Extension Service Webinars on Organic Agriculture

March 21, 2013

When it comes to doing research for articles and books I lean heavily on research based advice from our Cooperative Extension System. It’s a great resource. I just discovered a treasure trove of Extension Service webinars on organic farming practices that you can watch here: http://www.extension.org/pages/25242/webinars-by-eorganic. You can watch archived sessions or sign up to participate live.

While the webinars are aimed at small farmers, there’s a lot that gardeners can learn. Having co-founded a bread baking club, the Los Angeles Bread Bakers, I was particularly excited to watch the webinar on ancient grains. I’m also planning on watching “Linking Cover Crops, Plant Pathogens, and Disease Control in Organic Tomatoes” and “NRCS Conservation Practices, Organic Management, and Soil Health“.

Time to cancel that Netflix subscription!

How to Remove Bees From a Tree

Mr. Homegrown

March 20, 2013

Animals, Bees, Gardening, Trees

21 Comments

The Los Angeles Fire Department responds to the North Hollywood bee incident. Photo: LAFD.

First let’s cover how not to remove bees from a tree. My beekeeping mentor Kirk Anderson described an incident that took place this week in North Hollywood,

What happened was a HUMAN was cutting his tree down. It came down alright, with the bees that were in the tree. The bees didn’t expect or enjoy the trip to the ground. The home owner ran with the bees right after him. The bees found the neighbor’s dog and figured it was the dogs fault. The dog died of bee stings. The homeowner called 911 and the fire department came and foamed the bees. He then called a exterminator who sprayed the bees with some kind of poison. The exterminator told him he had to clean everything up because every bee with in 50 miles was coming to his backyard for breakfast in the morning. The homeowner caused this problem.

Kirk concludes by quoting George V. Higgins who said, “Life is hard. It’s harder when you are stupid.” Amen.

So how could this have been prevented?

Preventative tree maintenance. Hire an qualified arborist to keep your trees healthy. A large cavity filled with bees is generally a sign of a diseased or damaged tree. The bees may be the least of your concerns. You could be looking at a large limb crashing down on your house. Judging from the news footage the tree the idiot homeowner decided to cut down himself appeared to have codominant stems. This probably caused a crack leading to disease which, in turn, led to a cavity to form. Perfect habitat for bees! This was entirely preventable with judicious pruning.
Leave the bees alone. If they are way up in the tree and not bothering anyone, take a chill pill.
Hire a beekeeper to remove the hive. What Kirk has done with tree hives is to come at night when all the bees are in their hive and wrap a screen around the entrance so they can’t get out. Next day he comes with a chainsaw and saws off the limb with the bees in it. Then he gives the log filled with bees away to someone who wants to put it in their garden.
Hire a beekeeper to do a “trap-out.” This is harder to do and takes at least six weeks. The beekeeper comes after dark and installs a one way exit for the bees. Next to the exit the beekeeper places a hive box with some brood comb (baby bees) in it. The worker bees leave but can’t get into their old home. They take up residence in the new box and make a new queen. If all goes well the beekeeper comes in six weeks and takes away the box. I took bees out of a kitchen vent this way and wrote about it in a blog post.
Know the difference between a swarm and a beehive. Swarms are how bees reproduce. Often they will land on a tree branch temporarily while they search for a permanent home (like a diseased tree). Swarms are usually harmless and will take off within a few days.
Lastly, if you enjoy poisoning and killing things, I suppose you can hire an exterminator. Just don’t try to do it yourself with a can of raid.

Growing Strawberries in a Self Irrigating Gutter (SIG).

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2013

Gardening, Self Watering Containers

15 Comments

I got this idea from Larry Hall, who made a video showing how he uses gutters as self watering containers. In the first part of the video Larry shows how to use a gutter to supply water to a row of pots. In the second part he shows a two gutter strawberry growing system. I decided to build Hall’s self-irrigating gutter (let’s call it a SIG) to grow strawberries. Here’s how I did it:

With some scrap wood I made a support system for the two gutters–one gutter holds water and the other holds soil. I sealed the ends of the two gutters with silicon putty and secured the gutters to the wooden support with screws.

Next came my first trip to a hydroponics shop (there’s one on every corner in Los Angeles), to get a float valve. The float valve, similar to the one in your toilet, automatically fills the lower gutter with water as needed. I tried to fit the float valve through the end of the gutter but this kind of DIY bulkhead fitting is difficult to pull off. I ended up mounting the float valve above the gutter with a pipe strap, as you can see in the photo above. I cut the upper gutter around 10 inches shorter than the lower one so that I could access and maintain the float valve.

