An Organic Urban Yard in Less Time Than a Sit-Com

I am reminded of that folk tale about the simpleton-hero who amuses himself by swatting flies. He practiced until he was able to kill seven flies at once. He commemorated this ability by embroidering a sash that said “Seven at One Stroke” which he wore proudly. I think the tale continues that an ogre was preparing to do battle with the simpleton, until the ogre read the sash and instead ran away, thinking that the simpleton had killed seven creatures more fearsome than house flies.

I feel a bit like that simpleton-hero today in my foolish pride for my weed-pulling abilities. I was able to extract a dandelion with a root at least 9″ long. It required a firm and steady hand… and truth be told, it also required the fluffy “chocolate cake” soil we’ve been developing for a decade. Still, when I pulled that root from the ground, I felt like I was pulling Excalibur from the stone.

I have no illusions that I’ve really “got” all the dandelion. If you look closely, the very tip of the root broke off and will likely grow back. But I don’t sweat that. In fact, I appreciate my deep-rooted weeds because they are collecting nutrients from far down in the soil and I can reclaim when I use the weeds as mulch or compost. I know I’m “supposed” to worry about transmitting weed seeds when I put weeds to work like that, but really around the garden at least, I’m too foolish to worry much.

Now where do you suppose I can get a sash embroidered around here?

Does anyone else have any weed-triumph tales that you would like to share?

It’s almost here… The happiest time of the gardening season…

Tomato time!

If I could give two words of advice to a beginning kitchen gardener, it would be “Stake everything!” It’s the very same advice that my September-self always wishes that my June-self would have remembered and acted upon.

Many kitchen garden plants need to be supported in some way to do their best. I’m thinking of tomatoes especially, but we have also found staking our basil, eggplant, and peppers to be very helpful. If we manage to scrounge enough cages, we also support the cabbage or broccoli. Sometimes we use cages early in the season to mark the vulnerable seedlings so they don’t get stepped on, and sometimes we forget to move the cages until too late. By then, the plant has filled out enough that the cage can’t be removed easily.

Why stake up plants? Seedlings are much like children in that, when they are small, trying to imagine them all grown up is nearly impossible. Just like children, however, seedlings do grow– beyond your imagination. Those tiny tomato plants will not stay tiny. Same for those cucumbers, basil, eggplants, and, with luck, everything else you plant. You turn your back, occupied with other daily distractions, and then blammo– you’ve got tomato plants tripping over each other, falling on the ground.

The weather can also take its toll on the heartiest seeming plant. Given the torrential downpours that often mark Michigan summers, staking up as many plants as possible in the kitchen garden helps plants make it through the summer without getting beat up, knocked down or damaged.

Keeping plants standing up off the ground also yields more produce. Contact with soil weakens the skin of vegetables like tomatoes or eggplants, which can encourage decay. Soil contact also makes it easier for certain insects to have easy access to your crop. Some loss is unavoidable but it’s disappointing to share too much of your hard work.

There are different materials and methods available for staking up garden plants. We use a “what-have-ya-got” approach to staking, so our main methods are garden spirals, tomato cages, some home-made wire fencing cages, and wooden stakes. I’ve seen neighbors employing other shapes, like tripods or trellises, but the four types below are what we have on hand this season.

1. Tomato cages. Not just for tomatoes, these cages also support basil, peppers, and eggplant in our garden. Tomato cages are our old stand-by. Over the years we’ve acquired quite a few, and they are good to reuse for many seasons. They are fairly inexpensive to start, and occasionally I’ll see some out by the curb or listed on the ecycle list. Another thing I like about tomato cages is that they ‘stack’ together nicely for storage in our barn attic.

2. Tomato spirals. Oh my goodness, we love tomato spirals, and so do the tomato plants. We have about a dozen tomato spirals that we’ve collected over the years, and we wish we had more. The twisty part works with the tomato plant’s natural growing tendency, so with just a little nudge every now and then, the tomato grows up the spiral and stands tall in the garden. Spirals are particularly useful if you prune your tomato plants. They are not inexpensive, however, so we don’t have a one-to-one ratio of spirals to plants. We acquired some of ours from our local Downtown Home and Garden, but they are also available elsewhere, including Amazon.

3. Wire fencing cages. We purchased a roll of wire fencing and cut it to make our own. Our cages have about a 12-inch diameter. Jim says if he were doing it over again, he’d make the cages bigger. You’d want to have 4 inch to 6 inch squares in the wire pattern for easy access to your plants, i.e., harvesting, pruning. You don’t want something too small to put your hand through. The cages are a little wobbly so we usually use a metal fence post to support several cages.

4. Wooden stakes. Usually my last choice for staking up plants, but good in a pinch. We have some old ones around that we made tripods with in the past, but we didn’t do that this year. You have to be careful pushing wooden stakes into the ground because it can result in splinters or occasional self-stabbing when the stake breaks– and I had a bruise to show for that.

