Sunflowers in Bloom

Sunflower and bee

The sunflowers in the garden have been blooming for quite some time now, and we should continue to enjoy their lovely presence for many weeks to come.  During the spring, we noticed volunteers sprouting up along the southern side of the house where last year's sunflowers contributed many seeds, thanks to the goldfinches that frequented the sunflower patch.  The cats loved to sit in the windowsills and watch the birds - they were only inches away, just a pane of glass separating the eager cats from the clueless birds feasting on the oil-rich sunflower heads!

We planted the bronze-colored sunflowers, minis and other exotic types among the tall 10 ft yellow-flowered sunflowers. As one finishes blooming, another hastens to take its place. It's like having a bright forest along one wall of the house full of smiling flower faces.

I love sunflowers and find them intriguing.  Did you know, for example, that although each sunflower appears to have one blossom, each sunflower consists of multiple tiny flowers? These are called florets, and that's the reason the sunflower produces so many seeds...each seed develops out of each flower.

Sunflower seeds are arranged in an intricate pattern. One of my classmates in the Master Gardener program did a presentation about sunflowers and stated that the pattern nature provides in the sunflower has been replicated by scientists seeking the most advantageous arrangement of solar panels. Apparently, the pattern in the sunflower seed head is one of the most efficient solar collectors in nature. Who knew? 

Another fact about sunflowers is that they are native to North America.  The native Americans grew them as a food and flour source, grinding the seeds to make flower. Today, most of us enjoy sunflower seeds as a snack, or perhaps use the oils in cooking.

Sunflower in bloom

I usually leave the seed heads on the stalks and let the birds enjoy them.  Sometimes I dry them, hanging them up inside the garage and saving them until the winter time. Then I tie them to the pines and feed the birds for another day.  They seem to enjoy it.

All of the images on today's blog posts were taken yesterday in my garden.  Enjoy and let these sunflower pictures bring you some cheer today!

For more information about sunflowers:

• SunflowerGuide
• Wired's article on how sunflowers are inspiring better solar panels

Another sunflower against the summer sky

Biological Control for Tomato Hornworm

Tomato hornworm stung by parasitic wasp. 

Nature provides a very efficient biological control for the tomato hornworm in the form of a parasitic wasp.  Until I moved to Virginia, I had never seen the tomato hornworm. It's also known as the tobacco hornworm, and since this area was planted heavily with tobacco up until about World War II, I'm guessing there's a thriving insect population.

The first year that I planted tomatoes in Virginia, I planted them in pots and kept them near the house. We hadn't created the vegetable garden yet so I tended my little planters and waited for the tomatoes. Then I came out one day to find the plants absolutely stripped bare of leaves...and these big, ugly worms on the bare stems.  I plucked them off and killed them manually, but that forced me to do some research on tomato hornworms.  The next year, I planted marigolds around my tomatoes. It's thought that tomato hornworms hate the smell of marigolds. Among the Master Gardeners in my class this past winter, some said they had good luck with marigolds, others did not.  Those who did have good luck said that they planted old-fashioned varieties of marigolds, those with a very strong scent.  I usually planted marigolds all around the tomato beds, but this year, I forgot.  We have seen some tomato hornworm damage but fortunately not too much.

I stepped outside yesterday to pick tomatoes and saw this fellow. Those white things along his back are biological controls in action....what are are seeing is the nursery of a parasitic wasp.  The parasitic wasp stings the tomato hornworm and lays her eggs inside his body. Like something from a horror movie, the larvae feed on the living hornworm, eventually killling it and emerging to start the cycle anew.   If you see a tomato hornworm with these white spine-like things poking out from its body, what you are seeing is nature's way of keeping the hornworms in check...it's the action of the parasitic wasp.  You can leave it alone, as the worm will be dead soon and more of the helpful insects will emerge to keep the hornworm and other garden pests in check.

For more information on tomato hornworms and parasitic wasps, see:

• Virginia Cooperative Extension

A Squirrel with a Sweet Tooth

Peaches ripening on one of our trees (photo by Jeanne)

My dad, God rest his soul, had a lifelong hatred for squirrels. When he was a kid, his family went away on a long trip. They were gone for several weeks, and while they were away, a squirrel found its way into the house.  It made a mess of the pantry and kitchen, then damaged a great deal of their furniture and windowsills trying to escape.  Because of that incident, he always hated squirrels.

I always felt rather sorry for the squirrel in his story. After all, can you imagine falling down the chimney and finding yourself in a strange environment, desperate to escape?  I'd gnaw the windowsills, too.

I'd hear stories of gardeners just raving about squirrels, but I never understood how they can make a gardener crazy mad until now.

We had about 30 peaches on the peach tree by the kitchen. We tasted but two and eagerly watched them ripen. We noticed large green beetles attacking the peaches, but there were still plenty of fruit left for us. Until today.

