Garlic Mini-Workshop Friday July 3rd at 10am

Join us to learn about garlic: choosing, planting, growing, harvesting and storing. We will hold a mini-workshop in the garden this coming Friday July 3rd, 10-10:30am. Garden members are free, all others are $5 (cash or check pay at the gate). You can go home with a beautiful new braid! We will have additional garlic for sale.

Earwig Defense

I am not squeamish about most bugs. As a kid I handled spiders, grasshoppers, beetles, earwigs, caterpillars, rolly pollies, moths, butterflies, fire ants, grubs, butterflies, lady bugs, crickets, Daddy Longlegs, and millipedes (no bees, wasps or hornets for me, though). Then after a number of years with less exposure, my primal fears crept back. Five years of gardening like a madwoman have renewed my courage. However, I'm learning that with chemical-free gardening I can win the battle, but never the war. Take for example some Scarlet Runner Beans some friends gave me. These fellas popped out of the soil and began climbing heavenward about as fast as the Grimm Brothers could say "Jack and the Beanstalk." A couple weeks ago I went out early in the morning to check my garden and what used to be a healthy, happy plant, was a nubby inch of stem. Something had eaten the leaves off its neighbor and so I'd put a barrier around it to give it a chance to heal. But now, no more Mrs. Nice Gardener. After an evening garden tour (wearing my head lamp), I discovered that snails and earwigs were doing the initial damage, and the pill bugs were moving in like vultures to finish off my plants. I turned to the big guns: beer and yeast water. I used shallow plastic containers, dug small holes to get them near ground level and filled them two-thirds with beer. I bake a lot of bread, so I also use yeast (about 2 T. to 2 C. water, 1 t. sugar). Both worked well and I'm happy to report the leaf-eaten bean plant is making a strong recovery. The earwigs, on the other hand, met an unrecoverable end.

I have bees and they rarely go in the trap. Houseflies, pill bugs, and earwigs make up 95% of what I catch. Speaking of catch, I was also handpicking earwigs and snails each evening for a couple weeks.

June Sampling

I'm not a fan of fresh radishes, so when a friend told me about braised radishes, my curiosity was piqued. 2 cups radishes, washed, stemmed and sliced thin. Place in heated skillet on medium heat with 2 T. butter, 1 T. olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Cook until moisture is gone, edges begin to golden. Served with chard and feta frittata (see post from June 2013).

 Pakistani curried beef, peas and potatoes. A great use for peas (shelled and in-the-pod) and new potatoes (dig after blossoms wither). If you don't have turmeric, hope you have a friend with an incredibly well-stocked kitchen.

New potato salad with dill or mint. This was okay.

So many strawberries! The slugs, snails and pill bugs couldn't keep up;) Rhubarb pie with homemade vanilla ice cream-yum! The strawberry rhubarb marmalade was my epic fail. I read "until temperature reaches 230 degrees, 15-20  minutes" and somehow thought that I should cook it for fifteen more minutes after it reached 230 degrees. I made a molasses candy sauce that my husband enjoyed with ice cream.

Letting My Scandinavian Roots Show

During my first trip to Disneyland (I was 13), I saw a woman who looked like Marilyn Monroe. I described her to my sister, and asked, "Could I ever look like that?" She looked at me doubtfully and said, you know you'd have to get contacts, wear red lipstick and be a platinum blonde." But I am blonde, I thought. Turns out I'm dishwater. More than one set of my great-grandparents emigrated from Norway, so my hair lightens in the sun. A year later, with contacts, dark lipstick and looking nothing like Marilyn, I was thrilled when my mom suggested that I bleach my hair. But of course in 2 months, I had to dye my roots. After 3 years of dyeing, "your roots are showing," became the entry point of an argument with my mom. Then at my first job in college, my Norwegiaphile third cousin bragged about me until I told him I wasn't a natural Blonde. He got real quiet and sighed, "well, no one is perfect." After I married, when the cost of dye was a luxury and I grew out the roots, my sister overheard my Grandfather tell a friend that I had started dying my hair brown. Still, somewhere in there I think I have honest-to-goodness Norwegian roots. I recently read with my kids how my husband's Norwegian great-grandfather found 1880s agricultural work easy when he arrived penniless in Wisconsin. He observed that twenty-hour workdays were normal in Norway's short summer, so 14 hours was a picnic. I've noticed that despite years of sloppy sleep hygiene, gardening has brought out a new side of me. It's called "wake before dawn, work until after dusk." In the last week of May and throughout June and July I find myself waking up early, drawn to garden work, sometimes most of the day and until darkness. Someday maybe I'll find out what strengths I've inherited from my ancestors, but for now, I'm grateful for their work ethic. Because whether or not that can be transmitted across the generations, this I know: working dawn to dusk feels fantastic for a few weeks each year. And when Fall comes, I'll slip into semi-hibernation when instead of waking at 5:30 and turning in at 11, I'll fight to stay awake at 5:30 and want to sleep until 11.

Are You Addicted to Weed?

If you can answer yes to at least two of the following questions, you may have an addiction to weed:

1) You skip other activities because you just have "a little more" weeding to do.
2) When weeds are in sight, you find yourself preoccupied with them.
3) You tell yourself you can stop whenever you want, but then you keep weeding.
4) You find stress relief from weeding.
5) Even when you experience negative consequences (caked fingernails, rough hands, torn gloves, sore back, aching knees) you continue the behavior.

Although I grew up in Colorado, I am clearly not referring to that kind of weed. Weed Addict may be a bit strong, Weedophile sounds creepy, so I'll call myself a Weeder. During childhood I did some occasional weeding, but my first clear memory of weed-induced euphoria was the summer after I graduated high school. My sister and I were weeding along our fence and we noticed that thistle had overrun our elderly neighbor's roses. He grew prize-winning roses that he'd brought with him from Texas, but they'd been neglected while his wife had been very ill. We decided to do him a favor. We rang, and no one answered, so we tried the gate and found it unlocked. An hour later his roses were restored to full glory and I had fallen in love with gardening gloves. Since then I have weeded playgrounds, friends' lawns while the kids played in the pool, strangers' curbside landscaping, school grounds, yards of abandoned homes, neighbors' gardens (with and without permission), and of course my own and family members' yards and gardens.  I have pulled weeds taller than myself, removed goat heads bare-handed, sneaked into yards at night to weed, and offered free weeding to complete strangers. I lose track of time because I have a completion goal in mind. It's not "I'll quit in half an hour," it's "I'll quit when the compost bin can't be packed more or when this area is weed-free."

So with all this passion for weeding, you'd think our Community Garden would be heaven for me. But no. All those weeds have actually taught me to prioritize, relinquish my expectation of control, and put on blinders. I've learned that 5% vinegar barely affects weeds and that rhizomal weeds (bindweed and hoary cress), are better embraced and kept at bay than attacked full-on. Because we don't use commercial herbicides, we are trying black plastic to solarize some of the weeds. An 81-year old man visited RPCG and told me it takes 3-4 years of solarization to eradicate the bindweed. For anyone searching for job security, I say "Weeders of the world, pull together!"


At my Aunt's beautiful home in Logan, I could have been playing in the pool with my kids, but then I discovered a patch of thistle hiding on the edge of her property. No worries, I had a bandanna and work gloves stashed in the car for just such emergencies. And yes, I'm proud of my Full-fledged Farmer's Tan.