Greenfest Success!

This weekend our daylily club (BADS) participated in Greenfest at the University of Tampa.  It benefits friends of Historic Plant Park.  A huge festival with plants of all kinds, garden art and other gardening-related stuff, Greenfest is, in my opinion, the best of all the Bay Area Gardening Festivals.  The Master Gardeners are on hand to answer just about any question a gardener could have, and there are speakers of all types.  The  City of Tampa Wastewater Treatment plant was even handing out free bags of locally produced fertilizers. (yes, bags of people-poo)  Our club gets a great location every year, under huge oak trees.  It's one of two yearly events we hold  to make money and educate people about our favorite flowers.  Jay and I love growing daylilies because they are fuss-free and come in literally thousands of varieties. It was such a beautiful weekend (until 2 PM Sunday) that we sold out of all but 4 of our daylilies before 10 AM Saturday.  We had to call members to dig plants and bring them so we'd have more to sell.  Two of our members from Plant City saved the day Saturday by bringing more plants for the afternoon, and two other  members dug and divided plants from Brooksville and Redington Beach Saturday night to bring this morning so we'd have enough to sell on day 2.  After such a horrible winter, Tampa gardeners came out in full force to replace all the plants that didn't survive this year's crazy-cold temperatures.  I hung my gorgeous daylily quilt that my mother- and father-in-law designed and made for my birthday in our booth, and it was a huge draw. A lot of people came up to the booth just to look at the quilt, giving us a chance to tell people about daylilies and sell some plants.  Thank you, Arlene and Ray!

It doesn't seem that long ago that Jay and I bought 4 daylilies from the club at Greenfest.  Now we're the ones working the club booth, Jay is the vice president and we grow almost 80 varieties!   As a way to advertise our show and sale on May 1,  I had the idea for all of the club members to save the Daylily Journals, Magazines and Catalogs that we all get during the year and put stickers with our show and sale information on them.  We handed out probably a few hundred of them to people who bought plants, so I'm hoping we'll get even more visitors to our sale this year.  The Tampa Rose Society is joining us at our show venue, so we should get more traffic from the 'rose people,' too.  I'm glad we found one more use for all that printed material.

When I wasn't in our booth selling plants and talking to people about daylilies,  I roamed around to see the other vendors.  The lady we bought our worm compost system was there (I think a post about our worms is probably going to be coming soon).  I spent the majority of my mad money on heirloom veggie starts and herbal teas.  I got 6 heirloom tomatoes of all colors, shapes and sizes, white and yellow carrots, a 3-foot squash, a purple and a 'chocolate' sweet pepper as well as herbs to round out the last 3 sections of my square foot herb garden.  One of the herbs I got was "pukeless" cat grass.  Only 1 out of 4 of our cats liked it, and it is (so far) pukeless as advertised.  I'm going to do a post soon about heirloom seeds, too.  It's so important (to me, anyway) to preserve the rare varieties and our food heritage. After this terribly busy weekend, we're finally going to get back to building the chicken coop next weekend.  We really need to get it done so we can bring order and bring home our peeps!

We're going to a field trip WHERE?

Yesterday our Daylily Club visited Mother's Organics Humus Farm for our monthly meeting.  Mother's Organics takes yard waste from the City of Tampa and other places and turns it into compost.  The city pays Mother's to take all the yard waste from the collection sites and brings it to their facility, where they put it through a series of grinders and let it age at proper temperatures until it turns into compost.  The site is set on a slight grade, and all the water runs into ponds that are used to pump water back into the facility, so they are self sufficient and don't rely on any municipal water for their operation.  It was really interesting and inspiring to see a company making a living doing something that is good for the environment.  They let us bring buckets so we could all take home samples of the compost for use in our gardens.  Nothing like free dirt to send a bunch of middle-aged gardeners scrambling.  I've put a link here  to all the pictures I took.  Once I have a chance to go through the video I attempted to take with my FLIP, I'll amend this post and include that if there is any footage worth sharing.

Spring is Springing!

I just went out to check on things in the garden and found baby kale, tatsoi and swiss chard sprouts, lots of strawberries trying to ripen, and the first tomato bud forming on Mr. Stripey heirloom plants!  The beets, cauliflower, brussels sprouts and broccoli are all coming along nicely, too.  I ate a serving of raw snow peas for lunch yesterday, and today there are more waiting to be harvested.  I accidentally pulled out a baby swiss chard sprout because it looked just like all the baby maple trees sprouting from the helicopters dropped in from the neighbor's tree  (oops!)

