Texas Urban Homestead - To Dress a Garden

Delicious Pumpkin Soup Recipe

2011-10-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

I was feeling in the mood for some pumpkin soup the other day, so I did what I usually do if I am not sure of a recipe - I googled it, then combined what I liked best about each recipe into a new one of my own. I was looking at Asian soup recipes and if I didn't have the ingredients they asked for (or didn't know what they were!) I improvised. The resulting soup was so good!

I put all these ingredients in my vitamix (I used the canned pumpkin and sweet potatoes just because I didn't have fresh) then blended. A vitamix will cook the ingredients right in the container, but if you do not have one, place all the ingredients in a sauce pan and blend after it is all heat through, or if you are using fresh pumpkin and sweet potatoes, you have to cook them through before you do any blending, obviously. See below for the best way to cook fresh pumpkin.

5 cups chicken broth
3 cups cubed and peeled pumpkin, or one 15 oz can pumpkin
2 sweet potatoes cubed and peeled, or one 15 oz can sweet potatoes, drained
1/2 of a 15 oz can coconut cream (Not coconut milk, get the one with the least amount of sugar)
2 Tablespoons coconut oil
2 Tablespoons minced fresh ginger - use fresh! You can get it in tubes if you want.
1/2 tsp dried onion powder (or saute some fresh onions - I think I used fresh?)
Dash of dried garlic powder
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
2 Tablespoons lime juice
1/8 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 cup of fresh basil (don't leave this out, it is awesome)

If you are making this in a pot, simmer until all the pumpkin and sweet potatoes are tender, then blend and serve. Makes about 8 cups of soup.

It is so delicious! This does not taste like pumpkin pie! The sweetness combined with the ginger, basil, lime, and spices - just great! Everybody loved this soup, even the doubters : ) Hope you enjoy!

Here's how to cook fresh pumpkin easily. Using a sharp, heavy knife, chopped the pumpkin into large chunks very carefully. Use a spoon to scrap out all the seeds and membrane. Steam the pumpkin chunks, with the rind still on, for about 30-40 minutes until it is very soft. Wait until the chunks are cool enough to handle, then use a spoon to scrape the cooked flesh away from the rinds. It's messy, but easier then trying to peel a fresh (hard) pumpkin. We cook all large squash varieties this way too.

What the Bird Said Early In the Year - By C.S. Lewis

2011-07-20T05:45:00.000-07:00

I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear
'This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

'Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

'This year time's nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

'This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

'This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

'Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.

Insect Control with the Water Wand

2011-06-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

This summer I have been trying out a new device to control spider mites, aphids and other garden pests.

It is a store bought water wand with a head that can rotate to various angles, that has been extended with an adaption. The extension in length allows you to comfortably stand upright as you spray the underside of the plants leaves with the water wand's head resting on the ground. The head is adjusted to spray upward at a nighty degree angle. This makes spraying the underside of the plants leaves so easy and really saves your back. I have used a water wand without the extension, but it is a struggle to get the wand at the right angle to spray the underside of the leaves, and you have to stoop over to get the wand up under the bottom leaves of the plant.

The extension is made up of three parts bought at the hardware store. The grey plastic pipe is a riser for an in-ground sprinkler system, 12 inches long and threaded at both ends. The two brass fittings are adapters that allow you to connect the plastic pipe (iron pipe thread) to the water wand and to your hose (hose thread). For the water wand end you need a male hose thread/female iron pipe thread adapter, and for the hose end you need a female iron pipe thread/female hose thread adapter. A worker in the store helped us pick out all the parts and my husband put the whole thing together in a few minutes, using plastic pipe thread between the parts to keep it from leaking.

The piece between the brass fitting and the hose is a snap fitting that I use on all my hoses to make connecting things a snap! : )

The extension pretty much doubles the cost of the water wand (about ten dollars for the three parts bought retail.)

The water wand in use. In this picture the head is not pointing straight up. With taller plants and the head adjusted to 90 degrees you can still reach upper leaves while standing comfortably as shown.

Now the point of all this spraying is that aphids and spider mites, which reside under the leaves of your plants, are easily knocked off with a spray of water and don't seem to be smart enough to crawl back on. Spraying every couple of weeks helps to keep these populations in check.

I have also used the water wand with a partner to pick off stink bugs and cucumber beetles. One person sprays a fine mist under the leaves which causes the stink bugs to run up to the top of the leaves. The other person (not me) has the job of catching and squashing the bugs.

Why I love Swiss Chard

2011-06-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here I am with a bucket of one of my favorite greens - Swiss Chard. This is one of two buckets I picked that day from around the edges (outer leaves) of four chard plants. Why do I love chard? For one thing you dont have to replant it every year since its a perennial. Every year it just gets bigger and better and I can pick on it almost all winter. Chard has very few pests and is heat and drought tolerant. You can use it in anything you would use spinach in (except fresh salads) and it is so good for you.

Here is the mountain of chard sitting on the washing machine. Look how big those leaves are! I used my super big laundry sink to clean it all, they my mom and Anna helped me strip and chop all the stems, chop up the green part, and cook about 6 batches of chard with bacon and apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper and garlic. We ate one batch that night for dinner with cream and Jack cheese added, and packed the rest in freezer bags for the freezer.

Swiss Chard cooks down a lot. Here is what was left of that mountain once it was cooked. Two very large bowls of stems and one large bowl of greens. Its enough chard for 6 meals though. Use any Southern greens recipe for Swiss chard, but don't forget the vinegar when cooking the stems or they will turn brown.

Nothing to do with Swiss Chard, but Claire finally got a picture of the critter that has been digging holes all over the back yard. A big Armadillo! He is hiding under my rain barrel in this picture. Since he eats grubs, I don't mind him too much.

Onion Subirrigation, Onions in clumps, Herbal Tea Garden, Companion Planting

2011-05-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

This year I tried using subirrigation with my onions. In this picture you can see a buried soda pop bottle. The bottle has small holes poked all over it, and when you fill it with water the water slowly leaks out to water the plant below the surface of the soil. This puts the water right where the plant needs it, saves water, and helps control weeds by keeping the soil surface dry. I think it worked quite well with the onions.

Another thing I was trying here was planting the onions in groups instead of the traditional rows. I had read on another blog that you could plant them in a clump and the onions would have no problem pushing themselves away from each other as they grew. I found that this worked very well, and it saved a lot of room. I planted my usual three bundles of onion sets in a fraction of the space they usually use up when strung out in long rows. My three onion set bundles were clustered around about 6 buried bottles with about 20 -25 onions around each bottle.

Onions from around one bottle.

All my onions drying before I put them in onion braids. By my estimation I have about my usual onion harvest, with about the same ratio of big and little onions. Admittedly I could do a better job at growing onions period, but I haven't yet done an extensive study of growing onions in a low maintenance garden.

Here is a picture of my herbal tea garden the family planted a few years ago using sheet mulching over the lawn to get it established. This year I changed the direction of the rows so that I have a circle within a circle. This gave me more planting space. The garden is coming along fine and I added quite a few plants this year - apple and pineapple mint, more lavender, cat nip (protected by the can to keep the cats from rolling on it), bee balm, anise hyssop, cat mint, rue and verbena.

I have been reading a lot about permiculture on-line and I realized I had made a mistake by separating my flowers and vegetables from each other - flowers in front yard and vegetables in back yard. I should have know better since my inspiration was my French Grandmother's pottage type garden. My herbal tea garden in the front was buzzing with bees and beneficial insects, but in the flower free vegetable garden there was nothing there for the beneficial insects to eat. I had read about companion planting before but thought it was some funky wives tale. I had an "Ahha" moment when I realized the purpose was to give beneficial insects places to hide and feed, so that they would lay eggs on your vegetable plants. Then their larvae will attack vegetable pests. I went right out and bought a bunch of my favorite flowers (what a great excuse!), and not so favorite marigolds, and some clover seed, and planted a row of this right down the middle of my vegetable garden.

I chose to plant a row of permanent perennials flowers (with the annual marigolds) to keep the work to a minium every year. Since I rotate my veggies around the garden every year I will not have to rotate and plant a bunch of annual flowers too. I can cut clover and other plants like comfrey when I get them and use them as mulches around the plants that would benefit from that companion. The flowers will attract beneficial insects and the marigolds will hopefully concentrate aphids away from my other plants. This will be an ongoing experiment.

This last not very good picture is of a blue mud dauber on my parsley blossom. A lot of these were buzzing around in the tea garden. It was windy and I could not get a very good shot. Anyway I had fun watching them and did a little research on them later. It turns out that the adults eat pollen and nectar, and the larvae eat the spiders that the adults stuff in with them when they make their mud daubers nests. The blue mud dauber particularly likes Black Widow spiders, so its all right by me. I call that a beneficial insect.

Spring Garden Update 2011

2011-04-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

We have been busy in the garden here at home switching the rows around so the vegetable garden is in 7 blocks of 8 feet by 16 feet each. I want to have less bare earth this year and more plants. We have also invested in more 12 and 10 inch clay pots to use in our subsurface irrigation. I was fortunate in coming across a grocery store that was phasing out its garden section and picked up some 12 inch pots for less than a quarter of their usual price.

Here is a close up of a 12 inch clay pot buried in the ground and filled with water. The hole is plugged with plumbers putty. The lid is a cheep plastic plate which usually has a rock on top to keep it from blowing away. The pots will slowly leak moisture to the surrounding garden soil. This is a very efficient way to water the plants planted near the pots. These pots use much less water even then drip irrigation. Water only goes to the plants around the pot, not all over the garden, and as the plants dry out the soil, they pull just the moisture they need from the pots. You can see a just sprouted squash plant next to the pot.

The pots are about 3 feet apart and I plant around them in a circle.

Here is one with a circle of broccoli, Swiss chard and chives around it. These were transplants. I gave them supplemental water for a few weeks to get them started, then they only receive water from the buried pot after that. Last year I cut my water use for gardening in half by using, rain barrels in the spring, subirrigation, and grey water in the summer.

Another benefit of using the buried pots is that, without water running across the soil surface less weed seeds sprout. Using this method in conjunction with heavy mulching, I hardly ever have to pull any weeds.

In the garden right now: broccoli, swiss chard, onions, potatoes, peas, lettuce mix, garlic, beets, tomatoes, many kinds of peppers, egg plant, many kinds of squash and cucumbers.

A pretty picture to end with.

September Update - Rain!

2010-09-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

This has been a very hot, dry summer. After a more than unusually cool and wet spring, a late planting of the garden, then early hot dry weather, this year the garden has barely hung on and not produced a whole lot. Now that our fall rain has finally started I am looking to the fall garden to make up for the loss. After no rain for a couple of months, we finally had rain last week - 6 torrential inches in a few hours time! The one road going East out of town was flooded and closed down which meant going around a long way either North or South to get out.

This ditch in front of our house is 20 feet across. The water is really moving fast. Imagine what probably happened to the lettuce seeds that I had just planted out back in the garden!

This pretty little vine is Malabar Spinach. It is an edible perennial. I am very interested in anything that is perennial and edible, and I just read somewhere that Swiss Chard was a perennial! I am very interested in finding out if this is true. Wouldn't it be great if you only had to plant a vegetable garden once?

New growth on roses.

Spider Lilies coming up. I hope to eventually have a lot of these.

Crepe Myrtle Still blooming.

Its a small thing, but, hey, anything that will bloom this time of year is all right with me.

Day lilies this year put on a poor show. I am hoping that a good fertilizing in October will help for next year. But wait did I say that these bloom in the FALL like clockwork every July 23rd? I love them.

Turk's cap in full bloom. We see a hummingbird in these every day. They are right out side the dining room window and I can see them from my seat.

Pyracantha, otherwise know as fire thorn. The great thing is that you have to actually be allergic to them for the thorns to bother you, and I'm not. I love anything that blooms in the fall and has berries! Robins love these. This shrub has gotten so over grown that a major pruning is due once the berries fall in the winter, something I don't look forward to as, even though I am not allergic, thorns are still thorns! How will I protect the trash men from these?

My one annual plant is responding well to the rain. I am usually too lazy to plant annuals - Thanks for Giving me this Gail!

Shot of the pitiful garden. You can see squash on the left, broccoli, swiss chard, rocket and kale left over from spring on the right, tomatoes and peppers looking worse for ware, Okra going strong.

Other side of the garden. Lima beans, peppers, tomatoes and okra and a cucumber plant that so far has given us one tiny cucumber.

One morning after the rain I found a bunch of prints on the ground around the overflow to the rain barrels. I found cat, dog (we don't own a dog) and strange large bird prints. I mean a really large one legged bird! I don't know what it was, but it looked like the cat chased the bird up the tree!? Weird. There was also evidence that some creature, probably a possum, was digging in the vegetable garden for grubs. It must have been an interesting night out there!

What I planted so far this month: butternut squash, deluxe baby lettuce mix, spinach, swiss chard. I am hoping that my tomatoes and peppers will begin producing again and that the broccoli will also produce something.

August Pictures

2010-09-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Black-eyed Susans and Purple Cone Flowers

You can see how much the grasshoppers have devoured the Irises.

A lonely Rose of Sharron.

This summer was so hot and dry that nothing really bloomed spectacularly.

Turks cap just beginning to bloom.

Hummingbirds love these.

Rain Lilies

There were at least ten of these cabbage butterflies feeding at the blooming oregano at once. I know I should "hate" these, but they have such a twinkly cheerful way of flitting around the garden. I took dozens of pictures but nothing did them credit.

More Cabbage butterflies.

I canned some pickled okra and banana peppers.

It was really easy because you packed the jars with all the ingredients and seasonings, then poured boiling vinegar over them. Then just seal and boil in a water bath for ten minutes. Simple and uncomplicated, plus you can do a few jars at a time as you get the produce from your garden. Each jar has either okra or banana peppers, or both, a clove of garlic, a hot chili pepper, salt and dill seed. We have already tried these and they are good.

In August I planted more Lima beans and more squash. So far no stink bugs.

Always Learning New Things

2010-07-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

Today I was alternately grossed out and charmed by nature and learned a few new things along the way too.

First the gross stuff. Well part of it is interesting. We have this humongous garden spider that has made a web near the side entrance door. Anna has named it Allie. We have been watching it get bigger and bigger. We have watched her capture and eat a June bug or two, and yesterday Anna fed her a great big Tomato Horn Worm.

This is Allie. She is an Argiope aurantia and is about 4 inches long right now.

This is a close up that shows the tiny male spider. If you look to the left of her abdomen between the back legs you see a blurry little beige spider. He is actually on the back side of the web behind her - smart guy since she could eat him. Anna named the male James. LOL Allie seems to tolerate James just fine and she even shared a caterpillar with him!

Ok, this is all very interesting, but now comes the gross part!

Anna put a Tomato Horn Worm caterpillar in Allie's web as a gift. The caterpillar was very large- about as big as Allie, and about as fat as my thumb. At first Allie ran away from this thing breaking her web. Then she decided it was prey and she attached a few lines to the caterpiller and drew her up to the center of her web. She did not spin all around her as she did with the June bugs. She only left her entangled enough to stay put.

Claire got this close up so that you can see Allie's fangs. They are the tiny black pointed things coming from her head. They are hinged and you usually can not see them at all because they are folded up underneath her head. They are not the little black and yellow legs on either side of her head. Those are palps (not considered legs.) Allie bit the caterpillar repeatedly in a pattern all down one side, then retired until it died.

Ok, That's not the end of the gross/interesting stuff or the learning. The next thing was really gross! Anna was cutting some Swiss Chard for me with some scissors and she accidentally cut a grasshopper in half. Out of the grasshopper, who had looked perfectly healthy, uncoiled several very, very, very long thin worms!

