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National Wildlife Federation & Scotts Miracle Gro: OMG!
January 26, 2012 | 
Author 
I’d be happy to have a stand of goldenrod in my backyard wildlife habitat if it attracted butterflies and honeybees. Were I to use Scotts lawn and garden chemicals on my lawn and garden, I’d stand a reasonable chance of killing the very wildlife my habitat was supposed to attract.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and Scotts (the cure-it-with-chemicals lawn & garden company) have created some kind of partnership where Scotts is giving money to fund NWF projects. The NWF seems pleased to have this support from Scotts. Scotts must be ecstatic to have bought a relationship that looks like an enthusiastic endorsement from an alleged environmental watchdog. For that to make sense, I relate a conversation from many years ago that significantly shaped my attitudes about putting chemicals on my lawn and my small kitchen garden.
My Brother the City Gardener
My brother lives down-river from me near the Chesapeake Bay. He has managed the gardens in a large city for years, and his job has put him through training in all things horticulture: plants, insecticides, fertilizers, weed killers, heavy equipment operation, hydraulics… He has written some posts for this blog, and has corrected my errors when I’ve misspoken or misconstrued things on a Facebook group where we hang out.
We were chatting some ten or more years ago and I mentioned I was going to treat my lawn to knock out broadleaf weeds and crabgrass. He offered the following rule of thumb: To beat crabgrass, apply pre-emergent weed killer before the blossoms drop off of your forsythia plants.
Then he went on a rant. He complained that all us lawn-owners in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (I live near the Susquehanna River which drains central New York and Pennsylvania into the Chesapeake Bay) should scrape our lawns bare, layer on six inches of high-quality sop soil, condition it with aged compost, and start fresh. If we’d manage our grass better, the Chesapeake Bay wouldn’t be choking to death from all the chemicals that wash out of our lawns and down the Susquehanna river.
When I Realized I was Stupid
I took stock. It had always killed me to shell out more than $40 in very early spring to cover my lawn with crabgrass preventer. I’d hit the lawn again in mid spring to knock out broadleaf weeds—another crazy price tag. The chemicals coated my sneakers as I worked, and they smelled bad. So, I’d ban the kids and the dogs from the lawn for days until a decent rain had washed the stuff down to the soil.
I’m excavating to establish a rain garden. The long channel along the garden’s retention wall will receive gravel and perforated pipe before I fill with soil. The wet area in the left front of the photo is the actual rain garden, though I’ve dug it much larger since I took the photo.
I’d buy grass seed and work it into bare areas, but there were always new bare spots. Of course, I’d mow at least once a week, and sometimes twice. This meant more than an hour each time walking behind a noisy, stinky device, and heaping the clippings into a compost pile. If it wasn’t enough to burn all that gasoline (and time), I once had a mower catch fire and I let it burn on my driveway (kind of satisfying, actually).
Could I mow the lawn when it was convenient? Nope. I had to do it on dry days; couldn’t count on mowing on Saturday or Sunday. Oh, and I wasn’t the only one. During rainy seasons, if there was a dry day, there were mowers roaring all over the neighborhood. My family couldn’t (and still can’t) eat on our screened porch without hearing at least one mower grinding away every time.
And why do I have a lawn anyway? Because it’s the default when you buy a house. Even with young children, we had very little use for a lawn. But when I gave it serious thought I saw that the lawn is useless; I was doing all that unpleasant work and spending hundreds of dollars a year to grow something so I could cut it down and throw it away. I felt pretty stupid about it.
Chemical-Free Small Kitchen Garden
Once you try ornamental, you just want more. Some day, there’s likely to be a stand of bamboo growing in my yard… not because I need it, but because I really like the way it looks. I hope we can still get along.
Now I try NEVER to buy packaged chemicals for my lawn or garden. If I’m putting anything on the soil, it’s compost, mulch, or manure. I manage my kitchen garden by mulching with lawn clippings and adding compost when I set plants in the ground. From a lawn-growers perspective, mine is horrid, but it’s green when it’s supposed to be.
