Playing the Slots

I have written several gardening blogs lately, so maybe it is time for one on fishing…bass fishing. Adolescent bass are dumber than a box of rocks and easy to catch. Once bass reach legal size (14 inches in most Indiana lakes) they suddenly wise up and become very difficult to catch. I am thinking of one particular lake my brother and I frequent (although I have seen the same phenomenon at other lakes); we caught so many 13”and 13 ½” bass the first year that I was sure that if we went back the next summer they would all have grown to legal size and we would have a heyday. No such luck. After fishing the same reservoir for three summers, catching hundreds (dare I say a thousand) undersize bass, I have only caught ONE legal bass and it was just barely 14 inches. We had a lot of fun but you can understand why I became a fan of crappie which are all legal and became the basis of our meals.

One solution to this problem was to find a “slot lake” in our area. At the particular slot lake we fished, all bass were legal except those in the 13”-15” slot which had to be released. We caught our usual 50 bass between the two of us and had to throw quite a few back because they were a little over 13 inches. (It felt strange to measure fish and then throw them back because they were too big after all those I’d had to throw back because they were a tad small in the past.) Anyway, my brother and I both quickly filled our 5 bass daily limits with 12”to almost 13” bass along with several crappie. My brother is a wall mount fisherman who gets his adrenaline fix from fighting and landing bass over 5 pounds, so when we got home he gave me his share of the catch to get out of cleaning them. I had 24 filets, enough for six meals for my wife and I. I also felt this outcome could be repeated almost anytime we fished a slot lake. Had we gone to most lakes and caught the same fish, we could only have brought home a couple crappie.

Of course Jim has a different solution to this problem and that is to find a way to get larger bass to bite. I think he may be near a breakthrough. When Jim goes fishing he also goes lure hunting for what other casters have left in shoreline trees. He is as passionate about this pursuit as he is about fishing. One particular lure which we found in the bushes was an X-Rap® a new rapella lure that proved so effective against these dumb adolescent /not quite legal bass when fished with an erratic motion that my brother went out and bought about a half dozen more…and Jim doesn’t usually buy lures; he finds them. I liked the X-Rap because it ran fairly shallow-2’to 5’ and could be fished just over underwater weed beds. Because of my medical appointments, Jim has been fishing alone the last couple of weeks. He has bought some deeper running X-Raps which run down to 15’ to fish over deeper weed beds. He has landed a couple bass over 19” and failed to boat a third which he thinks might have gone close to eight pounds. Not bad for daytime fishing in the dog days of summer.

So the bottom line is we are both trying to refine our lure and lake selection and our technique until hopefully one of these days we get it right.

Melon and Garden Update

It is the first full week in July and our rear utility room is flowery fragrant with the aroma of ripe cantaloupe. There is a box of Burpee Ambrosias, a laundry basket of early honey dews and three large yellowing Crenshaws. Of course there are still quite a few in my garden patch which have not turned completely ripe yet. The Burpee Ambrosia have pretty well lived up to expectations and reputation as a standard of taste, although a bit on the medium size. A single chilled melon serves two. All my fruits, bell peppers and tomatoes as well, seem a bit small. I think I may possibly be lacking phosphorus so I am going to try to find some bone meal to buy and spread before ripping out my summer garden next week and beginning my fall garden.

We let the Ambrosias set a couple days in the back room to finish ripening after picking them from the patch when they turned beige and their vines “slipped”. They have been ripe to the rind and excellent flavor. We grew the other two melon types as an experiment just to get a feel for how “winter melons” work. The Crenshaws get as large as an icebox-size watermelon, turn yellow and the vine also “slips” when ripe. If we let a Crenshaw store in the back room until it is all the way ripe the flavor cannot be beat. My wife is reaching the point where she doesn’t want anything else but Crenshaws.

We are doing some learning with the honey dews. Either they were unripe and tasted like cucumber or they had ripened to the point of rotting; no in-between sweet melon stage. Their vine does not slip like the other two melons and must be cut with a knife. As near as I can figure, they should be cut when the skin is white turning to butter yellow color. As I was pondering this problem of determining honey dew ripeness, my wife commented, “Maybe they are like apples” meaning they needed significant post-picking storage time to sweeten up. I think she may be on to something because they are called a “winter melon” which probably indicates they may be a storage-keeper crop. So that is where I am on the learning curve at present. I hope I can figure them out because I have a bunch more out in the field which will come in after the watermelon crop in the fall.

