Trying Something Wild

Last fall, I looked into the getting some native wild plants for our yards. When I was out shopping for mums, I heard something about getting asters instead. Asters are native plants, perennials, and great for pollinators in the fall. I did a little research at that time trying to find where to buy asters but ended up just getting a pot of mums for my porch decor. 

Some naturalized plants at my former home.

In the new year, I decided it was time to look into native plants again. The New York State DEC has a nice guide to native plants. (check it out here) With that as a starting place, I began searching the interwebs for sources of seeds. I eventually came across the website of the Wild Seed Project in Maine. I like the organization's mission to equip "community members with the resources they need to collectively restore native plants that expand wildlife habitat, support biodiversity, and build climate resilience" and they had seeds for five of the plants I was looking for in their shop - smooth blue aster, blue lobelia, blue iris, foxglove beardtongue, and flowering raspberry. At $5 each, I was happy to make my purchase and add a small donation.

The seeds arrived quickly, which was good because a few of them need to be outside for the winter in order to germinate. I finally had time today to get the seeds planted. I'm a bit on the late side, but we'll see what we get. The seed packets came with good instructions for planting and it took me very little time to get them all set.

Seeds on the soil just waiting for the sand on top.

My biggest concern is the mob of squirrels that live in our neighborhood. These little pots with their precious seeds need to be outside, exposed to the weather. That means the dirty little tree rats will be all over them. I'm not just guessing. I know this for a fact. My husband put out a few pots of pawpaw seeds to overwinter and the squirrels have relentlessly harassed them.

Poor pawpaws. I'm not even sure if the seeds are still in there.

The instructions suggested a piece of window screen be placed over the pots to prevent molestation, but I had another idea. We have a couple humane animal traps that aren't being used at the moment. I figure if they could keep squirrels, woodchucks, and a sad little skunk we weren't even trying to trap inside once the door slammed shut, they would, likewise, keep the creatures out. So, I placed the newly-potted seeds inside the traps and then set them outside - one in the shade and one in the sun, as needed. And I even had enough space to add the pawpaw pots as well.

The big trap in the shade.

The little trap in the sun (if it ever comes out)

And now we wait. Patience will definitely be a virtue as wild plant seeds take more time to germinate than commercially-bred flower and vegetable seeds. I did set aside a few of the aster and flowering raspberry seeds. They don't need to be exposed to the winter in order to germinate so I thought I'd try them under the grow lights when I get my herbs started. I bought another pot for my herb collection today - it's beautifully orange - and I'm dreaming of spring.

Nothing is safe!

 

The Little Pumpkin That Could(n't)

Last fall, I bought a wonderful white pumpkin striped with orange and green at a farm stand near my job at the time. I had never seen anything quite like it. I got it just for decoration rather than for eating, so at the end of the season I bashed it apart on my concrete patio and put the pieces along the tree line at the back of our property as a seasonal treat for the deer and other woodland creatures who frequent the area. I saved a bunch of the seeds for myself with the hope of growing my own lovely, unique pumpkins.

When I started my herb seeds this spring, I put three of the saved pumpkin seeds in the starter tray. I learned that this variety was called One Too Many, which seemed like a good sign. Out of the three seeds I started, one plant grew. Boy did it grow. It was the reason I needed to keep raising the grow lamp. I also planted three Long Pie pumpkins seeds, with one actually germinating too. But Long Pie is just a side character in this story. One Too Many is our protagonist.

May 5: One Too Many on the left, Long Pie on the right.

May 23: One Too Many on the left, Long Pie on the right.

I had really good feelings about my pumpkin seedlings when I transplanted them out into the garden on Memorial Day weekend. Of the two, I gave better odds of survival to One Too Many. Long Pie was a nice seedling but kind of spindly. I know pumpkins can be resentful of transplanting, but I was confident that sturdy One Too Many would be fine. 

May 25: One Too Many in the center of the bed in the background. Small but proud.

I planted arugula in the bed with One Too Many. I like to put fast spring crops with larger later plants. I put Pak Choi in the bed with the zucchini and radishes with the beans. There is also a sweet basil plant in the corner of the bed, which grew beautifully and made tasty pesto but has little bearing on this tale. 

