Category: Home and Garden

Grandmother’s Garden

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This was by far on of my most favorite gardening projects this fall. My grandparents love to garden. But they are old, and its not so easy anymore. Their garden in recent years has turned into a weed patch with a few veggies. Now that I’m in Utah County, I was able to help them out. One big project was getting rid of the quackgrass. I also helped maintain the rest of the garden and helped them put in their veggie garden.

Last week, we pulled out the tomatoes that had far outgrown the small tomato cages. We held them up–over six feet tall! (I had the thought that one key to getting tall tomatoes is to have large tomato cages.) They raved the weeks they harvest dozens of large cantaloupes. There was a constant supply of zucchini, cucumbers, beans and grapes. They struggled to harvest all the peaches.  It was a successful year: better than they’ve had for a while.

I didn’t do a lot. Just enough to get them started, and lots of tricks to keep it going with minimal maintenance. I was there every couple of weeks or so, and thoroughly enjoyed my time. Not just out in the garden, but getting to know them more. It’s easy for me to get out of touch with my family members, but in my grandmother’s case, the garden brought us together.

Next year, no vine-type tomatoes in the grow boxes, and no peppers planted too close to the tomatoes. The raspberries and strawberries we killed off with the weeds will be replaced. I’m excited to spend another summer gardening with my grandparents.

Fall

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It is cold. But it didn’t freeze last night. I was still ready for it. The tomatoes are gone. I brought in the last few green ones yesterday. My small child proceeded to use them as balls and bite them. Now I’m not sure what to do with the teeth-marked green tomatoes. There’s got to be something better than throwing them away or letting them go moldy.

Can you believe it is the end of October and it hasn’t froze yet? I’m thoroughly impressed with this nice warm, long fall. Although waking up to snow on the mountains was just lovely yesterday. It’s rained a bunch, knocking all the leaves off the trees. It’s all very pretty. Fall is just so wonderful–even the snow and cold. Tonight it should get down to 28F–so here comes the freeze with a bang. I kinda like the sudden hard freeze. No trying to dance around protecting everything with blankets. It’ll be too cold for that to matter.

The only bad thing is my bulbs have not arrived yet. Whose bright idea was it to deliver them so late? I might be digging through snow to get them in. I finally checked with the company, and they should come this week. Should have checked sooner so I could have gotten them earlier. But the soil will be nice and moist. Okay, the soil will be soggy wet. Gotta be better than bone dry, which was how it was a week ago.

Lots of rambling. But I love fall so very much.

*A note on the bigtooth maple. The reminded me of searching for bigtooth maples for a job. I was on Google earth trying to find trees like this from the satellite image. I walked all around it, and was very disappointed all I had was my phone to take a picture. It’s gorgeous.

Irrigation

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So in college, I learned how to determine how much to irrigate. I learned how in so many places and so many ways I was beginning to get confused. So I wrote up this lovely little article on everything I knew about irrigation. I did leave out the more difficult calculations. (So much fun, but really why waste all that effort when a simple one would do?) Fast forward to now. I was running an irrigation clock and had my doubts on how to run it. In other words, I was doing it badly. Finally the nagging I was giving myself caused me to look at the wonderful article. (I just realized I said it was little. It’s not.) Within five minutes I was throughly refreshed all my knowledge, realized that, yes, I should irrigate more, but no, I wasn’t killing the plants.

I have to admit right now, I have no real information on irrigation systems. But when to irrigate…I learned about that in 4-5 classes: one of which involved the difficult calculations that I so much enjoyed, but forgot quickly due to no reason to actually use them. With all this rambling, I am now going to post my article that noone besides me has had access to before now. Feel free to use, leave feedback, and copy (but don’t plagiarize). I understand it perfectly but not sure everyone will, so if you have questions ASK. And enjoy.

IRRIGATION FOR THE HOME GARDENER (PDF)

IRRIGATION FOR THE HOME GARDENER (DOCX)

I did notice: this is Utah based. So its more useful if you live here, but still applies everywhere else.

Eating Cucurbit Leaves

My parents vegetable garden did not look so hot this year. Cucumber beetles and squash bugs ate the cucurbit crops. A recurring pest of pocket gophers decided to eat the tomatoes close to the ground. The squash was attacked by powdery mildew. One zucchini and tomato ended up dying before the season was over. There were wilt diseases present.

I gave my parents some recommendations on how to overcome the pests. But nothing was sprayed or done to control the pests even at its worst. And you know what? The garden came through. There was still good harvests, including the largest cantaloupe I’ve ever seen. Maybe the harvest wasn’t as plentiful as it could of been. But it was good enough. Plants and nature can often take care of themselves, even against seemingly impossible enemies. I don’t think we need to worry about pests as much as we do.

