Blog

Is Gardening Really All About Bugs?

16 October, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

Some weeks, it may seem like this blog is more about bugs than about plants. Isn’t gardening all about the plants? Well, it probably should be, but our gardens exist in the natural world, which is crowded with many kinds of life, including insects. Some of the insects are helper-insects, like pollinators and predators (“beneficials”). Other insects are destructive, eating our plants or spreading diseases across our landscapes (“pests”).

Some insects can be helpers as adults and pests in their larval stage. A lot of butterflies and moths are in this category. As adults, they pollinate flowers, helping plants to make fruits and seeds. As caterpillars (larval stage), they eat our plants. This dual life complicates a gardener’s decisions about how to manage caterpillars in the garden.

Which insects are “good” and which are “bad”? How can we know what to do when baby insects, like caterpillars, eat plants in our gardens?

Skipper butterfly on a late-summer zinnia. PHOTO/Amygwh

For me, the decision often comes down to whether the insect specializes on one kind of plant, especially if I am not planning to eat that plant. A lot of the skipper butterfly larvae eat turfgrass. Bermudagrass is not my most favorite plant, so I am not troubled when caterpillars are munching on the lawn.

However, the decision about how to manage pest insects in the garden could one-day disappear. You may remember the report last year of a study in Germany that showed a 75% loss of flying insects within the past few decades.

The authors of the study note:

The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity. While the gradual decline of rare insect species has been known for quite some time (e.g. specialized butterflies [9, 66]), our results illustrate an ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active in space and time.
Article appearing in PlosOne, 18 Oct. 2017

A recent article in the Washington Post, “‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss,” tells about another long-term study in Puerto Rico that shows the same trend. We are losing insects of all kinds, and in great numbers. Why should we care? The article offers a reason:

Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require pollination by bees, wasps and other animals. And arthropods are more than just pollinators. They’re the planet’s wee custodians, toiling away in unnoticed or avoided corners. They chew up rotting wood and eat carrion.
Washington Post article by Ben Guarino, 15 Oct. 2018

To some gardeners, no longer having to worry about pest insects may sound like a dream come true. Sadly, the good and the bad go together. If we lose our pests, we also lose our helpers. This means we also lose a lot of good food and our “wee custodians”.

Like melons? They are pollinated by insects.

It may be possible for us to live on wind-pollinated crops, like wheat, corn, and beets, and on self-pollinated crops, like most of the beans. I don’t think we’d like that diet, though. In addition, being surrounded by rotting carcasses would make the situation extra-unpleasant.

While I don’t expect total losses of insects any time soon (or even in my lifetime), the thought of such a catastrophic loss of beauty and helpfulness is sobering.

What can we do to change the situation? Well, any action that supports insect life could help slow the decline. Try this:

plant more wildflowers to support native pollinators,
allow more diverse plantings in our yards, to provide more places to live for more kinds of insects, and
refrain (as much as we can) from using pesticide products in ways that kill multiple kinds of insects instead of just the one pest that is “bugging” us.

One step that is both simple and difficult: plant clover in the lawn.

The Passing of a Gardener

9 October, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

If you spend enough time in a garden, it will tell you about its gardener. The garden of my Mom and stepdad, Bill, mostly tended by Bill, is no exception. It is full of flowers, vegetables, and herbs,

The flowers are for beauty and for butterflies. Bill loved butterflies. Don’t tell my butterfly-conservation friends, but back when his eyesight was good (decades ago), Bill caught butterflies to use in art, posed with dried plants in box-frames.

Right now, the cosmos are providing nectar for migrating Monarchs, but Bill is not here to enjoy either the flowers or the butterflies, because my stepdad, Reverend Bill Shaw, passed away on Saturday, just a few days ago. When he and my Mom married, back in 1997, he and I became gardening buddies.

Bill’s Oklahoma garden always grew more vegetables than his household could eat. Tomatoes would take over the kitchen and peppers pile up in any bare spaces. The overabundance meant there was plenty to share.

The herbs are mostly for my Mom. They show that he loved her very much.

Bill’s garden reflects his preference for a well-ordered and tidy space. The plants are spaced far enough apart that there is room to work around them. His garden also shows that he could outsmart the groundhogs.

