It's Easy Being Green

This past week the cacophony of lawn equipment has officially heralded in warmer weather here in southwestern Indiana.  The first warm and sunny day we had last week apparently awoke every neighbor’s desire to mow their lawn, even though most hadn’t even grown an inch.  With lawn work and garden cleanup comes a lot of waste and the question of what to do with all of it.

I generally mulch mow my lawn meaning I finely chop the clippings and leave them on my lawn to decompose and provide green manure for the rest of the growing season.  If the lawn is too thick or too long, I’ll compost the clippings.  Most of the time it just simply doesn’t make sense to throw grass clippings away.  It’s a great waste of time and resources to bag all those clipping, haul them out to the curb for pickup and watch all that water and fertilizer you bought get hauled off to the landfill.

That said, there are times when you do need to bag yard waste and there are greener alternatives to the normal plastic lawn garbage bag you might buy.  This past week I’ve been trying out some EconoGreen Plastics bags made by Jig-A-Loo.  The company has just released a line of trash bags and plastic drop cloths made entirely from recycled plastic.  They also claim the bags are “oxodegradable”.  Supposedly an additive in the plastic helps accelerate the decomposition of the plastic into simple organic compounds when it’s exposed to oxygen.

In my tests using a handful of bags the company sent me to try out, I found them to look, feel and hold up like most normal bags.  They weren’t any more puncture resistant to twigs and sticks but also weren’t like the thin, cheap trash bags you might find at the discount store.  If you do have some trash that needs to be thrown away and can’t be composted, these bags seem like a good option to help reduce the environmental impact at least just a bit.

The EconoGreen line includes large trash bags, tall kitchen bags, lawn and leaf bags, contractor bags, garage and automotive bags, wet/dry vac liner bags and drop cloths.  Home Depot is said to be carrying the full line of EconoGreen plastic products.

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Since I last posted about the progress of my new raised garden beds, I don’t think we’ve had more than two days straight without rain.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the rain but right now our yard is more like a mud bog with some portions verging on marsh-like.  I keep expecting to look out my window to see large water birds wading through the yard, looking for fish.

In order to complete my raised vegetable beds, I needed to locate the three items I needed the make the recommended growing media.  If you happened to miss my previous posts on creating this year’s garden check out Spring Fever and Garden Planning.  The three soil amendments I was in search of included bulk compost, Sphagnum peat moss and vermiculite.

Vermiculite ended up being the most difficult item to locate.  Even though it’s included in just about every ready-made bag of potting soil, I found it almost impossible to find by itself and in a quantity that was large enough as to not break the gardening bank.  Needing 25 cubic feet of the material, I quickly discovered that most gardening centers in my area wouldn’t be able to get me even close to that amount and they weren’t interested in ordering it in for me either.

Daylight Farm Supply was kind enough to price it out for me in 4 cubic foot bags and offered to order it in if I wanted it.  There was going to be a bit of a lag time to get the order so that’s when I got to thinking about the one place I drive by on a daily basis, specifically geared toward agriculture: The Warrick County Co-Op located in Vanderburgh County.  Sure enough they had vermiculite in stock at a little under $20 a bag which was the cheapest I was able to find it too.

Once I found my vermiculite supply I was set.  I ordered 4-scoop loads of well aged manure and compost from AP&P Soil Masters on Kansas Road and had them dump the large pile in my driveway.  After paying the driver I headed out to Rural King to get some peat moss and then to the county co-op to pick up vermiculite.  I spent about 3 hours playing mixologist, combining equal parts compost, peat moss and vermiculite to create my raised bed planting mix.  Without a wheelbarrow, I made a makeshift soil transporter with our little red wagon and two huge planting containers as my carrying buckets.

I’ve been dodging rain showers ever since, trying to get the rest of my raised beds filled with soil mix while trying to take care of other responsibilities around the house.  Today, rain be darned, I destined to get some more work done.  I finished filling in the raised beds and built the square foot planting grids to go over the tops of the boxes.  This is the grid system that lays out your planting squares.  It’s built using 4 foot lengths of wood lath that you buy by the bundle for about $5.

