Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
This is the second of two posts on finding the sunniest spot in a yard that has shade trees on either side. This one is based on observing the hours of the day during which direct sunlight fell on each part of the yard. Continue reading G23-007: The sunniest spot in a shady yard? Part 2, observation
This is the first of two posts on finding the sunniest spot in a yard that has shade trees on either side. This one uses geometry. The next one will use time-lapse photography on a sunny day.
With any luck, both approaches will tell me the same thing.
If your yard is bordered by shade trees, locate the beds so that due south (180 degrees) splits the compass bearing from your bed to each line of trees. This gives a surprising-looking result for my back yard. It’s not at all what you’d naively think, just looking at the trees and the yard.
I started gardening seriously during the pandemic. Temporary raised beds were made from recycled campaign yard signs and bamboo. I placed those in seemingly-reasonable locations in my back yard. In part, they were filling in low spots on the lawn. But it seemed like they were located so as to get the best sun.
I’m now getting around to putting in something more permanent. This time, I’m not going to wing it, but instead want to know what spot in my back yard gets the most sunlight.
It’s not obvious. I have tall trees on either edge of my yard. And, interestingly enough, what appears to be the obvious solution — locate the garden beds in the middle of the yard, away from both tree lines — isn’t even close to being right.
So, eyeball a couple of birds’-eye views of my back yard, and see if you think I put the beds in roughly the right place:
Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? You might even say that the location doesn’t much matter, because you’re going to get the same number of hours of sunlight almost anywhere in that back yard, regardless. What’s shaded in the morning will be sunny in the afternoon, and vice-versa.
Problem is, an hour of sun is not an hour of sun. Sunlight is much stronger around solar noon, and is weaker the farther you are from noon. And, because the sun is due south at noon (in the Northern hemisphere), you have to know which direction is south, in order to judge what part of the yard gets the most solar energy.
Source: Curtonics.com
You need to figure out the locations in your yard that place due south directly between those lines of trees. Those locations get the greatest amount of high-intensity, near-noon sunlight.
To cut to the chase, you need to calculate where your potential garden site is, relative to the obstructing trees, and to due south. The sunniest locations in the yard will have these two properties.
So now, take a look at my back yard, oriented so that south is directly down. Do you want to change your prior answer? By the look of the shadows, this is about 11 AM solar time. Note that the left edge of the yard is already in sunlight.
Let me take a brief break to mention a couple of pitfalls that can mess up your attempts to locate your garden in the sunniest spot on the yard.
Daylight savings time. Man I hate having to get up at 2 AM to turn all the clocks forward, as required by law. But the upshot is that solar noon occurs around 1 PM during daylight savings time. For example, on the hourly insolation graph above, peak insolation occurs around 13:00, or 1 PM. That’s not a mistake, that’s just daylight savings time. So if it’s summer, and you look to see where the shadows fall at noon, you’re screwing up. Because noon, daylight savings time, is actually 11 AM solar time.
Above: Compass set up for 10 degrees west magnetic declination
Magnetic declination. Declination is the extent to which magnetic north — where the compass needle points — deviates from true north. Because of magnetic declination, you can’t simply use the raw readings from a standard magnetic compass in order to locate your garden in the right spot.
If you have a compass made for use on land, and it’s anything but the most basic compass, chances are you can adjust the compass to account for declination.
You can find the magnetic declination for your locality at the US Geological Survey, among other places. Currently, magnetic declination at Vienna VA is about 10 degrees west. That means that the compass needle actually points to a heading of about 350 degrees, not 360 degrees (true north). That’s about 2.5 degrees further west than when I was a kid in the 1970s.
Magnetic declination is one of those incredibly simple topics that always manages to get an incredibly opaque explanation. But as long as you have a compass that can be set to account for your local declination, it’s really simple. The picture above shows a compass set up for 10 degrees west declination. Despite the fuzziness of the photo, I think it’s obvious that the compass body has been offset 10 degrees relative to the degree ring. When the needle points to 350 degrees (10 degrees west of true north), 360 or 0 on the degree ring shows you true north.
I can now take Google Earth, and start drawing in the angles between various backyard locations, and the ends of the lines of shading trees at the sides of the yard. It’s a little crude, but the conclusion is inescapable. I put the temporary beds too close to the middle of the yard. For the most solar energy possible, they ought to be almost under the trees at the side of the yard. Like so:
Which, to be honest, I would not have guessed, just eyeballing it.
Over the coming weekend, I’ll set up a stop-motion camera to film my back yard for one sunny day. With that, I should be able to validate that the area that gets the most solar energy is the one outlined. And I should be able to determine just how much energy I lose if I move away from that optimum spot.
People say the ancients constructed their calendars to keep track of religious holidays, based on astronomical events. Possibly true. But a nice side benefit of their religion is that it gave them a clear idea of when to plant their crops in the spring.
In the modern world, of course, we eschew such religion-based planting rituals. Thus my potatoes will go in the ground on St. Patrick’s day, and no sooner. Because that’s Science.
If left to my own devices, I would undoubtedly plant too early. Hence the need for my quasi-religious planting ritual. Here in Vienna VA, today’s high is expected to be near 80. Which definitely gets me in a gardening frame of mind. But tomorrow’s low is well below freezing. We’re still six weeks from our likely last-frost date.
Without getting into whys and wherefores of our ever-wackier weather, this post presents my vegetable garden plan for the year. It takes the form of three questions:
I started my current round of gardening in order to have something to do during the pit of the COVID-19 pandemic. If nothing else, shoveling around a few tons of dirt to create raised beds provided much-needed exercise (Post G05).
