The hard freeze came to my neighborhood a few hours after I got home from the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association's Sacred Agriculture conference and visiting friends and fam for Thanksgiving. The temperatures dipped down around 0F. That was disappointing because I didn't get a chance to harvest everything I could have, plant the rest of my tulips and camassia, or mow the future bee forage area. At least there is snow to insulate all the new perennial additions to our homestead from the harsh Minnesota winter.
At work I became an official University of Minnesota Master Gardener. State Master Gardener director Julie Weisenhorn drove up to Fond du Lac Reservation to give my cohorts and me our name tags, certificates, calendars, and some huge, beautiful, red velvet cupcakes! We completed our training earlier this year and then racked up 50 or more volunteer hours each by planting culturally significant plants with clients and staff at an addiction treatment center, assembling plant identification cards for Ojibwe ethnobotanicals, and creating a 4H garden and holding junior master gardener classes at a local community center. I've been wanting to become a master gardener for a long time, but haven't really lived in any place long enough to take the classes and volunteer and all that until now.
So now that it's cold outside I'm focusing on the indoor garden. I have amassed some pretty cool plants this year with my extra income, like a Vanilla orchid, coffee, figs, several Cattleya orchids, and a tea tree. I've had a bit of trouble with the tea tree because of an assumption I should not have made. I figured tea trees prefer dry conditions because they are from Australia. But they actually live in swampy areas in Australia, which I learned a few days ago after I came home from my vacation to find my little guy's leaves all shriveled and dry. He was even infested with mites, which is rare for tea trees because the oils they produce are fairly strong and repellent to most insects/arthropods. My tea tree must have been under quite a bit of stress. I feel bad but now I know how to take care of him a little better and hopefully he will grow back soon. To make use of my mistake, I trimmed off all of the branches with dead leaves and I'm currently infusing some grapeseed oil with them. I rinsed the mites off, but if any were remaining the grapeseed oil would have smothered them. And I'll strain them out later, before I use the infused oil to make salve. Mites are hard to get rid of, and with a large plant collection where many plants are touching or close, they can spread fast. You can physically remove the mites or at least keep their numbers low by spraying regularly with lukewarm water (spray them in the shower once a month or so--and turn the leaves over to get those creepers hiding out on the bottom). You can also cut off the affected plant parts, kill the mites with neem oil, or smother them with horticultural oil.
My biggest insect problem in the house at the moment, and probably since we moved in, is with fungus gnats. They are small flies, about the same size as vinegar flies (AKA fruit flies, the ones that hang around your dirty dishes, recyclables, or compost) but less robust and darker. They don't do much harm, they are just annoying. Their maggots live in soil and consume dead and decaying matter, including plant roots. They persist in large numbers around our house, alighting on the television at night and swarming the windows in the morning. They are attracted to yellow things, just like other common greenhouse pests like whiteflies and aphids. So you can make a simple trap by spreading something sticky on a yellow piece of paper and hanging it or staking it near your plants. I use Tanglefoot, which is an inexpensive natural product made of gum resins and vegetable wax. It is messy to apply because you want to cover as much as you can on both sides (or tape it to a window) and it is quite sticky. I spread it with a compostable knife so I could just toss it in the compost afterward. Another option for controlling fungus gnats, which I haven't tried yet, would be to make a Bt (Bacillus thurengiensis) soil drench. Bt is a bacterium that is ingested by immature insects that kills them. There are three different strains, and each one is specific to a different order of insects. Bt israelensis kills flies and is the active ingredient in some mosquito dunks. Bt kurstaki kills caterpillars, and Bt popilliae kills beetles.
I read on the Perelandra website (www.perelandra-ltd.com) about the cycles of energy that occur with the changing of the seasons. Machaelle has a special relationship with her garden and she says that she marks the exact moments of the equinoxes and solstices with a simple ritual like lighting a candle. She says the garden cycle starts in the fall, when the plan for the next growing season forms, and it solidifies at the winter solstice. The plan is put into action at the spring equinox, and it comes to fruition at the summer solstice. After reading that (well, what she wrote is much more poignant), I decided to start acknowledging the passing of the seasons by being present and awake. This year that means waking up at 5:00am on what could be a very important solstice. I will also hold off on developing any sort of plan for the garden and homestead until after the winter solstice when the devas who care for the plants will have their own plan, which I hope they will share with me.
