The lettuces are definately adding mass, one week after the LED array was set up. They didn’t get their first feed until yesterday: Miracle Grow at the package strength. (Sorry OGL folks, I promise, the next batch will be in a mix that includes compost.) I forgot how little water seedlings grown in relatively cool conditions need; they should have been feed a week ago.
I’ve worried over the height of the lights and can’t find relevant information.
Yugoslavian Red
The 90 watt light is supposed to cover a surface of four square feet. At 12-18″ away, the Yogoslavian Red lettuces at the end of the flat seem to be straining for the light. But they are showing some color. Too much of this light, I read, can hurt small seedlings. But I haven’t found a description of what that harm looks like, either. There is a good reason that I call this an experiment.
At least for the next week, I’ll leave the light centered about 12′ above the flat, moving the flat daily so that each end is closer on alternate days.
I started lettuces on 10/23 and they were just showing green, under my usual florescent bulb starting mechanisms, when the power went out for five days. I was worried that the sprouts would be too leggy and get my trials with an LED array off to a bad start, but after watching for a few days, these look fine. I guess that the cooler house temperatures also slowed development.
The light is an Illuminator UFO 5-Band Tri-Spectrum LED grow light. I vaguely thought that I would start with simple lettuces but the leftovers from last spring didn’t really offer that choice, except for Simpson Elite, a popular leaf lettuce, so I started two rows of it. And a row each (four 2″ soil cubes) of Australian Yellow (leaf) and Yugoslavian Red, my favorite heading lettuce. A row of Red Velvet didn’t germinate for some reason, I have had that problem before with that seed; this was a replacement pack. Thus, the empty cubes in the last picture.
In spite of plans to take advantage of extra basement space with a well-designed setup, in my usual haphazard way, I stuck the light in the guest/junk room. It uses the very sophisticated setup that I use in spring, two cross country skis over the tops of chairs and chains to hang the lights. I left one florescent fixture in place for times when I want to work with the lettuces. In just the time it takes me to get from the door to the outlet to unplug the LED array, my eyes are already complaining about the lurid pink glow. And everything is green while your eyes recover.
the setup
If anyone has advice about how long these lights should be on for lettuce, please speak up. I keep the seed starting lights on for 16 hours a day but I think that may be too long for these. Also, I suspect that day length has something to do with lettuce “heading up” so I’m thinking I should plan for some room to increase hours for that heading lettuce when it gets bigger. I have been warned that lettuces grown under low lights could have dangerous levels of nitrates, and did some reading on that. I do not know if “low light” applies to LED arrays. And about the only plans I have to deal with this is to use a low nitrogen fertilizer and get one of my lettuces tested at harvest time. I’ve also read that foods that have this problem taste bad so, guess what! I won’t eat them if they taste bad!
On hearing about my last week, a few people have said they couldn’t imagine being five days without power. For me, this was just one day more than our power outage in the ice storm of 2008, but yeah, before that, I couldn’t have imagined it either. A freind said I should share. I was a bit reluctant and tried to figure out why. During 2008 outage, I had just read Solviva, and in my head, developed so many ideas about how I could improve on this old, drafty house. A passive hot water system on the sunny side of the house; augmented by a redesigned fireplace that heats water as it’s used; a more elaborate, covered, outdoor cooking area. Dream on! The truth is that after that storm, I spent thousands of dollars remodling a bathroom in the back of the house where a pipe may have burst in the cold, and life went on. That was a once in a lifetime, right?
So my house is still drafty and energy inefficient, I never use the fireplace so I don’t dare try it in an emergency, even just to get some radiant heat. I don’t have double paned windows or even curtains on some of them. So I guess I should write about this like I write about my garden. How the rest of us do it, those who dream big but never get around to implementing the plan; who manage anyway.