The garden has been in the same small plot for 16 years. It is moving next year. That should help the vegetables continue to have good harvests.

Quackgrass

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I hope you never come across this plant. I’ve been helping my grandma out with her garden. In her berry patch was lots of grass. Grass that you couldn’t pull up and it chocked out all the berries. At first I thought it was the lawn grass spreading over its bounds. That would have been a lot nicer. Instead it was a mean stand of quackgrass.

Quackgrass grows in irrigated soil. It has tons and tons of undergroudn rhizomes. If you come across this grass, the worst control measure is to till. Tilling cuts up all the rhizomes into smaller pieces and does a wonderful job of propagating the plant. That’s opposite of killing the plant.

So after I figured out it was quackgrass, I started to think of control measures. Here is what I ended up doing:

I fertilized the plant and made it really happy. Sounds strange. The philosophy behind that is that quackgrass’s rhizomes have a lot of dormant buds. They will just come back even if you spray or pull it up. By making it happy, I hopefully made those dormant buds send up shoots. I waited about a month, then I sprayed it with glyphosate. I did it again in two weeks. That actually did a fairly good job of killing off the plant, but I really don’t want it to make a comeback.

The next step was hand-digging out all the rhizomes. This took a long time. I’m not done with the large patch I’m working on yet. But…to see soil that you could work with and rake through after I was done was worth it.  We could plant in it now…but I think we will wait. The next few months I will be watching the bed, looking for quackgrass to make a comeback. And I plan to nip out all the attempts.

This is the soil full of rhizomes. The grass isn't deserving enough of a picture.

We dug out two huge garbage bags full of rhizomes for a 8'x15' area. Wow.

The moral of this story is–learn to recognize your weeds. This weed wouldn’t have been such a problem if it was controlled when it started to invade, not years after. Also, by knowing what it was, I was able to choose good control measures and avoid ones (like tilling) that are ineffective. If you live in the west, Weeds of the West is an invaluable book. It has the id info for nearly all the weeds you come across.

Why Visiting Nurseries Ruins Garden Designs

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The vague inclination I had to put strawberries in the back garden suddenly took fruit after a visit to a local garden center. My husband and I were on our way to visit family and had some extra time. What better way to spend it then visiting a garden center? We went to Cook’s Farm & Greenhouse in Orem, UT. This is the very first nursery I remember visiting as kid to pick out starts to plant in our family vegetable garden. I enjoyed it then, and I still enjoy it now.

They price everything (at least the herbaceous smaller stuff) based on the size of container it is in. Very convenient from a consumer standpoint. (Too often I go to garden centers and can never find the price, hoping that when I check out it won’t be too outrageous.) Otherwise, the greenhouse has a good layout, and they also sale produce. (I was thinking that selling produce would be an excellent way to extend the season at a garden center. I’m glad somebody actually does it). I was browsing through all the plants, mostly uninterested, and happened upon a very large six pack of Albion strawberries.

I purchased the reasonably prices strawberries. Then I had to go home and figure out where to put them. That resulted in digging up my coral bells, moving them over to the newly dug out bed, and replacing the space with my strawberries. That is never what I had planned, but I like it. And I’m super excited to have fresh strawberries.

(Side note: I did an undergraduate project on strawberries and grew a 300 ft row. That year I had all the strawberries I desired. And evie-2 was my favorite variety, but not easy to come by.)

Watering the Lawn

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When I went outside to give my kid a ride on the swing, I discovered the mystery of the lawn irrigation. When they started the irrigation around my place it was going off multiple times a night, every night. I set out a tuna can, and found out they were applying a little over a half inch of water. Recently the irrigation was shut off entirely. The lawn is now quite dry and no longer lush green. So a neighbor came up to me and said that I must be cringing over the lawn. (I wasn’t. Just confused.) Turns out they had a leak in the system that needed to be fixed. She then said that they had an owner come up and say that this place looked like a dump due to dry grass. (Now I’m cringing.)

Where I am at, a lawn will survive with one irrigation a month. Not day, or even week. Month. This irrigation, and all irrigations for that matter, should be at least a half inch of water. One is better. If you do water that infrequently, the lawn will go dormant. Yellow, crispy, dormant. This is not a bad thing, and certainly doesn’t make a place a dump. Once it cools off, the lawn springs back into the lush greenness we love.

But most people like lush green lawn. That’s okay. You can get it by irrigating. But watering every day makes me cringe a lot, especially at a half-inch of water per irrigation. Its tons more water than the plant needs. Water the lawn ever day is a common practice around here, although why in the world it’s caught on is beyond me. More does tend to make lawn greener, although in a short-term non healthy way. It’s a lot like caffeine. Quick fix–but in the long run, the plants will crash. Plants, including the non-aquatic lawn, need a good night’s sleep rather than quick fixes. They need deep watering, much less frequently than is common.

