It’s time to plan this year’s garden. And right on schedule, the seed catalogues are appearing in the mail.

Have you ever noticed how the vast majority of these catalogues have the same plants in them? In every magazine, there are the same broccoli, tomatoes, beans, and carrots seeds you can get anywhere. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it can get boring, especially when you start to realize the vast swath of edible plants out there just waiting to be tried out in our gardens.

Luckily, several seed companies do go out of the their way to provide access to a more interesting variety of plants. Here are three see I particularly like:

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. This company, which goes out of its way to “promote and preserve our agricultural and culinary heritage”, provides vegetable seeds that you don’t normally see in the hardware store–purple carrots, white eggplants, peppermint tomatoes, striped beets, purple bell peppers… I’ve used their seeds several times and the plants have grown up great. Plus, they are “non-hybrid, non-GMO, non-treated, and non-patented seeds.” Order Baker Creek’s free–and rather beautiful–catalogue here.

One Green World. While this company doesn’t offer vegetables, it does offer a host of other fascinating-sounding trees, vines, and fruits. I mean, what exactly is a Tasmania Vine (pictured above)? What does a silverberry taste like? When I finally get around to planting honeyberries or tea bush, I will look here first. Request a catalogue here.

Bountiful Gardens. This is a great seed company that offers “untreated open-pollinated non-GMO seed of heirloom quality for vegetables, herbs, flowers, grains, green manures, compost and carbon crops.” What I particularly like about Bountiful Gardens is the variety of products. Not only do they have the usual vegetables, they have categories like “mushroom kits” or “unusual hot-weather heirlooms” or “grains, fibers and oil crops.” You can get the Bountiful Gardens catalogue here.

What is your favorite seed company? Why?

I always say I live on top of a giant anthill. Truly, the number of ants in my yard is amazing. They don’t invade my house, but they love to destroy my plants by colonizing them with aphids and scales. I’ve gotten pretty good at controlling aphids but the real problem was the ants putting the aphids on the plants, and I knew it. If I didn’t cut down the number of ants in my yard, this problem would keep coming back year after year.

And these ants were maddening. Unlike sugar ants, which will go to any ant bait and take it blithely back to the nest, these ants walked right past the commercial ant traps I put out. And no matter how many times I dumped boiling water on their anthills, there always seemed to be more of them.

Finally I did some research and discovered that they are Argentine Ants, an invasive species that can be found all over the United States, especially California where I live. They are sometimes also called piss ants.

Unlike other species of ants, Argentine ants aren’t competitive. While other ants fight over territory, Argentine ants join forces and make huge colonies with multiple queens, forming what biologists call “supercolonies.”

So what do you know, I really WAS living on top of a giant anthill.

The multiple queens also explained why the boiling water didn’t work. Dumping the water on the hill may have killed off a number of ants, even the queen, but there were eight more to take her place so it did no good in the end.

The answer to my problem was Borax. This white powder is sold in most grocery stores and is a common ingredient in cleaners. One box costs about $5.

I used the following recipe and the ants were so excited about it that they stopped colonizing my Jerusalem artichoke with aphids and concentrated on taking the bait back to the nest instead. Soon enough they had all disappeared.

Since then I have used the recipe several other times to the same results.

And the best part is, while borax may be poisonous, this trap is set up so that your pets and other wildlife can’t get to it.

How To Get Rid Of Outdoor Ants:

Ingredients:

3 parts sugar
2 parts borax
Enough water to loosen the solution

Directions:

When dealing with poison of any kind, always wear gloves.

In a pot, dissolve the sugar, borax, and water over medium heat until it turns to a paste. Carefully spoon the mixture into and old soda or beer can. This keeps animals out of the bait and protects it from rain.

Place the can in the ant stream and wait for them to notice it. Once they do, leave it alone and soon enough, the ants will be gone. (This can sometimes take awhile depending on the size of the colony. The first anthill I killed went at the bait for almost three weeks before they died out.)

