Bird Netting EVERYWHERE: Why and How

Just after the second set of pea leaves appeared, birds started eating them.  I blame sparrows, the possibly invasive species that seem to swarm our neighborhood in the spring.

So, bird netting is on the peas.

Last year we lost strawberries to the squirrels.  Even with Alex's not exactly legit squirrel hunting, they still come around.

Bird netting is on the strawberries.

Then I noticed that despite plenty of rain and sun the lettuce just never seemed to grow.

Five days of bird netting and the leaves are rounded and growing.  Same with the endive.

As much as I hate covering everything in little bits of plastic, I raise plants for me!  Go away birds and squirrels!!

If you struggle with critters eating your plants, netting might be the answer:

• Purchase an appropriate quantity of netting. I have two 14x14 foot packs I purchased from the local nursery for about $6 each.
• While it is still carefully folded, cut to the length of your garden bed.
• Spread each piece gently over top of the crop you are protecting. It doesn't have to be perfectly aligned. If your area is particularly windy, use several small sticks to secure the corners.
• When plants have been established, you can try removing the netting. Gently peel it away from the plants, unwinding tendrils if they have grown through the netting.
• Fold your netting to reuse next year. It never seems to pack down to the size it was when I purchased, so we keep a large grocery bag filled with folded up pieces of netting.
• Enjoy your peas/berries/lettuces munch free!

Fruit Blossoms and How I Care for Them

No flower is more welcomed in my garden than the first buds of our fruit trees and bushes.  With the warmth of the past few days, the peach trees in the treeyard bloomed.

I spotted a strawberry flower in the bed yesterday.  These beautiful flowers will soon develop into sweet nutritious fruit. The dwarf cherry has buds just waiting to burst.  I have no idea what to expect out of these knee high trees.  They are purported to produce edible fruit and time will tell whether that is true.

Leaves on the plum tree are unfurling.  Because this is the first year for the plum, with a heavy heart I will pinch off any blossoms before they go to fruit.  Allowing the tree to grow with no fruit for at least one full season helps it establish roots, branches, and height. Raspberry vines are growing and leafed out.  I buried several vines to establish some new plants. The blueberry bushes are just starting to sent out leaflets.

A part of me lives in terror this time of year.  A good hard frost can ruin the growing season for all of these fruits.  I follow forecasts looking for evening temperatures below 32 degrees.

The beauty of living on a tiny urban homestead is that I can cover these trees and plants if there is a frost warning.  I pull out sheets and tarps, anchor them with rocks, and give a little protective insulation to my precious fruit blossoms.

Once past May 15, the frost free date for central Ohio, I let down my frost guard.  The fruits slowly grow.  I keep an eye out for pests that might be invading and will treat accordingly, though I've never had any problems.

When fruits are just barely mature, changing from chartreuse to full color, my blood pressure rises again.  I want the juicy sweet berries and fruit for myself and my family.  Squirrels and birds have the same desire.  To reap the full harvest, I cover the strawberries, blueberries and raspberries with bird netting.  We reuse netting from year to year, getting our money's worth out of the $7 investment.  When I am ready for berries, I lift the netting or pick right through it.

This will be our first year allowing the peach and cherry trees to fruit.  I hope that pests will not be a problem either during development or harvest time.  I am armed with information from Mother Earth News and Back to Basics should I need to naturally treat animals invading my micro-orchard.

Keeping fruit trees is an emotional process for me.  I love fruit so very much that I take special, some might say obsessive, care of my plants.

Do you have fruit trees?  How do you care for them?

An Indoor Gardener I Am Not

Every year the months between November and April are a waiting game: will the indoor plants make it through the winter?

In addition to some non edible plants, this year I potted several herbs growing outdoors in mid November.  My hope is that we can use them in cooking throughout the winter.  In the case of the rosemary, perhaps we can replant it in the ground in the spring.

As much as I love vegetable gardening, I am simply inattentive to indoor plants.  They take up a huge corner of the dining room, yet I forget to water them.  Lil loves to water plants so I asked her to help me remember.  This year Alex is determined to get more lemon fruit so he is paying special attention to that tree.

