Time to feed the garden

Especially if you have a raised bed, it is time to feed your garden. You'll notice some yellowing and plants starting to not perform as well this time of year and this is because they have exhausted the nutrient base their roots are in.

To replenish this naturally you can brew your own organic fertilizer.

This is a good video on the simple process.
 However I use different ingredients to replenish the minerals we need in out food to help us be more healthy.

One is fresh worm castings, these are rich with micronutrients you can not substitute out of a plastic bottle. We discussed a worm farm earlier, to get the fresh worm castings simply go to the bottom tray and dig out the most digested dirt. Pile it up on small cones and any worms will work their way to the bottom in a few minutes, then take the top of the pile and put it in a nylon bag as the video discusses.

Number Two is Volcanic Ash or Azemite from Amazon.
Number Three is Sun Dried Kelp from Nova Scotia you can again purchase on line.
The fish emulsion mentioned is a good idea too.
So now you have nutrients along with the micro organisms needed to convey these nutrients into the plant.
This is a very strong brew so a five gallon bucket as shown in the video will actually go a long way doing most back yard gardens.

Do this every few weeks as your plants mature and you will be well rewarded for the effort.

Trees Turning Yellow

We are seeing a lot of Iron Chlorosis in Trees

Before you make that determination though, I want you to make sure you do the water probe check we've talked about on this blog. Is the tree getting dry at least once in a 10 day cycle or is it always extremely wet?

The problem with quick online diagnosis or taking a branch to a nursery or extension office, is the problem is often around the root base of the tree or from a landscape situation.

With that in mind; I want you to take all things into consideration over the past four to six months of what this tree has been experiencing in water, pesticide and weather related issues.

This is where most DIY folks look too hard for a quick answer. Take your time, trees are so slow to react that you have to take everything carefully into consideration. If you make snap diagnosis, or trust people who do, you will often do more harm than good.

If a "landscape professional" is quick to give you a cure by injection or some other costly sales approach, ask them for a money back guarantee on the work and this will often slow them down. If they know anything about tree treatments they will have to admit that it is very difficult to make a positive diagnosis and therefore very difficult to give a guarantee. That is the kind of honesty you want to hear before allowing someone to operate on your tree. If you do not think there has been any undue stress in these areas, then we can move onto Iron Chlorosis issues.

As the link talks about, the ph may be too high. However, those little $10 meters that claim to be able to read the ph are a joke. It takes very sophisticated equipment to accurately read ph, so only trust a soil sample test by the local extension office.

If it does come back with too high a ph, you can inject the tree with iron, but if it is later in the season you will get little results. This is where tree health care comes into play. You will have to start amending the soil around the tree early in the spring every year to try and lower that ph and any iron injections should be done in the early spring when the leaf is still forming. It's not a bad idea to start that process with a small amount of the supplement on the left of this blog now. The more in the spring time.

Trees will eventually decline and die if this is not remedied. Soil amendments will help, but remember, if anyone is selling a quick fix, trees don't do anything fast, so it may not be the best thing for the tree.

The power of Beats, Spinach, Kale and Swiss Chard

I have talked and talked about how Jerry (one of the oldest Alcatraz swimmers) got me into this blend of Beats, Spinach, Kale and Swiss Chard. It has truly been life changing in the way it has affected my health.

As an Arborist, I am getting older now and was really feeling the pain of the job, loosing energy and wondering if I could continue in the profession. This was the change that saved me.

I will admit, I was skeptical at first and listened to him but thought it was just another fad. It took two years of witnessing Jerry get healthier and healthier, for me to finally take that step and try it. Surprisingly my wife had heard me talk about him so much that she took the initiative and bought those first beats.

She blended the little drink up, I took a long sip, looked at her and said, "this sparks some kind of child hood memory," I thought for a moment, "oh, now I remember, eating dirt." We posted that on face book and got a lot of laughs but we also got a lot of encouragement from people who were using beats to improve their health; about how we could add orange juice, or other fruits.

Which we often do. But as time went by, I now can eat a beat raw without hesitating and actually like it. It shows how our taste buds can adjust. It is so satisfying that I don't munch afterwards and my wife and I now substitute it for our vegetables. Last night we had Salmon and the blender drink and felt great.

So for those who've been asking me I found a Amazon link to the blender we use and just as important is the knife sharpener for cutting everything up. When you look at the food statistics on the healthy page above on Beats alone, it is an amazing body feeder and worth the effort.

Our take on straw bale gardening

An update on straw bale gardening: Several factors you will not read in the hype on this idea is the fact that straw bales shed constantly; so if you put it on your porch or in your lawn you will have a mess all year long. This straw really is difficult to get the lawn mower to suck up or even rake. It blows around the yard and eventually makes a mess all around the area that you have to pick up one piece at a time by hand. So I believe we have to contain that straw to make the straw bale idea practical.

 

We live in a X-fruit growing area (people buying from Brazil etc. put hundreds out of work in our area of Emmett Idaho) so we have hundreds of these fruit boxes that need a home or will be wastefully burned or thrown away. The boxes are about 42 inches by 41 inches and 30 inches high. I feel they could be bit higher to be comfortable as a garden container. We played with the idea a few years ago but the thought of filling that much up with decent top soil did not seem practical. And then once the box was full of soil there would be no way to move it.

 

Straw as the foundation really seemed like a good combination here. The bale fit perfectly and was light weight. Then add the idea of straw bale gardening and we have a raised bed that is very simple and inexpensive.

 

By putting the straw bale in these boxes we were able to contain the straw mess and raise them up slightly for better access. There is an air gap on the sides which is probably a good thing because the wood is less liable to rot. I presume the straw bale will be decomposing by this fall and we will remove it. How much damage the moisture will do to the painted plywood is still out for review.