I feel like the arugula may have somewhat overwhelmed One Too Many. As the little spicy leaves flourished, the pumpkin just kinda sat there, not growing much but not giving up either.

June 22: Arugula making a run for it and going to seed with One Too Many at the left.

June 22: After the arugula was harvested giving One Too Many some breathing room.

I will admit that at this point, I was a bit concerned. Pumpkins have long growing seasons and One Too Many was pretty much the same size as it had been when it went into the garden a month earlier. Would there be time to make fruit? I considered adding something else to the bed to use the space. Each year I have to decided how to best use the very limited space I have. I don't like empty ground in my beds. But I decided to give the little pumpkin a chance and in just a few weeks, it was really doing its thing.

August 11 - One Too Many filling the bed.

August 11: A pumpkin!!

August 18: And another! (certainly not one too many, though)

I was excited to find the first tiny pumpkin. Then another larger one appeared a week later. After finding the second, more robust pumpkin, I debated taking off the smaller. That would funnel more resources to the larger and give it a better chance of growth. That made some sense, but I didn't want to limit the pumpkin potential. All your eggs in one basket, etc., etc. So, I left them both be and the plant ended up self-selecting the larger pumpkin anyway.

August 31: Looking fine.

The pumpkin began putting on weight and its stripes began to develop. It was slow and steady for weeks as I watched over it. By mid-September, I began thinking about when I should pick my one and only One Too Many pumpkin. It was not growing any bigger and the orange webbing on its white skin had really darkened to a lovely shade. One of the many squirrels in the neighborhood (the bane of my garden, which haven't really been too terrible this season actually) had sampled the pumpkin. It was only a little nick, though. I could bring it in now but I didn't want to cut it from the vine too early. There were still several weeks left in the season. So, I left it where it was.

September 21: Look at those stripes!

Spoiler alert, I should have picked it. This last week was very rainy. There weren't any torrential storms, just near-constant rain and perpetual gloominess. I did cursory checks of the garden each day. I picked a bucket of grape tomatoes on one dryer day but otherwise did little to the other plants. The sun finally came out at the end of the week so I could do a more in-depth inspection. When I looked at One Too Many, I did not like what I saw.

September 29: hmmm

The squirrels had been sampling again. While frustrating, it wasn't the end of the world. We weren't planning on eating this pumpkin. It was just for display. The missing chunk was unsightly but maybe it was still salvageable. Looking closer, though, it seemed like the pumpkin had sunk slightly into the ground. Perhaps it had rained heavily enough for the dirt underneath it to wash out. Well then, I had better pull it out of the mud and put it back on solid ground. So, I gently lifted it up...

Sad trumpet sounds.

Well crud. The pumpkin hadn't sunken into the soft ground. The underside had completely rotted and it collapsed. So much for One Too Many's lone pumpkin.

I hate to leave a story on a sad note. Remember side character Long Pie? Our spindly little friend produced three pumpkins. We plan on eating them. And I still have a bag of saved seeds from last fall's decorative pumpkin so I can try again next year.

Three Long Pie pumpkins just waiting to be part of the fall feast.

Not the nibbler but still a squirrel (photo from last summer)

What’s Eating Our Garden? (Besides Us)

 It has been a highly-productive year for the garden. We’ve had pounds of chard, stacks of zucchini, buckets of tomatoes, and more cucumbers than you can shake a stick at. I’m personally up to a 2-cucumber-a-day habit. I fear when we run out, I’ll have to wear some sort of patch to ease myself off of them. While we’ve been eating fresh produce as fast as we can, sharing with friends, freezing and preserving, there’s still a great abundance. That is likely why I am not being particularly strict about all the other species that also happen to be enjoying our produce.

The most blatant offenders have been the squirrels. I don’t think I would mind so much if they just picked one tomato or cucumber and just ate that. But noooo, they have to sample half a dozen vegetables. I hate finding tiny tooth marks on an otherwise perfect zucchini. If it’s not too bad, we trim the chewed off bits, but often it’s too much or we find it too late. I can shrug off one or two ruined pieces of veg, but they’re starting to get out of hand. We’ve finally taken a hard line on the tree rats, but it doesn’t seem to be making that much of a difference yet. 

A squirrel left this half-eaten tomato right on the top of the garden gate!