Of course we had to look it up and we found out that the worms are called hair worms. The hair worm is actually aquatic, so at a certain point they somehow drive the grasshopper crazy enough to jump in and drown in water. Then the worms emerge and mate in the water. I really didn't need to see or know all this, but here is the picture anyway!

It almost makes you feel sorry for the grasshopper, but since it is the pest of the month - I dont. Hope worms eat them all up, or at least the birds and spiders get a good meal off of them. Seems to me as soon as you figure out how to combat one type of pest you will never see it again and something new will come along to baffle you.

I hope you have stayed with me so far because now we will talk about some of God's more charming creatures. I dont have any pictures though so you will have to use your imagination. You may remember that we have a bird house right outside the dinning room window under the eves of the front porch. We have been watching a sparrow pair raise their young for the last couple of weeks. We sit at the table a lot to read, talk, crochet, eat, so we get to see the family a lot.

A few days ago the babies were getting so big that they were practically hanging out the entrance hole by their toes and shouting, "Hey mom, feed us!" One female in particular hogged the entrance and the parents had to fight her out of the way to get to the other two babies in the nest.

I knew they would fledge very soon and I sure wanted to be able to watch. Sure enough one day while I was gone at the grocery store, with everybody else sitting at the table, the birds somehow managed to fledge without anybody noticing! This is usually a very noisy affair! Oh well, I was disappointed, but since then we have been able to see the babies about the yard and they sure are funny! Instantly they went from sitting in a bird house to flying perfectly. Its amazing!

There are one male and two females. The little male is a momma's boy and keeps getting back in the bird house and begging! Or one of the females will sit on top of the bird house and stare all around it, peeking back behind it, as if to say, "So thats what this thing looked like all the time!" Or they will all get into a fight over who can get back inside the bird house. They are very charming and make me very glad for all the effort we have taken with the gardens. This place is full of birds and butterflies abound, the peach tree is so over laden with fruit we just had to pick half of it before it broke - it really feels like a tiny Eden sometimes.

Now the very last thing that happened in this eventful day was learning something new about how to cook Swiss Chard. My mother is staying with us and she grew up in France. When we were fixing the Swiss Chard she told me that her family used to make a dish with the Swiss Chard stems. I had always just thrown mine in the compost pile. How wasteful! Well I looked up a good recipe for the stems using olive oil and parmesan cheese which I will share in the next post. The funny thing about the Swiss Chard is that Mom said she didn't remember them using the green part at all! Can you imagine if in France they were throwing away the leaves and eating the stems, and here in America we were doing the reverse! Surely not.

The Bugs Bite Back, Weeds held in Check

2010-06-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

This year has been a real battle against bugs.

Last year I had a battle with cucumber beetles. They devastated squash and cucumber seedlings and spread disease in the garden. I made some changes to a few things and so far this year I have seen very few cucumber beetles.

First of all I covered all of my seedlings with fine row covers. This protected all my crops form cucumber beetles as well as from all kinds of caterpillars, and it really reduced aphid problems. Covers can be left on indefinitely for plants that don't need to be pollinated. The only thing I don't like about them is that it is more trouble to check your plants to see how they are doing. I like to check things everyday. To get around that I want to make some kind of hoop system that can be lifted up easily for checking plants.

My squash grew like gang busters under the row covers and did fine for a while after I uncovered them for pollination. Unfortunately last week I discovered hundreds of stink bus on my squash plants! These bugs can quickly kill a plant as tender as squash. I wasted lots of time trying to find some organic way to kill them (being a little squeamish about touching the stinky things) but nothing worked. Finally we resorted to hand picking and squashing the bugs (with gloves on.) The bugs have managed to kill two thirds of my squash plants and so far we have had no harvest.
: (

This plot shows all that is left of once tall healthy, lush squash plants.

The good news is that our combination subterranean watering and mulching has kept weeding down to a minimum. Whereas before I spent a great deal of time weeding, now I only pull a few weeds here and there as I go about other garden chores. By applying water lower down to the roots of the plants and keeping the soil surface dry, weed seeds do not sprout. A few spots even that have no mulch are weed free.

This picture shows a buried coke bottle next to a lemon balm plant. The bottle has small slits cut in it. I fill the bottle either with collected rain/or laundry water using a watering can, or I use the adapter shown hooked up the a garden hose. The hose can be hooked up to a rain barrel or the city water if necessary. You can see the snap fittings I use on all my hoses. This saves a lot of time moving the hoses around from place to place.

In addition to bottles I also bury porous clay pots which slowly seep water to the surrounding plants. This one pot watered all these surrounding plants. I still have swiss chard growing next to this pot even though the temperature has been in the hundreds!

Part of the garden showing lima beans, okra, swiss chard, carrots. Tomatoes are on the right out of the picture. Garry has access to lots of used cardboard boxes at his work and he brings them home for me to use as mulch in the garden. The back half is waiting to be used in the fall, so it is completely covered with cardboard to keep down weeds.

Tomatoes. The bottoms show the fight with spider mites, but the tops are still growing. As soon as I finish harvesting these I will pull them and replant for fall.

One more bug story. We have some very persistent wasps who have been trying to build a nest right on the lintel of our front door. We have knocked their nest down four times. We DO knock the nests down, but they always seem to be back again by the time the kids music teacher shows up each week. I am sure he is getting leery of our front door!

Anyway I was in the vegetable garden the other day and I got to watch two wasps hunting for bugs in the holey and spent broccoli patch. One wasp pounced on something on a broccoli leaf. I saw something fall to the ground and watched the wasp land on the ground and zoom around looking for his bug. Wasp chew up bugs and feed them to their larvae. The adult wasps feed on a nectar the larvae exude. They will even steal nectar from other wasps nests! The wasp in the picture above is very alert and warning me not to go near the two larvae you can see just under her legs.

It was very interesting watching these wasps hunt. Not all bugs are bad, even ones that sting. I welcome wasps in the environs, just not on my front door!

May Update

2010-06-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

I see that I am very behind with my posts. This post will show what we were up to in May. The early spring flowers are gone, but now my day lilies are blooming.

Orange Day Lilies

Yellow Day Lilies

Plum Day lily

Gulf Coast Penstemon amongst the Louisiana Iris. This lovely little plant will rebloom for a long time if you cut the dead flowers.

Purple Coneflowers starting up.

Pomegranate Blossoms

Blackberry bush. I am buying three more of these in the Fall.

Figs are finally producing and the peach tree is also doing well so far this year.

The vegetable garden has not done so well so far do to the wet cold Spring weather, but we did get onions and garlic out in May along with greens and a little broccoli, cabbage and brussel sprouts.

A wheelbarrow full of onions.

Onion Braids in Pantry. I braid these with a string in one of the leaf bundles for strength. then I use the string to tie off the top and hang up the braid. This many onions wont last long around here.

Garlic harvest. This is my first year to grow garlic. It was super easy and fun to see a few bulbs multiply into many.

Some things harvested from the herbal tea garden. In the bowl chamomile, lavender, and borage blossoms. In front of the bowl chocolate mint and pineapple mint, beside the bowl is stevia, and on the end is some dill which a child accidentally "weeded". The dill made a delicious tarter sauce and the herbs made a lovely tea.

A funny thing about the tarter sauce, Claire wouldn't eat it because she said she did not want her fish to taste like pickles!

How to Train a Spider

2010-05-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have always had the utmost respect for spiders. My Dad taught me that it was unlucky to kill spiders and as a kid I really believed it. I once had a dream that a legion of spiders were crawling up onto my bed while I slept, to get their revenge for a poor brother of theirs that I had killed - although I hadn't! Honestly!

I don't believe in lucky any more but I have kept my respect of spiders, and we never kill them at our house. So what do you do with a spider that makes a huge web right over your front door every night for instance? What I do is train the spider to make its web somewhere else.

Most of the spiders around here that put up huge face-whacking webs do so in the evening. You can watch them spinning if you go outside at dusk. They leave the webs up all night, then as soon as the sun touches the web in the morning they begin tearing their own web up. They neatly roll the whole thing up in a flash and retreat up one of the highest reaching anchor threads to a safe place to spend the day. They hide out in this safe place all day and start the process over again the next evening. Armed with this knowledge you can see why most people never get face-whacked with spider webs in their own yards. They are too lazy to get up at the proper time to do serious gardening!

If you are not one of these lazy persons, you may be asking me, "Florence, How can I train my spiders like you do? I love my spiders and I want them to eat all the bugs. Help me to save my spiders and not get face whacked!"

Training spiders is really very easy because spiders are pretty smart. If given the choice they really do prefer not to be in your face -the hardest part is locating the invisible webs with your eyes and not your head. In the spring when I am doing this training process I usually figure out pretty quick, the hard way, where all the spiders have decided to build their webs. After I have recovered from the terrible fright of spiders in my face, the next day I will begin the training process.

So usually I have one spider blocking every place I want to go early in the morning - across the garage door, over the paths, on the porches, between bushes and trees in places where I want to walk..... Early in the morning I carefully locate each web containing its spider. Using a long stick, or your hand if you are not squeamish, find the long anchor threads going down to the ground. Carefully break this thread and watch the web float up higher in the air. If the spider does not react and run up his escape upper anchor thread, continue breaking anchors until he does. Now the spider knows, "Hummm, so a big giant creature is likely to break my web if I make it here."

You only have to do this a few days in a row to train the spider. Usually all he will do is make the web much higher up in the air. The web that was across your path will now be way up in the air over the path. The anchor threads will also be way up there, maybe going between two trees, and you wont even experience face-whacking from those. If the spider cant make his web up higher he will usually go someplace else entirely, and voila! Your spider is now trained!

(I went inside to get my camera to take my very own picture of a spider web for this blog, but when I got back outside the spider had magically rolled up its web, and it was gone! So the photo above is from "the web." Pun Intended)

Spring Pictures

2010-04-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Grape Hyacinths and Daffodils

Peach Blossoms

Look at the shape of this snow on the pots!

Bumblebee on Red Bud Blossom

Baby Spirea bush. I love the arching shape of these bushes.

Ajuga with fountain

Irises

Same shot as the header only a year later.

Mariposa Skies

A Room With a View

2010-04-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

This is currently the view from the window right by my computer desk. My desk looks out over a short walk that goes from the side door to the back yard gate. It is a small area but I have planted things here that give me three seasons of bloom and a nice view whenever I am at my desk. Even in winter the Irises, walk, fence and gate look nice.

One landscaping principle that I am trying to follow is to make your garden as pretty when viewed from inside the house as it is when viewed from the street. Make something interesting and pleasing to look at from every window you spend a good length of time looking out of. Site your bird feeder where you can see it out the window from your place at the dining room table, and you wont miss seeing your bird friends visit.

I have a pretty view of the front garden from my favorite reading chair in the living room. Our bird feeder can be seen from one dining room window and also from the window over the kitchen sink. The humming bird feeder is right outside the other dining room window, close enough for plenty of opportunities to see the hummingbirds that visit.

Nothing lifts my spirits like seeing the beauty of a flower. So my final advice is to put a pot of pretty flowers right outside the door you go in and out of the most. In the summer try a big pot of petunias and in the winter you can have a pot of pansies. That way whenever you go out about your business your flowers will give you something to smile about.

Buzzzzz

2010-04-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

I recently had some fun watching the interactions of some Bumblebees and Honey bees in my two Red Bud trees. In the smaller tree the Honey bees appeared to be trying to chase off, unsuccessfully, the larger Bumblebees. In the larger tree the bees just ignored each other.

Since I took these pictures with a small point and shoot digital camera I had to get within inches of the bees to get the pictures. I knew they would just ignore me, but it made me jumpy anyway.

I liked this picture because it shows the veins in the wing.

Here is one flying.

The Bumblebees were easier to photograph than honey bees because they sit still a little longer. I seem to have a lot of bumblebees year round, which is something I am grateful for. Bumblebees are great pollinators - better than honey bees.

The last picture is one that Claire took of her fairy doll sitting in a fountain. I thought the water looked fantastic.

All these pictures look great blown up large. You can really see details on the bees and the water looks cool.

Spring Birdie Story

2010-03-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

This morning I was inspired to take another picture of this lovely pair - the Texas Red Bud and the white Daffodils - because they looked even prettier than a few days ago. The morning sun was making everything sparkle and shine so beautifully. I really wanted to capture the moment, but alas I am a terrible photographer. I point and click and hope for the best. Nothing ever looks as beautiful in the photograph as it did in my eyes.

Anyway, I took the picture, and was hoping for the best, when in flew a little Bedwrick's Wren wondering why I was standing so close to his birdhouse. I never expected birds to nest in these birdhouses. They are just for decoration really, they are too close to the house and the cats, but, for reasons known only to Wrens, the Wren chose the old dilapidate birdhouse closest to the Red Bud. We had provided a new certified Wren house (they have a tiny opening that keeps out Sparrows) in another, safer area of the yard, but the Wren has nested for four years now in the birdhouse that a squirrel chewed a very large opening in. The entrance hole is big enough to put your entire fist in. The cats could easily get these birds, especially as the Wren makes such a conspicuous production about protecting his nest, but somehow they survive. I have the privilege of watching this spectacle from the window you see in the picture. My desk sits right behind it.

Meanwhile, looking out the opposite window from the dining room, I see that the sparrows have been driven crazy trying to get into the wren house! It has stayed empty all this time, but every year a male sparrow will chose it and vainly sit calling out for a love to come inspect his chosen home. The sparrows cant get inside. The birdhouse is wedged up into a corner near the roof of the porch, so there is a little bitty space too small for a sparrow to stand up in on top of it and a little bitty space in the corner behind it.

The male sits outside our dining room window calling and calling. The females come and look. They try to get in and can't. They try out the little bitty space on top, and with difficulty wedge themselves behind it. They reject it. This is our dining room dinner hour drama.

Well, I thought to myself recently, "You know I am tired of watching all this disappointment. I am sort of anti English Sparrow, but I can't take this poor male sparrow's frustration any longer. Wouldn't it be better for some bird to use the house if the Wrens wont? It would be kinda fun to watch, even if it is just sparrows." So, Garry got out the hole saw and sawed a bigger hole in the Wren (now sparrow) house, and the hapless male sparrow now has a lady love to share his home with. (It is fun to watch too.)

Back to the Wren that flew into my picture. Of course I panicked! I took a very crooked picture where the Wren is all blurry. He is hopping all over the Red Bud giving me a look. I am franticly fumbling with the camera, chanting ZOOM ZOOM dumb camera! but I did manage to get a picture of him even if it isn't the best. Enjoy!

First Spring Flowers

2010-03-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Daffodils

Dandy Lions are the first flowers bees find in the spring and are very important for that reason. The low growing pretty ones like this I like to leave, but I chop the tall ugly purple ones.

Peach blossoms

Front walk. The purple flowers are grape hyacinth. I bought 50 bulbs wholesale and they have really filled in.

White daffodils under a baby Red-bud Tree. This is the tree that I kept having to save from the wood ants last summer.

Wild grape hyacinths under the peach tree in the front yard.

I planted one hundred day lilies and one hundred daffodils that I bought wholesale under the two Red Oak trees. The day lilies are doing great, but only 40 daffodils came up and bloomed this year. The daffodils come up first and bloom, then as their foliage dies they are hidden by the day lilies as they grow. The idea works well, but I did not buy the right kind of daffodils for Texas.

Grandmother's Iris blooming under another Red Bud tree. This is always the first iris to bloom. The rest of the flower bed looks pretty bare, but lots of things are sprouting up and soon it will be full.

Red Bud Blooms

First Garden Plantings

2010-03-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

I finally got to get out in the garden last Thursday and get some planting done. Anna and Claire helped me plant all the onion sets, three packs of yellow onions and one pack of red onions, in the bed I had prepared earlier.

