End-of-Season Surprise

One of those home-improvement store dahlias that I was talking about back in September didn't form buds until about two weeks ago. The tubers were labeled as Otto's Thrill, which characteristically has pink blooms at least 10" in diameter. Well, they're definitely not Otto's Thrill but somehow I'm not disappointed. Only two (4") flowers came up, but they're gorgeous! I'm looking forward to digging up and dividing the tubers with hopes for a better season for them next year.

The dahlias are one of the last things still going in the garden. Halloween marks the average last frost date for our area, so even they will be shutting down for the season soon. Fortunately, I'm pretty much ready for winter now. Everything is mulched down with compost, leaves, and grass clippings-- whatever I could get my hands on. The tomato plants have been pulled out. The salvageable cabbages have been cut and stored. The marjoram is cloched, and cuttings of tender herbs have been rooted and brought indoors. Only the dahlias, snow peas, arugula, and eggplant are out there at the weather's mercy now, along with a few hardy perennial herbs.

I miss vegetable season already. Is it spring yet?

Autumn round-up

The vegetable garden is definitely coming to a close for the year. I planted out a new crop of snow peas and arugula a week or so ago-- it looks like I'll definitely have some late-season arugula, but only the frost gods know whether the snow peas will make it.

But Satrina, whatever happened to...

Savoy cabbages - One down (coleslaw, stew filler, fish tacos), five still unharvested.
Meyer lemons - finally ripening! There are about 6 of them.
Snow peas (spring) - Stayed fresh & crisp in the refrigerator all through August! Used in last night's curry.
Anaheim chiles - Roasted, peeled, and ready for use in tonight's enchiladas
Jalapenos - Some still ripening; others chopped, dehydrated, and stored for emergency guacamole purposes.
Rhubarb - Chopped and frozen for a winter pie
Roma tomatoes - Halved and dehydrated as they ripen.
Early Girl tomatoes - Being used fresh, but we still have too many
Brandywine tomatoes - Most were cracked or succumbed to blossom-end rot; others were eaten by birds. The remaining 4 were used for tomato salad.
Zucchini (picked ripe) - shredded and frozen for cakes
Zucchini & Pattypan (overripened) - saved as future Halloween decorations

In addition to storing food, I've washed, bundled, and hung several bunches of hydrangea to dry this week. They were vivid purple in summer, but have since mellowed into shades of pale green and dark mauve.

There are still plenty of gardening tasks to be accomplished before winter hits, but I'm so sad to see the summer vegetable season end! I guess there's nothing to do but hit the seed catalogs and start planning for spring.

Regarding dahlias

Swan's Sunset at the Evergreen State Fair

A few of you may have noticed that I'm a wee bit preoccupied with dahlias these days. To be honest, I feel kind of embarassed about it. I mean, compared to my beloved herbs and vegetables, flowers are so... frivolous. But front yards full of lush foliage and huge dinnerplate blooms are one of the main botanical highlights of Northwest summers, so when it comes down to it, I just wasn't able to resist their temptation.

Last summer, I splurged on a couple of $4 multi-packs of dahlia tubers at Lowe's, figuring I'd get some nice cut flowers and my craving would be satiated. But alas, my luck with home-improvement store tubers has been less than fulfilling. Over the past two seasons, I've been disappointed time and time again: tubers packaged as "dinnerplates" have turned out to be no more than 4 inches across, and out of five varieties purchased this year, only one came up true to label. Grr!

It's not that I don't love my little darlings:


It's not red and gold, but at least the blooms are large (if bug-eaten!)


Right general color, wrong shape... but cute

After all, they all have their own charms, and they've brightened the house considerably. They're just not what I was planning on. Actually, every mislabeled tuber has just made me more determined to get it right the next season.

I can feel it already-- 2006 will be my lucky year! I've visited two dahlia shows (one in Palos Verdes, CA, with C & Y -- hi guys!; the other at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe) and catalogued pictures of the exact varieties I want. I've researched reputable local organizations and growers. I've read up on growing practices at the Colorado Dahlia Society's excellent website. And I'm already drooling at the thought of catalog releases in January.

In short, I am well on my way to cooking up a veritable obsession ;-)


This tiny little frog likes my dahlias too.

How to care for cut dahlias (information courtesy of a very nice woman tending the exhibit at the fair): Set cut stems in warm (100 degrees F) water for 30 minutes before moving them to their permanent vase. Trim stems and change water every day-- cared for this way, blooms can last up to a week.

