Well, I’m sure some citizens may hate this, but this is an opportunity for gardens, you’ll probably be able to finagle lots of compost from neighbors, or just do midnight raids on those green compost bins on the curb.

But if you’re going to be composting in a city, or trying to compost in San Francisco for this new law, there are issues you need to consider, especially if you don’t have a lot of land, yard, or plants.

Now, I wouldn’t really worry about making too much compost over the course of a year, unless you have no garden whatsoever. You may think you produce a lot of kitchen scraps, but you don’t, not really. Because they’re mostly water they shrink vastly in size while they rot, a cubic yard of uncomposted material may, in the end, produce a cubic foot of compost.

But there are things you need to worry about, such as rodents. Any open pile or bin with an open bottom or unsecured lid can and will attract wildlife, and not the kind you want. In the country it is mostly bears and raccoons and opossums. In cities you might still get raccoons and an opossum, depending on the size of the city, but mostly you’re looking at rats, dangerous and disease carrying rats. You don’t want to build a rat habitat in your yard, so you don’t want a pile or bin.

A compost tumbler is superior in that it is raised off the ground and fully enclosed, so that is what I would recommend for anyone in an urban or even suburban environment, or people in bear country (honestly, the tumbler will excel pretty much everywhere).

Don’t think you can squeak by leaving it exposed, I once let a bag of compost on my porch for a couple hours, and that is all it took to attract an ugly opossum.

Another big issue for the urban composter, is ingredient balance. Compost works best with aerobic decomposition which uses oxygen loving bacteria that need a balance of moisture, nitrogen, and carbon. Kitchen scraps tend to be high on the first two ingredients, but lax on the third. I solve this partway by loading all my kitchen scraps into brown paper bags, which are a carbon source, but that isn’t even, even I’ve had problems.

My main solution is to take newspaper, which is 100% biodegradable, run it through my paper shredder, and do that. It balances out the moisture because it is dry, and adds the necessary carbon. As a general rule of thumb, if your compost tumbler smells like garbage or sewage, you have anaerobic bacteria working instead of aerobic and you need to add more carbon (newspaper, shredded fine), less water, and mix it up (tumble) to produce more oxygen.

This balance issue is more an issue for city dwellers than country dwellers because urbanites have less trees, and so less leaves that’ll drop in the fall, which are a great and primary source of carbon for many composters. You can also use straw from a farmer, which is against more accessible to those in the country.

Another option for brown material is sawdust from untreated unpainted and unstained wood. You can get such sawdust from carpenters, building sites, saw mills, etc. Just make sure it is all untreated, and it is a miracle ingredient.

Finally, small amounts of wood ash or charcoal, again from unpainted, unstained, and untreated wood, also is an excellent source of carbon, but it can affect the Ph of your compost so you can’t use it in large quantities. So if you have a fire pit or fireplace and burn natural wood without lighter fluid or anything like that, you can save and use the ashes and any left over charred bits in your compost. In fact there is a whole gardening method called biochar that utilizes burnt wood to a large degree.

Following these tips should help you produce usable fertilizer for your garden from all the kitchen scraps your neighbors are going to be sending your way.

I always want more, and the easy answer is to propagate them. There are two main ways, layering and cutting. I’ll explain layering briefly but this post is mostly going to be about cutting.

Laying involves picking a flexible cane on the side of a shrub, carefully stripping the bark in about a one inch segment as if you were stripping the vinyl from an electric wire, bending the cane down against the ground, and layering something heavy like a brick on top to hold it in contact with the soil. It will root and thus form a new plant directly adjacent to the old one. This is a good method to create a hedge.

To propagate with cuttings you simply cut off a section at the terminal growth of a cane and pot it up.

Okay, it is simple, but let me give a little more detail.

