Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back into the Garden...

It was sunny and 70+ degrees today, so I decided it was probably time to hit the garden and yank out the sunflower, okra, and tomato stalks and throw them on the burn pile. I managed to get out the sunflower and tomato stalks, but couldn't budge the okra stalks (picture at left). I had forgotten how thick they get and how tightly they hold the ground, unlike the sunflower stalks, which are a bit easier to remove. My low back was already hurting a bit from lugging boxes of books around inside to put on the Ikea book shelves, so I didn't have much oomph to put into the okra. I'll have to see if I can talk hubby into digging them out for me.

A few days ago, I decided it was time to harvest the last of the green peppers, no matter how small they still were. I had diligently covered them with kitty litter buckets at night and on days when the temperatures were supposed to get near freezing, and they had been uncovered for several days where lows were in the 40s. But then, when I went to harvest them, they clearly had not survived the cold, wet weather (picture at right). The plants were shriveled and brown, and the peppers were a sickly green, wrinkly, and sporting black rotting spots. Only a week before they were green and healthy looking. [sigh] The moral of the story is, I guess, to plant green peppers much sooner in the season. I knew it was a crapshoot when I planted them, but I was hoping to get at least one pepper! At least I have several bags of diced green, yellow, red, and orange peppers I nabbed at the farmer's market over the summer.

Once I had all the sunflower and tomato stalks on the burn pile, I took one last quick survey of the garden. I need to rake the grass clippings and compost a bit more evenly over the garden (a job for another day, because the garden is still a bit muddy). It's a very different sight from the lush, green garden of summer.

But wait...are those onions?

Yes! They are! I couldn't believe my eyes. The cold and wet had taken out my precious pepper plants, but the white onions I couldn't find because of all the other encroaching plant cover were growing up through four inches of grass clippings, and looking pretty healthy at that! I wasn't sure at first whether they were onions or shallots (I never did find my shallots), so I dug a couple up. They were small white bulb onions. The outer couple of layers were slimy and clear--probably destroyed by the cold--but the rest of the bulb looked healthy. They were too small to do anything much with, so I left them to rot in the garden, to provide nutrients for the soil for next season. What amazed me is that they had about 12 inches of green on them from the top of the bulb to the tip of the green! They really wanted to get to that sunlight!

Of Geese and Gardens

It is always a sad day for me when I see geese migrating. I know what that means...winter is on its way.

While I am happy to be slowing down on the food preservation (and will be happier still when I get rid of the last of the gnats that are plaguing our kitchen right now), it's sad to see the garden lose its foliage and color. In fact, that's one of the things I dislike so much about fall and winter; once the leaves are done turning, the sky and land turn gray and seem to stay sunless and gray until mid-March.

I put up 5 1/2 pints of tomato sauce tonight, the last batch of tomato anything I'll be freezing for the season. I did cut the heads off the sunflowers and will try hanging them in the garage to dry, but it may have been a bit too early to cut them. I didn't have much of a choice, since we have had dire frost warnings lately.

The only item left in the garden that's producing at this point are my pepper plants. I covered five of them with kitty litter buckets to protect them from the frost and left two exposed. I was so tired by the time I got the five buckets out and cut off the sunflower heads (it was 41 degrees and I had a raging head cold), that I gave up on the other two plants. I feel bad about that, but a person can only do so much. I peeked under one bucket yesterday, and the little peppers seem to still be growing. We'll see, I suppose. One pepper: that's all I ask. Give me one pepper from my plants this year!
Yesterday, hubby and I did a bit of garden work. He mowed the yard and bagged it, dumping the mowed grass and leaves into the garden for winter mulch. He also took down the garden fence and pulled up the fence stakes.

