beehammer

I went a bit overboard planting blanket flower back in December.  It was cool and dry, and the plants weren't very big, and I had no real expectations of them bulking out as much as they did once things warmed back up.

Blanket flower is very pretty, and very showy, and I've wound up with a big fucking essentially contiguous stand of it in my front yard.  This basically means that every bee and bee-adjacent bug in a half-mile radius cannot get enough of it.  I was out watering at the correct time for bees this afternoon, and honey bees?  Check.  Solitary bees?  Check.  Solitary wasps?  Check.  Flies pretending to be bees?  Check.  It was just a buzzing mess of activity, and all the different sorts of bees had their own priorities.

The mustard greens have finally bolted, which means a sea of pretty little yellow flowers, which means tiny little wasps and butterflies visiting them.

O frabjous day, it rained.  It really, really rained.  I only had to water a handful of things in containers or otherwise situated so that they didn't get quite as much as they needed from the rain, which left me time to spread some fertilizer and reclip all my baby beans that haven't gotten the hang of wrapping around stuff yet and plant a bunch of seeds and re-pot all my roselle seedlings.

If it hadn't started raining again while I was doing that, I could have knocked out planting the parsley I bought in case either I or any black swallowtail caterpillars want to eat it--it's going in a little patch between the okra and the swamp milkweed.

So this is the planter.



I planted Florida heirloom broadleaf by scattering the seeds on the surface of the soil, watering vigorously, and hand-weeding any unwanted plants or weeds that cropped up.  The other plants are a mix of tropical sage, passionflower vine, violets, etc.--mostly native plants and selected to attract pollinators.  The planter's about four feet across and about 5-6 inches deep.  I used a whole packet of seed on this one patch of dirt, but it was an old packet so I really didn't expect much at all in terms of germination rate.



There are still tiny little mustard seedlings doing their thing and getting ready to grow once the bigger plants are harvested, too.



If your preferred method for harvest is to pull up the whole plant once it's fully mature, this isn't a great method--it's hard to pull out one plant without disturbing or damaging the ones close to it, at that proximity.  It probably also isn't a great bet for mustard types that get fairly sizeable before they're mature.  For Florida broadleaf, the plant seems to be pretty tolerant of the partial harvest method, where you trim off individual leaves as they get big enough to have that pepperiness and leave the rest of the plant alone, and most sources I've seen have recommended eating the leaves when they're 3-6 inches long, after which they get a bit tough and almost bitter. 

So far with a bed this size, I've gotten about a colander full of greens each time I've gone out to harvest.  They cook down aggressively, but it's enough for a side dish for one person or to spice up a main dish for everyone.  And the great thing about thinning greens, if your plants wind up too closely bunched to grow right, is that you just eat the greens you've thinned.

So it can't hurt to try, and seed packets are cheap enough to make it worth your while.  Even with the age of my seeds, this is about a month after sowing, after two rounds of harvesting.  In my case, I might not have enough cold weather left for the current seedlings to make it to eating-size without bolting, but they're an heirloom variety, so I should be able to save any seed the late bloomers produce for next winter.

One of the things I've found with raised bed gardening, and with spending a while gardening mostly for pollinators and wildlife, is that I now have a much healthier reservoir of insect predators hanging around waiting to spring into action if they spot an aphid or beetles.  Last time I tried food-gardening, the yard wasn't worth much of anything as habitat, and I had aphids and scale bugs and leafcutters and just about every other kind of gnarly insect you could wind up with crawling all up in my containers. 

I was also able to go hog-wild with coffee grounds earlier in the year, which help keep ants from colonizing the planters and upsetting the apple cart by guarding aphids against predation.  The ladybugs were out in force in this planter today cleaning off the passionflower vine, and the mild winter means that the paper wasps never quite went dormant, so stray caterpillars haven't been a problem either.  The feral lot next door even helps out by hosting hawks and owls that keep rabbits from being much of an issue.

There are definitely reasons you might want to go the neat, wide-spaced rows route when it comes to mustard greens--it certainly makes harvesting quicker and easier, especially if you're trying to feed a large number of people--but I'd say you don't really have to if you don't have high numbers of pests around waiting to wreck your whole crop.  Plus I've heard that mustard greens are hell on nematodes, so even if you don't get much yield for your seed, growing the mustard can help future crops you plant in that bed have a healthier time of it.

