*Another* one?

So, having just had an essay published at Garden Rant entitled "When a Garden Needs a Lawyer", about a couple who made a native plant habitat of their yard only to have a portion of it mowed by their city, now I find out that another internet aquantince with a similar yard is under threat, too. The town gave him precious little time; the mowers may come for his yard tomorrow.

I'M SO ANGRY! I wish I knew what to do to help. Please visit the link above, read his story, and offer advice, if you have any helpful pointers.

(The photo above is of Jason's front yard, and came from the article that I linked to.)

What a day!

Here is an entirely gratuitous photo of asclepias tuberosa, which is one of the few plants where the scientific name has lodged itself in my head. Contrary to what I had written previously, it does seem to attract a good number of pollinators. The blooms lasted a long time, but the plants have now moved on to the development of some wacky seed-pods. I'll most enthusiastically be starting those seeds in the Spring!

But back to today. Scatterbrained in anticipation of my first Garden Club meeting, I ran off to work in the morning without my purse. While driving home to go to Garden Club, the car overheated. And it was leaking something green, so I knew it was going to be a tow truck job. Since I have yet to join cell-phone culture, I went looking for a door to knock on. A kindly family (with the prettiest garden on the street, I must add) interrupted their dinner prep to let me make a phone call, and shortly thereafter Chris and Gabe came to my rescue.

We made it home just in time for me to grab some water and some plants, and, oh wait, is that a snake in the garage? What the heck kind of snake it it? It's colorful. Crud, what do we do? Five minutes, one bucket, one plant tray, one bucket, and one pair of garden gloves later, the snake was gently contained and I was on my way to the Garden Club.

*phew* Those Garden Club folks sure are nice. I am coming at Garden Club from an unusual perspective. When I was a child my mother was a garden club member. For a while. But she was less than pleased at what a social club it was. I think the final straw was when she hosted a meeting at our house and set out a vase of honeysuckle as a decoration. The other ladies had brought along prized houseplants. They spied my mother's uncultured bouquet from the Great Outdoors, screeched "thrips!", and wouldn't venture into the house until my mother had disposed of the offensive blooms.

So, I grew up with a less-than-stellar opinion of garden clubs. As if to remind me of this, a recent guest post at Garden Rant mentioned garden clubs in which flower arrangement is (shudder) mandatory.

So, I am much relieved to announce that the members of the Franklin Garden Club are enthusiastic about new members, even about new members who are perhaps overly Internet-educated while still marvelously short on years of experience! They seem far more interested in volunteering than in social functions. Nobody there struck me as the sort to have draconian attitudes on flowers arrangement or insects. They were, in face, about as nice as nice could be.

I'm excited to finally have some folks outside of my narrow computer-gaming world to share my plant interests with! Be sure to stop by later to see photos of the snake!

Joe Pye weed on Franklin Matters

I just put up this week's native plant post at Franklin Matters, this on on joe pye weed.



I still don't know much about Steve Sherlock, the author of Franklin Matters, but I am continually amazed at what he does there: he is a one-man newspaper. He attends or watches on television every town meeting he possibly can, and reports on the proceedings. He posts links to local news, he goes out and reports on and photographs all sorts of around-town happenings, and he posts announcements, reminders about town policies, opinion polls, and the occasional advertisement, all of which are very local in nature.

I find his site a bit like drinking from a fire hose. But I have had some really good stuff come from keeping an eye on what goes by there. His site is how I found out about Franklin's Beautification Day, and because of that, I'll be trying my first Garden Club meeting next week. Through my native plants posts on his blog, I found the website of a local man who was looking for a good home (or stewpot) for some young roosters. Alas, by the time I got in touch with him, the roosters had been taken. But I'm just tickled to know another person in town who is as wild about growing his own food as Chris!

And today, thanks to Franklin Matters, I got a call from the woman who is spearheading the effort to create a community garden in Franklin! Chris and I met up with her at a local park to say hello and to review a possible site for the garden.

Charles River Watershed Cleanup

Yesterday was the yearly Charles River Watershed Cleanup Day. After meeting at the local Whole Foods, we went out to our designated location: a dirt road leading out to a dammed bit of the Charles.



