Rain, Rain, Rain and Still More Rain

Eventually, I will finish getting the summer crops planted, but at this rate it might be June before they're all in. We had yet more rain over the weekend, which made the soil too wet for digging and planting. I put in a couple more tomato plants anyway, turned the compost pile and did some weeding, but there are still two whole beds and two partial beds that are not set for the summer.

Last May was a big harvest month, with potatoes, zucchini, onions, and quite a lot of green beans coming into the kitchen, but this year those crops will be pushed into June. However, things could be worse. I have heard from plenty of gardeners who already are contending with disease issues -- from the cool, wet weather -- in their gardens. Other gardeners also have said that some seeds that were planted rotted before they could germinate.

Currently, it's a mix of cool and warm season crops.

The slugs have begun to make an appearance, but  they aren't in the lettuces at this point. If the rain doesn't let up, I expect a population explosion.

In the meantime, I will just enjoy what I have. The tomato plants are growing slowly in the cool spring weather, but they look healthy, and they are flowering. The lettuces are in Great Shape, which means there is salad with supper, salad with lunch, and more the next day, and the next. 

Last beet of the season.     PHOTO/Amy W.

There are a few carrots left in the ground, but not many, and the radishes are almost all harvested, too. The peas are starting to make, and I'm looking forward to including those in our meals, but everything is running behind -- and not just compared to last year, when everything was freakishly early.

One of the great things about gardening is that there is so much to think about. I am never bored!

For Healthier Fruit Flies, Go Organic

Every now and then, the big debate over whether organically grown food supports an eater's health more than food that's conventionally grown rages anew, but a recent study suggests that, regardless of the effects on human health, organically grown foods do improve fruit fly health.

As a gardener whose kitchen in late summer and early fall typically becomes home to a whole lot of fruit flies, I am not sure this is the best of news. Most of the odds and ends in my compost pail are from organically grown produce, which means I am just making the annual infestation worse.

I read the news in an article titled Fruit Flies Fed Organic Diets are Healthier than Flies Fed Nonorganic Diets, Study Finds, which appeared on the website of Science Daily. The study was led by a high school student in the lab of biologist Johannes H. Bauer, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

 Here's the quote that pretty much says it all:

"To our surprise, in the majority of our tests of flies on organic foods, the flies fed organic diets did much better on our health tests than the flies fed conventional food," Bauer said. "Longevity and fertility are the two most important aspects of fly life. On both of these tests, flies fed organic diets performed much better than flies fed conventional diets. They lived longer, had higher fertility, and had a much higher lifetime reproductive output."

In other words, I probably either need to learn to get along with the fruit flies, or I need to keep the compost pail in the fridge until its contents are taken out to the compost pile.

Tracking the Harvest: March & April 2013 Totals

Nearing the end of the carrots and spring radishes.   PHOTO/Amy Whitney

The peas are flowering, the lettuces are flourishing, and we might finally have enough warm weather that the summer crops start to really grow.

How can a gardener complain?

Our jars of dehydrated vegetables from last summer are slowly but surely being emptied, so I will be very glad when the harvests return to being more abundant. In March and April, harvests were definitely down.

The total so far for the year is less pathetic than I thought it would be -- the total is 19.65 kilograms, which converts to 43 pounds 5.1 ounces.

March and April harvests contributed to that total as follows:

March (in kilograms)
Radish, winter          0.2

radishes                   0.3

Carrots                 0.2

Spinach               0.55

Beets plus greens        0.9

Onions, green            0.4

April (in kilograms)

spinach                   0.25

radishes                    0.15

Green onions               0.45

Beets plus greens            2.5

For March, the total harvested added up to 2.55 kilograms, which converts to 5 pounds, 9.9 ounces.

For April, the total harvested added up to 3.35 kilograms, which converts to7 pounds 6.1 ounces.

Around the Yard

It's been raining for the past couple of days - about four inches so far - which means I haven't been able to get any gardening done.

Rabun County Garlic

I have, though, been out between downpours with my camera, to celebrate the good things that are going on out there.

To start - the garlic is looking very good. The stems are thickening nicely, which bodes well for the likelihood of my harvesting large cloves. Usually, plants that are more slender when the bulbs start to form make smaller cloves.

Since I am lazy and would rather peel a few big cloves of garlic rather than a whole lot of little cloves, this development is making me pretty happy.

Thicker stems on onions translates the same way - into bigger bulbs - but my onions aren't coming along quite so well as the garlic. These things happen.

The lettuces are making nice, big bunches of leaves, and I expect to be having a lot more "yard salad" soon.

