Neighborly Encouragement and the Power of Flowers
Inside: Planting flowers is a delightful pursuit of mine, giving me much joy. Little did I know someone else has been enjoying my flowers, too.
As I was finishing some early morning gardening chores, trying to beat the heat, my neighbor drove by slowly. I put up a hand to wave, and she stopped, rolling down her window. It’s rare that our exchange is more than just a simple hand-waving, so I walked toward the car to see if she needed something. She’d had a rough couple of years dealing with a hip operation and quitting her job. Life had been downright hard for her at times, and I found myself praying for her more often. She’d spent most of a year being homebound but had been venturing out, cane in hand, since the weather turned warmer.
“I see you out here with the flowers, and I had to tell you, they look so nice,” she said. She asked me about caring for them in the extreme heat and noticed Mom’s geraniums by the barn were thriving on little water. Then she told me she was enjoying my flowers, particularly the ones growing around the stump. “I can’t take care of any flowers right now–but I will again.”
She left me with a final word of encouragement. “Keep up the good work.”
Our conversation didn’t last more than five minutes, if that, but I walked back to the house encouraged. I had no idea my flowers were a blessing to someone other than myself, and it made me wonder how often, when we use our gifts and talents in our everyday living, that we might be giving a much-needed lift to someone’s day. The fact that someone appreciated my efforts left me with an all-day smile. Her determination to keep going and someday get back to caring for her own flowers inspired me to face my own struggles.
Simply put, we had encouraged each other.
Do you share the beauty of your flowers (or talents) with others? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Compost 101 and Other Cheap Organic Fertilizers
Inside: Buying fertilizer from the store can be expensive and who knows what’s in that bag you purchased from the garden center, anyway. We’ve made it simple with our compost 101 and cheap organic fertilizers post. Read on to find out how.
*This post contains affiliate links.
If you’ve been stopping by this blog for a while now, you know I lean toward the unconventional and practical when it comes to gifts. I received this compost bin as a present for Mother’s Day, and I’m really liking it! (Amazon carries a similar compost bin for the home gardener.) Previously I’ve simply put compost on a pile or dug a hole–still good options, mind you. But confining kitchen scraps, weeds, spent flowers, grass clippings, and yard waste into a bin makes the most beautiful dark soil–cheap but valuable food for your garden. Filet mignon for your plants.
Compost 101
If you are new to composting, it’s probably quicker to mention what not to include in the kitchen compost bucket—meat, dairy products, eggs (the part inside the shells, obviously). All your other food scraps are welcome in the bucket, including coffee grounds and tea bags—minus any staples on the bags. The tea bags and coffee filters go right into the mix, so you don’t have to sort those out.
Since receiving the composter, I put fruit and veggie scraps, eggshells, cofffee grounds with filters, weeds, leaves, and grass clippings inside and give the ingredients in my compost potpourri a turn about once a week. I also add in some water about that often. Works like a charm.
But I’m also fond of another simple method–trench composting. Dig a hole between plants that’s big enough to accommodate your compost from the kitchen bucket, leaving a little room so that it’s buried under a layer of some of the dirt you removed. Then wait for your garbage gold to feed your plants.
A simpler method is tucking bits of scraps underneath your mulch, but I’ve not tried this. You do run the risk of pets or varmints retrieving the compost, whether digging up the hole or tearing up the mulch to get to the food.
Weeds
As I’ve mentioned before, weeds can be useful to the home garden. You can add them to your compost, provided they haven’t gone to seed. Note: Some gardeners say that if your compost gets hot enough the seeds will be destroyed. But I’d rather err on the side of caution by leaving them out. Besides, my compost pile doesn’t get that hot.
But my new favorite way to handle the weeds is to make a tea. Now let me be the first to tell you it will smell bad and attract flies after a while. And when I say after a while, I mean about a week or so into the process. Interestingly for me, I kept waiting for this horrendous odor, and it ended up smelling like the milk barn used to on very hot days. So it was oddly comforting, as I miss milking cows and miss my milking partner. You’d understand if you ever worked the underside of a Holstein.
Back to the weed tea. Here is what you’ll need:
- A standard 5-gallon bucket
- Water
- Weeds
- A stick for stirring if you’re in it for the long haul
Fill the 5-gallon bucket with weeds–nettles, horsetail, chickweed, to name a few–and cover with water. Stir once a week for three to five weeks. When the fertilizer has thickened into a gooey substance, you can use it by mixing the liquid at a 1:10 ratio. Or, more simply, add some of the liquid fertilizer to water in your watering can until it looks like a weak tea.
Eggshells
I found this on Pinterest last year. The idea comes from Tiffany McCauley’s website The Flavor of Healthy Living, and I love the story of her grandmother’s egg pitcher. Worth visiting for that alone. The long and the short of it is to simply put your eggshells in a pitcher of water whenever you make eggs—crush them down to fit more inside. This, too, will smell after a while, though for some reason mine didn’t have a strong odor. It could be because I didn’t add enough eggshells. As you use it up, she says you can keep adding water to the same shells, but when the water fails to stink, you’ll need to dump the old shells out and start over.
