In addition, be sure to check out our older gardening posts.
We got a late start on our deck grown tomatoes.
A bit of a mix up on which variety this is but I really like the sweet taste and easy harvest.
This is the second year our deck tomatoes seem to be healthier than the ones we planted in the garden.
I like to split them down the middle to add a sweet dash of color to our salads.
Our berry enclosure has been unsuccessful at keeping out chipmunks but successful at keeping out birds. So we moved our strawberries (aka chipmunk magnets) to a different setup and are using the space left behind for blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberries.
This year, we’ve had great harvests from all of our berries, which means I visit the berry enclosure a lot. And that also means bird netting rubbing against my head every time I take a step turned into a drag. Time to solve that problem once and for all!
My first step was to look back through old Walden Effect posts, where I found this great solution in another gardener’s berry area. Now, how to recreate it to mesh with our existing setup?
We had a lot of 10-foot PVC pipes lying around, purchased when we thought we’d need to extend our garden fence to 10 feet to keep out deer. That turned out to be unnecessary, so I decided to repurpose the pipes into berry-netting supports.
Next, we need to find a U-post that would slide easily inside the pipes. The cheapest, shortest ones were a fit!
I ended up cutting a couple of feet off each PVC pipe before sliding it onto the post since there was only so much wiggle room in our existing system. If you’re starting from scratch, you can probably use the full height.
Last step was to plop old plastic flower pots on top of each pipe to spread out that pressure point and prevent pipes from poking through netting if leaves fall before we take our setup down. If you repeat this, be smarter than I was — don’t stare up at the flower pot as you raise the pole into place or you’ll end up with an almost black eye!
We’re thrilled with the result, although the enclosure still has one big flaw. Honeysuckle has taken over the fence edges and each season it expands to twine into our berry netting. We’re still working out solutions on that front. In the meantime, eating lots of berries is a great reward for not-so-hard work.
Some of the problems with restoring a wheelbarrow is the damage around bolt holes which prevents the round headed bolts from biting in so you can tighten them.
An exterior screw with a washer isn’t exactly flat but it seemed better than a traditional nut and fastened in nicely with the wood of the handles.
Zip ties helped me hold it all together without needing a second hand while I tightened everything down.
It’s harvest season! Mostly, this post is just pretty pictures I couldn’t resist snapping while bringing goodies in out of the garden and woods. But here are a few tips to add redeeming value:
How’s your garden and pantry growing?
The wheelbarrow repair was not as easy as it first looked.
Holes in the wooden handles did not match up with the modern Kohl design.
Wooden Handles 19 dollars
Rustoleum Spray Paint 7 dollars
Nuts, Washers, Bolts 10 dollars
EvapaRust 13 dollars
It also took more time than I originally planned for.
Prepare surface of parts for EvapaRust, Apply EvapaRust, Wait, Wipe off, Paint with spray paint.
Drill the additional holes, and put it all back together.
Would’ve been much smarter to buy the 79 dollar Truper wheelbarrow with a plastic tray at Menards.
I did discover that Evaparust was a useful product with zero toxic smell that does what it says.
What about the Kohl lifetime warranty?
Not so fast. Kohl tools have a generous lifetime warranty but Kohl products do not.
They still sell the same 6 cubic feet Kohl model…now it’s 179 dollars.
Wooden replacement handles are 19 dollars which hopefully will give us many more years of hauling.
I’m sure you’ve been waiting with baited breath to hear how various experiments panned out. Wait no longer! Results are in.
Of the new vegetable varieties we’re trying this year, the Quirk cucumber, has already proven itself a winner. They’re sweet and tender and at least as productive as our other cucumber types. Just keep in mind that they mature quite small, so pick when you can still see the dried-up blossoms on the end.
Highly recommended! We’ll definitely be growing these again next year.
Remember how my mothers-in-law laid down an old solar pool cover over their garden beds last fall? They didn’t plant until around the frost-free date this spring and left the pool cover on until just before planting.
By the time they took it off, nearly all of the maple leaves they’d topdressed the beds with had melted into the soil and the entire area was completely weed-free. Even weeks later, they’re only seeing very mild weed pressure, suggesting that seedlings sprouted under the pool cover then died. (My mind is blanking on which garden writer recommends a similar technique, but using black plastic. Maybe you can refresh my memory in the comments?)
This experiment involved planting some broccoli seedlings early enough that their tops got a little nipped then setting out seedlings started inside at the same time considerably later. The expected tradeoff was that the early planted broccoli would grow more roots at the expense of their tops while the later planted broccoli would grow more tops at the expense of their roots.
The results are a little more mixed on this one. The early planted broccoli gave me the results I always get (because I usually plant at the first possible moment). They headed up at various sizes — some huge, some tiny, many medium. In contrast, the late-planted broccoli were more regular in size — all on the small side of medium — and they headed up one to two weeks later than the early planted broccoli.