To illustrate, here is a trap I set for a colony that recently appeared on my porch. The ants have been on it nonstop since I set it out:

As you can see, I accidentally squeezed the can and some of the baits spilled onto the bricks. Although that sped up the ant’s interest in the bait, I don’t recommend it because it encourages other animals to notice it as well.

To protect my cats, I put a plastic tub over the bait.

Now nothing can get at it, except the ants.

But not for long.

If you’ve ever had trouble calculating where the sun hits your house, the SunCalc might help. This Google Maps hack by Vladimir Agafonkin tracts the position of the sun over a location at any point in the year at any time from sunrise to sunset. From the site:

The thin orange curve is the current sun trajectory, and the yellow area around is the variation of sun trajectories during the year. The closer a point is to the center, the higher is the sun above the horizon.

This can be helpful when planting a garden or thinking about heating and cooling your house. Plus it’s fun to play with. [Root Simple]

[Courtesy Simple Bites]

I am planting garlic today and then my fall planting will be done. I already have in:

Radishes
Spinach
Kale
Lettuce
Carrots
Green beans
Beets

The funny thing is, that’s me being conservative! (The voles wore me out.)

No matter what climate you’re in, chances are you can put in some fall plants. Why not stretch out the fresh food your garden is able to give you for as long as possible?

Here’s a round-up of past posts on planting a garden in autumn:

* Cool Season Crops
* What To Plant When
* Why Plant Garlic In The Fall

What are you planting this fall?

This year I have been dealing with an infestation of voles in my garden. As I said before, I believe this is a result of sheet mulching–the layers of paper and mulch made a cover of protection that the voles were attracted to.

Voles are mouselike rodents that burrow underground and eat plants by the roots. They can be extremely destructive. Here is a list of all the plants they ate:

5 nasturtium
All my peas
Most of the green beans
1 giant zucchini
1 giant patty pan squash
1 butternut squash
1 volunteer squash
2 crane melons
1 parsley
4 leeks

On top of that, they did damage to the tomatoes and basil, since in addition to eating plants from underground, they climb out and sever branches from plants too. They even managed to harm plants they don’t eat, because the burrowing did damage to the roots.

I cannot tell you the frustration this situation has caused me. There is nothing worse than walking out to water your plants and seeing your four-foot tall plant loaded with baby squash lying dead on the ground because rodents ate its roots.

Voles are worse than gophers. Like gophers, they make a home in your garden and eat the plants from underneath, but there is only one gopher per tunnel, where there can be 30 voles living in a tunnel. If you kill a gopher, you’ve killed it, whereas with the voles, you kill one and there are 29 others waiting to take its place.

In addition, you can see gopher holes, where with many types of voles, you can’t see their burrows and have no idea they are there until they kill your plants. They hate having open tunnels, so if you open one up, they will not only close it again, they will fill it in with dirt. This can make it hard to find the tunnel again.

Oh, and did I mention that voles are nocturnal? Yeah, that doesn’t help either.

I struggled with this all summer. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, but after trying many methods, I did get control of the situation. (Knock wood.) Here is what I did:

First, I identified the types of voles in my garden. There are three types of voles: those that live above ground, those that live below ground, and those that do both. I have the kind that does both, thus they would kill the plants below the ground by eating the roots and then come out at night to eat the branches on top of the ground.

I tried flooding them out. I have had a lot of luck with flooding gophers, but with the voles, flooding only killed one that I know of. Well actually, it didn’t even kill him, just forced him out of his hole. Here is a picture I took of him:

(Looks so cute and innocent, doesn’t he? I let him go in the woods down the street from my house because I am a big ol’ softy.)

Flooding did let me understand the extent of the vole tunnels. Because voles have shallow tunnels, the water clearly marked where they were digging, and I discovered that the tunnels went all through my yard, under the concrete driveway and into my neighbor’s yard.

This was good information, but it also showed that I couldn’t get to the entrance of their burrow since it was under the neighbor’s shed. Annoying little buggers!

