Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
Not everything in my garden is a problem. I just tend to talk about the issues that I’m trying to solve. I’m attempting to achieve some balance here. Topic below, in order, are:
Above: Extremely over-ripe Boston Pickling cucumber. Source: My garden.
Another gardening post. Just move along if you have no interest in gardening. Continue reading Post #G13: Et tu, cuke?
Just a few brief gardening updates. If you’re not into gardening, move on.
See these little green guys, pictured left? We’ve gotten to know each other on a first-name basis this past month. Every day, I would come out and swear at them, individually, and at length. And every day they just sat there, full-sized yet completely unripe.
But note the slight tinge of orange, on the alpha tomato. That just showed up today. He and his green brothers and sisters appear to be ripening now. Just two days after I set up a sun shade for them.
As discussed in Post #G11, this year a lot of Vienna gardeners are experiencing tomatoes that won’t ripen. Myself included. Gardening gurus on the Vienna plant swap Facebook group suggested that the problem was that it’s too warm. We went from too cold, to too warm, and didn’t spend enough time in the 75F sweet spot that promotes tomato ripening.
A quick check of the science verified high temperatures as the likely culprit, with a common solution being to shade your tomatoes. So, two days ago, I shaded my tomatoes using a couple of pieces of PVC for the frame, and three layers of very thin floating row cover as the roof. The idea was to reduce light transmission by 30%, which I verified with a light meter.
And two days later, amid the hottest days of the year, as if by magic, those very tomatoes are now starting to ripen. Oldest first, as is the way of the tomato world. With no other tomatoes in my garden ripening yet. Either that’s a heck of a coincidence, or shade is just what they need to ripen in this hot weather.
So I’m checking this one off in the gardening success column. Give it a try. Per the reference above, you can shade them by doing something as simple as draping thin shade cloth over your tomato stakes.
I thought we’d reached the end of the SVB season, but that’s not yet so. I saw one this afternoon on and around my pumpkin vines. They are tough to catch in the best of times, but when the weather gets hot, they speed up. I didn’t even manage to get close.
The practical upshot is that this extends the period over which I am spraying the stems of my cucurbit vines, per Post #G11.
Plausibly, the reason nobody would give a hard date for the typical length of the SVB season around here is that it’s hard to tell. I might even have been SVB-free these past few days, and just had another one show up. (They only live about five days, on average, in the field.) It may be just plain difficult to tell when the season is actually over.
We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.
Source: Wal-Mart.
A canning supply shortage would make sense. First, you couldn’t find seeds locally. Then the hardware stores sold out of (and remain sold out of) many common pesticides. And now that gardens are producing, it seems to be unusually hard to find canning supplies locally.
My go-to local supplier is Twins Hardware in Fairfax, where they have a ridiculously complete home canning section. But they’re out of wide-mouth pints and quarts.
I checked Giant in Vienna, which manages to have a fairly good stock of canning jars most of the time. Nothing but some regular-mouth pints and then some half-pints and decorative jars. Oakton Giant either doesn’t carry them or is fully out-of-stock.
But one of our local Wal-Marts remained abundantly stocked with canning supplies of all types, as of today (7/21/2020). A tip of the hat to the aforementioned Vienna plant swap group for that advice. They must have had 50 12-packs of the wide-mouth pints that I was looking for.
For whatever reason, I could not manage to get the Wal-Mart website to tell me that this particular store a) existed, and b) had that much stock. Which may well be why there was stock left. Only because my wife joined that plant swap group years back did we find out, by word-of-mouth, where we could get some jars. If you want to know which store, join that group. I ain’t blabbing.
I’m scrambling to find jars because my cucumbers just won’t quit. Bacterial wilt, powdery mildew, cucumber beetles, and no doubt some hits by the SVB. And yet they are still cranking out cucumbers. So I’ve started running out of canning jars. I’ve now made three gallons of pickles (two lacto-fermented, one bread-and-butter). I’m getting set to do a gallon of vinegar pickle spears this afternoon.
I didn’t expect this because I’d never had a garden succeed before. To me, cucumber vines were these pitiful little plants that might give you a cuke or two before they died from exhaustion. Or any of the bugs and diseases mentioned above. But that was fair, because I never did much beyond planting the seeds and maybe watering now and again. But this year, I’m taking it a lot more seriously, and planted this square in the middle of my sunny back yard. And I wasn’t prepared for the results.
Oddly, having a successful garden is making me a much pickier home canner. It’s one thing to ferment and can some market-bought pickling cucumbers. It’s another thing entirely to do that with the fruits of your own labor. So now, quarts are not good enough (you have to keep them in the boiling water for longer). It’s wide-mouth pints or bust, despite the extra labor.