I am changing the garden from long rows to 8' by 4' blocks with narrow rows in between, so it has been necessary to move some dirt around. Also I am switching over from soaker hoses to subterranean waters, so that necessitated burying a few more milk cartons down the centers of the 8 x 4 beds. I had prepared two such beds for the onions, and one more bed was needed to plant all the transplants I had raised in the kitchen. In this third bed we planted green cabbage, Chinese cabbage, swiss chard, and some lettuce.

Transplants in the forground before row cover was added. Onions in the back ground. Everything is so tiny you can hardly see it.

The transplants with stems (the cabbage and swiss chard) got a treatment to protect them from cut worms. Small half inch to an inch sections of drinking straws were slit lengthwise and placed over the stems to keep hungry gnawers (cut worms and pill bugs) from decimating my transplants. Next we sprinkled composted cow manure over the onion's and transplant's beds. The tender transplants were then covered with a row cover to protect them as they transition to garden conditions and to keep other pests off. I planned this bed to have nonflowering plants in it, so the row cover can stay on all season. Things that flower and need to be pollenated have to be uncovered when they start flowering to let the pollenators have access to the flowers.

I still need to buy some broccoli transplants since my kitchen set up was not big enough to allow me to grow all the transplants I need. And there are planty of things which the rain has given me a late start on that I can still plant, such as carrots and spinach and other greens.

Just as a note on the leaf mulch we had applied in the fall. The mulch did a great job of supressing the rambuncious winter weeds we usually get. Usually I have to weed everthing before I can get to planting, but this time I just raked the leaves aside into my planned paths for use as mulch around my plantings as needed later. The ground underneath looked luscious.

I really was grateful to Anna and Claire for doing a lot of the hard work for me as my arthritus was acting up. Its great to have the help of strong young people.

Back in the Garden

2010-02-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

Today I was back in the garden again for the first time in a long time. This February has been the coldest and wettest that I can remember. We had a record 10 inches of snow while John was here on leave (of course.) Usually we have a lovely indian summer in February, but this time I was stuck indoors until now. Finally some pretty weather, but alas the garden is too wet to do any digging. I must get my onion transplants in!

Here is Garry, John and Claire with the snowman they made. For comparison purposes, Garry is 6'3''.

What I did today was rake back the leaf mulch from the area where I intend to plant the onions and I put an additional 6 subterranean waters (aka milk cartons) in the ground. I am going to plant my onions in large blocks this time, instead of long rows, in an attempt to save space.

I had such a good time being outdoors and looking over the garden. I picked a whole colander full of Brussels Sprouts! I also learned that it was not a good idea to cover the sprouts with a row cover. The B. sprouts that I left uncovered where fine, in-spite of the snows and freezing weather, but the ones I had covered with a row cover were full of aphids. They hadn't hurt the plants any and washed right off the sprouts though. My mustard greens are still going strong and my garlic looks good.

Brussels Sprouts

Here is a picture of the transplants I am growing for the garden. The set up is on the kitchen table and you can still see we have a few pumpkins left. I am growing tomatoes, 3 kinds of peppers, lettuce, two kinds of cabbage, and swiss chard. I found that I had no broccoli seed when I started this, but then remembered that I had a bag of seeds for making broccoli sprouts (for eating in the salad) so I only have one broccoli plant! I am only growing a few transplants because of space limitations, but this will give me a head start on the garden. When I plant these transplants, I will also plant seeds for a later harvest.

As soon as the garden dries a bit I can transplant the cabbage, lettuce and swiss chard.

Another indoor gardening activity has been to grow sprouts for our salads. I bought a little sprouter and some seeds for a mixture of sprouts and have had great success with this. Everyone loves the sprouts on a variety of dishes.

Winter Garden Work, Winter Plans

2010-01-10T07:27:00.001-08:00

This has been a very interesting winter so far weather wise. It has snowed three times already and one day of snow was on Christmas Eve. Thus this area had its first white Christmas since weather records have been kept! We usually do not have snow or freezing weather until January, but we get our first frost in November which kills out the summer garden. I have always taken this hard when our first frosts are followed by such nice weather afterwards. Now that I am learning how to grow cool weather crops more successfully I am hoping to fill this void time with lots of new vegetable experience - like growing cabbage for the first time this last year. One way I plan to extend the season is plant these cold whether crops under a row cover.

I have actually still been working in the garden, although I am only now getting around to writing about it, and I actually picked some small broccoli off-shoots and mustard greens in the beginning of January! Currently the Brussels's sprouts are snugged down under an old blanket due to our "extended" (for us) nights of freezing weather this past week. I need to replace the blanket with a good row cover so that I do not have to keep taking the blanket on and off. Surprisingly enough the mustard greens are still going strong even though they were uncovered and the temperature was in the teens.

The last bit of garden work I am doing is finishing the clean up of the old summer garden, and raking all the leaves from the property and piling them on the garden. That way I will not have to weed so much and hopefully the leaves will contribute to the build up of the soil. Everybody is supposed to do three loads a day and so far we are staying ahead of the weeds.

Here is the winter Garden.

If you remember the three dark green pumpkins I brought inside after the first freeze, well here they are on my breakfast table, all nice and orange now. We put them outside only for a few days when the weather was nice, and they turned orange with only the light that came in the kitchen window.

My plans for the winter are to continue to cover up the garden with leaf mulch to keep down weeds, and to start some experiments with gardening indoors and seed starting indoors.

I bought a tabletop florescent plant light from Gardens Alive and am setting it up today. I am hoping to grow all my own garden transplants and see what else edible I can grow indoors this winter - herbs and lettuce come to mind. Believe it or not now is the time to start some vegetable plants indoors!

Another thing I am going to try for indoor gardening is to grow some sprouts. I have done this before and it worked out fine if you can remember your sprouts every day.

I'll leave you with a picture I took of a little Inca Dove, my favorite doves, who is looking out over my garden. A little flock of them sits in the sun in the garden everyday. I am greeted by the surprise of them all flying off all at once each time I walk to the garden, because they are so perfectly camouflaged sitting on the ground.

12 Frozen Cabbages

2009-12-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

Well I played chicken a little too long with winter and had to run outside Wednesday night and bring 12 frozen cabbages inside. The big outer leaves were stiff and unbending, and very cold to hold in our bare hands. The cabbages covered up one side of my kitchen counter completely.

It was late and no time to do anything with them then. I just hoped that when they defrosted they would be fine on the inside and that I would be able to get some use out of them. The next morning I checked on the cabbages and they looked perfectly normal. No burned or wilted leaves. After school all three of us women got to work and started making cabbage rolls. We had never made these before and it was quite a bit of work, but fun.

There are tons of recipes for these on the net and we just picked one that we liked. We used the big outer green cabbage leaves to line the bottom of the pan. The big but light green leaves were used to roll up a meat and vegetable mixture (after blanching them in boiling water to make them pliable) and the tomato sauce was made from my stash of ripening garden tomatoes. I used my vitamix so I did not have to peel all those tomatoes, just threw them in and blended with the spices. The tomato sauce was poured on top of the bundles and the whole thing was topped off by more big outer cabbage leaves.

The most work of this whole affair was cleaning and preparing the cabbage leaves for the dish. We had to clean off dirt, fallen tree leaves, moths and other dead bugs, plus a few live caterpillars. The kitchen was such a mess afterwards! We were left with a big pile of unusable huge outer leaves (that felt like a big waste throwing those in the compost) and twelve little round inner cabbages, about 5 lbs worth, (and water and dirt everywhere!) At least I can report that the dish was a success, yummy, and lasted us for three meals.

The next day we were gone to band until the late afternoon when we tackled the rest of the cabbage. We had decided to make homemade sauerkraut. This time only Anna helped me. We chopped and chopped and chopped until I got tired and got out my kitchen-aid attachment that would shred the cabbage. We shredded cabbage and carrots and an apple, we pounded and pounded, added spices and packed it all in a big sun-tea jar. We added whey from yogurt to start the fermentation process, and set the jar on our counter to start working. Now I need to go to the store to get some wide mouth jars to pack the sauerkraut in for storage. I stupidly got rid of mine last time we moved. I will write another post soon all about using lactic acid fermentation as a way of food preservation at a later date.

Sauerkraut in gallon jar. The cup on top is a weight to hold down the cabbage under the juice. Its hard to believe that 5 lbs of cabbage only makes half a gallon of kraut. In front are some pumpkin muffins.

I checked the garden today and the broccoli and brussels sprouts are still doing fine despite the freezing weather. I even have another broccoli to harvest and a few broccoli side sprouts coming along. The brussels sprouts are still only as big as my pinky fingernail so I dont know if we will get any of those before it gets really cold. The mustard is just fine. Next thing on the schedule is garden clean up and processing 4 more pumpkins ( I have to get them out of my kitchen before the big church Christmas party at my house this Sunday.)

First Snow

2009-12-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

Wednesday we woke up to a surprising site - big puffy flakes of snow falling from the sky! No snow or freeze had been predicted so no one was expecting this. It snows so infrequently here - maybe once or twice a year, usually in January. Our first freeze was two weeks late, then snow. What next? Of course it did not stick to the streets and by late afternoon it turned to rain and the snow was all gone. Here are a few pictures of the garden. Anna took all these pictures for me.

Looking over the side fence at the vegetable garden.

Lantana and iris in the snow.

Frozen Vegetable Garden

Cute Cabbage in the snow.

Frozen Okra flower.

Fall colored leaves.

Green Pumpkin Recipe, Last Harvest Chicken Soup

2009-12-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

Since we have had a few frosts that mainly affected the tender pumpkins and squashes, I have chickened out and picked all the tender vegetables from the garden. This time of year you truly play a game of chicken with the last tender tomatoes and peppers and the first freeze. When will it be? Do I want all those green tomatoes in my house or can I wait a bit longer and let some of them ripen? If you wait too long and get caught by a freeze you will lose them all. (Not really because you can go ahead and make green tomato relish right away. The green tomatoes just wont keep and ripen if they have been touched with freezing, they will quickly rot in your house, so you really do want to get them before freezing weather.) Other vegetables like cabbage and broccoli can be left in the garden here in North Texas for a good while longer as our freezes usually only dip a few degrees below 32 over night.

The tomatoes green and red, the peppers, cucumbers and squashes are all safely in my house now waiting for me to decide what to do with them. Most of the broccoli has been picked and eaten. The cabbages, Brussels sprouts, carrots and mustard greens will be fine in the garden for now, but what about all those green unripened pumpkins sitting out there on their shriveled vines?

I wasn't sure of you could eat a green pumpkin so I did some research on line. I found out two things. The light green pumpkins that still had soft skin could be eaten just like any other squash. The dark green pumpkins with hard skins were fully mature and would turn orange if they got enough sun. One site suggested that you pick the green pumpkins and put them in a sunny dry place, such as a porch, while another site said you could leave them in the garden as long as it didn't freeze hard. Since that end of the garden tends to be wet I decided to pick my green pumpkins. Of course since last night was supposed to be the first freeze I had to bring them inside for the night - I am over run!

Green Pumpkin Stir-fry
Soft skinned small green pumpkins cut up. Do not skin or seed.
Several onions cut up in rings.
butter
Olive oil
Cinnamon
Salt and pepper

Add olive oil, butter and onions to a large frying pan. Cook on medium heat stirring frequently until onions are translucent. Add the cut up green pumpkin and spices. Cook stirring frequently until pumpkin is tender.

Last Harvest Chicken soup

Its really hard to go wrong with soup. You dont really need a recipe - just start with good broth and add whatever you have on hand.

I started with a whole chicken and boiled it up in a big pot. We had half the chicken for one dinner, then the pot was put in the fridge overnight. Next day the solidified fat was removed from the top of the pot and the rest of the chicken was de-boned. This gave about half a pot full of good broth and chicken. To that was added the last butternut squash picked from the garden along with several of the last green peppers. This was allowed to simmer until the squash was getting soft. I added water if the soup was reducing too much. Next I added some of the last broccoli, about four or five tomatoes rescued before the frost (skinned by poking them with a fork and dipping them in the boiling soup for 10 seconds. The skin comes right off), and a good two handfuls of chopped mustard greens. I added salt and pepper and Cumin. This was served as soon as the broccoli and mustard greens were soft. It was delicious.

November update Vegetables

2009-11-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

Garden Mid November. Since this picture we have had a slight frost which only cut the pumpkins back a little and didn't hurt anything else.

Cabbage
First time for growing cabbage. It looks like they are starting to form heads. We plan to try and make sour kraut with these. Unlike some people we really love cabbage. We will eat it just steamed with a little yogurt and salt added. I did have some worms but a little Safer Caterpillar Killer (which is organic) killed them all.

Mustard
First time I have grown mustard. I think tonight I will try to make some fried mustard greens with bacon!

Bell Peppers
I have just picked a bunch of bell peppers. Now I have to decide if I want to freeze them or figure out something to cook them in. I usually just eat bell peppers in salads, but these wont last that long. I could make a peck of pickled peppers I guess.

Green Tomatoes
Some of the tomatoes are starting to ripen. I have to figure out what to do with them all. I love to just eat these raw sprinkled with a little salt.

Tomatoes are very tricky in the fall, because if you let them get the slightest bit frozen they will rot and not ripen. You have to really keep an eye on the weather and bring them all in green if freezing is forecasted. They will ripen on their own sitting on the counter. I almost always have to bring them in green, which is really aggravating, because after the first frost we can have weeks of great frost free weather - too bad you can't put them back on the vine!

Broccoli
I've got lots of broccoli in the fall garden. Its so fun to pick your own.

Baby Pumpkin. The pumpkins were hit by a slight frost we had a while back, but they didn't die completely. I have quite a few baby pumpkins still on the vine, but I am not sure how they will do now. So far we have harvested 4 10-15 lb pumpkins and I hope we get a few more.

Garlic coming up.
This is my first time to plant garlic. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Cucumber
I made sure I planted a sweet, non-bitter cucumber for the fall garden (Cucumber Sweet Slice hybrid from Park Seeds) as the bitter kind attracts cucumber beetles (and nobody likes bitter anyway!) I planted them under a row cover to keep off the beetles that were already out there until they were big and ready to flower, then I uncovered them to allow pollination. This strategy worked great and I hardly have any beetles in the fall garden, or any bad bugs compared to the late spring garden. I will use this strategy in the spring with all the vegetables in the melon family, because cucumber beetles killed every single one of my cantaloupe plants this year. These cucumbers taste really good too.

Garter Snake- I don't grow these, (though it seems like it.)
I run into one of these frequently in my garden. I thought they would be eating insects, but I looked it up and they eat what other snakes eat - rodents, lizards, snails, frogs, birds, spiders, worms and fish. These guys are pretty small, that's a soaker hose it is next too, so what could they be eating in my garden? I hope it is snails and not frogs! I love all my frogs!

Early to Middle November Update - Flowers First

2009-11-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Blackeyed Susan vine climbing on the rose instead of the trellis. Lantana.

I'm a little late with November pictures but here they are finally. I am breaking this into two posts because I have a lot of pictures; one for flowers and one for vegetables.

My aim with flower gardening has always been to have something blooming every month of the year possible. Toward that aim I did a lot of research on what blooms when here in North Texas, and when to plant each flower to get the best bloom in its season. Maybe I will write a post about that later, even though it is pretty specific to this area, a lot of it can be extrapolated to different areas.

I have been pretty successful in getting something blooming at all times even if it is a lone flower in the landscape for that week/month, but I would really like to improve in the overall fullness of my garden. I love pictures of gardens that are chock full of greenery. For that I need more bushes and evergreen plants, which I can't really afford right now (I do most everything from seed for affordability) but I have plans for that later.

