Attack of The Powdery Mildew

So I discovered something rather unsettling yesterday on my squash plants.  I seem to have picked up a powdery mildew infection on the leaves and stems.  This common disease afflicts many different member's of the squash family and as such could jeopardize my fall crop of pumpkins, butter nut squash and whats left of the summer squash.

Powdery Mildew on Pumpkin Leaf

After doing a little research I found out that the best way to deal with this is to prevent it in the first place.  Which is unfortunate as it has already infected large portions of my garden.  So my next best step is mitigation of the damage by removing heavily infected portions of the plants and spraying the rest repeatedly with a mixture of milk, water and baking soda.  According to my research the mixture will help slow and even stop the spread of the mold by altering the pH of the leaf surface in a way that the mold can't survive.

Powdery Mildew on Pumpkin Leaf

I am afraid it will be a losing battle though because the conditions that allowed the mold to form will still be present in the garden,  I originally planted the garden plants very close together to maximize space potential.  Unfortunately by doing that I created the perfect conditions i.e damp and shady which allowed the mold to spread and propagate.

So whoops my bad.

We also have had a exceptionally wet summer here which kept things damp for long periods of time.  Plus I will say I am guilty of watering my garden at night quite frequently which would have only exasperated the damp issue.

So essentially the plan is as follows,

Today I will be removing and disposing infected leaves and stems and spraying large amounts of my mixture in order to combat what is left on the plants.  The mixture recipe I will be using is pulled from is one of my favorite books on gardening called Maximizing Your Mini Farm- Self Sufficiency on a 1/4 Acre by Brett Markham 


I really love this book and the others written by this author.  Full of practical information and easy to navigate pages it is a great one to have on your book shelf.

I will be back later with updates on how it seems the powdery mildew treatments are working.

Prepping the Garden for Fall and Winter

Many people are under the assumption that once the nights start to get colder and you start to see the first hints of frost that the time to be working in your garden is over.

Well that is just not the case.

There is a lot of work that can be done in the fall to enhance and prepare you garden for next year.  To name one off the top of my head you can plant some sort of fall cover crop to enhance you soil like this one,

If trying to grow something after the main garden season is done is not your thing then there are still a few things you should consider doing.  The first is garden sanitation.  At the end of every season you should take all the tops from the plants and remove them from the garden.  This is to remove potential habitat for insects or diseases that may have snuck into your garden over the season.  If you have plants with obvious infestations they should be removed and placed far away from the garden to decompose back into the earth over time. Anything that isn't obviously infected can be placed into a compost bin which may be hot composted and returned to the garden.

After basic sanitation some light weeding is usually in order to loosen soil and remove pesky summer weeds from the garden.  Many people stop here and will call that good but to really prepare the garden for the fall and winter you should consider some sort of mulch to cover and protect the soil.

Mulch does so much to protect and improve the garden that any garden without mulch in the winter would be like you going outside in winter without any clothing.  Anyways back to mulching, their are quite a few opinions out there and I am loathe to add mine to the mix but here I go.

I have a couple principles that I follow when I am adding mulch to my garden.

1. Always add a variety of different material type and sizes
2. Make it deep enough to suppress weeds
3. Mulch must be easy to move around both in and out of the garden.

Mulching the garden in the fall protects the soil from winter erosion, and provides habitat for beneficial soil organisms like earthworms and fungus.  Plus it will slowly add organic matter and nutrients to the soil over the winter and provide a great seed bed by spring.

Preparing the garden for fall is a simply process that can save you a lot of effort in spring time.  By doing the proper due diligence in the fall you can plant sooner with less effort and far less work over the course of the next summer.

Algea Biodiesiel- The Future of Liquid Fuels?

Now you probably have heard of bio-diesel made from soybeans, but you may have not heard of algae bio-diesel.  A relatively new player in the bio-fuels games it promises by far to be the best option for weening us off of fossil fuels.

What is algae?