Visit from Bert and Ernie

This has nothing whatsoever to do with gardening or eating clean... not even my cats.  Well, I could push it by saying that I wouldn't have known these little guys were visiting if Daisy, our "First Responder" cat hadn't alerted me to their presence, thereby making the event quasi-blog-worthy.  Yesterday aftenoon these two little raccoons waddled into the driveway from the back yard, and scrambled up the little tree next to where I park my car.  They were about half the size of my cats.  It's a little Camphor tree, maybe 15 feet high.  They looked so little and scared.  They climbed up to the very top, one stepping on the face of the other at the end of their journey, trying to get comfy and secure.  It was really windy, the one on the bottom had a better perch because he was in a little V in the tree.  The one on top was basically hanging on by sheer willpower.  Eventually they climbed back down and waddled across the driveway, into the front yard and off into the distance.  I was on the phone with work when they left, and my headset cord didn't reach long enough for me to see where they went.  Poor little guys. I hope they found food and a warm place to hang out.

Hydroponic Garden 2010

This is the new location and setup for the hydroponic garden.  Now we have two full sets of towers, and at the end are the two tall tomato-dedicated towers.  You can see the corner of the chicken coop to the right of the hydrogarden, to give you some sense of perspective and placement relative to one another.  We harvested some lettuce and snow peas for dinner tonight.  Yes, I did eat some of the snow peas before they made it into the house.  They are so good!

Chicken Coop Construction

Here is the coop so far.  We ended up taking a few weekends off due to family and work commitments, but we'll get back to it soon enough.  The  next steps are to install the roofing panels and build the hen house area with the nesting boxes.  I'm hoping that once that part is complete, we'll be able to order our chicks.  We can keep the brooding box in the hen house until the chicks are old enough to be in the coop, and until we get the whole coop enclosed in hardware cloth.
We had dinner with some friends who are genuine farm-folk and they were rolling their eyes at me talking about how we are planning names for our chickens, and how we're going to keep them even beyond their egg-laying years.

Hydroponic Garden, Round 1

Tammy asked me to post the link to pictures of our hydroponic system.  These are from the first round, last year.  This year we've more than doubled the size, and moved it to a better (we hope) location in the yard.  I'll work on getting pictures of that in the next few days.  We're still involved in the building of our chicken coop, that the debris pile is right next to the hydro-garden, so I'd like to get some of that cleared away before we take pictures of it.  What you'll see in this link (if this whole link-thing works) will be the process of putting together the system.  It really was a quick.  It took about an hour or so to set the whole thing up.  Longer, of course, to build the frame we used as a trellis.  Jay did all of the work.  Bless his big heart!

Cari and Jay's Hydroponic Garden Version 1.0

Time to bring in the Ladybug Hit Squad

   I went out a few evenings ago to harvest some Tatsoi greens from the hydroponic garden.  They were covered in aphids.  I should have known, since we had ants all over the towers, and that's not a common occurrence for us.  Ants love to eat the sugary secretions the aphids leave behind, and will swarm an aphid colony and actually try to protect them.  Since we try to use only organic methods in our garden, I need to order some ladybugs from http://www.gardensalive.com/ to combat the problem.  Ladybugs are voracious aphid-eaters.  Tammy asked me why I don't get them from the local big-box home improvement store, but the few times I've seen them there, all the ladybugs were dead in the bags.  I've had great success with the ones I've gotten from Gardens Alive.  Maybe since Tammy lives in California where the ladybugs are grown, they have a fighting chance to stay alive at those stores.
   Another way we combat aphids is to plant 'sacrificial' plants.  We find plants that the aphids like better than our crops or other ornamentals like our daylilies and hibiscus.  One of those is the Guara (commonly known as "Whirling Butterfly".)  We buy a few of those and plant them near the plants we want to protect.  Some of the aphids, not all, will flock to the Guara, leaving the other plants alone... this gives them a chance to fight the aphids on their own.  The Ladybug Hit Squad will take care of the rest.

   To keep ladybugs alive over several weeks, we put them in a little screened-in wooden box, with some wood shavings and a paper towel soaked in sugar water.  The picture above is the box, but in this photo, it's housing a parsley plant with a bunch of Swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on it.  I don't recommend using a little kids' Critter Keeper for the ladybugs.  Trust me.  The ladybugs are crafty and get out through the vents on the lid.  It takes quite a while to wrangle 2000 of them loose in your living room. Anyhow..... the ladybugs will glom all over the paper towel to eat the sugar water.  At night, right before sundown, I take out the paper towel (and any ladybugs that happen to be eating at the time) and put the paper towel on or near the aphid infested plant.  Ladybugs won't fly at night, so they'll settle in.  Come morning, the paper towel will be abandoned for their favorite food:  aphids.  I release some every few days, and can make a pint last a month.  The directions say you can put them in the refrigerator, but I can't bring myself to do that to them.  I just order more if I need more.

Day One, Tammy to the Rescue

Almost in tears over this whole blog thing (I don't think it's at all intuitive)  Tammy saves the day by doing it for me.. making things show up where I want them, and making them fit on the page. 

thank you, Tammy!