Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
Above: Famous “Pickle Maze”, Hunt-Henley House, Warwickshire.
This post provides updates on:
In a prior series of posts, I set the stage for trying to produce a decent-tasting canned sour pickle, sodium-free. I established that: Continue reading Post G22-036, a decent salt-free pickle, step 2.
Last year, mid-pandemic, I put a lot of effort into my tomato plants. Staked them up, consistently pruned out the suckers, kept them to a single main stem tied to the stake, pruned out leaves nearest the ground, pruned out any leaves with signs of disease, carefully watered them to avoid soil splash (and presumably, the resulting soil-borne fungal infections). And I used an electric toothbrush to ensure pollination. Continue reading Post G22-035: The hard lessons of minimum-effort tomatoes
My town goes to great effort and expense to collect and dispose of leaves each fall. Homeowners are instructed to rake their leaves to the curb. The leaves are vacuumed up, trucked off, and hot-composted.
To me, this looks increasingly like an anachronism. It’s one of those practices that was a point of civic pride 40 years ago, but which today appears to be a convenience that results in needless environmental harm.
We need a new paradigm that turns this maximum-effort approach on its head. Instead of collecting as much leaf volume as possible, our goal should be to encourage town residents to do as little as possible. Citizens should be encouraged to:
Only as a last resort, rake them to the curb, to be trucked around by town staff and ultimately sterilized via hot composting.
The Town still has a necessary role in removing leaves from roadways and storm drains. Getting them up off those impervious surfaces prevents rapid flow of leaf-borne nutrients into already-overburdened local waterways. (And continued street sweeping is a legal requirement here, given that we relied on the existing street-sweeping program to comply with certain nutrient runoff reductions mandated by the Chesapeake Bay Act.)
Beyond that, the town needs to recast this annual leaf collection not as some great municipal benefit, but as a necessary evil of living in a tree-dense suburban landscape. And as such, it should devote resources to minimizing the quantity of leaves input into this process. I’m guessing that just a little bit of effort in this direction can both save money on leaf collection costs and generate some small improvement in the local environment.
Let me start this section with one weird fact: The mulching lawn mower was invented in 1990. This, per Google Patents. That 1990 patent document cites the the avoidance of significant monetary and environmental costs of yard waste disposal as a major advantage of a mulching mower.
Today, all mowers are mulching mowers. Or nearly all. My local Home Depot has 54 different power lawn mowers in stock. I checked the first dozen listed, then spot-checked another half-dozen further down the list. Every one was advertised as a mulching mower. Gas, electric, multiple blade — it made no difference. To a close approximation, mulching is the default. In the modern era, “lawn mower” is synonymous with mulching mower. With effort, you might be able to find one that doesn’t mulch. But you’d have to work at it.
There appears to be near-universal agreement that mulching your fall leaf litter in place is beneficial to your lawn. By which I mean, mowing your leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower. Which, these days, per the above, means mowing your lawn.
Everyone from Fine Gardening to Virginia Tech Extension Service to Bob Villa says that this practice benefits your lawn. When shredded by a mulching mower, leaf litter disappears quickly, with an upper limit of roughly half-a-foot cumulative leaf depth (per Kansas State). The resulting mulched leaves provide a modest degree of fertilization (e.g., leaf litter is about 2 percent nitrogen). And the leaves of maple trees contain chemicals that suppress weed-seed germination (Michigan State University).
Even Scotts, the biggest vendor of lawn fertilizer in the U.S., tells you to mulch — not rake — your leaves. (And top it off with a bit of fertilizer, of course). The radical environmentalists at Scotts summed up the case for leaf mulching pretty well. (What’s next? Exxon promoting electric cars?)
When you rake up your leaves, it costs you. Your local taxes pay for trucks to sweep up your leaves or pick up your leaf bags, all of which often end up in landfills. If you burn leaves, you're just sending up clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. Mulching leaves simply recycles a natural resource, giving you richer soil for free.
