Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post G25-003: Some quick frost protection.

 

This post is about making some quick garden frost protection by lining a box with radiant barrier.

In my case, I’m using a plastic shoe box, lined with house radiant barrier cloth.  But a cardboard box and a cut-up space blanket would work just fine.

Based on prior tests, I’m betting these will provide about 5F of frost protection.  Good enough for the 29F predicted here for tonight.  (Edit:  Confirmed by actual test, see final section.)

A final plus is that I don’t have to store these.  That’s nice for an item that I might need once a year.  Once we’re clearly past last frost, the plastic shoe-box sized totes can go back to being plastic totes, the radiant barrier pieces can be rolled up and put away.

Any tin-foil hat will do:  Radiant barrier, or a space blanket.  Or even tin foil.

Post G22-005: Frost planning. Dodging the last breaths of Old Man Winter

The post linked just above summarizes some of the tests I did on frost protection methods, a few years back.

I scienced it.  I used a pair of temperature data loggers — little recording-thermometer gizmos that can dump their data into a USB port — to record the difference in temperature between protected and unprotected plants.

Glass (e.g., mason) jars work exceptionally well, as does radiant barrier material (e.g., space blanket).  And, both work by stopping the radiant heat (long-wave infrared) that radiates up from the (relatively warm) ground.

By contrast, floating row cover and polyethylene sheet do nothing.  The latter seems like it ought to work, but polyethylene is transparent in the far-infrared (long-wave infrared) region.  It doesn’t trap the heat radiating up out of the ground.

This year’s problem is the rhubarb

This year, I’m stuck with some early-sprouting rhubarb, and a prediction for 29F tonight. Not an ideal combination, as rhubarb leaves are not frost-tolerant.  Mason jars would be the easy solution, but the leaves are already too big.

So I did a little freeze-protection improv, and came up with using plastic shoe-box-sized containers lined with pieces of house radiant barrier (aluminized plastic cloth of some sort.)

As is my habit, I’m going to test these.  In this case, I’m testing against a “control” of just a plain plastic container without radiant barrier.

I’m betting that the radiant-barrier-lined plastic shoe boxes are good for 5F of frost protection.

I’ll post the results tomorrow, after the temperature data loggers have run all night.

Tested and proven, good for 4F of frost protection

 

Nature cooperated with the experiment by providing frost inside the “control” enclosure this AM.  This, on a night with a predicted low of 29F.  With underlying ground temperature (4″ down) of about 49F.

That’s nice, because Jack Frost left me a benchmark.  I’d better see “the data”, out of the little USB gizmo, at 32F or nearly, for the control (clear plastic box).  So that the results are all about how much warmer the ground is, under the tin-foil hat (the radiant barrier lined shoe box) and not about how much instrument error there might be.

And, as shown in the graph above, that’s what I got.  The ground under the clear-plastic cover froze.  It got down to 32F, according to the recording thermometer.  All quibbling over the accuracy and resolution of my recorder-gizmos aside, literal frost on the polypropylene tells me it froze last night, inside the clear-plastic enclosure.

Just a clear-plastic cover — in this case, a polypropylene storage container — sealed reasonably tightly over a plant, so as to provide a pocket of “still air” during the night — did essentially squat.  For sure, did not do enough to provide frost protection during a predicted 29F overnight.

But it was maybe 5F warmer in the radiant-barrier enclosure.  The same box, lined with a piece of radiant barrier.  In this case, house radiant barrier.  But a cheap space blanket would have worked just fine.

Note that this is about what I expected, based on past use of radiant barrier in my garden.  I fudge on the exact amount of warming because, if nothing else, the data loggers only record to the nearest 2F.  The resulting temperature difference looks five-ish to me.  Plus, it’ll depend on how warm your soil is (mine is currently 49F 4″ down.)

A nice thing about these old-school USB data loggers is the simplicity of use.   For an old-school user.  This device plugs into the USB port of my laptop, and, using very simple software, spits out a text file which, when copied into Excel, requires but a single chain of clicks to become data in a spreadsheet.

Otherwise, near as I can tell, the devices I’m using are obsolete by at least a couple of decades.  You can buy updated, modern (and of course, made-in-China) versions of these data loggers that are superior to what I’m using, in every way.

But 1) they still work, 2) they are good enough for my use, and 3) I already own them.

The trifecta of my material existence.

An addendum on “convection”.

I associate the word “convection” with “heat rises”.  Convection, in my mind, is about the natural circulation of heat in (e.g.) the atmosphere, or a cup of coffee, by the physical transfer of the heated gas or fluid.

But that’s NOT only one way in which heat can be transferred by the bulk movement of gas or fluid.  Which is what convect (from “convey”) means.  Any transfer of heat, by gross movement of a material medium, will do.  (To complete the trinity of conduction, convection, and radiation as the ways by which an object may lose heat.)

Outdoors, a breeze results in horizontal convection, for want of an easier term.

When you read about plant frost protection, you need be aware that when air conveys heat away from an object simply by blowing past it, that also counts as convection.   Anything other than “still air” provides convective transfer of heat energy.  Which is why creating a sealed enclosure to provide “still air” is the first step in many frost-protection methods.  It doesn’t much matter how much you an heat up a small area, if all the heat blows away.