Many people did the same, leading to shortages of everything gardening-related in 2020. Starting with empty seed racks at my local hardware stores (Post #G02, April 21, 2020) and ending with a long-lasting shortage of canning jar lids (Post #G21, August 2020).
Gardening was a much nicer experience then than now. The cessation of much local and long-distance travel meant that the air was cleaner, the skies were blue-er (Post #614, Post #618) , and neighborhoods were a lot quieter. So quiet I could hear the hum of the bees at work in the garden (Post #G11), a sound I have not heard since. A big bed of sunflowers, just outside my bedroom window, provided much-needed cheer during what was otherwise a fairly dark time.
But now, the air once again stinks of diesel exhaust, the Northern Virginia summer sky has returned to its traditional smog-white, the constant noise of traffic and construction smothers sound of the bees, and gyms are open for business.
In other words, things are back to normal.
When I distill it down, I’m going to continue to garden for four reasons.
One, it gives me a physical activity that actually has a purpose. Sure, I can go to the gym, and get exercise for exercise’s sake. I can walk around the neighborhood, for the sake of walking around the neighborhood. Gardening is a way to get non-pointless exercise.
Two, I really like growing plants. I guess I can come out and say that. Mostly food. But flowers are OK, in moderation.
Third, I’m cheap. As hobbies go, annual costs don’t get much cheaper than a few pounds of potatoes and a few packets of seeds. I’m not convinced that my gardening pays for itself in the value of produce. But the fact that I get anything at all useful out of a hobby is a bonus in and of itself.
Finally, it leaves nothing permanent. What isn’t eaten turns to compost. So, unlike (say) woodworking, this doesn’t produce yet-more-clutter, during a period of my life when I’m doing my best to get rid of stuff
In an intellectual breakthrough this year, I’ve decided on the following guidelines:
Being the kind of guy I am, I of course formalized that with a spreadsheet. But it doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Yellow: Certain herbs and herb-like plants rank highly here because they are extremely easy to grow, take up little room and cost an arm and a leg at the store. So, dill and rosemary, which I already grow, and ginger and turmeric, which are apparently easy to grow from grocery-store-purchased product.
Light blue: Potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. These all provide a lot of calories per square foot and (so far) have been both extremely easy to grow and highly productive in my garden. Plus, we like to eat them.
Red: Tomatoes and sweet peppers. Easy to grow, we like to eat them. Say no more.
Dark blue: The entire garlic and onion clan. I’ve had such spotty luck with these over the years, I’m going to skip them this year. Plus, my yields have been lousy.
Green: Peas, beans, lettuce, okra. We like to eat them just fine, but all require significant fuss. And, except for green beans, in a good year, yields are modest at best. But peas and lettuce can go in when it’s cold, and my wife likes green beans. So these are definitely going to get planted. Some. Not a lot.
Purple: Cucumbers and summer squash. I’ve had such a bad time with insect pests that I’m skipping those this year.
After three years in the Virginia climate, my temporary raised beds are “showing their age”. Which is a nice way of saying “falling apart”. I put up a set of temporary raised beds during the pandemic, recycling some yard signs, bamboo, and other materials around the yard. Their temporary nature is now showing pretty badly.
I did that to minimize my investment. I figured that if gardening didn’t work out, I could just tear them apart, spread the dirt on the low spots on the lawn, and plant grass. Nothing wasted. Nothing headed for the landfill that wasn’t already headed there before I tried gardening.
So I’ve reached a fork in the road. Either I do what I had planned on originally, take the beds down, use the dirt to even out the lawn, and be done with gardening. Or kick it up a notch.
Separately, things snowballed beyond the mere construction of the beds. In addition to the beds, I now have irrigation line, various types of row cover and insect netting, trellising material, tomato cages, deer deterrent devices, and so on. Not a huge dollar investment, as these things go. But it’s a lot of stuff that serves no purpose outside of gardening.
The upshot is that I’m now going to go back and do this right. But only as a last resort. The patchwork of temporary beds of varying depths, oriented along the low spots of the lawn, will be replaced by a single long bed oriented east-west, with a permanent trellis along the back. This will simplify everything from irrigation to protection against deer, and dovetail with the remaining in-ground beds that are now devoted to cane fruits.
I quite like the coroplast (yard sign) sides, and as I have several long sheets of that around, the new bed is going to be coroplast-and-post as well. I see no reason to import materials if I have durable materials on hand that would otherwise be trash.
As an extra added bonus, this allows me to re-shovel the multiple tons of dirt that I ordered in the first place. Much better than wasting my time at the gym. And see how my hugelculture experiment turned out. There are trash pieces of wood at the bottoms of all these beds, and I’ll get to see what happened to them after three years in the soil.
The goal is to have a single, well-constructed bed of uniform depth, with trellising, deer protection, and irrigation built in. We’ll see how close I come to that ideal.
After three years of seat-of-the-pants gardening in temporary raised beds, I have reached a fork in the road. I’m going to take what I learned in the past three years, and move forward with a single permanent bed incorporating everything I think I need to grow a bit of vegetables and flowers in my back yard. And at that point, I’ll focus on a few things that we really like to eat fresh out of the garden and that seem to grow well in this climate. And hope for the best.
As my store-bought organic potatoes chit (sprout), in anticipation of planting on St. Patrick’s day, I am in the process of figuring out what else I’m going to grow this year.
