What constitutes a plague?

As the chomping noises get louder and fine black grains of caterpillar excrement cover the ground, the plants, the lawn chairs, and anything we thought we might like to eat outdoors, Trounce begins to look very benign.  Barry gave me a fancy sprayer for my birthday and threw labour into the deal.  He has just come in from smiting the pests on the pear, apple, crabapple, and nanking cherries.  Too bad the sprayer has insufficient range to cover the 40 ft green ash and elm trees which are also being chewed on relentlessly.

Yesterday in the back yard I observed a juvenile robin as it gazed hopefully upward at a caterpillar dangling in a sunbeam just out of reach, maybe descending, maybe not.  So sweet.  So revolting.

Crunch 'n' munch

Several weeks ago Barry told me to go listen to the pear tree.  It was humming with the reassuring sound of honey bees at work.  Yesterday I entered the orchard (the small area next to the carport where our two fruit trees are situated) and heard a different sound, a disturbing one.  To adapt the fine poetry of Clement C Moore to the circumstances at hand:  "And then in a twinkling I heard with alarm, the biting and gnawing of each little worm."  I regret that I couldn't find a good rhyme there, even while misrepresenting the creatures as worms when they are surely caterpillars, though that is just an assumption since they are hidden inside their folded up leaves.

The pear and apple trees both look very sad.  I think the apple should have produced blossoms by now and hasn't because it's under too much stress from being chewed on.  I feel bad about it.  For one thing, the trees needed to be sprayed with a substance detrimental to caterpillars and I didn't get it done in time.  I wonder if a lack of predators could a source of the infestation as well.  Two years ago we acquired a wasp trap that was effective way beyond our expectations.  We then wondered if the death of so many wasps at once could affect the local population.  There were still a few wasp around the next summer, though; the population would recover even if we had affected it.  This spring I hung a Waspinator® imitation wasp nest in the pear tree to guard against wasps making nests in some buried cinder block bricks nearby.  We had a bad experience with such bricks in another location a few years ago.  It did not occur to me that doing this might keep all wasps away from the pear tree and I don't know if that has been the effect.   If this is the cause, I'm at a loss.  We want the wasps for pest control but we won't offer them a place to live.  We would let them nest in our yard if they would promise not to sting us for simply walking past the nest,  But where does one find a Vespo-English dictionary?  Peaceful co-existence with wasps is a tricky business.

My neighbour recommended Trounce® Insecticide and assured me it was biologically safe product.  Today at a garden centre I happened upon this product.  After reading the alarming list of precautions, I put it back on the shelf.  Having since looked up some information on potassium salts of fatty acids and pyrethrum, I begin to think the product might not be so bad after all. But is it too late?

Death to cutworms!

One of the advantages of growing vegetables in containers is that you don't need to worry about cutworms coming along and felling them. When we transplant cucurbits or nightshade vegetables into the ground, each one gets a security perimeter known as a "cutworm collar".  The collar is just an open-ended food can that sticks at least half an inch above the soil surface. I don't know how far the collar should penetrate the soil, but any size of can you can get around the transplant is probably tall enough to keep it safe.

All the melons, peppers and basil went into containers this year, due to my belief that melons and peppers like their roots to be extra warm and that basil would be less at risk of being lost and forgotten among tomatoes and weeds (its usual fate here). Barry did the transplanting and I assured him that cutworm collars were not necessary. This is probably the case if one fills the containers with new sterilized container mix each year. If, however, one just reuses what remains in the container from the prior year (it looked arable), there is a chance that some Noctuid moth dropped an egg or two or a thousand at the site last summer. The morning after the transplant, I noted that in one container the very small basil had disappeared and one of the peppers had been rearranged from an upright structure into a small heap of leaves. My prime suspect was Adventure Cat, the poorly socialized (to humans) tomcat from down the street. He has been known to interfere with our garden. A week later the remaining pepper vanished from the container and I began to think it was an inside job.  We removed the contents of the container scoop by scoop and found the fat little culprit curled up in a horrible grey-brown ball.  There is no picture here because the creature was quickly rendered unidentifiable by Barry's shoe.

Did we immediately surround the other container transplants with cutworm collars?  No.  Foolhardy, maybe, but it doesn't seems so risky if they are all still standing after nine days.  Besides, I'd want to use a fairly large collar (think industrial-sized ketchup can) to avoid damaging spreading roots, and that would result in as much area being inside the barrier as outside.  On which side of the barrier would the cutworm be?  Also, the ill-fated container was the only one in which the contents had been undisturbed prior to planting.  The others had last year's soil, but also some packaged topsoil and peat mixed in, vigorously.  Hard to say if that made the difference.  We'll just hope for the best and be more security conscious next time.

