You may recall that I had to see for myself why most folks say “don’t transplant carrots” and yet… your John Jeavonseses recommend it.  Well, I’d say that the jury is mostly in on that one.

Transplant your carrots, and you can expect to produce something that looks like:

Roaster Chicken Carrot

A roaster chicken– in this case, a roaster chicken sitting on a wall because it doesn’t want you to see:

FREAK!

ITS PIGGY TAIL!!!  AAAHHHHH!!!  MUTANT PIGGY TAILED ROASTER CHICKEN CARROT CREATURE!!!

Oh boy... oh boy... where's the bathroom...

You may also get the incontinent pot-bellied person carrot.

In any case, my point is, unless you are tired of the plain, old, run-of-the-mill, carrot-shaped carrots, you may want to stick with planting the seeds in situ.  On the other hand, I ate these freaks of nature, and they tasted just like carrots.  Good carrots, actually.  And, to be fair, there were also some less humorous carrot-shaped carrots.  I’d say the mutant-factor was about 50% or so.  Still, that’s pretty high.

The garden has a remarkable amount of this in it:

Scabiosa... NOT!

Remarkable mostly because I never planted it.  I can only assume that the previous owner planted it, and it’s been lurking in the background waiting to strike.  I guess this was the year.  It turns out that it’s actually called Knautia macedonica.  Truth is, sort of like the much more invasive Alstromeria,

Alstromeria? I barely know ya!

I like the Knautia.  I used to freak out about invasive plants.  Now… eh…

Truth is, I have come the conclusion that most things will give up if you pull them enough.  Sure, they come back a couple of times, but big deal.  I pull them out again.  No plant (with the possible exception of bamboo, which… never ceases to amaze me) can live if you keep yanking it out.  Believe me, I cleared about half of my property of giant examples from The Oregon Big Book of Invasive Weeds.  I still get the occasional Clematis vitalba or Himalayan blackberry four years later, but it takes me about 10 seconds to yank them out.  It kind of creeps me out to see people in the big box stores asking for “something stronger than Round Up” for their weeds.  I’d hate to eat their mutant piggy tail chicken carrots.

Sorry, I digress (again).  My point was… one man’s weed is another man’s bee-attracting background filler.

Speaking of bees:

Is she sticking her tongue out at that flower?!

The lavender’s blooming, and the bees are clearly pleased.  Washington hive is going gangbusters, but Adams is still queenless (or was, last time I looked).  I think they’ve actually got a queen, but I haven’t seen her or her eggs.  I suspect she exists for two reasons: they’re mellow, and the supercedure cells have been torn down.  If they were still queenless, I’d expect them to be making that agitated sound they make.  I’d also see no reason for them to tear down the supercedure cells (one of which had been opened from the side– a tell-tale “death by first queen” sign) if they didn’t have one.  I actually saw them taking one apart with the ghostly white, apparently deceased occupant still in it… ew.

Why not requeen Adams?  Well… I guess I could.  I might still.  It’s just that I didn’t really want two hives.  I’m ambivalent about it.  If they peter out, my feelings wouldn’t be hurt.  If they survive, I guess two hives aren’t much harder than one to care for.  I hate to spend another dime on this, though.  It’s already gotten a little out of hand.  I’ll probably crack it open tomorrow and see what’s up in there.  Best case scenario, Her Highness has returned from her fuckfest and has gotten to the business of laying an egg every 45 seconds or so.  Chop chop, Your Fecundiousness.

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I know, I already did one today.  So sue me.

I thought of something I could do in my semi-debilitated state (with the help of modern pharmaceuticals).

It’s time to harvest the garlic again!  Yay!

Lined up like hot babes on a California postcard.

You can make your own postcard from that if you want.

I know what you’re saying now… but Ri, tell us more about growing and harvesting garlic!

OK, here’s what ya do…

1. Plant your garlic last fall.  Go ahead; I’ll wait.
2. Just let them grow.  Don’t fertilize them.  They need to get established.
3. OK, now, spring has come, and they’ve started to grow again.  Now you want to fertilize the living daylights out of them.  I use something like blood meal to give them a head-start on nitrogen in the cold soil.  Side dress with some nice organic fertilizer (or petroleum distillate god-knows-what-all, if you’re Canadian).
4. Keep the bed well-weeded and evenly watered until you start to notice the greens starting to turn brown and peter out.  Stop watering.
5. When you get the feeling like they are on their inexorable march towards retreating into their bulbs (as indicated by about 1/3-1/2 of the leaves showing significant yellowing or browning), it’s go time.
6. Using your implement of choice– I use a hand trowel– carefully dig down under the roots and push them up while pulling gently on the greens.
7. “Dry down” the garlic in a relatively cool place out of direct sunlight.  There should be plenty of air flow to avoid them rotting or molding– which is generally unlikely.  Give them a week or two to get good and dry.  Don’t trim anything off as of yet.  Just put them aside and let them cure.
8. Store the bulbs in a cool (55F or so), dark, relatively dry (50% humidity) place.  I keep mine in an open cloth bag and usually don’t lose more than a couple before the next season.  Don’t store them too cold, or they’re likely to start growing again.  Too warm and they’ll dry out or rot.

