Spring Bulb Fertilizing

Growing tips break ground

A hint of green on gray branches

Spring unfolding

~ Marie B. Rice, 1932-2011, Haiku

Spring has sprung here in the Pacific Northwest, er… well, actually a couple of weeks ago if you consider all the bulbs that have come up and the number of early daffodils blooming today. So for us this post is timely for the tulips, muscari and other later bulbs just emerging, not yet blooming. As for the rest of the U.S., this post will give you the info you need for the upcoming thaw, it's coming...be strong a little while longer, and be ready to fertilize your bulbs when they emerge in the warming days to come.

When organically fertilizing flowering bulbs the nutrient of choice is usually fish bone meal, but rock phosphate is an alternative choice for the vegan/vegetarian gardeners reading today.

Both are great sources of phosphate for encouraging blooms and root development but the success lies in the application. If you are accustomed to applying synthetic chemical fertilizers, you are used to just scattering the granules on the ground and leaving them to dissolve. Easy yes, but if you want to do more to better the earth, soil health and your own health you will consider transitioning your gardening to organic practices whenever possible.

This brings me to today's topic. Fertilizing your spring flowering bulbs organically. A recent walk through the neighborhood brought this post to mind. This gardener sprinkled bone meal around their bulbs and flowering plants.

  

The bone meal is a good thing, but leaving it in big blobs like that isn't. They left out one important step...working the fertilizer into the soil.

Organic fertilizers need to be broken down by the naturally occurring microbes in the soil. So as you sprinkle your bone meal or rock phosphate you will need to lightly scratch it in with a rake, lightly working it into the soil surface so most of it comes into contact with the soil and its billions and billions of microbes. Easy enough to do but it takes a few minutes more of your time.

Now the granules are surrounded by microbes so those little treasures can do their very important work of breaking down the bulb food and making it available to the roots.

The time to apply the bone meal for spring flowering bulbs is when the leaf tips are breaking ground. If you can see where the bulbs are, you can work around the tender green tips and not damage them.

In Bloom in My Garden Today: Corylopsis veitchiana (winterhazel), Cyclamen coum (spring), Daffodils,Daphne caucasica ‘Eternal Fragrance’, Heath (Erica carnea ‘springwood white’), Hellebore, Hyacinth ‘blue jacket’, Primrose (double English)

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Collards - A New Favorite

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” ~Siddhartha Gautamav


First and foremost I want to thank all of you who still have my blog feed coming to you. I’ve been absent for many months and so appreciate you for hanging in there, waiting for me to get my stuff together and resume writing. Thank you so much.

It has been an interesting year since my last post; filled with sorrow and emotional soul searching while settling dad’s estate and clearing my parents’ house to prepare it for sale. However, peppered amongst all that was much joy and new beginnings for me.

I went back to work, this time at a nursery, doing what I love most…working with plants, helping people with their gardens and spending lots of time with people who love gardening like me. Thus far it’s the most rewarding job I think I’ve ever had.

In late August, one of my customers came in specifically to buy collard seeds. I remembered her as I’d helped her a few times throughout the summer but hadn’t really got to know who she is as a gardener. Turns out she is a weight trainer, and we got to talking about growing greens for a healthy diet. I’d sold lots of collard plant starts in the spring and knew it was very popular in Southern USA cooking. Now, I love greens… kale, beets, mustards, chard, etc but many greens contain oxalic acid which is fine for some folks but not for those concerned with calcium issues. I had never eaten collard greens nor paid much attention to them. So as she was extolling all the virtues of collard greens I asked her if she knew if it was high or low in oxalic acid. She didn’t know so I made a mental note to do research on it when I got home. Then she gave me one tidbit that sold me on growing collards myself. That it grows all winter in our climate, which means you can have fresh greens all winter and even snowfall doesn’t faze it. She said you simply knock off the snow, pick the leaves and cook them up. Wow, I want to grow some of that! I did some research and found them to be low in oxalic acid. Then I bought a bunch from my green grocer to try them. Yum! So I bought some seeds and got a few starts going. Today I have about 8 plants in various sunny places around the perennial garden to see which locations are best. 

Collards are cool weather plants. They are best grown in spring and fall, like spinach and some kales. I say some kales because I grew a new (new to me) variety of kale this year that wasn’t fazed by hot days in the 90’s F (32+C). But that’s fodder for another post. Today we’re talking collards. Collards can grow between 40-75F (5-23C) with optimum growing temps of 60-65F (16-19C) degrees, and as with many fall weather crops they taste sweeter after a frost. They are packed full of vitamins and minerals and rich in carotenoids. Naturally, as with many greens, they are high in vitamin K so if you have blood disorders they may not be right for you.

