Yesterday I went about the garden taking pictures of buds and young plants, and of course of the new lettuce in a little greenhouse on the alley. Well, here’s that greenhouse today:
Yes, the white stuff on top of the white cloth is snow. It’s after ten-thirty in the morning now, and it is just changing to rain.
Welcome to Montana.
Posted in Organic Gardening
I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis, the second week away in a month–and at planting time! No more.
This morning I pulled the covers off the only "greenhouses" that actually made it through the winter without major damage, and here’s what I found:
The tiny lettuce (yeah!) are in a bed on the alley that I kept protected all winter because when I did that last year, I pulled off the plastic and row-covers in the spring to find that young chard was already growing.
This year when I removed the covers I had nothing save one incipient spinach and some very dry dirt. I’m speculating (why not?) that this is one situation in which one does want to wet the bed, and that I didn’t do so sufficiently.
I’d prepped the soil last fall, so a couple of weeks ago between trips I planted alternating rows of lettuce and finger carrots. The plan (there’s actually a plan) is to harvest all this stuff in late June and plant out tomatoes that I’ve kept until then in pots.
I try to rotate crops, and it’s this bed’s turn to take on tomatoes. The big pine(s) east of it (you can see their trunks at the top of the first photo) keep it from getting sun until afternoon, but as the sun moves south at the end of summer this area gets more light, longer, than just about any other part of my garden. So the tomatoes should do okay, I think.
The square bed above is one I also kept covered all winter, more successfully. Those taller things with the white tips are leeks about to flower (I think),
and there’s creeping flox already in flower, and the bushier greer things featured on the right are something that I’m not quite sure about. They resemble stock, though it’s so long since I’ve seen stock that I could be seriously mistaken. I suspect it’s a weed whose small white flowers really don’t compensate for its size.
Any bets out there?
Posted in Organic Gardening
All right, so it’s probably a testimony to my inexperience and hubris that I thought this my idea, but I did think it so, and it turns out it’s not, because here and there in Minneapolis where I was helping out an old friend who’d just had heart surgery were wide white swatches on lawns where newly re-seeded places had been covered with row-covers or something indistinguishable from them. (Take a breath, Kate, or as that friend used to say when we were roommates in college several decades ago, "Du calme, du calme." She was a French major.)
The row-cover idea came to me several years back when I wanted to overseed in the heat of summer. (Why then? Beats me.) The technique — combined with top-dressing and frequent watering — worked surprisingly well, so I’ve incorporated it into my lawn gardening web-site article.
In all the reading I did for that article, I never once saw mention of such a technique. (Well, maybe once, where someone suggested mulching with straw.) Yet there they were, as I say, in Minneapolis, the white rectangles on upper-class lawns, usually on slopes, so the idea may have been more to prevent seed from washing away than to provide shade and reduce the need for watering.
It’s odd; I feel vindicated, but I also feel let down, almost ripped off. That was my idea! Mine, all mine! We hates them, Precious, yesss, we does…
Posted in Lawns & Grass
You know how these things go: a comment on my cinch bug post led to a brief conversation with my husband, me maintaining that vacuuming up bugs off the lawn is pretty odd, and he claiming that we’d actually done something similar ourselves.
"What? Vacuum up bugs–oh my god."
"Remember the roaches?"
"Agh–yes. You’re right."
"And that’s what finally got rid of them."
This isn’t strictly speaking a gardening story, but it is an organic pest-control story, so I’m going to go ahead and tell it. It took place in our San Diego days, which is a good thing, because if that many roaches had inhabited a stove in New York, neither the stove nor I would have survived the experience. Nor the vacuum cleaner, come to think of it. (I’m not afraid of bugs, but New York cockroaches are a different order of being, truly the stuff of nightmares–mine, anyway, when I was a child. It’s probably because I was the one my two squeamish sisters assigned to kill them.)
