"A Year in the Garden" video

A fun new video has popped up on YouTube. "A Year in the Garden" is a time-lapse video that shows one family of three's raised-bed gardening efforts in a the Los Angeles area. It's more artfully done than usual, with nice touches like the little cast of insect characters that the videographer captures going about their business.




I love the disclaimer:

Last weekend for tulips at Burnside Farms

We headed out to Burnside Farms on Monday and made a nice afternoon of it. This weekend is your last chance to check this small, family-run tulip farm out:
4905 James Madison Hwy 
Haymarket, VA 20169

Looking for something to do this weekend?

Archwood Green Barns opens up for this season on Sunday (10 a.m. - 3 p.m.) I'm excited to check out the new vendors as well as old standbys like the to-die-for BBQ. 

Archwood is a "producer only" farmer's market, which means each vendor raises, grows, and/or makes what they sell. (At a lot of other local farmer's markets, I've seen vendors reselling stuff they bought wholesale at places like Amish country up north of us.) Last year around this time there were plants, honey, eggs, meats, salsas and guacamole, jellies and jams, and crafts. There will likely be early spring vegetables, but I wouldn't expect much besides greens (arugula, spinach, and salad) this early in the growing season.  

Archwood Green Barns is located at the intersection of Rt. 245 and I-66; if you're using your GPS, plug in 4557 Old Tavern Road, The Plains, Virginia.

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Avoiding Artillery Fungus and Plant Starvation by Using Compost as Mulch

Mike McGrath, the Garden Editor that you hear locally on WTOP FM, is also the host of the "You Bet Your Garden" public radio show. I came across a Q & A that he did a while back about using mulch, and I was really surprised by his take on it.

Having grown up in suburbia, I thought that a topdressing of wood mulch was just The Thing To Do every spring. But Mike argues against using wood mulch for two reasons: 1) mulch can "breed ‘shotgun’ or ‘artillery’ fungi that shoot tar-like spores as far as 30 feet towards light colored objects, like the side of your house or car," and 2) "wood mulches can also slow the growth of established plants—and yes, just plain starve new ones to death—by ‘tying up’ the available food in your soil, a process known as 'Nitrogen immobilization.'"

 Image of artillery fungus from bloominggarden.com

I found out about these fungi firsthand last year, when alien life forms that looked like hundreds of thumbtack-sized birds' nests appeared in my mulch, each "nest" laden with three or four tiny, hard, grey spores. Soon afterwards, a good fifteen feet or so of the privacy fence in my backyard was covered with these spores, which were just impossible to clean off.

  Image of spores on siding from bloominggarden.com

If you are attacked by shotgun or artillery fungi, Mike suggests dousing them with soapy water as soon as you notice the problem, then giving the whole area a good scrubbing to see if they'll pop off. Unfortunately, by the time you realize that you have a problem, the spores are usually well adhered, making them like the Gorilla glue of the fungal world.

 
So wood mulch kinda sucks, but you still need some sort of mulch if you want good weed control and moisture retention, coupled with the addition of delicious organic matter that your plants are craving for dinner. What are your choices?  Some of Mike's recommendations are straw and shredded fall leaves, but his top recommendation is ... drumroll please ... compost.

Image from frederickcountymd.gov

McGrath points to a study at Ohio State that showed that compost cut weeding time by 1/20th, the same result that researchers got with wood mulch. And in talking to one of the OSU researchers, a Dr. Herms, McGrath learned that "compost will also greatly limit disease and insect problems in the plants it mulches and improve their overall vigor and root growth; wood mulches ... often have the opposite effect." Bonus points: you don't have to apply additional fertilizer during the growing season if you've mulched with compost.    

Mulching with compost can be just as aesthetically pleasing as mulching with wood, as the above image (drool drool drool) from Bear Path Farm shows. So with this new knowledge in my toolkit, I began mulching my combo veg-and-flower beds with compost last week, setting aside the wood mulch I had already purchased to use as the base in my dogs' pen. (Hopefully they won't mind a ducking a few flying spores while they go about their business.) So tell me, have you ever heard about or encountered any problems with wood mulch? What do you use to dress up your garden beds?

Things to Do in Fauquier County

Tammy from Casa Mariposa gave a shout-out to a few of my favorite places around Fauquier in her post about finding the soil amendment ground alfalfa on the cheap at the Culpeper Farm Co-op (CFC for short). I am all about Fauquier County. It is like the Pawnee, Indiana to my Leslie Knope. I go on and on about how it is seriously. the. prettiest. like it's one of my kids and it's at its first beauty pageant. Did I mention I heart Fauquier?

