Shelley, the Intrepid Beetle Hunter

At last! I have an actual post about Shelley, the Free-Range Turtle! A-way back in December of last year, I did my first post of the FRT. I explained that Shelley came to live in my back yard. I rely on Shelley to be part of my Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system. Shelley hunts down and savages garden snails (and slugs) with great relish. My back yard is now nearly slug- and snail-free! (Front yard still tends to be overrun.)

Shelley also eats the not-quite-ripe bits of fruit that the squirrels nab from the neighbors' fruit trees, steal away to nosh on my fence tops, then drop the leftovers into my yard. Similarly, if I have some bit of fruit or vegetable that sat just a bit too long in the crisper (or, as I call it, the refrigerated compost bin), I'll cut it into smaller chunks (as needed) and toss it out into the areas that Shelley frequents most often. I know that Shelley also likes earthworms and I'm sure she goes for grubs, too.

What I didn't know is that Shelley also seems to have a penchant for shiny objects!

When I was out yesterday afternoon taking the photo of my harvest basket, I heard crunching leaves and investigated. It was Shelley! And she was so engrossed in getting at that bright green object right there under her chin that she didn't even notice me till I snapped the photo.

That bright green bit under her chin turns out to be a Japanese Beetle. So, Shelley is continuing her efforts as a member of my IPM team. Go Shelley!

First Squash Harvest

I harvested the first real squashes yesterday. Yay! (And I ate most of them last night. Double-yay!)

In this harvest basket are a variety of squashes and three cucumbers. First, the squashes. For the friend who had never heard of a "Scalloped Squash," that's the funky-shaped, dark green blob (with dead blossom on top) at the left side of the basket, resting on the bright yellow zucchini. They are also known simply as "summer squash" or, when bright yellow (instead of dark green), as "Sunburst Squash" or, when pale green, as "Pattypan Squash" among other things. They taste generally like zucchini or crookneck squash. They're all yummy.

As I mentioned, there's a yellow zucchini in there and two light green zucchini. OK, now you're confused. You're looking at the two small squashes on the right and asking, "Why didn't you count those?" I didn't count those because they started dying on the vine. As I mentioned in my last post, those two were the only blossoms on the plant when they formed. No male blossoms means no fertilization. No fertilization means the fruits won't form to accommodate the seeds within. You can really see where the embryonic dark green zuke has started turning yellow from the blossom end followed by turning brown. The process has started on the light green zuke, but pale-green-turning-yellow doesn't show up so much.

"But your squashes are so small!" you cry. Well, there's a reason. I picked that way on purpose. When they're small, they are more tender. When they're small, there's less food to have to process and eat. "What?!? Don't you want to share with your non-gardening friends?" Well, yes, I'd LOVE to share with my non-gardening friends! But there's a problem.

The problem is the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM). This invasive, crop-damaging, threat to California agriculture was found in the state in 2007 in Alameda County and a quarantine was slapped on the area. It has been spreading ever since despite an ever-expanding quarantine area. A year ago, my yard was not in the quarantine area, but now it is. I was stunned at how all-encompassing the zone has become in the last year. What this means is that I can't share my harvest with my next door neighbors, let alone with friends outside the quarantine area.

Part of the rules of the quarantine says that commercial growers, because they are officially inspected, get to ship outside their area. Similarly, because officially-sanctioned Community Gardens are officially inspected, the produce from those gardens can be removed to the homes of the gardeners, shared with friends, donated to food banks, etc.

And that brings up the notion that, until recently, was being touted in Public Service Announcements (PSAs). The announcements were suggesting that folks could grow some of their own produce in these challenging economic times. They further suggested that, if everyone planted an extra row, they could donate the proceeds to their local food bank or other charitable organization. With the quarantine on, we can't do that.

Make sure that you and your friends and neighbors know whether they are in the current quarantine area and that they know what the rules are. Nobody's going to come after you for violating the quarantine, BUT! If the LBAM continues to spread, the State or the County are likely to do something drastic like they did back in the early eighties when we had the Medfly issue and start spraying entire communities with insecticides.

The insecticide used then was Malathion, a popular, broad-spectrum insecticide. Malathion is a chemical in a class called organophosphates. Organophosphates also go by the moniker "nerve agents." Yes, as in "nerve gas," one "weapon of mass destruction." Granted, the amount used in controlling insect pests is a lot lower that the amount used in warfare, but still! Every night that the helicopters came through to spray, I had an asthma attack.

Speaking of PSAs, there's a new PSA now. It's really-really short and relatively content-free, but it touts being aware of invasive pests. It goes by so fast that I never can quite get the URL. I'll let you know when I do.

SO! I'll be harvesting my veggies young and tender and keeping them all to myself.

