5 posts tagged “horticulture”

Why do some gardeners always assume you have to be either/or?  Yesterday I made an impulse stop at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette, CA.  I was stopping by hoping I'd find some Tuffits at a price I could afford.  I figured I probably wouldn't, but since I'd spent the gas money to do an errand out in Pleasant Hill, I was trying to get the most bang out of my gasoline buck as possible.

While there, I saw a couple thing I was interested in that didn't usually appear at Berkeley Hort.  Strawberry "Pink Panda", a variegated alpine strawberry, and Fragaria virginiana "Donner Lake Blue".  I'm trying to get better about tracking my garden purchases so last night I took out the receipt and was about to write down details in my garden journal on MyFolia.com  I discovered I'd been charged tax on the strawberries.  Now, in the state of California it is illegal to tax food, including food plants.  Many bigger nurseries don't make any differentiation. I was surprised that a nursery as good as Orchard is didn't, but I chalked it up to an inexperienced cashier or an overly-computerized system.  In the past, I would have just sucked it up. But I'm trying to be more assertive so I called up to see if I could get the money charged back to my credit card without having to waste gas money driving out there again.

It took a bit of phone-switching until I reached the person with the power to do this.  The first person I talked to said "are you going to eat them?"  "Of course!" I said.  "I'm an edible landscaper and I wouldn't have bought strawberries that don't bear edible fruit."  When I reached the fellow in charge of approving the refunding of the mistaken taxing and he heard the varieties I'd bought, he snapped back to me "Those are ornamentals". Well, if they happen to be used by some ONLY as ornamentals, that's their loss.  I'm interested in edible landscaping.

I was surprised at the amount of proving I had to do.  Look, tons of people buy kumquat trees for ornaments and never eat them.  Do the state tax police go around making sure that someone eats every lemon off the lemon tree you just bought?  No.  I can't help it that some people are narrow-minded enough not to consider alpine strawberries worth eating.  They're strawberries, they're food, and I eat them.  So there.

Coincidentally, the subject of this month's CRFG meeting (to be held at my house) is: Edible Landscaping.

It's bareroot season and the limited availability of some new low-chill Zaiger Genetics cherry cultivars has made me rush to order.  I was too afraid I'd be left out.  If I waited longer, I could maybe get some deals at local drugstores.  But I couldn't wait.  Not counting the time I've spent looking at the internet and catalogues before today, it must have taken me 3 hours of research and shopping before I could decide what I was buying.

The two Zaiger cherries were cinches:  Minnie Royal and Royal Lee.  Bay Laurel Nursery hasn't opened its page for ordering yet which is too bad because I first found out about these new introductions from them. I would gladly have given them my money.  I wasn't thrilled with my experience ordering from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply last time. But Bay Laurel's site emphasized that there'd be limited quantities available, so I was anxious.  Because the cost for shipping would be the same for 5 bareroot trees as for 1, and because there was a slight price break and bonus plants for ordering 5....I decided to order 5. Because the 7 apricots I got from my Blenheim apricot weren't enough to tide me over, I knew I had to get more apricots in.

My Berkeley coastal climate is one most folks would be envious of.  And it suits me just fine.  But it doesn't suit my favorite fruits. Most of the fruits I like prefer extremes of cold and heat that we don't get here.  The major concern here is a cultivar that doesn't need many winter chill hours.  Last year I winter I got a deal on a cherry tree for 10 bucks.  It was a Lapins cherry grafted on Colt stock and was labeled "Fogline".  So I figured it was meant for growing around here.  but when I looked up how many chill hours Lapins needed (800 hours), I knew it was too big a risk.  I'd be lucky if it bore once every 5 years.  So I donated it to the CRFG raffle and someone inland in Concord, CA (where they get more chill and more heat) gave it a better home.  It sucked, but I figured I'd never be able to grow cherries.  These new varieties only need 400 - 500 chill hours.  That's doable.  I won't get it every year, but I can get it most years, I think. Cherries!