Anyway as I dislike winter as a gardener I have focused a lot on fall blooming plants in order to lift my spirits as a see the dreaded bleakness of winter approaching. Besides mums, there are asters, fall blooming crocus, fall blooming lilies, re-blooming roses and irises, wildflowers and herbs. I let herbs that I have been keeping from flowering set seeds now if they are the self-seeding kind.

I am particularly proud of these asters. For some reason they are very hard to get started here. They are available for planting at a particularly hot and dry time of the year. I have killed about four of these, but this one took off with daily watering for about a month after I planted it. It is four years old and very large. This picture is a little late. Earlier it was covered in so many blooms you couldn't see the foliage.

Three different mums. I dont like the typical "fall" colors, muddy brown/yellow/oranges. I go for more clear yellows, purples, and reds.

This is a wildflower I think is called a straw flower. This flower blooms all year round, even in winter! It is not fully open here. It has a brown center and does not look like a dandelion when it is open. Very pretty and welcome in winter time.

Crab spider and re-blooming pink Knockout rose.

Red Knockout rose and morning glory.

Red knockout roses and bluebird house. Vegetable garden is behind the fence.

My first ever Florence Fennel bulb!

German Chamomile flowers.

Pretty blue borage flowers. See the Bee looking at us!

A somewhat blurry picture of a bee on basil flowers. The basil and the borage have been full of bees every day. Its really hard to get a picture of these fast moving guys! I am hoping that the basil and borage will self seed this year so I dont have to replant next year.

Thats it for flowers and herbs. Next post will be about vegetables.

Pumpkin Quiche

2009-11-02T18:27:00.000-08:00

I am still on a quest for pumpkin recipes to use our fresh garden pumpkin in. I combined several recipes to make a pumpkin quiche. Since we are gluten free we made ours crustless, but you can make yours in a crust if you like.

Pumpkin Quiche

One Onion, chopped
3 cups fresh cooked pumpkin (or one can) drained well
4 oz cream cheese
1 cup cheddar cheese, grated
1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
6 eggs
Salt and pepper to taste

Place all ingredients in a blender and blend on high for one minute. Pour into a greased quiche dish and bake at 375 for 35 to 45 minutes until set and golden.

It was very good.

Processing Pumpkins, Pumpkin soup, Pumpkin Seeds

2009-10-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

We processed our first garden pumpkin this week. It was 12.5 pounds and from it we got a big batch of pumpkin soup, 4 quarts of pulp for the freezer, and a couple of cups of pumpkin seeds.

Our first pumpkin.

The pumpkin was pretty easy to cut up and get ready for cooking. I cut the pumpkin up in wedges with a butcher knife, and carefully scraped away the stringy pulp that contain the seeds. Its easiest to remove the seeds if you dont jumble this pulp up as you remove it. The seeds come out easier and are cleaner.

Pumpkin subterrania

Next we roasted the pumpkin in a turkey roaster in a 375 degree oven for an hour and a half.

This looks like a lot of pumpkin, but since it is mostly water it cooks down a lot. We got about 5 quarts of pulp.

Once the pumpkin cooled we scraped it off of the skin in chunks. Some we made into soup, the recipe will be below, and some went into the freezer.

The seeds and seed pulp.

The seeds we mixed with a tablespoon of butter, a pinch of salt, and roasted them on a oiled cooke sheet at 300 degrees for half an hour. Keep an eye on them and stir occasionally. When they start to brown, they are done.

Pumpkin Coconut Soup

This is adapted from the vita-mix recipe book.

2 Cups Chicken broth

1/2 cup unsweetened coconut milk

3 cups fresh pumpkin cooked

1 cup diced onion sauteed until soft

3 garlic cloves sauteed with onion

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 tsp nutmeg

salt and pepper

Place all in a blender and puree until smooth. Heat and serve. Its delicious!

Rain Rain Go Away

2009-10-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

Lots of rain is lovely, but too much rain and too many gray sunless days are beginning to worry me. We have had almost 4 inches of rain in the last two weeks, and every day has been cool, cloudy and drizzly. The sun has barely made an appearance during this time and everything is soggy, soggy, soggy. What I am worried about are mold, mildew and all kinds of fungus in the garden. (Not to mention that I am allergic to all this and have had a headache for over a week.)

Things seem OK in the garden. We are starting to get tomatoes and we picked our first pumpkin!

This pumpkin actually broke off when we were looking at it in the garden, thus it got "picked." It is ready though and weighs 12.5 pounds! It is our smallest one.

Here is a long view of the garden.

Here is a closer view showing the broccoli.

The blooms in the pumpkin patch are bigger than my hand.

Here is the thing I have been fearing. Some sort of weird fungus. You can see that it is growing on the wood chip mulch, but it is also growing right up the leaf of this cabbage. Anna is studying biology this year and we had fun trying to figure out what this is. It is some kind of parasitic sporangiophore, but what exactly we dont know.

Here is a closer view. Black balls with yellow stalks. Cool looking, but now I am afraid for the whole pumpkin patch. I have found this on leaves and stems in the pumpkin patch and even growing on a soaker hose! It would be useless to spray anything in this weather.

Here is some growing on a baby acorn squash and the stem and leaf. Also the hose! Maybe this is the revenge of the tree we cut down and used as woodchips! I'll have to figure out what to do , if anything, and post it here.

Photos late September

2009-09-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here are a few photos from late September. I have been refurbishing the front flower beds. These beds right in front of the porch get hardly any sun and hardly anything grows there. If you look at this photo taken last year (its not time for the Red Oak to turn red yet here, but it will be great when it does) you can see that only a few clumps of Cast Iron Plant are growing in the bed right in front of the porch railing.

I would like to put some low growing evergreen bushes in front of the porch, but for now I am only going to refurbish this bed with existing plants. I dug up a few scraggily things that needed more sun and moved them elsewhere, then I dug up the clumps of Cast Iron Plant and spread them out in the middle of the bed. From another location I dug up about a foot sized clump of Liriopie. This was enough to spread all along the edge of the bed. Now both the Cast iron Plant and the Liriopie will thicken and spread. They are both evergreen so, until I can get some bushes in the back, my bed will look still full from the street even in the winter.

I bought a one gallon pot of Cast iron Plant 6 years ago. I took that clump from the old house and broke it up into 5 clumps for the front of this house. Now four years later I have spread three of those clumps out on this side of the porch (I still have to do the other side). This is one way to make gardening economical, by taking advantage of plants that can be divided. My two other favorite dividing plants are Irises and Day Lilies. I also take advantage of bulbs that divide such as daffodils, Joseph's and Ox Blood Lilies, grape Hyacinths, and spring and autumn crocus, as well as saving seed every year from many of my flowers.

Giant Pink Autumn Crocus

Golden Rod gift from the birds.

Yellow Autumn Crocus in front of the Pyracantha.

I have forgotten the name of this already. It is a spreading ground cover for under the pink Knockout roses.

Lantana

My first cup of tea from the herbal tea garden. I realize now that if you are going to be cutting a lot on something you need to plant a lot more than you would think. In this picture the blue flowers are Borage flowers with a borage leaf on bottom of the pile, the white and yellow ones are Camomile, and the ferny sprig is fennel. It was a good cup of tea!

Four-O'clocks. Pyracantha on left.

Four O'clocks.

Morning Glory.

My Black Soldier Fly Larvae Set Up

2009-09-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is my Black Soldier Fly (BSF) bin set up. A 55 gallon water barrel with a hatch cut into one side. My father made this for using as a rolling composter. I inherited two of these, and when I found quite a few BSF Larvae in one of them I switched it over to just raising the larvae. The other one is still doing duty as a composter. It gets less food scraps and has less larvae in it.

The bin is about 1/4 full of substrate and larvae. I have quite a big colony now as my family of four eats a lot of vegetables and we always have plenty of scraps. My self-harvesting system is a ramp made of a piece of 2" PVC pipe and a plastic container with a screw on lid. This works ok, but I need to get Garry to cut the pipe in half for more of its length as it tends to get clogged as it is. As it is the larvae can just climb up the round top of it and exit the bung hole in the side of the barrel, which is a little too big for the pipe.

The pipe goes into a hole cut in the side of the plastic container. This is a tight fit and the larvae fall into the container, which has a tight fitting screw on lid. So far I only have one pipe, but I have plans for two. Again waiting on Garry the power tool man. I have not concentrated a lot on the harvesting part as I have not gotten chickens yet. I fully realize though that harvesting is the whole point of raising the critters and hope to get a more perfect system worked out.

So far I have a lot of larvae and no real use for them, other than the fact that they are reducing my food scrapes and keeping them out of the garbage and landfill ( In addition to the fun I have had in raising them!) I plan on getting chickens and using the BSF as a feed supplement -they are supposed to be high in protein and fat. At the moment I save any BSF I do collect and give them to a friend that has chickens. I have also tried feeding them to our cats. As long as I mix them half-and-half with canned cat food the cats will eat them.

The barrel sits on bricks sunk in pans filled with water. This is to keep out ants. Not shown is a glass bottle with screw on lid attached to a length of garden hose, that collects "compost tea" from a hole drilled in the bottom of the bin.

The other two uses for the BSF larvae (other than chicken and fish feed) is the "compost" and the "compost tea" they produce. I have not done any experiments with this other than feed my red worms some of the "compost". They seemed to like it all right, but, despite what I have read, if you put any of the BSF compost in with your red worms you will get BSF in your worm bin. This isn't too much of a problem. I keep my worm bin pretty dry and do not over feed, but the bin is in the laundry room so maturing Black Soldier Flies find their way into my house.

Mature flies look like pretty black wasps, except since the adults only function is egg production, and they do not even eat in this stage, they have no mouth parts so they can not bite or sting you at all. Also, unlike house flies, they do not carry disease and are not attracted to your food or garbage. When we find one in the house we just catch it and let it go outside.

I have watered a few plants with diluted compost tea, but have nothing to report on the effectiveness since I have not made an experiment out of it.

A small section of the insides showing the larvae. I admit this looks gross, but there is no smell. Usually I save up the days worth of vegetable scraps and feed them to the BSF in the morning. One morning recently I took the scraps outside to the BSF. The BSF were all hidden under the substrate. After I sprinkled the food scraps on top of the substrate the BSF started making a noise like a million tiny bubbles popping, or like rice crispies! I dont know how they know I have just fed them, whether they feel the vibration or if they can somehow smell the food, but they always react. It didn't take them long to swarm all over the scraps.

A BSF studded apple. Clove oranges anyone?

This picture could look gross to you, or you could find it fascinating to watch the critters at work (me.) In the stage above when all is wet and dirty, yes its a little gross, but when the larvae mature they turn black, and climb out of the bin, somehow dry and clean. Even my twelve year old daughter will handle the mature larvae and flies, which says a lot if you know her.

Stink Bugs - You Dont Need Poison.

2009-09-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

These strange creatures are stink bug nymphs. Stink bugs undergo incomplete metamorphosis. This means that at first they do not look like adults at all, then they grow more and more like the adult form with each molt. I took this picture of the stink bugs on a pomegranate on our tree. There were a lot of them on each pomegranate.

Here is a close up of the nymphs. At first they were bright red. Now they are turning brown and you can see their wing cases (brown blobs on their backs) starting to develop. When their wing cases fully develop, and they have wings, they will be adult stink bugs capable of flying around and wreaking havoc. I wasn't too happy when I found the stink bugs sucking my pomegranates dry. I have had to deal with so many bugs this year! I didn't want to use poison either.

I decided to knock them off with a strong jet of water from the hose. This will work with a lot of bugs (probably the not so smart ones) and they will not be able to find their way back to where they were. I was afraid that stink bugs would be smart and hop right back on the pomegranates, but no, it worked with two tries. After the first spray about a quarter of them came back. I made the second spray longer and stronger and only a few came back.

Now I am supposed to hand pick the survivors and throw them in a basin of soapy water. I think I will ask for a volunteer for that job! Hey Anna!

P.S. Does anybody know how to juice pomegranates?

Pumpkins! Busy Time

2009-09-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! We finally have some pumpkins! After taking over an entire half of the garden for the whole summer the pumpkins have finally started producing. It seems like one day there were no pumpkins, then over night we had four between the size of soccer and basket balls! They are a deep dark green right now. I predict pumpkin pies and muffins in our future!

We worked very hard over the weekend. Now is the time to plant seeds of beets, carrots, lettuces, mustards, radishes, rutabaga, spinach, kale, leeks, and peas. A few fast growing herbs can also be planted such as parsley, dill, cilantro and basil. Wildflower seeds and certain perennials - foxglove, lupines, daisies, poppies, delphinium, coreopsis, dianthus, grasses, eupatorium and veronica - can all be planted now. Planting chart.

We have very little room, so we can't plant everything we would like. On Saturday we did plant carrots, a French lettuce mixture, and some mustard. We sunk a few more sub-irrigators into the ground beforehand for watering. After all that, Anna and I sprayed the soil in various hot spots with predatory nematodes to kill the larvae of various pests such as spider mites, flea beetles, and cucumber beetles. The nematodes were mixed in water and sprayed with a pump sprayer by me, then Anna came along behind me and watered with a watering can to make sure the nematodes went down into the soil. That pretty much wore Anna out, toting can after can of water. (Every night during family devotions we have been praying that God would "bless our nematodes"!)

While this was all going on Claire was working on a project to renovate a path that involved scraping back all the mulch and laying cardboard down on the ground, to block the grass that is growing up in the path, then reapplying mulch. It is a hard job. Garry has been renovating our back picket-fence. This meant digging and reseting leaning posts, replacing some pickets, and scraping all the paint. Garry was scraping paint all morning while the girls and I worked in the garden.

We also harvested some okra, yellow squash, butternut squash and our first acorn squashes, and a large bowl of lima beans. We had the lima beans that night (they were so tender and delicious), and the steamed acorn squash, and we took a great ratatouille to church on Sunday.

I was pretty ambitious that day and wanted to get started on a project for the front flower bed, the one directly in front of the front porch. This bed gets so much shade that not much will grow there. I wanted to take out what was not doing well, and divide and spread out the stuff that was doing well, which is basically just cast iron plant, then I wanted to transplant some liriope from another bed to edge the front of this bed. Both cast iron plant and liriope are evergreen and would look good all winter. The back of the bed up against the porch railings would be bare until we can afford some low-growing evergreen bushes, but from the street the cast iron plant gives the illusion of a full bed.

Well I got as far as moving a few things that needed more sun to a different bed, and raking back the mulch, then I was pooped and had to stop. On Monday morning I did divide one large cast iron plant clump and spread it out in the middle of the bed. When I was teaching my flute lessons in the afternoon I kept wondering why my back hurt so much!

Masala Stuffed Okra Boats (No slime!)

2009-09-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

Clemson Spineless Okra

Marmalade under the okra.

I like the Okra I grew this year, Clemson Spineless. It doesn't grow as tall as okra I have grown before, but is bushier and consequently has more blooms and pods. I pick the okra every day and store it in the fridge in a tupperware container lined with a paper towel. I only have four okra plants, since it is not a family favorite, so it takes about three days to get enough for a family meal. I like it myself and have been trying to find ways that my family will eat it - other than breaded and fried.

The main objection to okra most people have, if it is not fried, is that it is slimy. I did some research and got the advice that if you do not want your okra to be slimy you have to carefully dry each piece before you cook it. I guess excess moisture contributes to the slime. If you cook the whole fresh okra pods in a pan on top of the stove over low heat, with just a little oil, you will have no slime.

Most of the recipes I found on the internet for okra, that were not your traditional southern deep-fried, were from India! When I look for a recipe on the internet I usually find two or three for the same thing, then combine them into what suits my kitchen and ingredients on hand. I found a bunch of recipes for masala stuffed okra boats and came up with this recipe for me: (Masala is a paste made of a little tomato and a lot of spice. The mixture is first cooked to make the spices all fragrant, then it is used in various dishes.)

