Category Archive for ‘gardening’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'gardening' Category

EM•1, the latest form of pixie dust

Published on August 11, 2008 in gardening. 3 Comments

I routinely buy dried blood, bat guano, kelp, volcanic dust, and worm castings for the garden… and I’m not the only one. Many gardeners believe in the possibility of a perfect supplement. The latest and greatest supplement, though, is so far-fetched that people are keeping quiet about it around here. It’s the commercial growers who bought it first, at $250 for five gallons. Home growers could get the $23 size–still a lot for a supplement–and I see that they now have a $15 size for the house. The garden club split a bottle 8 ways, so I’ve been using it for a month.

EM•1 includes ”enzymes, bio-available trace minerals, vitamins, and live naturally occurring beneficial microorganisms” (it’s EM for Effective Microorganisms). It is classic pixie dust: you don’t know quite what it is; it doesn’t look like anything interesting; and it takes care of everything. (The pixie dust graphic is from here.)

You use a few drops at a time. EM•1 keeps the water in vases sweet, so cut flowers last much longer. A drop in the water for houseplants makes them much happier. Plants don’t shock during transplant if you dip their roots in a bucket of treated water. The vegetable garden looks more bodacious. The garden pond is more vibrant. I think I’m using it everywhere, and then Suzy asked, have you tried it in the toilet? It cleans the toilet bowl.

So I tried it, and it’s absolutely true: when you let a few drops sit in the toilet bowl for a few hours, it ends up clean. It’s a probiotic cleaner that, according to their literature, also works on the septic tank and the stove.

But the best cleaning trick is that EM•1 removes all odor from a wet dog. My dog keeps cool in the summer by dipping into the ditch, so by August she can get pretty ripe. I rubbed a few drops in water into the dog’s coat, and she became–and stayed–odor free.

Now that’s pixie dust.

Mulched

Published on August 7, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

I had a flat tire today, which took the time I would have spent putting together the post I had in mind. Instead, it’s 8:30 and I still have to make a full loaf of croutons… so I’ll show you what happened to the mulch.

I have a giant bed that goes 220 feet

all the way along the slope. A lot of it is newly transplanted this year so it doesn’t look like much, but it’ll fill in. And this bed can swallow a truckload of mulch for breakfast–Sam and I spread that load in 35 minutes flat.

I am clearly out of my mind for building a bed this big. So many excuses– it makes sense with the contours of the land; it’s all native cultivars so the bed almost takes care of itself– but the real excuse is this:

Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.

“The heart has its reasons, that reason knows not of.”

(Blaise Pascal 1623-1662, French mathematician and theologian)

Another load of mulch

Published on August 6, 2008 in gardening and teenagers. 1 Comment

While I was gone, Bob invited 30 people for dinner this Friday. It’s his annual lobsterfest, where everyone buys their own lobster. Bob grills corn, and I do salad, appetizer and dessert. It’s an easy party, so my thoughts turn to mulch. This is no surprise to Bob: he said he figured I’d want a truckload before the party, and maybe I could pick it up on Wednesday.

The bulk mulch is up on a mesa. They have piles of medium bark, shredded aspen and large pine chips, and it’s the medium pine bark that’s easy on your hands. I park far away enough for the Bobcat guy to maneuver.

He has a new 2-yard bucket that he likes a lot. He takes the load and slips it into the truck bed diagonally from the right

and from the left. I compliment him on his new bucket, and he says, Yep, she’s a beauty.

And I drove home at 30 mph.

I asked Sam when would be a good time for him to help me with the mulch, thinking maybe in 15 minutes.

He said, How about never? Would that work?

We settled on late afternoon. But the truth is that, at this moment, never sounds good to me too.

Growing Leeks (Time: 3 weeks, 7 weeks, 15 weeks)

Published on July 22, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

These Musselburgh leeks are three weeks old.

These are the same leeks transplanted at seven weeks,

It took a long time before they were thicker than a chive,

but at 15 weeks they’re coming along nicely. They were planted at the bottom of a trench, and now I’m hilling the soil around the stalks. Love those leeks.

Birds and Miss Roberta’s cherries

Published on July 15, 2008 in Colorado women, Old-timers, birds and gardening. 3 Comments

There are hundreds of old sweet cherry trees growing along this road, and just a few sour cherry trees. In the normal course of events, the birds are no problem. They eat the sweet cherries on the top third of the trees, which is dandy because the trees are full sized and too tall to pick. And (glutted on sweet fruit) they leave the sour cherries–mostly dwarf Montmorency’s–alone.

This year a late frost on just the wrong day erased the sweet cherry crop entirely. There’s not a single cherry on all those hundreds of sweet cherry trees, so the birds are turning their attention to the sour cherries instead.

This is Miss Roberta’s cherry tree. Aren’t they luscious?

This is what it takes to keep the birds away from such tender, brightly colored fruits.

At 95, Miss Roberta’s cherry tree strategy is: One for the birds; and one for me.

Time: two months

Published on July 8, 2008 in Colorado women, Do it yourself, gardening and time. 1 Comment

These are asparagus spears on May 8, growing in an eight-year-old bed that is nearing the height of production. Peg has a big market garden, and her asparagus is locally famous.

