I post this picture of The Heap to warn you of what can happen if you do not prune your old fashioned spirea at least every other year

This Spiraea x vanhouttei was only a little slip of a thing when Lois fobbed it off on me - admittedly quite a while ago. The house is 20 feet wide. The spirea is still on the march. How did this happen?

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

It’s fashionable to hate annuals, particularly common annuals like the licorice plant ( Helichrysum petiolare)  that’s spilling along here in front of the clematis. But as stepdaughter Celia says ” Phooey on that.”

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

They’re vegetarian rats, basically. Eat bulbs, empty birdfeeders, gnaw through attic walls to make smelly nests, from which they sally forth to eat the insulation from electric wires. Absolute proof - if we needed any - that good looks can get you a pass on a lot of bad behavior. If they had rat tails instead of those bottle brushes and did not have the habit of sitting up and eating with paw-hands, and

if the babies weren’t so damn cute, we’d be a lot farther ahead in squirrel erdication.

And don’t talk to me about dispersing seeds. If I find one more “volunteer ” black walnut with a taproot halfway to China…

Right. So what did we do with this little pair, scarcely larger than the violet leaves, happily playing for half an hour oblivious of dangerous humans only 10 feet away? We ooed and ah’d and elbowed each other and I ran out in my nightie to get photographs.

Bah, Humbug.

We all know the metal baffle does nothing. Taking down the feeder just sets them into the borders to nibble new buds. Any suggestions?

Former scenario:

It’s late August. The tomato rows are solid plant. I’m down on my knees in the jungle, pushing aside the mulch, digging around in the soft earth at the base of a mystery plant. It MUST be here somewhere and when I find it I will know whether the fat juicy sweetsharp tomato we had at lunch was a Brandywine or a Prudens Purple.

No more mysteries.

The place on the pole will be covered too, but the label will still be firmly in place.

If you use wire supports you can use Kristi’s never-fail identification system. Get flat green plastic plant-tying tape, write the name on it with sunproof (!!) permanent marker and tie it to the top wire.

When firewood suppliers who sell by the cord or truckload say they’re selling dry  wood, they mean the trees were cut down some time ago. They do not mean the wood was fitted: cut to length and split, more than about 5 minutes before it went on the truck. So if you want firewood dry enough to ignite easily and burn cleanly next winter, now is the time to order it and get it stacked out of the weather.  

HA! No such thing. But if you want to make sure you don’t buy something like

 this

  and wind up with something like

this

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

A smooth puree, accented with tender-crisp asparagus coins. Just the thing for these oxymoronic hot spring days, when it’s officially asparagus season but experientially August. We’ve stopped cutting but I see there’s still reasonably local asparagus in the stores.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

Possibly.

There are close to 200 posts on this site, many of them containing actual useful information. My blog wizards are working on an index but in the meantime, try putting a single likely word in the search field at the right.

is almost ( not always) a good thing. But straw isn’t always the best mulch to use.

 It’s ideal for tomatoes 

 These tomato babies have their bases covered in more ways than one.  

Strawberries, on the other hand, do better when mulched with pine needles, aka pine straw. Pine needles are slightly acid, which strawberries like, and they’re more inclined to lie flat. This is important for very short fruit plants. Fluffy oat and rye straw tend to shade low leaves, and leaves need sun to make sweetness.

are the happiest tomatoes. Well, not really. Gentle, consistent warmth is what tomato plants want - not only on their leaves and flowers ( tomato pollen is sterilized by temperatures over 85), but also around their roots, which by the way - news flash! - prefer to stay moist. 

Tomato Planting Tips

By now your seedlings are probably planted, so it’s too late (for this year) to say the first line of defense is deep planting - set the baby so 1/3 to 1/2 of the stem is underground. Useful new roots will form all along the buried portion.

I used to think it was important to remove leaves and suckers before burial.  Bill made fun of me. We did a side by side experiment. He was right; didn’t matter a whit. One less thing. 

Ok. They’re in there. Now what? Two things

1. Mulch, really a lot of mulch. We use a thin layer of newspaper - just one fold - under a largish pile of straw. This holds moisture in the soil and helps keep roots from frying. I put my hand down on the uncovered earth when I was weeding yesterday and it was HOT. Not warm. Hot. Not good.

Tomato mulching in progress. The brown paper grocery bags are a thicker weed (and water) barrier. Helpful if your raised beds are really raised. These are about a foot above the paths. 

2. Limb them up. If you have no problems with fungus diseases you can stop right here, but if blight has ever visited you, read on. 

 The scar is difficult to find, but if you look closely at the left side of the stem you’ll see the scar where a branch used to be.

Removing lower leaves and suckers so the stem is naked at the base accomplishes two things:

1. It provides good air circulation, an absolute necessity ( crowding is the mother of disease).

2. It deprives the fungus spores of handy landing spots from which to travel upward. In theory, a timely application of mulch will block spores so they cannot splash up. In practice, it helps but not enough to be relied on exclusively.