In a surprise move, I’m going to take my wife’s advice and … wait for it — only plant stuff that we actually like to eat.
Then it occurred to me that I should only plant stuff that the deer don’t like to eat.
Now that I was surfing that intellectual tsunami, I went out on a limb by saying that I probably don’t want to plant stuff that my local bugs like to eat.
Finally, drafting in the wake of that runaway 18-wheeler of brilliance, maybe I should avoid plants that are susceptible to diseases frequently found in my garden.
Fantastic. Easy-peasy. Planning accomplished.
I just need to fill in the details.
Unfortunately, when I do the Venn diagram of those four insights, I’m left with:
And I’m not all that sure about the red one.
(Plus, as I understand it, that “guy” on the left is now part of a lefty-liberal plot for the emasculation of America. Pink ears, blue shoes — that’s certainly a mixed message, but that’s the way the libs go after it. Slow rot. Next thing you know, they’ll be taking away his angry eyes. And then they’re coming for your potato cannon and spud gun!! You’ve been warned!!!)
Time for a bit of a rethink. More soon.
Spring is fast approaching.
I can tell from the daffodils and crocuses coming up in the yard.
The seed catalogs piling up in the mail box.
And a note on my wife’s calendar saying simply, “chit”. Continue reading Post G23-002: That potato isn’t going to chit himself.
One of the joys of gardening is coming across fresh-frozen produce, in the dead of winter, that you squirreled away last summer.
In the Spring of 2022, after determining that freezing was the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes (as long as you have room in an already-running freezer), I froze a bag of early-season “4th of July” tomatoes. Washed them, cut their tops off, put them in a vacuum-sealed bag, and froze them. (Then sealed the bag, after they had frozen.)
Source: Post G22-010.
The clincher for me was finding out that frozen tomatoes will slip right out of their skins. If you’ve every tried to peel a lot of tomatoes, you know what a plus that is.
That’s what I’m doing, in the video above, with the thawed tomatoes. They already have their tops cut off, they’ve been thawed, and they do, indeed, slip right out of their skins.
I learned that trick from the blog “from the family with love“. (You can see her video of peeling frozen tomatoes at this youtube URL). But, you know, sometimes, there is room for doubt until you actually do it with your own hands.
As a bonus, freezing them (after removing the tops) separates out most of the liquid. When I pulled the now-thawed tomatoes out of their vacuum-seal bag, roughly half of the output was tomato solids, half was tomato water.
Obviously, after freezing the texture isn’t good enough for eating out-of-hand. But for a quick batch of tomato sauce, or for adding some chopped tomatoes to a stew, these are fine. I’m making sauce, so I ran a stick blender through it to pulverize the seeds before reducing it down.
I might even go so far as to say that these are nice. Compared to canned tomatoes, freezing seems to preserve more of that “fresh tomato” taste. I’m vaguely guessing it preserves more of the aromatics that are lost in canning.
So there you have it. Wash them, cut the tops off, freeze, then seal the bag their are in. Thawed half a year later, they are a little taste of summer to enjoy in the dark of winter.
But few people have one. And that’s a situation I’m trying to change.
A couple of months ago, I put away some seeds from the pawpaw trees in my yard, with the idea of starting and giving away pawpaw seedlings in the spring. Preserving viable seeds turned out to be quite a process (Post #G22-062). After a thorough cleaning, the seeds need to be kept moist, and kept cold over the winter. So a couple of plastic bags of seeds-in-damp-potting-soil have been living at the back of my fridge for the past two months.
Today it was time for a mid-season checkup.
They’re still brown (no evidence of mildew or fungus). And they’re still damp, though it’s clear that they have dried out somewhat, so I’m going to top them off with a bit of fresh water. (In hindsight, I should have weighed them before I tucked them into the fridge.)
But, in general, things are proceeding according to plan.
Except that I don’t actually have a plan. I started this in response to a request for pawpaw seeds. I noted how difficult it seemed to be to come by pawpaw seedlings locally. And pawpaws are the only known host of the zebra swallowtail butterfly.
So when you get right down to it, my entire rationale for doing this is butterflies (aw!).
And thus I have fallen into the classic charismatic megafauna trap. As humans, we focus on saving animals that are attractive (pandas). Or noble-looking (elephants). Or have cultural context (bald eagles). Or, in this case, cute, and the Virginia state insect (zebra swallowtail butterfly).
The dead of winter is the perfect time to step back and take a more objective look at this effort. Given that we’re in the middle of the great insect apocalypse, and given that growing trees in suburban yards is more-or-less a zero-sum game (if not a pawpaw, then some other tree), what is it, exactly, that I’m hoping to accomplish.
Is propagating pawpaws the smart thing to do? Aside from the technical gardening challenge of doing this, and helping one insect (because it’s so cute!), is this really the best use of my time?
As my first attempt at being somewhat more systematic, let me use Google to find seemingly-serious websites offering advice on how to create an insect-friendly urban environment.
To frame that properly, I need to state clearly that urbanized areas constitute only a tiny fraction of U.S. land area. So, from the outset, this list is going to be oriented toward personal actions that residents of urbanized areas may take. My little survey clearly is not going to have the right “weighting” in terms of global impact, because those urbanized areas constitute such a small part of the entire U.S. insect habitat.
You can look at that any number of ways, and arrive at the same conclusion. The U.S. Census has a formal definition of what it considers to be an urbanized area:
Source: Census data via University of Texas.