More confusingly, preventing convection in the outdoor setting isn’t about “heat rises” much, if at all.  It’s about sealing the plant in some sort of breeze-proof enclosure.  It’s about providing a pocket of still air around the plant.

That’s because heat-driven convection in air only needs an inch or so of air space to get going.  (This, per experts in storm windows and such.)  Within these little shoe-box enclosures, for example, I’d expect cold air to be sheeting down the inside of the box walls, resulting in an internal air temperature that fairly uniformly reflects the temperature of those box walls, throughout the enclosure.

Which, in turn, is going to reflect the outside air temperature, less any small effects for insulation.

The upshot is that these plastic containers provide a pocket of still air around a plant.  They do not prevent thermal convection within that pocket of air.  (But the same uninsulated plastic box, if “powered” by infrared-reflecting radiant barrier, runs about 5F warmer.

But how, exactly, radiant barrier works, is not easy to explain.)

And now that I get well into the weeds, I realize I should have lined the clear plastic box with a piece of polyethylene sheet, to rule out that the insulative properties of the second sheet of plastic as the cause of the warmer temperatures under the radiant-barrier-lined plastic shoe boxes.  If I ever redo this, I’ll try to remember to test that.  But based on other attempts with radiant barrier, I’m sure it’s the IR-reflecting property of the radiant barrier material.

Further confusing the issue, you see discussions of providing “a pocket of still air” around a plant that focus on the insulating properties of that air.  But as this and my prior experiments have shown, the main effect of the “pocket of still air” is the prevention of convection, in the important sense of preventing your warmed air from being swept away by the breeze.  (And, noting that thermally-driven convection will continue freely within the enclosure, helping force the inside air temperature down to the outside temperature, less any insulating effect of the thin plastic wall of the container).

In any case, the practical upshot is that if you block both radiation and convection, you can get about 5F of frost protection.  Here in Virginia Zone 7A, with typical ground temperature at this time of say 49F or so).

But if all you do is provide “still air” around the plant — the plastic shoe box alone — you get next-to-no frost protection.

A good thing to keep in mind as the spring progresses.

Post G25-002: Bee emergence.

 

A few days of warm weather, and my mason bees are emerging.

You have to read between the lines on various internet write-ups of bee emergence, but I’m pretty sure what you see above is a crowd of young male bees, doing what young males do best.  That is, hanging out, accomplishing nothing, and hoping to get laid.

The male bees emerge first.  And I guess they look forward with glad anticipation to the emergence of the female mason bees.

I’m still not entirely sure what the emergence box is for.  And I’m not sufficiently interested to stick a camera inside to see what’s going on.

Anyway, we got down to 5F this winter, and it doesn’t seem to have done these over-wintering bees any harm.

My next-most-recent post on bees is here.  It’s pretty much a summary of everything I think I know about attracting mason bees.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

Post #2111: Of arctic ice and rosemary.

 

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

This saying is attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

This post is just a reminder that, in addition, you cannot fool the laws of physics any of the time.

Stuff’s melting.  Is anyone surprised?  Is anybody paying attention?

The full article is on the National Snow and Ice Data Center website:

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/analyses/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-low-maximum-2025

I don’t normally repeat the news, but I only just stumbled across the fact that Arctic sea ice hit a new low this year.  It peaks right about this time every year, and this year’s peak extent is the lowest in the roughly 50-year record.

No surprise, given the underlying trend.  The north polar ice cap has been shrinking slowly for about as long as there has been a satellite record of it.

The loss of reflective polar sea ice is an important positive feedback serving to accelerate the pace of global warming/climate change.  It lowers Earth’s albedo.  Dark open ocean absorbs more light energy than reflective white ice does.

If you don’t quite grasp why anyone should care about climate change, focus on a large net loss of arable North American land over the next century, as the climate changes.  Less food.  But with a growing world population.  And while that’s happening here, that’ll be happening across the world, as the (soil of the) the continental interiors warms and dries in response to climate change.

People also lose track of how long additional C02 emissions affect the climate.  The stuff coming out of your tailpipe will still be warming the earth centuries to millenia from now.

People forget about the two or three decade time lag in the global warming “pipeline”, due to the mass of the earth, relative to the small top-of-the-atmosphere energy imbalance.  Even if a miracle were to happen today, and atmospheric C02 were to stabilize, we’ve got three decades of warming “in the pipeline” as the earth’s surface temperate slowly adjusts to the energy imbalance that today’s level of C02 is creating.  That temperature increase is how nature restores the planet’s top-of-atmosphere energy balance.

And people forget how long energy-using devices last.  The majority of today’s new cars will still be on the road 15 years from now.  A new furnace?  Maybe 20 years.  A new house?  Maybe a century.  And for that entire century, a new house with natural gas heat will be pumping out tons of C02 per year.  Year in, year out.

Did the Biden Administration push the electrification of transport?  Sure did.  That’s because a world in which we drive gas vehicles, as we do now, but that still looks like our current world, is a pipe dream.  It’s not a feasible outcome.  The only way to hold onto a world whose climate is as benign as the climate in which civilization has flourished is to halt the buildup of C02 in the atmosphere.  Did the Biden administration push for more electrical transport than we seem to need right now?  Sure did.  Because “right now” isn’t the right time frame.  Twenty years down the road, as today’s new cars are finally heading off to the scrap yard  — twenty years of global warming in the future — look back and see how that modest push toward electrification looks then.