If you haven't already, it might be worth your while to check out David Goodman's Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening.  Most of his advice is more applicable to your section of Florida than mine, and I still found it to be a very helpful overview of possibilities and strategies.

Good luck, and happy growing! :D

So my a/c decided to conk out today.  Fortunately it wasn't very hot out; unfortunately it still hit 82 degrees inside the house, with the sort of cross-breeze issues that meant opening the windows was just making things more damp instead of cooler.  It was very much a work in the yard where the wind is blowing free kind of afternoon.

All the beanlets that sprouted so far have been tucked away along the fence in the ground, the other half of the rotten fence I pulled down has been broken up and binned, I pulled an ungodly amount of stickerburr weeds up as well as about forty feet of catbrier root.  It's been dry and hot enough, though, that the handful of potted plants I've collected since December really aren't having a good time unless they've in very big pots.  So it was time to get the two tomato plants and one blackberry plant I bought on impulse the last time I went to the native plant nursery into the ground.  And by "time," I mean that I had about ten minutes of daylight left and was damn well going to use it.

There was about... I want to say five minutes between me traipsing around the corner of the house with a big pointy shovel and and nitrile gloves and a grim determination, having the dim realization that this had kind of a murdery vibe to it, and scaring the absolute fucking shit out of my next-door neighbor when she came outside to throw something in her bin.  Because you know what you don't expect to find when you come outside your house as night is finally falling?  A human being on their knees scratching frantically at the dirt and rattling dead leaves around because the blackberry plant's entire rootball decided to just fucking unravel the second the pot came off, barely visible on the other side of your split-rail fence.

My backyard neighbors are an apartment complex, so there's a pretty robust privacy fence along their rear property line.  They put up a new one about eight years back, and instead of tearing down the old shitty one, they just built their new one like four inches in from it, leaving the shitty one up for me, my next-door neighbor, and the feral lot on the other side of us.

I spent the weekend trying to suss out what of it is usable as a trellis for the pole beans I'll be planting soon, and I came to the conclusion that most of it wasn't that bad, except for the last section on the southern edge of the property.  I spent two hours this afternoon ripping that ten-foot long section out with my bare hands and a little crowbar, and not only does that patch of yard now look a million times better, but the rest of the fence looks so much less shitty without that section dragging it off kilter that it's not even funny.  I'm going to anchor it to the newer fence sometime this week to give it more stability, but it doesn't really need it anymore.

Of course, there now being only one fence instead of two fences means you can kind of see through the gap a little, so it was fun to spend two hours getting glimpses of movement on the other side of the fence, someone stopping and contemplating the shaking plants and the sounds of wood breaking and the occasional rustle of the bins getting moved around and then just deciding it wasn't their fucking business and they did not need this right now.  Because the thing about brittle, old planks breaking is that it's loud.  So there's morning glory vine disappearing over the fence and through cracks in the fence like mad, and then there's a noise like the fucking Kool-Aid Man is kicking his way through the fence, and then you decide that you just don't want to know and walk faster.

I still have more work to do before I can plant anything I need to keep an eye on, but I have at least a week before I have to worry about it, too.  The beans are sprouting, but they're at that like neonate stage where they haven't even gotten their leaves out of the ground yet--they're just germinating.

It's a truth universally acknowledged that improving one part of a thing immediately throws all the other neglected pieces into sharper relief.  It's also a truth universally acknowledged that few things go right the first time around.

The orchid vine and the skyvine have been lashed to the tree they're meant to climb--it turns out it's Squirrel Season, and the chinaberry is a main rodent thoroughfare, so the plants aren't going to be able to swing this by themselves.  The main rain barrel's new downspout meant that, even though I got on the roof and cleaned the hell out of the gutters, a torrential downpour (half an inch in half an hour) a few days ago washed enough garbage into the barrel that the spigot is clogged.  I'll have to take the whole thing down to clean it out and flush it, which isn't what I wanted to do with next weekend, but it's a problem that happens.

