Save Money, Grow Raspberries
August 22nd, 2006
For many people edible gardening isn’t just about having fun, its about saving money.
However what can you really grow that is going to cost you less in time and effort than at the grocery store? Well, what tends to be quite expensive at the grocery store? Things that do not keep or ship well, like berries.
Strawberries are everyone’s favorite of course, but they’re a short lived perennial and are in my opinion a pain to grow what with all the stooping and watering and the fact that they grow near the ground by all the critters.
My favorite high value plant to grow is raspberries. Raspberries are bushes, they live a long time, might near forever, they produce like you wouldn’t believe, and every time you pick a handful you’ll be saving yourself a couple of bucks.
I started with 2 small raspberry plants 3 years ago. I now I have a 4 foot by 6 foot patch and it would be bigger if I let it. Raspberries, like all bramble berries, spread like mad with underground runners. For best results I recommend planting them in atleast a one foot high, possibly two foot high, raised bed, to stop lateral spread (unless you want them to spread that is. For a cheap raised bed consider an old tractor tire or old unneeded drain pipe scrap (the big pipes) place it on the ground, anchor it into the ground with some rebar pounded into the soil, and you’ve got a cheap and easy raised bed. Just fill with dirt. Speaking of rebar, a cheap way to provide support for the raspberries, which they will need, is to pound rebar into the ground until stable and then string twine or wire between the rods. Instant cheap trellis.
Raspberries, atleast the kind I have, will fruit on both new and old wood, so you get two main harvests, or really one very long harvest from late June until September with peaks in July and August. During the peak times with my little patch I can pick nearly a pound a day, depending on the prices in your neck of the woods that could be as high as $5-$10 worth of raspberries per day.
Once established your berry bushes will thrive on neglect, the only maintenance will be maintaining the support/boundaries and doing the picking.
Blueberries are another option, however they can be finicky to grow for some because they require very specific conditions.
In the vegetable world, I think red or other non-green bell peppers are one of the most worthwhile plants for the garden, considering the prices of their counterparts at the store. Asparagus is also a good choice, not because it is expensive at the store, but rather because it is a perennial it will keep paying you back your investment for many years to come.
Hot and Humid
July 31st, 2006I haven’t been posting much because I haven’t been gardening much, it has just been too hot and too humid. Our heat index has been between 90-100 for the past week.
It also sucks because I can’t even take good pictures of my garden to blog about things (and I like to have pictures with each post) because the camera lense fogs up from the humidity as soon as I take it outside.
Luckily it has been raining and with that and the humidity I haven’t had to water anything, which otherwise I’d have to do a ton of in this kind of heat.
One cool thing though, today when out picking raspberries for my breakfast I saw two tiny baby bunnies (4-5 inches). So the wildlife refuge has grown.
Weeding Concrete Cracks
July 25th, 2006So I was driving down the road yesterday and saw this poor women hunched over viciously tearing out the weeds in the cracks of her driveway.
Unfortunately this lady must not be big on gardening because she didn’t know there is a better way.
I like to use RoundUp or another herbacide to do it. They are very effective and kill the weeds for good. However I understand many people do not like to use chemical herbacides, so there are two other options that work well enough.
The first is boiling water. Boil a big pot of water, take it off of the burner and immediately outside and carefully (don’t want to splash yourself) pour it over the cracks. It will cook the weeds where they grow and they will die.
The second is vinegar. Simply spray vinegar on the weeds to kill them. Now vinegar isn’t always acidic enough, and you can buy a more acidic vinegar made specifically for this purpose, but plain old household vinegar often works great.
Then, to stop the weeds from coming back, you can sprinkle rock salt in the cracks. This will make the soil lifeless. You’ll want to be careful not to do it in your lawn or garden beds, but for those little cracks in the middle of your driveway, go ahead. Of course it will not last forever, but it should last a decent amount of time.
My Babies are Born
July 9th, 2006
I’ve had an exciting week. After 18 months my daylily seedlings have bloomed (2 of them anyways). Here is one and here is the other.
Hybridizing daylilies is a fun and easy activity to try. Each daylily has a single pistil, or female part, and multiple stamen, or male parts, sticking out of the bloom. You can recognize them because the pistil is usually longer, has no pollen, and there is only one of them. All you need to do is break off a stamen of one plant you want to cross (don’t worry, you won’t hurt the plant) and carry it to the plant you want to cross the first plant with and rub the pollen on the tip of the pistil. Then you can, if you like, put a bag over the bloom so the bees do not volunteer some more pollen later in the day. Hybridizing is generally best done in the morning for this same reason.
That is all there is too it, a little pumpkin-like pod will form and a few months later dry up and split open and shiny black seeds will emerge. You can plant them immediately or keep them in a cool dry place over winter and start them indoors in early spring or outdoors after the last frost.
Most plants will not bloom until their second summer, so you’re in for a wait, but it is exciting to think that the flower you are seeing has never been seen before. Also, because of how genetics work, remember that two parents aren’t going to product identical children. The children might look like either parent, or not at all, and they won’t necessarily look like each other.
The only other thing to remember is that daylilies come in two forms, diploid and tetraploid. Ploidy describes the number of chromosomes a daylily has, diploids have 2, tetraploids have 4. You can only cross tets with other tets and dips with other dips. If you don’t know what your plants are you can usually guess if you know that tets tend to be bigger, with fancier & more substantial blooms.
