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.