Next came the apricots.  Zaiger has also come up with some low chill apricots that beaer earlier and later than Blenheim so that I can extend the very short apricot season. Since the Zaiger varieties are patented, I'll never be able to get them cheaply.  They're not going to show up (legally, anyway) at a CRFG Scion Exchange.  So those are the ones that make the most sense to buy at an elevated mail order price.   I settled on Gold Kist and Earli Autumn.  One more tree to pick.  When I went to Harbin for my birthday 2 years ago, I tasted my first Pink Lady apple.  I wasn't expecting much. I don't love most apples, or at least that's what I always thought, but I was desperate for fresh fruit to take to Harbin.  The apple was exactly the type I like: crisp, tart yet sweet and delicious.  I made a note to look into it for my garden.  It turns out that it's a patented variety, which also means it won't show up at a scion exchange.  So it was a good choice to buy compared to a variety I could get free as a scion.

Not only did I get a slight discount for picking 5 trees, but I could get 2 grape vines for free.  The varieties were limited, but them's the breaks.  I opted for Muscat of Alexandria, which might not do well here as it needs heat, and California Concord, which I already have one of.  Next I hemmed and hawed over whether to buy professional frost protection cloth or to try to figure out something cheaper to do.  Having lost 4 citrus trees to the record frosts last year, I decided that I had better pay more up front to keep from losing more later.  When you lose the trees, you don't just lose the cost of the tree itself.  You lose any money you paid a landscaper/gardener to take care of it, you lose the money you spent on water and fertilizer, you lose all the hours you yourself put into it, and you lose time because it'll be that much longer until you'll be getting fruit and it's that much longer until the trees grow tall enough to give you privacy from your neighbors.

There's an "early buyer" special on the frost cloth, but it's still expensive.  $167, not counting the cost of shipping a 42 lb. box, to be exact.  But it's a better deal than buying the smaller cloths piece by piece.  With a big roll, I can tailor the frost protection.  I better prepare ahead of time this year because doing it right means more time than I'll be able to come up with at the last minute.  You have to build frames because you don't want the cloth to actually touch the plants.

Now my total was such that I was entitled to 6 packs of seeds.  I bought celery, purple bush beans, Walla Walla onions, pickling cucumbers, and native California lupines.  Oh yeah, I also have a pound of Daikon radish seed in my order which I want to use to aerate the soil.  Oddly enough, the Daikon radish seed is taxable.  Edible plants are not supposed to be taxable in CA.  But I guess because they view it as primarily cover crop seed instead of anything to be eaten, they tax it.  I believe they're wrong.  Not that I'd be able to eat that radishes...

The shipping on this was $25, not counting the trees.  The trees they're going to figure out shipping for and add on later.  This order cost me a bit above 3 Cs.  Oy.

Bareroot season is coming up and I'm starting to peruse online catalogs.  And just the same way it works when I go into a comic book or record store, the more I see, the more I want.  Just "going in" is dangerous.  It's hard to limit myself to what is most time-sensitive instead of getting luxury plants like a Miracle Fruit bush.

Google Pedometer tells me I walked 4.5209 miles today (It said that worked off 837 calories.  Two slices of cake would put it all back on, I think. Not that I had any cake, but I wasn't eating super-healthy, either.)  That is a LOT for someone as out-of-shape as I am.  So when I got home I was too tired to garden (and, actually, it was too hot).  Now it's cooler but I don't want to water in the front yard because the neighbors are doing their usual yelling (instead of normal conversational tone), their relatives parking their cars in front of my driveway because they're too lazy to walk 10 feet further than they have to, and the kids going nuts outside 'til much later than my parents ever allowed me to stay up at that age.... When that happens, I just stay inside because otherwise my blood pressure starts climbing.

I was in the back yard for a short while to see whether the wanna-be general contractor my mom hired had finally (3.5 months after the fact) removed the soil his subcontractors poisoned by throwing their paint thinner all over it.  He finally had, although I wish he'd done a longer strip to be sure.  The feral cat and kitten are still hanging out in my backyard.  They seem to have adopted a shade-dappled space underneath the park bench.  I wanted to get them more used to me so I approached as close as I thought they'd take and sat there for a while.  I really don't do enough sitting and enjoying of my garden. That's supposed to be part of what a garden is for, right??

At Cross-Pollination,  a guy mentioned that one of his deciduous fruit trees had just bloomed again.  Idell explained a little of why that might be but I have trouble remembering why.  Anyway, today I noticed that one of my plum trees has done the same thing!  Not profuse blossoming, but at least a half dozen. I noticed the Pakistan mulberry leafing out a couple weeks ago and I just thought that was its normal habit but now that it's leafing and blossoming (they don't look much like flowers...they actually look a lot like green mulberries), I'm beginning to think it's doing the same.  I don't know why the plants are freaking out into a second spring.  I mean, a second flush of warmth is pretty normal Bay Area weather.  Our hottest month is usually October.  So why is it different this year?