Also, in addition to my babies blooming, my largest daylily purchase ever, the $200 Purple Maze, (pictured above) bloomed for the first time, so I was really excited about that.
Pictures of My Garden
July 2nd, 2006I’ve posted pictures of various plants in my garden, but never really large shots showing you exactly what my beds look like. However, since my beds are starting to look really good, I wanted to share, so here are some big pictures.
This is a picture of the bed that curves along my back fence. I call it my “Hot Colors Bed” because it is all yellow & orange.
Here is a picture of my side garden. This is where most of my daylilies are, and it forms the north border of my property starting from near the sidewalk to the back of my garage where my fence starts.
Park Seed Coupon Code
June 29th, 2006New Deal: 15% off a $50+ order from Park Seed
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60 Bags of Mulch
June 25th, 2006
I had 60 bags of mulch delivered from Lowes this morning.
The picture is 20 bags of 3 cubic feet each and 40 bags of 2 cubic feet each. I have in the past gotten a full 60 bags of the 3 cubic feet and that pile was significantly more. This time though I got some colored mulch for the first time (previously I liked the look of natural more) and those only came in the 2 cu/ft bags.
I have a bit of a problem with mulch. You see for my lot size I have a large amount of garden beds. People with this many beds usually get mulch delivered in bulk from a landscaping company in a dump truck. I cannot do this as I have no where for them to dump the mulch at, unless I wanted to kill a spot of my front lawn. So I’m stuck getting the more expensive bagged mulch and having it delivered by truck.
This problem though has contributed to me not mulching as I should. You see you should put down atleast 2 inches of mulch to cover your beds, I only put down enough so that I can no longer see soil. I’d like to put down more, but getting it is such a hassle for me.
So that is what I hope to cure with this delivery. I hope to finally get a nice depth going. It certainly will be a few days of work and I have a wedding reception to go to so I cannot even get started today.
With the colored mulch I got both red and gold. I don’t plan on using all one color for my gardens. I plan on using gold, which really just looks like fresh mulch only it keeps it’s color, in my front yard. In my back yard I have one bed on the side with some spruces and some yellow/white/green hostas so I’ll put the red there. It’ll contrast nicely with the blue & green spruces and the yellow in the hostas. For my other beds (my very large ones) I’ll just use standard mulch for two reasons. 1, its cheaper, and 2, I have plants of all colors in those beds and I think the colored mulches really work best when you use them to contrast with your plant foliage or flowers (red mulch for yellow or blue plants, yellow mulch for red or green plants).
Also today I had this very large urn delivered with the mulch. It is very nice looking and made it Italy. I love big pots.
‘Eden’s Paintbrush’ Japanese Iris
June 24th, 2006
My first japanese iris began blooming today. Called Eden’s Paintbrush I got it from Spring Hill 2 summers ago and it is finally blooming. Sure, Spring Hill is cheap, but no one has ever accused them of sending large plants.
I really enjoy the japanese iris flower forms. Their standards (those are the up-petals) are much smaller than the typical iris. Their foliage also resembles gladiolus more than the typical tall bearded iris we see so much of.
They come in a variety of colors, one, called Shogun, is a vibrant red. I’ve tried growing that one too but no luck so far. This one is a variegated purple and white.
It also only just started blooming which puts it a few weeks after other irises stop blooming. To give you some perspective it started blooming around the same time as my lilies (which seem late this year).
I’m a sucker for interesting and unique flowers and while tall bearded irises are everywhere, these are not, and I think thats a big reason why I like them.
I must be doing something right…
June 22nd, 2006
Last night on our back deck we saw a raccoon.
Now I live in the city, I have my entire backyard surrounded by a privacy fence, and overall my lot is only 90×160. Yet in my backyard there are families of 3 different kinds of squirrels, a family of rabbits, chipmunks, scores of birds, and now this raccoon. My garden must be some amazing wildlife habitat to attract all of these critters.
Now I’m not a huge fan of squirrels & rabbits for the destruction they cause, especially the rabbits in winter, but my wife likes them. Growing up in the country I also have no love of raccoons and the messes they make but my wife grew up in the city and this was actually her first time seeing a raccoon not dead by the side of the road. So I’ll put up with it.
Its nice to think that in this sprawling suburbia I’m providing habitat for these animals, I just wish they wouldn’t eat my plants. Luckily the squirrels just annoyingly dig and as long as I’m not planting any new irises they don’t seem to harm my other plants. The rabbits though, the only plant they really eat during the growing season is the crocuses, and then just the foliage and not the flowers, but in the winter they’ll eat anything poking up above the snow. My bamboo, my climbing roses, my trumpet vine, my hydrangeas, my hardy kiwi, and low hanging or small branches from all my smaller trees and shrubs. My plan this winter is to build cages out of chicken fence and surround all the plants they like to eat. I don’t mind when they eat the dead remains of a plant that comes back every year, but when I’m trying to train a vine on a fence or over a trellis I don’t want to start from scratch every year and when they eat something that blooms on old wood and not new growth I get annoyed as well.
Another Wayside Coupon
June 21st, 200615% off $75+ order from Wayside Gardens
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