When the groundhogs first invaded, he tried all kinds of traps and baits that didn’t work. The groundhogs ate the plants from below, while underground, which made catching them more difficult. Finally, Bill bought some plastic food-grade barrels, sawed them in half, then sunk the halves into the garden. He planted much of his garden in those half-barrels, which kept out the groundhogs.

Tomato plants, safe from groundhogs in the half-barrel in-ground planters.

This planting strategy shows the creativity of the gardener. No groundhogs were harmed, but the plants were protected.

Back when Bill’s hearing was better, we would talk on the phone about our gardens. He was my main source of information about old-time garden practices. I was his source for information about new varieties and crop diseases.

I will miss Bill and our discussions about his latest plans for the garden.

WWII veteran, U.S. Navy
At his 90th birthday party.

Cucumber Bonanza Nearing its End

2 October, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

My late-planted home garden cucumbers have been coming into the kitchen for three weeks now. The fridge contains a small pile of them, and I harvested more today, but the cucumber bonanza is nearing its end. The older cucumber leaves have spots/lesions that look like downy mildew; the leaves that still are unspotted and beautifully green droop in the afternoon sun. The droop makes me think that the plants have another disease, in addition to the mildew.

Cucumber plants, wilted in the afternoon sun, but they look fine in the morning and evening, if you ignore the spotted/mildewed older leaves.

There is a bacterial wilt disease for cucumbers that is carried by cucumber beetles. I have checked the plants — leaves, stems, and flowers — very closely, and I have not seen these beetles. I have seen several bumblebees, some brown skipper-type butterflies, a few flea beetles, tiny snails, ants, a tiny native bee, a jumping spider, and one squash beetle on the plants, but those critters are not known to carry the bacterial wilt disease.

It is possible that cucumber beetles are very good at hiding. When I finally pull up the plants, I will check the stems for the white stringy goo that is a sign of bacterial wilt (as seen on the Missouri Botanical Garden page on bacterial wilt).

Today’s harvest of cucumbers and peppers.

Meanwhile, I have a small basketful of cucumbers in my kitchen. Some of them will be peeled before we eat them, because something else has scraped the outer part of the skins. If I had found cucumber beetles, I would have suspected that they caused the damage. Since I haven’t seen those beetles, and since squash beetle damage looks different (remember the semicircular troughs?), tiny snails are my current top suspects.

It is hard to say whether the cucumber part of my late-summer-garden-experiment is a bust. The harvest seems short (three+ weeks), but we have a lot of cucumbers. The zucchini part is definitely a bust. There is zero chance of getting zucchini from the sad plants in the half-barrel garden.

Of course, the pepper plants continue to grow and make peppers, unmarred by disease. Some stink bugs have found them and blemished the skins a bit, but the peppers are all still good enough. The late-planted basil will be big enough for pesto soon. Chicory is looking good, too, and so are the carrots and assorted radishes.

I will transplant the rest of my cool-season seedlings into the garden this week. Currently, they are in a flat, where I planted them in late August. The new crops are kale, spinach, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. Those will all provide food for our kitchen in the cooler months ahead.

Trap Crops for the Home Garden

28 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

Since trap crops take up some space, it never occurred to me that using these was a suitable organic pest control strategy for small home gardens. However, I have unexpectedly gained experience with a trap crop, since that is what my zucchini have turned out to be.

What is a trap crop?

A trap crop is one that is planted as a lure to pest insects, to keep them away from the main crop. Most trap crops are not expected to yield a harvest; instead, they are offered up to pests as an alternative to the main crop of a farm. According to SARE, trap crops are often planted around the edge of the main crop, forming a protective barrier that pests are likely to stay within. Trap crops can also be planted as a block or patch near the main crop.

According to University of Georgia, trap crops to work best when they make flowers before the main crop that they are protecting. When the plants are making flowers and fruits, that is when they are most attractive to most pests.

My zucchini plants function as a trap crop

You may have read the two recent blog posts about pests on my zucchini plants — one about squash beetles and the other about cucumber pickleworms. The squash beetles are really less of a problem, since there are only four or five each day for me to smash and the damage is limited to holes in the leaves. The pickleworms, though, are another story.

They have caused serious damage to the zucchini plants, ruining flowers and boring into main-stems and leaf-stems. The plants are still standing, but all hope of harvesting zucchini from this late-summer crop is gone.

