May 27th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Well, I did start this ‘blog with the partial intent that it would help me document what I learn in the course of gardening. So today I had to rewire a thing I understood about particular bugs I’ve seen in the yard. I’ve always noticed clusters of red-black bugs on various plants. And I’d assumed they were a form of assassin bug, a predatory bug that nabs other bugs and sucks the juices out of them. I think I got that impression because I do indeed have some assassin bugs, and they are red and black, and I have seen them with captured bees and whatnot.

So I didn’t think much about the cluster of red and black bugs on my cherry tomatoes. I assumed they were happily nabbing pests that dropped by. Little did I know they ARE the pests.

Fortunately (can I say that about this situation??) Carla of austinurbangardens.com fame has them and asked her people what they were. After boldly jumping in and naïvely asserting they were assassin bugs, I went back to read her other comments on the subject. And I had to agree… they are leaf-footed bugs, a form of stink bug that sucks not the life out of other bugs, but out of tomatoes… AND peppers AND passion vines AND a number of other things I have growing here.

I suppose these pests only really matter to me now that I have vegetables I will fight to protect like my own son. And that’s just what I did tonight. Armed with a spray bottle mixture of one part Seventh Generation dish soap to 4 or maybe more parts water, I doused as many of the buggers as I could find. I’d heard these bugs are hard to control with anything but insecticide, but most bugs can’t withstand soap since it breaks down the waxy layer that allows them to repel water and breathe. So, they drown.

Doing some reading, it appears my mixture was a little heavy on the soap side, and probably should have been a different type of soap, too. Like Dr. Bronners castile soap. I’m sure what I used won’t kill my plants – I ran the sprinkler over them to wash it off this evening – but I don’t want to take any chances.

There are lots of homebrew insecticidal soaps mentioned on the internet, but it seems the ideal recipe is 1-2 tablespoons of soap per quart of water. For a little extra oomph, the water can be used to boil some noxious (to bugs) herbs (cayenne or other hot peppers, ginger and garlic are all mentioned) before it is cooled and soap is added. The mixture can be sprayed on the leaves, undersides of leaves and stems where bugs hide. It is a contact poison to bugs, and kills them indiscriminately. Bees, beneficial bugs and spiders would all die from this mixture, too.

But it is non-toxic to humans, and safe for plants if it isn’t applied under full-sun. One site mentioned not using it more than once a week, but didn’t give a reason.

Tomorrow I’ll check to see what the mortality rate was with my soap mixture. Hopefully the count doesn’t include any of my plants.

assassin bug, bugs, insecticidal soap, leaf-footed bug, pest, stinkbug, tomato, tomatoes

May 27th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I had a couple of my garden’s porter tomatoes for lunch today, and they were pretty tasty. I’m not very good at describing tastes and qualities of food – I could never be a food reviewer – but I did enjoy these tomatoes. They ripened to a deep pink color, not the red-orange of standard tomatoes. They were a little mushier than I expected, and the taste was pretty mild. I sliced them and topped some toasted english muffins with the tomatoes and cream cheese. Pretty nice little light lunch. Can’t wait until I have enough for BLTs. Yum.

I forgot to take pictures before devouring them. But I think there will be more ripe ones tonight.

porter, tomato

May 25th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Just some pictures I took over the weekend of my yard, mainly the front. This Spring has seen a lot of abundance from the wildflower contingent… verging on jungle-like conditions:

May 25th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

It turns out the tomato plant my dad raised and gave to me was a porter tomato. It is by far the healthiest, most prolific vine I have. No wonder, too… one website described them as: “developed by Porter & Son Seed Company for Southern regions like Texas. Porter is an old-time drought-tolerant favorite in the Southwest.” Another site considered it a heirloom variety.

Tonight I picked two tomatoes from it, not fully ripe, but close enough they’ll ripen inside in a day or two. They have a more pinkish than reddish hue, are a little oblong, and about the size of a small roma tomato.

Something knocked a nearly-ripe cherry tomato off its vine. Not sure if it was a squirrel because the tomato was otherwise unmolested. I brought it inside to finish ripening.

I’m kinda curious to know how Austin Urban Garden’s pre-emptive strike on her tree-rats is going.

porter, tomato

May 23rd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Not much brewing, ‘cept some genuine Authentic Havens brand compost tea, sent to me gratis by Jodi at westerngardeners.com. I have a 5 gallon jug of it ready to fertilize the tomatoes and peppers. Will use the rest to help condition the soil in one of the side beds.

