Exurban Living Notebook | Independence Journal

Exurban Living

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WHAT IF…

Raised Bed Gardening is kicking your ass??

We just completed our first full-bore (reality check) summer crop in the Houston area. It was not as clean and easy as we had thought. Gardening here is very different from North Louisiana, where my gardening experience originates. So let me take you on the nickel tour…

The Basics

Containers

The basic container is a 3’ X 8’ X 1-1/2’ rectangle made of landscape timbers. For those smaller areas, we built 6’ X 3’ X 1-2/3’ containers out of fence boards and leftover treated 2x4 from our deck. All containers were lined with plastic to avoid arsenic contamination from the pressure treated lumber and to keep our number one problem weed at bay – nutgrass. The plastic we used were the industrial strength trash bags from Home Depot, which we split with a razor. These were stapled to the outside edges and draped into the middle of each container. The remaining exposed earth at the bottom was then covered with plastic prior to filling each with growing medium. We simply let the dirt hold the plastic in place, and did not bother to build a bottom to these containers.

For those smaller areas, we employed green plastic 5-gallon pails. These were “pickle pails” we got from Wendy’s simply for the asking. We then purchased clay bottoms for each to sit in, and bored some holes in each of these “pots” for drainage. We also dumped out a lot of ornamentals in existing large pots and replaced them with veggies.

The final, ultra-simple container was used for growing beans. We planned on using the fence for beans to run on, and so to build a bed, we purchased several cinder blocks (like $1.50 each). These we simply lined up next to the fence, and used them to make a rectangle with the fence as one of the long sides. We stapled plastic to the fence to retard rotting it, but otherwise it was simply a rectangle of cinder blocks on three sides, with the fence making the final side.

Growing Medium (i.e., dirt!)

Here in this area, the primary headache weed is called nutgrass. There is a specialty product designed specifically for this incredible nuisance, but we wanted to avoid using anything other than sweat and organic solutions to keep things real and simple. Nutgrass is a nearly ineradicable weed here in the south. It has a small nodule or ‘nut’ in the root system that is extremely hardy. It can over-winter for years buried in the soil and then pop up and proliferate with the smallest amount of rainfall. As it grows, it makes more root nodules and soaks up your nutrients to no edible purpose, and thus is considered a nightmare for the organic gardener. The tried and true method is to dig out each nodule, but actually doing this sold me on slavery quickly…. My next great idea was to try and sift the nuts out using various grades of screening, but again, this was problematic – sifting also removed all the humus but even then, the smallest nodules escaped the mesh to pop up and compete most effectively with our crops. By building new containers insulated from the nutgrass with plastic, the nutgrass gets no sun, and doesn’t penetrate the plastic when it tries to shoot up.

In addition to the nutgrass, we have overhead power lines in our city, and I have a transformer right behind my house. As my home is 35 years old, it is VERY likely that this transformer has blown out before. Thus there are probably PCB’s in the soil under this utility pole, which we do not want our veggies feeding from. So look around your place and be aware of possible pollution or contamination.

For these two reasons, I decided to opt for building new soil for each container. Upon my arrival at the nursery, I asked for 20 bags of cow manure or sheep manure. I was promptly told that sheep manure wasn’t sold anymore. The “cow manure” they were selling (Home Depot, Lowes, and nurseries) was at best 30% manure and 70% composted “stuff-of-unknown-origin”. This is NOT suitable to maximize yields without adding commercial fertilizers, which we did not want to do. So job one in the soil department turned out to be finding REAL 100% composted manure somewhere.

After searching over 20 different places, I went to the nearest real feed store (where you can buy chicks, kresote dip, saddles and bulk seeds – NOT the typical “metro feed store”). Even here, 20 miles outside of Houston, I had to specifically order 100% composted sheep manure by the pallet. They were selling the same crappy 30/70 mix as “manure” that I had found in town, to their local gardeners. Only the organic farmers were ordering real manure, and that is just what I did.

Be nice to EVERYONE – while at the feed store, I met a chicken farmer who told me I could have as much chicken shit (guano for the squeamish) as I could truck every 90 days – all I had to do was show up in a truck. This alone will save me ever buying manure again. Now all I have to do is see how “hot” this guano is before I use it and se how high gas really is next spring.