First, I was gifted in 2008 with some of my most important tools: a propane burner and tank and two boxes of votive candles, one with votive holders. (Sister had loaned me her burner in the 2008 storm and I’d used every old candle in my collection.) The ability to make your own coffee or heat up some soup, or just a kettle of water to wash, is key to feeling as if you can cope. The other two important tools were my i-Phone and a battery run indoor/outdoor thermometer. Any PDA that lets you check weather and news and text or call family will do.
The lights went out on Saturday night and on Monday morning, the towns nearby were still closed down tightly. Rumor (text messages) had it that places: groceries, gas stations, had tried to open on battery/generator on Sunday; the fact that they’d given up told me we were in for a long outage. And rumor had it that trees were blocking roads everywhere and had to be removed. So priorities change; give up on getting into work and focus on staying warm and protecting the house. At first the differential between indoor and outdoor heat was enough that I just kept things closed up, and started burning those votives. When I moved to the bedroom for the night, all of the burning candles came with me. As the indoor temps became closer to outdoor temps, afternoons were spent heating water in all my biggest cooking pots to bring inside. I’d fire up the grill and boil water, cooking dinner before the charcoal burned out.
Food was no problem; I ate well. I keep what I call “winter meats” on hand, things like a can of corned beef hash, which includes beans and other protiens but the first days were spent using stuff from the freezer and eggs. It’s a small freezer, fortunately, as everything left in there has to go. And I gave up on the eggs about Tuesday. A yam, baked in foil on the grill, tucked in around the boiling water, was the sweetest I’ve had in ages and I wonder if the higher heat carmelized sugars in a way that the oven would not have done. And I was not cold. Whenever I wasn’t working, I was under a pile of blankets and three cats. The cats came to appreciate me as a source of heat, as well as food and affection. Living bodies generate a lot of heat on their own so preserving it and sharing it goes a long way. The nightime temps got lower every night, but 46 degrees F was the lowest; not that bad. Outside, we had a 26 deg F night that got me worrying about the darn pipes, so running water through that back bathroom periodically became a serious task. Ironically, the plumber did such a good job on the faucets that I couldn’t get them to drip.
But it was not a walk in the park. Between the things I need to do to keep my job and the things I like to do, there never seems to be enough time. So watching the week slip by when I couldn’t make progress on either front was frustrating. And yet there was plenty of time four coulda, shouldas and wouldas. Pergatory for a procrastinator like me. I hadn’t even thought to get cash like my father taught me, although the gas tank was pretty full.
But that’s probably not the way to think about it. Here’s what I want to share with you:
Make some simple preparations, canned food, a propane burner and a box or two of votive candles are cheap.
Use what you have; I hadn’t thought about charcoal and ligher fluid as survival tools but that’s what I had in 2008 and now I know.
Keep your gas tank full and cash on hand, especially when the weatherman says a storm is coming.
Recognize that priorities change and we have to embrace the moment: hug a cat (or other warm body); read that book on the coffee table: drink that third cup of coffee just because it’s warm.
Why the power went out
Deck side of houseNieghbor's House, notice the tree on the stoop.Wasp's nest still there!
I’ve been wanting a hard frost to kill off the tops of the dahlias; I want to do some expansion of the bed and add a lot of compost to see if that will help with the poor (purchased) soil that I used to build the beds. However, mother nature over-acheived. As I was driving home from work last night what was rain in eastern MA started turning into sleet and then fluffy white stuff as I climbed in elevation near home. As the temps dropped, it continued and we have a measurable accumulation from overnight. Weather people are also talking about more of the white stuff this weekend so I will need to dig dahlia tubers quickly.
Things are actually not looking too bad this morning but when the frozen tissues thaw, that expansion will destroy the plants. Shots of a deck box and the garden follow. The Swiss Chard and parsley will probably recover. Not the nasturtiums.
