Bad Beans and Black Locust

Hello!

I can’t believe its late July already. This is the week where reality set in for me in terms of what is going to grow and what isn’t going to grow. The good news is, my three sisters garden is thriving. I only had one hill where some pumpkins didn’t come up, the rest at least have some. The random gourds I threw around between the sunflowers and the broom corn are also growing great. The main garden is okay, but my fancy onion sets are disappointing. I may even write to the company I got them from to mention that they were disappointing. My onions from seed are coming along slow, too, but they also didn’t cost like those sets cost, and I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from just green onion tops and little baby onions.

My sister’s husband planted carrots and onions in flowerpots this year, and they’ve been eating fresh onions and carrots for weeks and teasing one of uncles about it mercilessly. They just used potting soil and any old seed from Home Depot and leftover pots from the hanging plants my sister kills every year, and, viola, instant carrot snacks. I work and work, and my uncle has a garden you could take a picture of and put in a magazine it’s so nice, and neither of us have seen a carrot yet this year. It’s kind of funny. Just recently, I was having a conversation with a gentleman who lives and works on an organic farm in Panama, New York, and we were talking cropping systems and raised beds and soil building techniques and cover crops and all that stuff, and another girl joined in and was really proud of her garden, too, and she was like: “I just put miracle grow on it! It works really well!” So, there’s more than on way to skin a cat!

Unfortunately, it looks like all of my melons are going to be a wash this year. Nothing wanted to grow! They have little tiny buds on them , but I just don’t see how the plant is going to be big enough ever to support fruit. That is a shame because I had lots of heirloom type melons I was trying, and I ‘ad ‘opes, I tell ya. I ‘ad ‘opes. But I’ve never had anything like luck with pumpkins before, and it looks like they are going strong.

Speaking of dashed hopes, it looks like my beans are also too damaged by bunny rabbits to bear this year. Luckily, I saved the seeds for my fancy French beans that I didn’t plant. Bean seeds should last three years, so I probably won’t have to rebuy French bean seeds, though I’m going to have to start over with bush beans. I tried a new variety last year, and, unlike the original beans I planted my first and second garden years, the seeds didn’t breed true. They were Burpee Kentucky Wonder, and they bore well last year, but the saved seeds were no good. I have noticed that Burpee seeds don’t even keep from year to year in the package which is why I don’t have any salsa peppers this year. I had a whole half package of them, but they never grew. Makes me reconsider whether I will buy many Burpee seeds next year.

Anyway, my large task of the day was to cut back and clear the black locust sprouts away from the pond edge. When we moved in here, three years ago, the previous owners had allowed the pond edge to grow up in black locust. They also let the landscaping escape, and trees that should have been trimmed back to shrub size had really sprung up.

The problem with having trees on your pond dam is pretty simple. The roots infiltrate the dam. In the short run, they hold back erosion and the trees keep the pond from getting too hot, after the trees get big, the roots start breaking things apart. And if you cut the trees or the trees die or fall down, the decaying roots can weaken the dam.

For this reason, maybe it was a mistake to cut the locust trees around the pond, but they were also obscuring the view, which is very nice. When we first came to look at this house, my mother figured there would be a view, but it took imagination.

This is a picture of two of my many cousins fishing by the pond the first year we got here:



This is a picture I took this afternoon after chopping down the sprouts off the tops of the locust stumps:




For clearing brush, I use a pair of by-pass loppers, and I would say get a good pair of by-pass loppers, but I’m now convinced that there is no such thing. We started out with Fiskars, and they were okay. They chopped a lot of stuff and had a lifetime guarantee, which was good because my mother destroyed her first set inside of a year. We’ve had them replaced twice, but we eventually gave up. They have a design flaw where the handle just keeps breaking, and instead of fixing it, they just started making them in China. The loppers wore out and broke quicker, and they just made them cheaper so that they were cheaper to replace rather than making better loppers. We gave up, and I’ve been using a pair of Martha Stewart loppers with solid wood handles. They don’t that well, but there are fewer parts to break!

Anyway, I have at least one more day of chopping to get the sprouts from the swamp side of the pond, and I ended up with about a truckload of branches to give the goats. I’ll wait until they eat down what I gave them a little.

Other than messing up the view and possibly ripping the pond dam apart, I think that black locust is one of the best trees you can grow. It’s a fast grower. We counted the rings on the trees we took down, and most of them were less than ten years old. I don’t know if the locust was deliberately planted around the pond, but it does spread really well and has these pretty, feathery leaves. It also has really wicked thorns, but that is beside the point.

