Gardening by Mistake

I was determined to get to the garden and spray some AVCT yesterday evening. I couldn’t believe it when clouds started to fill the sky and a check on the radar showed big storms headed our way. There wasn’t supposed to be much chance of rain. Ha! No waiting for evening, then, to do my spraying.

I grabbed my sprayer (made more difficult by the fact that my son had moved it and I didn’t know it– I thought I was losing my mind when I couldn’t find it) and got it loaded up. I debated about straining the tea before putting it into the sprayer. Last time, I used a coffee filter, but that took a long time. This time, I used a wire mesh strainer. I didn’t think the strainer had very large holes, but apparently I was wrong and that wasn’t fine enough.

Yes, I saved time loading the sprayer, but I more than lost that time in the garden as I had to repeatedly take off the sprayer head and clean it out. Once I even had to clean out the tubing that sucks the water into the sprayer. I got to know this new sprayer real quickly. So call this a learning experience. Next time, I’ll take the time to strain better than what the mesh strainer does. (I need something that’s a compromise between coffee filters and the strainer. A coffee filter filters out fungi, which I want in the tea).

At least I got it sprayed in time for it to dry before the storms once again sent flood waters through my yard.

One nice thing about being out there, a bonus for my work: I got to see my first oenothera missouriensis (Missouri primrose) bloom from a WS baby. It was wonderful— huge and a very bright yellow (a pure yellow; not an orangey yellow). I wish I’d grown more now. I’ll be sure to do so when I WS next time.

Yesterday evening I started brewing a batch of AVCT (aerated vermicompost tea),  my first batch this season.

At 7:15 this evening I realized I’d better get a move on with the tea spraying. I grabbed my sprayer for the first time this year, opened it, saw the residue at the bottom and said, “Oh crap!” I’d forgotten one tiny detail: I can’t use this sprayer. Doh! This sprayer was used to spray mancozeb and other heavy-duty anti-fungal chemicals on my roses last year. Putting my microbial-rich tea in that would be an exercise of stupidity since it would kill them. So, I need a new sprayer. Dang it!

Well, spraying was out. So I had a choice: I could let the tea brew another day or I could apply it as a drench. I chose drench. I used a 1:5 ratio so my 3 gallons of tea would make 18 to apply. I added a couple of additional substances (like liquid kelp) and carried it out to the garden in 2 1/2 gallon batches. It took 7 trips like that. That might not sound like a lot, but my garden is far away. And each trip it seemed further. Next time I’m going to be smarter and take the tea and a hose out to the garden and do my diluting in situ. That would save a lot of time and effort. I didn’t have that brilliant idea until after I was done tonight, of course.

I didn’t have enough tea for all the plants, so only my roses got it, and I didn’t have enough for any roses outside of the rose beds. But those roses got 24 ounces apiece, except for some really small minis which got 12 ounces. If I could have, I would have given them each quite a bit more, at least a gallon apiece.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to do the foliar spray I’d planned on, but this tea and effort was not wasted by any means.  It feels good—very good— to have it done now.  Next time, hopefully, I’ll do the foliar spray. Just have to remember to get a new sprayer first!

CNN has an article Top Ten Gardening Mistakes and I took a look at them last night. On my way to the article, I said, “I bet I’ve made them all” and my husband laughed. Surprisingly, there were some I didn’t make. I’ve made plenty of mistakes; I guess I’ve just specialized in the less common ones.

So, how do you do on the list?

I may have lost an entire tub of echinacea ‘Prairie Splendor’ seedlings. That’s 40 plants. And that’s not the end of my likely losses, either. So what happened?

Quite simply: the tarp didn’t work. And, worse, I thought it had, so I didn’t check on the plants. It looked like more rain yesterday, so I didn’t want to pull the tarp back and then have to fight with it to cover the plants again. Now, of course, I wish I had. The plants floated in water 24 hours longer than they should have.  Some plants have taken it remarkably well (at least so far) but others, like the echinacea, are looking pretty horrible.

I spent a couple hours Monday emptying the tubs and literally squeezing water from each pot before putting them back in their tubs. I was trying to figure out some way to wick some of the water out of the pots while I did this. I had an idea and I’m just trying it out. If it works, I’ll post it. One good thing is that it was windy Monday. That should help a bit toward drying out the soil.

There’s another lesson in this: have drain holes. I purposefully did not have drain holes in my tubs (obviously each pot has them) because I thought I could bottom water that way. I wasn’t thinking ahead at that time to the spring rains that come inches at a time. Doh! I’m trying to decide now whether I want to add holes at this point. I’m leaning toward no, aware of the fact that I’ll have to do better with covering them the next time it rains.

