Juli Lawrence - Rakish Gardening

Boy, we just had a huge gullywasher. Yesterday we had hail, although it was small. The weather guy said they got some the size of golf balls on the north side of the island, but missed me.

Hubby put this nifty little pocket video camera in my Easter basket, and I’ve been taking videos but haven’t yet had the time to edit and upload. I’m anxious to post video of this crazy straw bale garden.

Unfortunately, we also have a new groundhog. I’m sure he’ll be every bit as cute as Holtsville Hal, which is a problem for me. Tony’s uncle has humane traps, and came and set one, but it’s been three days and still no Hal. Last year we also had a groundhog that dug under the front deck. One day came home to this crazy pile of dirt, and I thought the cable company had been digging for cables. But then I thought, under the front deck??? No, was a groundhog. So Uncle Renzo came over and set a trap and that groundhog was caught in ten minutes! But it wasn’t garden season, and I guess he was hungry.

That groundhog was sent to witness protection in the country. He was just adorable, even though he had rat teeth. Here’s last year’s groundhog:

Now we have a new groundhog, and he ate his way through my neighbor’s garden. I caught my neighbor at the end of our drive with a bow and arrow, getting ready to shoot. So I discussed with the neighbor and our deal was this: if he sees the groundhog in his garden again, he’ll shoot, but if Uncle R can catch him in a trap, that’s fine.

Today, however, my perspective has changed. The groundhog ate my corno di toro peppers. And a baby eggplant! You mess with my peppers and eggplants, and I get mad.

But I still don’t want Holtsville Hal shot with a bow and arrow. I’d prefer the relocation program.

Tomorrow I will apply the compost tea I made. It really stinks.

I fell in love with kefir in Russia, and only recently learned it’s now a health-food drink. And you can get it in America - woo hoo! It’s good for you in many ways.

Go read about kefir on this site (or Google it) and try it. You might fall in love. And here’s a coupon for a free bottle. FREE KEFIR! Just in time for the holiday.

So far, this is shaping up to be one of my best years. I’ve already had a dozen cucumbers and some yellow crookneck squash. I have lots of tomatoes, but none are ripe yet. The old farmer rule of thumb is if you have a ripe one by fourth of July, you’re doing well. I don’t think I will, but they *are* looking good.

My neighbor, Grandma (I call her that because I forgot her name, and sometimes her great grandkids stay with her, cuties they are), put out a big garden this year with one of her granddaughters. She sees this as some kind of competition with me, which is funny. They planted a couple of weeks earlier than I did (I usually wait til Mother’s Day, another farmer rule that my uncle the farmer does NOT follow), so will naturally have tomatoes before I do. However, I believe their tomatoes have a blight. I’ve had that before, and it’s ugly, but doesn’t hurt the tomatoes.

My chicory spread out of the pot. LOL. My uncle (the farmer) warned of this catastrophe, although I don’t see it as one. I like chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace a lot. They remind me of childhood, I guess playing in the pastures where this stuff grew. I swear half of the things I grow are noxious weeds to him, but I’ve come to enjoy finding something new to annoy him with. It’s our dance, and he likes it too. This year, it’s the straw garden, which he’s sure is an internet scam. Can’t wait for him to see my big scam and how well it’s doing!

One of my penstemons didn’t come up this year. It’s weird. Sometimes a perennial doesn’t show, and I think it must have died, then it comes back the next year. This was a good year for my goat’s beard, though. First year it really did well. I may have to plant more of that…so pretty.

A friend of mine has herds of goats and sheep and is getting a llama as a guard dog. A llama apparently can and will kick a fox or coyote to death, so they’re the latest rage among goat farmers. I just find that incredibly interesting and still wish I had some goats. We don’t have coyotes, so I wouldn’t need the llama.

I have two large (huge) piles of great mulch from a beautiful maple tree that had to come down. It was a beauty, but too close to the house. I’m planning on trying some of that Bark Brite (safe) spray dye for mulch. I like bright red and I may try black, too, to give my neighbor something new to gossip about. I aim to please.