You can see my friend Walt out there, just between the trees. He donned waders and bravely slogged out into the wetland to extract trash. Among the stuff he hauled out were a broken baseball batting practice device, part of a table, an entire sealed bag of garbage that someone else had dumped, and the ingredients of beer pong: beer bottles and ping-pong balls.



He also brought a turtle back to shore for Gabe to examine. A snapping turtle perhaps? Judging by the damage to its shell, the poor critter had led a rough life.



Kelly, Gabe and myself stuck to the shore. Of the three of us, Kelly did the most work. I bagged a measly half-bag in between keeping Gabe out of the poison ivy and ineffectively keeping the gnats from biting his neck. Gabe contributed a few sticks and leaves.



Walt and Gabe.



Here is Gabe scaling sand bags left over from the recent flooding. . .



. . .and playing with sticks.



And this is what we were cleaning up. Beautiful, isn't it?

"Get off my lawn!"

I try to keep my ranting to a minimum, but if you excuse me for a moment, I would like to bellow a bit.

I hate, *hate*, that segment of the population that yells at the neighborhood kids to "get off my lawn!" In moving out to suburbia we have pushed our neighbors to arm's length and fenced off our own little pie-slices of territory which we rule like tiny countries. We eat our meals alone and learn so very little about our so-called "community". As adults we are very shy about going into our neighbors' tiny domains without permission. But kids range freely. And they should! They need more space to explore than their own yard. They should get the chance to learn about their neighbors by the yard equivalent of climbing around through the ventilation shafts.

I have seen footprints left in our yard by "nosy" kids, and it makes me glad! I can't even complain about the occasional Yoohoo bottle in the back yard. At least they are exploring. Manners will come later.

Recently I have been baffled by adults who want deeply to make changes in public attitudes about native plants and animals, but who harbor rather sneering attitudes towards other peoples' children. How do they expect to pass their memes along to younger generations? They are missing a glorious opportunity.

We had our weekly Sunday Dinner last night, and had our biggest crowd to date: fourteen people, including three generations and a brand new baby! Our group feels more and more like a tribe. *This* is the way community should be!

The weekend brought some stunning warm weather, and all the kids were out. When two of them came by on bicycles, I encouraged them to practice riding up and down the curb into our front lawn, which I know they can't do at their own homes. Go ahead, kids, tear up the grass! You are far more important than a lawn.

Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary

Words aren't needed sometimes.










Highbrush blueberry:


I don't know what this is:


Solomon's plume:


This is the same unidentified fern that grows in my yard:


My partners in crime.

The White House FreshFarm Market (or, How to Get 500 Lawyers to Flee Work at the Same Time)

Hello! I’m Dori, a friend of Michelle’s from way back in middle school. I’m a self-taught cook and amateur herb gardener. I recently bought my first home, and have happily been growing herbs in my tiny fenced in back yard. I love fresh, seasonal produce and am finally starting to be less of a slave to recipes and improvise more, which makes it the perfect time to buy fun foods at a farmer’s market! Michelle asked me to take some pictures and write a post about the farmers market Michelle Obama opened in the middle of September. I took the opportunity to post a picture of the meal I made with ingredients from the market because I am a giant nerd who takes pictures of her food. :)

Frustratingly, most farmers markets in my area are inconveniently open in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, making it pretty much impossible for someone who works full time to shop at them. So, like many other denizens of Northern Virginia, I make my Sunday pilgrimage to Wegmans and worship their enormous produce section and mighty cheese shop. Happy little Wegmans cult member that I am, I was overjoyed when I heard that Michelle Obama attended the opening of a FreshFarm market right in front of my office building. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend the opening, but I’ve gone every Thursday since, and I love it!

The FreshFarm market is on Vermont Avenue, near the White House. In addition to the usual produce that can be found at a farmers market, there are vendors selling artisan cheeses, live hydroponic lettuce, locally raised organic meats, locally made pasta, bread, and pastries. I was intrigued by the hydroponic lettuce booth, which sold a variety of live lettuces. The vendor assured me that unlike my fancy box of supermarket lettuce, this stuff would live in my fridge for a month so long as I kept the root ball intact. It’s over a week old now, and hasn’t shown any signs of wilting or going bad. It’s so tasty that it won’t survive for a month, but I’m happy knowing that it would live long enough for me to use it all.

