One man's adventure playing in his yard

Life of a sunflower patch

Posted on | September 9, 2009 | No Comments

Labor Day has come and gone and there’s only two weeks left of summer. I can tell.
The sun, still bright and yellow, is no longer directly overhead at mid-day. Most of the perennials need a good pruning and many of the summer annuals are spent. The garden looks tired in general.

For the next couple of weeks it’s still too hot and dry to do any planting for fall, so it’s a nice time to pause, take a deep breath, and look back on the season.

One of the high points from this spring / summer was my sunflower patch — the first I had planted in many a year. Here’s a photo gallery of it’s life, from first till back in April to it’s final condition just a couple of days ago.

Garden Tip: Wringing new life from old soaker hose

Posted on | September 7, 2009 | No Comments

I love soaker hose — the weepy pipe made from recycled tires. It’s cheap (usually less than $2 per foot), does a great job of applying water directly to plant roots, and lasts for years.

Unfortunately, over time the pores in soaker hose start to clog with mineral deposits, dirt and tiny insects, making it more inefficient and eventually worthless (unless you want to use it as a regular hose). But fret not, if your soaker hose isn’t soaking the way it used to be, you don’t need to toss it because there’s a quick fix that will make it nearly as good as new.

Here’s all you have to do:

1. If you’ve haven’t already, connect your soaker hose to a water source and turn it on.
2. Starting at the end closest to the water spigot, grab the hose with both hands and twist it as if you were wringing out a wet towel. Do this twice in both directions (you should see water weep more quickly now).
3. Continue “wringing” the length of the hose, until you reach the end.
4. Once you reach the end, remove the cap the covers the hose connector at the end and let the water pour out for 10 seconds or so. This will clear all of the mineral deposits and dirt you just wrang out of the hose.

That’s it! Now your hose should be nearly as good as new.

Got a nifty garden tip? Share it with me and I’ll share it with the countless dozens who read this blog.

Fall Garden Planting Tips

Posted on | September 3, 2009 | No Comments

Labor Day weekend is here – a typically busy time in the garden.
I’m sure you, like me, are harvesting spring / summer crops — corn, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, beans, melons, etc.

But this is also a good time to get started on fall crops that mature in 60 days or so and benefit flavor-wise from cooler weather.

A lot of root and leaf vegetables can be planted right now while the weather is still hot. For others, such as peas, spinach, kale, Swiss chard and kohlrabi you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for it to cool down.

To get good production out of your fall garden you need to account for three factors:

1. Germination temperatures (hot soil is no friend of cool plants)
2. Available sun and day length
3. Changing weather (hot sometimes, occasional frost others)

Soil temps and starting your fall crops
As I mentioned above, there’s a number of fall veggies that will germinate just fine in higher soil temperatures. Carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, cabbage, Chinese cabbage, green onions, and a lot of lettuces (especially head varieties) etc., will all sprout in soil temps as high as 90°F (32°C), so you can plant those right now.

Swiss chard, kohlrabi, kale and leaf lettuces need slightly cooler temps – around 80°F (27°C) – so you either have to wait a couple more weeks or use some tricks to cool the soil a bit.

My favorite soil-cooling tactic is to water the planting bed in the evening, cover the bed with a layer of newspaper and watering it too. Wait a day or two and then plant by poking a hole in the newspaper and dropping in your seeds.

Watering in the evening helps cool down the soil and the wet newspaper acts like a layer of insulation – reflecting the day’s heat and keeping the soil cool below. Even better, the newspaper breaks down in the soil, so there’s no cleanup after harvest.

For plants that like cool germination temperatures below 70°F (21°C) – spinach, peas, Swiss chard and the like – I’ve found it best to simply wait to plant until the first week of Autumn and use floating row covers to protect them from the occasional light frost or cold rain.

Dealing with shorter days and less sunlight
Fall gardens differ from spring gardens in that each day is a little shorter, the sun a little lower in the sky and kicking out a bit less energy.

Most fall vegetables only require five hours of full sun, so unless you live in the northernmost (or southernmost) regions of the planet, day length probably isn’t a big limiting factor. What a lot of people don’t think about, however, is that the sun, which was high overhead a couple of months ago, is now much lower in the sky meaning that trees, shrubs, fences, etc. may cover sections of once sunny planting beds in long shadows. You’ll want to take note of these sections and try to either avoid planting in them, or make sure that they’re only shadowed for a short time.

Along with being lower in the sky, the autumn sun is also giving off less energy, which is, of course, what plants use to make food. This generally slows growth and/or results in smaller plants at the end of the growing cycle. To bounce a little more sunlight up to the plants, I spread out newspaper on the planting beds (hooray newspaper!) and weigh it down with a little soil around the edges. The white color of the newspaper bounces extra sunlight under the plant’s leaves and delivering a little extra ooomph from the autumn’s waning sunlight.