Mission almost accomplished

It's June 11 and planting is still not done.  But it's mostly done.

All of the tomatoes, peppers, squashes, and melons have been placed in the ground, or in containers large enough to keep them comfortable for the season.  There doesn't appear to have been much advantage to putting them in the ground in early May.  They might like to have room for their roots to spread, but more than that they like their roots to be warm enough.  All the tomatoes survived, and one early transplanted Tigerella tomato looks quite robust compared to the others, but other than that, the tomatoes did just as well in the protection of the greenhouse.  They were a bit crowded, though - they grew taller and less full than the plants that were given a little more space.  One winter squash and all the Costata Romanesca zucchini's exposed to the May cold were lost.  The Costatas grow quickly, so I'll wait until May next year, and maybe even direct sow them.

The two Marketmore cucumbers that survived to the transplant stage also perished.  They were forgotten in the covering-up frenzy of an afternoon hail storm and didn't survive the cold night that followed.  Lesson: covering works, even with plastic, unless cucumbers are especially fragile.  We acquired a Sweet Slice cucumber today at Greenhaven and transplanted it into the Topsy Turvy Upside Down Tomato Planter (As Seen On TV!).  Growing  vegetables downward is new to us.  Peeking into a book called Vertical Gardening on amazon.com, I see that it may not be totally ridiculous.  The planted cucumber now hangs from one of the clothesline supports.  The product packaging suggests that we could also grow peppers, eggplants and even zucchinis.  What else?    If it works, and if the greenhouse roof is built for it, we could move them indoors with the first threat of frost in September (as we can, I am aware, do with right-side-up containers of similar size).

Potatoes are reliable, at least for showing up on the surface.  We just have to hope something is happening underground.  I picked up a box of Russet Burbank seed potatoes at the grocery store mid-May, cut them up and let them heal for a week in the basement, then planted them in a raised be on May 21.  If we have to heap more soil on top of the plants as they grow, that's going to be an ultra-raised bed.  Hope it doesn't topple over.  It looks like most of the potato chunks have made themselves present on the surface now and the healthy rosettes are rapidly growing, like the ones pictured at the right.  Those in the picture, however, are likely not from potatoes planted this year, given that they are situated several feet away among the rattlesnake pole beans.  There are a few others showing up in that vicinity, which happens to be where potatoes were grown last year.  Someone (me) was less than thorough at harvest time.

I've been slow at getting all the sowing done, largely because I wasn't sure where all the transplants were going.  Individual tomato and squash plants have big footprints.  And they want maximum sun exposure.  Rather than get out the tape measure and calculate the space they will occupy, which is even more difficult if the beds aren't completed yet, I find it easier to get the them planted and work certain other vegetables around them.  Pole beans also get priority placement because there has to be room to build a stable structure that will be exposed to sufficient sunlight for the beans and will shade or not shade other plants as needed.  Small fry like carrots, parsnips, onions, radishes, beets and lettuce can go almost anywhere - among tomatoes, around squashes, beneath pole beans, between rows of spinach.  Bush beans are a little bigger, but a single plant can still occupy blank space at the end of a bed or fill in a gap where the spacing didn't quite work.  There is still space in a couple of beds for additional plantings of beans for the next three weeks.  Plus, I'll be trying two bolt-resistant varieties of lettuce in different areas to see if I can find a sweet spot.  Home grown lettuce is amazing and I wish I could figure out how to have it all summer long.  Other than that, planting is pretty much done.  Yay!  We can relax now.  ;)

Making the beds

Our vegetable garden beds have been in the making since April.  We finished on Saturday.  The permaculturists and my favourite reference book direct me to create wide raised beds for planting.  They also tell me that once this work is done, I will never have to do it again.  But we do it every single year.  Something is wrong.



The idea behind raised beds is to have good drainage, a thick layer of loosened soil to accommodate root growth, and faster warming of the soil.  Between the beds is a trough, or swale, that collects water and delivers it, we hope, to the plants' roots.  Within the beds, row spacing as given on seed packages can be ignored because there won't be any walking between rows.  Human feet are permitted only on the paths between the beds because tromping through the beds would compress the soil.  For this reason, beds should only be twice as wide as one can comfortably reach for sowing, planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting.  A bed should not be so long that one is tempted to walk through it rather than around the end in order to get to the other side.  It is recommended that paths be covered with straw to suppress weed growth and avoid muck on one's shoes.

