deer resistant

My Top Five New Plants

/ Wmarkhall / 3 Comments

Well, it is a new year, I have a new haircut, and it’s time to talk about what is going to be new in the garden this year. I try every year to have lots of new things mixed in with the old stalwarts, But today I have 5 new plants that I am really excited about adding to the gardens.

This first plant-Hypericum perforatum or Saint John’s Wort- “Topas”, is a plant we picked up at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center nursery the last time we were over in that area. This nursery is awesome. It is small, well, ok, it is tiny, but they have things you will not find anywhere else, and it is all grown organically and regeneratively to boot! The next time you are up in the Napa/Sonoma wine region this nursery is worth the time. And leave some time for some good Italian food in the town of Occidental CA.

Image of Hypericum perforatum

Image CC BY-SA 3.0 by H. Zell

We grow a number of different herb plants here in our gardens. While we have not grown this plant here, a neighbor has a big patch of it. They seem to be very deer resistant and frost hardy-two prime consideration here- and they are great for pollinators. This plant has yellow flowers that are really loved by the pollinators I am looking forward to the blooms. It will definitely be a plant I harvest for teas. Tea made from this plant has been found to be helpful for fighting depression. (Ng)

Another plant we picked up is this Phlox Subulata or moss phlox. This is a low growing creeping ground cover. We need lots of ground cover plants here to help keep the soil cool and supportive of the little things that dwell in the soil. It flowers in the blue-red spectrum, providing the pollinators with the pollen and nectar they need. I know exactly where I want to put it outside one of the gardens. If it does well, then you know we will be propagating and buying more!

These ground covers play a number of roles in our gardens. Keeping the ground covered, whether by plants or by mulch, is vital for the soil food web. The cover keeps the soil temperature down, and it slows the evaporation of water from the soil. Soil that is both moist and cool is more beneficial to the many organisms that live in the soil. These organisms then produce humus, which is sequestered carbon. The carbon, in turn, allows the soil to hold more moisture. (Ingham)  The moisture in the soil, in turn, allows the plants to be more fire resistant, which is one of my primary goals for the land!

Picture of Luther Burbank

Photo from Luther Burbank.org

This next plant I ordered last spring after visiting the Luther Burbank Garden in Santa Rosa. Ca. If you haven’t been there, you need to go. Luther Burbank was an incredible plant breeder, if not a bit of a charlatan, being responsible for many of the plants we all enjoy today. This particular plant is the Luther Burbank Thornless Prickly Pear.  I ordered this from Territorial Seed Company up in Springfield, Oregon. The legend has it that Luther Burbank was on a train ride through the desert in the eastern part of California and noticed all the cactus with their big thorns, and thought if he could breed out the thorns and ranchers could use the thornless cactus for cattle feed. Well, that didn’t work out, as the plant wasn’t all that he claimed it would be. It turns out the plant may not have been developed by Burbank after all. Rather, it may simply be a selection of one of the many thornless prickly pears grown by Native Americans in the South West. (Dreyer) But I do love the fruits, and many folks love eating the fronds. That is something I will need to learn about when this plant gets to harvest size.

Image of Perennial Kale

Image from ExperimentalFarmNetwork.org

Next up is this packet of seeds from the Experimental Farm Network. Check this out: Homesteader’s Kaleidoscopic Perennial Kale Grex. They had me at kale, but perennial? What the what? Put those two together and I just have to have it. We will see how it goes.

Image of Strawberries

Image from Rareseeds.com

And lastly, but for sure not the least, is this packet of seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company, one of my favorite seed companies. I have gotten so many seeds from these folks. It is like I just have to give them my money. Really. These seeds are of Golden Berry Red Wonder Wild Strawberries or Fragaria vesca. Someone might say “but Mark, you already have so many strawberries. Why do you need more.” To that, I would answer with a pained look, and say “they are strawberries. You can never, ever have too many strawberries. If you can’t see that, you can’t be my friend!” Not really, you can still be my friend.

Now I am off to plant these seeds. I will see you next time I am looking at you. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other, and take care of the planet.

*This post was updated to include a higher quality video.

Works Cited

“CALIFORNIA CHAPARRAL INSTITUTE.” Top Chaparral Critters, http://www.californiachaparral.com/bprotectingyourhome.html.

Dreyer, P.  THE PRICKLY LUTHER BURBANK “I See by the Papers…” comstockhousehistory.blogspot.com/2011/06/prickly-luther-burbank.html.