I’ve found that veggies with a newspaper mulch grow as much as 50 percent larger than those without it.

Handling weather changes
The final step in growing a great fall garden is being prepared for autumn’s unpredictable weather. It can be a pleasant 65°F (18°C) one day, and suddenly you get a frost that night followed by three days of 45°F (7°C) temperatures.

The best precaution you can take here is to invest in some floating row cover – light material that you either drape directly on plants, or over hoops staked on either side of the planting beds. This lightweight fabric not only traps heat near the plants, thereby preventing frost, but also helps keep insects, foraging birds, and other undesirable creatures from nibbling away at your crops.

For cooler climates, you’ll want to have your row covers ready late September or early October. For those in more moderate zones, late October, early November is good. Either way, the moment the TV weatherman says “chance of frost,” you’ll want it ready to go.

Used regularly, floating row covers can actually extend your harvest all the way until Thanksgiving in New England and the upper Midwest, and even longer in other areas.

Another alternative is to plant in a hoophouse – basically an unheated greenhouse wrapped in plastic. I built one a decade ago for about $100 using PVC pipe and 6mil plastic from my local home supply warehouse.

Other than having to re-cover it in new plastic every year, it’s virtually maintenance free and extends my fall growing season all the way into late December. (I even managed to over-winter some pepper plants in it one year.)

Got a fall garden tip? Share it with me and I’ll share it with the countless dozens who read this blog.

Of Dead Ducks and Passing Days

Posted on | August 24, 2009 | No Comments

Over the weekend I went down to the tack shed to get feed for the birds and found Elroy dead next to the horse trough that serves as the duck’s pond.

Finding dead poultry isn’t all that unusual — with 20 or so birds at any one time — one tends to die every so often for one reason or another. But Elroy was different.

Elroy was an old duck. Ten years old to be precise. In a species where six is a ripe old age, 10 is positively ancient.

Elroy was the grandson of the first pair of ducks we bought at the feed store back in 1991. That first pair (Elroy and Judy after the characters in the Jetsons cartoon) produced four ducklings one mallard that grew to look just like dad (leading us to call all mallards “Elroy” from then on) and three hens. That group turned around and produced four more ducklings the next year, one of which was the now-deceased Elroy.

The original Elroy, his son, Judy and one of the other hens followed the call of nature the next winter and flew off to live at the pond next to our property, returning every so often to eat and visit, and occasionally bringing a wild guest or two with them. But Elroy the younger, and his five sisters stayed behind.

As the years passed we introduced new ducks to the flock (for the sake of genetic diversity), and the flock bred and grew — sometimes as large as 16, but usually between 8 and 12 — but for whatever reason, Elroy was always the only male.

Countless times I walked through the lower yard or the dry creek valley and saw “the girls” sitting under a tree quacking to each other while Elroy stood on watch a few paces away muttering quietly to himself. (If you didn’t know, female ducks make the characteristic “quack” that we identify as the duck sound. Male ducks make a quiet, mumbling or muttering sound. Ducks are a lot like people that way.)

Over the years Elroy’s sisters died, as did all but one of his granddaughters (Blackduck), but his great grandchildren, great great grandchildren, and so on, continued to live on an produce a new generation each year. After a while, Elroy had been here so long that I forgot that he’d lived two full duck lifetimes.

I forgot until Saturday morning anyway. Seeing old Elroy lying there motionless, looking every bit as colorful as he did a decade ago, I couldn’t help but be a little sad. We got a new male a while ago — “Aflac” a big, white Peking and former pet of a family friend who went off to college. He came along with a black and white female and they both seem to have integrated into the flock, so I doubt we’ll be short on ducklings next spring. But with Elroy’s passing, the last of the mallards have gone.

Goodbye Elroy. You’ll be missed.

Company Vegetable Gardens are Growing

Posted on | August 18, 2009 | No Comments

The Wall Street Journal has a story today on how some small businesses are setting up company gardens where employees can do some tilling, build a little camaraderie, and take home some fresh produce on the cheap. Some are even implementing it as part of their corporate wellness program.

I think that’s pretty cool.

I never really took a liking to company “team-building” exercises or weird wellness programs (gawd, please not another ropes course or morning yoga class…), but I do like the idea of a company garden.

Rather than heading off to McDonald’s on your lunch hour, you could simply go outside and pick yourself a really fresh salad. Nice.

» Read Vegetable Gardens Help Morale Grow From The Wall Street Journal)

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Category: Funny & Interesting, General
Tags: company > gardening > organic garden > vegetable garden > work

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