Bee Happy

By now I'm sure anyone who's interested in gardening and raising a bit of their own food has heard about the plight of the honey bee. Since so much of our food supply depends on these little creatures as pollinators the fact that honey bees are disappearing at an alarming rate should have us all worried on many levels. But honey bees aren't the only bees who are good pollinators. In fact, honey bees aren't even native to this country. Some of the best pollinators don't live in hives or make honey. They're our own native mason bee, also known as the orchard bee. At first glance mason bees look like a small version of a honey bee, but they are very different from honey bees. Mason bees don't build hives, but instead look for holes in trees in which to raise their young. The female mason bee gathers pollen and places it inside a suitable hole. When she has enough she lays an egg, and then seals it off with a plug made of mud (hence the name "mason" bee). She then proceeds to gather more food, lay another egg, seal it off, and so-on until the hole is full. She then plugs the end with mud and starts all over again in a new hole. The eggs hatch and the young feed on the pollen she's provided for them during the summer, then pupate and over-winter in the holes. Come spring they emerge, males first, (who were deposited in the front sections of the hole) then later, the females. They mate, and then start the whole process over again.

Since mason bees don't make their own holes you can encourage them to nest close to your garden by providing suitable nesting holes for them. Many garden supply companies sell mason bee houses. You can also easily make one, and there are good instructions on how to do that here. You can also purchase mason bees, but you really shouldn't need to. As the saying goes, if you build it (or buy it), they will come. I put up my mason bee houses a little over a week ago, and the bees were using them immediately. (Actually they were using them before the houses were put up since I had them sitting on the porch!) You should put your bee house someplace with a bit of protection from rain and other nasty weather (if it doesn't have it's own roof built in), and if it can get morning sun, that's really optimal. You really don't need to worry about having the bees close to where you are. Unlike honey bees, mason bees aren't aggressive at all since they have no honey stores to protect. They can sting, but you pretty much have to squish one to get it to do so. As I was taking the pictures for this post the bees were actually hitting me since I was in their flight path to their nests, and I didn't get stung once. And they really are fascinating to watch as they go about their bee business.

So, if you're planning to grow anything that requires a bit of bee action, I'd really suggest making friends with some of our own orchard bees. They're some of the best friends a gardener can have!

Plant Peas When Daffodils and Forsythia Bloom

I'm a little bit behind this year. Happily I do have a few green things making appearances on the shelves in the basement. And yesterday I actually planted some spinach, lettuce, carrots and parsnips in some of our beds. It was wonderful to get my hands dirty once again! One thing I still haven't managed to plant yet are peas. Saint Patrick's Day has come and gone, and still the peas are in their seed packets. Well, lucky for me I have an excuse: my forsythia isn't blooming yet! Nor are my daffodils. Those beauties pictured at the top are from last year. What's this got

to do with peas? Well, according to the science of phenology, forsythia and daffodil blooms indicate when the soil is the perfect temperature for peas to germinate. Phenology uses nature's own indicators as a timetable for when to plant instead of just sticking to a calendar. There are a few nice web sites here, here, and here that talk about phenology in more detail. There are even sites where you can participate by logging in your own observations, here for example. If you believe, as I do, that our climate is changing this would be an important project to participate in. And it sounds like it would be fun!

I plan to try and pay a bit more attention to Mother Nature's signals when I'm gardening this year. After all, Mother usually knows best!

Garden Planning Part 1

I think I've been hibernating. There certainly hasn't been anything but the winter wind whistling through this site lately! It's been weeks since I've even been able to GET to my garden plot since the parking lot has turned into a snow-covered ice-skating rink. And after our mid-Atlantic blizzard dumped almost 2 feet of snow on us (with an additional 6-8 inches by tomorrow) I'm not going anywhere for a while! And a Note to Self: Leaving your winter supply of parsnips and leeks in the ground means they STAY in the ground until it thaws. It would take a jackhammer to free those puppies! Sigh. Live and learn.

Luckily the seed catalogs arrived as usual, and they've inspired me to start thinking about spring and what to put where (and when) in the garden. One thing I've resolved to do better this coming season is crop rotation. I've spent a good part of the winter reading up about why this is important, how best to do it, what plants should follow what, and I must say I STILL don't have a clear picture about it all! So I figured I might as well write about it! I'll either clarify things for myself, or confuse a few more fellow gardeners!

Elliot Coleman introduces this concept in his New Organic Grower (I love this book!) as follows:

In a word, crop rotation means variety, and variety gives stability to biological systems. By definition, crop rotation is the practice of changing the crop each year on the same piece of ground. Ideally, these different crops are not related botanically. Ideally, two successive crops do not make the same demands on the soil for nutrients, nor do they share diseases or insect pests.

Makes sense, and certainly seems like a simple enough concept. So how to get started? Well, first figure out what "families" the plants you want to grow belong to and group them accordingly. Plants that are related have similar nutrient demands, diseases, and pests, and often require the same growing conditions. You can find the botanical families of many common food plants listed here, or in many gardening guides, including Coleman's book. The goal in crop rotation is to avoid growing plants from the same family in one location year after year. For example, you don't want to plant eggplants and peppers where you had tomatoes or potatoes last year because they're in the same family (Solanaceae).

Next, (and this is what I'm going to try doing this year) pick a color for each of the families you're growing from. Write the name of each particular plant you want to grow this season on an index card or sticky note in that color (good excuse to break out the crayons!). Then make a diagram of last year's garden plot and color in where you had each plant family. You'll want to avoid putting anything the same "color" there this year (and ideally for the next three years.) Now you can start putting your cards on your diagram, avoiding like color on like arrangements. This is the first and simplest step. If you do successive planting the way that I do you'll have different crops in each area depending upon the time of year. Well, I guess it's a good thing I'm snowed in for a while!

A Sack of Potatoes

Well, the potato harvest wasn't quite what I'd hoped. I'd planted two garden bags with seed potatoes (French fingerlings and red fingerlings). As the plants grew I added compost to the bags until they were full. Once the plants started to die back about three weeks ago we harvested the potatoes. The French fingerling potatoes weren't terrifically prolific. In fact, I think we got back pretty much 1 potato for every seed potato we put in! They were beautiful and delicious nonetheless! The red fingerlings did a bit better. I think from both bags we got about 5 pounds of beautiful potatoes. Perhaps not the best return on our investment, but having freshly-dug fingerling potatoes for dinner is, of course, priceless!

Garden in a Bag

We've been eating lots of baby carrots and parsnips lately, from a bag! Not a grocery store bag, mind you, but from one of these garden bags from Gardener's Supply Company. They sell them for potatoes, but I thought they'd also be great for other root veggies, and so far the carrots and parsnips have done great in them. The potatoes seem to be growing well too, but I'll have to do an update post when we actually harvest the potatoes.

We wanted a bit more growing space at the garden since our raised beds are pretty much stuffed to the gills with plants, and I saw these in the catalog. They're made of heavy-duty felt, and are supposed to last several years. Just fill them with nice sifted soil, water well, and plant your seeds. These would be great for small-space gardens like patios. So, even if you have cement for a "backyard", that's no excuse not to grow some food!