[ducks, damping off, sprouter]
You’d think my chickens and ducks would be more thankful. Ratty, old straw bedding and manure have now been replace by fresh, new straw. But no, the chickens were nonchalant as usual, hardly noticing my work. And the ducks decided to spend the night out – not a wise choice, but then ducks aren’t know for their intelligence. The drake wouldn’t know about the housekeeping anyway because he has chosen or been directed to keep out of the house nights since the female ducks began laying a few weeks ago. He sits nearby from dusk till dawn.
Cleaning out the chicken and duck house a few times a year is little work compared to what the poultry offer in return. The chickens spend all day scratching and pecking for insects and whatever else they find in the lawn and field; the ducks dine by scooping and nibbling. All that foodstuff, along with the few grains of cracked corn I scatter in the poultry houses each evening to let the birds know where home is, get processed into the tastiest eggs I’ve ever eaten, with yolks a deep, rich, orange color. I credit my garden’s relative lack of slug problems to the chicken and ducks’ constant patrolling of the grounds. And the poultry are like moving lawn ornaments.
—————————–
A look in the greenhouse today brought back some not-so-fond memories of my first garden. The memory actually pre-dates my first garden by a few weeks, to the raising of the first seedlings indoors.
I then lived in a motel whose rooms had been converted into (very) small apartments. On some small shelves in my very small, dark kitchen I lined up Jiffy-7 peat pellets into which I had sown various seeds.
The seeds sprouted, then toppled over, dead – a brutal introduction to gardening and damping-off disease. It’s a wonder I didn’t give up gardening right then and there.
Investigation revealed that damping-disease is caused by a few fungi that are ubiquitous and get the upper hand when soils are too wet, when temperatures aren’t optimum for plant growth, when light is poor, and/or when nitrogen levels are excessive. Chemicals, of course, can offer control, as can sterilized potting mixes, although healthy soils and mixes house natural antagonists to damping-off fungi. By paying careful attention to moisture, temperatures, light, and nitrogen, I have hardly ever seen damping-off since that ill-fated garden beginning.
Except a couple of days ago, when I noticed a number of toppled snapdragon seedlings in the greenhouse. Too many weeds had been sprouting in my potting mix, so I had microwaved the soil and compost that went into that mix. But temperatures that soar too high can kill off the fungi that fend off damping-off fungi. High temperatures also cause a release of excessive nitrogen. In retrospect, I had created a recipe for disaster.
From now on, I’ll go back to not sterilizing the soil or compost in my potting mixes, or else paying very careful attention to “cooking” temperature (no higher than 180 degrees for 10 minutes). Careful attention to watering may still save most of those snapdragons.
———————————–
Damping-off disease can be more insidious than I just described, attacking seeds even before they sprout. And that’s what I thought might be happening to my pepper seeds because, three weeks after sowing, some varieties still had not sprouted. Then again, some varieties had.
I was determined to determine whether the fault was with the seed or with the soil mix. So I re-sowed, this time putting the flowerpot of seeds and potting mix into my home-made incubator, which also, incidentally, gets a good rise out of bread dough. The temperature set at 80 degrees Fahrenheit was right near pepper’s optimum germination temperature of 85 degrees. Under such conditions, I expected the seeds to practically jump right out of the flower pot, but no, after days and days, the potting mix’s surface remained a desert.
This morning, finally, the seeds did practically pop up through the surface, and all together.
Good thing they did, because those seeds about which I had my doubts were of Sweet Italia peppers. Sweet Italia, a variety I’ve grown for many years from seeds I save each previous year, reliably yields oodles of tasty red peppers relatively early in the season.
Oh, the Sweet Italia seeds in the greenhouse? By chance, they also happened to finally sprout today. The warming mat on which they sit is at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, still within the germination range peppers need, but further from their optimum temperature.
Up until a few years ago, I couldn’t get sufficiently empathetic to other gardener’s Japanese beetle woes. That, despite the fact that Japanese beetles are not picky eaters and descend upon gardens almost everywhere. The problem – the empathy problem, that is – was that never more than a few beetles ever made their appearance in my garden.
That situation changed – bad for my garden, good for my empathy – around 2005, when beetle numbers started increasing. Nowadays my garden has annual, full-blown outbreaks of the beetles. Last summer’s rain was good for the beetles’ egg-laying, so problems may be severe this year.