I purchased a small Toro electric mower this spring and wondered if my lawn was too much for it. I love its quiet ways, no worries about waking up the neighbors if I want to do an early morning mow. But, let’s face it, my lawn is not a genteel expanse of grasses. “Hey lady, is that Bugleweed (Ajuga) in your lawn?” Why yes, how perceptive of you to have noticed! I have both purple-leaved and green and n the spring it makes a lovely carpet of blue flowers that the pollinators love. I mow around the thickest spots until the bees abandon them.
My initial impression of the mower was that it did’t have enough power to pull the grass upright before cutting it but that has not proved to be a problem. Somehow it gets cut. It’s been doing it’s job all summer and there are no gouged and empty spots like the mowing company left from turning their big equipment in small places.
autumn nasturtium
But this article is about another experiment. I’m not going to rake the lawn this year. I am going to try to mow the leaves in. Although I’d heard it suggested before, a friend sent me this link to a Fine Gardening article that talks about Michigan State researchers who mowed an 18 inch! layer of leaves into test plots.
As you can see above, I don’t have much to lose. So, this is the year I try it with my much lighter layers of leaves. The season is slow in coming with many trees still green, but you can see my tiny eggbeater of a mower does make a dent in what’s there now.
Rose Teasing Georgia
Some bonus shots. The nasturtium are still going strong in the food beds; they keep me company as I clean, fork, and add compost. They will melt after our first bad frost.
And this only blossom on rose “Teasing Georgia” was hanging about at eye level to cheer on my efforts.
It works, it really works! This little guy single handedly defended my garden from the neighborhood deer. Last year the woods side of my garden took a lot of damage. This year, when they ate all of my Yogoslavian Red lettuce, just as it was about to form it’s tender, beautiful, small heads, I asked my gardening friends for advice. We went over many of the things that don’t work too well and I was actually thinking about spending hundreds of dollars for fencing, when one of my garden friends mentioned she’d had success with a motion activated water system, marketed as the Scarecrow. When it senses something moving in its “line of sight” it sends out a strong jet of water. The sensitivity and the range of water movement can be controlled. Mine is made by Contec but I noticed Haveaheart also had their version. They aren’t too expensive but you probably want to add a dedicated hose and a splitter if you can’t dedicate a water outlet to it.
Some friends found evidence that deer would lose their fear over time. So as soon as the summer garden was winding down, I turned it off. However, it seems the deer haven’t checked back recently as nothing has been eaten. It may be in neighborhoods like mine where there are few deer, it’s a permanent deterrent.
Now if I could find something just as effective for chipmunks. In my tightly packed garden, they quickly learned how to stay out of the Scarecrow’s sight. I ordered Coyote Urine crystals from the same source and only succeeded in ruining my garden shoes. Stinky!
[oqeygallery id=18]Here are some of my nicest photos of this year’s dahlias and the dahlia bed.
Small, compact dahlias dominated this year, starting with Art Deco, (saved from 2010) which graces the deck boxes in back. The different colors that you see in the pictures are real; there’s even more variation of golds and rusts along with purplish pink tones than my camera can catch. Dahlia Esther was also a surprise. The online catalogue showed a rather flat orange and this is much nicer. It started early; it’s had the most blossoms of any variety and it’s still going strong. You will see it dominating the dahlia bed in most of the bed pictures. Ellen Houston is a small, solid, deep red dahlia, (deeper red than the camera can handle) with dark stems and shiney dark leaves. It should have been in front of the bed and next year it will go there. It may need some staking, or just more sun.
Two small ball dahlias come next in the sequence. Kasasagi echos the colors of Esther but with a different shape. Little Scotty completes the color transition to a pure yellow. I love their perfectly shaped, minature petals but both of these have minimal impact from a distance. Littly Scotty is a tall plant that needs staking. I think he will go on the back row between some larger-blossomed dahlias next year.