Sounds brilliant and simple.  Therefore, I'm feeling a bit of a dunce about not being able to do this properly.  I don't know how high the beds should be raised, nor have I taken pains to measure their elevations (all different, I'm sure).  Ed Smith (The Vegetable Gardener's Bible) says there should be 18 inches of loosened soil, but is that the difference between the top of the bed and the surface of the path or does the loosened soil go below path level?  I have no objection to building up 18 inches; it should be much easier on the back.  However, these raised beds are not walled, so I'm not getting a vertical edge.  For such a rise, the bed is going to lose a considerable area of planting at the edges unless I can convince seeds to stay put on a 50-60 degree incline until they get their roots going.  Incidentally, garden bellflower and quack grass have no qualms about proliferating on these slopes.  At the same time, our beds are not as wide as they might be.  A permaculture designer suggested that twice my arms length was a logical width, but it doesn't work for me.  Maybe after years of yoga training I could squat on the path and reach the horizontal distance of my arms, with both hands, while my arms are angled from their shoulders down to ground level.  For now, the beds have to be narrower than that.  So it seems there isn't much left after the side-sloping eats into them.  Then there is the straw issue.  The way these people talk, one would think bales of straw are readily available at every gas station and convenience store.  I live in a small urban city surrounded by fields of grain and have no idea where to find straw.  Our paths are filled with leaves, paving stones, and warped wooden planks.

Okay, I'm done complaining about my inability to turn theory into reality.  The beds are made - yay!  They started out rectangular (or a close approximation thereof) at the edges.  The perennial onion and chive habitat in the center of the garden then forced some modifications as the remaining spaces between that and the peas on one side and squash on the other was too wide for one bed and too narrow for two.  As luck would have it, I had recently attended a talk by Ron Berezan (The Urban Farmer) during which he mentioned keyhole beds.  Not his invention and not something I couldn't have, eventually, come up with myself.  Nevertheless, I credit him for putting the idea in front of me at the right time.  If the bed is a bit too wide, you can just gouge out "keyholes" in the sides of it here and there to get easy access to the entire surface.  Our potato bed has two keyholes on the south edge and one on the north.  It's now essentially a curving bed, like a very wide M.  Three more beds with keyholes followed, one similar to this one and two with less describable shapes in leftover sections of the garden.

Even with the fancy serpentine keyhole beds, I still felt the need to make the layout unnecessarily interesting.  My one indulgence was to have a small bed that contains only one tipi of pole bean poles.  I suspect a more efficient land use plan could have been devised in this region, but I convinced myself that the ability to walk all the way around the tower of scarlet runner beans was prerequisite to a successful harvest.  It had nothing to do with showcasing my great collection of sunflower stalks.

Now that the garden space has been defined, I see how much of it there is.  The transplants are all done and there is still plenty of vacancy.  It's getting too late for planting peas, lettuce (though I'm going to keep trying with the lettuce), and brassicas, but we have bush beans, beets, carrots, and parsnips galore that would be happy to move in.




Making bed feels like a too much work to do every spring, and this year it seems to have made me late in getting the sowing done.  I want to keep the same beds for next summer, so I will try not to wreck them during harvest time.  And I'll keep perusing the Lethbridge Shopper for straw bale mongers.

Maybe flowers

Which came first, the daffodil or the tulip?  It's a trick question.  I can never remember, so I paid attention this year.  Early in April I had the answer as several pointy tulip leaves pushed up from the depths of the corner of the big vegetable garden.  Slowly they rose, through snow and sleet and cold.  Weeks later, the first blunt tips of daffodils emerged in front of the house.  We didn't entirely expect to see them to the south of the path to our front door after Barry had applied a thick layer of earth last fall in an effort to get the front yard to stop sloping toward the house.  Undeterred, the south daffodils kept pace with the north daffodils, rising rapidly and popping open their various yellow faces indisputably before the tulips.  A saving grace this spring was the lack of a heavy wet snow coming to topple the grown daffodils.  Tulips followed soon after, giving a warm glow to the back yard.  Roughly eighty flowers opened in one little corner.  This fall I should dig up a few and spread the warmth for next spring.  Anyway, either answer to the question can be the correct one.

