Protect our friends. So many butterflies in our area have laid their eggs and their baby caterpillars are getting big and fat and chewing up plants. Be sure you know who your friends are before you squash any of them! You’ll love having the butterflies.
Swallowtail caterpillars
I found these this week, not on the dozens of dill plants I planted for them but on a leftover parsley from last year. Next year, more parsley.
Monarch caterpillars
Also yellow stripey…they look a little more serious. I’m watching for these now. Quite a few eggs on the milkweed plants I let take over part of the back garden…so I’m hoping
Painted lady caterpillar
I almost never see these although I see lots of the butterflies. Skinny little black prickly caterpillars. Their host is the Malva family like thistles or hollyhocks.
Cabbage looper
Well, this is one you’re probably seeing a lot of right now. Cute little white moths fluttering everywhere. Bright green little loopers inching along devouring your cabbages. If you want cabbages, you have to treat these as pests.
After weeks of rainy days, we were rewarded with a week of hot sunshine. This is great news for the tomatoes, but it means all those cool-season veggies started to bolt and are going to seed. When summer temperatures warm, all the cilantro and spinach, and lettuce put out lovely seed heads. That’s a sign there won’t be many more leafy greens growing but all the plants’ efforts will go into reproduction and making seeds.
Seed making in the leafy greens means the leaves are going to turn bitter. And once bitter, you never get the sweetness back on those spinaches and lettuces.
Now it is time to make some choices. Gardening is always about choices.
There are early choices about what to plant.
Choices about whether to treat pests.
Choices about when to harvest.
You can yank the plants out and re-seed.
For us, that means big salads for dinner every night this week. We took out our harvesting knives and cut the lettuces and spinach to the ground. Lots of cilantro was done also…so an armload of cilantro greens will go into awesome pesto this week. Dozens of flat edible pea pods were plucked for salad and stir-fry. As the evening cooled, we sat around the outdoor table and watched the tomato plants put out more yellow flowers.
If you are growing your garden primarily to feed yourself, you need to harvest as the market farmers do. When it’s time to cut kale, you don’t just take a few leaves. You get your knife and cut that plant to within two inches of the soil. That shocks the leafy greens and they immediately triple leaf production and you will get two more big harvests out of each plant. Ruthless cutting produces more food.
Another choice is for beauty and generosity. If you allow some of those plants to bolt and start going to seed, you end up with a garden that generously feeds the pollinators and butterflies and birds with flowers and seed heads. The swallowtail butterflies ignored all the dill that I planted for them and instead congregated on one old parsley plant to lay their eggs. Nature’s creatures have reasons for choosing that we don’t always understand.
With the rain this year, bolted lettuce is statuesque, four feet high, and visible across the yard. Purple Merlot lettuce at this size is stunning next to the sweet peas. The dill is taller than I am in the well-watered garden and surrounds all the tomatoes like protective warriors. Yellow mustard flowers and white arugula flowers lean out across the walk begging to be nibbled. Broccoli heads opening up into flowers are beguiling.
So once again you have a choice. You can go out in the hot sun and tidy up your garden that’s going to seed and harvest the last of the good lettuces, or you can let Nature’s idea of Beauty run amok.
We’ve had crazy amounts of rain this season and a sad consequence of this is plants are plagued with leaf diseases of every sort. Organic treatment of black spot and rust and powdery mildew usually starts with useless notes like air the plant out, provide adequate drainage, pick off diseased leaves. Daily rain means there is no extra air, there’s nowhere for the water to go, and if we picked off all the diseased leaves there’d be no leaves left to support the plant.
The One Big Secret to knowing if a fungus is about to move in on your plant? Look on the bottom side of the leaves. This works as well for pumpkins and squash as for roses.
Catching the Fungus in action was the most important part of keeping your plants healthy.
Now you have to Treat it Regularly.
There is no reversing fungus when it hits your plant…there’s just stopping it from spreading. If you know you have plants likely to get diseased, like roses in the rain, or squash plants in hot stressed conditions, walk by the plants from time to time and look at the underside of the leaves.