I have two containers that can be used to haul mulch to various parts of the landscape: one is a yard cart, sort of a plastic wheelbarrow. The other is my Total Trolley (that thing is one of the best “As Seen on TV” doodads I’ve bought). I put a city recycling bin (LOL, they’re good bins) on the trolley with bungee cords and then it’s kind of a modified wagon.

But there’s gotta be a better way to load the bins than pitching a shovel. I looked at the piles of mulch with love in my eyes; turns out it’s a LOT of backbreaking work, and the city tells me I can’t have my piles too much longer or they’ll give me a ticket. I’ve got to get on this job asap.

I kept seeing pillbugs (roly poly) that were a very pretty purple color. I finally googled it and the poor things are infected with a virus called iridovirus. It’s fatal.

I don’t mind pillbugs; they work hard in my compost pile and I appreciate their service. So while these purple guys are lovely, I’m kind of sad for them. I know that’s strange…I cannot explain my affection for the bugs these days.

I can’t seem to get a good picture of the purple bugs. By the time I run in for my camera, they’ve disappeared, probably off to die. But here’s a good pic:

http://insektenfotos.de/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=10324&thumbnail=1

Geez, it seems the entire book is online. I thought those Google books just had previews like Amazon does. This can’t be good for the authors.

But it’s good for a person who doesn’t want to spend twenty bucks. It was published in 1996, so some of the newer techniques and organic products won’t be in there, but there’s a huge section that lists pests and diseases. Good reference to bookmark.

The organic gardener’s handbook of natural insect and disease control

I make compost tea throughout the gardening season and I use my own finished compost. The first year, I tried making the aerobic kind, using a cheap aquarium pump I bought at Pet Smart.

There’s a difference of opinion in the organic community regarding aerobic versus anaerobic teas. I’ve done a lot of reading about it, and it seems that the old aerobic tea (without the aeration) has been used successfully for centuries in Europe.

I found the pump to be a real pain, and one of the cats was positively obsessed with the bubbles. I don’t like the idea of any electrical devices outside through the night, and putting it in the basement made me nervous as well. But this cat was not going to stop trying to catch bubbles, so the entire thing was a big bust.

Since then, I’ve just prepared tea by adding compost to a bucket of water and stirring with a bamboo stick (I have a large supply of those thanks to my groves) now and then. I tried making tea bags from old socks and pantyhose, but that’s just hard. Now I just dump it all in together and stir.

There *is* scientific research out there that indicates compost tea (both kinds) really does help with disease suppression, thanks to the zillions of microbes in the tea. I just think my plants like it a lot, and I get my kicks in odd ways. Compost tea is one of those ways.

Here’s a recipe I came across, for another kind of compost tea: (I’ll be trying this the next time the lawn is mowed)

Fill a five-gallon bucket half full with 50/50 mixture of green and brown materials.

Green: anything that is high nitrogen: grass clippings, fresh leaves, weeds (full of nutrients….dandelions are fantastic!), rabbit food, fresh manure….and yes, my favorite green: human urine. (As long as you’re healthy.)

Brown: dry grass/weeds, hay/straw, composted manure, dried leaves

Mash all of that down and keep adding until half full.

Add water to the top. (Or if you’re like me and prefer rain water, try and time it when a big rain is coming…set outside to catch the water. One of these days I’m going to buy one of those rain water things.)

Let it sit in the sun for 10 to 14 days, stirring once a day. It will stink.

Stretch a pair of old pantyhose (or cheesecloth or cotton tshirt, or whatever is in the junk box) over the top of a second bucket and secure with clothespins. Pour the mixture into the bucket, remove the pantyhose, and you’ve got your tea.

Dilute this at a ratio of four water to one tea. Spray on your  plants and use as a root drench. You can add orange oil, molasses and/or seaweed juice for extra oomph. I use the Maxicrop seaweed juice throughout the season. If I could only have one product, it would be Maxicrop.

I’m going to start a batch of this as soon as the kid mows our yard. If you use a lot of chemicals on your lawn, I think I’d find something else. I use nothing but myself on the lawn, though I keep intending to use corn gluten meal.

