Ready, Set - PLANT!

Your seedlings are started, the temperatures are slowly warming, the days are getting longer....is it time to hit the dirt?

Officially, the last frost date of the winter in Central Oregon is May 31, next Sunday.  But I've been religiously watching the weather reports for night-time lows and it seems as if we've reached the beginning of growing season. Hooray!

As I promised 'way back on April 5th when I started the first batch of veggie seeds, it's usually June when we plant out, but I'm jumping the gun and hoping for steady warm night-time temps. So my lettuce and broccoli have been in the ground for a week and I may need to improvise a shade if the temps go above 80. I like the simple (read: CHEAP) approach like this one I found in Mother Earth News

Mother Earth News photo

It's really ironic that I've been waiting and waiting for the warm temperatures to arrive so I can plant out the luscious tomatoes, squashes and melons I started last month.  And now that it's here, I'm worrying about the delicate cool season plants getting fried and bolting (setting their seeds and stopping any tasty  leaf growth). Central Oregon weather is a steady duel between too much cool and too much heat.

But the fledgling tomato plants will love the heat predicted for this coming week - daytime temps in upper 70s/low 80s and nights above 45. They'll begin to set some fruit as long as I maintain consistent watering. The same is true for the summer squash and cantaloupe.  When you think about your crop, consider the final product: tomatoes, zucchini, melon and corn all are juicy when you slice them open -  that's the water you've faithfully provided. Corn is an especially thirsty, greedy plant.  In addition to lots of water, the corn plant needs a very good soil, amended with compost and aged manure.  You can understand why so many gardeners balance the effort and expense of home grown corn (it tastes sooooo yummy) against the convenience of the farmer's market variety. After all, one stalk yields just 2 ears - JUST TWO!

But my intention this week and next is to add some organic amendments to the veggie beds, water deeply and set out the tomatoes, squashes and melons. I'll plant some carrot seeds in the tomato containers on my deck and plant the green beans beside my simple trellis to get the most produce from my limited space. The hollyhocks are getting ready to push up their tall stalks of flowers and the nasturtiums will soon be growing amongst the melons and beans to deter bugs. Once the marigolds have their true leaves, I'll be planting them randomly in the garden since they seem to help most plants - and they're cute!

Lots of work to do but it'll be very satisfying since summer seems to (finally!) be here.

If you're looking for some shade solutions for your cool season crops, this is the link I found:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/keeping-crops-cool-during-hot-weather-zmaz08aszgoe.aspx

The Lovely Iris

How you seen the Irises lately? They seem very excited that summer seems to be here - standing proud and brilliant.

Dreamsicle Iris

Eleven months of  the year, the unassuming leaf "fans" sit in the crowded garden bed, almost hiding behind the ornamental grasses and flashier shrubs. Then the heat arrives and BLAM! these gorgeous flowers open up and flaunt their incredible colors for almost a month. The tall Bearded Iris stand about 3' tall, heads and shoulders above the quieter plants - what an outstanding display for an early summer garden.

The only drawback to buying some iris for your Central Oregon garden is -  which variety?? There are Bearded Iris, Beardless Iris and Siberian Iris, all of which love our hot, dry landscape. If you go to an Iris Grower's nursery (a good one is Schreiner's in Salem, Oregon) you'll be overwhelmed by the colors: pink, peach, white, peach & white, peach & purple, white & purple, blue, blue & white, pale blue, blue-black,

Jazzed Up Iris

lavender, orange, yellow, red, apricot - the list goes on and on.

I've begun to realize that the daffodil varieties that charm me every Spring figuratively transform into Irises in the Summer - all shapes, sizes and colors that re-bloom year after year with minimal effort on my part.

And, as I said in a February post, even the great artists appreciate great flowers:

 

Vincent Van Gogh's Irises

Are you growing Irises? Tell me in the Comments what are your favorites.

Are you ready to buy some Irises? Come to the Master Gardeners Plant Sale on Saturday, June 6th from 9am to 2pm at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds in Redmond - we'll have 14 varieties to choose from.

Hope to see you there!

How to Grow the Easy Veggies

After talking to a couple of new veggie gardeners recently, I remembered what it was like when I first tried to grow veggies and all the poor, sad plants I killed. It would almost be worth it all if I could help someone else avoid the mistakes I made.

