Category: Garden

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

Post #1961: I just did my taxes, and some potentially helpful advice on the Virginia 2023 tax rebate checks.

 

I did my Federal and state income taxes yesterday.

This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding filing taxes in the modern world.

1:  Embracing full tax ignorance, or, you say it, I pay it.

Source:  Calculated from U.S. Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement.

Back when I ran my own small business, I understood my taxes because I did them in my own spreadsheet.  That evolved from doing my business accounts in Excel.  It just seemed easier to build a Form 1040 onto those than to figure out how to move all my business financial data into somebody else’s system.

As a side-effect, a) I knew where every number came from, b) I knew how the taxes were calculated.  For example, I could calculate my true marginal tax rate (including income tax, self-employment tax, and Medicare tax, and so on) by jiggling the income number by a dollar and seeing how that affected the taxes owed.

This year, using Turbotax, I finally reached total tax ignorance.  The Turbotax software talks to my financial institutions.  This provides the dollar figures that populate various IRS forms (e.g., 1099-INT for interest earned.).  Got a W2 this year?  Chances are, Turbotax already has it in its database, so you don’t even have to type in the dollar amounts.  Turbotax then chats with the IRS to tell them how much it thinks I owe.  Assuming the IRS agrees, the IRS software talks to my bank and withdraws the agreed-upon amount from my account.

I’m starting to wonder why I’m involved in this process at all.  I have no choice but to pay my taxes.  At this point, I have no clue where the numbers come from or how the calculations work.  I don’t even have to know any of the dollar amounts.  The software just magically generates a number that it says I owe to Uncle Sam.   And so long as it’s ballpark, who am I to argue with it, or with the IRS?

My fate is in the hands of Skynet.

Is this how most people go through life?

2:  A potentially helpful note on handling last year’s Virginia state tax rebate.

Source:  Pew charitable trusts.

Helpful note is in red, at the end of this section.

I, like most Virginians, got an IRS Form 1099-G from from the Commonwealth.

And, like most Virginians, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it.  I was completely flummoxed by the bafflegab that accompanied it.

Virginia told me “This is important tax information … a negligence penalty or other sanction may be imposed … “.  But that’s it.  On-line explanations were lacking.  The instructions in Turbotax were unclear.  All I knew is that once I entered the information, Turbotax showed that my tax forms were in error.  But I didn’t know why.

Turns out, Virginia was not alone.  A whole lot of states issued tax refunds for the 2022 tax year.  And that’s not a coincidence.  It is the flip side of the big Federal deficit that year.  Because a big chunk of what the Feds did is ship money to the States, in various forms, mid-2021, in their attempt to keep the economy from tanking.  That’s why, above, collectively, the “rainy day funds” (cumulative budget surpluses) of the states swelled in 2022.  And those states then shipped money to their citizens in 2023, labeled as refund of 2022 taxes.

All of the tax guidance for dealing with this was ludicrously ambiguous.  Even the guidance within Turbotax itself was not enough to lead me to the correct way to enter and deal with this.

Let me try to explain it, because it has two significant parts.  But it all boils down doing proper cash accounting of your tax payments and refunds.  You account for your state tax payments and refunds in the year that you receive them (cash accounting), and not by tax year (the tax year for which they were actually due.)

In the pre-Trump era, the rule for dealing with a state tax refund was simple and logical.

If you used the standard deduction in Year 1, just ignore any state tax refund in Year 2. State taxes paid in Year 1 didn’t affect your Federal return, so the refund doesn’t either.

But if you itemized your deductions in Year 1, and one of those itemized deductions was for state taxes paid in Year 1, then you have to balance your books in the event of a state tax refund.   And it’s pretty obvious what you had to do.  If you subtracted your state tax payments from taxable income in Year 1, then you have to add any refund to your taxable income in Year 2.

The logic is that, in the long run, you only get to deduct the net amount that you actually paid in state taxes.  As a result, the tax instructions were an unambiguous if-then statement.  If you itemized in Year 1 (and took off your state taxes as an itemized deduction), then you have to add any state tax refund to your taxable income in Year 2.