I’m mad at and very upset with myself about this. Some of the plants out there I started in November (New Jersey Tea and some native grasses) and grew over the winter under lights. The bulk of them are from winter sowing which I started at the beginning of January. Months and hours of work and care, floating. It’s not just that time and effort that upsets me, but also the fact that I lose an entire year for anything that doesn’t get planted this year. In the case of some of the bushes and slower growing perennials, that’s important.

I’ve already had doubts about my ability to ever turn these garden beds into something I can be proud of. The ongoing flooding in the garden and this just magnifies my doubts and feelings of being overwhelmed.

I’m not even going to number these. I managed to commit a whole bunch in a short space.

Yesterday we got rain. It had been 2 weeks since we’d had any and 5 days since I’d watered my WS seedlings. I figured they’d probably like another drink. The forecast was .1 – .25 inches– a great amount for my pots in tubs.

Ha! THREE inches later, my pots are literally floating in their tubs, and that’s after I dumped the tubs out about 1/2 way through. Those poor, poor babies.

Fortunately, tubs of floating pots accounts for “only” 140 of my seedlings. The other tubs were also emptied 1/2 way through the rain but I covered them with a tarp. I haven’t yet checked to see if they got flooded somehow anyway— I’m kind of afraid to. I do wonder, though, why I felt like I didn’t need to cover the 3 tubs on my deck when I covered all the tubs down on my patio. The brain works in mysterious ways. My brain, anyway.

So, one mistake might have been to believe the forecast. Or maybe it was not double checking it once the rain started. A definite mistake was not covering those 3 tubs of pots after I drained them the first time.

I’ve emptied the tubs at this point. Later, I’ll be heading back out to squeeze some of the water out of the pots. They are that saturated.

There’s a good chance of more storms tonight. Ack.

As the winter sowing process continues and the seedlings sprout and grow, I’m making notes about what I need to do differently next time. This is a biggie: next year, I’m going to use some sort of screen or landscape fabric to cover my open containers. The neighbor’s *&^% elm tree next door is currently dropping seeds like mad. They are everywhere in my pots. Very soon I’ll start seeing elm tree babies. What a nuisance. So, next year: screen!

Last night we had quite a storm. We had a full day’s warning about it, so I’d moved all my tubs of plants under the deck where they’d be protected from hail and I put the lids on my 2 big WS bins. But I forgot to put the lids on a couple of individual take-out containers. And, worse, at least one of those containers had no drainage holes. I was in a hurry the day I sowed that one and skipped the holes. It’s come back to bite me. I’ll find out later tonight what happens when you try to add holes to a container full of saturated soil.

Next year: don’t take shortcuts.

This is my first year with winter sowing. It’s all new to me. I reported already that one lesson was that I’d been too stingy with some of my seeds.

I’ve learned something else today: the depth of the container the seeds are sown in matters. Having a really deep container likely isn’t a problem, but having one that is too shallow sure is. I sowed some seeds in the clam shell takeout containers. They are maybe 2 inches deep. My thinking at the time was that these seedlings won’t need to grow to much size before I transplant them. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me how easily those shallow containers would dry out. So, while it was great to have containers that had vented, clear lids, I don’t think I’ll be using those again next year.

I found myself wishing multiple times that I’d sown more of some varieties of seeds. I was reflecting that I’m stingy with my seeds— I never want to sow more than I can use. I’d feel like I was wasting them. That song Every Sperm is Sacred just started going through my head and I had to laugh at myself. Next year, I’m going to live large with the seeds. Even if it just about kills me.

When it comes to seeds I’ve harvested from my own garden, I don’t worry about using too many. It’s just the ones I have to buy. Some are more rare than others and come in smaller quantities, often for more money. Those I’ll still be careful with. But on the others it’s going to be more Darwinian gardening for me. There’s a lot of that going on in my garden already.

Okay, I admit it: I was enjoying having the quiet house to myself. This is spring break for the kids. They wanted to have a water fight outside, but I nixed that idea for a couple of reasons, one of which is that the yard is still drying out from all the rain we’ve had. So, I armed them each with a spray bottle and turned them loose. That was mistake #1.

Mistake #2 was relaxing too much in the quiet house. I should have checked on them more often than I did. At my last update, they were industriously trying to convince an ant colony to relocate through the use of the spray bottles. I guess they realized the futility of that and found another way to occupy themselves.

The picture doesn’t show the full extent of the mess, but you get the idea. Both of them had the mud smeared into their hair in a thick layer.

Looking forward to school resuming.