Here's one of the cagey little jerks. I've found they're rather photo-shy.

The deer have gotten a bit too fresh themselves. I planted some rattlesnake beans along the back of one of the garden beds. I made sure to put the trellis away from the fence a bit, but apparently not far enough. Last year, the yard long beans, planted on the other bed at the back of the garden, were right against the fence. The deer enjoyed them quite thoroughly, but I didn’t really care because I didn’t enjoy the taste or texture of the beans. It seems, however, that I trained the deer to come looking for beans. 

It is fun to see them in the back yard.

Too bad they've been eating my beans!

As this year’s beans grew, the trellis started to lean back against the fence. I didn’t not pull it forward in time, so the deer got a taste. They must have really enjoyed the delicate purple spotted pods because even after I reset the trellis, the deer reached over the fence to continue eating them. They had to step up on some sandbags and stretch to do so. Well, my husband devised a solution with a recycled piece of fence. Let’s see Bambi get to my beans now!

Anti-Bambi technology.

Another unsurprising garden invader has been stem borers. We’ve had problems with those little beasties since we started gardening. I’ve read that the best way to get rid of them is to run a wire into the holes in the stem and skewer the larva. Yeah, no. That makes my stomach turn just thinking about it, so they’ve just had their way with our zucchini plants. In the grand scheme of things I don’t mind too much. While the stems have been just torn apart, we have gotten several dozen zucchini already and the plants are managing to keep going. I imagine we could find some heavy-duty poison to eradicate the problem, but there are too many other insects we actually want in the garden like bees and butterflies.

The stems are a mess...

...but the fridge is full of zucchini!

I have to admit that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for caterpillars. I blame raising monarchs in elementary school. This year, I gave up a second harvest of dill for a trio of swallowtail caterpillars. My husband and I actually moved them from the dill patch in one part of the garden that they had eaten down to just stems to patch in another bed. I’ve already dried a bunch of dill weed and used some of the seed heads for pickles, so I’m willing to sacrifice for the squishy little guys.

Raawr!

We have monarch caterpillars in our orange milkweed too, so that’s exciting!

One thing that hasn’t been eating our garden is the rabbits. Last year, as some may remember, I neglected the garden to the point that a rabbit raised a litter of babies in our pak choi patch. The perimeter fence has been secured since then, so no one is living in there this year. One bunny did, however, consider having her litter under our clothesline; which would have been a very bad idea. We got to watch her one evening digging a hole and lining it with fur. Fortunately, she seems to have abandoned her efforts. I wonder if she was one of the babies from the garden. She does seem particularly young and dumb.

Her lovely little nest we hope she doesn't use.

The sweet little dumb bunny.

Back in the Garden Again

The 2016 gardening season is in full swing now. Nearly everything is planted in the garden and we’ve already been able to pick some things. It is wonderful to be in the second year of a garden. The chives were up and ready to use by the middle of April and on the 25^th of that month we had our first asparagus. We made a rhubarb pie on May 7^th. We had to supplement the fresh rhubarb with some frozen from last year to fill the crust but it tasted very good. The strawberries are coming back strong as well.

Garden at rest in mid-April

Home-grown asparagus - yum!

As usual, I spent much of late winter/early spring poring over seed catalogs and working out my garden layout. After the fungus on the chard and beets last year I had to make sure I rotated things around this year. That’s just good practice anyway, but it did lead to a lot of erasing on my plan. I thought I had it all set when I realized I had put the tomatoes where the potatoes were last year and that’s a no no. So, I had to make some changes but finally got everything worked out.

Potatoes starting to peek through

I put the first seeds in the ground on April 29 – scallions, beets and arugula. At the beginning of May we put in the potatoes, carrots, pak choi, chard, snap peas and garden peas. Since then we have been battling squirrels who think their nuts are still stashed in the garden from last winter. In all fairness, I have pulled out two acorns that were on their way to turning into oak trees so the squirrels are not entirely wrong.

An oak tree in the garden? I don't think so.

Nearly every day there were new little drill holes in the raised beds. I wouldn’t mind the digging so much if it didn’t disturb the new seedlings. The only seeds the tree rats seem to actually be digging up and eating are the snap peas which have been entirely cleaned out. All the other plants are just collateral damage of the digging. I tried dusting everything with cayenne pepper but that seemed to have no effect. I probably didn’t use enough. One container got spread over the entire garden. I have some other pepper-based repellent on the way from Amazon so we’ll see how that works.

