Weeding Between the Lines

by Jim McGinty

The Heat is here – one hundred degrees Fahrenheit this last weekend, with a prognostication of more hot days for the rest of the July.  Time to buckle down and keep the important stuff alive and growing: ornamental lawns not so much, but fire resistant “green zones” around your home, yes.  Fruit trees and bushes, perennial herbs, pollinator attractors (think honeysuckle, white clover, mock orange, etc.), and vegetables, all deserve a good water soaking (and maybe some home- made compost/manure tea!) during the hot days ahead.  Now is when the drip and weep hose irrigation systems really pay off: expensive water is delivered right to the plant, no water is wasted on the surrounding lawns or weeds, and all it takes is a flick of the wrist – no hoses to haul around.

Remember to water your plants and trees in the early morning or late evening (if possible), to avoid wasting water (and money!) as water spray evaporates in the Heat – inexpensive water timers are available which will turn water on and off, while you sleep, or while you hide next to the air conditioner.

Here at Rancho McGinty, the garlic scapes have been harvested and chopped, breaded, and deep fried, or used in pesto sauce, or dehydrated like chives for future baked potatoes.  The garlic plants themselves are not quite waist high, and the tops are about one third yellow, so we’re looking at a mid-July harvest – I applied water to the garlic patch one last time at the end of June, and that’s it – easy food to grow.

Despite an early June frost (31 degrees F.!), our potato plants look good (Pat the Wife has been dumping straw bedding from the chicken house and goat/sheep yard on the plants to stimulate additional spud production), and the other cool weather crops (cabbage, onions, leeks, and scallions) are handling the heat with additional applications of water and some Ree-May row cover used as kinda-shade cloth.

In the “Earth Boxes” on the front deck, the tomatoes are stretching their legs, producing flowers (fewer flowers at this time of the Heat, as tomato blooms don’t set for fruit above 85 degree F. or so), and growing thick stems for all those delicious fruits – remember, knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are actually a member of the fruit family, while wisdom is not putting tomatoes in the fruit salad.

You will want to check your compost bins to ensure they are as wet as a wrung-out sponge, in order for the fermenting and bug-attracting conditions to continue during the Heat – dig into the bin and grab a handful of immature compost:  hot material is good, but hot and wet material is better.

If your June-bearing strawberries are through for the year, and/or if your ever-bearing strawberries are about half way through production, then now is the perfect time to fertilize those beds.

Now is also a good time to plant some more salad green seeds to ensure continuing hot-weather meals (Pat and I love to assemble fresh salads from the deck planters, slice in some cooked chicken or beef, and drizzle on the blue cheese dressing – yumalicious), and if you plan to plant some cool weather plants for late Autumn harvests (you DO plan to utilize that expensive garden soil for at least two seasons this year, right?!), now is the time to start the kale, chard, choi’s, bush beans, and anything else that will handle a light frost.

GARDEN CALENDAR:

On the 8^th of July, I will teach a Fruits and Berries class at the Newport College Center (1204 W. 5^thAve., Newport) from 1-3 p.m. – we’ll learn how to grow (and control!) all those thorny vines and aggressive bushes.  You can call the center at 509-447-3835 for more details and to register for the class.

On the 14^th of July, our local gardening club will depart from Camden Grange at 7 p.m. for another of our most-excellent garden tours:  this month we will tour a “delightful” (according to more than one of our members who have visited this location) garden space with manicured lawns, stone raised beds, vegetable collections, and floral displays.  Bring your cameras as you will not remember all the great ideas and innovations you will see – this garden has been the beautiful setting for many weddings and receptions.

And for those of us who have NOT been described as “delightful” or “beautiful,” well, try to stay cool in the Heat, and don’t irritate your loved ones nearly as much as you normally do – we all deserve some slack.

    

Making hay

We've been using our new food dehydrator to make leaf hay for our rabbits. The leaf part is kale, chard, arugula, joi choi and maruba santo – basically any kind of garden green – and the hay part is drying it and storing it in big old lard tins or food-safe buckets for winter. The garden is bursting with all kinds of greens right now, and the six angora rabbits get a three- or four-gallon bucket full of fresh stuff every day. And at least that much goes into the driers.

I'm sure the sheep and goats would relish dried greens, too, but that would take a whole lot more drying, and we're not sure we want to go there.

We have a row of rinky-dink round, plastic, electric food dehydrators, but the new model is bigger, and costs nothing to run. It's a 1996 Subaru. Yep.

On sunny, 80-degree weekends when we won't be using the car we lower all the windows an inch or two (for air movement and to keep temps down) and lay a big piece cardboard or a clean sheet (to catch any stray bits) in the back of the station wagon. Wire racks – old fridge racks, I think – are propped up on pipes and milk crates. (Don't use galvanized fencing, window screen or other materials that aren't food-safe for your racks.) The greens are laid out on the racks, and by Sunday night they are dry but not too brittle, and are packed away.