Bloomberg has a nicely detailed summary of U.S. land use. You reach much the same conclusion from that as you do from the map above. Urban areas account for a few percent of the total land area of the U.S.
Source: Bloomberg, Here’s How America Uses Its Land,By Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby,
So, almost beyond a doubt, policies or actions applicable to the other land categories will have a much larger impact than what gets done in urbanized areas. Pasture/range, forest, cropland, and parks (and other special-use lands) vastly outweigh urban areas in terms of insect habitat.
The easiest way to quantify that is to focus on the diagram above. Roughly speaking, there’s one acre of crop land and two acres of pasture/grazing land for every resident of the U.S. Most of the production from that land is consumed domestically. Adults consume more than kids. If I had to guess, I’d guess that growing a year’s food for two U.S. adults takes up at least six acres of land. Compare that to my suburban lot, and, arguably, what I choose to eat is going to matter a lot more than how I landscape my yard.
But you do what you can.
That said, below I have tabulated the advice most commonly offered to Joe and Jane Urbanite, to help protect and preserve the insect population. This is literally the first nine reputable sources that showed up in a simple Google query of best things to do to help insects. The full tables may be a bit tough to read, so scroll down for just the good parts.
Just the useful bit:
When I start from this perspective, I’m pretty sure that displacing other species of backyard trees, in favor of pawpaws necessary for a single butterfly species, is probably not the most effective thing I can be doing to help beneficial insects survive in my yard.
#1: Overwhelmingly, the first piece of advice is to reduce the area of your lawn, in favor of … well, just about anything else. Eight of nine sources said some version of that. Minimally, don’t mow it. Maximally, return it to more-or-less a wild area. Maybe plant it with wildflowers. Maybe plant it with insect-friendly plants.
I think I’m going to take this one to heart next year, as I have a large section of my back yard currently covered in black plastic, trying to kill the weeds. And a whole lot of saved flower seeds. I think that’s all going to become a flower bed next year.
#2: Skip the pesticides and herbicides. I think I have that one knocked. The more I grow in my vegetable garden, the less inclined I am toward any type of insecticides. Herbicide? I spell that h-o-e.
#3: Address your outdoor lighting. I had no idea this was quite so much of an issue. Everyone gives the same advice. Minimize outdoor lighting. And if you use outdoor lighting, go toward the red/yellow/amber spectrum, not white. Apparently, there is some truth to the idea that old-fashioned yellow bug lights attract fewer bugs. What also appears true, however, is that the switch to LED street lights. however good that is from the standpoint of reducing energy consumption, is a step backward in terms of harm to the insect population. Apparently, those old fashioned yellow high-pressure sodium lights were reasonably benign, compared to the white light issued by LED or mercury vapor/halide lamps.
For me, this is fixable. I have exactly two small outdoor lights. Both have white bulbs in them. I’ll swap those for bug lights, and problem solved.
#4: Create bee nests, bug hotels, and other protected habitats. Or, alternatively, just leave the edges of your yard looking like crap all the time. That works for me. I now have a great excuse for leaves, branches, pine cones, etc. along the margins of my yard. It’s not sloth, it’s environmentally sound policy. Plausibly the wilder it looks, the more insect-friendly it is.
But you can also buy bits of made habitat. I bought one of those solitary-bee or mason-bee nesting boxes in Spring 2016. Never touched it. Here’s how it looks this morning:
To me, that looks like an underwhelming amount of new-bee production for six years. A lot of the tubes remain untouched. Maybe a half-dozen have clearly released a live bee, as evidenced by the hole in the end of the mud. A few more might hold bees that will emerge this spring. That said, those bees will re-use those tubes, so it’s not clear exactly how many bees this investment produced. Or, for that matter, whether those bees would simply have laid their eggs elsewhere, absent this cute little device.
That said, I already own a couple, so I guess I’ll get the refill tubes, clean them up, and re-hang them. What could it hurt?
I’m going to stop there, except to note that planting native plants (such as pawpaws) is pretty far down the list. And so, as I had begun to suspect, it’s likely that going to all this effort to produce pawpaw seedlings is not very efficient. Laboriously saving the seeds, to produce the seedlings, so that others may displace some trees in their yard with pawpaws, so that the zebra swallowtail has a place to lay eggs … that’s a positive thing to do, but it should hardly be first on the list.
Best guess, after fixing my outdoor lighting, the single smartest thing I can do is transform large portions of the edges of my yard to wildflowers. Around here, it takes considerable effort to keep “wild” patches of yard from being overgrown with less desirable plants. So it’ll take some doing to get a setup that has any hope of maintaining itself, even if I mow it once a year to keep the trees down.
After that, it’s probably a question of being pickier about what I eat. I’m not sure about the extent to which eating organic produce actually avoids use of pesticides, rather than merely substitutes some classes of pesticides for others. But I am pretty sure that foods vary widely in terms of the average amount of pesticide and herbicide used per edible calorie. I think my next step is to see if research can generate any reliable information on that.
Or Judgment, depending on which style guide you follow.
When I started trying new varieties of plants in my little backyard garden, I did not quite grasp one obvious consequence: At some point, you have to thin down your seed collection.
Left to its own devices, my shoebox of seed packets exhibits reverse Darwinism: Survival of the un-fittest. It’s not merely that I end up with far too many packets of seeds. It’s that the long-term survivors are the duds — the ones I didn’t want to plant again. By contrast, plants with desirable traits are removed from my shoebox gene pool, because I planted the seeds and grew them.
