Poison Ivy Progress

 No more berries from these guys.

Poison Ivy

I am very tired of Poison Ivy.  This vine pictured below is our main culprit in spreading it everywhere because it is so mature and is covered with berries every fall.  Then the birds eat them and poop the seeds all over the place!

Not a day goes by that I don't find a bunch more seedlings to pull or spray.  It is my number one most prevalent weed in the landscape.

Its in the mulch

Its in the ground cover

Its on the deck.

And those are just what I found walking around in five minutes when I realized "I need some photos to illustrate this"...  after pulling and spraying all week.

That vine doesn't look like such a big deal until you put a person beside it for scale.  It has engulfed the entire dead Ash tree and forty feet up.  Luckily the next door neighbor is not allergic to it (yet).  So he gets elected to deal with it whenever we are cutting trees.  Neither my husband nor I will ever pick up the neighbor's chain saw.  And just watching gives us the heebie jeebies.

About the only thing you can do with a vine this big is try to cut off its food and hope it stops thriving and eventually dies.  The main root has a million little hair roots that cling to the tree bark and get moisture from the surface.  We decided to try cutting out a section of the roots to see if we can at least discourage it.

That's not the only dead Ash tree we have that is covered in Ivy.

We had a go at several others.

Neighbor Mike pulls out a section of root.  And it looks like there is a hunk right out of the tree.  But that is just Ivy root.

Poison Ivy is pretty hard to discourage.  I'll let you know if the leaves ever begin to wilt. 

Winter Weeding

Every winter we get a few breaks when you can go out and spend some time in the garden.  Yesterday was absolutely perfect for picking up sticks and leaves.

It got up to 49F.

There are a few spots where the weeds were flourishing.  Even flowering.

There are few weeds in the raised beds but the ones that are there were getting pretty big.  I pulled them all.

The last of the lettuce was down for the count.

The tulips are eager to get going.

This morning was very cold and clear with freezing fog and hoar frost.

The silly blue birds were in the middle of their mating ritual and checking out the bird house.  I've even seen a few robins.  They'll have to face reality though.  The ground hogs are predicting an early spring but I think we have at least a month to go.  

PreEmergent Experiment

 In two of my raised beds I have a problem with purslane weeds.  Each year I weed it and manage it but the following year it comes up from whatever seeds are left.  Last year I intended to use a preemergent control but didn't get around to it.  This year we are going to give it a shot.

Corn gluten meal  is derived from the part of the corn kernel that is not used when making corn meal. It is commonly used to control weeds. The oily coating on the corn gluten meal doesn’t allow plant roots to form, so newly germinated seedlings die.  I purchased 10 pounds of corn gluten meal on line and I wanted to get it spread before the seeds started to germinate.

The worst bed is one that I am planning to plan cauliflower and cabbage seedlings in this year.  I won't be seeding anything and I don't want to have to weed every week.

I spread three scoops of the corn gluten meal and today's rain should begin to activate it.  It should be good for five or six weeks and then I will spread a second batch.  I'll let you know if it helps.

It is another soggy day out.  I managed to dodge the raindrops. 

It was also quite warm out and I got a few other things done in the garden.

I set out my pre-sprouted ranunculus corms.   I'll run you through that project when it is complete.  Our weather is supposed to be very normal for the next week with no artic blasts forecasted.  I was sort of hesitant to set out the corms this early.  I wondered if I should pot a few up separately and put them in the cold frame but  thought - "no, I did the research and laid out these dates and I'm sticking to them.  If they don't work out then I'll have to try something else next year."  In for a penny, in for a pound.

This time of year when the ground is soft is also a good time to do some driveway maintenance.  The guys had a tractor ballet going next door scraping the crown out of the neighbor's driveway with a box scraper and taking the material away.

It looked like a bit of a mucky mess, but they took a lot of used gravel out and used it as fill in other areas and then laid down fresh gravel.

Afterwards it was flat and fresh and ready for summer.

This is the first year I have been able to enjoy crocuses during the day.  The blooms only open up when it is sunny.  When I worked I only got to see them on the weekends.  Now I get to enjoy them on any sunny day.