In short, if you just use a mulching mower to chop up your leaves, rather than rake them up and dispose of them, you’ll end up with a greener lawn with fewer weeds.
The upshot is that more-or-less every suburban homeowner already owns a power tool that eliminates the need to rake leaves. That’s a radical change from three decades ago. Once upon a time, that was a specialty piece of equipment called a mulching mower. Now, near as I can tell, it’s called a lawn mower. And for the few who don’t have one, the cost of on-site leaf disposal is just the cost of hiring somebody to mow your lawn with a mulching mower.
My point is that, 30 years ago, nobody owned a mulching mower. Now, if you own a mower, it’s a mulching mower. To a close approximation, every citizen of my town already owns a tool that allows them to dispose of their own leaves, with minimal effort, on their own property.
So, why does my home town encourage all citizens to rake their leaves to the curb, for taxpayer-financed pickup and disposal? Forty years ago, that was a real life-style improvement, because nobody had a convenient way to dispose of fall leaf litter. Now, everybody does. So why have we maintained that ancient program, unchanged?
Beyond feeding your lawn, leaf litter is reported to play a key role in the life cycle of many beneficial insects, including pollinators. In particular, both butterflies and fireflies need winter leaf litter to survive. You can find any number of responsible organizations who tell you not to mulch your leaves but, ideally, just let them be. Or rake them up and let them decompose naturally. That, in a nutshell, the worst thing you can do is have centralized hot-composting of leaves, because that effectively eliminates next year’s butterflies, present in the leaf litter as larvae and pupae.
And many others.
In particular, as this article makes clear, if you pride yourself on your butterfly-friendly garden, then rake your leaves to the curb each fall, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re basically in the business of attracting butterflies into your yard, so that you can exterminate their offspring.
While many of us are growing more sensitive to the plight of the pollinators, mindfully incorporating pollinator-friendly plants into our gardens in the spring and resisting the urge to use pesticides in our garden all summer, we are unwittingly undoing our hard work and good intentions when we clear away the leaf litter and standing dead plant material in the fall! What? You mean I am killing off the very pollinators that I “cultivated” all summer? Yep. Ouch!
Caveat: That said, while many reputable sources say that leaving leaf litter is necessary for butterflies and other beneficial insects, I could not find even one objective study that quantified the impact of it. So this is one of those things that you just have to take on the faith of expert testimony. It makes sense, experts say it. But as far as I know, it has never been quantified.
There are two types of people in this world: Those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
By which I mean, thinking that you must adopt just one of the methods outlined above is arbitrary. Nothing stops you from doing a bit of each.
This fall, maybe let some of year leaves alone. Maybe rake some aside for your own butterfly sanctuary. Maybe mow some into your lawn and skip the fertilizer in the spring.
All of that reduces the tonnage that the town has to collect. And that’s unambiguously good.
Source: US Geological Survey, presented in this document.
The only significant environmental caveat that I can identify is that leaves left on impermeable areas (such as roadways) end up putting nutrients into the local waterways.
Unfortunately, the best study of this issue (in Madison, Wisconsin) evalulated a combined program of leaf collection (asking people to rake their leaves to the curb) and street sweeping. You can see the full reference at this location.
That said, their conclusion is that frequent street sweeping is far more important than leaf collection, for keeping nutrients out of stormwater. At least, that’s how I read their summary, emphasis mine:
Collection of only leaf piles, leaving streets unswept, showed no significant reduction in loads of total or dissolved phosphorus and an 83 percent increase in load of total nitrogen. The majority of nutrient concentrations were in the dissolved fraction making source control through leaf collection and street cleaning more effective at reducing the amount of dissolved nutrients in stormwater runoff than structural practices such as wet detention ponds. Based on the results of this study, municipal leaf management programs would be most effective with weekly street cleaning in areas of high street tree canopy, whereas the method and frequency of leaf pile collection is of less importance to the mitigation of nutrients in stormwater runoff.