Most fast-growing trees, especially ones that grow in wet or less than ideal areas are just junky, but locust is a pretty hard wood. You can use it for firewood after it dries, but the best use for locust is as fence posts. It grows nice and straight, and when you cut it, you can peel the bark right off like a banana peel. If you miss the really wet stage though, it will com off easy after it completely dries, as well. Locust fence posts will last anywhere from twenty to forty years in the ground with no chemical treatment whatsoever.

We got a lot of use out of the locust trees we cut that first year. Most of them went into the snake rail fence that appears in some of my other posted pictures, though we did burn some. Even though the sprouts are a nuisance, they make good fodder for the goats. One year, before I had hay and snow was setting in, I drove the goats into the swamp and had them eat the leaves still on the locusts for their roughage.

One of these days, I’d like to have a locust stand farther down the hill where they won’t be in the way, but right now, the woods are almost all evergreens.

Midsummer Day's Dream

Hello!

We’ve kind of reached that point in summer where the hard work is really over and the rest is just trying to keep everything balanced. The greenhouse is empty and down with plants either plunked into empty places in the gardens or tossed into Plant Heaven at the edge of the yard. I’ve been staking tomatoes and tying up vines and of course weeding, weeding, weeding.

Right now, my biggest problem is varmints! Something, probably raccoons, has been raiding the compost pile. We’ve been eating a lot of those cute little seedless watermelons, and the rinds have been irresistible to critters. I’ve tried burying the pile in tons of hay and straw. I put wire over the top. Nothing works. The wire is always peeled back or the little guys just drag stuff out right through the wire! I’m going to have to raid the scrap lumber from the goat shed to make a sturdier, non peeling-back cap for the pile. I’m a bad builder, but I’m going to have to get over that, because the old particle board closet that was left behind here that I moved into the basement and have been using as a storage cupboard is on its way out. The damp down there has finally gotten to it, and it is bowing out, and the shelves have started to drop.

Speaking of critters, I have finally taken care of a bad muskrat hole in the walkway on top of the dam on the pond. Muskrats will dig in at the water level and then build a big den uphill from the entrance. A lot of times, this will cave in, and that’s what happened here. It was getting treacherous to go over the top of the dam with the lawnmower, so I was working on getting some better drainage around the garage by chopping down the sod and regrading the yard off the cement pad there and ended up with a couple three hundred pounds of dirt and sod. I wasn’t aware that the hole was so big, but almost all that dirt and sod went into making the walkway flat again and building up the side of the pond. I always keep a good amount of grass seed and cover crop on hand to use when I do my yard repairs. It is easier than running into town every time I throw some dirt around, and they don’t always have grass seed at the feed mill. I refuse to pay what they charge for grass seed at Tractor Supply. My A-Number-One money saving tip for saving money is never buy anything there. Don’t even set foot in the store to look. Everything is overpriced, and everything is made in China.

The last thing I bought at Tractor Supply was a hose nozzle, and it was too expensive and didn’t work. How can a hose nozzle not work? Then, when I was looking for an exchange for it, I found the exact same thing in the sale bin for five dollars less except for the one that I was returning was tied to a card and the cheaper one just had a sticker on it. Same manufacturer. Same weight and features. I just returned it and went someplace to purchase a reasonably priced, made in America hose nozzle. I know they cheat people by charging too much for stuff you can get at real farm supply places, but this was a little too far, and I haven’t been there since.

Anyway, I’m lucky that the muskrats seem to have abandoned the pond. The only way to get rid of them, really is to off them, and I’m not quite ready to do that. Though, I might shoot some bunnies here very soon! They are really doing a number on my lower garden away from the house, and I really like beans. The rabbits are cute, though. They play little jumping games on the yard in the mornings, and maybe a cat will eat them and I won’t have to try and actually hit anything with my gun, though I bet I could get my sister’s husband to do it. She had a raccoon in her garbage right in town the other evening, and it was all she could do to keep him from shooting it. He really wanted to. It would have been perfectly safe. He’s a firearms instructor and a good shot, but it would have been just too hard to explain if they had actually got in trouble for shooting in the city

My uncle who was born in Kansas in the ‘40’s said that they used to catch rabbits in sacks in the summer when they mowed hay. They would mow in a square and the rabbits wouldn’t run out of the long grass, so they could just pick them right up and pop them into feed sacks. They ate rabbit all summer to the point where they couldn’t even look at rabbit, but a lot of times, that was all they had for meat in summer.

We have stray cats out the ears right now. Two mother cats brought their kittens ot the garage. Three of the kittens are really gentle and nice, and the four from the other litter are wild. We’re going ot have to figure out what to do about all those cats, but I’m hoping they keep down the mouse problem. Last year, I was on the verge of getting a few cats from the farm where I buy milk. They have really pretty cats. A lot of calicoes. However, I have ten garage cats right now and one house cat. My cousins named the older little all weird names from comic books, but the nice cats are Boots, Smokey, and Billi. Billi used to be named Whitey, because he has more white than any of the other cats, but we decided he needed a less culturally fraught name, and so I called him Billi which is Whitey in Ukrainian. My grandmother always has grey cats and they are always named Sivvi, which means “grey”. She’s on about Sivvi IV or V by now!