My work took place in the garden itself. I pulled up all the tomato plant stakes and separated out the good stakes from the bad stakes. Bad stakes went into the burn pile; good stakes went into the garage for next year. Bamboo stakes I will never use again--I nearly put my eye out on one of them when I was harvesting tomatoes about a month ago. Plus they don't bear weight very well: they bend. The green bread ties (well, they aren't really bread ties; they're much longer. But they look like bread ties) are NOT going to be used next year--they cut into the tomato plants as the tomato plants grow and have to be pulled off the stakes at the end of the year. I'll have to try something softer, more pliable, that can simply be allowed to stay in the garden to become compost at the end of the year.

I used the compost from the compost bin and the still-rotting fruits and veggies in the bin to layer over part of the garden. Then, newspaper shred over that, and the grass and leaf clippings on top of that. Some of the garden still isn't covered, but I have more time to do that before winter sets in. If, that is, we get one more good mowing day in at least. I still have to take down the okra stalks, too.

I definitely need to pay a lot more attention to my compost bin this year. I basically ignored it this year and didn't get the amount of compost out of it that I should have and could have. I'll make a checklist over the winter based on my blog entries of things I want to do differently for next year's garden.

Planting a Peck of Pickled Peppers...Well, Just a Few, Really

It was a beautiful day, so I decided it was time to plant the pepper seedlings: 9 California Wonder sweet peppers and 6 Chinese Giant heirloom peppers. They've been seedlings long enough, in my view, and I think they will grow faster out in the regular garden. Now that the rabbit fence completely surrounds the garden, I think it's safe to put them out.

David conveniently mowed the yard today, leaving me a couple of bags of grass clippings to use for mulch. After hoeing up the weeds in the empty section of garden (tough work!), I planted the peppers and mulched around them, using leftover rain water to water each individual pepper plant. We'll see how many survive the transplant. I'm not even certain I'm planting peppers at the right time--most gardeners probably have had their peppers in for a month or more and may even be harvesting at this point. Unfortunately, I only have so much energy, and have to put things out when I can.

After the planting, I went inside to rest up a bit and shredded my next batch of newspaper for mulching between plant rows. As you can see from the picture, the onion/shallot/bean section of the garden is weed-ridden, and I will need to weed first, then lay down the shredded newspaper base, followed by grass clippings. I did that previously with the tomatoes, and I am happy to report that I still have no weeds growing in that section of the garden, and the tomatoes are happily growing in the moisture-retaining mulch. But I won't get to the weeding and mulching of this section until tomorrow.

The Benefits of "Spider Mulch"

I stopped by the local Goodwill thrift store today and came home with a copy of The Experts Book of Garden Hints: Over 1,500 Organic Tips and Techniques from 250 of America's Best Gardeners. The book is copyrighted 1993, so it's a bit dated, but it seems to have some very useful information in it and, after all, only cost me $2.

I was thumbing through the book, looking for information about how to eradicate Japanese beetles (nothing new on that front), when I stumbled across the subheading "Use 'Spider Mulch'" under "Bringing In the Good Bugs."

Apparently, by using grass clippings as mulch in my garden, I am using what one of "America's Best Gardeners" calls "spider mulch," apparently because it attracts spiders (I have seen lots of evidence of them in the garden where I have mulched--[shiver]), and those spiders are beneficial critters that eat the bad bugs. Here's the entry about "spider mulch":

Mulching your crops with hay or dried grass when you plant in the spring will attract spiders--a formidable natural "pesticide" that can drastically reduce insect damage in vegetable gardens, says Susan Riechert, Ph.D., a professor of zoology at the University of Tennesee at Knoxville. Dr. Riechert conducted a two-year study comparing the insect damage in hay-mulched and bare-ground vegetable plots. She found 60 to 80 percent less damage--and natural spider populations 10 to 30 times higher--in the hay-mulched gardens. Then when Dr. Riechert regularly removed the arachnids from the mulched plots, insect damage immediately climbed to levels comparable to those in the bare-ground gardens.

Spiders need high humidity, moderate temperature, and some type of structure to hide in. Peak spider migration occurs in April and May, when most gardens are still fairly bare. A garden mulched early in the growing season will provide a better habitat and end up with more resident spiders, Dr. Riechert explains.