You need about 30 okra pods for 4 people. Cut your pods when they are 2 - 4 inches long.

Combine in a large fry pan on top of the stove:
One can of diced tomatoes and sweet onions, drained.
One-inch piece of ginger, peeled and chopped.
One tsp each of ground cumin, ground coriander, and tumeric
1/4 tsp of red pepper flakes

Stir until thick, hot and fragrant.
Add one Tbls of lemon juice.
(The lemon juice is taking the place of one tsp of amchur powder (dried green mangos) because we did not have any! The amchur powder is for tanginess, so the lemon juice is O.K. Also missing is garam masala. Is this even masala without garam masala? I dont know, but it sure tasted good! When I get these ingredients, I will try this properly, but for now you can make it too with common ingredients.)

Take the pan off the heat and let the masala mixture cool a little. While this is cooling cut off the stems of each okra pod, and make a slit from the stem end up to the tip. Don't cut through the tip or the pod will split in half. Hold a pod in you left hand with your thumb holding open the slit you made in the pod. With you right hand use a butter knife to scoop up a tsp of the masala and fill your pod slits from wide (thumb) end to tip.

Beware! If you dont want yellow fingernails, wear some thin latex gloves! (Believe me.)

Save any left over spice mixture to season your main-dish meat. Put a little ( one Tbls. ) oil in the bottom of your same fry pan so as not to waste any of that spice. Turn the pan on medium low heat and add your okra. Cook covered, stirring carefully occasionally, for 15 - 20 minutes. Dont let the oil get sizzling hot. You dont want to brown the okra, just cook it until it is tender, but not mushy. No slime! This dish is sweet, tangy, flavorful and just a little spicy. Delicious! (And my family ate it, even though they are prejudiced against okra.)

Masala stuffed Okra Boats just starting to cook.

Squash blossoms For Dinner

2009-09-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

A few days ago we tried something new - squash blossoms for dinner! It has been a dream of mine to create an edible landscape. One in which most of the plants are not only good looking, but good for something - either producing edible fruit or leaves, or useful as a medicinal herb, or for tea. Most people are familiar with rosemary and thyme, but did you know that the flowers of nasturtiums, daylilies, borage, and all kinds of squashes are edible?

Well since we are planting an edible landscape we had to be brave and eat some flowers. (You already eat one flower even if you didn't realize it - yes broccoli!) Not my daylilies since they are too pretty, but we had plenty of squash blossoms out back. Squash vines have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. You can tell them apart by their stems. A male flower has a long stem, a female flower has a very short stem and has a round bulb at the base of the flower which is the immature fruit. Since there are many more male flowers on the vine then female, you can sacrifice a few of the male flowers for dinner without reducing the chance that your female flowers will be pollinated.

Squash flowers open for only one day, in the morning, and are usually closed by noon. Take a glass of water and a pair of scissors out into the garden in the late morning - after the bees have finished with your flowers, but before they have closed up. Look for the male flowers with the long stems and check inside for any bugs hanging out. Beetles and such like to hang out in the flowers, and since you dont want to take them inside or eat them, evict them now. Cut your flowers with the long stem intact and put them in your glass of water. Your flowers will keep for one day so use them up for dinner or breakfast.

When your are ready to use your flowers (which will probably close up within a few hours of cutting) the preparation is simple. Cut off the base of the flower where the stem is attached and the anther part (that holds the pollen) will fall out. This part doesn't taste good. You will only be eating the petals.

Squash flowers are used mostly in Italian and Mexican cooking. Most of the recipes I found for them involving stuffing the closed blossoms with an herb and cheese mixture, dipping them in flour or batter, then frying them. They are also used in both Mexican and Italian soups, and chopped up in Mexican quesadillas, or you could chop them and add them to a salad.

The way we ate ours was to add them to the pan we had cooked our ribs in and let the moisture of the blossoms (they are mostly water) deglaze the pan. We served them over the meat. Twelve blossoms reduced in size to a couple of tablespoons, so stuffing them and frying them might give you a little more to bite into.

I'll be giving you more info on edible landscaping as we try new things. We had a blast eating our flowers for dinner and trying something new.

Late August Harvest

2009-08-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

Isn't this a beautiful flower? Its Okra! Our Okra just started blooming a few days ago, and already we have large pods that need to be picked. This is something that you have to check every day. I happen to be the only one in the family that likes okra, so I didn't plant very much. This morning I was searching for okra recipes and came across an indian recipe for marsala stuffed okra. We will have to try that one.

In addition to the okra, we have been picking green peppers, yellow squash, butternut squash, and lima beans. The lima beans that I rescued in the spring from the ants and aphids lived all this time and produced a bumper crop. It was fun shelling them all and having a meal of the best tasting, tender limas we had ever had.

The pumpkin vines have grown truly enormous, but still no pumpkins!

What's Blooming in August

2009-08-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

I just took a photographic survey of what's blooming in the yard and was surprised at how much I had. Of course I have made an effort over the years to plant stuff that bloomed in late summer and fall because I want to always have something blooming. So enjoy the pictures. Now if I had banks and banks of each of these wouldn't that make a show!

Knock Out Rose

Black-eyed Susan

Purple Cone-Flower

The backs of sunflowers are interesting too.

Sunflower. I dont know if that is a wasp or a bee on there.

Ice Plant

Plumbago

The Dill flower would not sit still for this picture, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

Sorrel

Native Daylilly and liriopie

Native Daylillies

Crape Myrtle

Yucca pod with seeds

Red Yucca

Lantana

I dont know what this is called. I just call it the pink fall blooming lilly.

Purple Sorrel

Rain Lillies

Turk's Cap

Spiderwort

Wishing I Had This Bounty!

2009-08-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

"What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass."

Andrew Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden

My peaches were sparse this year, and if I stumble on anything its probably a garden hose! Oh well, on to fall gardening!

Water Conservation is Saving Me Money

2009-07-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Garry shared the news that our water conservation efforts this summer have been paying off! I will share what I have learned this summer about reducing the amount of water you use, recycling some of the water you have, and using water more efficiently.

During the summer months our water bill usually goes up 100$ a month due to extra watering of the yard and gardens. Extra water is needed because it is much hotter and it usually does not rain much during June, July and August. This summer when I expressed a desire to more than double the size of our vegetable garden, Garry was reluctant due to the extra water we would need, especially since the cost of water here had just gone up. We set ourselves a challenge to conserve water anyway we could.

The first thing we did was heavily mulch all flower and vegetable beds. The mulch was "free" from a dying tree we had cut down. This reduces the amount of water you need since it reduces evaporation. It also eliminates competition for water by suppressing weeds.

The next thing was to install three connected rain-barrels to the only rain-gutter we have on our property, which is on our detached garage. This is making use of available water that is normally lost to you as run off.

Two empty 55 gallon barrels cost $7.50 each, and the parts needed cost about 25-30$. So about 23$ each to make a rain-barrel is quite a bit of savings over a store bought ($150 each) barrel. The third barrel is actually just a trash can stuck under the over flow from the other two. This one is handy for dipping my watering cans into for hand watering.

The rain-barrels have spigots for filling a watering can or attaching a garden hose to. We only need about half an inch of rain to fill up these three barrels, and they are good for several waterings of the new vegetable garden.

The next thing I did for water conservation is to stop watering the Bermuda parts of my lawn. I continued to water a few shady spots that had Saint Augustine grass only when the grass actually wilted. St. Augustine really doesn't need a lot of water to keep it looking nice, since it grows in the shade, but Bermuda needs a lot of water to keep it green in the hot summertime. My lawn did not turn completely brown as I had feared. In fact it still look pretty green even with no water, and it didn't look any worse than any of my neighbor's lawns.

Another thing I was already doing was using soaker hoses in all my flower and vegetable beds. Soaker hoses use a lot less water than overhead sprinklers because overhead sprinklers loose a lot of water to evaporation, and they water the ground indiscriminately instead delivering water directly to the plants roots. Watering with overhead sprinklers encourages weeds and really is a big waste. I snake soaker hoses through my beds so that mostly only the plants get the water, and I cover them with mulch to further protect from evaporation.

Next I did some research on, just how much water does a plant really need? I found that with drip irrigation a tomato plant only needs two pints of water a week! (I'm not sure if this holds true in Texas heat or not, but it was still way less than I had imagined!) This tells me that most of the water we are pouring on our gardens is wasted to run off, evaporation and migration down deeper than the roots of the plant. What a plant needs is moisture kept close to its root zone.

Even though I had been using soaker hoses in all my gardens, I still had the idea that the entire bed needed to look wet, so I was turning the water on strong enough to get the entire bed good and soaked looking. I learned something very important from the rain-barrels. Rain-barrels have very little water pressure. When hooked up to the existing soaker hoses overnight (a 50 foot hose) they would only release about 5 gallons of water. The area directly under the hose was good and moist, but a foot away was completely dry (I'm talking bone dry and cracked) - and my garden plants loved it! I began watering my flower beds (most of which are out of reach of the rain barrels) with much lower water pressure, so that the bed itself still looked dry but the plants were happy.

I also did some research on sub-irrigation which is applying the water below the soil surface directly to the plant root zone. In many parts of the southern-hemisphere farmers water gardens with buried porous unglazed pots. Water seeps out of the porous pots very slowly and waters plants growing next to it. These pots are so efficient that they use 10 times less water than a soaker hose! The reason for this is that the buried pots keep the soil around them consistently moist. The water is not running along the ground where it evaporates and encourages weeds. It also seeps slowly enough that it does not flow down too deep for the plants to reach.

I made my own pots by plugging the bottom holes of existing clay flower pots I already had and buried then in the new part of the garden that had no soaker hose yet. Next to the pots I planted pumpkins and squashes. These plants are growing huge with only the water from the buried pots! I top off the water in the pots only a few times a week when the water goes down a few inches.

I also learned that wilting plants do not necessarily need water. If the reason that they are wilting is because it is over 100 degrees outside, and not because the ground is dry, then leave them alone. They will perk back up in the cool of the evening.

Using rain-barrels, soaker hoses and sub-irrigation is using water more wisely. Now for water recycling. Water recycling is taking water you have already used in your shower or laundry, and reusing it in your garden. We accomplished this by putting another 55 gallon barrel setup outside under the laundry room window, and running the exit hose from the washing machine out the laundry room window into the barrel. One load of laundry almost fills the barrel. Once this was accomplished I felt I had more water than I knew what to do with! I really only need the laundry water when it is not raining at all.

So how much water did we save? My wonderful Hubby has kept a spread sheet for the last couple of years that has the amount of water we use each month and the amount we paid each month. (Don't ask me why he would spend the time doing this - that's just the way he is. Lucky for me.) Last July, when I watered per the old way, was unseasonably cool. Only a few days were over 100 degrees for the whole summer. This July we had 100 plus temperatures for weeks at a time. Even though it was so much hotter, my vegetable garden was two thirds bigger, and we added a separate herb garden, we used almost exactly 4,000 gallons less water in one month! The actual amount we paid between the two Julys was only 5$ less for this one comparison month, but when you consider that the price of water had gone up for this year on all the water that we use for everything else (laundry, dishes, bathing) in addition to what we used for the garden, then we saved quite a bit more.

So, I expanded my gardens, learned a lot about water, and saved money!

Natural Control of Insect Pests (Spider Mites, Cucumber Beetles, Flea Beetles, Aphids, Fireants and Red Bugs) With Predatory Nematodes

2009-07-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

Spider mites, Cucumber beetles, flea beetles, aphids, fire ants, and Red Bugs (chiggers) have been the bane of my existence this year in the garden. I would have to say that this location has been the most challenging place in which I have ever tried to garden, due to the heavy clay soil and an abundance of insect pests that come back on the same plants predictably each year. I have been doing some research on natural control for various insect pests and came across predatory nematodes.

Predatory nematodes are basically microscopic "worms" that live in the soil and prey on the larval stages of hundreds of pest insects that have a life stage in the soil. You buy predatory nematodes in a powder or liquid suspension which you mix with water, apply to the soil, and water in. There they multiply and spread out attacking the larval stages of many many pest insects. Unlike some pest predators, predatory nematodes won't fly off to someone else's garden.

Its best to apply them in the spring or the fall when the soil is cooler.

I had forgotten I had used predatory nematodes in the past to deal with a stubborn flea problem in a rent house we once had. The house had been repeatedly bombed and the yard was treated by a professional exterminator twice to no avail, but once I sprayed the yard and the carpet indoors with predatory nematodes the flea problem went away. What I didn't know is that predatory nematodes are not just for treating flea problems.

Just a short list of some of the pest insects predatory nematodes prey on includes all kinds of beetles, such as cucumber and potato beetles, Japanese beetles and flea beetles, borers such as corn borers and onion borers, moths such as coddling moths and meal moths, weevils such as corn, and strawberry root weevils, worms such as cabbage worms, corn earworms, and hornworms, in addition to gnats, aphids, fireants, loopers, cockroaches and termites!

Most of everything that is bugging me can be treated with these predatory nematodes. Since I have used them before I have confidence that they will help me again. I am very reluctant to spray anything on my plants that will hurt natural predators such as lady bugs, or that might harm bees, so this fall I am planning to apply predatory nematodes. The plants that are heavily infested now will just be pulled and counted as a loss.

Predatory nematodes are sold in quantities that describe the "millions of nematodes". So you buy them by 3, 4 and 5 million which is just a small container of powder or liquid, which, as I said, you mix with water. They cost about 18 to 20 dollars and can provide protection for years. If you are interested in using predatory nematodes just do a web search and you will find many companies that sell them. This is the link that I think I will buy mine from http://naturescontrol.com/nemavictims.html

Keeping The Garden Going In The Heat

2009-07-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

The last couple of weeks have been blazing hot! In the last 12 days it has been over 100 degrees 9 times. Yesterday it was 104! Needless to say I am struggling to keep everything watered and alive. The Laundry room water has been a great help in this, plus the 1/2 inch rain that filled 4 rain barrels. Most everything is doing alright, except the tomatoes which usually dont survive this time of year anyway.

I am in the process of getting the fall garden planted with new tomatoes, peppers, and various squash. Most everything has taken the heat just fine except for the new tomato transplants - they were wilting badly every afternoon even with good water. My solution for that was to rig card board shades on the west sides of their tomato cages. I simply cut up some cardboard and used clothespins to attach them to the west side of the cages. This way the tomatoes get shade in the hottest part of the afternoon.

I am happy with what I have been learning in the water conservation area. What with rain barrels, grey water, and sub-irrigation pots I have drastically reduced my usual water bill, while actually doing a better job of keeping everything happy.

Grey Water, Blue Water

2009-07-11T09:07:00.000-07:00

Our grey water laundry barrel is finished and we have been using it for about a week. We opted for the most low tech system - a hose out the laundry room window into the top of a 55 gallon drum equipped with a hose bib. I attached a panty hose leg to the end of the hose with a rubber band to keep lint out of the barrel. A full cycle of one load of laundry gives us about 45 gallons of laundry water.

I wait for the full cycle to finish so that the laundry soap is diluted, then I hook up the garden hose to the barrel and to the soaker hoses in the garden. The soaker hoses are covered with mulch, so no water is puddling on the surface of the ground.

It takes many hours to empty the barrel this way, the pressure is so low that it takes an hour for a few gallons of water to go through the hose, but I think this is actually better water conservation and better for the plants.

We were really blessed this week with half an inch of rain. It fell very slowly, so all of it was absorbed into the ground (our usual rain is a 10 minute downpour that all runs off.) Now I have full rain barrels as well as the laundry water to use. Only one small section of our house has gutters, so I dug out a bunch of tubs from the attic and set them under the eves to catch the rain. All of these tubs you see, plus the child's pool, were filled by that half inch of rain. I have already used most of that water up except for what is in the kiddy pool. (It has been close to, or over, 100 degrees every day for a few weeks now!)

