Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
I harvested about a third of my mustard plants today. The stack of plants is currently on a bed sheet, on my back porch, drying.
Not sure if this was smart, but it looks like heavy rains for the next two days, and I figured I’d roll the dice on part of the crop. I may have been a bit early. Continue reading G23-036: Mus-stakes?
To save you some time, it’s a stupid idea to plant russet potatoes in the South. That’s all this post is about. Thus showing, once again, that the most important step in gardening is growing the right varieties of plants.
Edit: Also see also Post G23-041, on the poor yield of all varieties with this method.
Continue reading G23-035: Russet potatoes, southern garden, poor yield.
I used to think I had a great e-rapport with my daughter. I would frequently write her lengthy emails, and she would respond almost immediately. How nice, I thought, that she’d always send back this little abbreviation, just to let me know that she’d gotten my email.
Then I found out what TLDR meant.
With that as background, let me keep this one brief. Continue reading Post #1805: The best deal at the farmers’ market.
Well, finally.
The package clearly implied that I’d have ripe tomatoes by the 4th of July. And here it is the 6th, and I’m just now seeing some ripening (above). Easily week behind schedule, maybe more. And that may not even be the 4th of July’s that are ripening.
I know that gardening is supposed to be a relaxing hobby, an appreciation of the ebb and flow of the natural forces of blah blah blah.
But some people are just wired a little differently. Sometimes you just gotta go with what God gave you. If you swing toward “Type A” on the gardening scale, run with it.
Source: Source: Ripening Tomatoes, Marita Cantwell, Dept. Plant Sciences, UC Davis, Fruit Ripening and Retail Handling Workshop, Postharvest Technology Center, UC Davis, March 18-19, 2013
That’s what I do. Among other things, I check my tomatoes for signs of ripeness, every day. I get out of my chair and walk the back 40 (square yards). Finally, today I was rewarded by the first blush of color. That’s the stage professionals call “turning” (above), and that means that ripe tomatoes are somewhere around a week away.
I could, in theory, pick that tomato now, and in a week, it would be as ripe as if I’d left it on the vine. As I learned in Post G21-038. Some say that. Others disagree. But if pests are a problem, it’s nice to know that I have the option of picking now, and … maybe it’ll still be a pretty good tomato.
Once upon a time, ripe tomatoes by the 4th of July would have been cause for bragging rights. But now, with all kinds of “cold season” varieties, it’s more a matter of picking the right variety than of having any particular gardening skill.
But that’s OK. I still look forward to that first ripe tomato of the year. Just wish it would hurry up.
As a gardener, I try to keep an eye on the thievin’ varmints wonderful creatures of nature passing through my back yard.
As a retiree, I have nothing better to do.
But my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.
Keep that in mind when I say that I’m fairly sure I saw my first backyard coyote yesterday.
The pictures you might typically see — making the coyote look like some noble offshoot of the wolf — don’t match reality of the eastern Coyote. Around here, if you see something about the size of an adult fox, but without the good looks, chance are, that’s a coyote. If you see an ugly brown dog with a mottled coat and a long tail, not acting like a domesticated dog, chances are good that you’ve spotted an eastern coyote.
This was not unexpected. Coyotes are native to the western U.S., and have been expanding eastward for the better part of a century. The predominant theory is that we invited them in by killing off bigger predators (wolf, bear), and converting forest into open areas.
I got my first-hand introduction to the Eastern coyote about five years ago, camping at Sky Meadows State Park. That sits adjacent to the ridge of the Blue Ridge.
Just at dusk, the coyotes had themselves a howl. At first, you hear a few individuals starting it off. You think, oh, cute, that must be a coyote. A minute later the entire ridge is ringing with the sound of howling coyotes. Three minutes later they wind it down, and silence returns.
It was chilling. There aren’t a few coyotes in those woods. Like bear, or foxes. There were hundreds within earshot of where I was camping. At least by the sound of them.
In short, the Blue Ridge Mountains are infested with coyotes. Given how few bear and foxes there are left, I’m guessing coyotes are now the dominant predator species in this area. That’s a complete change from my youth, where there were no coyotes in this area, period.
And they are here in the ‘burbs. There have been sporadic reports of pets being eaten by coyotes, here in the D.C. area. I think I spotted one crossing a construction site a few years back.