The purpose of our garden melon patch is to get family and friends through to when the field of watermelons ripen, which I expect will be toward the end of July. I am confident that the watermelons will do fine. We are seven inches short on rainfall so far this year and I have been irrigating them on a daily basis. Some are the size of basketballs already. Almost half our crop is seedless watermelons this year so that should improve marketability. Still I am not sure that I am looking forward to sitting on my truck tailgate at the local farmer’s market Saturday mornings in August.

Obviously I am big fan of melons and it is not just because our sandy soil is best suited to growing watermelons. We have several little patches of berries, a couple peach trees, an apple tree, and a couple cherry trees that were rife with cherries this spring. Now I have enjoyed cherry pie as much as anyone this summer but except for the apples, I really don’t care much whether the other fruits make or not; if they make, fine and if they don’t, fine. I must specialize a little and prioritize my time a little. I cannot do everything well in the limited time frame of a growing season, so I pretty well stick to my small vegetable garden which is supposed to help feed us and to the watermelons. Cherries are a good comparison. If I pick a cherry I have something the size of a marble and after I take the time to pit it, I basically have a little piece of red peel. If I bend over and pick up a watermelon, I can have twenty pounds of real food despite the rind.

Melons are also one of the few dessert foods that you can gorge yourself on and still claim to be dieting to lose weight. Melons are satisfying; on a hot day, I can eat one and skip the rest of a noon meal. As I write this, I am within striking distance of losing back the 25 pounds I gained over last winter’s holiday season. Hoeing half a day in a hot melon patch is good exercise and also conducive to weight loss.

It is now mid season, and as I get ready to rip out my early garden to plant my fall garden, I give myself a midterm grade of C as a learning gardener. Heck, given the drought we have been through, make it a C+. My goal has been to grow as much food as possible on as little a garden as possible. I have put a lot of food on the table this year and kudos to my wife; she is some cook. She has done her Dad proud. (He was their family chef.) I grew my little 25’X 40’ garden with only hand tools and organic methods and materials. This does not mean that I am a purist fanatic who will never ever use commercial chemical fertilizer; some day I may give my vegetables a squirt of Miracle Gro ®but before I do that I want to learn the organic method first. The best world may be a blend of the two methods.

I can’t give myself a higher mid-term grade than a C+, because as I look at my now drought browned garden I see how I missed opportunities to get a lot more produce from that small patch. I grew about a third of my garden in cantaloupe and similar melons and about another fourth of the total garden in sweet corn. The melon patch often wilted in the mid-day heat and this may have contributed to my not getting large melons. In hindsight, I should have grown half the garden in sweet corn and grown the cantaloupe between the north-south running corn rows. This might have doubled my corn production while still increasing the size of my melon patch by one sixth. Both the melons and the corn would be harvested by now if I had used transplants instead of direct seeding the cantaloupe. Once the melons were harvested, I could have planted late pole beans on the stripped corn stalks and the shade would have benefited late cabbages and winter squash planted as a succession crop between the corn rows for the fall garden.

I grew an early potato patch which we dug at the end of May, a late potato patch which I am just now ready to harvest, and a sweet potato patch which we put in as slips in late May. All three potato patches were about equal in size…a little larger than a king-size mattress. In hindsight, I should have skipped the late potatoes and planted all three beds in early potatoes; when the early potatoes were harvested in late May, I could have planted all three beds in sweet potatoes thus tripling my sweet potatoes while increasing the white potato by a third. There would need to be some extra potash added to grow the two root crops successively but I think it could have been done.

If I can pull these changes off next year I am going to raise my horticulture grade to B and my rank to gardener second class. I dream on. Got any windmills you need jousted?

Deer and other Pests

There is a semi-wooded area behind our house and garden that I have cut a meandering oval walking path through. Several weeks back I discovered that three deer were also using this as their path and it led them to within two deer hops of being in my garden. I had read somewhere that deer hate man odor and that hanging some bars of soap in trees along their pathway might deter them, so I did. It did not work. After a full-moon night later that month I found deer tracks inside my garden and some leaves eaten from my sweet potatoes. There were also deer prints in my field of watermelons and some plants eaten.

