ForbesOnTech

Trying to Garden in Soil That's Been Compressed by Tons of Remodel Trash

For most of the gardening season this year, my best plot was rendered unusable by a  hulking construction debris box chock full of tons of lumber, plaster, concrete, and the detritus of our remodel.

            The debris box was hauled away, emptied and returned three times, to it’s spot over where for the last five years I’ve grown vegetables and been tormented by a clan of truly evil field voles.

            So when the debris box was finally removed a little more than a month ago I had feint hopes of getting at least one crop of tomatoes from the plot, and I sincerely believed that the local snakes would have wiped out the shallow burrowing voles. But when I got around to preparing the soil in the upper garden for planting, I quickly discovered the effects of tons of trash sitting in a metal box on what previously had been “perfectly balanced lose soil”. One week of using a pick and Maddox later, I was able to use my tiller to build two small rows for my last of the season French heirloom beefsteaks.

            How hard was the soil?  Well I’ve had to reset and sharpen the tines on my mighty Mantis two-cycle tiller and I’ve added 10 cubic feet of soil amendment to get the dirt back to a Ph level that’s conducive for tomatoes. And even after all that, four of my prized French beefsteak heirlooms, croaked within one week of going in the ground.

            On a whim I also planted Mad Max giant orange pumpkins in the just-reclaimed upper garden patch.  They took off right away, giving me just enough false hope to believe I might actually get something out of the beloved patch.

            And two weeks ago I discovered that the local vole and rattlesnakes were working in concert with the damn debris box to dash my hopes for produce in my upper garden this year.  

Unbeknownst to me, the voles and rattlers had signed a mutual non-aggression pack while living quite happily under the debris box. The net effect of this is that the voles now frolic in my garden, free of concerns about being injected with venom and subsequently eaten whole.

How was I to know that every vole in the county has an insatiable hunger for tender young pumpkin plants? Four plants in two weeks?

I surrender—until this winter during which season will have eradicated each of the little pests.

In the mean time, I have nearly two score tomato plants down in the lower garden, free of attacking rodents and later this evening. I may excavate and harvest the last of my Kennebec potatoes.

Of such small victories are smiles on a gardener’s’ face created.—Jim Forbes 07/20/2008.

When Your Best Made Plans Go Horribly Wrong--Miss Butterfly Meets Mr. Horned Toad

Sometimes your best intentions can have very bad repercussions.

Case in point: My love of wild things.

When I moved to my little mountain here in Escondido, one of the first things I noticed was a large population of Monarch butterflies flitting about my yard and hanging around a patch of milk weed at the base of my hedge in the front yard.

Seeing the Monarchs triggered two memories: First, Escondido was right in the path of the Monarch’s migration from Mexico to Monterey, CA; Second, I vaguely remembered learning that Monarchs were attracted to milkweed.

In the fullness of time, I started cultivating small clumps of milkweed, carefully transplanting them into one-gallon pots set along the walkway to my front yard as they matured And, it worked.

For the last several years, the milkweed has regularly hosted several colonies of Monarchs. This year has been the best so far. I’ve watched about 30 Monarchs make the transition from caterpillars to adult butterflies. Watching this process is  one of my ties to the natural world. And, I really enjoy having my coffee while I watch butterflies.

But this year I realized I had done something wrong. Very wrong! This morning I checked the milkweed pot by my patio and saw about five just-hatched butterflies drying their wings. So, I go in to the house and grab my coffee. But, when I come back, there is only one insect and there’s none flying around in the rose garden.

I glanced over at the base of the planter and saw a big fat horned toad with Monarch wings hanging out of his reptilian mouth. Swear to God, I think I saw him burp butterfly dust. The glutton!