SloBolt Lettuce

Peony, bowed down in the rain.

The weather in the past month or so has been decidedly cool, which is a little bit frustrating in that the summer crops are lagging as a result.

However, I am expecting to see spectacular flowers on the peonies this year. When they bloom in hot weather, the petals open unevenly - the centers expanding more rapidly than the outer layers - and the flowers never make it to the lush, full bloom that they achieve in cooler springs.

This is definitely a cooler spring, so I have high hopes for some beautiful flowers.

In spite of the cool weather, in which we are still having nights with temperatures in the 40s (degrees F), the peppers seem to be doing well enough. Most of my thirteen little pepper plants have flower buds on them. When we Finally get some warmer weather, these should all do very well.

A Napoleon sweet bell pepper.

The potatoes are starting to send up little flower buds, which means that actual spuds are beginning to form below ground. If I were especially impatient for some little new potatoes, I could probably dig around under the mass of plants and pull some tiny potatoes out. I'm going to wait, though, for the big harvest in June.

Potatoes sending up flower buds.

The fall-planted strawberry plants that I got from a friend are making lots of flowers and green berries. I've put a frame around them that I need to get covered up with netting soon, before the birds figure out what I'm growing.

An ever-bearing type of strawberry, unknown variety.

The zucchini are making a slow start in the cool weather, but a slow start is better than no start! I am looking forward to the first harvest of squash; it's so much better fresh than from the freezer.

Raven zucchini, off to a good start.

It's also good to see the comfrey in bloom. Bees like comfrey flowers, and the leaves are a useful addition to the compost heap. Comfrey has a very deep taproot that brings up nutrients from much farther below the surface than many other perennials. The compost, when comfrey leaves are added, benefits from the dive down to the different layer of soil nutrients.

Comfrey in bloom.

I am hoping to make more progress on getting the summer garden planted in the next week. It's a little weird to be waiting for warmer weather this far into the spring!

Of Gardening and Bees

One of the things I love about gardening is that I get to really see miracles every day. Here is Saturday's miracle:

My zucchini seedlings have pushed up through the surface!

The huge cotyledons (seed leaves) on these baby plants expand out from seeds that are actually pretty small. My friend Becky says that the baby zucchini plants remind her of solar panels - they flatten out when the sun is high but fold closed for nighttime.

Also on Saturday (before the Big Rain started), I was able to plant the rest of the cucumbers and some okra and sunflowers. I still have a long way to go in terms of getting my summer garden planted, but it feels good to have made some headway.

Earlier in the day, Joe and I did our usual couple of hours weeding out at our friends' garden/farm on Dallas Highway, and I was invited on a little field trip to Burnt Hickory Roots Greenhouses to pick up flats of tomato and pepper plants.

I had never been out to that particular greenhouse - and I'll be lucky if I ever find it again, because I had a hilarious tour of Paulding County on the way there. However, the plants, which are grown from seed at the greenhouse, were beautiful and astonishingly affordable.

Joe and I also checked our hive on Saturday afternoon (it was a very full day!). The bees have started to make comb on seven of the bars in our top-bar hive. Here is Joe with one of the just-started combs:

Joe with a comb that is being newly formed by our bees.

 We even found the queen! She has a red dot on her back; otherwise, I wouldn't have noticed her. The closed white cells at the top of this comb contain honey, and the closed yellow cells (we think) are "brood cells," with baby bees inside.

The queen is marked with a dot of red paint.

When Joe built the hive, he put in a viewing window to let us do quick checks on the hive without disturbing the bees as much as when we've opened the hive and pulled out bars to see how the bees are doing. The window has been a good source of reassurance to us new beekeepers that all is still fine.

New comb, seen through the window on the side of the hive.

Every now and then, though, we will need to check on the hive comb-by-comb, to make sure all is as it should be. There are mites and beetles that cause lots of trouble for bees, and we need to keep an eye out for those, and we will need to add more bars to the bee-side of the hive as more comb is built.

Right now, there is a divider in place, keeping the hive space a little cozier until the bees reproduce and need more space.

Hope that everyone else had a great gardening weekend, too!

Garden Update

Does anyone else have sore muscles today from all the garden-work yesterday? I amended and planted two and a half beds and set up the bird bath, and then I bumped up some of the remaining plants into larger pots.

The two completed beds are the two nearest the front door. Now, instead of weeds, the long curved bed has three eggplants, thirteen pepper plants, and some gladiolus bulbs to go with the bee balm that was already there, and the smaller bed shaped like a big slice of pie has six Swiss chard, seeds for zinnias and pickling cucumbers, and the birdbath. When Joe got back in the late afternoon from kayaking on the Etowah River, he was amazed at how different the front yard looked!