This is the good news: my cucumber patch, planted in early August like the zucchini, has supplied several cucumbers for our meals already. Checking the cucumber plants nearly every day, I have found only a few squash beetles, grand-total, on the plants. It has been easy to find and smash the one-every-few-days beetles as I check on the garden.

In an instance of amazing good luck, my zucchini variety was so fast to mature that the plants made flowers more than a week before the cucumbers did. When the pests first showed up in my garden, the squash beetles and cucumber pickleworm moths flew past the cucumber patch, which didn’t have flowers, and attacked the zucchini plants in the half-barrel planter, where flowers and little squashes were abundant.

Cucumber patch protected by trap crop of zucchini, example of organic pest control. Zucchini are in a half-barrel at left end of garden (not in this image). — My cucumber patch in late September. No leaf mildew diseases, no pickleworm damage. PHOTO/Amygwh

Even better, the cucumbers still do not show any pickleworm damage.

To combat any pickleworms that could be present, I have been treating both sets of plants with Bt for caterpillars (the one I am using is Thuricide), which is an organic pest control product. We have had a lot of rain, though, which washes the Bt away. I am not re-spraying my plants after every rain, so some days the cucumber crop is unprotected other than by the stronger allure of the zucchini plants.

At this point, the three remaining zucchini plants look hopelessly ragged, but they are still alive. I am leaving them in the garden for as long as they continue to work as pest-magnets.

The cucumbers remain pickleworm-free, but they are not perfect specimens. I had forgotten about the uneven pollination in hot weather that results in lumpy cucumbers. These are not headed for a pickle jar, which means the imperfect shapes are not really a problem.

Weird shapes from incomplete pollination, but no cucumber pickleworm damage. PHOTO/Amygwh

Because of pest-concerns, I am harvesting the cucumbers while they are fairly small. This is a bit like harvesting tomatoes before they are fully red. I know that if I leave tomatoes in the garden to fully ripen, some pest (stink bug, chipmunk, mockingbird, etc) will notice the beautiful, ripe fruit and take a bite before I get a chance to enjoy the harvest, myself.

Unlike for tomatoes, there is not a flavor-reason to wait for more mature cucumbers. They taste pretty much the same at smaller sizes, and leaving them out in the pest-filled world seems a little like tempting fate.

So, as I ponder my next year’s garden, it is good to know that zucchini plants can use some unseen come-hither chemistry to draw pests away from the cucumbers.

This is the kind of garden-discovery that any of us can make. I have been growing food in this yard for more than 25 years, and I learn more about gardening every year. And even though there are pests, the garden is producing good food. This is part of the joy of gardening!

At the Pollinator Symposium

24 September, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

At the Pollinator Symposium at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit this past weekend, attendees learned about urban bees, pollinator plantings along roadsides and around retention ponds, and about plant-pollinator interactions. The event was amazing!

Of course, I am on the committee for Monarchs Across Georgia, the group that organized the symposium, so I might be biased.

Dr. Jaret Daniels, the first presenter, is working in Florida with the Florida Dept. of Transportation to find the best mowing schedule for roadside wildflower plantings in that state. Dr. Daniels reported that the state DOT mostly keeps an every-3-weeks schedule for much of the mowing. For the 12-or-so feet nearest the road, the vegetation needs to be kept short for safety reasons.

He has found, though, that for parts of the verge further back from the road, 6-weeks between mowing allows more plants, and more kinds of plants, to flower (all good for pollinators!). In talking with state officials, he found that “protecting monarch butterflies” was a better motivator for trying a longer mowing cycle than “saving money.” Everyone wants to be seen as a friend of the monarch!

Dr. Leavey, telling us about her students’ work with urban bees.

Dr. Jennifer Leavey, working at Georgia Tech to understand how urban environments affect bees, suggested that flowering trees are a great supplement to our small pollinator gardens. Each flowering tree provides many more flowers than a small garden, even though a tree may flower for only a few weeks. The key is to make sure that enough flowers are available to pollinators through the entire growing season to support bees over many months.

She showed us a graph of information, developed by her students with information from Trees Atlanta, that showed most of Atlanta’s flowering trees are blooming in April. Apparently, we need more trees that flower in other months.

