5 May

Hippie Reluctantly Ventures Outside of Her Yard

Posted by rakhi in Gardening.

I’m going on a fantastic adventure to Bolivia for the next couple weeks, and I can’t help but feel a [tiny] bit sad that I’m going to come back and my garden will be almost an entirely different creature.

My cascade hops are now growing 6-12 inches a day, and even though I’ve strung up lines for them to crawl, I have no doubt when I get back I’ll have to reroute them.

By the time I get back, my lettuce and radishes will be ready to harvest, and I probably will not recognize my swiss chard, kale, and beets. My experimental square foot of oats and barley will probably have another foot or so on them (more on the grain, later), and my strawberries will have set fruit that might even be starting to ripen!

Every morning before I go to work, and every evening when I get home, I can’t help but stroll around and examine every bed for the tiniest changed details. So when I get back from this journey, I will have missed a lot…and that is just a little bit sad.

In any case, I gotta get to the airport, but here are some recent pics of the yard:

Pea and Fava & lettuce beds

apple tree, raspberries, blackberries, and thyme…and some decorative stuff I don’t know the name of  :)

I am so-very excited for this trip. Catchya in two weeks!

27 Apr

Seed Art Enjoyers, Unite

Posted by rakhi in Random Thought. Tagged: .

Saw this car on the way to work yesterday. :)

20120427-140201.jpg

26 Apr

Precisely *Not* the Sign a Hippie wants to see in her Next Door Neighbor’s Lawn.

Posted by rakhi in a gardening problem, The environment. Tagged: .

If I were to, say, pick out a sign that I do not want to see in my next door neighbors lawn, this would be it:

It’s like they read my mind.

18 Apr

Refined Technique of “Doing Nothing” Proves Ineffectual

Posted by rakhi in Experiments, Fruit. Tagged: , , , .

Before. Notice the full blossom coverage.

After. Notice the 4-5 blossoms left. Blossoms that may not have made it through Sunday and Monday nights.

After some more espalier-ing

After a crazy March, where the high was 80°F and soil temperature got to 56°F, my impulse pear tree hit the ground running a good month or two early. So when news hit last week that a hard frost was going to hit St. Paul, I had to make a decision. And my decision, dear friends, was to do nothing.

I was tired, and lied to myself about how my yard will somehow stay a pleasant temperature for my lovely pear tree, even though many of my gardening-savvy West Seventh Neighbors had covered their own fruit trees to protect them. Conspicuously covered their own fruit trees as if they were sending me a signal. That I should do something. But at the time the signal seemed a bit too cryptic for me, and my love for homegrown, delectable pears was overshadowed by my unending laziness.

And so this year I will suffer dreaded store-bought pears because I have only a few blooms left, that were most likely eaten by the cold weather on Sunday and Monday nights.

In other news, as you can probably tell from the pictures, last year I started to espalier the pear tree, and I am a big fan. The tree fits perfectly in the corner of my tiny backyard with branches running along the fence and the garage. Yesterday I finished espaliering the crap out of it. Now if it would just bear some damn fruit we’d be going places.

16 Apr

Tomatoes!

Posted by rakhi in a gardening problem, Food, Gardening, Local Food, The environment. Tagged: , , , , , .

Last June Fresh Air aired an interview with Barry Estabrook based on Barry Estabrook‘s book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.  I meant to write a post about it back then, but laziness got the best of me. Don’t judge.

I have not read the book, but the interview with Estabrook was endlessly fascinating.  I guess anyone who has made the mistake of purchasing a tomato in the winter from a big box grocery store knows how actual garden tomatoes don’t even compare, but it sounds like his book tells us why this is the case.  Much of the reason is through breeding and development that favors ship-ability, volume, and attractiveness of the fruit rather than nutrition and taste, and another reason is inhospitable climates that the tomatoes are grown in.  He also delves into the horrendous labor practices in the tomato industry, and how some growers have been successfully prosecuted for having slaves.  I learned a bunch of other stuff, too, but I’m trying to keep this post to a palatable length.

I had always assumed that tomatoes are grown in Florida because the climate is perfect for them, but apparently this is not the case.  The humidity is actually really bad for the tomato plants, and so the farmers are resigned to constantly spraying their crops so as to prevent mildew and disease problems that would naturally arise.  Estabrook has identified 100 different herbicides and pesticides that are recommended for farmers in Florida to use on one crop of tomatoes.

Thinking back to my own experience with tomatoes, it makes sense that Florida is not ideal.  Our summers here are much shorter than Florida, but it still gets very humid.  By the end of the 2010 summer year all my tomato plants were a pretty sad sight from the powdery mildew that I was unable to control.  Last year it was less of a problem because I did a few things differently:

1. watered early in the day.

2. avoided water on the leaves of the plants while watering.

3. spaced the plants properly.

4. Got lucky.

6 Apr

Hippie Experiments with Shrooms. *Yawn* (What Else is New)

Posted by rakhi in A Happy Accident, Experiments, Gardening. Tagged: , , , , .

Amanita muscaria A magic mushroom I ran into in Alaska

My front yard does not get enormous amounts of sunlight, which I found out last year after planting ten tomato plants, four pepper plants, three okra plants, and two eggplants. Yeah. It was an educational – and depressing – summer. So this year I’m holding back on planting uncontrolled amounts of those delightful treats and experimenting with less sunshine-sucking plants. One of these experiments is mushrooms.

