Bitter Cress and Groundsel are already seeding

Groundsel and bitter cress, blooming together

Bitter cress and groundsel are blooming and groundsel is seeding all over our valley about 2 months early, in January, indeed, before Christmas.  They usually start seeding in March.  You won’t get a better chance to eliminate them from your yard than the next few weeks—though a few plants can sprout and bloom all summer, right up to late fall. 

Young bitter cress, close up, abut 2 inches wide

While bitter cress is blooming, it is relatively easy to see by its tiny white four-petal flowers, though the smallest plants are not obvious; some are as tiny as a half-inch wide and 1.5 inches tall, fully seeded out.  The largest are 6” wide across the basal leaves with numerous stalks up to 18 inches tall seeded out.  They are easiest to pull when they have started to develop seed pods.

Just before they bloom, the larger plants are good to eat as a hot, bitter mustard green.  They are small, but softer and juicier than most mustards, good in a salad.  But don’t let them seed out; they are a nuisance.

Seeded bitter cress, popped out and ugly.

They become a nearly invisible green mist when all the flowers are finished, but as they turn yellow and dry, they become an eyesore, and pop their seeds up to three feet in all directions at the slightest disturbance of the pods.  By this time, seed control is impossible; all one can do is pull the dry stalks and resolve to do better next year. 

Groundsel, blooming and seeding in a ditch

Groundsel is also blooming right now, quickly blowing out and spreading to your neighbors’ yards or from them.  It is a miniature wild lettuce and not pretty, up to a foot tall, with squared-off leaves; the flowers are yellow, do not open fully, bending over while they are in bloom, straightening as they make seed.  It is the first blowing weed of the season, blooming in yards and empty lots all over town.  It’s often easy to pull, but like other wild lettuce, sticks hard in hard ground.  Cutting it under its crown, in the soil beneath where the leaves grow, will kill it.

Dandelions are also blooming and seeding about 2 months early.  A famous gardener once said that if dandelions were rare and hard to grow, they would be a prized flower.  Their dead-heads don’t even look bad, and they can be tasty greens before they bloom—but once buds even start to form in the base, they turn quite bitter. 

Dandelions are equally hard to pull before and after blooming:  not easy at all unless your soil is loose from generous mulching with compost or leaves.  With big perennial tap roots like these, it’s best to stick a shovel in next to the root, loosen, and pull. 

Gardening is growing plants where you want them to grow, not where they happen to land.  Many a pretty flower or edible plant shows itself to be a weed unless kept under tight control, and that goes double for flowers that cast their seeds to the wind.

Revised Jan-Feb 2015 issue, online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and at the Mail Center, 305 NE 6^th

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Litter is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

Recent temperature extremes support global drying

12/16/14

The Oregonian prints summaries of Earthweek every Friday.  Last week, the headline was "Quickening Extremes:" "The number of outbreaks of extreme heat and cold around the world during the past three decades increased more rapidly than the rate of global warming, which scientists say is fueling the trend."

One suspects that the scientists involved are all climate scientists who have long bought into trace-gas warming alarmism.  Weathermen and physicists know that dryness brings on extremes of temperature, as Arizona's desert illustrates: cold nights and hot days in summer; colder nights and days in winter; and cooler days and warmer nights during the humid summer monsoon season.

One cannot find any article on Oregonlive.com unless it is written by their writer.  So I looked it up on Earthweek: http://www.earthweek.com/2014/ew141212/ew141212a.html.  It has a lot more information than the Oregonian brief.  But their page does not allow one to copy and paste.

It continues, "Researchers at the UK's University of East Anglia looked at temperature records from 1883 to 2013 before coming to the conclusion.

"They found that the occurrence of unusually cold periods had been increasing at a faster rate than heat waves until 30 years ago."

"But the trend reversed in 1983, when extreme heat events became more frequent."

"Temperatures were also found to be more variable in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere, mainly because there is less landmass south of the Equator to make weather systems more complex."

This fits with the increase in modern irrigation from 1883 to 1983, which was about the time the water-saving no-lawn movement began, followed by water price hikes in cities to save water, regardless of local supplies and conditions.  In Grants Pass, overpricing has been too successful, with seemingly half the town going dry in summer.  

I was part of the anti-lawn movement until a few years ago, simply because I hate mowing.  But as a professional gardener for the last 14 years, I have come to realize that replacing lawn with ground covers, shrubs, flowers, especially edibles does not save any water over lawn, as most plants and all vegetables need an inch of water per week, just like lawn.  

Lawns and hedges are also easier for most people to maintain, as it takes little knowledge to water deep, give everything a haircut, and to weed out everything but lawn grasses.  But with high water prices, many have simply stopped watering and weeding.  They can't afford to water, and no one likes to maintain ugly, so they ignore the yard and its weeds and play indoors.  