It's important to keep temps under 150 degrees, which might be a problem this coming weekend with forecast highs of 100. (I guess we could park in the shade.) An oven thermometer would be helpful to monitor this.

Just think – that dead car in the yard might finally turn out to be an asset.

The grandson would call this whole setup tacky, and would prefer we buy an expensive gadget that does the same job and matches the kitchen. (We pat him on the head and urge him to have another cookie.)

The hay is pretty brittle when served, and will shatter if handled roughly. The rabbits go crazy for it.

Su

Gardening here is not for wimps

So many newcomers to Elk, Wash., and gardening in general, do not understand our local "weather-challenged" food-growing situation. Case in point was the frost in the early morning (2 a.m.) of 12 June 2015 – 32 degrees F., and the potato flowers and upper leaves took a big hit.   

Frost-damaged spud foliage in June. Yes, June!

What to do? Well, heavy-weight floating-row cover (Ree-May, Agri-bon, etc.) would have helped our plants, as would light flannel sheets or blankets, or even an overhead light water spray – any of those would have protected the precious flowers and foliage. Fortunately, the potatoes have since recovered, and are on track to spud-harvestville, with only a slight delay/detour.

As club member Tim Koenig said, "Expect frost in the garden every month to be safe." Oh, and remember to do something about said frost, as well.

jim

Identify that mystery gardening tool

This is what makes the internet so great - it's like having 24/7 access to a HUGE, weird old library. So here is a Dutch museum of old tools, complete with with photos of some identified and some not, where you can search by trade or shape. So now when you buy that peculiar gadget at a yard sale for $2, you might be able to tell if it was used to trim the nose hairs of oxen, or set kerfs on two-man logging saws.

I'm curious, and interested in things, and admire a tool made to serve a purpose with elegance and/or simplicity. If you are like that (or you just have a strange old mystery tool), you might enjoy the site.

The garden tools section has some dandies, too. Who wouldn't want a garden pulverizer, or a grafting froe, or a grubber? And I've got to get a scuffle hoe, just so I can hang it on pegboard, spray-paint an outline around it, and write "scuffle hoe" in Sharpy marker. Voilá! Decor!

Not all of the site is in English, so unless you have some Dutch you might have to resort to the online translators, which is always amusing, if not informative.

Su

Apple sleuth in the news

Our own favorite apple tree detective (and club member) Dave Benscoter was the subject of a recent article in the "Country Folks - Western Edition" June 2015 newsletter. Dave and his pursuit of "extinct" apple varieties have become cutting edge coolness, and it's a treat to see a familiar name and face with headlines like, "WSU researchers, sleuth resurrect "lost" apples of the Palouse." You can read the article here.

Please keep up the important (and fun) work, Dave - I'm seeing more heritage apple varieties showing up in local farmers' markets every summer. 

jim

After-action-report for our club's June 2015 tour

Club members ready to tour (our hosts Dale and Val are second and third from left).

We assembled in the Riverside Center Place Market parking lot (club member and NOT-the-President Barbara Midtbo handed out free plant starts to anyone not guarding their car doors) and convoyed to the home of Val and Dale McDonald, located in the area SE of Deer Park, and just off Highway 2.  We checked out the veggie gardens (Dale uses plumbing heat tape buried in his favorite raised bed to keep the Ree-May-covered bed warm in early Spring!), the 120 degree F. fermenting compost bins, and the beautifully manicured, rolling lawns. Dale is trying out strawbale gardening this year (as is my favorite gardening partner, Pat), and I have to say the tomato and other plants growing in the middle of the bales looked REALLY healthy. Val's floral displays and veggie beds were inspirational (for those of us with a few weeds), and answered our multitude of related (and unrelated) gardening questions; Val also provided us with wonderful snacks.

Thank you to the McDonalds for putting up with us - we had a great time.  Next month, we'll visit another unsuspecting gardener, so be sure to check here for time and date information.

jim

The Joys of Beekeeping

By Pat McGinty 

OMG (in the vernacular of the texting generation)! It is June already; where has the first half of the year gone?  

Since last we visited, my two new hives have been busy expanding their numbers and preparing for the infamous “nectar flow.”  Nectar flow, of course, is when the bees start turning nectar into honey for themselves, and us, if all goes well (no monsoons, hurricanes, so much heat the nectar dries up.)  Bees are extremely organized and know instinctively that if they are going to survive they have a lot of work to do (some people could stand to learn that ethic) and the more bees to do it the more quickly and efficiently it will be done (an excellent example of community effort.) The worker bees in my two new colonies have been drawing out cells on new foundation and cleaning up cells drawn out on old foundation by previous occupants to make room for the nursery and the food supply, both of which are important factors in their survival.