I certainly felt like a pioneer woman lugging around buckets of water all over the yard. Hopefully we can get gutters and more rain barrels as time goes by.

How to Make Beautiful Compost

2009-06-26T08:29:00.000-07:00

Yippee! I finally made some beautiful compost!

I recently discovered that to make beautiful compost you need a 12 year old girl.

For years I have had the shame of being compostedly challenged. There my dad was making beautiful compost seemingly effortlessly, bringing it to me by the tub full, and there I was turning horrid mountains of moldy too dry stuff that never turned into compost. My composting experience was a lot of sweaty, hot, back breaking work, and in the end my pile just sat there and refused to decompose.

When my father past-away my mom gave me his old homebuilt rotating barrel system -Two 55 gallon drums supported on a wooden frame, with wheels underneath the drums to allow you to turn them. There is a hatch cut into one side with a door attached with hinges.

For a few years, yes years!, I diligently tried to make compost in those barrels. Ok, add green stuff (fresh vegetable scraps, weeds, green grass), add brown stuff (old leaves, old grass), make sure it is moist (not too wet, not too dry), and turn drums every day.

Actually I wasn't all that diligent. I always seemed to have more dry brown stuff than fresh green stuff. I could never remember to go out there and turn those barrels. Plus those drums were not easy to turn. They were very heavy and a few turns was about all I could manage. I could never get the moisture level just right. The barrels were either too dry or sopping wet.

Well those barrels ended up kinda neglected. One day I noticed they looked a little lop-sided. The stuff in the barrels had not decomposed, but the wooden structure had been eaten by termites!

Ok. Reorganize. Throw those barrels on the ground. Remove wooden structure and cinder blocks supports. Hmmm, these barrels roll easily across the ground! Maybe I wont give up, maybe I'll try one more time.

Enter 12 year old girl who would rather roll barrels along the ground then weed the family garden. Claire loved rolling the barrels for me. She rolled one barrel all the way up and down the yard everyday. (The other barrel has volunteer Black Soldier Fly larvae in it, and did not get rolled. I have plans for those larvae.) I added brown and green stuff, and checked on the water periodically. After a while when it looked good and decomposed I stopped adding anything, and just had Claire roll. It looked pretty good but was this compost? It still had quite a bit of undecomposed stuff in there. My dad always sifted his compost, maybe I need to sift this.

I rolled the barrel into the shade. Sat up a chair, a big plastic tote to hold the compost, and the sifter Garry made for me. I started sifting and the girls came over to help. The stuff in the barrel had reduced in size so that it was half full. Out of that I got about a third of a big tote of beautiful, delicious compost. Yes delicious! (No I didn't eat it but my plants will love it.) In addition to the beautiful compost, we picked out about a cup of Black Soldier Fly larvae that I didn't know were in there. We will give these to my chicken raising friend. The not-all-the-way-decomposed stuff got put back in the barrel, and we are ready to start all over again!

Now just look at that picture of beautiful compost held by the lovely Anna. Doesn't that look delicious?

Water Conservation

2009-06-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

Its close to the end of June, we can expect little to no rain from now until the end of August, and my rain barrels are all empty. About this time every year our water bills go up about 100$ a month. Even I can see that this is not self-sufficiency and that my garden is not saving me money. If we are to have an urban homestead that actually produces anything, then I have to find ways to conserve water.

I am already using a deep mulch on all my beds including the vegetable garden. I also use soaker hoses instead of overhead watering. Even with the soaker hoses I tended to waste a lot of water. I would forget that they were on and flood everything. I would forget to set a timer to remind my self to turn off the water. I bought timers that would turn the water off after a preset time. They worked for a while, then they started leaking. Then I had to remember to set a timer to remind myself to check the water timer to see if it was leaking! This is obviously not working the best.

I tend to think that plants really need a lot of water, but what plants really need is consistent moister. You can grow bean sprouts just by keeping them damp. Some hydroponics systems grow plants just by misting their roots. I need to find more efficient systems.

I remembered an old trick that I used to use. I took an old plastic milk jug, poked small holes in it with an awl, and buried it in the ground next to my newly popped up pumpkin seedlings. You fill the buried jug with water from the hose and the water seeps into the ground through the holes. None of the water is wasted on top of the soil where it will evaporate and encourage weed seeds to sprout. However with this system I am still left with the question of how often do I fill this thing?

Buried plastic milk jug.

I also remembered something I had read online once, about how in Mexico and South America farmers would burry porous unglazed clay pots in the ground and fill them with water. The water seeps out very slowly and waters plants planted next to the buried pot. I checked on the price for some of these pots and they really were too expensive for me. I thought that I ought to be able to use a regular clay flower pot with the hole plugged and something set on top to keep out mosquitoes.

I looked online and found many people who had done just that. I also found many scientific papers on the benefits of using buried clay pots! I found out that a buried clay pot can save 10 times the amount of water over a soaker hose! The reason for this is that the pots keep the soil around them consistently moist. The water is not running along the ground where it evaporates and encourages weeds. It also seeps slow enough that it does not all flow down too deep for the plants roots to reach, as it may do with my buried milk jug.

So now I am running several experiments. I took one milk jug out and replaced it with a big 12" clay pot next to the pumpkin seedlings. I left one milk jug buried and will plant some cantaloupe next to it. I buried a clay pot in the center of a large plastic pot that I plan to plant lettuce in. I buried a clay pot next to a butterfly bush that always wilts when all the plants around it are OK. Yes it will be work to fill these pots up, but the few that have been in the ground for several days have lost very little water. I am anticipating the water lasting at least a week or more. As much as I have always wanted the ease of an expensive in-ground sprinkler system, I know such a system would definitely not meet my goal of saving water, so I am content to lug hoses and watering cans around to fill pots.

12" unglazed clay pot next to pumpkin seedlings, uncovered

I use clay or plastic saucers to cover the buried pots.

Clay pot in a plastic pot. You can see the moist soil around the clay pot. The pot actually is almost full of water, but it disappeared in the photo.

We plan on adding more rain barrels and are on the hunt for a 275 gallon water storage drum. We see them advertised used a lot, but have no pickup to go get one with. There is a place we drive by that has them, but we need to figure out a way to contact then and see if they will sell us a used one. I know just where I would like to put it. Meanwhile in the absence of rain we are thinking now of grey water.

Garry and I are looking into ways to use the grey water in our home. Grey water is the water from your laundry and bath. This water is just wasted down the drain when it would be perfectly good for watering plants. In Texas its legal to use grey water as long as you are not just pouring it on the ground. It has to be going through a layer of mulch seeping from a pipe buried under the mulch, or be going directly into the ground.

I have seen very simple systems that just utilize a hose out the laundry room window that goes into a barrel outside. More elaborate systems will use valves that let you choose if you want the water to go down the drain, or out to your garden. If you collect the water in a barrel it has to be used right away, after a few days it can go bad, so we plan to use a barrel with a hose spigot so we can connect a garden hose either to our existing soaker hoses, or I can use the water to fill buried pots. Our laundry room window faces the back yard right in a corner where I am planing to try and plant a Forest Garden. More on that later.

Laundry room window. This shady corner is the future Forest Garden.

Until we get this set up I am going to feel criminal every time I let my laundry water go down the drain!

The last thing I am still thinking about is using a shade cloth over the vegetable garden. Plants out of the direct sun, and the sun can be brutal here, use less water.

Planting Chart for Texas

2009-06-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

There is a great month by month planting chart for just about everything you could want to plant at What to plant Month by Month in North Central and Central Texas.

This excellent chart (which lives on my refrigerator door) is put out by the Texas Cooperative Extension Service and has sections for vegetables, flowers, trees/shrubs/grasses.

According to the chart in June you can plant Okra, all melons and squashes, and southern peas. I planted recently some cantaloup, okra and pumpkins. Hopefully everything will survive the terrible heat - its been close to 100 all week. If we can afford the water we will hopefully have a fall garden. I have always wanted a huge shade cloth for this time of year, but they are pretty expensive. Yesterday Garry was also talking about getting one - I think a shade cloth would be cheeper than paying for all that water.

Take a look at the planting chart. You might be surprise to find that you can plant something every month of the year in this part of Texas!

How Does Your Garden Grow

2009-06-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be fun to keep an on going picture album of the garden progress. This will help me with evaluating the stuff I am doing this year. A clickable picture in the sidebar will take you to this post in future.

Spring 2010

Grape Hyacinths and Daffodils

Peach Blossoms

Look at the shape of this snow on the pots!

Bumblebee on Red Bud Blossom

Baby Spirea bush. I love the arching shape of these bushes.

Ajuga with fountain

Irises

Same shot as the header only a year later.

Mariposa Skies

Early December Snow

Wednesday we woke up to a surprising site - big puffy flakes of snow falling from the sky! No snow or freeze had been predicted so no one was expecting this. It snows so infrequently here - maybe once or twice a year, usually in January. Our first freeze was two weeks late, then snow. What next? Of course it did not stick to the streets and by late afternoon it turned to rain and the snow was all gone. Here are a few pictures of the garden. Anna took all these pictures for me.

Looking over the side fence at the vegetable garden.

Lantana and iris in the snow.

Frozen Vegetable Garden

Cute Cabbage in the snow.

Frozen Okra flower.

November Update

Garden Mid November. Since this picture we have had a slight frost which only cut the pumpkins back a little and didn't hurt anything else.

Mustard
First time I have grown mustard. I think tonight I will try to make some fried mustard greens with bacon!

Broccoli
I've got lots of broccoli in the fall garden. Its so fun to pick your own.

Garlic coming up.
This is my first time to plant garlic. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Garden, early October

Cabbages and broccoli, early October

Large pumpkin blossom.

Our first pumpkin 12.5 Lbs

After So much rain I now have this mystery fungus to contend with. It is growing on the woodchips and this cabbage leaf.

Here are a few photos from late September.

I have been refurbishing the front flower beds.

Giant Pink Autumn Crocus

Golden Rod gift from the birds.

Yellow Autumn Crocus in front of the Pyracantha.

I have forgotten the name of this already. It is a spreading ground cover for under the pink Knockout roses.

Lantana

My first cup of tea from the herbal tea garden. In this picture the blue flowers are Borage flowers with a borage leaf on bottom of the pile, the white and yellow ones are Camomile, and the ferny sprig is fennel.

Four-O'clocks. Pyracantha on left.

Four O'clocks.

Morning Glory.

Our first pumpkin! Mid September.

Spider Lilies. I love things that bloom in the fall.

Pyracantha berries. One day I will make jelly with these.

Oxblood Lily. A rare native Texas bulb.

Garden mid September.

Okra Bloom.

Okra Early September

Marmalade under the okra, early September

Pumpkin and squash patch. Summer, butternut, and acorn squash. This takes up the entire south half of the garden.

You can see in the middle part of the garden the buried watering pots covered with tin pie pans. Next to them are planted broccoli, cabbage and brussel sprouts. Early September.

North half of the garden. Bell peppers, lima beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, summer and butternut squash.

Lima Bean Pods and Flowers. Early September.

Morning Glories. Early September.

Crepe Myrtle early September

Turk's Cap. Grown from wild collected seed.

Stink bug Nymphs on a Pomegranate. Early September. These have been sprayed off with a strong stream of water from the garden hose twice now. The first spray they just came right back. The second spray was longer and more vigorous, and only a few have come back. Will keep checking and spraying.

Ground cover with little blue flowers. I think it might be a type of spiderwort. It hitched a ride from my old garden to this one with the other plants I transplanted. August

Turk's Cap. I collected this seed wild from a country Neighbor. It makes "edible" berries.

Rain Lilly blooming after our 2 inch end of July rain.

Pink Lilly blooming for the first time. It took two years to get this to bloom. Flowers that bloom in July and August are my favorite. August 3rd.

Vegetable garden August 3rd. Okra, tomatoes, yellow squash, two winter squash, pumpkins, peppers, lima beans growing, broccoli and cabbage just planted.

Most of what you see here is left over from Spring and not doing too well, except for the yellow squash. August 3rd.

Pumpkins and winter squash August 3rd

Purple Cone Flowers, Mid June

Hibiscus, Mid June

My Mannerly Tomato Vines, Mid June

Butternut Squash Bloom, 9 inches across, Mid June

Vertical growing of squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and green beans

Mid June

Vegetable Garden Mid June

Nile Lilies, Liatris with Daylilies, Mid June

Vegetable Garden, Early June

Onions, lettuce, Spinach harvested

Tomatoes, Beans, Squashes growing

Part of the Onion Harvest, May

Daylily Bed, May

Hail and Shredded Leaves Early May

Vegetable Garden Late April

Wildflower Bed Late April

Joseph (or Jacob's ?) Lilies Early april

Irises Early April 2009

Worm Composting - as the Worm Turns

2009-06-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Saturday Anna and I attended a Worm Composting class at a local organic farm. It was very interesting and lots of fun. We came away with a set-up worm bin containing aged worm bedding and 1/2 lb. of red wiggler worms.

We plan on using the bins primarily to generate worm casting for the garden. As half a pound of worms really cannot digest more than about 1/2 cup of food a day, or even over a few days, we will not be relying on these worms to recycle all of our table scraps, at least not just yet.

For recycling our table scraps we will continue to use regular composting and Black Soldier Fly larvae.

We learned at the class that the red wiggler worms do not actually eat the stuff you put in the bins, but eat the microbes and fungi generated by the decomposing foods. Black Soldier Fly larvae on the other hand can directly consume several pounds of table scraps a day. They begin eating the fresh table scraps right away, before they have a chance to start decomposing, and they generate a substrate that is perfect worm food.

We plan on trying to create a system using these two organisms. First the BSF larvae will take fresh table scraps and convert them into worm food, then the worms will take that BSF compost and create worm castings for the garden.

The BSF larvae are set up outdoors and the worm bin is in the laundry room. Neither bin is smelly. I will have another post soon about the self-harvesting BSF bin I set up, in addition to the bin that contains the BSF larvae now, if it looks like it is going to work. I want to be able to harvest the mature larvae for feed when we get our chickens.

Anna's comments - The worms were cool, but she liked the farms friendly baby goats best.

Almost a Tornado

2009-06-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was praying for rain because I had used up all the water in the rain barrels, and we almost had a tornado! I had been checking the weather online in hopes of rain when I saw that a tornado was coming our way. I told the girls to put some lawn chairs down in the storm shelter. Then I reversed myself and said, never mind, because it looked like the tornado was going to pass by to the North.

There was thunder, dark, dark clouds, threatening drops of rain, and it was very windy, and right about that time the neighbor's dog and three puppies escaped from their yard and began running around the intersection. Our neighbors weren't home so Claire and I tried to get them back in their yard. Garry arrived home to find a puppy round up in progress. There Claire and I were running all over the neighborhood after puppies, when it was obviously about to pour down raining, and nobody was keeping an eye on the tornado. Garry now looked online. The tornado was headed straight for us again and we had a severe hail warning of 100% to boot!

The sirens kept sounding. People were going out into the street to look around. We kept trying in get the friendly but uncooperative puppies back in our neighbors yard. With Garry's help we finally caught them all and simply dropped them over the short chain-link fence (the gate was pad locked.) Now we all began running around to get the chairs that I had nixed earlier, get flash lights, and water (Claire even got cheerios.) During all this Anna had been trying to get dinner cooked and had totally ignored the sirens. She was surprised when we burst into the house and told her to forget dinner and get in the storm shelter.

Of course, as usual we waited until it was really raining before we made the dash to the storm shelter, so we all got soaked. We squeamishly tiptoed down the cobwebby stairs and huddled in the center flashing our lights around. Even the innocent lawn chairs that had been out in the clean air a moment ago were avoided until we all were convinced that nothing disgusting lurked in our shelter.

