March 26,
2013 - Kim’s Weekly Garden Newsletter
These weekly garden notes are
written by Kim Willis, unless another author is noted, and the opinions
expressed in these notes are her opinions and do not represent any other
individual, group or organizations opinions.
Hi Gardeners
I am chomping at the bit to get gardening but the weather is
limiting what I can do. I have dozens of
things to get done maybe hundreds of things, and it seems like everything is
going to have to be done at once. I have
been outside poking around a bit, measuring and planning, picking up trash,
pruning but so many things are left to be done when the soil is not
frozen. Maybe we will start seeing some
improvement at the end of the week.
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| Grape Hycinths |
One of my garden mail orders has arrived already so now I
have a peach tree, blackberry bush and a grape planted in 5 gallon buckets on
my porch and I just received notification that another order has been
shipped. Now normally you would be able
to plant these dormant things now but not this year. This is the coldest,
latest spring in many years, according to my garden notes.
We had a huge spruce that had pretty much succumbed to the
spruce “blight”, that combination of
fungal diseases that has destroyed so many spruces, cut down last week. I asked them to leave all the wood chips and
I now have a huge pile as high as me and 15 feet long or so right by my
driveway. I am going to use it to make
paths but the frost needs to be out of the ground first. Soft ground and mud make it hard to get a
loaded cart around so it will probably also have to wait until the ground is
dried up a bit too. So one warm weekend
in a month or so I will probably need to get everything done at once.
Inside I have an amaryllis getting ready to bloom; I hope it
will make it for Easter. A red Easter
Lily, so to speak, I hope that isn’t an omen or anything. It’s amazing how much it grows every day.
Sunday evening I noticed the bud poking up from the bulb; today it’s about 8
inches high. I have a beautiful lavender
ivy geranium blooming in my kitchen window and I did have some pretty geraniums
blooming on my porch, until the squirrel got back in there and ate all the tops
off the plants. I do hate those
squirrels. I have a rat trap out there
but it never gets caught.
I worked on covering some pots with cloth as I talked about
last week. I didn’t have the colorful fabric
I really wanted, except for one silky floral piece. It proved almost impossible to glue the
fabric to its self at the seams. The
material really resisted the glue. I
found that stretchy sleeves and socks really made nice, easy pot covers. Everyone has socks around without a mate; just
slip them over a pot. Socks fit around 4
inch and if real stretchy even 6 inch pots.
The sleeves of old sweaters, shirts etc.
will stretch over bigger pots and just need to be cut off at the right
length, no glue needed. If they need to
be more colorful socks are easy to dye.
You can use some acrylic craft paint diluted in a little water, food
coloring, plant based dyes, or regular fabric dye. I am going to post pictures of some pots I
covered on my blog soon.
Easy way to figure
out how much you need.
Do you ever wonder how much mulch or planting soil or
compost you need for a certain area? I
found this easy calculator on the Campbell Greenhouse site, it works
great. Go to this address http://campbellsgreenhouses.com/Bulk_Material_Calculator.php to find out how much bulk product you
need for a project.
Watch those weeds
At some point this spring the weeds will begin growing and
we will all be pulling them. But be careful
what you do with weeds like ground ivy, hensbit, shepherds purse, common
violet, and the various forms of bindweed.
If you toss these into a “cold” compost pile, they often survive, even
if they are reduced to tiny pieces and will jump to life when spread on the
garden with the compost. Some aggressive
spreading perennial garden plants like bishops weed, beebalm, common tawny
daylily, comfrey, bamboo, even phlox will also survive the compost pile. Jerusalem
Artichoke and potatoes also survive cold composting. Cold composting is when you simply heap
discarded plant material and make no effort to keep it composting at a “hot”
level by turning and managing it as needed.
If you have plants that you do not want to see live again
let them dry out in the sun until crisp before adding them to the compost pile. Spread them thinly as some will survive at
the bottom of a pile. You can put them in a black plastic bag also and set the
bag in the sun to cook them for a few days.
Then add it to the compost pile. (Yes husband there is a method in my madness for
my throwing weeds all over the lawn, I’m drying them out.)
