Category: Garden

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

Post #G21-054: My first frost date will be late this year.

 

As fall progresses, it’s time to start looking out for the first frost.  For open-air gardeners, that’s when you either start hassling with some sort of overnight frost protection, or you call it quits for the year on any frost-sensitive plants.

I still have a lot of things growing in my garden that I would like to harvest before first frost.  These are plants that survived the summer (peppers, sweet potatoes) and vegetables planted specifically for fall harvest (lettuce, spinach, peas, green beans, eggplant).

For Vienna, VA, in Zone 7, first frost is expected on or about October 24 (Post #G21-052).  That’s the “30th percentile” first frost date.  Over the past three decades, first frost has occurred on or after that date 70 percent of the time.

As I noted in earlier posts, the “last spring frost” and “first fall frost” concepts are crude.  They are unconditional probabilities, that is, they simply summarize what occurred in the past.  They don’t account for the current weather this year, and they don’t account for the presence of long-term (e.g., ten-day) forecasts.

For the spring last frost date, the presence of good long-term (e.g., ten-day)  forecasts shifts the odds in your favor (Post #G21-005).  That happens because you won’t plant if frost is in the forecast.  That obvious observation converts the unconditional “30th percentile” spring date into a conditional “10th percentile” date.  Just by keeping an eye on the 10-day forecast in the spring, you can cut your odds of a post-planting frost from 30% to 10%.

The same should be true of the fall first-frost date, but without any significant real-world consequences.  As with the spring date, the current ten-day forecast should help you predict the first-frost date more accurately than the simple unconditional 30th percentile date.  But unlike spring, the plants are already in the ground.  This might give you a bit longer time to plan when to harvest the last of your garden, but that’s about it.

The statement above ignores the potential for significant predictive help from “seasonal forecasts”, which I take to mean forecasts of average weather conditions made months in advance.  There are a lot of issues there, the foremost of which being that these tend to be vague (e.g., the prediction will be whether or not a season will warmer or colder, wetter or dryer, than usual).

To put it plainly, even if the forecast is for a warmer-than-normal fall, nobody has done the analysis to translate that into a specific prediction for the fall first frost date.  It’s not even clear if it is feasible to do that.  And so, this year, the prediction is for a warm fall in this area (e.g., this reporting, or this reporting).  But I have no clue what that implies for first frost date.

You can access the official U.S. seasonal climate forecasts on-line.  As is the custom for the modern age, you can go play with them in an interactive map, courtesy of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, below:

Source:  NOAA.gov

NOAA says there’s a good chance that temperatures will be warmer than normal in my area.  I’m sure that’s helpful to somebody, but surely not to me.  I’m guessing that’s about as good as they can do, and, given the inherently (mathematically) chaotic nature of weather, that may be about as well as they will ever be able to do.

As a result, I’m not holding out much hope for a super-accurate seasonal forecast.  Instead, I’m sticking with the idea that the only actionable information is the current ten-day forecast.

Source:  The Weather Channel, accessed 10/11/2021.

Based on today’s ten-day forecast for my area, I have little to worry about regarding the 10/24 first frost date.

I’d like to ask a couple of questions, given this forecast, but I don’t have the data, and I don’t think I can get my hands on the data.  First, I’d like to know the odds that it actually will freeze on October 24th, given that the forecast low is in the high 40’s.  I would also like to estimate what the actual first frost date is likely to be, given this forecast.  Both of those would require having historical data on the 10-day forecasts.  And, while I’m sure that somebody has stored that information, there’s no way for me to get my hands on it.

In any case, this has almost zero practical importance.  The only change this makes in my gardening is for two remaining pumpkin plants that I was about to pull out.  These were late to set fruit, to the point where neither of them was going to be able to produce an edible pumpkin by October 24.  I was about to clear that bed and set that up for over-wintering.

But now, given this forecast for warmth almost two weeks into the future, I think I’ll let them go.  You never know what another couple of weeks of growing season might bring.

Post #G21-053: The 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.

 

I’m getting ready to can some pickled vegetables, so I decided to take one last look at the 2021 canning lid shortage.

