Random Summer Stuff

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.

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

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.

Thinning Fruit

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

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.

Giant Magic Marker O' Death V.2.0

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

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

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

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

strawberries w/ soaker hose and freshly cut grass.

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

new apple tree

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

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

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

GardenerX invents the (already
invented) capillary siphon

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

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

Asparagus: Not completely Awful

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

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

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

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

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

strawberry flowers

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

grape vines getting leaves

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

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

Apple blossoms

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

A Slow Week

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

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

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

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

strawberry plants

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

asparagus spears

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

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

celery and broccoli

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

celery and broccoli planted

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

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

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

pears in full bloom.

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

rhubarb sans flower stalks.

Rhubarb Flowers and the Giant Magic Marker of Death

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

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

Roundup in the garden

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

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

Rhubarb flowering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boring Garden Layout

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.)