Collards are from the Brassica family therefore the cabbage moth is something to guard against. The minute mine were in the ground that little white rascal of a moth was flitting around laying her eggs on the undersides of the leaves. We still had warm, sunny days at planting time and the moths were persistent, so I mixed up some BT (Bacillus Thuringiensis) in my 1 gallon sprayer. BT is an organic pesticide that is used to kill leaf eating larvae and caterpillars. It degrades in the sunlight so spray it in the evening hours and re-apply every few days or once weekly, depending on your level of pest control needed. That’s why I mix it up in a gallon sprayer. I just keep it mixed and use the gallon over a period of several weeks. It makes it easy to do a quick spray when I get home from work or after dinner. Frankly the cabbage moths were making a mess of my kale too so every few days I’d spray the whole lot, concentrating on the underneath of the leaves.  And I’ll say this about the collards…the cabbage moths seemed to like the kale more than the collards. Way more egg laying going on with the kale. Now that the weather has turned cold and wet, the moths are gone, so the spray isn’t needed any more.

Fertilize with a high nitrogen fertilizer like seaweed extract organic liquid or a fish fertilizer since it’s the leaves you want and not flowers. I’m excited to see the plants getting bigger. And it is interesting to see which locations are growing bigger plants. Do you ever do that? Plant veggies in more than one location throughout your perennial garden areas? I’ve often done that when my veggie space fills up and am surprised to see some grow better where I least expected them to.

As far as cooking collards, I’ve seen many recipes and only a few ways to cook them. Thus far I have only chopped the de-stemmed leaves and sautéed them in olive oil and spices, just like I do kale greens. Quite delicious I must say. The flavor is hard to describe but for sure nothing like kale. Collard greens have an earthy flavor to me.

Our winter is forecasted to be warmer and drier than normal so I may not get the fun of knocking off the snow before I harvest them but I can’t wait to cook my fresh winter harvest.

Since I’m new to this beautiful green I’d love any and all thoughts on cooking and even your favorite recipe if you care to share.

Thanks ever so much for reading!

In Bloom In My Garden Today: Agastache foeniculum (anise hyssop),

Alyssum, Cyclamen hederifolium (fall),Daisy(white double,) Daphne caucasica, Echinacea, Eupatorium rugosum ‘chocolate’ (joe pye weed),
Fuchsia, Heath (Erica carnea ‘springwood white’), Kirengeshoma palmata, Nepeta, Rose, old English ‘reine des violettes’, Salvia

 
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Cleaning the Water Butts

God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.
~Author Unknown

Now that the title has got your attention, I have to explain to my American readers that we’re talking about rain barrels here…what did you think?? No surprise to my UK readers. What ever you call it, it’s a great way to collect free, clean water to use in your gardens. And I might add, house plants love it too because it has nothing added to it to ‘purify’ it.

I made all 3 of my 55 gallon rain barrels and a compost bin from former pickle barrels that I got from the Nalley’s Pickle Co before they closed the business in this area. They have a two part cap-and-ring style lid in which I drilled several holes so water from the downspout can drip in. I used nylon window screening just under the lids to screen out debris. They each have an overflow outlet near the top with tubing running down to the garden below so I don’t have to go out there in a downpour to open the spigot when they overflow. Then I drilled holes as low as possible, but high enough so I could reach in to be able to attach the spigots/washers/nuts for the outflow. It would probably be boring to read about all the parts and pieces I used. So I’ll just say I just went to the hardware store with a mental plan of how I wanted to make them and spent more than an hour finding parts that would accomplish it. All the parts I used were found in both the PVC plumbing and garden sprinkler departments. Back and forth I went more than once. Of course you can buy rain barrels already complete, but I’m a do-it-yourselfer, a problem solver and like to build/design things.

Naturally the size of roof you connect it to will determine how quickly it fills up. I have one attached to my house downspout…that one fills up in a day during a heavy rain. I have two attached to the smaller garage roof and they can take more than a week to fill. It would be better to attach two or all three to the house but aesthetics are important to me and garden space wouldn’t allow.

Two of the barrels are in the sun and one in the shade. I think it’s best to keep them in the shade if you can but even that one got ‘fragrant’ if I didn’t use it quickly enough. Each summer when I use up all the stored water, I open them up and give them a good rinse out and brush down (on the inside) with a long handled car wash brush. A quick, easy and not particularly unpleasant job.

