Monarch butterflies aren’t the only ones that love butterflyweed.
Finding Asclepias tuberosa or Butterflyweed seed pods is relatively easy. Getting the seeds without a load of the white “silks,” however, can be a bit more difficult unless you know how to open and hold the pod for seed saving. Continue reading
We grow potatoes more for the fun than the quantity, since I’m the only one that eats them. This is half of this year’s crop.
This is half of our potato crop. At home we grow them in potato “bags” made of polypropylene. At schools and other places we grow them in storage containers with holes drilled in them.
One great thing about this method is that once you run out of space in the garden you can just plunk a tub anywhere, regardless of soil quality (or any soil at all) and grow potatoes. Continue reading
Flat leaf parsley. You don’t need to do this much at a time.
Now is the time to harvest and quickly preserve lots of parsley for winter soups (and soup stocks).
Sure, parsley will survive much cooler weather, but as the daylight wanes and cooler daytime temps become the norm, the aesthetic appeal of the plants diminishes and eventually it becomes a bunch of limp, dangling green branches that are halfway to mush. Continue reading
Three of the several volunteer pumpkins we’ll get this year.
Composting rarely kills off all tomato and squash seeds. This is one reason that municipal yard waste programs don’t want you to place your pumpkins in yard waste.
If you don’t want the “volunteer” tomato and squash plants that pop up, they’re easy enough to pull. Sometimes, however, they work to your advantage.
Maple Tar Spot. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This is a follow up to the recent post “maple leaves falling and we’re all going to die.”
Turns out, stories of our imminent death may have been premature. I was able to contact Professor George Hudler of Cornell for more information, and he’s got more good news. Continue reading
Some of this year’s harvest.
Every other year we typically get a great apple harvest from our Gala tree. What you’re looking at is this year’s harvest, in a plastic bag in the trash can.
Maple Tar Spot infected leaf. Image used with these permissions: Use:Saforrest, Black tar spot on sugar maple, CC BY-SA 3.0
I’ve received a lot of questions about the diseased Maple leaves falling early and whether they’re safe to compost.
I’m terrible at this whole “don’t give an answer right away in order to drag readers along” so here’s the short answer:
If you hot compost, you can compost them.
If not, send the leaves away.
More explanation and information after the jump. Continue reading
By this time in the season many people have pulled out their ball jars, boiled their lids and are well on their way to filling their pantry with home preserved goods.
We’re not doing any of that, and that’s by design.
NOT infected Sungold tomatoes
This summer has not been great for growing tomatoes. It was cold, then it was cold, and after it got hot, it then got cold again. Finally, as the weather seems to be warm long enough to keep the tomatoes happy, Late Blight is approaching.
Time to spray. Continue reading
One of these cukes is not like the other. (Left to right: Tasty Jade, Marketmore 76, overripe Diva, ripe Diva.)
Despite best efforts, cucumbers sometimes go unharvested a bit longer than they should. By the time I find them, they’ll be a bit, well, portly. Once they’ve reached that size the seeds can be large and the flesh bitter.
All is NOT lost. Continue reading
