Everyday Household Items for the Garden Shed - 2020 Edition

 

I have a lot of cleaning brushes lurking around the garden shed.  Everything from fingernail brushes to kitchen scrub brushes, bucket brushes, and bench brushes.  Then I realized what I really needed to clean my four inch pots was a  Toilet Bowl Brush.  This is just the right shape, size and stiffness.  It even works on 3 inch pots which sort of surprised me because I thought it might be too stiff to push into a 3 inch pot. And of course gallon pots.  But the best is the 4 inch pots.  Pot in one hand, brush in the other.  Rotate once or twice and anything and everything you would be getting off with a brush is off.  Why did I not think of this sooner?

I have a couple of cleaners in the garden shed.  For basic scrubbing I have Castile Soap .  For the counter top and windows and other hard surfaces I have Windex.  I have a simple spray bottle with Pine Sol and water to make yucky stuff smell clean.  I have a pump bottle of Germ-X for disinfecting pruning shears and hands.  But what I use a lot is my Armor All Cleaning Wipes.  These things really clean plastic and rubber very well and they leave a nice shine.  For one thing they keep my rain boots and garden clogs looking nice.  They polish up my glossy plastic resin planters that I spent a pretty penny on.  And when I get done with the string trimmer or leave blower, I wipe them down too.  Just about anything you invested a little money in (Hunter boots ain't exactly cheap) that you want to keep looking new deserves the ArmorAll treatment.

For years I've kept a small number of essentials right at the garden gate.  Usually a pair of kitchen shears and a kneeler of some sort.  An old dull knife comes in handy for harvesting if you've forgotten to bring a good one out.  A few pairs of gloves clothes-pinned to the fence to dry. And usually a collection of different hose attachments from a watering wand to a misting nozzle for delicate seedlings.  Due to being relatively weather resistant and in constant use they have collected at the gate post in an untidy mound.  The shears are on a nail on the side of the post, but that didn't work for everything. I know some people put a mail box in their garden to keep tools, but I wanted something that would hold my big blue kneeling pad and watering wands not necessarily my trowels and such.  So I came up with this Wire Basket that hangs on the wire fence and is just what I needed.

I am always seeing people ask what kind of markers last the longest.  The answer to that queston is these metal markers.  But I get tired of writing them up with the special carbon pencil, cleaning the name off with steel wool, collecting them and keeping them corralled for the winter.  In fact the last time I used them was when I was expecting the Master Gardener class for a garden tour.  I figured that it would be helpful if they could read things for themselves instead of having to ask.   I don't use a lot of markers anymore.  I plant things in the position that seems logical to me (which is sort of like storing things in the first place you would look for them), and before long the plants are mature enough that I can pretty reliably tell the difference between tomato varieties or even pea and bean varieties.  

What I really want is a marker that will get me through spring transplanting and then go away.  These good old fashioned Tongue Depressors are just the ticket.  I write on them with a Sharpie.  They do really well marking pots and I can give them away freely that way.  Some of them I put in the garden and by the end of the season, they go into the compost pile with the plant waste or just get raked into the soil.  Nothing irritates me more than a plastic tag floating around the garden.  Problem solved.

A good vegetable brush.  This isn't technically IN the garden but it is very closely related.  When I was studying up on how to prepare sweet potatoes, one of the warnings was to make sure they are very clean and to not spoil your sweet potato pie with garden grit.  This is really true of all our root vegetables.  So I read Amazon reviews for awhile and settled on this handle-less coconut fibre brush.  Its quite a nice little brush and it tucks away in the corner of the dish drying rack, out of sight.

And that is a list of my garden tool improvements for this year.  I'm always looking for a better way to clean and store things.  Someday I may get it right all at once.