Source: US Geological Survey, https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20205109
Beyond that one study, every other reference I can find refers only to the link between tree canopy over the street, and apparent fall nutrient loading in surrounding waterways. E.g., this one. Similarly, this one looked at all sources, but pointed to urban trees adjacent to streets as the significant wintertime nutrient source in the watershed it studied.
So it’s pretty clear that if you have leaf-covered streets, the decomposing leaves wash into the storm sewers and add nutrients to local streams. For sure, the town has a proper role in sweeping the streets in the fall to remove fallen leaves before they can get into the storm sewers.
But as far as I can tell, asking citizens to dispose of their own leaves, on their own property, is not a concern. Almost all of the research shows that it’s the leaf load on the streets that is the major driver of fall nutrient runoff. So, absent information to the contrary, I’d assume that as long as the town continues to sweep the streets in the fall, a program of encouraging residents to keep their leaves on their own lot would have no significant implications for compliance with the Chesapeake Bay Act.
Some time in the distant past, my town began a program of mass collection and composting of fall leaves.
This started before before the invention of the mulching mower. It started decades before it was widely understood that many beneficial insects need the leaf litter to survive, and decades before research made it clear that frequent street sweeping was far more important than bulk leaf removal, for preventing high fall nutrient loads in urban storm water.
And yet, even now, every year, citizens are directed to rake their leaves to the curb, so that we can use our tax dollars to vacuum them up and send them off to be hot composted (i.e. sterilized and broken down in large, hot piles.).
All I’m suggesting is that maybe this needs a change of focus. The town should de-emphasize centralized leaf collection and instead encourage residents to take care of their own leaves responsibly. This can be as low-effort as simply mowing the leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower. It can take the form of raking the leaves to the edges of the yard to let them slowly decompose (“sheet composting”). And then focusing the town’s resources on sweeping up whatever leaves end up on the streets.
Sure, allow residents to continue to rake their leaves to the curb for pickup if they wish. But it’s time to stop encouraging that practice. And, instead, to promote ways in which citizens can responsibly handle their own fall leaves.
I got up this morning and ate a bunch of pickles. All in the name of Science. Above, you see the results on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being pickle perfection. Continue reading Post G22-033: Lord preserve us and protect us, we’ve been eatin’ pickles for breakfast
See next post for results
This is a continuation of my just-prior gardening post.
The goal of this experiment is to come up with home canned no-salt sour dill pickle. Not a refrigerator pickle, not a sweet pickle, not a “low-salt” pickle that has half as much salt as a regular pickle. But a canned, shelf-stable sour pickle with no or negligible sodium content. That tastes OK. Continue reading Post G22-032: No-salt pickles 2, the experiment
In this post, I lay out a simple experiment to develop a variety of recipes for sodium-free canned pickles. By pickles, I mean sour dills. And by canned, I mean preserved so that they don’t have to be refrigerated. Continue reading Post G22-031, sodium-free home-canned dill pickle experiment 1: Background
If you have ever needed to join two sheets of floating row cover, or other spun-bonded or non-woven porous plastic cloth, this post outlines the easy, skill-free way to do that.
In a nutshell: Use fusible interfacing.
If you know what fusible interfacing is, you probably don’t need to read the rest of this. The only pro tip is to use a damp pressing cloth, to avoid melting the floating row cover.
For the rest of you, fusible interfacing is hot-melt fabric glue that comes in thin sheets. Cut it to size, slip it between pieces of fabric to be joined, press briefly with an iron, and presto, the fabric pieces are joined.
My only value added in this post is in pointing out that this does, in fact, work quite well with floating row cover. The only other method I’ve seen mentioned is to sew it, which strikes me as both a lot of skilled work, and likely subject to early failure.
Let me put two caveats up front.
First, this seam is strong enough to use, but it’s not as strong as a sewn seam when used on this thin plastic material. If you stress it enough, you can pull those two pieces of plastic spun-bonded fabric apart. So far, for me, it is holding up well in my intended use, which is as a cover for a hoop house. But in that use, it’s just draped over a frame, not stretched taught. This probably would not work well in an application where the cloth is stretched taught and stressed across the seam.
