Hi Gardeners
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| Rose Carefree Celebration |
I am sitting here feeling guilty because the birds and a
chipmunk are outside my window staring at me. The feeder is empty again, even
though I filled it yesterday. The birds are eating like crazy now. I have 3 sunflower feeders, 2 suet feeders, a
jelly feeder, large bird nectar feeder and 3 hummingbird feeders. All are being
emptied almost as soon as I fill them.
It’s getting expensive. When I get up in a few minutes I’ll go out and
fill them again.
The mulberry tree is just starting to ripen it’s fruit,
which will help feed the birds. The strawberries are ripe around here, I just
had some today. My own patch was abandoned this year. I am going to start from
scratch again next year.
The Asiatic lilies are beginning to open. The first variety
here is always a double one I am not particularly fond of called ‘Apricot
Fudge’. Some things just don’t look better when they are doubled. Daylilies seem a bit slow to bloom this
spring, lots of buds but even the common daylily isn’t in bloom yet. It looks
like some of my martagon lilies were harmed by that late cold spell and won’t
be blooming this year. I have buds on the oriental lilies too.
Every year is different in the garden. Some years certain
plants are the stars of the garden, other years they just don’t perform as
well. Some years things manage to synchronize
bloom, so their colors complement each other. Other times one finishes before
the other. Over the winter some plants get damaged or just disappear. And
others pop up in unexpected places each spring.
In my garden this year the ostrich ferns are dominating some
plants. I’ve had to cut some back so other things get a chance for sunlight. Some
years they just get off to a really good start. They are beautiful but also a
plant you might consider weedy, as they spread aggressively. And in late summer
or when it gets dry, they yellow and start dying back and then they aren’t so
attractive.
The newer clematis seem very slow in growth, although the
more established ones are blooming. I lost some dahlias in the cold snap even
though I moved them into the barn. The cannas, dahlias, elephant ears and taro
are growing slowly this year and they should like the heat. You just never know
what nature has in mind.
I bought and potted some of the tuberous begonias said to
look like daffodils in April this year. They showed tiny buds on the surface
after a few weeks. But here it is late
June and they are just showing one or two small leaves each. I wonder if some
of these bulb companies use a growth retardant on bulbs when they store them. I
don’t know if I will get to see them bloom or not.
Last year I had some valerian pop up in my butterfly
/cutting garden. I don’t know where it came from, I didn’t plant it. This year
it has spread, and I have a huge clump in bloom easily 6 feet high. I see
several younger plants in there too. I am eyeing it warily. I think it’s pretty
right now, but I fear it will become a beast of a weed like the comfrey and
lemon balm did.
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| Valerian |
A lot of herbs are weedy things. People probably found uses
for them just because they were so abundant. If you got them why not sell them
to neighbors as a medicine? I so regret
planting many of them when I was in my “herbal” stage. I have an aggressive strategy
this year to get rid of the stinging nettles.
And I’ll never run out of comfrey, lemon balm, catnip, anise hyssop, valerian
and various forms of mint. Do be careful when you plant these things.
We got some rain last night, and it was needed. I hope all
of you who needed rain got some too. Gardens love a good rain.
Water for
the birds
One of the ways to attract birds to your yard is to feed them. Another way is to provide a source of
water. Even when abundant natural water
sources are available birds really appreciate a nearby source of drinking and
bathing water. Ponds, large water features and natural water areas may not
provide the shallow, protected places they like to bathe in and drink from. In
hot and dry spells during summer you may see more species of birds at a bird
bath than at a feeder. Birds splashing and playing in water are entertaining so
make sure your bird bath is located somewhere where you can watch the fun.
Birds like shallow water and dripping or flowing water is a
big draw. A small fountain with a shallow basin will be eagerly used. The
simpler the design of the fountain the better. A fine spray, small stream or
gentle drip is preferable to harder streams of water. A simple jug with a small hole in it
suspended over a basin to catch the drips will be a bird favorite.
Birds will also use less elaborate set ups of simple saucer-like
bird baths. Saucers with rough surfaces
that keep tiny feet from slipping around are ideal. The depth of the basin
should be no more than 4 inches at the deepest part. If it is deeper you can add
a large flat stone in some part of the basin to make a shallow spot. This is
easy to remove for cleaning. Keep the
surface area of the basin modest in size- 12 - 18 inches is a good size.
Saucer type bird baths should be easy to dump and clean. To
keep down mosquitoes and bird diseases they should be dumped and refilled every
other day. A good scrubbing with a rough brush once a week is recommended. Disinfectants
and cleaners are generally not needed. If the feeder looks exceptionally dirty
just use a dish detergent, scrub, and rinse well.