 

. The one pictured is a bit hard to move by your self so this weekend we cut one in half. That made a huge difference in the ability to make it more mobile and it fits a single bale fine.

 

As I said, I still feel it is a bit low and we are trying to put a counter top over them. This might really make them work better because you'd have an open end, then a water proof top to put pots on. I'll update as we experiment.

Straw Bale Gardens

Seems like everyone is trying to find some way to garden that is easier. Bending over or getting on your knees is something that makes gardening just painful.

The straw bale garden is an interesting idea in that it is a quick raised bed, the straw decomposes and creates heat that helps the ambient temperature of the soil, and it's relatively cheap.

Not a bad idea but there are a few issues. One is that the straw bale honestly is messy. It will shed and not look that attractive especially as it begins to disintegrate. As it disintegrate you have the issue of how to get rid of it without making more mess. One way to help the process is to build something around the bale but keep in mind the oxygen is very important around that bale and watch out for spontaneous combustion which has happened in hay stacks for years.

The other item not discussed much is that just like hydroponics that we discuss in the pages above, where are the soil nutrients? Soil goes through a microbial process that builds the natural elements our bodies need. Just because it grows fast and big does not mean it has the nutrient absorption that is the key reason to raise our own food.

Still; not a bad idea, but soil and nutrients need to be considered as with all raised beds. This brings us to the subject of mid-summer feeding raised bed gardens.

There is a definite drop as the living organisms in the soil start to fail in a raised bed. This is partially to a interlinking of those micro-organisms that can draw nutrients from hundreds of feet away. The main one is Hypha or Hyphae for plural. This is an amazing network that raised beds cut off. This simply means you need to add worm tea a couple of times a year to insure that the soil is feeding you the nutrients you need in your diet.

Understanding how to use your worm composter

Worm composting is the key to great returns on raised garden beds.

It is important to make sure you understand how it all works. You'll read lots of information seeming to contradict themselves, but keep to these facts and it will help.

One reason there are contradictions is there are no control factors enforced on how worm tea is produced and how it is labeled.

The Leachate that comes out of the tap on the bottom of your composter is not compost or worm tea. It is drainage from the bins. This has proven to be a great fertilizer for some people, then, other times it can actually harm plants...why? Because the extract from the worms "gut" is what we are looking for to have the micro biology of aerobic organisms that we want. However, if you put raw vegetables in whole, those vegetables will be full of liquid, rotting, and discharging a fluid full of anaerobic bacteria whose function is to break down plant cellulose > that isn't what we want on living plants.

So we have people grinding their vegetables up, putting them in with lots of paper products, which the worms consume quickly, not allowing the drainage of decaying plants in the basin, who say the leachate fertilizer is great...it's actually from the worm extract, so they are right. Then we have people who put in whole rotting vegetables, who get the anaerobic drainage, that actually can harm living plants.

So how do we tell the difference? Well smell actually is the best way, if it's earthy smelling then it's probably from the worms, if it's foul smelling, it's full of anaerobic bacteria. Many people use this method, but still, I recommend pouring the leachate onto the compost pile, and let it do it's job one way or the other.

Worm tea is the powerful stuff we put on our raised garden beds to replenish the mycorrhiza to produce great healthy food. This is from the actual worm castings in the worm bin. This is done by putting the fresh castings in a tea like bag, putting an air pump (like from a fish tank) in and farming off the good stuff into a liquid we can put on the garden. This must be done in a short period of time, in order to get the aerobic affect before the anaerobic takes over. See details.

I hope it doesn't seem to complicated, it really isn't once you've done it. And the results are amazing.
It's simply having the knowledge that takes a few hours to learn, that makes all the difference in success or failure.

Weather Stress on Trees

We had our last cold snap here locally but other states have really been hit. And now we see a quick warm up to the eighties.

How do trees handle this?

 Often the answer is, "not well".
The best way to see what is happening to your tree is to look at the very top first. This will show signs of stress first. The second is to look at the foliage and judge it against healthy trees. The third is to step back and see if there are areas of the tree looking worse than others.

The most difficult part of diagnosing trees is the fact that they don't do anything fast. Heat stress or chemical damage can take weeks to show. So it is crucial that you always look into the history of what the tree has gone through, over the last few months, to make a correct diagnosis.

We will see trees struggle with these extremes in temperatures however, if we feed them and water them properly, most trees can push through one or two extreme stresses.

 

It's when multiple stresses compound that we see trees die.

___________________________________________________________

 

UPDATE JUNE 15: That stress we were talking about this early spring is just now showing the damage. People don't understand, or even believe, that a tree will take three months, or, in the case of covering the trunk flare, fifteen years; to show damage from poor tree health care. But that is exactly why their trees often die and they really don't know why. 

 

We are seeing trees die on one side and live on the other. WHY? The tree's vascular system runs fairly vertical. This means that their "arteries" go up and down. So if you damage them on one side at the trunk base, you'll see death on one side of the tree.

 

In the case of that late freeze, it was severe enough in some trees to actually freeze and damage the cambium layer on one side. The tree had nutrients enough to put on the first round of foliage, but as soon as the heat hit, it couldn't support the leaf tissue with the damaged "arteries" called phloem and xylem in a tree.

 

The result is symptoms appearing months after the damage occurred. People who specialize in trees see these late results and know that often symptoms can not be fixed. And at the very least, they can not be fixed quickly in a safe way for the tree to react to a chemical or nutrient. If you  want healthy trees, you have to be diligent in the care and pay attention to what they are going through.