Ingham, E. R. “Natural Resources Conservation Service.” What Is Soil Conservation? | NRCS, http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/soils/health/biology/?cid=nrcs142p2_053868.

Ng, Q X, et al. “Clinical Use of Hypericum Perforatum (St John’s Wort) in Depression: A Meta-Analysis.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Mar. 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28064110.

Plants Profile for Ledum Groenlandicum (Bog Labrador Tea), plants.usda.gov/java/charProfile?symbol=PHSU3.

Fall Chores

/ Wmarkhall / 2 Comments

Fall, with it’s cooler days, means it is time to clean up the garden and prepare it for winter. I grew a little patch of corn, pumpkins, and beans. You know The Three Sisters. I had never made a serious attempt at this before, but it worked out fine. With the crop in and the remaining plant matter frost killed, it was time to cut everything back and plant the winter cover crop. But not in that order.

I am using a technique called ‘throw sow’ I first learned about throw sow when I read the book One Straw Revolution. In the book, Masanobu Fukuoka described how he would harvest the crop of the prior season, and then cast handfuls of seed around the plot, and then chop down the crop residuals to cover and mulch the seeds. Because I am not as young and spry as I once was, casting seeds about seems much more fun than stooping over to plant each individual seed the traditional way!

It has been found that there is a tremendous benefit to planting multiple species of plants in a single plot. Since my primary purpose for the bed this winter is to be a cover crop, increasing the nutrient and carbon content of the soil, I mixed some rye, hairy vetch, and clover seeds and soaked them in water overnight. The pre-soaking of seeds has been found to soften the outer shell of the seed, allowing for faster germination, among other things. The following day I drained the seeds and threw handfuls of seed around the plot that still had the dried corn stalks standing and frozen pumpkin plants covering the ground. I then proceeded to chop and drop the remaining plant material. The chopped plant material now serves as a mulch, covering the seeds and soil allowing the soil food web do its thing.

That is it. The bed is now planted and is on its way to spring!

Screen Shot 2018-12-31 at 9.13.12 PM

What about the deer?

/ Wmarkhall / 2 Comments

We typically have two kinds of gardens in our neighborhood; fenced and unfenced. Our unfenced gardens have things like lavender, sage, rosemary, and other plants that deer typically do not like. Everything else goes behind a fence. All of the annuals and vegetables go behind a fence, lest the deer eat them all. When I say all, I mean the real all. The deer ate everything!

I have tried a number of times to try to grow annuals outside of the deer fence. At first, I just planted things like I always did- make a raised bed and plant. As soon as anything green appeared, it just as suddenly disappeared. I read about Sepp Holzer‘s throw sow method of growing and Masanobu Fukuoka’s techniques tried them. I thought maybe I just needed a diversity of crops planted very closely. I mixed together a variety of seeds and soil and cast them on the ground. Things soon sprouted, and just like previous attempts, they disappeared.

I knew it possible to grow in this area without fences because Matt Powers was doing it in a very similar area to the south of us. I had seen it work. I just had to figure it out.

This spring I had a bunch of seeds that had been lying around that I knew I would not ever get to plant in our fenced vegetable garden. There was just not enough room, and there was never going to be enough room. What the heck I thought, Why not give it a try. I mixed a bunch of seeds together- corn, amaranth, squash, radishes and anything else that was lying around. I soaked them overnight, mixed in some compost, and spread it willy-nilly in an area I had cleared. With our huge bird and squirrel populating I thought I needed to cover the seeds more, but I didn’t have any more compost. I grabbed some trimmers and went and trimmed a bunch of plants to use as mulch.

Garden picture

This patch of annual vegetables is on the outside of the deer fence. As seedlings, they were protected only with a thin mulch layer trimmed from deer resistant shrubs.

I week or so later I could see the little plants under the mulch! They hadn’t been eaten! They kept getting bigger and bigger, and the deer were pretty much ignoring them! It was the mulch that mattered. In one section I had used artemisia trimmings. Deer never touch that plant. I also had a section covered with trimmings from heavenly bamboo, and in the middle section, I used oregano trimmings. Three plants that I knew deer don’t touch. When looking at it now I can see that the deer did, in fact, browse down the middle oregano section. But the other two sections are doing very nicely indeed. Better even than the plants I started indoors and transplanted after danger of frost.  The only question will be if the plants mature before the killing frost comes. In the best case, I have a whole new huge growing area.  In the worst case, I will have a lot of biomass and a bunch of green pumpkins to put into a curry. Either way, I will call it a win.