Hindsight is 2020

 The 2020 gardening season is winding up and its time to look back and summarize what worked and what didn't.  For starters, the year 2020 has gotten a bad rap.  Apparently whatever can go wrong is going wrong, and the gardening world is no exception.  I heard one person lament "if I'd have had to rely on my Covid Survival Garden I would have starved"

I'm hearing everywhere how challenging the weather has been this year, and honestly, I haven't found this year to be any more challenging than most years.  You know - its always something.  As usual, some things went well and some things fell flat.  

 This year, I had my fill of the abundant cauliflower and summer squash but had to wait for ages for any decent beans.  My sweet potatoes were a great success (in my opinion) but the volume of regular potatoes was a disappointment.  Late beans and small potatoes were a theme nationwide.  August was so hot and dry that tomatoes refused to ripen, but that too came to an end.  I don't think I had trouble with anything to the extent that I'd never try it again, but there were a few things I need to practice on some more.

May Weather:  OK, May was a trial.  The first half anyway.  I struggled to keep everything growing through day after day of frost, wind and snow.  It was made worse by the lovely warm end to April which enticed me to optimistically pot up my tomatoes into gallon pots instead of leaving them in the safety of the basement under the grow light, and the fact that I received a pear tree fully leafed out two days before a late snow storm.  The cole crops in their shelters, and the seedlings still in the house did just fine.  The peas, in their eternal wisdom, waited it out, but did just dandy when the weather finally turned.  For several weeks I thought for sure all of the tomato plants were going to die but they recovered and carried on like nothing ever happened.  It was a lot of work taking care of everything, but it was one of those cold snaps which can be overcome by supplies, preparation, hard work and dedication to carrying. everything. in. and out. every. single. day. Without fail.

Peas:  Peas did well.  I succession planted them beginning in March, as I always do, which ended up not mattering at all because the weather was so erratic that the early peas stopped growing for weeks on end and then they all agreed at the same time that the weather was perfect and they should get going all at once.  But that's the awesome thing about peas in my growing zone.  They are a very sensible crop.  They deal with a lot of issues on their own.  You put them in the ground as soon as you can and then you wait and let them do their thing.  I'm done experimenting with varieties for awhile. Next year I'm only growing Penelope because they are currently working perfectly for my needs.

Carrots:  Carrots don't like root pruning grow-bags.  That's an easy and broad assumption to make but I'm taking some responsibility in the meager results.  I didn't water them enough.  And grow bags dry out quickly.  Next year I am putting them underfoot so I will pay more attention.  But I am also putting them back in plastic containers.  My local nursery was thoughtful enough to bring in stacks of good sized, non-decorative, useful growing containers at a price much more reasonable than I can find online and I got two appropriately carrot-sized pots to replace the grow bags.  Grow bags are a great thing to have on hand.  They fold flat to store, and you can use them as a back-up when you run out of space.  But that doesn't mean they are the end all solution to container gardening.  

Cauliflower:  I'm feeling quite comfortable with growing cauliflowers now.  They are a long term commitment, starting in March and going into the garden in April, but if you enjoy fresh cauliflower its worth it.  We've discovered a lot of difference in taste across the varieties.  The purple Graffiti were beautiful and fun to grow but had a rather strong taste.  We prefer the yellow Flame Star for its mild, sweet taste, so next year I will probably only grow those.  I have a lot frozen and I plan on trying my hand at some cauliflower cheddar soup.  The key to growing good cauliflower (really all cole crops) is row covering to keep the cabbage moths off.  

I was quite happy with my row cover solutions and my supplies are ready for next year.  I'm going to start in spring with the heavier GardenQuilt from Gardeners (which held up well tot he weather and clips) and then skip straight to the see-through AgFabric insect netting .  I've purchased the appropriate sizes and labeled them in case I forget what my plan was.

Broccoli: I only planted broccoli as a fill-in but very much enjoyed fresh broccoli and pea salad. So next year I will again buy some transplants but not start seeds.

Cabbage: transplants were also an impulse buy because I was in the mood for homemade cole slaw.  Next year I will grow some again.  Not a great quantity, but at least four for fresh slaw.  The cabbages can share a bed with the broccoli since they require the same covering.