The market features many local and organic produce vendors selling a variety of fruits and vegetables. My personal favorites right now are the crazy varieties of tomatoes that are unavailable at the grocery store.

Lastly, I think I might be addicted to eating lavender. As soon as I left my building, I could smell the lavender booth. A sign proclaimed, “eat lavender!” and the drug dealers vendors were offering free samples of chocolate and lavender covered almonds, which were very tasty. I could definitely taste the lavender, but it wasn’t overpowering. My bag of almonds smelled heavenly for the few days it lasted.

From last week's run, I made a grilled chicken salad with romaine and “rustic” guacamole. It's my adaptation of a Rick Bayless recipe. I added tomato and marinated the chicken to make it a little bit spicier. All ingredients were from the market except the chicken and the avocado. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of my bison meatballs with cilantro yogurt sauce!

An Unexpected Community Event

Chris’s enthusiasm for the garden never entirely recovered from the tomato blight. The long row of carrots and the sweet potato patch were, I think, looking like more work to him than fun. It didn’t help that the last batch of carrots was a bit bland, and the individual carrots were small and a pain to clean.

But we have made a habit of inviting the neighborhood kids over to help themselves to raspberries. They know that we are eager to show off whatever is growing. (Here, try a green bean! Take a squash home with you! Do you know what ground cherry looks like?) A taste-tour of our garden has become a regular destination for some of them. Chris and I have shown them what a turnip looks like when yanked from the ground, what asparagus looks like when it grows up, and what watermelon looks like when it is only the size of a golf ball.

Today, we invited them over to help dig our root crops.

I volunteered once at the Food Project during the sweet potato harvest, and plucking the giant tubers from the ground was so much more fun than I had expected it would be. I thought the neighborhood kids would at the very least find such an experience to be novel and educational. After all, just a week previously, when I had pointed out the leafy sweet potato patch, one of the pre-teen girls had asked where the sweet potatoes were. I had to suppress a grin when I said “under the ground”. She smacked her head in a silly-me-I-knew-that gesture, but the fact remains that she, like myself and so many others in this culture, had never seen a sweet potato – or a beet or a squash or a green bean - as a whole plant.

One of the funnier people-disconnected-with-crops moments I had was a few years back, when the topic of pineapples came up when talking to a friend who, like me, had spent part of her youth in Hawaii. She had a memory of pulling a pineapple out of the ground, and so assumed that they were root vegetables. I think what she pulled from the ground was a pineapple top that someone was attempting to root.

I find it quirky that although canned, and even whole pineapple are readily available across the continental US, that even in Hawaii it isn’t common knowledge how a pineapple grows.

The kids today were so curious about our root vegetables that they arrived at a run, and I can’t adequately convey the enthusiasm they generated as they dragged their fingers through the soil for those sweet potatoes. Every pitiful, under-developed root was like a buried treasure. Clumps of carrots pulled up by the handful made them giddy. The sheer weight of the carrot-filled basket had them in awe.

Chris later pointed out that he would have been disappointed in the underwhelming sweet potato harvest had the kids not made the event such a delight. It would have taken him five times as long, and he would have come in the house afterward dusty and weary. Instead, when he waved goodbye to the gang, he was giddy. We sent our helpers home with sweet potatoes that don’t compare to the scale of the ones in stores, and carrots that we suspect may be (like the previous harvest) a little lacking in taste. But, I suspect, the kids will be far more excited to eat these vegetables than the perfect ones that arrive miraculous and dirt-free from the store. Perhaps we have inspired one or two of them to cook. Or maybe, we hope, some day one or more of them will start their own garden.

Slug Fest '09

While looking for a good place in the backyard to build an ark in anticipation of the eventual flood from the 40 days of rain we've been experiencing, I took a walk around the garden and noticed the plants each had 5-8 slugs on them. What really set me over the edge was the slug that wrapped itself around a new bud on my fig tree and then ate the entire thing. Normally I say live and let live, but now this was personal. Just as my father declared war on the neighborhood squirrels after they broke into his birdfeeder, so now I, too, declared war against the slugs.