The smaller varieties are also earlier than the large ones, which just started showing off. I’ll be adding to this part of the collection next year for sure. This part of the gallery starts with Croyden Masterpiece. These are not as large as some that I grew a few years ago; those got me hooked and then, tragically, died. These start much pinker than I remember. Then they go lovely shades of peachy orange. Huge, yellow Bilbao was saved from one that I grew last year and planted directly into the ground as a trial. Worked pretty well! I like Ryn Fou best when it develops that deep purple stripe.
Also called: Pride of Gibraltar and Cathedral Bells.
I bought the seed from Renee’s Garden Seeds, who says “They make a show-stopping centerpice in the garden…” Somewhere else, I’d read that they are nondescript until the bracts show and then they are incredible, or words to that effect. In my garden, this is as good as it gets. If somewhere I needed a rangy, succulent looking, grey leaved plant, it might be a good choice but in my garden the single bracts are so subtle that you have to look closely to see them.
Doing further research, I read that they are a mediterranean plant. Maybe more heat and sun than I get would help?
Although the water spray that’s triggered by a motion detector seems to have stopped the deer damage in the garden, the chipmunks have eaten more of my tomatoes than I have. I was feeling a bit deprived as I looked at the chewed tomatos hanging sadly here and there in my late summer garden. But then I looked at my large kitchen island and saw it covered with enough food for a family of six, large and small tomatoes, two kinds of cucumbers, summer squash and baggies of beans and Piracicaba in the refridgerator. (onions and garlic curing in the garage…) Yes, most of the tomatoes on that counter were picked green, that pale light green that they get just before they turn color, but there are more than I need and they will still taste better than anything I can buy at the grocery store. Even local farmers pick them early and let them “counter ripen” for sale. So is that counter half empty or half full?
Just as I was pondering that, sister stopped by with a gift. A beautiful, vine-ripened tomato of the variety called Pineapple, from the plants that I had given her this spring. And that decided it. The counter is definately half full. Overflowing, even.
I bought maybe one plant of a deep red daylilly at a public garden that I visited in New York State many years ago. It was in the bed along the front walk before I planted the roses and I may have split it once long ago. Due to the horizontal supports for the climbers, it ended up under the roses. After this year’s flowers were spent, I decided to move it. It had become quite a clump and I was able to divide it into seven fans without even trying. I decided to pull the non-performing amaranths and from the before and after pictures, you may agree that pulling them wasn’t a sacrifice. I was able to preserve the single perfoming specimens of amaranth “Cinco de Mayo” and “Early Splendor” (from left to right). My plan for this long border is for the display to move forward through the seasons, from the once blooming roses to daylillies and then to the dahlia bed in front. Maybe the amaranths to fill; we’ll see.
It’s still too early for my full season dahlia gallery. The dinnerplate dahlias are tight buds, but starting to show color. I’m enjoying the flowers too much though, not to share. Croyden Masterpiece is not as large as it should be and not really orange, but I love it’s complex coloring. And it shows well with amaranths Love Lies Bleeding and Cinco de Mayo.
I have a nice design element happening (I never actually saw any of these before, just picked them out of a catalogue) which is the color and shape transitions from “Esther” the flat collerette to “Kasasagi”, to “Little Scotty”, the shy yellow ball (He still has a lot of leaf to flower ratio but it’s still early). Next year I will know that Ellen Houston stays shorter and goes in front. It picks up the red in the yellow/red blends.
July is when I realized that I was insane. Or at least that my decision to keep up with the weeds in the rose bed without mulching must have been made in a moment of insanity. My father told me that roses did better with bare soil but now I remember that he said that when he was fully retired and could tend to his roses (and the weeds) every day.
To mulch or not to mulch is a serious question. Here in the North, mulch has a number of negatives, especially the typical bark or wood chips that are so widely used. These mulches can:
Raise the acidity levels, and most New England soils tend to be a bit too acidic already.
Tie up nutrients as they decompose, at least right where they touch the soil.
Keep soil cool, and I’m always running around in the spring with a soil thermometer, willing the soil to heat up! Heat up!
Prevent repeated applications of composts, manure and other soil amendments, throughout the season.