Ever single peach has been stripped from the tree.

Pits litter the raised bed.


My father in law saw the culprit: the squirrel.

After...nothing left but the evidence, pits! (Photo by Jeanne)

 

This same squirrel raided the bird feeder by the vegetable garden. I stopped filling the feeder in the hopes it would deter him.  He next ate through the chicken wire around the vegetable garden.  My husband found him happily devouring the strawberries. We shooed him out of the garden and closed the hole.  Well, Mr. Squirrel still has his sweet tooth.  He decided to climb the peach tree and eat every single peach.

All I have left are...the pits.

Is it wrong to wish Mr. Squirrel severe gastric distress for his gluttony?

Dad, I really do understand your thing about squirrels now. I really do. 

.

Potato Harvest Yields Good Results

Basket of Yukon Gold potatoes harvested July 2012

Despite the heat wave hitting south central Virginia last week, it was time to harvest the potatoes. We tried waiting until the heat wave finally broke but with each passing day, it became readily apparently that the potatoes needed to be dug, and now.  So on Friday night, after the sun left the garden area and it was a "mere" 90 degrees, we trundled the wheelbarrow and a few buckets to the vegetable garden and began digging potatoes.

We planted potato slips or pieces of potato in late March in a 10 x 10 raised bed filled with soil and compost. The potato pieces were either small potatoes saved from last year's harvest and stored in a brown paper bag in the basement or in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, or pieces cut from a seed potato I purchased at the garden center.  Each piece has to have an "eye" in it - that's where the new plant sprouts develops.  The instructions said to leave the pieces exposed to air for a day or two, which we did, and then we planted them.  Rain watered them for the first several months.  They were attacked by potato beetles, which ate a lot of the leaves, but we chose not to use any pesticides on the plants. We figured that there were so many potatoes that the beetles were welcome to a few leaves, and fortunately we were correct. The potatoes suffered no ill effects.

By late June, the foliage began to die back, and by the 4th of July most of the foliage had died. According to my books this is about the right time to harvest the potatoes, although some books say to wait a week or two after all the foliage dies back.  We didn't want to wait!

Last year I used a spade and fork to dig out the potatoes, but unfortunately I ended up hitting a lot of them with the tines of the garden fork and that ruined them.  So this year we dug them up by hand.

The resulting harvest surpassed our expectations.  By far the best potatoes were the Yukon Gold.  These are now second year descendents from the bag of starter potatoes our neighbor and friend Mel gave us.  The yield this year was 68 pounds of almost perfectly uniform potatoes, each the size of a big fist, well formed and with good skin.  The Russet potatoes weren't that great this year.  Just 9 pounds dug from a lot of little starter potatoes planted in the spring.  But like the Yukon Gold potatoes, the Russets were all a nice size for baked potatoes.

We dug the potatoes and let them dry overnight in a single layer in cardboard boxes in the garage.  Then we sorted them by type and size and stored them in bushel baskets in the cellar.  Now comes the maintenance part; each month we will need to go downstairs and pull off the sprouts, and check for any rotting potatoes.  I don't know an easier way of doing this. No matter what we have tried, the potatoes will sprout, and Mel, who gave us the potatoes to start us off a few years ago, said that his sprout, too.  If anyone has tips to prevent sprouting let me know.

In the meantime, we ate our first baked potatoes - Russets - on Sunday.  Home grown organic potatoes have a much stronger, richer, earthier flavor than store bought ones.  It is such a great feeling to look down at your dinner plate and realize that you grew or raised nearly everything on it - grown less than 20 feet from the kitchen, in an organic garden where you know EXACTLY what conditions the plants were grown, harvested, and stored.  

We've saved a bunch of seed potatoes and are hoping to plant a second harvest for the fall.

What tips can you give for growing potatoes?

Growing Onions from Sets

Onion harvest today

 
Growing onions from sets and learning how to grow onions was one of the easiest gardening projects I've undertaken this year at Seven Oaks. I've grown onions off and on since moving to Virginia, but never had much luck. We'd get a few but not many.  This year, we had a good harvest. 

I started by buying the Park Seed Catalog "Short Day" (Southern) Onion Plant Sampler. It was a $14.95 investment, but well worth it, because it gave me three different kinds of onions to grow, and they were supposed to be suited for my Virginia climate. I think that was one of the keys to successfully growing onions from sets this year - I started with varieties that from my research, should and did grow well in my gardening zone and climate.

