Catching Up

This week's flower availability: yarrow, valerian, iris, and bee's friend
Thanks to everyone who made it out to the bedding plant sale! I have planted all the leftovers from the sale, aside from the native perennial fruits. I may use some of those to replace trees and shrubs that didn't take off once they were planted in the orchard, but there are quite a few left if anyone is interested. The inventory includes high bush cranberry, lilac, basswood, Juneberry, chokeberry (Aronia), and American wild plum. I am selling them for $6 each or 2 for $10. I also plan to bring whatever is left to the Fond du Lac Resource Management division's Ganawenjigewin Maawanji'idiwin (Taking Care of Things Gathering) farmers' market on September 6 at the pow wow grounds behind the Fond du Lac Ojibwe School. I will also bring cut flowers, winter squash, melons, tomatoes, and whatever else I have by early September.
So far this year's garden is off to a good start. A big buck has been sneaking in occasionally to eat the tops off the peas. The grasshoppers are everywhere for the third year in a row, but once again they mostly don't bother the crops I planted. They destroyed some small, young tomato and pepper plants and skeletonized my rhubarb again, but for the most part they stick to the weeds and the compost when feeding. The fava bean plants all came up but suffered a bit from being splashed with dirt. The dirt seemed to damage the lower leaves, and that combined with the poor, sandy soil has resulted in few flowers on the plants. The fava beans in my work garden are doing better, and the bumblebees seem to love the flowers. I picked two different corn varieties to grow this year. I am hoping they will flower and silk separately, but I have corn condoms in case they don't. The varieties I picked are Lindsay Meyer blue, the corn that matured fastest at work last year, and Glass Gem, the most beautiful corn I've ever seen. I don't think I would mind if they crossed, but I prefer to have "pure"ish seeds if possible (John Navazio's book, "The Organic Seed Grower," stresses that there is no such thing as "pure" seed) .
I mentioned my poor, sandy soil. This year I finally have finished compost, but I have not yet made time to add the biodynamic preparations to it so I can add it to the garden. I will have to get on that soon. I have been spending so much time at work that it has been hard for me to get my butt out to my home garden when I have some free time. I haven't sprayed 500 or 501 yet either! i am thinking I may spray the barrel compost I got at the biodynamic farming conference last fall soon, and spray 500 in the fall. I have also tried using cover crops this year. They are only planted in about 1/4 of the garden, but I have more to plant as the season progresses. Currently there is crimson clover and bee's friend, plus a few volunteer buckwheat and vetch plants.
I just transplanted my sweet potato plants today. They arrived from Sand Hill Preservation Center last week with a note stating that it is in fact okay to plant them so late, and that they would catch up to sweet potato plants that were put in the ground up to a month ago because the warmth of the soil helps the plants grow more than the length or number of days it has to grow. I am trying a few traditionally southern crops this year, including okra, melons, and cotton. I had meant to try peanuts, but put it off for too long and now it is too late to plant them. My work garden got some, and those are doing well. Sand Hill Preservation Center sells black peanuts that have a maturation time of only 100 days, which is about all we have here.

My strawberries are ripening finally also. Are there many other places in the US where strawberries ripen in July? Some animal helped itself to the first few ripe strawberries but I got a handful this morning. Last year only 3 strawberries grew on the plants but there are scores more this year, which is exciting. I also have some alpine strawberries growing, in three different colors: red, yellow, and white. Those probably won't flower this year, but next year I will have some cool treats.

and here comes the tundra

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.

how my garden grows

It rained today for the first time in over a week, and like most areas of the United States, northern Minnesota has been rather hot as of late. Still, miraculously, the majority of the plants in my garden show no signs of water stress. I credit this to evening shade and tough love. I have found that most plants adapt to a lack of supplemental water, and that if watered too often, plants will begin to depend on it and wilt if the watering isn't kept up. Our high temperatures have remained in the double digits, so that has certainly helped as well. There were some casualties, though. Some of the peas died, and the rosemary I overwintered from last year and recently replanted in the garden is looking pretty bad, and a couple of the hardy kiwis (including the only male) have lost all their leaves to drought. Perhaps the rain falling now will bring the kiwis back (they seem to be rather tough--the ones I planted at work have survived trampling and neglect) and the rosemary.

I harvested two sunflower seed heads yesterday after working on staving off the invading grass. I saw some bees crawling all over the yellow wood sorrel (Oxalis stricta) flowers so I decided to let them remain in the garden. The peas are finally starting to form. The plants are growing so tall and erect, full of pretty white flowers.

The grasshoppers are abundant again this year. At first they weren't so bad, and the crows were showing up to eat them regularly (hopefully they still are--I just haven't noticed any). Then they started eating stuff I don't want them to eat. They have nibbled my rhubarb and turmeric down to nothing, they have bitten half-moons into many of the gladioli, and they have probably finished off my last remaining chamomile plant by now. Something--I'm not sure what--has eaten two of my rosemary plants entirely. I didn't think anything would eat rosemary.
I sprayed the biodynamic preparation 502  on the garden a couple of weeks ago. 502 is supposed to help plants maximize the energy they absorb from the sun, and it can be used to regenerate leaf damage. I was hoping it would give the watermelon radishes and red Russian kale the boost they need to stay alive after a brutal attack from the grasshoppers. Their frass (droppings) are visibly littered all around what is left of the poor plants. I don't notice much of a difference, but I remain hopeful they will pull through (um, long enough for me to eat them...)

The garden truly does feel magic this summer. I love having so much space and freedom to help facilitate the creation of this beautiful, edible landscape, and I feel energized by it and lucky to be its caretaker.