There in San Diego we noticed roaches on our stove-top from time to time–slender, half-inch long items, not New York’s lumbering giants, which are often over an inch long and half an inch wide–(and here you see one of the many ways that growing up in New York City leaves one permanently twisted: everything, for the rest of one’s life, exists in comparison with the New York version and these paler imitations are, well, paler imitations. The rule applies to fireworks, cockroaches, you name it. And you wondered what the "twisted roots" in the blog tag meant. Now you know.)
So, back in San Diego, (remember San Diego? (remember Alice’s Restaurant?) This is a story about San Diego) I got up from bed one night and turned on the kitchen light to find the stove-top aswarm with roaches. We didn’t want to spray lethal chemicals all over the surface where we cooked dinner, so we took to lying in wait for them in the dark, then flicking on the light and leaping at the stove, bug-squashers at the ready. It worked great in that we got lots of bugs every time, but there were always more. It looked as though we could go on this way forever, and we weren’t that bored with our lives.
It was Steve who proposed taking the sides off the stove. When we did–pay dirt. Or pay bugs, except that I haven’t found anyone willing to pay. They swarmed over the insulation just inside the metal sides. We could actually see the little hollows where eggs were laid.
Clearly, a couple of sponges weren’t going to do the trick. And again, I suspect it was Steve who suggested the vacuum cleaner, because he really does have a "beginner’s mind" in the Zen sense–open to new ideas and therefore infinitely creative.
There was something perversely satisfying in vacuuming up those bugs by the dozen. We practically fought over the nozzle–"That one’s going to get away!" "Let me!" "No, let me!" And then there was the other side of the stove to do.
As Steve reminded me today, after that it was just mopping up. There were a few stray roaches over the next couple of days, but really, it was over. No sprays, no traps, no powders and, thank god, no nightmares.
We get locked into set ways of thinking about things (bugs=Raid), and this rigidity cramps our style. Sure, vacuuming the lawn may seem odd–but no more so than vacuuming the inside of the stove. If we’re going to give up pesticides, we’re going to have to be creative.
Posted in Pests and Pesticides
written 4/15
If I didn’t know there was a pesticide near-ban in Toronto, I wouldn’t be able to tell from the look of lawns and parks around town. Since my parents still bike everywhere though he’s 81 and she’s "in her eightieth year," as she modestly puts it (they don’t own a car), I see a lot of lawns and parks up close just biking with them to lunch, or the cheese store, or the lawyer’s, or a friend’s house.
What appears in those lawns and parks, though, isn’t all that revealing, because spring here is weeks behind. When I planned the trip, I figured I’d be able to learn a lot from how the lawns and parks look, even if I didn’t manage any official interviews. After all, it’s April, and though spring is barely a rumor back in Montana, it should be well-advanced here.
Or so my memory of high school springs told me.
After several days here though, I cannot claim to have made great progress. My calls are all suspended in some virtual purgatory, and the weather is not co-operating. When I got up this morning (this was ), it was 34 degrees Fahrenheit here, or barely above zero on the Celsius thermometer used in Canada (and in the rest of the world), and 39 in Bozeman. A few days ago the split was even wider: forty something here for the high and seventy-seven in Bozeman.
(Of course, the temperature in Bozeman is now falling and due to continue doing so; by the time I get home it should be back in the normal range, dang it. Where is justice?)
In Toronto, the trees are bare of leaves, though some appear to be thinking about budding; the lawns are green, but only just. Crocuses are blooming everywhere, and the tiny blue-flowered scylla, and on one ride I spotted daffodils are out on a warm south-facing slope, but no forsythia yet. It’s been a long winter here.
I’d read one blog entry before leaving that said Toronto’s parks look awful; that certainly wasn’t my impression, but the dandelions were barely sprouting, much less flowering. So I can’t say I got a good impression of the parks, but in this context that means not that they look bad, but that I didn’t have a good chance to form an impression. Since my next visit may be in October, I’ll hope that fall this year also comes late. If it comes as early as spring is late, I’ll be looking at fallen leaves and brown grass, or even at snow.
Posted in Lawns & Grass
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