It’s a nice metaphor for much of the junk in my life. The shirts I wear every day eventually wear out. The ill-fitting and the ugly remain until I haul them off to the thrift shop. The low-fat, low-salt cottage cheese slowly expires at the back of the fridge. But somehow my pantry has never held a bag of potato chips beyond its expiration date.
Above: The starting point. It’s not quite as chaotic as it looks, because I have them sorted into categories.
1) I just ain’t gonna grow that vegetable any more.
Here, the varieties themselves are blameless. It’s mostly that nobody wanted to eat them, even if I grew them well. Or, in a few cases, that, plus they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth.
Maybe I’ll try to give these away. There’s nothing wrong with the seeds.
2) I ain’t gonna grow that variety any more.
Some of these just didn’t grow well. Some didn’t taste like much. And, to be clear, I’m tossing some not because they are intrinsically bad but because I could use the same space for better varieties.
2.1) Tomatoes
These all grew, but were disappointing for some reason. Some, I couldn’t tell when they were ripe. Others lacked taste. Some had poor yields, possibly due to operator error. But mostly, they aren’t themselves bad, it’s just that there were better varieties for my garden conditions.
2.2) Squash
At the end of the day, I’m sticking with a handful of tried-and-true varieties of winter and summer squash. As with the tomatoes above, the ones pictured here just didn’t do as well as other varieties that I planted.
From now on, I’ll do a couple of varieties of winter squash (Dickenson pumpkin, Waltham butternut squash), a couple of varieties of summer squash (prolific yellow straightneck, black beauty zucchini), and call it a day.
2.3 Cucumbers.
I’m giving up on cucumbers for the time being. Cucumber beetles are now endemic to my garden. I’m not willing to use the strong toxins it would take to get rid of them, and none of the varieties above is sufficiently resistant to bacterial wilt, spread by cucumber beetles. In addition, my attempt at growing parthenocarpic cukes under insect netting failed. I’m giving it a rest next year.
With that thinning, everything now fits in one plastic shoebox. In theory, I ought to vacuum-seal these seeds, so they’d last longer. In practice, I tend to use them up before they start failing to germinate.
This has been an odd post, in that all I talked about is the stuff that didn’t work. But every once in a while, you have to clean house. By its nature, that has to focus on the duds.
Source: Analysis of historical weather data from NOAA.
It looks like we’re going to have a few nights with freezing temperatures this week, here in Vienna, VA.
I’ve been doing a few chores in and around the garden to get ready for that. The most important of which was moving a large potted lime tree into the garage. Even a touch of frost and that would likely die back to the ground. I’ve also drained all the water barrels, and I’m bringing hose timers and other frost-sensitive objects inside.
This means it’s also time to redo my prior analysis of trends in first frost. It’s been unseasonably warm in the East, so it would be no surprise if this year’s first frost were a bit later than usual.
But when I actually looked at the data, I got a surprise: Dulles Airport (my standard for this frost analysis) recorded a frost about three weeks ago, on October 21. I missed that, and clearly we didn’t get a frost in Vienna, based on (e.g.) the fact that my okra plants are still alive.
That said, on average, first frost in my area is now about 20 days later than it was in the 1960s. As you can probably see from the graph, virtually all that change has been in this century. That couple-of-weeks shift in the first frost date appears to be a fairly widespread phenomenon (per this reference).
That’s consistent with the continued northward shift of the USDA hardiness zones. They update those every so often, using more recent historical weather (i.e.) climate data. With the most recent up date (2012, using the 30 years of weather ending 2010), most of the zone boundaries slid north, compared to the prior map (using the 30 years ending in 1990). Apparently, the average rate of travel of the hardiness zone boundaries is reported at 13 miles (north) per decade (per that same reference). That varies widely, as zone boundaries at the coast shift more slowly, due to the moderating effects of ocean temperatures.
In any case, it will be sometime around 2040 before Vienna, VA makes it into Zone 8 — or Zone 8 makes it to Vienna — take your pick.
Source: NOAA, via the New York Times
So I guess it’s still a bit early to expect climate change to save me from these frost-related chores. But give it enough time, and we our descendants our descendants, if any, will have no problem growing palm trees around here.
As was true at last year’s first frost date (Post G21-057), indoor relative humidity remains high. That said, I’m keeping an eye on it, and when it drops below 40%, I’ll start running my humidifiers. I summarized why that’s important for prevention of respiratory infections in Post #894.
Source: American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers
I’ve picked the last of my peppers, stripped the green tomatoes from the vines, set them up to pickle (shown above). All that’s left growing is a bit of stunted lettuce and spinach, and a few onions left to overwinter.
As I get my garden beds ready for the winter, I’ll summarize what I think I learned in my third year of being a serious vegetable gardener. Let me arrange this from choosing seeds to preserving the harvest.
This isn’t everything I grow, it’s just plants where I had something to say.
For tomatoes, I settled on growing four broad classes. Varieties are shown in Post G22-001.
Early-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes were a total winner. I had tomatoes by June, and those plants continued to bear through October (Post G22-025). I judged the overall winner to be Fourth of July, a hybrid from Burpee Seeds. I’ll plant that again next year.
OTOH, my other tomato choices were flops. Two (paste, heat-tolerant) were due to operator error (deer damage, poor location, planted too late.) But of the three heirloom tomatoes I tried, the only one I will keep is Cherokee Purple. That produced a decent yield of consistently tasty tomatoes. For the other two (Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Chocolate Stripes), I simply couldn’t guess when they were ripe. I won’t grow those again (Post G22-051).