Desperate times call for desperate solutions. I slipped out of my pair of clod hoppers which I wear without laces so I can get out of them easily whenever I go into the house ( this has helped to save my marriage) and peeled off my pair of socks. I put the socks on a couple garden fence posts and that evening after working in the heat a good part of the day I put my rank smelling, long sleeve shirt on a third post. I know for a fact that these articles will repulse even two-legged dear. Yes, Bambi and kin were definitely going to know that “man is in the woods.” It seems to be working; the deer have not returned despite several more full-moon nights and my patch remains protected by dirty socks.

Spot the cat who came to us from my daughter’s downtown apartment has transitioned from city cat to country cat and has become quite a huntress. She and a couple feral tomcats who include us in their territory have kept the rabbits that were the bane of our first retirement garden, well under control. I have only seen one small bunny in my vegetable garden all summer and my wife was able to grow Asian lilies without a single loss this year. Maybe the two-foot chicken wire fence helped too.

When I was in the first grade a bunch of us lads got into trouble (I can’t remember what for) and the teacher decided that we would “have our mouths washed out with soap.” (Yes, teachers did have more disciplinary latitude back in those days…especially nuns). I didn’t understand how the game was being played…that each boy was only touching the tip of his tongue to the bar and grimacing, so when my turn came I bit the end of the bar off and swallowed it. Sister’s eyes about popped out of her head. Before I was back to my desk my hand was up and before I could say a word, the young nun was yelling, “GO…GO…GO!”

Now I guess I just have a mean streak, but I don’t want to kill the insects that attack my vegetable garden; I just want them to go through what I did that afternoon after eating soap in the first grade. So when flea beetles and baby grasshoppers began destroying the leaves on my sweet potatoes, I put a chunk of soap in the bottom of a spray bottle, added water, shook it and misted the foliage. It seemed to do the trick. The damage ceased. Even had several grasshoppers come up to the house and ask for paper.

I had other bug problems too. There were potato beetles that attacked my late potatoes, but I successfully handpicked them in the nymph stage before they got wings and could fly. It only took about three pickings and they were gone. I also handpicked half a dozen fat tomato worms before they did any real damage. Planting early and getting a lot of plant up before the insects hit really helped. Of course what happened with the corn silk beetles is old history in another blog.

Then in June the Japanese beetles came and they did have wings and did fly. Japanese beetles seem to me to have a couple unique traits other than their voracious appetites. First, they seem to really like a particular type of plant species and will ignore other plants right next to that particular species. They are picky eaters. I had pole beans and cucumbers growing together and climbing on each other. The beetles only ate and congregated in large numbers on the highest leaves of the pole beans. If that is what they wanted then I decided to give it to them. The beans had about petered out anyway and we were definitely getting a little tired of eating them so I decided to use pole beans as my “trap crop” to keep the beetles off other more desirable plants.

The second unique trait of the Japanese beetles is that they drop before they fly…about a foot or so. Catching them was just a matter of holding a container beneath a leaf with half a dozen bugs on it and then tapping the leaf. The bugs dropped right into the container. For a long term solution I will need to get some Milky Spore disease into my yard next year.

My real insect nemesis this year has been cutworms…much more so in my field crop of water melons than in my vegetable garden itself. I found an awful lot of large melon plants that were looking great one day and the next day were cut off at the base. Of course this could have been avoided had I had the sense to knock the bottom out of a Dixie cup and use it as a cutworm collar. I’ll do that next year. What I did do was replant…first with more watermelons…then when the season got too short to mature watermelons, I replanted with cantaloupe and finally with pumpkins. I went through plan B… and C…and D. On a positive note, I do appear to have a good watermelon crop growing so I guess in the end, I won.

These are my major pest travails to date this year. As I have more, I will update you.

Succession Gardening and Eating

There is a routine and rhythm in gardening, both in terms of succession planting and in eating what is in season. If you can successively plant your garden with multiple crops over the spring and summer, then you have effectively tripled the size of your garden with no increase in actual space. If you eat what is in season, then there is not near the need for processing and food storage. The produce unrefrigerated, remains fresh-stored on the plant.