Global warming in your back yard:  The northward migration of the USDA plant hardiness zones.

Source:  Maps are from USDA.  I added the line marking the boundary between hardiness zones 5 and 6.

Maybe the easiest way to see climate change happening in your lifetime is to pay attention the good old USDA plant hardiness zones.  Every home gardener is at least passingly familiar with these, because these are a guide to what will and won’t overwinter in your climate.   The zones represent 10-degree-F increments in the coldest likely wintertime temperature, and are simply based on the coldest observed temperature in an area over the previous 30 years of weather data.  They get split into -a and -b halves, based on a 5F difference in coldest expected temperature.

In Zone 7b, for example, I should expect temperatures to go no lower than 5F.  This past winter it hit 5F here, and that killed a rosemary bush that I’d been growing for the better part of a decade.  Rosemary, I now find, is only hardy to USDA Zone 8.  Which I have now proven the hard way.

Turns out, these every-day use USDA plant hardiness zones are extremely sensitive to global warming.  I think that’s because they reflect the coldest wintertime temperature you should expect in an area.  That coldest temperature will occur in winter, at night.  And global warming has its strongest effects at night, and in winter.

So, even though global warming has done almost nothing to the U.S. so far, and certainly not much in terms of average US land temperature, the impact on minimum annual temperature — what determines the USDA hardiness zones — has been large enough to be easily visible.

On the maps above, the Zone 6 boundary moved north about 200 miles, in 33 years.  That’s ballpark for all of the zones, on average, over this period, but the movement north is fastest in the center of the continent, away from the coasts.

In Northern Virginia, over the same period, Vienna moved from just inside Zone 6, to just inside Zone 7.  Or, rather, the zones slid far enough north over three decades that one full zone slid past Vienna, VA in 33 years.

Same phenomenon.

But 6 miles a year is 600 miles a century.  Project that out, and a century from now, Iowa ends up with the climate that west Texas has now.  Just from that slow, 6-miles-a-year, northward migration of the climate zones under global warming.

Without too much exaggeration, let this continue, and today’s children will get to see the sagebrush desert of the U.S. Southwest take over the U.S. Midwest.  Let it go two centuries, and the current climate of Mexico will occur at the Canadian border.

With everything you think that would imply for U.S. food production.  Amber waves of grain?  That’ll be just another obsolete concept.

Merely from allowing the current observed rate of change to go unchecked.

As a society, we seem to have become too stupid to survive.

Conclusion

If civilization survives, the Republican Party’s head-in-the-sand policy toward climate change will go down as the stupidest, most costly, and most damaging thing ever done by a political party.  Wars included.

Except possibly for encouraging increased use of fossil fuels.  That would be even stupider than doing nothing, at this time.  But that also seems to be firmly embedded in the Republican agenda.

I can only hope that they are as effective at that as they were at helping U.S. coal miners.  The promise to do that being central to Trump’s prior win.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

On global warming, I’ll have to listen to the Republican party parroting Russian disinformation for the rest of my life.  Fact-free spin and bullshit seems to be their preferred fuel these days.

But I will die with the certain knowledge that if civilization survives, the stupidity of encouraging faster global warming will be universally recognized.  By whatever portion of the population manages to survive the mass die-offs that will result from a world-wide reduction in arable land.

(As an afterthought, will the Arctic save us?  No.  Only if you live on a Mercator Projection.  And only if you think you can grow crops without topsoil, as the last ice age scraped most of Arctic North America down to bedrock, and deposited that topsoil in the U.S. Midwest.  (See Canadian Shield).  Some fraction of the population will likely survive there under even the most extreme warming scenarios.  But most citizens of the U.S., and the world, will have starved long before there’s any Arctic dividend to share.)

Post #2103: This and that.

 

Well,

a)  this is a blog, after all, and

b) if the President can flip flop daily on tariffs, then

c) it’s hard to see the shame in having a mere blog post that wanders a bit.

1:  AI replacement theory

1: Every human job that can be replaced by AI will be.

2: Every human job that requires speech and reasoning alone is at immediate risk of being replaced by AI.

3: All other human occupations will be condensed to the portions that can’t feasibly be replaced by AI.

 

These are laws of economics, not computer science.  New technologies have been doing this sort of thing since the start of the industrial revolution.  There’s nothing about this that’s entirely unique to AI.

This time, instead of technology making your biceps obsolete, now it’s making your brain obsolete.  The most important difference between the AI revolution and what has gone before is that this time, they’re coming for my job.

I just can’t quite get my big brain around the fact that my big brain is obsolete.

It’s going to take me a while — like a few posts — to work out the ramifications of that, to my own satisfaction.

If nothing else, if this does what I think it’s going to do, to “knowledge workers” generically, that’s got to be nothing but bad news for the real estate market here in Northern Virginia.  Pile on a dip in Federal employment, and, as I live here, I should pay attention to what’s happening with AI.

Even though I’d much rather not.

 

2: My garden is a mess

Yonder it sits, as of late fall of last year (left), and as of about 5 minutes ago (right).

In theory, this should be some sort of planned operation.  E.g., I want to grow such-and-such, in this-and-so quantity.  And so on.

In practice, I can’t even get that far.

Instead, this has turned into a game of fixing the worst errors, then seeing what’s left.

