A hunting we will go...a hunting we will go...

Nightly around 10pm, we have a hunt of sorts. I don yellow kitchen gloves, a camping lantern, flashlight, and sweatshirt (not quite 110 during the day yet...so the nights are still cool) and make my way to the side yard with the raised beds.

I've been fighting caterpillars for a while now, but they seem to be fewer by the night. I only found two munchers tonight. So that begs the question...

What is eating the plants now?

Grasshoppers I do believe. It's a little too late for biological control of them (those bran flakes with a biological agent that destroys them from the inside out), but they give me the willies and are hard to catch. Wonder how I'll fight this battle. Yellow gloves will be part of the plan, I'm sure.

Local Farmer's Market

So Chris and I ventured out into the Folsom Thursday Night Market for the first time since moving to this little city in August 2006.

Folsom was once a little town in the West that had attracted gold miner's during California's gold rush. (PS - it's cool to have grown up in an area rich with 4th grade history...). Named for Joseph Folsom, who tried to connect Folsom to Sacramento via railroad, the town was founded in 1856, and the oldest part is rich with the old west's history.

Today, Folsom is a well-planned suburban city, with lots of open space and cool activities. We feel really lucky to live here.

At the market, we were pleased to find RASPBERRIES! My favorite and much cheaper than the stores....Chris even liked 'em, which he usually doesn't. "Small, yet flavorful" was his verdict. We also bought the largest clump of basil I have ever seen, and some peaches and cherries. Grand total spent: <$20.

Money well spent in the local economy if you ask me.

"A dollar spent in a locally owned business is worth three times as much to the local economy as one spent in a chain store."

One more step towards decreasing our carbon footprint.

Dirt (ok fine...soil) Temperature Maps!

Browsing through other gardening blogs, I've come across some really cool tidbits of info and websites.

Specifically, this one that shows you what your current soil temperature is!
How awesome!

Give it another 2 weeks, and that soil temp will be dark red in my area!

Ahhh...summer

Today is such a beautiful day here in NorCal. It might get to 90 degrees later today, but it's nice and cool and I'm sitting here with the windows open....finding and reading gardening blogs like mine!

Here is a picture of the raised beds. I remember when they were nekkid!

So I'm almost done with updating the drip irrigation system throughout the entire front and backyards. I was walking along the fence on the South side of the house in the front yard and discovered 1) 1/8" drip irrigation line coiled up and 2) a low knot hole in the fence. Putting 2-and-2 together, I threaded the line through the fence, and now just need a converter piece to take it from 1/8" tubing to 1/4" tubing so I can use all of my extra supplies and actually be able to auto water the raised beds!

Although it is beautiful here today in NorCal, we are quickly approaching the 98-110 degree timeframe of July and August. This time of year can test any plant, and gardeners need to be able to spot dry plant stress quickly, or risk losing the plant before getting off work for the day!

Here are some flower pics from this morning:


I was in the raised bed garden watering this morning, and I've noticed an uptick in the number of yellow jackets and birds. The yellow jackets have chased me away for now (hence sitting here), but I was out long enough to make a few observations:

Some of the tomato plants have some sort of fungal disease. :0( I'll have to look into it more in depth, and soon! There are 2 schools of tomato thought -- those that prune the lowest suckers and those that don't. Next year I will be with the school that prunes them. I have a feeling they have directly contributed to the fungal disease.

The soybeans and broccoli are beginning to show signs of grasshopper "chompage" -- because when I'm hunting for caterpillars at night, I am finding fewer and fewer. And we're finding grasshoppers in the yard....and my plants are still being eaten, but they look different...

Can't help but wonder...

We have experienced nearly ever bug and nasty thing I've read about it my garden books. We never had a problem at the old house with these kinds of pests. Makes me wonder.

Is the presence of these pests because of the high use of fertilizers and insecticides in this sterile suburban environment where every lawn is cloaked in dark green and nearly all houses have a chemical fertilizer/mowing service? That birds and beneficial insects are poisoned or don't have an environment in which they can survive or thrive? (2 dead birds and counting in our backyard so far in as many months). Or is it because we used a pest service at the old house (cringe, I know! I know) so they were never around --- (PS didn't help much for the black widows).

Makes me wonder why there seems to be so many pests up here.

Hoity toity

In my blog, I will not wax about the greatest new caessdesrfe quarius (NOT a real plant, or is it? I just made it up by typing a bunch of letters that sounded Latin-y in a row) or whatever I found at my local garden nursery. Hell, I don't even know the Latin names of my favorite plants!

Instead, my garden will focus on things I'm learning or where I screwed up or in rare cases things I did right.