You’ll want to snip off a section of stem about six inches long with one set of opposing leaves attached. Make the cut on a diagonal to maximize surface area. Dip the cutting in rooting hormone (available at any well stocked garden supply store, Lowes, Home Depot, etc). You’ll want a small pot or other container with premoistened potting mix. You can buy a special rooting mix, vermiculite, or something like that too, but plain potting mix should work. Using a pencil make a small hole, and then put your cutting into the hole, and gently firm the soil.

You now have a cutting in a pot, but your work is not done. Without any roots the cutting will not be able to suck up water, and so it’ll dehydrate. Since plants respirate and lose water through leaf surfaces you need to minimize leaf surfaces. So, there should be two leaves attached to your cutting, cut each leaf in half. It seems harsh, but it is necessary.

The final step is to do something to hold moisture around the plant. You need containment, but also volume, anything that isn’t rigid could hold moisture up against leaf surfaces and promote infection. You can put wooden sticks in the pot to prop up and open a plastic bag, or what I prefer is a clear two liter pop bottle, cut in half. The world’s cheapest greenhouse, and it works. Don’t worry about sealing the bottom, you’re not trying to make it airtight or anything.

Give your cuttings a few weeks to form good roots before planting them up or removing the cone. Then you can share them with friends or use them to expand your own garden.

So the relatively bland and white potato has little going for it. But did you know in the Andes, where potatoes are from, they grow in all sorts of colors? One of which is purple, containing the same antioxidants as blueberries. And, they taste just like normal potatoes.

Locally I can only find them in mixed bags of gemstone potatoes at the store. Last year I planted one and it grew and I got a decent little harvest off of it. This year I ordered seed potatoes from Burpee, potato variety called “All Blue” I can’t say I recommend it. It definitely seemed different than the unknown variety I planted last year.

Firstly, many of the potatoes had a mostly white interior. I picked the best one of the picture you see here, but many had large sections of white around the outside. The spud also seemed more susceptible to scab, and yields weren’t too good. The color also faded significantly when cooked, making mashed potatoes with these ended up brownish white. This never happened with the ones I get from the store. I’ve decided this is an inferior variety.

There is another purple variety, “Purple Majesty” that I’ve seen available as seed potatoes. I think I’ll try that one next year. Considering the added nutrition benefits and no change in taste, I can see no reason why these shouldn’t take a bigger share of the domestic potato crop, hopefully it grows in popularity in the future. Nothing quite like eating your fries, and getting your antioxidants too.

But, it is time to start again, so let me say, I hate frost. This year we had a really cold early Spring but then it warmed really quick so we had a warm late Spring, with no late frosts. What a wonderful way to start the year. Then, of course, we had a really cold summer, so cold that plant growth and flowering was severely retarded. Then, October 1st, we get a freak early frost, and man I hate it. Going to bed earlier because of the baby so I didn’t watch the 11 o’clock news to see it coming. So I put down no protection, and my winter squash, which needed until probably mid october, all but died.

But, it isn’t dead. The vine lives, a few leaves live, and if it warms back up (it has been cold and dreary since) it may still grow some, maybe. We’ll see. It has squash on it, they merely need to mature.

This frost was so early that the mums had just started to bloom and some of my hardy hibiscus were still blooming, and those are summer flowers (but as I said, cold weather retarded things all summer).

One thing it did not claim was my hardy kiwi. For the first time, ever, my kiwi flowered and fruited. I don’t know if the vine finally reached maturity to do so, I planted as a seedling in 2004. Or it could be that it always gets hit by late frosts. No late frost this year, but if I had left the fruit on the vine another week it might have been hit by the early frost, wouldn’t that have been ironic?

