Busy Lately Outside

It is the end of the outside gardening season.   We had hard freezes 2 night in a row.  I covered the tomato plants because the next 10 nights are forecast to stay above freezing and I was hoping to get a few more tomatoes to ripen.

But they all died.  Well, tomatoes are actually tropical vines.  So I picked all the green ones.  There are some recipes for using them.  Fried in batter is routine, but I saw one for Tomato Parmesan and will try that too.

The Coleus and Mum pots were safely in the house, so they can go back outside for another week.  I will be bringing them and all the salad trays indoors after that to limp them through Winter.  Any color inside and any salad cuttings are good.

I disassembled the tomato bed today.  Not the simplest thing.  Pull out thge cage support stakes, remove the cages, take up all the labels, pull the plants, pull up the black landscaping fabric that kept the weeds smothered.  The fabric is all trash.  It seems to fall apart in 6 months.  

But at least the grassy weeds are all dead this year.  I'll be planting most of the Pansies there next week (a few will go around the mailbox and some in the deck pots this year).  

Did some serious compost bin work the past week (there are 2 bins).  

I bought a self-propelled battery Ryobi mower a few years ago and it is wonderful.  I have it set for mulching, and I can still use the bagger attachment (easy to attach and remove).  I shredded/mowed leaves all over the yard.  

Filled the empty bin 6" deep.  Then filled 4 trash barrels and 2 trash bags with leaves for future use.  There are more leaves in the trees, but I will shred them in place on the lawn as free fertilizer for both grass and trees.

I had too much green stuff for proper composting, so the leaves were nice to add.  Yesterday, I started turning the existing greenish pile into the other bin and mixed it with more shredded leaves 6" at a shot (the layers compress).  Found I had some good worms in the existing pile.

I got half of the old piled moved but it gets tiresome.  So the rest will get moved tomorrow.  Between the existing green stuff (kitchen scraps) and the newly shredded browns (leaves) and watered a bit, the new pile should finally heat up nicely.

I overseeded the lawn a week ago.  The shredded leaves won't bother them when I do that next week.  They will have either germinated or not and they can grow up between the leaf-shreds without difficulty.

Blew all the leaves off the deck.  They don't bother me any, but the cats dislike walking on dry crunchy leaves.  It offends their sense of stealth.  I indulge The Mews.  And the leaves don't do any positive good sitting on the deck.

Put a marinated chicken on the smoker.  Not exactly my old model (fancier shelves), but close enough.

I can never quite get it to fully-cooked in the smoker, but I've read that all the smokey flavor gets in after 2 hours, so I just finish them in the oven.  Sometimes I brush half with BBQ sauce for variety.  I pulled off a whole leg for dinner (with veggies).  It was delicious!

More to do the next few days...

RAIN!

2' so far and thank you Mother Nature.  We sure needed it.  Give us a couple more...  I actually stood outside in the rain.  

I haven't mowed the lawn in weeks.  Well, there were a few weeds sending up flowers.   But mostly there were dead clovers seed heads all over.   I like clovers.  They send down deep roots and pull nutrients to the surface for the grass to use.

A "lawn" is anything short and green to me.  LOL. 

Catching Up With The Yard, Part 1

I got some stuff done in the yard in June and July (which got undone as weeds regrew in August) but at least it isn't as bad as before.  Young new weeds are better that old tough ones. 

August was odd.  Too much rain.  I never thought I would complain about THAT!  My 1st 25 years here, the soil would get so dry that it would crack open like a lesser version of parched mudflats.

When some rain DID fall, it would immediately be sucked into the depths.  OK, unlike the above picture, I DID have lawn grass, but dry and brown.  Things have changed.  Partly, by my own efforts to leave grass clippings on the lawn which gradually improved the soil.  And NO, grass-clippings do not cause "thatch". Frequent but only surface watering causes the grass roots to spread on the top inch or so (where the water is), and THAT causes thatch.  And that leaves the grass roots subject to drying and death.

I have a healthy lawn almost year-round these days, and I seldom water it.  But when I do, it is a long deep watering.  Healthy grass can send roots down a foot or more if that is where the water is, and deeper water doesn't evaporate away as fast as surface water.

And I'll mention the clover is good for your lawn.  Clover sends roots down several feet and brings nutrients back up to the surface as the leaves die.  But bees like clover, and I sure don't mind helping the bees.  

As far as the lawn goes my rule is pretty much "If it is green, it is OK".  I don't even mind a few dandelions.  I don't have many because the grass is healthy and I cut it at 3" which is enough to smother/shadeout most weeds.  

I have neighbors who cut their grass to 1" and are constantly fighting with weak grass and happy weeds.  I'm pretty sure all the dandelions I DO have come from them.  Well, you know, most people don't exactly study about lawns.  They just do their best in their busy days.  I've always been interested in growing things though, and a lawn is like a garden.  

