Borage: A miraculous plant

Borage (Borago officinalis) is growing freely in our pollinator gardens. Some of it re-seeded from last year, and some is growing from seeds I sowed earlier this year. I've been watching the native and honey bees in this plant, and it is always covered with pollinators who are collecting nectar from its bright blue, pink, and purple flowers. I started to wonder about this pretty herb.

Then, while reading "A Sting in the Tale" by biologist and naturalist Dave Goulson, I came across a few paragraphs about the time it takes for flowers to refill their nectar. Nectar, of course, is a little bonus that the plant gives in order to be pollinated. Nectar is usually just a drop at the base of a flower. Once sucked up by a bee, wasp, or butterfly, the flower refills its nectar supply, thus ensuring that the pollinators will come back. Some flowers take as much as 24 hours to replenish the nectar. Borage, on the other hand, apparently takes only two minutes. From Mr. Goulson: "When feeding on borage, bees start revisiting a flower just two minutes after the previous visit." No wonder the bees love it. They can start at one end of the patch, then start again after they've cleaned it out - it's completely refreshed.

My chickens also love borage. When the stalk gets a little large and unwieldy, I just clip it off and throw it whole in to the coop. It's demolished fairly quickly.

We humans are also able to eat borage. The leaves can be sauteed or eaten raw (though cooking will take off the fuzz), and the flowers are often used in salad, candy, or drinks. It's rich in Omega 6 fatty acids, B vitamins, beta-carotene, and fiber. 

Furthermore, borage is compatible with most plants, including vegetables, and repels bad bugs such as hornworms. 

Another plus of borage is that it reseeds itself so easily and blooms for a very long time, from Spring into Fall. It also creates a good deal of biomass for the compost. It seems to grow easily in any soil, it just needs a sunny spot in your garden. 

Lastly, the blue tint of the flowers is welcome in any garden, as blue is a color that is hard to come by in the plant world. 

Borage is easy to start from seed. Just mix the seed with a little soil and scatter in your garden. You can find borage seeds at nearly every seed company; I get mine from Renee's Garden and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Happy Planting!

First Jam of 2016

In 2015, we made about 12 half-pints of strawberry jam total throughout the Spring and Summer, and we discovered that each half-pint lasts only a week, on average. Once a jar is opened, we seem to find reasons to eat it - on homemade sourdough toast, on P&J, on vanilla ice cream. Realizing how much we enjoyed having homemade jam, we resolved to make more of it in 2016, and today Tom made a dent in our goal. His entire Sunday was spent in pursuit of strawberry jam.

It began in the morning, when Tom went to our local farmer's market and bought eight pounds of strawberries. He talked the the farmer, who was from Salinas, and discovered the strawberries were pesticide-free, and so he bought a great quantity. Tom also asked, if he wanted to buy even more, could she arrange that? and she said, given a week's notice, she could definitely promise him a large amount if he wanted it. Anyway, eight pounds of organic strawberries was $20, a steal if you calculate what you pay at Whole Foods for these (and often, at this time of year, the ones from WF are from Mexico, increasing your carbon footprint quite a bit). 

When Tom came home with the strawberries, the entire house, including the neighborhood kids here playing Wii, started eating them - they were that hard to resist.  Tom didn't get a picture because he was too busy shooing us out of the kitchen, but here they are in his new jam pot (his Christmas present from the kids):

The strawberries need to macerate for a long period of time, and then the juice is cooked down, and then the fruit is added and cooked down for hours, making the whole house smell unbelievably delicious. The upside of processing this many berries at once is that we are now in ownership of 13 half-pints (one of which we immediately gave to a neighbor) and 2 pints of lovely jam. The downside is that you spend most of your day in the kitchen, over a hot stove, when it's 88 degrees outside.

You know where to find your local farmer's market, yes? If not, check out Local Harvest - they'll have the scoop.

Next up, blueberry jam, as soon as blueberries are available. 

Garden Check-In

I spent some quality time walking through the garden this evening, after work and all the kids' activities were finished, and before dinner had to be prepared (which is on hold while I write this blog. Hey, priorities.). It's been a crazy week and this morning I woke up in exactly the same position I had fallen asleep in, eight hours before. We're all exhausted. But nothing recharges me like time in the garden, and I intend to get a lot of it this weekend. Or at least as much as the kids' busy schedules will allow me. So walking around this evening, and checking in with every bed and plant, helps me to see what needs doing and creates a list in my head. 

Spring is such a beautiful time, there is so much to show you. Let's get to it.

First on my list is cleaning up some vegetable beds. The braising greens have totally bolted. I've been cutting flowers for the chickens daily, but it's time to just clear out this bed and get it ready for summer planting.

We'll eat that chard that still looks nice, but the rest of it will go to the chickens and the compost.

