Artichokes

My artichoke plants are just going absolutely CRAZY right now, producing so much fruit! We really enjoy them with melted butter. I was surprised, 30 years ago, when I moved to California, that folks here eat their artichokes with mayonnaise. I guess I'm an east-coaster when it comes to the melted butter thing.

The plants take over the garden every spring with both their height and their spread. I spent a good amount of time pruning out a lot of the bottom leaves so I could actually walk around them and so they don't shade out the herb bed. They are impressive in size and elicit more comments from passerby than any other plant, especially when in bloom, which will happen when we are tired of eating chokes and let the last flower heads go to seed. They do have a spectacular purple thistle flower, which are almost other-worldly in color and always covered in bees.

California is known for artichokes; most of them grow in cool coastal areas, so folks are always surprised to see them in our hot-in-summer-cold-in-winter garden. The trick is to place them in nearly full shade in this climate. These guys get a lot of dappled light, but probably only one hour or so of direct light per day. Heavily mulch the base to keep the roots cool. I've never fertilized them. They do need regular water (3x a week here). When they have finished producing and blooming, they start to look pretty bad. When they brown up completely, it's time to cut them back to the base. You'll see that they've formed a thick trunk-like stem. Next year, the artichoke will send up a new stem next to those old stems.

There are some downsides. Home-grown artichokes are smaller than the ones you get at the store, and the choke is not as meaty. Some of the ones you can buy make almost a whole meal all by themselves, they're so huge. Not so these. In fact, we find ourselves sort of removing most of the leaves to just get to the choke already, which is just as delicious and tender as any we've ever had. (One of the nice things about home grown, they don't sit on the plant as long, and they don't get as spiny for some reason - I never even have to trim the leaves.) This makes me think that the thing to do is maybe marinate and preserve these for winter. I've found a good recipe at The Washington Post.  I definitely want to try this.

Another drawback is that they are a haven for earwigs. Earwigs can be good or bad, they certainly are a yucky-looking bug and I find them highly inconvenient more than anything. They like to hide in dark, cool, moist places. Well. The artichoke heads are perfect for that. So when I pick them, I have to spend quite a bit of time cleaning them outside in the yard, to get rid of the earwigs. I tend to fill a bucket with water, cut the artichoke flower head off the plant, and throw it into the bucket of water. This gets the first flush of earwigs out. Then I pour that water in the chicken coop (on the compost pile) and the chickens eat the earwigs. Bonus. Then I spend another stupid amount of time cleaning them in the kitchen sink; I have to really open up the buds and get in there for any stray earwigs, and also any gunk. I don't need to tell you what the gunk is. It's not a fun part of organic gardening, cleaning up the bugs and their crap. It does make me wonder what farms do to clean them? I'm sort of guessing they throw the heads in a bucket of water and bleach or something, which I also don't like to think about too much.

So if you can stand the earwig situation, you might consider growing these perennial vegetables in your garden. They are truly spectacular plants from the start, and when mature, provide a high yield of spring veg. 

Garlic & Shallots

First, the good news. The shallots are in, and it's a great harvest. You can see in the picture above that they are drying above the chicken coop; after a couple of weeks there, I'll braid them and hang them inside from the Shaker Peg Rail. I usually like to plant French Gray shallots, but couldn't find them this year, so instead planted red - they were prolific. Not as big in the bulb, so to speak, but each clove made 5-6 big onions. So I'm pleased with this harvest.

Now for the bad news:

That's it for the garlic harvest. I planted my usual Inchelium Red, and it just didn't take this time. I planted it in three different places, but the main bed of garlic did terribly. The heads are incredibly small and under-formed. I'm so disappointed, I can't even express it. We go through so much garlic every year, and I count on this harvest. Ugh.

One thing I found as I was cleaning the garlic of dirt - millions of tiny black aphids.

They're all over the green part of the stems, and this could be part of the reason why they didn't do as well as usual. We had a weird, dry winter until March, and then the skies unloaded, but it might have just been too late. I broke up the soil in both the garlic and shallot beds, and they both were compacted and dry. So I added a ton of organic matter to both (homemade compost/chicken manure), some organic granulated fertilizer too, and in one I planted cucumbers and the other has both watermelon and cantaloupe. We'll see how they do.

Meanwhile, I was down to our last two heads of garlic from last year, and all the cloves had sprouted and were soft. So I diced it all up, removing the sprout from each clove, and dried them on 125 degrees in my dehydrator and made a little (a very little) garlic powder. It smells heavenly.

I took all those bitter sprouts from the garlic cloves and planted them. Maybe they'll root and I'll get a surprise harvest, come Fall.

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.