Category: Garden

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

Post G24-018: Where are the bugs?

 

Edit 7/16/2024:  The cucumber beetles finally showed up this morning.  And, we had a few Japanese beetles.  Still no sign of the squash vine borer, though, despite having several varieties of cucurbits in my garden.

Where are the bugs?

I guess I shouldn’t complain, but certain of my garden insect pests are missing.  And — see below — that’s likely due to drought in this area.

It’s now way past time for Japanese beetles (left), cucumber beetles (center), and squash vine borers (right) to show up.  These should all appear when we’ve reached ~1000 growing-degree-days of accumulated warmth for the year.  That occurred in this area almost two weeks ago.  We’ve now accumulated somewhere in excess of 1300 growing-degree-days of warmth.  So these pests are way overdue, no matter how I figure it.

Source:  Cornell University.

And yet, so far, I’ve seen a total of three Japanese beetles.  Cucumber beetles — normally found in my squash blossoms every morning — are nowhere to be seen.  Ditto for the squash vine borer, which should be fairly easy to spot due to its bright orange coloring.

Does that mean they aren’t going to show up this year?  Or are they merely delayed for some reason?

A clue from Purdue U

Nothing heralds summer like the hum of Japanese beetles ravenously descending on a flower garden. Cool weather this spring has slowed emergence of adults from the soil. Heavy spring rains early followed by relatively drier weather in late June, may have trapped adult Japanese beetles under a crusty layer of hardened soil. Due to their large numbers in many parts of Indiana last year, they are very likely just waiting for a good rain to soften the surface, so they can dig themselves into the light of day and on to your flowers. So, if we get a little more rain by the time this article comes out, we are likely to be awash in adult beetles.

Source:  Purdue University landscaper report, emphasis mine.

The paragraph above was for 2022, for Indiana.

But it describes 2024 in Virginia well.  This spring was characterized by plenty of rain, followed by drought that kicked in just as we were approaching 1000 degree-days of warmth.

For Japanese beetles, at least, the bottom line is that they have probably been delayed by the drought.  For the other two, by analogy, it’s plausible that they, too, have been delayed by crusty topsoil resulting from weeks of no rain.

The bottom line is that I can’t count on having dodged these pests for the year.  Likely they are just waiting for enough rain to soften the topsoil, so they can dig themselves up into the light of day.

We had a welcome half-inch of rain last night.  Perhaps I’ll be seeing these old friends soon.

 

Post G24-017: First Japanese beetle and first red tomato. A first.

 

The Japanese beetle and the squash vine borer both show up somewhere around 1000 growing-degree-days into the year.

Source:  Cornell University.

This year being pretty close to average, temperature-wise, the Japanese beetles are right on time.  I saw my first one this afternoon.  Last year’s version of this post occurred on June 20.  The year before that, June 18.

It’s not so much that the Japanese beetles do a lot of damage in my garden.  It’s that, around here, they are easy to spot, and their appearance means that many other pestiferous bugs will soon be arriving.  Relatively pest-free gardening is over for the year.

While Japanese beetles arrive like clockwork, not so the tomatoes.  Every year, I plant some short-season/cold-tolerant tomatoes, including Burpee’s aptly-named Fourth of July.  And, owing to the warm weather, and maybe an early start indoors, for the first time ever, I have my first red tomato on the same day as my first Japanese beetle.  I believe this year’s winning variety is Glacier.

x

This early ripening is kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  Good news is, it’s been so warm that the early-season tomatoes are extra early.  (E.g., a neighbor of mine has had ripe cherry tomatoes for about two weeks now.)  The bad news is that it’s been so hot, we’re already having nigh-time lows in the 70’s F, which is too warm for tomatoes to begin the ripening process.  So I’m guessing that I may get a few ripe tomatoes soon, but the bulk of what’s growing is going to remain green until temperatures cool off a bit.

 

Post #1979: Catching up with a few things.

 

Day trips:  Great Falls, Maryland and Sky Meadows, VA.

Sky Meadows is one of our under-appreciated Virginia State Parks.  The main hike at Sky Meadows (above) is a seemingly-easy half-mile walk up a hillside meadow with nice views.  It’s only a half-mile to the top, but that’s at a constant 18% grade. 