Post-Trump, there’s a $10K cap on the state and local tax deduction.  And this is why the resulting tax advice is no longer obvious and clear.  Then simple if-then gets replaced by a more complicated set of logic.  Everything is conditional on hitting that $10K threshold.

If you itemized deductions in Year 1, and the state tax deduction mattered in Year 1, then you have to deal with the state tax refund, in some fashion, in Year 2.  This boils down to having the state and local taxes line, on last year’s tax return, at or near that $10K threshold.

If you were below the $10K threshold last year, and you itemized, then the logic is the same as in the pre-Trump era.  Yep, you’re going to owe taxes on your state tax refund paid in 2023.  One way or the other.

If you exceeded the $10K threshold last year, by more than your state tax refund, then your state tax refund will not affect this year’s taxes.  That’s because your actual payments, net of the refund, would still have exceeded the maximum allowable $10K.

The only tricky part is that Turbotax wouldn’t let me just skate by, because, apparently there’s some further twist to the law that allows you to spread the state tax refund over several years of tax reporting, if that’s to your advantage.  In any case, after several attempts at fussing with the state and local tax worksheet in Turbotax, I finally clicked the right box that said, just reduce my state and local taxes paid this year by the full amount of the state tax refund I received this year.  And that finally cleared the error.

It was weirdly complicated, in that, no matter what box I checked, my Federal taxes remained the same.  And the default under Turbotax was to spread the Virginia $400 tax rebate over several years.  But in fact, I could net out the full $400 this year, and be done with it, without paying any more tax.  So a) Turbotax flagged this as an error under its defaults, and b) I had to override the default manually, to clear that, even though c) I owed the same amount of taxes this year, regardless.  The Turbotax default minimized current-year taxes for all taxpayers.  But it did not minimize future-year taxes for all taxpayers.  If you’re well above the $10K threshold, check the box that tells Turbotax to subtract the full value of the rebate from this year’s state and local taxes paid.

Or do what I did, which was to keep checking and unchecking boxes on the state and local tax worksheet until the error message went away.  Then figure out why it went away, after-the-fact.

Don’t forget to thank an economist if you still have a job.

 

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

If you listen to nothing but right-wing media, you’re supposed to recall — and be incredibly angry about — the big Federal budget deficit that occurred during the pandemic.  But you’re supposed to forget — right down the old memory hole — that much of that deficit was incurred because Uncle Sam sent big checks to (nearly) every taxpayer.  (It goes without saying that you’re supposed to forget which budget was passed under which President.)

It was, arguably, the last truly egalitarian act that you’re ever likely to see from your Federal government.  Anyone who had managed to file a tax return in the prior year, and was still breathing, got the same fat check(s).  The only exception was for the well-to-do, who got squat, at least for some of the rounds of rebates.  It was the sole exception you’re ever likely to see, in your lifetime, to the rule that the rich get richer.

As a side note, that policy demonstrates what every economist knows, but nobody is willing to acknowledge these days.  The rich have an exceptionally low marginal propensity to consume out of current income.  Or, in plain language, if you want to prop up spending in the economy, the last thing you want to do is give more money to the wealthy.  That’s because they won’t spend it, they’ll save it.  If you want to boost current spending, give money to the middle and lower classes.

The other thing you’re supposed to forget about that deficit is what it accomplished.  When the pandemic hit, people panicked, and (God forbid!) stopped spending every penny they earned.  This resulted in the unprecedented spike in the U.S. savings rate in 2000 (above), which, as night follows day, immediately began to tip the economy into a recession.  Because money you save is money you don’t spend, and one person’s spending is another person’s income.  The next Great Depression was avoided by the expedient of just mailing out money.  Repeatedly.  Until people started spending it.

Source:  McKinsey.

Sure, it seems crude and expensive.  Unless you are smart enough to compare it to the alternative, which was the total collapse of the economy.  And it worked.  The same scenario played out in more-or-less every civilized nation on earth.  U.S. pandemic emergency fiscal policy was middle-of-the-road, in terms of overall size.  The result was a short, sharp recession followed by immediate recover.