I’m liking the kiwi, my 5 year old vines (one female, one male) yielded 7 pounds of the small quarter-sized fruit. Well, there was probably 8 pounds on the vine, but I couldn’t reach them all for picking. They’re smaller and more nutritious than the fuzzy kiwi most people know, and you can grow some varieties as north as zone 4. There is one variety called Michigan State, hybridized about a mile from where I live, but I didn’t know that when I bought my vines so I bought some generic variety, which is probably why it is more vulnerable to late Spring frosts. The plant is a vigorous grower (lots of pruning to keep it from going where you don’t want it) but overall is very attractive and works even as an ornamental vine. No pest or disease problems that I’ve seen, japanese beetles slightly like it, but they’re easily dealt with.

I’ve seen on another blog where the first year with fruit the girl got only a handful of fruit, so I’m glad I got as much as I did. You eat them whole, and they taste just like kiwi. When they’re really ripe they have a minty taste. You can also apparently make jam and whatnot with them. The fruit keeps well in the fridge too. This will definitely be a vine I plant wherever I live.

Composting is not an exact science, and even someone who has used a compost tumbler for a long time like me can mess up.

I use my compost tumbler in the following way: I take brown paper bags and while cooking put scraps of veggies, peels, watermelon rinds, etc, in the bags. Then I toss the whole bag into the tumbler. The bag provides the brown, the contents the green, and it should compost, and it does compost. I know though that the bag doesn’t provide enough brown, but I also add clippings from the garden, including chipped branches and other woody stuff, and of course in Fall I add leaves.

So, in this batch, not enough brown, too much green. It got wet, it get smelly, it got poopy. This is not good compost. You need enough brown to absorb that moisture and make sure it doesn’t smell. Compost shouldn’t smell, if it does, you need to add more brown, more carbon.

If this was Fall I would add leaves, I could also add straw, or more shredded woody prunings. But instead I’ve set upon a cheap, easy, and fast solution. Shredded newspaper.

To make this all you need is newspaper, and a paper shredder. Run Sunday’s paper through, leaving out any glossy or otherwise fancy pages. Newspaper print is completely organic and biodegradable, the ink is soy based. It’ll absorb the water, and because it is paper, will decompose fast, quickly rectifying my compost problem in less than a week.

Garden planters can be made of a wide variety of materials, do you know which is best, do you know the pros and cons of each?

Ceramic

Ceramic or clay pots from plain terra cotta to fancy glazed colorful examples, are some of the most widely recognized and used garden containers, probably because they’re old technology. They do have numerous downsides however. They are expensive, and fragile if broken. What is more such pots cannot be left out all year round in places where it gets below freezing, full anyways. Supposedly you can get double fired ones that can take the cold, but I’ve never seen one for sale and they’re supposedly twice as expensive as the already expensive normal ones. Such pots are also porous (the non-glazed ones) and so need to be watered more frequently. The good thing about ceramic, where they really excel, are in style and color. Colorful glazed pots maintain their color better than the other types I will mention, and many colors are available.

Plastic

Plastic pots are the cheapest, and very durable. Some cheap plastic pots do become fragile in cold weather, but good ones don’t. They are nonporous and can easily retain water. Where plastic suffers is in colors and styles. Plastic containers typically are not painted (though they can be), they get colors from the plastic itself being infused. This is both good and bad, but mostly bad. It means that the entire pot is usually going to be one solid color, with no detail of variance. It also means that the colors can and will fade, really quickly, really significantly, when exposed to sun. The only good thing is that there is nothing to flake off (unless it is painted). Plastic can otherwise be left out year round, and can retain water well for those water loving plants.

Metal

Metal containers are not that popular, but they do excel in a variety of applications. If you want the simple galvanized metal look you have a basic no-maintenance container. Painted metal containers are typically done with a powder coating or other durable finish, these types of paints typically do not need maintenance and last a long time. Metal can also be easily embossed with designs so you can find some really cool looking containers. The downsides of metal is that it can rust eventually, how quickly will depend on the quality of the manufacturer. For instance some “copper” containers aren’t really copper, but a thinly plated steel and they can rust. Also, sometimes the coating or painting process is incomplete and the little uncovered crevasses can then rust. Then of course, if you scratch the pot with a trowel or something, that scratched bit can rust. Metal is also more expensive than other types other than ceramic. But you can leave them out all year round.

