This is the Ruby Queen variety.
I alternated the Ruby Queen row-for-row with the more common Chubby Checkers variety. The Ruby Queen seems to be producing faster, which is the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work. It does seem to be producing right on schedule– if so, the first day of summer, I should be eating my own home-grown corn.
What a difference a few weeks makes in the garden!
If you look back at the May 16th entry, you’ll see some tiny little corn plants, and patches of bare dirt. Three weeks later, this is what’s there.
Some more nice wildflowers. These are growing at the back of my garden, near one of the peach trees.
I have no idea what these are. I’m still looking for a good on-line reference to wildflowers. Part of the problem is there’s so much variety in what will grow in one region or another.
Over the weekend, I went to an art show. One of the featured artists has done some work with dried and pressed flowers. While his style didn’t particularly appeal to me, the medium does. Some quick net exploration reveals that it’s not a particularly difficult medium to get started with– this article describes how to get started with items that almost anyone has available.
I have quite a few wildflowers in my garden. Some of them are truly wild, and some are from a couple of handfuls of wildflower seed mix that I threw out there in late January, when it all was barren and gloomy.
This particular batch has grown up among my raspberry bushes and the field of daisies.
Here is a recent photo of the garden. The daisies in the right and center foreground are my best crop so far. Believe it or not, that mass of flowers is only two plants, and a couple of months ago they lived in a pot on my sister’s patio. You can also see some of the tomatoes and eggplants in the left and center foreground. Corn is in the center of the photo.
Figs! Under ideal conditions, a fig tree bears two crops; one in the spring, and one in the late summer. The spring crop looks good. They are of normal size and are starting to ripen.
I suspect that in a couple of months I will be as sick of figs as I am of avocados.
The grapevines are doing well too, but I’m a little disappointed that they’re not growing much larger. My neighbor has some vines that are growing over his fence already. These were planted from two year old bare-root stock, so they ought to be a little bigger. No signs of any grapes yet.
I think I may have figured out what’s wrong with my spinach. (Yes, I am in denial; I refuse to admit that it’s pretty much the end of spinach season here in San Diego. I like spinach.) Spinach, like beets and a few other crops, requires a lot of boron. Boron deficient spinach has dark roots and numerous small, flattened, yellow leaves and is generally stunted. Guess I’ll get ahold of some Borax.
I have a new pet. It lives underneath the back garden shed. While I have not actually seen it, it’s undeniably a member of the Mustelidae family, most likely Mephitis mephitis. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m referring to the common striped skunk.
This is a photo looking directly down on the entrance to its burrow, between the back fence and the garden shed. The pile of forage at the entrance is an ominous sign; it’s pretty likely that there’s a nesting female in there. (My apologies for the poor quality of the photo, but I wasn’t about to hang around and compose a better one. Skunks are generally nocturnal, but that’s mainly by choice, and meeting Momma Skunk up close and personal might not be a fun thing.)
You might think that a skunk would be a pretty simple thing to get rid of. You’d be wrong. The County Animal Control couldn’t care less, unless it’s rabid or wounded.
Exterminators (excuse me, “pest removal professionals”) want $300 to do the job. Up front. With no guarantee of success. Basically what they do is bring a trap, catch it, throw it in a bag, and take it somewhere else and release it. “Where” is unspecified. You’re suppposed to be happy with “where” being “away from here.”
So, it won’t hurt much to do this as a DIY project, I suppose. Needless to say, there’s a wealth of information available on the ‘net on how to get rid of skunks. The idea seems to be that you want to piss it off enough to leave, then wall up the den so it can’t get back in.
I’ve put a nice bowl of ammonia inside the shed. We’ll see if that does the job. The next step is to put a radio in there. Probably playing sports-talk radio or something equally annoying. I’ve already got a nice chunk of chicken wire to cover the den entrance. Hopefully Momma will decide tonight that maybe this wasn’t such a great choice and will move out.
And if anyone even thinks of suggesting that skunks make nice pets, one word: don’t.
I’m still getting used to watering the back garden. There’s a fine line between not enough water and too much. The sprinkler system back there is entirely inadequate. (It was designed for the prior residents’ “orchard” configuration, and not at all for my “garden” layout.)
So far I’ve avoided digging trenches and laying new sprinkler pipes. I wanted to get a feel for how much water was needed, and where, before I did that. Of course, the downside of that is that I have to get up early two or three days a week and go out and turn on the sprinklers manually. This needs to be done in the early morning, before the sun gets too hot– I don’t want to burn the tender young plants.
As the days get longer and it gets hot earlier, I expect this little task will get more and more onerous. Anybody want to bet that I’ll laying sprinkler lines by next month?
I’ve got a pretty good population of weeds in my backyard garden. I’ve been trying to identify them so I would know how best to attack them. (My garden is strictly organic, so chemical answers are not an option.) This month’s Sunset has a lengthy article on common garden weeds along with some solutions to the problem. Unfortunately, the pictures are drawings rather than photos, which makes identification a little more difficult.
This database from Michigan State University Extension, has an invaluable set of weed identification keys, along with actual photos of the weeds themselves at various points in their growth.
This pretty little plant, purslane, is growing like crazy in my strawberry patch. Unfortunately, it wants to grow OVER the berries, thus sticking them to the ground where they’re eaten by bugs. So it’s got to go!
The whole Michican State University Extension web site is a treasure trove of useful gardening information.