I didn't plant pumpkins...

...but apparently that's what I've got. After my month of absence, these pattypan & zucchini are unsalvageable as vegetables, so they'll probably be recycled as Halloween decorations. The plants are dead, so into the compost pile they went, along with the bolted arugula and dead snow pea vines. Wonder if I have time for a second crop of snow peas?

In other news, marigolds have taken over...



They are three feet high and crowding out my dahlias. They will *not* be in my garden next year... anybody want some marigold seeds?

I'm going to dig up any surviving strawberry plants and move them to the dahlia bed... they just didn't get enough water where they were. Likewise, the eggplant is dried out and shows no sign of setting fruit.

On a brighter note, the rhubarb is looking better, tomatoes are just ripening (had Romas for dinner and they were great), and the savoy cabbages are close to being harvestable:



Here's the overview of the garden after a month of neglect:



Am currently compiling dahlia photos, so you know what to expect next update ;-)

Summer Heat

Summer has definitely arrived in Washington over the past two weeks! Temperatures are in the eighties during the day and the rain has slowed to an occasional sprinkling-- I've even had to water the garden a few times (the horror!) Meanwhile, the mizuna and arugula have bolted, the pea vines are yellowing and slowing down production, and the summer vegetables are taking off like there's no tomorrow.

Zucchini and yellow pattypan squash are my main crops at the moment; there is definitely zucchini bread in our future, and lots of it. The squash bed is lush and overbrimming. The eleven plants are yielding about four zucchini and two pattypan squash per day, and it looks like they're just getting started. Following Sillyduckie's suggestion, I finally broke down and made stuffed zucchini blossoms over the weekend; they disappeared almost instantaneously.

The eggplant and jalapeno plants (also in the squash bed) aren't doing quite as well; the eggplant gets dried out before anything else in the garden in this heat, although it's finally flowering. Of the two jalapeno plants, only the one furthest from the shade of the squash plants is setting fruit. There are about five baby jalapenos on the plant now, and it looks like there will be more before the season's done. Jalapeno poppers, yum!

Tomatoes still aren't ripening yet-- I'm keeping an eye on the earliest cluster of fruit, which has been growing steadily over the past month but not showing the least hint of reddening. At least I'm not alone; according to GardenWeb's forums, the only tomatoes ripening in our corner of the country are cherry tomatoes, which I neglected to plant. The good news, though, is that the Roma and Brandywine plants have finally set fruit, and the plants seem to have topped out in terms of height... the Early Girl is easily four feet high, and the Romas and Brandywines at least three feet high each.

The everbearing strawberries are small and runty and drying out as quickly as the eggplant! They will definitely need transplanting to a frequently watered spot at the end of the season. On the other hand, the oregano and thyme plants are flourishing, along with the basil, chives, and lemon thyme.

On the ornamental front: some sweet peas that were planted back in late April have finally bloomed-- and they're all dark magenta. I guess that's okay, since the dahlias in that bed are also all dark magenta, with the exception of two pink cactus types ('Bonne Esprit')that we added this year. Actually, the hollyhocks in that bed (which haven't bloomed yet) are also going to be dark magenta... so apparently it's going to be a running theme.

Nasturtiums and marigolds are finally blooming as of this past week. The marigolds were definitely a surprise... the marigolds I'm used to are the short French type that don't get much more than nine inches high. The ones I planted (unbeknownst to me at the time) are an American type and two feet high. They work well in bouquets, though, so it all seems to have turned out for the best.

The purple hydrangea in our front yard is finally starting to grow on me. It looked garish at first consideration, with its bright violet and magenta blooms, but this year I've discovered that before the flowers mature, they turn pretty shades of pink and periwinkle. And they last over a week as cut flowers-- definitely nice, since the dahlias don't seem to make it more than three or four days without drying out.

Finally, the garden is starting to flow over into the back porch. We bought a couple of fuschias for two hanging baskets the previous owners left behind, and nasturtiums are coming up in a third hanging basket. A shaded two-foot bowl planted just two weeks ago is already full of sprouting mesclun, and a Meyer lemon tree that was suffering from spider mite damage indoors has started to sprout new leaves after a thorough water-spraying.