I spent yesterday tearing apart and cleaning the front porch.  Everything is now swept, mopped, and tidied up.  I scrubbed down the front door and brushed away the cobwebs and scraped off the super-old muddauber nests.  It now has a few bits of new furniture that should help keep things sorted instead of just kind of piled up together, and I got enough things planted that there's now space for the old furniture to be spread out in a more useful way.  I got the last of the seeds I ordered a few months back planted--with any luck I'll see some sprouts in the next two or three weeks.

The baby longan trees have been moved to bigger pots, the feral mango tree that's never done anything but look shitty has been taken down to a stump, and I have a new compost bin picked out.  I've picked out where I want to put the last few plants going in the ground before the weather warms up, so I'll be prepping those this week.  I might remulch around one of the old planters if I get really ambitious, because weeds suck and know it's practically impossible to get the weedeater close enough to that planter to take them out.

I'm feeling pretty good about getting things as far along as they are, and everything definitely looks a lot less of a higgledy-piggledy mess scattered around the yard.  If I can just maintain a bit of the momentum going forward, I should be able to get it to the point where it's not difficult to keep up with over the summer when the weather's less cooperative.

Well, not quite, but almost.  I have a couple of things to repot, and a lot of things to keep an eye on, but otherwise I am done with putting things in the ground.


Behold, the doom planter.  Two cubic feet of peat moss, fifty pounds of composted cow manure, and four cubic feet of garden soil piled up in a brick circle made out of stuff I found pulling the previous one apart.

The thing on the left is a blue skyvine.  The thing on the right is an orchid vine.  They should both be happy with the set-up, and I've got my fingers crossed for the Cretan brake fern in the middle.  The chinaberry in the center's a bit sparse right now, but it tends to throw a pretty decent amount of shade in the summer, and the fern Does Not Like living on the porch from about June through August.  I have a big roll of garden twine I can use to get the vines started on their journey up the tree if they don't take on their own, but the bark is pretty rough and toothy, so I'm hoping they find their own way without issue.

I kind of wish I'd taken before and after photos--I try to take basically birthday pictures of the planters when I'm done with them, because you don't notice plants growing when you see them every day.  But the thing really didn't look that bad on the surface, so the before picture would be a damn lie.

I got a baby jadevine in the autumn, and it went from not doing anything to suddenly making super good friends with the plant next to it, so it's now in a much bigger pot with its own trellis.  The tropical lavender it was hugging too hard also got a bigger pot, but I fucked that one up so we'll see how it goes.  I'm really hoping I didn't shock it, but time will tell.  I think I have homes for all the orphaned oyster plants if they ultimately survive the potting process, so now it's just a matter of continuing to water them until they figure themselves out again.

So, the final planter is a pre-existing planter.  It came with the house, and I had no real objection to the ring of oyster plants around the deeply-objectionable but difficult-and-expensive-to-remove chinaberry tree, so everything pretty much stayed as it was.  I've kept it weeded, but beyond that I haven't really interacted with it.  The oyster plants haven't exactly flourished under this neglect, but they've lived and produced pups and in a couple of cases even, I think, reseeded.

Unfortunately for them, I've decided to use the chinaberry tree essentially as a giant trellis for a skyvine and an orchid vine.  For that to happen, the oyster plants need to rehomed.  I somehow just assumed this would be like, digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we'd go. 

What it is like is sometimes digging up plants and putting them in pots and off we go and sometimes pulling up three horizontal feet of base with three plants sprouting from it that will fit in no pot known to man.  I have no idea what to do with these conglomerates, so I picked a patch of dirt along my backyard neighbors' shitty wooden fence and dug a hole.  It's not far from where they were, soil and sun-wise, so I'm hoping they're not much the worse for wear after they've had time to recover from the transplant.

Also unfortunately, as I'm pulling out plants I'm discovering more and more just random fucking garbage the previous owners threw in there and assumed the plants would cover their sins.  Pieces of broken clay pots, concrete chips from where somebody made a batch or broke something up and didn't feel like hauling it all to the dumpster, broken bricks.  Upon closer inspection, a lot of the stones around the bottom layer of the planter don't really fit, and that's why the top layer's always been so precarious.  They just assembled it out of whatever they had.  The soil inside it looks completely unamended, which I expected that it wouldn't be great, so I was prepared for that, but they just blocked in a patch of yard and planted some stuff and called it a day, I guess.