This pink Salvia is the kind of flower that is pollinated by critters that have long tongues, like butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds. As pollinators fly under the extended flower parts (anthers with pollen, stigma where the pollen needs to go for pollination) to get to the nectar inside the flower, pollen brushes onto their heads and backs.

Dr. Tim Spira is a (recently retired) plant ecologist whose work has focused on plant-pollinator interactions. His information was less practical, in some ways, since much of what he told us isn’t “things to do”. It was more, “how this works, and why.” However, his talk contained the most fun-facts.

Example: Usually, pollination is a happy accident that occurs when an insect or animal pokes its head inside a flower to plunder the nectar or pollen. Some of the pollen ends up on the insect/animal, and when that individual visits another flower in search of more good food, the pollen from the first flower brushes onto the female parts of the second flower. If the two flowers are for the same kind of plant, voila! Pollination can occur. He told us, though, about one pollinator that moves pollen onto the female parts of a flower on purpose, with pollination as her primary goal. This pollinator is the yucca moth (link to US Forestry Service information).

She gathers pollen from one yucca flower, then flies to another flower where she lays eggs inside the ovary of the new flower. Then, she uses her wad of gathered-up pollen to pollinate the flower where she has laid her eggs. When her eggs hatch, the babies will eat seeds of the yucca fruit that develops from the pollinated flower.

More than just butterflies and bees were visiting the wildflower meadows at the Monastery. Some flower-visitors, like this grasshopper, are not pollinators.

All in all, it was a great day. My little presentation about systemic pesticides seemed to go well, and I had fun visiting with other gardeners and people who love pollinators. Of course, very few people place the flower flies quite so high on their list of favorite insects as I do, but someday that may change.

Uncommon Crops at Area Community Gardens

18 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

The 2018 Annual Conference of the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was in Atlanta this past week. Bus tours of local community gardens were part of the conference. The bus tour option I chose (there were several – all looked good!) was for community gardens in Clarkston, which is a little Southeast of Atlanta.

Our bus tour guide, Bobby, said he’d heard Clarkston called both “the most diverse square mile in the U.S.”, and “Ellis Island South.” One organizer for a garden we visited told us that students from 65 nations attend the local high school.

Our bus stopped at the North Dekalb Mall Community Garden, the Community Garden at Clarkston Community Center, the Clarkston International Garden at 40 Oaks Preserve, the Friends of Refugees Garden at Jolly Avenue, and the Community Garden at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Gardeners at these gardens mostly do not speak English. Many are from countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa.

Uncommon garden crops

Cocoyam

One member of our tour group lives in New York now, but he grew up in Ghana. Luckily, he recognized the cocoyam that we saw in the gardens. Otherwise, I would probably still be trying to identify it! According to the cocoyam description at Plant Village, there are two kinds of cocoyam. The leaves of one type are edible at maturity, in addition to having an edible root. Leaves of the other kind are edible only when young.

Thai basil

Thai basil and lemongrass are not totally unfamiliar (unlike cocoyam), but I don’t normally see them in community gardens. BBC offers many recipes that use Thai basil. In general, the leaves are used in pho (soup) and curries.

Amaranth

We actually saw more than one kind of amaranth. Some, I think, were grown for the leaves (cook them like spinach), and others for the seeds. I have grown a grain amaranth before, but my experience was that separating the seeds from the rest of the plant bits was not easy. Will Bonsall (Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening) wrote about his amaranth experience, saying:

“Looking at my first amaranth crop I was somewhat disappointed to see that, although the yield of biomass was impressive, the grain yield seemed much less than, say, wheat, although they are said to yield comparably. When I hefted the bucket of grain, however, I was far more impressed. It was like lead, and I had to conclude that such a dense grain must really be as nutrient packed as they say.”

He had winnowed his crop on a breezy day, and he grinds the grain (passing the tiny seeds through a hand mill four times) to use in pancakes and waffles.

Tree collards

I have actually read about tree collards before, but it seemed likely that they would be attacked by caterpillars just like other cabbage-family plants, so I never looked into growing them myself. Maybe I should change that! The tree collards growing at the Clarkston Community Center garden looked great.

