May Wreath

This month's wreath is made out of a flower familiar to all of us, Nigella damascena or Love-In-A-Mist. You plant this flower once, and you'll have it for as long as you want it. It can be a little pushy in your flower beds, but I really like it coming up every year and allow it to re-seed freely. It has that lovely, tall, blow-in-the-wind quality that I like so much; it's ferny foliage can be a nice backdrop for larger, showier flowers. Plus, the bees like it.

The botany of this flower is interesting. First of all, all parts of this plant are toxic and should not be consumed. Secondly, the flower 'petals' that you see are not petals at all, but colored sepals. The actual flower petals are clawed at the base of the stamens (they look sort of green). The stamens (male parts) are numerous. The pistils (female parts) are in the center and have that spider look. As you can see in the flower below, there are five pistils, which means five carpels, or chambers, in the ovary. Which forms a bloated capsule that opens when dry to release all the seeds. The capsules are attractive too. The ferny leaves are pinnately divided and thread-like.

All this to say, it's a lovely flower, easy to grow, it comes in shades of blue, purple, pink, and white, and I think you should go plant some in your garden. :)

Happy May!

Seed Donation for the Beekeepers Association

I've started volunteering a little time with my local beekeeping association, with their community education team. We go to all sorts of events - pollinator days at local wildlife museums, farmers markets, garden clubs, and especially in to local schools to teach the kids about bees and how they can help them. 

I've done a couple of these events now, and it's highly enjoyable. I love kids; young kids especially are so openly curious about everything and so willing to learn. We were at a local elementary school last week where we talked with three different first-grade classes. First one of us gives a little presentation, and then there are the ubiquitous stations - one with honey tasting, one with beekeeping equipment available to try on and touch, one with age-appropriate books about bees and coloring pages, and one with an observation hive. This hive is made of glass, and the queen is marked so that the kids can find her easily. 

I was struck by something at this event. We were saying goodbye to the kids and telling them to 'plant flowers for the bees!' and the kids pointed to our seed packets that were there for viewing purposes only and said, "Can we have a seed packet?" And we had none to give them.

Well. I can't let something like that stand. So when I got home, I called down to Renee's Garden Seeds in Felton (sorta near Santa Cruz), and talked to them about a donation of last season's seeds. Almost immediately, they agreed to donate almost 2000 seed packets, as long as I was willing to pay the shipping. And yes I was. And I did. And yesterday I got the most glorious box on my front porch.

Not every packet is appropriate - there are some things like decorative gourds. Well, those actually could be for the bees, because they adore squash blossoms. But you know what I mean. However most are just right for kids to plant and watch grow, and hopefully, see a bee or two come visit them! Right away I packed up a box to take to the elementary school where we were last week and dropped them off with a note. Yay!

I want to send an enormous THANK YOU to Renee's for these seeds! What a generous local company! I do tend to buy an awful lot of my annual vegetable and flower seeds from Renee's. I know I've mentioned them before. 

Not the first grade class last week. This is Kate's first grade class on a field trip to a local orchard. Kate's focus is on something else entirely, which has never been unusual for her, but most of the class was pretty into it if I recall correctly. (It was 8 years ago!) 

Catching kids while they're young and curious is vital to keeping them engaged in the natural world. I really believe this and I think this sort of thing doesn't happen enough. When I'm at local parks with the beekeepers and the observation hive, older kids are also very interested; in the later years of elementary are studying metamorphosis and can understand what is happening in the capped brood cells of the hive. And I don't know about you, but I'm more likely to help an insect or bug if I can appreciate it. And in order to appreciate it, I need to know all about it. I'm looking at you, spiders.

As for the flowers in my own garden, well, I think we can call this the Spring of the Phacelia. I remember spreading a bunch of seed two years ago and pow, this year it all came up. Never give up on your seeds, ladies and gents.

In a similar vein, it's looking like it'll be the Summer of the Hollyhocks.

The Benefits of Wasps

Many years ago, Kate attended a local summer Girl Scout camp, which took place in a secluded canyon in Briones Regional Wilderness, which spans four cities and is a haven for wildlife. One of the highlights of this camp was that the girls learned how to cook lunch over a campfire, and did this (with the leaders' help) every day. We're not talking hot dogs and hamburgers; we're talking cast iron dutch ovens on coals, and using box ovens, to cook everything from taco casserole to potato and bacon hash. Dessert always followed; cake or cobbler, with ice cream made in hand-cranked buckets, natch. It was fun. Messy and a little dangerous, but fun. There was one major problem every year, and this was yellow jackets. The tiny beasties would swarm the picnic tables in droves. Everything had to be constantly covered. Girls, aged 5-15, screamed repeatedly. There was always a group of them running down or up a canyon, screeching about the 'bees.' 