Was there anything lurking down here? Were there bugs or snakes or monsters? Were creepy black alien arms going to poke their way through the wood screened window, a la "Signs"? (I decide not to mention that particular thought to the dear children.)

Do you get the idea that I need to go down here more often and outfit this place properly?

We were pleasantly surprise to see by flashlight a clean, dry, bug, snake, rat, and monster free safe place to be! I mean it was white washed clean down there and almost empty, except for the chairs and the people now sitting in the chairs. We had water, cheerios, a cell phone, flash lights and chairs, now we had to wait for the possible tornado or hail.

We prayed for no tornado, no hail (remember my garden), but we did want lots of rain please. We prayed for the neighbor's puppies, our house, or cats in the house, and for all our neighbors to be safe. That accomplished, I began thinking how ironic it would be if our house blew down before the insurance inspector could get here to inspect the roof for damage from the last hail storm in May. Hey, what a rip-off it would be to exchange a new roof, for no roof!

We also discovered that a concrete underground storm shelter is a great place to sing! We sang all the hymns and scripture songs we could remember until Garry pronounced it safe to go back to the house. The girls didn't want to leave, but I was starving.

What an anticlimax to have had no tornado! The tornado had gone off to the North after all, and dissipated without touching down anywhere. We sat in the storm shelter for two inches of rain and no hail - it was good choir practice though.

Miller Moth Woes Solved

2009-06-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

We seem to be obsessing with bugs lately, but honestly I think bugs are very interesting creatures! Its only when bugs get "personal" that I take offense. A June Bug or a Cicada is interesting to me until it flies into my hair, then, as my husband will attest, you are liable to see me do a crazy dance accompanied by a loud "Eekk!, Get it off!"

We all have bugs that we really can't stand, however, and one bug that really bugs me is the Miller Moth. Miller moths are diabolical! They lay eggs on the outside of packages in the grocery store, then the eggs hitch a ride into your house. After you open the package the tiny larvae can go right inside. Miller moths prefer any whole grain (brown rice, whole wheat) but they can infest a wide variety of foods. I have found them in the past in brown rice, nuts, Rice flour, bird seed, noodles, corn meal and once even in some pouporie that contained a few dried orange slices! They dont like white bleached flour as much, or white rice, but if they are desperate you may find them even there. I have read that they also can be found in dog food, powdered milk, seeds, dried vegetables and fruit, dried cereal, and even chocolate!

In my house brown rice automatically goes into the freezer for 24 hours as soon as I get it home. Then it goes into some kind of plastic or glass container. My pantry is like a fort with every food stuff locked up in its individual plastic cell. The moths will find something I have left unprotected though - I told you they were diabolical! Who would have thought that they would infest chocolate or pouporie! Each time I have a who-would-have-thought experience I have to come up with new fortifications. The tops of bird seed bags are kept tightly rolled up and closed with a close-pin. I don't leave them open even for a second! Ditto for the dog food and cat food.

Well recently I found them in my house again. (Did I mention I think they are creepy and I hate them?) As usual everything in the pantry had to be gone through. They were in some spaghetti this time, and an unprotected box of rice bran (I thought bran was safe at least.) The infested stuff gets thrown out of course, and as I was searching for an empty container to put my white flour in (hey, the bugs will probably get desperate now and go for my white flour) I found a container that contained a Safer Brand Pantry Pest Trap. Hmmm, I put this in there four years ago when we moved, and forgot where it was. Could it still work?

I took out the sticky trap, and opened up the pheromone lure. As I was standing there reading the directions, holding the lure, a moth appeared out of nowhere and began fluttering around my head! I put the pheromone lure in the trap, set the trap on the counter and called Anna in to watch. Two moths circled the trap, eventually went inside and got stuck in the glue. Hooray!

Moths! At least let me get this trap in the pantry for crying out loud!

My problem is solved for now. My fort is secure. All the staples are locked away in prison and the adult moths will be lured away from the food and trapped. The war will go on, but I am ready.

Controlling Cabbage Loppers with Organic Bacillus thuringiensis Spray

2009-06-09T13:23:00.001-07:00

My lackadaisical attitude toward the cabbage loppers on my broccoli plants came to a halt on Saturday when seemingly over night they multiplied and just about devoured my broccoli. I have an old bottle (probably 10 years old!) of Safer's Caterpillar Killer, which is an organic spray that is basically a suspension of a particular bacteria that only kill caterpillars. It is totally safe for people, their pets, and beneficial insects, because the bacterial spores are only activated in the gut of the target host. The caterpillars eat the spores on the sprayed leaves, immediately stop eating, and die.

I wasn't sure this bottle was still any good, but I mixed up a batch of spray and gave it a try. After two days I had dead caterpillars (I didnt check after only one day) and my plants are already looking better!

Well that's my plug for Safer products. Their stuff is organic and usually works great.

Ant Killer and Aphid Update

2009-06-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Carpenter Ants going to Homemade Boric Acid Mixture.

A couple of weeks ago I put out some homemade ant killer (Borax mixed with honey and splenda) and it is time to report on my results. The first set of ants were tending aphids on my lima beans. The limas were so stunted that they had stopped growing. To control aphids I put out yellow bowls filled with water with a drop of dish detergent in each. Flying aphids are attracted to the color yellow and drown in the water. The water mixture attracted and killed a lot of aphids and other insects, notably wasps. I simply squashed the non flying aphids that were attached to the plants.

The ants were immediately attracted to the pill bottle containing the mixture. You could tell that many of them were dying right in the bottle, however they were still bothering the plants. I was wondering if this was going to work, and yes over time I noticed less and less ant activity on the plants,and more activity in the pill bottle, until low and behold my lima plants recovered and began to grow again! The mixture did kill ants and it also got the ants attracted away from my plants enough for them to recover.

The second set of ants are carpenter ants going into our attic! Yikes! I put out the same borax mixture (no need to measure anything, just make a thick paste) in pill bottles and placed them along a lower fence rail they were using for their highway to our attic. Ants did go into the bottles, but mostly ignored them. They did not get all excited and swarm the bottles like the ants in my garden. I kept checking and there did seam to be a reduction in numbers of ants going in and out of the attic, however I wasn't too sure it had anything to do with my mixture. This morning I noticed a mass moving day of the ants from the attic of the house, over to the attic of our detached garage! Gerrrrrr! I mixed up more borax, honey, splenda and this time applied dollops of it directly on the fence rail ant highway. The picture above shows the ants after just a few minutes! Stay tuned.......

Braiding Onions

2009-06-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

Today we braided the onions we harvested a few days ago. Anna wanted to learn how, and she is very proud of her onion braid in the picture above. If you can French braid your hair, you can braid onions. Actually I can't French braid my hair, braiding onions is much easier because they are not on top of my head!

Take three onions by their leaves and start braiding like a regular braid (if you dont know how to braid, look it up!) Add new onions into the three sections of leaves as you go up the braid, so you dont run out of length to braid with.

When we are done with the braid we fold over the top to form a loop and secure it with a big rubber band. Then I hang them in the pantry from a hook in the ceiling. This is several braids. I am not sure how much weight this hook can take. I am going to put up another hook for the rest of the onions. Last year my onions were stored this way all summer and winter, and came out beautifully. I didn't buy any onions except for a few weeks in spring.

If you have small onions that do not have long leaves to braid, you can work them into a braided string. This way is almost easier!

What I did today in the Garden

2009-06-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

I thought I would start a running post of my day to day gardening activities, when I actually do something. It will live over in the side bar henceforthly.

Wednesday May 12, 2010

I obviously have not been keeping up with this post. My entire spring and summer vegetable garden has been planted and we are already almost through with the spring stuff like lettuce and broccoli. Here is a list of things I recently planted around the house. In the herb garden: Cinnamon Basil, Purple basil and curly leaf basil, Pineapple Mint, chocolate Mint, Stevia, curry plant, salad burnet and more lavender. Else where here and there: Malabar Spinach on a pretty trellis, four o'clocks, moss rose, black-eyed susan vine, cosmos, and bachelor buttons.

Thursday March 4, 2010

In a gap in the rain we planted 4 packs of onion sets, cabbage, swiss chard and lettuce transplants.

Saturday February 27, 2010

Today I got back in the garden again. All of December and January we raked leaves on top of the vegetable garden and it did a great job of keeping out the winter weeds. I will be transplanting soon! Today I raked back the leaves in the spot where I plan to plant onions and I buried some watering pots. The soil is still too wet to dig in yet.

Monday December 7, 2009

I see that I haven't posted here for while. Shame on me, I will have to recap. Our first frost was sometime late in November, but it was so mild that it only slightly hit the pumpkin vines, everything else was fine. Since then we have harvested everything we could that was in danger, Okra, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, broccoli, and last of all the pumpkins. I discovered that soft green pumpkins can be cooked just like zucchini, and that hard skinned green pumpkin can be set in the sun to ripen, just bring them in if it is going to freeze.

What is left in the garden is cabbage, carrots, the broccoli stalks which I hope will still produce some shoots, mustard greens, Brussel sprouts, and garlic.

We have a problem with winter weeds in this part of Texas, especially hen bit taking over the garden during the winter, so I will have to get busy remulching everything and stay on top of the weeds. If I had a shredder it would make cleaning up the garden so much easier.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Today we picked our first pumpkin ever! It was an accident since we were messing with it to see if it was ripe and the stem snapped, so it was "picked." It was ripe and it weighs 12.5 pounds. I am thrilled to have grown our first pumpkin.

Thursday September 24, 2009

Planted seeds of Lupine amongst the Irises and in various spots. Planted three types of Echinacea (purple cone flower), Thunbergia (black eyed susan vine), Malabar Spinach (an edible perennial vine) and a climbing vine mix on part of the picket fence.

Saturday September 19, 2009

Time to plant seeds of beets, carrots, lettuces, mustards, radishes, rutabaga, spinach, kale, leeks, and peas. A few fast growing herbs can also be planted such as parsley, dill, cilantro and basil. Wildflower seeds and certain perennials - foxglove, lupines, daisies, poppies, delphinium, coreopsis, dianthus, grasses, eupatorium and veronica - can all be planted now. Planting chart.

We planted carrots, a French lettuce mixture, and some mustard. We sunk a few more sub-irrigators into the ground beforehand for watering. After all that, Anna and I sprayed the soil in various hot spots with predatory nematodes to kill the larvae of various pests such as spider mites, flea beetles, and cucumber beetles. The nematodes were mixed in water and sprayed with a pump sprayer by me, then watered in with a watering can to make sure the nematodes went down into the soil by Anna.

Claire worked on a project to renovate a path to block the grass from growing. . Garry was scraping paint from the back picket fence all morning while the girls and I worked in the garden.

We harvested some okra, yellow squash, butternut squash and our first acorn squashes, and a large bowl of lima beans.

I was pretty ambitious that day and wanted to get started on a project for the front flower bed, the one directly in front of the front porch. This bed gets so much shade that not much will grow there.

Well I got as far as moving a few things that needed more sun to a different bed, and raking back the mulch, then I was pooped and had to stop. On Monday morning I did divide one large cast iron plant clump and spread it out in the middle of the bed. When I was teaching my flute lessons in the afternoon I kept wondering why my back hurt so much!

Saturday September 5, 2009

Today Anna and I planted a bunch of transplants. First I sank a bunch of clay pots in the ground for sub-irrigation. When I ran out of pots we buried plastic milk jugs with holes punched in them to do the same thing. Next we planted 3-4 transplants next to each water filled pot. The water will seep out and keep the soil around the buried pots moist. We planted broccoli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts. If you have been reading this you will wonder why I planted broccoli again. Well the first broccoli I planted from seed never came up! I think my seed is too old.

We also harvested some okra and squash today.

Sunday August 30, 2009

Our Okra just started blooming a few days ago, and already we have large pods that need to be picked. This is something that you have to check every day. I happen to be the only one in the family that likes okra, so I didn't plant very much. This morning I was searching for okra recipes and came across an indian recipe for marsala stuffed okra. We will have to try that one.

The pumpkin vines have grown truly enormous, but still no pumpkins!

Wednesday August 5, 2009

Today Anna helped me rip out all the old plants from the spring garden to make way for the fall stuff. Its hard to rip out stuff that is still alive, but I really dont think it will produce anything more. We left the old squash as it has started producing again, and the old tomatoes, peppers and lima beans. Remember the lima beens that the ants tried to destroy? Well they are doing great and producing some beans.

Most of the old stuff was so full of spider-mites that I just stuffed them in black garbage bags and threw them away. I felt creepy after touching them and had to wash up really well!

What I have in the garden right now is:

Tomatoes, peppers, yellow squash, butternut squash, patty pan squash, pumpkins, okra, lima beans. I have planted seeds of broccoli and cabbage, and will soon plant cucumbers, then all the greens at the end of the month. I could also plant corn and potatoes, but I wont.

Saturday August 1, 2009

I officially started planting fall cool weather crops! Today I planted about a row of three different kinds of broccoli, and about 1/4 of a row of cabbage.

We had two inches of rain this week! The garden looks pretty good except for all the old spider-mite ridden beans that I haven't pulled up yet. Note to self - its not worth it to try and tide most plants over from spring to fall. The squash I planted in the spring is still looking great and started producing again though. I am questioning if it was worth it to water them while they were not producing. I dont know?

Most of the new pepper plants were eaten by something. Either cut worms or pill bugs. I only have three new pepper plants left. If I had remembered to put cut pieces of drinking straw around their stems, and had shaded them from the west, it probably would have been alright. I do have 4 old pepper plants that are still producing though.

Tuesday July 14, 2009

The last couple of weeks have been blazing hot! In the last 12 days it has been over 100 degrees 9 times. Yesterday it was 104! Needless to say I am struggling to keep everything watered and alive. The Laundry room water has been a great help in this, plus the 1/2 rain that filled 4 rain barrels. Most everything is doing alright, except the tomatoes which usually dont survive this time of year anyway.

I am in the process of getting the fall garden planted with new tomatoes, peppers. and various squash. Most everything has taken the heat just fine except for the new tomato transplants - they were wilting badly every afternoon even with good water. My solution for that was to rig card board shades on the west sides of their tomato cages. I simply cut up some cardboard and used clothespins to attach them to the west side of the cages. This way the tomatoes get shade in the hottest part of the afternoon.

Wednesday July 1, 2009

I have scavenged all my old clay pots to convert them into subsurface irrigators. I wasn't using the clay pots for anything since, over the years, I have realized that in this heat clay pots just let too much water evaporate due to their porosity. This makes them good subsurface irrigators though. I cleaned up the pots, plugged the bottom hole with silicone, buried them, and filled them with water. The water will slowly leach out and water the plant planted next to them.

I am currently planting some of my fall garden plants around these, and will see how they do. I am planting pumpkin, squash and cantaloupe right now, and am getting ready to plant tomatoes and peppers. I am still harvesting tomatoes, beans, squash, cucumbers, and bell peppers.

The water barrel under the laundry room window is finished and catching laundry water. It is so hot and we really need this water!

I am doing very little weeding due to the heavy mulch I put down.

Friday June 25, 2009

I finally made compost!!! See my post about it here.

In addition to that I have been experimenting with water conservation methods, and picking produce. We have a potato beetle problem that I hope wont kill everything off. Apparently the larvae feed on plant roots. It's too hot to spray the plants. Around here it's sometimes hard to keep everything alive in July and August since it gets so hot. It's already getting over 100 everyday.

We can plant things for a fall garden though, and try to keep those alive in the heat.

My worms and BSF larvae are still alive and wriggling - so far so good.

Monday June 15, 2009

Harvested strawberries, tomatoes, dill seed.

Planted lavender.

Set out Safer Brand Fire Ant bait, and Garden Safe slug bait, both are non-toxic.