Honest to God, I thought cultivating a plant that attracted Monarch butterflies would be a good thing. I didn’t know that I was setting up a cafeteria line for the local reptiles. There was something horribly wrong in my equation, but it’s just dark enough to make me chuckle.—Jim Forbes 07.01/2008.

here's What Happens When you have Untamed Water Presssure

Woops ,I think I may have a tad too much water pressure on the circuit down among the fruit trees. the sprinkler on the left is gear driven and lated 20 minutes before it blew its top. the one on the right, which  cost half as much as the larger sprinkler lasted all of seven minutes before it too blew its head off.  thank God Home Depot is only 4 miles away. i replaced these sprinklers with a Rabid oscillating sprinkler and now only open up my faucet half way. Everything is working well. High water pressure can be a good thing in the fire season, but I definitely have to put a regulator on the circuit down the hill. 120 pounds of pressure is a bit much.--Farmer Forbes 

Construction Debris Box and Portapotty Removed-- Huzzah the Remodel is Really Done!

Today will be a very good day for me.  The final phase of my remodel—new cabinets and a glass enclosure for my new tub and shower are in, marking the completion of the remodel we started seven months ago.

            The most difficult part of the remodel—living through the demolition of the eastern pary of my house here in Escondido to make room for aa fully self-sufficient in-law for MaForbes—was completed six weeks ago. The final phase/project was wrapped up yesterday afternoon.

            Sometime this morning I expect to see glorious rich brown earth that has hidden by construction debris box in mid December for the first time in 2008. The contractors’ portapotty will be removed at about the same time today.

            I’m going to celebrate by reopening my upper garden and tilling a 50 by 25-foot patch, and then planting two long rows of heirloom tomatoes and four or five melons as well as a couple of big pumpkin hybrids. I’ve got four rolls of quarters wrapped and set aside for my trip to the nursery and with just a little bit of luck my upper garden will be planted by Sunday.

            While the debris box has been sitting in the space where I’ve gardened for the last five years the voles have been quietly establishing their colony.  Voles are fecund, fast breeders, and my strategy is drown the suckers using my hose or use God’s own rodent eliminator-- weasels. I know this sounds hateful, but when it comes to my garden, it’s just me against the burrowing rodents.

            I also think I’ll buy a small stock tank and keep it filled with water out there. My reason? As long as they are prey/food, nearby if there are weasels on hand, they’ll come running for the combination of water and live chow. And nothing eliminates a garden full of gophers and evil voles faster than a mommy weasel and two hungry kits. Besides they’re highly amusing to watch.

            A battle between weasels and burrowing rodents or venomous serpents? There’s no reason to bet on the outcome. It’s a done deal.—Farmer Forbes with another how to attrract weasels to the garden strategy on 6/25/2008.

Peaches go Plop In the Night-- I Harvest 45 pounds

Gardening has become a core element of my stroke recovery program. It keeps me engaged in something that requires moderate physical activity. And it forces me to think critically about several processes that if done somewhat correctly yields tangible and tasty results.  Rolling past the middle of my gardening season I’ve already broken open and unearthed my Kennebec potato crop, picked and consumed several dozen ears of tasty fresh corn, and harvested enough tomatoes to fill four buckets.

            While I’ve written mostly about vegetables I have something to confess: I also have 28 hybrid tea rose plants in my rose garden, 48 cymbidium orchids in pots in my back yard and my garden is edged with California golden poppies and double blossom giant carnations.

            But it’s my small stone fruit orchard that gives me real pleasure. As I’ve learned, growing great fruit takes patience, planning and a lot of work. One of my biggest goals this year has been to grow and harvest a “perfect (freestone) peach.” I started my season by trying an organic solution to control peach leaf curl (which hinders fruit production by  often causing fruits to drop long before they’re ripe.

            When I discovered the solution didn’t work I fell back on plan B; removing each effected leaf  by hand—a process that kept me crawling around my two peach trees for three weeks. I also hit my peaches with an extra dose of manure, in the hope that I could stimulate vegetative growth.  In addition, I thinned my crop to give the fruit more room to grow.

The good news is that the sound of heavy plops in the middle of the Friday night awakened me to the fact that my peaches were almost ripe and ready for the picking. This afternoon I picked 45 pounds of peaches and I suspect I can talk MaForbes into making fresh peach cobbler tomorrow. Yum yum.