I also dug two holes about two feet deep on either side of my main aisle.  These were to sink my 4×4 poles into the ground to support the two picket fence panels.  I will also be attaching a swinging gate and building an arbor over the top of the 4×4’s.  The garden looks so much different from the last time I took a picture of it.  I’m excited about everything I was able to get done today and can’t wait to get out and starting getting some Spring veggies planted to take advantage of the cool weather.

It still looks like a construction zone but you can see my newly filled raised square foot gardening boxes with their planting grids and the new picket fence and two 4x4 posts waiting for a swinging gate and an arbor over the top

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Being the nomadic little family we are, last year’s vegetable garden and all others prior to that, have been one year affairs with little planning.  We literally moved to a new rental house at least once a year if not twice depending on the circumstances.

Before moving to the Midwest, we enjoyed high-elevation mountain living in Flagstaff, Arizona.  At 7500 feet, Flagstaff has a growing season that lasts barely 90 days.  If you blink, you might miss it!  Transplants couldn’t hit the soil until late May (snow that month wasn’t out of the question) and you had to hope you’d have something to harvest by late August before the first frost set in.  It was an incredible challenge and consequently we chose to always keep the veggie garden on the small side.  It ranged from just a few potted vegetables at our townhouse with a 10×10 foot patio to a 4×8 foot raised garden bed at our biggest rental house.

Here in southwest Indiana we’re strangely in the same USDA climate zone as our old home in Flagstaff but our growing season is double what we’re used to.  It feels like you can grow half the year and that is awesome!  Because we were renting the house we just bought, we kept the vegetable garden small and spontaneous.  I planted a strip about 4 feet deep and 20 feet long against our northern fence.  It was originally lawn space so I crudely turned the heavy clay soil with a pitchfork, tried to get rid of as much grass as I could and plopped in some transplants from the local farm market.

Now that the house is officially ours and we plan to stick around for awhile, I decided to actually plan this year’s garden space as most experts recommend.  Our 80 square foot planting space last year included about 6 tomatoes, 2 zucchinis, 2 lemon cucumbers, 6 regular cucumbers, 6 collard greens, 2 eggplants and about a dozen stalks of sweet corn (which didn’t do very well because there were so few of them).  We packed a lot in to that tiny space and we didn’t have to buy produce the entire Summer.

I then began to lay out different ideas on graph paper.  I tried different sized beds and layouts until I came up with a design that I liked and that maximized the amount of space I had to grow in.  When you come up with your design, make sure to list your priorities before you get started.  I wanted to plant as much space as possible yet keep it accessible and pleasant to look at.

After mulling several different designs for a day or so, I didn’t like anything I came up with so I started drawing a few more.  I simply tweaked the designs I had previously come up with.  Finally one I put down on paper felt right and I knew I had a winner.  I opted on a central aisle that is 3 feet wide, big enough to roll a wheelbarrow up and down.  Branching off the main aisle will be wraparound aisles for harvesting that are about 2 feet wide.  That’s less than recommended by Bartholomew but I think it will be okay since I don’t plan to roll a wheelbarrow up and down those aisles and don’t mind to brush my vegetables as I walk by.

Planning the raised beds on graph paper also made estimating cost and materials a lot easier.  I was able to quickly come up with how much lumber I needed and calculated the formulations of soil mixes I’ll need to buy to fill the planting beds.  I’ll also make photocopies of the full-size garden plan so I can actually plot out what will get planted where.

Over the past two weekends I bought the lumber and built 6 of my raised garden beds.  I still need to build 3 more beds but that will take just a couple hours of time.  To make sure I was still on track with my plan, I laid out the finished beds to see the full-scale look of garden 2010 and I like what I see so far!  I’m exited to start putting in my soil mix, mulching my aisles and building the gate and arbor that will serve as the entryway to veggie heaven.

Stay tuned for our next installment as I put the finishing touches on the raised beds and get to growing!

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Imagine the joy of this past Saturday.  The sun was shining.  The sky was a vibrant blue.  Birds were chirping.  It warmed up to a positively balmy 50 degrees.  The snow had completely disappeared.  Now imagine today’s disappointment when I awoke to see another dusting of snow outside!