Foam

Foam pots are made by having polyurethane foam expand into a mold. They can create very intricate designs, and technically, are insulated. This would make them a good choice for a plant that needs a warmer root ball during winter than you’d get in another container (though, honestly, an container is a bad choice in such a situation). Once the form is made it is then painted. Unfortunately the paint flakes of quicker than any other type of pot I’ve found, the foam underneath yellows in an ugly fashion, and they can crack from impacts. All told, foam is my least favorite type of planter, they seem to only look good for 1 season. They can be relatively inexpensive though.

Fiberglass

Fiberglass pots are some of my favorites, they are extremely durable, available in a wide range of colors, and water tight. They do have some of the issues of plastic, colors can fade, but not that much, paint can flake, but not as badly, and while most fiberglass pots are largely one color, there are usually accent colors added. They can also be nicely textured to resemble old ceramic urns and whatnot. Price was they’re fairly inexpensive, though not as inexpensive as plastic. If you’re looking for a pot that can closely resemble ceramic without the price or durability issue, fiberglass is the one.

Concrete

For durability nothing beats concrete. It lasts and lasts and lasts. Concrete is my favorite kind of pot. It is somewhat porous, not very though, and holds water well. It is heavy, which can be hard to move, but it also means the wind won’t be blowing it over. Concrete, like plastic, when colored has color all the way through, unlike plastic though, it tends not to fade. Concrete, like foam, is made with molds, so it can have intricate designs on it, but unlike foam, paint adheres better (through it is rarely painted, you could paint it at home though). Concrete can be a little pricey, more than fiberglass, less than ceramic. And because of the weight you’ll never find really big concrete pots (fiberglass is best for big pots) but for small and medium size containers they’re great. The only downside is limited color options, you can get uncolored, charcoal, a greenish color, and a brownish color typically. If you made one yourself (doable) you could get a wider variety of colors, and you can buy concrete paints and stains.

Wood

Wooden containers, usually boxes or barrels, are fairly uncommon nowadays, and while they do have a rustic charm, they are the least durable of the lot, with rot and warping and pests all being a problem. It is not something I would recommend using, and wood is also fairly expensive, especially rot resistant woods.

So there you go, those are all the common materials used for garden containers, now hopefully when you’re at the garden center picking one out you’ll be better equipped to make a decision on which to buy.

1. Avoid Straight Lines and Even Numbers

Your garden bed should avoid any and all straight lines. If your bed is a foundation planting the back of the bed may be straight because it borders the house, but the front better have a curve to it. Pickpockets and magicians move their hands in arcs to distract us because our eyes cannot follow curved lines as well as straight lines. So when you use a curved line in your garden design you’re forcing the eye to slow down and follow along it rather than skip to the end, you’re telling eyes to stop and smell the roses so to speak. It makes the garden more interesting. Long sweeping curves look far better than straight lines, one of the most boring garden beds you’ll ever see is a flat straight 3 foot wide section along the foundation of a house. In a formal geometic garden straight lines can work, but such gardens also tend to require fulltime staffs of landscapers to maintain their precision pruning, they aren’t the style most of us want or can afford.

Even numbers, or planting things in matching pairs, should also be avoided, as they are easier for our brain to add up and categorize. Instead plant things in odd groups such as 3 or 7, it feels more natural and is more visually interesting.

2. Plant in Many Colors

Flowers are transient, foliage is forever. Every garden bed should have atleast one plant that has foliage that is red or purple, one that has golden or yellow foliage, and one that has silver or blue foliage. The more shades you can add the better, bonus points for black foliage.

In the red/purple foliage category there is barberry (in the pictures), purple smoke bush, ‘forest pansy’ redbud (a wonderful purple leaved tree seen in a picture here), various heuchera or heucherella (in one of the pictures), red maples (in one of the pictures), some ornamental cherries, some sedums, and some types of hardy hibiscus.