I began my early planting in March with spinach, lettuce and early “new” potatoes. By April we were eating a lot of meals with large salads as sides. For variety, there was also wilted spinach and spinach enchiladas which are made with tortillas and cottage cheese; this entre tasted something like lasagna to me. With all the salads and various salad dressings, I finally began losing a little weight.

In very early April, I made a small planting of sweet corn, followed in mid-April by a second planting of corn. I also planted a row of bush beans in an area that I knew would eventually be smothered by melon vines, but not before I got the beans picked. In mid-April I also started a couple tripod teepees of pole beans with cucumbers growing underneath. When we were burnt-out on salads and the lettuce and spinach began to bolt from heat, we switched to eating vinegar marinated cucumbers; as the bush green beans petered out in May, we began eating the pole beans. In late April, I planted some butternut squash between the corn rows for winter consumption. We also planted four well protected tomato plants and four sweet peppers in late April.

In May, I planted late “straw potatoes”, cantaloupe and late in the month we planted sweet potatoes and a field of watermelon transplants. Throughout June, we ate cooked green beans, new potatoes, cucumbers, and sweet corn.

It is now early July, and we are beginning to eat cantaloupe, bell peppers, and tomatoes. July is a harvest month and there is a respite in the work. I have cut back totally on watering cantaloupe which cover a third of my garden in order to ripen and sweeten them. The watermelons have begun spreading out vines, so I am no longer hoeing weeds in that patch. The sweet corn is also finished, as are the potatoes. I am stripping the leaves off the corn and adding them as more mulch around the winter squash between the corn rows. I will shortly plant pole beans around the leafless corn stalks for a fall crop and to give shade to the potato patches on either side of the corn. Where the potatoes were, I will shortly be planting a fall crop cabbages for winter cole slaws and cooked greens. We still have plenty of new potatoes left to eat for the summer and the late potatoes should hold us well into autumn when we will harvest the sweet potatoes and eat on them and the winter squash until spring salads again are an option. By August the cantaloupe will be finished and replaced on our menu by watermelons which we will eat into the fall. So by August the cantaloupe vines can be ripped out to be replaced by another fall crop.

This all sounds complicated, and in truth it is more complicated than I have written in this blog, but there is a lot to be said for succession planting and eating what is in season. I hope to put tubers and greens on my plate and a little dessert too throughout most of the year. Now I just need to do some fishing to put some filets on that plate too.

Duct Tape Corn

Now I don’t believe in exaggerating and I am definitely not one to give into bragging or hyperbole, but I can say in all humility that by late May my sweet corn was light years ahead of anyone else’s in the state. By Memorial Day weekend the farmer’s field corn was only ankle to knee high despite having an exceptionally early dry April planting spell; I had been keeping an eye on all the gardeners and they were at about the same stage. But my corn… my sweet corn was as tall as me, fully tasseled, had yellow silks and ears. I had planted early and covered it with newspaper during a frost. My goal with my whole garden was to get as much plant growth up as early as possible so that when the insect hordes hit, my garden would have enough foliage and be far enough along to take a good hit. I am using natural pest controls not so much because I am environmentally conscious as that I am cheap and lazy. I felt that planting early and getting out ahead of the insects and Mother Nature’s surprises was worth the risk. Besides, for a small gardener like me (and unlike a commercial farmer) it would cost relatively little to buy seed to replant. So by Memorial Day, all I had to do was to wait for the yellow silks to turn brown and I would be eating sweet corn.

Everything looked so dandy I decided to go fishing…bet you saw that coming! After a couple days of relatively good fishing I checked back on my corn patch. All of the silks on my first planting had been eaten back by beetles to the husk. I raced to pull out my organic gardening guidebook. Yes, beetles sometimes do this; no silks, no pollination, no corn; the ears would not fill out. Simple translation: you’re screwed; try again next year.

Had I been slam dunked by Mother Nature again at the last minute? I decided not to go down without a fight. I went out to the patch and pulled back the husks on every ear of my first planting, exposing the tip of the cob and another two inches of golden silks. I grabbed my trusty roll of duct tape and tore off two inch pieces that I held between my fingers like a man preparing to roll a cigarette; I pulled my other hand across the tassels and dumped the pollen beads into my duct tape cigarette and wrapped it around the newly exposed corn silk. If those beetles were going to get these last silks, they were going to have to eat through duct tape to do it!