That’s about everything going on here! I’m going to start fall crops of broccoli and cabbage very soon and the lettuces are about over until it cools down a little, too. I paid a visit to my other uncle’s garden the other day, and I may change my mind about using black plastic , since the cool weather has really slowed down my melons and peppers and he says the plastic keeps the soil warm as well as cuts down on weeding. I’ve done two batches of strawberry jam and two batches of currant jelly, and my kitchen is starting to fill up with jars. hopefully, the bunnies will leave me some pickling cukes because I’d like to try that this year.

I need to go and hang out a load of wash which is another great way to keep the electric bill low over the summer. I even hang out clothes in the basement over the winter next to the wood stove. In Ontario, they have actually made it illegal for planned housing communities to write bylaws that don’t allow people to hang out wash in an effort to keep down the drain on the grid. My sister runs central air in her very large house all summer but hangs out her clothes, and her bills are the same in summer as they are in winter! That dryer costs a lot to run! Interestingly enough, the yearly report from the power company says the peak draw for our area in 2007 was actually in February when the weather was so cold. My cousins from down south can’t believe how few people in PA have AC in their houses. We actually have an air conditioner. It’s one of those ones that hang out the window, and it’s still in the box it came in. Up on the hill, it is consistently 10 to 15 degrees cooler than it is in town, and there is always a breeze. We bought the air conditioner for my brother who was too lazy to install it even though he was living in my aunt’s upstairs apartment which was melting hot, and it’s just been passed around between different family members, none of which have actually used it!

My Garden Notebook Gets a 2008 Entry

Hello!

I haven’t written for a while, because, really not a lot is going on. And I’ve been sick for about a month! I finally gave in and went to the doctor’s office. I have a sinus infection, but I couldn’t get the antibiotic that actually treats sinus infections, because it was too expensive. Instead, I have whatever might do the job that is available from the $4 prescription list as Walmart (AKA the devil’s playground) plus some free samples of allergy nose spray which will probably work since I never take antibiotics. I know it’s very American and all that private enterprise is filling in the gap for cheap prescriptions, since we don’t have a discount system like they have in other countries, but I was kind of annoyed.

I’m not a Walmart shopper. I know people like it and all, but most of their business practices are very bad, and I take buying as little as possible and buying locally seriously. There I was, kicking my heels for the twenty minutes I had to wait to get the prescription filled. They lure people to the store with their cheap prescriptions and take a long time filling them so people get tricked into buying things they don’t need and that they wouldn’t have bought had they not been waiting and waiting and waiting! I didn’t buy anything else. Ha.

Being sick has a good side, too. I haven’t minded half as much as my mother that he weather has been really quite awful the last few weeks. We usually expect a nice thaw in February and even a few sixty and seventy degree days, which never really happened. We also expected to be able to get a little more wood in February, and that didn’t happen either, between the weather being bad and the chain coming off the chainsaw. I figured out how to put it back on, but I haven’t figured out how to control the weather yet!

I’ve been doing a lot of spinning. I have a lovely alpaca fleece that has grey and silver and white and black in it. I also have the baby fleece from the same alpaca. My mother has been hovering looking at the yarn as I’m plying and skeining it, making plans for what to do with it. These alpaca fleeces are not exactly mine, however, and a portion of the yarn has to go back to the owner of the alpacas. That is going to hurt. It’s the prettiest yarn, dyed or undyed, that I’ve ever spun.

I’m also working on a cross stitch nativity scene which is going to be really big and kind of impractical. The Holy Family are in a frame, but the other figures are going to be stuffed and free standing. I can’t imagine keeping it clean and in good condition, but I have a bee in my bonnet about this nativity scene which I saw in a book of Christmas cross stitch years ago and have wanted to make ever since.

And yes, I’ve been reading a lot. Well, a lot for me. I read fast, but I hardly ever find anything I like enough to finish. Right now, I’m just finishing up Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It’s a cute, little book about little kids growing up during the Great Depression. I’m also leafing through a couple of books about the Depression and the third volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War plus An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson. That’s about the Allied landings in North Africa, and it’s the second time through that one for me. I read most of it last year and kind of set it aside. It’s been long enough that I started from the beginning. Interestingly enough, I met an older gentleman by chance last year who fought with Patton’s Ghost Brigade at a later stage in the war, and he said the same thing the book did about the North African campaign being important because it taught the American army how to actually fight a war.