Next I tried trapping the voles. Everyone I talked to said to trap. I even asked my local master gardeners, and here is what they told me:

Try peanut butter, oatmeal or apple slices in your traps. Placement is crucial, right angles to runways, a minimum of 12 traps for a small garden is required. Persistence is your best weapon.

I followed these instructions to the letter. I dug around until I found a hole–which is filthy, frustrating work–then I put oatmeal and peanut butter on a trap, put it down at a right angle to the hole. I did this repeatedly.

I did not catch a single freaking vole this way.

Once the voles figured out what the traps were, they didn’t go near them, but just kicked dirt on them. Voles are not stupid animals.

Two things I tried helped, however. One was removing all the sheet mulch from my garden. I was loathe to do this because, as I mentioned in the this post, it is a lot of work to put the sheet mulch in.

However, the local master garderner told me that, “Voles love the cover and don’t like to cross bare ground or feed in the open.” This seemed to be true. When I pulled out the sheet mulching, I noticed a reduction in vole activity in that area.

The other thing that helped was using a nontoxic deterrent around plants. In this case, the voles had eaten four of my five squash plants and I could tell they would go for the last zucchini next. So I used Gopher Max repellent around the plant.

I know it worked because my cats heard the voles moving away from the zucchini when I applied the repellent. They have since left that plant alone.

But repellent didn’t solve the problem. Yes, it saved the zucchini, but the voles were still there and they were steadily destroying my garden. I needed a stronger method.

I couldn’t use poison because this was in a vegetable garden, so I finally bought a Crittergetter, which allows you to pump car exhaust into the vole’s burrow.

Believe me, I wouldn’t have resorted to this if I weren’t desperate.

The way it works is, you attach a long, balloon-like tube to your car exhaust and insert the other end of the burrow. Then you run your car for 15 minutes and the exhaust goes through their burrow and kills the voles in their sleep. It’s a pretty humane method, overall.

And it worked. We had to do it a couple of times, but the voles slowly stopped filling in their holes (a sign they were dead) and slowly started leaving the plants alone. I now am fairly confident that I will have some melons and pumpkins this fall.

However, I put all my fall plants in containers where the voles can’t get to them. Next year, we are going to lay wire down and put in a raised bed. That way I don’t ever have to deal with voles or gophers again.

So to sum up:

What didn’t work for voles:

Trapping
Flooding
Digging their burrow

What did work for voles:

Repellents
Clearing out mulch
Car exhaust
Container gardening

I would love to hear your thoughts on voles. How have you dealt with them?

(Image courtesy Native Sanctuary)

I’ve been sheet mulching in my garden for almost two years now and I thought it would be interesting to talk about the pros and cons of my experience with it.

Sheet mulching is a method of mulching that uses cardboard or newspaper to suppress weeds–you lay down the cardboard and several inches of mulch and simply leave it. Not only does this keep weeds from coming up, over time, the cardboard breaks down and enriches the soil.

It’s been interesting to me to see the effects of this method in my garden. As with everything you put in the ground, the environment responds to it and adjusts accordingly–and not all those adjustments have been good.

In fact, if you want to know the truth, I’m torn about whether to keep sheet mulching. The things I like about it, I really like. But the problems have been a lot to deal with. Let’s talk about both.

The Pros of Sheet Mulching:

No Weeds: Without a doubt, sheet mulching eliminates weeds. There is no way that any weed can get through that many layers of mulch, so once you’ve put in the sheet mulching, you’re effectively done weeding for the year. That’s great.

Eliminates Competition For Your Plants: Because there are no weeds, the plants you allow through get the full use of the soil and water. There are no weeds teeming to take the resources and your plants do better because of it.

Enriches Soil: After the first year of sheet mulching, the newspaper/cardboard had disappeared into the soil and left black, rich-looking loam in its place. Over time, there’s no doubt this would have a positive impact on the soil.

Looks Great: Although I used hay as my top layer of mulch, the sheet mulching made my garden look neat and cared for. And it stayed that way, too.

Sounds great, right? It was. But then I noticed some problems.

