Beating Bindweed

My arch nemesis... the absolute scourge of the garden in my opinion is bindweed. If you don't have it in your yard, count your blessings. Personally, I know no gardeners in Utah that have not at some point fought this beast! Here's a picture of a section of my garden beds that have lain empty for about a month and a half. You can see the bindweed right there in the middle of the picture.The other "weeds", dandelions or mallow, are nothing, I don't even stress them at this time of the year. Just a quick pull to keep them under control and forget about it.

We've been really making an effort over the last few years to move toward a more organic method of growing on our property. This season so far we've not used any herbicide or pesticide on our food-garden at all. (full disclosure: I did use a broad leaf weed killer once on the front yard lawn around midsummer.) What this means is that where we don't have the advantage of being able to simply spray and let the wonder of petro-chemicals kill the weeds, we need to instead supplement that with other "inputs". In other words, it takes time and effort.

Through trial and error, I've found the best way to get some control over bindweed is to take a little time to dig the ground up and remove as many of the roots as I can by hand. Last spring I did this to part of the garden, as well as the spring before. This year, with the addition of the new beds, I decided to go ahead and dig the big area that was behind the birdbath. It was really getting infested and needed a dig. You can see here a little of what I'm dealing with. Those roots go down from the top of the ground to easily 12-15 inches. I have been taking a shovel full at a time and turning it over into another pile, and hand sifting through it to remove the root remnants. It's a pain, but really it's the only way I know to safely remove this pest without dowsing the garden in chem's. This year I'm also taking an additional step. As I finish the beds, I'm going to layer the bottoms with some fairly heavy cardboard in hopes that as it takes a year or more to break down it will deter the very deep bindweed roots from coming up.

And there you go. My very hands on, totally organic method of waging war on my arch nemesis. Will it keep it at bay forever???? Doubt it. Will it give me a good season or two of relative peace? Yeah, probably, and every year I do it I will find less and less of it to pull. Then, one day, I'll finally have it totally eradicated, just in time to find a nice piece of land and move somewhere where I'll get to start all over!!

You gotta love being a farmer!
P~

Fighting the freeze

First off, I'm sorry to billbillbillbill (Freedom Gardens member) for lagging on getting this post up. Life... it happens, you know?

Anyway, on we go. Those of us local to Utah have found, as have many of our fellow gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere, fall is upon us. And with that the first frost/freeze warnings of the year. We received our first one this week and from the looks of it, it should be a hard one. The forecast is even calling for the possibility of snow in the valley. Drastic steps must be taken!

As you can see, the majority of my garden was removed this week. It's always a hard part of the year for me, sort of a gardeners version of separation anxiety. The beans were done though, as were the cucumbers, but the carrots that were growing in the area under the cukes have been left to overwinter. The only things being kept in the summer garden to try and stretch the harvest of are the tomatoes.

The last few nights have really pushed the limits of what the tomato plants can handle. The night before last in particular. I thought that for any of you that may be new to vegetable gardening I would show you what the signs of too much cold are on your tomato plants.

See there on the left hand corner of that tomato, the almost translucent part of the fruit? That is frost bite. That part of the fruit has been damaged. It's not necessarily beyond hope, depending on the amount of frost bite that happened. Then in the picture on the right, you see the darkened and wilted tips of one of the new shoots coming up on the plant, it's been frost bitten as well. This won't kill the plant, but honestly that shoot will most likely die at this point. It's OK though, I'm gonna tell you what to do with it here in a minute anyway.

Here are a couple of the tomato plants that I have growing in my beds. The one on the top is my brandywine. It had a very slow summer, I learned that it was not very tolerant of our hot summers here, and now that I've finally set a good number of fruit on it by golly I'm not just giving up on it! The one on the bottom is my San Marzano. I'm keeping it going just for the sheer number of green tomatoes on it.

What I did to these to get them ready for my version of season extension, and which will resolve the frost bitten plant tip from the previous picture, is to prune them. I trimmed the heck out of all of these prior to covering them. This site illustrates tomato pruning very thoroughly so I'll just link to it and not reinvent the wheel. Essentially, the idea is to top the plants, and remove all new growth so as to allow the plant, which is already getting stressed from the cold, to focus on maturing the already set fruit and not to growing more foliage or new fruits.

After I pruned them, and cleaned up the ground around them, I covered them with a 4 mil. clear plastic cover, basically making a small A-frame greenhouse. Let me digress here for a second... I also placed a little garden addition in the beds a few days back that really helps moderate the micro-climates around the plants as well... black water bottles. All they are, are plastic 1 gallon water bottles that I filled with some tap water after painting them black. They will get warm throughout the day and then hold that heat and radiate it back out throughout the cold nights.

I place them right at the bottom of the plants in the path of the sun, and they will slowly radiate that heat back up all night. I took the thermometer picture yesterday afternoon at approx. 3:30 PM when the outside temps were around 50-51 deg F. The temp in the water container is almost 80 deg F. So...back to the A-frame.