  

You may heart Fauquier, too, after visiting some of my favorite spots:

Red Truck Bakery (22 Waterloo Street, Warrenton)

Parade Magazine voted its granola “one of the two best in the country.” Red Truck offers locally-sourced lunch fare, plus amazing sweets like double-chocolate moonshine cake, cranberry orange walnut muffins, and seasonal goodies like chocolate and Guinness stout Irish cake in the spring and Shenandoah apple cake in the fall. 

Hollin Farms (11324 Pearlstone Lane, Delaplane)

Pick-your-own fruits and vegetables. Natural beef. Heritage pork. Unbeatable views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Crooked Run valley. This family –owned farm, which has been up and running since the 1950s, is a little slice of heaven on earth.

Buckland Farm Market (4484 Lee Highway, Warrenton)

Located just north of Warrenton on Route 29, Buckland Farm Market sells plants, regionally-grown organic produce, baked goods, locally-raised beef and poultry, and bulk foods. There’s a play area for kids out back, along with chickens, rabbits, and sometimes donkeys. In the fall, Buckland holds a month-long fall festival with a corn maze. 

Archwood Green Barns Farmers and Gardeners Market (4557 Old Tavern Rd, The Plains)

The highlights here are fresh, locally-grown produce, plants, farm crafts, and food vendors like Magic Mike’s BBQ and Karri’s Addiction Cheesecakes. This is arguably the best farmers market in the area, and it’s open Sundays from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m beginning April 28th.

Schoolhouse #18 (7592 John Marshall Highway, Marshall)

This small wooden one-room schoolhouse was built in 1887 and is the last of its kind in the county. The gardens on the grounds are maintained by the Fauquier Master Gardeners and are open from dawn to dusk year round. Tours of the schoolhouse are conducted the last Saturday of every month from 1-3 p.m.

Tulips, Anyone?

If you're local and looking for something to do this weekend or next, there's a Certifikid deal for $15 admission to the Organic Tulip Festival down in Aroda, which is southwest of Culpeper, near  Shenandoah National Park. You also get a free organic coffee, Stroopwafels (a kind of "waffles meets-cookies" creation from the Dutch), and fifteen tulips. It looks like the $15 covers a carload of people.

Photo of the Organic Tulip Festival from Certifikid

Another, more local tulip farm, Burnside in Haymarket, will be hosting their tulip festival starting this weekend. (Inside NoVa did a good newspaper article about them a few weeks ago.) Burnside Farms will be open from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. - 6 p.m. on the weekends, and they expect for peak bloom to be about the 22nd of April. Their Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/BurnsideFarms; I like that they take the time to respond to people's posts on their wall.

Photo of Burnside Farms from Inside NoVa

I'm not making any money from recommending these places, btw - just thought I'd share some cool finds. Happy tulip hunting!

The Universe Does Not Want Me to Grade These Papers

I sat down to email my straggler-students that they still had a little time to turn in their drama essays, which I am looking forward to grading ever so much, when lo! I found I had a comment alert in my inbox from none other than Terry at HenCam.com, who wanted to let me know about this new development: 

 THE CHICK CAM!

I think that Terry's impeccable timing is a sign from the universe (or something). I'm just going to put F's on all the essays and call it a day. I mean COME ON, look at how fuzzy and Easterific these chicks are!

Terry, I need this chick right here. It is the cutest thing ever. I've already named him. He's Rufus (unless he's actually a hen, in which case I'll go with Rufusina). Hurry up and put a stamp on Rufus and stick him in the nearest mail slot before my husband sees this post.

Adventures with the Tiniest Gardener

Please excuse my orange clay-covered knees if you saw me out and about yesterday - I was (finally!) able to get in a good bit of gardening. Virginia's Tiniest Gardener and I planted about fifty square feet of our backyard garden with spring vegetables and some strawberry starts. He had a blast out there raking, digging, and poking around. My hope is that the garden will teach my kiddos some of the more admirable character traits, like patience ("Whaddaya mean, these don't turn into fully-formed carrots overnight?") and humility (because as all gardeners know, we may be bigger than cutworms, Japanese beetles, stinkbugs, and tomato hornworms, but they will still defeat us handily).

I also hope that the experience of growing his own fruits and veggies will give my son, who currently subsists on noodles, buttered toast, and yogurt, an appreciation for foods with colors outside the continuum between white and ecru. To that end, he ate, with a little prompting, a lettuce leaf straight from the garden, which is a minor miracle. He did tell me almost immediately afterwards that "lettuce is green, and green is icky, like sausage that has skin on it," but I'll take what I can get. Today lettuce leaf, tomorrow broccoli rabe? A girl can dream.