I set one of my client’s clocks. Their lawn is watered twice a week, pretty deeply. (They also had a free water check, which is a great program if you are in Utah. They tell you how much to water based on the output of your system. So I really didn’t have to figure out how long to water to put a half inch on, I just set the clock.)  I’ll step it back when I stop by next time. Their lawn looks amazing. It’s getting less than a third of the water than the lawn at my complex was, and it’s actually more lush and healthy.

Do we have to maintain unnaturally lush green lawns in the heat of the summer? We can conserve a lot of water by allowing summer dormancy. But even if you want a green lawn, it needs a lot less water than you think. Please don’t follow what a neighbor is doing. Stop drowning the lawn.

Curb-Side Makeover

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On of my relative’s house is a very plain manufactured home:

I gave them a landscape design for a present and recently finished the front planting bed. I wanted to get rid of the look of the manufactured home, and add lots more plants. I went with plants that mirrored the blue-grey and maroon in the house color, focusing primarily on foliage color. There are actually lots of interesting blue-grey/purple-leafed plants out there, so it was a fun design to do. The following plan could be planted more heavily, but I decided it was  good enough start.

I also decided to experiment with a digital makeover. I saw some on another garden blog and wanted to give it a go. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be, and the results are dramatic. I think people are much more likly to follow a landscape plan when they can see it as it would turn out. Overhead plans are functional, but don’t have the wow factor. Here’s the generated image of the matured landscape:

I’m pleased with how it turned out and have shared it a lot. It is the first of a lot more mock-ups follow: I enjoy doing it and it helped my planting plan as well.

Harvest

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This is one of the best times of the year. The heat has started to abate, but most of all it’s time to harvest. My harvest is smaller than in previous years (I had less space), but I’m quite pleased with it. I picked my first couple tomatoes yesterday, and ate one like an apple. Certainly not the best tomato I’ve ever had but still delicious. I’ve made ratatouille twice this week, with eggplant and pepper from my own garden and zucchini from others. (No need to grow that myself. I keep turning down requests to take even more than what I have.)

Ratatouille is my favorite dish from the garden harvest. I craved it in the spring and resorted to buying rubbery grocery store eggplant. Ick…should have waited until harvest. Now is when I can make as much as I want (almost) and eat to my heart’s content. My garden has most of the fixings: eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, herbs. All I need to add is zucchini, onion, garlic. I was just about to write what I did tonight in recipe form, but I can’t quite translate it. You will get a paragraph instead. I cut corners when I cook and try to do everything as easy as possible, so feel free to elaborate the idea.

I put butter in the bottom of a crock pot, and layered slices of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and zucchini.  I sprinkled that all with garlic salt, Italian seasoning, and dried chopped onion. (Told you I cut corners. You could use real onion, etc.) I have no idea how much of each, just put on what looks good. Bake on high for 2-3 hours. I let it cool down, and used it to top toasted bagels, but have eaten it by itself, and on top of pasta.

Enjoy your harvests!

Patio Garden

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I overhauled the patio garden. One day I looked at the stupid paving and decided it had to go. It was surprisingly easy to rip it out. I replaced small pavers with rocks in between (messy looking and my little kid loves to try and eat the rocks) with larger pavers and nothing in between.  There was a little extra room that the pavers didn’t fill up and I’m going to plant starts of my mom’s miniature thyme there.

The small pavers left over fit under my potted plants that were previously just on the grass. I didn’t try to level them or anything…maybe later. I’d pulled up the large pavers from the side of the patio where we stored  junk for a while. After pulling them up, I realized I could extend my planting space by turning it into another planting bed. The whole garden is looking much neater and I’m excited for the extra space to plant in.

I’ve been thinking lately that I tend to have a large-scale, expensive view on gardening due to school. Great for clients who will pay me…but not good for my own small garden and non-existent budget. I’ve realized I can do a lot for free, like move around patio stones and taking starts from other people. My goal is to garden cheaply right now, but to still do a lot.

I’ve also realized a garden is never complete. There’s always improvements to be made or places to put another awesome plant or idea. So much never-ending fun! I still need to finish what I started after I ripped up that first patio stone. It sent off a hurricane of activity in my garden.

The tomatoes are huge, but less than loaded with fruit. My brandywine has not a tomato on it. I’m guessing it was too hot too fast, and the brandywine is not as heat resistant as the others. One my sticky geraniums is blooming, and I’m quite enjoying it.