The Enemy

The strawberry bed seems to be a favorite place for the squirrel digging. Again, they have not damage the plants, they are just digging everywhere among them. I worried that when the strawberries actually did come on that the squirrels would finally turn their attention to the berries. After waiting over a year for the fruit myself, I am not about to give them up to the squirrels or the chipmunks or the birds, for that matter. So, I got some bird netting and made a little cage over the plants. I got that done a few days ago and so far so good. (fingers crossed)

Protecting the strawberries

I just got the rest of the seeds in the ground yesterday. The list is similar to last year – corn, pumpkins, beans, cucumbers, summer squashes, acorn squash. I gave up on some vegetables I planted last year like kale, turnips and spinach and have added watermelon radishes to the mix. I started several plants indoors earlier in the spring but I forgot to start hardening them off until yesterday morning so I’m not ready to plant them out yet. I’ll write more about starting the seeds in my next post.

View of the garden on May 28

My husband asked me the other day if it actually saved any money growing produce ourselves or if it was cheaper to just buy vegetables at the grocery store. My first thought was that it must be less expensive at the store, especially if you figure in the time we put in to keep the garden running. Of course that’s one of my favorite parts of gardening so I hesitate to consider that an expense. So, I decided to run some numbers. This year, we spent $23.89 on seeds and $55.77 to amend the soil. We also spent $374.87 for everything needed to start seeds indoors. That’s a grand total $454.53 (so far). Will the garden produce that much store-quality veg? I don’t know. If it does, great. If not, well, at least I had a great time playing in the dirt!

Pak choi seedling

Strawberry blossoms

Arugula before thinning

Chive blossoms

Garden pea seedling

Where's Winter?

It has been a very odd winter. It snowed a bit then it got warm then it rained then it got warmer (68 degrees on Christmas Eve day!) then it snowed a little again then it got cold (about 7 degrees, so not really cold) and now it’s warm and raining again. The other day I actually saw a forsythia bush blossoming! Sheesh. I wish the weather would make up its mind.

A little frosty

Just a bit of snow

The snow blower anxiously awaiting snow

Our house has a nice little fireplace. Unfortunately it has been rare to have a day cold enough this season to warrant a fire. There were a couple of cold evenings, though, when we could have a fire. There’s nothing like sitting in front of a glowing fireplace, watching the dancing flames, soaking up the heat. We’ve found a combination of pressed wood “logs” and actual wood make a nice balance of heat and flames.

So many pretty colors: oranges...

...purple and yellow...

...pinks and reds.

This fall my husband took down a couple of trees in the back yard to use for firewood. While it’s far too green to burn this year, it should be very nice for next winter. I grew up with a variety of wood-fueled heat sources. By the time the first snow fell, the cellar was filled with firewood. Row upon row would be stacked from floor to ceiling. I never cared for the creepy-crawlies that would come out of the wood, though the tiny pocket snake was rather cute. Still, I’m glad our home-cut firewood is stacked out in the garage.

The pile waiting for next year

Some nice cherry and locust wood

We finally put the bird feeder out for the season. Normally, we wait until there is snow on the ground but who knows when that’s going to be. The chickadees found the feeder within minutes. I love chickadees! Soon after that, a titmouse showed up. Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal now frequent the feeder along with a tiny wren. A small flock of finches stops by on occasion as well. I love watching the birds and it’s much easier to get photos of them when they come to you. Of course the bird seeds have also attracted Tubby McSquirrel and his friends but if I want to feed the birds, I have to host the squirrels as well.

A chickadee being tall

A titmouse and chickadee sharing the feeder

Squirrel!

It just doesn’t feel like winter without the snow. Sure, the wind is cold and the trees are bare but the grass is still oddly green. I enjoy the snow. That’s why I still live in New York State. I get tired of it after a while but it just doesn’t feel like winter without a white blanket over everything. The snow will come. I’m sure of that. Until then, I’ll just have to look back at pictures from winters when we lived on the mountain.

Looking back at winter in 2009 in the Adirondacks