As early as possible in the spring I will move the lemon tree, avacado, norfolk island pine and others back outside where they can breath fresh air and soak up regular water from rain.  If, of course, they manage to survive my neglect.

What's Growing: October 10, 2009

It has been a long time since I entered a What's Growing post.  The end of the summer was so busy that I ran out of time to photograph and post on a weekly basis.  I hope to be more disciplined next year not only to share with other Columbus gardeners, but to keep records for myself.

The garden is in a bit of transition now.  Most summer crops were pulled last weekend.  Herbs are still producing.  All the herbs for last week's Kids Cook class came from our garden.

Fall produce is just getting started.  Our lettuces are delayed because birds ate the tops two weeks ago.  I put bird netting on and they are recovering nicely.

Spinach is almost ready to eat.

The second planting of squash is trying to hang in.  There are lots of blossoms but not any fruit yet.  We planted a bit late, so the squash might not end up producing this year.

We could harvest the beet tops now but we will leave them on the plants to produce strong roots.

We are still eating the spring planted kale and new kale seeds are sprouting.

What's growing in your garden?

Expanding the Urban Orchard

On Sunday we went shopping at our local nursery Oakland Park for garlic starts (they did not have any hardneck varieties) and blueberries (which they did not have either).  They did have a dwarf european plum tree at 33% off.  We were sold.

For awhile I have been hating on two overgrown shrubs in a small bed near our garage.  They are not pretty and produce nothing worthwhile.  The spot gets a fair amount of sun; at least enough for a small tree.  So, the shrubs had to come out before the plum could go in.

While Alex was removing shrubs, I went to Lowes.  I generally try to avoid Big Box stores, but Alex had seen blueberry plants there earlier in the week and we really wanted to expand our blueberry bed.  (By personal and non-profit accounts, Lowes is one of the more employee and human rights friendly Big Boxes.)

When I came home, the shrubs were out and the tree hole was dug.  Alex was a patient co-gardener and  re dug the hole when we realized the tree would be more centered a few feet over.

Lillian "helped" the whole time.  Sometimes her assistance was more trouble than help, but she does love to break up dirt clods.  Given some layers of clay in our holes, there were plenty of dirt clods.  She is also a helpful model of how deep a tree hole needs to be.

Lil was great at lossening the roots.  Then she sprinkled some alpaca green beans in the tree hole.  These alpaca feces are full of nutrients!  My neighbor Mary graciously provides them to me for free right now, but may eventually sell them as part of her burgeoning farm, Alpaca Green.

The plum tree was planted in the new hole.  I made Alex take a picture of me filling in around the tree, lest anyone think I always leave the heavy lifting to him.

Under one of the overgrown shrubs was a hearty and pretty azalea.  We thought it would do better out front, so I replanted it.

I worked on planting the blueberries when Alex got the idea that we could fit a new raspberry patch in our side yard if we just removed an overgrown rose of sharon.  He worked on it for a long time and finally sunlight shed on the side yard.

Off he went back to Lowes where I had seen the raspberries.  He chose three Fall Gold plants, which are supposed to be ever-bearing.  The spot we planting is not truly full sun but hearty raspberries will likely still produce.

We do not expect fruit from any of these plantings for at least two years.  We will pinch off blossoms from the plum and blueberries to allow the plants to establish strong roots before putting energy into fruiting.  In a few years, we should have quite the urban orchard!

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Summary of our Fruiting Plants

plant (variety) - quantity - location -years in ground

peach (dwarf) - 2 - front yard between sidewalk and street - 1

cherry (dwarf) - 2 - backyard - 1/2

raspberry (red early) - 1 - backyard by alley - 1

raspberry (red everbearing) - 1 - backyard by alley - 2

raspberry (fall gold ever-bearing) - 3 - sideyard - 0

strawberry (early) - 10 - sideyard - 2

strawberry (late) - 10 - sideyard - 2

plum (dwarf self pollinating) - 1 - backyard - 0

blueberry (multiple) - 4 - front yard - 1, 2, 0

What's Growing: July 10, 2009

What's growing?  Everything!  Well, almost everything. Peppers are starting to mature and we are eating them as we need.  If we keep them on the vine, they will ripen to red, which is fine by me.