We (pant) took many (pant) pauses to (pant) admire the view.  On a clear day (e.g., without forest fire smoke), you can see the tall buildings at Reston, VA, roughly 50 miles away.

Roses are red, boysenberries are purple.

My little patch of berries is doing well.  Black raspberries have peaked.  Blackberries (above) are doing OK.  Currants and gooseberries are about done.  Wineberries are still to come.

My boysenberries are now ripening.  Three years ago I put in a few boysenberry plants.  I did this for the novelty, as I can’t recall ever having seen boysenberries for sale in this area (Virginia).  Now, having grown some, I understand why.  Technically, they are cane fruits.  In some climates, they may in fact produce stout canes.  But in my yard, they are low, creeping, sprawling plants.  They are hard to grow, in that it’s all-but-impossible to weed around them.  They’re a pain to pick, as the berries are borne just a few inches off the ground.

A ripe boysenberry looks like a purple blackberry, as shown above.   When less than totally and fully ripe, boysenberries and blackberries taste about the same to me.  But fully ripe, each berry yields a few seconds of its own distinct flavor.  Boysenberries are different from blackberries, but I would not say that a fully-ripe boysenberry is better than a fully-ripe blackberry.  And blackberries are vastly easier to grow, in my climate.

In both cases, once the fruit is fully ripe, it’s very soft and won’t travel.  Near as I can tell, the only way to taste a fully-ripe blackberry is to grow it.  And around here, the only way to taste a fresh boysenberry, at all, is to grow it.

Bike rehab success.

I must have made the right choices in rehabbing my wife’s BikeE recumbent bike (Post #1978 and earlier).  This, because she was gadding about town, on that bike, for a couple of hours today.  There’s the bike, on the W&OD trail this morning.

My sole useful advice was to mind her coccyx, in the sense that a long bike ride on a recumbent can leave you with a sore butt, particularly if you haven’t done any riding in a while.

This bike rehab project remains unfinished.  I managed to get the bike into ride-able condition, but I have been unable to get the three-speed rear hub and other bearings serviced.  My local bike shop took on the task, then declined to work on the bike due to a damaged shock mount.  (Apparently my 15-year-old repair of that mount left them unimpressed.)

This is the problem with riding what is, in effect, an antique.  I need to find another bike shop in my area that can rebuild a Sachs 3×7 rear hub.  That’s a bit of a trick, given that every part for those has been out of production for a couple of decades.

Poor garlic yield

This year marks my fourth attempt at growing garlic in my back yard garden.  This year I bought seed garlic (i.e., big heads with big cloves) from a local grower, made sure the soil had adequate nutrients including sulfur, and generally I Did What They Told Me To Do.  Including planting after our nominal first frost date in the fall.

Once again, my dreams of growing garlic heads the size of my fist are unrealized.  In fact, this is shaping up to be my fourth failure at growing garlic.  As with my prior attempts, my heads of garlic are tiny.  About half of my garlic is still in the ground, but it’s clear that most or all of my garlic heads will be on order of 1.5″ diameter or so.  Almost but not quite unusable.

At this point, I’ve tried using different garlic varieties, planting times, backyard locations, and soil amendments and fertilizers.  But I always get the same result.

I suspect that I just don’t have enough sunlight to grow full-sized garlic.  My garlic bed gets about 5 hours of direct sunlight a day.  Growing guides variously recommend “at least six hours”, and in some cases, eight-to-ten hours of direct sunlight per day.  Garlic doesn’t have a whole lot of leaf area, and as a consequence, I’m guessing it really needs more direct sunlight than is available in my back yard.

Plant propagation:  Snip-and-dip success, air layering fail.

Seven weeks ago, I started to propagate some schip (skip) laurels by two methods:  Air-layering, and snip-and-dip (Post #1967).

The snip-and-dip plants are thriving, as shown above.  Seven weeks ago, these were green branch tips that I snipped off, dipped in rooting hormone, stuck in wet potting soil, then kept moist and out of direct sunlight.  These cuttings are obviously thriving.

Air layering skip laurels, by contrast, has been a total dud (above).  The internet told me I’d have a big ball of roots at the end of that cutting after just four weeks.  After four weeks, I had nothing.  After seven weeks, there are some little bumps on the bark that might, eventually, become roots.  My guess is that for a schip (skip) laurel, I’d have to tend to that air-layered branch all summer to have any hope of having a root ball form.  Snip-and-dip is a lot easier and in this case a lot more effective.