In fact, it is time to spread corn gluten meal on the lawn.  It inhibits seeds from developing and Fall is when the dandelion and most lawn weeds germinate.  And since it is also mostly nitrogen, the grass loves it.  Turf grasses in temperate zones grow roots best in Fall/Winter (which admittedly does seem odd for most plants) and good roots make healthy lawns.  But Spring bulbs are like that too, so they aren't unique.

But the corn gluten that prevents weed seeds from developing also affects grass seed.  So I generally cycle the  Fall treatments.  Two Septembers, the corn gluten, and the 3rd, new grass seed.  My preferred lawn grass is tall fescue and they are not spreaders.  So new seed has to be spread "sometimes".  

Every few years, I get a trailerful of free compost from the County and spread it around on the lawn.  It's really kind of a cool system.  You have yard debris like fallen branches and even Christmas trees and bring it to the Mulching Center.  

They pile it up into huge mounds for a couple years while it heats up and breaks down.  Then they move it to a 2nd spot for a final "churn" where it heats up again.  The result is something between mulch and compost.  It's not like finely-sifted compost of course, but it is ready for lawn and garden use.  

I like it for several reasons.  It's free to dump the raw stuff at the start and free to pick the finished product.  And if you go on Saturdays 8am-Noon, they use a bucket-loader to fill the trailer for free.  I LOVE "free".

The commercial nursery near the County mulch center probably hates that.  They get $40 per bucketload (my trailer holds 3).  But they offer sifted compost and a 50/50 blend of topsoil at the same price and sometimes I buy some of that.  And I only know of them because I have stooped there on my way to the County mulch center, so they get some business from me for that and sometimes I buy plants.

But back to the lawn.  I spread the compost over the lawn thinly most Springs.  Every little amount helps.  An 1/8" of compost helps the grass quite a lot (they are good at living on very little help (consider that most grasses worldwide live without human assistance)...

But all that is about the lawn.  I have problems with TOO much grass in other places.  More about that tomorrow... 

Dead Trees

Last year was hard on trees here.  Very dry.  And I only say that about MY local conditions.  It has been horribly drier in other places.  But I'm here and not there.  So I have my only experience "here".

Many years ago, I planted Golden Rain trees on either side of the driveway near the street.  I like "specimen" trees, small and interesting.  Golden Rain produces ping-pong-ball-sized seed packets in July that turn deep yellow as they mature.  The seeds never seem to grow, so I assume they are sterile hybrids.  And that is good; I don't want invasive plants.  But they ARE interesting in the middle of Summer (I have some other trees and shrubs for Spring and Fall color).

But, as I said, last year was harsh.  One is completely dead (it sent up one shoot from the trunk, but it didn't last long). 

 The other is half dead.  IT looks fine from the house, but dead from the street.  I'm not an arborist, but I have "enough" understanding of pruning small trees to remove the deadwood properly (undercut, then downward cut, then allow 1/2" "branch collar cut" for healing.

The surviving tree will look unbalanced for a few years, but the tree will send out new branches and I know how to direct them slightly if necessary.  

I also lost a beech tree.  I was slightly fooled at first, because there were vines growing on it and the vine leaves made it look like the tree was recovering.  When I pruned the vines at ground level, and THEY died, the sad truth was obvious.  

The tree was here when I moved in 35 years ago.  If you look closely, you will see that the top was literally "trunkated" but new branches arose to create a new canopy.  The tree can't very well have died of last year's drought; it is just a few feet from a drainage easement and there is "some" water flowing from the neighborhood above year-round.  That itself is actually amazing.  No matter how dry it gets, water flows...  I have no idea how old the beech tree was.  Maybe it just lived its full life.  But it sure had access to water!

Ground conditions can be strange.  When I first moved here, the lawn would get so dry that the soil would crack open.  I used to water the lawn, not realizing that it was natural for the grasses in my area to go dormant and grown in the hot days of July and August.  I've stopped doing that (waste of water and fertilizer to force the lawn to grow).

Instead, I started leaving the grass-clippings on the lawn and laid down corn gluten just twice a year (both a natural fertilizer and a weed suppressant).  I also bought a soil aerator I could drag behind the riding mower.  It brought up plugs of soil to the surface, allowed air and decaying grass in, and over the years, the soil greatly improved.  It hasn't cracked in a decade.  And the tall fescue grass stays green most Summers.  

A lawn-care company rep came by a few weeks ago.  I don't ever engage the services of "door-knockers", but I had time and was curious.  So we sat on the front step while he pointed out that I had a few weeds and a lot of clover in my lawn and his company could fix that.  I mentioned that I was an organic yardkeeper.  He said "we can improve your lawn".

My immediate thought was "welcome to my web, said the spider to the fly"...

So I asked him why my clover was so bad.  He said "it's not grass".  I pointed out that clover has deep roots and brings nutrients back up to the grassroot level, that it was pleasantly green, that it didn't need fertilizing, and that bees like clover blossoms.  

He got an annoyed look and decided he should move on to talk to other neighbors.  I LOVE doing stuff like that...