Bring their own fungal diseases or weed seeds.
Create considerable expense.
So why mulch, I asked? And with that long list, you might also. Well, here’s my story from this summer, with the plants I raise.
Tomatoes: I don’t have enough space to rotate, and that’s fallen out of favor as people learn more about micro-organisms that live in the soil and have a symbiotic relationshp with specific plants. However, other diseases overwinter in the soil and get transferred to the plants when water splashes them onto the leaves, so mulch can minimize that. See my post on Mainely Mulch. I was very disappointed that it wasn’t free of crop seeds as advertised, but the truth is that even the heirloom varieties that are vulnerable to soil borne diseases are looking good for late July.
Dahlias: I’m a novice with these. Told not to put them into the ground until the soil warmed, I planted them out in a new bed with soil purchased from a local farmer and thought that the sun warming bare soil would be a good thing. But when I asked some questions about plants that were wilting and failing to thrive, See pictures in Dahlia Problems. I was told that it was probably verticillium or fusarium wilt, the same soil borne problems that tomatos have! Further, because of questions from a gardening freind in Arizona, I learned that dahlias have shallow root systems that don’t like too much heat. Southerners who want to try to grow them should apply a thick layer of mulch to keep the soil cool. It’s all relative, I guess. But I can report that after a thick layer of mulch in July, all of the plants in the dahlia bed, even the healthy ones, perked up and started growing faster. (No, it didn’t save the plants that were already sick.)
Hydrangeas: This spring, I planted a couple of small “Let’s Dance Moonlight” hydrangeas (picture above) that I’ve been growing in pots into a bed that’s not realy finished. I wanted to continue to reshape the area and add amendments and other plantings before I mulched. The hydrangeas were doing very well except that they would wilt badly in the heat of mid-summer sun. I was wondering if I had to sacrifice their lovely blossoms for this season, to let them develop deeper root systems. But first I thought I’d try mulching them. Since this section of my post is talking about why I do mulch, you know what happened; they thrived.
Roses: Yes, personally, I’m sad to say that I can’t keep up with the weeds without mulch. Even with mulch, I have to weed. Lots of vining or plants with runners (strawberries, e.g.) don’t need bare soil to settle in. And mulch should never be applied right against the stem of a plant, which creates opportunities for weeds. Especially with roses; they do much better if there is plenty of air circulation around the bud union. That means no mulch but also, no weeds.
So I hope this has offered some advice that you can adapt to your own plantings. I do have a regular feeding schedule of balanced, slow release fertilizers for roses and other mulched plants to compensate for the little bit of nutrients that may be tied up in the decomposition process of the mulch. And I amend the soil in flower beds to lower their acidity every spring and fall. I’m trying to get competent with a soil test kit to make that more accurate. If you understand the needs of your plants and compensate for the down side, mulch can:
Help with weed control
Keep soil borne diseases from spreading to new plants
Gallery updated July 16, 2011 with three new shots from the rose ghetto. I think the third shot, a hybrid tea, pink blend, is “Love and Peace” but I can’t find the purchase info!
All of the roses have done their spring thing and some of them are over for the year or resting up for a late summer show. Here is a gallery of my best shots. As I looked through my photos, I realized that it’s heavy on the climbers and once bloomers, I’ll have to get more shots of the Hybrids in the rose ghetto. These pictures do show why I love the once bloomers so much. When they are in blossom they put on an impressive show. The ones I’ve selected also smell heavenly, sorry I can’t share that with you. The last shots are of Seven Sisters with Clematis Jackmanii. They are still looking good.[oqeygallery id=14]
I don’t seem to have a problem with pollinators like some people are reporting. Although it’s also true that many of those I see are wasps or bumblebees, not honeybees. I’d been tying up tomatoes before this photo was shot was working along side one of a bumblebee like this. Their laid back nature is comforting to one who’s been stung many times by honeybees and wasps. He’s working in rose “City of York”, one of the best smelling, ever. I didn’t have to add music as he was making his own!
