An Animal Surprise in the Garden

In my front-yard garden, I have seen many different kinds of animals, or evidence of their having stopped by, over the years. Some of the animals are pests, and but not all.

Of course, there has been a vast assortment of the neighborhood pets, both dogs and cats. We've had rabbits (the native kind), chipmunks, voles, possums, rats, box turtles, lizards, frogs, salamanders, and snakes. (How could I forget even ONE of the snakes? They are always such a surprise.) I've seen deer walking up the road, thankfully not stopping to check out my garden. And there have been birds of all kinds: those pesky crows, the whole list of species that eat my blueberries, goldfinches, hummingbirds, crested flycatchers, loud wrens, and many more. There are coyotes and racoons in the woods out back, but I haven't seen them or their footprints in front.

If anyone had asked, I would have said that I had seen pretty much all of the kinds of animal-visitors-to-the-garden that I would see.

So this visitor to the garden was unexpected:

Snapping turtle visits the garden.                PHOTO/Amy W.

I had been about to walk down that path to pick a cucumber when the sight of this snapper stopped me in my tracks. I think she was looking for a place to lay her eggs, but the clay in the paths is pretty tough stuff to dig in.

After a few minutes, she got herself turned around,  picked herself up -- on surprisingly long legs -- and made her slow way back toward the creek.

Found Food: Black Trumpet Mushrooms

When I was out walking the dog the other day, I noticed some very tiny yellow chanterelle mushrooms beginning to form. In years past, a place I know that has tended to produce small numbers of black trumpet mushrooms has been "past its prime" by the time the chanterelles were large and well-formed, so I went (as soon as I could) straight to the black-trumpet-spot to check it out, hoping that I hadn't missed the magical black-trumpet time.

If I had been a day or two later, the mushrooms might have been larger, but waiting also meant risking a total loss if I couldn't get back to the spot in time.  This is what I was able to harvest:

Small Black Trumpet mushrooms.                                  PHOTO/Amy W.

I don't think I can complain! These mushrooms weigh very little, but they are packed with amazingly wonderful flavor.

Persistent Herbicides, OR, Manure Isn't What it Used to Be

Pepper plant affected by persistent herbicide in Cobb County, GA. PHOTO/Amy W.

I have a friend who has been farming for a very long time, and his life experience has told him that Manure Is Good.

He has friends - owners of stables of horses - who offer to provide him with enormous amounts of composted manure, and he accepts.

Even though he has had trouble with manure before (a couple of years ago), he spread it on some of his planting beds again this year, and the tomato-family plants, not too surprisingly, have become twisty and weird.

The leaves from before the spreading of the compost look fine, but all the growth since the application looks pretty bizarre.

The North Carolina State Univ. publication about Herbicide Carryover explains that the chain of herbicide-treated hay to horse to compost needs to be very clear. Unfortunately, in the casual exchanges of small-plot farmers, the information chain can become a little vague. That can be a problem for garden-farmers who are hoping to produce healthful food from their land.

For any of us who have always thought that manure can be a great amendment to the soil for their vegetables, it is good to remember that times have changed, and that not all composted manures are what they used to be.

Finally, a Summer Harvest!

I have been bringing in green beans for a few days now, and this is not the first pepper, and the zucchini isn't quite full-sized, but today is the first day I could bring in more than one or two kinds of veggies from the garden in the same day.

In honor of the occasion, I have arranged it all in Grammy J's cut glass bowl (Grammy J was my mother's mother's mother -- my great grandmother). That is just how happy I am with the little harvest.

First real harvest of summer crops, 2013.            PHOTO/Amy W.

I brought in the regular bulbing onions today, too, but they need to dry a few days on the front porch before I trim and weigh them.

The 2013 harvest of bulb-type onions from my yard.        PHOTO/Amy W.

We've had crows in the yard over the past couple of weeks, which means that seedlings have been pulled up and tossed about. I've replanted some of the cucumbers (and melons, and butternut squash) more than once.

To protect the most recent batch, I cut the bottoms from small plastic cups then pushed the cups down around the seedlings as they emerged. This seems to have been enough protection; the smallest cucumber plants finally all have a couple of true leaves. This may be enough that they are no longer so attractive to crows.