            Did I grow my  “perfect peach?” No, but I came damn close.  The fruit is so good looking and plump that you instinctively cradle the fruit after it’s picked and take extra care to make sure it’s not bruised in the harvesting process.

It didn’t take very long for my neighbors to notice me on thw ladder picking peaches.  Two of them showed up with their own buckets and helped with the harvest.

            The pay off for me isn’t the size or even the quality of my crops. It’s the pure satisfaction of working outside and growing something that’s healthy, refreshing and quite tasty. And every year I do this I learn I enjoy it more.

Now if I could only master growing a simple damn watermelon.

Oh well, there’s enough time left in the year to put two more vines in the ground.  Besides, if that doesn’t work, I have some monstrous pumpkins going in an unused corner of the garden. Who would have dreamed I would I turned into Farmer Forbes after a long career in journalism?—Jim Forbes 06/23/2008.

The Great Serpent Infestation of June 2008-- Road Runners Say "Meep, Meep,Thanks"

    It's been a wild week here at Rancho Bizarro. the temperature has hit 100-plus degrees four days running, the yellowtail fishing has been too fantastic to ignore and yesterday I discovered I had a genuine infestation of venomous serpents, of the noisy geometric pattern kind.

     My discovery of the phenom came as i was pulling weeds in the ice plants on the northern edge of my glorious rose garden. As i reached down to yank an errant dandelion I sensed movement to my left side.  What I glimpsed was a small rattler coiling with it's little tail raised high. I'm not someone who goes out of their way to kill rattlesnakes. In fact, i was raised to believe that they have an extremely important role in the  southern California ecosystem. As an avid gardener I appreciate rattlesnakes' appetite for gophers and voles. So, I grabbed my long handled hoe, draped the snake around its end and gently placed it in an overgrown field on the other side of my driveway.

     Going back to the task of weeding, I heard more rustling in the ice plants. Bingo, another small buzz tail captured and removed to the field. Two small --sub 18-inch--rattlesnakes by 10 AM makes me think a female rattler or two gave birth a week or so ago to babies near my house. Two more of about the same size as i worked down in my vegetable garden made me even more cautious.

    I think the local roadrunner colony appreciated my moving the snakes to the field. Riding my  ATV down to the street to pick up my mail, i saw one of  long legged birds that live on my mountain top striding down the road with a rattle snake hanging like spaghetti out of his beak.  I'm sorry for the rattle snake. But the image of ferocious road runner makes me smile.

    OK, I'm over being sorry about the little  buzz tails demise. For now.

     It's a long way from Escondido to Silicon Valley and somewhere when I was southbound on I-5 moving back to Southern California, I shed a layer of tough skin and morphed back into Jim the Naturalist.  I think the transformation happened somewhere around Kettleman City after I passed three miles of apricot orchards.--Jim Forbes 06/26/2008

The Right Tool for a Backbreaking Job

Swinging a mattock (the Hand tool on left) to chop and prepare hard packed clay landscaped plots for planting is not a much of fun.

But,if you look around  hard enough you occasionally find the right tool for the job.

In my case it was my cordless drill and an 18 by 1.0-inch auger bit(in my cordless drill pictured to the right of the mattock). By drilling 6-inch deep holes in the clay spaced in 8-inch diamond patterns, I was able to use my Mantis tiller  to break up the soil and mix in potting medium in about six hours.

Thanks to a sidewalk sale at a local discount tool store I was able to get my planters ready very quickly.

Oh, I managed to avoid hitting any of the irrigation pipes in my landscape plots too. A Happy Fathers' Day Gardening tips--Jim Forbes 06/15/2008

My Tomato Cages Aren't Plumb or Level, But I Don't Care-- Dancing Through Another Gardenining Season

The 100-foot patch of land where I normally garden here at Rancho Bizarro has been taken over by a huge construction debris box and a portable toilet for the contractors working on my two-day-from-completion remodel, so I’ve found new dirt to grow things in.

