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| Dozens of flats needing care |
Business
is booming. I’m pooped. As detail man for Fitzgeralds Gardening, my brain is
overtaxed by client container and garden designs with plant lists complicated by
the onus of pulling inspired substitutions out of my hat when grower extraordinaire Christine tells me she’s
out of this or that pivotal specimen. Other self-imposed duties include keeping
the dozens of flats on the south side of our house watered, cut back and perky-looking,
and ensuring we bring the right plants to the right job. These activities fall on
top of the first three design jobs we’ve landed since the Great
Recession, reminders of how out of practice I've become with vellum and templates. And then
there’s Toadflax Farm, where the produce is beginning to drift in, as are the kudzu
bugs and the imminent threat of pickleworms.
Have I
mentioned that multitasking is not among my character strengths?
Have I
mentioned that lickety-split is not my favorite speed?
Have I
mentioned my occasional melt-downs?
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| Innovative Organic Solutions |
Had one
of the latter this past weekend. Took the whole two days off, to putz and stare
into space. I ignored emails, only turning on the computer to collect weather
data and blog statistics, and to ascertain I had emails to ignore. I didn’t
dust, vacuum or mop. I didn’t look at the pile of work on the drafting table,
which we’d cleverly relocated from office/studio to living room during the winter so it’s
harder to forget. Instead, I called my mom and nattered for two hours. I did laundry, an enjoyably
mindless task. I leisurely hose-end-sprayered the farm with Growers Secret emulsion, because watering is fun when
you’re not in a hurry. I knitted. I played cards (Solitaire’s my game). And I
read.
One of
the things I read, cover-to-cover, was the June-July issue of Organic Gardening (OG). Always informative, the little articles
bracketing the features ended up more dog-eared than usual this month. After closing
the magazine with a contented sigh, it occurred to me that the information
on those marked pages would make a good, if scatter-shot, blog post. So here it
is.
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| Where Cabarrus County is in NC |
Page 22: In rural Cabarrus County, NC, northeast of
Charlotte, wannabe farmers get a chance to practice organic agriculture at the Elma C. Lomax Incubator Farm. No, these novices aren’t
making incubators: rather, Don Boekelheide informs us, they are incubating
themselves into sustainable producers of food, livestock and flowers for local
consumption.
Unsurprisingly,
the idea of incubator farms first took root (haha) in that hotbed of
self-sufficiency, Burlington, Vermont, back in 1990. By 2001, it had crept across the continent to Salinas,
California. The USDA belatedly joined the party in 2008 with its Beginning
Farmer and Rancher Development Program. These projects build participants’
skills and confidence with access to on-the-job training; land; animals; equipment;
greenhouse, storage and packing facilities; and agricultural and marketing
mentoring.
Many farms
provide both educational and hands-on volunteer opportunities for home
gardeners as well; others “…report unanticipated interest” from this group of
dirt-diggers, including full-time enrollments in their programs. Brings to mind
my brief brush with commune living back in the ‘70s, only cleaner. And possibly
not as cold, if one elects not to incubate in Vermont.
Page 26: “Homemade preserves with half the sugar
and none of the fuss” promises Sara Foster in the subtitle to her article on
making freezer jam. Since berries of all types are pouring into our kitchen
from Lewis Farms of Rocky Point, NC, and since horrible memories of
pre-air-conditioning summertime hot canning marathons make freezing my
preservation method of choice, I’m going to give this one a go. Sara swears all you need is
fruit, a potato masher, pectin, sugar, jars and freezer space.
Page 62: In the “Ask Organic Gardener” feature, Rose
Rogers of Cary, NC, wonders if using some of her home-grown compost will
improve her scraggly lawn. Well, sure, replies Cary Oshins of the U.S.
Composting Council. It’s calling top-dressing, he says, and putting down a
quarter-inch or so of screened organic matter benefits the grass by benefiting
the soil. In the time-honored way of mavens, he goes on to outline the
proper, officially sanctioned application procedure, and tacks on a recipe for
compost tea that “… delivers some of
compost’s benefits.” (Emphasis mine: seems like a whole lot of trouble to brew
enough poo-water to drench an entire lawn area for only a fraction of the value
of the exercise.) If you want to calculate how much compost you’d need, check
out the compost calculator at the Composting Council’s website.
Page 66: Jessica Walliser, author of Good Bug, Bad Bug, offers a primer on the family of beneficial parasitoid tachinid flies. (Parasitoids end up killing
their hosts in particularly gruesome ways, whereas your basic parasites don’t.
Just in case you didn’t already know.) We differentiate these flying good guys
(“good,” that is, if you’re not a host) from their ickier kin, the houseflies,
by a) the dark, bristly hairs on the their abdomens should you manage to observe them up close; and b) the fact that they live in the garden
as opposed to the house. While their cousins prefer garbage or whatever you’re
having, all tachinid species eat nectar. So in addition to laying eggs on or in
common pestiferous insects like grasshoppers, Japanese beetle grubs, gypsy moth
caterpillars, cabbageworms, etc., tachinids also pollinate their food sources
in the carrot and aster families. What’s not to love? |
| Hedera helix could kill your cat |
Page 68: Did you know most pets only chew on plants
when they’re bored? Did you know some plants that merely inconvenience dogs
will kill cats? And vice-versa? Yew, on the third hand, is fatally toxic to
dogs and cats, but not deer or birds. It’s a dangerous world out there for
Spot, Kitty and Flicka, says Ilene Sternberg, so check out the ASPCA’s website for a list of potential pet poisons.
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| That's one Red Admiral... |
Page 70:
Attention, citizen scientists—it’s time to count butterflies!
Cristina Santiestevan lists five websites for Americans and Brits to access for
getting involved.
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| Death to plastic nursery pots! |
Page 76:
Finally, Katie Walker profiles five commercially available
biodegradable garden pots. Made of materials varying from cow poop, ground-up
spruce mixed with peat moss, and coir to rice hulls, bamboo, and newspaper, many can be
planted directly into the soil, minimizing both transplant and landfill stress.
Is that cool or what?
So maybe
you ought to go pick up a copy of the June-July Organic Gardening, if only to see what it was I didn’t dog-ear.
Thanks
for dropping by.
Kathy