My mother has been insane with cabin fever, and she has read the entire history of the Civil War by Shelby Foote, which I read a while back and come back to occasionally, as well. My little nephew is going to fit in well with the family. My sister’s first real job was as a history teacher, and my nephew’s “bedtime book” for the last year or so is about Soviet military equipment. He’s seven. I went and saw “Atonement” a few weeks ago, and I mentioned I’d seen a World War II movie. My nephew was like: “You went and saw a World War II movie, and you didn’t take me?” until I told him it was more like an “Oh, will my true love come back from the war” war movie. He plays those war games on his video game player all the time. I’m waiting for one to come out about Stalingrad before I think about playing one.

But enough of that! The seed orders are in the mail! Soon, they will coming winging their way back to us, and it will be the busy time again. The closest I’ve ever come in my life to keeping a journal is this “column”, and so I had initially rejected the idea of keeping a garden notebook until I realized how helpful it could be. Using my garden notebook, I can keep track of what I have planted where just by drawing rough diagrams of my gardens. I also can create a schedule of what seeds need to be started when and what plans I have for the garden. (As well as if I actually did them.)

My garden notebook is a combination journal and catalog and to do list. My best idea for my notebook was taking the empty envelopes of seed packets and stapling them to the actual pages of the notebook. I leave one side unstapled and just write on the page itself. I make all sorts of notes. When was ti planted? What was the weather? How it is doing? Which bugs are being pests? How long did it take to grow? Did it taste good? Was it prolific?

This is really a good trick, because each kind of plant gets a little spot, and nothing gets really forgotten about. Also, a lot of things are pretty unpredictable. For instance, last year, when I planted a polygonum “Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate”, I had given up on seeing more than a few of them and was even getting ready to use the soil from the seemingly failed flat of Kiss Me’s to plant some other plants. Then, they started coming up like mad. Because of my dated notes in my garden notebook, I’m able to see just how long the flat just sat and sat before the flowers started coming up.

And that’s where I am right now! It is time to start the polygonum! The very first plants of the year. These are interesting because they need to be “scarified” and “stratified” which are just fancy words for sandpapered and frozen. The little black seeds in the wild would be eaten by birds and left out on the ground to grow after the winter was over. They won’t germinate without a period of being cold. The first year, I grew polygonum, I scarified them, but I just planted them where I wanted them outdoors during a winter thaw. I got a plant or two, but ti was disappointing. Definitely, the way to go is by putting them in flats.

Scarify and Stratify:

To scarify: Use sandpaper. Medium to coarse is okay. This is not easy. It just gets mentioned as easy-as-you-please, but the little seeds shoot all over the place, and they knock the sand off the sandpaper a lot easier than the sandpaper will wear through the seed hulls. You don’t need to sane all the way through, but there has to be some kind of damage to the hulls.

Stratify: This can be done many ways. You can put the seeds in envelopes in the freezer or in a cold spot in the basement. One method calls for actually just digging a little ditch in the yard and laying all the seeds that need to be cold treated in it. Every kind of plant needs a certain length of time in the cold. If you are planting from saved seed and don’t have a seed packet with all the information, al lot of time a seed catalog or web site from a seed company will have the information that would have been on the seed packet reprinted. If not, try gardening books or web sites. I’d go with the books, since they have been vetted to a certain degree, and people writing web sites don’t have to be honest or realistic!

With the Kiss Me’s, I had good success last year by putting them in an aluminum cake pan with seed starting medium and wetting it down really well. I covered it with plastic wrap and set it on a shelf in the garage. The seeds I’m planting this year are saved from last year’s flowers, but because I saved my seed packet and stapled it into my garden book, I have all the planting information from the company plus my own notes about how long it actually took for the seeds to grow. They need to be kept out in the cold for at least 21 days. By that time, it will be mid to late March, and I will be starting my earliest seeds in flats and pots in the house. It’s all very exciting!

Late winter is also the time for making sure that the fish in the pond have a good year, too. There is a lot of snow coming down, and the pond has been frozen over a few different times this year. Each time, it has thawed almost completely after a week or two. This is the longest sustained period of time it has been frozen, and the snow is piling up. This is a problem, because the snow is deep enough to block any light. In the winter, the fish and plants are largely dormant, but not entirely. Even under ice, the plants in the water are carrying out some photosynthesis. When there is no light, the plants start to die, and decaying plant matter will consume the oxygen that the fish need to survive.

The solution for preventing a plant die-off and a potential fish kill is pretty simple: shovel the pond! You don’t need to do the whole pond. More like, just create bare “lanes” over the surface. Of course, this is not practical if the ice is not safe. If the ice is safe. it is kind of fun to scoot around on top of the ice. Remember, never go on ice that is less than four inches thick! The best ice is “thick and blue”. Don’t go on ice alone. Don’t go on any ice over moving water, and don’t go on at all if you’re not sure!