The Dancy tangerine is bursting with blossoms and the honeybees are all over it. But that's normal for that citrus variety.

Oh!  I forgot to mention that I hit the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse to look for something I could use for plant tags.  I didn't find anything appropriate. But then I saw Frazee Paint and realized paint stirrers would be perfect.  I was prepared to buy some but they gave me a bunch for free.  Whoopee!

The event I conceived of, pitched to the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, and have been co-organizing with them for a year has finally come our way.  If you're a gardener in the SF Bay Area or have *thought* about starting to garden, please attend Cross-Pollination: Gardeners Unite!  This event is meant to be to gardeners what a user group fair is to computer users.  I hope it will be a big success and turn into an annual event.  I want to bring in even more participants next year.  Please come!

My disability has really hindered me from achieving what I'd like to achieve in the garden.  Though we have periodically spent boocoo bux hiring landscapers to help with major tasks, loads of things haven't turned out as envisioned.  To be fair to me, part of that is because one landscaper didn't do as he was hired to do and I didn't discover it 'til nearly a year later.  Preventative measures are SO important in keeping the workload manageable for me.  Sheet mulching was a major part of this. The landscaper sheet mulched the back yard but put mulch on plain ground for the front yard and the difference is striking.  While the backyard mulching is a year older than the front yard and is only now in need of a re-do (the cardboard underneat is decomposing, letting more weeds up through the bottom), the front yard quickly had issues with Spanish burclover, field bindweed, various grasses, scarlet pimpernel, cleavers (in a big way!), sow thistles and dandelions.  I did loads of work trying to nip those in the bud but I can't keep up with nature.  That mulch will have to be redone properly. Other problems are due to dormant oiling and fungicide applications not having been made in the winter despite the fact that I asked for it over and over again. Then there are the plant choices that were made in direct contradiction of my expressed wishes...

Despite all that, there are ways I just couldn't keep up myself.  I didn't make myself go out in the garden during the gloomy winter.  I didn't fully realize all the prep work I could and should have been doing.  Then I was out of commission for a number of weeks in February for my surgery. That's a crucial time, too. Though I am about to have the same surgery on my other side, it shouldn't be quite so big a deal that I am going to be less active in August.  I hope.  Actually, watering will be an issue. For some reason, the installed irrigation isn't working right so I've been doing a lot of watering with greywater by hand.

The oldest parts of my garden are about 2 years old now. It really is a work in progress.  I think only the filthy rich can have a garden installed top to bottom in a way that's complete and mature.  Well, them and the companies that put on installations for major home & garden shows.  Today I went out to transplant a couple of tomatoes that desperately needed to come out of their containers.  I wasted a lot of time/money this year by germinating seeds that I then put off transplating when they were old enough.  Some didn't cost anything (bell pepper seeds that came from a bell pepper I ate), but others did.  And beyond the cost, it's just disappointing that I could have had hefty harvests of watermelon, haricot, snowpeas and other things I like, but I couldn't summon the energy to get my ass into the garden and transplant.  Funny thing is, I almost ALWAYS enjoy myself and get energized if I can just get myself out of the house in the first place.

Anyway, I'm lucky to have a large yard. As I learn more about gardening and learn more from experience, it is entirely possible that I could provide all my produce from the yard. (I don't eat as many veggies as some people do.  If I were a serious veggie person, I might provide 3/4 of my intake.)  One thing I really hated when I gardened as a kid is that I would spend my hard-earned chore money buying plants, spend my time nurturing them to harvest, and then my brothers would steal the fruit. Being in a large family has made me very territorial about my stuff and that really turns some people off.  I worried about how I would feel about housemates who might constantly graze in the back yard.  I guess my attitude now is to try to grow more than I can eat anyway.  Then it won't bother me as much if someone takes something they haven't contributed to. I worried about how it would be if I got a couple gardeners as housemates.  I'd want to give them access to the garden since the rent here can't be as cheap as I'd like and I view the garden as one of the big "value-added" appeals of the household.  I've realized now that although the major bones of the garden are still something I will be controlling, I haven't got enough energy to intensively cultivate all four raised beds.  So if some gardening folks move in I'm more able to let go now.  In fact, I'd welcome the help.  It could be great.