My job at this camp was nature leader, so, me being me, I did a lot of research about the yellow jackets and incorporated some of what I learned into the lessons, hoping to calm fears. For instance: Did you know that yellow jackets are one of nature's best garbage collectors and composters? Without them, we'd be knee-deep in detritus. Yellow jackets also eat insect pests that bother us and eat our crops, like flies and caterpillars. I often find them, in the heat of summer, scavenging dying bees from the 'graveyard' under my hive. They take those back to their nests and feed them to their young. Yellow jackets even pollinate flowers, like in the photo above, something I never knew before today. I watched this lady long enough to take the picture and fire it off to my insect professor, who wrote back immediately: "Yes indeed, they love pollen and any sweet liquid like nectar!" It's hard to hate anything that pollinates flowers.

The problem, of course, is that they are so aggressive. They get into our food when we try to eat outside. They drop into soda cans, surprising the drinker on the next sip. They can sting repeatedly without any repercussions. It's so freaking annoying. I hate them hovering around the chickens, eating any tidbits I put out for them. If the yellow jackets nest in your yard, they are very hard to eradicate. As my dad found out, last summer, in his own yard, they are not deterred by any kind of bee suit and will sting through them with abandon if their home is threatened.

Yellow jackets are social creatures, just like bees, and in fact are in the same family as honeybees and ants (Hymenoptera). The queens, newly hatched in fall, overwinter in leaf litter. In the spring, they emerge and find a place to start a nest. They eat until they are strong enough to start laying eggs. This is happening right now, here in CA. A yellow jacket trap placed outside now might just catch queens, and prevent a hoard of worker wasps over the summer. The only one I've found that works is this one.

Image credit: PestWorld

Another wasp that we often find around our homes and gardens is the Paper Wasp. These tend to make their nests under overhanging eaves. I have a group that nests every year in the shallow eaves under Adam's train shed. Paper wasps are great pollinators, but their true benefit comes from the fact that they are very efficient hunters of caterpillars, beetle larvae, and flies. They attack them and take them back to their nests to feed their young. They are aggressive if bothered, but mostly just stay to themselves. They don't care about our picnic dinners, which means they are very polite guests in the home garden.

Image credit: Bugguide.net

Then there are all the myriad kinds of predatory wasps, most of which you'll never see, which parasitize caterpillars. This means they lay their eggs in the body of the caterpillar, which then hatch and consume the caterpillar from the inside out. Yuck, and cool!

So the next time you see a wasp of any kind in the garden, instead of freaking out, try to focus on the fact that they perform an important service for us. I'm not saying not to kill them; my patience is often tried to the limit with yellow jackets. But just give it some thought before automatically switching into 'destroy' mode. 

Foliar Feeding Experiment/Overview of Nutrition requirements of Plants

(Thank you to Laura Forlin, co-chair of the Merritt College Horticulture Dept, for teaching me all this stuff.)

We completed our Foliar Feeding Experiment yesterday in lab. The results were interesting, and I want to share them with you. But before I do that, we need to review a couple of things.

What do plants require to grow, thrive, and set seed? 

An element is essential if: 1) A plant cannot complete it's life cycle without it; 2) no other element can perform the same function; 3) it is directly involved in the nutrition of the plant; and 4) missing or insufficient supplies adversely affect plant growth.

There are three macronutrients that everyone forgets, they are non-mineral, and they are required in larger quantities than any of the others. Can you guess what they are?

They are obtained from the atmosphere and water.

Yes! Oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. 

The next six elements are macronutrients and are the most important after the big three: Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), Potassium (K), Calcium (Ca), Magnesium (Mg), and Sulfur (S). These are required in large quantities. N, P, and K more than the others. 

The next eight are micronutrients - still essential, but required in much smaller amounts: Chloride (Cl), Iron (Fe), Boron (B), Manganese (Mn), Zinc (Zn), Copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), and Molybdenum (Mo). 