Learny things: tomato hornworms are gross. Disgusting even. I have every bug I've recently learned about it my garden. Black widows like to hang around and in strawberry pots. The fact that I didn't expect my squishes (squash) plants to get sooo out of control large and shade out the cilantro. And they have prickly stems. Why I can't get tomatillos to set fruit. Why it's important to be able to access ALL sides of an indeterminate tomato plant (the ones I can't reach aren't staked. G R E A T ...) Why my nasturtiums grew a little, plateaued, and then started getting speckled brown and dying one by one. That holes in leaves and munched leaves = caterpillars dummy! (A little late to that party)....Or the fact that Cloud Cover antiperspirant has made me really appreciate zinnias. How cool is that? A newfound appreciation for sage/salvias of all kinds. The under appreciated Lily of the Nile (because here in Norcal they grow like weeds) grow really well in my yard. Drip systems are easy to install but hurt your fingertips. Extravagant landscape plans that I have no idea how we'll finance.

Gardening is humbling. No matter what you read or learn, you're usually too late to take the advice, or you enter a parallel universe when you step out into your garden
that sucks you clean of your gardening memory. "Oh, I heard you should...uh....err..ooh look pretty flowers!" Every time I feel as though I have made it to a new rung on the Official Gardener Ladder, graduating from "neophyte" to "sorta gardener" (official terms, of course) I get smacked back by caterpillars, fungal diseases, foul smelling compost, or a host of other things I thought I knew enough about. It's a constant learning experience, for sure!

This blog entry is because I subscribe to lots of different blogs via Google Reader. Many (not all) of the gardening blogs I read (look at and delete usually) are BORING! No wonder folks *my age* don't like gardening. When you start waxing about the caessdesrfe quarius and other plants, you lose me. I mark it as read and move on to funny blogs like Grim Richards Irregulars or ONE GOOD LIFE. Funny folks with a point of view. Not hoity toity I'm better than you because I can actually pronounce the latin names of the plants I buy. Guess there goes my shot at ever being a Master Gardener! Oh well.

It's all about the journey, and saving the planet one plant at a time anyway, right?!

Since we're on the topic of pests...

The other night I was doing my "hunting" and thought that a wasp was guarding the side yard. I thought that it was flying awfully slow, but didn't want to risk it and gave up for the night.

I came inside and not an hour later the little bugger was inside! I had no idea how the wasp got into the house. After a couple jumps off the couch, and running around the house, he hit the fan and fell to the ground, giving my cat a reason to be interested.

The kicker: it wasn't a wasp, but what I found out to be a May or June beetle. Guess that explains the grub in the lawn a few months ago. He must have landed on my shirt before I came in the house.

Great. Caterpillars, beetles, and creepy crawlies. Oh my! Welcome to suburban gardening...

Ew! Totally Gross.

The wasps took over the side yard tonight, so I was viewing the tomatillos from inside when all of a sudden I let out a gasp and scream. Chris came running. The goosebumps rose to the surface and I stammered out, "THAT IS BY FAR THE NASTIEST, GROSSEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN!"

My friends, our garden has been invaded by tomato horn worms.

This is the actual culprit at work.
These nasty things were nearly 3-4" long. I made Chris go out and grab them with the BBQ tongs, and drown them in soapy water.

This guy and his buddy met their match tonight, but I wonder if we'll find more in the dark when we do our nightly hunt.

EWWWWWWWWW!

Death comes swiftly.

Part of the reason were gardening organically is because we don't want to harm living things. But we want to eat what we grow, and try to keep them away from birds and critters.

We put netting over the strawberries only to find a dead lizard that choked itself to death on the netting today before I got home for lunch. Screw it. I'd rather let the birds, lizards, and insects eat the strawberries than have a beautiful lizard die. He/she was about 4" long and a beautiful metallic shade of blue. We gently cut the netting away from the body, and buried it in the front where the lizards seem to congregate.

I'm so sad. We've never had a bumper crop of strawberries, so perhaps it is better that we admit defeat on this one.


Go ahead birds. They're all yours.

RIP little guy.

Like whoa

I turned the corner onto my street this evening, and noticed the house two doors down that has been working on it's back landscape on and off for a few months had a Tuff Shed truck out front.

"Interesting. I wonder where he's going to put it." I asked myself.
...and then I came all the way around and saw a two story (almost) behemoth Tuff Shed, faced oddly at an angle to the house, in PLAIN view of all of the neighbors and the folks that drive down our street.

Technically, our CC&R's disallow sheds or any building not attached to the house without written permission of the Architectural Committee, but I have nothing against my neighbors shed that peeks slightly above our fence. He uses it to stash pool suppplies, so I'm not going to hold it against him. Plus his is like a little house with a nice roof and such. Nicely done, WITH REGARD THAT HE HAS NEIGHBORS!