The Prudent Homemaker's Garden Tour

Two bouts of "Don't you know it's March?!" snow have kept me out of the garden for fear I'll compact all that heavy, wet clay soil I have with my giant clodhoppers. I'm having to get all my garden thrills vicariously (though hopefully next week's forecast of temperatures in the sixties will hold true and I'll be out there before you know it). One of my favorite sites to check out is the Prudent Homemaker's, and she just put up a virtual tour of her garden.

I'm amazed at what she has been able to accomplish in a backyard in gardening-unfriendly Nevada, with its hard, rocky soil and its punishingly low rainfall amounts.

Even more pictures, plus her gardening story (which includes fitting 34 fruit trees on a .24-acre lot!) can be found on her "Edible Landscaping" page. Enjoy, especially if, like me, Mother Nature is giving you fits and keeping you out of the dirt for longer than you'd like.

Gardening with Devil Dogs

I've been growing nasturtiums from seed for about two weeks now. I love nasturtiums, and so by extension, I loved my nasturtium seedlings. The seedlings looked healthy, green, and strong when I left the house this morning. Here is how they looked when I returned home:

LEAFLESS LITTLE NASTURTIUM SKELETONS.
What? How? Why? Because furry demons had converted them into dog upchuck on my deck.

 (demons not shown to scale)

Hungry for Spring

Virginia's Tiniest Farmer and I toured the Back Forty (cough *square feet* cough) this morning and found a few signs that spring is truly on its way.

The crocus have bloomed, and the chickweed has sprung up. The crocus will be a distant memory within an month, but the chickweed will continue to vex me throughout the growing season.

The fuzzy green leaves of "Paprika" yarrow have begun to push through the soil. In the summer, these plants will be covered in beautiful red flowers, and in the fall, its seedheads will be a tasty snack for birds. You're welcome, little dudes.

The azalea buds are beginning to fatten up. I'm not a big azalea fan - I think they look lovely, of course, but I can't deal with how much those spider mites love them - so these two are guests in one of my raised beds until they are ready to head over to my next-door neighbor's front yard.

Hellebores! Or Lenten roses. Tomayto, Tomahto. They are also budding, and should bloom soon. Did you know that Lenten roses are in the same family as clematis and columbines? The More You Know (tm)...

More winter rye has sprouted in one of the raised beds. I used rye as a cover crop in the beds this winter, and the plants never grew more than a few inches high but stayed pleasantly green throughout the colder months. I turned this bed over a few weeks ago so that the rye would decompose into the soil and enrich it; some of the seeds must have come closer to the surface when I did this. They'll be turned into the soil, too, to amend it with plenty 'o' good stuff.

Virginia's Tiniest Farmer and I did a little recreational digging, just to get our wiggles out, but we're looking forward to really getting our shovels (some more plastic than others) dirty in just a few weeks. 

Check out "Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA"

"Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries."

Snowquestration 2013

Well thank goodness I had the discipline to not plant my peas this weekend.

Those suckers would have been buried under a foot of snow or so right when they were thinking it might be nice to poke up out of the ground.

Barn cam, Hen cam, and Goat cam, or, Additional Ways for Me to Procastinate

Everybody, stop what you are doing rightthissecond (unless it's something important, like open heart surgery or purchasing pizza rolls) and check out HenCam.com. I'll wait.

Hello again, and welcome back! I assume that it's been at least a half-hour and that you have experienced the phenomenon of missing time, because seriously, multiple hen cams? Plus a goat cam with inside AND great outdoors views? You had me at "Here's something Katie can do besides grading these last few freshman comp papers." Or "Hello," if you're Jerry Maguire, aka Tom Cruise before we all knew about the Scientology stuff and saw the couch-jumping and got kind of weird taste in our mouths and made That Face, like a collective "Are you sure this is 'regular' and not 'diet'?" pucker.

Mavis from OneHundredDollarsaMonth.com first alerted me to this ideal procrastination device. The first time I looked at the goat cam, the goat looked like s/he was trying to eat the cam, which struck me as very, well, goat-like behavior.

"What a delicious piece of technology!"

 

I can't decide what I dig more: this, or the hens struttin' their stuff.
 

 "What are you lookin' at, punk?"

Yours in not getting a substantive amount of work done this fine Thursday afternoon,
Katie

On Animal Husbandry

I love animals. I've thought for a long time that I'd like to have a small hobby farm one day, something with some chickens and dairy goats, maybe, or even some sheep. But I'm starting to rethink this now that I've learned about the genetic mutations that create anomalies like Two-Pronged Attack Goats and Snooki's Beach Party Sheep.

(from nickholmes.tumblr.com)

(from xmarksthescot.com)

What will we be munching this year?

