One of the joys of getting a bit older is having the time to putter around in the garden. Below is my garden blog. This site also contains sections of recipes and features about specific, and often obscure, gardening lore.

Friday, September 3, 2010 - Squash Bugs

Our East Garden plot has produced a bounty of melons for us this year. We've also had some spectacular failures there, too. The deer ate most of our sweet corn. Our potatoes are dying out from lack of soil moisture. And our butternut squash season ended early due to insect damage.

I cleaned out the squash vines this week and thoroughly tilled the area afterward. I guess I should have sprayed first, as all the squash bugs from the butternuts appear to have moved to our pumpkins and yellow squash!

Our pumpkins were an afterthought. I had moved our compost pile to a new location mid-summer, and on a whim, popped a few pumpkins seeds in the ground where the compost pile had previously been. I didn't do any more soil preparation than loosening the soil a bit with a garden trowel, and have been pleasantly surprised that they've grown so well.

When I looked closely at the squash bug infestation, I knew I was in trouble. Squash bug eggs were clearly visible on the leaves of the pumpkin plants. While I'd been spraying elsewhere with biologicals this morning, the squash bug infestation required something a bit more potent: rotenone-pyrethrin. This product used to be marketed under the name Red Arrow Spray, but over the years has come to be marketed as rotenone-pyrethrin or just pyrethrin. It is active for just a day or so, making it a good choice for something like yellow squash where I will be picking again in a day or two.

I put down a good spray on the entire pumpkin patch and both of our yellow squash plants. When I checked the area later in the day, I hand picked and squashed a few survivors. I'll need to check the plants daily for a while, and if necessary, come back with something even more potent. But for now, it appears the rotenone-pyrethrin and hand picking will save these plants. I really don't need another crop failure in the East Garden!

Broccoli On the Way

After several light rains and one pretty good rain (a half inch or more) last night, our fall brassicas are looking pretty good. We lost one cauliflower plant in the dry weather, but all of the other broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage plants appear to be in good shape.

I was out spraying them this morning with Thuricide...this time before any insect damage occurred. I also put down a good layer of the biological on our kale, as we're close to picking to make Portuguese Kale Soup.

The other biological I used this morning was Serenade, a fungicide with a long list of diseases it may help control. While it's much too late in the season for a real test of the product, I wanted to see if it had any effect on a couple of tomato plants that have been hit with bacterial spot and anthracnose. I really should have just pulled the plants when I saw that they were infected, but...

Random Thoughts

While I grouse a bit about failures in the garden, that's just part of gardening. Each year, some crops surprise us with how well they do. Others don't do as well. This summer has been more challenging than most with hot and very wet growing conditions followed by a long period of hot and dry weather. We learn a bit more about gardening each year.

One of the things we've grown this year that has been especially satisfying is our row of zinnias. Zinnias were one of my mother's favorite flowers. I've used them for years at the ends of rows of sweet corn, but this is the first year I've just put in a whole row of them. They've dazzled us over the summer.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - Compost

Since it was relatively cool this morning and there was a nice breeze, I decided it was finally time to break my finished compost pile. I've been tending two compost piles over the last few weeks, as one was pretty well done composting, and I still had enough new material to start another compost heap.

I usually just shovel up the finished compost and apply it wherever I want. But I'd added some evergreen trimmings and some other hard to digest material to the pile early this summer. Not wanting to spread the undigested stuff, I decided to screen the compost using some half inch hardware cloth I'd picked up at the hardware store just for that purpose. I remember seeing Jim Crockett on Crockett's Victory Garden using something similar, only his tool had a nice frame around it.

I hooked the curled ends of the hardware cloth over the handle and front end of my garden cart. Then one or two shovelfuls at a time, I screened the rough compost, using my gloved hands to rub the lumpy compost over the hardware cloth and giving the cloth a good shake. The compost sifted nicely into the cart, leaving dried leaves, clumps of undistinguishable material, and some really smelly, half composted garlic to be dumped onto the new pile. I ended up doing three cartfuls (around 9 cubic feet of material) of the compost this way.

I realize that you have to be a gardener to appreciate the photo at right. But hey, this is a garden site!

We put lots of stuff into our compost pile. Weeds and spent garden plants add a lot of volume to it. All of our corn stalks get chopped and put into the pile, even though they'll take a long time to break down. When we can spare grass clippings, they help add nitrogen and heat up the pile if mixed in. I often topdress with grass clippings to hide the somewhat unsightly pile!

We don't put any meat or dairy products into our compost piles, as that is sure to get our dogs or some wild critters interested in it. We do put moldy bread, kitchen vegetable trimmings and peelings, and during melon season, a seemingly unending supply of melon rinds. If I have a knife or something sharp with me, cull melons from the field get cut and go into the pile. If not, they go in whole. They'll break down pretty quickly.

We also add commercial fertilizer and lime to the pile. The fertilizer feeds the microbes that break down the plants. The lime helps neutralize what is an acid producing process. I also use one of the many variants of a Jerry Baker Compost Tonic. The one I use to get the pile cooking includes a 12 ounce Coke (regular, not diet), one cup of household ammonia, and a quarter cup of dish detergent. I mix about a cup of that mixture into a two gallon watering can and sprinkle it on the pile.

Getting back to the project at hand, I'd originally planned to use the compost from this pile for our fall lettuce area. I decided today that our asparagus patch could use both the nutritional boost the compost gives, plus the organic matter. And...there was still a good bit of the pile left. I won't be able to work in a layer of it for the lettuce, but there will be enough to sidedress the plants.

On the way to the asparagus patch with the first load of compost, I stopped at our back porch and got out my soil pH tester. I was pleased to see the compost was at a nearly neutral 6.9-7.0 pH. I'm pretty generous with lime on the compost pile, but checking never hurts. Compost piles can get pretty acidic without enough lime. Too much lime can make the pile somewhat alkaline. Either extreme isn't good for asparagus.

I ended up adding one to four inches of compost to the asparagus raised bed. Some areas of the bed had settled more than others. Since our asparagus is pretty dense, I had to sneak shovelfuls in between stalks, throw it through the stalks, and sometimes just put it at the edge and get down under the foliage and push it in by hand.

I also brought in our Waltham Butternut Squash today, added the vines to the new compost heap, and tilled the area where the squash had grown. Our plants got zapped early on by something, probably squash bugs. But by the time I got to that chore, I was hot and had already put away the camera.

My hard work was rewarded this evening, as we had a brief shower. We only got about a quarter of an inch of rain, but even that little amount was welcome.

August, 2010

From the at Senior Gardening