DryStoneGarden

variegated iris

We’ve been collecting photos of the winter vegi garden for a class that Anita will be teaching in the fall at Heather Farms, and this is our latest and possibly last crop of photos. We’re letting some things–the mache, the meadowfoam, the miner’s lettuce–go to seed, and a few things are entering or yet to reach their harvest phase–the favas and alpine strawberries, and later the onions and garlic–but most of the garden is now heading towards the summer phase, so this might be the last of the photos. One of the ideas of the class will be that folks should try to have a lot of flowers, including natives and perennials, mixed in with the edibles to attract beneficials. I put rest of today’s photo harvest below.
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golden mummies & aphids

Please excuse the rather unpleasant photo. Aphids are gross, but golden mummies are one of the best things I ever learned about IPM.

We’ve had a couple of outbreaks of aphids this spring, first with the lupine when it put out a big flush of new growth and now on our kales as they begin to bolt. Golden mummies are the brownish, mummified carcasses of parasitized aphids; wasps lay their eggs in the aphids and the larva eat the aphids from the inside, leaving the dried husks. If you aren’t familiar with them, click on the photo and you should be able to see the difference. In the garden, another way to tell the difference is that aphids move and mummies don’t.

When you see an outbreak of aphids, the presence of golden mummies is one sign that natural predators are present. Count the aphids and golden mummies on a leaf, and, if the outbreak includes at least 10 percent golden mummies, the natural predators will deal with the outbreak for you. Spraying would kill the natural predators along with the aphids and therefore be counterproductive, though aiming a spray of water against the aphids to knock them off (which actually kills a large percentage of them, while not harming the beneficials) is okay if you want to speed the process. 

In the photo, I count 14 golden mummies (mostly on the right, but three in the population of aphids on the left) and estimate about 100 aphids, so our IPM is working. Our earlier outbreak on the lupine was the same way, and it resolved itself without intervention.

ryan 4/22

The White House Blog has a nice photo of the new vegi garden, and the fertilizer industry is nervous about the organic example so they’ve written a letter which is now adding more attention (I love the Monsanto ad next to an article about conventional versus organic, nice job of content linking) and some pushback. I think the fertilizer industry should just keep quiet and hope the White House vegi garden gets full of weeds and the plants all bolt. Every time the word organic is spoken, an angel gets the petroleum cleaned off its wings.

All those online petitions do sometimes work. The White House is going to take out 1,000 square feet of lawn and plant a vegetable garden. I remember when people were criticizing the San Francisco victory garden as a photo op, my thought was, well, maybe, but it’s exactly the kind of photo op we need. It will be great to see photos of the U.S. president weeding the White House vegi garden.

Here’s a link to Michael Pollen’s long NY Times Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief from last October, which includes a call for the next president to make a vegetable garden.

ryan 3/20

mache, corn salad

Tiny little mâche. The plant in the photo is approaching harvest size, and it’s still dwarfed by the trowel. I added the trowel for scale, but it reminds me of Spinal Tap, “Our Stonehenge monument was in danger of being trampled by DWARVES!”

I find mâche is really easy (although slow) to grow and a pain in the neck to harvest and totally worth it. You have to pick and clean a bunch of little plants to make one single salad, but it has the best flavor of any single green, it’s supposed to be really healthy, and the ease of growing it completely makes up for the effort of harvesting. Our plants are all volunteers from the first batch I grew a few years ago, the only effort with growing them has actually been to keep them properly thinned so they can reach a decent size; I’ve thinned ours at least four times this year. They can apparently be a bit invasive–one of the common names, corn salad, comes from it’s tendency to naturalize in agricultural fields–though I don’t think they are a problem in the Bay Area.

Last Christmas, the organic market near our house was selling 4 ounce packages for $13. That was early in the season and unusually high, but even at half that price, it’s gonna be on the list of things I have to grow for myself. It kind of fascinates me to think that someone could charge so much money for something that is so easy to grow.

FromSeedToTable has a post about golden corn salad, which I’ve never grown, but sounds worth trying.

ryan 3/14

black mulberry female flower

We bought a bare-root black mulberry for a client last week, but then wimped out and decided to hang onto it. We’d never planted one, they seem somewhat unknown in the Bay Area. The fruit doesn’t keep well, so it doesn’t show up in stores, and the trees need a good amount of space to spread their limbs and drop their fruit, more space than many people have in their yard, and more space, we decided, than our current client. The problem is that the fruit will stain anything it touches, so you have to plant them away from decks and patios and so forth, and the trees get big, thirty feet tall and wide usually, so picking the fruit isn’t always easy. The foliage is unspectacular, and the bloom is sort of interesting but un-showy. You plant them for the fruit, and hope they don’t end up ruining the carpet. 

But, the fruit, ahhhhh…the fruit. It’s like a sweet, musky, delicious blackberry. We once got paid to move a 24″ box mulberry for a client, because it was dropping fruit on the deck, and we had to pick (and eat) all of the fruit before we moved it. After tasting the first one, our eyes all got wide and we looked at each other, “We need one of these!” So we’re happy enough to keep one in a pot for a while.

Wildmanstevebrill.com has an entertaining website with info on the fruit and a number of other “wild” foods, some of which I’d never eat. Two different nurseries have told me they are selling a ton of bare-root fruit trees this year and it seems like there is a ton of online interest in edibles, so it seems, anecdotally at least, that the economy has people turning to the victory garden concept. I’m all in favor.

ryan 3/3