I was going to write a "What will I be growing?" post, but really, now that I'm focusing on more of an edible landscape approach, this is really a "What will we be munching?" post.

When it comes to fruit and vegetable seeds and starts, I have an "eyes bigger than stomach" problem: I always want far more than I could possibly plant or feed my family. Half of my problem is the gorgeous, glossy seed catalogs. They are the devil. In The Dirty Life, one of my favorite farm and garden books, Kristin Kimball writes that "the whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be seen clearly," and describes her first winter's worth of seed catalogs as "piling up next to the bed like farmer porn." How perfect of an analogy is that? Esssscuse me while I just jam a few more of these under my mattress where Mom won't find them...

Botanical Interests is, to me, the sexiest of the sexy when it comes to seed catalogs. Those illustrations!

Botanical Interests, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

I dog-eared just about every page in my BI seed catalog after I got it last month, and some of the pages? Double-dog-eared. It was ridiculous. So I had to figure out a way to pare it down, and I finally landed on an ingenious solution: employ the Magic of the Painfully Pragmatic Husband.

"Which of these do you think we'll actually eat?" I asked, and lo, after our brief conference, the list became much shorter and more manageable. Okra? Out. Cauliflower? Ick. Forget it. Greens? Snow peas? Fancy carrots? All systems go. Beets in a rainbow of colors? Got some side-eye on that one, but we'll let it slide. Melons? Tomatoes? Potatoes? This is America! Those are REQUIRED GARDEN PURCHASES!

So now I'm sitting pretty with about twenty packets of Normal People Food seeds, plus Tristar strawberry starts and Adirondack Blue potatoes. In my next post, I'll profile what's headed into the dirt first: Asian Salad Greens. Mmm!

Best Practices for Preventing Damping-Off and Other Fungal Diseases

Illustration of damping off Pythium sp. affecting tomato seedlings, by Margaret Senior

Damping off is a fungal disease that can cause germinating seeds to rot (called pre-emergence damping off) and young seedlings to shrivel and die (called post-emergence damping off). My first experience with damping off was textbook: I was growing cantaloupes from seeds, and one day, the seedlings looked pinched at the base, where the soil touched the growing stems. As happens with post-emergence damping off, the seedlings had begun to rot from the roots. Within a few hours, the stems of the infected seedlings turned brown, and the seedlings later collapsed on themselves. As is often the case, none of them were salvageable once the problem became apparent. 

Happily, damping off is preventable if you follow these best practices:
 

1. Start your seeds off in sterilized seed-starting mixes, not potting soil or dirt from your yard.

2. Don't get your seedlings soggy-wet. Make sure that whatever pot you're using has good drainage, and let the planting medium get fairly dry between waterings.

3. Make sure there's good air circulation in the room you're growing your seedlings in. You can ensure this by setting up a fan, just like a small-scale version of what commercial greenhouses do, which will provide the added benefit of helping your seedlings grow strong stems as they push back against the gentle air flow you've provided.

4. Don't sow your seeds too close together. You want air to circulate between your seedlings. 

5. Give your seedlings adequate light, preferably in the form of some grow lights. (I just use fluorescent grow lights that I bought at the local hardware store.)   

Starting Seeds: Preventing Fungi and Damping-Off with Cinnamon

It's seed-startin' time on Virginia's tiniest farm. I woke up early this morning, grabbed my trusty old Carhartt hat and my coffee, and headed out to the back forty, where I hitched up the tractor to bring our seed-starting operation up from our damp basement to our sunny and airy kitchen. My son made sure I had plenty of farm hands to assist me, as you can see - Lightning, Finn, and two (two!) Tow Mater Trucks. Very helpful.
The seedlings made the temporary move in an effort to defeat the dreaded Fungus Among Us that had developed on the cheap-o peat pots I started everything in this year. (Note to self - next year, go coir or go home!) As you can see in the picture above, I deployed my crop duster over the Tiniest Farm in Virginia, using it to sprinkle cinnamon, which has natural antifungal properties, on the surface of the seed-starting mix and the peat pots.

Cinnamon has saved me from several Katie-created seed-starting disasters and even stopped a bad case of damping-off from spreading even further a few years ago. It's cheap (I think I paid a buck for my container of Trader's Choice Cinnamon), it's effective, and it's a great alternative to chemicals for those of us who hang with the organic crowd. 
Prevention is far easier than management; I'll cover prevention strategies (in other words, "do as I say, not as I did this year") in my next post. Right now, I'm getting ready to attend my first Dirt Works meeting with Tammy of Casa Mariposa. Fingers crossed that she's baked some cookies for our inaugural meeting...