At our monthly Rose Society Meeting with collectively at least 200 years of rose growing experience, we did come up with things we think you can do to keep roses and other plants health during a high fungus year.
Number One was to feed your soil.
Everyone agreed that good soil with lots of nutrients and microbes made for plants that didn’t catch every fungus and disease floating in the air.
Number Two was pay attention and respond quickly. Nip it in the bud so to speak.
Watch the underside of the leaves. As soon as there is the sign of disease start treatment.
Some people use foliar sprays like baking soda or potassium salts. Others used buttermilk. (both of those treatments change pH.) Some are big on compost tea. Liquid kelp in a spray bottle is my go-to for most things.
The trick with sprays is to pull off the entirely diseased leaves and then start spraying on the underside of leaves, then on the top. The second secret for sprays is to repeat them every week. One time isn’t going to do it.
That’s it. The short version of our collective wisdom when it comes to a rainy season full of disease:
Have a potluck so everyone can commiserate with each other about their little natural disasters. Then get out there and make sure your soil is good and you stay vigilant.
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00Sandy Swegelhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngSandy Swegel2015-06-05 15:52:332021-02-24 15:10:43The One Best Way to know when fungus is attacking your rose garden
Just a moment to be serious now. Spring has arrived and stores are filling with bedding plants and seeds. At the same time, homeowners are noticing all the weeds in yards and some still go out to buy weed killer.
There are three easy quick things you can do that make a difference to help protect bees and yourself from the “neonic” pesticides.
Learn One Name
Imidacloprid
That’s the neonic most likely in retail products. If you’re an overachiever, the other names are Clothianidin, Thiamethoxam, Acetamiprid, Dinotefuran. These are ingredients in weed killers, especially products marked Bayer or with names like Systemic or Max. Just check your labels and don’t buy these.
Watch For the Label
Customer pressure led Home Depot and Lowe’s last year to agree to put labels on all plants treated with neonics. The label is deceptive….makes it sound like neonics are better…but watch for the label.
Ask Your Retailer
There’s no government regulation (Alas!) that says neonics have to be labeled. The best thing you can do is ask at the garden center if the plants you are buying have been treated with neonics. If they don’t know…then you can probably assume the plants have been sprayed. The treatments can last up to two months in your garden…making your pretty flowers potentially lethal to bees that land on them.
Every time you ask a garden center employee or a grower if their plants have been treated with neonics, you are educating them. That’s what we are after. Nobody really wants to harm bees or the environment. Two years ago when I asked a major grower here in the Denver area if they used neonics, the owner looked at me like I was some crazy Boulder liberal. Which of course I am. He said, “Bah humbug, there’s no way to grow plants without neonics.” But last week, his greenhouse (Welby) had an open house in which they proudly said that most of their plants were grown without neonics and they were continuing to work on how to get neonic-free.
Oh, and of course there’s a fourth thing to do to help the bees. Grow your own plants from good non-pesticide treated, non-GMO, often organic, often heirloom, always neonic-free seeds like ours!
For lots of info on neonics in consumer products, you can read this pdf put out by Xerces.
http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/NeonicsInYourGarden.pdf
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00Mike Wadehttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngMike Wade2015-03-25 15:01:132021-02-24 15:56:11No Neonics: Three Easy Ways to Help
I had to laugh this week when reader Mike Hood commented earlier on one of our sweet inspiring quotes about the virtues of gardening that “Gardening is a Battle.” Now maybe Mike was just trolling, but I am all too familiar with the feeling that gardening is a battle. When I’m having that experience is usually when I’m about to injure myself. I was fighting with dandelion roots in hard clay when I torqued my wrist and gave myself carpal tunnel for a few weeks. I was hacking out old lilac stumps with a mini pick ax when I nearly tore my rotator cuff. And then there was the time when I was furiously trying to get all the work done before dark when I tripped on a stupid piece of metal fencing and impaled it in my leg. I keep my tetanus shots current for a reason. Mother Nature is quite solid and stubborn and I rarely win the battles.