The bigger news is that I’m getting rid of my lawn. Three years ago, I gave myself 10 years to reduce the lawn to pathways and decorative patches. In its place there will be food. I’ve added several planting beds as well as perennial fruit bushes. In time, I’ll have nut trees, fruit trees, brambles, strawberries, and grapes. As well, I’m planning decorative herb gardens, extensive trellising for annual vegetables, and unusual land features (such as rock piles and amorphous raised beds) to handle other annual veggies.
I’ve excavated much of what will become a rain garden to redirect excessive runoff away from my main vegetable bed. That will be an ornamental feature which, I’m afraid, will start me down the slippery slope at the bottom of which are more ornamental plantings. At the risk of diluting my “grow food” message, I’d love to have a stand of bamboo in the yard.
What of the National Wildlife Federation?
I’ve lost all respect for the National Wildlife Federation. They have a certification program through which you might get your yard certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat. It’s inconceivable that they’d recommend tossing Scotts chemicals into such a habitat for ANY reason. Yet, if you pay for the certification, you’re supporting a program that enthusiastically publicizes it’s a good idea to use chemicals in gardens and lawns. Seriously, if you use weed killer, bug killer, and fertilizer on your lawn and/or planting beds abutting your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, you contaminate that habitat and make it unsuitable for the wildlife it’s supposed to attract. Pretty much the way Scotts’s relationship with the NWF contaminates the NWF.
Here are some articles I read over the past day as I was deciding what to write about this inappropriate alliance between the National Wildlife Federation and Scotts:
NWF Teams Up With Scotts Miracle Gro
Scotts National Wildlife Federation Partner Get Kids Outside
National Wildlife Federation Scotts Miracle Gro: Weird
December 2011 Post Produce: BBQ Pizza Sauce
Looking a lot like a calzone, my folded pizza contains BBQ sauce I made using produce from my own garden.
With this, the first Post Produce of winter, my small kitchen garden is dormant, though not frozen. It is crazy warm for late December, but rain keeps me away from the garden. Thank goodness for canning!
For a few weeks this summer I harvested tomatoes from my kitchen garden. I canned tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, and I used some of the tomato sauce to make Pear and Tomato BBQ sauce… which brings me to today’s Post Produce post.
Folded BBQ Pizza
I discovered that I really like pizza with Pear and Tomato BBQ sauce in place of traditional pizza sauce. When I started to make some pizza, I also discovered that my pizza paddle is broken, so I made what I dubbed “folded pizza.”
My folded pizzas look a lot like Calzone. They’re really easy to make, and they taste fine with traditional tomato-based pizza sauce, or with pear and tomato BBQ sauce. The photos tell the story.
Use whatever pizza dough recipe you prefer, and make each folded pizza starting with a chunk of dough slightly larger than a golf ball. Heavily flour an otherwise clean counter, and use a rolling pin to flatten the dough into a six- to eight-inch disk about 1/8 of an inch thick.
Leave a generous border around the sauce when you spread it on the pizza blank. Cover the sauce with shredded mozzarella cheese, then fold the blank in half.
Align the edges of the folded pizza blank, and fold the dough over along the entire edge. Crease the dough along the fold and then fold in the edge a second time. Press firmly so the folded material sticks together reliably. Set the filled, folded, and crimped blank on a baking sheet that you’ll covered liberally with corn meal; there’s no need to grease the pan.
One you’ve made an air-tight seal along the edges of your folded pizza, stab a few holes in the crust using a sharply pointed knife or some other sharp implement. By the way, you can put these pretty close together on the baking pan; they don’t rise a lot. Bake the folded pizzas at 375F degrees for about 12 minutes. The top crusts should develop a golden-brown. Sadly, even with the vent holes you poke through the dough, pressure may build up during baking and cause melted cheese and BBQ sauce to ooze out. When that happens, I scrape up the mass, let it cool, and snack on it.
Post Your Produce!