Sketchy no more.

The scene on the left is a particularly sketchy bit of sidewalk in my neighborhood, as of March 2024 (Post #1950).  The scene on the right is the same stretch of sidewalk, now.  Presumably, in the interim, the Town of Vienna Department of Public Works has been at work.

That was good to see, given that the Town, in Its infinite wisdom, has decided to tear up my street next year.  This, due to free money from Covid. 

The plan is to bury the roadside swales that have been there for half a century, widen the street, and almost manage to convert it into just another cookie-cutter suburban street.  The point of which is to provide “a sidewalk” on my street.  In this case, for reasons only apparent to DPW, the sidewalk will cross the street mid-block.  Thus, when they are done, anyone wishing to walk down my block, on the sidewalk, will be required to cross the street in front of my house.

My bet is that nobody is going to use the sidewalk beyond that ridiculous crossing.  Other than the geezers in the 100+ bed assisted living facility that the town permitted at the end of the block.

Which, although nobody will admit it, is why this one-block-long sidewalk has to cross the street mid-block.  Because it’s not for residents on the block to use, it’s for benefit of the commercial establishment at the end of the block.  (The sidewalk crosses the street in order to attach to the sidewalk directly adjacent to the assisted living facility).

But hey, if somebody else is paying for it, and you are in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the more money it wastes, the better.

Anyway, kudos to the Town for putting the this particularly run-down bit of local sidewalk back into good repair.

I am not looking forward to next year’s makeover of my street.  But the Town owns the right-of-way, and they can do pretty much whatever they damn well please with it.  Which, apparently, is pretty much the Town’s view of the issue, as well.

Cultivating my first deadly toxic plant.

To the casual observer, that looks like a bunch of un-ripe cherry tomatoes.  Those are actually potato fruit, what you get if you allow your potatoes to flower.  These are quite toxic due to their high solanine content.

 

 

Post #1969: Rainy-day this and that.

 

It has turned into a cool and rainy spring, here in Northern Virginia.

This post is a hodgepodge:

  • Microwave “energy saver” mode?
  • Ace hardware watering can.
  • Vegetative propagation:  still rootless at four weeks
  • Learning a new computer language.

Microwave energy saver mode?

Hey, my new microwave has an “energy saver” mode.  This turns off the display, and so reduces the electricity the microwave uses when sitting idle, the so-called “parasitic draw” or standby energy use.

Conspicuous by its absence, however, is any mention of how much energy this saves.  So I put a meter on it.  Without energy saver, the parasitic draw is two watts.  With energy saver, the parasitic draw is two watts.  In other words, energy save reduces standby electricity consumption by less than 1 watt (else the digits on my meter would have changed).

Observation 1:  I am old enough that, once upon a time, I thought it odd that every new appliance had a clock, and those clocks were constantly on.    Now, having lived with that for decades, my gut reaction to a microwave without a lit clock is “oh no, the microwave is broken”.  My brain no longer understands the concept of a working microwave without a clock.  No clock showing instantly registers as “oh crap, the microwave is dead”.

Perhaps my brain will adapt.  But the easier solution is to ignore the “energy saver” feature, and needlessly burn an additional 9 KWH per year in clock-lighting energy.

Observation 2:  There was a time when electronics used tubes, and electronic devices literally had to warm up before they would function.  As I recall, for a TV, this would typically take on-order-of 15 seconds or so.  The only way to avoid that delay was to use “instant-on” technology, which simply ran electricity through the tubes all the time, to keep the filaments hot.  Instant-on devices consumed so much energy in standby mode that this was banned, for new electronics, as part of the Carter administration’s grappling with the fallout from the Arab oil embargoes and the resulting 1970s energy crises.

Observation 3:  And yet, now that everything is solid-state (no tubes), you can still find electronics with pretty substantial parasitic draws.  Here, I think the worst offenders are computers (where “sleep” mode keeps all the chips hot, versus “hibernate” mode that writes the internal state of the computer to disk, then turns it off), and game consoles (same notion).