Upshot: It’s a problem that was never resolved.  Even now, in most parts of the country, you aren’t going to be able to go to your local store and buy Ball wide-mouth canning lids.

A little history

I first stumbled across the pandemic-driven shortage of home canning supplies last year (Post #G12, July 2020).  At that point, I had to look around a bit to find wide-mouth jars.  I noted the logical progression from that year’s shortage of garden seeds, to last year’s shortage of common garden chemicals, to, inevitably, last year’s shortage of canning supplies.  By August 2020 stories about the canning supply shortage had gone mainstream (Post #G21, August 2020).

In 2020, a shortage didn’t really stand out.  The first pandemic year was rife with shortages of consumer goods.  (Fill in toilet paper joke here.)  A shortage of canning supplies was nothing unusual.  It was just one of many.

And it’s not as if a shortage of canning supplies had never happened before in the U.S.  During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, and the resulting U.S. energy crises, Americans faced a shortage of canning lids (documented in Post #G21-003, March 2021).

The roots of that shortage were attributed to the same source as the modern shortage.  Insecure people instinctively turn to growing their own food, and as a result, there’s an increased demand for home canning supplies that can’t be met by the existing supply chain.

But I was more than a bit surprised to hear that there was still a shortage of canning lids in spring of 2021 (Post #G21-003, March 2021).  Seriously, that was then, this is now.  This is America.  We don’t do shortages.  I more-or-less laughed it off, figuring that once manufacturers started shipping product for the 2021 canning season, the shortage would disappear.  That, after pointing out how irrational the price of lids had become.  Vendors were asking more for twelve lids than for twelve jars — the joke being that jars come with lids.

My assumption that the early 2021 canning lid shortage would go away was dead wrong.  Except for a brief period this spring when the new shipments arrived for the 2021 canning season, canning lids have been in-and-out-of-stock ever since. 

It’s an odd sort of shortage, in that you can go on-line and order lids at any time.  So it’s not as if lids are unavailable.  It’s more that name-brand lids cost three times the pre-pandemic price.  So you either pay far more for lids, you make do with imported lids of dubious quality, or you switch to re-usable lids (Post #G21-010) of a sort that are not familiar to most canners.

Or, at a last resort, re-use your canning lids.  While I never had to do that, but I did check out the method of boiling used lids for 20 minutes.  That’s supposed to remove the groove in the silicone from the prior use, making them more nearly fit for re-use.  And my observation is that boiling them does, in fact, relax the old groove in the silicone sealing material, as shown in the contrast of an un-boiled and boiled used lid, below.

One final oddity of the U.S. situation is that we’re dealing with a monopoly supplier, more-or-less.  All of the familiar top-drawer brands of U.S. lids (Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest) are made by one subsidiary of a corporate conglomerate (documented in Post #G21-009).  The history of the one U.S. lid manufacturer — bought and sold and re-sold — is like a short course in what has gone wrong with U.S. industry.

In the end, my summary is that Ball canning isn’t even rounding error on the bottom line of its current owner, Newell Brands.  They’re the only supplier of trusted domestic single-use canning lids.  And as a result, they may not have to care very much if they meet home canners’ needs or not.

Lid availability at start and end of 2021 U.S. canning season

As of today (10/9/2021), my local Warmart has wide-mouth Ball lids back in stock, at the normal price of about $0.30 per lid.  And while that’s great for me, and while I check my local stores periodically, that doesn’t really indicate what the lid situation looks like nationally.

In the spring, I took 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes, and used the Walmart website to check local availability of wide-mouth Ball lids (Post #G21-025).  The results are shown below, with only 15% of stores having those lids in stock at that time.

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Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

Mid-summer, I tried to repeat that.  But by mid-summer, Walmart had simply pulled the listing for Ball wide-mouth jars off their website entirely.  I couldn’t repeat the analysis because I could no longer search for that product on their website.

But now that item is back on the Walmart website.  And, while the format of the results has changed a bit, the bottom line remains just about the same.  At the end of the 2021 canning season, the vast majority of Walmarts have no Ball wide-mouth lids on the shelf.

Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

One further interesting change is that Walmart won’t ship you three packages of lids, at a reasonable price, as they were sometimes willing to do back in the spring.  If the lids weren’t in stock, in every case, Walmart offered you a single internet vendor who would sell you wide-mouth lids for more than $1 each.