The 22nd is Post Produce day. Please join me and other bloggers and share whatever you’re consuming from your garden. Whether it’s still growing in your garden, you’re harvesting it for a meal, you’re preserving it, or you’re taking it out of your larder for dinner, blog about your homegrown produce, and then link to it below. For more information, follow this link to the Post Produce page.
Linky:
Robins Nest at My Small Kitchen Garden
Catbirds could pass themselves off as the generics of birds. What they lack in flamboyant feathering, they make up for with genuine curiosity. This one visited me nearly every time I stepped into my small kitchen garden in 2011.
Gardens attract birds. I’ve made no scientific measurements, nor have I reviewed science journals to support this claim. But I’ve no doubt that it’s true.
I have two favorites that have hung around my small kitchen garden for several seasons. First, perhaps, is the cat bird. A cat bird is quite unremarkable: brownish-gray with a dark spot. But what a cat bird lacks in appearance, it makes up for with personality.
Catbirds are naturally curious, and when one nests in or near my yard, it invariably flies to the garden whenever I go there to work. A cat bird won’t get close if it doesn’t need to, but it will stay close enough to keep an eye on me; as if it’s supervising my activity.
When you stress out a catbird, it scolds. And, a catbird’s scold sounds kind of like a cat’s meow. I understand that the meowing earned the catbird its name.
We get only the ruby throated variety of hummingbirds in Pennsylvania. These are some of the bravest wild animals I’ve ever seen. During our photo shoot, they hovered near my head as if measuring the camera angle. Usually, if hummers are in the garden it coincides with my watering activities.
Humming Birds in my Small Kitchen Garden
While humming birds don’t spend so much time in and around my garden, they are amazingly curious about me when they’re there. Splashing water on a sunny day seems irresistible to a humming bird. When I do see a humming bird in the garden, it’s usually when I’m watering in bright sunlight; the bird will zip around me a few times as if deciding whether to shower.
One of my best moments with humming birds was when I made the photo in this article. I stood ready to shoot, and time and again I’d hear the buzz of a hummer’s wings behind me. When I turned, at least one bird would be hanging in the air about three feet from my head; staring at me. I danced with the hummers for about a half hour before one decided to use the feeder.
Robins on the Downspouts
So, this past summer a catbird nested somewhere in our yard. I never spotted its nest, but it was in the garden pretty much whenever I was. We also had hummers, though rarely at the garden. They were happy to visit the feeder just outside our screened porch but they otherwise stayed away.
The first flock of robins above our deck hatched out in early spring. While I spent some time watching the babies grow, they didn’t show much interest in me.
Robins, however, weren’t shy about their relationships with us. Our screened porch abuts a deck from which stairs lead down to the yard and garden. Above the stairs, robins built a nest on the bend in the downspout. The robins were prolific. They raised a small flock of chicks and, when the chicks left, the robins raised a second flock. Photos in this post are of the first robin family.
Robins aren’t particularly friendly. They make house a few feet from our main walkway, and then fly away scolding when we come and go. Occasionally, whichever parent is on incubation duty hunkers down low as we walk by—a great time-saver when we’re particularly active.
I enjoy having the robins around; in most years there are two or three nests in our yard. Their child-rearing fascinates me, and I watch them come and go, but the robins aren’t at all interested in what I’m doing. Their only interest in me, I think, is whether I’m about to try to eat them. (I’m not… yet.)
When the first flock of robins left the nest, all but one vanished in a day. This one sat on the downspout next to the nest for hours before it, too, flew to a nearby tree. At one point this year, the robin parents administered to two of their babies while sitting on my kitchen garden’s rodent fence. Sadly, the photos I captured weren’t nice enough to publish.
Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway
Use Amazon.com’s Look Inside feature to see the terrific job the art director did in designing and laying out Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. Oh… and to get a good look at the book you might win if you enter this Holiday Giveaway!
