June 15th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Over the weekend, I had a lot of yard maintenance to do. Mowing, weeding, de-bugging, etc. I also wanted to turn the compost piles and swap the contents of the two. It’s a good way of mixing them up and making sure they are aerated. I was expecting them not to really have much in the way of useable compost yet. Boy, was I surprised.

Maybe I had neglected turning them for too long a while, but the bottoms of both contained a foot of rich, dark soil the color of coffee grounds. It was filled with earthworms and the daddy of all decomposers, hercules beetle larvae (probably dynastes tityus). 

I’ve only seen dead versions of the adults in my yard, and even that was a while ago. So hercules beetles are mostly a guess. But still, with larvae that big – the circumference of a golf ball – that’s probably the beast. I’ve seen these consistently in the bottom of the piles. I’ve always taken it as a good sign my compost pile was performing well.

I managed to dig out two wheelbarrows full of soil to top-dress a couple beds. I estimate there are 4 or 5 more wheelbarrows in there, and much more on the way. I added equal parts shredded live oak leaves saved from Spring and freshly-cut grass to the left pile. I covered that with some pieces of paper yard waste bags. I’m interested in seeing if the paper helps hold moisture in the compost. I left most of the useable soil in the right pile, though I did mix some in on the left to spread the microbial goodness.

compost, dirt, dynastes tityus, hercules beetle, wheelbarrow

June 15th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

My friend Amanda is the executive director of Growing Hope, an organization that promotes community empowerment through gardening, and I’ve been a big fan of her work there for a few years. I sometimes wish I lived closer in order to volunteer in their projects.

But I’d forgotten she also makes buttons, magnets and jewelry, and how cute some of those things are. I recently saw some of her things I’d ordered a few years ago for my parents. They have a set of her fridge magnets with sayings like, “Friend of Urban Chickens”.

She’s posting new stuff on Etsy, and I think her GROW coasters are adorable:

Amanda's GROW Coasters

Maybe I’ll get a set at some point and offer them as a prize here on my blog.

coasters, etsy, growing hope

June 13th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I have a list of projects in my head that mainly stays there. Some, we lack the resources for me to finish, and others are perhaps too impractical. Others stay in my head because I lack the expertise to know how to proceed, victims of inertia. Some languish as a combination of all three.

But maybe if I put them down on paper blog, they’ll get closer to reality somehow.

So without further adieu, and in no particular order:

• brick walkway from front sidewalk to front door
• remove grass from side of driveway and make it a wildflower area (it is now unofficially, but there’s a lot of bermuda grass mixed in)
• find and fix fourth station of the sprinkler system (how do you find control valves, anyway?)
• build chicken coop out of cedar (ashe juniper) posts and small chicken yard
• build two to three more raised beds for the side yard and extend drip sprinkler to them
• remove half of back deck and refurbish remaining part. Put flagstone over underlying cement patio and steps.
• build larger in-ground vegetable garden in back along fence.
• build a permanent water feature of some sort.
• build bamboo trellises for vegetables
• 350+ gallon rainwater collection system

I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t remember it for now. I will probably add to the list over time.

deck, landscape, projects, raised beds, water feature

June 13th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Today I managed to get a little yard maintenance time in. I went to town. I trimmed back the tomatoes, weed-whacked some parts of the back yard, mowed others, pulled some coreopsis that had gone to seed, severely trimmed back some autumn sage that was dominating, and pulled a heck of a lot of stuff that was growing in the cracks of the brick walkways in back.

I didn’t finish the mowing, and I had wanted to turn the compost piles. But those will have to wait when I’m not on duty with the baby boy. He’s much too young to operate the lawnmower… dammit.

I’d had a conversation with my boss on Friday about tomatoes. He is the son of an Iowa farmer (much as I’m the grandson of an Ohio farmer) and grows a fair number of vegetables successfully. He mentioned that he trimmed the undersides of his tomato vines to remove suckers and to get more air to the center of the plants. Today I followed that model and opened up my plants somewhat. Part of my motivation was to make it easier to find critters. In fact, I’m dead certain now there is a large hornworm in there somewhere. There are droppings everywhere, and some damage… but I’ve yet to find the culprit. Usually they hide in plain sight, even if they are the same color as the plant and try to mimic the stem. The droppings tend to give them away, but this one is being wily.