So, no pictures today, but I need to note things I've noticed.  The Malacothamnus fasciculatus is twice as tall as when I took a picture of it in March and it has FINALLY come into bloom.  It is a nice choice for next to the Rose Mallow.  I'm worried about the size and spread of these plants.  While the landscaper made some nice choices for the front yard (an area over which I had less control because my mom cares a lot about how the front looks), he chose some plants that are going to get really big and bushy.  And they're too close together.  I found out some of that when I finally nagged him into identifying the plants for me (he has a nasty habit of tossing the plant tags) and I looked the plants up. Some of the native grasses that were planted are HYUGE.

I harvested my first spaghetti squash today. I had *thought* was planting Moon & Stars watermelon but I must have mixed my seedlings up.  Which means my Moon & Stars seedlings died the death because I didn't get to transplant them in time.  The first heatwave we had killed them in their little 6-packs.  I was watering and saw a plum underneath the plum stand.  I thought I'd inspected them carefully to see if any of the blooms had set fruit and had seen nothing.  However, it looks like the Elephant Heart plum managed one solitary fruit. Honestly, it's not any better than anything I could get at the supermarket.  I'm really looking forward to when the Blue Damson is mature enough to bear, though.

The Charentais melon has set fruit and they're waxing larger.  I first harvested some Stupice tomatoes last week, I think.  Today I went to harvest a few more and noticed they have blossom end rot, which is supposed to be from a deficiency from calcium.  It can also be caused by drought conditions. There have definitely been days when I've been tardy watering it during a heatwave so I think that's it.  At least it's not a contagious thing like verticillium wilt.  The Black Krim tomato, which is planted in the ground (the Stupice is in an EarthBox), is slowly coming along.  It has set a couple fruit.  The first one has got some splits or long scars in it.  The Sungold I planted in the ground is a runt compared to the amazing Sungold I had last year. That thing bore like gangbusters and grew and grew.  This one is about 2 feet high and just not very robust.  There are loads of volunteer tomatoes in that raised bed and I've let them grow.  I've let most of the volunteer tomatoes grow but most of them are also very slow growers. Looks like one of the volunteers is a Roma and others are Sungolds.

I think the problem with the tomatoes is that the raised bed irrigation system hasn't been working.  And of course there are other areas where it wasn't installed because there weren't plants there at the time.  While I've worked hard to be regular about my greywater watering, there have been days at a time when I was too exhausted and unfortunately that corresponded with some hot weather.  Oh well. It's a good thing I let the volunteers grow.  That way if there are only 3 tomatoes per plant, I'm still coming out okay.

Come to think of it, I have quite a few "failures" that were due to inconsistent watering.  The loganberry set fruit for nearly every blossom.  But it didn't get enough water when it was crucial so the resulting berries were barely more than a little flesh stretched over the seeds and were thus very bitter.  Inedible, really.  The mulberry tree didn't get enough water at the right time and thus the berries were smaller than they were in their first year.  Unlike the loganberry, it was possible to salvage some of the berries by subsequent waterings. Missing *a* crucial time didn't mean you'd missed all of them.

The lavender holllyhock has come into full bloom and this is after the black hollyhock has completely shot its wad.  A frilly pinkish-white hollyhock is also in bloom right now, though it's much smaller and weaker.  The artichokes are in bloom.  I only harvested two this year and they weren't very good.  Not only do I think the landscaper picked bad varieties (he didn't tell me the varieties so I can't learn any lessons), but the ants love them.  They're visiting aphids, I guess.  And there are other insect grubs that love them.  Given that I don't actually like artichokes that much, it's not a good use of my garden space.  I think I'm going to rip them out and use the space for more fruit trees.  I do like artichoke flowers, however.  They're lovely and I'm surprised more florists don't use them in really big arrangements.

Today I collected some seeds from the marigolds, Erigeron glauca, and "Drama Queen" poppy.  Seed collecting is something that is very time-consuming and that I haven't been able to do as well as I'd like.  Not only would it save me money on annuals, but it would give me some stuff to trade with. Plus I hope to be brave enough to make some approaches to the youth in the neighborhood and get them interested in gardening.  Having free seeds for people helps. I may also make some guerilla seedballs to toss into vacant lots in Berkeley. For that project, though, I should really stick to native plants.