Thank you for visiting Your Small Kitchen Garden! I love writing this blog, and I love that at least some people actually read it. In that spirit I’m giving away a copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
I wrote Yes, You Can! last summer for people who are just starting to preserve produce—whether from their own gardens, from farmers’ markets and farm stands, or from grocery stores. Reviewers have been very kind to Yes, You Can! and (of course) I’d love to see it coach tens of thousands of gardening-, food-, and green-enthusiasts into more responsible relationships with the food chain.
Win a Signed Copy of Yes, You Can!
This giveaway has an ulterior motive: to introduce more people to Yard Birds. Here’s how it works:
I’m giving away one copy of Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. The book’s retail value is $19.95, and I’ll cover the cost of shipping to the winner.
This is a judged contest. To enter, do the following:
1. Visit the Yard Birds store (this is a link to it)
2. Note the serial number (item number) of a Yard Bird that tickles your fancy
3. Return here and leave a comment that…
- …includes the Yard Bird’s serial number
- …proposes a name for the Yard Bird
- …explains why you would give the Yard Bird that name
I was lucky to capture a photo of this small flock of Yard Birds in the artist’s yard before he sold off most of them at an annual arts festival here in Lewisburg..
How We’ll Pick the Winner
My wife and kids will select one winning entry from all the entries posted. They will read all the entries and select the one they agree is the most entertaining. Use humor, pathos, irony, wordplay… if you want to play to the audience, keep in mind that some of the judges are seriously geeky.
Our judges will not know the identities of the entrants; this is a blind judging. I’ll announce the winner on this blog as soon as the judges finish their task—probably within a day or two of the close of the contest.
Enter Now, Enter Once, Enter Again!
The Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway ends at midnight on December 7, 2011. We will consider only one entry per participant; if you enter more than one time, we’ll include only your LAST entry in the judging. Last entry? Sure. This contest includes an opportunity for a do-over. If, after you post your entry a much better idea pops into your head, go ahead and post another entry. We’ll enjoy all your entries, but only the very last one you post before midnight on December 7th will go to the judges… so make the last one your best!
The Prize
To be clear: I’m not giving away a Yard Bird. The prize for this giveaway is a single signed copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | 
Tags: contest, free book, garden art, garden tool sculpture, giveaway, lawn sculpture, yard birds, yes you can | 
12 Comments »
Pepper Freaks from My Small Kitchen Garden
When I cut open this perfectly ripe California Wonder pepper from my small kitchen garden, I found several pepper-like fruits inside of it.
For the first 49 or so years of my life, bell peppers held no surprises. Even after I’d established my small kitchen garden in rural Pennsylvania, peppers were peppers. But then, last season, I grew and gutted a pepper that was full of surprises… and since then I’ve discovered three or four of these gems.
This Year’s Red Pepper Freak
When I cut open one of the few stunted but well-ripened California Wonders from my kitchen garden a month or so back, I found it packed with what might pass for pepper babies.
Have you ever found these in your peppers? Each is a hollow shape, apparently grown of bell pepper flesh. While the pepper babies are entirely inside the parent pepper, they fall out easily (once you cut the pepper open)—as if not attached to the parent in any way. Of course, these oddly-shaped gems must grow connected in some way, so I imagine a tiny bell pepper umbilical chord that connects each one to the inside of the parent pepper.
Please let me know whether you’ve ever cut open a pregnant pepper. I’m curious to know how common is this little phenomenon.
The pepper freaks shook out of their parent easily as if they weren’t attached in any way. Each seemed to be a small “pepper fruit” having the same texture as the flesh of a typical bell pepper.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bell pepper, california wonder, red pepper | 8 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day 11/11
This lone pink blossom is on a plant my wife set in one of her ornamental beds. A clump of buds just behind the blossom looks ready to pop. Forecast temperatures suggest the buds have a chance.
It was a challenging Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for this kitchen gardener. Mainly, my small kitchen garden was finished by late summer. Rain, blight, rain, mud, rain, rot, rain, insects, rain, and rain conspired to shut things down well earlier than in any previous year. After all that, we had a significant snow storm in late October when peak fall colors were just starting to fade. Oh, and guess how the weather was when I went out to take photos? Yep, it was raining and overcast.