But it’s a different thing entirely to find one eyeballing your back yard. It skedaddled as soon as I opened my back porch door.
I would like to think I’m not the sort of person to form an opinion about animals based on cuteness. For example, I loathe deer, for the destruction they bring. Despite being handsome creatures. Foxes, I like for the fact that they eat squirrels, and not just because they are really elegant-looking beautiful animals.
Eastern coyote? My gut reaction is, one step up from rat. They may be noble wolf-like creatures in the western climate. And most photos you’ll see of them make them look the part. But around here, they look like mangy stray dogs. As in this view, from Wikipedia:
Looks aside, near as I can tell, this newest invasive species brings along only one good attribute: They kill deer.
Better yet, they kill baby deer. More specifically, in many areas, coyotes are the number one cause of death for fawns. (See, e.g., this random reference).
Much of the literature on this topic comes from the deer-hunting community, which of course tut-tuts over these premature deer losses. The deer hunters have a valid point of view. For them, coyotes are competition. Having eliminated wolves and nearly eliminated bear in this area, the deer hunter is the only native carnivore that’s in competition with the coyote.
By contrast, as a back-yard gardener, I’m am definitely on Team Coyote on this one.
However.
However, coyotes are omnivores. Sure they eat fawns. They also eat poodles. And squirrels. And garbage. And fruits and berries, if there’s nothing else around.
Oh, and they are known to attack small children occasionally. Just thought you might want to know, in case you were still harboring some sympathy for coyotes.
This invasive species is definitely going to put some pressure on our local fox population. And that’s a pity, because the foxes in my neighborhood don’t go around hunting down my neighbor’s cats. Or kids.
So if the coyote succeeds in pushing out foxes, we’ll have replaced a relatively benign and good-looking wild creature with one that’s far more of a nuisance. And ugly to boot. But one that is capable of reducing the deer population.
If Fluffy goes missing out of your backyard any time soon, you’ll know whom to suspect.
Coyotes aren’t advertising their presence. They aren’t howling, here, yet. (I think that’s a large-group activity for them and they aren’t yet that numerous.) They are stealthy, and they are hard to spot. They are easy to mistake for a fox or a stray dog.
But they are here. As in, prowling the suburban back-yards of Vienna VA.
In the grand scheme of ongoing slow-mo environmental apocalypse — (reference insect loss, reference global warming) — I guess this hardly even registers. Just another nuisance invasive species to deal with.
Last fall I put aside some pawpaw seeds, to see if I could grow pawpaw seedlings (Post G22-062).
Pawpaws have a reputation for being difficult to propagate. They don’t much like to be transplanted, so it’s better to grow from seed. But pawpaw seeds have a reputation for having a low germination rate.
Putting these seeds into storage last fall was quite a process. Apparently the seeds are quite picky about the conditions they will tolerate. So I devoted an afternoon to extracting, cleaning, sterilizing, and packing up pawpaw seeds. In particular, they cannot be allowed to dry out, and require lengthy refrigeration in damp sterile medium if you are to have any hope of germination in the spring.
Or so they say.
Nature doesn’t merely abhor a vacuum. Nature is a vacuum.
You name the delicious food plant that you’d like to grow, and I’ll find a pest that will hoover it up before you can.
Thus, the Iron Law of Backyard Gardening:
Anything that can be eaten, will be eaten.
Plan your garden accordingly.
I had a friend over yesterday, during which time I showed him the various deer defenses for my garden area. These are pretty much in line with my original garden plan for the year (Post G23-009), and include:
I can see where some might think this is a bit extreme. But, so far, this seems to be keeping the deer out of my garden. I’ll settle for that.
Outside the defensive perimeter, the only survivors are plants that deer won’t (typically) eat. This year, that’s mustard, various “deer-proof” flower mixes, marigolds, and zinnias.
I don’t plant that because I’m particularly fond of it. I plant it because the deer aren’t.
When you consider planting sweet corn in your garden, the first thing that comes to mind is:
Score your gardening maturity level as follows:
Why? Because if you don’t have a good solution to c) above, a) and b) just don’t matter.
