Of Rats and Strawberries

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Ann Lovejoy
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Letting The Light Shine In Dark Places

On Monday, a headlight was out on my car so I took it to the auto shop to get the bulb replaced. I have a spiffy little red Smart car which gets great mileage and is a blast to drive. It is, however, very small. The engine is in the back and there is hardly any front to it; the driver is just a foot or so away from the headlights.

When the mechanic popped the front panel off, he yelled and several of his co-workers rushed over. In a minute, they got brooms and sticks and powerful flashlights and started poking away at my car. The narrow space between the headlights was packed with what looked like dried leaves but when the men poked them, several critters slithered away into the dim recesses of my tiny car, which I didn’t even know HAD dim recesses.

Enter The Rats

“It’s a mouse!” one man yelled. Another said, “No way, they’re HUGE,” and the third man said, “Dude, those were rats for sure.” He thumped the sides of my car while his companion got an air hose and blasted air into every nook and crevice. Soon they had a pressure washer running as well and my car was really rocking. I thought about asking them to wash the car while they were at it but felt the request might not be well received.

All this time, no rodents of any size had emerged from the car, which seemed ominous. Where were they? The men said that the rats could get into amazingly tight places and hang on for a long time. It turned out that they had seen over half a dozen other rat nests in cars over the past few weeks, probably because of all the rain. Rodents like to find dry nesting spots and fair enough except that I am not willing to share my little car with a rat family.

Hitting All The Puddles

They fellows cheerfully advised me to drive through every puddle I could find and go over lots of bumps. “Don’t go home,” one man cautioned, saying the rats would bail but get back on board. He suggested I do lots of errands so the rats would jump out elsewhere. He also told me to tuck some of those noxious clothing dryer sheets that smell so revolting into the front end because the smell would drive the rats out and keep them from returning.

I bought some–and they really do stink. Yuck! I put them under the little hood and drove along merrily. After a bit I was feeling chilly so I turned on the heat. Within minutes, I was sneezing and my ears teared up and I started to feel ill. I realized belatedly that the air intake for my car is in the front end, which now was packed with revolting dryer cloths. Oh well. Being cold is a small price to pay for being rat free.

Ditto for the Deer

I then recalled that several gardeners have reported good luck with using dryer cloths to drive deer away from tender young plants. Since my garden is regularly ravaged by our local herd of deer, I decided to plant out some dryer sheets along with my strawberries. Deer love strawberries and in the past, I have experimented with many ways to keep deer out of my berry beds.

One of the more successful techniques I’ve used is to buy big bargain-sized packets of skinny bamboo kebab skewers and poke them thickly, pointy side up, in amongst the berries. This time I decided to amplify that by threading some of the stinking dryer clothes on the skewers. In the past, my strawberries were sheared regularly by the deer, but so far, none of my tender new strawberry plants have been pillaged. Success? We’ll see….

Here’s To The Lovely Strawberries

Again this year I am planting all our food crops in big tree tubs on my South-facing deck, where the deer have not yet ventured. My strawberry bed is in the garden proper, but for backup, I’m growing a few dozen plants in tubs as well. I especially love the little Alpine strawberries that grow wild all over Northern Italy and Switzerland. Though tiny, each fragrant mouthful offers a burst of intensely delicious flavor.

I’m trying a new-to-me everbearing variety called Rugen Improved Alpine which boasts inch-long fruit. That doesn’t sound so big, but my old Alpines’ fruit was about half that size. It took forever to pick enough fruit for the family so most ended up on my breakfast cereal (unless I ate them all while weeding).

I’m also growing Golden Alexandria Alpine, with vivid chartreuse foliage that makes a pretty accent against dusky foliage (mine are partnered with red leafed lettuces). This one has ruby red, round little fruits like bright buttons with an especially sweet flavor. Serve these little treats with thick, Greek yogurt with a little honey and some chopped lemon balm or fresh mint for a refreshing dessert.

Invite In The Bees

Native to open meadows, Alpine strawberries appreciate a sunny spot with at least six hours of direct light each day. Because pollination can be an issue, I planted my Alpines between clumps of sweet alyssum and fragrant herbs that are frequently visited by bees. I’ve got lavender, chives, thyme, and rosemary in many places throughout the garden so with any luck, I should get good fruitset.