Staking up garden plants is an entirely worthwhile effort that will always pay off more than you think. Other methods abound. What’s are your favorite?

If you’re a long-time reader, you know that 20MinuteJan and I set out several years ago to reclaim our yard 20 minutes at a time after a construction project had some unexpectedly destructive side effects. We’ve continued that process for the most part in maintaining the yard. 20 minute a day is actually a LOT of time if you stay focused… and honest. I’ll be the first to admit that some days, I find it hard to stop after 20 minutes. So I let myself store up time to use on those “easy” days. My Gramma always said “You make hay while the sun shines” which I take to mean, I work more on days when it’s possible and don’t sweat it overly on days that it’s not (rain, commitments, etc.)

Except for the one week every year when we flat out cheat!

Next week is the Ann Arbor Art Fair and friends from far and wide will be stopping by to see the garden… and park in our drive. The yard has to be on its best behavior and so we traditionally spent extra time – sometimes LOTS of extra time – getting things in shape. This year though, I thought I’d keep a rough tally of what we did.

– Cut the Lawn: (40 minutes) We cut ours as well as our next door neighbor’s in exchange because she lets us use her back yard as a garden annex. It’s not that much of an imposition because her entire back yard is garden (“More hoe, less mow”) and because we generally view grass clippings as a crop. This harvest became mulch around the tomatoes and the nearer part of the squash.

– Harvest the Lovage: Lovage is a wonderfully weird plant. It smells just like celery but it grows to a good six feet tall– before it flops over around this time of the year. Propping it up helps a bit but as soon as the hollow stalks bend, they snap and it’s all over. In this case, “harvest” means the seeds which are used as “celery seed.” Hack it down, hang it upside down in the garage to dry.

– Yank up more of that blasted Bindweed: It sounds like a magical ingredient from Harry Potter… and if there are any budding wizards out there who’d like to try, I know where there seems to be a perpetual stand of the stuff.

– Tidy up the backyard projects: At least that’s what Janice suggests I do. But the wood burning stove is still in the middle of the drive because I’ve almost gathered enough scrap wood to brew another batch of beer. And that section of fence that I’ve trimmed down and set on its end is almost ready to be painted into a “road side sign.” And those saw horses of 2×4′s are really just… OK, I’ll tidy ‘em up.

– General weeding: the all-over-mulch strategy works extremely well, and then planting extremely closely also discourages weeds but still a few weeds peek up as a testament to persistence if nothing else.

– Stake up at least the most obvious lollygaggers.

Wow! I’m exhausted just TYPING up all those tasks. I’d best get busy!

The other day in the garden, I stood admiring the new Caribbean hot peppers that 20 Minute Jim had planted earlier this year. As a hot pepper aficionado, he had been very excited to a new pepper to the varieties growing in the garden. I observed the green peppers hanging under the leaves, and then an odd shaped pepper poking up among the foliage caught my eye. That’s weird, thought I. And I reached out and touched this weird pepper… and it moved!

AAAA-gggghhhhh!

My shriek certainly startled the neighborhood or at least the chickens next door.

I was too hot and shook up to trudge all the way upstairs to find my favorite gardening pest book (The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals), so I instead consulted the internet. Googling “big green worm” immediately brought some of the desired information. The big green worm was a tomato hornworm, the larval stage of the Manduca quinquemaculata. As I suspected, it was a foe, rather than a friend, to the garden and one possessing a voracious appetite.

Author Relic. Used under Creative Commons License.

The advice I read was to pick off and kill tomato worms, with one exception that I’ll detail in the next paragraph. Large wormy pests are not things I can pick off using my fingers. I returned to the garden with a plastic container and its lid, thinking I could knock said tomato worm into the container. But no. Tomato worms have several sets of rather powerful legs. They cling. I donned my handy gardening gloves and returned to plucking. The worm was not cooperative; I had to tug firmly as each set of legs reluctantly let go of the pepper plant stem. I put him in the container for disposal, after showing him off to anyone who’d listen to my tale of woe. And I shivered for a few minutes. Ugh.

When shouldn’t a gardener pluck up the offending tomato hornworm and mush it out of existence? When the worm looks like this:

Author Stsmith. Used with permission under the Creative Commons License.

A tomato hornworm who looks like rice is stuck on its back has already met its end: it has been parasitized by the Braconidae wasp larvae, a beneficial insect, a gardener’s friend. This tomato hornworm has become a nursery for Braconidea wasps, which will attack tomato hornworms and other harmful insects in your garden. A parasitized tomato hornworm should be left as is.

Tomato hornworms like to eat various plants from the family Solanaceae, including tomato, eggplant, pepper, and potato; they also attack tobacco but we don’t grow that. I’m keeping a daily patrol on the rest, however, watching for areas of defoliation. So far, I haven’t found another big green worm, but I know the old gardening adage of “one insect seen usually means more than one in the garden” so I’m remaining vigilant.