Bottom line is that I’ve never had a garden produce much of anything before. So I planned for and planted for failure. Now I’m scrambling to find enough canning jars.
I’m so desperate that I made dehydrated pickle chips, from my fermented dills. Not only to they vastly reduce the amount of storage space required, they are like little pickle flavor bombs. Sour patch kids:lemonade :: dehydrated pickle chips:pickles. You really have to like pickles to like these. But if you like pickles, give them a try.
Cut them into pickle chips (quarter-inch thick or less), dehydrate at 125 to 135F, stop when they are crispy. Not a snack for the faint of heart.
Credit: Mother Nature.
… and that’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.
This is yet another post about my garden. Just an update, with a few things I’m doing that might be of interest to local gardeners.
If you have no interest in gardening, read no further.
Continue reading G11: There’s just two things that money can’t buy …
Edit 7/10/2022: A lot of people find this post every year, when the squash vine borer is around. This post is years old. Let me summarize where things ended up:
Edit 7/24/2024: In the end, growing summer squash under netting, in my back-yard garden, was just too much hassle. And I didn’t get much yield. So this year I skipped the summer squash. Instead I’m growing what are supposed to be close substitutes: Tromboncino (a winter squash) and guinea bean (an edible member of the gourd family). These are solid-stemmed vines that, by reputation (and based on my experience this year), are not bothered by the SVB.
I can attest that immature (foot-long) trombincini fruits are an excellent substitute for zucchini. But the yield seems poor, relative to zucchini or yellow summer squash. It’s the end of July, the vines are huge, and so far I’ve picked two tromboncini, and the guinea bean has only started to set fruit. Maybe they’ll pick up the pace in the heat of August? But I’m not betting on it. I’m guessing the low yield makes sense, else we’d all have been planting tromboncini instead of summer squash all along.
The original post follows.
I’ll try to avoid my usual TLDR style and get to the point. A later section adds more detail.
I’m not going to try to get systemic protection using a neem “soil drench”. Maybe I am going to use neem oil as a horticultural oil spray, hoping to smother the eggs. But I am reluctant to do that, as nobody seems to be able to pin down why, exactly, neem oil should work against the SVB. And even for a relatively harmless poison like raw neem oil, I’m reluctant to spray that in volume around my garden, when I really have no clue what it’s supposed to be doing for me in this case.
Details follow. Continue reading Post #G10: Squash Vine Borer: Thinking through neem and considering horticultural oil?
Source: U Wisconsin Vegetable Entomology.
This is another in my occasional posts on gardening. It’s short. The squash vine borer has made its annual appearance in Vienna. If you grow cucurbits, particularly summer squash, be on the lookout for this bug.
She drops in. Just for a week or so, each year. She lays her eggs. Two weeks later, all your squash plants wilt and die. That’s the reputation, anyway. You can read a more formal description at the Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension Service.
I’ve never had a problem with squash vine borer before. On the other hand, I’ve never grown as many cucurbits as I am growing this year. My squash-heavy plantings are the reason I was keeping an eye out for this pest. And plausibly, extensive squash/pumpkin plantings made me a good target. Or maybe the borer is just more prevalent this year.
So consider this a public service announcement. These are easy to miss. They aren’t around for very long, and they aren’t around in great numbers. If not for the fact that I was watering my garden by hand yesterday, I would not have seen it. But the brilliant coloring, plus the fact that it was digging around at the base of my zucchini, made for a pretty sure identification. Another identifying factor is that the little @#$(# are fast, which means they are tough to kill by hand.
I only saw one. Maybe two. Can’t tell because I was too slow to get the first one. And one is all it takes, anyway.
If you see one in your garden, act accordingly. Apparently the pupae overwinter, so if you don’t stop them early, you can be stuck with them for years.
I looked over all the potential treatments that can be taken at this stage (my plants are grown, I’m harvesting summer squash already), and none of them seemed very attractive. Many could not be done to mature plants. Many looked like folklore. Some seemed plausible, but experts said that they did not work.
With reluctance, early this morning, I went for what seemed like the minimal effective intervention. I sprayed spray the bases of the main stems of my summer squash with spinosad.
For the record, I don’t normally use insecticide. I figure, if the bugs want to eat some plant that badly, I’ll eat something else. E.g., this year, the cabbage moths got to my cabbage plants. So I tore them out and re-planted with peppers. Not worth spraying poisons around (even organic ones like BT) to try to preserve what might amount to $10 worth of dubious quality cabbages.
But I would like to keep my already-producing squash.