This is the same bed 2 months later. This patch yielded 125 pounds of spears that sold for $10 a pound. They were exceptional asparagus spears, and now the ferns are six feet tall.

Peg sells iris rhizomes, potted penstemons, and pansies in her salad mix. This is her commercial flower bed on May 8, and

here are those same rows two months later, after selling 125 penstemon in pots. The iris get harvested next, and the pansies are sold every week with her greens.

You wouldn’t look at this garden and think it’s an easy living. But Peg says: I love my life. And you can tell she means it.

A dead squirrel

Published on July 2, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

The squirrel came back and started tunneling the potatoes, and that was the end of that. If something eats my lettuces, I can say shoo. It messed around with Bob’s potatoes, though, and he called Department of Wildlife that morning to see if he could shoot it. He was told, sure. So he set the trap out for show, and the squirrel walked into it by early afternoon.

Bob told me he said very nice things to the squirrel when he drowned it.

When he said the squirrel had to go last week, I wrote that he was ruthless. It made me wonder, what is ruth? Is anyone ever ruthful? It turns out that the root of the word is rue, or regret. My husband is a man who rueth less.

ruthless

c.1327, from reuthe “pity, compassion” (c.1175), formed from reuwen “to rue” (see rue (v.)) on the model of true/truth, etc. Ruthful (c.1225) has fallen from use since late 17c. except as a deliberate archaism.

rue (v.)

“feel regret,” O.E. hreowan “make sorry, grieve” …

Living next to wilderness with no deer fence, no cat and a dog that’s trained not to chase wildlife, there has to be someone willing to take a stand. Glad it’s not me. And since I live in a world where I get to rue because he rueth less, I’m making a nice shrimp and snow pea Thai curry in thanks. Wanna keep that man strong.

Walking Onions

Published on June 30, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

My walking onions are about to take a hike.

These are also called tree onions, top-setting onions, or Egyptian onions. They’re originally from Canada, and became popular in kitchen gardens in the 1790s. Instead of making seeds, the flowers turn into little bulbils that drop off and form a new plant.

It’s kind of a standard-looking onion flower

but instead of making seeds, each little floret turns into a tiny bulb (this flower top has two more florets and the rest are already little bulbils.

These are mature bulbils, and if you look closely you can see new flowers forming at the top of some of the bulbils. When those top flowers form bulbils, the stalk is so overloaded that it bends to the ground and new onions will form where the little bulbs touch the earth. That’s the ‘walking’.

I saw this in a friend’s garden last year, and he gave me a few clusters of bulbils that I planted 15 miles away. In plant speed, that would be running really, really fast.

[bul·bil (bul′bil′) noun

a small bulb or fleshy bud on a flower stalk, as in some onions, or in the axil of a leaf, as in a tiger lily.]

Garden Peace

Published on June 25, 2008 in gardening. 1 Comment

Bob thought it’d be no problem to catch that squirrel. He went to grad school at Harvard, for Pete’s sake. He was sure that he could outwit a rodent. But he was wrong.

So he declared Peace. No chickenwire, no mesh, no traps

and of course the squirrel suddenly disappeared. Funny thing how declaring peace changes the atmosphere.

I sprinkled the lettuce bed with dried blood (thanks wkf) and the plants with cayenne, and if that doesn’t do the trick I’ll put it under strawberries for next year.

I integrated some vegetables into the flower beds this year. I put onions grown from seed amongst the daffodils. They were threads in May,

but not anymore. The daffodils are dying back and the onions, with the same kind of spiky foliage, are taking over. I have fifty onions tucked into the daffodils, and you can see they’re kind of cute–the crashed-over leaves are the daffodils, and the perky blue-green spears are the onions.

Here I have a half-dozen fennel tucked in amongst the coreopsis. Doesn’t look like much right now, but in August they’ll be four feet tall.

And my favorite plant of the moment is

patchouli. They’re annuals at this altitude, and I put in three. They’re getting racked by the sun but are setting their roots down nonetheless, and will be fine in a month. Sam said, Patchouli? I said, You know: Hippy perfume. According to Wikipedia, patchouli is in the mint family.

Mark Twain called brussels sprouts “a cabbage with a college education”. Would that make patchouli a mint that dropped out, turned on, and had a lot of casual affairs?

Garden wars

Published on June 19, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

We try to grow a year’s worth of potatoes, onions and tomatoes. These crops don’t excite the deer. Last year we just ran a string around the garden at deer-chest height, and that was enough to keep it safe.

But when Bob built raised beds, there’s suddenly room for beans, lettuces and spinach. And everybody loves lettuces, beans and spinach, so we fenced the garden. (It’s a black plastic mesh that doesn’t show up in photos, but it’s there).

A brown squirrel (which isn’t detered by fences, wire mesh or chicken wire) eats all the lettuces most every day. Bob’s trying to catch it with a Havahart trap. He would then heartlessly drown it in the ditch. He is ruthless.

But that’s not all. The beans were being ripped out of the ground and tossed aside. Who could be so mean? There were magpies in the Havahart two days in a row, and our neighbor clued us in: when beans first emerge, they look like worms.

The magpie plucks the worm, realizes that it’s a sprout, and tosses it aside… so two beds of beans under mesh.

And a coyote ate three chickens. I don’t mind fencing the vegetables, but I hate locking up the chickens.

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