Brussels Sprouts:  Talk about a long term project.  They are still in the garden even though we have had one hard frost and I should be picking them now.

Lima Beans:  Much like the cole slaw, I got a craving for lima beans.  This was my first try for limas. The plants did very well and there were a lot of blooms, and the earliest ones set well but after that most of the blossoms dropped, probably because of the hot dry weather.  In fact, they were still blooming and again setting baby beans when I pulled them out.  The six or so portions I did get were very good so I will try this crop again and see how they perform under different weather conditions. 

Sweet Corn:  I hadn't grown sweet corn in awhile but this year and last have been so successful that I will probably keep growing at least one bed each year.  The taste is far superior to the best the local farmstand has to offer.  Next year I will drive T-posts at the corners of the bed so I can run a cat's cradle of wires to prevent the stalks from lodging during wet weather.

Pole Beans: Good things come to those who wait.  My fourth planting of beans at the end of July was the real success.  I planted two varieties of bush (Jade and Jade II) and two pole (Monte Gusto and Carminat). The yellow Monte Gusto were my favorite.  Awesome variety of long, straight beans.  I have an excess of beans stored away.

Tomatoes:  I grew too many tomatoes.  Go figure.  I planned to grow three plants.  I ended up growing seven because I was so worried by their early (non)performance.  And that is more than TWICE as many plants as intended.  Must do better next time.

Cucumbers:  I grew too many cucumbers.  Again - I get nervous with germination problems and I start to over plant.  This year I also grew pickling cucumbers because it was a pickle year.  I won't have to plant them next year but I have leftover seeds and will probably plant a few plants because I've found some good pickling packets that you can make one pint of refrigerator pickles at a time.  And I found that to be really fun.  And man - are those pickles SPICY.  They will light you up! And they're very crunchy.

Potatoes:  the plants were more impressive than the harvest, but I still have plenty of spuds stored away.

Sweet Potatoes:  What Fun!  These were beautiful plants to watch all season and the tubers were plentiful and just about perfect.  I cured them for two weeks in a sunny window and they are super sweet.  In fact, the first time I prepared them, I roasted them and the instructions suggested that I toss them in oil and brown sugar.  Well - they didn't need the sugar.  I sampled them when they were almost done and pulled the whole batch out, rinsed them in a collander and put them back in the oven.  The next time I prepared them I baked them and we ate them plain. Not even any butter. They had a terrific taste and texture and the skins fell right off onto the plate.  I am working my way through processing them (about 20 #), storing them in the freezer both baked and roasted.

Summer Squash:  

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

I will not plant more than one zucchini plant. 

  I will not plant more than one zucchini plant.   

And the one plant will be a Cue Ball.

As you can see, this year's theme was "Too Much".  I went through a phase where I felt undue pressure to use everything I'd grown. All at once.  I didn't really have an excess of any one thing so much as too many things happening all at once.  I would have five fresh veggie dishes I wanted to serve for supper when one or two would do.  I began eating cole slaw for breakfast - which isn't a bad thing.  This isn't the first time this happened.  I felt this way in 2011, the second year for the raised beds when I went hog wild.  There have been years when I lamented that I had refined my quantities so well that I no longer had an over abundance of anything.  I am again cured of this.  I will go back to careful counting.

The Moment of Truth - Sweet Potatoes

 This past weekend was absolutely gorgeous.  Friday through Sunday, clear, dry, sunny.  Warm.  Breezy.  Perfect.  The coming week will be cool, cloudy and drippy.  So I've been hustling around making sure everything that you would want to do when it is dry is done.  Soil sifted and stored.  Containers cleaned, dried and put away.  Row covers folded and put in bins. 

I dumped all of my potato grow bags, stored the soil and packed up the bags.  I knew from watching the internet not to set my sights too high for this year's harvest.  I have plenty of potatoes but they are all small.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but makes the yield very low.  