Roselle

This is another crop that I had read about and then dismissed as one I would not be interested in. The bright red calyxes (flower parts) are used in teas like ‘Red Zinger‘, and I have never liked those teas. They seem slimy to me. However, while at Community Garden at North Dekalb Mall, I was offered a leaf to taste.

The flavor was tart, like sorrel (sheep sorrel in the yard, or French sorrel planted on purpose). Looking it up when I got home, I found that another name for roselle is sour leaf. Apparently, the plants are grown just as much for the leaves as for the calyxes.

According to the chapter on roselle in the book Fruits of Warm Climates, by Julia Morton, roselle did not used to be such an uncommon crop in the U.S.:

“Roselle became and remained a common home garden crop throughout southern and central Florida until after World War II when this area began to develop rapidly and home gardening and preserving declined. Mrs. Edith Trebell of Estero, Florida, was one of the last remaining suppliers of roselle jelly. In February, 1961, I purchased the last 2 jars made from the small crop salvaged following the 1960 hurricane and before frost killed all her plants.”

The book chapter also describes using the red calyxes to make a dish that tastes like cranberry sauce. Since cranberries do not grow well in north Georgia, this could be another reason to grow some roselle.

Hyacinth bean

Plenty of people grow hyacinth bean as an ornamental plant. It is beautiful! however, most of us have not eaten the amazing purple beans. Green Dean at Eat the Weeds offers this caution about hyacinth beans:

“Mature and dry beans have got a high amount of cyanogenic glycosides in them. Not good for you.”

But, he offers this hope:

“Mature or dry beans must not be eaten raw. They have to be cooked. That means boiling soft raw mature beans or roasting as heat drives away the toxin. If they have dried — read they are hard — that means soaking overnight then boiling them a long time in a lot of water. Or, boil unsoaked dry beans in a lot of water twice. “

More hope: he says that young beans, leaves, and flowers can be eaten without all that extra work. Read his linked article find out how to prepare these other plant parts.

Bitter melon

This vegetable seemed to be very popular at the gardens we visited. The vines covered many of the fences used to separate the garden plots. We were told that the fruits truly are bitter, but that the bitterness could be reduced.

Tennessee State University has published information about bitter melon, including its food value, which may explain why anyone would eat such a difficult fruit:

“Bitter melon has twice the beta carotene of broccoli, twice the potassium of bananas, and twice the calcium of spinach. It also contains high amounts of fiber, phosphorous, and Vitamins C, B1, B2, and B3.”

In addition, the fruits are used in herbal medicines in Asia, Africa, and India, for a wide range of complaints, from gout, to cancer, to graying hair (see TSU’s linked publication for fuller list).

Any uncommon crops in your garden?

My most “uncommon crop” is chicory (many kinds). I do snack on garden weeds while in the yard, which might count for something, but I am not an adventurous eater. When I was a child, the foods I was most likely to eat were peanut butter sandwiches, Cheerios, and canned green beans. These many years later, my list of acceptable foods is still not super-long.

The good news about chicory is that, like so many of the uncommon crops I saw last Saturday at the refugee gardens, chicory is unbothered by pests, and it is drought tolerant. Also, if I put chicory on pizza or in bean soup, I can eat it.

Next year, though, I might try roselle.

Hope your gardens are growing well!

Something is Making Holes in My Squash Flowers and Stems

11 September, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of days, I have noticed that several flower buds on my zucchini squash plants don’t look healthy. The flower buds have stayed small and turned pale and droopy. Today, I finally took the time to REALLY inspect my plants. What I saw is a lot of bad news.

The holes in the flower buds and the holes in the stems could — possibly — be caused by several kinds of insects. However, the piles of pale green, round globs like tapioca, and the yellow globs too, are most likely frass (poo) from caterpillars.

Around here, a major cause of this kind of damage is squash vine borers. The adult moths lay eggs on the plants. Then, the tiny caterpillars that hatch out of the eggs eat their way inside the plant, where they eat and eat until they have killed the plant from the inside.

I pulled up two of my five zucchini plants to try to find the culprits/caterpillars. As I dissected the plants, this is what I found:

What are pickleworms?

Pickleworms, the caterpillars of a night-flying moth, are a common summertime pest in the South. They are pests I have seen before, but I have not seen such extensive damage to plants from their activity before. Who knew that they would gnaw right into a stem? Not me. At least, not until now.