Another suspicion I’ve had is that all the overgrown stuff in the yard is fostering the mosquito problem I have. Lots of places to hide. I certainly don’t have any standing water, but I have clouds of mosquitoes morning and evening. Unbearable. Hopefully thinning some frostweed and other stuff will help reduce their numbers.

Another big step I took was girdling a mimosa tree that is – as far as I’m concerned – an imported trash tree. It’s starting to shade parts of my vegetable area. Also, it’s rotten at its core and contains some form of ant colony. I’m wondering how long it will take to succumb. Hopefully it’s nothing like the robo-tree I girdled, the Chinese tallow. That damned thing survived a year with some deep girdling. Only when it encountered last Summer’s drought did it finally succumb.

June 13th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I find one or two of these a day, usually before they get so big they take out whole tops of plants. Nevertheless, finding one still tends to simultaneously gross me out, thrill me and feel like a small victory against the insect forces of entropy.

Most of them meet with untimely ends. Some, the soapy swimming pool. Others, traumatic compression.

caterpllar, hornworm, pest

June 10th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

I don’t like posting other people’s photos on my blog (though I’ll link to them), so no photo of the braconid wasp cocoons… until this morning:

Yuck. One shouldn’t look at such things while eating Meyer’s sausage. But on closer inspection, those wasps have flown the coop, and are hopefully hunting for their own hornworms.

On the cheerier side of things, some proto-greenbeans:

I have several small bushes at about the same stage, so in a few weeks I should have a small handful of beans. Yum. Assuming nothing else eats them, of course.

beans, braconid wasp, bugs, garden, hornworm, organic, vegetables

June 9th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

Since we were away for the weekend, and it rained so much this week, things have rapidly gotten out of hand in the yard. There’s the usual stuff, like the grass needing mowing, plants needing lots of dead-heading, and pruning. In particular, all the maximillian sunflowers have fallen over, the autumn salvia has overrun just about everything around it, the lyre-leaf salvia is sprouting everywhere, and the trumpet vine/passion vine monster at the end of the porch is threatening to swallow most of the yard.

In addition, the insects have come to rule. Leaf-foots, stink bugs and worms of various sorts have all claimed the vegetable- producing parts of the yard, while the mosquitoes are so thick they pretty much rule the air. I’ve spent a couple hours collectively hand-picking leaf-foots and stinks off the tomatoes. This has made the mosquitoes very happy.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad. Spider populations have ramped up, too, as have butterflies of all sorts. On Monday morning I briefly held a gulf fritillary butterfly that had just emerged from its chrysalis. And there appear to be dozens more chrysalises all around the back porch, as well as a healthy profusion of bees, caterpillars I actually like, and at least one praying mantis.

Some things in nature are both eerily horrifying and morbidly fascinating at the same time. Such is the case with a type of wasp that targets tomato hornworms, a braconid wasp. (It was fascinating to me, though Jenna was horrified by the notion of it.) This small wasp finds hornworms and lays its eggs just under the skin of the hapless worm. The wasp’s larva feed on the innards of the worm and pupate, eventually killing it. I found just such a hornworm that had succumbed to the wasp larvae, the pupal cocoons hanging off the back of the incapacitated worm. Creepy in all the right sci-fi ways, but I’m glad it’s there.

I’m also beginning to regret my decision to kill of all the grass around the firepit I built last Fall. Not that I particularly love the St. Augustine grass we had, but I failed to come up with a plan that would forestall vegetative chaos. Since I had used that area for a few years as the staging grounds for shredding and composting, a fair amount of seed had dropped, and now I have a mix of frost weed, sunflowers, tropical salvia, mexican hats, and other weeds all vying for dominance. That doesn’t sound bad on the surface – the flowers are nice – but it’s all just a mess, and one that is probably harboring a lot of the detrimental insects mentioned above. Not to mention it’s ruining the firepit and blocking access to the compost heaps. I’ll probably mow it all down this weekend and wait until I can sow some buffalo grass.