It may be unfair, but I have some reservations about daffodils and tulips.  There's just something a little add-water-and-stir about them.  A little manufactured.  Is it because they've been bred six ways from Sunday?  Is it their simplicity - the long flat leaves and few large petals?  Pretty sure that I spent Grade Two art period drawing tulips, not columbine.  Maybe I'm unimpressed by their lack of endurance.  The daffodil flowers have shriveled away, more tulip petals are on the ground than on the stems, and what is left looks a bit absurd.  These plants are nothing without their showy flowers.  This feels like a very petty complaint about plants that give us such a happy burst of colour so (relatively) early in the season.  Other people's smart arrays of different coloured bulb flowers give me great pleasure as I hike along residential streets.  I find I like them best when juxtaposed with perfect lawn grass and walkways lifted from Architectural Digest.  Our yard is more likely to be seen on the pages of Ramshackle Monthly.  Maybe the perfection of tulips and daffodils are out of place in the unkempt, undesigned spaces they light up here every May.  I like them, and look forward to seeing them, but they are a different class of organism, somewhere between my delicate saxifrage and the neighbour's year-round container of artificial flowers.

May flowers

As I said, there are a very few flowers that bloom in our yard during May.  This is more than I knew two months ago.  That they would all bloom before October was about as specific as I dared to get.  There are expected bloom times for any species, normally given as a range of dates that are dependent on climate conditions.  Furthermore, microclimates matter.  I've recently strolled past southern-exposed gardens which sport open flowers of the same kind as mine which are still tightly closed, cringing against their harsh western exposure.  Well, it's not a race.

Pasque Flower (Pulsatilla)

After the demise of crocuses and glories-of-the-snow in April, Pasque flower was the first bloom in May, just a little later than the closely related prairie crocuses that grow in the coulees.  The plant was purchased two (?) years ago and grows inches from the sidewalk.  Although it will never bloom early enough in Lethbridge, it's flowers have the colours of Easter - deep purple petals with a ring of bright yellow thingies around a pointy bit in the center.  (Should I, perhaps, learn the proper names of flower parts?)  Even better, the leaves and stems are furry.  This is a plant you can pet.  The blooming has gone on for about four weeks now; the first flowers are now spectacular spiky seed heads (picture needed here).  It puts on a good show.  About a week ago I noticed what appeared to be a flower stalk coming to an abrupt end about three inches up.  Thief!, I gasped, but soon forgave.  The plants are there to be enjoyed by the passing public.  Maybe somebody liked it so much she just had to take it, maybe even to the plant store so she could get one of her own.  Maybe someone took it to his sick father.  We live between two hospitals.  I'm glad it was that special to somebody.

Elephant Ears (Bergenia)

Elephant ears live in the same triangular garden as the Pasque flower and are one of the reasons I think of this area as a zoo. There are five other animals mentioned in names of plants located here, six if "baby" counts as an animal.  This plant was one of the original residents of this plot, having been installed in 2008 when the lawn was torn out.  The flowers are new, though.  Sometimes it takes a while.  It seems they want to invest in roots first before diversifying into blossoms.  Or could be some other reason.  Anyway, it erected two robust red stalks and hung out some little pink blossoms of the ends of them.  Not my favourite colour combination, red and pink, yet I don't think any less of the elephant ears for it.  Plants get away with a lot.

Cranesbill (Geranium)

Another of the critter-inspired names here is cranesbill geranium, and I have not figured out which part of the blossom resembles the bill of a crane.  If I were naming this organism after an animal, I think I'd choose a winged insect because of the fine, dark veins of the petal, so distinct against the pale background.  This individual, introduced to the garden late last summer, opened it's first blossom of the season on the last day of May, just making it into this post.  Today there are two more open and one getting ready.

Chives (Allium)

The under-rated chive flower appears to be mainly a June baby in our back yard, but since a few (of the hundreds that will be) burst through their casings in the last couple of days, they count as May flowers.  Didn't I post a photo of emerging chive flowers back on April 3?  They take their time.  The chive cluster is a lovely patch of green, and increasing pink, in the middle of the garden.  Now that the flowers are opening, it will be a hub of activity for the local bees.     It's been a welcome surprise, discovering that seeds I planted six years ago for a season of herbs became this beautiful edible perennial bee magnet.  Why doesn't everyone grow masses of chives?  Could it be the prodigious self-seeding?  Yes, we have a great cluster of grown-up chives, and a two foot border of baby chives all around it.  It's good to know that onion family plants are good companions to a great number of the other vegetables we grow.