Happy Earth Day

St. Louis has a big Earth Day Festival each year, but we missed it today. The weather was just too nice not to spend it in our own yard. Doug raked acorns and de-thatched* the front yard, while I started on a wine bottle border for one of our garden beds. I managed to get all of my food plants fed and mulched today as well, so I feel I've accomplished something.

In early spring, just before the first time you mow, you may notice a lot of little purple violets in your yard. It blows my mind that so many people think of them as weeds: I think they're beautiful. The leaves and flowers are also edible (provided you do not use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides on your lawn). They taste mild, like a lettuce, and they make for a beautiful salad!

As with most plants, violets seem to look fresher if you pick them in the morning. If you're not going to eat them right away, place them in a bowl and cover with cold water. They'll keep that way for hours, maybe longer but I've never tried. I use a "Salad Spinner" to dry them before use. That's all the prep you need: even the flower stems are edible.



* When you've been organic for awhile, you shouln't have to de-thatch your lawn. However, we're in transition since we have only been here 18 months, and the lawn has suffered from years of high fertilization and short mowing: a perfect recipe for thatch.

Fabulous Weekend!

The calendar says spring started weeks ago, but this was really the first weekend of spring in the St. Louis area. We had two perfect days (60's & 70's), and trees everywhere are in bloom!

The nurseries are starting to get a better selection of plants, so I picked up a columbine, a calla, and a few gerber daisies to fill in some areas of the yard. I planted brussels sprouts, garlic, cauliflower, and onions in a bed that my husband double-dug for me a few weeks ago. I don't know how I'm going to line the raised bed (wood? bricks? bottles?) or what its final shape will be, so instead of letting it sit there while I make up my mind, I just planted it. Most of the veggies in there will be through by mid-summer so I can deal with how the bed should look then. At least it no longer looks like a grave!

Other beds got cabbage, broccoli and lettuce. Some spinach that I planted in the fall and gave up on seemed to spring up overnight, and we ended up eating two bunches of it with dinner yesterday. A bunch of the vegetable transplants ended up in flower beds. I love mixing flowers and veggies!

I also made some progress on planning for the garden club. No details yet, but it looks like things may get off the ground in July.

Images for bloggers

I came across this site while reading a web analytics (that's my day job) blog, and thought I'd try it out. The site is called PicApp (www.picapp.com), and it provides legal copyrighted photos for use on blog sites, in exchange for some advertising embedded in the photos. They do have some gardening photos so I thought I'd give it a try.

My disclaimer is that I have no control over what they advertise, so obviously I don't endorse anything you might see in the ad.

Worms!

Last weekend's near-80-degree weather is just a distant memory with our 10+ inches of snow outside. This winter -- our third in St. Louis -- has by far been the coldest and snowiest.

I vermicompost in my kitchen, and last summer I also started an in-ground worm bin outside. Before winter, I piled 3-4 feet of shredded oak leaves on top of the bin with the hope that it would provide some insulation: prior winters weren't all that cold, at least not for any extended period of time. I was pleasantly surprised last weekend to discover that not only have the worms survived this cold winter so far, but they appear to have thrived!

After yesterday's snowfall, I'm probably more concerned about flooding them out when it melts than I am about the cold, since the snow provides a lot of insulation and it's not the bitter cold we had earlier.

Copyrights on Seeds

Here's an interesting (and scary) post on Techdirt about another way that big agribusiness is trying to push small farmers out of business.

Transitioning your lawn to organic

The prior owner of our house had one of those trophy lawns... you know the type. "Perfect," green, short, high-maintenance, and high chemical input. We've even had neighbors tell us how much they were impressed with the prior owner's lawn. If you live in a house with one of those "perfect" lawns, it'll probably take a little longer to get it looking good organically: your lawn is like a drug addict, and it'll take awhile from it to recover from its high-nitrogen, frequent-watering ways.


Compost quick-start to an organic lawn

How much you fuss with your yard -- and how quickly you can get it into good, organic shape -- depends in part on how large your yard is. We used this method on our 1/2 acre yard in Texas and, although it was a lot of work (and required a *lot* of compost), the lawn looked fantastic even when it was in transition from chemical to organic. We have close to an acre now, so I expect it'll take a lot longer (or require a lot more work) before our lawn recovers.

Materials:

• A garden fork (like a pitchfork, but with thicker tines).
• Good-quality compost; I don't know if cotton burr compost is available around here, but that's what we've used in the past. Mushroom compost is also good. Look at nurseries instead of home improvement stores, and steer clear of the composted cow manure that you get in the big box stores: it's too heavy and muddy, and the quality varies too much.
• Rake.
  