Here's the garden just two months after planting:



After speaking with my sister-in-law, a long-time vegetable gardener, I'm definitely scheming to expand the garden next year. She's been picking a hundred tomatoes a day in her Missouri garden, which is about three times the size of ours.

A hundred tomatoes a day! That's a whole lot of salsa!

Harvest

Today's harvest: arugula, too-damn-much mizuna, chives, snow peas, chickweed, our first round zucchini! and a borage blossom.

ALERT: Exploding Garden!

Early Girl tomatoes

It's been a little over a month since I planted my seedlings, but it seems like it's been so much longer! Checking on the plants day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour), I somehow failed to notice how vigorously everything was growing. Oh, sure, I knew the mizuna and arugula were out of hand, but when did the cabbages start to overtake the snow peas? And what about the zucchini that were barely the size of a rubber Hi-Bounce ball last week? When did they start to look like real zucchini? The Early Girl tomato has started fruiting and has already exceeded the height of its cage-- and its neighboring Brandywine and Roma plants are beginning to flower as well.


The squash bed, with round zucchini, pattypan squash, jalapenos, eggplant, nasturtiums, and marigolds.

I've also discovered proof that my double-dug beds make for happier plants... a stray nasturtium seed sprouted in the path, but came up all small and sad and runty, while its brothers in the beds are flourishing.

Elsewhere in the garden, the pattypans have just sprouted a first female flower, the dahlias in the cutting garden are starting to form buds, and the lavatera that F transplanted last fall is taller than I am!

We also harvested cherries from our two giant cherry trees this past week. The robins got most of them, and the pickings were slim to begin with since the trees haven't been pruned in ages. But all told, we netted about half a colander's worth of tart little pie cherries... none of which survived to be made into pies ;-)

I'm so optimistic at the moment that I've started to decorate the garden. R, speaking of wedding anniversaries, do you remember this windchime? It hung on my balcony in Italy while we were there, but I hadn't found a place for it here... now it hangs from a cherry branch that shades the vegetable garden.

And can a garden with gay gnomes be anything but exuberantly happy?

Zucchini flowers

Two of my zucchini plants have started flowering. They seem too small to be producing flowers already... eep.

Compost

Finished compost!

The compost heap was one of the first things we added to the yard when we moved into this house two years ago. F built it for me out of leftover pallets from our fireplace wood, and at first, I was so excited about it that I saved every little scrap of vegetable and yard waste I could find for it. But over the course of a year or so, we found that it was too cold in winter to go out and dump scraps on the heap, and that it was too much of a pain to go out and turn every week, so the pile fell into disuse...

...until this year. You see, we were forced to buy compost to enrich the deep beds this year-- it cost about $50 for a cubic yard-and-a-half of the stuff, and that amount still wasn't enough to feed my aspirations. Our soil is pretty nice, but the best garden soil comes from years of good amendment practices and lots of organic matter. So after the beds were filled, I began to despair that there hadn't been enough compost left from that yard-and-a-half to enrich the uppermost layer of soil.

That's when I remembered the compost pile.

On the outside, it looked pretty much the same as the way we'd left it eighteen months earlier-- like a big sunken pile of dried-out grass. But digging deeper, I discovered what gardeners call "black gold"-- beautiful finished compost. With glee, I set the uppermost layers aside and shoveled three inches of homemade compost on the tops of my planted vegetable beds as mulch.



Having rediscovered this lost backyard resource, I've decided that the pile needs to be tended again. So a couple of days ago, I went out and thoroughly turned it. Lawn clippings that F had just added to the pile went to the bottom, covered by a layer of shredded paper. Next came the sod I had cleared in preparation for the garden almost two months ago (which was already decomposing nicely). Then more shredded paper. Then... ugh!

The most disgusting smell to be found outside of a sewer hit my nostrils as I reached the layer beneath the sod. Luckily, I was prepared for this eventuality, but the neighbors must have come home to a nasty surprise when stepping out of their air-conditioned cars-- the center of the compost pile had become an anaerobic mass of slimy, squishy, smelly sludge, and the stink immediately began to waft through the neighborhood.

Dear neighbors: I'm very, very sorry. (But not sorry enough to stop composting) ;-)



Another thing about this layer of the pile: it was full of earthworms! Now, I already knew there were earthworms in the pile-- I rejoiced when I saw them wriggling their way down through the compost mulch into my beds. But they don't belong in the type of fast pile that I'm now trying to build, in which the center heats up to temperatures inhospitable to worms and their ilk. I flipped them into the turned pile along with the sludge and more paper, but they will soon have to find another home.