Any bulky mulch that keeps the ground moist and cool offers an attractive habitat. Hay mulch, shredded newspaper, and leaf litter are examples.

Dr. Riechert adds, "You can't use any chemicals, or you'll wipe out the spiders along with the pests. But that shouldn't be a problem. In my opinion, backyard gardeners can virtually eliminate the need for chemicals by using spiders."

On reflection, I realize that the only bugs I have noticed in my garden are the spiders that crawl out of the mulch when I move it or add to it. I'm using both shredded newspaper and grass clippings, so I'm sure I've encouraged many spiders to move in. I don't use any chemicals on my garden since I don't want chemicals anywhere near my food, so the spiders have a safe haven for food foraging. Let's hope that they find Mexican bean beetles and squash bugs tasty--those are the two pests that my past gardens have had the most trouble with!

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Planting Tomatoes. And More Tomatoes. And Still More Tomatoes.

My friend Michelle kindly supplied me yesterday with 14 varieties of heirloom tomato plants, 28 plants total. The varieties include Black Cherry, Bloody Butcher, Ox Heart, Black Tom, Sungold Select, Brandywine, San Marzano, Orange Banana, Cosmonaut Volkov, Costoluto Genovese, Soldacki, Peach Tom, Green Velvet, and Orange Strawberry. Some of them sound downright tasty. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the different tomatoes they produce and putting them all to a taste test!

Today I braved the 87-degree, ridiculously humid weather and planted every one of them. I didn't want to take the chance that it would rain AGAIN before I could get them in the ground. Or that I would leave them sitting around, neglected, like I did my first batch of tomatoes. I didn't have enough stakes, so tomorrow I will need to run to Menards to pick up additional stakes for support.

Speaking of which, my previous neglect of the hort-sale tomatoes didn't seem to do any lasting damage. With some grass clippings, stake support, and regular grow juice from Mother Nature, these plants are really greening up, filling out, and blossoming!

With today's planting of the heirlooms, my tomato plant count is now about 38. Which doesn't count the seedlings that I'm waiting on . . .

Okay, so maybe I'm a little tomato crazy. But you know, tomatoes do make great salsa. And you can can or freeze them (I'll be freezing them; I don't have the patience for canning.) And honestly, I suspect many tomatoes will never even make it into the house. They'll be eaten right there in the garden, warmed by the sun, their juice dripping down my chin. That day seems so far off right now, but it will be here before I know it.

Rules for Mulching with Grass Clippings

It's 80 degrees out with no breeze and an ungodly percentage of humidity that only the Midwest seems inclined to produce. It rained just a little sometime this morning, so I thought maybe I could get some planting done before the next rain, which could be any minute now.

As flies, gnats, and other buzzing creatures swarmed around me, I began to suspect that this was not the best time to plant.

However, I'm seriously behind in my planting, so forward, hoe! A planting I did go. I planted a row of Old Mother Stallard soup beans, and decided I have planted way too many beans. We will have to keep windows cracked this winter to dispose of the excess methane produced by so many beans as it is. I skipped the Hutterite and October beans, which was a good thing, because these poor seedlings have been bound up so long in their little peat pots that they are near death. The cuke seedlings didn't make it, either, so I planted cuke seeds today straight into the garden. I took the two boxwood basil plants that have been on the verge of dying in their pot as well and planted those, and threw in a row of Mammoth dill seeds next to the cucumbers. I mulched everything and then, arms flailing at the bugs, I marched quickly into the house to shower.

As I was planting and fighting off a determined swarm of flying annoyances, a couple of thoughts occurred to me that I would like to share with you so you may learn from my experience.

1. Do not leave grass clippings in a wheelbarrow in the rain. They will smell like cow dung and attract flies. Big, nasty, annoying flies that scare the crap out of you when they buzz your head.
2. If you despise spiders, it is best to use FRESH grass clippings, not the clippings that have been sitting in the burn pile, mildewing in the rain. Apparently spiders really dig these kind of clippings.