Since they can't garden without water, the poor are not learning how to garden, and paid gardeners are scarce.  Our Food Bank rents farmland from the City to supply the poor, and gets middle class volunteers to weed it.  The poor used to supply the Food Bank with excess vegetables and enter their best produce in the Fair.  Produce entries in the Fair are pitifully few these days, spread out thinly through a huge building.

A bit over a year ago, after reading this article in Science News on irrigation from Central California farms increasing monsoon rains in the Four Corners area and water in the Colorado River, I did a study of weather in Grants Pass from 1983 to 2013, and wrote this blog post.  

It shows that midsummer monthly high temps dropped slightly from 1993 to 2003, and then rose a lot from 2003-2013.  In the same two decades, midsummer rainfall dropped by 0.9 inches per decade, and July and August high rainfall events were lower than those in June and September.  In the first decade, when we were nearly all watering, July and August rainstorms were bigger than in June and September, which fit with my memories of frequent wet summer thunderstorms when I lived here between 1985 and 1987.  

When this area was first settled by white people, it was called the Agate Desert.  It takes a lot of irrigation to grow food here.

Sprinkler irrigation cools, humidifies, and reduces weather extremes.  Less irrigation can only do the reverse, especially with high temperatures.  Drip contributes some humidity through transpiration from plants, but not like throwing water in the air and all over the plants.  The effects are seen the most in the interior of the continents, far from the moderating humidity of the ocean.

 



 at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia looked at temperature records from 1881 to 2013 before coming to the conclusion.

They found that the occurrence of unusually cold periods had been increasing at a faster rate than heat waves until 30 years ago.

But the trend reversed beginning in 1983, with extreme heat events becoming more frequent.hers at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia looked at temperature records from 1881 to 2013 before coming to the conclusion.

They found that the occurrence of unusually cold periods had been increasing at a faster rate than heat waves until 30 years ago.

But the trend reversed beginning in 1983, with extreme heat events becoming more frequent.

Leave leaves on your lawn

Just enough leaves on a lawn to stop weeds but not good grass

People are way too afraid of leaves on lawns.  Perennial grass is stronger than you might think.  A pile of leaves will leave a hole in a lawn.  Two inches or more will allow grass to grow through only here and there.  But a few layers will not stop perennial grasses from jumping right up in the spring.  They have enough food in their roots to push through light layers of leaves.  Leaves keep the soil warmer than no leaves and make it more fertile as the worms eat them through the winter, so grasses grow stronger in the spring.

Leaves not only feed soil and keep it warmer to grow grass better, but they stop small seeds like crabgrass; annual rye; Bermuda grass, nut sedge; dandelions; wild lettuce; and groundsel, the first of the wind-blown weeds to bloom in the spring, by keeping sun off the soil.  They also stop mosses, which like these weeds, need sun on bare soil to germinate.  Large annual grass seeds, like cheat and foxtails, can push through a few layers of leaves and need to be pulled.  You can tell them from perennial grass sprouts by their color, which is a lighter green with wider blades than perennial grass, or by their seed stalks later in the spring.  Crab grass, which sprouts in late spring, are very fat even when very short, and are best pulled small.

The weakest perennial grass is probably perennial rye sod, which most lawns on new construction are built with.  It is not a true sod grass; it is a clumping grass held together by plastic net.  Its roots are short for cutting off its clay soil base and transplanting, so it only lasts about 5 years before being invaded by stronger grasses.  Clumping grasses don’t spread by rhizomes, underground stems, but depend on reseeding to refill bare spots that form when clumps die, so it pays to reseed it in the fall before allowing leaves to cover, or rake it into the leaves in spring.  Its seeds are large enough to push through a few layers of leaves when they are ready to grow.  Perennial rye seed grows deeper roots than rye sod, and can create a stronger lawn as the sod grass dies out if it is reseeded yearly. 

Perennial grasses prefer to grow longer north of California, as the sun is lower and they need to be taller to catch the sunlight.  Two inches tall is good in summer, but 3-4 inches is better in winter.  Not cutting grass too short in summer or winter also helps keep sun off soil to prevent weeds and moss. 

A mulching mower can break up the leaves and help them to lie heavy enough between the grasses to keep small weed seeds from sprouting, but whole leaves will not stop the good grass from growing from roots or seed if they are not too thick.

Use leaves to stop weeds

Oak leaves covered with pine needles to keep them in place

Leaves are starting to fall, and they are way too useful to just rake up and put on the curb for pickup.  It’s also a lot of work to rake them out of your shrubbery and flower beds.  Leaves are natural mulch that feed soil and stop weeds, and the thicker they lie, the better they do it.  A foot of mixed leaves can grow great vegetables. They belong on bare soil and mulched beds. 

