First Fruits!

I came back from a 4-day vacation last night and could hardly believe my eyes!  Two peppers have somehow evaded cutworm execution and the perils of my inexperience, and are truly growing.  Maybe when I'm a more seasoned gardener I'll be disappointed with the potential harvest of only two peppers, but right now I'm ecstatic.

My cornmeal bait traps (an idea I got from Good Bug, Bad Bug - see previous post) are somewhat effective... probably better than nothing.  Supposedly the cutworms are attracted to and eat the cornmeal, but are unable to digest it.  This is supposed to kill them.  But I'm unclear about how long it takes, and if it kills them before or after they move on to eat more of my plants.  I catch anywhere from one to four cutworms each day in each trap (I have three traps in various places at the moment), but still find a few cutworms on or around the plant as well.  My little trowel is bloodied with the green guts of countless cutworms.  In fact, you can see one on the underside of the leaf of garlic directly above the trap, which I didn't notice until I posted this picture.  Hilarious. 

My first tomato!  It'll be a red, cherry tomato before too long.

Early Indoctrination

I'm slowly working my way through every last gardening book at the library (or so my husband thinks), and a few weeks ago I picked up a great book by Jessica Walliser: "Good Bug, Bad Bug: Who's Who, What They Do, and How to Manage Them Organically in Your Garden."  My 2 year-old decided the book was awesome, too, and every day he looks at the pictures and asks questions.  He's become truly helpful outside, eagerly identifying aphids and cutworms so that he can dispatch them. 


Yesterday, I managed captured one of those moments that I delight in as a mom.  Gideon wanted to read to his baby sister.  And not just any book.  The "bug book."  He might not have all of his facts straight yet, but it was pretty sweet.  (Ignore my messy house.  I've been recovering from a tonsillectomy this week, so I was glad to simply have everyone occupied, fed and happy.)

Compost & Fruit Flies

I started composting 5 years ago, and every spring since then fruit flies have managed to find their way to my kitchen.  They irritate me the fire out of me.  I keep my kitchen clean (okay fine, as clean as I can with 3 kids adding to the messes as fast as I can deal with them), I carry the fruit and veggie scraps to the compost bin daily, I add more "brown" to the pile outside, etc.  It doesn't matter.  The fruit flies never totally go away.  

A few weeks ago, I saw an advertisement in my Gardener's Supply Company magazine for a $20 fruit fly trap.  The colorful pear shape is definitely an attractive solution to a nasty problem, but I'd rather spend that money on seeds, plants or tools.  So I poked around online and spent 2 minutes throwing together a trap that has worked amazingly well.  And didn't cost me a dime.

I used an old sparkling grape juice bottle, some apple cider vinegar, and a small paper funnel held together with one little piece of tape.  The funnel being small was key for me.  I jammed it into the bottle securely enough that it didn't require a seal of any kind.  My original funnel was made from an uncut 8x13 piece of paper, and it was apparently too tall for fruit flies to bother exploring.  I cut the funnel down to about 3 inches and started catching flies immediately.  It's been sitting innocently beside my sink for weeks now, has no odors like I was afraid it might, and is the ONLY place I find fruit flies in my entire house.  

Bright Spots

Look at those beautiful (almost) tomatoes! Seeing this one flower today, clustered with so many other tiny promises filled me with joy, wonder and hope I just can't describe.

Sweet Pepper Blossoms

Oh My!!  So that's what you look like little peppers!  Another explosion of wonder for Amy.  :)

This is my heirloom Brandywine tomato vine.  Just the name of this tomato makes my mouth water.  I've guarded and hoped for this plant more than any of the other 30+ seedlings I grew.  I'm beside myself with hope that I might actually see a tomato from it...

Poor little peppers...

The good news is, I'm now pretty positive that blossom end rot is NOT the thing nabbing my baby peppers.  (Have just looked up lifecycle of a pepper plant to confirm this; there's a great picture on this ehow link shows a new flower, old flower, and burgeoning fruit.)  Being my first season to watch food grow, it makes sense that I wouldn't know the difference between a blossom doing its job and a blossom meeting an untimely end on the vine.  The bad news, it is STILL those freaking cutworms.  This is what I picked up out of the dirt this morning.

Beautiful baby peppers.  GRR.  For every five cutworms I kill on an average outdoor smooshing escapade, I'm clearly missing twice as many.  These tiny peppers actually smelled like bell peppers, too.  What did I expect, right?  But I couldn't stop sticking my nose against the little things and inhaling the smell of food.  I never do that with food I buy at the grocery store.  But having nurtured these from a little plant, I was amazed by them. 

Eve and I have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books together for several weeks now.  It was a perfect day for us to get to the "The Glittering Cloud" chapter of "On the Banks of Plum Creek."  I still remembered reading this chapter as a little girl and the devastation Pa felt at seeing his entire wheat croup devoured by grasshoppers with NOTHING he could do about it.  Today it provided a dramatic adjustment for my perspective about my garden on which our lives do NOT depend.  Having a (fledgling container) garden is a luxury for me, a hobby even.  I want it to thrive, and I would love to decrease our need for grocery story trips, even a little bit.  But we're a long way from that happening, and we're not going to starve or struggle in the meantime.  Here's to not taking food for granted!