I got up early to avoid the bees — only to find that some of my local bees are early risers. The theory being, once spinosad dries, it has little bee toxicity (per this reference, with the understanding that the sprays available to consumers are “low volume” sprays, under their definition). I didn’t get near the blossoms. I was really trying to avoid killing even one bee, purely out of self-interest. I’ve been having such trouble with lack of fruit set that the bees are worth more to me than the squash plants.
I may or may not try putting Tanglefoot on the based of the main stems, in addition to that. Apparently that’s bee-safe (because the bees have no reason to light there). But that’s a treatment that may or may not be just a piece of folklore.
Give it two weeks, and we’ll have a one-way test of effectiveness. If my summer squash plants die, I’ll know this didn’t work. If they don’t die, I’m not sure what I’ll know. There’ no way for me to know the extent to which the squash vine borer laid eggs. (In theory, you can see them if laid directly on the plant. But they’ll also lay them in the dirt around the plant. In practice, the eggs look like specs of dirt to me.)
Worst comes to worst, I’ll replant. Apparently, cucurbits planted in a new spot, after the squash vine borer has made her appearance, are not at risk for squash vine borer infestation. So I may end up with fall summer squash.
Source: Clipart-library.com
This is one of my occasional posts on gardening. In it, I’m going to explain how to take an off-the-shelf plug-and-play motion sensor and turn it into flexible device for deterring deer.
As anyone who gardens in this area will tell you, deer are pests. Cute as all get-out. But pests, nevertheless. And, unfortunately, either they can’t read, or they just don’t obey signs. So unless you want to feed the local deer, either you erect some serious fencing around your garden, or you do something else to convince your local deer to feed elsewhere.
What I describe in this post is one of several deer-deterrence measures I have taken. They seem to be working so far. But I haven’t seen any elephants in my yard recently, either, and that doesn’t mean I’ve found a good elephant repellent.
Source: USDA
At the end of March, I decided to put in a big vegetable garden. Just to have something to do during the pandemic (Post #580).
I recycled my “MAC” signs into raised beds. Figuring, if there was no longer a MAC ordinance, I’d have to get signs reprinted anyway (Post #G05). And that’s how things did shake out, this past month (Post #706).
Above, that’s the same garden, today. Note the complete and total absence of deer! The red arrow points to my latest deer deterrent. That’s a trash bag covering up an indoor motion detector. That’s what I explain next.
There are some things that absolutely will keep deer out of your garden. A tall and sturdy fence. A shorter fence, if you can plant enough shrubbery around it to prevent the deer from jumping it. A two-layer electric fence.
I didn’t want to do any of those and/or they were illegal and/or my wife didn’t want that in the back yard. Not that I can blame her. Nor was I willing to buy a few hundred dollars in supplies, and put in hours of labor, to produce a few tens of dollars of vegetables.
Any cheap and easy deer deterrents are likely to be, at best, partially effective. I’m not going to run through all the commercial and home-made deer deterrents, except to say that a) there is little agreement on effectiveness of most of them, and b) the conventional wisdom is that deer will get used to just about any un-changing device designed to scare them.
I had several deer deterrents in use, and they seem to be mostly effective. This includes Bobbex deer repellent, a Yard Enforcer motion-activated sprayer, some older ultrasonic “pest scarers” that seem to be useless and/or broken. Liberal use of blood meal throughout the garden. And, of course, the classic of low-end DIY deer repellents — bars of Irish Spring soap. (Manly, yes, but deer hate it too.)
I decided to add a motion-activated noise/motion device of some sort. Just something to startle the deer as they chow down on my string beans. But didn’t really find what I was looking for as a commercial product. So I decided to make one.
My first attempt failed. I tried to make one out of a cheap motion-activated floodlight. Figured that, in place of the floodlights, I’d just put in some screw-in sockets, and then plug something into that. But modern motion-activated floodlights are all (or nearly all) designed to turn off during the day. Basically, a) they don’t work in daylight, b) everything that I tried to block the daylight also messed up the infrared-based motion sensor, and c) I ended up ruining the unit when I tried to drill out the wired-in cheap light sensor (literally, just an LED).
Not only did I not figure out how to defeat the nighttime-use-only problem, those require a lot of additional parts, and they require having an electrical box. And the cheap one I got from Home Depot was clearly going to require a lot of sealant in order to be weatherproof. And, owing to the electronics of the motion sensor, there are limits on what sort of electrical/electronic device you can control with that. All in all, too complicated and too clever by half. But designed for outdoor use.
Here’s what saved the day.
Source: Amazon.com
My second attempt worked perfectly: I used an off-the-shelf plug-and-play indoor motion sensor. What you see above is an indoor motion sensor with a roughly 25-foot range. It has no problem working in daylight.