What are the results?
Whenever I’ve used any of these homemade fertilizers, I’ve noticed the boost a week or two later, so patience is needed. I happened to use the contents of the egg fertilizer on a large planter filled with squash, and the leaves perked up and turned a darker shade of green with some noticeable growth on the plants. The weed tea worked well on my strawberry bed. Right after renovating I applied my weed tea fertilizer and, again, I noticed the darker, more vibrant green leaves and healthy growth.
Try one of these fertilizers on your little piece of the good green Earth, and be patient. You’ll reap the rewards of healthy plants and not spend an arm and a leg to do it!
Do you make compost? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Planting the Late Summer Garden
Unique Containers for Gardening
Lily Days, Pickup Talk, and Other News Fresh From the Farm
Inside: When lilies are in bloom, talking ’round the pickup, and don’t bug me. Catch up on all the latest around the farm.
When Lilies Are in Bloom
If May was in a footrace with June, I’m not sure which month would have won. Both zoomed past me, leaving me in the dust and wondering where they ran off to. So reflections are sporadic this time around.
In the middle of all this hurry-blurry time, my lilies made a spectacle of themselves. They showed off with their many gorgeous pink and white blooms, saying, “Hey, notice us.” Thankfully I snatched a few moments here and there to do just that. And snapped a few photos along the way.
I’ve come to appreciate my annual lily show. A wonderful way to end spring and begin the long days of summer.
Talking ’Round the Pickup
Growing up on a farm leaves you with many fond memories and also those you take for granted. One such memory that fits neatly into both categories is the sight of farmers talking around their pickups, leaned over the truck bed, discussing the news of the day, corn prices, bovine behavior, and maybe a little gossip about the neighbors. And, if you were really lucky, you’d catch one of those favorite family yarns they’d tell over and over again. So many times I’d see my dad and his brothers, gathered around one of their pickups. Sometimes a feed salesman or neighbor down the road would join the conversation if they happened to stop by. It was such a common sight that I never really thought about it. The sun comes up, farmers stand around their pickups to talk. Just another day in rural America.
Fast forward four decades later. My brother Vince is trying to fix a part on the tractor so he can cut hay. My sister-in-law Lisa is there to help pull the tractor. Mom is at my door, asking if I have an electrical outlet so they can run an extension cord. We’re busy in our efforts to get the tractor going, though to no avail. Meanwhile a friend of my brother’s, who went to school with us, pulls up to help, and the next thing you know we’re gathered around a pickup, listening to Brian tell stories. Soon Bradley, my nephew, drives up and joins us, and we’re laughing and talking. That’s when it hit me. How long it had been since we stood around some pickup like that. Like my uncles and my dad did. How precious and fleeting those moments! And, yet, there we were, doing the same thing. Keeping the custom alive. Bringing it back again.
For as long as there are farmers and pickups, I expect the tradition will live on.
Don’t Bug Me
And with the move into summer another annual event takes place. This time no warm fuzzies. The descent of the Japanese beetles on otherwise healthy vegetation. I’ve been watching them for a few years now, remembering fondly the years when I never had to deal with them. I’m not sure at what point they invaded our lives, but they’ve become a summer occurrence, like baseball and lemonade and swimming—except not because the bug visitation isn’t a good thing.
I’m becoming a student of their habits. (What else are you going to do when you have hundreds—maybe thousands–of them in your trees?) They’re quite picky about what they eat. Unlike the locust of bygone eras—the bane of our forefathers and foremothers—which stripped everything in their path, these delightful creatures prefer to dine selectively on wild grapevine leaves, Chinese Elms, apple tree leaves, wild rose bushes, daisies, and peaches. At least that’s what they’re feasting on in my yard. They leave alone corn, cukes and melons, tomatoes, peppers, silver maples, hackberry trees, and most flowers as well. I know I should be grateful they’re leaving my crops alone. And I am, but, really, enough already!
I caught one in a pan of water today doing the breaststroke, it’s little body merrily paddling in the shallow rainwater. Sometimes you just have to laugh. I’ve got brown lacy grapevine leaves and Chinese Elm leaves littering my yard, yet this little guy is having the time of his life. Club Med for Japanese beetles. My yard is most likely a tourist hotspot in the Japanese beetle world, with a 3-star rating (“exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”) in the Japanese Beetle Michelin Guide.
Sigh.
They’ll be gone soon. I’m not sure if they just up and leave or come to the end of their life cycle. Guessing the former because my yard isn’t blanketed with a thick coating of dead beetles.
Or maybe they leave when they’ve used up all of their vacation days.