Second, a hot iron will most definitely melt floating row cover. (Ask me how I know). So place a thin, damp cloth over the fabric/interfacing sandwich before pressing it.
Details follow. But you’ve already read everything you need to know.
Here’s the end result below, once with the seam sitting flat, once with the seam standing up. I am sure the floating row cover will fail before the seam will.
FWIW, I moseyed through ironing two 30-foot pieces of row cover together in about ten minutes. Start-to-finish, it took me far longer to write this up than it took to do it.
Sometimes there’s a fine line between thrifty and stupid. This project may well cross that line. But the facts in my case are the following:
Why I own an entire bolt of fusible interfacing, I do not know. Must have had a reason for it, at some point. But at this point, it’s been sitting with my sewing stuff so long it’s like an old friend. I’ll probably be a little sad if I ever finally use it up.
It’s this sort of thing that caused my wife to revoke my Costco membership.
Source: JoAnn Fabrics
In any case, fusible interfacing is cheap. I cut mine into 5″ strips, but surely a strip a couple of inches wide would be adequate. At full retail, above, that’s $1.29 worth of fusible interfacing, to join two 10-yard pieces of floating row cover.
As long as this works, and doesn’t take a lot of time, I think that puts me on the thrift side of the line.
As shown above, the only tools you need are
The ironing board is optional but makes this a lot easier. It holds stuff at the right height, it allows the material to glide over it, it’s padded just right for ironing. In short, it’s the thing that was designed to make ironing easier. If you lack an ironing board, a towel on a table can be used as the base for your ironing.
The iron should be set to steam, if you have that setting. Otherwise, set it about halfway between its lowest and highest setting. The interfacing itself just says “use a hot iron”, so the setting is not critical. Anything that will melt the glue but not the fabric is OK.
A hot iron will melt floating row cover in no time flat. That’s why you must use some sort of cover, and why I suggest using a thin damp cloth on top of the assembly to be ironed. That both presses steam into the cloth, ensuring even heating, and limits the temperature to somewhere around 212F (100C).
Here’s the trick: Keep it neat.
It doesn’t matter whether you have additional layers of floating row cover in the stack of material to be ironed. Just insert the fusible interfacing between the two pieces that you wish to glue together. So if your row cover comes folded over — leave it that way, and handle it that way.
In my case, the 8′ floating row cover came folded over, on the 4′ long roll. I left it that way. I unrolled the length I needed (30′), put a weight on the fabric, unrolled another 30′ back in the direction I started from, and then cut that (total-of) 60′ piece off the roll.
The result was a single, neat, 4′ wide stack of four layers of floating row cover. Two long folded-over pieces, on top of each other. In cross-section, it’s like two “U”s on top of each other, with the open sides of both “U”s on the same side.
My goal is to glue together layers 2 and 3, along the open side of the U. Just as they lie.
If you know anything at all about sewing, you are probably appalled at the thought of making a seam this way. That is, just by gluing two flat pieces of cloth together as they lay on top of each other.
You’ve probably got an urge to do something that’s stronger, like trying to make a lapped or French seam. Ignore that urge. Floating row cover is a beast to handle in this circumstance. Trying to align large pieces of it, to form any sort of fancy seam, is just asking for trouble.
Just keep it simple.
Take care that the fusible interfacing is ENTIRELY COVERED by the two pieces of that you want glued together. Whatever it touches, it will glue together. You can be as sloppy as you want, as long as you don’t accidentally glue together anything other than the two pieces that you want to glue together.
At this point, I think I’ve driven it into the ground. The only real point is to keep the floating row cover as neat and compact as possible. Don’t unfold it, roll it up before you move it, and so on. And mind that the fusible interfacing is not sticking out where you don’t want it.
