Okra & “Fire Lilies”

May 28, 2020

Okra & “Fire Lilies”

Today we planted okra. Three long rows of okra plants just far enough apart to walk through the rows with the mower for easy weeding, pruning, and harvesting.

Yesterday and Tuesday were the 6 by 4 corn patch. The 5 by 4 corn patch already has rows of little green stalks pushing up and it was planted Saturday! We also did a patch of mustard greens and our trio experiment over the weekend. The “trio experiment” is onion seed, three inches, beet seed, three inches, carrot seed in a patch 3 by 3.

Oh, all numbers are in feet… so far.

And my favorite of my blooms at this house (since my gardenia has been reluctant to bloom) is this –

– it’s a bulb with a single straight stalk that ends in this fiery flower! We call them fire-lilies but I know that can’t be their official name. It’s a takeaway from Grandma Jeanette… a little piece of history carried along and the blooms make me think of her every time I see a new one exploding with color.

(oh, and if you know what it is, please comment! We’d love to know what it really is!)

Lucas and Thea ate all six ripe tomatoes themselves before they got inside. I managed to sneak one away for the egg scramble I made for brunch. (I eat shakeology breakfast at 5:45 so at 11am I was practically starving and had to grab something filling and nutritious!)

We have little pets who poop breakfast… and Becky made more of these:

YES!

Worked at gym yesterday… REC CLASSES OPEN MONDAY!! Camp fills up quickly & starts June 1st (I can’t wait to see my gymnasts!) and we get to have gym party (Parent’s Night Out) this month!! (Third Saturday of each month: our coaches entertain and feed a boocoodle of kiddos so their parents can have a night kidfree… here)

I’m excited about coaching again! I’m thrilled about our garden! I even got to play Age of Empires with Jillian and Lucas today while big sisters went shopping!

We had a lovely day!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

Elephant Ears

May 24, 2018

Elephant Ears

One of my favorite garden bulbs is what we call “Elephant  Ears.”

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These are from three bulbs that we dug up in some weeds when we first moved in.  They were tiny, neglected, and crowded.  With good fertilizer and plenty of water, (we didn’t have to water them, God did it with the rain!) those three multiplied into fifteen by January when we replanted them in this nice half-shady strip between the carport and the side of the house.

We also leave the wild flowers that don’t crowd out our bulbs.  Tiny white flowers that spread like ground cover are some of Jillian’s favorite because they look like “stars on green sky.”  (Those are under the star lily in the above picture, but their blooms look like dots in the picture.)

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These are the smallest ones.  The elephant ears are now growing alongside a few lilies, six pineapples, tomatoes, and squash.  (The clump of bushy leaves on the right corner are tomatoes.) The plants are called elephant ears because their leaves get to be the size of African Elephant’s ears.  I’ve grown some before, which by their third year, had leaves that were five feet wide!  (Since you have to clip the ears off at the stalk when the ears fall to help encourage new growth, the girls would save the clipped stalks for umbrellas!)

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These are some of the “wild” tomatoes.  This means we didn’t sow them there, they just came from our fertilizer/compost and we tended the plants as they sprouted.  Jillian has the worm-picking job because we don’t use pesticides.

I love Florida bulbs, they are easy to grow and propagate quickly.  I can give the many extras away and cover my yard in little groves of them within just a couple of years.  Now if I can just get fruit trees like fig, citrus, kumquat, pineapple, and bananas to grow as well!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

 

Conquering Ticks

Our natural solution to ticks.

August 10, 2017

Conquering Ticks

We live on what we call a tiny farm.  It’s just over an acre.  It was abandoned before our landlord bought it, spruced it up, and cut down all the brush.  When we arrived in April, we discovered that a twenty-foot walk from our carport to the front step attracted lots of ticks!  Not the big, easy-to-see dog ticks, but tiny ticks the size of a period!  (Yes, some are so small they can fit on the head of a sewing pin, the girls have tried it – they also are fascinating to look at under a microscope because the light goes through them!)  Some were slightly bigger.  (No, we’ve never taken pictures of them!  We are usually inside when we find them and we smash, burn, or flush them, instantly!)

Research taught us these were a variety of deer tick.  The small ones are called “seed ticks.”  In part of the tick’s life cycle, they are newly emerged in their tick form (small adult form) and need just a little blood to finish growing.  So they bite and release.  The duration of this bite is between ten minutes and an hour, so sometimes we caught them and got them off.  We got very adept at distinguishing tick bites from the bites of other minuscule horrors of Florida, like sand gnats, mosquitoes, fire ants, and yellow flies.  We all know that ticks attach themselves once they are full adults.  (For this variety, full adult size is about 1/8th of an inch in diameter – the size of a small print “o”.)

I hate ticks.  (Who doesn’t?)  I don’t like pesticides.  (We want to eat food from this yard!)

Luckily, I have chickens!

Chickens are opportunistic omnivores (aka, scavengers).  This means while most people envision them eating dry seeds and corn, they actually have a palate that inclines them toward consumption of living organic material such as insects, microscopic organisms, fresh new plant shoots, and anything moving that is small enough to fit in their beak.  My chicken flock has always been known to hunt actively for mosquitoes and flies.  (Yes, they run along under the flying insect and jump to attack once they perceive catch is possible.  Several times they have smashed into a fence or wall while hunting in this manner.  Side-effect: human entertainment.)

Roosters (grown-up males) seem to find ant larvae a delicacy and get all excited digging up ant beds and telling the others, “here, some awesome food!”  (A few hens join in this feast, but others look at the ant-larvae-loving chickens with “eww, gross” expressions.)

Our laying hens (females) and breeding roosters stay in the covered henyard.  Our “biddie-babies” (the girls have made-up terms for every stage; this is newly hatched to 6 weeks) and “baby-toddlers” (6 to 10 weeks) share the brooding pens so they can be protected from rain, draft, and heat in the pre-feathered chick stage (biddie-babies) and to protect them from our area’s population of kites (beautiful, small hawk-like birds who hunt young chickens).  The “big toddlers” (10 to 15 weeks) and “teenagers” (15 to 24 weeks) roam near the henyard because they are too big for the kites to carry away.

They will forage all day for insects and leave the free-choice feed completely alone.  They stay within about 25 feet of their water source at all times (during or just after a light rain, they may wander a bit farther, but not normally).  They LOVE seed ticks!

Within two weeks of our natural pest control plan, we could walk to the carport with zero ticks!  Within a month, the strip of back yard where we hang clothes and the kids play was nearly tick-free!  It’s been five months and they have cleared an expanded circle that includes parts of the front yard.

(My bulb beds helped grow the circle as they love to eat insects that eat the bulbs and the plants hold dew.)

Slowly, our chickens are conquering the tick population in the rest of the yard!

In closing, if you have a tick problem and don’t mind chickens scratching through your plant beds, maybe consider a pest control plan that rewards you with organic fertilizer… and eggs too!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

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