Now this thing on the other hand is completely inapprproate use of a shed. It's location, placement, and sheer grandiose nature was enough to make me walk in the house and exclaim,

"Honey, did you see that thi...."
"I can't believe they're putting in a shed that big." Chris said before I even finished my sentence.

I'm in disbelief that this dude thinks that someone won't call code enforcement on his a$$. If I was the neighbor directly behind him, I would have called today while they were putting it up to save him the trouble. A little violation of the CC&R's I can take, but WOW.

For your viewing pleasure, I've attached a picture of his shed from the Tuff Shed website. I've included a line showing how tall I am; add a foot and that's Chris' height or the height of the fence screening it from the neighborhood. Everything else is what folks can see. It's nearly as tall as his house.

Updates forthcoming, I'm sure.

Good news

I can buy the Victor poison-free minty elixir of death at my local OSH.

Life is good.

Success!

Ha! I win the war of the spiders, or at least the current battle!

Yesterday I received my order of non-poisonous insect/wasp/hornet sprays. I wasn't to keen to use them for the simple reason that it would get me close to my sworn enemy.

But I summoned the courage to go out back right before I went to bed to hunt for spiders with my new ammunition. Low and behold, I immediately spotted the troublemaker who was making a ton of webs between the house and BBQ. I postured up, squeezed the trigger on the wasp/hornet spray and soaked the damn thing with the minty elixir of death. It freaked me out how much the thing gyrated and twisted itself in agony I'm sure, because it was moving faster than any black widow I have ever seen before! I let it do its thing, and went inside.

I checked this morning and was disappointed to find that there wasn't a dead black widow hanging around the web. I checked again when I got home and realized I originally missed it this morning, but there she was in all her glory. DEAD glory.

The purchase was a raging success, and I can't wait for Chris to come home and use it. I could summon the courage once, but not again tonight!

Dogs love organic gardening too

Yesterday I scratched some pelletized organic fertilizer into the soil around many of the plants in my raised beds. Last time I did this, they took off with wild abandon, as the box predicted they would. So when it advised that I reapply after first blooms appear, I was more than happy to oblige.

I scooted the mulch away from the plants, scratched the chicken poo fertilizer around the plant base, and reapplied the mulch. I then watered HEAVILY.

Imagine my surprise today when I came home for lunch and the dog had gotten up into the beds to lick the fertilizer off of the dirt. So I scared him to within an inch of his life and called it even, but put some plastic Adirondack chairs in the 8 foot opening to the side yard for good measure. But when I got home from some errands this evening, I noticed that the cat made a spooked move to look towards the back window where I had the chairs stacked. Sure enough, the dog had jumped the chairs and the same thing happened again but this time I lost 2 soybean plants. I was furious.


#1) We had used a bone and blood meal fertilizer on our citrus trees, only to find the dog licked the dirt off all of such nutrients once we went inside and he was all alone. So we stacked the plastic chairs all around the plants, and still do to this day when we apply that fertilizer.

#2) I had fertilized some bulbs that had just finished flowering with some organic meal-type fertilizer, and I should mention that the mulch for this potted plant was small pebbles. When I went to pick up the dog crap to mow the lawn, guess what I found. Yum.

#3) Before we purchased a used gas grill, we used a charcoal grill. We had to make a physical barrier around the thing after we BBQ'd so the dog wouldn't eat the ashes.

I can understand that at a biological level, he is attracted to the smell of these fertilizers because of their components, and that he will never understand why I get frustrated and upset with him when he eats/licks it all up. But I'm about at my wits end trying to keep him away from these things without using the plastic Adirondack chairs, and I'm far too tired to try and think of a real barrier solution.

Advice?

Honey, I think we bought too much mulch.

I'm one for buying more than you need when it comes to dirt, compost, mulch, drip system components, etc. So when we decided that it was getting warm and we needed to mulch the raised beds, we bought 12 cubic feet, or 6 bags of shredded redwood mulch. We only used 2 bags on the raised beds!

So today we decided to mulch part of the other planter beds in the backyard, fixing the drip system there because that's where the most water-intensive plants are located. And the previous owners didn't understand that there is more than one kind of drip emitter/sprayer....

So we pulled the dyed black bark mulch away from all the plants, installed some new lines and drip emitters, tested them, and replaced the mulch with the new redwood mulch. What a difference! (Although my fingertips hurt pretty badly...) Our plants will now get enough water so I won't have to hand water them, and the redwood bark smells nice. Also, it's not poisonous like the dyed bark is. Sheesh.

I've also updated some pictures of the raised beds. I scratched some
natural chicken poo +other stuff organic fertilizer in them a few weeks ago and everything is growing like mad. It's so awesome. Although we've yet to eat anything from the backyard, we are oh-so-close. I can't wait!

So I'll keep this short because my fingers are sore from installing the drip emitters.... 1/8 of the backyard drip emitters fixed, 7/8 to go!