Fountain bird baths where the water is re-circulated won’t
become mosquito breeders but may become dirty and cause bird diseases. Remove
floating debris like leaves and feathers daily and dump, clean and refill every
week.
Locate your bird bath in an open area but with cover nearby.
Wet birds are somewhat more vulnerable to predators and need a hiding place
they can fly to quickly. Sunny or shady areas work equally well when it’s hot,
sunny areas are better in cooler times of the year.
Elevate the bird bath from 1 to 3 feet off the ground. This
makes them feel safer and you will be able to enjoy watching their bathing
antics better. The bird bath should be in a spot that is quiet, without a lot
of human or pet traffic near it. The shyer species won’t bathe if they feel
predators, like cats, might be near.
Do not put bird baths directly under bird feeders. Seed hulls and droppings will quickly make a
mess of the water. Place them at least a
few feet away from feeders.
Birds appreciate a source of water in the winter too. There
are heaters that can be added to birdbaths and birdbaths with heated bases that
keep unfrozen water available. If you have a bird bath that won’t crack when it
freezes you can simply provide warm water a few times a day.
Farm
Markets in the age of CV19
In most states farm markets, both roadside stands and large
community markets are open and running. The risk of getting CV19 from fruits
and vegetables is probably low but there are some things to consider if you
decide to visit the Farmers market or stop at a stand.
Avoid crowded markets. Go early or choose a weekday visit
when there are fewer people. Wear a mask in community markets even though they
may be outside. This is especially true if you are a person who likes to chat
with vendors and other customers. Sellers should be wearing masks if the market
is indoors. Maintain 6 feet between you and others in lines and at booths.
Don’t handle the produce. Try to pick booths where the
seller wisely restricts people from pinching, prodding, shaking, smelling or
even tasting food. He or she may have packaged the food or uses samples out
front and brings out protected produce for purchases. Yes, you want the
freshest produce but everyone handling produce is not a good health practice.
Wash your hands or use sanitizer before handling food if you
must do so. Gloves don’t really help unless you put on fresh ones every time
you move to a different booth. It would be nice if the seller put on food
service gloves before handling his produce during a sale. And of course, you will wash all produce
before you eat it.
Most people go to a Farmers Market to get fresh, locally
grown produce. Be aware that some
sellers at the market are not growing the food, rather they go to wholesale
markets and buy produce to resell. Some markets don’t have rules to prevent
this. A lot of this produce comes from
Mexico and other places. If you want that type of food, you can find it cheaper
at a supermarket.
A clue to see if the “farmer” is scamming you is to know what
produce is ripe and ready for use in your area. If you see a vendor selling
ripe tomatoes in June in a northern state, they most likely weren’t grown locally.
(It’s possible they are being grown in a greenhouse but the seller should tell
you this.) If you see oranges or pecans in northern markets they weren’t grown
locally and probably the other produce at the stand wasn’t either.
Look around. If few
sellers are offering ripe strawberries, it’s probably a sign strawberries aren’t
ripe locally yet. Not every seller will grow strawberries but generally in a
market of any size there will be more than one person selling a common local
product. Ask another vendor if they sell
strawberries at any point and listen to their answer.
You can’t tell what produce is organic from looking at it. Even
if they are imperfect fruits and vegetables it doesn’t guarantee they were grown
organically. And for goodness sake don’t pay more for imperfect produce on just
the promise they are organic. One study
found that so called organic produce at a local market has a 50-50 chance of
not being grown organically.
You really have to trust the seller when it comes to produce
being organic or grown locally. Talk to him or her. Ask what varieties of a
fruit or vegetable are being offered. Ask where their farm is. If they are “cheating”
on some aspects at their stand, such as offering ripe melons in May in Michigan,
they are probably cheating in other ways.
Sometimes other vendors will give you hints.
Many people love
going to farm markets just for the ambiance and fun. There’s no reason not to
go even in the pandemic if you use some care. But do practice being a wise and
safe consumer.
Plant
growth inhibited by plastics
Everyone knows plastic waste in the environment is a problem
for wildlife. But now science has confirmed it’s also a problem for plants.
Plastic in the environment never goes away, it just degrades
into smaller and smaller pieces. Some of these pieces can get to be the size of
viruses. These tiny pieces get incorporated into soil, where they acquire an
electric charge- either negative or positive- like other elements of soil.
Researchers found that plants can take up these tiny charged
particles, especially negative charged ones, when they take up water and
nutrients. The plants exposed to
nanoparticles of plastic that were absorbed into them were less vigorous and
smaller than plants that didn’t absorb plastic.