For some reason, the Crazy Right got bent out of shape when Microsoft updated its Xbox game console software to make (low-energy) hibernate the default temporary shutdown mode, rather than sleep mode, which consumed 15 watts, continuously, even when the game console appeared to be off (see Post #1696).  I have never figured out the logical reason why anything that reduces fuel use is deemed Evil by the nutso right, but that surely seems to be the case.

Observation 4:  This energy-saver feature is just one more instance of the all-hype, all-the-time society.  The reality is that this microwave has an energy-saver mode that does almost nothing.  So the manufacturer simply advertised that it had an energy-saver mode.  Full stop. Thus validating the rule-of-thumb that when a key bit of information is missing  — in this case, the actual energy savings — that was done on purpose.

Ace hardware watering can breaks the replacement-purchase rule.

The only interesting story here is that this breaks the replacement-purchase rule: Any time you go to replace an item that you really like, you will find that item is no longer being made. 

I bought two Ace hardware plastic watering cans somewhere around 15 years ago.  They have held up remarkably well (plus or minus one missing rosette, which is probably the result of operator error).

These function well, but are otherwise unremarkable.  The Jerrycan-like design is perfect for watering a vegetable garden.  (Even when full, you can hold them by the back handle, nozzle-down, for fast, intense watering.)

I had assumed that after all this time, Ace would have changed the can.  Just because the Gods of Eternal Change for Change’s Sake would demand it.  But no.  Ace still sells the exact same plastic 2-gallon watering can.  I just bought another one, above, from Ace Hardware.

Only when I got it home did I realize they’d redone the rosette to make it a much slower can, with a much finer, more delicate spray.   That’s the old rosette on the left, and the new one on the right, above.  This is easily fixed with about a minute of time and a drill/bit.

Vegetative propagation:  Alive but rootless.

Like a retiree living in a motor home.

Four weeks ago, I set out to try two different approaches to growing new plants by taking cuttings of old plants:  Air layering, and snip-dip-stick. With air layering, you girdle a branch, then pack wet potting soil around the injury, wrap in plastic, and hope that the branch will set new roots in that potting soil.  With snip-dip-stick, you snip off a green branch end, dip it in rooting hormone, and stick it in potting soil.  Again, in the hope that roots will form.

The good news is that four weeks into it, and almost all the cuttings are still alive.  That’s a surprise to me.

The bad news is that none of my cuttings has grown roots yet.

This despite the fact that the internet swore I’d have a humongous root ball on these things after just four weeks.

Note the total absence of roots, above.  That said, I potted them up anyway.  When you get down to it, sitting in wet potting soil in your own pot is not very different from sitting in wet potting soil with a bunch of other cuttings.

In any case, “four weeks” to have a nicely-rooted cutting now seems wildly optimistic.  These things are still basically sticks with leaves on them.  But they are most definitely still alive.

So now they are sticks, in their own pots, with leaves on them.

We’ll see how it goes from here.  I still have one air-layered branch still attached to the mother plant.  I’m leaving that be, for the time being, and maybe at 8 weeks I’ll see some root development there.

Learning a new computer language.

I have no interest in learning a new computer language. My brain is full. Anything I learn now requires forgetting something I already know.

In fact, I’ve never had any interest in learning any computer language.  But that’s the price of admission if you intend to write computer programs to (e.g.) perform data analysis.  I’m an “applications programmer”, that is, a person who uses some sort of higher-level computer language, as opposed to a “systems programmer”, the sort of person who creates and writes a higher-level computer language.

I mean, there are nerds, and then there are nerds.  I’m just an applications-programming nerd, not a systems-programming nerd.

Actually, I have exactly $3400 worth of interest in learning a new computer language this year.  That’s what the annual license costs, for the program that I’m fluent in — SAS (Statistical Analysis System).

My continued use of SAS — and the annual fee — are holdovers from my years of running my own small business.  Back when custom data analysis using SAS was the core of my business, that expense was easily justified.  Now it’s just an expensive hobby.  I used SAS quite a bit during the pandemic, to track and analyze COVID-19 data.  But since that time, I rarely ever boot up the program.

And yet, I can’t quite let it go.  After spending most of my life doing data analysis, I just can’t go cold turkey.  I’m just not going to feel comfortable without something at my disposal that’s a step up from using Excel.