First, I need to get the sun-rotting plastic out of my garden, and disposed of.  But, as I (intentionally!) made the raised beds by recycling plastic coroplast campaign signs, removing those plastic sides effectively destroys all the existing raised beds. 

But, second, I always intended these beds to be temporary, and, ultimately, I figured the dirt would fill some of the worst “valleys” in my back yard.  So that’s what I’m doing — dismembering the side-less corpses of these raised beds and using the dirt to fill the largest and most annoying valleys in my lawn.

(These “valleys” are the aftermath of the installation of the ground loop for the ground source heat pump, and they continue to sink, ever-so-gently, 20 years after that was installed.  It really does not surprise me that this method (parallel trenches 6′ deep) seems relatively rarely used, compared to drilling a vertical well for the ground loop.  I already shoveled 10 tons of dirt trying to fill those valleys the first time.)

Third, I’m re-using the concrete corner blocks from the defunct low beds to build fewer, taller, better-placed raised beds.  I don’t actually want the resulting raised beds, but they are a place to store the concrete corner blocks, and most importantly, to store some of the soil that’s in the former plastic-sided beds.

Interesting calculation there. When I started these beds, I brought in 10 cubic yards of 50/50 mixed topsoil and compost.  And now, when I do the arithmetic on what’s left (bed dimensions x bed depth = volume of soil in bed), come up with about 5 cubic yards.  Which is just about exactly what I ought to have, if all the organic matter (the compost) in the original mix has rotted and so returned to being C02.  The upshot being that, at a density of about a ton per cubic yard, I’d have to shovel 5 tons of dirt, to get rid of these beds.  Not clear I’m up to that task any more.   Not clear that I’m not.

So, as stupid as it was to have to move a raised bed once, I am, in effect, moving them twice.  But the second time is largely to get rid of their dirt.  It’s a planned-life-cycle kind of thing.

And the new garden plan, such as it is, involves growing more stuff that neither the deer nor the bugs want to eat. But that my wife and I do.

That’s a very short list of crops.  That’s about as far as I’ve gotten on my garden plan for 2025.

3: Bee hotels, the final chapter begins

I am putting up my native (mason, orchard) bee hotels for the last time.  Mine are bundles of 6″ (or so) bamboo tubes, with smooth-cut ends (cut while green, or commercial pre-sanded cutoffs), with inside diameter around 3/8″ inch.  Above, I’m using Virginia clay to seal off one end of each tube.  When I have those sealed and dry to my satisfaction, those bundles of nesting tubes will be hung securely over the site of the emergence box (Post G25-001), ready for spring to commence.  And for the female mason bees to use at their convenience.  Next spring, the (now filled, hopefully) bundles of nesting tubes will have to be taken down and placed in next year’s bee emergence box.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

 

I have a small back-yard vegetable garden.  I’ve tried to keep that garden attractive to bees.  Partly, that’s for pollination.  Partly, that’s a good way to avoid using the worst and most persistent pesticides.

This post explains why I’m not going to be putting out a “bee hotel” in my garden this year.

Not only do these bees do nothing for my garden, I’m not sure I’m doing them any favors by providing such a large number of nesting sites.

Two years ago, I bought a little bee hotel at Home Depot.  In theory, this array of narrow, closed-ended tubes provides nesting sites for local native and solitary bees, e.g., mason bees, orchard bees.  (But not social bees, like honey bees or bumble bees.)

And, sure enough, about half the nesting tubes in that Home Depot bee hotel ended up filled, the first year I hung that up.  As shown at the left.

(I now know that this is a terrible bee hotel design and I would never buy it again.  The tubes are too short (4″), which apparently leads to an excess of male over female bees.  And they’re glued in place, and so cannot be replaced annually with clean nesting tubes, as everyone advises.)

Regardless, the picture above bodes good luck to this location, w/r/t/ mason bees.  A lot of people hang one of these up and get nothing, at least for a year or two.  But I followed all the directions, and hung that securely, a few feet off the ground, in a sheltered location that gets morning sun, with plenty of flowering plants nearby, and a nearby source of mud for the bees to use.  (That last one courtesy of some slightly leaky rainwater barrels.)

Following standard advice, I took that bee hotel down for the winter and left it in an unheated building.

Then I killed my overwintering mason bees.

I killed them with kindness.

My unheated outbuilding must have been just a touch warmer than the surrounding area.  In any case, by all the signs — average daytime temperature, extent of blooming flowers —  my bees emerged early, as explained in Post G24-004.  Just as the crocuses were starting to bloom.

If that didn’t kill them outright — from the low temperatures and lack of blooming plants for food — then it almost surely prevented them from reproducing.   Again, as explained in Post G24-004.

The moral of that story is, resist the urge to shelter your overwintering bees.  Let them freeze along with everything else.

 

One year ago, for my second attempt, I made my own bee hotels.  I used 6″ long bamboo tubes, cut from the green bamboo growing in my back yard (Post G23-015).  (Cutting them green gave them a smooth, splinter-free finish that did not require (e.g.) sanding.  Apparently, you don’t want to leave rough edges on these tubes, or they’ll cut up the bees’ wings.)