The bottom line is that the 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.  Near as I can tell, the situation at the end of the canning season is just about the same as it was this past spring.  In large parts of the country, you probably can’t go into your local stores and buy wide-mouth canning lids.

This has dropped out of national news entirely.  You’ll still see a tiny bit of reporting in areas where home canning is common, as in this August 2021 piece from Minnesota, or this farm-oriented article in June 2021.

I don’t know if there’s a larger lesson in this or not.  I had a reader email me about the monopoly-supplier aspect of this shortage (to which I am now sorry that I never replied).  The idea being that the concentration of market share into fewer and fewer hands, throughout the U.S. and global economies, is giving results that are not in consumers’ best interests.  While I’d certainly believe that monopolies are bad for consumers, I have no way to know whether the persistence of the shortage of this plain-vanilla, low-tech product is in any way related to the near-monopoly position of the Newell Brands conglomerate.

Canada, for example, seems to face the same monopoly supplier situation as the U.S., with the two major brands there (Bernardin, Golden Harvest) owned by Newell Brands (via its Jarden subsidiary).  And yet, despite monopoly supply there as well, there does not seem to have been a Canadian canning lid shortage.

So it remains a puzzle.  Going on two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s still hard to get hold of name-brand canning lids in the U.S.  Of all the shortages you might have expected, that has to be pretty close to the bottom of the list.  And yet, of all the shortages we faced, this seems to be among the most persistent.

If you want to see my list of what you can do if you can’t get Ball/Kerr/Golden Harvest lids, try the end of Post #G21-020.

 

Post #G21-052: Starting to wrap up the garden year.

 

Last year, I put in some raised beds and made a serious effort to grow some vegetables.  Mostly, it was to have something to do during the pandemic.  If nothing else, during all that isolation, it was cheering to look out my back window and see a patch of giant sunflowers.

Now it’s year two of the pandemic and of my garden.  I’m done with planting for the year, and I’m focused on winding things down, and on the likely first frost date for Vienna, VA.

It seems like a good time to summarize what did and did not go well this year.  Mostly as a reminder to myself, but also in case anyone else might benefit from reading it.

After a brief note on first frost dates, I’ll go through methods and techniques I tried this year, and maybe finish up with some notes on individual vegetables, if there is anything notable to say.  Click the links to go to the relevant sections.  Click the links below to see those sections, click the “back” link to return here.
 Continue reading Post #G21-052: Starting to wrap up the garden year.

Post #G21-051: Adding to my deer deterrent arsenal.

I have an un-fenced vegetable garden in Vienna, VA.  Which means that I have a problem with deer.

We all know that deer can read.  Otherwise, how would then know where to cross the highway?  But for some reason, they scoff at my no-deer-allowed signs.

This post is a summary of everything I think I know about deterring deer from eating my garden.  And an introduction to my latest deer-deterrent device, wireless deer fence.

Edit on 3/9/2024:  A year after I wrote this, I ended up buying an electric fence.  Those are a) surprisingly cheap, b) surprisingly easy to set up and take down, and c) effective against deer.  So far.  I use an electric fence to define the outer perimeter of my garden, and run a couple of motion-activated sprinklers (“Yard Defender” and similar) inside the perimeter.  That combination has turned out to be effective.  So far.    See (e.g.) Post G22-063, to see what one looks like.  If you don’t have little kids or pets to worry about, I’d say that a small, portable electric fence setup should be the backbone of your deer deterrence.  So much so that I planned my new garden layout with an electric fence in mind.  Take it down in the fall, put it back up when you have something worth defending, in the spring.

Why it’s so hard to separate fact from fiction regarding deer repellents

Much has been written on deer deterrents, some of which might even be true.  But it has taken some sifting and sorting to try to separate what I believe to be true, from what I believe to be false.

The first problem with evaluating deer deterrents it that deer damage is sporadic.  The deer will come by, mow down a row of (say) beans, and move on.  They might be back tomorrow, they might be back next month.  You might have one herd of deer frequenting your garden.  You might have several distinct herds.  I’ve had long stretches where I’ve seen no evidence of deer.  I have had stretches where I’ve seen them daily.