It impresses me that anything is in bloom around here, so I stepped out of my small kitchen garden and scavenged blossoms wherever I found them in the yard. Most of what’s in bloom is in ornamental beds or containers, and it’s all barely holding on. Please enjoy what’s left of summer in my wet little chunk of central Pennsylvania.
A diaphanous puff of white clings tenuously to a stem just a few feet from the pink blossom in the preceding photo. The two blossoms are all that remain on annuals my wife planted in late spring.
There are four potted plants on our front porch. They might have served as centerpieces at some banquet during the summer. Two have wilted back to their roots (one I recognized as a begonia). The other two show signs of stress, but they continue to put out blossoms resembling asters; the ornamental-savvy among you will have to ID them.
The second of two potted plants on our front porch that continues to produce blossoms despite many overnight lows in the twenties and a significant snowfall in late October.
Somehow, this makes sense to me: the holly bush that came with the house is in bloom, though it has more buds than it has blossoms. Still, if it’s just blooming now, will berries form within the month? Come to think of it, in 18 years, I don’t recall ever seeing berries on this plant.
Rain stunted my broccoli this year, but one plant continues to taunt me by putting out tablespoon-sized florets.
In the department of confused, a forsythia in a back corner of the yard is in bloom. Is it because an unseasonable warm spell followed a cold spell? Is it because the rain paused for two weeks after the freak October snow? Perhaps this branch of blossoms thinks winter ought to be just four days long?
Nutmeg provided drama on this month’s Bloom Day. She happily accompanied me on my photo shoot and discovered poop in the grass when I paused to photograph the broccoli. If my dog is going to roll in something stinky, I choose carrion. Sadly, today she chose poop. She’s damp in this photo because I dragged her straight to the shower where she had the lather, rinse, and repeat treatment twice! I’m pretty sure the camera captured a smirk; Nutmeg has a lot of attitude for several hours after a shower.
Don’t Forget to Post Product Next Week!!!
Your Small Kitchen Garden blog hosts Post Produce on the 22nd of every month. Create a blog entry that shares what you’re eating from your garden-what you’re harvesting, what’s ripening, what you’re cooking or preserving, or even what you’re taking out of your larder for an off-season meal. Then find my Post Produce post and create a link back to yours. Follow the link here for find more information about Post Produce.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, broccoli, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, nutmeg | 5 Comments »
Nearly Wordless Wednesday, Nov 9, 2011
If you know Your Small Kitchen Garden, you know that a Wordless Wednesday post is beyond my ability. However, in the spirit of wordlessness Wednesdayness, here’s a photo and a caption. Enjoy!
Until this summer, I didn’t even know there are tree frogs in the wilds of central Pennsylvania. Now I wonder how many of these amazing critters I’ve looked at without seeing them. One hung out for two days on my porch rail, mostly snuggled under a gallon milk jug planted with peppers. Resting on a lichens-covered rock or tree bark, this frog would be invisible. Now that I know they’re out there, I’ll watch for Gray Tree Frogs whenever I wander where lichens grow.
Pink Champagne Blueberries in my Small Kitchen Garden
Briggs Plant Propagators in Elma, Washington provided attendees of the Garden Writers Association Symposium with bagged Pink Champagne blueberry plants. I’ve planted mine near my fruit trees in hopes of improving the blueberry crop in my small kitchen garden.
In late August, I abandoned my small kitchen garden for a week and attended the GWA Symposium in Cincinnati. I’m glad that I did for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I returned with several Pink Champagne Blueberry plants courtesy of Briggs Plant Propagators in the state of Washington.
I finally planted the blueberries in late October. Why did it take me so long? Rain. Rain and PH.
Blueberry Plants Prefer Acid
As I’ve reported in nearly every post this year: In central Pennsylvania, if you weren’t gardening in the rain, you weren’t gardening. We had so much rain that several towns in my area made the national news. But I wasn’t out in the rain for gardening or for any other activity.