The "half" part of the two-and-a-half beds is one that is supposed to get tomatoes planted in it later in the summer, based on my newly-created rotation scheme, but it got a couple of Amish tomato plants early. I need for the Amish tomatoes to be separate from the rest to avoid any further cross-pollination.

Last year's Amish tomatoes looked pretty different from the tomatoes of the first couple of years, and I am hoping that the older seeds (saved from one of the earlier years with this variety) that I used this year will produce plants that are more similar to the original variety. Keeping them in a bed across the yard from the rest should lessen the cross pollination problem.

Other activities for the day included admiring our new bees and cleaning my bunnies' enclosures. My friend Cheryl stopped by to pick up some plastic nursery pots because she needed more of the 3-gallon size (I had plenty under the house) and she brought some bunny salad - which included some wheat plants - from her yard for Moonpie, Tiny, Burrito, and Holstein. They seemed to enjoy the different salad!

I'm expecting to plant most of the rest of the summer garden over the next couple of weeks, completing a little bit each evening after work. The sweet potatoes will be last, because they need reliably warm soil to do well.

Impatience Wins: I Planted Zucchini Seeds

I have been waiting and waiting for warmer weather, but on Wednesday evening I gave in to my impatience and planted some zucchini seeds. Last year, I began harvesting zucchini in May (May!), but this year I will be lucky to bring in zucchini by mid-June.

Even though the past several days have been toasty warm, tonight's forecast includes a swoop down below 40 degrees F. That's why I've been trying so hard to wait on planting the summer veggies. Many of those really don't like temperatures in the thirties.

The forecast includes a frost advisory, and if a frost materializes it would be disastrous for many gardeners at this point. However, back in 2005, our last frost was on April 24; one more dip down to freezing wouldn't be out of the realm of normal.

After that, though, the forecast temperatures trend upward, and I am planning to begin the spring-planting extravaganza on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, my yard enjoyed a big rain today, which means those zucchini seeds will be well-hydrated for eventual germination.

Hope everyone else's gardens keep safely un-frosted and growing well!

Where Do Bees Come From?

Where do bees come from? A box! Pictured below is the box containing our first very-own bees.

Our First Bees

I got a phone call from the post office on Thursday morning, and at the other end of the line a nice lady, in a somewhat tense voice, asked that I please come pick up my bees as soon as possible. Now, actually. Right now.

So I went around to the back door of the post office as instructed and rang the bell, and the one person in the post office who WASN'T freaked out by the bees came to the door. It turned out that the bees were on a shelf outside, because they weren't especially welcome inside. The bees were just as you see them above, in a part wood, part screen container, so it was easy to see (and hear!) all the activity in there.

Joe built a top-bar hive last year to begin our beekeeping adventure, but he was out of town when the bees arrived, which meant that I had to open the box and put the bees into the hive myself.

I had a bee veil that went over a hat, and I put on one of Joe's long-sleeved white shirts and a pair of garden gloves for the big event.

The hardest part was prying the can of sugar-water out of the big hole at the top of the box. The can fit just exactly into the hole, so every time I pried up one bit of the edge, the opposite side slipped down into the box.

I finally got it, though, and was able to pull out the little cage that holds the queen. I hung her up in the hive, then poured all her little worker friends into the hive. They didn't all want to leave the box, so I left it right near the hive entrance, to make it easy for them to find their new home.

When Joe got back into town on Saturday evening, we went to check on the queen. She hadn't made it out of her little cage yet (the exit was blocked with a sugar-cube that the bees are supposed to eat through to release her), so Joe finished poking an exit-hole through the cube for her. A quick look around showed that the bees had been making comb, and we think that's a good sign.

Today, the bees all seem to be still there, which is good news. Sometimes a batch of bees will decide to find a different home than the one they were dumped into, and that would mean we'd have to start over with a new batch of bees. Wish us luck?

Planting "Bunny Salad"

Saturday was sunny and warm, and I spent a large part of the day at the Georgia House Rabbit Society explaining and supervising the planting of raised beds for growing bunny salad.

The mainstay of the diet of domestic rabbits is hay (mostly timothy hay); bunnies also typically are given some pellets that are made of compressed hay with some nutritional supplements added, and bunnies also need some fresh food each day (the rabbit house has a list of good bunny foods on its website).

That fresh part of the diet can get expensive, which makes these new raised bed gardens a potentially great addition to the grounds of the rabbit shelter.