The following Sunday, after church I told a farmer buddy who sings in choir with me what had transpired and asked for his advice. I’m one who believes in picking an expert’s brain. As he listened politely, he was grinning broadly on the outside so I knew he was guffawing on the inside.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone do that before; it’s interesting how people solve problems. When seed companies want to pollinate corn, they put the pollen they want into a small paper bag and then staple it over the ears they want pollinated. Each bead of pollen has about ten thousand grains of pollen on it. You might try that.”

When I got home from church that Sunday, I went to have another look at my corn. I noticed that the silks on my second planting of corn—planted a couple weeks after the first-- had not had their silks eaten on, so maybe this silk-eating phase of the insect’s life was over. I pulled all the duct tape off my first planting and pulled handfuls of pollen off the tassels and mixed it into the now again exposed short silks. I do not know if it was the duct tape pollination or the later hand pollination that worked, but I do know that when the kids came home Father’s Day, we ate buttered corn on the cob, cucumber and onion slices marinated in sweet vinegar, a green bean/new potato and sausage entre and a cherry cobbler dessert baked from the cherries that we picked from our trees and scoops of vanilla ice cream we bought at the store.

Now I’m not one to exaggerate or given to bragging but…FRANK NELLIS-ONE; Mother Nature-ZIP!

Mulch

When I began my garden in March, I did not plan to use so many different types of mulch; I just used what was available and it just happened. First, I had a good pickup load of last fall’s maple leaves which I had tried to compost over the winter but they only partially biodegraded. Once my sweet corn was up about three inches tall, I spread the leaves between the rows. My corn is about knee-high now in mid-May and weed free. I’ve thrown some aged horse manure on top of the leaf mulch and worked a furrow of both into the soil and planted Butternut squash between every other corn row. This leaves me enough empty rows to harvest corn from and after that hopefully the squash will form a living mulch over the leaf mulch and also provide a late season crop.

I had put a bale of straw up against our north-facing crawl space entrance to help insulate the crawl space and water pipes last winter. I laid an old throw rug, rubberized bottom up, on top of the straw bale to keep the weather from degrading the straw. This spring that straw went over a strawberry patch of about 25 plants, along a row of bush beans (once they were three inches tall) and over a plot of late potatoes. I put only straw over the late potatoes, which they have now emerged through, but for the beans and strawberries I put two ply of newsprint under the straw. If I did not use the newspaper, it would just have been a waste product to be hauled to the recycling bin. Newsprint and straw or grass clippings seem to work well as combination mulches. The paper is a difficult barrier for weeds and grass to break through but would blow off without the straw or grass to weight it down. Before I put the top mulch on, I wetted the paper down with a garden hose to get it to mold to the soil. I also used newspaper and cardboard weighted down with soil on the edges to protect plants during a light late frost.

I decided to buy some black plastic for plants which like especially hot soil for their roots such as peppers, sweet potatoes and cantaloupe. I could have also used it for cucumbers and tomatoes, but I didn’t. I am trying some large rocks and bricks around my tomatoes and the cukes are planted along with a couple zucchini to form a living mulch under my pole beans. For the plants in black plastic (except for the bell peppers ), I put an old soaker hose down, covered it with the plastic and made a furrow with a hoe down either side of the plastic, tucked the edges of the plastic in the furrows, and then filled in the furrows with dirt to secure the plastic mulch. I’ve had problems with that old soaker hose blowing out large leaks from my water pressure. I have to tear a hole into the plastic at the leak, slit a piece of old garden hose and use radiator clamps to fix the garden hose over the leaks. In hindsight I probably would have been better off doing my sweet potatoes and cantaloupe like I did my peppers and skipping the soaker hose altogether. For the peppers, in addition to the two side furrows I also made a third furrow down the middle, then put the black plastic down and planted into the middle furrow. The middle furrow forms a trough which catches any water from garden hose or rain and delivers it straight to the plant holes.