While I waited for the rain to subside, I managed to test the soil’s acidity. According to a home test kit (that I’ve since been told is highly unreliable), my yard has neutral PH. That’s not too bad for blueberries, but they prefer acidic soil, so I treated the soil with an organic acidifier.
Instructions for the acidifier were to spread some of the material on the soil and that it would take five or more weeks to lower the PH one full point. So, I dug holes for the blueberry plants, loosened the soil in the holes, and sprinkled the prescribed amount of acidifier in each hole. Then I waited.
Captions under the photos in this blog post tell the rest of the story. Happily, we had a few rainless days and I set the blueberry plants in the holes. I watered heavily that day, and I erected small fences to keep out rodents and deer. The plants look terrific; they’ve started to develop fall colors, and I expect they’ll drop leaves in the next week or so.
When I plant a perennial, I dig a hole dramatically larger than the root ball requires. This lets me work compost into the soil, or, if I’m planting in a lawn, it lets me recycle the sod into fertilizer. I piled the sod along one side of the hole, and heaped the soil on the other side. Then, I laid the sod into the hole grass-side-down. It will break down as the blueberry plant’s roots reach it, providing an abundance of nourishment in the plant’s first season.
You can’t see a “how to plant _______” sequence often enough! OK, you can, really. There are so many “how to plant” videos and articles on the Internet, it’s easy to get your fill. I won’t be offended if you pass on the planting, but have a look at the final set of photos; they show how to protect your seedlings from foraging animals. Here’s the basic planting sequence: gently squeeze the nursery pot several times and tip it down until the root ball comes free and slides out. Then, especially for heavily root-bound plants, loosen the root ball across its bottom. I don’t butterfly the roots as some do—just gently pull them apart across the middle so the roots loosen up. Finally, I set the slightly softened root ball into the middle of the prepared hole.
I pulled the soil into the hole and filled around the blueberry plant’s roots. I filled the hole so that the soil was exactly even with the surface of the soil that was in the pot. Sometimes, you need to adjust the plant by lifting it and adding soil beneath the root ball. It’s very important that you don’t let soil rest against the exposed stems of the plant. After filling the hole with soil, I ran the hose… I used enough water to saturate the soil all the way through the sod in the bottom of the hole. In retrospect, it would have been better to set up the fence before watering the plant.
My blueberries need only a modest fence. Using 24-inch chicken wire, I figured to make a cylinder about a foot and a half across. Remember high school trigonometry? To calculate the distance around a circle, multiply the circle’s diameter times PI. So, to get a 1.5 foot circle, multiply 1.5 times PI (which I approximated as 3); you need about 4.5 feet of chicken wire. I cut the wire, drove a stake about 8 inches away from the plant (completely missing the root ball), curved the chicken wire into a cylinder, and stapled it to the stake. The bottom of the cylinder rests on the soil, and I can use a tent stake to pin it down later if the need arises.
GWA is the Garden Writers Association, a group of people who write for magazines, newspapers, television, radio, gardening-related businesses, and the Internet. You might guess that GWA members are important to companies who sell products and services to gardeners or who create products for the gardening industry. You’d be right. The GWA Symposium draws tool manufacturers, nursery suppliers, plant breeders, and other concerns who wish to get the attention of writers. Those writers, in turn, might report on the products and services, bringing them to the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners.
I received products mentioned in the accompanying article to use for free because I’m a member of GWA. The experiences and any opinions I report are purely my own.
Posted in small kitchen garden | Tags: blueberries, pink champaign, plant fruit, planting | 1 Comment »
Raisins for Pie at Your Small Kitchen Garden
My entry in October’s Post Produce is about pie. The pie involves pears and homemade raisins–both visible in this photo. I hope you’ll join me and bloggers everywhere on Saturday, the 22nd to share whatever you’re consuming from your own garden.
