Gardening by Mistake

Oh boy did I overdo it in the garden today (Sunday).  On the positive side, I got a LOT of weeds pulled and made a lot of progress. On the other hand, I still have tons more weeds to go and I probably won’t be able to move my legs for a few days. Ha! It figures.

While out there I made the happy discovery that I do actually have at least one snake out there. I didn’t see the snake, but I saw the skin it shed. I’m fine with keeping that as close to encountering the snake as I come. I don’t care if I ever see it/them– I just want them out there eating voles, grasshoppers and whatever else. I’d say I wish they’d eat the damn rabbits that get into the garden, but I don’t think I want my snakes that big! Vole-eating-sized is good enough for me.

Saturday we were in Topeka for the day. We spent some time at the Lake Shawnee gardens. I’m intending to get some pictures from that visit up this coming week. Maybe I’ll work on that while my legs recover from today!

The poison ivy count continues to climb. I don’t know how many of those buggers I pulled today. It had to be more than 100. And that was only in the front border and front flower bed! I haven’t even started on the back yard or the rose garden. It’s crazy.  It’s a very good thing I don’t get rashes from the stuff.

Going out to the garden is an exercise in depression right now. We’ve been having 105-110 degree heat indexes for two weeks now. Think I’m getting any weeding done? Nope! Think that heat’s stopped the weeds any? Ha!

I’ve done so well on the weeding front this year, but right now looking at the garden, you wouldn’t know it. I don’t have “nice” weeds, you know, short ones that grow close to the ground and aren’t horribly visible. Henbit comes to mind. No, what I have is yellow nut sedge (and in bloom it’s even taller) and grasses. Lots of very tall grasses. And not the native kind, darn it. Those I’d just relocate. No, I’ve got a disaster out there right now. I haven’t sprayed my roses for 2 weeks. If I miss this weekend, that’ll be 3 spray sessions, and the roses are definitely showing it. The black spot does just great in this high humidity.

I think I’m going to have to suck it up and at least give it a try this weekend, 110 degree heat index or not. Ugh.

I was delighted recently to discover a new plant, grown from winter sowing, is a first-year blooming plant: ruellia humilis. This is a native to Missouri, familiarly called the wild petunia, although it is not related to petunias. There are other reasons to like this perennial aside from its early bloom. It is one tough plant, dealing with a brutally sunny spot and getting only rain for moisture, not to mention our high humidity.  That’s the beauty of a native plant in its preferred environment!

Another winter-sown plant has turned out to be a first-year bloomer as well: agastache foeniculum. This one is not technically a native to my area, although it’s a native in neighboring states, so I cheated an included it for this year.

I’m trying for the first time a method I’d read about some time ago. With this method, you take a 2-liter bottle or a milk jug or whatever container you want, and you put a small hole in the bottom of it. Place it where you want to water and fill it with water. The water will slowly drip from the container. It will drip so slowly, in fact, that it has time to be fully absorbed into the soil, rather than running off it or being evaporated by the sun. This will provide a slow, deep watering for the spot you place it.

I started collecting rainwater this year. I’m too cheap to pay for an expensive rain barrel, and in my situation I couldn’t use the spiffy hose on one, anyway. So I have a large, and I do mean large, tub sitting under a spout. I probably collected 35 gallons in that. When I’m on top of it, I bail some of that into a second container that holds something like 17 gallons. In a good rain, I collect some significant water which I’ve been using to brew my AVCTs (chloramine free!) and to water plants. I need to use up today what I collected last Sunday because I have seen the very first mosquito larvae. As soon as I see them, I use up whatever water remains in the bin. It takes something like a week for the mosquito larvae to complete its cycle and become a mosquito, so by doing this I make sure I’m not raising mosquitoes.

I’ve got my first 6 gallon milk jugs out in the garden, dripping as I type. I learned something, though: only put one hole in the container. A smaller hole leads to a slower drip and a longer watering time. If you put two holes, even small holes, you’ve just lost your nice, slow drip. I’ve got one jug that way and that is how I discovered this. It will still do a good job watering, but it won’t be quite a good as the others. (Also, don’t let your husband use a pocketknife to make the holes because he think the slit will work just fine. It won’t! Use a small drill bit or an ice pick or something like this.) It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those gallon jugs to drip empty. Only some of my roses will get watered this way. I don’t have enough water for them all. Hopefully we’ll get rain soon and I’ll be able to re-charge my water bins and then another bed of roses will get a slow, deep watering between rains which don’t come often enough  this time of year when it’s blast-furnace hot.