Veggie Garden Progress

Just over a week ago I did a post about my veggie garden that I started rather late in the season. Well, what a difference a week makes!

The tomatoes have grown a foot and the beans have grown a couple of feet. The beets, as pictured, are larger and thicker... despite having harvested a basket full of greens! And the zucchini have not only started blooming...

but have also started putting on fruits, both dark green...

and light green. (No yellow zukes yet.)

They're moving along a trifle more slowly, but the scalloped squash are also getting started.

(If you look carefully, right in the center of the photo, you can just make out a green embryonic scalloped squash with a blossom bud on top.)

Oh, yeah. That's how you can tell the male blossoms from the female blossoms. The males are perched on the ends of long, thin stalks. The females are on the ovary on short stalks. I can't guarantee that the two zucchinis pictured above will actually turn into edible zukes. The male blossoms weren't yet open when those zukes' female blossoms were open, so it's not very likely that they got fertilized. In the case that they didn't fertilize, the fruit will suddenly decide that it isn't happening and will start yellowing and shriveling from the blossom end. :-(

So, while getting a jump on planting one's veggie garden by planting as early as possible after frost is the usual mode, planting in mid-summer only delays harvest by a short bit. Because the ground has had a chance to warm, because the days are longer, and because the days and nights are warmer, the veggies veritable LEAP from the ground in a much bigger hurry to start producing.

In the meanwhile, the cucumber vines that are growing on the trellis out front continue to produce a few cucumbers every two or three days. However... Remember how I mentioned in that previous post that I had to move the tomatoes out back to get them enough sun and warmth? Well, the lack of blazing sun and warmth is also taking its toll on the cucumbers. The fruits are frequently slightly deformed (much narrower at the blossom end) and the leaves are already starting to mildew (a sign of insufficient heat, too much moisture on the leaves, not enough air movement, or old age). Given that they are watered by soaker hose, it shouldn't be damp leaves. Given that the breeze comes up every afternoon and blows through there, and that the trellis is held a couple of inches out from the wall and sags even farther from the wall from the weight of the vines, there should be plenty of air circulation. The vines really aren't all that old and they are continuing to grow rather vigorously at their growing ends. So, that leaves insufficient sun. *sigh*

Well, I'll go give the cukes a dusting of ground sulfur for the mildew now.

Street Facelift

OK, so this isn't about the garden or traveling or hiking or birds or nature or... But I thought it was interesting.

I bought my house 12.5 years ago. In that time I've seen street sweeping go from once a week to every other week to once a month.

Oh! Just so you know, the sweeping is NOT about cleaning up the trash dropped by passers by or lifted by the wind from the garbage truck or even the bits of detritus left after the Scooperizer(TM) has scooped the yard clippings we leave at the curb weekly. No. It's not about that at all. It's about "brake tailings" (a.k.a. asbestos) in the gutters that might make it to the bay. So, someone thinks that running the street sweeper up and down the street once a month is gonna keep vast quantities of asbestos from sneaking into the bay.

How do I know that this is what's going on? Because our neighborhood association had a city rep at a meeting where we were complaining about how littered our streets were getting what with the change in sweep schedule and the increase of trash after changing garbage companies. And that's what this representative of my city's government told us in all sincerity. *sigh*

ANYWAY, back to the original subject, in the last 12.5 years the city has given my street a facelift two or three times. The *type* of facelift varies between the kind where they grind down the top couple of inches then lay down a new, thick layer and the kind where they spray on some oil then lay down some gravel. (I really like the first kind. The second kind, not so much. You end up with sharp, loose gravel in the house.) This time around they are doing the oil-and-gravel treatment.

When I was a wee tyke, they always did the oil-and-gravel thing in my neighborhood. It was always done in the summertime, so we kids would spend the day watching the process. I don't recall a street sweeper (at least, not the big-mechanical-brushes-vacuum-on-wheels version we have today) being involved in the process, but someone must have done some sort of pre-clean. Then the asphalt truck would come through. This was a small thing with a kind of thin tar in it that they sort of mopped onto the street. Then guys would come along and shovel gravel on and rake it even. After that came the steam roller to mash the gravel into the tar.

Well, the process is still sort of the same, but not. Now the big-mechanical-brushes-vacuum-on-wheels street sweeper shows up first thing in the morning and runs up and down the street a couple of dozen times before the other trucks show up. Eventually a really big, wide tanker with an array of spray nozzles wider than the truck and fully half the width of the street shows up. It sprays something much thinner than the tarry substance of my youth on half the road.