My small kitchen garden still has a few winter squashes, green beans, peppers, and carrots holding on against interminable rain and increasing cold. There’s not much out there, so I’ve put more and more attention on what’s available at the local farmers’ markets. Recently, I bought several pounds of seedless grapes and used my dehydrator to convert them into raisins. I posted about the procedure over at Food Dryer Home. Have a look if you need encouragement to make your own raisins. Please trust me: homemade raisins are so worth the trouble to make them.
What Pie has to do With It
I made raisins because I’ve been developing a recipe—a pie recipe rooted in about seven years of experimentation with pears. The recipe uses stuff from my small kitchen garden, and I plan to present it presently in my pending Post Produce post.
Post Produce? Pear Pie? All will become clear before I go to bed on Friday, October 21 (tomorrow).
Join Post Produce!
Saturday the 22nd is Post Produce day. The idea of Post Produce is to encourage bloggers everywhere to share with the world whatever they’re consuming from their gardens. Are you harvesting citrus fruit? Post about it! Are you opening home-canned produce for dinner? Post about it! Do you have awesome vegetables fresh from the garden? Post!
Follow this link to find more details at the Post Produce page. On Saturday, show or tell us about your produce, and then return to Your Small Kitchen Garden, and create a link back to your post. If you’re so inclined, visit all the Post Produce posts to see what bloggers are growing to eat all over the world.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: dehydrator, food dryer, pears, pie, post produce, raisins | No Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, Oct 2011: Butterflies
Before I left for the meadow, I photographed zinnias that grow within four feet of my small kitchen garden. Actually, I planted the zinnias (please don’t tell anyone). When I expressed frustration with how moisture was killing bean plants in my vegetable bed, my wife offered up one of the ornamental beds for an auxiliary bean garden. I planted a row of climbing beans in the back of the bed, and several types of annual flowers in front of them. Zinnias took over, but there’s a decent crop of green beans as well.
I wasn’t anywhere near my small kitchen garden for yesterday’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, but I tried to post. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and energy before I started writing (I chose and cropped photos before I went to bed).
Not only don’t my photos feature my kitchen garden this month, they only barely feature any garden. Rather, I stepped into the meadow across the street and down the road and captured photos of what’s in bloom because nature wants it to be.
From Meadow to Forest
Few gardens are as sustainable as those that start themselves, and these meadows emerged from abandoned farmland. Left to their own devices, in 70 to 100 years the meadows will be young climax forests of native hardwoods. If you pull up a lawn chair and watch for a few dozen years, you’ll see a diverse assortment of organisms at every stage of the forest’s development.
I tried to capture some of the diversity in my photos. It’s not hard to recognize a theme other than just blooms in my Bloom Day post. A healthy wild meadow teams with insects, arachnids, birds, reptiles, and mammals. On a recent sunny day (or two), I captured photos of dozens of meadow creatures. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
I don’t know flowers—particularly wild flowers. Perhaps you can tell me what these are. (My guess: Heath Asters.) Wherever I see stands of these happy blossoms, there is a swarm of winged critters flitting among them.
In case the previous photo lacked detail you need to identify the flowers, I include this for another look. What are those plants?
Are these purple flowers wild asters? I love seeing a clump of these in the meadow—particularly mixed in with goldenrod. Nature knows which plants to pair up for brilliant displays.
Speaking of goldenrod, it’s passing its prime, but it has been spectacular this year. I like to make huge bouquets of goldenrod for our dining table, but we’ve been so busy that I haven’t gotten to it. Fortunately, I have found some time to get out in the meadow and enjoy the goldenrod with bunches of other critters who also enjoy it.
Invitation to Post Produce
In a similar vein to Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, I invite the blogging community to join me on the 22nd of each month to Post Produce. On Saturday, October 22, create a blog post that reveals whatever you’re eating from your garden. Then return to Your Small Kitchen Garden and link to your post. There are more details on my Post Produce page. I hope you’ll share your kitchen gardening successes on October 22, and Post Produce.
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