No one has studied this to my knowledge but maybe we should
reconsider using plastic flowerpots, flats, cell packs, plastic mulch and
lining beds with plastic. And what happens when people ingest fruits and
vegetables that have nanoparticles of plastic in them? Just giving you something else to worry
about. You can read more at the link
below.
Gardens =
work, bugs and weeds
I am inspired to write this today by so many people who want
to garden but who don’t want to actually do gardening. People want flowers and
fresh fruits and vegetables but don’t have any idea about what it takes to have
those things. I want people to take up gardening, but I want them to understand
what gardening is about. You rarely get anything good without some work and
that holds with a garden too.
We are so used to having products and machines to eliminate
labor that we expect that there be “labor saving” solutions for all things
garden related. There are some remarkable inventions that have lightened the
labor in gardening, but, if you want a garden, whether it’s a food garden or an
ornamental garden, there is still a lot of labor involved. You’ll need to get
your hands dirty- or pay someone to dirty theirs for you.
Bugs and weeds
There are many new gardeners this year so that may be why
there is so much angst over bugs. But
anyone who goes outside to garden should understand this- there will be bugs.
That’s not an abnormal situation. Bugs are the normal situation.
(Creatures like spiders, rolly polys, (sowbugs), and
snails and slugs are not insects but are generally regarded as such by
gardeners. I’ll lump them together as garden pests.)
At least 75% of the insect species you see on your plants
are perfectly harmless to the plants and may even be helpful. Another 20% of
the insects you see are only mildly harmful to your plants, diminishing their
looks but not substantially harming them. So that leaves about 5% of the insects
you are seeing as extremely harmful to plants, possibly causing plant death or
that could harm you.
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| Dragon flies are beneficial insects |
You need to make decisions on what to tolerate and what to
try and control with the 25% that could damage plants or harm you. Outside in
the garden control of pests is what you aim for, not elimination. Your decisions should be based on science and
logic and with concern for the total environment. You may be afraid of spiders
but that is not reason to kill them. Spiders are beneficial.
Educate yourself on what the pests that are harmful to your
plants look like and what damage they do. If you are growing roses, look up
what pests affect them. If you are growing tomatoes look up what pests affect
them. Then concentrate on controlling only pests.
Don’t assume because you saw an insect sitting on a damaged
plant that it did the damage. Ants for
example, rarely damage plants. Turn leaves over and look for harmful pests and
check around the plants on the ground and under mulch. Diseases sometimes cause
holes and other damage to plants that people assume a creature did.
On the other hand- don’t get caught up in this “but it turns
into a butterfly” idea. ALL CATERPILLARS/WORMS ON YOUR PLANTS DO NOT TURN
INTO HARMLESS, PRETTY BUTTERFLIES, as some people on social media would have
you believe. Many pests have a larvae stage that looks like a caterpillar
or worm. That critter can turn into a beetle, sawfly, or a moth or butterfly
that isn’t exactly harmless.
It doesn’t make sense to plant cabbage so that cabbage worms
can devour them and then turn into common white butterflies. Hornworms turn
into lovely sphinx moths, but are you growing tomatoes for making sphinx moths
or to eat? The adult form of some caterpillars can also eat your plants,
continuing the damage until the plant dies, as in viburnum leaf beetles. Don’t
feel guilty about controlling these pests.
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| This hornworm turns into a moth- but do you really want it to eat your tomatoes? |
Bees and wasps are beneficial but if you are allergic to bee
stings you don’t want them near the house or places you work. There are many
strategies you can use to control them without spraying chemicals but sometimes
bees and wasps do need to be controlled.
Some pests, like mosquitoes, should always be controlled
around your home. That’s because they carry diseases that can seriously harm or
kill you. You don’t have to drench the yard in pesticides to control mosquitoes.
There are biological pesticides and management strategies like dumping standing
water that can manage the population. But
mosquitoes should be controlled.
Managing pests
A good gardener always starts with the method of pest
management that is the least harmful to the environment, beneficial creatures,
and humans. You then work your way up to
the level of pest control that will manage the problem to your standards,
without a lot of collateral damage. What collateral damage is acceptable will
depend on the situation and the gardener. It may also depend on the law. You
can’t use dynamite to get rid of Japanese knotweed.
Hand picking pests, enclosing plants with netting, removing
mulch, spraying with a stream of water and so on should be your first choice
for insect pest control. After that, if satisfactory control isn’t achieved,
you have choices to make. Sometimes commercial pesticides- those dreaded
“chemicals” are actually the surest and safest ways to protect plants. Homemade mixes may not be safer, some are
even dangerous, and most don’t work.