Mentally, we are definitely done with Winter.  I’m not sure what has all the sudden pushed us past the tipping point here in our household.  Maybe it’s the cabin fever talking but regardless of the reason, we want to see an end to our current season.

My "pile" of seed catalogs. It's one of my many piles that endlessly frustrates my poor wifey.

I’ve been trying to make myself feel better by burying myself with a pile of colorful and always enticing seed catalogs.  It makes me not only feel better but provides a little glimmer of hope that I will one day be back outside, enjoying the warmth and sunshine while laboring or simply enjoying our garden.

As you probably remember from previous posts, I’ve been toiling with my vegetable gardening “method” for the year.  Historically, our little family of three has moved just about every year, going from one rental to the next.  That won’t happen this year since we’ve actually solidified our existence and purchased a house.  Now we can put down some more permanent roots in our garden as well.

Last Fall, I took some time and read Lasagna Gardening.  I’ve known for awhile that no-till gardens are much more environmentally friendly and figured Patricia Lanza’s book might be enough to spur me in the no-till direction when planning our permanent veggie garden.  About halfway through her book though, I was frustrated.  What I needed to know, the way to lasagna garden, was literally two paragraphs worth of material in the beginning of the book.  Lay down a thick layer of newspaper to smother weeds and grass and then simply pile up loose, friable, organically supreme soil for your garden beds was the basic gist.  I’m glad I only checked the book out at the library and didn’t waste the money buying her book.  It was perfect for a beginning gardener who might be discovering this new found hobby but not for me.

I felt like I didn’t have many other options though and tried to mentally design how this lasagna garden would look in my backyard.  Our yard is already small and so I was really only looking to expand my vegetable space to about 19 feet by 12 feet, a little more than 200 square feet.  I started looking for cast-offs from everyone’s front yard, Fall decorations: straw bales.  Lanza’s soil mix suggests straw as a good component to help build your raised beds up above the original soil surface.  The idea is that the straw will compost with your other organics and produce a top-notch soil.

As Winter pushed deeper into the calendar, my straw bales sat untouched, well at least by me.  Dixie, our doofy but lovable dog, has been smart enough to use the straw bales as a warming perch this winter.  Every morning she sits with a yoga-like patience atop those bales, warms herself in the early morning sun and keeps watch for the mouser cat Haley to wander back from her early walk to eat breakfast.  The more Dixie sits, the more the straw bales break down making it easier to spread into future garden beds but frankly she seemed to be getting more use out of it as a makeshift sundeck.

Dixie sits atop her straw bale sundeck. It's a product of my procrastination and her keen, dog-like ingenuity. To the right you can see our composter, poorly visited bird feeder (which will be moved) and a torn up piece of trellis used to keep Dixie off of what was left of the collard greens.

Knowing my yearning to pick something, my wife gently nudged me in one direction with a little Valentine’s Day present.  It was Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening:  Grow More in Less Space.  His concept, ditching the inefficient practice of gardening in long single rows, made much more sense for our tiny backyard.  I haven’t blogged a bit lately, in part because I’ve spent the past seven days reading Bartholomew’s book from cover to cover and embarked on the design process of our own square foot garden.  Check back tomorrow for more on how I designed our 2010 vegetable garden and what I’ve been able to get done so far.  Hopefully it will trigger you to start planning your own and make the most of your garden space and your wallet!

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We’ve all heard the concerns surrounding pollinators, especially bees, and the diminishing populations we’re seeing worldwide.  Now is the time to step up our fight to save these tiny creatures that do so much work to keep us alive!

A Monarch butterfly migrating through southwestern Indiana stops to sip some nectar from a purple thistle.

The North American Pollinator Protection Project has come up with 30 regional-specific guides discussing the pollinators found in your area and how best to attract them.  Each guide discusses native plants found in your area that bees, butterflies, beetles and birds use for food and nesting.  They also show you how to include those plants in your landscape to best provide shelter from predators and harsh weather.

To find the guide for your region, just head to the North American Pollinator Project website.