In the yellow/gold category there is golden privet (which smells wonderful and honey bees love, in a picture), eunonymous, lots of hostas, some heucheras or heucherellas, golden barberry, some arborvitae, some other evergreen hybrids, some sedums, and lysimachia.

In the blue/silver category is the well known blue spruce, but there are many varieties that are bluer than what the average person is familiar with, really striking. All types of juniper (my favorite are upright narrow varieties, in pictures, or groundcover varieties), some irises, artemisia, various other conifer cultivars, some hostas, and blue fescue.

In the black category there is “Black Lace” Sambucus, and black mondo grass, as well as a type of bamboo.

3. Plant atleast one of each of the follow…

• A tall ornamental grass. For northern climates this generally means miscanthus, but in the south you have other species to choose from. Many people overlook grasses because they can be expensive and seem plain at the nursery, plus they think they have a lawn full of grass so why need one in a bed? But tall clumping ornamental grasses provide a feathery texture that creates interest with the wind like no other plant can. Only in a full shade bed, where most would not grow well, would I recommend not planting atleast one.
• An evergreen. You’ll want interest in winter, and evergreens provide structure to a garden bed. Garden beds can’t be all flowers, then need structure and anchors, foundation, you get that with trees and shrubs, and let one of them be evergreen. I really like dwarf pines, but there are lots of options.
• A tree or standard-form shrub with an exposed trunk. Foliage and flowers are not the only part of a plant worth showing, bark trunks provide interest all their own with interesting colors and textures. A standard-form shrub is a shrub that has been grafted on top of a trunk to resemble a tree, so you can plant one of those, or an actual tree (one that has an exposed trunk, ie not a spruce). It doesn’t have to be a large tree, but you need something that’ll have interesting bark one day.

Follow those simple guidelines and you will create more visually interesting garden beds. One final fourth rule, if you can afford it, is something inorganic. A large boulder can be invaluable to a garden bed, or use stone or brick as your edging material. A scultural item can work as well, be it made of wood such as driftwood (technically organic I guess), stone, ceramic, bronze, glass, concrete, whatever. A large container works here as well, a container a 5 year old could hide in, that big.

When I’m not gardening I’m running websites and I have a new one I want to tell you about. It isn’t strictly about gardening, it is more about living off the land, but topically those two things are very close, and I think many of you will be interested in this.

Wildcrafting.net is an advanced mashup of plant data and Google Maps which allows you to find or plot exact locations where a plant grows. If there is a wild elderberry bush growing on the side of the road, you can plot it, then come midsummer when the berries are ripe, you can visit the site and see all the local elderberry locations, thus allowing you to drive around and pick loads of elderberries.

Of course there are hundreds of plants, elderberries aren’t the only option, but the overall goal of the site is to make it easier for people to go out and find free food growing in nature by marking the locations where wild edibles grow on public lands. There is also an option to keep your marks private, allowing you to use the site as a diary or library of your own known locations, if you don’t want people to know about them.

Right now the site is brand new, there aren’t many plant locations plotted yet, hopefully that will change, so that eventually with enough user participation the maps will just be full of plotted locations. Allowing anyone to pull up the site, type in their address, and see what free food grows near their house.

This site was built as an extension of the Wilderness Survival Forums, so to participate you must first register there. Then you can add marks, add pictures, comment on marks or plants or pictures, rate things, add new plants, and more, all for free.

So go ahead, check it out. Wildcrafting.net Wild Edibles.

But is it a weed if it is a food crop, something cultivated for thousands of years in other parts of the world, and still eaten there today? A superfood with more omega-3s than any other leafy vegetable (so long spinach), as well as oodles of of other vitamins and cancer fighting antioxtidants and health benefits? A plant that is so versatile it can be eaten raw, sauted or stir-fried, even used in soups and stews? Supposedly it also has medicinal properties for a healthy GI tract. Does that sound like a weed to you?