As a result, absent a serious large-scale controlled trial, all tests of deer deterrents are one-way tests.  If you see continued deer damage, you know they are not working.  But if you see no damage, well, you just don’t know whether the deer deterrent worked, or whether you just got lucky for a spell.  There is a real element of people mistaking luck for effectiveness.

The second problem with evaluating deer deterrents is that deer differ, conditions differ, and the attractiveness of your plantings (compared to other nearby forage) will differ.  People swear that deer love hostas.  We have hostas all over our yard, and the deer have never touched them.  Others will swear that deer won’t eat tomato plants.  Yet that doesn’t stop my deer from chowing down on mine from time to time, at least when the plants are young.

This generates a true “path of least resistance” effect.  Deer manage their risk/return tradeoff depending on what’s available.  Deterrents that might work on some plants, in some circumstances, will not work in others.  If you’re growing something that deer find merely edible, but there is better forage nearby, maybe a simple folklore-style deterrent (Irish Spring soap) will convince them to go elsewhere.  But if you’re growing something that deer really like (e.g., sunflowers), and there’s little for them to browse elsewhere, you’re going to have to seek a stronger solution if you’re going to keep the deer off those plants.

As a result, the available information is a mix of:

  • Proper controlled tests run by (e.g.) state extension services.  These focus almost exclusively on commercially-available products that would be of use to (say) farms, orchards, and the like, to the exclusion of things you might use in your back yard.
  • Claims/testimonials from manufacturers.  Who, of course, are not going to tout any of the negative reviews.
  • Self-reports from people who have tried some deer deterrent.  This is everything from thoughtful advice from individuals who lots of experience, to anecdotes from people who tried something and the deer went away, to classic friend-of-a-friend urban-legend style stories where the person doing the writing isn’t the person with the actual deer problem.

And in each case, the solutions that some people will swear by may or may not work in your circumstances.  Just as the plants that some will swear are “deer proof” may or may not be, depending on just how hungry the deer are.  And the same for plants that are thought to attract deer.

The facts, as I believe them to be.

I’m not giving citation as to source here.  This is just a summary of my impression of what’s true about deterring deer, based on extensive reading of internet sources.

  • Deer do prefer certain plants, and not others.  You can find lists all over the internet.  But if they are motivated enough, they’ll eat almost anything.
  • The only 100%-sure fixed deer deterrent is a physical barrier such as a tall fence, a properly configured electric fence, caging or netting.
  • A properly-trained dog, allowed to roam, is also said to be 100% effective in keeping deer out of your yard.
  • Deer get more aggressive as fall approaches.  Deterrents that worked earlier in the year may not work then, or you have to ramp them up (e.g., increase the concentrations of odor-based deterrents).
  • Deer will get used to any fixed device meant to scare them.  They actively test the limits of your deer deterrents and stay just beyond those limits, or figure ways to work around them.

If I had it to do all over again.

I use several different deer deterrents.  Mostly, I only started gardening seriously last year, and I wasn’t sure what would work or not.  So, I tried a range of them, to hedge my bets.

If I had to start from scratch, knowing what I now know, I believe I’d invest a few hundred dollars in several Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprinklers, and the associated hoses.  I’d set up double coverage of every bit of garden beds that I have.  And I’d leave them on the “night” setting, so that I’d never forget to turn them back on after I’ve been working in the garden.

This would be a somewhat expensive solution.  The hoses would eventually sun-rot from being left out continuously, and would need to be replaced.  You’d probably cut one with the mower now and then.  And I’d guess that I would not expect to get more than five years’ reliable service from the motion-activated sprinkler.

That said, absent leaks, or freezing weather, I think this would solve my problem with minimal effort on my part.  As far as I can tell, the deer have never gotten used to the Yard Enforcer that I have.  I’m not sure if that’s luck, or whether it really does annoy them enough to keep them away in the long run.  But so far, when I remember to turn it on, for the area that it covers, it seems to keep the deer at bay.  This clearly would not work if you need to protect plants when temperatures drop below freezing.

What I have actually used, so far.