Next time you see an economist, thank them.  Or, in the words of the patron saint of reactionary economics, Saint Milton, “We are all Keynesians now”.  As evidenced by the near-universal adoption of strong stimulus measures in response to the pandemic-induced decrease in spending.

Post G24-009: Chipping/shredding vines and green twigs.

 

This post shows you how to build a little purpose-made sawbuck for use in chopping up vines and green twigs.  That, plus an electric hedge clipper, and you can efficiently chop vines and similar material into pieces just a few inches long, suitable for composting.

The results aren’t “shredded”, but you control the size of the pieces.  If you want shorter pieces, it just takes more passes with the hedge clipper. Continue reading Post G24-009: Chipping/shredding vines and green twigs.

Post G24-007: The Great Potato Chit-Off, 2024, and my rules for planting potatoes in the South.

 

 

This year I’m doing a small test of whether chitting (sprouting) potatoes makes much difference.  The raised garden bed above is planted with gold and red potatoes.  Flags mark the rows where chitted potatoes were planted.  Between the flags are rows of un-chitted potatoes.  I’ll dig them up around mid-June and (maybe) see whether or how much chitting improved my yield.

Edit:  See Post G24-012 for results.  But one picture shows that chitting obviously works:

Original post follows:

I detest gardening by folklore.

And that’s why I plant my Irish potatoes on St. Patrick’s day.  That sounds like folklore, but it’s not.  In climate Zone 7, March 17 is just about four weeks before our expected last frost date.  That’s commonly-recommended time to get potatoes, peas, and a few other cool-weather crops into the ground.

Instead, the folklore in this process is chitting, that is, sprouting the potatoes before planting them.  Everybody tells you to chit your potatoes.  But when you look carefully, nobody tests whether or not chitting makes much difference.

In theory, sprouting the potatoes before planting gives you a jump-start on the growing season.  This matters — particularly in the South — as potatoes really do not like the heat.  And it’s not just that the mid-summer heat kills them.  It’s that once soil temperatures reach a certain level, they stop producing anything useful, and all you get is a few small, knobby potatoes.

In practice, chitting potatoes has all the earmarks of gardening folklore.  It seems reasonable but a) commercial potato growers don’t chit, b) there’s little-to-no systematic evidence that chitting increases yields, and c) how-to-chit advice is all over the map — warm/cold, dark/light, short period/months — as if it didn’t really matter.  That’s all laid out in Post G24-002.

One thing I’ve learned is that much frequently-repeated gardening advice is simply folklore.  It’s something that made some sense to somebody somewhere, and then got mindlessly repeated without ever being tested.  Some of it may be true.  Most of it is not.  For example, many commonly-cited methods for frost protection do nothing, including covering plants with plastic sheeting or thin floating row cover.   But a mason jar provides excellent frost protection, Post G22-006.

This year I decided to do a little controlled trial of chitting.  I bought two bags of organic potatoes at the grocery store, and randomized the potatoes into chit and no-chit groups.  The no-chits went into the fridge for a month, the chits stayed out to sprout.

You don’t get a lot of “statistical power” out of the resulting 60-odd potato plants.  But this little trial ought to be enough to tell me whether or not chitting has some profound impact on my potato yields (Post G24-002, Addendum).

I’ve now put those potatoes into the ground in as even a fashion as possible, to try to eliminate any difference between the chit and no-chit groups in terms of location, water, nutrients, and sunlight.  To do that, I inter-planted the chit and no-chit potatoes, using surveyor’s flags to mark the rows with chitted potatoes.  That’s as close as I can get to growing the two groups of potatoes under identical conditions.

If chitting matters greatly, it should show up as a “statistically significant” difference in yield, when I dig these up in June or so.  In other words, a difference in yield so great that it is unlikely to have arisen merely by chance.  But I’ve already done the math to show that any small difference between the chit and no-chit groups will be indistinguishable from random variation.

There’s only so much you can learn from a small bed of potatoes.

My advice for growing potatoes in Virginia: Heat is the enemy.

After four years of growing potatoes with varying rates of success, I think I finally understand what I should be doing, in Zone 7.  So I thought I’d take a minute to lay out my rules for growing potatoes in a warm climate like that of Virginia.