In terms of open-source freeware for statistical analysis, my options seem to be R or Python.  Having taken a brief peek at both, and seen way too many C-like curly brackets {{{  }}} in Python, I downloaded and installed R on my Windows 7 laptop.  Eventually, successfully, one Windows tweak required.

This did not preclude downloading Python as well.  The clincher is that, when asked, my daughter said R was the better choice if my intended use is statistical analysis.  The response was sufficiently terse and on-point that I’m pretty sure it was her genuine opinion, and not the product of an AI.

In any case, that, and running readily under Windows 7, clinched the deal for R.  It looked to me as if the latest versions of Python do not run (or run right) under Windows 7.  Or getting them to do so was beyond my skill level.

Now I just need to see if I can make R do what I used to make SAS do.

The oddity here is not that I’m learning a new higher-level computer language.  It’s that a) I’m 65 years old, b) I’m doing this for $3400 a year and some sense of connection with my professional past.

Old dog.  New trick.  We’ll see how well it works.

Post G24-015: Gardening in shorts.

 

That is, a few short items on gardening, since it seems as if all I do these days is garden.

These include:

  • The FROGS.  OMG, the FROGS.
  • Recycling campaign signs into temporary raised beds.
  • Solarizing lawn to convert it to garden beds.
  • Heating the soil by covering with black plastic.

Continue reading Post G24-015: Gardening in shorts.

Post G24-014: Creeping Charlie puller and other garden items.

 

Creeping Charley is a weed, also know as ground ivy.  When mature, it forms masses of thin vines (stolons), loosely rooted to the ground.  My “puller” is a bow rake paired with a paint roller.  It’s crude, but this allowed me to pull masses of Creeping Charlie out of a garden bed that I was preparing, without having to stoop over and pull it by hand.  Details are below.

Continue reading Post G24-014: Creeping Charlie puller and other garden items.

Post #1967: Friday/Saturday this-n-that. Part 3: Vegetative propagation via air layering.

 

The set-up:  Yardwork postponed is yardwork delayed.

I would have gone done a bunch of gardening tasks yesterday morning, were it not for the fact that there was a bunch of guys building a fence in my back yard.

I didn’t invite them.  The house across my back fence was torn down a couple of months back.  That old house has been replaced by a new, much bigger, house.  The builders of that new, much bigger, house are now tearing down the rotting fence between our yards, and replacing it.

It’s their fence.  It was falling down.  No one will mourn the loss.

But while that work crew is there, I’m not comfortable going out and engaging in a leisure-time activity like gardening.

I have dug a foot in his boots.  Or something.

That said, I can see that to make the post holes, they have a guy with a post-hole digger.  A manual post-hole digger, as pictured above.

Unsurprisingly — to me, anyway — he’s having a hard time of it.  The look on his face is about the same as the look on mine, when I try to dig holes in that area, using a post-hole digger.  It’s a cross between “you’re kidding me, right” and “I have to hack my way through this with a post-hole digger”?

The dirt in that area is packed with roots of every size and description, from 60-year-old-maples to the neighbor’s bamboo.  No single tool will do the complete job of making a hole in that.  (OK,a utility company truck with a power augur would likely have no trouble.  But not much short of that.)  I resort to (and dull the edges of) an entire array of tools when I dig there, starting with an axe.

In short, digging a nice neat hole in that location is going to be a total pain.

I do not envy the man his job.  I share his pain.

But he powered on through it, I guess, as the fence is now up.

Vegetative propagation.

Now that fence is in, I need to plant something that will plausibly block my view of the new, much bigger, house.

I ideally want to plant something that doesn’t require a big hole.   Not in that location.  And yet isn’t tiny, implying years before it grows adequately to fill the space.

And if the builder plants his side in the meantime, I need to leave an open gap there for sunlight. So I may want to plant nothing.  At the least, this argues against buying a big expensive plant for this location.

In any case, I decided to use this odd need — it boils down to wanting a big plant in a small container — as an excuse to try out vegetative propagation to grow some new plants.

Old-school, this would have been stated as “I’m taking some cuttings”.  But to me, that doesn’t sound quite macho enough.  So vegetative propagation it is.

