Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

Here is an image of our Bleeding Heart plant. It has started to break through the soil already. It grows about three feet tall and has hundreds of little heart-shaped flowers that bloom all summer long. This is a red variety, though we planted unsuccessfully a white one last year as well.

Here in the Northwest we do have the native Pacific Bleeding Heart, but our plant is the common domesticated Dicentra spectabilis - with much rounder and bigger flowers.

This is a close-up on the little shoots.

Here is another image of Jen’s pruning handwork/swath of destruction .

As you can see, its a bit wet out out there - that is the plum tree, I think. Not much to report here, just something to use for comparison later.

For Valentine’s Day, I decided not to buy Jen a dozen roses, ’cause, well, I just don’t do that kind of thing; if I did, she’d probably assume I did something wrong and was trying to make up for it. Also, there were reports that the flowers grown and sent on Valentines day were actually bad for the environment, and I am not about to have that on my conscience.

Knowing that I had to come up with something, I did some almost-serious thinking; I decided that in keeping with the theme of my blog here, I would buy her a new little planter pot and some seeds. So I bought her a nice little blue terra cotta pot as well as some very good smelling sweet peas. I had hoped that she could plant them and then take the whole thing to work to watch grow all year. When I got home, I looked at the back of the packet, and it said “grows 6 feet”- oops. Maybe she can erect some sort of cubicle sized trellis.

Here is the before mentioned box of lettuce. As you can see, it has sprouted now, beating not only the frost and freeze but also the fact that they are more-than-two year old seeds.

When you buy mixed green in those little tubs at Costco or wherever, they are apparently chopped down using a laser cutter, so as to avoid bruising the lettuce. I think we’ll just use the regular kitchen shears for harvesting methods.

We have a few dozen of these wood boxes around the house. Hopefully at some point I can figure out a rotation with planting to ensure that we have year-round patio-fresh lettuce.

This past weekend, while I was no doubt taking a nap, my wife Jen decided that it was right time to prune the fruit trees. I walked outside in the late afternoon to find her teetering in the middle of an old apple tree with what looked like the remnants of a massacre at its base. Branches, sticks, small logs littered at the foot of most of the trees in my backyard.

What madness hath she wrought on these poor trees!

You can see some of her handiwork in that picture. She had just finished giving the two on the left a buzzcut.

The trees that we inherited had, at one time, been trained. But much like our lawn, they had been on the former owners’ back burner of projects. So the darned old things, wanting to grow every year, focus their energy into thin branches that shoot straight up from the tree - these are called, and I am not kidding, suckers. These small branches will suck the energy of the plant into growing these multiple, literally fruitless shoots, and not spend that same energy on making quality apples or pears.

The best time to prune, I gather, is late in the winter, a practice called dormant pruning. In late fall, the trees build up energy stores to aid the plant through the winter. When you remove the little sucker branches from the tree, that stored energy is still in the plant. So, when it starts back up in the spring, it will be able to focus its energy more effectively, encourage planned growth and hopefully setting the stage for more fruit from the tree. Get it?

Jen readily admitted she had no idea what she was doing, chomping and cutting mostly by intuition and assumption. She may have killed the trees, but at least she took action, right?

I am sure she did enough reading on it and just decided to put a little mid-winter doubt into our backyard equation. We looked at some of the neighbors trees and they are similar in shape to what we ended up with.

More or less.

When we bought this house, the back yard was the jewel of the purchase. It is big and open and sunny, great for parties and just sitting around and reading.

But it was permeated with insidious weeds.

The battle for a green lush lawn v one choked with weeds is a grueling war of attrition. The minute you yield an inch to the weeds, it can take months or years to win back what you previously controlled. The former owners of this house started out with one child - by the time they sold it, they were at number three. Consequently, their attention necessarily changed from working on the yard and garden to their children.

By the middle of my first summer here the whole yard was covered with evil dandelions, covered with clover and thick with moss. I set to eradicate the dandelions quickly with the use of Round Up and other nasty chemicals. The moss, however, I told myself, was not an issue, since it looked green and didn’t grow very much.

After some research into how to reclaim my yard, I learned that moss is one of the factors that can choke out a compromise a lawn. Eventully this may increase room for weeds to squeeze their way into you yard. Grass lawns are like a thick carpet: it forms a dense thatch between which few weeds can grow. Thus, the healthier the lawn, the fewer weeds can succeed.

Entering my third summer here, I have decided that it is time to declare war on the moss, and reclaim this back yard. I bought new seed/fertilizer spreader and some Moss Out fertilizer.

This is the fertlizer. I bought three bags, enough for 15,000 square feet.

Here is a close up of the lawn and the moss. You have to admit is is pretty.


Here is a picture of my new spreader.

So, I went ahead an purchased a new digital camera. I won’t tell you its brand, as I am still in the process of boycotting that companies terrible warranty policies. Lets just say that it seems like a nice camera, and I hope it lasts more than 14 months.

The bright side is that I can now start to upload pictures on this site. w00t!

(for part I, click here; for part II, click here)

The last part of the NPK ratio is Potassium, logically represented on the periodic table by the letter k. Potassium is an alkali metal commonly found in Potash.

What is the purpose of Potassium in the soil? It helps build strengthen the plant structure and helps protect against disease. Here in the Northwest, we have a tremendous amount of Potassium naturally existing in the soil. To illustrate, think about the most common plants: strong and tall trees.

Potassium (in the form of Potash) is often applied to cereal crops - when you are paid proportionally for the mass of what you sell, you would want to grow a bulkier and heavier plant. But when we are dealing with growing vegetables, we want the plant to focus on producing fruit at the expense of the structure. We can make a tomato cage to support the plant in exchange for it producing more and better fruit

Fast Facts about Potassium:

-The letter K is from the Latin word kalium.
-It is the seventh most abundant element on Earth.
-Its atomic weight is: 39.0983
-It is atomic number 19

(for part I, click here)

The second of our elements in the NPK Ratio is Phosphorus. This is the glowing element that is represented by the letter P on the periodic table. It is an inorganic element commonly found concentrated in nature in the form of rock phosphate.

What is the purpose of Phosphorus in gardening? It helps promote vigorous and healthy root growth of the plant. It also helps on the cellular level, encouraging rapid growth, which is especially important when the plant is a seedling.

In the Northwest, a good deal of this natural phosphate has been leached out from the rain. As I noted before, we are looking for a 5-5-1 NPK ratio in our garden soil. We can reintroduce this back into our soil by using a natural fertilizer made of ground phosphate rock or through bone meal fertilizers.

Fast Facts about Phosphorus:

-The word Phosphorus is derived from Greek - phôs meaning “light”, and phoros meaning “bearer.”
-It is never found as a free element in nature.
-Its atomic weight is: 30.97376
-It is atomic number 15

So, Canon, even though they said that my repair was covered under Warranty, has turned around and said that it would cost me over $100 to fix my new old camera. In the same email, they also stated that if I wanted to forgo getting it repaired, I can go ahead and just pay the $99 for a refurbished one.

I called them and explained how the website had told me it was still covered by warranty even though it was 14 months pas the purchase date. They told me that they can only lower the repair cost by 20%, which is still 80$ - more than I was intending to spend on a camera that is on eBay going for 65$. 

Ugh.

This has really put me in a bad mood. Now I have to decide whether I want to have them fix it, or use that $100 toward a new camera from a different company.