Bucket tip: if you know anyone with cats, ask if they ever buy cat litter in those buckets. I don’t, because I only use World’s Best cat litter and it comes in a bag. (It’s the world’s best cat litter, and I sometimes compost the urine clumps because it’s 100 percent corn, no additives, and the cats seem to use one box for urine and one box for poo.)

I have a lot of those cat litter buckets, courtesy of a relative who DOES use the Tidy Cat in the buckets. (They have five cats.) They were gathering in their garage, intended for the recycling bin, and I said I NEED THOSE!

These are the best buckets ever, and they’re free.

Yes, my neighbors with the large (beautiful) privacy fence got a little yappy dog. Most neighbors would complain about yappy dogs, but I think he’s chased the squirrels away. I see them in other yards, but for a few weeks, I haven’t been bonked in the head with sticks from the squirrels. (It’s their tree, not mine, and they let me know.)

The true test will be when my tomatoes get ripe. Yappy dogs rule.

This is a reminder to myself that hummingbird vine (Ipomoea quamoclit) is a late arrival. Every year, I start looking for sprouts (so easy to identify and even easier to move around the garden) and wondering, where is it?

But this year, I was certain something happened. Either the birds ate the seeds, perhaps there was a disease, or my nosy neighbor thought she was being helpful and cleared last year’s dead vines off my lattice. (She recently did that to some that had wrapped itself - per my guidance - around some bamboo stalks, thinking she was being helpful. I gently explained that I leave the tiny, dried vines there so the plants will reseed.)

Two days ago, I even said to my mother - who invented the vine - that I supposed I had no vines this year, and what a disappointment that was. She didn’t really invent the vine, but was the originator of it in the family. She got some seeds from a friend and now several of us grow it because it’s just great stuff.

She said, “Just when you think it’s gone, it will surprise you. You’ll look down at the ground and there it is.”

The very next day, after I’d give up all hope, there they were…little sproutlets. I immediately ran into the house, called my mom and said “Once again, you know everything.” She liked that.

So here it is June 5, and yesterday I saw the first hummingbird vine sprout. I need to make a record of progress, but usually by early to mid July, it’s grown up the lattice (and anywhere else I transplant it) into a messy mix of tangles, full of bright red blooms. The flowers are tiny trumpets, and of course adored by hummingbirds. Each flower has a seed, and I just let it all dry out at the end of season and it reseeds on its own.

The foliage is as beautiful as the tiny flowers; very airy, almost like asparagus fern. But don’t let its delicate look fool you. It’s a tough guy, and once you can identify the seedlings, you can carefully pull them out of the ground and stick them somewhere else. Carefully, only because you need the tiny root.

I was so sure this wasn’t returning that I bought a similar plant at the nursery, Ipomoea x multifida, also called Cardinal Climber. It’s pretty, too, although I don’t think it’s as prolific and it doesn’t have the airy foliage that I love.

Maybe my vine sprouts this late every year and I’ve just forgotten. But now I have a record for next year, that it didn’t start to show up until June 4. Welcome to my favorite friend!

Here’s a good article on hummingbird vine (with a great picture of a sprout), and this person says it doesn’t emerge until at least late May - zone 7. I’m in zone 6. Next year, I will be more patient.

It’s June already and I haven’t posted once since gardening season started. It’s the usual story: busy. This has been a busy year, in good and bad ways. Deaths in the family, illnesses (all bad), and moving a close relative to a house nearby (very good, but SO much work!), plus the assorted odds and ends.

But I was able to squeeze in plantings here and there and get my garden out. I’ve got my perpetual to-do list going, but learning to prioritize tasks has helped.

Another thing that helped: my new straw bale garden. That was surprisingly easy to set up, and so far, it’s thriving beyond my expectations. I’ll give it a separate post, because it’s worth your consideration. Straw bale gardening isn’t for everyone, and it’s this year’s big experiment.

But it’s interesting, the plants like it, and I’m always happy to provide gossip for the neighborhood.