A weed we eat isn’t new, but one that tastes good is, to me anyways. The most commonly eaten weed, dandelion, is just bitter to me, not something I like at all. Purslane though is good, crunchy and fresh, a satisfying texture.

Purslane is a prostrate growing succulent, most resembling ground cover sedum. It has reddish stems and oblong rich green leaves. The stems, leaves, seeds, flowers, are all edible, anything above ground really, so eat the whole thing. If you see this growing in your garden and you want to pull it up, well, I can’t stop you, but if you do pull it up, make sure it ends up in a salad bowl and not your composter.

It grows everywhere, chances are it is growing in your yard right now. I personally seem to get it whenever I get store bought bagged composted cow manure. But I’ve also now planted it on purpose in my yard to get it to grow.

I’ve not found seeds for the prostrate variety most commonly found growing wild, however if you have some you can easily collect seeds thanks to the aforementioned survival property of the plant going to seed after being up rooted. Simply uproot one and hang it upside down over a paper bag, you’ll get your seeds, and once you plant it in a permanent location it’ll reseed readily year after year. The seeds I have found are for an upright variety, I found those on ebay.

When harvesting purslane you could pull it up, but why? Use scissors and just cut off some stems, and they’ll grow back. Constant food for you all summer long. Some people can get confused and harvest a weed called spurge (which is poisonous) when harvesting purslane. I don’t think they look much alike, but I’ll repeat the warning just in case. Spurge is not a succulent, it has a wiry stem, and when broken the stem has a milky sap. Purslane is a succulent with clear sap.

So you have an easy to grow, well adapted, nutritional powerhouse that can take drought, poor soil, is easy to seed save, can be continually harvested from, and cooked and eaten in a myriad of ways. Sounds like food to me. Try carmelizing a pan of onions, add some balsamic vinegar and purslane.

The other day, well, almost 4 weeks ago (we’ve got a new baby, and so I’ve been too busy to blog), on my way to the hospital to see said baby I noticed large clumps of something on my Tanyosho pine. The pine hadn’t been looking too hot this Spring but I hadn’t looked too closely at it, but now it couldn’t be avoided.

Clumps of something had weighed down the tips of the needles to the point where they were drooping noticably, very obvious abnormal. So I took a closer look. It wasn’t a growth, it wasn’t needles with elephantisis, it was an infestation of caterpillars. They looked like the “tent worms” (gypsy moth larvae) that had defoliated so many trees around my parents house when I was younger (eventually forcing government intervention with airplane spraying).

I don’t, or rather I didn’t, often think of pines or other conifers as having pest problems. Their foliage is much more armored and it just didn’t seem like something they’d deal with. But these larvae had made short work of the needles on my pine and had defoliated maybe 30 or 40% of it before I noticed. This, is of course, much much worse than a critter defoliating a deciduous tree, because such trees are used to losing their leaves yearly and growing a new set in Spring. When most evergreens lose needles they usually do not grow back. Pines are somewhat of an exception, they do lose a small amount of needles every year and regrow them, but no where near 40%. So this is a big hit to the tree.

I googled it of course and turns out these are sawfly larvae, and the specifically target young or short pines, who would have thought, with all the other more vulnerable trees out there, the sawfly evolved to have their larvae target pines.

Couple the very bad damage, and the fact that I needed to get to the hospital (not for the delivery mind you, this was two days later) I didn’t bother trying to deal with it by hand (there were many dozens, but they were big suckers, so I could have, technically) or finding an all natural pest control (something I do usually think about, but rarely try, because they’re so hard to find to buy, and the one time I tried a home made concoction I killed every plant I tried it on). I grabbed trusty Sevin, and making sure no bees were present, I went to town. They rapidly started dropping and I haven’t seen one since.