Snipped strawberry runners.

Messed with worms and BSF Larvae.

Saturday June 10, 2009

Planted okra, pumpkins, cantaloupe.

Picked strawberries, tomatoes, green beans.

Went to a worm composting class with Anna! We now have a plastic worm bin and 1/2 lb. of worms!

Friday June 9, 2009

I spent most of the day making a homemade Black Soldier Fly composter/pod. I used a left over 10 gallon bucket equipped with a screw on lid, a piece of old garden hose cut in half length wise for the ramp, and two old jars for the compost tea collector and the self harvesting container, and more garden hose for all the connections. I used Garry's hand auger to drill 3/4 and 1" holes for ventilation and connections. I will post a picture when it is all done.

Planted a few more transplants, basil, thyme and chamomile, in the herbal tea bed.

Continued to renew the mulch in flower beds. We have run out of mulch from our tree.

Wednesday June 10, 2009

Today it is too wet to work in the garden. We got three inches of rain last night and this morning, and the rain barrels are all full. I wish we had more barrels! My wonderful husband brought home something yesterday call, "Texas Guide to Rainwater Harvesting. Texas Water Development Board in Cooperation with the Center for Maximum Building Systems." I cant wait to read it. This is funny since he came home to the weather sirens going off due to a tornado/hail warning and we had to go down in the storm shelter. Read about it in the post "Almost a Tornado."

Tuesday June 9, 2009

Transplanted borage, basil, fennel and dill to the herbal tea garden.

Made a huge list of garden chores and put it up in the house. The girls are supposed to check it in the morning and pick something to help me with each day. They put their initials by chores they have done. Now I have to think up some reward. ; )

Claire picked deadheading some flowers, and Anna helped me with the transplants. Then I taught Anna how to train and prune the various vines in the vegetable garden (cucumbers, tomatoes and squashes.)

Today I discovered black soldier fly larvae in my compost. (Yes the compost in the rolling barrels finally started working.) After doing research on the web I got so excited! People actually raise these things in bins (like worms) and they make great chicken, fish and reptile feed! I am definitely getting into this, so stay tuned. Now I am more than ever eager to get some chickens, and my old excuse for not letting Anna have a pet lizard is gone (I dont like spending good money for crickets.) I dont have to spend money on the lizard either - she catches them all the time!

Saturday June 6, 2009

The last couple of days were spent just enjoying my garden and pulling a few weeds here and there. Garry put up some tall stakes for me to train the tomatoes on. Thank you! We tackled bermuda grass in the new paths. I finished reading "Ruth stouts No Work Garden book."

Today I harvested the rest of the carrots and onions. The carrots were the best ever - wish I had planted more of them. Now that the garden is bigger I will be able to plant a bigger fall crop.

I also renewed my attack on the ants and put out more homemade ant killer.

My baby herbs are doing fine and I am starting to harden them to more direct sunlight. I will plant them soon.

Wednesday June 3, 2009

It is such a lovely day today! Here it is 2:00 in the afternoon and it is only 81 degrees out side. We worked in the garden all morning long, off an on, right up 'til noon, because it was so cloudy and cool. The only thing that stopped me was that I pooped out : (

I finished weeding the rose bed and reapplying the mulch. Hopefully the job is done for the summer. I'll just keep throwing on mulch if weeds appear.

Claire weeded a gravel path, a difficult job, and Anna weeded and expanded her Iris bed.

I mulched the 40' row that is now empty of onions. That was a lot of work shuttling the mulch around from a pile to the garden, as opposed to opening up store bought bags. But the mulch is free - unless you count how much we paid having the tree cut down : (

I worked on training the tomatoes, cucumbers and squash - a perplexing job I am just learning.

After that Anna and I braided all the onions we have pulled up so far. That was fun. I have a picture of them in the blog called Braiding Onions. We hung the onions up in the pantry/laundry room.

Doesn't seem like much, but I am really tired!

Tuesday June 2, 2009

The rain kept me from doing anything in the garden this morning. The storm was pretty spectacular though and we got about an inch of rain. Instead of working at home we took a little trip to our Pastor's house to visit with Marlene. Marlene showed us her Easter Egg Chicks (we hope to adopt a few). The grown rooster was gorgeous! Marlene also raises meat goats and goat dogs. We got a tour of all her ingenious automated devices for watering and feeding- she is a wiz at concocting things to suit her purposes. Way to go Marlene! Marlene gave me lots of advice, especially about all the things you can make out of wire stock panels! I am now "hatching" a plan to make a chicken tractor out of one 16' stock panel.

Monday June 1, 2009

Got up very early and weeded the Rose bed. I reapplied mulch which was thinning.

Anna got up and helped me dig up bermuda grass in the vegetable garden extension area. We cleaned up the area, moving all the various heavy composting trash cans over to a new spot, moved a bunch of bricks and cinder blocks, and raked wood chips all over so no bare soil shows now. In a few weeks it will be time to start putting in the second season garden plants.

We found two garter snakes and one lizard. Anna had fun playing with them. The lizard was the same leopard gecko that lost it's tail last time Anna found it. It's tail had already grown back a quarter of an inch! The tail was not spotted like the rest of him and was a different color, so we could tell it was new. We played a hide and seek game where the lizard crawled all over Anna, while I tried to look at it. It was always just going around one corner of her as I was going around the other! If I stopped, it would peek around her shoulder at me. Anna is a good sport.

We dug a trench and set in an 8 foot long board along one side of this garden extension to baffle the bermuda grass. Of course I will be the one that gets baffled by the wilily grass!

We played around rolling the compost barrels that had been freed from the termite ridden stand along the ground. This was fun and much easier than rotating them on the stand. I am going to leave it like this.

By 10:30 we were done and we sat in the shade and looked at the flowers. It was only 82 degrees by this time today.

Sunday May 31, 2009

Claire was feeling poorly so I stayed home from church with her.

I wasn't going to do any "work" in the garden, but I couldn't help noticing...

The Ants were eating my baby Red Bud again. I reapplied the kaoline clay band-aid which had washed off in the pouring rain a few days ago. Once again worked like a charm.

Of course I noticed that the rain had washed off all the clay from the peach tree. No, I wasn't going to spray the tree while all my good brethren were at church! However, I did dab a bit on that happened to be left over from the ants (spraying's easier.)

I wandered around "looking" at things, and refilled all the bug traps with water. Why do the bugs all go into the trap already filled with dead bugs? You would think it would be a "dead" give away ; )

I checked the ant bait I had put out in pill bottles. Boy ants are dumb! There is a pile of dead ants in the bottle and around, but the ants are still going in there. (Ants may be "dumb" but they sure have got us beat!)

I noticed two big empty pots sitting there all forlorn. What they really wanted was fennel seeds, so I obliged.

I also notice a Rosemary plant that wanted to be planted in the big pot next the the iron bench, so I obliged it, and also the peppermint seeds that wanted to be planted in the big pot's partner on the other side of the iron bench.

But Really now Garden, that's enough, its Sunday morning!

Time to go in when its 90 degrees in the shade at 10:00 in the morning.

Saturday May 30, 2009

Weeded here and there.

Claire weeded the Iris bed (this is never mulched so... weeds : )

Anna helped me harvest 88 onions that had fallen over. They are drying in the shade of the front porch waiting for me to braid them and hang them in the laundry room.

Tied up a squash to the trellis.

Pruned a few tomatoes. Lots of fruit is setting!

Anna and I pulled up all the spinach and lettuce that was bolting. Ate the spinach and threw the lettuce in compost.

Everyone helped mulch the new herb garden with our dear departed tree's wood chips.

I redesigned the new herb garden layout, as its real self differed from my "plan."

Started some more herb seed.

Cooled off in the shade under the Cucumber trellis. There was a wonderful cool breeze!

Read " Ruth Stout's No Work Garden Book" for a few hours. Fabulous!

Did garden research on the net.

Our New "No Tilling, No Digging" Herb Garden

2009-05-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

When winter was cold and dreary I bought a pack of seeds to make an Herbal Tea garden. When the time for planting said seeds was here, the seeds were back ordered and they did not arrive until I was out of town for a whole week at Presbytery, so this whole project got off to a very late start. If you plant stuff after May here it has a very hard time with the heat, but perhaps the seeds will have a better time of it than full grown plants would.

I had originally planned to just stuff the plants into existing beds, but after looking it over and seeing that there really was no room, and after hearing Garry complaining about how much lawn we had to mow, I decided to make a whole new bed right out in the lawn on the East side of our house. This is in keeping with the urban homesteading idea of growing more useful plants and less lawn.

Our Lawn is Bermuda grass. This is the hardest grass to kill in existence, I think. When we put in our garden beds we have to till or dig down at lest 8 inches to get to the Bermuda roots, and pull it all out. Then you have to very carefully sift every grass stem out of the dirt or the smallest piece will sprout! We had just gone through this whole procedure this spring when we expanded our vegetable garden, and we were not ready for this again. So we tried something we had read about in the past.

The Bermuda grass problem is taken care of by laying cardboard or paper out directly on the lawn, wetting it down, and piling lawn clippings and leaves, whatever can be composted on top. Pile this on a couple of feet thick. Ideally you do this in the Fall and plant in the Spring, but since I wanted to use this right away we added a step and moved a pile of dirt we had handy from digging out a walk way, on top of the leaves. This dirt was from the area we excavated to put in a pathway last year, and had spent the year under a pile of compost. It was pretty good dirt and we needed its spot to plant something else in. Finally remember all those woods chips from our defunct tree? This was spread on top for mulch, to keep down weeds while I get the herbs ready to plant and to keep the bed moist.

Every cardboard box we could spare from the attic was opened up and laid down.

An entire compost pile is being moved on top.

Garry did use the little tiller to make a ditch for the edging. A smart person would have done this first! My bad planning!

Edging installed and walkways established, we piled on the dirt.

Wood chips are on and the bed is finished.

The entire project was pretty fun and the whole family worked on it together. (We discovered having more than one wheel-barrow would have been helpful!) It probably was just as much work time-wise as doing it the other way since I added two steps (dirt and wood chips), but it was less back breaking and tedious than the tilling, pulling and sifting would have been. Now that the bed is done I will never have to till it or mess with it again.

The No Till philosophy is to improve soil by doing it the way nature does by adding amendments to the top of the soil and using copious mulch. This accomplishes several things. No tilling means the soil's structure is not destroyed. Tilling actually adds too much oxygen to the soil and makes the organic matter break down too fast. Mulching prevents weeds, regulates soil temperature, prevents erosion, attracts earthworms, and becomes an amendment in itself. You can further protect your soil structure from another problem, compaction, by setting up established pathways, only walking in those areas and never stepping in you planting beds.

Most people will apply these principles to their flower gardens, but what about your vegetable garden? Yep our vegetable garden is going to be no till from now on! Our next area of expansion has little Bermuda grass and is already covered in a deep layer of wood chips. When we are ready to plant this area it should be weed and grass free.

Fresh Bread in Five Minutes a Day

2009-05-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

I recently found a wonderful bread recipe on-line that is super economical, easy, no knead and is really supper fast. It tastes like expensive artisan bread, and my family loves it. Of course I cant eat it because I am gluten free right now.

Rather than duplicate all the instructions I will give an overview and you can go to the web site for the recipe. There are only four ingredients, water, yeast, flour, and salt. This makes it economical (no expensive honey, no oil, no eggs, no milk) and fast to mix up. You mix a batch of this soft, wet dough in a large bowl with a spoon (no kneading), let rise for two hours, put on a lid, and store the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks. As it ages it takes on a sour dough taste.

When you want to make a loaf you just oil your hands, pull off a hunk of dough, shape it a bit, and throw it in an oiled loaf pan, or shape a round boule and plop it on a cookie sheet - no kneading! Let it rest 20 minutes and bake. Ignore the directions to use corn meal and a special pizza peel to put the dough in the oven - its not necessary. Instead I would oil the loaf well and it will brown nicely.

The small batch recipe is:

Three cups warm water

1 1/2 Tbls dry yeast

1 1/2 Tbls salt (I just used 1)

6 1/2 cups white flour (less for whole wheat )

Makes 4 1 lb loaves

The large batch recipe is:

Six cups warm water

3 Tbls dry yeast

3 Tbls (or less) salt

13 cups white flour (less for whole wheat )

Makes 8 1 lb loaves

Five Minutes a Day for Fresh-Baked Bread

Enjoy!

From The Lark Ascending by George Meredith

2009-05-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

…… And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup,

And he the wine which overflows

To lift us with him as he goes:

The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine,

He is, the hills, the human line,

The meadows green, the fallows brown,

The dreams of labour in the town;

He sings the sap, the quickened veins;

The wedding song of sun and rains

He is, the dance of children, thanks

Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,

And eye of violets while they breathe;

All these the circling song will wreathe,

And you shall hear the herb and tree,

The better heart of men shall see,

Shall feel celestially, as long

As you crave nothing save the song. ……..

Homemade Rose Spray for Black Spot

2009-05-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Arrrrr Cap'n! Tis the dreaded Black Spot! Ready to destroy you........ err ....... your roses!

If your rose leaves turn yellow, have black sooty spots on them, die and fall off, then they have black spot, which is a fungal disease. Prevention of this is to buy resistant roses, which I did, and try not to get your roses wet while watering. Also don't use foliar sprays (spray on fertilizer) on roses that are susceptible to black spot.

We have had some very wet and cool weather for this part of the country lately and I foolishly sprayed my roses with foliar spray in the midst of all this. One set of roses looks great and very healthy, the other set have lost most of their leaves. Maybe it wasn't my fault, because my sister's roses are also afflicted, poor dears.

This is the spray I am using on them to kill it. I'll let you know how it goes : )

To rid roses of black spot, mix:

1 gallon of water
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon dish detergent

Spray once a week.

I doubt I will spray once a week all summer, knowing me, but at least for a while until they recover.

Adventures with Kaolin Clay (Surround), Ants Again!

2009-05-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Peach Tree Sprayed with Surround

Clay Tree Band-aid!

I am trying an organic fruit tree spray this year. It is called surround and it is basically Kaolin Clay. It is supposed to keep bugs from biting and tunneling into your fruit. You just mix with water and spray it on the fruit, and the trunk if you want because it will protect from sunburn too. You can just wipe it off when you harvest your fruit. I called around the local feed-stores until I found one that had it, and would sell me only two pounds (instead of thirty) and I think this cost me less than $5.

I applied it to our peach tree before we went to Tennessee, but we had so much rain that I needed to reapply. I went out to the tree, after I had already mixed up half a gallon of spray, and I found that there were only 20 peaches left on the tree! What happened while we were gone? Did the hail damage some peaches and they fell off after we left? Well that was discouraging, but I went ahead and sprayed the nice looking 20 peaches that were left. I thought, "Well at least they will be 20 big peaches."

I had a lot of spray left, so I wondered if it might help me with another ant problem I was having. Ants were attacking a young red bud tree next to the house. It had started when I accidentally injured the tree while trying to tied it up straight. At first the ants were attracted to the spot that was oozing sap, then they started biting holes in the bark at all the branch junctions and eating the sap. They were swarming all over the tree. I tried blasting them off with the water hose, but they just came right back. So I sprayed the spots they were attacking with the kaolin clay spray, but it was too thin and did not seam to be working.

I was getting frustrated at this point and afraid they would damage my tree, so I mixed a thick solution of clay and water in a small cup, and used a paint brush to paint it on in gobs right over the ants where they were attacking the Red Bud. It worked! The ants left the tree and the clay dried into a tree band-aid!

Oh, by the way, when I checked the peach tree next day, two more peaches had fallen off! : (

Another by the way, I dont hate bugs! They are a fascinating part of God's world and I tolerate the "bad" ones as much as possible.