So I assumed this would be a two-day project at worst, with day one being plant removal and day two being replanting, but that was all I worked on today and I'm not even halfway done with removal and clean up.  I might wind up needing to tear the whole thing apart and build it back up from scratch to get acceptable results, which is just... I have time and materials for it, mostly, but this was not how I intended to spend the last days of my vacation.

In better news, everything in the other planters seems to be taking okay--I'm not seeing any obvious signs of transplant shock or wilting--and the Christmas senna weathered yesterday's wind without flopping on any of its neighbors.

When I started gardening, I had these ambitions that I was going to, I don't fucking know, grow my own food or something.  Which is an admirable goal, yes, but my yard is composed of sand and bullshit.  Apart from almost drowning myself in cherry tomatoes, annoying everyone I knew with free jalapenos, and spending a lot of time fighting with aphids and the ants who turned them into a problem (yes, I know: coffee grounds), I didn't accomplish much.

It turns out that flower gardening with an eye on helping out bees and butterflies is a lower-stress proposition, so that's mostly what I shifted into.  The thing that you have to understand about bees, though, is that honeybees have a specific register they buzz in when they're pissed off about something.  What do honeybees get pissed about?  Lots of things, it turns out. 

They landed on you, and you went inside.  They wanted to hang out on a bag all day because it has a picture of a flower on it, and you need to throw the bag away before it gets blown all over your neighbor's yard.  They found a flower they liked, and then another bee came and tried to fit in the flower with them.  Just, you know, bee problems.

But a lot of the angry buzzing seemed to come for no real reason at all.  Just walk past a plant, hear angry buzzing, be vaguely miffed because the bee in question wouldn't have a flower to get territorial over if you hadn't planted it in the first place.


Turns out these little jerks just fly around making the same buzz as an angry honeybee.  They're not mad about anything, that's just how they sound.  So, mystery solved.  My flowers haven't been visited by particularly irritable honeybees, they're being made use of by native sweat bees with resting bitch buzz.

I ordered a literal ton of garden soil, composted manure, mulch, etc. from Lowe's to execute my Grand Garden Vision during the extended break from work between holidays and the bout of cool weather that makes working outside bearable.  Most of it got delivered today, so I spent six hours fighting with the yard. 

We've had massive dumps of rain and attendant windstorms in the past week, and so far my Christmas senna has proved impervious to any attempts at staking and keeps falling over onto my rollinia sapling.  Fortunately, it's in a cinderblock planter, so the current brilliant plan is to see how it does with loops of jute twine anchoring it to the cinderblocks.  I'd prefer not to take it out.  It's invasive, but it's easy to control by clipping the seedpods before they ripen.  It's also very pretty and has proven productive as a butterfly plant in the past season, though I don't think any of the caterpillars ultimately survived contact with the local paperwasps. 

But the fruit trees come first, and it'll damage the lychee sapling if it goes in the other direction, which isn't an option--that one's finally showing a lot of new growth, and I'm optimistic about it fruiting within the next five years if it stays happy.  The rollinia had a long scrape from being flopped on, which I treated with neosporin and crossed fingers, and I staked it upright until it stops looking so squished.  Supposedly I could see fruit as early as next year from that one, though it would be in the plant's best interests to nip anything rather than letting the plant waste its energy trying to fruit.

One of the new planters is going in where a patch of Jamaican porterweed got consumed by a sprawling vine, which meant digging the whole thing up and ripping everything out by the roots so it doesn't invade the new planter.  A half-dozen baby porterweeds were in the way, so they've been transplanted to pots.  I'm hoping they survive, since they reseed readily, butterflies and bees absolutely love them, and my mother's been asking for some to try out in her yard for a while.  They were fairly deeply embedded in the sod, though, with roots wrapped around grass rhizomes, so we'll see if they were damaged during the extraction process.

The endgoal of the multiple new planters I'm adding is to get everything I reasonably can out of pots and into the ground, since it's easier to keep everything healthy and functioning that way and should ultimately take less water once everything is established.  And if it doesn't, I suppose that's what the two new 50-gallon rain barrels are for.  It turns out the clerodendrum is finally flowering, which I hope I didn't disrupt by transporting it.  If the weather holds tomorrow, I can retrieve the trellis I made for the second planter and finally get the passionflower vines a coworker donated to the cause in the ground and trained to it.