Leaves laid thick for growing vegetables

Leaves need to be removed from buildings, pavements and paths.   They should not lie too thick on lawns, where they can smother grass, but even there, they can suppress crab grass and other small seeds, while stronger perennial grasses like fine and tall fescues, can grow right through several inches as the soil warms in the spring; they are encouraged by the fertility.  Larger annual grasses, like cheat and fox tails, need a good two inches to stop them.
Most small seeds need a touch of sunlight to allow them to germinate, lest they sprout too deep and are unable to grow out from under their cover.  The larger the seed, the more food it has to grow through soil or leaf cover.  But the smaller the seeds, the more there are to sprout.  Once larger seeds have sprouted, it can be easier to smother them with mulch, if they are covered before they put a lot of food in their roots.

Naturally fallen Red Maple leaves stopping bitter cress and annual rye

Leaves vary in their ability to stop weeds from sprouting.  Very soft light leaves, like box elder, can be eaten by worms, pill bugs, earwigs, and other detritus eaters before fall is even over, and are good for feeding soil, but are fairly useless for stopping weeds in the spring.  Not-so-soft leaves, like red maple, will make it through the winter and stop early spring weeds like groundsel and bitter cress.  Tougher leaves, like oak, sweet gum, and magnolia, stick around all summer, and prevent the germination of later-flying wild lettuce and dandelions and tracked-in crab grass.

Non-broadleaf evergreens also vary in their ability to stop weeds.  Pine needles and needle-type true cedars are tough and take a long time to decompose, but their shape allows seeds to grow through unless they are over an inch thick.  Flatter evergreens, like fir and local cedars, decompose more quickly, but seem to stop weeds fairly well anyways.

One kind of soft leaf can stop weed seeds smaller than a maple nut all summer, even after they are gone: black walnut.  They have juglone, a natural pre-emergent herbicide.  They are not a problem for established perennials, but they stop smaller seeds even after the soil is bare.  Spread under a tree where birds perch, they can stop blackberries and other berry seeds from sprouting where they are laid at least an inch deep.

Use leaves; don’t lose them.  They can save you a lot of work.

October issue, online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com, sold at the Mail Center, 305 NE 6^th St. 

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Litter is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener                 541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Keep food and drink cool with water

You can keep food and drinks cool on a camping trip or in an emergency without ice or a refrigerator, using the powerful cooling ability of water, which evaporates at 41 degrees, and therefore can cool stuff to 41 degrees, regardless of air temperature, as long as relative humidity is not 100%.

Take a jug of water.  Put it in a shallow pan.  Cover it with a towel, and let the ends of the towel lie in the pan.  Pour water over the towel and fill the pan.  The water evaporates from the towel, which wicks more water from the pan, cooling the towel and the mass of water beneath it eventually to 41 degrees F, the point below which water stops evaporating.   Theoretically, one could cool a box of food by setting it in a bigger box and covering it with a wet towel that lies in water in the larger box.  I cool and keep grapes and melon slices fresh, moist and free of flies by covering their bowl with a wet towel set in a shallow pan of water.

One might think that standing water would likewise cool off to 41 degrees, because it evaporates.  But it has a smooth surface with surface tension, allowing relatively little evaporation compared to a towel, which has a rough surface with lots of surface area to evaporate from, and no surface tension.  Towels are made to suck up and evaporate water efficiently. 

Standing or flowing water also sucks up heat from the mass that it is sitting in or flowing over and holds it in its mass, so a low-running creek or river or standing water can get warm, because it does not evaporate faster than it soaks up heat. 

The water cycle that makes summer thunderstorms depends on evaporation and condensation.  We used to water most of our in-town properties and most of our farmland back in the '80s with sprinklers, and we had frequent wet storms in midsummer, more frequent and stronger uphill and upstream in Jackson  and Klamath Counties, keeping our creeks running. 

In the ‘90s many cities started raising water prices to save water, regardless of local supply or costs.  Drip irrigation and letting lawns dry came into fashion.  Watering plants with drip saves water at the price of losing the evaporative cooling effect of wet plants and soil, and thereby reducing the water cycle that makes summer rain.  Letting land go dry stops most transpiration from plants, and makes no rain.  Half or more of our town and farms are dry.

Now we get more dry storms and forest fires, and creeks going dry that used to run year-round. We have lost nearly a tenth of an inch of midsummer rainfall per decade for the last two decades.  Our July and August storms used to be larger than those in June or September.

September issue, published in GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com, sold at the Mail Center, 305 NE 6^th Street

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Water is not precious; it overpriced.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener            541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Good mulch brings good bugs

Leaves under butternut squash and tomatoes

A gentleman of my acquaintance asked me what to do about squash bugs.  I said that I never really have a problem with squash bugs.  Turns out that the people he is helping with their farm are using plastic mulch to control weeds and row covers to try to control insect pests. 