Voila! There it is. I want to take a minute to make the statement that this is yet another great benefit of trellising in the home garden, I can't speak to their benefit enough. The trellis that I used this year to hold up the tomatoes is the top of this cover. It allows me to leave the cover over the plants and to be able to get inside to water or check the fruits without removing the whole cover. A very nice benefit.

Fall is beautiful, and it's an important time for both the garden and the gardener to slow down a little, catch their breath and get ready for the next year. If you're really motivated it is possible to harvest all year, although I'm not quite to that point myself yet, perhaps next year. There are a lot of really good ways available and I'm sure some products one could buy to do much the same, but either way if you're not quite ready to give up the battle against the freeze then put together a plan, give it your best shot and as always learn from the process.
Good luck all.
Stay tuned for some interesting and very cool news to come on the next post.
P~

potting prep

Well folks, If I'm going to get anything from the backyard for my 100 ft diet this year I need to get my sprouts going, and first things first, it's time to get the potting soil ready. I build a pretty basic potting soil, nothing fancy or gimmicky, just good water holding materials like peat and vermiculite, and some dark rich homemade compost. This is the compost that I finished in September last year, I placed it in a 30 gallon tote with holes on the sides for air and drainage, and covered it with a wide piece of plywood to protect it from getting snowed on over the winter. It over-wintered well, and now is dark and rich and truly lives up to the moniker "Black Gold." I want to try to slowly move away from peat whenever possible since learning more about it and how unsustainable it is. For now, however, the peat that I am using this spring is what was leftover from last year, as is the vermiculite. I hope to be able to eventually find a good source for coir fibre to use in it's place, but thus far have only managed to find it in small quantities.
I mix all three parts together, using equal parts of peat and compost. For the vermiculite, I am adding slightly more that an equal third. This is because I will be primarily using this mix for starting seeds and as such want to encourage moisture retention in the short term. Our seedlings have a tendency to dry out when they start to fill in a bit, both because of the small amount of grow medium they are in, as well as because of Utah's naturally dry weather.

Whatever mix is left after I start all my plants, will get added components to bring the mix to an equal 3rd's proportion and will be used for some of our potted plants. Last year our petunias did much much better in this mix than they did the previous two years in miracle grow potting soil. And it was much cheaper!Try making your own, your plants will love it, you'll save some $$, and learn a solid gardening skill. Good luck will everyones sprouting.

P~

Finally got some work done

I got out into the yard again today to get working on the garden area and here it is. I pulled almost all of the plants from the garden during the week to get ready for today so that I could concentrate of getting the work done, or nearly so.

You may remember a list that I posted a little while back with so much to do and so little time; I thought I'd update you to the progress. I know it helps me to see others posting their goals and how they go about accomplishing them, perhaps I can inspire one of you.

• Pull the summer veggies that are now, thanks to an early and hard fall, dieing.
Check. I pulled all the squash, pepper, tomato and other plants that were still left in the garden beds.

• Pull the annuals from the front beds.
Check. Petunias and other annuals pulled, potted plants pulled and soil sifted to remove roots. Next spring I'll add some fresh compost and vermiculite to re-energize it and get it ready for a new planting.

• Dig out, split and replant the Rhubarb so we can have more next year.
Check. Look at this thing! I thought it looked like some kind of strange alien life form, I know, time to lay off the star trek huh? I dug out carefully around the outside of the crown and root ball. For those of you that are not familiar with it, the crown of a plant like rhubarb or strawberries is that area at the top of the root ball that sits generally at the soil level. It is where all the growth of the plant comes from. After I had dug out the whole plant, I used a flat shovel to split the crown into three pieces each of which a bit of rootstock still attached. I gave one to a neighbor that was interested in growing some of her own. The two I kept were added to part of the new area of garden that A~ and I cleared out last weekend, right between where my raspberries and strawberries are growing, I thing I'll call that the pie stretch of garden from now on.

• Decide which large perennials we will leave where they are and which we will move and then actually move them.
Check. A~ and I got this done last weekend, and opened up a good sized area of our back planting area for future gardening. We've decided that the front is largely for show and the back is for food. Works for me.

• Cut up and consolidate all of the pulled greens from the garden for composting.
Check. I also collected the bagged grass from the last lawn mowing (yeah our lawn is done for the season.) I've found that our gas lawn mower works great as a garden waste compost prep device. That's a really technical geeky way of saying that I can chop the heck out of all the greens and browns collected in the garden before adding them to the compost pile. This makes the breakdown of the compost go much faster and the finished product much finer. Speaking of compost, My wife thinks I may have become a little, well, let's just say she says I've gone a little overboard when I referred to this area of the yard as "Compost Central". You can see behind the bags of grass clippings that I've added an area for an actual pile to sit over winter. I haven't added all the clippings and greens yet, I need to get some straw to make sure I get adequate carbon to nitrogen mixture and that I have enough room for air movement. This is what keeps the pile from smelling and gets it hot, helping it to break down quicker.