To grow potatoes, in your back-yard garden, in Virginia:

  1. Buy organic potatoes at the grocery store.
  2. Buy gold potatoes, maybe red potatoes, but never russet potatoes.
  3. Chit them, maybe.
  4. Plant them as early as you reasonably can.
  5. After they sprout, add a light-colored mulch to keep the soil cool.
  6. Otherwise, follow standard potato-growing advice.

My advice for growing potatoes in Virginia mostly focuses on the main drawback of this climate, for potatoes:  The heat.  The list of top potato-growing states should give you a clue that the South is not a great place for growing potatoes.

Source: Potatopro.com

Here’s the reasoning behind my rules:

Rule 1 — buy organic potatoes at the grocery store — is based on the understanding that non-organic potatoes are typically sprayed with the potent herbicide chlorpropham (reference) to inhibit sprouting.  That permanently damages the ability of the potato to grow.  You can’t use that chemical on organic potatoes (see Post G22-004).   Which is why, if you want to plant grocery-store potatoes, you should buy organic potatoes.

Rule 2 — buy gold potatoes.  Potatoes come in short-season, medium-season and main-season (long-season) varieties.  In Virginia, if you want your potatoes to finish before the heat of mid-summer, you want short-season potatoes.  Based on my observation, the gold potatoes from the grocery store are short-season potatoes.  They sprout sooner, come up quicker, and are ready sooner than the other commonly available varieties.  (And, the Yukon Gold variety is, in fact, a short-season potato.)  By the same reasoning, you should avoid russets (Post G23-035), as those are all main-season (long-season) potatoes that take about five months from planting to harvest.  In Virginia, the heat will kill them before they are mature.

3:  Chit?  Well, that’s what I’m testing this year, but chitting is consistent with getting the biggest head-start on growing that you can.

4:  Plant them early.  Same logic.  You want them to grow while its cool, and you want them to be as big as they are going to get before the heat of summer arrives.  Sooner is preferred to later.

5:  Light-colored mulch.  The point of this is that, after the potatoes produce green above-ground sprouts, you want to keep the soil as cool as possible, for as long as possible.  That’s because potatoes will not set new tubers once the soil is sufficiently warm, and they will produce few, small, knobby tubers if they are trying to set and grow tubers in very warm soil.

Rule 6:  Everything else is standard.  You can get the rest of the advice you need on potato-growing anywhere.  Everything else is standard.  Depending on your soil conditions, you’ll want to add fertilizer (particularly potassium).  Weed and water.  “Hill” them once the shoots are well up, to ensure that the base of the plant is covered with soil (or opaque mulch).  Most people say you should nip off the flowers before they produce seeds (berries).  Dig up potatoes at any time, but for maximum yield, let the foliage droop and die back before you harvest.

In any case, you can get the rest of the advice you need anywhere.  It’s not as if I have any special insight into that.  My only value added here is in (finally) figuring out that heat is the enemy of this crop, in Virginia, and for best results, you should plan every aspect of planting and harvest with that in mind.

Post G24-006: “My grandmother grew loofahs … once.”

 

The title of this post is my wife’s comment, when I announced last spring  that I was going to plant a few loofah/luffa/loofa gourds at the edge of my garden.

Her grandmother was a master gardener.  I have come to see the wisdom of her decision.

Planting them once produced all I will need for quite some time.  So I don’t see any reason to plant them again this year.

Loofah processing

You can find YouTube videos on this, so there’s little point in rehashing the basics.  You peel them, de-seed them, and (optionally) bleach them.  Or, if not bleach, give them a good soap and water wash.

Lesson 1:  You don’t need many loofah plants.  The yield above was from a couple of loofah plants that I pruned heavily over the course of the summer.  I pinched off flowers and fruit every time I walked past it.  I’m sure I could have had several multiples of this if I’d let the plants procreate at will.

Lesson 2:  De-seeding them completely is a game of diminishing returns.  I let these sit on my back porch over the winter, so all of those are light and dry.  On this rainy March day, the skins mostly came off fairly easily, in one piece, as shown below.  Peeling these took maybe a minute per gourd.