If the damage had been from squash vine borers, I would have pulled up all five of the zucchini plants and called them an interesting late-summer experiment that I never need to repeat. Since the damage is from pickleworms, I am trying another option. That second option is the use of an organic-approved product for caterpillars.

Organic control for pickleworms

I have mixed up some “Bt for caterpillars” – the product at my house is Thuricide, but others are available – and I’ve sprayed it all over the stems and flower buds of the remaining zucchini plants and my little patch of cucumbers. The name “pickleworm”, if you haven’t already guessed, alludes to a fondness for cucumbers. Since I like cucumbers, too, it would be nice to bring any cucumbers that these plants make into my kitchen, without caterpillars inside.

I planted seeds for cucumbers the same day I planted the zucchini. With a time-to-maturity of 65 days, they seemed less likely than the zucchini to make a crop before the first frost, but they are another late-summer garden experiment. Since they have plenty of flowers on them, the odds look good that I might harvest a couple of cucumbers before the end of October.

This hope for cucumbers depends on me and the Bt. It will need to be re-applied every week, and after every rain, for the Bt to work well.

Wish me luck?

Coffee Grounds for Gardens

9 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

The season of falling leaves is nearly upon us, which means it might also be the season for collecting used coffee grounds from nearby coffee shops. The grounds combine well with raked-up leaves in a compost pile to create compost for your next-year garden.

Used coffee grounds can also be mixed directly into the garden soil, as a soil amendment, but then the soil-microbes need a few weeks to start breaking those grounds down before anything is planted in the area.

An explanation is in the video below (video – for a change of pace!). If you can’t see the video on this webpage, you can find it here on YouTube.

The information from Oregon State University is linked here.

Hoping that all your gardens are growing well!

Are Ladybugs Eating My Squash Plants?

5 September, 2018 by amygwh 2 Comments

The little orange, dotted beetles that are eating my squash plants actually are in the ladybug family. Most beetles in the ladybug family do not eat plants; instead, they eat pests like aphids and whiteflies and are great helpers in our gardens. Mexican bean beetles and squash beetles, which look a lot alike, are exceptions. They are garden pests.

Right now, it is squash beetles in my garden, eating my squash plants.

It may look like ladybugs are eating my squash plants, but it is really squash beetles doing the damage.

How to identify squash beetles

The first big clue that they are not Mexican bean beetles is that they are on my zucchini, not on beans. Squash beetles eat plants in the squash family, like zucchini, squashes, and cucumbers. Bean beetles eat plants in the bean family.

Another is that their babies, also called larvae, have dark spines. The spines on Mexican bean beetle larvae are yellow, with dark tips as they get older.

Another clue is the method of eating. Both the babies and adults often gnaw a trench around the patch of leaf they are getting ready to eat. You may notice semicircular lines at the edges of damaged leaves.

One theory about why they do this is that the trenching prevents sap from running into the desired area. The sap may carry nasty chemicals that would interfere with the beetles’ eating.

Organic control of squash beetles

For now, I am hand-picking and smashing the beetles, both adults and larvae. The damage on my plants isn’t severe, and the number of beetles is low. Today, I found and smashed seven adults and one larva.

If the infestation gets bad enough that smashing is insufficient, there are a couple of organic-approved options to try. University of Connecticut agrees that hand-picking can work in small gardens but suggests that products containing spinosad might help if a beetle-damage gets very bad.

Another pest in my garden right now is armyworms

Armyworms have eaten all the leaves in this patch of cleome. — Armyworms have eaten most of the leaves in this patch of cleome.

I found armyworms in the garden today, too.

They were on both patches of cleome (spider flowers), and they haven’t left many leaves. When I realized what the pests were, I removed all the plants, with caterpillars attached, and stuffed them into a large bag.

That bag is now sealed up and ready for the municipal compost truck to pick up on Friday.

Armyworms can eat a garden to the ground in just a few days, which is why extreme steps are needed. If you see these in your garden, do not delay even one day in removing them!

Better news in the garden

First leaves on carrot seedlings are strappy and narrow; the next leaves are more feathery. PHOTO/Amygwh

Elsewhere in the garden, the carrot seedlings are sending up the “true” leaves that come after the first leaves. The first leaves that come out of a seed rarely look like the leaves on a mature plant.

