Thyme Traveler
Archives
Articles
About Marcia
RSS Feed For This News
Traveler in Thyme
Blanco, Texas : Thyme Traveler : You, Too Can Be a Thyme Traveler
You, Too Can Be a Thyme Traveler
Advice for sustainable living in the Texas Hill Country that is actually useful. Always helpful, usually amusing, and don't forget to try the recipes!
The Symptom is Not the Disease
May 4, 2008 12:09
If your plants are puny or infested with bugs, those are signs of a deeper problem you need to remedy, rather than just spraying the fungus or the bug.
For example:
- Pill bugs and slugs are symptoms of too much moist, rotten material.
- Grasshoppers are a sign it's too dry.
- Stink bugs, spittle bugs, and aphids love rank, crowded growth, and often attack plants that
have been over fed or watered.
You also get all of these enemies by taking away all of their natural weed food and believing your garden is 100%
yours to harvest.
Powdery mildew, black spot, and fungi are symptoms of moist, unclean conditions.
- Avoid splattering dirt on vegetation when watering.
- Wear clean clothes when brushing against your plants, many problems are contagious from your dirty old gloves.
- Avoid watering on bright, sunny days because plants aren't stupid and know it's not raining. Your soil need be no moister than a slightly damp sponge.
- Water deeply, at least an inch per week, then let the hose alone so the roots go deep instead of feeding on the surface.
- Don't touch anything when the leaves are wet.
If your garden is a volunteer veggie jungle like our backyard, your main job will be to thin the thousands of seeds Nature has planted in the space needed for a few. Knowing which companions enjoy each other's company,
take out everything that is crowding its neighbor, leaving one of each companion variety in touching distance.
You'll have to do this at least once a week in spring, sometimes every day if your weeds grow as fast as ours!
For example, about 50 lambs quarters seedlings came up in about 10 square feet. This plant gets 2 or 3 feet wide, and 3 or 6 feet tall when mature, so take out all the big ones and make a mess of greens, then go back in a
few days and yank out all the biggest ones again, and also all the scrawny ones that won't ever be mighty.
Before summer, you should be down to 2 plants in this space, which will more than fill up your garden and your
tummy with yummy spinach substitute, and you'll only have to water it if it never rains at all.
Underneath these giants, there will be an overabundance of weedlings in many varieties. Immediatly pull anything that gets tall and will compete with your lambs quarters. Leave the low growing ground cover stuff, we have lots of dead nettle and chickweed, but keep them judiciously thinned, to avoid overcrowding your "living mulch."
You want it abundant, but not rank and overgrown. All thinnings and prunings can be tossed in the compost, or eaten, or fed to the chickens and goats. Now you are well on your way through spring, ready for a healthy summer garden.
Now, our front garden is more of a traditional layout, with rows of trellised veggies and companion herbs, heavily mulched with leaves. As soon as the mulch starts breaking down, all sorts of weeds come up there, too, but things are kept further apart for ease of harvesting and to promote good air flow on the peppers and tomatoes.
Lambs quarters and tomatoes do NOT like each other, both are too big and greedy to stand too close together. Basil, dill, and marigolds protect my annual crops, with a wide border of perennial herbs and shrubs to attract the butterflies and spice up the cooking.
I love waking up in the morning, dashing out barefoot to grab a handful of whatever for the breakfast omelette. Today we had lambs quarters, lemon balm, and garlic chives scrambled with big brown eggs, with a bit of canned
fruit salad on the side, whole grain toast with butter and strawberry jam, and a big cup of chai. I need another cup, more later......
To reference this entry please copy the url in this link (Permalink)
Gardener's Zones
April 29, 2008 11:38
In this era of global fluctuation, gardeners across the earth are seeing changes in their normal Climate Zones. It's really a challenge for us here in Blanco County! (Read Article)
To reference this entry please copy the url in this link (Permalink)
Spring Thyme: Flowers, Flowers Everywhere!
April 19, 2008 19:24
Flowers, flowers everywhere, with billions of butterflies in contrasting colours. It smells as good as it looks, too! The brush piles from last winter's cedar chopping have become Wren apartments, they are fixing them up
for their kids, who are just now being laid as eggs in the nest inside the old attic fan.
Proud Papa sits on a post outside my studio in the afternoons, singing "Security, security, security" at the top of his voice. His song is different in the morning, it sounds more like "Fidgety, fidgety, fidgety wrennnn..." while Mama has a more conversational tone, chatting to her family and friends. I can hardly wait until the babies hatch.
My husband has really gotten into mulching mode, toting leaves from the forest up to the veggie patch. He spent his Saturday digging up a humongous dewberry patch that had crossed it's borders all the way up to the tomatoes, like a carpet of thorns all over the east end of the garden.
Since we never get any of the little ol' dewberries, anyway, it's no loss, if we can get a few bushels of groceries and meds from the same space. The soil there on the downslope is deep and black, with lots of morning sun, what should I grow for fall? Gee, is it already thyme to be thinking about fall? Yes!
Global warming has really speeded up or compost piles, and all the weeds that don't get eaten are filling the bins fast. Our excellent and picturesque compost bin is made from wooden pallets, the kind you get free at the lumber yard. It's a double bin, made from 5 pallets, with the closed side facing the sidewalk and the open back facing
the kitchen door.
Beautiful shrubberies and a magnificent datura surround the frame, and thrive on the compost inside. It never smells nor draws flies, because we toss leaves and grass clippings on top of the veggie scraps. Occasionally the armadillos come and turn the pile for us, so that's no work, either, except for raking the spill back into the bin.
One side is building while the other side is rotting, so twice a year we get a couple of barrows of compost, though we never scrape it all the way to the bottom because then the shrubs around the outside suffer. It's been there for at least 12 years, we had to prop up the corners with steel fence posts about 5 years ago because they were old and falling apart.
So easy! Compost is really a no-sweat project, if you are doing a lot of work you are doing something wrong (LOL)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recipe of the Week ~ Eat Your Weeds
Go out in the yard, pick the tenderest, perfect tips of whatever you can find that is edible.
Take them in the kitchen, chop them up all very fine ( I use big scissors instead of dragging out the cutting board).
Bring 1 quart salted water to a boil, add a dash of olive oil, toss in the snipped greens and simmer for an hour.
You can strain out the green slime or put it thru a blender for a creamy green soup with grated cheeze or croutons, or you can use it to cook rice, potatoes, or peas.
I made a good bowl of stew last week by adding 2 cans of jalapeno blackeyed peas and 1/2 sack of frozen mixed veggies to a thick broth that was mostly lambs quarters, lemon balm, cilantro, and baby garlic.
To that I added black pepper, turmeric, and dried sage, so the taste was reminiscent of curry.
Each week brings a surprising new flavour, some are kinda weird, but you may discover a combination that is delicious. As much as we love Italian and TexMex flavours (the kind that are easiest to grow around here), the garden has grown into a jungle of all sorts of other possibilities, so we are experimenting with putting our meds in our food.
Lemon balm is one of my faves, it tastes so good in omelettes or fried rice, besides being a tasty hot or iced tea, and is reputed to relieve the aches and pains from working in the garden. It's self sown all over the place, so now it, too, is officially a weed, right up there with the parsley and garlic and all the other denizens of the Veggie Jungle. Go get 'em!
To reference this entry please copy the url in this link (Permalink)