• Water hose or sprinkler.
  

Stick the lawn fork in the grass and rock it gently back and forth to open up some holes. Repeat every few feet in the yard. This is going to accomplish several things:

1. If your lawn has thatch, this is going to open up spaces in the thatch layer to allow water and nutrients to reach the soil.
2. It aerates the soil: oxygen is important for good plant growth.
3. It allows the compost to be applied further down to the soil where it's needed.

Next, sprinkle compost over your lawn. How much should you use? Even a little will help, but ideally you'd like enough to provide a 1/2-inch or so over the entire yard. Rake it in to work the compost down into the holes you just created with the garden fork, and to fluff up the grass so it doesn't get smothered under the compost.

Water it in. This step is optional, to get your grass looking better faster. Compost does not burn your lawn and you shouldn't have applied enough to smother the grass, so if you choose to wait for the next rain that's ok.

Maintenance

Whether or not you choose to start with compost, you can still maintain your yard without synthetics. The secret is to mow regularly, and keep your mower on the highest height setting. Longer leaves on the grass allow for deeper roots, which are more resistant to our summer dry spells. Mowing regularly also helps to keep weeds under control. If you need to water, water deeply (at least 1-2 inches) but not often -- maybe once/week during a dry part of summer. This also encourages deeper root growth.

Don't think "fertilization" . . . think "food". There are companies that make prepackaged organic lawn amendments, but you can't find any you can start in the feed store. We use cotton seed meal on our yard since that's something we've been able to find here in the St. Louis area. Alfalfa meal, coffee grounds, Mexican bat guano, or other amendments can also be used to provide nitrogen to your lawn. In the spirit of "food" not "drugs", I prefer to alternate amendments instead of using the same thing over and over. Most organic amendments won't burn if you use a lot or are not watered in, but be careful with bat guano because it's stronger and can burn if you use too much. As with any fine powder, wear a mask to avoid breathing it in.

You do not have to be careful about application rates when applying organic amendments since most don't burn, but a good rule of thumb is 25 pounds per 1000 square feet. This means that a 40-pound bag will cover 1600 square feet. Different amendments have different recommended application rates, but they all have a pretty wide range. You can find a fertilizer calculator here if you want to be more precise.

"Weeds" are an interesting subject for an organic homeowner. Nature always seems to thrive best with diversity, while monocultures invite pests and diseases. If you're going after a monoculture lawn (the traditional "perfect" one), you're probably not going to have the healthiest one. Mowing high and hand-pulling the worst of the weeds is often all that is required.

Corn gluten meal can be used to keep the weed population in check. Corn gluten meal works by preventing seed germination, so obviously it won't work on weeds that spread through other methods. In order to get the benefit from this product, you need to apply it at the right time, which is just as it's getting warm enough for weed seeds to germinate. If weeds are already growing in your yard then it's probably too late. It also takes a couple years of applying each spring before you'll see full benefit, since it doesn't eliminate 100% of weeds. Corn gluten meal is also a pretty decent fertilizer so even if you didn't get the timing right for the weeds you'll still get the benefit of the nutrients. If you can find an inexpensive source of corn gluten meal (perhaps at feed stores) then it's a low-risk thing to try, but if you can only find expensive prepackaged sources then the payoff might not be worth it.

Does this really work?

We rented a house for a year after we moved here, while we figured out where we wanted to buy. It was in a neighborhood full of well-maintained (but not organic) lawns: most people paid a service to mow & fertilize, and those that didn't housed guys who faithfully rode the lawnmower every Saturday morning. Our house sat vacant for a while before we rented, so although the yard was mowed regularly it obviously wasn't fussed with very much. The summer before we moved, imagine my husband's pride when the next door neighbor -- one of the faithful Saturday morning mowers -- asked my husband what was his secret, since our lawn always looked so good, especially considering that we rented!

We'll have more challenges with the new house, I suspect. Instead of the pretty green grass (I don't even know what type) we find in the shady areas, we have zoysia -- and drug-addicted zoysia at that -- all over the sunny parts of the yard. I'll keep you posted on our progress.

Skippers

I guess I'm not a very good lepidopterist. I didn't realize that, in addition to butterflies and moths, there is a third family of lepidoptera called skippers. I found this out while trying to identify this "butterfly" on my African Blue Basil plant.

One way to tell the difference is with the antennae. Butterflies' are clubbed, skippers' are hooked, and moths' are often ferny. If you click on the photo to enlarge you can see the hooks on this guy's antennae.



The skipper's wings also remind me of a paper airplane, or maybe nature's version of the FA-18.