Here's where I went wrong:

1. Chose the wrong veggies for a beginner;
2. Tried to grow hot season plants too soon;
3. Planted in cold ground; 
4. Grew sun plants in less than full sun
5. Forgot to prepare the soil;
6. Let my enthusiasm over-water the seedlings;
7. Failed to protect the new plants from weather extremes.

1. The Wrong Veggies - in Central Oregon, growing corn, cucumbers and eggplant is not easy for the best gardeners. But leaf lettuce, broccoli, peas, potatoes and (in the middle of summer), beans and zucchini, will produce beautiful crops and make you proud to show off your garden to all the neighborhood. Once you've got these veggies mastered (give yourself a couple years), branch out to the more fussy ones like pumpkin and melon (they really need a long hot season with no cold nights).

2. The Right Season - sad to say, corn is a difficult plant.  It needs a steady heat to pollinate the ears and keep them growing fat and juicy - not easy with Central Oregon's occasional summer nights of 45 degrees. If you are adventurous and plant corn, don't start it before June or the seeds will rot in the damp, cold soil.  However, peas will be delighted to send out their tough little shoots in early May and you'll have plenty of pea pods before the heat of summer takes over. Leaf lettuce also does well in a cool Spring alongside  broccoli and cabbage. Hold off planting beans until June, too.

3. The Cold Cold Ground - the seed packets talk about air temperatures but the seeds care about soil temps. Get a soil thermometer (they're cheap: $5) and check your planting beds every couple days. When the soil is above 45, it's okay to start most cool season crops.  Micro-climates in your yard will have different temperatures, so check everywhere you intend to plant.

4. The Full Sun Garden - this seems like a no-brainer, but novice gardeners underestimate their solar exposure all the time.  Trees, buildings, time of year all play a part.  If your garden faces South or West, you have a good start but be aware of any potential shade sources that will reduce your solar exposure. Most veggies want at least 6 hours a day  or they'll grow tall and lanky trying to find the sun, and you'll get a disappointing crop, if at all.

5. Preparation is Everything - I've gardened in clay, sand, and rocky soil and know that Central Oregon's sandy-ish soil is not too bad once I've amended it. A yearly addition of compost and/or aged manure supplies organic, slow-released nutrients and helps the soil hold water. The change from native soil to amended soil is staggering - and my plants show their gratitude all summer long.

6. Water-Logged vs Dry to the Bone - when I was new at this, watering was a way to enjoy my hard work: spraying water across my new plants and feeling proud.  Until the plants started to wilt and die!  More water! More water!  They must be dry! But, in reality, what really was happening was the roots were so wet they were rotting in the damp soil. The fine hair-like roots drowned and died, unable to absorb nutrients in the soil. A slow sad death I could have avoided. Dry plants should perk up again but wet, wilted plants are destined for the compost pile.

7. Weather Extremes - those of us who live here, don't talk of weather extremes, we talk of regular, daily weather. Summer temps can range from 40 at night to 85 in the mid-afternoon. Hail can strike any Spring or Summer day. And everyone has stories about the wind blowing down 100 year-old trees. Farmers know how devastating the weather can be but, luckily, homeowners, with their smaller gardens, can do something about it. My storage shed holds row cover, walls of water, and improvised wind screens to be brought out at a moment's notice. I feel I've become a close acquaintance with the local TV weather forecaster (thanks, Travis) and study the NOAA website daily in the growing season.  A little attention and I haven't lost any plants to the weather in years. Not to say Mother Nature may not come up with something new any day, though (the paper says Mount St. Helens is still an active volcano!).

These websites have some really good information about veggie gardens, but you should add 2 or 3 weeks to  adjust the Minnesota dates to work with our shorter growing season (June 1 to Sept 1):
http://www.extension.umn.edu/garden/yard-garden/vegetables/planting-the-vegetable-garden/
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/mg/gardennotes/719.pdf

Write it Down! Make a Plan! Take a Pic!

Do you read Liz Douville's twice-monthly column in the Bend Bulletin? It was my introduction to gardening in Central Oregon when I first arrived from Portland in 2000. Her comfortable writing style pulled me in and her wealth of information kept me coming back for more - 15 years later I'm still hooked.