And in the meantime, until I can get some maintenance time in, I hope it doesn’t all swallow me.

beneficial insects, braconid wasp, hornworm, insects, leaf-footed bug, parasitic wasp, stinkbug, tobacco hornwom

June 7th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

We visited my parents over the weekend in Kingwood (north of Houston), and I braved the mosquitos just before we left to visit the vegetable garden out back.

I’m always rather impressed with what my parents accomplish in the space they have, despite having grown up with this kind of gardening. Most of their vegetable gardening takes place on land that technically doesn’t belong to them – the banks of a channelized creek that serves mostly as a drainage ditch, a so-called “bayou”. But they have built up compost-rich soil over 20-plus years, and have amazing vegetables to show for it. Their compost comes not from mere piles, but a veritable walled compound of decaying organic matter that would consume a measurable chunk of my small back yard if I were to build something like it.

Dad had just finished harvesting most of his onions, and had four or five trays of onions, each with 20-30 in it. The tomatoes – cherries, porters, larger stuff, and an intriguing “peach” tomato – were coming in by the small bucket load. On tap were various cucumbers, zuchini, peppers, garlic, okra… not to mention the orange tree towering above it all with perhaps hundreds of oranges on it.

Their tomato cages – something I need to emulate because mine are mostly inadequate – are very tall rings of heavy fence wire with openings big enough to get a hand through for picking. Most of the vegetables are planted in some form of raised wooden bed. Much of the wood is probably scraps or reclaimed from building-site dumpsters. Though in the Houston climate, wood becomes part of the compost pretty quickly. All of the growing area has a sprinkler system in it. This is fed by a well they drilled a few years back to tap water that doesn’t come from the city. In other words, it has no fluoride or chlorine in it, and is a huge boon to beneficial micro-organisms in the soil and compost.

Oh, yeah… I mentioned that peach tomato. About the size of a golfball or a little smaller, a pale yellow in color, fuzzy skin, juicy and a mild, low-acid taste. Not sure if it will grow in Austin, but a worthy tomato. I didn’t get any pictures of them, but I suspect my parents would happily oblige once they read this.

Here’s the peach tomatoes, courtesy of Dad:

June 6th, 2010 by Marc Opperman

It’s been a few days since I posted, but it was because we went to Houston for a couple nights to see my parents for their 45th wedding anniversary (go Mom and Dad!!)

I was worried about the tomatoes while we were away as I assumed a flock of birds, a litter of raccoons or an army of worms would decimate the crops. Seems I was mostly wrong:

That was what the plants produced in two days, though two of those Celebrities (the large ones) I picked Friday night before we left as I assumed they’d be toast if I left them.

The only two issues were that, one, the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs were having a FIELD DAY and I spent a miserable hour extricating them to the soapy swimming pool this evening. I say miserable because the mosquitoes were murderous and it was more humid than Houston out there. I dunked about 45 bugs, though some got away. I think this illustrates the benefit of inspecting the plants twice a day and dealing with bugs as they come up.

The second issue is one that I failed to grasp properly early on: these plants are vines. Healthy, hearty, robust vines with so much grow power in them they are taking over my area and the wimpy tomato cages I am using. So, along with bug extraction, I hammered some new bamboo poles in to give me something extra to tie off branches. Not perfect, and not pretty, but at least I can walk around the plants now.

I was also worried the hot weather would fry a lot of stuff, but I took care of that by setting the sprinkler system to run automatically at 4 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday for a bit each day.

All in all, I think the only things suffering now are my legs… need to wipe off the mosquito bodies and smears of blood. And dab them with some anti-itch goop.

bugs, leaf-footed bug, leaf-footed bugs, stink bugs, tomato, tomatoes

June 2nd, 2010 by Marc Opperman

jalapeños, tomatoes