From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
Yes, here we are a week later in the gardening season. No big changes are taking place in my garden right now, its a slow-and-steady progress. We have had a couple more really unusual heavy downpours and hail storms, but other than knocking over the penstemons and the echinops, the garden has fared quite well. The rain is so nice.
My tomato plants are still tall and slender, but I have blossoms and even notice a couple of small green tomatoes coming on. I found three lanky sprawly tomato plants that had been overlooked in my hall of shame (personal plant nursery/holding area) and popped them in the ground yesterday before it started to get smoking hot here. I planted a great white. Every one says they are really tasty. We shall see. Like Annie in Austin said about my pink forget-me-nots, “Now that just isn’t right.” Really, why would anyone want a white tomato?
Since Carol/Indy loves to raz me about the tomato contest (the rules of which are known only to her) I find I have no alternative to raz her back about my delish raspberries. And I have a lot of them. The Fall Golds are going wild, and the reds are catching up. I can pick enough for my breakfast every morning. Enough for Flyboy too. He just loves them. Did I tell you its especially nice to grow something Carol doesn’t grow? Therefore, I win the raspberry contest.
My beans and peas are still just teeny tiny and the squash are just making their second sets of leaves. I was at a Boise Garden Bloggers’ meetup last night and after seeing Victoria and Kim’s garden, veggies too, I realized I am WAAAAAAYY behind on my vegetable growing. I am going to blame it all on being sick, twice, when I should have been planting. That’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.
Just look at this hideous mess at my place:
I had 5 enormous miscanthus removed earlier in the season. They were taller than they were reputed to be and by the end of the season, they blocked the view from our favorite perch. Can’t have that, now can we? The view is one of the best parts of this house. The removal of the giant grasses left huge, gaping craters yawning at me. Plus, we had a pile of beautiful cut sandstone waiting to be made into a retaining wall. I couldn’t make up my mind exactly how to do the wall, I flipped and flopped about “arting” it up, and by the time I reached a conclusion, well, here we are. Now it is going to be 95-100 this week and its a bitch to work in that kind of heat. I’ve made a priority list of how to proceed since that is easier than actually doing any real work. List making is a very good thing. Grocery lists, to-do lists, books to read lists, articles to write lists, packing lists and so on. When the lists are almost done, start checking your Twitter page, Facebook and Plurk. Oh, and email.
This week’s to-do list:
Find a stirrup hoe in town. I saw some of the staff at the Botanical Garden using them on little masses of weeds: off with their heads!
Pick up a flat of raspberries at the fruit stand tomorrow. Make sure they are local. Make jam. Hide most of the jam until winter.
Weed the tomato bed.
Keep top dressing the beds with compost.
Keep planting the stuff from the holding area.
Whew, just making that list made me tired! Until next week,
MA
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It's a deliberate choice that I make to not use pesticides in any form - organic or chemical. And, while this choice comes at a cost (it rules out growing many exotic plants) it offers some decent rewards as well. The main reward being that I have very few pests that visit my garden.
Most gardeners tend to find plants that they want to grow and then add them to their garden. Then, an assortment of pests seem to turn up as though someone's put on a buffet and the only way they leave is when they're carried out in the garbage - after a decent spray.
Year after year the problems occur and the gardener just looks for ways to better manage the pests. They start with chemical sprays but then realise that this can't be doing the environment any benefit, so they turn to organic pesticides as an alternative. Needless to say, many organic pesticides contain chemicals anyway - detergents, soap flakes, bi-carb soda and a plethora of other acids or alkalis.
Did we ever stop to think that maybe these things weren't good for our garden whether we made them ourselves or bought them already pre-mixed in a convenient spray? Probably not. In fact, we possibly thought we were doing the environment a good turn.
But, when we stop and think about what we're doing we realise that any type of pesticide, organic or chemical, is harmful - it just depends how harmful!
It's a philosophical paradigm really. On the one hand you get to grow anything you want but have to deal with the pests that those plants attract. While on the other your plant choices are a little more limited but you don't lose precious gardening time trying to combat the little critters. Yet the permaculturalist will argue that there's a third option - companion planting.
To be honest, my garden's not completely pest-free - but it is pretty close. I still have a few roses that the aphids love but the ladybugs keep them under control. Then there's the sowbugs that like to feast on my new seedlings and the snails are never far from their bromeliad habitat. But moths, caterpillars, grasshoppers and crickets are kept at bay from the birds that I try to attract.
So, before you go mixing up a batch of organic pesticide take a moment to consider why you need it all. If it's because you can't find an alternative to keep the pests at bay then find some other plants to grow instead. It will be far more beneficial for your garden environment and the world's environment at large.
From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