Many of these are present in the soil already and you may not need to supply them. Knowing your levels of nutrients can be important, and that's why folks do soil tests, to discover what is lacking and add it in appropriate amounts. Now this is important: TOO MUCH FERTILIZER CAN BE WORSE THAN TOO LITTLE. I cannot stress this enough. If you just add chemicals willy-nilly, they will either be leached out quickly (entering the water supply, affecting organisms downstream) or they will damage your soil and plants. 

MOST SYNTHETIC FERTILIZERS HAVE HUGE AMOUNTS OF THE NUTRIENTS. You buy something like a 16-16-16, that's super hot. Putting that on your plants can be very damaging. Most synthetic fertilizers are completely water-soluble, meaning they enter soil solution quickly, are taken up quickly, and are leached quickly. It's wasteful, it's expensive, it can damage your plants, it can kill your soil microorganisms, and it damages the environment. If you've decided that you need to fertilize your plants, ORGANIC FERTILIZERS ARE THE WAY TO GO. They have a much smaller percentage of nutrients (like 3-3-3), most are only partly water soluble (which means some will be available right away, and some needs to be mineralized by the soil life first, giving you longer lasting nutrients; it also means less will be leached quickly from the soil and cause environmental problems), and they are made from products which are found in nature, and are often made out of waste-stream materials like feather meal, blood meal, bone meal. CHECK THE LABELS ON THE PACKAGES to know what you are getting and how high the percentages are.

Container plants will need regular feeding because they are disconnected from the soil life. BUT - if you are adding lots of organic matter to your in-ground beds, mulching, using cover crops, crop rotation, etc - you probably won't need much in the way of fertilizers at all. The only way to know for sure is to test your soil. 

Image Credit: Lowe's

You can buy a simple home-testing kit for about $10, which is really all most of us need - they aren't perfectly accurate but will give you enough of a result to figure out your imbalances. However, if you're feeling adventurous and you want some serious results, you can send your soil away to be tested at a lab. For a more conventional nutrient test, you can send a sample to U Mass. It costs very little, and you'll get a very interesting report. They will also give you recommendations based on your nutrient levels and soil texture. This is a fine way to go, but it's maybe not the most important test you can do.

You see, the microorganisms present in your soil determine your soil health. They are the ones who process the minerals and make them available to your plants. If you really want to know how alive your soil is (and you want it to be very, very alive), you could send a sample to Earthfort. They will test to determine the amounts of bacteria, fungi, nematodes (beneficial and detrimental) and protozoa in your soil. They can also tell you the percentage of organic matter. This costs a bit more, but it's probably worth it. I haven't done this yet, but I very much want to. 

So that's an overview of nutrition. Now I want to tell you the results of our foliar feeding experiment. 

The reason we even did this experiment is because of all the hype surrounding foliar feeding. Search for it on the internet, and you'll get some fabulous claims.  Let me be clear: the science is definitely not there to support those claims. There just isn't enough peer-reviewed data to say definitively that foliar feeding works. Plus, plant biology doesn't really support anything being taken up by the leaves. Each leaf has stomata, little openings on the undersides, which allow for gas exchange. But they don't take anything else up in there. So how does a foliar substance get in the leaf in the first place? It hasn't been discovered, if it exists. Also, there is a translocation of nutrients within the plant, but the nutrients themselves come from the roots. Photosynthate moves down, nutrients move up. Mostly. Not always. Things can be reallocated around the plant if need be. But there is no pathway from the stomata to the xylem or phloem from the stomata. 

There IS evidence that spraying microbiology on the leaves, like with compost tea, provides a coating on the leaf that is helpful in many ways. The leaves need good biota just like the roots do. It can protect them from predators, keep them from being sunburned, allow good stuff to live on the surface. It's just that it isn't clear that anything actually ever gets in the leaves except gases. 

Our teacher, Laura, wanted us to try an experiment to see if we could get any definitive results. Once the plants (chard for my team, again) germinated and had a couple of leaves, we began to cover the soil and spray only the leaves with macronutrients. We sprayed some with organic all-purpose fertilizer, and some with synthetic all-purpose fertilizer. We also had several controls that got soil drenches of these same fertilizers. We drenched the soil of each plant with micronutrients each week so that wouldn't be a limiting factor. The soil surface of each plant was covered with fresh plastic wrap each week, so no accidental dripping from the leaves would occur. The controls were covered as well so we could make a comparison.

Spoiler alert: They all did horribly. Even the controls weren't so hot, we think because the soil was covered each week and there was a lack of oxygen.

Here's our best-looking control:

Really floppy. Not good strength. Nice color, but not a lot of growth.