At home and at the garden/farm where I volunteer, I have been pruning the tomato plants. If I can't stand up tomorrow, it's because I have been hunched over pruning leaves and suckers from about 150 tomato plants in the past couple of days. Here in the South, diseases are an ever-present threat to tomatoes. It can help if the plants are pruned up a bit.

I like to get them to the point that there are no leaves within about 18 inches of the ground, and I prune away leaves that are growing in toward the center of the plant, to create a cone of air-space in the center. This takes several weeks of work as the plants grow, but the improved airflow can help keep the remaining foliage drier and less susceptible to the most common airborne fungal diseases.

Hope all the other gardens out there are growing well!

Plenty of Blossoms, But No Big Zucchini

My Raven zucchini plants are flowering, but it will be awhile before I have sizable squashes to eat. That's because the flowers that are farthest along in development are all female.

Squash family plants have separate female and male flowers. Annoyingly, if the two kinds aren't open and ready at the same time, no pollination takes place, and the little fruits at the base of the female flowers just languish, wilt, and drop off.

Two female flowers, fat yellow buds almost ready to open, sit on tiny, undeveloped squashes. PHOTO/Amy W.

The male flowers sit on top of slender stems, rather than on tiny squashes. In the second picture (below), there is a male flower in the foreground. It is still very green, and I don't expect it to mature for a few more days. In that time, a lot of female flowers in my squash patch will have opened and missed being pollinated.

Male squash flower in the foreground sits on a slender stem rather than a tiny fruit.  PHOTO/Amy W.

Anyone who's had the experience of seeing lots of blossoms, but a week or so passes without any squash developing, has probably had this same situation -- lots of one kind of flower and none of the other. Eventually, the other flowers develop and the squash/fruits finally begin to grow, but the wait can be tough.

For gardeners whose squash patches are small (just a few plants), if a quick check of the plants shows a few females but only one male in full bloom, that mature male flower can be plucked from the plant, the petals torn away, and pollen-holding parts (anthers) used to pollinate all the open female flowers.

In the early part of squash season, I tend to do just that -- "be the bee" for a couple of weeks -- until I see plenty of pollinators working to take back that job.

Crazy Busy Planting Weekend -- and I'm Still Not Done

No pictures yet, but I was able to get most of the rest of the garden planted in summer crops over the long weekend.

On Saturday morning, before working on our own yard, we went out to the farm on Dallas Highway where we usually volunteer, and we weeded (a lot) and planted a couple dozen tomato plants and a couple dozen pepper plants in some of the raised beds.

Then, just when we thought we were leaving for the day, our farmer friend (Charles) said, "when you come back after lunch you can plant the rest of the tomatoes down in the field." So we went back after lunch, and with the help of one other guy we planted two 150 foot rows of tomato plants. In other words, we started the planting-weekend with a bang.

I didn't really start on my own yard until the next day, because I was kind of wiped out after that, but  planting in my yard included:

Half of the sweet potatoes (Beauregard, Purple Delight), the parching corn (Supai Red), this year's round of the melon de-hybridization project (Amy's Kennesaw Sweet Canary), a few of the "dwarf" butternut squash that I planted last year, watermelon (Luscious Golden), cucumbers (Burpee's Picklebush, Straight Nine) to replace ones that didn't come up when they were planted before, one more tomato plant, and some flower seeds. I also started some flower seeds in Jiffy Pellets, because I will need a lot more flowers for our bees.

After the corn is up and  looking good, I plan to plant peanuts in the spaces between. I still have some sweet potato slips to plant (Nancy Hall, Porto Rican Gold), and I'm expecting to harvest the onions and garlic within the next two or three weeks, which means I'll be planting the Tarahumara Popping Sorghum soon, too. When the shallots come out, I'll be planting more zucchini in their space.

Joe and I also worked on the "foundation planting" area that had been destroyed last summer when the tree smashed the house. The soil there was VERY compacted clay; breaking that up and mixing in the compost and other amendments required some seriously hard work. At the sunnier end of that bed we planted the bay tree that has been growing in a pot for the past few years, three perennial, purple-flowered Salvia, and a couple of Coronation Gold Yarrow.

The hard work will all be rewarded later in the summer, when the flowers are beautiful and we are enjoying the harvest, but right now I am a mass of sore muscles. Of course, I am also very happy to have accomplished so much.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

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.