I’m trying to grow new skip laurels (and some new fig trees) from cuttings.  And I’m trying two methods of vegetative propagation:  Air layering some branches, and (what I think of as) snip, dip-and-stick on some twigs.  I vaguely believe the first is a form of brown-wood propagation, the latter is a form of green-wood propagation.  But I am unsure.  I’ve never done any of this before, and I have no clue about much of anything yet.  Let alone the accepted nomenclature.

Air layering.

With air layering, you intentionally girdle a small branch, hoping to force it to grow roots where you girdled it.  You cleanly remove a tube of bark about 1″ long, circling the branch.  Scrape the inch of branch to bare wood, optionally dust the wound with Rootone (or equivalent rooting hormone), pack a wad of wet potting soil around the wound.  Tightly wrap that wad in a layer of plastic.  Finish with a layer of aluminum foil.  The plastic is there to retain water.  The tin foil, to exclude light.

Note that, implied in all this is the idea of a branch with bark you can easily remove.  Likely second-year (possibly later) wood, with brown bark.  Likely not first-year green-barked shoots.  Thus, as practiced, an example of brown-wood vegetative reproduction.

Why not do this to a big tree limb, and produce yourself a brand-new big tree in one year?   I’m not sure.  I’m guessing the practical upper limit is set by the imbalance between leaf area and roots.  So I’d guess there’s a practical upper limit to how big a branch would survive this to become a new plant.  I’d say the norm is to do this on two-year-old wood.

Edit:  Upon reflection, that’s probably not the right reason.  Seems like leaf area and water transmission area should be in balance on the growing plant, no matter what age or diameter the branch is.  Each branch or stem would itself be balanced in this regard.  Maybe the limitation on survival is elsewhere, such as the point in time where the branch must survive on its own (new) roots.

In any case, then you wait.  Check your wad o’ dirt weekly.  Add water as required.

In a month, you’ll have a ball of roots running through that potting soil.  So they  say.

If all goes well, you then cut the air-layered branch just below the root ball, and hey presto, the branch is now a sapling.  Pot it up with TLC for one year, put it in the ground the next.   

Snip, dip, and stick.

With snip-dip-stick, you snip off a green branch end, dip the cut end in an inch or so of Rootone (-equivalent) powdered rooting agent, then stick that into a few inches of wet potting soil, in a flower pot.  Keep the pot well watered and out of direct sunlight.  Reduce to just a leaf or two per snip, so that they don’t dry out.

The theory is that (some of) these snips will grow roots in a month, at which time they can be pulled from the communal flower pot and potted up individually.  My dozen or so snips are sharing a north-facing, well-watered, never-in-the-sun flower pot.  Easy enough to water one pot.

As with the air-layered plant, they should remain potted up for a year, with TLC, and then should be ready to put in the ground next year.

In the end, these are two different ways to create something to plant next year.   I have no clue whether either method will work for me.  I’ll know more in a couple of weeks.

Addendum:  Why doesn’t air-layering kill the branch?

Here’s the part that could not believe: Girdling does not kill the branch.  The air-layered branches — stripped of their living bark for an inch — appear fine.  On both sides of the complete break in the bark.

Really?  I always heard that doing this to the trunk of a tree would kill it. And, it will.  But I figured that, by analogy, if you did that to a branch of a tree, the branch would necessarily die.

That turns out to be an incorrect analogy.  The leaves on the girdled, air-layered branches in my back yard remain green. All the way out to the end of the branch.  This is presumably from water transported to the leaves via the pith (inside) of the stem. 

Which, in my ignorance, I didn’t realize was a thing.  I thought all transport was via the cambium, the growth layer just under the bark.  But that’s wrong.  At the branch tips, water and nutrients flow from roots to leaves via the branch central pith, and finished products of photosynthesis (starches, sugars, and so on) flow from leaves to roots via the surface cambium layer.

Again, so they say.  I skipped biology in school.  Seems true, as those air-layered branches appear undisturbed by this approach.

The key point is that the branch won’t die for lack of water, even as you are preparing it for full independence from the mother plant.  That’s because you leave the water-distribution vasculature of the branch — the stem pith — intact.  Meanwhile, it takes the energy of photosynthesis, nutrients from the tree roots, and uses that to produce new roots, at the break in the outer bark.

At least, that’s the theory.  I’m reserving judgment, but this seems like an obviously better approach than snip-dip-stick.  I should know, for these plants, in a couple of weeks.