My Garden of Earthly Delights

My nemesis - squash bugs

My husband hates Bermuda grass above all other pests in the garden.  My nemesis is the squash bug - shown here with their disgusting brood.

Dozing in the sunshine

Panda, our ancient cat dozes in the hot summer sun:

Rat faced spider

The garden spiders around here look like they have rat faces on their bellies.  This one looks like the rat has a big red nose.

Squash leaf wierdness

I found a couple of my squash plants suddenly with this big streak of white.  Maybe they are getting old.  I don't know, but it looked very striking.

 

Fascinating white praying mantis

I love praying mantis's. I love their almost palpable attitude. They either come in different colors or change to match the background.  Every time I find one, it's always the color of where it is.  This one was almost white, or maybe a pale yellow.

Hummingbird poses for portrait

A lovely little hummingbird sat stock still for me for quite a while in the redbud tree.  I took a large number of shots of it.

Trouble in the garden

I  noticed a raised bed of potatoes was suddenly covered in webs. I know this is not common behavior for spiders, so I had my husband look at the plant, he had to go get a magnifying glass to see what it was.  Unsurprisingly, he found tiny red mites and looked it up and found it was spider mites.

 We have some unintended brussel sprouts.  Every year, I get a little too fast throwing plants into my shopping cart and each time I end up with something I didn't want.  Last year, it was cabbage which got huge and filled with earwigs.  This year, it was a six pack of brussel sprouts.  I never can leave little plants to die without at least trying, so I put them in.  Right after I noticed the webbing, I found a white powder around them and the leaves looking wilted.  Aphids my husband told me.  I looked closer, yup a thick layer on the bottom of each leaf of little white bugs.

My husband put some insecticidal soap on both and it looked good at first, but the aphids came right back and the potatos immediately died. 

I dug up the potatos, so it wasn't a big loss.  They weren't that far from being harvested, but the brussel sprouts are laying around still.

 

Grow your veggies stuff

Get a cool gardening sigg bottle with veggies on it

Gaging your chile pepper heat

I have several types of peppers growing that I'm not sure how hot they are.  I found this handy pepper heat chart at about.com Home Cooking

I have a Big Jim plant and the Sweet Bananas and some Fresno Chiles as well as some various bells and a few others.  I was surprised to see the sweet bananas have no heat at all.

The chart below rates chile peppers, with 0 being mildest and 10 highest heat.

Scoville Chile Heat Chart
Variety	Rating	Heat Level
Sweet Bells; Sweet Banana; and Pimento	0	Negligible Scoville Units
Mexi-Bells; Cherry; New Mexica; New Mexico; Anaheim; Big Jim	1	100-1,000 Scoville Units
Ancho; Pasilla; Espanola; Anaheim	2	1,000 - 1,500 Scoville Units
Sandia; Cascabel	3	1,500 - 2,500 Scoville Units
Jalapeno; Mirasol; Chipotle; Poblano	4	2,500 - 5,000 Scoville Units
Yellow Wax; Serrano	5	5,000 - 15,000 Scoville Units
Chile De Arbol	6	15,000 - 30,000 Scoville Units
Aji; Cayenne; Tabasco; Piquin	7	30,000 - 50,000 Scoville Units
Santaka; Chiltecpin; Thai	8	50,000 - 100,000 Scoville Units
Habanero; Scotch Bonnet	9	100,000 - 350,000 Scoville Units
Red Savina Habanero; Indian Tezpur	10	350-855,000 Scoville Units

You looked hotter online hat

 

Eating on 50 dollars a week or less

I've found a couple of interesting blogs that are documenting efforts to eat on a reduced budget.  My reality TV instincts kick in and I find myself reading these things with a weird fascination.  My own food budget gets out of hand regularly giving me a constant guilt complex, the result of growing up the 4th in a family of 5 competitive children with a father who felt it was his honored right to eat anything in the fridge that didn't have a screaming daughter attached to it.

Eating Well on $50 a Week

30 Bucks a Week

The Paupered Chef

'What's Growing On' bike tour of community and urban gardens

This weekend we took a bike tour of community and urban gardens in Sacramento put on by Slow Food Sacramento.  I took my camera along and documented what we saw.

Southside Community Garden

We started out at this fascinating if somewhat unruly community garden.  Community gardens usually are fenced off, a product of their urban location.  The standard process is to divide up the area into plots and have a signup with various rules.  Usually the city pays the water bill.  Interestingly enough drip systems are discouraged to be sure the plots are not neglected and weeds usually gets you a warning letter to come tend to your plot. This one had a beautiful hand made gate.