Once I have cooled off and rested, I will plant some tomato seedlings to plant in a couple of days. Provided the rain stops long enough.

The Lady of Shallot (with Apologies to Tennyson)

Since the ground was too wet to plant today because of the rain yesterday and this morning, I decided to see whether the rain had resulted in any plant growth in the garden. The beans I had recently planted had perked up, and lo and behold, the zucchini plants--all 12 of them--are starting to look like zucchini plants now! It won't be long now and I'll have to break out the zucchini recipes. My favorite is Zucchini Chocolate Sheet Cake; close behind is Cagley Casserole...a zucchini casserole recipe given to me by a former neighbor, now deceased, named Mrs. Cagley. She was my gardening buddy, always bringing me shallots, rhubarb, and asparagus from her garden, while I provided her with zucchini, lettuce, and tomatoes from mine. She was a wonderful neighbor, and always had helpful gardening tips at hand to help out.

The shallots (planted in her honor) and onion sets, both yellow and white, are sending their shoots up through the grass clippings now. It will be a while before they will be ready to harvest, but I'm delighted they are doing so well so quickly! I'm not entirely certain what to cook with shallots (other than just to use shallots as onion replacements for a slightly different flavor), but I'll do some recipe searches before harvest.

What I'm most pleased about, however, are the tomato plants which, after being inexcusably neglected, have rallied! The new leaves on top are a deep verdigris, and all but the two smallest plants have at least two small tomatoes a piece. A couple of the plants even have additional blossoms, so provided that I keep them well watered, they should produce well for me this season.

My biggest concern right now is getting the rest of the garden planted! I know I sound like a broken record, but please, Mother Nature, may we have a couple of days without rain? Pretty please?

Finally...I Am Playing in the Dirt!

Yesterday I finally was able to re-till the garden quickly and begin planting. I had 8 sickly, water-starved tomato plants that needed to get into the ground and watered deeply. (I watered them a few days before my wedding, which was last Saturday, but busy-ness caused me to neglect the poor things.) Today they are starting to green up and stand a bit more upright. A couple of them even have teeny tiny tomatoes, despite being parched. These tomato plants want to live!

I know that some of you are probably asking, "So, why didn't you plant your garden much earlier? Sheesh, it's June 1 tomorrow!"

The answer goes something like this. Rain. Rain. Rain. No rain--ground too wet. Rain. Rain. Rain. No rain...oops, rain. No rain--ground too wet. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. More. Effing. Rain.

We were supposed to get the four-letter R-word today, but thankfully the weathercasters were wrong! So I schlepped out to Menard's to get some rabbit fencing,stakes, and more organic seeds. (I've seen bunnies in the yard, so I'm not taking chances.)

Apparently, I missed the Menard's-party memo. Everybody in the area was at Menard's, with not a single cart to be found. Courtesy dude, who is supposed to collect carts and bring them back to the store, looked lost. I finally went out and brought my own cart in. Then, people were in my way, driving on the wrong side of the aisles (you can tell what kind of driver they are on the road by the way they drive their shopping carts in the store). Sheer craziness. But I found what I needed and headed home.

I watered the poor little tomato plants (I read somewhere that they need a gallon of water each day--whoa!) and then set out to do some more planting. I got 12 zucchini plants in the ground and surrounded by grass clippings, 80 yellow onion sets, 20 white onion sets, and 20 shallot sets. (I don't think I'll need to buy onions the rest of the year.) I covered them all with grass clippings and watered them well.

By then, I was utterly exhausted. Too exhausted to manage planting anything else or put up the rabbit fence. Clearly I need to build up my stamina. I was able to get all the implements back to the garage, and now can barely budge from the chair where I am sitting, typing my gardening commentary.

Tomorrow I will start some more seedlings and hope to get some cucumbers and/or beans planted. Unless I can't get out of bed.