However, all the battles are what have taught me how to garden wisely.
Wearing the brace for carpal tunnel on my dominant hand taught me several important things about weeding.
Keeping my tools sharp means less work.
Forget wussy dandelion diggers and get a real weapon for weeds: a Hori Hori knife does a much better job with less work.
It’s the torquing and anger that causes injuries. A straight wrist and sharp tools and a mindful attitude isn’t so much work.
The non-dominant hand can learn to do an awesome job of pulling annual weeds in soft soil.
Over rotating my shoulder with the pick introduced me to a favorite tool, my battery operated Sawzall. Dig up an entire bush? Easy if you just systematically go round and round the plant using the Sawzall and an Ugly blade for rough wood. Cut through a root, scoop out dirt to get to the next root, repeat. No sweat. Divide massive grass clumps or daylilies. The Ugly blade slides through like going through butter. The brain and a sharp tool are always better than brute force for getting the job done and for not hacking through irrigation.
The best lesson came from getting impaled on the metal fencing. A puncture wound in the back of my thigh meant I could stand up or I could sit down…changing positions caused all the pain. That’s when I learned how much gardening can be happily done sitting on my butt right next to the garden bed. Much less work than bending over. I can even do better pruning if I can see the structure of the plant from the ground level. Pests are easier to spot too.
So yes I do a lot of work in the garden, but it feels like play because I always work in the shade or cool parts of the day. I often sit before the garden bed while working in it. I use really sharp tools and I have colorful orange and purple trug buckets to make me smile. Those are my weapons in battle.
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00konabirdhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngkonabird2014-08-11 16:41:002021-02-25 15:16:41Is Gardening work or play?
We had our first 100-degree day which always reminds me that I prefer to be a fair-weather gardener and garden where it is cool and partly shady. Sometime mid-summer, gardening can become a chore rather than a delight. So on that hot day, I thought about what I could do to revitalize my love of gardening.
Put Down the Phone.
Really. I know we’re all addicted to our phones and incoming text messages. Scientists say it’s an actual chemical addiction with little dopamine rushes every time the alert sound goes off. But it also means you are only half conscious in the garden. How can you learn to listen to the fairies and devas if you’re always on the phone? Or how can you see the early signs of pest infestations or the amazing tiny native pollinators if you’re not fully present?
Show the Garden to Someone Who Knows Nothing of Gardens.
City folk or small children are good subjects. You’ll find out what you love when you’re doing show-and-tell to your garden newbie. You learn your attitude to dandelions has softened when you find yourself explaining that dandelions are the first foods of the year for bees. And those caterpillars you might think of as pests….you love lifting the leaves to show off their hiding places. Your love of the mystery and surprise of nature shows up when you introduce a garden to someone new.
Forget that you know the difference between Plants and “Weeds”.
Every few years my town has an artists’ garden tour where we visit the homes and studios of local artists. These artists have gardens with incredible detail to shapes and textures and color combinations. They are often inexperienced gardeners but rather just using the green growing things as another medium in their art. They don’t know that pretty purple flowers are thistles that should be yanked. And uncut grassy weeds look nice blowing in the wind in their minds. If you forget everything you know about plants and just walk around your garden looking at the pretty colors and textures and how the shapes look against the sky, you’ll have a whole new love for your garden.
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00konabirdhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngkonabird2014-06-23 06:00:002021-02-25 15:49:263 Ways to Enjoy Gardening More
Is it time? Is it too late? Can I still plant seeds? These are the questions I heard this week. In our Zone 5 area, garden centers are already starting to discount plants and seasonal workers will get laid off by the 4th of July. Does that mean it’s too late to plant seeds and you should just buy the biggest plant you can find?
Generally, the answer is, of course, there is still time to plant seeds…It’s only June! For gardeners, the truest answer is always, “It Depends.”