Healthy “brood” is essential to a strong hive and her majesty, the Queen Bee, can lay 2,000 or more eggs a day – and if she doesn’t the colony can decide to get rid of her and start over (who says it’s great to be queen?).  In her lifetime, which averages three years, she could lay over one million eggs, supplying the colony with worker bees, nurse bees, and drones. The latter are the male bees and pretty much useless until a new queen is needed, and then they are fertilization machines that die with smiles on their little bee faces. Each of my hives has five of the eight frames filled with varying stages of brood. Some have eggs so small you almost need a magnifying glass to see them (don’t do this in direct sunlight unless you want fried bee eggs); some at the larval stage, looking like tiny white worms; and other cells already capped, with tiny bees growing inside. Since the turnover in worker and nurse bees is fairly frequent (they live only four to six weeks, depending on the work load) it is important to see a lot of brood in the hive. Five or more frames full, though, means it is time to add another story (hive box) to the living accommodations or it is likely that one of the dreaded experiences of beekeeping, swarming, will soon take place.

As I said before, they have also been collecting and storing pollen (of which there was plenty and early this year) to feed, among others, the baby bees. Since a single frame with a solid (not spotty) brood pattern could produce nearly 6,000 new bees at hatching time, they will need a lot of pollen. One of the responsibilities of the beekeeper is to observe just how much stored food there is in the hive. Looking for pollen stores is one of the easier beekeeping jobs. When opening the hive and pulling out a frame, you will see some variously colored cells. This is not because the hive has a decorator bee, but because pollen from different plants has different colors. For instance, the bright yellow is probably dandelion pollen, but you will also see red, orange, gray, brown and so on (if you see black it may not be pollen but disease so look carefully); it all depends on the plant source.  Supposedly honey bees will collect 66 to 100 pounds of pollen per year (I am not sure how this was determined but it doesn’t seem an impossible feat with nearly 60,000 bees populating a hive.) It is a nutritional powerhouse for the bees supplying 35 percent protein, 10 percent sugars, carbohydrates, enzymes, minerals, and Vitamin A, B1, B2, B3, B5, C, H (biotin), and R(rutin). Without a good supply of pollen the hive will weaken quickly.  Unfortunately, pollen has great commercial value in the human world and some beekeepers have found ways to rob the bees of their pollen and then wonder why the hive dies. Duh!!

So now we have opened the hive and checked for brood and food. We are also estimating our hive strength because if the “hive doesn’t thrive they will not survive.” Additionally, you will not be getting any honey for your winter biscuits. A healthy hive has frames covered in bees doing their assigned duties. The frames should not have bees that are so packed together they cannot move about; a hive with frames like that will most likely swarm (leave home to find better accommodations). If all the frames are covered with working bees and the brood is occupying half or more of the frames, then add the new hive box full of frames, close the hive up, and leave them alone. I will wait two or more weeks at this point, as long as I see lots of motion going on outside the hive as the workers leave and return with stores for the colony, or it becomes obvious the nectar flow has started.

Because of the extreme heat we seem to already be experiencing this year, I want to address one more important nutrient for the bees and that is water. You will remember in my last column I said that bees do not like to be wet and that is true but they don’t like to be hot and thirsty either; water is an important ingredient in many of the processes taking place in the hive. In the summer heat (which seems to be upon us early this year along with everything else), water is used for evaporative cooling of the hive. The water is spread in a thin layer on top of the capped brood and then the nurse bees fan the water with their wings to create air currents that cool down the hive (kind of a bee air conditioning). If your hive sits in an area that is sunny all day you may also see the bees congregating on the outside of the hive to keep the interior heat down. Two years ago I had such a hive and it was not unusual to see the bees outside the hive at ten o’clock at night.   

The bees get their water supply from different places including morning dew, damp rocks, puddles, ponds, animal water dishes, and that kiddie pool you’ve been cooling off in, just to name a few. The most helpful thing you can do is set up a shallow bowl, like a bird bath for instance, put some rocks or sticks in it, and fill it with water. The rocks and sticks give the bees something to land on (since they are not very good swimmers; remember the kiddie pool?). Check the water level daily or more often if it is really hot, because not only will it evaporate faster but other fauna will also take advantage of the available sustenance. I use a two-gallon chicken waterer and, once it is filled with water and closed up, I put rocks and twigs in the moat. I usually have to refill it once a week and the bees use it readily. So help out your local bees and have a watering station handy for their use.

I have barely scratched the surface of bee care so for those of you wanting to learn more about bees and beekeeping, the Backyard Beekeepers Association will be meeting on Thursday, June 18, at 6:30 p.m. at the Bug-n-Out store (108 E. Crawford St. in Deer Park.)   We are all about beekeeper and wanna-be beekeeper education and support. See you there.