A Volunteer... Potato?

Compost Bin With Potatoes

We knew that potatoes like plenty of compost, but we didn't realize that they like it so much they would seek out the compost bin and root there, but we found exactly that the other day.

Mere feet away from these hardy volunteers are the pampered potato plants that Cindy has lavished attention on for months now, carefully starting them, then transplanting the seedlings to the grow bags inside Fortress Blueberry, where she periodically rolls up the sides of the grow bags to add more potting soil so the plant will produce more potatoes.

Those potato plants are currently looking like they are struggling a bit; since they are cool weather plants, it may be getting a bit warm for them now, although that doesn't seem to have bothered the volunteers.

Healthy Looking Volunteers

The Beet Goes On...

Double Beet

When Cindy was harvesting her beets yesterday, she found this very interesting double beet among them.

Makes you wonder how this came about; did one beet form and the plant forget about it and start to form another one?  Or was it just one of those odd vegetable things that happen now and then?

There were plenty of beet greens in this crop of beets, and the Swiss Chard is ready to be harvested, too.

There's always something interesting going on in the garden.  

"Hold This", or The Joys Of Installing Bird Netting

Fort Blueberry

Don't get me wrong, we love birds of all shapes and sizes, except maybe crows, but we love our blueberries even more.

As we've watched the current crop of blueberries ripening, it has become apparent that we need to protect the berries from attack from the air as well as from assault by ground forces in the form of the California Ground Squirrels who will soon emerge from their burrows with their cute but voracious babies, looking for a juicy meal or three.

The California Towhees have been eyeing the blueberry crop as it ripens, so that meant it was time to install the bird netting over the raised bed.

Cindy first slipped some PVC pipe on top of the panel stakes, then cut lengths of black irrigation tubing and slid it into the PVC pipe to form a half hoop from one side of the bed to another.  That created a structure to support the bird netting, but the real trick was getting the dang netting over the bed and clipping it the the upper edges of the protective panels.

That's where I, as the unskilled labor of choice, came in, for "hold this" while we stretched the netting from side to side.  We finally got it all stretched and clipped, although for a while I thought Cindy was going to become a big cocoon of netting as she clipped the last two pieces of it together.

Then she attached strips of mylar to the hoops to warn the birds off.  That worked for about half a day; we later saw a Mourning Dove sitting on top of one of the hoops, ignoring the mylar, but fortunately the dove flew away without becoming entangled in the netting.

And, of course, we just had to pick some of the riper blueberries while we were there.  Yum.

Gotcha!

We've been hearing a bird in our shrubbery for the past couple of months, but haven't been able to identify it.

The bird has a distinctive song that starts out with a couple of higher notes and then resolves into a lower trill.  After hearing this song for some time, we finally spotted a small grayish bird that seemed to be the one singing this song, but never got a really good look at it, let alone a picture of it.

The best description we could come up with was:  small, about the size of a sparrow, grayish or brownish color, a bit darker on the back than on the chest and with an upturned tail.  Since the bird was usually hopping around in the neighbors' trumpet creeper vine, that was about the best description we could come up with.

I tried searching all the likely members of the Passeriformes order on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website, including sparrows, wrens and bushtits, but nothing seemed even close to the song we were hearing, until I got to the last bird on the list, the Wrentit.  That's the song, and the description fits:  small songbird, dull grayish brown, long tail, short bill, and "difficult to see as it skulks through the dense scrub."

Yep, that's our bird.

Crimes Against Horticulture

One of my favorite gardening sites is Billy Goodnick's Crimes Against Horticulture: When Bad Taste Meets Power Tools page on Facebook, where Billy highlights some of the amazingly bad decisions people make in their gardens.  I think my favorite is photo of what appears to be an otherwise blameless Italian Cypress pruned into an unfortunate shape that looks like stacked up wineglasses.  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=651314434904092&set=pb.183426311692909.-2207520000.1395618579.&type=3&theater

We were fortunate yesterday to be able to attend one of Billy's lectures during the San Diego Master Gardeners Spring seminar, and it was as entertaining as it was informative.

And I won a roll of Billy's yellow Horticultural Crime Scene tape, so watch out, neighbors.  Next time you prune those trees inappropriately, you're getting taped!

You've Got ... Borage!

Borage

I told Cindy when she planted the Borage last year that I had read that the plant tends to self-sow, and once you plant it, you're going to have Borage again.  And again and again.

So, here it is.  Again.

And now it's blooming, too, which means even more Borage next year.

The flowers are supposed to be good in tea, but I haven't worked up the nerve to try any in my morning tea yet.

End of An Era

Cindy's dad, Louis Dehmlow, grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois and remained a passionate gardener the rest of his life.  It seemed like he could make anything grow.  We lost him at the end of February, a week short of his 90th birthday.  Indiana was still covered with snow and tomatoes were only a distant dream of summer.

Lou was very proud of his flourishing upside down tomato plant a few years ago, especially when he heard that Master Gardener Cindy's upside down tomato was a scrawny specimen that managed to produce only one (1) tomato the entire summer.

He never let her hear the end of that one, but he took great delight in helping her install a drip irrigation system for his roses when his back problems prevented him from hand carrying water to them during Indiana's drought; it turned out that all the bits and pieces of a drip system was almost like a tinker toy set for an engineer like Lou.

He was an inventive, funny, wonderful man who cared deeply about his family and his garden, and we will all miss him greatly.