The broccoli has also totally bolted, but I noticed bees in it today, collecting both pollen and nectar. So I'll leave that there for the time being. It's pretty, too.

We have one nice cabbage - I believe it was the variety 'Pixie' - so we'll harvest that and either make slaw or sauerkraut, and the rest can go to C & C (chickens and/or compost). 

The pea plants are still pumping out produce, so that will stay in place for now. I'm hoping to get some kohlrabi from that bed, as well. The spinach is being taken over by nasturtiums. I'm ok with that for now - these were all volunteers, and lots of bad bugs will go to nasturtiums before they go to my veg, so I'm going to leave them there. And the bees like 'em. And, they're pretty (I like a lot of flowers and color in the garden, as you know). 

There's still plenty of kale and chard in the last bed in the South Garden, so I'll leave that for now, too.

The Understory garden is growing very slowly, so not much to show you there, but the South Pollinator garden is starting to get diverse with blooms. Here's a few.

a Native I can't remember the name of

volunteer Nicotiana

I've figured out that I got this in a mix from Larner Seeds. It's a California Native called Mountain Phlox. It's charming.

Erigeron

Japanese Mock Orange

Ceanothus

In the Woodland Garden, coral bells are blooming, the yarrow is starting to bud, and there are different salvias blooming along with the spirea, and we can't forget lots of Douglas Iris in purples and yellows. One plant I always see a lot of native bee activity on is scabiosa.

And there is a gorgeous thing blooming, I have no idea what it is, boys and girls, do not be like me and throw out your identifying tags. Argh.

Over in the North Garden, things are starting to look a little spare in one respect. There are three bare beds ready for planting. One bed still has garlic and I think it will for a long time yet. Another bed has potatoes, which haven't bloomed, and are now getting eaten up by some sort of bug, so I'm not sure how long I'll let them linger. Another bed has what's left of the carrots and some cilantro I seeded a while ago. It's also where I tend to find Joe when I come home from work. He doesn't look a bit guilty, does he?

Another bed has what's left of the beets. You can only eat so many beets, and it's interesting, a lot of people don't like them (including my son, who will eat almost anything else including Brussels sprouts and kale). Sometimes I pluck a few out and throw them whole to the chickens, who love them, but what's interesting about that is that they poop red the next day. It's a little startling.

The fruit trees are all coming along really nicely.

Peaches

We're getting a few strawberries. It's hard to get to them before the slugs do. But when I find a slug, guess who gets it? Sometimes I'll just go out in the early morning and find all the slugs I can to take to those voracious chickens. By the way, why buy vegetarian eggs? Chickens aren't vegetarians. I can promise you that. I have a friend who saw her chickens decapitate a mouse. I digress.

In the North Pollinator garden, there are loads of Chinese Houses, and the Clarkia is starting to bloom which will be spectacular in a week or so. But for sure, the Borage is the star at the moment, and my honeybees think it's the greatest flower ever.

the first Sweet Pea

Poppy

Now, about those tomatoes and peppers. The most wonderful thing happened. I have six paste tomatoes, five slicers, and four cherries ready to go. I really wanted six slicers, and decided to go back to the Master Gardeners to pick another one up, but they SOLD OUT. So I resigned myself to five. And then a neighbor came by with a beautiful tomato called Copper River.  I was so excited! Now I have six slicers. 

All the tomatoes are big, beautiful, and healthy - most of them grown from seed. Seeds are truly miraculous. Last night I went to our local beekeepers association bee talk, and the person giving the talk said the coolest thing. He said when he goes to pick up a swarm in someone's yard, he sits them down and says, "Let's watch a minute." He talks to them about how the swarm is a miracle of nature. An event that most folks never see. It's like the swallows coming back to San Juan Capistrano every Spring on March 19. It's like the California Grey Whales migrating 10,000 miles every year. It's simply a miracle and it must be watched respectfully and with wonder. There's no need to be afraid of a swarm, it's a beautiful thing to see. And that's how I feel about seeds. Each and every one is a crazy amazing feat of nature.

ANYWAY. Some of my potted tomatoes are already starting to bloom! A couple more weeks, and I'll get them in the ground.

Brandywine

So! That's the state of the garden. I neglected to take pictures of the blueberries, but if I can stay ahead of the birds, we're going to have a nice crop this year. Everything is doing quite nicely and we look forward to opening the bee hive tomorrow and spending some time working in the dirt!

Spittlebugs

It's that time of the year - everywhere I look I see telltale white foamy clusters on my plants.

This foamy sack is actually a nursery for baby spittlebugs, the nymphs, as they grow to size (eating all the way). The adult female lays her eggs in this foam, which protects the nymphs. 