Okay, not those kind of mushrooms.

After doing some research, I figured out that it’s really hard to find mushroom spawn around here. Eventually I found this kit from Eggplant Supply (great for kids and Hippies alike!).

I didn’t have any idea how quickly mushrooms grew, but check this out, and keep in mind that two photos were taken each day (except the first):

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So cool! My local Co-op sells Oyster mushrooms for 29.99/lb. The kit promises around 1-1.5 lbs of mushrooms, so at $20 a kit, it’s a pretty decent deal. Not as good a deal, however, as foraging in your local Nature and finding one for free.

26 Mar

Hippie Impulsively Laughs in the Face of Nature

Posted by rakhi in Gardening Timetable, Inspiration, Local Gardening Information, Zone 4 Madness. Tagged: , , , , .

Rogue lettuce from last years plantings. If things go according to plan, it will be part of my salad in 2-3 weeks.

I did some things that I probably shouldn’t have done this weekend. Things I can’t take back, and that I hope I can be forgiven for. Like many other gardeners, I just couldn’t help myself. The sun was bright, the temperatures were high, and all the stars seemed to align this weekend. And so, my dear readers, I gardened. I gardened like it was going out of style. I gardened like my life depended on it. Yes, I gardened like a complete buffoon. I laughed in the face of nature while sowing every early vegetable I could think of and re-arranging my perennial edible bed like I owned the place.

I moved my asparagus to the back of the bed. A bad decision last year left me with tall, burly asparagus shading out my teeny strawberries. We can't have that.

I hang my head in shame, asking for forgiveness from Zone 4 and hoping she will be merciful this year. But I know that I sowed this bed and now I have to plant in it.

FYI, the soil temperature in St. Paul this past week (March 19-18; last week’s data is not up yet) averaged 56 degrees. Last year at this time it was a full 24 degrees lower. Yep. I wouldn’t lie to you about something this serious.

6 Feb

I Had to Come Out of Hiding for This

Posted by rakhi in Random Thought. Tagged: , .

NPR Valentines

NPR Valentines

The witness protection program is no match for my love of these Valentines.

12 Aug

Hippie has a Garden-Induced Panick Attack

Posted by rakhi in a gardening problem, Gardening, Local Gardening Information, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

On Midmorning this morning a master gardener told me that if I have hard green tomatoes on my tomato plant, it’s too late  :(    I am reluctant to acknowledge this, and am trying to keep positive based on last year’s mid-October tomato harvest:

But now I am thinking about all the vegetables I may not get a harvest from at all: cucumbers, pole beans, summer squash (okay, there’s one fruit on the plant, but that’s it), okra, bitter melon, five tomato plants (brandywine, martian giant, persimmon, wapsipinicom peach, zapotec, cherokee purple), rocoto pepper, soybeans, corn, watermelon, and probably a few more that I just am not thinking of right now.

Also, my reisetomate is having an identity crisis.  This is what the fruit is looking like:

which, incidentally, looks nothing like these.

One of my corn stalks has started shedding pollen, and all the corn appears to be a decent height, but I can’t find any of the silks that are supposed to be pollinated (here is information I found about corn pollination).

It looks like, in Minnesota last week, 95% of the crop corn was silking.  This puts my corn at least a week behind the norm, which I guess is not terrible, considering my shady yard.  I guess the decider will be whether I get any ears.

Only 50% of the crop soybeans are setting pods in MN.  I would love to just get a few from my plants.

Sigh.

29 Jul

Murder Solved; Squash Bore Denies, but Lets out a Telltale Burp

Posted by rakhi in a gardening problem, Gardening. Tagged: , , .

I’ve lost 8 of my 11 squash plants over the last two weeks and could not figure out why.  I Google’d the crap out of “squash troubleshooting” and, decided that is must bacterial wilt, although the diagnosis troubled me because my squash is spread out across four different planting beds, and I removed much of the existing soil and replaced it with different kinds of high quality compost.  For whatever reason, I completely neglected to consider the possibility it was actually a pest problem.  Even after rescuing the one baby buttercup squash and finding this ugly thing:

I just assumed that maybe a larvae worked it’s way in because the plant was on the decline…instead of what I should have assumed.  That the larvae IS the enemy.

But yesterday I had the great pleasure of meeting Susane Moua, the founder of City Backyard Farming, LLC.  In addition to getting to see the gorgeous mini-farm, I told her about my squash plight, and she dragged me over to a couple of her squash plants that looked, sadly, much like mine:

Can you see the bore in the left side of the stem???

The most obvious, sign seems to be the orange bore poop called “frass“.

My summer squash plant seems to be strong and healthy at this point, but this morning after poking around it I did find a squash bore hole:

Squash Vine Borer Information from the UMN Extension and Harvest to Table article on Squash Troubleshooting both indicate that I might be able to save the plant by cutting the stem to remove the bore(s) and hilling soil over the damage.  Hopefully that little shithead doesn’t kill the plant by the time I get home from work tonight.

After all these ugly pics, I have to add this one from this morning of a cute little pollinator working away  :)

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 608 other followers