What I was looking forward to is the Sweet Potatoes.  The vines were huge and thriving.  They went through the fence, put rootlets down into the gravel and still demanded daily watering.  And I was careful to listen to them and give them what they wanted.  I was still afraid I had all vine and no tuber.

That's the thing about roots crops.  

You never know how well you did until the moment of truth.

Oooo I see something in there!

Lots of somethings

The sifter above contains the harvest from one container

I got plenty of large baker sized and some that are more suitable for cubing.

I still have some vines tucked into ornamental plantings that need to be dug up.

This is the combined harvest from both of my containers.

I cleaned them off and set them on the strawberry cage  

to sort by size and ready them for curing.  

I plan on prepping them and putting most of them in the freezer.

Here is a Joe Gardener video about harvesting, curing and storing sweet potatoes.  

And an article on freezing them to store.

The last tomato plant.  I picked all of the tomatoes, pulled the plant and 

repurposed the soil into a bed which needed amendment. 

This bed got all of the tomato soil and some of the potato soil because both of these were topped with shredded leaves which made a nice combination.  Next year my Dahlias will be planted here but I also planted some of the smallest potatoes to see if can get an early crop in the spring.  Because I only grew in bags there would be no missed spuds to sprout as volunteers.  So I volunteered them.

My meager lettuce crop.  Better than nothing!

Brussells Sprouts.  I've removed the insect netting and put that away.  They can't do much damage at this point.  The sprouts really haven't done much despite being watered every other day.  I'm hoping some cooler wet weather will stimulate some growth.

The Nasturtiums are at their peak and the bees and even hummingbirds are loving them.

The Dry Creek bed grasses are also at their peak and are giving some autumn color.

This Strawberry Marigold is right outside the garden shed door and I admired it each time I walked by.

Another "more fun when it's dry" project is compost.  I turned my existing piles and dumped out one of our compost tubes which we used over the winter for kitchen waste and which has been sitting since early May when we emptied the other tube and began filling it.  From left to right - the tiger lilies, the cornstalks and the kitchen waste.

The strawberry bed has been weeded and mulched in preparation for spring.

And finally the Clematis Vine which I cut back to the ground in early August has outdone itself in the second blooming.  The variety is Rebecca and it always has a few blooms late into the season but nothing like this.  The other side has just as many blooms.

The Days are Numbered

The days are numbered and so is the harvest.  Just about the time you get sick of zucchini and pull out the plants leaving lovely tillable soil in place of a mass of failing vines, you realize that the half dozen zukes you have sitting in the basket on the counter is all there will be until next June.  Then you start counting how many tomatoes are left on the vine and estimating that in terms of sandwiches (which you also thought you were sick of but were wrong).  The garden days are numbered.  This morning there was patchy frost on the roof but the garden temperature was still 36.

I still have a beautiful bed of pole beans, two decent tomato plants, the sweet potato vines and the brussels sprouts.  I'm trying to get lettuce started but the other things are being dealt with one by one.  Soil is being returned to the dirt locker and pots are being put away.  The fences are on the landscape shrubs, and leaf blowing has begun.

Here is the Clematis Vine I cut to the ground in Mid-August.  

It is big and beautiful and blooming again.

The Nasturtium are doing pretty well this year.  I pulled out some scraggly ones, but about half of them remain.  No sign of aphids this year.

 

It sure took some trying, but the pole beans are beautiful now.  This is the third planting.  Both the Monte Gusto and Carminat are topping the trellis and producing super long, straight beans in yellow and purple.  I have Jade planted at their feet.  Not performing spectacularly as last year, but still good.  The beans were the only thing I was concerned may be touched by frost, but the dew was heavy this morning and they seem OK.

Above is the cleared out zucchini bed.  

Even after the plant is gone, the roots are still doing their job.