Ground cherries. I tried and rejected ground cherries (Post G22-029). They grew with no fuss, as advertised. But yield was tiny and harvesting was a pain. Plus, as it turns out, I don’t much like them. Mine, at least, were not sweet. I’m not growing them again.
Summer squash and cucumbers. I have a terrible time growing these due to insect pests (squash vine borer (Post G27), and cucumber beetle (various posts). For squash vine borer, I had mixed success spraying with Spinosad (Post G21-044). That’s only bulletproof if you stake the squash vines up, off the ground, and it’s a lot of work in any case. For cucumber beetle, I never found a method of killing them that I was comfortable with, because I don’t want to use (e.g.) Sevin or similar pesticide dusts. Nothing I tried worked at all, including methods that get a generally good reputation on the internet (such as yellow sticky traps).
This year I tried growing parthenocarpic varieties under insect netting (Post G22-013, Post G22-050). The upshot is that the “parthenocarpic” part didn’t work out, but that growing under netting is a pesticide-free way to avoid the worst of the squash vine borer. Timed right, I end up with large, flowering summer squash by August 1 or so. At that point, there’s only an occasional squash vine borer visiting the garden, and I can take the netting off and get some summer squash. For cucumbers, by contrast, this didn’t work at all, because the cucumber beetle appears to be a year-round pest in my garden now.
I’m not sure if I’m going to try growing under netting again, or not.
Winter squash. I experimented last year, but I’ve settled on good old Waltham Butternut squash, and on Dickinson pumpkin (which, despite the name, size, and shape, is just a gigantic winter squash, and tastes more-or-less exactly the same as butternut squash.) These are pretty much hassle-free, although I do wrap the pumpkins in floating row cover to keep the squirrels confused. I’ll plant these again next year.
Potatoes. I finally figured out exactly why you typically can’t use store-bought potatoes as seed potatoes (Post G22-004). And yet, sometimes, you can. The answer is organic potatoes can’t be treated with the most potent and toxic sprout inhibitor. So, either buy certified seed potatoes, or plant organic potatoes from the grocery store. Chit early and often. Consider no-dig planting if you’ve got money to burn and/or a cheap source of straw (Post #1073).
Sweet potatoes. God’s gift to the lazy and untalented gardener. Buy them from the store in late winter, sit them in some damp potting soil until they sprout, plant the slips (sprouts). Water well. If you want more, cut a foot off the ends of some vines, strip off most of the leaves, and plant those. Nice to have a food plant that’s so aggressive it can strangle the weeds. Definitely planting again. No idea what variety I’m planting, because it’s whatever is in the grocery store.
Beets, turnips, radishes. Nix. I’m just giving up on these. I can’t seem to get a decent-sized root in my soil, and I’m the only one in my family who will eat them.
Eggplant. Nix. Grows well, nobody else in my family will eat it. Skipping that next year.
Heavy-hitter Okra. This was a disappointment. I grew about ten okra plants, of the “heavy hitter” strain. These are supposed to produce multiple flower heads per plant and to be extremely productive. What we actually got was some nice-looking plants with mediocre production. Throughout the summer, we managed to get one pod per two plants per day. I’m going to try a different strain next year, but I suspect that I’m just going to have to plant a field of okra if we’re ever going to have a surplus of it.
Fluorescents are obsolete. I had been using a two-bulb four-foot shop light as a grow light, for staring plants inside. This year I “rewired” it (basically, gutted it) and (eventually) successfully installed LED replacement bulbs (Post G22-003). The LEDs use about half the electricity that the fluorescents used.
Window box is best. That said, the cheapest source of grow light is the sun. I’m not very good at using a cold frame — I typically end up frying my plants on a sunny day. So I made a cheap, temporary window box out of some clear plastic totes (Post G22-003). That worked fine and was climate-controlled.
Dump the peat pellets, use paper bags instead. For years, I have started seeds using peat pellets. These are convenient, and hold together well as you move your seedlings from place to place. But a couple of things happened this year that have made me change my mind on peat pellets.
First, I had an exceptionally productive year for winter squash. Easily four times the yield I’ve had in any prior year. Here’s a picture of some of what I harvested. Those butternuts came from just four Waltham butternut vines.
But the only thing I did differently this year was to start those squash seedlings without using peat pellets. I started them in cups, then moved them to doubled-up paper lunch bags (Post G22-012, Post G22-017). As I pulled up those vines, this year, I noticed that they seemed to have exceptionally well-developed roots.
This got me to wondering whether those peat pellets inhibit root formation. I stopped using peat pots long ago for exactly that reason. I’d pull plants up at the end of the season, only to find that they were root-bound inside those un-degraded peat pots.
As I pulled up my late tomato vines, I decided to compare those that had been started in peat pellets, and those that had been started in cups of potting soil. These are plants of about the same size and that were started at the same time.
These were both photographed at arms length. Note that the peat pellet is still largely intact (left). And that the plant grown without using a peat pellet (right) has an obviously much more developed root structure, with a far longer tap root and longer side roots as well.
As it turns out, I am not the only person to have noticed this. If you Google peat pellet root bound, you’ll find lots of stories and pictures showing plants that became totally root bound in a peat pellet. Some then suggest cutting up the mesh that holds the peat pellet together, but to me, that kills the main advantage of planting the intact peat pellet, which is that you avoid transplant shock.