Algae is a group of single and multi-celled organisms that number over 100,000 species ranging from the microscopic to massive species of kelp in the oceans.  Algae is composed of over half lipid oils by weight which when processed correctly can be a clean burning and more efficient biodiesel than petroleum diesel.  Under optimal conditions you can grow a almost unlimited quantity of algae that only needs water, sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce a amazing amount of the natural oils needed to produce biodiesel.

How Can You Grow It?

Algae grown for bio-diesel production is done in a couple a ways with varying degrees of success.

Open Pond

Using open ponds we can grow large amounts of algae in sunny, hot locations in many places all over the country.  While this is the the least invasive and most environmentally friendly technique it has some drawback as far as production is concerned.  The pond can be infiltrated by bacteria or other harmful organisms and it can be stunted by bad weather or pond water being to cool.  

Vertical Growth/Closed Loop  

A technique used by many budding algae farms it is far more efficient and easier to manage algae than in a open pond.  How it works is algae is placed in clear plastic bags and exposed to sunlight on two side which greatly increases algae production and growth.  They are protected from the rain and stacked to improve space efficiency and sun exposure.  They are also protected from contamination as any new water and carbon dioxide introduced into the system is screened before it can go in.  

Closed Tank Bioreactors

Indoor plants are constructed which allow every factor of algae growth can be controlled very strictly.  This allows for optimum growth and means that a properly sized and producing reactor can be harvested every day providing a daily supply of the lipid oils used in biodiesel production.  Another benefit to this technique is that these facilities can be placed adjacent to CO2 producing factories or power plant and the extra CO2 can be used to maximize algae growth.  

Making Biodiesel

After you have grown the algae you then squeeze out the oil and turn it into biodiesel. First you have to refine it by putting it through a process called transesterification which in a nutshell is a chemical reaction involving the oil, a alcohol and and ester compound that produces viable biodiesel.

To learn more about algae and its potential role in biodiesel I would highly recommend a documentary called Fuel by Josh Tickell.

    

3 Plants To Companion Plant With Cucumbers

Companion planting has a long and documented history. While there has yet to be any serious scientific research into whether companion planting actual works the anecdotal evidence is intriguing. There are as many companion planting combinations as there are garden plants so the choices can be daunting. I wanted to narrow it down a little bit by talking about cucumber and what companions are suitable for them.

Radishes

Radishes are a quick growing early planted crop that pairs quite well with cucumbers. They do a couple things that really work well with cucumbers. The season that they can grow in starts quite early, much earlier than you can start hot sun loving cucumbers. So you can grow and harvest a crop of radishes before you transplant a cucumber seedling. The radishes will leave the soil loose and well worked easy for cucumber roots to penetrate.


What else the radishes do is that they repel the cucumber beetle which can wreak all sorts of havoc on your cucumbers. In some regions you can even underseed a crop of radishes towards the end of the season of the cucumber and get a third crop from the same garden plot.

Corn

Corn one of the mainstays of US agriculture is the most grown crop in the United States with 87.7 million acres harvested in 2013. But despite its large stature in American agriculture it to has a place in the humble backyard garden. By now some of you are thinking about growing some delicious sweet corn in your garden but perhaps you should consider growing a flint or a popcorn variety instead.[1]


So what does corn do for cucumbers in the garden. Well in terms of actually providing some sort of benefit like pest prevention or nutrients it is much more passive than that. They simply grow well together, the cucumbers provide a leafy ground covering for the corn and the corn is simply there, but on some occasions corn provides support for cucumber vines. A down side to this pairing would be the high use of water and nutrients in that section of the garden. It made need more hands on fertilizing and tlc but I feel the benefits of being able to plant two space hungry crops in one location is just great.

Beans

Beans especially pole beans are great to plant with cucumbers. The beans being a legume are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen into the soil adding much needed nitrogen to feed hungry plants. It's great to plant beans with both corn and cucumbers as all three form a symbiosis called the Three Sisters. These three types of plants grow very well together with the beans providing nutrition, the corn serving as a trellis for the beans and the cucumber providing moisture retention and weed control for the all the plants.


By finding the right combinations you can greatly enhance your gardens growth, productivity and ease of maintenance. There are many resources out there to help you along the companion planting path if you want to explore more. One of the best resources out there is a book called Carrots love Tomatoes by Lousie Riotte, it is considered the bible of companion planting to many gardeners out there.