I mixed things (eyeball measurements) as follows: 40% manure, 30% fine, composted humus, 20% clean dirt and 10% sand. And this mixing wasn’t easy, but after it was done you could smell the result, and it simply smelled RIGHT! Whoopee! I filled the containers, soaked them with water, let them settle overnight, and filled them again. The following day I planted. After planting, I used CEDAR mulch to help with pest control, and mulched each bed heavily.

Watering

This is all-important in the Gulf Coast heat. Temperatures here average in the mid to upper 90’s for most of the summer. If you don’t have watering set up right, you will be out every single day catching up with your wilting crop. Raised beds drain FAST, and thus they do require more frequent watering.

I installed a few sprinklers on posts around the containers, the height letting them cover more area. I hard-plumbed each of these into a single hose connection and popped a timer on it. This worked fairly well for the first half of the summer, but as the Dog Days hit, it was obvious that it wasn’t enough. If your crop is fighting wilt, it isn’t growing.

The answer is to run soak hose under the mulch in each big container. You can feed this from a rainwater cistern if you have one, and the rainwater helps the plants with their nitrogen immensely. Otherwise, you can simply run it from your water hose. But the results from having the soak hose running all the time were markedly better in SunBelt heat. I would recommend the cistern option as the best way to go, even if you have to fill the cistern with the water hose in the event of no rainfall for a week or two. It is really painless, and avoids heat wilt until the temperature nears 100. At that point, shade needs to be considered.

That is the basic layout. Tomatoes were the main potted plants, as they tend to do well in pots. Peppers, with their hardy stems, also do extremely well. We tried eggplants as well – they worked, but use 10-gallon pots. They get pretty big by August, and are still making fruit, and I wound up placing a big pole in each to support the eggplant weight with string. Next year I will use tomato cages for the eggplants as well.

The Travails of Gardening Somewhere New (or at all!)

Sluggo, Your Friendly Snail

Pest wave number one was slugs and snails. I guess in Houston, with all the rainfall we get, we couldn’t just have slugs or snails. We have to be cursed with both. Initially, I tried going out after dusk and just crushing the little buggers as I found them. But the mulch provided too many hiding places. Once they made it into the containers, they went through every newly emerged bean plant I had.

Forget diatomaceous earth in Houston – it gets wet too fast to be effective, which dissolves the little spikes on the diatoms. I initially got control back by resorting to commercial slug bait. But after that, I began trying several methods in my “starter bed”. This is a small bed I have on top of my garden workbench. It has a Plexiglas cover, and I germinate things under it and then transplant them. This helps with culling wimpy plants, avoiding pests that eat new shoots, and with seed rot.

The old beer in a pie plate thing works pretty well with raised beds. The yeast attracts the slugs or snails, and they do fall in by the tens and drown. For this to work right, you need to bury the pie plate until the lip is even with the ground. Slugs and snails are just not good at climbing – make it easy for them to get their beer. Make sure to fill up every few days, and after it rains. What worked best for me was to put the pie plates on the east side of the containers, so dark hit there first. I found that this got most of the larger buggers fairly well. But the little guys climbed and hid in my mulch.

I took sand and made a mound or island on top of the mulch around the newly emerged shoots. These animals do not like dry sand, and in the Houston heat, it dries fast. It sticks to their slime, and forces them to exude a lot of water to get anywhere, and it is irritating. This helped quite a bit, and between the beer traps and the sand, it pretty much solved the problem. Just be sure to “rough up” the sand every time you go through the garden – it keeps the grains from compacting, maximizing slug irritation. Replace it with a fresh layer if it gets to turning green with algae. Once your plants are big enough, they are generally slug-proof.

Tomato Horn Worm (aka - caterpillar from hell)

Well, it only takes one of these guys to nuke an entire plant. You can generally control them by hand-plucking. Unfortunately, if you miss one, you are minus and entire tomato plant the next day. They have a fairly constant feeding window – check your local agricultural extension service for the dates they will be most likely to appear. As soon as you see any munched leaves, it is time to go hunting.

Using technology is fun, but can make you seem like a total nut. The best way to find these guys, since their camouflage is just magnificently effective, is to use a black light (ultraviolet light) at night. They stand out along with a host of other insects in this light. You can take some needle nose pliers and go on a very effective killing spree. Do this every 2-3 days during their seasonal window, and they will no longer be growing into the finger-length, butt-ugly critters they become at the expense of your tomatoes.