Still, all that stagnant water can get foul at times. What to do? As a kid, didn’t I have a fish tank and didn’t the filters always use charcoal to keep the water clear? Why not charcoal for water butts? So I bought a bag of natural BBQ briquettes. Natural, with nothing added, as many manufacturers have added chemicals for better combustion. I put them in a nylon mesh bag (actually made for straining paint found in the paint dept), tied a long string to it and lowered it to the bottom of the barrel. By golly I think it really does help! It does seem to keep the water cleaner longer, at least by the time I use it up now.

So every year at cleaning time I re-supply the briquettes, about 6 or 8 per bag. They do eventually dissolve into a mucky ooze which I just turn out into the garden. Briquettes are wood ash, which is potash, the third nutrient on the NPK fertilizer list. Potassium (potash) is necessary for the development of strong plants able to overcome disease susceptibility and maintaining balanced nitrogen use. Potassium (potash) also alkalinizes soils that are too acidic. Then with clean, scrubbed insides and a fresh bag of briquettes they are ready for our next PNW rainstorm to fill them back up again.

Rain barrels don’t have enough water pressure to run a sprinkler but are great for filling watering cans, topping off water features, bird baths and rinsing off tools and boots. I can hook up a hose to them to run water anywhere the hose can reach, but it’s only gravity fed so the water runs slower. The lower the water level, the slower the water runs. That said, they do have their uses.

Do you have rain barrels? If not, do you plan to install any? If you get a lot of rain like we do here in western Washington they are great, and we can use them most of the spring and early summer months until the rain dries up!

In bloom in my garden today: Hardy Geranium, Peas, Heuchera ‘Palace Purple’, Armeria latifolia ‘Joystick’, Dianthus, Day Lily, Aquilegia (Columbine), Rose, Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’, Iris, Geum ‘Lady Stratheden’, Saxifrage, old fashioned Coral Bells (Heuchera), Alpine strawberry, Daphne caucasica ‘Eternal Fragrance’ and ‘Summer Ice’


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Mulch, Compost or Fertilizer?

The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow.

~Author Unknown

A while back reader Christine asked me to write about compost. She wants to recycle waste from her kitchen and garden rather than send it to a landfill. Composting and mulching are great ways to make your waste work for you.

Mulch is material that is laid on top of the soil and left to decompose as a top layer. It can be leaves, wood chips, grass clippings etc, that decay and enrich the soil. Beauty bark is not recommended as it is said to contain salts, which can harm plants and soil organisms. Rocks and decorative stones are considered a more permanent form of mulch, and while they provide minerals as they break down they won’t necessarily enrich the soil like decaying plant material. Mulch helps to smother seeds that will be future weeds and keeps the soil moist and cool in the summer. It is a natural and easy way to nourish your soil as it releases nutrients gradually, just like nature does. Take a walk in the forest and you’ll see the soil covered with fallen leaves and plant debris, leaving a loamy rich top layer. In her book No Work Garden Book, Ruth Stout writes she only mulched, never weeded, never messed with compost and stopped fertilizing. She was quite successful by simply covering her soil with hay. Since mulch keeps your soil cool from the sun’s rays you may want to remove it from vegetable beds in spring so the sun can warm the soil for better seed germination before spring planting. All my fall leaves go straight onto the garden beds just as soon as they are raked, like a blanket, so they are mulch, not composted. You can find more information and photos of my leaf mulching in September’s post titled “Fall Cleanup, More or Less”.

Compost is the result of a pile of mixed plant debris (grass clippings, leaves, stems, twigs, vegetative food wastes) that has heated up and decomposed into a fine, dark, crumbly material and is also nutrient rich. It is not considered fertilizer by some experts but Organic Gardening magazine says it is. In fact OG maintains that if you use compost, mulch and cover crops you may not need to use any fertilizer.

Commercial composting facilities create compost that has heated up enough to kill weed seeds and disease pathogens. You can buy it in bulk or bags or you can create your own by simply corralling and layering ‘green’ materials and ‘brown’ materials. Green materials are grass clippings, weeds, green leaves/stems, coffee grounds. Brown materials are dried stems, twigs, dried leaves, shredded paper. Thinly layering each is the way to create your pile and once it heats up, turning it with a garden fork brings air into the process and helps it to break down. Come spring there will be lots of dried, dead brown plant materials to remove from your garden beds and green grass clippings (the first few cuttings) high in nitrogen are great to mix together for your compost pile.

