Compost tea the easy way

We've never been very successful with composting. We never seem to be able to keep the compost pile sufficiently moist, so the things we put in it just dessicate rather than decompose. Our latest experiment with kitchen scraps is to throw them in a Vitamix with some water and let its 2-horsepower motor blend away on the Smoothie cycle. (For comparison, the small wood chipper we bought a couple of years ago has a 1/2-horsepower motor.) It does a fine job of chopping up coffee filters along with the grounds, along with banana peels, vegetable peelings, and other kitchen waste. Then I just pour the slurry around in the garden.

Flower mulch

Sadly, most of the hollyhocks, larkspur, nasturtiums, and bachelor's button are well past their prime, so I've been removing them from the garden. Since we had good success this year with an "accidental garden" created by composting spent flower stalks in place, I decided to create a few more piles elsewhere in the yard. We bought this small chopper several years ago at Harbor Freight, intending to use it on yard waste so that we could recycle more of it as compost. It's rather finicky...it can't handle wood materials any thicker than finger-width sticks, and green material causes it to jam. It did an admirable job of grinding up hollyhock stalks which, by the way, should not be used in a vegetable garden in a semi-composted state.

My piles of deceased flowers were looking rather messy, so Mike suggested we use the chopper on them. One of the places I think I'd like to see hollyhocks and larkspur next year is in the space between our gazebo and the block wall. We took the chopper directly to an area where I had one of my piles, and fed flower stalks into it, letting it spit out the chopped material directly on the ground. It handled dried larkspur spikes almost as well as the hollyhocks, but had a little trouble with the bushier bachelor's button plants. Now we have a lovely mulch full of seeds that I hope will become flowers that I will write about next spring!

Experiments in composting

I had lunch with my retiree group at Desert Botanical Gardens today (and by the way, I recommend Gertrude's...the food was delicious) and of course the conversation went to gardening. I told them about the contact I'd had with a Master Gardener who was doing an article for Phoenix Home and Garden, and how I thought I was going to back out from consideration because I don't think our backyard is magazine worthy. I do not plant things in neat, color-coordinated groupings. I let things go to seed, pick the seeds, and toss them somewhere else. Half the fun is watching to see what comes up, and where and when. I also like to experiment, and not all my experiments work the way I hypothesized they would. One of my friends said I should describe it as a "willy-nilly" garden! She's probably right.

This is one of my current experiments. Mike built this trellis for climbing things out of scrap wood, and right now there are snow and sugar snap peas growing on it.  I planted the Zipper Cream peas I brought back from Alabama and a few Armenian cucumbers with the idea that they would take over once temperatures rise. The experiment is that I am open composting in the middle of the tent created by the trellis. I have been throwing coffee grounds, banana peels, eggshells, and other kitchen waste in this area for several months, and when it came time to pull up kale and Swiss chard plants to make room for spring plantings, I added them to the pile. Then I topped it off with a layer of dirt. And now, I'll wait to see what happens.

New Year's Resolutions

I think I read somewhere that most New Year's resolutions have to do with (a) losing weight (b) exercising more (c) giving up unhealthful habits. Most people find that they are spectacularly unsuccessful in keeping them beyond a short period of time. So instead of making resolutions for our Arizona Backyard Eden, I'll submit a few observations about what went wrong and what went right this year.

1. Attempting to spend at least 15 minutes a day doing something outside...even if it is making a circuit of the yard- good idea. Even if it is insanely hot, I usually find that I will pull a few weeds or notice a problem with the drip irrigation. I've been a fan of the Flylady approach for inside-the-house tasks for several years, and she really is correct in saying "you can do anything for 15 minutes" and that "15 minutes a day over time will make a difference". It works in the garden as well as it does in the house.

2. Mulching with semi-composted ground-up hollyhock stalks- bad idea. Two years later, I'm still pulling up baby hollyhock plants from what is supposed to be a vegetable bed.

3. Following master gardener mentors Pam Perry's advice to pull vegetable and flower plants up when they are past their prime and "just let them die"...good idea. I've gotten more edible yield this year by following this suggestion. Tomato plants rarely "come back" after the hot weather, but I got a nice crop of bush beans in the same space after I yanked the struggling tomatoes out. Oh, and though you may have read that some annual plants can be perennials in this area, you won't get a second crop of broccoli from the same plants.