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The so-called “Dog Days of Summer” are paying off in the veggie garden this week. My wife and I have spent quite a bit of time outside pulling weeds, smashing squash beetles, plucking Tomato Hornworms and giving our little 10×4 foot plot of wholesome paradise some good ‘ol TLC. Mother nature has been a big help too, squeezing some much needed rain out of a passing cloud or two at least once a week. That’s apparently a rarity out here in southwestern Indiana during August but who’s complaining? We’ll gladly take the free water!

Our collander is brimming with Friday's tomato harvest, sporting a fresh batch of roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and slicing tomatoes.

On Friday I had to make a mad dash through my tomato patch to harvest what was ripe before the plants sucked up all the rain water. I’ve been having a big problem with tomatoes expanding way too quickly with all the rain and then splitting just as they ripen. Since I’ve been picking preemptively, they’ve been faring much better though. Our roma tomatoes are producing a bumper crop of pear-shaped goodness that will be perfect with pasta. The cherry tomatoes haven’t let up either, gifting us with a fresh flush of fruit every couple of days.

On Saturday our baby was fast asleep for an afternoon nap so we decided to hit the garden again and do some cleanup. Squash beetles totally annihilated both of our zucchini plants. They bore into the stems of the plants and kill their ability to suck up water. They eventually get the wilt disease and die. I would normally be sad about it but those two plants each produced about ten pounds or more a piece of fresh summer squash.

A weekend bounty of fresh vegetables for the picking. Clockwise from top left: Handfuls of cherry and roma tomatoes, lemon cucumber, bell peppers and an Orange Oxheart heirloom tomato.

While we were out there dealing with the squash beetles we harvested another basket full of produce. Saturday’s take included more roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, bell peppers and an Orange Oxheart heirloom tomato. All have really taken off and produced wonderfully in southwestern Indiana. We can’t wait to enjoy the fresh tastes of each of them.

My failures were definitely sweet corn, yellow squash, pickling cucumbers and pumpkins. I’ve been struggling with powdery mildew spreading from one cucumber vine to the next and then it spread onto my pumpkins. Both are still putting on fresh leaves and trying to set fruit but the mildew just marches on. My sweet corn growth was very stunted and produced some very tiny ears of corn, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. I didn’t follow proper planting recommendations by planting at least four rows so that was probably the cause there. Yellow squash were attacked by squash beetles early on and never really had a chance.

We still have another three months to go before the first average fall frost so I think our harvest days are far from over. I’m also going to try my hands at growing some fall vegetables this year and am getting ready to tackle that project this week.

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It’s already coming up on mid-August but there is still plenty to do out in the yard. This week my Mammoth Sunflowers started blooming, so there is now an array of happy faces greeting us all around the back of the house. Many of them have reached 8 feet or taller and continue to grow even taller with each passing day.

One of our many Mammoth Sunflowers that started blooming this week has a special resident. If you look closely at the bottom of the bloom, you'll see a Praying Mantis waiting in the shadows.

Now that they’re blooming, I can start my bee survey. It’s all part of the Great Sunflower Project run by Gretchen LeBuhn at San Francisco State University. The project was started to help understand the challenges that one of our most important pollinators, bees, are now facing. After all, scientists say every third bite of food you take is the result of bees doing their good work.

A Bumblebee makes his way around the blooming sunflower, collecting pollen.

I set myself up in my lawn chair this morning, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat and observed one of my sunflowers for a few minutes to see how long it took for 5 bees to visit one bloom. The maximum wait time allowed by the study is 30 minutes but I didn’t even get close to that amount. As it turns out, just six minutes into my sunflower observation I had reached 5 bees visiting and happily pollinating.

That’s good news! Not only do the bees pollinate the flowers but also the bountiful harvest growing in our own backyard vegetable garden. I’m hoping just a few minutes spent helping their research will help develop some solutions to dwindling bee populations. While small, they’re so important to our life.

I’ve even considered doing some home beekeeping at some point in time. My yard is way to small to even think about it now but in the future when I have a few acres under my belt, I’m hoping I can get some hives going.

If you’re interested in learning more about The Great Sunflower Project or want to know how to conduct your own bee survey, just click that link and head to their website.

Happy pollinators hard at work on a Mammoth Sunflower

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