One of her tips back in 2000 was to have a garden journal.  I didn't get it: write down what I was doing in the yard? After a long day when dinner needed to be on the table, my nails were dark brown with dirt and my back ached from bending, I was supposed to pull out a notebook and write about my day? Seriously??

Silly me, I was reverting back to high school and my teenage diary, full of dreams, disappointments and crushed feelings. But Liz was talking about a journal of happy successes and insightful failures with a calendar to mark the progress. And a chart of what exactly went where.

I was finally convinced -  I need to use a calendar to note the last frost of the spring and the first frost of the fall, where I planted the veggies each year (to avoid any veggie family diseases), where I bought the seeds I started (and when I started them), and the names of the perennials in the yard.

That last one was a long time coming - I was always sure I'd remember (how could I forget?) the name of the fantastic sagebrush-looking plant I put in next to the juniper, if the bland, leafy shrub in the raised bed that doesn't have flowers (yet) is just a huge weed, or the type of clematis behind the greenhouse (early pruning variety? late pruning variety??). I eventually figured out what each was by visiting nurseries and online catalogs: a Powis Castle Artemisia, a Maltese Cross plant, and an early pruning Clematis. Too much work for every mystery shrub in the yard! I definitely needed a plan.

So - where to begin? With little effort, I've found a boatload of great ways to make the journal writing fun (I've always been a pretty pen, fancy paper kind of person and now I'm a happy computer geek).

I started with a journal designed especially for gardeners - graph paper pages, a calendar, a place to make lists. It was compact and I kept it near my chair for daily record-keeping. But I got ambitious pretty quickly and needed a 3-ring binder to add maintenance comments (every May - Beat The Cheat Grass, fertilize the summer annuals every month), create my plant wish list (another apple tree? a blue clematis to grow beside the red one?), and sketch out project ideas (a pretty fence for the veggie garden, a paver design in the Secret Garden).

Once I started adding photos to the calendar (Is the Allium skimpier than last year? Did the Silver Lace Vine bloom so much last summer?), I realized I needed a techie upgrade.  My tablet can go with me now (in a plastic bag as insurance against water damage) but a house-bound computer could serve as well. I can use either an online program or adapt my own spreadsheet and word processing programs to record everything I need. Some of the packaged programs look interesting for anyone who likes to share garden experiences and get advice online. There's also a wealth of garden journals in every bookstore and a few online programs for anyone who doesn't want to design a journal from scratch.

To get you started, I've listed a few sites that can show you what's available:
http://www.daru.com/Garden/Garden_Tracker_Worksheets.htm

http://www.greenthumbjournal.com/

http://myfolia.com/journals

Consider Container Gardens

I've always thought containers (big, small, glazed, terra cotta, weird) were great fun but I never planted  many since I've had plenty of ground space to plant right in the dirt.

Well!  Was I wrong!!?!??!!

A friend showed me a little tray that her creative husband built of scrap wood.  It was only about 4 or 5  inches deep, about a foot wide and 2 feet long, much like an old kitchen drawer. It had drawer handles on each short side so it could be easily carried.  Her intention was to fill it with potting soil and plant lettuces for the spring and summer.  As the sun moved across the sky every day, she was going to carry it around the yard to get the most exposure and when the hot summer sun arrived, she'd move it into morning sun/afternoon shade to keep the lettuces from bolting (going to seed) in the heat. Since lettuces have shallow roots, she could plant lots of leaf-type lettuce and eat free salad for months! It had simple materials, was easy to build and fun to use!

Since she lives on 15 acres it made me realize that containers aren't just for apartment balconies - they're chosen to fit the objective, not the space. Architects say this is principle is "Form Follows Function".

Have you hear of the Three Sisters garden plan? It's supposed to have originated with Native Americans who planted corn with beans and squash at the foot of the stalks.  The beans grow up the corn stalk and the squash cover the ground, smothering weeds. I've recently read about some great plants for containers that love growing together like that - carrots, for example, are supposed to grow well with tomatoes.  On my porch last summer I had 2 very large pots with cherry tomatoes in cages (they did get pretty wild by August!) with carrots and patio zucchini growing around the tomatoes' "feet". The pots with  lacy carrot tops and draping squash vines looked very attractive and the huge green tomato plants with their decorative red fruits were very tempting as we ate dinner (not many tomatoes made it all the way to the salad plates).