Been noticing more types of caterpillars on the tomatoes, particularly something that drilled a bunch of holes in one cluster of smaller tomatoes. That peeved me a little, but it’s on the bush that’s so productive I probably won’t miss the 5 tomatoes it ruined. And I caught the bugger, too, red… mouthed? and hanging out of one of the tomatoes it drilled. It was not a hornworm. Could have been an army worm, but I dispatched it without I.D.-ing or photographing it, so I’m not sure. Sadly, there will probably be more.

The tomato vines themselves are going gangbusters and I’m having to prune them. Next year I need to do a better job of this before they make it to the overgrown and unruly stages the are now. I also need something better than these 56″ wire cages. The bamboo trellises would be good here.

I’ve picked a half-dozen cherry tomatoes and one jalapeño pepper to date. The tomatoes have had wonderful sweet flavor, while the jalapeño had absolutely no spiciness at all. Zip. Tasted like a bell pepper. So I treated it like one, chopped it up seeds and all and tossed it in some organic ground beef I was sautéing for tacos last night.

The basil is at the magic point where I need to use it before I lose it. Pesto is probably in the wind. Need pine nuts and cheese I suppose before I can do that.

Spent a fair amount of time picking off dried seed pods from the bluebonnets yesterday, too, and shucking them like peas to get their little stone-like seeds. (Bluebonnets are legumes, so it makes sense their seeds are like peas). I distributed a lot of those around the yard in places that could use a few bluebonnets next year. The seed pods have a spring mechanism in them so that when activated, it flings the seeds a short distance. Kinda fun to play with.

Also visited Boggy Creek Farm yesterday, but alas we got there too late for blackberries. Hard to get out the door early on a Saturday with an infant. We did get some nice yellow onions and some new potatoes. I sautéed one of the onions for the tacos last night, too. Even if the produce purchase was a little anemic, it was fun to watch the chickens and see the rest of the farm.

May 20th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I learned something new today about tomatoes.

Tomato varieties are labeled as either indeterminate or determinate, and horticulture experts recommend choosing indeterminate ones for upside-down gardens. Determinate tomato plants are stubbier, with somewhat rigid stalks that issue all their fruit at once, which could weigh down and break the stems if hanging upside down. Indeterminate types, by contrast, have more flexible, sprawling stems that produce fruit throughout the season and are less likely to be harmed by gravity.
Growing Vegetables Upside Down

Based on that description, I now know that two of my plants are indeterminate, and one is determinate. That would explain the behavior or the two sprawling, prolific plants vs. the one squat bush with ten (now rather large) tomatoes that have been there since the start. It may be coincidence, but the determinate plant also seems to be more susceptible to pests… hornworms, particularly. I have picked all the hornworms I’ve found off that one plant.

And while the idea of growing tomatoes and peppers upside down in buckets appeals to me from the perspective of foiling predators and for saving space, I’m not convinced I’ll try this in any big way. But I’m very tempted to convert a couple old Home Depot buckets into hanging upside-down planters like the New Braunfels gardener mentioned in the article. All of this gardening stuff is experimentation to me anyway, so why not? Seems like an innovative, fun project to try.

This link is mentioned in the article, but in case the NYT page disappears, here’s a link to a guy experimenting with upside-down planters:
at Cheapvegetablegardener.com

May 18th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Had to clean out the fountain because it stopped working a couple days ago. It goes for 3 or 4 months before it clogs itself up with green algae. I can always tell it’s getting close because the glass pebbles start turning green, and the water output drops.

Cleaning it involves taking it completely apart, which involves removing 20 lbs of glass pebbles, removing two levels of heavy screen, and pulling the pump and pipe assembly out. Then I scrub the sides of the pot, flush it, and replace everything. Cleaning the glass pebbles involves a little bit of detergent and a bit of bleach. Two old plastic 5 pound coffee cans serve as the wash and rinse tanks.

Not that any of this is terribly exciting, but the fountain is a pretty important part of my landscape since it attracts birds, helps water the container plants with splash, and serves as our cat’s water source when she’s outside on hot days. (She’s not very interested in the birds, by the way). The fountain also serves as the water-provided-for-wildlife requirement in my Certified Wildlife Habitat. Especially if the cat counts as wildlife.