4. Fall planting of tomatoes- less than successful two years in a row. In our area, you're supposed to be able to plant tomatoes in late summer, provide shade through the hot months, and pick tomatoes in late fall.  The first time I tried this idea, the plants were loaded with dozens of beautiful green tomatoes just in time to be hit by unseasonably cold weather in December. Green tomatoes will ripen on the kitchen counter, but they do not taste as good as the ones ripened on the vine. This year we put a couple of plants in large pots and wheeled them into the garage when frost was predicted. The plants lived...barely....but green tomatoes take forever to ripen in the short days of winter.

5. Revamped drip irrigation system- so far, good idea. It is less prone to clogging than microsprayers and waters the intended area more evenly.

6. Planting cattails in the upper pond...bad idea. They have escaped their intended confinement to the perimeter shelf and are crowding out the water lilies, as well as blocking the view of the waterfall. And they are very difficult to remove from the center of the pond, which is about three feet deep.

7. Planting sweet potato vine around the lower pond next to the gazebo...good idea. I planted two and they spread prolifically in spite of the summer heat, through the fall, and well into the winter. It was only today I noticed any signs of frost damage. They are easy to propagate, too.

8. Planting blackberry vine, roses, and asparagus in the same bed...not a good idea. It was nice the first season or two, but now the plants have grown to be too much for the area.In all fairness, I hadn't taken the Master Gardener class when we started on this adventure, and wasn't aware of the mantra "Right plant in the right place". We're going to attempt to transplant the blackberry plant to a more appropriate location where its spreading habits will not be such a thorny issue.

One of the nice things about gardening is that it doesn't lend itself well to New Year's resolutions. It's an organic, ongoing process. Trying new things and seeing what works and what doesn't, planning and dreaming and making improvements...that goes on all year long!

Messy things

I was excited to receive an email yesterday from the chair of this year's Real Gardens for Real People tour informing me that she was forwarding information about our "Arizona Backyard Eden" to the people who are planning the 2013 tour. Because the 2011 tour was in the west valley area, it's not likely that another tour will be scheduled in this part of the valley, but her email was very affirming and complimentary. It did get me to thinking "what if", though. What if our garden is selected for a future RGRP tour? Although productive and pleasurable, it's rather messy compared to the ones we visited on last year's tour.

There's a large pile of vegetable debris under the lemon tree, evidence of our current experimentation with open-air composting. We have two purchased compost bins, a traditional squarish one and a cylindrical tumbler contraption. Neither have worked very well for us, most likely because I haven't been diligent about keeping the material in them sufficiently moist. So this time when I cleaned out the broccoli and cauliflower leaves after last harvest, I just dumped them on the ground under the lemon tree. It's too shady to successfully grow much under there anyway. I also dump coffee grounds, banana peels, and other kitchen scraps directly into the raised beds outside the kitchen. Not very attractive, but the vegetables and flowers growing in them seem to like these additions. I also don't rake up fallen leaves from around the citrus trees in the gravel yard; they too compost in place and add needed organic material to the heavy clay soil.

Then there are the dandelion-type weeds, which seem to explode on some kind of exponential curve this time of year. I don't "dig up" the beds very often- an idea I took from a Phoenix Permaculture Guild class- and I prefer to minimize the use of chemicals, so that means lots of hand pulling of weeds, which takes lots of time I don't always have. Our largest pond is currently overwhelmed by cattails that are crowding out the water lilies. (Cattails are #3 on my list of "things I wish I hadn't planted", along with Mexican primrose and Mexican petunia.) Of course, the fish don't seem to mind living in an underwater jungle, and the hummingbirds can use the cattail fluff as nesting material. The sandstone pieces lining our lower pond are crumbling in places because I step on them while dipping water out to water potted plants...but the plants love the nitrogen-rich pond water.

Yes, our yard is messy, all right. Hopefully I'm not justifying my own laziness, but I see meaning in its messiness. When I think about it, life can be pretty messy too. We can spend our time raking gravel and spraying weeds into submission, and end up with a barren moonscape of a yard...or a life. I think I'd rather tolerate....and maybe even learn to appreciate.....a little messiness.

No picture this time, though! Not comfortable enough with my messes for that!