Beating the seeds out of all of them, by contrast, took the better part of half an hour.  I was determined to get as many whole, uncut, seed-free loofahs as I could.  Which meant a lot of beating on gourds that had just a few seeds left in them.  It might have gone faster if I had better technique, but basically I just beat a couple of gourds together until I stopped hearing seeds fall out into the box below.

The result is a small mixed pile of cut and uncut gourds, stuffed into a bucket, ready for bleaching.

 

The half-life of bleach.

The strength of household chlorine bleach falls over time.  Even if stored properly, the longer it is stored, the weaker it gets.  As a result, to know how much bleach to add to anything, you have to factor in how old your bleach is.

Clorox (r) helpfully tells you how to decode their manufacturing date codes, on this web page.  The Clorox bleach above was made on the 140th day of 2020, so it’s just under four years old now.  The no-name bleach in the second bottle likely follows the same Julian-date standard, so it was probably made on the 211th day of 2014.  It’s now close to ten years old.

Then you need a firm estimate of how quickly the bleach degrades.  Here, Clorox is less than helpful, and just says that you need to replace your bleach every year.  Almost as if their main concern were selling bleach, instead of your well-being.

Many seemingly-reputable internet sources quote “20% per year” degradation of the available chlorine in household bleach.  That is a reasonable match for more technical sources, which seem to show something over a two-year half-life for low-concentration sodium hypochlorite stored at room temperature.

That’s surely an approximation, because bleach degrades much faster when warm, among other things.  So “20% per year” embodies some assumption about the storage temperature for the bleach.  But it’s just about all I have to go on.  So that’ll have to do.

Based on that, my bottle of four-year-old Clorox is at roughly (0.8^4 =~) 40% strength, and my 10-year-old bleach should be around (0.8^10 =~) 10% strength.  But to a close approximation, all that means is that, for bleaching these loofahs, I need to use (e.g.) ten times the recommended concentration, if I’m using that ten-year-old bleach.

The most common recommendation that I find is to bleach badly stained loofahs for an hour, using a 1:10 solution of household bleach to water.  Judging from more technical work, that combination, done at room temperature, ought to get even the worst-stained loofahs white without significantly reducing their strength.

The recommended 1:10 bleach/water solution for loofah bleaching is VASTLY stronger than what you would use on laundry.  Household bleach varies modestly in original strength, but the directions suggest at most one cup bleach for a 16-gallon laundry load, or a 1:256 bleach/water solution for laundry.

The bottom line is that if I follow common internet advice and (apparently) approved industrial practice, I should just pour my 10-year-old bleach directly on the loofahs, then make up any difference with the four-year-old bleach diluted approximately 1:2.5.

Let that sit for an hour.  Then drain, rinse, and dry.

Results?  Well, they’re definitely better-looking than they were.  These are tan rather than white, and the remaining seeds show up as black blotches.  Some of the darkest patches didn’t bleach out.  But I’m not going to bother to redo, other than than to dig out the stray seeds.  They are usable as-is, which is all that I require.

Next up

At least I had a practical purpose in mind for the loofahs.

I also planted a couple of birdhouse gourds.  As with the loofahs, after they’d set a few gourds, I started pinching off flowers and fruit whenever I spotted them.  I still ended up with more than I could plausibly use.  These are almost dry now, so doing something with them (or tossing them out) is on my agenda.

Post G24-005: Is it March already?

 

This is one of those old-guy, life-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper posts.  About gardening, yet.

If you actually have things to do, just move along, there’s nothing here for you.

Today’s topics are ginger, spinach, tomatoes, and garlic.

 

1:  Ginger.  If you enjoy watching paint dry …

… you’ll love sprouting ginger.

I decided on a whim to try growing ginger this year.  Apparently, it can be done in Zone 7, you just have to start them in the winter and grow them as housplants until mid-summer.

On the plus side, yes, you can sprout grocery-store ginger root.  There’s mine, above.

On the down side, I planted this particular piece of root just shy of one month ago.