Many people plant Alpines along their garden paths, but in my experience, they are more productive when given a little plot of their own. Alpines like good, rich garden soil blended with compost, and I usually top dress with composted dairy manure as well. It’s easy to over-feed with commercial fertilizers, resulting in lots of saw-toothed foliage and very little fruit. Instead, I give them some liquid kelp in the spring and again in early summer and renew their compost after harvesting the berries.

Posted in Garden Prep, Growing Berry Crops, Pets & Pests In The Garden, Soil, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Eradicating Buttercups and Horsetail

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Ann Lovejoy
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Beautiful But Dangerous

As spring arrives, the garden fills with primroses, crocus, and daffodils. If you live on heavy clay soil, the garden may also fill up with buttercups and horsetail. It’s really quite fascinating that weeds this challenging are such beautiful plants. Lustrous buttercups hold up their golden goblets to the sun, their petals gleaming as though glazed with golden Chinese lacquer. Feathery horsetail rises in delicately textured turrets, its whorling fronds unfurling in the sparkling spring air. Why don’t we love and worship them?

Lovely as they undeniably are, these two weeds are the scourge of many a gardener, creating a great deal of frustrating work. This is especially true for those dealing with clay. True, the heavy clay soils so common in the Northwest are often quite nutritious, supporting a wide range of plants that appreciate being mucky wet in winter and bone dry in summer. However, unimproved clays can be tricky to work with, apt to promote root rots and various fungal disorders.

Weeding With Drainage

Interestingly, the answer to clay soil improvement is the same as the answer to sandy soil improvement: In a word, it is compost. Rake an inch of compost into your lawn each spring and fall and you will notice a marked improvement in turf health. Mulch your beds and borders with 2-4 inches of compost each spring and fall and you will see decidedly happier, healthier plants.

However, where horsetail and buttercups flourish, another problem must also be addressed. Improving the drainage on your site will help almost everything to grow better, from lawn to flowers and vegetables. The only plants that won’t enjoy well aerated soil are those like buttercup and horsetails that prefer heavy clay soils that are low in oxygen.

Adding Simple Drains

How do you improve your drainage on clay soils? In general, this involves adding drains of various kinds. Depending on your site and situation, you may want to make or improve a curtain drain around your house. You will certainly be well served by trenching out all pathways and turning them into French drains. French drains are trenches of varying depths filled with gravel of varying sizes, again depending on what local conditions demand.

Dig your pathway about 18 inches to 2 feet deep and 3 to 5 feet wide. (Or, more sustainably, cause all that digging to be done by others.) These excavated paths can be infilled with 1- or 2-inch gravel for the first foot or 18 inches, then topped with 6 inches of 3/4 minus crushed gravel. (This means the largest pieces are 3/4 inch, and includes smaller bits which help the gravel both to pack well and to drain well.)

Mound To Bring Air In, Let Water Out

Such paths will allow more air into your soil, improving root growth in nearby beds. To maximize the effects, elevate your plants by mounding all the beds and borders. This does not require tilling or digging; just lift your plants, rebuild your beds by adding topsoil and compost, then replant everything. (It’s a good time to divide crowded perennials as well.)

Sounds simple? Maybe yes, maybe no. In reality, this is only a simple process when you are making a new garden. It remains fairly simple in situations where all the existing plants are young and small. In gardens filled with an abundance of mature plants, mounding is no longer simple and you will probably prefer to do what you can with compost and drains.

Help For Mature Gardens

To help heal soggy gardens with mature but struggling shrubs, begin with the trenched pathway concept outlined above. In addition, add 2-4 inches of compost to all beds and borders in spring and top them off in fall. Next, find a nearby nursery that makes aerobically brewed compost tea like SoilSoup. These living teas are like adding manure without a shovel; they open the soil and return it to abundant life without involving back-breaking work.

Next, begin a monthly spray program for plants, lawn, beds and borders. As the soil life and health increases, you will be able to cut back your compost tea spray program to every other month, then quarterly.  You will notice as an added bonus that your roses will have clean foliage and your plants won’t be suffering from mildews and botrytis.

Boosting Lawn Health

To improve lawns where buttercups thrive, rake in compost as mentioned above and spray with compost tea monthly all year round. If you have big soggy spots that are wet all winter, this may or may not prove to be enough. You may also need to cut drains across the lawn, fill them with gravel, then cover them with soil and turf.

Battling Buttercup By Hand

In time, improved soil will bolster turf root growth to the point that grass will be favored over buttercups. In the meantime, a fabulous little weeding tool makes buttercup removal an active pleasure. Even  surly teens will enjoy popping strings of buttercups out of the soil with this cute little gadget.