I only used this to create one long seam, but the same technique would work to create a more complex shape. Any sort of a cover that you could sew, you can create from floating row cover and fusible interfacing. So, for example, I could fuse a couple of seams perpendicular to the long seam and make a tent-like shape. And so on.
I am confident that this would work with any porous spun-bonded or non-woven fabric. As I understand it, fusible interfacing works well because you get a physical bond, as you press the glue through the fibers of the fabric. This is what allows you to join, with confidence, a low-surface-energy material (poly-whatever-plastic) that would be all-but-impossible to glue up if it were in the form of solid sheets.
That said, I have not literally tried this with Tyvek or similar non-woven fabric. My guess is that as long as there is a fibrous (as opposed to slick) surface to the fabric, this would work. But, duly noted, I have not actually done the experiment. For sure, fusible interface works with just about any traditional (woven, sewable) fabric used in making clothing.
To use this floating row cover, I had to cut up one 10′ piece of rebar. Turns out, unless you want to lay out some cash, that’s not quite as easy as most internet sources will suggest. They’ll tell you all the ways you can (possibly) cut rebar. Many of which are reasonably cost-effective if you’re going to cut up a ton of rebar. They won’t really focus on what it’ll cost you if you don’t happen to own the right tool already, and you just want to cut up one piece.
For me, the cost-effective solution was a hacksaw with brand-new blades. That’s blades, plural.
I should start with what I’m using this for. This is for my attempt to grow parthenocarpic cucumbers and summer squash under insect-proof netting (Post G22-013). Which, in turn, is my way of dodging last year’s plague of cucumber beetles and squash vine borers.
Here’s one of the two hoop-house enclosures that I hope will keep out the squash vine borer and cucumber beetle. Note the visible seam between the two pieces of floating row cover, created by the fusible-interfacing method outlined above.
The construction of this is standard. For two hoops, pound four short pieces of rebar part-way into the ground. Then bow two pieces of 10′ piece of 3/4″ PVC pipe and slip the ends over the protruding pieces of rebar.
I (of course) bought rebar in the cheapest form possible. In my case, that was 10-foot-long pieces of #3 (3/8″) rebar. I could have bought it pre-cut, but at a much higher price per foot.
I owned several tools that plausibly would cut 3/8″ rebar, so I figured, hey, I’ll just cut it when I get it home.
Well.
That was when I identified all the tools I owned that either wouldn’t cut #3 rebar or cut it so slowly it would take all day. These included:
Circular saw? I didn’t want to invest in a $25 metal-cutting blade, to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.
Angle grinder? I don’t own an angle grinder. And, as it turns out, looks like all the cheap ones specifically say NOT to use a flat metal cutoff disk. So I really didn’t feel like investing $100+ in a new, higher end (and dangerous) tool, just to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.
Hacksaw with a dull blade? No go.
Hacksaw with a brand new carbon-steel blade? Bingo. Cut halfway through the bar, then bend it to snap it. First cut was easy, second was OK, third was work. Then toss the blade and put in a new one. I could feel and hear the blade going dull over the course of three cuts.
The upshot is that a hacksaw will work fine, as long as you have a sharp blade. It’s not even hard work. But if you use cheap carbon-steel blades, expect to get maybe three cuts per blade. And if your blade is dull, this basically won’t work at all.
Bottom line: You can easily cut rebar with a hacksaw and a new, sharp blade. But the cost of the hacksaw blades used may well offset the savings from buying a single long piece of rebar and cutting it at home. I’ve since bought a pack of better bi-metallic blades, but I have no idea (yet) of how many cuts you get with a higher-quality blade.
My advice on growing ground cherries? Don’t bother.
This year I’m trying a few new plants in the garden. For whatever reason, ground cherries caught my eye. They seemed easy to grow, and the idea of growing something sweet in the garden was appealing.
If you look at the seed catalogues, you’ll see piles of beautiful ripe fruit. You’ll see the fruit described as “about the size of a cherry tomato”. You’ll hear the flavor likened to, e.g., pineapple.
And X-ray specs let you see the bones in your hands. And sea monkeys provide endless amusement.