Bobbex deer repellent.  This has an excellent reputation, and really does seem to work in my situation.  I couldn’t really say if it’s any better or worse than any other name-brand odor-based repellent.

It has some drawbacks.  It stinks, so it’s kind of nasty to mix up and apply (you use a spray bottle).  You have to re-apply it at two-week or one-week intervals.  You can’t spray it directly on fruits or vegetables (it taints the taste of them).  And you have to amp it up as fall approaches, according to the directions, because the deer get more aggressive.

Of all that, the biggest drawback for me is that you have to remember to mix it up and use it every week, during peak deer season.  I’m just not that regular in my gardening habits.  (And, clearly, it’s not going to work if you take an extended vacation).

Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprinkler.  The deer don’t seem to get used to this one.  As long as I remember to turn it on, it seems to provide complete protection to the area it covers.

The hose connection on mine leaked, but a ten-cent rubber hose washer fixed the problem.  You do have to change the batteries every once in a while.  And I get a lot of false triggers in bright sunlight.

I have taken to leaving it set on “night”.  On that setting, it’s only active in the dark.  That way, I don’t have to turn it on and off as I go into and out of the garden.  (Or, more likely, turn it off and forget that I’ve done that).  And that avoids the false triggers in bright sunlight.

Home-made motion-activated radio (Post #G07).  I left this one in the shed this year.  It works, but it requires having an extension cord running across the lawn.  Not only will that eventually sun-rot, but there’s no convenient way to turn it off.  As a consequence, I was always triggering this as I went out into the garden.  (Don’t know if it scares the deer, but it never failed to scare the pee out of me.)  I think this would work well in an area that you didn’t routinely walk through.  But in an area where you do some sort of activity almost daily, this was less than ideal.

Blood meal, Irish spring soap, and other similar folklore-based repellents.  These had no appreciable effect that I could see.  Doesn’t mean that they don’t work in some circumstances.  Just didn’t seem to keep the deer away in mine.

New for this fall:  Wireless Deer Fence.

As fall sets in, the deer get larger, hungrier, and more aggressive.  It gets increasingly hard to keep them out of the garden.  And, frankly, I get tired of spraying stinking solutions every week, trying to keep them out.  And I’ll forget to turn on the Yard Enforcer after I’ve been working in the garden.

I looked over what was commercially available, and settled on “wireless deer fence“, three units for $60.  That’s probably not quite enough for the size of my garden, but these will work in conjunction with everything else.

The wireless deer fence consists of roughly one-foot-tall plastic stakes that hold a deer-attracting scent-based lure.  They hold that lure in the middle of four high-voltage metal tines, running off a couple of AA batteries in the base.  If the deer touches nose or tongue to the tines, it gets a nasty shock.  And, ideally, this trains the deer to go elsewhere.  Place one wherever you note deer damage.

Of course I tried it on myself.  (If this turned out to be really horrific, I wasn’t going to use it.)  I did not have the moxie to lick it, deer-style.  Instead, I tapped it on my wet skin.  It hurts, but not too badly.  Felt about the same as brushing up against an electric fence.  Unpleasant and startling, but not hugely painful.  And no lingering pain once you lose contact with the high-voltage metal.  Once you break contact, you’re fine.

Based on the company’s write-up, one shock is enough to train any one deer to stay away.  In the grand scheme of things — no damage, no lasting pain, one shock, and trying it out on myself first — this did not seem like an excessively cruel deer deterrent to me.  Others could reasonably disagree.

And so, you place these where you see deer damage.  Maybe move them from time to time, just so the deer don’t know how to avoid them.

So far, they seem to work.  But, as noted above, there’s really no way for the backyard user to separate cause-and-effect from sheer luck, when it comes to deer deterrents.

Conclusion.

Now you know everything about this topic that I think I know.  A tall fence was not practical for my garden.  I’m fairly sure that an electric fence would be illegal in my area.  I don’t own a dog.  So I’m left with a mix of second-best solutions.

Edit, 3/9/2024:  Turns out, only barbed wire fencing is explicitly illegal in my area (Fairfax County VA).  County code does not address electric fences.  Not sure whether that’s on purpose, or because they never thought any back-yard gardener would be crazy enough to install an electric fence.  In any case, there is no legal ban on electric fences where I live.