This is Art Deco, from the Gallery series. It’s a small plant that I grew in my deck boxes last year and again this year. It’s very happy at my house, compared to other dahlias that I’ve tried, and just starting what I hope will be a long blossoming season. The color is hard to describe and changes in different lights. But it goes well with just about anything. I like it with blues and yellows.
I’d seen this mother/child drama before I went to work on Friday but baby was just passively hanging on the support for the suet feeder. While I was at work he’s learned how to get his own suet but mama is still doing most of the work. This morning a family of nuthatches was getting the same lesson. [wpvideo HHTfbZXj]
I have problems with two of my transplanted dahlias. One is wilting for no apparent reason and another has very curly leaves. I’ve read a lot of web sites and they are so scary; easy to think that all of mine have one symptom or another. Wilting, and I’m supposed to look for rot at the root of the stem, there is none. And curling leaves mean aphids they say. I see no other evidence of aphids and being a rose person, I do know aphids.
I SO want to be a dahlia person. Any suggestions?
Dahlia with leaf curl
Wilting dahlia
I am also updating my June photo gallery post to include a budding “Art Deco” dahlia, among other shots.
Updated 6/11/11 on another rainy day. The Amaranth Cinco de Mayo (4th shot in gallery) is certainly the winner in the Amaranth trials so far, an incredible complexity of color. Love Lies Bleeding just looks a little weird to date. The last new shot (6th in the gallery) is of the rose ghetto; even on a rainy day it warms my heart.
June 9: I woke up to a mass of thunderstorms and knew that I couldn’t do my early morning garden chores so I put together a quick gallery of some of my June photos. OK, a couple of late May pictures snuck in, too. The iris and columbines, to name them. However, since I still have an iris blooming (not this one) and columbines, I figure it’s OK.
In the middle of the gallery is half of my food garden. If you look closely, you can see the sprouts of cucumbers that will grow up the central, round trellis and the sprouts of summer squash in front of the tomatoes. They will spill out into the path, which I hope to level soon. The rhubarb and a small nursery for shade plants are in the back.
I just wanted to share a couple of photos of my decorative amaranths. One question I have is whether I should be pinching out the middle to encourage side shoots. especially in Love Lies Bleeding. No one on the gardens list could tell me so I did it on one out of four, the other three have a blossom starting in the middle as in the picture below.
I’ve read on some reputable blogs that beans shouldn’t be started inside because they don’t like their roots to be disturbed. With respect, I have been doing it for years. I have problems with critters, and should also probably credit my cool soil with part of the problem. Beans wouldn’t germinate, or maybe disappear from the soil before they had a chance. And those that did come up would get chewed leaves or completely defoliated before they had a chance to get established. So, not knowing that it wouldn’t work, I planted Emerite beans in my 2″ soil cubes several years ago. I had such good success that this has become my regular habit. They don’t need heat or lights. I start them at the same time I would plant seed in the ground and keep them on my deck. It only takes a couple of weeks; one for them to germinate and another for them to develop true leaves.
When I was planting them this year, I was wondering if knowing that it wasn’t supposed to work would jinx this process. There were wads of roots at the bottom of the flat that I had to disturb to separate the plants. They looked a little wilty right after I planted and I thought Oh, oh. But when I came home from work they had already aclimated and look fine.
Now I just need to protect them from the deer that have found my garden (reason for the propped empty trays) and get them started up the mesh that I use for a trellis, before they find the nearby tomato cages. Yes, I often pick beans from tomato plants at the end of the season.
So I think the life lesson in this is that it’s all about what works for you. When you find a plant or technique that gives you success, trust it. No two gardens are the same and even in the same family, say beans, plants differ in what they like or will tolerate. I would have given up on beans with my early results. Especially when all you have to lose is an inexpensive package of seed, keep trying; dare to break the rules.