Plus, I like the sound of it when the windows are open.

fountain, water

May 17th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I’m really glad Jenna and I are on-board with organics and growing as much of our own food as possible.

Study: ADHD linked to pesticide exposure – CNN.com.

May 16th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

A couple weeks ago I cleared out a lot of junk from the side yard and prepared the ground for a series of raised beds. Yesterday, after attempting to build one such bed from scrap lumber, I gave up and went to Lowe’s for white pine boards. The stuff I had around was either too short, too warped, treated or splintered in the wrong places. Most of it was wood from old palettes, but I really had to admit defeat on that stuff.

$22 bought a 16-foot 2×12 which translated to a bed that was supposed to be 38 inches deep (the depth of the area they’ll go on the side yard) by 61.5 inches. However, I made a bad impromptu calculation at Lowe’s and had them cut the board in the wrong place. I had them make one cut at 73 inches so I could get a 16 foot board in my truck. That 73 inches was supposed to be the two sides when cut in half. The sides, however, needed to be 35 inches each to accommodate the total 3 inch width of the front and back boards combined. The net effect is that I now have a 39.5 inch box in a 38 inch space. Not disastrous, but it’s messing with my sense of aesthetics and knowledge I could have done better. Grr. Can’t decide if I’ll tear it out and cut the sides to the right length or not.

Probably not since I already leveled it, put down brown paper to help suppress the bermuda grass that was there, and put shredded live oak leaves on top of that, and freshly-cut grass over that.

Using white pine isn’t the best option since it’ll rot in a few years and isn’t a very recycled product. Nor is it as pretty or durable as the raised beds Austin Urban Gardens creates. And while concrete or limestone blocks are very reusable and durable, they’re also expensive and a little too bulky for that space. So for $22 and twelve 3-inch deck screws, it was the least-expensive option I could come up with.

Oh, and the best part… this one goes to Jenna for her to dip in and try her hand at growing some vegetables. On Friday she texted me and said she wants to collaborate on gardening now. Hopefully she can use this to get something growing and find some success.

May 14th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

My yard produces two berries in abundance – agarita in the spring, and chiletepíns (a.k.a chile pequin) in the fall. And I wish I could do more with them both.

Both are remarkable native plants in their own rights, even without the abundant fruit. Taken together, they are an incredible source of food for wildlife lasting collectively from early Spring (which in Texas can sometimes seem to be January) to late Fall (i.e., November).

According to Matt Turner’s Remarkable Plants of Texas, agarita berries have been used by humans since 7,000 BCE in Texas for everything from jellies, pies, cobblers, cool drinks, wines and margaritas. If you eat them straight from the bush, they have some of the qualities of strawberries – high acidity, but some sweetness. And a lot of seeds. Those seeds, when roasted, have been said to be used as a coffee substitute (as have many things when times have been lean).

The problem is picking them:

Those leaves are as sharp as they look, and guard their fruit well. I picked a small bowl of them, and my fingers felt like they had been used as a pincushion. I read that there are better ways – beating the branches above an upturned umbrella, for one. I’m a little skeptical of that.

Chiletepíns, on the other hand, are easy to pick. In fact, they are so easy to pick, birds tend to pluck them readily and spread their seeds all over the yard. I have many small bushes in various places, with the two most productive ones growing out from under my back deck.

Turner describes the chiletepín as “the reputed progenitor of all domesticated peppers [...] including such notables as the Anaheim, bell, cayenne, jalapeño, pimento, poblano and serrano.” To my mind, they are just hot, though they possess a good flavor, too. I will occasionally eat them straight off the bush just to revel in the exquisite burn for five minutes or so. Usually all it takes for me is one. But the bushes produce hundreds if not thousands at any given time. I’ve taken to harvesting small bags of them for a couple co-workers who appear to appreciate them far more than I do.

I have a third plant producing fruits that are somewhat undervalued by me… a small asian persimmon tree. While the tree is not native, the fruit is gorgeous and visually inviting. Sadly, it’s so astringent I couldn’t even put a slice on my tongue without recoiling. Maybe they are good for jelly or something, but that’s beyond my current skill.

agarita, berry, chiletepín, fruits, pepper, persimmon