In the garden, my Wooly Thyme with Siberian Irises and Daffodils poking through the "carpet" looks great in the Spring but it gets a little scraggly by mid-Summer.  Last Summer I took a pretty glazed pot off the porch and plunked it in the middle of the Thyme - Voila! Instant impact: height, color and depth with such a small addition.  I put a Silvermound Artemesia (the color was the same as the Wooly Thyme) in the middle and surrounded it with draping Bacopa. The Bacopa freezes if I don't take it indoors (I don't always remember) but it's a pretty flowering container all summer & into fall.


Are you wondering what I mean by "weird" containers? A few years ago some local nurseries had a lot of fun selling annuals planted in old denim overalls. I wondered how long the fabric would last but it was a pretty unique sight to see. My succulent collection includes a little child's ballet slipper planted with a small Sedum and some Stonecrop - the tiny pink shoe is an amusing contrast to the spiky Hens and Chicks. I've also seen old discarded boots planted with tall Irises and worn out kitchen pots filled with blooming blue Grape Hyacinths (Muscari).

Now when I think of Garden Art, I'm trying hard to think outside the garden box and go with a little creative container design. I'd love to hear what you've grown in a container.

If you need help with your container gardening, look at these great publications:
 http://extension.oregonstate.edu/deschutes/sites/default/files/Horticulture/documents/container_gardening2014.pdf
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mg/metro/sites/default/files/Container_Planting.pdf

I May Need a Dictionary - GMO vs GEO

It's all in a name, like William Shakespeare said. But sometimes those words have no meaning if you don't understand them! How did it all get so confusing?

Family, Genus, Species - Genetically Engineered, Genetically Modified - Hybrid, Heirloom - ????

Ironically, the sometimes difficult Latin names were a solution to fix the confusion of common names. Just think of all the plants we call Daisy: Shasta Daisy, Asters, Gerbera, English Daisy, Rudbeckia (the Black-Eyed Susan) - it's very confusing.

In the early 18th Century a Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, worked up a classifying system  to put all plants (ALL plants - boy, did he have big dreams!) into separate "boxes" (my wording, not his) so, for example, we can identify a plant without any leaves or fruit as a cherry tree and not a maple. Or when we want to plant  a spruce that will grow on a hill above the ocean (Picea sitchensis - Sitka Spruce) and not a tree for a high mountain ridge (Picea engelmannii - Engelmann Spruce). Knowing the correct name will ensure success.


So, wouldn't you know, once the names got straightened out, folks just had to start inventing new words. In our great-grandparents day, plants were open-pollinated - the insects did all the work and the fruit and flowers  yielded seeds that resembled the "parent" plant, for the most part. Squashes can get a little kinky when they're allowed to freely cross-pollinate and you may be very surprised by the resulting squash. But our Heirloom plants are the open-pollinated kind and you can save the seeds for future planting.

About 60 years ago, horticulture took a turn away from Heirloom varieties and starting hybridizing plants on large scale to guarantee the desirable qualities growers wanted: flower color, disease resistance, plant vigor, etc. The hybrids were a result of careful breeding, like AKC dogs - generation after generation, plants had their pollination manipulated so the best plants were the result.  This is why some hybrids (the Wave Petunias, for example) have a higher price tag. Growing hybrids requires patience and diligent  record keeping.

This modern manipulation of a natural process can also be called Genetic Modification, resulting in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Seedless watermelons are a good example of a GMO. The process should not be confused with Genetic Engineering which happens in a laboratory with plant genes.

Vegetables have been bred to resist Verticillium and Fusarium Wilts for years and many homeowners have grown the modified plants with great success. Agriculture is a huge business in the modern world and no farmer dares to fall behind the newest technology. It's understandable that when Genetic Engineering promised crops that would resist insects or disease, increasing yield, it became popular. Herbicide resistant crops meant farmers could spray the competing weeds without harming their crop, again increasing yield.

But Nature is a relentless foe and, like modern antibiotics, the weeds surrounding the glyphosate resistant plants are learning how to be herbicide resistant also. No matter what your position is, genetic engineering is in our future and I think we all need to become educated to all its aspects.

If you'd like to read more, I found these educational sites to be very informative:
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/
http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetically-modified-organisms-gmos-transgenic-crops-and-732