The Cons of Sheet Mulching:

Lots of Pests: It turns out that many pests loooooovvvvveeeee sheet mulching. The layers of cardboard and mulch is a haven for them to hide in. As a result, this year I saw a huge amount of earwigs and snails, to the point that keeping baby plants alive was a struggle. Earwigs in particular love to hide in newspaper. I have heard that sheet mulching can attract cutworms and termites too.

Lots of Work: I didn’t mind this, but it’s a lot of work to put the sheet mulching in. You have to lay all those layers down, and that takes time and effort.

Can Cause Water Problems: Water can stay right on top of your sheet mulching and drain away from your plants if you aren’t careful. Consequently, the water can also get trapped underneath the sheet mulch, which can cause aeration and drainage problems.

Voles: Technically, voles are just another pest, but in my case, they were more like an infestation, and so they get their own category. Voles are mouselike rodents that burrow underground and eat plants by the roots. They are like gophers except that instead of just one of them in the garden, there are probably about 20-30. It turns out that voles love sheet mulching because it provides them a cover that they can burrow under and stay protected from predators. They did so much damage that I had to pull all the sheet mulching out and resort to some ugly methods to reduce the vole population (that’s another post) and they still completely obliterated many of my crops and caused me a lot of headaches–and heart aches–this year.

While the sheet mulching isn’t wholly responsible for the voles, it did offer them protection and something to nest in, and it is enough to make me think twice about it in the future.

(Courtesy The Website of Everything)

If you have sheet mulched, what has been your experience?

Chef Alice Waters has been working with a middle school in Berkeley, California to turn a one-acre vacant lot into a vegetable garden. The kids not only help in the garden they eat the food from it too. Not only is the food incorporated into their school lunches, there are kitchen classes that teach the kids how to cook the food.

The kids get exercise and learn math, biology, and practical skills that will stick with them their whole lives. Alice Waters calls the project The Edible Schoolyard.

Alice Waters: Edible Education on Nowness.com.

I love this. There’s no reason schools all over the country can’t have vegetable gardens. It’s a great way to solve the issue of unhealthy school lunches.

As Alice Waters says in the film, “So that the cafeteria is no longer a catering operation in some part of the school but where the cafeteria is brought into academia and there’s a kind of life breathed into it. ” [Notcot]

You may be asking yourself why I am posting a bucket of muddy water on my blog. But that’s not mud, that’s compost tea.

I have written about the magic of compost before on here, and how amazing it is that you can take your kitchen waste and turn it into an fertilizer for your garden. This year, I’ve been taking the extra compost I have and making compost tea with it, and then using it as an all-purpose liquid fertilizer for my plants.

Let me tell you: it works great. I have been using it all over the garden and have seen impressive results. If you pour compost tea on a droopy plant, it will pick up within an hour of your applying it–that’s how powerful this stuff is. And it’s free and easy to make.

So how do you make it? All you do is put a quart (4 cups) of compost in a 5 gallon bucket and fill that bucket with water. Let the bucket sit overnight so that the compost can “steep” into the water, thus the name compost “tea.” After that, transfer the compost tea to a watering can and water your plants as you would with any other liquid fertilizer.

Compost tea can be applied to any plant. It’s especially great if the plant is producing food and seems to need an extra boost of nutrition. It also helps sickly or struggling plants and is a great way to feed your container garden.

Also compost tea lets you make the most out of a small amount of compost. So if you don’t have room for a giant compost bin, don’t worry. Make what you can and then make compost tea with it. That way your plants can still benefit from the magic of compost.

How do you make compost tea?

[Courtesy Luc Viatour]

Ugh.

Aphids, as I have learned first hand, come in many colors. I have seen then in green, gray, black, white, and red. Sometimes they have wings and sometimes they they don’t. But despite their changing appearance, aphids always do the same thing: clump on the ends of your plants and slowly suck the life out of them.