Here is an example of one of our foliar-sprayed plants. Remember, this plant got zero macronutrients other than on the leaves.

Just terrible. It's very chlorotic, and it didn't grow at all from the time we started spraying until the end of the experiment. What a total waste of a plant.

So there you have it. Foliar sprays are really a waste of time. Unless you feel that you need some good biota on the leaves, you can skip it. Add your inputs to the soil itself. Making compost tea is fine, but just drench the soil with it, where it can do some real good. Don't bother with the spraying.

***** edited 5/1/18  Talked to a fellow student last night who is doing his own foliar feeding experiment at home with tomato plants. He is spraying with a calcium/mag supplement and getting terrific results compared to the controls. So it just goes to show that more research is needed in this field! Different nutrients on different plants might react differently!!! Take my experiment with a grain of salt, and look for other scholarly papers on this subject. 

New Tomato System

I think I write those same words about this time every year, don't I? It feels like we've tried every method, and they all work fine. Mostly. Not perfectly. I still haven't found the perfect system. I'm going to keep trying new things until I find it!

This year, I decided to plant about half the tomatoes I did last year - only 32. One (or two) of each of my favorite varieties, and some new ones to see if I find a new obsession. I'll list the tomatoes we have with links to their descriptions below. (I know some of you are as smitten with tomatoes as I am!) The problem with growing ~70 plants last year is that there wasn't room for anything else. And I missed home-grown corn! winter squash! melons! pole beans! And all those plants require a lot of sun. So all those things are going in the sunniest spaces, along with peppers (both sweet and hot) and cucumbers, which we never go without. Plus I have a whole bed of basil and collards. Whole beds of cilantro and dill. It feels diverse and fun, after a yard full of tomatoes last summer. 

However I still wanted lots of tomatoes. So I knew I needed to find a system where I could plant more closely. Enter: Staking and Pruning. Each tomato plant has its own stake and will be trained to climb up it (basically, that means I tie it up a lot), and each plant will be pruned to only the leader. No side shoots allowed. This should keep them tidy, with plenty of airflow around them. 

Does this mean more work for me? Um, yes. I'm going to have to spend some quality time every week in the tomato patch, keeping things ship-shape. I'm also probably going to have to amend the soil at some point with some organic, all-purpose fertilizer, or more compost, or worm castings. Luckily the soil is in top form after all those covers this winter.

I usually use tomato twine to keep things tied up, which is fine - soft and durable. But I wanted something a little more sturdy for the bottoms of the plants as the main stem grows thicker and stronger. So I found this sort of velcro strapping - and I love it.

I have them nice and loose right now, to leave plenty of room for the stem to grow. We'll see how these fare as the pressure on them grows greater, but as of right now, they are terrific.

What system have you decided to use in your garden this year?

Here's a list of the tomatoes I'm growing, with links to their descriptions.

Cherry: Sungold, Austin Red Pear, Beam's Yellow Pear, and two new ones, Green Vernissage, which is leading the race and is the tallest tomato in the patch, and Black Vernissage. We always plant a few cherries because they ripen first and give us our first tomato taste of the season while the bigger guys ripen. Also, Tom likes to go out and pick a pint-jar-full every morning to take to work, either with cucumbers and rice vinegar, or with fresh mozzarella and basil.

Slicers/Beefsteak: Italian Heirloom (technically a slicer but meaty like a paste, I planted two), Dester, Big Dena (new to us), Black from Tula (new to us), Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Kellogg's Breakfast, Martha Washington, Carbon (new to us), Pink Berkeley Tie Dye, Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Mortgage Lifter, Vorlon (new to us), Black Beauty (new to us), Kolb (new to us), Pineapple (new to us), and Crnkovic Yugoslavian (new to us). I have a lot of dark colored tomatoes and yellow tomatoes. The yellow ones seem to go later into the fall and form the backbone of our late summer/early fall production. The purple ones seem to have the deepest flavor. 

Paste/Plum: Gezahnte (new to us, I've planted two), Cour di Bue (new to us), Ukrainian Purple, Hungarian Heart (I planted two), Opalka, Amish Paste, and Sheboygan. I use these mostly for cooking down into canned goods. I like paste tomatoes that are very large and thick, because they seem to do better resisting blossom end rot.

So, here's to tomatoes, and here's to summer! It was 89 degrees in our yard yesterday afternoon, but it looks like we're going to cool down again, thankfully.