( You will see mentions of a lot of plants whose stems can, in theory, be used for bee nesting tubes.  I tried growing a few (e.g., poke weed), but I learned the hard way that, as with bamboo, your only realistic option is to harvest the material green, and immediately cut it to length.  If you wait until spring to go looking for some, all those hollow stems will be weathered and brittle, and you won’t be able to get nice smoothly-cut 6″ pieces from them.)

I closed off one end of each tube with some mud.

Locally-sourced.

Then bundled a handful of such tubes together with wire ties (and later, jute twine).

And hung up my nice new bee hotels, under the eaves of my back porch.

These were an even bigger hit with local mason bees.  As you can see at the left, almost all the nesting tubes were filled. Only a handful of empty tubes are left, and by eye, these seem to be too large for my local mason bees to want to use them.  (Bees are quite picky about what size of nesting tube they will use.)

Similarly, I made and hung one more bee hotel with much smaller-diameter tubes.  This would have been attractive to smaller “leaf cutter” bees that might be present in my area, mid-summer.  But I got no takers for those smaller tubes — that 4th bee hotel remained completely empty.

This year, I put those filled bee hotels into a “bee emergence box”.

This is just a dark box with some holes cut out of the sides, level with the bottom of the box, as shown, left.  (Level because the newly-emerged bees don’t fly out of the box, they crawl to the opening and hang out there for a while before dispersing.  That, according to the University of Utah extension service (Google link to .pdf).

Exactly why I need to supply a bee emergence box seems subject to some uncertainty.  Some experts say its to “avoid predators”.  (I assume the newly-emerged bees are fairly helpless.)  Some say the box must be placed directly adjacent to new bee hotels (with fresh nesting tubes) and that neither should be moved, even a matter of inches, once emergence has begun.  Some say that the box allows female bees to find their way back to this location, as they can smell the old cocoons, but the box keeps them from re-using the old nesting tubes.

In short, all experts agree this step is good.  But exactly why it’s good, and what purpose this serves, seems unclear.  Somewhat folklore-ish.  (And clearly related to the naughty bits bee reproduction in some fashion, possibly explaining reticence on this subject.  But everybody agrees that such a box is a good idea.)

In any case, below are my home-made bamboo bee hotels, carefully and gently placed in my simple emergence box, before I closed and sealed the lid.

FWIW, one bamboo tube had a little tiny perfectly round hole drilled in it.  I’m pretty sure that was an instance of parasitic wasp predation, so I removed that one nesting tube as I placed these in the emergence box.

Apparently, the point of all the darkness is so that the only light entering the box is from the holes that I want the bees to use, to exit the box.  And, because this sits in a sheltered location (under the eaves of my porch), I’ve done the easiest thing and made the release box out of cardboard.  (Interestingly, I found scant details on release boxes, as if such details hardly mattered.)

Why I’m not putting out multiple bee hotels again this year.

First, these bees do my garden no good whatsoever.  These orchard or mason bees will have come and gone long before anything in my garden is blooming.  If I had an orchard, with lots of early-spring fruit blossoms, encouraging a local population of orchard bees would be a good idea.  But as it stands, these bees will have emerged, mated, and died a month before anything in my garden is blooming.

These are not the bees you’re looking for.  … Move along.

Second, it’s not clear that I’m doing them any good, either.  Mainly, it’s not clear that nesting sites are the limiting factor for my local mason bee population.  There really isn’t all that much around here blooming in late March.  And so, I wonder if in effect, I may be raising bees, simply to have them die off soon after they emerge, because there’s no link between the number of bee hotel tubes that I provide, and the size of the local early-spring flowering plant supply.

I found no guidance whatsoever on “right-sizing” a mason bee hotel, to match the resources available in the surrounding area.

Conclusion

 

There’s not a lot to providing nesting sites for solitary bees.  You just have to obey a few simple rules.

The nesting tubes should be about 6″ long, for the most common mason bees.  The tubes need to be of about the right diameter for the bees you are trying to attract.  In my case, maybe 1/4th to 3/8ths of an inch.  If you use natural materials, you’ll get some variation in diameter anyway.  One end of each tube needs to be closed off.  (I did that with mud.) You need to have them set up so that you can either throw them away once they have been used, or sterilize them (e.g., soak in bleach) for re-use.

And you need to move your bee hotels (or the contents thereof) to a release box the next spring.  That’s just a box with holes at floor level, so that the emerging bees will see the light and crawl out into the outdoors.  That way, they can emerge, but they aren’t able to find their way back in again and re-use the old nesting tubes.

But, be aware that when they say you should try to attract bees to your vegetable garden, they didn’t mean mason bees.  These guys are up and about way too early in the year to do my garden any good.   They’ll have lived out their lives weeks before the first pea blossoms open up.

My upshot is that I need to let this box sit around for, at most, a couple of months.  Then I can throw the whole thing away.  I guess I’ll continue to put up bee hotels until I’ve used up my stock of six-inch bamboo tubes.  But I’m not seeing any benefit to making this a permanent part of my garden.

Addendum

I relented.  These are this year’s bee hotels, pre-mud.  I took the best from my stash of potential bee nesting tubes.  And tossed the rest.

My final thought on the emergence box is that mine is entirely in the shade.  (Facing east-ish, on the north-ish side of the house, though I think that’s not very relevant.)