Good Mulch

If you miss two weeks in the garden, you miss a lot, and that's how long I've been away from it. Larkspur, hollyhock, bachelor's button, sweet alyssum, black-eyed susans, yarrow, and Gloriosa daisies have faded and gone to seed, which the birds are enjoying. Surprisingly there are a few petunias and snapdragons still blooming. Without my daily walks through the garden to pull up the tall dandelion-like weeds, they have multiplied exponentially. Some things are wilted because of malfunctioning drip irrigation emitters-checking the moisture status of plants and giving supplemental water when needed is another daily responsibility. However, nectarines, blackberries, and tomatoes are ripening, pole beans have started to produce, and the apple tree is bowed over by an abundance of fruit. Squash, melon, and cucumber plants look anemic and spindly...the spring flowers grew faster than the spring vegetables, and probably shaded them too much. The corn plants are producing tassels, and soon we will see if our hand-pollination efforts produce any edible ears.

We spent the morning pulling up flowers that were past their prime, and removing weeds and grass from the raised beds. This involved separating the dead flowers from the weeds as their remains will make a good mulch that also contains the seeds of next year's flowers. The weeds and grass have to go into the trash as we don't want their seeds spread around. (Unfortunately, quite a few of the ones that sprouted in my absence have already done that) There were a few surprises that were hidden until we removed the taller plants- tiny zinnia and snapdragon plants that sprouted from last year's seeds. After a run to Home Depot, I planted a few six-packs of vinca and portulaca in the most barren raised bed, scattered more zinnia and cosmos seeds, and topped it all off with two bags of mulch.

As I was pulling up plants and separating them into usable and nonusable piles, I was reminded of the parable Jesus told of the wheat and the tares:

Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from? ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”

This story probably came to my mind as I was working today because two recent events that occurred in close proximity have caused me to think about "the end of the age", or at least human mortality. In practical terms for the individual, I think the two are synonymous. First, there was a great deal of publicity about the May 21 Rapture prediction by Harold Camping, which of course, did not happen. Second, my younger sister suddenly and unexpectedly died due to a complication from a medication she took that was supposed to prolong her life, not take it. As "no man knows the day or the hour" of Jesus's return, so also no one knows when his or her life may end. I hope and I pray that my life will be the kind of "good mulch" that enriches the soil and contains the seeds that will one day grow into next spring's beautiful flowers.

It's hot!

The garden is a mess after being neglected while we were on vacation for two weeks. The intense heat and an irrigation malfunction affecting the raised beds did not help matters much. They look pretty sad. The "old" vegetable garden wasn't affected so much as its watering system was on a different line. We picked a bumper crop of tomatoes before we left and have at least that many green ones maturing now. No beans yet but the vines continue to grow up the trellis and look healthy. The volunteer sugar snap peas, not unexpectedly, died from the heat. I also picked a couple of giant Armenian cucumbers.

I'm trying to catch up weeding, deadheading, and pulling out spent annuals in the raised beds. The irrigation malfunction caused water to just seep from the sprayers, so I have a nice healthy crop of bermuda grass and a purslane-type weed growing in some spots, while other things are dead. I cut the allyssum way back and most of it is still green underneath, so it will probably come back. If not, it dropped lots of seeds for new plants. I can't find the Japanese eggplant- maybe it will appear once I get all the weeds and grass out, and remove some zinnias that are past their prime. I think we've lost one of the new fruit trees we planted this spring, a peach. We have really had a difficult time with stone fruits- it is hard to get the watering right with our heavy clay soil.

I was accepted to the Master Gardener program and have been to two classes so far. The first was on basic botany and I was surprised how much I remembered about cellular structure and photosynthesis from my college botany classes, which were in 1970. Fortunately the lecture did not include the Krebs citric acid cycle nor having to draw any three-dimensional chemical formulas. The second was on soil and fertilization and reminded me more of my chemistry classes. We have a huge stack of books with reading assignments each week. Some of it is pretty technical, but it's kind of fun for a geek like me. The most practical thing I have learned so far is that it's OK to put oleander and thevetia leaves in the compost bin....the toxins are broken down by the composting process. Considering how messy those are, that is certainly a good thing to know...both in terms of not sending more trash to the landfill than necessary, and in saving money because the more compost we can make, the less we have to buy!