Oh No Squash Bugs

It seems the next in the long line of garden plagues this year will be squash bugs.  This morning one of the zucchini was wilting.  It looked a little wilty yesterday and worse today.  So I took it out.  I still have several plants remaining there. 

As I was examining the other plants for problems I found this...

Actually I found about half a dozen clusters.

At first I thought it was Cucumber Beetles, but this little guy is the only one I've seen in a week.

Then ...

Squash Bug Nymphs.

Uh Oh.

I found an adult on one of my cantaloupe vines but no time for a photo op.

Those things are "Squish on Sight"

I figured I'd better put eyes on the covered cucumber plants.  They are just fine but needed a little weeding.  The Purslane was starting to come in thick.  You have to get that stuff early.

In fact, I was making a mental list of anything that is going better this year than last and I came up with Purslane.  Both of my Sweet Corn beds are completely weed free this year thanks to two or three sessions with the claw when they were just about 6 inches high.

This is my Sweet Corn bed last year (below).

At least its all one kind of weed.  That way it almost looks purposeful.

Or at least sort of tidy.

I cleaned the Strawberry bed for the second time this year.

This year we have dozens and dozens of these little Pearl Crescent butterflies.

Their host plant is Aster and we have a fair share of wild Aster.

I had a nice big, fat, green cabbage ready to harvest and I decided to try Sauerkraut.

I had seen the Ball Fermenting Lids on the 5 Acres and a Dream blog.  Useful gadgets like that really appeal to me so I put Sauerkraut on my mental To Do list for this year.

I read up on recipes and watched some instructions on YouTube.

Because I am new at this I laid out everything ahead of time along with my notes.

I used our big McCoy bowl.  This is the 12 inch but we also recently acquired a hard to find 14 inch bowl at a flea market for about half $$ what you would pay online.  These heavy old bowls are excellent for hand mixing (we use them for mixing sausage) because they stay put and don't walk around on the counter.  This was also perfect for massaging the salt into the cabbage.

I sliced the cabbage by hand instead of using a mandolin because I've determined I am not safe to use one.... I didn't want any undesirable pieces (of me) in my kraut.   I slice lettuce and cabbage frequently so I'm pretty good at it.   I've been obsessively tucking the edges down into the brine but perfection seems impossible.  I'm going to leave these alone for a few hours and then reassess to see if I need to add a smidge of water.

Passive Weed Control

My husband asked me awhile back why I was taking up a whole raised bed just to set potato grow bags on when they could just as well be on the gravel along the fence like last year.

This is why:

See all those itty bitty weed babies?

That bed, and two two others, were completely over run by purslane last year.  Practically knee deep in it in between the corn stalks which is pretty impressive for a ground hugging plant.  So I am blocking it out.  Covering it up.  And weeding the edges.  That'll fix it!  Or at least its one less bed to worry about this year.

I just go over it with a claw ever week or two and uproot all of those seedlings before they get big enough to require pulling

Less weeding is also why I use up all my old lettuce seed as ground cover.

No room for weeds in there!

The Gardening is over let the Weeding begin

Strawberry Blonde Marigolds.
Prettier now than they were all summer

We're starting to look forward to cooler weather and less work.  It was time to start pulling things out.  After all, we could be only two weeks away from a blizzard. 

It happens!

Everything was either dead or overgrown

The downside to pulling out tomato plants and cucumber vines is that you are left with a pile of crumbly, blighted leaves and a lot of weeds you have previously ignored.

A quick once over with the leaf blower gets rid of those nasty old leaves.

And a few minutes with a weeder and a rake and things are as good as new.

But this is weeding season.  It's tough to cultivate your soil when it's in use.  So for the next month I will keep a close eye on the weed situation.  This bed is developing a bit of a creeping oxalis problem.  So it will be the last one planted in the spring giving me time to manage the weed problem.

But not everything is gone.  Besides plenty of lettuce and a big pile of ripening tomatoes, there are still carrots.  These are in the oven now for honey roasted carrots and roasted carrot soup.