The Results Are In!

We wanted to see which of three added fertilizers would result in more growth for our basil plants; a commercial powder, our own compost, and our own worm castings, with an a fourth basil plant with nothing added as a control.

Here is the ‘Nothing Added’ plant

The commercial powdered fertilizer.

The worm castings plant.

And above is the added compost one.

Hmm… Can’t tell the difference?

Well I figured out that the problem with my experiment was that as basil plants get bigger, you can’t help but want to make some pesto.

So the photos above are after I cut off the best leaves to use in my pesto. You’ll just have to take my word for it that the one with the added compost wins. All for the advancement of Science!

Volunteer pumpkin

All of our vegetables in the garden are doing great this year. The only thing that has not worked out so far are our pumpkins. We grew six pumpkins from seed, they were all hardened carefully, transplanted to the garden, and then they all died in about a week. Pumpkins need warm weather, and unfortunately we had a couple of cool nights in late June that probably killed them.

However, we do have a volunteer pumpkin in our side yard which is doing great. Is the term ‘volunteer’ used outside New England? It means that we did not plant this one, it just started growing. Most likely from a composted pumpkin from last year. It stretches across two sections of fence, each about eight feet long. Every few days I have to check to see if it is growing into my neighbors yard, I’ve already had to move the huge vines out of the neighbor’s yard twice.

There’s also a small tomato plant squeezed in there too.

I hope we get some pumpkins from this one!

A gardening experiment

We’re experimenting with our basil this year. We eat a lot of pesto, and it usually costs something like $6 for a four ounce jar, so we’ve been growing our own. Homemade pesto is very inexpensive and any excess can be frozen too.

Basil tends to grow like a weed here, but I noticed that our plants have not been doing well so far this year. We have them in old kitty litter bins, to keep the dog from trampling them. It’s possible that the potting soil-dirt mix may just be played out, it’s been in the same bins for a few years now. So we’ve added some supplements to the bins to see which one helps the plants the most.

In this bin we have added some compost from our own compost bin. Decomposed fruit and vegetable peels and cores, grass clippings, leaves.

A commercial plant food. It’s a powder that is mixed with water.

Worm castings. We have a worm bin. C likes to say that he takes care of a thousand pets in addition to the dog. Possibly another post to come on that. The worms eat the same type of fruit and vegetable scraps that we have in the compost, they also eat paper, newspaper, and cardboard. We then gather up the finished castings.

And as a control, a bin with nothing added.

Each bin had about a quart of each supplement added to try to make sure each one is equal. Each one also receives about the same amount when we water them.

We’ll see what happens.

Vegetable Garden ‘18

Last year we had a plot in our town’s community garden area. We have a small yard and what do have planted will be trampled by our dog anyway so the community garden is a good option. We had been on the waiting list for about two years, and I had not planned anything ahead of time when they assigned us our plot in late May. So we had to rush to get seedlings in the ground and we just were not able to get much done in time, so by the end of the season we ended up with just some carrots and a few stalks of basil.

Once you’re in the garden you are automatically renewed unless you cancel so this year we were determined to plan ahead! Here’s what the garden looks like at the beginning of the season.

We have a 20 x 40 plot, located where the pile of garden tools are in the photo. In the distance are a group of guys playing cricket!

Here’s what it looks like now.

Several plots are in the photo, ours is the three rows in the center. The enormous cabbage in the foreground is C’s contribution, part of a school project. Whoever grows the biggest cabbage in his grade wins! I forget what the winner gets, but he’s determined to win.

Here’s our Brussels sprouts and swiss chard.

Here’s our zucchini.

Results are already much better than last year. We’re going to have more zucchini than we can eat. We’re already using it for zucchini bread.

Caterpillar Update

It’s been a little over a week, and Mr. C’s Monarch caterpillars have more than doubled in size.  Here’s a photo from This past Thursday. 

As of this morning, they’re all in the process of creating cocoons, attaching themselves to either sticks that we added to rhe habitat, or directly to the bottom of the cardboard cover that we put on the habitat.  And by ‘habitat’ I mean a wire mesh tradh can with a piece of cardboard on top!  Next, they will then be transformed into Monarch butterflies. 

Here’s a photo of some of them on the cardboard, kind of creepy looking.  

I had to be careful not to disturb them so I could just lift the lid up a few inches to take the photo.  

When I first moved here, fifteen years ago, there would at least be a few Monarch’s around our stand of milk weed in the Fall, but I haven’t seen very many at all lately.  This year I haven’t seen any, except for the ones Mr C has.  Hopefully in the next few weeks, we’ll have some to let out to make their way down to Mexico.

First Pet

We have a lot of milkweed in the backyard. It can spread and take over areas quickly, so I used to pull it all out. Ms J told me that milkweed is the only thing that Monarch butterflies eat, so I stopped pulling it all out, letting most of it grow to maturity.