Gravel Gardening
When most people think of gravel gardening they think of gardening
minimally, with sedums, cacti and other drought tolerant plants and a sort of
zen-like simplicity. Now however, there is an intriguing new take
on gravel gardening, growing food and ornamental plants in gravel instead of
soil. It is said that deep layer of
gravel laid on moist soil not only conserves moisture but as the rocks heat up
they draw moisture from deep inside the earth through condensation and water
the plants rooted in them.
There has been limited studies on this but there is a book
out that purports to explain the system in detail. I declined to purchase the book for $20 but
went to the website for this researcher and also read a few additional articles
on the subject. Here’s the website
address http://tosoilless.com/ The author claims to have planted corn and
beans in a gravel bed and without any additional water or fertilizer was able
to harvest crops. It is also claimed
that with only minor amounts of water and fertilizer dozens of food crops and
most ornamentals can be grown very successfully.
I do see some advantages to this method. Soil borne diseases and diseases that are
often splashed onto plants from spores laying on the soil such as some of the
tomato fungal diseases could be greatly lessened or diminished. And as water
becomes more expensive and harder to get, methods of gardening that “find”
water or conserve it are welcome.
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| Spring violas |
But I have some unanswered questions about this method. Plants often have a symbiotic relationship
with soil microbes, especially plants that are evolved to live in organic based
soil. This relationship helps plants get the minerals and even the water they
need. Without organic matter and the attendant
microbes and fungi, do they do well? If the gravel gets hot enough to produce
condensation wouldn’t it be hot enough to harm the roots of plants? And if food and ornamental plants can grow in
the gravel weeds could too. Usually we
mulch gardens to prevent weeds.
People have used gravel beds outside to do a sort of outdoor
hydroponic gardening, where fertilizers and water are flushed through a gravel
bed many times a day. This works well
but is expensive and requires electricity for pumps in most cases. There is really no savings in water or energy
use.
I have decided I may try a small experiment this summer with
a gravel garden. Maybe some of you would
like to try it also. If you do please
let me know your results. It sure would
be nice to develop a way to grow tomatoes without fighting the battle with the
various fungal diseases that always develops.
Easter facts
The Christian celebration of Easter is this Sunday. Easter wasn’t celebrated immediately
following Christ’s crucifixion. It took
some decades before anything other than the traditional Passover celebration was
followed. On the old calendars the time
around the spring solstice was devoted to celebrations of renewal and
fertility. When Easter became a Christian
“feast day” or holy day it incorporated many pagan celebrations associated with
the spring solstice into the rituals and customs. The Pagan goddess of spring and renewal is
called Oestar. (In Greek oistros means 'gadfly' or 'frenzy' and is associated
with the same Goddess.) The Assyrians and Babylonians called her Ishtar which
is pronounced like Easter and that is where the name Easter comes from.
The egg is one of the oldest symbols of renewal and new life
and the rabbit is a symbol of fertility and both are still prominent Easter
themes. "Omne vivum ex ovo" is
a Latin saying which means, "all life comes from an egg” and when you
think about it, it’s absolutely correct. In early times people dyed eggs in
pastel, spring colors and presented them to others as a gift during spring
solstice. In early Christianity eggs
were often dyed red to symbolize Christ’s blood and given out. Easter “baskets” were made to look like bird’s
nests to hold the decorated eggs.
The earliest foods associated with Easter were pretzels,
dough twisted into the shape of a cross in a circle, and hot cross buns, a
bread treat with a cross on top that monks made and distributed to the poor on
Easter. Eggs were turned into candy confections, often elaborately carved for
table decorations in the 1800’s and eventually chocolate eggs were being made
for consumption. Now candy is forever a
staple of Easter celebrations, (maybe because it makes children go into “oistros”).
In 2012 Americans spent 2.1 billion dollars on Easter candy,
more than on any other holiday. Chocolate
is the favorite Easter candy, especially in the form of chocolate Easter
bunnies. (A poll found that 76% of Americans prefer to eat a chocolate Easter
bunny starting with the ears.) But
marshmallow “peeps” and jelly beans are also top favorites. In 1953 it took 27 hours to make a
marshmallow peep, now it takes just 6 minutes. Jelly beans were first made by a Boston candy
maker, William Schrafft, who cleverly sold his new product by urging people to
send them to soldiers fighting in the Civil War. They did not become associated with Easter
until the 1930’s.
Have a Happy Easter everyone
Kim
Garden
as though you will live forever. William Kent
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