The second item I picked up at the hydroponics shop was a bunch of 3 inch mesh pots. These hang down into the lower gutter and wick water up into the soil. I cut circular holes in the upper gutter using a hole saw, and fit the mesh cups into the holes.

Next I filled the upper gutter with potting mix (note that with self watering containers you have to use potting mix, not regular soil). And all self watering containers need mulch of some kind–I just happened to have a roll of vinyl billboard material that my neighbor Ray gave me. I stapled the vinyl to the wooden gutter support and stretched it over the top of the soil. I cut holes and planted my strawberries about 8 inches apart.

Rain barrel. The white pipe on the left is an overflow pipe that drains to the street.

The float valve is connected to a rainwater barrel. You can read more about how this barrel is constructed in one of our older posts. Since SIGs need to be watered even when it’s raining, this is a perfect use for a rain barrel. I will have to fill the barrel with municipal water during our dry season.

Problems
There’s a lot of plastic here, specifically PVC, which is an environmental and health disaster. I have two questions–how much PVC is leached into the growing medium and how much of it would be taken up into the fruit? I don’t have an answer to either. If you know of science-based information (i.e. not Livestrong articles) on PVC and growing food please leave a link. Generally, plants do not take up toxins into fruit so I’m not losing any sleep thinking about eating a few strawberries grown in my small PVC SIG. I might think twice about eating greens grown in PVC.

The other issue is the use of peat moss as the growing medium. Peat moss is unsustainably harvested (see Horticulture professor Linda Chalker-Scott’s article on this). Coconut coir, in my experience works great, but not in self watering containers. If you know of a peat moss alternative for self-watering containers, please comment.

There might also be mosquito problems with the standing water in the lower gutter. This could be countered with a mosquito dunk.

Advantages
I can now grow food in an otherwise useless space–the top retaining wall in our front yard (we live on a hill). I can also, finally, make good use of my rain barrel. I was also able to recycle a bunch of scrap wood and some billboard material. And, unlike hydroponics, no electricity or liquid fertilizers are needed. If this system works out I’m eying the top of our garage for more SIGs (our garage is at street level below the house–we look down on it from our front porch).

I think there’s also an opportunity for an entrepreneur to make a non-PVC version this gadget out of food grade material such as HDPE. With a custom design you could also enlarge the upper, soil container gutter as well as creating a sealed mosquito proof lower container. But you would have to sort out who owns the patent on self-watering containers.

And many thanks to Larry Hall for sharing this cool idea!

UPDATE 4/30/2013: One side of the strawberry gutter sprung a leak due to a poor seal on the end of the gutter. I was able to fix it. One thought about the design is that you should leave both ends open and the gutter ends accessible so that you can make repairs. And make sure to use a sealant appropriate for gutters.

Citified Parched Corn

Mrs. Homegrown

March 18, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, How-to, Recipes

8 Comments

Dried corn on the left, parched corn with peas and blueberries on right

I was thinking about trail food, and wishing for a portable snack which was not based on nuts and chocolate chips (though there’s nothing wrong with that!) or too sugary, like dried fruit or energy bars. Then I recalled parched corn.

Parched corn–dried corn which has been roasted–is one of those legendary Native American foods, like pemmican, which you hear about but don’t necessarily ever get to try. Parched corn is a lightweight, long-keeping, high-energy trail food. It can also be ground into flour and used in cooking. I have vague elementary school memories of claims that a warrior* could walk a whole day nourished on just a handful of parched corn.

(They did not mention that the warrior might be cranky at the end of the day–which I suspected might be the case. I’ve heard similar claims about Roman soldiers marching on handfuls of barley. Poor guys. But now that I’ve tried parched corn, I must admit that it is strangely filling. I managed to spoil my supper by doing too much tasting as I roasted the corn. So maybe the claim are real and–geek alert!– parched corn is our homegrown Lembas bread.)

Parched corn, being tasty and useful, was widely adopted by the Europeans who arrived here. So it was turned out to be the Official Snack Food of wagon trains and trappers and the like.

I went looking for a recipe and found my idea was hardly original. Preppers and outdoorstypes love their parched corn and there are plenty of recipes and tips out there. The only thing that I have to offer that is different is that this is a rather sissified, citified, consumerist version of parched corn. And it is delicious. Chewy, sweet, a little salty… and most of all, corny.