I don't like pesticides of any kind, so preferred to stick with more natural preventatives. Looking through the fridge, I chose what was on hand - Sam Adams Light. It was a shame pouring a bottle of Sam into a shallow purple bowl and to set out in the garden for the slugs, but sacrifices are necessary in time of war.

The next morning I did a preliminary investigation of the bowl and was rewarded with 8 slugs that had drowned in the sudsy foam of doom. I felt a slight twinge of guilt but knew I had to reduce the slimy menace from my beloved little garden.



After work I checked again. It was Happy Hour at the new bar in the middle of my garden. A crowd of slugs surrounded the bowl and more were making a distinct beeline for it.

The next day, I found more slugs and realized I needed to refill the bowl with beer, but I didn't want to fill it with the good stuff again. I went across the street to the local package store to view the selection. Ultimately I chose O'Doul's so see if the slugs would go for a non-alcoholic malt beverage. Based on what I saw over the next couple days, it doesn't matter if its alcoholic or non-alcoholic beer. Slugs love them both and it'll save you some decent cash in the long run to go for non-alcoholic.

Although the beer worked its magic, there were still a decent amount of slugs remaining on the plants. In doing some research, I discovered that while slugs love malt, they hate caffeine. Since I rarely drink coffee, I have to rely on my wife to supply me with grounds from her morning coffee. Every morning, I sprinkle the coffee grounds around the edge of the garden. Since coffee grounds are great as fertilizer, it's also good for the overall garden health.



The result has been a dramatic drop in slug activity in my garden. Now the beer trough only catches an occasional slug here and there, the ones that happen to get by the caffeine border surrounding my garden. For the moment, I'm winning the war against the slugs and so will keep up my vigilance and step up my efforts when I notice an increase in slug activity. I still hold out hope that we'll get warmer, drier days to come, because I really don't want to move forward with building an ark.

Raised Vegetable Bed - A Progress Report

So it's been a little while since I posted, seeing as with my work hours, I don't get home early enough to photograph while there is decent light.

So I've divided up this post into two sub categories: Last months pictures and this months.

The Old:

So here is a progress of the raised vegetable bed a month ago. Since my first post I added two tomato plants on either side of the bed (a Red Brandy wine and a Purple Cherokee), both of which were given o me by Chris and Michele. I also planted three cloves of Garlic, I had noticed they were sprouting in our kitchen counter, so I decided to plants them to see what would come of them.




The New:

Ok, so over this weekend I finally had time to snap some updates to the garden. Things have certainly starting growing...and some not so much...


Quite a bit has taken off; the Patio tomato plant on the right has grown enormous in comparison to the other Patio tomato plant to the left, which is now dwarfed by the Red Brandy Wine. However, I'm running into a problem where the larger Patio tomato plant is starting to choke the sun out from the Purple Cherokee, as you can see in the image below.

I'm going to have to cut or tie back the Patio tomato plant to give the Purple Cherokee a fighting chance for sun, which is a stark difference to the left side of the bed where the Red Brandy Wine towers over the other Patio Tomato. However, I think the reason for that is that I didn't pick a tomato that it's been putting all of its resources in trying to ripen. The green tomato that I picked off of it was the hardest green tomato I've ever held.

So in other parts of the veggie bed, the Asparagus are going happily, though some smaller then others. Out of the six roots I plants, only four emerged, with two being the biggest (closest to the camera), The smallest, just barely poking out of the soil a hefty 2 inches.


And lastly, the Zucchini and Cucumber. They have remained their same size for the last month, though the Zucchini have begun sprouting flowers.


Hopefully we'll finally get some warmer weather... Next article will focus on Dehydrating herbs, stay tuned...

Mmmm, green beans!

Picked my first handful of green beans from my Earthbox. Unfortunately, aphids are attacking fiercely - so I have to keep spraying my homemade insecticidal soap every few days to keep the population down.

Here's my bean harvest:

An Earthbox Memorial Day

My goal for today was to try to get my remaining, empty Earthbox filled. I was planning on planting leeks in it - but after stopping at all of the garden centers over the past few weeks (and again today), I gave up my search for leek seedlings. So, I thought that I would try to start them from seed - ran over to find a packet...and there were none!