This year, I planted my most deer-attractive plants right next to the Yard Enforcer.  I put things that deer don’t like — potatoes, for example — on the edges of the garden.  That, by itself, worked fairly well.

I’ve kept up with the Bobbex from time to time.  And I’ve now installed three wireless deer fence devices.

I still get some deer damage.  Mostly when I forget.  Forget to spray, forget to turn the Yard Enforcer back on.  But I’ve managed to keep it to a tolerable level.  As long as the deer are here and hungry, that’s about the best I can hope for.

Post #G21-049: Simplest solar food dehydrator, works with Nesco dehydrator trays.

 

Edit 4/19/2022: As shown, this simple solar food dryer is under-powered and under-ventilated.  It clearly will dry tomatoes, just not fast enough in my climate to suit my needs.  I’m going to put together a modified-and-improved version of this for the 2022 garden year, and I’ll link to that when I have that finished.

Edit 4/28/2022:  See Post G22-015.  If you go with this, replace the “chimney” with a two-watt (or so) computer fan.  And in the end, while this nice clean plastic tote is convenient, the throughput is too small.  When all the dust has settled, my decision is to cobble up a much larger, fan-vented version of this once the tomatoes start ripening later this year.  The concept is fine.  I just need to execute it at a much larger scale.

This started out to be a little treatise on solar dehydrators, ovens, and kilns. And I may yet write that.

But my goal, right now, is to make a small solar food dehydrator that will work with four 13.5″ diameter trays from my Nesco electric food dryer.  That’s “a batch of tomatoes” for me.  The upside of using those trays is that I can always finish off the drying using the electric food dehydrator.  It is, in effect, hybrid solar-electric food drying. Continue reading Post #G21-049: Simplest solar food dehydrator, works with Nesco dehydrator trays.

Post #G21-047: Canning lid shortage revisited mid-August 2021

This post is about the ongoing shorting of lids for home canning in the U.S.  The only value-added here is that I’ve been tracking this for a while, so I can give some perspective on how things are evolving.

Briefly, U.S.-made disposable lids are much harder to find now than they were when I posted on this back in May.  In my area, I found one retailer (Tractor Supply) that would ship them to store for pickup.  On-line, they are still available from Amazon, but almost nowhere else.  On-line prices appear unchanged to up slightly.

By contrast, there is no on-line shortage of foreign- (i.e., Chinese-) made lids.  Prices appear to be falling, with some Amazon offers now in the $0.15-$0.22 per lid range, for lids in bulk.  That’s down from about $0.30 when I checked back in May 2021.

U.S.-made re-usable lids (Tattler, Harvest Guard) are unchanged in price, but only the more expensive ones (Tattler, about $1 per lid) are freely available.  The less-expensive Harvest Guard lids appear to be back-ordered by about a month. Continue reading Post #G21-047: Canning lid shortage revisited mid-August 2021

Post #G21-046: The carbon footprint of home-made tomato sauce

In this post, I estimate the carbon footprint of my home-made spaghetti sauce.

You’ll hear people casually assert that home-canned food is good for the environment.  The idea is that it avoids (among other things) the fossil-fuel use associated with transporting food.

But as an economist, I guess it’s my lot in life to point out that nothing is free.  Home canning uses a significant amount of fossil fuels.  Home-canning of foods with relative low energy content leads to a significant amount of fossil fuel consumed per edible calorie preserved (see Post #G22).  It can also generate a non-neglible carbon footprint, owing to the fossil fuels used.

Each quart of sauce I make generates a bit over two pounds of C02 emissions.  But that is heavily dependent on a couple of things. Continue reading Post #G21-046: The carbon footprint of home-made tomato sauce

Post #G21-045: Embracing my inner rutabaga.

Part 1:  A farewell to squash

I pulled up my summer squash plants yesterday morning.  These plants held up well and produced a reasonable yield, but their time had come.  And so I called an end to summer squash season.

The members of my family took the bad news remarkably well.  If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think they were tired of eating summer squash.  Continue reading Post #G21-045: Embracing my inner rutabaga.