Spring: In Seven Pictures

Sacramento's spring has begun.  There are still plenty of leafless trees and our record breaking dry winter (part of California's worst drought in 500 years) has left many homes, mine included, with dry, brown lawns.  But it's not all gross to look at.  Here's a peak at what has been blooming in my yard the last few days.

A plum tree of an unknown variety.  But I think it might be a Blue Damson or a "French Improved"
No matter the type, the blooms this year were the first to proclaim the end of winter. 

One morning last week I woke up and saw a Camellia bloom.  A few hours later there were a half dozen opening up.

The Japanese maple cultivar "Katsura" is almost always the first to leaf out in the spring.
It starts out yellow with tinges of red and then turns lime green for a while before darkening a few shades in summer.

This hydrangea managed to hold onto a few leaves from last season and is now putting on new growth.

This is one of my favorite Japanese maples.  The cultivar name is Murasaki Kiyohme.
It's a smaller JM and suitable for growing in a container in a shady spot.
All JMs prefer afternoon shade in hot climates but this one is especially sensitive to hot sun
and the leaves will shrivel up in the wrong spot.
If you look closely, you can see the buds are just beginning to swell.

The birds have returned and their voracious appetites made quick work of what I put out for them.

This pictures sums up Sacramento's Spring pretty well.  There are plenty of weeds to attend to but since they are the greenest part of the lawn I might just decide to let them take over this year.  Who needs a lawn anyway?

Putting the D Back in Codling Moth

I was under the impression that there was a bit of irony at work when someone decided to name my most hated garden pest after a word, “coddle”, which means to treat tenderly; pamper even.

Because I can assure you that I do not want to tenderly stroke the slimy looking back of the codling moth larva.  I do not wish to pamper the frass-producing worms.  In fact, when I think about them, I think of them more as the brown and smelly stuff that fills children’s Pampers. 

I despise the codling moth and everything about it, even its name. 

Photo from Wikipedia

But, of course, I was wrong about the name.  There are two “d’s” in coddle and the codling moth has just one “d”.  If I had to guess, I’d say that the codling moth ate that other “d” just like they do everything else.

A not so quick research project of mine (i.e. a few keystrokes on Google and lots and lots of reading about how hard it is to control these buggers) revealed that the moth earned its name after attacking an old varietyof cooking apples called English Codling apples.  

This picture shows the stark contrast between an apple infested and one that will be infested.

Many of the publications I have consulted report that a bad infestation of the codling moth can reduce a crop by 90%.  In the case of my tree, I’d say that’s been pretty close to accurate.  So, this year the codling moths get an A.  I’m hoping next year that I’ll be able to give them that D they’ve been missing and get the destruction down in the 60% range. 

One day's worth of spoiled fruit picked from the tree and lifted from the ground.

Because I’m trying to garden with as few chemicals as possible (and because chemical control in this case depends almost entirely on exactly correct timing) I plan to combat the codling moths in a variety of ways:

First, I’m removing all of this year’s crop.  I will remove the remaining apples, bag them up, and throw them away.  That should decrease the number of moths that overwinter in my yard.

Hungry?  Me neither.  

Second, I’ll try cardboard banding the trunk of the tree.  The larvae will frequently crawl up and hide in the corrugated ridges of the cardboard so you can remove the cardboard after a few days and throw it away too.

I will try hanging a few pheromone traps to kill the moths and disrupt the mating cycle and I think I will move a bird feeder to a neighboring tree since birds are a natural predator of the codling moth. 

I will also try bagging the apples to prevent them from getting attacked in the first place.  It’s going to look strange having a tree with 200 brown paper lunch bags hanging from it but maybe I can try to convince my daughter that it’s not an apple tree, it’s a Lunch Bag Tree.    

If you have any tips or tricks on how you’ve handled codling moths, I’d love to hear them.  I’ve done a lot of reading on this and it seems like a pretty daunting task which is why I’m not aiming for anywhere near total eradication.  

I need a macro lens for my camera but perhaps you can still make out the worm in the middle of the picture.

Depressing Videos About Edibles

I seem to keep stumbling upon YouTube videos that leave me feeling discouraged and depressed about the uphill battles faced by both commercial growers and backyard gardeners.  I was introduced to this first video while visiting Gardening Along the Creek:

I don't often make political comments on this blog, but I can't refrain from stating that I believe without a shadow of a doubt that taking 47% of a farmer's crop without compensating the farmer is wrong.

The next depressing video is about Cavendish bananas - the type of banana that we all eat today (and is also, surprisingly, WalMart's #1 selling product!).  Until sixty-plus years ago we ate a type of banana called Gros Michel but it was wiped out by a fungal pathogen which caused Panama Disease.  And now, apparently, that pathogen has developed a strain that affects the Cavendish and could destroy the world's crop if we don't find a way to stop Panama Disease first.

And how about Citrus Greening which started killing citrus trees in Florida in 2005 and has now infected nearly half the trees in the state and has spread to many other states?  Have you heard of this?

This issue has literally hit quite close to home as it now spreading in California and could soon arrive in my own backyard according to this article in the New York Times.

And if all those don't make you cranky enough, how about fears that our coffee beans are at stake thanks to Coffee Leaf Rust?  There are several good articles on this topic on the internet but this one from the Atlantic does a nice job at pointing out the paradox of how organic coffee might, in this case, be doing more harm than good for coffee plants as a whole.  

I am thankful for the smart people out there that are working on solutions for these problems.  Hopefully some of them will have some good news to share with us in the coming years.

A Modest Harvest

"If you have a garden and you like food, then it is mad not to grow your own."  -Monty Don

I like Monty Don's garden writing quite a bit.  But, man, that kinda stings, Monty.  Am I mad?  I mean I like food as much as the next guy (okay, the extra weight around my mid-section will testify that I might like it a little more than the next guy) but I prefer to grow things that aren't very edible.  Like Japanese maples.



This is the produce aisle in my paved side yard.  From left to right: an espaliered Fuji apple tree,
Early Girl tomatoes, Eversweet strawberries, Kentucky Colonel mint, and  zucchini.  

 Though I have been trying.  A little bit.  I bought some new wine barrels this year and cleaned out some of my unused pots to grow vegetables in this summer.  I knew going in that my output wouldn't be as high as it would have been if I had devoted actual earth space to this endeavor but I was okay with that because we don't eat a lot of vegetables anyway.  

With that in mind, I picked these last night:



A few strawberries and some pole beans - some Italian variety I guess.



Yes, that is just five smallish strawberries and about a dozen pole beans.  Not enough to make a meal appetizer for myself let alone a family of three, but it was still met with some excitement when I brought them in. 



My daughter ate all but one of the strawberries I picked.  



Maybe someday more of my yard will be devoted to things we can eat but for now we're enjoying the modest harvest of this year and feeling a little less "mad" in the process.