Argh!

I suppose I'll have to catalog order them next year and start them myself. Instead of leeks, I decided that Earthbox #5 would be an experimental box (last year, I experimented with watermelon). Rather than trying something exotic (like watermelon...for this region) again, I wanted to attempt a root vegetable. I picked up a packet of Burpee carrot seeds: short, sweet, 4-5" long ones that won't get caught up in the grid at the bottom of the Earthbox. I sowed them directly into the box, 2-3 per hole. I'll thin them out when they pop up. Hopefully I'll get around 25-30 carrots in the box.

On the pest note - I'm also seeing aphids and spider mites hanging around my tomato plants and peas more, so I sprayed more of my insecticidal soap on all of the plants.

I have green beans forming:


Yay :)

My roma tomato plants haven't yet reached their cage/netting yet, so I had to support them with a bamboo stake until they get tall enough to start weaving them into the netting. They have also started setting some early fruit!



I can't wait to taste em!

A Raised Vegetable Bed - A Journey

Chris and Michelle asked me to contribute my experience creating a raised vegetable bed in our back yard. While my wife, Bridget, likes flower gardening, I like growing herbs and vegetables. I base a plant's importance on whether or not I can eat it. If I can't, it ceases to interest me, much to my wife's dismay.

Since my wife decided that there wasn't enough room to plant vegetables in the existing flower bed, so coveted because of its full-sun location, we ended up creating a new bed just for vegetables right next to it. My wife found an interesting article on the HGTV site about building raised beds. However, as you'll see, ours wasn't as elaborate.

Below are some diagrams of the design and dimensions (Sorry for the poor renderings, I was in a hurry). We ended up using untreated pine, though we wanted to use cedar because it’s a hardwood and would last the longest. The cedar planks, however, were very expensive and didn’t come readily available in the dimensions we needed.

The materials used were

• (2) 1.5x3x12 planks
• (2) 1.5x8x12 planks
• (4) 4x4x12 planks
• (16) 3/8 Carriage Bolts

We stained the outside, top and bottom edges of the frame to make it more water resistant. We didn't stain the inside because we didn't want the chemicals to leach into the soil.

*Disclaimer: As you'll notice in the images below of the actual construction, we messed up the on the corners and created a gap. Something to learn from in the future. Moral of the story: Measure twice, cut once.


After we bought the materials and assembled the frame, we marked out a spot on the lawn that receives the most direct sun throughout the day.


Because the area had some really nice grass that I didn't want to just rip up, we transplanted it to an area next to the compost pile that had sparse grass.

We set the frame of the vegetable bed into the hole created by removing the grass sod. We dug down a little further on one side (about 2-3 inches) to level the frame because our backyard has a gradual slope.

We then headed down to a local garden center and asked their advice on what to put into the box. They recommended we get 3 bags of stones for drainage, 14 bags of Bumper Crop organic top soil (a combination of soil, peat moss, and organic fertilizer), and a jar of Soil Moist Plus. The Soil Moist Plus is supposed to absorb water, and then when the soil begins to dry, it releases water back into the soil along with extra nutrients. We loaded up our VW bus with all our supplies, which filled up almost the whole car, and headed back home.


We first layered the rocks in the bottom of the bed and spread two bags of Bumper Crop on top. Then we sprinkled the Soil Moist Plus, watered it, and waited about ten minutes to give the gel beads a chance to absorb the water and expand.


We then spread the rest of the soil in the box but only wound up using 11 bags. We started out by planting asparagus, 5 zucchinis, 5 cucumber, 2 cherry tomato plants and a basil. The zucchinis and cucumber I sprouted from seedlings using a Jiffy Peat Moss growing kit.

We decided to put the cherry tomato plants closer to the asparagus because asparagus beetles hate the smell of tomato plants and could help ward them off. from what I've been told planting even one zucchinis or cucumber plants is one too much, so we might giving away a ton of vegetables to friends and family soon enough.

So that's it for now! More was added to the garden since these images were taken and will post them soon.

-S