Finally, beneath the slime, there was more finished compost to be had! I cheerfully stored it for later use by shoveling it into a spare 44-gallon trash can-- the garden's equivalent of a well-stocked pantry larder.

One of the most interesting things I found in the finished compost was what at first appeared to be an intact avocado pit. Just as I was making a mental note not to add any more avocado pits to the pile, I picked it out of the bin with my fingers and the papery outer covering crumbled in my hand, revealing a core made of perfectly smooth, rich compost. Nifty stuff :-)

Garden survives hail, heatwave

First, we had hail, which shredded the leaves of my uncloched plants-- so I added more cloches.

Then, we had a three-day heat wave with temperatures into the 90s, which scorched leaves on the cloched zucchini and tomatoes-- so I took the cloches off.

Then it went back to normal Pacific NorthWET weather, and the birds hit my uncloched plants again, killing one of my Roma tomatoes. So I put the cloches back on.

The birds have now moved on to the uncloched marigolds. :-/

That said, all is well in the garden. I took a day to put a stone edging around the perimeter using tiles the previous owners had left behind:


It's kinda crooked.

In the garden itself, we've set out beer traps for the slugs, but going out in the early morning to pick them out of the beds seems to be the best solution so far. I've got nasturtiums coming up from a direct seeding almost a month ago, and dahlias (four varieties just purchased) are coming up as well. I'm harvesting three or four stalks of rhubarb each week, then washing, slicing, and freezing them. We've also picked our first tiny Quinault strawberry, and the arugula is growing like crazy since the overcast weather set in again-- which is great, because I love arugula!

Some of the zucchini and tomato plants have outgrown their pop cloches, so I'm on to a new solution, bamboo stakes and Ziplocs:



And finally, a sample of what's growing:


Clockwise from top left: eggplant, snow peas, arugula, savoy cabbage.

Summer usually hits us in mid-to-late June, so I'm prepping for big growth spurts on the summer veggies... my tomato cages are ready and waiting!

Made of Plastic, They're Fantastic

Let's see you get at my seedlings now, you pesky birds!

Luckily, the recycling truck hadn't come by the time I discovered the mischief, and I was able to rescue a bunch of plastic bottles to be made into pop cloches. These recycled devices will protect little plants from birds, insects, weather, and cold.



They're constructed from some saved 64-ounce juice bottles, an empty fertilizer bottle, and several Aquafina water bottles. So best of all, they didn't cost anything to make!

Garden Drama

F helped me finish the garden this weekend. We decided to hold off on building frames for the beds until fall, but as you can see, we've been pretty busy anyway!

After picking up more compost and some bark mulch on Saturday, the bones of the garden were finally complete. Yesterday, I put additional fertilizer in the top layer of all the beds, strung the pea trellis, and planted out my first batch of babies:



As you can see, I'm planting two rows in the top of each bed, and a row of leaf crops into the sides of the slopes.

Back row (left bed): five snow peas, six savoy cabbage, and lettuce (slope).

Back row (right bed): dahlia tubers (unused slope).

Middle row: one early girl tomato, four brandywine, four roma, basil and mizuna (slope).

Front row: four round zucchini, four pattypan squash (not set out yet), two jalapeno, one kamo eggplant, nasturiums and arugula (slope).

I was feeling pretty proud of myself last night. With the seedlings in, my garden was starting to look like an actual garden! But then, overnight:



Something has eaten the crowns of two of my zucchini plants overnight! It looks like the work of birds, rather than bugs-- they left the lower leaves alone, and there's a telltale strand of vascular fiber coming off of one of the stems, indicating pulling rather than chewing. Ack!

What am I going to do to protect my babies? Will the zucchini survive? Stay tuned for answers...

Comfrey, and the Secret Life of Bees

Some bees are dumber than others.

I swiped part of the title of this post from the acclaimed Sue Monk Kidd novel, but I'm referring to actual bees!

Specifically, I'm referring to the small bumblebees that are attracted to the comfrey in our side yard each year. They're predictable as clockwork-- as soon as the flowers start opening, there they are, up to ten at a time, gathering pollen as nice as you please. Today I went out to stake the plant before its inevitable fall (the weight of the stalks makes the whole plant collapse shortly after bloom), and my little garden guests kept buzzing me off, as if I was the interloper.