On the other plus side, the internet correctly warned me that this was a slow and piecemeal process.

This is interestingly unlike anything else I’ve ever grown.   Usually, you plant a bunch of fill-in-the-blank, and then, however long it takes them to sprout, you get a bunch of sprouted fill-in-the-blank.   All at the same time.  Not so with ginger.  Each piece of root proceeds according to its own timetable.

On the other down side, this means I have to run an electrical heat mat for months.  I’m only running this at six watts, by using a lamp dimmer in the circuit.  But it runs all the time, so that by the time these are done sprouting (say, three months total?), that’ll be about 13 KWH, or enough electricity to drive may be 65 miles.  That’s rounding error, in the grand scheme of things, I guess.  But I’d rather avoid it if I could.

In hindsight, I ought to have started these around New Year’s Day.  Or not at all.  But now that something has sprouted, I’m going to keep going.

2: Spinach.  What, I’m already late?

Source:  Clipart library.com

Yes, I yam.

My wife is particularly fond of fresh spinach.  But I’ve never had the least luck growing it.

Maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was doing.  So this year, I actually read the directions.

Turns out, spinach seeds like being in the cold, wet ground.  Far more than I would have guessed.  You should sow spinach seeds four to eight weeks before your expected last frost of the spring.

Or, in my case, the eight week limit was a couple of weeks ago.  So today I planted a few short rows of spinach.  I’m sure this is vastly earlier than I have ever planted spinach in the past.  Maybe I’ll actually get a decent yield this year.

3:  Tomatoes.  No way that it’s time to start tomatoes now.  Is it?

Yep, sure is.  In Zone 7, it’s time to start short-season (a.k.a. cold-tolerant) tomatoes, indoors, if you grow them.  Varieties like 4th of July or Early Girl, and more exotic ones that promise to produce tomatoes in a hurry.

After trying out various approaches to growing tomatoes, I’ve now settled down to growing some short-season (cold-tolerant) ones, and some regular-season ones.  (I’ve given up on heat-tolerant or late-season tomatoes, because all of those that I have grown have tasted just like bland grocery-store tomatoes.)

Cold-tolerant or short-season tomatoes can go out in the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past.  They can tolerate the cool nights that we’re still having in early spring.  By contrast, regular-season tomatoes have to wait another month or so, beyond that, until the nights have warmed up.

Anyway, in my area, we’re now about six weeks before our nominal last frost date of April 22.  So it’s time to get my early-season tomato plants started, indoors.  A week or so to germinate, five weeks or so to grow, then out into the garden they will go.

I was more than happy with the short-season (cold-tolerant) tomatoes I planted the past couple of years, so this is just a re-run.  I just set up six starts each of:

  • Burpee’s 4th of July.
  • Glacier
  • Moskovitch.
  • Quedlinburger Furhe Libe

Transplanted into the garden on or about my last frost date (April 22), I find that the 4th of July is true to its name, and has consistently given me its first tomato on that date, plus or minus a week.  Glacier and Moskovitch come in a few days later.  But for a truly early tomato, Quedlinburger Furhe Libe takes the prize in my garden, consistently beating 4th of July by a week or so.

These all yield decent-tasting golf-ball-sized tomatoes.  They keep on yielding through the summer.  And the deer leave them alone, at least once the plants have a bit of size on them.  What’s not to like?

It’s hard to think about the 4th of July right now, when we’re still having freezing nights.  But there’s a solid and logical chain between starting those seeds today and eating tomatoes out of the garden in early summer.

Sometimes I wish the rest of my life had been that linear.

4:  Garlic:  The hazards of planning for failure.

And then there’s the garlic I planted last fall.

I’ve tried growing garlic in prior years.  I’ve never gotten much yield.  But then again, I never did it right.

Among the things I didn’t know were that you really shouldn’t use grocery-store garlic for planting.  That’s for two reasons.  First, it’s all “soft-neck” garlic, which is both bland and does not grow well in the hot and humid Virginia climate.  (Though it does keep well, which is why you find it in the industrial food chain.)  Instead, I want to grow hard-neck garlic, which I can’t get in the stores here, and has to be bought from a supplier of some sort.  Second, “culinary grade” garlic is the puny stuff.  They reserve the biggest heads, with the biggest cloves, to be “seed grade” garlic.  And it is well-documented that if you plant bigger cloves, you’ll harvest bigger heads of garlic.  Which is precisely why they save the big stuff for use as seed.

