Ya aint got pictures? Ya aint got nothin’!

What my sunflowers really look like

Let’s just get this out of the way first. There is no such thing as a perfect garden. Thus, when one follows a particular blog or several (as in my case) and sighs with head in hands and mopes that one’s own blog will NEVER be as good as those others. Well…that’s just a load of manure! A garden, and a garden blog, is just as good as the work one puts into it. Furthermore, a blog is a constructed space, so it’s only as good as I let you see it is. Image is everything. A few cases in point…

Number 1: Although the blogging medium utilizes words, most bloggers blog

around images because truly, and especially in a garden blog’s case, a picture is worth a thousand words. Since the blogosphere was born from out of mother internet to appeal to readers who want quick vignettes and infobites, you’ll notice that posts are short summaries, generally in diary format, usually with embedded links so that readers feel they maintain autonomy in deciding if they require or want more info. Often the post is just a frame or caption for the image; a caption on steroids, or in the case of garden blogs, a caption on Miracle Grow.

Number 2: Images seen on blogs are carefully constructed and chosen to draw the reader in. No matter how much we bloggers protest that we are renegades, breaking down the ivory tower of information production, we are still nothing if not products of our society. We may be masters of a post-post modern medium, but hey, old habits die hard. We CAREFULLY choose the images you get to see.  It’s really not as informal as we like to make it appear. It’s like, if you were coming over to look at my garden, I’d pick up the trash, pull the weeds and rake a bit. Same with the images I choose for my site, and all the images seen on my own favorite blogs.

So, I (we) can quit moping. If you want to blog, start a blog. If you want a good blog,  get good pictures and write good content. If you want a good garden, get off the computer and get back to work :-)

The War on Worms and Other Things

Wait! Before we grab that industrial size jug of Ortho and blast those ants out of existence, think for a minute. Why should we blast ants out of existence? Are the ants really hurting anything in our garden? What about that full-spectrum weed killer we’ve been spraying onto our gardens lately? Have we thought about how it kills those weeds and what else it might kill ?  Have we given any thought to WHY we go to such lengths to keep our gardens so tidy?

It’s resource conflict folks. Yep. Our gardens represent ourselves. If you don’t believe me, ask me to show you a picture of my garden (er…farm). Odds are, I won’t pull out the picture of recently seeded bare rows or a picture of my weeds. I’ll show you my garden in full flower and dressed up in its Sunday best. Our gardens (or farms) are extensions of ourselves. We want them to present the best possible picture of us. They provision us. They nurture us. When our gardens fail, it reflects poorly on our ability to provide. Yes’m. We put a WHOLE lot more than just money into our gardens.

That’s why we go to such lengths to keep our gardens and farms pest free. Company’s like Ortho KNOW this about us. Just look at the arsenal of synthetic weed & pest killers available to those of us who want to get our gardens in ship-shape, tout-de-suite. There are pre & post- emergent herbicides, systemic weed killers, non-selective (broad-spectrum) weed killer, selective weed killer, and residual herbicides. Wow. Really? Do we ever ask ourselves why there are so many different categories of weed killers? Keep in mind that the above named are just the categories of commercial weed-killers, not the brand names of all of the weed & pest-killers on the market. To gardeners and farmers, potential enemies could include beneficial weeds,ants, caterpillars or anything else that we THINK might harm our gardens. I don’t know what’s happening in your garden right now, but my garden’s (pardon the pun) being eaten alive!

For example, this year I’ve been hit with several different issues. Leaf minors got my peas and whiteflies got everything else. The birds ate the best crop of apricots we’ve had since we bought the place. Chuck and I were able to salvage TWO measly little apricots from the ENTIRE tree. Don’t get me wrong. We want to share with our wildlife, SHARE being the operative word. To add insult to injury, the only thing that is

doing even remotely well in my beds this year are my  tomatoes...that is until they were hit with rust last week and now even my container tomatoes have blossom-end rot.   

So if it's us or them, what do we erstwhile caterpillar hugging, bee-loving, highly evolved gardeners, do? We embrace integrated pest management (ipm). That’s short for trying a whole lot of different things to keep our gardens alive. Because I eventually want to earn organic certification of some kind, for me this means completely organic IPM. For the leaf miners and whiteflies I first tried a weak solution of biodegradable dish soap which didn’t really do the trick. Next I used Neem.