When thinking of this in terms of overall yield, it’s important to note that we keep picking side shoots for a long time from our spring broccoli. That’s a data point in favor of the early planting, even though some of the early broccoli made teensy little initial heads.
That said, it’s nice not to have all of my excess broccoli needing to be frozen at once. Which is an argument for hedging my bets by planting both ways in future.
Any garden experiments you’d like to share results of with the with the world at large?
I usually focus on food gardening instead of ornamental gardening both on this blog and in life, but I couldn’t resist sharing some of the pointers I learned at a fascinating library talk last week. Jim McCormac, one of the authors of Gardening for Moths regaled us with a hilarious, beautifully illustrated, and inspiring presentation about why and how to attract moths to our yards. I was definitely sold!
Why moths matterJim started off by pointing out how important moths are to parts of the ecosystem many of us care about deeply. To start with, lot of those pretty birds I spend so much time photographing enjoy moth caterpillars as a large part of their diet. In fact, moths suffer about 99% mortality between the egg and the adult stage, proof that caterpillars are close to the foundation of lots of food chains. Then, as adults, moths become a favorite food for bats (who will help clear up your mosquito problems, so you definitely want them around).
Moths are also important pollinators, especially for orchids. Any time you see a flower with a long tube or nectar spur, that’s a hint that it’s pollinated by one of the long-tongued pollinators — hummingbirds, butterflies, or very likely moths.
Moth diversity is also astounding. The book covers five states and parts of three others, an area that contains a couple of hundred species of butterflies and a whopping 10,000 species of moths. And since many moths are small and/or active only at night both in adult and caterpillar forms, new species are being found frequently enough that even that huge sum is likely an underestimate.
If you want to encourage moths in your yard (and you should if only to feed all the pretty birds!), the simplest way is to plant native species in your flower beds. Like butterflies, many moth caterpillars are host-specific, so they often turn up their noses at plants we bring in from other continents. In contrast, some of our natives are especially heavy hitters when it comes to caterpillar munching — white oaks, native grapevines, sugar maples, and redbuds are great species to start with if you want your local moth population to explode.
Like fireflies, moths get confused by lights at night, so turn off unused exterior lights to give them a wing up. Finally, leaf litter is an important habitat for moths along with lots of other native critters, so don’t rake in the fall (or at least set aside some wild areas as reservoirs for the natives).
One big warning, though: once you start paying attention to moths and their caterpillars, you’ll get sucked in by the colors and patterns. If you get hooked on lepidoptery, it is not my fault!
One challenge of our deck growing area is the shade it gets from close by structures.
The new experiment is to see what we can grow in this gutter area that escapes some of the shade.
A 10 foot section of aluminum gutter is about 15 dollars with another 15 on end caps and hardware.
Remember my disappointment in summer-planted hairy vetch? Well, that patch kept growing slowly throughout the fall and winter, then took off like a rocket this spring. I needed some mulch this week and didn’t mind the vetch bed staying in cover crops for another year, so I actually cut when only the first few blooms had appeared. Harvest was extremely simple — a lot of stalks ripped out easily by hand then I used a toothed sickle to cut through the rest.
For the first bed that was entirely vetch, I rolled my cut cover crops up into a big snowball of greenery and pushed them down the hill to the broccoli, who have been treated with worm castings but still need more nitrogen (plus mulch). The vetch covered up an area about three times as large as the original spot it had been harvested from, although we’ll see how much the greenery melts down as the stems die and dry.
Next up was taking a look at a rye-and-vetch co-planting. Like the other vetch bed, this patch of garden soil needs serious improvement (thus the focus on a nitrogen-fixer like vetch). Unlike that other bed, I planted in fall instead of summer.
In this area, I wanted to determine which did better — rye planted solo or rye interplanted with vetch. So I divided the bed up into stripes, the first one vetch and rye, the next one rye only, etc. The idea is to make sure any difference I saw between plantings wasn’t due to the part of bed they were planted in.
Conclusions? First of all, it’s clear that rye does much better in excellent soil than it does in poor soil. When we’d planted it in Virginia, our rye used to grow to my shoulder. These beds barely make it to my waist.
The vetch, in contrast, did quite well here (although only about 60% as well as the summer-planted vetch-only bed). The bands with vetch produced about twice as much total biomass as the rye-only bands did. Would a vetch-only band have produced yet more? Hard to say since my vetch-only bed was planted earlier in the season than the rye-and-vetch bands. Sounds like we’re due for another experiment this fall.
As a side note, the firewood tote carrier we no longer use turns out to be awesome for moving cover crop mulch around. If you’re hand harvesting, you can lay clumps into the carrier as you cut them, then the tote bundles them up nicely as you wander across the garden.
And here’s about a third of the area I mulched with handcut cover crops over the course of a bit over an hour. Yes, I did yank up blooming arugula and cut some comfrey leaves also to round things out. I’m now tuckered out but very pleased with my free mulch.