Called a Japanese weeding fork, it consists of a 3-4 inch handle with a two-inch metal blade. The narrowly forked blade has a deep notch that is exactly the right size and shape for buttercup roots.This neat small tool pops out the buttercups with a flick of the wrist and is extremely satisfying to use.

Japanese weeding forks come with wooden or plastic handles and cost under $10. This is the perfect tool for removing buttercups that have insinuated themselves into a well-filled border, where larger tools would damage plants just coming into bloom. It’s also good for removing weeds from cracks in paving or stacked stone walls.

Cutting Horsetail

With horsetail, the rule is; cut, don’t pull. Every time you tug a piece of horsetail, the root scar stimulates the production of even more shoots. Cutting depletes the root, while pulling energizes it.

Posted in composting, Drainage, Garden Prep, Soil, Sustainable Gardening, Weed Control | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Dealing With Those Darling Deer

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Ann Lovejoy
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What To Try When Deer Appear

photo by Leesa at wildvizionz.com

The first sign is usually cropped foliage, perhaps on perennials or young shrubs. You might initially think, “Wow, somebody did a really poor pruning job here,” until you realize that you are looking at the gnawed ends of juicy twigs and stems. If deer browsed lightly then wandered on their way, it wouldn’t be such a problem. However, once they find their way to your garden, they tend to return often and linger indefinitely.

In my present garden, we have a resident herd of about a dozen deer, including a mom with 2-year-old twins. The young bucks like to play on the little meadow below the house, and sometimes we even see them touching noses with our curious cats, who seem totally unafraid to find such big critters in their own backyard. Sweet? Well, sort of.

Coexistence is certainly possible, especially if you are not a gardener. If you are, it is very challenging to maintain a positive attitude toward the deer and keep on trying to gardening despite their depredations. If you plan to grow your own food and hope to reap the harvest you plant, then you simply must keep deer out of the garden.

Best For The Birds

The best deer deterrent is a big, energetic, noisy dog. Barring that, gardeners resort to a host of strategies, all of which work for a while. Many gardeners report that deer-deterring devices that emit combinations of water, sound, and even lights are very effective (though this can change from year to year). I’ve used the Scare-Crows with success (though crows quickly learn how to trigger them and use the water to wash in on hot summer days).

Other folks swear by sprays such as Deer-Off and Tree Guard. I’ve seen published studies that report totally different (and contradictory) results from applying all of these substances. In general, all these various techniques are most effective when used in combination and when the combinations are changed periodically.

My own garden abuts wooded land on two sides and we are definitely on a deer superhighway, the thoroughfares deer use daily. In my experience, there are no totally deer proof plants. My deer eat ivy, rosemary, and even lavender on occasion. Their appetites vary, and what they gorge on one year may be ignored the next, while plants they disdained for years suddenly become irresistible. Young deer are more adventurous than their elders, happily taste testing almost everything that comes their way.

To Fence Or Not To Fence

Many people swear by deer fencing, which is only effective if well built and comprehensively installed (and thus very expensive). Effective deer fencing must be at least 8 feet high, and 10 feet is better. I’ve seen workable deer fencing made from two 4-foot widths of stockade wire, placed with the denser wires at ground level and at the top. Strung between sturdy supports, this keeps rabbits out as well as deer, but raccoons won’t be deterred at all.

My solution is not to fence but to provide a large assortment of plants, including many kinds of local favorite natives. When there is enough variety, something will always survive to look great. For instance, deer adore our native red twig dogwood, which normally grows to 8 feet high and wide. They are less interested in other twiggy dogwoods, but will nibble them from time to time.

Letting Deer Help You

I was able to use this pattern to advantage when I planted my garden school parking lot some years ago.  The planning department ordered me to put in an 8-foot visual screen of plants to hide the parking lot from the road. The local police department, however, ordered to me plant a screen that was no more than 3 feet high. Hmm.

To satisfy both requirements, I planted the native red twig dogwood (Cornus sanguinea), which was on the planning department’s list of acceptable choices. That got me the vital permit required to open our school. Until the Sequoia Center became a synagogue,  the deer kept the dogwood trimmed to a height of 3 feet, which made the police happy and allowed a clear view of the road from the parking lot.

In my current garden, the presence of the red twig dogwoods helps to protect several other, more ornamental dogwoods I grow, which are barely touched when so many tasty red twigs are available. This is what I call “win-win” planting.

