The bugs are back! (but all is not lost)

April was the honeymoon month in my  kitchen garden, when lots of things were growing and nothing ate them but my family. Now it's May, all chance of frost is past, and many bugs are chowing down in my garden.
 OK, yes I have a degree in horticulture and  in 2003 passed the test to be a certified pesticide applicator in the state of Massachusetts, so I should not call them bugs. But disease vectors just doesn't sound right!  Now that I'm organic a lot of the chemicals I learned about are not options for many reasons, so I'm studying pest management all over again. My first defense is close observation - knowing my enemy.
Here's a list of what I found yesterday: unspecified green caterpillars (cabbage moth or winter moth, probably), slugs, snails, potato beetles, scale insects and aphids ( both black and green).
 The lettuce looked great from afar, but up close there were telltale piles of dark droppings, with caterpillars nearby. It's a big, crowded patch, which means that birds aren't able to spot the caterpillars and help me much:

So here's my plan of attack for preserving the lettuce: thinning so the birds can find the caterpillars, and spraying with spinosad, a natural pesticide for  many kinds of larvae. It's non-toxic to most beneficials, and won't hurt the birds if they eat the dead or sick caterpillars.  I could not spray today because there was so much rain on the lettuce that the spinosad would be diluted and ineffective, so tomorrow morning I'll thin, and tomorrow night I'll spray.
There is some slug damage in the  vegetable garden, but most of it is on flowers, such as this poor iris:

Here's a fat and nasty slug on a rudbeckia:

It's been so wet the slugs are thriving. To think I was worried about drought a couple of weeks ago.  I'm not sure what I'll do about the slugs-- probably cut back the plants and get the slugs off, then fertilize and hope they come back. The slugs on the iris are definitely causing a fungal problem too-- that's the vector part; the slime trails are a place for fungus to thrive. Yuck!

I've been pretty successful just hand picking and spraying aphids off the peas. Here's my first pea flowers:




My strategy for dealing with potato beetles works for squash and beans too. The first thing I do is plant small patches all over the garden, rather than all together. One patch of potatoes I inspected yesterday had lots of  potato beetles, which I handpicked, and eggs, which I crushed.

Here's a pic of the eggs on the underside of the leaves:



Other patches of potatoes had no beetles. By spreading out the plants I reduce the chance of a heavy infestation of potato beetles.

Here's a patch of potatoes I've found beetle free, so far. They are planted in the flower bed, next to geraniums and under a cotoneaster:

And so the war begins.  Everyday I walk the garden and look and touch, monitoring the plants as they grow, trying to stay ahead of all the non-humans who find my crops tasty.

Sometimes I worry needlessly, and have to laugh at myself. Here's a picture of my jerusalem artichokes covered with what I feared were whiteflies:

Then I brushed my hand across a leaf and nothing flew up, which is the characteristic whitefly response.  I looked overhead and saw a wild cherry shedding it's tiny white petals all over the garden. 

I laughed, then I kept looking for pests. I believe it's better to be vigilant and wrong than blase and hungry.

Sol studying the garden this morning

Maybe he was planning how to get to the radishes. I've been feeding him one every day but he wants more...

Manic mulching and letting go of seedlings

So here's what's been occupying my free time for the last week:

This ten yard pile of locally produced mulch was paid for by the sale of used books from my garage.

Each day I have spent hours mulching my newly expanded flower and shrub borders.
I listen to books on tape and remember to lift with my legs, then go inside, put on a heat pack and have a drink.
 I'm sore, but the final result is worth the work.  The beds look so neat and tidy!

I also sanded, then sprayed a rusty old garden chair. The color is 'true blue'. I like the way it matches my garden trug.

These thickly mulched new beds mean less time spent weeding and cutting grass later in the summer, and more time for tending my tomatoes and peppers, which are now hardening off outside the garage each day, and going back inside at night.

I did plant a test tomato (Sungold) and  pepper  (Jalapeno) yesterday to see how they do before I risk planting the rest of my babies too early.

And the 'Florence' fennel seed I planted directly into the garden several weeks ago is doing great under the shelter of the arugula patch:

That's all I've got time to write today-- there's still lots of mulch to spread!

May 1 crops: green and red and delicious

It's a rainy May 1, and I'm really happy about how much food I am already harvesting. My goal used to be my first meal from the garden by May 1. Now it's April 1, thanks to the 3 coldframes I set up this spring.

I've got greens galore: swiss chard, spinach, arugula, radishes and red and green lettuces. My dinners for the past week have featured my own raw or cooked greens.  Today  for lunch I had a stir fry of my own  'Icicle' radishes (both tops and bottoms) with store-bought shitakes, carrots, onion and ginger.  Here are the radishes I used:

The rhubarb plants are giants already, and I made another batch of stewed rhubarb to eat over yogurt. I love the way the smell of the rhubarb rises through the house and lingers upstairs for hours. I checked the net to see if I can freeze the jars of cooked rhubarb, and apparently I can, so I will!