The completed gardens will serve not only as a source of food for the shelter's bunnies, but will also serve as an educational tool, to show new bunny-owners some of the foods that bunnies can eat and that these can be grown at home. 

First, of course, the volunteers who showed up to help put in the gardens had to assemble the beds.
 
One of the big home improvement stores had been having a sale on cedar, raised bed garden kits, and the shelter had bought six of the 4x4 kits for their new gardens.

The kits were designed to allow them to be joined together to create larger beds, and after some discussion and much pounding, we ended up with four 4x8 beds.

I had brought my grub hoe (a favorite tool!), and it was put to good use breaking up the soil in the beds. After the Very Compacted soil was loosened, the volunteers worked on getting the worst of the weeds out of the beds.
Then there was the job of moving all the good garden soil which the shelter had acquired. The soil - which was in two large piles in the yard - was wet and heavy from recent rains, but the volunteers were undeterred. It took some doing, but the beds finally were all filled with the soil.

Then we got to my favorite part - the actual planting. Most of the volunteers hadn't actually planted a garden before, so I showed them how to get the plants out of their pots with as little damage as possible, how to lay them out in the appropriate spacing, and how to set the plants into the ground.

We had transplants for anise hyssop, bronze fennel, parsley, cilantro, lettuces, radicchio, chicory, three different mints, and arugula. We left space for the basil, which needs slightly warmer weather.

I also taught some volunteers how to use the garden rake to make furrows for planting seeds, because we had seeds to plant, too.

We had seeds for more cilantro and lettuce, for radishes, and for peas (bunnies like the stems and leaves of the pea shoots). We also had some seeds for flowers that the bunnies won't be eating - they are just to help make the grounds look more attractive.

Some radishes had been planted in a "gutter planter" around the back deck, too, but I forgot to take a picture of that. One of the regular shelter volunteers had hung guttering around the outside of the railing for the back deck. He had drilled holes for drainage, so it could be used for a planter.

Since bunnies really like radish leaves, we had a small group of volunteers working in the back, filling the gutter-trough-planter with potting mix and then planting radish seeds. There should be plenty of radish leaves for the bunnies in just a few weeks!

A few of the day's volunteers were regulars with the rabbit shelter, but most were with an animal protection group called GARP. This was one of the activities they had chosen to help support other groups that protect animals.

The volunteers also worked on some additional projects at the shelter: they dug out the path to the garden and spread the gravel under-layment that will be the foundation for the bricks that will form the path, and they worked to pull out a very unattractive older planting of low-growing junipers (mixed with honeysuckle vines and assorted other weeds) that lined the front of the property. Then they replanted that area with daylilies and daisies. All of this involved hard, physical labor.

Over the course of the day, the group of twenty-or-so people got a lot done. It was great to see the huge change in the landscape in such a short time!

Kudzu Bug Update

A clearer picture of the impact of the kudzu bug on Georgia's roadsides, farms, and gardens is slowly emerging as information from across the state is gathered and evaluated by personnel at UGA.

The map below shows the speed at which this particular pest is spreading across the Southeast:


At a meeting about four weeks ago, Wayne Gardner, an Entomologist at UGA,  shared some very useful new information about these little stink bugs. It turns out that - so far -  they are most damaging to kudzu and soybeans. They don't seem to damage peanuts, but they have been observed feeding on wisteria.They also are seen on many other legume-family plants, but the amount of damage they inflict on those is unclear.

Gardner listed host plants for the kudzu bugs, and those that are legumes include: Lima beans, pole/string/green beans, lablab beans, pigeon peas, wisteria (both American and Chinese), American Yellowwood, lespedeza, peanut, crimson clover, clover, alfalfa, sicklepod, and black locust.

Non-legume host plants include: alligator weed, black willow, banana, cocklebur, cotton, fig, loquat, muscadine grape, pecan, pine trees, potato, satsuma mandarin, tnagerine, wax myrtle, wheat, and wild blackberry.

On most of the host plants, the bugs are present as adults, but they aren't reproducing on the plants, and the amount of damage done is yet to be established. The kudzu bugs are present in all stages of the lifecycle on soybeans and kudzu, and they damage soybeans and kudzu primarily by feeding on the stems rather than the leaves. 

Gardner reported that kudzu biomass in infested stands is reduced by about one third within a year's time, which is probably good news for our roadsides. For soybean farmers, the average 18% reduction in crop yield is markedly less-than-good news. For urban areas, it may turn out that the worst problems relate to the stink and the staining caused by the little pests, and some people may have a localized allergic reaction to contact with the bugs. Hopefully, the picture will become even more clear this season, as more data are gathered and added to what we already know.