At work I became an official University of Minnesota Master Gardener. State Master Gardener director Julie Weisenhorn drove up to Fond du Lac Reservation to give my cohorts and me our name tags, certificates, calendars, and some huge, beautiful, red velvet cupcakes! We completed our training earlier this year and then racked up 50 or more volunteer hours each by planting culturally significant plants with clients and staff at an addiction treatment center, assembling plant identification cards for Ojibwe ethnobotanicals, and creating a 4H garden and holding junior master gardener classes at a local community center. I've been wanting to become a master gardener for a long time, but haven't really lived in any place long enough to take the classes and volunteer and all that until now.
So now that it's cold outside I'm focusing on the indoor garden. I have amassed some pretty cool plants this year with my extra income, like a Vanilla orchid, coffee, figs, several Cattleya orchids, and a tea tree. I've had a bit of trouble with the tea tree because of an assumption I should not have made. I figured tea trees prefer dry conditions because they are from Australia. But they actually live in swampy areas in Australia, which I learned a few days ago after I came home from my vacation to find my little guy's leaves all shriveled and dry. He was even infested with mites, which is rare for tea trees because the oils they produce are fairly strong and repellent to most insects/arthropods. My tea tree must have been under quite a bit of stress. I feel bad but now I know how to take care of him a little better and hopefully he will grow back soon. To make use of my mistake, I trimmed off all of the branches with dead leaves and I'm currently infusing some grapeseed oil with them. I rinsed the mites off, but if any were remaining the grapeseed oil would have smothered them. And I'll strain them out later, before I use the infused oil to make salve. Mites are hard to get rid of, and with a large plant collection where many plants are touching or close, they can spread fast. You can physically remove the mites or at least keep their numbers low by spraying regularly with lukewarm water (spray them in the shower once a month or so--and turn the leaves over to get those creepers hiding out on the bottom). You can also cut off the affected plant parts, kill the mites with neem oil, or smother them with horticultural oil.
My biggest insect problem in the house at the moment, and probably since we moved in, is with fungus gnats. They are small flies, about the same size as vinegar flies (AKA fruit flies, the ones that hang around your dirty dishes, recyclables, or compost) but less robust and darker. They don't do much harm, they are just annoying. Their maggots live in soil and consume dead and decaying matter, including plant roots. They persist in large numbers around our house, alighting on the television at night and swarming the windows in the morning. They are attracted to yellow things, just like other common greenhouse pests like whiteflies and aphids. So you can make a simple trap by spreading something sticky on a yellow piece of paper and hanging it or staking it near your plants. I use Tanglefoot, which is an inexpensive natural product made of gum resins and vegetable wax. It is messy to apply because you want to cover as much as you can on both sides (or tape it to a window) and it is quite sticky. I spread it with a compostable knife so I could just toss it in the compost afterward. Another option for controlling fungus gnats, which I haven't tried yet, would be to make a Bt (Bacillus thurengiensis) soil drench. Bt is a bacterium that is ingested by immature insects that kills them. There are three different strains, and each one is specific to a different order of insects. Bt israelensis kills flies and is the active ingredient in some mosquito dunks. Bt kurstaki kills caterpillars, and Bt popilliae kills beetles.
I read on the Perelandra website (www.perelandra-ltd.com) about the cycles of energy that occur with the changing of the seasons. Machaelle has a special relationship with her garden and she says that she marks the exact moments of the equinoxes and solstices with a simple ritual like lighting a candle. She says the garden cycle starts in the fall, when the plan for the next growing season forms, and it solidifies at the winter solstice. The plan is put into action at the spring equinox, and it comes to fruition at the summer solstice. After reading that (well, what she wrote is much more poignant), I decided to start acknowledging the passing of the seasons by being present and awake. This year that means waking up at 5:00am on what could be a very important solstice. I will also hold off on developing any sort of plan for the garden and homestead until after the winter solstice when the devas who care for the plants will have their own plan, which I hope they will share with me.