Now Neem is interesting because it’s all over the market as natural pesticides and health care products. Buyer beware! Like all things in quantity, naturally derived Neem oil can be dangerous too. It’s also not necessarily approved for organic gardening or farming depending on the “synergists” being used in the products formula (for example, pyrethrin is NOT approved). So, if you plan on using Neem oil, do your research. Eventually, I ended up calling my local agricultural extension agent and the organic certification unit to make certain I could use the Neem oil had purchased. Once you use something that is not on the list of acceptable products, you have to go back and start at square one – so be careful!

Next year I plan on using the following ipm: Biodegradable vegetable soap, Neem Oil, lady bugs and encarsia wasps. I MAY use the Tanglefoot traps I used this year as an absolute last resort. They work, but they also capture beneficial wasps and bees. In addition to this arsenal, I also plan on using bed rotation and cover crops. Next project? Finding the best native cover crops available to us. Native covers will help me attract those insects I want, improve my soil, and keep down invasive weeds!

Gardening Tips - National Wildlife Federation

Gardening Tips - National Wildlife Federation

This is a great site. It has numerous projects to choose from if you wish to make your garden (or backyard farm) more wildlife friendly, which is one of our missions. Thus far this year we've had Cooper's hawks, skunks, mice, various lizards, Downy woodpeckers, Ladder-backed woodpeckers, Flickers, an occasional Blue grossbeak & Black-headed Grossbeaks & one or two Orioles. Black-chinned and Broad-tailed hummingbirds, Finches, Lesser Goldfinches, American Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Barn swallows, Western Scrub-jays, Greater roadrunners, White-winged doves, Eurasian Collared-doves (unfortunately) and Western Kingbirds. We've had Mountain Chickadees, White-breastsed Nuthatches and Robins, White-Crowned Sparrows,  Dark-eyed Juncos and Pine Siskins. As for butterflies, I've seen, Black swallow-tailed butterflies, Two-tailed swallow-tail butterflies, an Orange Sulfar, a Mounring Cloak and as for moths, I think we've had a Mournful sphinx moth. 

Predators - coming soon to a backyard farm near you!

 

Flame Skimmer Dragonlfy (Libellula saturata)

My cousin Kelly swears this guy was posing for me. According to my go-to-field-guide, A Field Guide to the Plants and Animals of the Middle Rio Grande Bosque, the  males sometimes stray far from water to prey on small flying insects (like the the white flies on my farm!).

Herbs of summer

Some of the arugula before I pulled it all out due to white fly infestation. The garden is crawling with the little buggers

A few peas in their pods and an image of life unfolding in front

of our very eyes!

  Mint  

Oregano                                                                                        Dill

                                                        

Sex on the farm

It's high noon on the farm and the plants and animals are propagating wildly. I've just been harvesting dill, oregano and arugula for seed stock. All of the books and blogs say to wait until the flowers are beginning to die back to harvest for seeds. I want a LOT more herbs next season so I am interested in trying different methods; saving seed and re-sowing, and propagating cuttings this year too. The squash, tomatoes and peas are blooming! Soon baby veggies will abound.

While tooling around in the back .25 today, Chuck and I noticed a gorgeous black swallowtail butterfly in the herb bed. It was flitting and floating from leaf to leaf in a kind of erratic way, and I thought "that doesn't seem right". Leaning in closer to take a look, I noticed that the butterfly would alight upon a leaf, quickly extend it's ovipositer onto the leaf and then flit off again. Each time it flew away to another leaf it left behind a tiny, yellowish-white egg (looks like a grain of couscous or a tapioca pearl).

My parsley, which finally JUST started taking off, is now dotted with tapioca-like black swallowtail eggs. Oddly, the dill that I bought particularly for the butterflies, remains remarkably egg free. Time to start watching out for caterpillars again.

Las Golondrinas son aqui!

The swallows are here and one pair has re-purposed a finch nest above our back porch door. Has anyone else noticed swallows taking over finch nests?

Beautiful weather. It rained Monday and Albuquerque breathed a collective sigh of relief and contentment. Couldn't you all hear it?

I think my sugarsnaps on the eastside of the house are toast. Something is decimating them. Sowbuugs maybe (Maybe not)? Leaf miners? Maybe. I've found the tell-tale burrows they've left like a road map all over my pea leaves. I'm dowsing with biodegradable soap every morning but to no avail. Some blogs suggest neem oil. The squash has taken kindly to my protective measures and is taking off. All tomatoes (except the San Marzanos on the westside of the house)are doing well thus far, although the container tomatoes are winning the race. Something is going to town on the bells peppers despite the soap applications.

Looks like I'll loose the garbanzos, no carrots and few onions to speak of. The tower 'o potatoes is starting to sprout.