The point is, cool.  Living in Zone 7b, with little nearby in the way of flowering fruit trees, I think the later my bees waken, the better.  Within reason.  There will be more around to eat, I think.  In any case, no direct solar heating — no direct sunlight — is consistent with this year’s approach of not sheltering the bee hotels in winter.  These bees are going to have to live in the ambient air.  They need to be in sync with ambient air temperatures.

But I can see where, in a more northerly climate, you might make the other call, and at this time of year, if a bit of extra heat means having your bees up and about when their preferred blossoms are out, then that’s a good thing.

In both cases, I’m guessing that you up the odds of bee survival by trying to ensure that their emergence coincides with lots of local blooms, within what the bees themselves can tolerate.

Anyway, crocuses alone make slim pickings for orchard bees.  My observation, based on my unfortunate experience last year.  So perhaps I am erring on the side of caution.

Or, in this case, shade.

Epilogue:  Psst.  It’s the maple trees.

Why did this work well, in this location?  Based on internet chatter, a lot of people have trouble attracting mason bees.

I did manage to avoid significant operator error, on my second try.  This, by hanging the bee hotels in a sheltered place, then leaving them alone until it was time to move them to the emergence box in the spring.

But I think my success has more to do with the location, than with anything I did.

So, why is my back yard a good location for orchard bees? 

Right at this moment, there’s little in the way of flowering trees in my area.  (We’re in sync with the DC cherry blossoms, more or less.)  I guess we have some Bradford pears out, but not in my area.  My wife’s extensive daffodil beds are in bloom.  But that’s about it.

Nary a blooming orchard in sight.  It’s too early for most of the flowering trees in my area.

It was my pollen-sensitive wife who pointed out that there is one common tree that is flowering now:  Maple.  She knows these things.

And now that I look it up, yep, flowering maples provide food for orchard bees.  So sayeth Google’s AI:

Arguably, then, my back yard is more-or-less mason bee heaven, owing to the presence of several large old maple trees. Plus mud, from the gardening.  And nesting tubes, from the gardener.

Of which, the nesting tubes — nesting sites — were likely the “rate-limiting factor” in my local native bee population.

OK, let’s say this is all true.  I could maintain an extensive population of mason bees in my back yard, owing mainly to the presence of several large maples there.  As long as the mason bees emerge as the maples are flowering, the female bees have plenty to eat.

These bees still don’t do me one bit of good.  In a food-production sense, these are not the bees I’m looking for, to pollinate what needs pollinatin’, in my garden.  They are here, then gone, far too early in the year.  (Further, my maples need no help in producing seeds, thanks.)

So there you go.  At this point, I’m betting that this bee-wrangling went well, in my back yard, from the start, because mason bees can feed on maple flowers.  Those are in abundance now.  All these bees were lacking was nesting sites.  And these hotels were the only game in town, or close to it.

But — aside from observing the great circle-of-life thing, as it plays out for the mason bee — it doesn’t do me one iota of good to maintain a mason been population in my back yard.

Post G24-028: How’d that ginger turn out?

 

Quite well, starting with candied (crystallized) ginger, shown above.

After a rough start, growing ginger in Virginia turned out to be an outstanding success.

The big plus of growing ginger in this climate (USDA zone 7) is that the growing season is way too short to produce mature ginger root.  So what I got was seven pounds of immature (baby) ginger.  And, as it turns out, immature ginger is a lot nicer to cook with than mature ginger.

My inability to produce mature ginger root is a feature, not a bug.

Ginger,  being a tropical plant, never saw it coming.

The picture above is a week or two after first killing frost.

My ginger stayed lovely and green, right up to the night that it froze solid.  I can only assume that, as a tropical plant, it had no idea what was about to happen.

In any case, for a growing season that effectively started in June, I got three nice surprises:

  1. Aside from watering, it pretty much took care of itself.
  2. I got about a pound of ginger per square foot of container.
  3. It’s all immature or “baby” ginger.

The unexpected plus is that immature ginger root (shown below) is much nicer to use than mature ginger root.

 

Hassle-free fresh ginger tea?

Immature ginger — shown cleaned and bagged, above, and cut into chunks just above — lacks the tough skin and woody fibers of mature ginger.  (Note I did not say “fibers”, I said “woody fibers”.)  This makes it much nicer to use than mature ginger.   Among other things, it’s easy to slice (using the slicer portion of a garlic press), and cooked thin slices of whole root are pleasantly edible.

On the downside, some say immature ginger isn’t as strong-tasting as mature ginger root.  But ours is plenty peppery enough for us.  Others say that, lacking a tough skin, immature ginger has to be used fresh or preserved.  That drawback, I buy into.  After cleaning, the roots are nearly skinless.  They surely don’t look tough, the way mature ginger root looks.

Aside from ginger syrup (which yields crystallized (candied) ginger slices as a byproduct), my wife’s preferred bulk preservation method is to create ice cubes of frozen ginger puree. 

The sequence below shows chunks of (cleaned) immature ginger being turned into frozen ginger puree.

First, chunk (as above), then chop in a food processor.  After cutting the immature ginger roots into chunks the size of grapes, run those ginger chunks through a small food processor.  Pulse/scrape as needed until you get them to the consistency of a chopped-up paste.  Like so:

Then purée:  Add just enough water to let that mix circulate and turn into a smooth purée as the food processor runs.  If you were adding a small amount of citric acid as a preservative, you’d add it while puréeing.)  Let it run.  From chopped to puréed might be five minutes of food-processor running time.

