Watch Out for Killer Compost!

That is the title of a report by Cheryl Long and Barbara Pleasant in the new bookazine, Mother Earth News - Guide to Growing Your Own Food.

I just bought this gem a few days ago and I love it. It is filled with great articles about how to garden better. Many great topics like organic pest control, seed starting basics, preserving your harvest and container gardening are covered. I enjoyed them all but this one little half page article jumped out at me most of all.

It documents Dow chemical's marketing of the herbicide Aminopyralid as a control of perennial weeds in horse and cattle pastures. It also spells out how the U.S. EPA has approved it even after a previous Dow chemical herbicide, clopyralied (Confront) was found to be the contaminant in compost that killed garden and nursery plants in Washington, Pennsylvania and New Zealand.

The major problem with Aminopyralied is that Dow's own research showed that Aminopyralid is expected to remain in manure for over a year! Many times there is enough herbicide residue even in the composted manure to kill tomatoes and other vegetable crops. This is a real concern for organic gardeners like me who rely heavily on compost and often acquire manure from elsewhere.

Dow's Aminopyralid was associated with the loss of thousands of home gardens in Great Britain last year! If you are always searching for compost ingredients like me, be careful where you get your manure. The Authors of this piece warn us to ask questions about safety before buying manure or compost that contains manure.

They end the article with these words about this problem: "Alert your friends and local composting facilities - gardeners work too hard to lose their food to corporate greed and government loopholes." I agree! That is why I am doing what they advise by telling all of you - my gardening friends.

Pick up a copy of Mother Earth News - Guide to Growing Your Own Food for more details. The article I'm referencing will make you angry, but the rest of the bookazine will cause you to get excited for the promise of the new season ahead. Just watch out for killer compost!

Thanks Cheryl and Barbara for this warning.

I'm back!

If you tried to come to this site in the past day and a half, you noticed that it was down. Sorry about that. There was a major problem with my DNS control ip address registered with the domain name. It wasn't able to talk to blogger and redirect my blogspot pages to gardendesk.

Hopefully it is back now.

It has made me look into some other things though, and I think I will be migrating this site to typepad along with Veggie Garden Info. I haven't been able to add to veggiegardeninfo.com for some time now due to a problem that I can't seem to solve with wordpress. If I move it to typepad as well, I can resume adding content and links to all the great garden blogs out there. I understand typepad fairly well now thanks to my 14 year old daughter who has a site about American Girl dolls hosted there.

See, when us old people can't figure out computer issues, it always works to turn to a teenager who has had the Internet all of her life. My daughter will help me get everything squared away!

Anyway, enough with the rambling. It was awful having gardendesk down. I'm glad its back. Sorry for the inconvenience. The next post will be about gardening again :)

Learn From My Mistakes - Don't Let This Happen to Your Garden!

We live out in the country, which is really great. With a country setting comes lots of animals; hungry animals. We see many raccoons, foxes, opossums, and deer. This winter we went walking in the woods behind the garden and was amazed at all of the animal tracks we saw in the snow.

It looked like all the different animals got together and had a party.

So even though I know that there are so many animals surrounding my garden, I foolishly wrote this in a post just four days ago:

"For the most part I have been lucky over the years to not have much of a problem with pests in the garden. I have an occasional loss to a deer or some other animal and I have a few minor bouts with insects. None of the pests really make much of a difference in the overall outcome of the harvest."

What was I thinking? Writing that was my first mistake. My second mistake was spending all day Friday cleaning up the garden. I weeded and used the weed-eater on all of the tall grass around all of the raised beds. I watered everything thoroughly. The whole vegetable garden looked better than it has all season. My third mistake was deciding not to pick all of those almost ripe heirloom tomatoes. "I can get them in a day or two", I said to myself. "Besides, I want to get some pictures of them still on the vine since they look so good now", I added to put the final nail in the proverbial coffin.

I'm sure by now you know where this is going. I didn't visit the garden Sunday morning and then we were gone all day. Last night just before dark, I walked up to the garden to admire my work.

OH NO! WHAT HAPPENED HERE?!

To my horror and amazement, the entire vegetable garden had been attacked! The animals that got together for the party in the snow must have had another party. This time it was an all-you-can-eat buffet! All of those almost-ripe heirlooms, - gone. All of the leaves on the sweet potatoes - gone. Many of the cantaloupe - done for. Half of the bean plants - almost bare. Many of the cucumber leaves - eaten as well.

This was the single worst attack my garden had ever seen. Here are some painful pictures of the carnage:

They took a bite out of six cantaloupe and completely ate the ripest two. Everywhere I looked there were half eaten tomatoes lying on the ground.

Many of the green bean plants lost most of their leaves:

And the most painful of all is what they did to my sweet potatoes. This was the first year I have tried growing them. I only planted one 4'x4' bed.

This is what the sweet potato bed looked like last week:

And this is what it looks like now:

I don't know much about sweet potatoes, but I would guess that this spells doom for this year's crop.

So what does one do when your garden is so severely attacked? My 10 year old daughter was with me when we discovered all of this and she was pretty upset. So we did the only thing we could do to boost our spirits. We began talking about next year's tall fence and harvested everything we could find that wasn't eaten. The animals left plenty for us:

Not a bad harvest from such a ravaged garden. We can still count our blessings and know that some animals are well fed.

Tonight - we make salsa!

The April Freeze of 2007!

Wow, oh wow has the weather been "unseasonably cold" for the past couple of weeks. I know this is not news to anyone. It’s just that I have never seen this bad of freeze damage. Not only were many of the garden plants hurt by it, but so were the trees! Look at our normally beautiful Sugar Maple tree!

All of the leaves were killed by the many nights of freezing temperatures. When the wind blows, the leaves rustle like they do in the fall.

Nature is a funny thing though. There is a peach tree about fifty feet from our maple and it still has about half of it's blooms!

Unfortunately, this peach blossom is the exception to the rule. Many of our so-called hardy perennials were damaged. Look at the frost damage on these hostas and day Lilies:

And now for the dead plants that really sadden me; my poor baby broccoli and lettuce plants:

Actually, I think the lettuce may survive. My wife and I took a walk around the yard tonight and that is the kind of thing we found ourselves saying over and over. "That plant isn't too bad", and "That may make it" were the best we could come up with.

The plants that faired the best were ones that had a bit of protection from an overhead tree or roof overhang. The plants around and slightly under my daughters' tree house did well. For instance, here's some Easter Lilies and Live Forever:

The other thing that the cold has temporarily put a stop to is the reconstruction of our deck.

We'll just call that the "before" picture. I like to stay positive.

I will end on a positive note as well. These phlox seemed to sustain absolutely no damage.

Just like the peach blossoms, I can't explain it. They are right out in the open like everything else. That's just the way nature is I guess. As for the rest of the spring, I hope the weather is better. In the garden it is okay to lose some once in a while. It just makes our successes all the sweeter. You cannot have the mountaintops without the valleys.

Here's wishing you all a mountaintop growing season!