What about the tomato plant that gets devoured in a single dinner by one of these monsters? If your tomato plant is well along, try cutting it back. If you clip it way back and then place it in the shade for a week or so, they can often come back and still make.

Tunnel Worms

These are the pesky critters that make tunnels in the leaves of your tomatoes and cucumbers and melons. They are too tiny to get at, and the only thing I have found to get them under control is a good dosing of insecticidal soap (organic). Do this the first time you see a tunneled leaf, and do it to the entire area.

Whiteflies

These are sneaky guys. When you first see them, they look like a swarm of gnats. Then you begin to see wilting leaves. If you take a magnifying glass and look at the underside of one of the wilted leaves, you can see the maggots sucking the juices from your plants!! If you don’t get them under control fast, the honeydew weeping from under the leaves will start mildew going, and then you will have a massive crop loss. If you think there are gnats in your garden, there are likely whiteflies instead.

Make sure your compost area is on the opposite side of your yard from the crops. Whiteflies love soft veggie flesh, and this is usually their origin – you throw out veggie scraps to recycle and they climb on board by laying eggs. These hatch, and then they migrate to your soft, fresh crops.

Insecticidal soap works well, especially if you hit the underside of the leaves with a hand sprayer. If the infestation is too far along, just uproot and start over. Be sure to bury the uprooted stuff – whiteflies will still propagate from it if left unburied. I also tried something called NEEM (organic). It did a good job of getting and keeping them under control in a very infected cucumber container. I eventually yanked the plants due to the damage already done, but there were no maggots left on the damaged leaves after a single application.

Squash Vine Borer

This one really pissed me off. My squash was up and making and looked awesome! Two days later it was all dying. At the base of the stems were yellowish, ochre colored mounds of what looked like sawdust. The stems were split, and in one, I could see a grub feeding merrily away inside the plant stem. They hit every type of squash, from yellow to spaghetti to acorn.

Turns out this grub is a moth larvae. Moth looks like a red wasp with furry legs. I had seen it flying around, but didn’t know what it was. In Louisiana, it’s the squash bugs (like stinkbugs) that we have to deal with more often. These moths lay eggs on the plant. They look like a tiny red dot. They hatch, bore into the stem and kill your crop. I lost the early squash to this pest.

Turns out these guys have two breeding cycles down here. So I planted a couple of “test” seeds to see if they would get hit and when. Extension service said all they could tell me was that there were two breeding cycles down here, not when they were. I checked every day to see if there were any eggs. After a few weeks, I found them in mid-July. I waited until the 1st week of August to plant again, and this time, I checked every day. I found eggs the 2nd week and got most of them off, and then when the grubs got big enough, I slit the stems and pulled each out. Then I covered the damaged stem with dirt and let it root.

Everything is doing fine now – their cycles are over. But the grubs burrow into the soil and pupate for the next season. I have two containers that will be getting new dirt next spring….and the squash will not go in until the second crop.

The Bee Problem

Bees are becoming scarce. They are struggling against their own pests here in the US, killer bees included. Bee populations are down everywhere, and you can see it in the garden. I would recommend that you try your hand at beekeeping if you have any urge. Bees can make your garden really work, and maximize production. It’s on my to-do list, especially since my grandfather kept bees. And since I love honey…

I had a bee infestation a few years ago in the wall of my house. The bees had gotten in through an old knothole and made a hive behind my bathtub. We could hear them at night by putting an ear to the bathroom tile and listening. I hired a guy to remove them – it was $900 by the time he finished. Then he sold the bees for another $250!!

Needless to say, I watched everything he did. First, if they were Africanized, we would already know it – they would have attacked us already. The next thing he did was smoke them to calm them down. This is a small hand bellows attached to a can. Pine straw is lit and placed in the can, and smoke pumped into the nest. Thinking “Fire!” the bees pile on to protect the queen.

Next he ripped my siding off, and there were 5 honeycombs each 4 feet long. He just kept smoking them to keep them calm. Then he went to his truck and pulled out a shop vac. But this shop vac had a plexi box between the end of the hose and the vac. There was a screen on the vac side of the plexi to keep the bees in the plexi box while he vacuumed them up!! Once he sucked up most of the workers, he broke the honeycomb where the queen was and popped it into a gallon jar, queen and all. We got to keep the honeycomb, but at $900 for the removal (not including repair costs), I still felt stupid. It was just so easy. The biggest thing is not to kill a bee. Doing so releases a fear hormone and they get ornery. So he was extra careful not to kill anything until he started the vacuum going.