These nurseries (in my garden, anyway), seem to mostly occur on older, larger, woody plants. The nymphs do suck juices from the plant as they mature, but do little damage.  As you can see in the picture below (I'm sorry, I cannot remember the name of this particular kind of spirea - you know how I forget to label things and I've had this one for ten years), the spittlebugs are not doing any significant harm. The plant is large and bushy, needs cutting back every fall, and produces masses of tiny white umbels that little native bees seem to love.

In the background of this section of the Woodland Garden, you can see the Spirea just beginning to bloom.

I seem to find evidence of spittlebugs only in the shady, wet part of our garden - the Woodland Garden, under the Brazilian Pepper tree .

When it starts to look as though the nymphs are taking over, I get out the hose, and blast the foamy clusters with water. This does the trick. 

Shallots

This morning, as I was making my rounds in the garden, I noticed the shallots were bolting.

Not good. This means the plant is finished fruiting, and wanting to set seed. 

So I snipped off the blooms and put them in a jar (I can at least get a pretty bouquet out of it, right?), then harvested the shallots as soon as I could get to it. They had beautiful root systems, but the soil was very, very dry. I am seriously wondering about the effectiveness of our drip system. Or maybe it's just that we're not watering nearly often nor long enough. This will take some musing about and fiddling with over the weekend. 

Meanwhile, there's a nice crop of shallots, though they did not bulb as large as I'd like. I picked a different kind of shallot this year, hoping for a larger bulb, as slicing up tiny bulbs is tedious. This crop was more uniform, but still not terribly large. Although I learned a lot when I read this article about French Grey Shallots, which is the variety I planted this year. Apparently no 'true' shallot should be very large at all. In that case, I'm a supreme grower of shallots.

I'm unsure how well these shallots will keep, as they already started setting seed. But I've put them to dry up in the usual place, the top of the chicken coop, and we have our 'tiki coop' once again.

So, I harvested shallots in June last year, and in early April this year. Interesting. We use a lot of shallots in cooking, using them in place of onion in every recipe, as we find we tolerate them better digestively. Also, according to Eating on the Wild Side, by Jo Robinson, shallots are actually much more nutritionally dense than onions. And that means they are a nutrition powerhouse!

Well, they smell good, anyway. Kate, who helped me put them on top of the coop, said "they have a very sticky smell." I thought that was a good description. Though I'm not sure she meant it favorably.

After I was done with the shallots, I checked the garlic carefully, as we usually harvest that before shallots. But the leafy tops are still fully green, they haven't started to turn brown yet, so the garlic is not ready for harvest.

I have, however, harvested the last of the turnips and prepared that bed for summer planting. Preparing a bed takes three steps:

1) After removing the drip lines, I take my pitchfork and treat it a bit like a broadfork - I slide it in to the soil at an angle, then just loosen the soil with it. I don't ever till. Tilling disturbs all the wonderful creatures on the micro level - the bugs, worms, mycelium, all those things that make your soil lovely. But roots do need space and air, so loosening it is a good idea.

2) I add a wheelbarrow-full of compost to a 4x4 bed, two barrows-full for a 4x8 bed. I use a garden rake to smooth it out and mash out any big clumps. 

3) I replace the drip lines.

That's it! So far, I've got three beds ready for summer planting. I don't like to let them sit a terribly long time - nature abhors a vacuum and will replace any bare ground with weeds if I'm not careful - but letting it sit a short time is fine. (If you look closely at the blooming shallots at the top of the page, you can see two prepared beds in the background.)

We've been harvesting beets and carrots and peas regularly.

We had a big group of teenagers over here yesterday, and they got a kick out of eating fresh carrots and peas straight from the garden. Adam had to teach one boy how to shell a pea. I found this shocking, but I don't suppose there are many kids shelling peas these days. This boy liked fresh peas so much, he had to go pick more to eat. This makes my heart very glad. And they thought it was fun to feed their carrot tops and pea pods to the chickens. 

The hops are growing well but not fast enough for me - we could use some shade on the back patio!

those little seedlings are sweet peas

Flowers continue to burst out all over. We had several days of high heat (90 degrees this past Wednesday) which confused everything - but we're having lower temps now and a chance of rain, which should right everything. I've emptied all my rain barrels in preparation for a fresh deluge. I can but hope.

Clarkia Mountain Garland - soon my pollinator garden will be bursting with these in all pink-y colors

Chinese Houses and Borage

Scarlet Monkey Flower

Culinary Sage

a Poppy seed pod

My plans for the weekend include opening the hive, as the bees have been very active, and I want to make sure they have enough room to grow. It's good to have a 'buzzing' garden once again. By the way, I'm currently reading "A Sting in the Tale" by Dave Goulson, and it's delightful - all about bumblebees. I'm looking forward to reading his new book, "A Buzz in the Meadow," next.