Trellising Pumpkins and Squash

Trellis- "a frame of latticework used as a screen or as a support for climbing plants"

What a dry definition for a wonderful tool in the gardeners toolbag. There is so many ways you can utilize a trellis in the garden as just a simple support for plants or as a frame work for building a beautiful landscaped area using living plants and flowers. Now I do not claim to be a expert in any sense of the word about trellising plants and what you can do with it. In fact this is the first summer I have every tried to trellis anything other than putting cages around tomatoes.

I decided to start my learning curve into trellising by diving strait past the easy stuff like beans and going right to the big stuff. Plants like pumpkins, watermelons, squash and cucumbers can also be trellised quite successfully but to do this right a couple of things need to change about your trellis system.

1. It needs to be made larger and stronger 
2. Need to have a mechanism in place to support fruit on the vine 

As long as you build something or already have something in place that can take large amounts of fruiting vines you can just dive right in. Now in my particular case I have a handy chain link fence that is at the back of my long thin garden.

Since it was already strong enough to take the weight of what I was going to trellis I could just dive right in it.  To get something to trellis you might have to give it a helping hand.  You will usually have to direct it onto the trellis and sometimes you will have to loosely tie it to get it to climb up the supporting structure.  I had to tie vines to the fence to get them to climb properly and that is okay as long as you don't constrict or damage the vines in the process.  

Getting the vines to climb is only the first step in trellising large garden plants like squash and pumpkins.  Once they start to flower and fruit then the most important part of this type of trellising comes into play.  You have to provide some sort of support for the growing fruit or else it will grow so heavy it will tear itself right off the vine.  

If the fruit is close enough to the ground you can simple build something up to meet the fruit and support like a shelf or stacked rocks or bricks.

Use for old bricks # 142 Winter Squash support

  

If they are to high you will have to resort to using other methods and materials.  Some things that I found to work well are scraps of old white sheets  and cut up burlap sacks.  With a little twine, some sewing and bungee cords I made pretty nifty (that's right I said nifty) supports for the fruit.    

The use for old sheets do they ever end

A little more advanced than a sheet and I already like it more. 

So with a few consideration you can trellis large sized fruits traditionally reserved for the ground.  The question a lot of people would ask is why would I do this instead of just letting the vines spread naturally.  Well the answer to that question is that I simply don't have the space and I love squash and pumpkins so I was compelled to think of something.

There are many more ways you can trellis garden plants and I would love to hear more from you about it so let me know what you have done or what you have seen or read about.  

Testing Out a New Cover Crop Update.

A few weeks back I planted a fall cover crop of Oats and Field Peas into my garden in order to improve the soil quality.

I figured it was about time to post a update along with new photo to shows it progress as it grows.  I have been getting great growth out of it already and it will be very beneficial for my garden soil.  The combination of the grassy oats and the legume field peas will add organic matter and all important nitrogen to the soil profile.  I am trying to establish a completely organic and natural soil ecosystem that will support vigorous garden growth.  I have a good base but I know I have much to do in order to maximize my soil into the perfect growing machine.

Updated Photo

Planting Day

Updated Photo

Planting Day

I will be letting this cover crop grow up until frost kills it or if it starts to go to seed them I will have to chop it down or try a technique called roller crimping.  Which is essential used to flatten and crush stems of plants repeatedly as the roller bar goes over the crop.  The crushing action kills the plant while at the same time laying the crop down providing a thick mulch for the garden.
  

4 Companions to Plant With Your Tomatoes

Tomatoes....

You either love em or hate em.

Period.

Ok so that is just not true I for one do not love tomatoes, but I do love tomato products like salsa, ketchup, marinara sauce, etc, etc.  This love of tomato products not tomatoes has led me to explore many avenues of successful tomato production.  I have seen staked, caged, free range tomatoes,  greenhouse tomatoes, hydroponic tomatoes etc, etc.  What I learned though all this is that there are way to many techniques for growing tomatoes and that I couldn't begin to use half of them in my personal garden.  I needed something that is an effective use of space, provided good growing conditions and prevents weeds and pest damage in the most environmentally friendly way possible.  