 

The mural was painted by students


Squash planted for children

 

This plot was planted by an Irish transplant who brought along the custom of digging a small deep trench around the garden to water it.  What I saw of it was very green and looked to be doing well.


This was a plot set up for handicapped gardeners.

This sculpture collects rainwater in the flowers which drains down into the ladybug for use in watering.






A broken sculpture of a dog leaning on concrete basket creatively half buried beside a plot


The guy that directs the garden and sets up other community gardens in the city.  I didn't catch his name






Some people concentrate on flowers

These hollyhocks were gorgeous

Fremont Community Garden

This garden had a very formalized and tidy look.  Since the background was that the garden was there for years when the owner decided to develop the property.  The gardeners protested and delayed things for a while, and eventually (I think) lost. However the developer decided to find other property for the community gardens (the aforementioned Southside garden) and retain a third of the property as a community garden.  I'm thinking the developer set up this garden or because there is an apartment building right next to it, they were required to have it look more polished.



What looks like empty waiting raised beds on the left are really bocce ball courts.  The entire garden had to have the top two feet or so of soil removed because of contamination and that side was next to some lovely full grown trees that would have had their roots harmed, so instead they put in the bocce ball courts.

One of the plot gardeners standing before her garden


The garden gazebo that is not quite finished yet.


Another plot owner waters her plants


A lovely tomato that almost glows


The rotating mulch containers


A plot for handicapped gardeners


The sunflowers were out that day in force in almost every garden.  This one was particularly nice in form.



The compost bins - with rules that everyone must cut their trimmings into 4 inch bits or smaller.  Nice and clean looking so the apartments rising over them don't have an ugly sight to look at.



Pink batchelor buttons



Squash flowers



Some kind of allum flower, I think

Capitol WE garden

This is the garden Maria Shriver put together.  I understand it was conceived and planned before the white house garden.  The plot it is in is very very small, a circular shape at the crux of several walks and unfortunately had to be set up under a lot of rules of what could be done and how it looked.  Despite that, it was a nice little garden with herbs and marigolds all around the edge and criss crossed with small pavement walks.

Many of the plants had little plaques telling about them


Another sunflower, this one an interesting variety

J. Neely Johnson Park Community Garden

This was a very compact garden on the northern side of Sacramento in Alkali Flats, which is an area with a lot of homeless.









A couple of late artichokes





Apparently mint is almost a weed when not planted in a pot and tends to overwhelm.  We were encouraged to take all we wanted at a couple of gardens.  It sure has a pretty purple flower to it and leaves a lovely lingering scent when the leaves are rolled in the fingers.



More photogenic sunflowers....

Curbside garden

This garden was neatly set in the area between the street and sidewalk.




Neighborhood garden

This garden is on a lot owned by the city where a house stood many years ago.  According to a note on the garden gate, it was reportedly set up by a an elementary teacher as a gardening program for his/her students, then that teacher retired and the lot sat unused for several years.  10 years ago, a group of neighbors decided to organize a community garden there with 20 plots and a set of rules. To get a plot you have live within a certain boundry. 





This is Stuart Leavenworth  a columnist for the Sacramento Bee who is writing about being an apprentice cook for a well known restaurant the Oliveto in Oakland and one of the plot owners at the Neighborhood garden.  He was going to be auctioned off later to personally cook for someone.  He was kind enough to share tastes of one of his tomatoes with several of us.

Front yard garden

This is the front yard garden of the people who organized a weekly vegetable trade in a nearby park. The lady was growing cotton in her backyard and had samples of it for people to look at and touch.



She has also set up one of her cotton plants in an easy to put together self watering pot, which she made out of two kitty litter containers, one stacked in the other with a hole in the bottom of one and on the side near the bottom of the outer where you add more water to it.


Faith-based Community garden

This garden was set up at a Lutheran church in Oak Park. There used to be a house there, but it had been torn down long ago.



At this garden we were treated to a demonstration of the building of a bench out of adobe.









Yet another dramatic sunflower that begged to have it's picture taken.

Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services garden

This garden was set up to teach children about gardening.  The caretaker and teacher is an entomologist so one of the first lessons was about bugs which of course thrilled many of the boys.  One corner has been set up as nursery for praying mantises, as one of the boys has shown himself to be unusually adept at finding the egg sacks.









 


the entomologist


The children love the flowers



 
The ever-present sunflowers weren't even planted, these were volunteers from the year before.

Along with the interested public we had a documentary being filmed as we went along. 



The name of the documentary is 'From the Ground Up' and you can find more information about them here