There are a few seeds that it is too late to plant. In Zone 5 or other short growing season areas, it’s too late to plant watermelon or winter squash or tomatoes by seed. The “days to maturity” info on the back of the seed package tells you that you need 90-100 days before the plant makes its first ripe fruit. 100 days from now is mid-September before you might get a watermelon…that doesn’t work when we might have frost by then…or at the very least cold nights.
The flip side of this question is, “Are there seeds I should plant rather than buy plants?” Absolutely. It makes no sense to buy a broccoli or cauliflower plant now for $4.00 when it’s just going to bolt in the summer heat. It likes cooler weather. And you could probably buy the broccoli itself cheaper. But in a couple of weeks, market farmers are starting their broccoli seeds to get their fall crops going. Planting broccoli and cauliflower soon is a great idea!
Annuals are still a great bargain to plant. I went into sticker shock when I went plant shopping this year. Plant prices are up about 30 percent in my area. For less than the price of a 4-inch pot with a marigold, I can get one seed packet of marigolds and have dozens and dozens of plants in bloom in only 45 days. They’ll be super cute all over the garden and in the vegetable garden, they’ll help repel pests.
It’s the same forcosmos and California poppies and zinnias and all the annual wildflower mixes. There’s still time. For perennial seed, some plants might not bloom till next year, but the plants will be strong and it’s a lot easier to start seeds now in the garden where you want them to grow instead of inside under lights in the middle of winter.
Buying bedding plants is great for instant gratification, but gardeners know that if you want a garden full of hundreds of flowers (without breaking the bank), SEEDS are the way to go!
So there IS still time. Lots of time for annual flowers like cosmos and zinnias and sunflowers and bachelor buttons and zinnias and for big flowery herbs. Then there all those vegetables to seed. And the perennials you are admiring in bloom now. You get the idea. There is plenty of time to plant by seed and enjoy them this year.
Heirloom vegetable seed
Wildflower Mixes
Pollinator mixes
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00Sandy Swegelhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngSandy Swegel2014-06-13 06:00:002021-02-25 17:00:50Is It Time?
I’ve been watching my neighbor Tory’s vegetable garden with great interest this year. She worked as a farm intern (ie. Full-time farming, almost no money) the last couple of years and has brought farm techniques to her home garden. Yesterday as we enjoyed the latest harvest of arugula she announced it was time to dig these up and plant something else. I was surprised since she just seeded these arugula in early March.
From a market farming perspective, you grow greens to harvest a lot of food quickly. She seeded the arugula early and when they are big enough to harvest she cuts them to just an inch or so above the soil level. Then she lets them grow again and the cycle repeats. Plants grown like this produce a lot of food, but they also get tired and worn out. The plant itself is depleted. Tory made her decision to dig under the arugula because the plants weren’t growing as vigorously as before and, the biggest factor, they didn’t taste as good. Whether it was the hard fast growth or a recent week of warm weather, the arugula was getting a little too spicy. It seems harsh, but if you want to keep eating from your garden, you have to unplant the less productive plants and know what to unplant.
Things I’ve unplanted this week: Arugula that has been harvested three times and is losing vigor. Kale that had overwintered. It was great to have kale from last year’s plants, but the old woody stems are no longer producing as well as the new plants. Radishes that got bitter. A week of rain followed by a week of heat made huge bitter radishes. They look great but we crave sweet young vegetables.
Garden more productive and more beautiful.
In the perennial garden, I’ve been unplanting too. Poppies that have spread everywhere. They are at risk of becoming a weed.
Plants that have grown too big for where they are planted.
Plants that are blocking sprinkler heads.
Plants that I’ve never liked.
Gardeners are often loathe getting rid of plants. They feel sorry for them. They’ve come to know them as friends. But there is a time and season for every plant and a good gardener learns to be a little ruthless. If you want to have succession gardening, you have to create the empty space for the next plant. It may seem harsh, but you have to declutter and make space for new growth!