Trapping, milky spore disease, walks over the lawn with spiked shoes, and hand-picking all do their part in limiting beetle numbers, but a recent report tells of another tack: geraniums! Botanically Pelargonium, and specifically zonal geraniums, the ones with the dark zones on their leaves. When Japanese beetles eat geranium flowers or leaves, they become paralyzed for about a day, during which time they’re susceptible to all sorts of predation.
I started thinking about the beetles now, well before they are due to arrive, so that I could start propagating dozens of geranium plants to set out all over my yard this spring. Before beginning, though, I decided to have a chat with Dr. Chris Ranger, the USDA entomologist in Ohio who has been watching beetles keel over following feasts on geranium. It’s a good thing I called because Dr. Ranger quickly pointed out that Japanese beetles won’t eat geraniums unless nothing else is available.
So planting geraniums will not control Japanese beetles. For me, come June, it will be back to hand-picking and traps. On the bright side, geraniums may become a source of a natural, botanical formulation for controlling the beetles. And the flowers are pretty.
——————————————–
The greenhouse is starting to fill up with vegetable seedlings for transplanting. Generally, plants to grow as transplants are tomatoes and others that that need a long season before harvest, and broccoli and others from which you pick a lot from each plant. Root vegetables generally don’t like to be transplanted because their roots want to go straight down deeply, deeper than your average seed flat, before they swell. Any disturbance and the plants die or yield deformed roots.
Beets, however, are one root vegetable that I have been transplanting successfully for a few years. One reason I start beets indoors is because their seeds don’t germinate well. Indoors, I can control moisture and temperature for best germination.
And each beet “seed” is actually a cluster of seeds in a dried fruit, so once they sprout, they come up in crowded clumps. From a seed flat, I can lift individual plants once they have seed leaves and transplant each into its own home in a compartmentalized seed tray.
And finally, some creature – a bird? – always seems to tug out small beet seedlings in the garden. Perhaps the red color in the leaves makes the bird — if the culprit is, in fact, some bird — mistake the seedlings for fruits. At any rate, larger seedlings that I transplant don’t suffer such affronts.
——————————————–
By the end of this week, I’m hoping to have almost all the blueberry bushes pruned, both highbush and lowbush.
On the highbush varieties, I cut a few of the oldest – and, hence, thickest — stems away or to low, vigorous branches using a saw or lopper. Then, using a hand shears and still crouched beneath a bush, I thin out some of the youngest stems wherever they are crowded. After standing back up and snipping back any straggly, gawky, or crowded branches,as well as any that are dead or broken, I’m finished with a bush.
The lowbush blueberries are easier to prune: I just lop all stems back to ground level. The best crops will be borne next year on new shoots that spring forth this year. Those stems yield a lesser crop the following year, and then I start the cycle again by lopping those lowbush blueberry stems way back again.
The problem, of course, is that there are no blueberries to eat each year their stems get lopped back. I’ve solved this problem by dividing the bed in thirds and lopping only a different third of the bed back each year.
(weeds from wet last summer)
As the writer of the book Weedless Gardening, I would have expected my own vegetable garden to be more weedless. I see weeds in my garden, more than in springs past.
Last summer’s wet weather has something to do with the present weed situation. In a normal summer, with its periods of dryness, drip irrigation (part of my “weedless” gardening system) pinpoints water to my garden plants without promoting weed growth in paths and between widely spaced plants. Incessant rain kept promoting lush growth everywhere.
The clear plastic tunnels that I put up to extend the harvest season of endive, lettuce, and other greens late into autumn also contributed to the present weed situation. Garden plants weren’t the only plants that thrived in those mini-greenhouses. Weeds also were able to sneak in and get some foothold.
In fact, the weed situation is not really that bad. The other day I cleared five beds, each about 3 feet wide and 20 feet long in less than an hour. I started at one end of each bed pulling out each weed along with any remains, now dead, of last autumn’s garden plants. One bed had a lot of little weeds that had sprouted. Rather than pull them individually, I decapitated them en masse by skimming just a half-inch or so beneath the surface of the ground with my sharp winged-weeder. Those small weeds are too small to re-sprout from root pieces.
Important in “weedless gardening” is not tilling the soil, which keeps weed seeds, inevitably present in any soil, from being exposed to the light that they need to sprout. By not having to till the soil and by thoroughly clearing beds of weeds and old plants, the beds are immediately ready for planting– as soon as the ground warms.