• Prune, thin and support the raspberries and strawberries.
Yes, check. I finally got around to doing this. This year my strawberries really went crazy. I got a decent amount of berries from the small patch (4' x 5') that I had last year. Then after harvest, they began to drop runners and new growth. Whoa, they spread like fire. I pulled a good bit of the old growth to allow the new plants to come up better and thin the patch. I also made a distinct edge to the spreading patch. final size of the patch is about 4' x 8'. Not quite twice the size, but with the thinning and some care, I hope to get nearly twice the harvest next year. As for the raspberries, I learned this year that raspberries will only fruit on the second year growth but not thereafter; I cut out the two year old growth and strung up and supported the one year old growth, hopefully I can get my two plantings on the same schedule from here on out. Last year one of them gave a lot of fruit, this year the other did; if I can get them both producing together I'll be a happy sorbet eating man!

• Weed some of the bad areas of the yard to get a head start on next year.
This part is an on going project. I am trying to get a handle on weeds overall, the grass looks good, but I still have to weed and till the new garden areas before winter sets in.

I hope your garden chores are coming along. This is that time of the year when it is so easy to neglect the garden, but at the same time is one of the most important times for prepping and putting the earth to sleep before winter. I'm really pleased with my progress so far this year. I spent much of the spring this year going through the beds and getting them ready for planting. I hope to be able to get seed in the ground much earlier next year and enjoy a greater and earlier harvest. Don't throw in the trowel yet, there's work to do. (Yeah I stole that line from Mother Earth News, it was just to perfect I had too. LOL)

Namaste
P~

Ssshhhh don't tell

You have to keep this a secret or I may get run out of the suburbs.

I don't like lawns.

Nope I don't, just figured that out this afternoon. I was out there mowing it, getting it short for the fall, and thinking to myself about all of the things we do for this plant. We water it, kill the weeds and fertilize it so it will grow fast and lush; then we complain about how often we have to mow it. I did fertilize it early in the spring, and I do have a sprinkler system, but I didn't use any weed killers. (I pulled them with my hands. And for that matter ate many of them. Dandylion and purslane, Mmm Mmm good!) I've come up with a theory that directly relates my level of summer enjoyment and overall happiness to the number of weeds and imperfections in my lawn. It goes as follows:

To control my weeds I can either spray them with a bunch of poisons and then let my kids and my dog run and lay and play in it, but no trouble right? Or I can take the time to pull them all, one by one, investing my time in nothing but manicuring the lawn and miss out on so much of the other things that life offers.

I struck a balance. No chemicals, and I pulled weeds when I had the chance, here or there. I didn't get them all, but you know what, I had a pretty good summer all told. Am I being a little extreme? Yeah maybe a little, but think about it, how much time and effort do we put into our lawns as a nation? What if we put that into something more productive like growing something edible or playing with our kids? Wouldn't we be happier, I know I would.

Oh well, I guess I'll just go pull some more weeds. Have a good day all.

P~

What a weekend

Groan... creek.. arrrgg; What a weekend! A~ and I spent literally the whole weekend from Fri afternoon to Sunday evening working like crazy people in the yard. Allow me to tick off a list of tasks.

•Leveling, straightening, and backfilling the recycled concrete edging that we put in earlier this year.
•Planted some new perennials around the front of the house.
•Finished laying the recycled concrete pavers under our pergola. (Watch for pictures this week.)
•Mixed huge batch of plantable fill dirt to fill into the spacers between the pavers and planted two sheet trays of elfin thyme to grow along spaces.
•Stretched shade fabric over the pergola to give some nice shade this summer.
•Finished roofing the wood hutch that I built earlier this spring. (Again, watch for pictures later.)
•Sided the wood hutch with some recycled siding that a constr. site was throwing out.
•Mowed the lawn.
•Spread some grass seed and starter fertilizer onto the thin spots on the lawn.
•Dug out and repaired three sprinkler heads.

And I'm sure there were a couple of other things that I've forgotten. At any rate, this had to be one of the busiest weekends we've had since... well, since last spring. My wife and I have a little too much ambition for our own good sometimes. We also are firm believers in the fact that if we work really hard during the spring when the weather is cooler and perfect, we can be lazy larry's all summer when it's 90+ degrees. Here's the problem with that, we don't actually have any control over the weather, go figure. It turns out that this weekend on the Wasatch Front we set a new record high of 89 degrees on Sunday and Sat. wasn't much cooler. Oh well, the hammock will be nice in that shade this summer, and I can't say I've ever had a bad time spending a whole weekend working closely with my sweetie. That's all for now, I gotto go take some Aleve! Groan... humph. C-ya.
P~

Reduce, Recyle, Reuse!

Take one pile of "unusable" concrete waste left over from trampling march of urban sprawl.

Break into manageable pieces, and transport to "refining" facility.

Once there, add two heaping helpings of manual labor. (And yes, I mean HEAPING HELPINGS!)

And Voila! Beautiful, garden edging, complete with "Rustic" cobblestone-like appearance for that quaint English garden look!

To me this is what Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is all about. Reduce what you consume, Reuse something in order to accomplish your goal, and Recycle because it saves resources and $$.

Get out there and see what you can find to reuse. It feels great to have something beautiful for nothing, and to get a good feeling for helping the environment to boot!