Learning to flex

My grand ideas for growing vegetables at home came very close to never becoming any kind of reality.  After reading, researching, taking notes and making plans for months, I walked outside in January with a shovel and a game plan.  Because I'm the kind of person who generally likes to bite off way more than I can chew, I really was trying not to go overboard for our first season.   I was combining ideas from Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening," lasagna gardening, and "Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens" by Barbara Pleasant.  I had every intention of ripping out small sections of our brand-new bermuda sod while it was still mostly dormant, and laying out the beginnings of an edible back-yard wonderland.

And I quickly realized that the sun wasn't shining where I was going to start our garden.  And it was barely after noon.  No where in the backyard were we getting the minimum 6 hours of sunlight.  The phrase "my heart sank" comes to mind, but isn't quite dramatic enough to describe my sadness and disappointment.  I was completely crushed. And 8 months pregnant, which made it even worse.  Some good friends reminded me that the sun would fall differently in the spring, and that the crazy baby-making hormones might be affecting my judgment and magnifying my emotions.  

So I took a deep breath and started coming up with a Plan B. 

Solution #1
The front yard!  It gets plenty of sunshine, but there are several things to consider.  It's small, sloping, visible to neighborhood, and has problematic soil.  Raised beds are not an option.  In the long run, I'm still holding out for an edible front yard (I highly recommend the book "The Edible Front Yard" by Ivette Soler by the way) with revitalized soil, revamped landscaping and delicious flowerbeds.  But in the short term, I've thrown myself into container gardening.  I'm learning a lot.

Solution #2
The community garden.  This just makes me smile.  We have a beautiful community garden about one mile from our home, and my church reserved 3 plots this year.  For the fruits and vegetables I truly don't have room for yet, this has been the perfect solution.  The kids and I planted sets of 1015Y Texas Sweet Onions and garlic in January, and most recently a watermelon plant.  Having a 2-month old means I can't get over there very much to dig around and plant.  But this is the stage of life we're in!  We'll just do what we can.

War on Cutworms

Sweet peppers of every color are a staple at our house, so they've been at the top of my list of vegetables to grow.  I tried unsuccessfully to grow them from seed (great learning experience - more about that later), and finally bought transplants at Lowe's.  I planted them in containers, and it didn't occur to me to take basic cutworm precautions like collars and diatomaceous earth.  Everything seemed to be fine until blooms appeared and started to open.  The morning after I took this picture, this beautiful blossom was lying in the dirt.  And then I spotted my first cutworm of the season stretched out on a limb of the plant like it owned the place.   

I've become a bit obsessed with hunting cutworms since then.  If I weren't so pissed at them, I might actually be impressed by what they're capable of.  Since hand-picking doesn't seem to be scratching the surface, diatomaceous earth is my next step and I hope it works.   My pepper blossoms have continued to wither and fall off, and I've almost lost hope for homegrown peppers this year.  I used an epsom salt foliar spray last week, in case the larger issue is blossom end rot.  I also placed cornmeal traps around my plants, which ended up attracting both cutworms and slugs.  Eew  And probably feeding the ant population.  Insert exasperated sigh here.

For future reference, here's a list of different ways to prevent or fight cutworms:

  - get rid of weeds
  - surround your garden with a perennial flower border
  - put a collar of stiff paperboard around your plants when you plant them
  - use diatomaceous earth around the base of the plant
  - surround your plants with a collar of molasses as a deterrent
  - sprinkle used coffee grounds around the plant and infected areas
  - cultivate at the end of the season to expose and destroy winter habitats
  - saucers of cornmeal are supposed to work as deadly bait that cutworms eat, but can't digest

Off to a rocky start

During my most recent pregnancy, "nesting" took a different form. I began pouring over gardening books.  Devouring them might be more like it.  I think finally being in our new house (and having no intention or desire to move in the next 20 years) gave me permission to envision putting down roots.  The plant-related variety. 

Our yard at the last house was an afterthought.  I mowed and raked it when it was absolutely necessary.  I occasionally planted things in our shaded flowerbeds and containers only to watch them die, which made sense as I had no sense of responsibility for watering them.  I had a beautiful hydrangea bush for a few years, until we discovered and fixed a leak that had been providing a constant stream of water for it.  It was never the same after that.  I half-heartedly attempted to care it and even transplanted it to a back-breaking container for transport to the new house.  But it died in the garage at my in-laws.  Come to think of it, I even had a compost pile that magically grew an enormous squash plant one summer.  It produced several half-yellow, half-green squash hybrids that (I'm embarrassed to admit) I was actually afraid to eat. 

But over the past few years, our family has experienced gradual and dramatic changes in the way we think about food.  And I'm finally discovering and indulging an insatiable urge to grow things, especially things that I can feed to my family. 

So far my success has been limited.  Really limited.  We've been able to eat one salad each from our lettuce (which I grew from seed).  We've used our herbs (which I did not grow from seed) in several dishes and drinks.  And right now I'm working toward a future harvest of tomatoes, peppers and garlic.  And it IS WORK, but work that fascinates me.