I compost most of my chopped up plant trimmings, weeds, all of my organic vegetable kitchen waste, coffee grounds, tea leaves and egg shells (shells supply calcium to the soil). The finer the materials are chopped the quicker the breakdown. You can chop by hand or by running a mower over large leaves and stems or dumping the lot into a garbage can and plunging in a weed eater (string trimmer). The plant materials I exclude from my compost heap are large woody branches and rhododendron leaves, both of which take too long to decompose, also no trimmings that will contain seeds go in. My compost doesn’t get hot enough to kill seeds. If viable seeds remain in compost they will sprout and you’ll have to weed later. Nor do I include rose leaves (which often carry disease) and any leaf or plant material that appears or is known to have disease because home compost doesn’t often get hot enough to kill disease pathogens either. I live in the city where we have free recycling for yard waste. Any undesirable materials go in that bin, which is composted at a commercial level and does get hot enough to kill seeds and pathogens. 

Compost needs nitrogen to get it to heat up quickly. There are compost starters you can buy in a box but are expensive and I think more a gimmick than necessary. Early spring grass clippings are high in nitrogen and free if you have a lawn. Alfalfa meal is inexpensive and high in nitrogen if you don’t have grass. A few cups of that added to your pile will start the process and the balance of the bag is great fertilizer for your roses. (Be sure to lightly mix the alfalfa and any organic fertilizer you use into the soil surface so the microorganisms can break it down to release the nutrients.) A pile of plant trimmings with a good mix of green and brown materials will decompose and will smell earthy. The pile that just rots and is smelly has too much of one material.

There are 2 ways to make compost: aerobic and anaerobic.

Aerobic piles are turned about once or twice a week. Aerobic compost finishes faster, between 2-6 months given sufficient heat generation, water and volume. To get finished compost in 2 months the green/brown ratio is important and you turn it daily for the first week or so. Pile temperature should remain between 135 and 155 degrees for 3 days to kill seeds and most pathogens. If you don’t want to pay that much attention to it, it will simply take longer to break down. Mine usually takes more like 6 months. When I had a pile in four sided wire fencing, a hay fork was my tool of choice for turning the pile, with 5 skinny, long, curved prongs. A shovel or pitch fork can be used also but were awkward to me. You turn the hot core out and the cooler sides in creating a new pile each time, which gets more of the material to heat up. The more heat the quicker the decomposition. Moisture is important too. You need some but not too much. Most articles say as damp as a wrung out sponge. You can cover the pile in winter if you get a lot of rain, but in a dry summer you may need to hose it down now and again.

Anaerobic piles are never turned. You just keep adding materials in green and brown layers to the top. Finished compost is pulled out from the bottom of the pile. Plastic bins designed for this type of compost have a door at the base where you can shovel out finished compost. Anaerobic compost can take a year or so to finish the bottom layers.

Since winter keeps many of us out of our gardens, it is a good time to research compost bin designs, think about what kind of composting will work for you and where you might like to locate your pile. What ever style you choose it needs to allow a pile at least 3 feet tall by 3 feet wide. This size or bigger heats up best. The better the heat and aeration the quicker the decomposition and the sooner you can spread it on your garden. Some people simply make a pile with no boundaries. Some choose to corral their pile by making a ‘bin’. Some use found wooden shipping pallets, stood upright and fastened into a square, some use concrete blocks stacked to make a 3 sided bin and some use a big circle of chicken wire. There are many commercial designs made of plastic. One is even made to tumble by simply kicking it around, eliminating the need to mix it by hand. Some municipalities offer wire or plastic bins at a discount to encourage composting which cuts down on land fill usage. What ever you do, if you choose to turn your pile, make sure your bin will allow you to get in there easily and often with your hay fork. Having two aerobic piles side by side is helpful, because at some point you need to stop adding to a pile to let it decompose. All the while you keep finding plant material in your garden to add, so a second pile is needed.

The ‘bin’ I have now I made from a 55 gallon pickle barrel. To use less garden space I adapted a ‘spin’ design I found on the internet (sorry but the site is no longer up or I’d include it). I made it to hang between 2 fence posts so I can spin it on an iron bar that I inserted through the barrel and both fence posts. I live near the now vacated Nalley's pickle factory. When the company closed I bought four food grade barrels for five dollars each and used one as a composter and three for rain barrels. Finding food grade barrels was important to me as I garden organically and wanted to know that no chemicals were ever stored in the barrels I was going to use.

Worms help decompose plant debris too. Normally they will come up into your pile from the soil underneath, but since my bin is a ‘closed’ system I toss in worms as I find them. They must thrive in there as they have multiplied by the time my compost is finished and ready to spread. When your compost is finished you can either spread it as a top dressing on your soil or dig it in. Some say you must dig it in for it to improve soil structure but that’s a lot of work. I just leave it as a top dressing and let the worms and soil organisms mix it all up over time. It seems to work.

I hope this has been a helpful overview and perhaps an incentive for you consider composting in the near future. Happy composting Christine!!

In bloom in my garden today: Daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’

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