            Well it’s not exactly new dirt, judging from my experience tilling and cultivating the 80 by 20-foot patch in front of my house.  To be quite truthful, I’d have to classify it as dried hard-packed Triassic adobe. In one place the damn dirt was so hard I wiped out the teeth on my Mantis tiller. That really bummed me out.

            But I’m not a quitter, so I went to plan B: chopping ground like a mad man with a long handled mattock.  What the hell, I don’t really have anything else to do and I’m not about to sit out a gardening season because of a little thing like a massive remodel. The good news is that I’m about half way through the 2008 gardening season and all my neighbors have gotten baskets of fresh beefsteak tomatoes, fresh Italian broccoli and bags of fresh Kennebec potatoes.

            I’ve survived two massed attacks by voles and gophers and convinced the local bird population that it’s less worrisome to take the free food in my bird feeder than it is to dig up seeds I’ve planted.

            Two weeks ago I caged up my last crop of tomatoes.  My older brother, Saint Chuck, happened to be down for the day and I was showing him my garden, somewhat proudly.  So St.Chuck (who in real life is an accomplished land surveyor who teaches that trade to apprentices here in Southern California) looks at the cages cracks a frosty smile and says, “Why aren’t they plumb and level?”

            There never seems to be a pick ax around when you want it, damn it!

            I have to admit it: my steel wire cages are in their third season and have seen better days; furthermore, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to how they’re set, when I put them in.

            But to someone who checks and certifies the alignment of support girders in multi-story buildings, I suppose everything should be plumb and level at the top. Needless to say St Chuck went home with only a few beefsteaks that evening.

            I’m not a linear gardener. And truthfully, I don’t care a whit if my tomato plants are aligned perfectly, or if my rows of beets wander  left or right.

            I do love gardening, feeling the back of my neck grow a little redder every day I yank a bucket of weeds from my patch. And, I’m a full contact gardener, so I get to smell rich earth as the year cycles through. My gardening clothes are stained brown from rich San Diego soil, my fingers are dirt-stained and calloused, but I’ve found an avocation that keeps my busy, exercising my afflicted left hand. And at the end of the day, I find I have a little more fine motor control. That’s part of why I love gardening and why I don’t quit.

            Besides when I get discouraged by crops that don’t respond to my husbandry, I can a voice in the back of my mind, quietly speaking across five decades, “ Now, Jimmy, don’t be a quitter, and take time to enjoy what you do.”

Lordy me, it’s been 50 years this week since that voice was stilled, but I still hear it from time to time down here on perfect and imperfect days alike, in the nurturing soil of rural Southern California.—Jim Forbes 06/12/2208.

Remodeling Completed, It's time for Landscaping-- Back to Blogging.

Sorry for the absence. For the last three weeks, I’ve been swamped closing down the house in Azusa where I was raised and getting MaForbes settled in her new digs here at my house.

I’ve been very surprised by how much she likes living here and how much I appreciate the company. The only glitch I’ve had in the whole process was having  to install and removed a stacked washer dryer combo that was dead on arrival.

But now even that is a memory and life here at Rancho Bizarro is on an even keel.  The final part of my massive remodel is my responsibility. For the last ten days I’ve been knee deep in landscaping the extension to my house where MaForbes lives and the front of my house.

Four years of gardening here has made me appreciate how hard it us to break hard packed clay. But even my gardens left me unprepared for how difficult it’s been to break the soil where my new planters are going in.  The bright ray of sunshine to this problem appeared this morning when I stopped by a local discount tool store—Harbor Freight—and came across a package of three large diameter auger bits with ends that I thought would fit into my cordless drill.

            So there I was this morning drilling eight to 12-inch deep holes in the clay.  I lightly watered the plot with its approximately 100 holes, let it sit until this evening and fired up my Mantis two-cycle tiller. To my surprise, the mantis flew through the plot and my flowerbeds are now ready for the four cubic yards of “Tierra jardin” (enriched garden soil) that was delivered this afternoon.