I may be jinxing myself by writing this, but I have been gaining control of my aphid problem lately. My garden is changing over the years, and as it does, it is becoming more balanced and the aphids (knock on wood) are less of a problem. Of course, as these things go, now I have a cutworm issue instead, but let’s focus on the positive: getting rid of aphids. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Observe The Aphids. The first step of getting rid of any pest is to observe what is happening in the garden. Are the aphids there on their own or are they being put there by ants that want to feed on the sugary honeydew the aphids secrete? (Read more about the relationship between ants and aphids here.) Are the aphids attacking all the plants or just one kind of plant? How are they getting into the garden? Think of this step as information gathering. If you know what is going on in the garden, it is much easier to act effectively.

2. Attract Beneficial Insects. Last year I talked about putting in plants that attract predatory insects in the garden. This really works. My garden is full of insects that were simply not there a few years ago–ladybugs, soldier beetles, predatory wasps, etc. This is the best way to control your aphids since you don’t have to do a thing because the bugs do it for you. For example, this winter my fava beans had aphids. Before I could react, a bunch of soldier beetles descended and ate the aphids up for me. The downside is that is a slower control method–it took about a year to start seeing results–but you can jump start the process by buying ladybugs in the store and releasing them into your garden.

3. Kill Ants. Often the aphids aren’t really the problem, the ants are. If you have both aphids and ants streaming into your garden, the ants are probably putting the aphids on the plants. If that’s the case, you can remove the aphids all you want but the ants will just put more of them on your plants. Thus it’s more efficient to kill the anthill and stop the problem that way. This is still a struggle for me because ants are hard to kill.

4. Spray Aphids Off With Water. If the plant can handle it, spray the aphids off with the hose. Even assuming they could survive, aphids are not smart enough to regroup and go back on your plant. This works great for established plants, but won’t work for seedlings or more delicate plants that will bruise from the water.

5. Use A Gentle Insecticide Soap. Finally, I preemptively spray areas that I know are vulnerable to aphids with insecticide soap. In particular, I always spray the new growth on my squash plants, which is apparently an aphid paradise. Use insecticide soap that says you can use “up to the day of harvest” and doesn’t harm bees. Or make your own.

That’s my method. How do you control aphids? And what about ants?

This weekend, I was talking to someone who has a deer problem. The deer, he said, had eaten all his tomatoes and he was dreading putting in an expensive fence all around his garden. (He wasn’t going to shoot or poison the deer, which is, shall we say, overkill.)

I suggested another method, which is to use plants to deter the deer. A perfect example of this comes from the comment Kristina made in my post on Three Sisters Companion Planting:

We do a different type of companion planting. We’ve successfully protected our strawberry plants from the deer by surrounding them with rosemary.

Deer, it turns out, dislike many kinds of plants, especially strong smelling ones like rosemary. One way to deter them is to plant what they don’t like on the outside of what they do like, thereby masking the desirable plants from the deer.

This post from DIY Life has a list of plants that deter deer, including:

* Butterfly Bush
* Elderberry
* Flowering Quince
* Rosa Rugosa
* Basil
* Bee balm
* Chives
* Fennel
* Lavender
* Parsley
* Pumpkin
* Sage
* Yarrow
* Chrysanthemum
* Salvia

Another way to use plants to deter deer comes from the book Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. Instead of putting in plants the deer don’t like, Hemenway planted what they do like, but in the form of a hedge around his garden.

On the outside of the hedge, he planted “bush cherries, Manchurian apricots, currants, and other wildlife plants for wildlife food” and “wild plums, Osage orange, and gooseberries to hold back the deer.” On the inside of the hedge, he planted domestic fruit and the rest of his garden. From the book:

This food-bearing hedge (sometimes called a fedge) fed both the deer and me. … As the hedge matured, deer became less of a problem for us. By the time the animals had munched around the hedge to its end, they were almost to the edge of the yard and showed little interest in turning back toward the house.

In this scenario, the hedge acts as a fence around the property and keeps the deer out. When they have plenty to eat, they don’t have an incentive to come inside your garden in search of other food. Thus, with some clever plant placement, you can solve your deer problem relatively cheaply and humanely.

Or so goes the theory, anyway.

How do you deter deer?