I am trying to get some fall lettuce started.  Last year it didn't work.  This year is a bit touch and go too.  After I shot this photo, I transplanted half a dozen romaine seedlings and a nice oak leaf plant that I started in the house under grow lights.  I will have a little salad, but it might not be a lot.  In years past I have been very successful and had lettuce into December when the plants just stopped growing and were eaten to the nub.

This year I am trying burlap over the seed bed to keep the birds out ( I have very efficient purple finches) and keep the soil moist and cool.  The weather has been hot and dry but we are getting temps in the high 60s all this week, so not good lettuce sprouting weather before now but still some hope.  No matter how well we plan, how hard we work or how clever we think we are, we are always at the mercy of the weather to some extent.

Also, I have already ordered the bulk of my seeds for next year.  Some things like potatoes will naturally have to wait, but the larger, long lasting seeds (like peas and beans) are all sorted and ready and the list of remaining seeds (like Sweet Corn and Lettuce) will be taken care of as soon as they are in stock.  I hope everyone is getting their harvest stored.  Canning lids and freezer bags are hard to come by these days and only natural hoarders like myself have extra.

And a River Runs Through it.

We live on the wide, level top of a large hill.  Our house is on a small raised area and there is decent grade in every direction, but we still have flooding issues.  Our back lawn, which traditionally had two boggy spots along the tree lines where the sun rarely shone, had, in the past five years, turned into an unmowable swamp.  

We don't know what happened to change our lawn into a swamp.  We have a couple of theories.  Maybe when we hooked up to the city water and left our water well unused, we stopped moving the water out of the water table.  Maybe that winter when it was -30 for two weeks and the frost was 48 inches into the ground, the shale ledge fractured opening up new springs?  Whatever it was, it was fast and dramatic.  And it has caused a lot of misery.

There comes a point in June when you figure you are just going to have to chance mowing for the first time, before you have to resort to the brush hog.  In some areas you can get through, and others are softer than they look.  A whole section of lawn felt like a waterbed.  

The sod layer ballooned up away from the hard grey clay below.  There were areas of the backyard that were left unmowed almost all last summer.    I had to put tall boots on to access my cold frame which sat on the patio with the open side to the lawn.  Sometimes the pressure of the mower deck alone would rumple up sections of sod like an area rug that isn't stuck down right. 

To the west of my garden, there was a strip of lawn where the mower has been getting stuck for decades.  When we chose the spot for our garden, we also decided this would be a good time to put in a driveway along that terrible wet spot to get past the garden and back to an area we use for staging materials, storing equipment, and burning brush.  The construction of this driveway only moved the wet spot a little further east.

There would be standing water along these RR ties all year.  When we got a hard rain, the driveway itself would be ankle deep in water.  During really hard rains (I'm talking an inch an hour for more than one hour) the water would back up into the raised bed garden.

The first thing we did last spring was to put a dry well into that sunken wet spot, and we dug across the driveway to connect a drain pipe from the drywell to the overflow pipe from our rainwater collection system.  This pipe runs the center of the wooded area, picks up the water from half of the next door neighbor's downspouts, and runs out behind their barn and into the woods.  Now the driveway, and the section of the lawn to its northwest, stays dry and does not hold water.

The next thing we did was turn the worst part of the swamp, directly south of the garden shed, into a gravel pad.  If you can't mow it... build on it.

We laid down road stabilization mat over the grass, and bordered the area with RR ties pinned into the ground.  Then we began adding #2 washed stone.  A lot of stone.  Loads and loads of stone.  We filled it eight inches deep to match the top edge of the ties.

The plan is to build a greenhouse here.  And add some storage.  With a shady porch to sit under and admire our hard work  The hard part is deciding how to do this.  It would be great if I could choose a picture off of Pinterest, put it in my shopping cart, and have UPS deliver it tomorrow.  But we all know there is a lot more planning and hard work that goes into it than that.  Also this building project will incorporate rain water collection and eventually solar power.  All ambitious ideas.