Carrots are notoriously slow to germinate; the weeds always come up first and then the carrots are lost to one giant mess of a weed patch. This year I tried a trick an old farmer had told me and planted my carrots under boards. Each day I flipped the boards to one side to see if the seed had sprouted, then sprinkled with a hose and pressed the boards back in place. When the carrots did sprout, I laid the boards to the sides of the carrots to suppress any weeds between the rows. I am very impressed with the results to date and plan to keep an eye out for any surplus unpainted and untreated lumber that I might happen upon. Wood is organic, heavy enough that it doesn’t blow away; it lasts for years so you don’t have to find new material each year and no weeds or grass grows through it. If you need to thin a crop like carrots or beets, or pick a row of bush beans you can place a stool’s legs on the planks on either side of the row and work sitting rather than kneeling. One other advantage is that fishing worms congregate right under the boards for easy picking.

So in conclusion, I have used three types of mulch: organic (like grass, leaves, newsprint, wood, cardboard and straw), inorganic (like black plastic, old carpet, and large rocks or bricks) and living mulch (leafy vining ground covers like cucumbers, cantaloupe, squash and sweet potatoes) to mulch my garden, conserve moisture and suppress weeds.

Half-wild Salads

The irises have been popping blue-purple everywhere. The apple tree and cherry trees blossomed snow white a couple weeks ago, then shed their blossoms and now the green cherries are already beginning to appear. Spring passes in a blur of speed. It has been an unusually droughty April, which the farmers loved because they could get their corn crops in the field, but today the weatherman has promised an inch or two of rain and possibly a twister so I have time to write a blog.

I divided some rhubarb plants and replanted them in one-foot deep and wide holes filled with compost so that next year we should have some early summer pies to be followed by the cherry pies of late summer and apple pies of fall. It is nice to have a succession of eating even though that is not necessary today with a freezer. We had not planned to plant strawberries but when a neighbor gave us 30 plants we couldn’t pass it up. The rhubarb and strawberries now occupy a perennial area in the far west end of my garden. They receive the morning sun but are somewhat shaded by the apple tree in the hot afternoon. The morning sun is a blessing in summer but the afternoon sun is a curse. Next year I also hope to add a permanent bed of asparagus to this perennial area of the garden.

This year where the asparagus will be next year is a bed of salad greens, seven five-foot rows of lettuce and two of spinach. This represents the first produce of the garden we have begun to consume. We have had several salads so far, some of the wilted greens variety made with a hot topping of sweetened vinegar, bacon and bacon grease—the kind we ate in the 50s before salad dressings were sold in plastic bottles. We threw in some sweet violet leaves which are ubiquitous in my yard and edible and tasty in salads. Violets have none of the bitter taste of dandelion greens and have more nutritional value than garden grown greens. We will probably be eating a lot of salads for the next month until later vegetables begin coming in. Good deal for the waistline.

The early spuds are up, about six inches tall, and the late potatoes are planted and under a straw mulch to keep down weed competition. I also have bush beans, pole beans and corn all up and about six inches tall. There are four tomato and four peppers plants. I am taking a chance by planting so early but I have sandy soil that drains well and heats up early. Seed is relatively inexpensive if I do have to replant because of a late frost and I really want to get the plants off to a good start before the insect hordes arrive. I did have to cover everything with newspaper and cardboard one night when frost was predicted, but I think it is worth the effort to beat the bugs and summer drought.

Besides the vegetables I’ve already mentioned, I also have two 25-foot rows covered with black plastic and drip irrigation hose under the plastic for melons and cucumbers. My horseman buddy arrived right on schedule with a free dump-trailer load of two-year aged horse manure. After two years it has turned back into soil and you would never be able to identify the substance as horse manure. So all the beds, including plastic topped, drip irrigated strips are well fertilized. The black plastic has proved a real incubator and Crenshaw, cantaloupe and honeydews are all beginning to poke through the holes in the plastic. I am taking a real gamble with the Crenshaw and honeydews since the local farmers don’t grow them and I have learned not to question the locals. But I am a melon lover and have decided to take the long shot anyway. As for watermelons, I will plant a whole field of Jubilees around May 15, hopefully from transplants and under irrigated black plastic, so they aren’t included in my little 25’X40’ vegetable garden.

That pretty well brings everything up to date. I’ll just sit here, eat my greens and listen to the thunder and rain. I don’t REALLY think there will be a tornado?