As importantly, this device has no problem “seeing” right through a thin plastic bag. So all you need to do, to use this outside, is set up whatever you are going to set up. Then put a white garbage bag over it, to keep the rain off the electronics.
What’s more, it’s electrically bulletproof. Some light controls used electronics to turn the lights on and off, and so have significant limitations at to the type of device they can control. (E.g., some on-at-dusk, off-at-dawn controllers can’t deal with compact fluorescent bulbs). But this device uses a physical relay to turn the electricity on and off (you can hear it click). That means there are no restrictions (other than total wattage) as to the type of electronics it can control. And it can handle up to 1200 watts. That means you can use a wide range of household devices as noise-makers. For example, I could plug my Shop-Vac into this.
With this part in hand and tested, the rest of the deer-scaring device is straightforward. Put a stake in the ground where you want to use this. Run an outdoor extension cord out to your garden, plug this in, mount it to that stake. Plug the device of your choice into this. (Or use a multiple tap, and plug in several devices).
Then cover the whole assembly with a white plastic trash bag. When a deer walks by, it will now trigger whatever device you have plugged in. For the amount of time you choose.
For my first round, I’m following a recommendation I’ve seen in several places, and have hooked this up to a radio. Then I put the radio in a small metal garbage can. That keeps the water off the radio. I have it set, very loud, to WMZQ. Now when a deer tries to walk up to my beans, it is greeted with one minute of loud country music. Which then stops. And if they are still there, it runs for another minute. And so on.
It’s far enough into the yard that I don’t think I’ve created a neighbor-annoyance device. But if you’re standing right next to it, the effect is pretty startling.
The nice thing is, if the deer get used to this, I can just change out the radio for something else. Maybe a weed whacker next time? And there are all kinds of sound-and-motion possibilities using a Shop-Vac exhaust. Maybe some flashing lights. Plug in a three-way tap and operate three devices, subject to the 1200 watt limit.
Basically, anything you can plug into a standard wall outlet, and that doesn’t draw too much current, can serve in place of the radio. Which means you can keep it fresh, for your deer. And keep them from getting used to this deer deterrent.
I lack self-control around stuff that’s cheap. In this case, dirt cheap. Less than 2 cents a pound, delivered.
I had always wanted to have a few raised beds, just to make it easy to do a little gardening. And, given the situation, I had time on my hands, so “Victory Garden” made sense (Post #580). And I had a whole bunch of what should soon be obsolete* signs (Post #675).
*Not that the policy I was protesting with those green signs has gone away. To the contrary, it’s alive and well. It’s just that the proponents are in the process of re-branding it.
So I ordered up an innocent-sounding 10 yards of mixed topsoil/compost. Which, only in hindsight, did I realize was about 13 tons of material. I did that arithmetic sometime in my second week of shoveling. And shoveling. And shoveling.
Anyway, the good news is, this is now gone. (Doesn’t look like much, until you realize you have to move the whole thing, one shovel-full at a time.)
And in its place, I have about 400 square feet of raised beds pictured above. And I’ve kept those signs out of the landfill.
Not sure how the crops are going to turn out. But if nothing else, I will have a lasting and concrete reminder of the pandemic.
Judging from the hits on this website yesterday, there’s a lot of interest in this. I don’t think the uptick is due to my sparkling prose.
I have roughly dressed and put out the first 30 poles and tops. Take what you want, but please limit yourself to no more than maybe a dozen of the poles. They have the stubs of the leaf stems sticking out, so take care as you handle them.
Take as much as you want of the thinner tops, with leaves still attached.
The location is 226 Glen Ave SW, Vienna VA 22180. You can’t miss the Atlas Cedar in front. Glen is off Courthouse, right across from the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
I’ll be doing this in batches, once a day. That’s not to ration them. That’s because my back can take only so much stooping over and lopping off leaves. There should be another batch, this size, tomorrow.
Be warned, these are big. I’d guess median length is 24′, and there are some that are about 30′. If you only want a few short pieces, I’ve left a branch lopper out there. You can try lopping off the thin ends of the poles. Place it right next to a joint, and lop as if you mean it, because the faster you do it, the less it splits. If you place it in the middle of a section, it’ll just splinter.
Maintain your social distancing, and then some, please.
I have some political signs out there as well. You are welcome to take some if you care to.
I’ll have another batch of poles tomorrow, if my back is up for it. This is just under half the total, by eye.
At some point, as a favor, could one or two of you who takes some of these email and clue me in on why people like this stuff so much? I use a little in the garden, for trellises and such, but honestly, PVC pipe works better for me. I’m not questioning it, I’m just curious as to what the attraction is.
Chris Hogan, chogan@directresearch.com
