Fertilized with Fish Emulsion at home, Pruned Roses

I fertilized the South, North and West garden beds with Fish Emulsion today.  The lettuce and beet seeds that I planted in my nematode-infested North bed are hardly germinating.

Pruned all the roses, so now my house is littered with vases of roses that were still on the bushes.  What do other people do in warm climates?  You have to prune sometime, right?  But it always seems a shame to cut off so many flowers.

While pruning roses, I found more raccoon scat.  That thing loves my garden.  DH was kind enough to clean it up for me, wearing gloves and mask and such.  Nasty diseases in that stuff.

Worm Bin, Planted seeds

Today we cleaned out half the worm composting bin to harvest the worm castings and make room for more composting.  I used the worm castings in the N. bed, W. bed, and on both mandarins.

The prior oil spray seems to have improved the black aphid situation on the chard but it is far from over.

The prior compost addition to the N. and W. beds did indeed attract the raccoon back for more digging.  Fortunately, it didn't dig out any plants this time, just the dirt/compost.  I'm sure the worm castings will be a raccoon magnet.

I also planted seeds from romaine and buttercrunch lettuce and for beets in the N bed.  I hope those don't get trashed tonight by the raccoon.

Happy New Year!

Compost to garden, sprayed with horticultural oil

Yesterday while DH was sifting the finished compost, I sprayed the small, dark mystery bugs on the chard with horticultural oil.  They look a bit like aphids, but black.  I've never had any significant bug issues on my chard, but these things are so problematic that some of the leaves look like they are melting to mush.  I also, finally, took the time to separate some romaine and buttercrunch lettuce seeds that I'd saved from last spring.

Today we took that finished compost and put down a good layer in the North and West garden beds at home.  I wonder if that will draw back the racoon, to dig for fresh worms.  Hope not.

Fertilized Citrus

The lowest Mandarin has been looking fairly sorry with some leaf drop and some curled up and yellow leaves.  This one a raccoon had been using its well as a latrine, but I cleaned that up last week.  I checked its drip irrigation and I think one of the emitters may have been plugged, but I fixed that now.  Plus I gave the two mandarins a shot of iron chelate and fertilized all the citrus with organic citrus fertilizer.  We'll hope that helps.  The smallest mandarin (not the lowest on the slope) is teensy tiny and yet has one hopeful little mandarin ripening on it!

Gardening update

I've been neglecting this blog and recording what I've been doing.

At home: The VFN tomatoes didn't die super quickly, but they don't look very happy either.  I wonder if the FN load in the bed is just too much.  Also, the marigolds quickly got skelatonized at home (and a bit at the community garden), in a pattern that spread in such a way that I wonder if it was a caterpillar or something that crawls.  I've planted many broccoli and cauliflower starts at home, plus some cosmos and snapdragons.  Twice now they've been badly uprooted and thrown about.  I'm wondering if it is a raccoon or a skunk doing that.  I've replanted everything that survived, used a my granular all-purpose organic fertilizer, sprinkled some crushed dried jalapeno peppers around and DH set some rat traps in the garden.  I'll hope some part of that helps.

At the community garden: brussel sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower starts went in.  Plus lots of seeds for kale (saved), carrot (saved), lettuce (saved), broccoli (saved), onion, beets, bok choy, kohlrabi.  What am I forgetting?  Oh, and today I fertilized at the CG with the all-purpose dry organic fertilizer.

Fertilized Magnolia and Carrotwood Trees

Last week I had an arborist out to look at a very sad looking Carrotwood tree in the backyard.  The Magnolia in the front needs a tiny bit of deadwooding.  But that Carrotwood is a mess, so we shut off one sprinkler that was hitting the trunk, removed from rocks that were too near the trunk, took out a pampas grass that limiting airflow, deeply watered and fertilized.  DH cleaned out the garage and found some ancient (>10 years old) Osmocote and Miracle Grow, so I used that on both trees figuring that since I didn't plan to eat either it would be okay.

Canned Organic Chicken Stock

We normally save the bones from organic chicken that we've eaten and freeze them until I'm ready to make soup or stock.  But this time the freezer was full and it wasn't really soup weather, so I canned most of the stock using this recipe, mostly.  I did my bone broth as usual - lots of chicken bones with bay leaves, a little salt and pepper and 1 T apple cider vinegar per quart of water added.  I had so many chicken bones that I put them all in my new 16 quart stock pot.  It was the perfect size.  After simmering for 24 hours, we strained out the bones (which we bury in the heart of the compost pile to add phosphorus and calcium to the compost.)  The saved stock, I reboiled and canned as directed.  I had originally added 10 quarts of water, but this boiled down a bit.  In the end I had 7 quarts canned plus about 1-2 quarts that I made into a quick lentil soup.