For carrots, the first leaves are narrow and strappy. They are the ones that unfolded out of the seed, which is why the first leaves are often called seed leaves.

Do you see the seedling on the far right in the photo? The one leaf that is wider and more feathery gives a clue what the mature leaves will look like.

Also in the garden, there are tiny caterpillars on the pipevine plant. I planted the pipevine with these caterpillars in mind. If all goes well, a few of them will survive to become pipevine swallowtail butterflies, which are beautiful.

Caterpillars on a leaf of pipevine. If all goes well, they will mature to become pipevine swallowtail butterflies. — Caterpillars on a leaf of pipevine. PHOTO/Amygwh

Small Garden Ideas from Uncommon Ground (Use What You Have)

1 September, 2018 by amygwh Leave a Comment

Uncommon Ground restaurant and rooftop farm grows crops vertically, everywhere it can. — Uncommon Ground restaurant and rooftop farm. PHOTOS/Amygwh

Uncommon Ground restaurant and organic farm, in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, doesn’t have much exposed soil to work with. The restaurant building sits at the intersection of two streets, and a parking lot wraps the other two sides.

Not too surprisingly, large containers, raised beds, and trellises are key parts of the farm. Uncommon Ground also uses existing structures to provide more space for growing.

The ways it has expanded to make full use of the small lot may help other gardeners working with limited space think of new ways to expand their own little farms.

Rooftop farm

The first idea is the least practical for most of us. In order to make the roof of the restaurant strong enough that the whole farm wouldn’t come crashing down onto diners at their tables, the original wood supports were removed, new metal supports were installed, and those were set more deeply into the ground.

This is not the kind of retrofit that can be done cheaply or easily. However, anyone thinking of building a new shed or workshop in the backyard, in a spot where there is plenty of sunlight, might consider whether installing a mini-rooftop farm is feasible.

If you know a structural engineer or architect, that would be helpful. Working out how to make the structure strong enough to hold the load of soil, water, and plants will require their expertise.

Stair rails as trellises

Grapevine trained on stair rail at Uncommon Ground in Chicago. PHOTO/Amygwh

Installing trellises everywhere possible helps, but using existing structures (and not just the rooftop!) is also good. One feature at Uncommon Ground that is hard to miss is the amazingly productive grapevine threaded through the outside stair rail, all the way up to the roof.

At my house, our grapevine is trained onto the railings of our back deck, but my vine is not nearly as productive as the vine at Uncommon Ground.

Another way I have used existing structures in my gardening in the past was when we lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. I planted cucumbers in pots, then set the pots at the base of our (South-facing) metal-scrollwork porch posts. The cucumbers grew up the scrollwork posts. Harvesting was as easy as stepping out the front door.

One caution

It is important, when planting food crops, to remember not to set them into the ground too close to our homes in the Southeastern U.S. The foundations of our homes have all been chemically treated to deter termites.

The chemicals involved are not rated as being safe for eating, but plant roots don’t know that. The roots would bring the unwelcome chemicals into our plants along with the water and nutrients they need. The chemicals would totally wreck our plans for organically home-grown food!

Walls for plant support

Hop vines at Uncommon Ground are supported by a wall. PHOTO/Amygwh

The most luxuriant hop vine I have ever seen is at Uncommon Ground, supported by a brick wall. In the Southeastern U.S., we might not choose hops as the crop to drape over a wall, due to leaf-disease issues that they get here, but the idea is a good one.

Do you grow climbing forms of nasturtiums, passionfruit, or other vining crops?

If your property has a wall that is not part of the house, in a sunny spot, plants can be espaliered in front of it (little fruit trees), or draped over it, like at Uncommon Ground.

Meanwhile, in my yard

For me, just north of Atlanta, it is time to plant crops that have a listed days-to-maturity of 55-60 days. That includes ‘Detroit dark red’ beets, ‘Little finger’ carrots, and ‘Marvel of 4 Seasons’ lettuce. The carrots and winter radishes that I planted a couple of weeks ago have sent up their first leaves. The fall garden really has begun!

Blog

Is Gardening Really All About Bugs?

The Passing of a Gardener

Cucumber Bonanza Nearing its End