Here’s some milkweed mixed in with the flowers next to my neighbor’s garage. It’s the tall leafy plant in back of the purple flowers.

Mr C loves learning about plants, bugs, and animals, so for his birthday he received a milkweed plant in a box.  The plant was covered by a mesh netting in the box.

The netting was over the plant to protect the twenty or so Monarch caterpillars on the plant. The company that sends them out wants to raise awareness of the dwindling number of Monarchs, mostly due to loss of habitat caused by development and people pulling out milkweed. 

The only thing we could think of to put the plant in for a temporary habitat is this wire mesh trashcan!  We’re gathering branches from the milkweed in the backyard for them to eat.

Eventually the caterpillars will turn into Monarch butterflies, we’ll release them and hopefully they will mysteriously fly off to the one spot in Mexico where all Monarch butterflies migrate to.

We plan on getting Mr C a dog at some point, but for the next two or three weeks his first pet will be Monarch butterfly caterpillars.

Take a picture Dada!  he says.

Here is what one looks like on Day Two, already much bigger. 

Compost

This past Spring we bought a compost bin.  It’s about four feet tall, three feet wide.  Fill it up with any kind of plant material that you’d usually just throw away, such as apple cores, banana peels, grass clippings and leaves.   

And then, about six months later, you have some rich organic soil for the garden.   

Mystery Solved

Back in June, I wrote a post (here’s the link to it) about how our back yard has been regularly visited by some mystery animal that has been digging fairly large holes in the lawn.

One day last week, I was having trouble sleeping, so I went downstairs to make a sandwich.  It was about 2:00 am, and while making the sandwich I noticed some movement in the backyard. Taking a look out the window, I saw a slinky white and gray animal, which seemed to be about two feet long, very close to the ground, digging in the lawn.  In the darkness, it had an eerie ghostly look to it as it dug in the lawn.  It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but from the color and the distinctive long tail, I’m fairly certain that it was an opossum.   After about five minutes or so, it wandered away, under a bush and then probably under the fence.

Opossums dig in the dirt to look for grubs and any other bugs to eat.  They may hiss and bare their teeth, but they’re harmless overall.  I’ve never seen one in the wild, and I didn’t know that New Hampshire was anywhere near their range so I was surprised to see it.

A few years ago, a photo of a “Found Cat – Not Very Friendly” poster circulated on the internet.  The poster included a photo of an opossum in a cage, which the person who found had thought was a not very friendly cat.

It was too dark to get a photo, especially since I only had my smart phone with me which doesn’t take very good photos with low light anyway.  So if anyone doesn’t know what an Opossum looks like, here’s  a stand in from Mr. C’s hand puppet collection.

Planet of the Heleniums

In past years I would write a few posts about the garden, but not this year, I just haven’t been able to spend much time gardening this year.  Unfortunately, what has happened due to this lack of gardening time is that the clump of helenium that I planted about 15 years ago has taken over the garden.  Helenium is a perennial flower with medium sized daisy-like flowers.  They bloom for months and spread, spread, spread everywhere.

There’s 30 or so other perennials in the garden, but you can’t see them, they’ve been crowded out by the heleniums.  I usually have a few more of these red lilies , but not this year.   The common name is sneezeweed.   Hmmm… this probably explains Mr. C’s frequent sneezing since they’ve started blooming.

Doesn’t matter if it’s not a sunny area either, they can insert themselves everywhere.  They’re native to the area, so at least they’re not an invasive species.

There’s three rose bushes in the picture below… somewhere.

They’ve moved to the neighbor’s yard too.

And down the street, about a block away, on the sidewalk.

At least, I’ve seen a lot more birds in the yard this year, like orioles and finches,  which are not uncommon here but there has been a noticeable increase of these and other birds.  Also,  they look good in a bouquet.

 

Sorry, little tree!

Mr. C planted a tree late last year, I think it was a Japanese Maple seedling.

To try to help make sure it survived the snowy winter, I made a little triangle shaped wooden shelter for it.  I’m sure that the shelter helped since we had a record 110″ of snow this past year, and without the shelter it would have been crushed.   It was also just a few feet from our driveway and since I had to put the snow that I shoveled from the driveway somewhere,  the little shelter ended up being completely covered by up to fifteen feet of snow at the height of the winter snow.

 

Once all the snow melted, it seemed to be doing fine in the early Spring, (sorry, no photo of the tree in the Spring, but it did have nice foliage at first) , but soon all of the leaves withered away and fell off.    Since then, the tree has completely withered away and died.

 

I checked some gardening websites, and apparently Japanese Maples are fickle when they are this young.  Most likely all that melting snow waterlogged its roots and killed it.

Mr. C was not upset at the time, but now when he passes the spot  he says; ‘That’s where the tree used to be.”.

He’s looking around for another seedling to try too.