Freeze as you would ice cubes.  Pour/spatula the puréed immature ginger root into a silicone ice cube tray.  (Silicone makes it easier to release when frozen.)

Store the frozen cubes in the container of your choice.

One cube yields one cup of ginger tea (with the addition of a cup of hot water and the sweetener of your choice.)  As if made from the fresh root.  Insoluble plant matter in the cube becomes dregs in the bottom of the cup.

Ginger syrup and crystalized ginger

To our surprise, ginger syrup and candied ginger are two products of the same process.  You boil thinly-sliced ginger root in water for half-an-hour.  Toss most of that liquid.  Add sugar.  Boil for another half-an-hour.  Pour off and save the liquid to be ginger-infused simple syrup.  Dust the ginger slices with table sugar, and leave them to dry.

The results, when dry, are candied ginger.

It’s candy, but you don’t pop these like Tic-Tacs.  Ginger root is peppery — the “gingerols” in ginger are analogs to the capsaicins in hot peppers.  This “candy” is not for the faint-of-heart.  And you’d best like the taste of ginger, because it’ll be with you for a while after you eat one.

A few comments on growing and harvesting ginger in USDA zone 7.

My prior post has most of the technical details on growing ginger in USDA zone 7.

Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.

Ginger is a tropical plant. 

My garden soil (in USDA zone 7) never gets warm enough to make ginger happy.  I have to grow it in some sort of container, so that the soil will get to the roughly 90F that ginger prefers.  This, in turn, meant hooking up some irrigation on a timer, because otherwise I’d forget to water those containers.  So there’s a fair bit of prep required to get this up and running.

This year, I followed the standard advice and started ginger inside.  The idea being that you need to start it 10 months before first frost, if you want any hope of harvesting mature ginger root.  But starting it early was a waste of time, because normal wintertime room temperature is too cold for ginger to grow.  So, unless you want to keep heating your ginger the entire time you’re growing it, all it does is sit around and wait for warmer weather.

Now that I know I actually prefer immature ginger root, next year I’m just going to plant it outside, in planters, around the first of June (Zone 7).  Knowing full well that I can’t get mature ginger that way.

At the other end of the season, my ginger seemed to stop growing entirely by mid-September here in Zone 7.  It didn’t die.  It just didn’t grow.  Again, now that I know I won’t get mature ginger root, I could dig it up any time time from early September onward.

The upshot is that in Zone 7, if you grow it in containers outdoors, you have more-or-less three months in which ginger will grow.  Any spring-like or fall-like temperatures seems to send it into hibernation.  To be a fair, it is a tropical plant. It’s my bad for planting it an inappropriate climate.  But the good news is that this seems to be plenty of time to produce a crop of immature ginger.  Which, as I noted above, just seem to beat the pants off of mature ginger root, from an ease-of-culinary-use standpoint.

Nothing bothers ginger, here in Virginia.  I had zero insect, animal, or disease damage on this little crop of ginger.

This is tough to clean!  If I had this to do over, I’d pick a different growing medium that wouldn’t stick together so well.  In the end, a) the ginger was firmly rooted in the potting soil I used, and b) every “elbow” of the ginger root (where two lobes grew close together) trapped dirt.  I had to break the ginger up fully into pieces, so that I could scrub out all the trapped dirt.

The upshot of all that is that the digging-and-cleaning step was tedious.  I don’t know how they get commercial ginger roots so clean, but I suspect it involves some sort of power sprayer.  Next year, I  think I’m going to try spraying it down, outside, using the garden hose.

Conclusion.

This year, I took the standard advice for growing ginger in a non-tropical climate, and sprouted it around February 1.

This turned out to be a near-total waste of time, because ginger won’t grow unless it’s kept really warm.  Specifically, warmer than I keep the inside of my house, in the winter.

As a result of their stubborn non-growth, I transplanted my pitiful ginger sprouts to containers, outside, in June. After they’d been more-or-less in suspended animation since they sprouted in February.

And that worked spectacularly well.  Assuming you want immature ginger root.  Which I now know that I do.

Without the thick skin and woody fibers of the mature root, immature ginger is just a whole lot easier to cook with.  Instead of having to peel it and grate it, you just wash it and slice it.  It’s soft enough and non-fibrous enough to go through the “slicer” section of a garlic press.

I’ve never grown ginger before, but a pound per square foot of container is an adequate yield from my standpoint.  That’s as good a yield as any root crops I grow in my back yard.  With the added bonus that the ginger plants are decorative, and that nothing in this region bothers it.  No bugs, no deer damage, no fungi or other plant diseases.

It’s a pain to have to grow it in containers.  But I consider that mandatory, as the soil in this region never reaches the 90F and up that ginger likes.

I’ll be growing this again next year.

Post G24-027: A review of my vegetable garden year.

This has been a year of disappointing yields.  I still have a bit of stuff growing, but I am more than ready to call it quits this year, here in Virginia zone 7.

When I boil it down, it looks like I should grow tomatoes, okra, beans, and winter squash.  And not much else.  So, tentatively, that’s the plan for next year.

Continue reading Post G24-027: A review of my vegetable garden year.

G24-026: Squash-off, round II: Tromboncino versus Butternut.