That's when it hit me, I needed to do research into companion planting for tomatoes.  Using the right companions in my garden I could solve all the problems that face a tomato and grow even more veggies at the same time.

Asparagus

Ahh the wonderful asparagus another much-loved and hated vegetable.  many of us over the years have turned our nose up to asparagus when it was offered, but lets face it we didn't know any better.  Asparagus sauteed in butter has to be one of the most simple yet delicious dishes you can make and is usually a crowed pleaser.

But enough of that you are here to find out why asparagus makes a good companion plant to tomatoes.  Well like most good pairings this is a two-way street with the tomato helping the asparagus as well as the other way around.

The tomato produces a chemical called solanine which does "something" to the asparagus beetles.  I could not find something definitive that stated what solanine does to them but the world of the Internet seems to agree that solanine will solve your asparagus beetle problems.  If you know of or have a reputable reference of this fact please let me know in the comments.

Now again according the world of the Internet the asparagus plant produces another natural chemical the name of which I could not find that kills nematodes that afflict tomatoes.  How the chemical does this or what is called I could not find.  So again if you know a good reference for this let me know so I can add it.

Chives

Credit: By Captain-tucker (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Who doesn't love chives?

I mean really, this versatile herb can be put on salads, meat, potatoes pretty much anything you want to spice up with a little garlic or onion flavor.  If you don't love chives you must just be weird.

Just kidding by the way you are entitled to like or dislike whatever you want.  Anyways to get right down to it why do chives make a good companions to tomatoes?  Well to start off they are perennials like asparagus and very difficult to kill (speaking from experience here).  That means they will always be there before, during and after the tomatoes life.  But what is it about chives that help tomatoes.  Well you are a fan or chives you might already know that chives produce a fairly strong odor.  Well to tomato aphids that smell is intolerable and it actually drives them away.  So chives placed properly in and around your tomato plant can essential create a scent barrier to aphids.[4]

So to recap chives make a wonderful companion to tomatoes because,

1. They are perennial
2. Hard to kill
3. Provide flavorful accents to many different types of food
4. Create a scent barrier that drive tomato aphids away 

Carrots

Carrots huh...

This one had me stumped for a bit as I thought about it.  What could carrots and tomatoes possibly like about each other.  Well when you look at some of the basic requirements of the two plants the answer begins to become a little clearer.   

Carrots are a cool season, deeply rooting root crop.

While tomatoes are a warm season fruiting crop that like to spread out if it can.  They also like loose well draining soil that can require a lot of work to maintain. 

Well for companions these two do make an unlikely pair, but they do help each other out quite a bit.  As the heat loving tomatoes grow they begin to shade the cooler temperature loving carrots which greatly appreciate the extra shade. They also excrete that familiar chemical solanine which kills insects that might otherwise damage the carrots.  They carrots return the favor by losing the soil around the tomatoes providing avenues for better root growth for the tomatoes.

Also on the plus side these two use the garden space for its full season as the carrots can be put in early and you usually let the tomato go as long as it can it so it works out pretty good  I would say. 

Parsley

Credit: By Tharish (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Parsley a popular culinary herb that is used extensively in kitchens around the world.  It is cold tolerant but cannot withstand harsh winters found in much of the US so for the purpose of this article it shall be considered an annual.  It can be planted earlier than many tomato crops and as such can get some good growth going before the tomatoes get really started.  

What parsley does for the tomato is that it attracts predatory insects that target the tomato hornworm.  It is also great at repelling other damaging insects in the garden.  As a general insect repellant in the garden you can also interplant among most of the garden, just make sure to keep it away from your mint and lettuces.   

One thing that must be mentioned is that there is very little to none scientific evidence that companion planting actually works like it is advertised.  Most of what you will read stem from he said she said kind of evidence and as such must be taken with a grain of salt.

As much as it pains me to admit this post is much the same.  I tried to find actual evidence that support the claims or organic gardeners around the world and I couldn't really find any.  But despite all that it wont hurt to give it a try in your own garden if you really want to.