as carefree as possible so I don't have to do much work. To achieve that I've been putting in drip irrigation. Underground water mains feed riser pipes that poke up through the ground. At each riser pipe, I can attach drip lines for each row. It's a lot of work in the beginning to install all of this stuff but it lasts for years and now I don't spend much time watering. I just turn a few valves and the next morning every thing's been watered.

Here's the layout of my permanent plants that produce (or are supposed to) year after year. I also plant a garden of the traditional garden vegetables each year. (click the picture to enlarge.)

Spring is Here...sort of.

2008-03-25T10:07:00.013-04:00

It's March 25th. Spring was officially here 5 days ago. It was 36º this morning and we had a pretty good frost yesterday morning. Where's that global warming I've been promised?

Hopefully the frosts are just about done. My peach and pear trees are already covered with flower buds and a frost can damage the flowers. No flowers no fruit. Nature has lots of tricks up her sleeve to defeat me.

Even though it's still so cold, I've already started a few things this year. I ordered 3 more fruit trees and they came last week. I planted them the day they arrived. The new trees are a Fuji apple, Granny Smith apple, and a Hardi-Red Nectarine. That makes 9 total fruit trees in my little orchard behind my house. Three years ago, I planted 2 pears (one Bosc, one Bartlett), 2 peaches (one Gala, one Bell of Georga), and two "5-in-1" apples. The 5-in-one apples were 5 different varieties grafted onto one tree. It's supposed to produce 5 different varieties. I can't prune them right because I'm afraid I'll cut off a whole variety if I cut off a branch. I got a few golden delicious apples last year but nothing else. I'm just skeptical that these trees are going to really be worth much which is why I bought the two new apples this year.

When I put in my three new trees, I wanted to extend my existing irrigation system to these trees. When I first put in my trees, I buried poly pipe with a small sprayer at each tree. Over the last few days, I've been slowly digging some trenches and in a couple of days I'll get pipe in the ground.

We had a couple of warmer weeks already. Several days into the 50's. The soil temperature is right around 45º and some things are already growing. My rhubarb is starting to grow. I planted 4 heads last year but only 2 made it.

I also planted a short row of peas yesterday evening. I've got several rows of posts that I put in the ground over the past two years. Two of these posts support wire for my grapes, one supports wire for drip irrigation for a row of blackberries and sickly blueberries, and a few just give me a place to bring my irrigation pipes up out of the ground to attach drip irrigation for a couple of rows of asparagus, the rhubarb, and a matted row of strawberries.

Well, I had a spare row with posts that's been sitting empty. Since I haven't got anything permanent to plant there, I'm going to use the posts to support trellises for peas and cucumbers this year. The trellis for the peas is finished and the peas went in last night.

If you look at the picture of the above trellis, you can see a posted row of blackberries, two rows of grapes and my little orchard of fruit trees beyond that. The white pipes coming up out of the ground to the left of each row, right at the post, is attached to a buried piece of poly pipe for irrigation. A black soaker hose can be seen under the pea trellis attached to the irrigation riser.