Here are some of the ideas we are batting
around as we search for the perfect solution

So for now, the gravel pad sits empty.  And dry.  Very dry!  It is beautiful in its dryness and its potential.  And the best part - when we first mowed the backyard in early May, we didn't get stuck.  We didn't even leave a rut.  Not even a muddy stripe!  That means we diverted a lot of water.

But now that there is a road stabilization mat under all of that gravel, water will run off of it instead of soaking into the sponge that was pretending to be lawn.  And we needed to get that water 60 feet downgrade to that drywell at the edge of the driveway.  What we wanted, was rocks.  A whole lot of rocks.  Something that would not have to be mowed.  Something like the Dry Creek Bed nearby.  What we needed was something along the lines of a Rain Garden.  And we really do like rocks.  There is so much beauty there if you look.  Every time I walk through our man made riverbed I marvel that such a wide variety of material all ended up in one gravel bank to be harvested for our landscaping.

And so it began.

This space is half as wide as it is long.  So at some points of its development it began to look more like a landslide than a riverbed.  But we kept working on it.  This main drainage project spawned a lot of side projects.  I wanted tall grasses and plants that attract butterflies, so I took advantage of late season sales last summer and bought carloads of grasses and transplanted them into fiber pots.

Which led to digging SIXTY holes.  Moving the stones aside, cutting into the road fabric.  Burrowing into the nasty, hard, nearly pure clay.  The fiber pot and potting soil method I used on the last dry creek bed has proven quite successful.  The daylilies, irises and grasses thrive and grow bigger each year as the pots disintegrate and the roots find native soil below.  When the grasses are filled out, they add a lot of texture and as they mature they will add height making the winding creek bed itself look narrower.  I plan on adding some low shrubs as well.

Connected the drainage project was the Firepit project.  The fire pit located itself in a deep void that developed from driving the tractor back and forth over an area where a stump had been deteriorating underground.  The tree that belonged to the stump that made the fire pit is now a counter top in my kitchen.  When a hole develops, we put it to use!  We have had several fires, both last fall and early this spring.  The west side becomes shaded around 1pm so we've put a variety of chairs around it.  These chairs have been moved so many times before they found a home!  And they're HEAVY.  And awkward.  They used to have to be moved every time we mowed the lawn.

See all of those little orange flags on the chairs?  Those are to keep the birds off.

The flags look a little silly but trust me, I'd rather look at silly orange flags than scrub bird poop off of the chairs every day.  And there was a lot!  And some of it was berry purple.

The last thing we did was add a walkway and finished off the south edge of the gravel pad where it joins the lawn.  We need to keep this area accessible and undeveloped until we build whatever it is we are going to build.  It is easily reached by the driveway making construction relatively easy.

This spring the creek still looked a little bare.  

I've kept adding plants, and now it looks much more interesting.  We get a lot of butterflies which love the three butterfly bushes I planted

As most things do, this project has evolved in its own way.  Without any thought being put into it, the color scheme has gravitated towards purple and yellow.  There is no shortage of yellow or orange day lilies that need to be divided so I've added some of those, and in a few weeks I will transplant black-eyed susans and salvia.  

Growing up I spent many many hours playing in the creek.  Now I have one running through my own backyard.  And yes, when it rains, the water does run down the center towards the drain. There is something very peaceful about the creek bed with the swaying grasses and the dragon flies.

Above is my favorite view of the dry creek bed.  It is a nice transition between the structure of the garden and seating areas and the natural areas beyond.  It is full of fossils and quartz and flint.  The rocks themselves are worthy of landscape arranging and the plants only enhance their beauty.  

We live in the Great Lakes region which was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet until about 14,000 years ago.  That glacier pushed a lot of rocks across Western NY.  It isn't unusual to find boulders the size of a stove not far under the surface of your lawn or pasture.  The rocks are worn smooth by waters and ice.  I wonder how far some of them have traveled before they were deposited together in a creek bank to lay buried for thousands of years..

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. 

~Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It