We have tons of green tomatos on the vine.  A very few have started blushing red.  One cherry tomato plant (a volunteer) has given us our first two ripe tomatos!

Speaking of volunteers, the sunflowers are a delight!  I might actually plant them on purpose next year.  The big blooms provide the perfect playground for us to observe goldfinches, cardinals, and bees.

Every day or so I pick a handful of green beans.  Beans are one of my very favorite veggies and I can't help but eat a lot of them raw.  We are leaving the rest of the dragon tongue on the vine to dry out for dry beans.  I've never done this before and hope it works out!

Only one broccoli plant has a broccoli head.

And one has this:

Not a broccoli. Maybe cauliflower?  Except we started these all from a single seed packet and I didn't intend to plant any cauliflower.  Hmmm...

We have eaten a few servings of kale from the forest that is happy along the fence.  Swiss chard is almost ready for picking too.

Blueberries didn't like the cool weather and dropped most of their berries.  We were able to eat a few ripe ones, but only maybe 10 in all.  Boo.

Then there's the squash.  We started with just four mounds and they have now taken over a huge chunk of the garden.  The golden nugget variety has lots of fruit, some of which is almost ripe, I think.  (Never grown it so I'm not sure.)

We were calling the hokkaido blue variety a bust until today when I saw these squashlings.

I thought I could illustrate the size of the squash monster by placing our little squash princess in the picture.

We tapped the rain barrel as we watered this evening.  I am hoping for a storm tomorrow to soak the plants and refill our barrel.

What's growing in your garden?

What's Growing: June 26, 2009

Oh goodness.  We went on vacation for a week and a half and the garden GREW! It was green stuff everywhere, and most of it didn't belong.  The grass was almost a foot high!

We threw out the peas (they were past the sweet stage by the time we came home) and transplanted some tomatoes in their place.

The strawberry bed needed major work.  Can you even see the strawberries in this picture?

An hour later, and it looks much better.  We have a late bearing variety that will hopefully fruit in September.

The squash are crazy big.  We spotted a few squash babies and some bees doing a little pollinating.

Raspberries are ripe and delicious.  The plants are only a year old and not producing much yet.

The garlic sent up scapes which we harvested.  Our reading indicates that if you cut off the scapes the plant puts more energy into the bulb which is the more useful part.  We have been using the scapes in meals.

Our dragon tongue beans are producing too.  We are picking the young ones to eat as fresh beans, though they sadly lose their color when cooked.  Some are left on the vine to dry for dry beans.

The pole beans are just starting to send out beans.  We planted another row where some of the peas were hoping to extend the harvest.

After a nice thunderstorm wet the ground, I was able to thin the carrots tonight.  We had a lot of thinnings!  When you wait this long to thin, the babies are tasty and can be eaten too.  Don't thin (like we did last year) and you'll have lots of nifty looking entertwined legs that are impossible to clean, i.e. very gritty.

I love the growing season and learned an important lesson this year: I will never take a vacation for more than 3 or 4 days in June.

What's Growing: May 22 2009

Yesterday was a lazy day with an overcast sky so I finally took time to photograph what's growing in our garden. Broccoli Raab, Lettuce, Spinach and herbs were all harvested this week

Broccoli, Peas, Beans, Squash, Strawberries, Tomatos and Carrots are growing strong

We supplemented our peppers grown from seed with 3 sweet yellow and 3 sweet chili peppers seedlings from Oakland Nursery.  We also planted 1 cherry and 1 beefsteak tomato seedling from oakland because we just might not have enough.  laugh

I couldn't resist buying some lavender from Oakland too.  I planted them under where our clothesline hangs and am hoping that we might get some aromatic laundry later in the summer.

Swiss chard seeds were planted overtop where the parsnip seeds never grew.

We covered strawberries and spinach with bird netting.  Birds have also been pecking away at our peas, so no more bird seed in the back yard.  Maybe I'll move a feeder out front because we still love to see them.

I also added a fence to the second square plot because the hounds kept walking through the delicate carrots and peppers.

We have been watering a lot as there has been not much rain in central Ohio lately.  Storms are forecasted for the next few days and I expect a giant growth spurt after that.

Now the photo evidence:

What's growing in your garden?

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