The final thing I didn’t know is that garlic may benefit from the addition of a modest amount of sulfur to your soil.  That’s covered in Post G23-067.

Last fall, I decided to do it correctly.  Just for a change.

I bought three varieties of seed-grade hard-neck garlic from Snickers Run Farm, a Northern Virginia garlic farm.  Their product was, by a longshot, the burliest heads of true garlic I’ve ever seen. (N.B, elephant garlic is not actually garlic.)  I added a modest amount of a sulfur-containing fertilizer (Espoma Holly Tone) to the soil, along with compost and mulch.  And I planted in the late fall, when it was already pretty cold, though in hindsight, I probably should have planted later.

By-the-book, start to finish.

Based on prior experience, I didn’t expect much. I figured half of them would survive. So … rational or not, I planted quite a lot of it.  (Plus, I had to buy quite a bit of seed garlic to justify the shipping cost, which didn’t exactly help temper my decision-making.)

I looked that bed over today, and my only thought was, what on earth was I thinking.  Because, as of today, I have a 32-square-foot bed chock-a-block with garlic plants that seem very happy to be here.

Based on various estimates of typical yield, this should give me somewhere around 8 pounds of garlic, if it all comes to fruition.  That, where the recommended planting is about one pound, per adult, per year.

Luckily, garlic goes great with tomatoes.  And, I suspect, will go with pretty much everything I’m going to cook from June onwards, this year.

Post G24-004: Advice on sheltering your bee hotel for the winter.

 

My advice:  Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter.  Let it freeze along with everything else.  This post explains why.

Early bee emergence

Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel.  This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce.  It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below.  Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.

I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in.  In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.

Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea.  Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts.  That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.

That’s what appears to have happened this year.  For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …

… are all now empty.

Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning.  Which was odd enough to stand out.  Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil.  And it’s not all that warm out yet.  The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.

I’m betting that those were “my” bees.  And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year.  If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I’m now of the opinion that  bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.

Like Tinder, but with only 15 people using it.

Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).

By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.

Blossoms:  Slim pickings.  At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming.  There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom.  For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service).  Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.

Temperatures:  Still too cold.  We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between.  We are not consistently 55F and higher.  But we’re closing in on that.

Source:  Weather underground. 

And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.

Source:  Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).

All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early.  Call it three weeks, minimum.

Finally, these bees don’t live very long.  They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks.  They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges.  So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.

Conclusion

I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic.  The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.

By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures.  I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.

If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter.  The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.

Source;  All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.

Addendum:  To bee, or not.

Edit:  In the end, I gave it another go, doing it better this time, as explained in Post #G24-008.  This year, my bee hotels are ugly, but properly constructed (closed-ended tubes roughly 6″ long), as shown above.  Well over half the tubes are now filled, as of this writing (4/22/2024).  I’m just going to leave them be until its time to take them down and put them in an emergence box next spring.

Original post follows.

Am I going to put up bee hotel this year?  Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not.  Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year.  For the following reasons.

First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden.  They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination.  So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees.  The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom.  Apparently they are good for orchards.  Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early.  (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure.  I don’t have an orchard.)

Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees.  But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment.  I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.

You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.

But its not that simple.

Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in.  (Or equivalent.)  That seems right by my experience so far.  Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems.  Looks about the right size.

But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.

In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer.  I’m not going to go through the details.  I can boil it down to this.

Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer?  For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.)  And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers.  And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.

I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.

In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work.  I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year.  This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.

I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.

But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year.  I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora.  Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it.  But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.

Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

 

 

The goal here is to force some ginger root.  To do that, you put the root in a warm, moist (micro) environment, and encourage it to sprout.  Typically, you do that warm-moist thing indoors, with a planting tray on a “seedling heat mat”.