This is no mere academic exercise. I’ve been thinking about planting a little Silver Queen sweet corn in that garden. It ticks all the boxes for something I’d like to grow. My whole family likes it, and we can’t buy it around here, not even at the local farmers’ markets.
The old me would have simply cleared some space, planted some seeds, watered and fertilized according to directions … and hoped. But in the squirrel-infested suburbs, I suspect that all I’d be doing is buying myself a ton of heartache down the road.
Why? See the Iron Law of Backyard Gardening above.
Probably the existing electric fence etc. will keep the deer out. Maybe the squirrels won’t recognize it as food. Maybe the local crows won’t discover my tiny batch of corn. Maybe my cucumber beetles (which double as the Southern Corn Rootworm) won’t find it.
But when I add all those up, the likelihood that I’m going to get to eat that sweet corn is pretty slim. Absent some fairly strong and pro-active defensive measures.
Before I put a seed in the ground, I have to work out how am I going to keep the squirrels off my corn.
All else is folly.
The first thing I came across is the traditional “Three Sisters” planting method, above. It’s actually pretty sophisticated, in that you don’t just randomly inter-plant corn, beans, and squash. Instead, the squash is planted to form a defensive ring around the corn/beans plot. With the idea being that (e.g.) raccoons and squirrels don’t like pushing through the prickly squash leaves, and so will leave your corn alone.
Funny thing about it, though. As with so many things for the home garden, a lot of people repeat that story. Almost nobody tests it. And almost nobody reports the results of that test. I found exactly one individual who tried it, and said it was a miserable failure for keeping squirrels out of the corn.
And I believe that, because my squirrels had no problem at all waltzing through my cucurbits in order to gnaw on my winter squash and pumpkins. What finally put a stop to that was wrapping the pumpkins in floating row cover, which, apparently, led the squirrels to forget that there were pumpkins there. Or something.
(Upon reflection, it’s entirely possible that modern squash varieties are a lot “tamer” than what Native Americans would have grown. A thornier squash might in fact make a pretty good barrier against squirrels and raccoons.)
So the idea that a row of squash plants is going to deter them from going after a prize like sweet corn, that’s just fantasy. Might work somewhere, but I’m not staking my corn crop on it.
And then for every other “home remedy” approach to keeping squirrels off corn, you can find plenty of people who tried it and had it fail. Hot pepper powder. Peppermint oil. Chemical repellents. And so on.
Near as I can tell, my options are to grow my corn in a squirrel-proof cage (including six inches under the soil, and a fence roof on top), or produce enough of an electric fence/net that the squirrels can’t get over it to get to the corn. Or, alternatively, exterminate my local squirrels, or use a squirrel-hating dog as a garden watch dog.
Given that I already have an electric fence driver, I believe that if I go through with growing Silver Queen, I’m going to surround it with a mesh-type electric fence. If I can find or make one cheaply enough.
In hindsight, this really and truly reflects how I garden now, after just four years of intensive back-yard gardening. Each year, what I grow is a smaller and smaller subset of what I’d like to grow.
My vegetable garden increasingly consists of plants that can fend for themselves, and those that I can feasibly protect. Poisonous leaves (potato, tomato)? Perfect. Painful thorns (cane fruits)? Ideal. Or plants that are mostly left alone, as long as I can keep the deer off them (peas, beans, sweet potato, cucurbits). That’ll do.
But sweet corn? No natural defenses. Attractive to everything that flies or walks through my yard. Tall enough that fencing it in is a chore. Plus, plentiful insect pests.
With sweet corn, it’s not a question of whether something will eat it. Just when, and how much.
If I can figure out some cheap and feasible squirrel defense, I’ll give it a try. But if that’s a crash-and-burn, I’ll buy my corn at the store just like everybody else. And move on.
Ever get partway through a task and thought, hmm, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea?
Such was today’s task, making mustard shocks. That is, bundling mustard stems together so that the mustard plants would stand upright to dry, rather than lying on the ground. Continue reading G23-030: Shocking mustard. Maybe not the best idea I’ve ever had.
This post is a note to myself about what I plan to do with the mustard in my back yard. Continue reading G23-029: Notes to myself on mustard harvest, curing, threshing, etc., etc.
… have arrived. Continue reading G23-028: … the beetles