We did get the soil tested this year and the result was that in all of the raised beds, the compost mixture we'd added was rather acidic. Some lime, applied according to the test results and recommendations, fixed that problem just fine. (Not only did the onions grow well, but I didn't have the same problem I've had each year with tomato blossom end rot.  Already we have harvested cherry tomatoes and one delicious "Early Girl" without any hint of blossom end rot. Seems like it was indeed a pH problem with the soil that was preventing the absorption of calcium.) You can get your soil tested at the local County Cooperative Extension office.  There is a fee, but it is worth paying it.  They can walk you through the proper steps for sampling your soil and help you understand the test results and recommendations.

We planted the onion sets in late March or early April, and then we added the soaker hoses.  The soaker hoses or drip irrigation seemed to be the deciding factor for all the vegetables this year.  We weren't just watering the tops of the plants with the sprinkler - we were dripping moisture to the roots, which is where the plant needs it.  And it is not just the time when you have the hose running that the vegetables get watered.  The water continues to drip for a good period of time after you shut off the hose.

All in all, I'm very happy with the harvest.  We used NO chemicals, no pesticides and no fertilizes other than the compost in the soil, and the onions are large and healthy. No signs of insects or diseases at all.  We have Red Creole, Texas Early White and Texas Supersweet (which are supposed to be the parents of the famous Vidalia onion) to try.  They are drying on the front porch now and will spend some time in the hot, dry garage.  Then I will transfer them to a half bushel basket for storage in the cellar pantry.

So for my $14.95 investment, this is what we achieved:

• $14.95 for the onion sets (starter plants)
• Harvest: about 20 - 25 lbs onions, organic, including "gourmet" Red Creole
• I found a price online of $3.99 per 3 lb bag for organic red onions, which seems about right.
• Doing the math....
• 24 lbs divided by 3 (estimating my harvest/3 lb bag) = 8 "bags"
• 8 "bags" of organic onions x $3.99 each = $31.92 worth of onions

So, give or take, I've got over $30 worth of onions from a $14.95 investment - about double my money, just by letting nature do her work and adding water when needed.

How can you beat that? Gardening is amazing.

Onions drying on the front porch after harvest.

I Learned a New Word - Derecho

I have lived through hurricanes and a tornado while living on Long Island. Since moving to Virginia, I've added to my list of experiences an earthquake. Now I will add a new experience: derecho.  Yes, I've learned a new word.

Last Friday, temperatures soared past the 100 degree mark.  Around 8 p.m, we turned on the Weather Channel and saw that nearly the entire state of Virginia was outlined in the yellow "thunderstorm warning" box.  We didn't see any clouds on the map, so we decided to just check back later and make sure the electronics were unplugged before retiring for the evening.  We lost one computer several years ago when we forgot to disconnect the phone line from it during a storm, and from that experience gleaned only that which experience teaches.

Around 9:45 I took Shadow for her last walk, and the air outside was hot and still.  The colorful garden flag my friend Joan gave me for my birthday just hung limply from its post, and the American flag on the porch was still.  I went upstairs to get ready for bed.  A weird noise seemed to be coming from above me, and I figured it was the sound of the air conditioner turning onto high speed.  But the noise increased and I ran downstairs to see what was happening just as my husband shouted for me to come down.

We were hit with a derecho- a wall of high velocity wind that precedes thunderstorms.  The winds by some estimates were 60-80 miles per hour and they sustained that speed for about 10 minutes.  It was an awful sound listening to the howl and shrieking of the wind hitting the house. It was unrelenting. Usually during a storm you get gusts, but not this. It was like a wall of wind just hit the house and kept coming.

And then the power went out.

We stood by the windows and watched big bolts of lightning touching down to the south of us.  But there was no rain and eerily enough...no thunder.  Just lightning.

Saturday was hot, sticky and without electricity, telephones or running water. And of course - no air conditioning.  As temperatures soared beyond 100 once again, I had flashbacks to hiking in the desert Canyonlands of Utah many years ago. So hot you wanted to lay down in the shade and nap....

The reports on the radio were grim.  We thought we'd be out of power for many days, but fortunately, Dominion power restored service in just about 20 hours from the power outage.  I keep praying for the rest of the people in the state who don't have power. 

It happened so fast!  And in the end, it could have been much worse.  We could have been stuck in the 100 degree weather for days on end without relief of air conditioning.

Derecho. I learned a new word this weekend.

And I also want to urge you to get your bad weather preparedness stuff ready.  I used to laugh when I'd see that info back when I lived on Long Island. On Long Island when the power went out, you just complained because you were missing your favorite TV shows.  The water system kept working (gravity fed) and the supermarket was a block or two away.  But out here in the country, you have to be prepared. If a big tree fell over the driveway, for example, we have to be ready to remove it.  We have to have water for when the electric well pump won't work.  We have to have dried food that will keep several days.  I have a friend from Miami who jokes about "hurricane dinners" of Ritz crackers and peanut butter.  It's food like that in the pantry that will at least keep you full until you can get the power back on and fresh food again.

So...derecho.  I learned a new word. And respect for derecho!