Eat lots and lots of garlic, and you will live forever.  The vampires and mosquitoes will not bother you.  Your blood will be clean– whatever that means.  You can put -ino -ini on the end of your names (e.g., Rianino Schmidtini).

You’re welcome.

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Note to the future: It was June 29th, 2009 that I started forcing my guests to take home produce.  It happens every year.  I go outside and realize that there’s no chance we’re going to eat those 12 heads of lettuce before they bolt.  And a person can only maintain so many vases of sweet peas in one’s home.  You know you’ve reached this point when you’ve started sneaking bouquets into the neighbors’ houses.

So, I start insisting that, if you’re going to come visit, you’re going to go home with a bag of produce.  So far no one is complaining, but even if they start, I’m going to stuff their backseat with eggplants.  Suck it.

Throw them in YOUR compost pile.

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Don't call it Flexeril!

Whatcha got there is my collection of pills that I’m currently supposed to be taking.  Somehow, I went from my 30s to my 80s.  I’m going to have to get one of those little plastic dispenser things to keep track.  And pull my pants way up.

Most of those are to treat the herniated disk I gave myself a couple of days ago– lifting a full brood box from the beehive.  Did you know that one of those can weigh upwards of 100 lbs?  Well, it’s true.

A little word to the wise here… don’t try to move one from one place to another by lifting it up at arm’s length and turning your body to the destination and lowering it from that position.  A little thing will go “pop” in your back, and you’ll be letting out expletives of pain every few minutes and eating muscle relaxants and vicodin for the next week or so.  Trust me on this one.

The garden?  I can only imagine it’s still out there.  Maybe I’ll go dig a… or… wait… move that… um… get down and pull some… hmm…

Maybe I’ll gobble down some vicodin, cyclobenzaprine, and a glass of sauvignon blanc and slide down the wall into a mushy pile on the floor.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

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My favorite mom’s sister asked me a couple of questions today, and I thought they were worth a post since they seem to come up a lot.  Plus, I don’t have anything else to talk about today.

1.) Do you know anything about tomato pruning?

I usually prune my indeterminate (vining) tomatoes to two main stems and continue to pull off all the suckers (i.e., the growth in the “crotches” between stems).  I also thin the fruit to one or two per cluster.  When it starts to cool down in fall, I (try to) pinch off the growing tip and not let it set any more fruit.

Determinate (bush) varieties, I don’t do anything with…they don’t seem to benefit from the pruning as much, and they don’t get nearly as out of control without it.  Sometimes I thin the fruit a bit if they get crowded.

In both cases, after they’re large enough, I prune off the bottom leaves to keep them off and away from the soil.  They’re mostly shaded anyway and just serve to block airflow and pick up soil-borne diseases.

To be fair, some people think that tomato pruners are losers who need to get a life.  While there’s some truth to that, my experience is that you actually get more, better yield with pruning because you concentrate the resources of the plant on producing fewer, better fruits.  It’s like buying a couple good pairs of pants instead of several that don’t fit quite right.

2) What is a good safe spray to kill bugs on Bell Pepper plants?

Firstly, I’ll stick in here that the only really effective way to handle pests is to identify them first.  I recommend Bt for hornworms below, but that’s useless against flea beetles, for instance.

OK. Spray!  My favorite stuff to spray as a general purpose thing– since you didn’t specify the problem– is neem oil.  It’s insecticidal and fungicidal without having much impact on beneficials (unless you shoot them directly).  In India, it’s used for all kinds of stuff– including toothpaste.

The other very safe option is insecticidal soap (potassium salts of fatty acids, but a diluted pure soap will do in a pinch).  These are particularly useful for aphids, I find.

There’s a chemical called spinosad out these days that’s supposed to be quite safe (a bacterial fermentation product), but requires a bit more care with regard to bees, in particular.  However, it’s supposed to control some difficult characters– like leaf miners. I’ve had pretty good results with it, but I’m not sure that it’s been any better than neem, which I prefer.

If it’s hornworms, I’d go with Bt (bacillus thuringiensis). Except for the fact that Monsanto is engineering plants with built-in Bt, and thus almost certainly introducing resistance to this very useful staple of organic gardening, it’s wonderful stuff for most catepillars– especially cabbage loopers, cabbage worms, and hornworms.

Finally, pyrethrins are sort of a generic organic insecticide– which I’m not super keen on.  It’s relatively safe, but I try to keep my impact on the actual out of control problem so as not to knock the predators out of whack– which just makes things worse.  Pyrethrins are whatchacall “broad spectrum”.

If you know who the culprit is, I can maybe make some better suggestions.

Probably more than you wanted to know… but every year, I bounce around between letting nature provide the balance and realizing that nature doesn’t necessarily WANT me to grow tomatoes; I am not some indigenous person in a loincloth picking berries off of a native plant, after all.  Though, I do wear a loincloth when I garden, but that’s a different thing.

Anything else I need to know?

I don’t know.  Is there?  Can you tell me when you find out what it is?  I’m starting to understand why all the really good gardeners are 80.