 

Tromboncino was an exceptionally productive winter squash in my garden this year, in Virginia zone 7.  Maybe a little too productive, if you get my drift.  It’s the kind of vine that doesn’t take no for an answer as it attempts to sprawl its way to garden domination.

In the end, two plants plus total neglect yielded about a dozen fruit, roughly 6 pounds each.  Area for area, this was more productive than butternut squash, this year, by a large margin.

But how does it taste?

OK.  Neither as colorful nor as flavorful as Waltham butternut.  But no off notes, either.  It’s a perfectly adequate winter squash for adding bulk to (say) a soup, without altering the taste.

Easy to grow, productive, and edible.  And an amusing shape.  What’s not to like?  I’ll be growing this again next year.

Details follow.

I did not set out to grow tromboncino as winter squash.

The back-story is in this post, below.  I grew both tromboncino and cucuzzi (guinea bean) to use the immature fruits as a substitute for summer squash. That, because I’m tired of fighting the squash vine borer.

As a substitute for summer squash, that was a failure.  More for cucuzzi, which to me had a distinctive “dirt” undertone, than for tromboncino.  But neither of them was good compared to the taste of normal (e.g., straightneck yellow) summer squash.

Post G24-023: Taste test of tromboncino, cucuzzi, and yellow summer squash.

So I killed the cucuzzi, but let the two tromboncino vines live.  They turned out to be the most productive winter squash I grew this year, by a large margin.

I won’t be buying winter squash any time soon.

How does it compare to butternut?

I took my smallest, seemingly-mature tromboncino fruit, and a small butternut, and had it it.

Tromboncino is clearly a relative of butternut squash. Same color.  It peels easily, like butternut, but it takes longer to peel, per edible pound, as the long, thin neck of the tromboncino has around about twice the peel area, per unit of volume, relative to the stockier butternut.

The flesh is a paler orange (right, below).

I ended up throwing away the seed-cavity end of the tromboncino.  This squash has a large, bulbous, thin-walled seed cavity.  I dug out some seeds, but decided that between peeling it and de-seeding it, I’m guessing I’d have gotten another half-pound of usable squash.  Didn’t seem worth the effort, so I chucked it.  I might reconsider that when I get around to cooking the larger ones.  Might also make “roasted pumpkin seeds” out of the bigger ones, depending on the volume of seeds.

Steamed or boiled, tromboncino is blander than butternut.  I get no “sweet potato” notes whatsoever.  Instead, there’s a faint aromatic after-taste that reminds me vaguely of steamed yellow summer squash.  In any event, tromboncino has a distinctively different taste from butternut, but not much of a taste.

In chicken-squash soup, both squashes are bland enough that they contribute bulk, but no noticeable flavor.  If I closed my eyes, I would not have known I was eating diced squash as opposed to somewhat-overcooked diced potato.

Bottom line

Assuming this keeps fairly well, I will definitely plant this again, owing to the high productivity and the toughness of the plant.  By eye, these two vines (allowed to sprawl) out-produced all the rest of my winter squash combined.

Better yet, once these were established, I did nothing other than kick them out of the way occasionally.  (The same can be said for butternut in my garden.  Nothing seems to bother it much.)

Compared to butternut, it’s paler, blander, and has an unusual hint of summer squash to it.  But that’s pretty subtle, and in a soup or stew, it serves merely as a bland filler.  Not necessarily a bad thing, for a winter squash.

See also:

Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.

Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.

 

On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.

Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.

More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash.  Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.

My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations.  Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash.  I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.

Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR.  If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.

In any case, the picture tells the whole story.  The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.

The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.

The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh.  In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.

Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine.  But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context.  It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.

Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted.  Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport.  The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.

My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut.  I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.

Neither here nor there.  It’s food.  This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.

 

Schmaltzitarian squash soup.

This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.

The only seasoning is salt.  The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken.  If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.

It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.

Elapsed time is under one hour.

You need

  • a pressure cooker
  • a few (4 to 10, say) bone-in skin-on chicken thighs
  • chopped vegetables enough to fill the pressure cooker 2/3rds full.
    • Winter squash, primarily.
    • With optional soup vegetables such as carrots or celery
  • a teaspoon of salt

Step 1A:  Pressure-cook the chicken thighs:  Elapsed time 30 minutes.

Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker.  Cover (barely) with water.  Heat.  Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure.  Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.

Step 1B:  Cut up the vegetables.

As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot.  The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.

You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.

Step 2:  Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.

Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.

Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot.  Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.

Remove and save any excess stock.

In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables.  So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot.  Or so.

Salt to taste.  I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.

This doesn’t need any spices.  With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.

Step 3:  Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes.  Elapsed time around 12 minutes.

Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.

Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release.  The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.

Step 4:  Open and eat.

If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely.  It is ready to eat.

If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.

Post G24-024: So that’s what okra is supposed to look like.

 

This is my fifth year of growing okra.  Though it seems like more than that.

Last year, my okra plants made nearly it to the stage pictured above, …

… then it got too cold for them, and there was no more okra for the year.  Great sadness descended upon our household.

But this year, for whatever reason — maybe I put them in earlier, who knows — they have reached the point of looking like a big ol’ flower stalk on top, and it’s still fairly warm.

So, while these pictures are not quite seed-catalog good, I figure, any time you see clusters of okra pods, that’s good.

This is Jambalaya okra.  I would definitely plant this again.  Virginia, Zone 7.