I bought some some seeds for Cossack Pineapple ground cherries, sprouted them, and transplanted the seedlings to the garden without incident. They grew just fine, and appear to be thriving in the garden with no help from me. So ease-of-cultivation is as-advertised.
Here’s the garden plot, below, with a bunch of healthy ground cherry plants. I have maybe half-a-dozen plants, in about 16 square feet of garden space.
The fruit are unusual. They have a papery husk like a tomatillo. So it’s moderately interesting plant, though nothing showy. It doesn’t really stand out in the garden.
Here’s the first problem: The fruit is about the size of a pea. Not a pea pod. A pea. OK, maybe a fairly large pea. But definitely in that ballpark. Vastly smaller than, say, a typical cherry tomato. Imagine having to pick your peas by picking one pea at a time.
Oh, did I mention the ground part? The fruit ripens over an extended period of time, visible as the papery husks change from pale green to pale tan. You will see it said that the best way to tell if the fruit is ripe is to let it fall to the ground. My take on it is the only reliable way to get ripe ground cherries is to pick them up off the ground. As a result, in practice, you harvest these by getting down on hands and knees and rooting around in the mulch, underneath your plants, to find these pea-sized fruits in their cute little papery husks.
Here’s the second problem: The total yield of fruit is tiny. Maybe this will get better as the season progresses. But right now — from a half-dozen of these, covering may 16 square feet — I might be able to pick enough of fruit to match the volume of one (1, a) salad tomato. And, because I’m impatient, I pick not only what’s on the ground, but I pick some that appear ripe, but are still on the bush.
Here’s what today’s harvest looks like, in the husk, and then peeled:
Note the color variation for both the husks and the fruit. That’s because I picked a handful up off the ground — those are the ripe yellow ones above — then snagged a few more that were still hanging, but appeared ripe.
Here’s the third problem: They aren’t sweet. At least, these aren’t. Not even the fully-ripe ones. They do have an unusual taste. It’s described as being like pineapple, but in fact its only distantly related to that. Slightly tangy, slightly fruity. It’s definitely pleasant. Even the green ones have a nice tartness to them. But it’s not some great delicacy. It’s nowhere close to being as nice as, say, fresh blackberries.
It’s possible the yield will pick up some, as the season progresses. It’s possible that other varieties are tastier. But as of today, my view is that these are an interesting novelty, and nothing more than that. If you’re willing to get down on hands-and-knees, you can harvest a scant palmful of ripe fruit per day, out of roughly 16 square feet of garden space. And enjoy an interesting — but not sweet — fruit-like flavor from them.
In the grand scheme of what I could be growing in that space, and using my gardening time for, these are a waste of time and space. Interesting. Better than nothing. But I won’t be growing them again.
Edit 7/29/2022: When all was said and done, I bought another copy of the one that just broke. I then modified it by drilling two small weep holes, like so:
I then mounted this horizontally (with the dial facing the sky). In theory, when this leaks — and it will — the weep holes will allow the water to drain without drowning the motor. Which — see below — is what killed the first one.
Edit 7/11/2024: That same cheap-o hose timer above is still working. Granted, it’s only been two years, so I can’t exactly claim victory. But it’s worth nothing that this one — mounted to drain through the weep holes I drilled — at least didn’t crap out after a year, the way so many of its ancestors did. I take it in during the winter, I give it new batteries annually. It has to open and close twice a day during the summer. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that $30 should buy me more than just one or two years of service.
The original post follows.
A hose timer is a gizmo for turning water on and off on some pre-set schedule. You (typically) stick a couple of batteries in it, program it, place it between faucet and garden hose, and turn the faucet on. It will then operate a little valve to turn that water on and off according to your chosen schedule.
Until it breaks. Which it will. Which you probably won’t notice until your plants start withering. Unless you’re away on vacation, that is. In which case you’ll return to dead plants. Continue reading Post G22-028: Low-pressure hose timer autopsy.