I have since removed two hives from other peoples homes, and will start one for next years garden as soon as I can find a hive to move. The rest is all in books – being read now.

But I digress. Bees are struggling, and I noticed that bumblebees were taking up the slack. Nature is resilient, but the bee is the work horse for pollination. Should they get much more hammered, the bumblebee will become the next best thing. So don’t kill ANY bees!!

That said, you might find that by using a brush, you can increase your yield if the bees are scarce by pollinating flowers with a brush. This isn’t viable in a big garden, but the raised family plots can be worked pretty well this way.

Cross Pollination

If you are going to plant crops in the same genus, but different species, separate them as much as possible. If you can, put some in the front yard and the others in the back. Bees generally will not hop more than 30 feet, but they can. This way, you can grow those lemon cucumbers and pickling cucumbers that look nice, instead of the yellow pickling cucumbers I got this year….seems the lemon cukes crossed with the pickling cukes – I got yellow pickles. Novel, but not what I was after…

Beans

Rotate beans with your other crops – they fix nitrogen in the soil, keeping it from wearing out. And if you are going to do beans in the Gulf Coast, start EARLY!! The heat really hammers them in July, and makes the yield really low. Butterbeans, green beans, any type – try and get them in early or wait until the July/August window.

Broccoli, Cauliflower, Strawberries

Forget it in this heat, unless you put up some manmade shade. The hot sun down here just beats these plants to death. I have done strawberries on the patio, but you just will not get many. I will try these in the fall next year, depending on what this winter turns out to be like. With the climate so unsteady, who knows?

Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes are best due to the heat. They also make all summer, but be ready to have them 8 feet tall. Mine were cut back at 8 feet, and budded back out making more tomatoes.

For bigger tomatoes, try the Roma type. They seem to handle the heat better. Beefsteak and most others have trouble with the heat and with blooms setting to make fruit. If you have them in pots, and place them in the shade so that they only get 2-3 hours of direct sun each day, then they will do ok. It is almost a requirement that you use Bloom Set down here due to the heat, unless you get your crop in very early. The only other way is to bring them into air conditioning at night, which is only good if you have 3-4 plants. So just buy the Bloom Set and use it if you want a decent yield.

Also, try and pick them just as they begin to turn color. The heat makes them ripen too fast internally, and they will often rot if you try and let them stay on the vine.

Melons

The Norwegian Tree Rat has infested most North American cities, and Houston is no exception. In addition, squirrels like to screw with anything that looks edible, and to bury their acorns in fresh soil. Both of these pests will wreck your melon crop by gnawing, so I recommend training melons onto trellises and then supporting the fruits in panty-hose baskets from the trellis. They don’t seem to bother them if they are up off the ground.

You can double crop melons, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes and most anything but squash in the Gulf Coast. You can triple and quadruple 30 day crops too, like radishes.

That sums up year one – learned a little more to be prepared, help feed the family better, and had quite a lot to can and eat!! But the lesson to be taken from this is that there is no way to get organic growing right for the area you are in short of actually doing it. I have had multi-acre plots before, and never had some of these pests. I certainly never had to worry about snails in a big rowed garden. But growing next to your home is entirely different. I never thought squirrels would have a go at tomatoes – but they will if you don’t watch for them and run them off.

Each region is divided into eco-microcosms, with their own pests, soil quirks, and climatic issues. Even in your own yard – one side of your lot may favor beans – the other may not even support them!! Remember, many subdivisions are built on trucked in landfill – you have no idea what you are planting in until you turn the first shovel over and look. There is just no substitute for getting your hands dirty and doing it, if you intend to be successful without toxic pesticides, commercial fertilizers and a big plot of land.

You CAN grow lots of food in suburbia, but don’t expect to learn how from reading a book!! And get your kids involved – nothing makes them prouder than taking a jar of pickles or a string of peppers to their Grandma and saying, “I grew these!”

Writer: oilman2@urbansurvival.com

Publisher: george@ure.net

Editor: elaine@ure.net