What’s happening in your neck of the woods? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Hackberry Trees, Family Visits, and Other News Fresh From the Farm
Bucking Bales: A Family Tradition
Planting the Late Summer Garden
Inside: Now that it’s officially summer, you might think it’s too late to plant your garden. We think otherwise! Follow our late summer adventures as we turn over soil, sow some seeds, and tuck plants into the good green earth!
Why the Late Summer Garden
Back in February when Mom gave her garden talk, she happened to mention the best garden she ever raised was planted in June. I’d never heard her say that before, but my experience had been similar. One of the two best gardens I ever had came from a garden hastily planted in the month of June. (The other best garden year ironically happened by throwing caution to the wind and planting in March, but that’s a post for another day.)
This year the perfect opportunity presented itself for the late summer garden. An April planting of cabbage and cauliflower only yielded bunny food, and the cruciferous crops that survived the rabbit buffet refused to develop heads in the too warm late spring. May was a blur of activity, and my time seemed to evaporate like rain on a hot day. While I managed to transplant a few tomatoes into my raised bed, my outdoor table overflowed with flowers, herbs, and vegetables waiting to find a home in the dirt. I did what I could, but once I turned the calendar page to June, I found myself still potting flowers and sticking plants into the ground. And I still had seeds I wanted to plant. That’s when I decided purposely planting a late summer garden was a great idea for a post.
Where to Start
So maybe you find yourself in the same situation. Your late spring was too cold or too busy or too . . . gone. Now summer is in full force and you feel you’ve missed out on the growing season. Not necessarily. The first place to start is to find out–if you don’t already know–your average first frost date. That will show you how many days you have left for your plants to grow. I found a helpful website that will tell you that information when you type in your zip code.
When I entered my zip, Dave’s Garden told me my average risk of frost dates ranged from October 10 – April 21, and almost certainly I will experience frost between October 24 – April 5. As a seasoned gardener, I am quite familiar with these dates already, but in the interest of testing the site, I was pleasantly surprised at how accurate it was for my area, even taking into consideration the microclimate quirks of my yard.
Once you learn your first frost date, you can make your list of what you’d like to plant, bearing in mind the amount of days to harvest. Also, you want to leave some time between frost and harvest, as plants like corn, tomatoes, or beans won’t ripen all in one day, of course. I suggest leaving about a two-week period before frost at the very least. It’s also helpful to prioritize the plants on your list for what needs planting first, particularly if you only have a certain amount of time to garden each day.
For example, the longer sweet potatoes have to grow, the bigger the spuds. Many gardening resources suggest 120 days for them. I’ve had them in the ground for a couple of weeks now, so they’ll have plenty of time to mature. However, I do have some more slips in a water jar, waiting on me, and it’s a reasonable bet that planting them within the next few days will get me potatoes in the fall. Most of the time we end up having our frost the third week of October, so I’m willing to risk it. Beyond that, I can dig them up before frost, and they’ll just be smaller. Considering I’ve grown five pounders in four months’ time, a regular-sized sweet potato is not beyond the realm of what is possible.
My Late Summer Garden
So let’s bring it home. What have I planted this month? A couple of tomato seeds, pickling cucumbers–mine just popped out of the ground while folks around me are already harvesting theirs–winter squash, watermelon, and sweet potatoes. I still need to put in a few herbs and start cabbage and cauliflower for the fall. (Right on target with those, actually.)
I’ve also planted flowers because I have a lot of old seed packets I wanted to use up, and in the interest of gardening experimentation, I wanted to see what would happen. In large plastic pots, I scattered wild flower seeds and forget-me-nots. In another pot I planted profusion zinnias. I also sowed more zinnias directly into a couple of flower beds. I’ll have to wait a while before I see the blooms, but I’ll still have plenty of time to enjoy their beauty.
Benefits of Late Planting
The year I planted my garden late, I had low expectations, and I actually felt like I had failed as a gardener. But that was before the results. Was I happily surprised! While seeds and transplants arrived to their soil beds late for my neck of the woods, the long, warm-hot days of June helped many of the plants to nearly catch up. They didn’t suffer cold nights or slow starts because of adjusting to their new environment. I also noticed that with the corn, the corn earworms didn’t show up for the late season. Pests also left my cole crops alone–no green worms eating through layers of my cabbage. And when it came to preserving the harvest, I had more time in the fall to process the veggies and can pickles–and in a cooler kitchen! Another benefit worth mentioning? Plants go on sale, so you might find some bargains and maybe try something new.
If you’ve come to the garden late this season, don’t throw in the trowel just yet. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Scale back if you must, but don’t deprive yourself of the joy of gardening. Choose a few plants that are the most important to you, even if it’s just a pot of begonias or a container of tomatoes by the front steps. And if you have more time, by all means, plant to your heart’s content! You might just be pleasantly surprised come late summer!
Have you ever planted a late summer garden? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Gardening Advice from a Thirty-year Greenhouse Veteran