Incidentally, you can use this same setup (a jug with a single small hole in it) to attract birds. Hang the dripping jug over a container that can collect the water. The sound of water will attract the birds. If you use a shallow container, the birds will likely bathe in it.

I get more questions about roaches than probably any other topic. People want to know if worm bins will attract roaches. On the surface, it seems like worm bins could be ideal environments for roaches. However,  I’ve not heard of anyone ever having a problem with them. The only time I had roaches in a single bin was when I introduced materials that, unbeknownst to me had some roaches already in them. I had some great leaf mold/decaying leaves that I thought the worms would love. Turns out, other critters were already enjoying them, but I didn’t know that until after I added the material to my bin. Oops. What happened? I was fortunate in that it was a small bin and small numbers of roaches. Whenever I took the lid off that bin, I made sure I had something that I could use to squish the roaches. In this case, it was only one or two roaches running around at a time. After doing this several times, the roaches were mostly gone. I would get one here and there as it hatched. But they never had a chance to keep the cycle going. Now, in an environment where roaches are common, it might be different. In an outdoor setting, roaches are going to be in the worm “bin” at least occasionally as will many other critters and that isn’t something that would worry me.

This website has information on some common roaches and pictures of the egg cases. If you do have roaches in your worm bin, you can start to fight the problem by keeping on the lookout for egg cases. If you see any, remove and destroy them immediately.

“The Soil Biology Primer is an introduction to the living component of soil and how it contributes to agricultural productivity, and air and water quality. The Primer includes units describing the soil food web and its relationship to soil health, and units about bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, and earthworms. It is suitable for a broad audience including farmers, ranchers, agricultural professionals, resource specialists, conservationists, soil scientists, students, and educators.”  (from the USDA National Resources Conservation Service website).

This book includes information written by Elaine Ingham and Clive Edwards, two of the big names in their respective areas of expertise (soil microbiology and vermiculture, respectively). You can buy the book for $18, or you can read it online. The hard copy contains additional pictures not found in the online version.

If you are interested in nurturing your garden or just want to get a better idea of all the myriad components of soil life, this is required reading and just the starting point. Once you’ve read this, consider reading Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis.

I’d never seen a flicker before this past winter when I started putting out lots of bird foods. We had a male and a female flicker visit us throughout the winter. Just recently I saw an adult flicker with a fledgling. They were on the driveway. The fledgling hopped around, seemingly randomly, while the parent worked its way along the edge of the grass; I saw it feeding the fledgling multiple times.

I’d like to think that my efforts at starling removal this past winter had a role to play in that fledgling flicker.

Early results are very positive in my trials. I’m using aerated vermicompost tea in my attempt to keep my roses black spot free, or at least mostly black spot free.

On June 7th, I took pictures of about 40 of my roses, most of them the worst cases of black spot. Then the next day, I started spraying them with the tea. So far they’ve been sprayed with AVCT 3 times. Some roses don’t look much different, two might actually look a little worse, but then there are the rest which look like different rose bushes. Some of my roses are black spot magnets, and they are looking beautiful. The changes in just 3 weeks are quite remarkable. At the end of the season I’ll post final conclusions and some before and after pictures. I’m looking forward to seeing how the roses look at that point.

There are baby poison ivy plants popping up everywhere in my yard.  I have never seen anything like this. It’s crazy. And it’s frustrating because no matter how many seedlings I pull, when I turn around I find more. The worst is that they like to grow under existing plants, so they are hard to see and hard to remove without disturbing the plants I want there.  Sometime soon I’m going to have to set aside a couple hours for nothing but poison ivy removal. I hate to spend my limited garden time doing that, but we’re being overrun.

This is my first year growing cucumbers. I have planted 3 vines, and I think I still have another 2 in pots. I suspect that 3 vines will be more than enough to bury us under cucumbers. My son wanted to grow cucumbers to make pickles. All I can say is, he’d better eat them if we make ‘em!

I planted one cucumber vine where it can climb up New Dawn. As far as I’m concerned, that will be the best possible use of that rose bush. I hate that bush. It has one good flush in the spring, but the blooms last only about 3 days. Then for the rest of the growing season it just blooms  here and there but never in a big flush. Someday I’d like to replace it with something else. Until then, I can use it as something for the cucumber vine to climb.