On my first attempt, I ended up cooking my ginger roots.  Per just-prior post.  Soil temps approached 110F, in what I think was its thermal steady state.

This post is about my second attempt at sprouting ginger root. Continue reading Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

Post G24-003, addendum 1: Slow-roasted ginger root.

 

Yield:  Approximately one-half pound roasted ginger root.

Preparation time: Ten minutes.

Cook time:  Two weeks.

  • Purchase a few ounces of organic ginger root.
  • Wash and cut into bite-sized chunks.
  • Sprinkle with copious amounts of potting soil.
  • Water to taste.
  • Place on seedling heat mat.
  • Bake at ~110F for one to two weeks, or until shoots fail to develop.

Ready, Fire, Aim.

I started some ginger and turmeric plants about two weeks ago (Post G24-003).  This is the first time I’ve tried growing these.

For me, they fall into the same garden category as potatoes and sweet potatoes.  They  are roots/tubers that you start by sprouting indoors, before moving them out to the garden much later in the year.  The sole difference, really, is that these will need to spend several months as houseplants before going out into the garden.

The potatoes are doing fine — see prior post.

The sweet potatoes aren’t expected to start sprouting for another couple of months.

But ginger and turmeric sprouts are now conspicuous by their absence, nearly two weeks after planting. So I decided to see what was up.

Turns out, the cheap seed-starting heat mat I bought from Amazon last year was a bit too powerful for the task.  I thought it might warm the soil enough for to prod these into growth — maybe 80F or so, from my roughly 60F floor. Never bothered to check it.  I figured that, if anything, that cheap little mat wouldn’t cut it, and so this tray of soil might remain too cool for the ginger and turmeric to sprout.

But now I see that I have more-or-less cooked those roots, over the past two weeks.  What felt warm to the touch was actually around 110F where the roots sit.  Pretty sure that’s lethally warm.

Another twenty degrees and I can claim I was trying to compost them.

In hindsight, expecting that off-the-shelf heat mat to be just perfect, for this situation, was kind of dumb.

So it’s back to the grocery store for another few dollars’ worth of ginger and turmeric.

And off to rummage in the garage for some sort of lamp dimmer or similar, to allow me to control the temperature of these heat mats.  Pretty sure that anything that will control a small electrical resistance load will work.  That, and a thermometer, and I ought to be able to make this work.

 

Post G24-002, addendum 2. Chilling the chitting.

I’ve been chitting a batch of potatoes at room temperature for about ten days now.  About half have started to sprout vigorously.  About half have not.

This is mostly a function of potato variety.  I’d say more about that if I could, but these are from bags of grocery-store organic potatoes.  (Organic, to avoid potatoes sprayed with a potent sprout inhibitor.)  The grocery store is a cheap source for potatoes for planting, but a downside is that all I know about the varieties is “gold” and “red”. Because that’s what it said on the bags.

The early-sprouter is “gold”.  This may be a result of some Yukon Gold potato somewhere in its family tree.  Or it may be an actual Yukon Gold, for all I know.  (Yukon being a pretty good indication that the potato was marketed to growers with cold climates and short growing seasons.)

Or maybe none of the above.  The exact variety doesn’t matter.   What matters is that all of these potatoes end up chitting at about the same rate.  I want them all equally ready to be planted, at the same time.

Ideally, these will all be in the same sprouted state, a month from now, on St. Patrick’s day (March 17).  That’s the traditional day for planting potatoes and peas in this area (Zone 7).

I have to slow down the ones that have already sprouted, both to avoid the sprouts getting too big, and to let the others catch up.  The ones that haven’t really gotten started yet will remain at room temperature.  The ones that are well on their way are now in a box, to be placed in a cooler, non-freezing location, such as the garage.  The nights are still getting down into the 20’s F here, so I don’t think the sprouts will survive on my back porch.

This is all part of this year’s chit-versus-no-chit experiment.  A similar number of potatoes sits in the fridge, not sprouting, in a bag with “DO NOT EAT” written on it.  The fridge potatoes are destined to be the control group in this experiment.  Assuming all goes well, sometime in July I’ll see whether chitting made any (statistically) significant difference in potato yield.