5/26/08 On recycling by a team of slugs, sowbugs, earthworms and humans:  Have you ever noticed how fast a leaf disappears when it is left laying on the ground in an organic garden? I find that, when left overnight, a handful of dandelion leaves or some old collard leaves will be covered with sow bugs and a slug or two.  There are usually some earthworms above or just below the soil under the leaves.  This seems like teamwork to me.  Me, a human, pulls the leaves (weeds) and drops them on the ground.  The slugs come in to eat holes and start the process.  The sowbugs and earthworms finish the process. So they are working for me by saving trips to and from the compost pile.  But I find that if I clean all the vegetation away before planting beans, the recyclers eat the new bean shoots.  Not good.  I can't get rid of them.  There are too many.  I could poison them, but their recycling effort is needed.  So now I am feeding them so they leave the bean plants alone.  Yes, they seem to prefer leaves that have been pulled and left on the ground to growing foliage.  Of course, they multiply and demand more food.  Fortunately, once the beans are growing strong, they won't be so susceptible.  And I do collect the slugs I can find and feed them to the fish. The fish eat sowbugs too.   All part of the recycling...

8/21/07 More on the pretty can be painful issue (see 4/27/06 below).  On Saturday we had our big, beautiful silk (mimosa) tree cut down.  It was a difficult decision, and Hugh was most unhappy to see it go.  The pretty part:  The tree was spectacular when in full flower.  We looked out of our upstairs bedroom window to a beautiful pink fluffy carpet being visited by hummingbirds.  The flowers provided nectar for the hummies and the bees. The tree shaded the patio and the house.  Silk trees fix nitrogen and thus add fertility. The tree also produced a lot of organic matter which leads to ...The pain part:  The dead flowers made black sticky messes on the new metal roof, the evergreen shrubs, and every other plant under it.  When I managed to keep the gutters open, the flowers turned the water in the rain barrels sour and stinking of sulfur. I had to sweep the patio two or three times a week just to keep the dead flowers and worm-eaten leaves from being tracked into the house.  Silk trees are considered highly invasive in our area because they produce copious amounts of seed pods.  These pods fly everywhere in the fall.  Then in the spring, there are seedlings all throughout the flower beds.  Guess what you have to do if you don't want your yard turned into a silk tree forest?  My main regret is that if we had planted a pawpaw in that spot instead of the silk tree, we would have had shade and fruit without all the mess.  But now we will have to wait a few years for the replacement to grow. 

8/2/06  While on my usual pest bug control this morning, I stopped to watch a hummingbird on a volunteer salvia.  The bird was about 3 ft from me.  It then flew to a zinnia about a foot away from me.  It didn't notice me there.  And then it occurred to me that I had been moving through the garden and working with plants all morning without disturbing the bees, wasps and butterflies that attended all the flowers in my path.  At that point I realized that I am as much a part of the garden as the plants and insects.  The gardener is part of the garden.  I belong.  This is the place for me. 

4/27/06 While at a local concert the other day, we watched a little girl trying to walk in her mother's fancy new shoes.  The little girl of course found them uncomfortable.  The mother told her "you have to put up with some pain to be pretty."  I think of that often as I clean up flowers that have fallen on the patio and the floor.  They are pretty, but they come with a cost in labor.  In Gaia's Garden, Toby Hemenway refers to flowers that are pretty but have no other purpose as "eye candy".  Some beautiful flowering plants provide nectar for bees, predator insects and butterflies.  Or they produce edible leaves, fruits or seeds. Some fix nitrogen and thus enrich the soil.  But some plants just have pretty flowers that the bees, butterflies and other critters are indifferent to.  So now I ask myself: "Is there any point in growing the eye candy plants when other equally beautiful plants can be grown?  Are they worth the pain?"  The hard part is knowing in advance or at least thinking before acquiring these plants.  Is there a list of eye-candy-only plants?  On the other hand, dianthus seems to have few if any visitors, stays beautiful year round and really needs no care except deadheading in the spring. I think the flowers are edible, at least some varieties.  So maybe it isn't eye candy.  Bougainvillea is knock out beautiful in the sunroom all winter, but what a mess when the flowers drop.  Should it be replaced with a passion flower that produces edible fruit?  Or scarlet runner beans? 

Sterile vs compost in potting mix

I am taking the Master Gardener volunteer training.  It is recommended by the pros teaching the course to use sterile potting medium for starting seeds and cuttings.  Today I learned about root rots caused by pathogenic fungi.  My concern is that damping off and root rots could be associated with starting with sterile mix.  I know from my work with tissue culture that there are many spores in the air, on our clothing, etc.  These will grow and multiply rapidly in a moist, nutrient-rich environment if there is no competition.  These spores can be from beneficial, neutral or pathogenic microbes.  Others have shown that adding compost to potting soil can prevent damping off.  So my thought is that if you don't want pathogenic microbes growing in your potting mix you need first colonize the mix with beneficial microbes. (Compost works for me although I haven't had a lot of luck germinating seeds that take more than 2 weeks.)  If you don't want to rely on compost (it may not have composted at a high enough temperature to kill pathogens), you can buy a beneficial fungi inoculant called Rootshield Home & Garden from Johnny's Selected Seeds.  The fungi is Trichoderma harzianum, strain T-22.  This strain was developed by a research scientist at Cornell.  T-22 attacks pathogenic fungi but doesn't hurt plants.  I haven't tried it. 

http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/ent/bcconf/talks/harman.html

http://www.bioworksbiocontrol.com/index.html

 

 

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