Spraying your entire yard with a pesticide that kills
everything it contacts so you don’t have to see any sort of bug when you walk
through it is stupid and actually pretty useless. Instead gardeners should try
to target only a pest that seriously harms them or a plant they wish to protect
and only in the smallest area necessary to achieve that goal.
And all those weeds…
There will always be weeds in the garden too. Weeds are just
plants you don’t want. There is no magic
way to have only the plants you want and none you don’t want in the garden. There is nothing you can spray or sprinkle
that will control only weeds. Weeds are plants. There is no weed killer that
knows which plants you want eliminated and only kills them.
You can’t spray poison ivy killer on poison ivy growing on a
rose plant without killing the rose too, even if the label says it kills poison
ivy. Most weed killers kill all plants. (And
always read those labels and do exactly what they say – it’s the law).
The exception to the “kills all plants” rule is when lawns
are sprayed with weed killers that kill broadleaf weeds like dandelions but
doesn’t harm the grass. This confuses people. It’s too much to explain in this
article but it involves classification of plants into dicots and monocots. There
are some pesticides that target only dicots. Grass is a monocot. But most of
your garden plants are dicots.
When the lawn care employee with no training or your spouse
sprays the vegetable garden with lawn weed killer thinking they are helping you
with the weeding, a disaster occurs. Most of your garden dies. Lawn weed spray
will also kill nearby plants that any spray hits.
What about pre-emergent pesticides- products that keep seeds
from germinating? First let me mention
that cornmeal is not one of those. Corn gluten meal, an entirely different
product, has only limited success on certain weeds. REPEAT: CORNMEAL WILL
NOT KEEP SEEDS FROM GERMINATING AND IT DOESN’T KILL “WEEDS”.
Other products such as “preen” also have limited success. If
a weed is perennial and has already rooted it won’t be harmed. Weeds often
spread by root rhizomes and these products don’t work on them. It can’t be used
in food gardens either.
A note here. Ditch the vinegar, salt and soap recipes for
killing weeds. Use them only on paved areas, like weeds in cracks. They harm
the soil and aren’t very effective at killing weeds, which leads you to add
more and then more damage is done to the soil.
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| Purple loosestrife, weed or flower? |
So, what do you do to get rid of weeds? Pull them, hoe them,
smother them with mulch. You can target specific weeds with pesticides
carefully applied. These all require
labor. The preparation for your first garden will affect how much labor you
will have to do, but you will need to do some weeding, even after years of
gardening.
New gardeners should remember not to make more garden than
they can care for, and since they don’t know yet what that is, to start small.
As you gain experience, you can care for more garden, often in the same amount
of time. Don’t let the weed problem get away from you, a little every day is
often easier than a whole day of weeding.
Choose plants and a style of gardening that suits the level
of gardening you expect to do. Low maintenance foliage plants or plants that
need deadheading and pruning? Cottage garden or formal garden with topiaries?
Remember plants you once wanted often turn into “weeds”. The
reason someone is giving you a bushel of common daylilies is because they
spread like weeds. Research before you accept freebies or snap up garden store
bargains.
Don’t be afraid to get rid of plants that spread too quickly
or that you don’t like. Don’t let people
guilt you into keeping some plant because; “you can eat it”. You can eat a lot
of things but that doesn’t mean you will actually want to. If you aren’t fond
of foraging bitter greens pull them and toss them on the compost pile. These “edible” weeds often spread
aggressively and soon you will have a mess.
Unless you are growing food for survival, gardening should
be something you want to do, not something you must do. Gardening is more than
a one-time project, like a kitchen remodel, that will pay off for years. Think
of gardening as an ongoing activity, a hobby you regularly invest time and
effort into. If you don’t like being outside, if you can’t tolerate bugs and
frogs, if you can’t stand dirt under your nails, gardening may not be the
activity for you. You can always get fresh flowers and vegetables at the
farmers market.
Viburnum
Beetles
This is the time of year when viburnums may be showing
damage from the larvae of viburnum beetles and the adult beetles themselves.
Viburnum beetles are an invasive pest and they do serious damage to, or cause
death of, many viburnum species. The beetles feed on viburnum foliage and may
completely strip the trees of leaves.
This beetle is slowly spreading across the US and it may be new
in your area. Gardeners should read up about the pest and learn to identify and
control it. In addition, your state Extension office or USDA office may want
you to report sightings.
Here are some good resources for learning about Viburnum
beetles.
When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food
and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault
lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones
to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
- Tecumseh-
Kim Willis
All parts of this blog are copyrighted and may not be used without
permission.
And So On….
Find
Michigan garden events/classes here:
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is the Lapeer County Gardeners facebook page)
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