There have been failures-- even under a net cover my kale and bokchoy were eaten by bugs.  I just can't grow any brassicas without losing way to much to insects, so I may give up, or at least try them in the fall when the insect load will decrease.

But otherwise I'm happy. Here are some pics of the greens, my pea patch,  and the strawberries netted against birds:

Inside the house I have finished repotting all the tomatoes and peppers, and my summer crops are growing apace under my crazy (but effective) lighting. So much potential and hope in one room.

Happy May Day!

Grey and blue.... weather and potatoes. And some asparagus too.

Last week I finally got my much dreamed of blue potatoes. They came in a shipment from Pinetree along with  some big healthy looking asparagus and strawberries. Here's a pic of the asparagus crowns in the box.

I took the plastic off the crowns and set them in water up to the top of the roots, and put them into a shady spot to hydrate for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, the potatoes were half rotted. I got out my Swiss army knife and cut off most of the rot,  and lost about half the 'eyes' -- the growing sprouts.

Then I put the cut potatoes in the garage to dry for a day before planting.
Later I planted the asparagus crowns in several beds I had prepped. I added aged horse manure, compost, 10-10-10 fertilizer, and dug them deeply, removing any tree roots and rocks I encountered (there were a lot, this is New England).

 The crowns went in about a foot apart, with the tops just exposed. As they grow I'm supposed to hill up soil around the stems.  I should not pick any asparagus for a couple of years to let the crowns build up strength, but if they get well established I'll be eating  my own asparagus every spring for the next twenty years.
The next morning I planted the potatoes. Sol came over while I was digging and  picked one up experimentally, then dropped it back onto the bin lid I was using to dry them.  Definitely not to his taste, by the grimace on his face.

 Planting the potatoes was much like planting the asparagus, except that I don't have to fence the potato bed; just like Sol, the woodchucks and rabbits have no taste for potato.

I called Pinetree and they are sending me replacement potatoes, but not blue ones; they were out of stock.  It takes about three weeks for potatoes to sprout, and we've had the first good rain storm of the season  in the week since I planted them-- three inches of rain on April 22.
Whether the current cool grey weather will rot the blue potatoes or speed their growth, only about another two weeks will tell. All my earlier potatoes  planted on April 4 ( Rose Finn, Russet, Katahdin whites, Yukon Gold) are all sprouting as of today, so even if the blues don't survive, I'll have plenty of  home grown potatoes  in late summer.

Aha! Fiddlehead ferns for lunch

The latest issue of 'Mother Earth News' has an article about perennial vegetables, and as I perused it last week I wondered if they'd somehow been reading my mind.  I mused all winter about what mix of perennial crops to plant over the next few years, with the goal being less work and more food down the road.
The piece featured some crops I knew and some I didn't-- I will definitely follow up on growing ramps, groudnuts, chervil and 'good King Henry' (apparently a tasty green). But there is  at least one easy to grow perennial crop they overlooked -- fiddlehead ferns.
The joke is that I forgot about them too. When I was a fine dining line cook many years ago we cooked with fiddleheads every spring. But until I looked around my garden last week and realized that my annual transplanting of ostrich ferns to yet another shady corner of my garden was now producing a bumper crop of fiddleheads, I had never harvested and eaten my own ferns.
Like all leafy crops, fiddleheads are best harvested in the morning when they are plump with moisture.  I picked only the still tightly curled leaves, not those that were already elongating. Most plants had a mix of both:

Though some, perhaps in sunnier spots, were well past the edible stage:

The fiddleheads must be rinsed thoroughly to remove the brown chaff of last year's growth. Here's yesterday's pickings:

I sauteed the fiddle heads with onion, and deglazed with sherry, then combined them with some cooked orzo, butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Delicious.

And I've already transplanted ferns this spring to a new bed by my second compost bin. I love perennial vegetables!

Early Crops

It's April 12th and I'm already eating something from the garden every day. The chives are so vigorous I am throwing them into practically everything I eat (ok, not dessert) so that they won't take over.  And the arugula, spinach, parsley, and radish sprout salad I had yesterday was vibrant and full of green spiciness.

The  trio of rhubarb plants I got from my neighbor last year are already leafing out:

I would not normally harvest rhubarb this early, but it is the perfect time to transplant it, and when I dug up a clump for a friend some stems fell off.  I brought them in and made a small batch of my grandmother's strawberry rhubarb compote (see last spring's blog entry for the recipe).  I'm looking forward to rhubarb compote and yogurt for breakfast!

It has been a dry spring and I bought some soaker hoses yesterday. Here they are in the raspberry patch:

Today we did get some rain, but not enough.  We need a nice long spring storm!

Finally, here are some flowers from the garden.  The daffodils are a mix of ones I planted and those that came with the garden when I moved in 19 years ago. I've never planted tulips because I know rabbits find them tasty, but a few pop up every year in random spots around the garden. They are often destroyed by  rain, so I guess there's a good side to this dry spell.