I pointed out that what controls bad bugs are good bugs, predators that eat the plant eaters, and the most effective ones require good mulch like leaves to live under.  When you have plastic mulch or bare soil, you lose all the spiders, centipedes, ground beetles, and soldier beetles, to name a few of the most effective predators in the garden.

Warming rocks under peppers.  They warm the soil at night, cool it during the day.

Almost all of these predators live exclusively under loose mulch and rocks.  Soldier beetles spend the spring month of their adult lives flying, eating aphids, mating, and laying their eggs under mulch, where their larvae live under the mulch the remaining 11 months of the year, eating anything they can catch and kill.  If you have no loose organic mulch, you will have no soldier beetles laying eggs, and few or none of the others.

He said that the plastic mulch is needed to keep weeds down.  I said that leaves do that.  Not only do they keep sun off the seeds that need light to sprout, but they are a poor sprouting surface, as they dry out quickly, so seeds that land on top cannot sprout either.  Only larger seeds can get through 2 inches of leaves, and they are easily pulled; it is the tiny seeds that need sunlight on soil that are hardest to control without mulch.

4x8 sand and rocks under peppers and melons.  Insects are not under sand, only under rocks.  Sand is too hot.  Walk-on fir bark is beyond.

Plastic mulch cannot feed soil, while leaves are the natural food of worms and other detritus eaters, who turn them into soil.  One eater of detritus is the earwig, which many think of as a pest.  They are rather creepy in their habit of hiding in flowers and foliage during the day and coming out when they are brought into the house, but they don’t generally eat live plants; they eat the fungus out of dead or living leaves and can actually eat fungus, like rust on hollyhocks, out of your plants. 

Wikipedia considers earwigs omnivorous and says that they eat insects and plants.  Scientists seem to have missed that they love the fungus-infected parts of leaves.  They are said to eat corn silks as well, but I always have many earwigs and no corn silk damage.  Without fungus-ridden rotting leaves to eat, earwigs have only the softer parts of live plants to eat.

Two inches of leaves is great for stopping weeds and feeding soil.  12 inches or more can make wonderful soil and grow huge plants as they decompose.  Start next year’s garden by gathering your leaves this fall, rather than giving them to the trash company for compost.  They will make wonderful compost in your garden if you just let them lie there, and add to them.

Control Cobweb Spiders with Mist

The "cellar spider," family Pholcidae, is our most common local cobweb builder and the one referred to in this article.  They grow up to an inch or so across.  Black widows and their relatives are more commonly considered cobweb spiders, going by the Internet.  

Cobweb spiders have hatched, and are dirtying houses with their dirty little webs.  Unlike other web builders, a cobweb spider doesn’t clean and repair its web; it camps until the web gets dirty and then moves on to another spot, the homeless vagrant of the web-spider world.  A dirty, visible web is useless to the spider, except to steer flies into its new, invisible web.  But they sure mess up a house, inside and out, and shrubbery as well.  Cobwebs scream neglect to thieves and encourage other disorderly conduct, like littering and breaking windows.

Last summer’s fires were very hard on cobweb spiders and other web builders, showing up their webs with ash.  Cobwebbers starved except under cover; they could not build new webs fast enough, though they sure tried, covering shrubs all over town.   There have been relatively few cobwebs this spring until now.  

Daddy Long Legs, AKA harvestmen, family Opiliones, are not spiders, having one body section, not two.

Daddy long-legs have become common where they were rare, as they don’t build webs, but just walk around.  Cobwebs certainly mess up their hunting range, and could be a hazard to them.

Rain is also hard on cobweb spiders, because they are delicate, and too much water can stick their legs together.  Rain also shows their webs, so they build webs under cover until the weather is dry, when they spread into the shrubbery.  This is another good reason to use sprinklers rather than drip or soaker hoses, besides making rain.

A customer’s neighbor in her duplex has rough siding covered with tiny, dirty spider webs, with larger webs under the eve on his front porch, but she had few on her portion of the duplex, and she has needed little web cleaning thus far this year. 

This standing mister usually sells around $10.

Last year, during the fires, she started using misters to keep her plants happy, settle the smoke and breathe easier, and she has loved the results.   When they are on, it takes only a few minutes for them to show all the webs within 8 feet, allowing this gardener to clean them off with a web duster. 

There are many brands of this tool available on the web.

A web duster, a pom-pom shaped broom head that can be attached to an extendable pole, is also needed for cobweb spider control, since as soon as the misters are turned off and the webs dry out, they are good for catching food again, and the mist doesn’t reach to the high eves.  Using a duster alone, it is an endless battle to keep the cobwebs down.  The two together can do wonders.

If you don’t have misters, cobwebs in shrubs are better controlled with hoses and spray nozzles that adjust from spray to jet than with a web duster.  Or you can use a sprinkler and web duster.  But the jet reaches inside the shrubs where you can’t see.