I don't know why the bees go so crazy over the comfrey, but I'm in no place to criticize since it's one of my favorite plants, too. Medicinally, it can be used in compresses to speed healing (it contains a compound called allatoin, which is a cell proliferant). When added to the compost pile, comfrey foliage acts as an activator, helping to break down surrounding matter. Then, of course, there are the flowers-- so pretty and distinctive with curled racemes full of pink and purple blossoms. The fact that they bring extra pollinators to the garden is just a bonus.


The comfrey four weeks ago (pre-bumblebee).

Anyway, as I was saying, I went out to stake the comfrey, and the bees kept running me off. (To be fair, they didn't have to do much to freak me out, other than zip in my general direction). As I watched them, waiting for a break in the action, I realized that while most of the bees were flying from flower to flower, deftly landing on the downward-facing petals and working their heads inside, there was one bee in particular that just kept landing on the sides of the blossoms and inspecting the place where the sepals and petals met in confusion.

Clearly, someone wasn't in line when they were handing out basic pollinator instincts.

Ten minutes later, as I was trying to capture this prospective winner of the insect Darwin Awards on film, my husband walked up and asked what I was doing. "Check it out," I told him, pointing, "it's a stupid bee."

DH watched for a while as I followed the bee around the comfrey. "Hey, I think he figured it out," DH said suddenly. "I just saw him going into a--"

"--it's not him, then," I said grimly. "I've been watching these bees for twenty minutes now and his MO hasn't changed once."

"But wait--" DH protested, hopeful of a happy ending. Then his voice fell again. "Oh, no, never mind. You're right. He's still stupid. I was looking at the wrong one."

Silence.

"What's up with this other guy?" DH asked, pointing at another bee that had been still inside one of the flowers for a good two minutes.


"Zzzzzz." <--buzzing, or snoring?

"Oh, him," I said, "I don't know. I thought he might have died in there at first, but then he moved on to another flower."

DH laughed. "So whoever made up the expression 'busy as a bee' wasn't talking about that guy."

"I guess not."

"Maybe he's narcoleptic," DH grinned.

And that is today's installment of silly garden conversations.

P.S. When I went out after sunset to have another go at staking the comfrey, all the other bees had gone home for the night-- except DH's narcoleptic bee, which was still hanging around with its butt sticking out of the same damn flower.

Garden in Progress

Welcome to Scythe and Spade, my gardening blog!

A little background: My husband and I moved to USDA zone 8, in the Pacific Northwest, about two years ago. Up until now, I've lived in zone 10 climates and have mostly been a container herb gardener, but now I'm branching out into veggies, fruit, and a cutting garden-- while the existing ornamental beds go neglected ;-)

My current project: digging deep beds for my first vegetable garden.



It took four days to clear out this 15' x 20' patch of sod and weeds because I was more meticulous than I should have been. But my hand tool collection is pretty limited, so simply tilling things under wasn't really an alternative. The remaining patch of green is rhubarb, which came with the house and is staying in place until I divide it in the spring.



After clearing the sod, it was on to digging deep beds. Deep beds allow you to plant more densely than you would with a conventional bed, and since my patch is a bit small for my vast ambitions, space is a major concern.

How to dig a deep bed: first, you dig a trench one foot deep, then fork down another foot (loosening the soil without disturbing the soil strata too much). After that, you add a layer of compost, mix it with the loose layer of soil, then fill the hole back in with the removed topsoil and more compost. Each row of beds is taking me about a day to complete.

The local soil is a kind of sandy loam; the substrata is yellow, sandy clay. Yay Washington. Even though the soil is pretty nice to start with, I'm amending each trench with about six inches of organic matter (compost, manure, etc) to give my seedlings plenty of nutrients.

I still have one more bed to dig. Will be going out to do that as soon as I've posted this!


Clockwise from top left: buttercrunch lettuce plug tray and snow peas in cups; arugula and mizuna in trays; Roma and Brandywine tomato seedlings in cups; Quinalt everbearing strawberries in 4" pots and hollyhocks in cups.

These are about half of the reasons why those beds must be dug-- and soon! Most of them have been hardening off since the day before yesterday in preparation for going into the soil. It may be too late for the snow peas, greens, and lettuce (they should have gone out early last month), but I'm going to put them out in a shady spot and see how it goes.