The upshot of this is that I’m tossing out my peat pellets, and starting plants in doubled-up paper bags from now on. Those bags get quite fragile by the time they get planted, but that’s the whole point. You want them to be just at the point of falling apart when they are put into the ground.
Fall garden flops. Two years in a row now, I’ve followed standard gardening advice and planted some fall crops in the garden. I’ve direct-sown some greens and such. And two years in a row, that’s been a total flop. Here’s the writeup for last year (G21-057). It’s pretty much ditto for this year.
The upshot is that while I can direct-sow seeds in late August in Zone 7, it’s probably going to be a complete waste of time. As the days shorten and the temperatures cool, plants begin to grow not just more slowly, but much more slowly. I did the analytics on this in Post G22-061.
The upshot is that you can either put in some sort of poly tunnel or greenhouse, or you can start your fall crops in pots in July, so that you are planting out month+ seedlings. What I can’t do is direct sow (e.g.) lettuce and spinach at the end of August and expect to have usable yield.
Frost protection alone isn’t worth it. This year, I nailed down the ins and outs of frost protection. Aluminized fabric or space blanket radiant barrier works great (Post G22-005). Mason jars (and some types of plastic) work great, because they are radiant barriers (Post G22-006). Some other plastics work, but polyethylene sheeting or floating row cover has no impact. Basically, those are worthless for frost protection (Post G22-005).
But this year, as I was hustling and putting my plants in early and protecting them when there was a threat of frost — it occurred to me that this is largely a waste of time (Post G22-009).
Why? See Fall Garden Flops above. If it’s that early in the spring, when it’s cold out, plants grow at a snail’s pace. You put in a huge amount of effort to keep those plants from freezing, and your reward is a tiny head start on the gardening year.
To get a head start on the growing season, it seems like it’s far smarter to keep growing your seedlings in some sort of protected (i.e., warmed) space, then plant those much larger seedlings into the garden only after things have warmed up. That means setting up some sort of poly tunnel with frost protection — to raise daytime temperatures for the plants and prevent nighttime freezes. Or keeping your seedlings in some sort of cold frame/window box arrangement until they are much older and larger than you would normally grow them.
In any case, my take on it is that planting early, into a cold garden, and hustling to provide frost protection, is all pain and (almost) no gain. I’m not going to do that next year. If I need frost protection, it’s too early to plant.
Days to maturity does not tell you much. I worked through all the details on what “days to maturity” means, as printed on seed packets, in Post G22-025. The reality is that a) that figure is for ideal growing conditions, b) that’s just the date on which under ideal conditions you can pick your first ripe crop, and c) in spring and fall — when that figure really matters — days to maturity will be vastly higher than the number cited on the seed pack. See Fall Garden Flops above.
The bottom line is that if you start from your fall first frost date, and count backward by “days to maturity”, you are nowhere near the correct date for planting seeds for a fall crop. You have to plant them much, much earlier than that to be able to expect to harvest anything.
Irrigation. For a little home garden, it turns out that an effective irrigation system can be incredibly simple, quick to install, reasonably cheap, and will work with rain barrels or city water. See post G22-037 and further references in that post. I can’t believe I went through two years of carrying buckets all over the garden. If I had it to do over, I’d put in irrigation from the start.
Hose timers. These always seem to fail after a few years. With my last failure, I did an autopsy to figure out why they die, then modified my new timer accordingly (Post G22-028).
Rain barrels. I think rain barrels are a good thing, and I have a bunch of them. But no matter how many I have, I always seem to run out of water anyway. And I end up using city water, run through an activated charcoal filter to remove the chloramines.
So I did a “micro-simulation” model of a rain barrel system, using the actual historical rainfall data for my area (Post G21-043). And, sure enough, practically speaking, you are always going to run out of water. As it turns out, for a small garden like mine, the first few rain barrels do a lot of good, and then the benefit per additional rain barrel decreases rapidly. And, don’t kid yourself that you’re doing much for the environment by using rain barrels. I think that if I’d known this from the start, I’d have put in a couple of rain barrels and called it quits. For a few hundred square feet of garden beds, a large rain barrel system is mostly a waste.
Sprawl technique for tomatoes (Post G22-018). That’s a big No on that one. They grow fine. In fact, the probably grow better if allowed to sprawl than they do if staked, because they put out secondary roots. But harvesting is a nightmare, and you lose a lot of the crop to bugs. I used the sprawl technique this year because I had an injury that made it hard to get around. I’d never do that again. I’m staking and/or caging my tomatoes from now on.
Oh, and sprawl technique with green tomatoes? Dumb squared. Sprawl technique with black plastic mulch, in Virginia summer? Tomatocide. Just don’t go there.
Woven black plastic ag fabric instead of mulch. I gave this a try this year, again because I had some problem getting around in the spring, and I figured this would be a labor-saving measure.
I see this being used all over YouTube. I couldn’t quite figure out how plants could possibly handle the heat stress of all that black plastic with the sun beating down on it. Turns out, by and large, mine couldn’t. Some plants were just outright killed by the heat. Some were stunted. Some — mostly beefy upright plants like okra — handled it OK.
In the end, I’d say that it’s OK if you put this down, then spread straw or other light-colored mulch on top. It’s OK if you use it as straight-up weed blocking fabric. It probably works OK if you’ve got enough foliage to keep the black plastic cloth in the shade. But (e.g.) planting peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, and squash seedlings through holes in woven black plastic was simply a mistake. Those that the heat did not kill outright clearly appear to have been heat-stressed anywhere any part of the plant touched the plastic.