I have about 60 plants to sink in the soil sometime tomorrow, including star jasmine, the smell of which I love outside my bedroom window.

My remodel is now done and I can enjoy a long soak in my Jacuzzi bath tub. Whopee!-- Farmer Forbes 06/07/2008.

Organic Gardening And Celebrating My Returning Weasels

Monday of this week, I was in garden heaven. The noontime temp out in the vegetable patch was right around 100 degrees. I picked four ripe tomatoes and a double handful of broccoli. It’s months like this that makes me glad I live in San Diego, where you can have a garden that produces table crops abundantly on a near year-round basis.

            The only limitations to my gardening are those imposed by my commitment to sustainable organic techniques.  I use no petroleum- or manufactured chemical additives of any kind and thus far the results of my four year commitment to this type of gardening have been very good.

            Also, I don’t grow Frankenfruit produce and limit myself to seeds from organic suppliers—most of which adhere to open pollination standards. This means in most years I’ve used $.88 bag steer manure for fertilizer, crushed oyster shells for calcium and ash from burned hardwood for potash. I also screen and fine my soil by hand at the start of the gardening season, carefully pulling out grubs, Jerusalem crickets and the like and putting them in a bucket for the neighborhood scrub jays and mocking birds, who seem to delight in my method of soil prep.

Once my garden if established I revert to Tom Sawyer-like pest control.  In middle age, I’ve managed to resurrect the ability to catch lizards by the diving and scooping technique of my long-ago youth. While my method of pest control may seem funny to some, I like using natural things to get rid of garden pests. I just wish the local ‘zard population had a taste for the slugs that are gobbling up my potato vine leaves. When bugs overwhelm the ‘zards I do use organic pesticides; a Canola oil based product and the old stand by of a mild soapy water and nicotine.  I’ve found that slugs really don’t like nicotine and for now this seems to be working on my potato patch.

Another pest control measure I’m using this year are rows of tobacco and burley plants on three sides of my garden. Anecdotally, this seems to work very well—providing you keep the tobacco four to five feet away from unvaccinated tomato plants.  So far this year, I’ve not seen a single white fly or horned worm in the garden. And, the tobacco (mostly Havana, but I also grow a Virginia hybrid) looks quite attractive.

One final thought on pest control. The weasels are back so that means that the gophers and voles that routinely feast on my vegetable roots have changed tense; going from “are alive” to “were alive, but have been consumed.” Damn I love watching the two weazettes gallop through the garden, even if they do occasionally eat my alligator lizards. And, like last year, on of the chick weasels appears to be nursing—always a good thing for a wild thing making a slow comeback.

Late last year, after talking to an agricultural biologist I met at my favorite nursery, I learned the secret to attracting weasels. The California long-tailed weasel really wants a supply of fresh water—which exists in my garden in the form of a 120 year-old hand made stone and cement watering trough set amidst my rose garden. And proof that the weasels like it can be seen once a week or so when I find a desiccated rattlesnake carcass at the bottom of the tank, and little weasel foot prints in the ground on the ground around the tank.

Wild weasels in a garden;  good. Rattlesnakes amongst my hybrid tea rose bushes;not so good.

Yeah Weazes!

One of the new crops I experimented with this year is an Early Girl-like tomato developed in Siberia. Although its fruits aren’t as large as an Early Girl, the Siberian tomatoes are sweet and seem to bear in about 45 to 50 days.

As my plants bear and die back, I uproot them and toss them to the part of may garden that “I’ll plant in June. I turn the decomposing plant material into the soil in the hope of raising the nitrogen content of my garden and aerating the clay-based soil.

Although it was hot early in the week, it’s raining cats and dogs now. And the temperature is dropping. I just checked my trusty barometer and saw that the pressure has dropped two-tenths of a point so I might just tent my tomatoes and potatoes in case it hails tonight.  Another year, Another garden. Jim Forbes, from rural San Diego County on 5/23/2008.