This is followed by a gravel truck, but it's a two-part affair. Hitched to the back of the gravel truck is a gravel spreader. It has a steering wheel, but the gravel truck seems to be doing the driving and sharing in the steering. The spreader takes the gravel feed from the truck and scatters it in an even layer over the oil in a single pass. (When the gravel truck is empty, the truck and spreader unhitch so the spreader can hook up with the next load of gravel.)

Now here's where it really gets wacky. Instead of a steamroller, a bunch of large vehicles show up, each of which are almost as big as a steamroller. But these vehicles have four large tires on the front and four large tires on the back. Yep, they have eight wheels with tires. They drive up and down the street, at various speeds, forward and reverse, almost-but-not-quite playing bumper cars. Really. These guys, after the first pass, are driving up and down the street quite maniacally. This is apparently how they mash the gravel into the oil.

The signs all along the street say no parking during the workday for three days. I don't remember what they do on the second day, but I think the come through and sweep up the excess gravel on the third day.

If anything new or different comes along, I'll post it here, but for now I'm going to assume that there are no new surprises.

Spike's First Blossom... EVER!

I'm SO excited!

About 25 years ago I "inherited" a beavertail-type cactus that was left behind by the previous owners of a house we bought. We named him Spike. After all, he was covered not only with tiny fine hairs of thorns, but with great woody thorns from 1" to 3" long. Spikes, indeed!

We bought a new redwood pot for him and, with painful and painstaking effort, transplanted him to his new home. (Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!) We bought a brass plaque with his name, Spike, engraved on it and mounted it to his pot. He sat on the front porch as our guard plant with us telling folks that he wasn't aggressive, merely territorial. Get too close and he will bite.

When we moved to the east coast, Spike went to live with my mom. But, when Mom and crew got him to her place, he bit someone and got dropped in the middle of her rock and gravel front yard. And there he stayed, not just for the two years we lived on the east coast, but for some years beyond that.

When I bought my current home, Spike finally came home to live with me again. But, after all those years of living in a redwood tub, dropped from a fair height, left to the elements and ignored, he was in rather sad condition. And I didn't really have the time, energy, inclination to really pamper him and make him feel at home.

So, there's he's sat for twelve years, in far too much shade for his species (whatever it is), with a great insufficiency of soil, and probably more water than he should be getting, but since he's nearly soilless, I figure he's not drowning.

And now he's gone and rewarded me with his very first blossom in 25 years! I'm so excited!

Now to go look up *which* species of beavertail cactus he is. :-)

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day -- 15 August 2009

Oh my heavens! I've gone and missed Garden Bloggers Bloom Day! I guess this month's post will be, by definition, much shorter. A list, in no particular order other than to say that the one new thing blooming is my Crepe Myrtle tree. So, let's start with that:

• Crepe Myrtle tree
• Purple Potato Plant
• Plumbago (both creeping and vining varieties)
• Rosy Buckwheat
• Sunflowers
• Cucumbers
• California Poppies of various colors and forms
• Clarkia amoena (Farewell to Spring)
• Sticky Monkeyflower
• Sambucus mexicana (Blue Elderberry)
• White-flowered potato vine (Solanum rattonii?)
• Impatiens
• Geranium (both Ivy and Upright)
• Tuberous Begonia
• Columbine (both native Western and non-native 'Nora Barlow')
• Spider Plant
• Rose bushes (floribunda and climbing)
• Tomatoes
• Cana Lilies
• Nasturtiums
• Vitus californica 'Rogers Red'
• Calendula
• Love in a Mist
• Western Virgins' Bower
• Seep Monkeyflower
• Some purple penstemon
• Some random allium species that I can't seem to get rid of

The zucchini and summer squash are putting on buds, so next month they should actually be blooming.

Late Vegetable Garden

In a couple of earlier posts I talked about my vegetable garden memories and vertical gardening. I had intended on writing a series of posts, but as you can tell from my last post, vacation got in the way. So be it. We'll just jump ahead for now and get back to the intended series in a bit.

During the couple of weeks before the "memories" post, I decided that I needed to find a better location to grow the tomatoes that I had started in 6-packs. The problem was that the places I had been growing tomatoes for years had become unsuitable. My "traditional" landscaping had become more "mature" and was now providing too much shade for the tomatoes to be happy. The first several years, I had grown groaning boards-full of tomatoes of all sorts -- cherry, beefsteak, pear, lemon -- but now I was hard put to get an Early Girl to do anything but curl up and die.

So, I had to go out to the back yard where there was an area of under-productive ground next to the back fence. It gets blazing sun from noon till almost sunset. The growing bed is a full four feet deep and I figured I could reclaim about eight feet of running length.