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00Sandy Swegelhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngSandy Swegel2014-05-23 19:21:002021-02-25 17:33:57What to Unplant
Our friend and blog reader CJ recently sent us some great suggestions about tackling weeds when you are absolutely overwhelmed by weeds on your property. She has a large hilly country property that is atop a mesa so weed seeds fly in from miles around. Her gardens are xeriscaped and mulched which helps discourage weeds, but last Fall’s flooding here in Colorado has created a bumper crop of tall lush weeds that threaten to take over everything.
If you have more weeds on your property than you have hours in the day to pull, here are her suggestions.
First, I tackle any weed that is threatening the life of a plant I care about.
I weed an area around the plant perimeter. This doesn’t take too long, and often is the first weeding I do in the spring.
Second, I must give priority to any weed that is going to seed.
Especially if it is upwind from my beds. Downwind, given our terrain, I don’t care too much. I just weeded cheatgrass and that thin sticky thing with tiny yellow flowers along the driveway berm. Got the whole thing weeded in a little over an hour.
Third, I weed where the weeds bother me…as in, if something is getting ready to bloom, I don’t want to stare through a bunch of weeds to see it. So I try to be aware of focal points, and where the eye is naturally drawn to.
Finally, with noxious weeds, my rule is just to get rid of them before they release seeds, at all costs, but not necessarily as a first priority if they are still flowering. (and yes, I left the donkey tail this year until now because it is the first thing in my garden for the pollinators, along with the dandelions.)
Of course, sometimes when I just need a rush, I go out and pull the biggest weeds I can find, so after 30 minutes I have this pile twelve feet high and feel like I’ve really accomplished something. : )
Thanks to CJ for sharing her wisdom of many years of living on the windblown high plains. I love the idea of the adrenaline rush from a frenzy of pulling big weeds. I do love doing that too!
A gardener I know recently went out to his cold frame to harvest some beautiful kale he could see pushing against the top of the frame. Instead of an ecstatic reaction of joy to this spring treat, he quickly retreated with a big “Ewww.” His kale was absolutely coated in aphids. He had nursed it and even given it extra organic nitrogen fertilizer recently and this was the thanks he got.
Aphids are irritating pests. They are very prolific and can have twenty generations in a season. And it could take a long time to rinse each one off a leaf of kale, so what’s a gardener to do if they are not ready to become an insectivore?
You Can Prevent Aphids
Our gardener probably got aphids for a couple of reasons:
His cold frame was sealed pretty tight, so predators like birds and ladybugs couldn’t get in to control the aphids. Also, recent warm temperatures stressed the plants in the closed frame. Opening the cold frame on warmer days will help.
They are everywhere. They overwinter on mustard weeds which are prolific in the spring garden. There’s no avoiding the aphids altogether on cole plants, but cleaning up the debris in the garden and weeding out the mustard weeds will remove many of the eggs from last year.
They adore nitrogen. The soluble nitrogen he had just added just enticed even more aphids to come eat over here!
Plant chard and spinach. Aphids don’t bother them as much.
You Can Treat Aphids
Aphids are super easy to treat: a blast from a garden hose washes them to the ground and they don’t easily crawl back.
Soapy water (a drop or two of dish soap or Dr. Bronner’s in your watering can or spray bottle) kills them easily.
Check the plants frequently: the aphids are often under the leaves or along the stems…hard places to reach.
You Can Clean the Kale
A sink full of water, most people agreed, was the best way to clean the aphids off so you don’t disgust your dinner guests. Submerge the kale completely and squish it around a lot. The aphids float to the surface. Repeat.
Someone else suggested dissolving some salt in hot water and then adding it to the sink of cold water, letting the kale sit for 30 minutes. The salty water helps dislodge the aphids.
Don’t give up. Kale is incredibly nutritious not to mention tasty and easy to grow.
https://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.png00Sandy Swegelhttps://bbbseed.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/BBB-Seed-logo-with-tagline-2023.pngSandy Swegel2014-04-28 06:00:002022-06-21 15:29:14Aphids on your Kale – Ewwww
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