How to Become a Plant Nerd

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How to Become a Plant Nerd

by Sandy Swegel

You know you are a Plant Nerd When…
(Or How to Become a Plant Nerd)

You know every garden starts with graph paper. You draw a scale drawing with trees and fences.

You create an Excel file listing the times to seed and days to harvest. Your file shows when to plant second crops for fall veggies.

You automate your garden
You put a timer on for watering. Your smartphone calendar alerts you six weeks before the last frost. You have to use a moisture sensor to know when to water.

You know the scientific names of your weeds.

You make the most of what you have.
You never plant in rows…you know it’s more efficient to plant densely in quadrants. If space is limited, you grow vertically. If all you have is a balcony to grow on you figure out how to make a hydroponic system out of a Rubbermaid container.

Your garden is full of experiments.
You test everything before you believe it. You have one section of peas planted with inoculant and one section planted without inoculant to see if it matters. You plant carrots with tomatoes and measure yield to see if it made a differences

You collect data.
You have a max-min thermometer to see the actual temperature in your yard. You write down how many days it took pepper seeds to germinate. You record when the apple trees blossomed and when you got your first tomato. You weigh your giant pumpkin to see if it weighs more than you do.

You make use of technology.
You use frost cloth and low tunnels to extend your season, and red plastic mulch to increase tomato yield.

 

You have taste testings to see which tomato tastes better.

You know the variety names of the vegetables you eat.

You love problems in the garden because it means you get to come up with a solution!

In other words, you garden smarter not harder.

You’re my superhero.

 

Photo Credit:  http://www.pinterest.com/pin/174796029262705028/

 

 

 

1000 bags of leaves and what to do with them

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How to Repurpose Fall Leaves

by Sandy Swegel

Fall leaves are Nature’s parting gift from the growing season to the gardener.  Tree roots run deep and wide and have collected minerals and nutrients from deep in the soil.  These are nutrients that then spent the summer high in the sky at treetop collecting sun rays and are now being placed abundantly at your feet.

If you’ve been gardening any length of time you know how valuable leaves are.  They decompose beautifully in the compost bin when mixed in with the green matter.  You can run them over with the mower to break them down and use them as mulch in all your garden beds.  You can keep piles of them in a shady moist corner of the garden decomposing down into leaf mold which is a superior soil amendment.

The most important thing gardeners in my neighborhood do within Fall leaves is collect them.  Our neighbor Barbara is the Queen of Fall Leaves and had taught us about how valuable leaves are to the gardener.  She lives on a busy street and puts a big cardboard sign in front of her house every year that says “Bagged Leaves Wanted.” Pretty soon bags and bags of leaves start piling up, brought from strangers all over town who are happy to have a place to recycle their leaves.  Barbara gets the first 1000 bags and about fifteen of us split the next 1000 bags of leaves.

So what do you do with 1000 bags of leaves?

Mulch the garden beds. Some of the leaves have already been chopped by blower vacs. These leaves easily go on perennial beds.

Mulch the garden paths.  Big dried leaves that are slow to break down like oak leaves or pine needles go on the paths to keep the weeds down.

Put a layer over the vegetable garden. If you don’t till in the spring, a thick layer of leaves will block light and suppress weeds and keep in moisture. But wait, you say, the wind will blow the leaves away.  That’s when you put the bagged leaves on top of the garden. It’s a place to store extra leaves and the weight of the bags keeps the loose leaves from blowing away. Moisture collects under the bags and earthworms come to feast there.

Till the molding leaves into the soil in Spring with the cover crop.

Insulate the cold frame or greenhouse with bags of leaves stacked around.

Line the troughs you dig for your potatoes next year with rotting leaves.

Make easy Leaf Mold.  Stack the bags that look like they don’t have holes somewhere (as insulation or just as storage) and put the hose in to fill the bag about ¼ way with water.  This makes speedy leaf mold.

Use as free litter for chickens and bunnies. If you have farm animals, dried leaves are perfect free litter for the bottom of the coop or cage. And the manure is already pre-mixed with carbon for composting.

Feed the Goats. The most fun thing to do with the leaves (aside from jumping in piles of them) is to feed the goats.  Apparently, dry leaves are yummy like potato chips to goats and they come running to eat the crunchiest ones when I’m hauling the latest bag of leaves to the backyard.

Happy goats running with floppy ears flying is a highlight of my day.

Photo credit:  http://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/mavis-garden-blog-how-to-find-free-compost/

3 Ways to Enjoy Gardening More

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Revitalize Your Love For Gardening 

by Sandy Swegel

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.

Photo Credit: http://20minutegarden.com/2011/06/28/garden-advice-a-phone-call-away/

http://www.liveluvcreate.com/image/weeds_are_beautiful_too-123094.html

 

 

Heirloom vegetable seeds for sale

Wildflower seed mixes

Tackling Weeds

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What to do When You Are Overwhelmed by Weeds

by Sandy Swegel

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!

 

 

Photo credit http://bikesandbirds.blogspot.com/2010/07/weeds.html
http://www.suburbanprairiehomemaker.com/2012/08/garden-party-our-lasagna-garden.html

 

 

 

A Wild Thicket

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Keeping a Little Wild in Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

When it comes to our gardens, we Americans are of a divided heart. Deep in our ancestral memories are the manicured gardens of Europe.  We swoon over the groomed roses and delphiniums of England, We admire the orderliness of rows of Tuscan poplars. We see the almost mathematical grid of Versailles echoed in Jefferson’s Monticello. We use raised beds to confine our vegetables just as the medieval cloister gardens were enclosed.

 

 At the same time, we Americans are a frontier people, dazzled by the wildness and grandeur of raw untamed nature.  Grassy plains and dense woodlands and mountains majesty tug at our hearts even as we tend our suburban plots.

 

To fill the needs of our wild nature souls, I think it’s always good to have a wild area in our yard. One that manages to thrive only on what nature provides and provides a haven for small wildlife.  Generally, there is some place in your yard that already refuses to be tamed. Someplace wild plums keep sprouting and sumacs come unbidden.   This is the area to encourage in your yard – your secret garden, if you’d like – or just the area you see from your kitchen window reminding you that beneath the dishes and chores and children and jobs, you have a wild spirit too.

My favorite thicket started with the wild plums that kept coming back. Over time, a couple of chokecherries worked their way in, and the patch of lemon balm appeared all on its own.  Birds planted wild roses. Squirrels brought in nuts. I decided to play along with nature and seeded an unruly pollinators’ hedge filled with the nectar and pollen-rich flowering plants that bees and butterflies crave. I let the wild queen anne’s lace have some space in the back and I didn’t pull the dandelions. I did plant one of those tall dark purple butterfly bushes for structure and I seeded a buffer zone of grasses and wildflowers to create a neutral zone of sorts between “The Lawn” and “The Thicket.” 

 I don’t really “garden” the thicket but over time I’ve planted some naturalizing crocus and daffodils and a handful of seeds a decade ago that keep the spring display stunning.  About the only care I give the area is water during really dry spells and a birdbath of water because butterflies and birds and bees need something to drink.

 I am proudest of my tended garden…the showy beds of vegetables and annual flowers, the elegant stretches of roses and flowering shrubs and tulips in Spring. But deep down, it is my thicket that I love the most.