The "reclamation" involved pulling and digging lots of rampantly, wildly, berzerkly-growing parsley that was going to seed along with some freely-reseeding calendulas. It also involved removing five 18" x 18" square plastic planters, dumping them out, and composting their contents (mostly aging bearded iris and daffodils with weeds). The poor planters were starting to split down the sides at their corners (plastic will do that after 10 years of exposure to the elements), but were otherwise OK.

Not being one to be able to just ditch something that has *some* use left in it, it occurred to to me that I could cut the bottoms off the planters, sink them much of the way into some holes, and back-fill with compost, thus creating miniature raised planters/planting hills.

In the above photo, you can readily see two of the white and one of the green planters that have been converted into "raised planters." The arrangement before you goes like this:

• On the left (north) end (next to a rose bush) is a beefsteak tomato in a green tub, interplanted with basil
• In front (to the west), to the right (south) is a white tub with 2 seeds each of 3 colors (yellow, pale green, and dark green) of zucchini interplanted with scallions
• To the right of the zukes is a tub of beets (a variety that is more focused on growing greens rather than roots because I like the greens, too)
• To the right of the beets is a white tub with 2 seeds each of 3 colors (yellow, pale green, and dark green) of scalloped squash (aka Pattypan squash) interplanted with scallions
• To the right, to the back is another green tub with a Super-Sweet 100 (cherry) tomato, interplanted with basil
• Between the tomatoes, against the fence is a row of 3 colors (green, yellow, and purple) pole beans planted directly in the soil and climbing up a string trellis
• In front of the beans is a row of carrots.

So, that's my 4' x 8' vegetable garden. It was planted rather late in the year, but it should continue growing and producing late into the fall. The zucchini and the squash will give up first by giving in to mildew when the days become sufficiently short, cool, and moist. But note that the both tubs are interplanted with scallions! Those will continue to grow through the winter... or until I finish harvesting and eating them. :-) The beans and the tomatoes will continue, albeit slowly, until a hard freeze and the carrots will continue till I finish harvesting them.

Here you can see the row of carrots at the feet of the beans climbing up the trellis. (Remember the post on vertical gardening?)

And here you can see the scallions interplanted with the summer squash.

You may have also noted the various screened frames stacked on the lawn or next to the tubs. Those were needed to keep from feeding my seed to the birds, feeding the sprouts to the snails, and keeping the neighborhood cats from using my veggie garden as a litter box. Now that everything is up and *well* beyond the bounds of the screens, I can store them for the next time.

Summer Vacation

For those who have missed seeing new posts on The Free-Range Turtle, yes, I'm alive and well. I've just been on vacation! (And getting ready to go on vacation and getting settled back in after vacation and...)

Back in March I headed down to SoCal (Julian and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park) and blogged about it in 6 parts. I just can't seem to stay away from sunrise views like this:

Taken from the deck (where I was sleeping in the freshening breezes), you can see a light grey band in the saddle of the mountains. That grey band is the light of the sunrise reflecting off the Salton Sea.

I'm one of those people who like to spend some time in an area exploring and learning about the place. So, I spent some time this trip exploring the town of Julian and some trails in the Laguna Mountains south of Julian (specifically, the Garnet Peak Trail).

In town -- well, on the outskirts of town -- is an old hard-rock gold mine called the Eagle Mining Co. where we took a tour.

This was one of the many mines that were opened for operations in the post-Civil War era.

One morning we headed south on highway 79 then east on the Sunrise Highway to the trailhead for the Garnet Peak Trail. Along the trail we had plenty of opportunity to see the remnants of the Cedar Fire of 2003.

The area has already experienced a lot of re-growth, but everywhere you look there are burned stands of trees and burned outcrops of shrubs. While the ecology here evolved in fire, it's sad to note that this fire was caused by a hunter who, when he became lost, fired a flare into the forest.

But the renewal of life continues as evidenced by the curly, feathery seeds of the Mountain Mahogany...

... and this bee going after the flowers of this bush mallow...

... or this bee on this buckwheat blossom.

But let's not forget the views from the top, to the north...

... and to the east.

And there were views along the way, too.

But, at the end of the day, we got to sit out on a deck with views of some amazing sunsets.

Here's a view to the east -- toward Anza-Borrego and the Salton Sea -- where the dying sun catches the top of the last peak, but the sun in the clouds was amazing and ever-changing like this cloud to the north.

And the light at the horizon to the west was pretty amazing as well!

But then, what can compete with the sunrises!

However, our plan only included a few days in and around Julian, because we had a friend to visit closer to the coast. Among other things, we spent quite the pleasant afternoon in a local park with our friend (and his pal Charlie) playing Scrabble and having a picnic.

We also visited the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park (thanks for the suggestion, Peter!) and the USS Midway in San Diego Bay, but I didn't bring my camera along for those adventures.