I don’t think I’m going to use that again as anything but weed-block ag fabric. I don’t think I’ll try to grow my seedlings through it.
Weeding. I looked into numerous organic weed killers, and decided that I might as well just use a weed-whacker (Post G22-046). With one exception, organic weed killers (e.g., strong vinegar) are burn-down weed killers. They kill the top of the plant, but not the roots.
I also tried using bamboo leaves as a natural weed killer, with inferior results (Post G22-060).
If nothing else, I gained a better understanding of why people use Roundup in their yards, even if I won’t touch the stuff. If you want to kill a plant roots and all, you don’t really have any good organic choices.
Electric fence for deer. After years of trying various deer-deterrent devices, I rage-purchased the equipment to set up a small, portable electric fence (Post #G22-018). These are reasonably cheap and ridiculously easy to set up. The “wire” is more of a twine with embedded metal fibers. You run that through plastic step-in posts. You’ll need to pound in a grounding rod, that’s just about the only work involved. And you’ll need to be able to run an extension cord to where the charger is attached to the fence.
Deer damage effectively ceased for as long as I ran it. Wish I’d thought of it sooner, and this is now a permanent part of my backyard suburban gardening setup.
I also run a Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprayer. This works, with a few caveats. It tends to trigger off randomly when faced with bright sunshine on broad, fluttering leaves. And the hose connection began to leak until I replaced the original cheap vinyl hose gasket with a standard 10-cent rubber hose gasket. Otherwise, it shows no signs of deterioration after one season of use. And the deer will stay out of the area it sprays.
Otherwise, I have retired the rest of my arsenal of deer deterrents. Search for that category on this website if you want to see what else I was using.
Wrap your pumpkins to keep the squirrels off (Post G30). For the second year in a row, I wrapped floating row cover around my pumpkins. This appears to work perfectly to keep the squirrels from gnawing on them. That’s now a standard part of what I do when I grow pumpkins.
Powdery mildew. The first year I gardened, I had to put in the time just to learn the lingo (Post G15). Because, as it turns out, most commercial treatments for powdery mildew don’t actually kill powdery mildew (“eradicants”), they only claim to help prevent its spread (“protectants”). Next you have to realize that virtually no home-remedy type powdery mildew treatments work (Post G19). Despite having people swear by them in various internet posts. Or, at least, did not work on whatever strain of mildew I had in my garden. Finally, once you do come up with something that will kill powdery mildew, what you find is that a) you have to keep spraying it, and b) what you end up with is a heavily damaged plant anyway (Post G20).
That learning is summarized in Post G20. The upshot of all that is that you ideally want to spray to prevent powdery mildew, not to try to cure some that has already set in.
I tried to test a couple of preventatives this year, one a commercial copper-based spray, the other a weak citric acid solution (Post G22-039, Post G22-040). Nature did not cooperate, in that I didn’t ever get significant powdery mildew in the garden until very late in the garden year. At which point, I can certify that weak citric acid solution does not kill existing powdery mildew (Post G22-060) .
French marigolds. I’ve bought a lot of “deer proof” flower mixes. And yeah, you can get some flowers, and yeah, maybe the deer won’t eat some of them, even if they are desperate.
But let me tell you a few things about french marigolds:
Vinegar pickles do not require salt. If you are making a traditional vinegar-based pickle, the salt is there solely for flavor. It it not necessary for the preservation of the food. Accordingly, I tried making a sodium-free vinegar dill pickle. The results were … OK. Edible. Definitely pickle-like. I’m undecided as to whether I’d do that again, but for sure, I can’t take the high-salt diet one gets with home-canned vinegar pickles following a traditional recipe. (See Post G22-031, Post G22-032, Post G22-036).
FWIW: Neither pickle crisp (calcium chloride) nor soaking the cucumbers in ice had any impact on the crispness of the pickle. Based on my final batches, you can replace salt with salt substitute measure-for-measure in a vinegar pickle recipe and get a reasonably salty-tasting pickle without significant off notes. And it definitely helps to replace about half the vinegar acidity with citric acid acidity, following standard canning formulas as described in the posts above. Finally, because these salt-free pickles tended to have a somewhat tough skin, you get a better product processing them as spears rather than as whole pickles.
Freezing is the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes if and only if you are going to be running that freezer anyway. That’s the gist of Post G22-010. It is also by far the easiest. And the skins slip right off the tomatoes afterwards (same post).
These days, I mostly preserve them by making tomato sauce on the stove, then freezing that in vacuum-sealed bags. FWIW, my process is as follows:
I’ve stopped making tomato sauce in a crock-pot because it takes forever and is energy inefficient. A crock pot is a poor device for reducing reducing tomato juice down to tomato sauce.
I threw my garden together in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to get some exercise, and have something to do. I set the whole thing up out of recycled materials, including a bunch of coroplast political protest signs that I had printed up for use in the Town of Vienna, VA, and some bamboo I had cut down in my yard (Post G05).
If I had to do a raised-bed garden over, from scratch, I would:
I am still not quite ready to go full-on to growing in a greenhouse. There are advantages to that, but any greenhouse I could build would end up being one great big disposable, as the various plastics broke down.
I think that, on this forthcoming re-build, I’m looking for something a bit more permanent, a bit less disposable, and something that incorporates all the varied temporary structures that I’ve set up over the past three years of gardening.