Deer and Roses

There are of course other good solutions. In one garden I know, a young boy planted a hedge of “dog” roses around his mother’s garden. These were not the wild dog roses of England’s hedgerows, but a mixed assortment of free roses that nobody really liked much. He figured (quite rightly, as it turns out), that the deer would nibble these and leave the choicer ones inside the garden alone. Another neighbor’s woodland garden is similarly protected by an irregular “hedge” of recycled plants, including many freebie roses, that distract the deer from the garden’s more valued flowers.

In my own gardens, I generally plant several varieties of anything that deer tend to feed on, such as the twiggy dogwoods and smaller willows. By offering a small smorgasbord, I generally escape the wholesale damage that occurs when deer find a concentration of one special plant they really love.

Rose gardens are notable for attracting deer with sorrowful results. When we incorporate our roses and lilies and other delicious plants into naturalistically layered gardens where they share the borders with many other kinds of plants, they are less likely to be found than when they are temptingly massed. It’s silly to set plants out like a salad bar, then get angry when something takes us up on our offer. Mixing tasty plants into mixed borders makes them harder for pests to find.

Posted in Garden Prep, Pets & Pests In The Garden, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Winter Harvest

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Ann Lovejoy
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Frost-Nipped Kale and Cabbage

After our usual Northwestern mix of freezing and milder days, with heavy rains and wild winds, it is delightful to find much of my kale and cabbage still edible. In fact, a touch of frost leaves the cole family sweeter and crisper than ever, just like leeks.

Most of my daily salads involve kale as well as spinach and some kind of cabbage. At this time of year, I steam the tougher stems and stem-end foliage or use them in stir-fries, saving the more tender leaf tips for eating raw.

Our winter salads are beautified and enriched with a variety of kales, from bold red Russian and rippled black Tuscan to frilly Scotch and blue-green Winterbor. Although they can get a little tough over time, all are equally delicious when shredded or sliced into ribbons and quickly cooked with a little olive oil and garlic. A touch of sea salt and a drizzle of fresh lemon or lime juice makes them utterly scrumptious (sometimes that’s all I need for dinner!).

Make Room For Choys and Jois

It’s still too early to plant, but I’m prepping my beds so spring will find them ready to fill. I’ll probably start with some of the Asian choys, fast-growing cool weather crops that taste sweetest in fall and early winter. Bok choy and joi choy are especially strong performers in early spring and from late summer into fall.

Like cabbage, Asian choys must be harvested as a whole plant. Compost the tough outer leaves and use the tender inner ones raw or lightly cooked. Shred the sweet-hot leaves of Asian choys into salads, stir-fries, and soups, and add shredded Napa cabbage or bok choy to fish tacos and tuna salads.

Not sure what to do with kale? Toss torn up bits of young kale with salads, shred it on sandwiches, or sliver it into  soup for a crunchy garnish. Mix finely shredded kale with crinkled Savoy cabbage, tangerine sections, and pomegranate seeds for a sparkling winter salad.

Eating The Rainbow

Nutritionists remind us to eat food of every color daily, so here are some delicious ways to do jut that. Colorful and healthy, Winter Rainbow Salad offers delightful contrasts of flavor and texture, from crunchy cabbage to juicy tangerines, while savory pumpkin seeds add extra protein (with very few carbs, if you care).

Winter Rainbow Salad With Orange Dressing

2 cups Savoy cabbage, finely shredded
2 cups Winterbore or blue kale, finely shredded
2 cups young spinach
1 cup red cabbage, shredded
1 cup purple cabbage, shredded
1/4 cup red onion, chopped
2 tangerines, peeled and sectioned
1/4 cup toasted pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup Fresh Orange Dressing (see below)

In a bowl, combine all ingredients and gently toss. Let stand for 10-15 minutes before serving. Serves 4-6.

Fresh Orange Dressing

1/3 cup canola or rice oil
2 tablespoons plain rice vinegar
1 organic orange, juiced, rind grated
1/8 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon maple syrup or honey
2-3 drops chipotle Tabasco sauce

Combine all ingredients in a jar, starting with smaller amounts where indicated. Close tightly, shake well to emulsify, adjust seasoning to taste. Refrigerate leftovers for up to 3 days. Makes about 1 cup.

Posted in fall/winter crops, Garden Prep, Recipes, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged | Leave a comment