This year was mostly a great growing season for our garden. We got lots of beans, squash, tomatoes, and other goodies.

However, this year was also the year of aphids.

At left is a blossom on a red oleandar that I planted a few weeks before that photo was taken.

The ants are farming the aphids. That is, they herd and protect the aphids. In return, the aphids suck the plant’s sap and the ants carry off the waste product — the aphid poop — to store away in their nest for future feasting.

Two species acting symbiotically to irritate the hell out of me.

If this were the only infestation of this kind, I would be concerned that I had chosen a location for the plant that was sub-optimal and, thus, led to weakness that made the plant susceptible to such an attack.

But, not in this case. This is not the only massive infestation of aphids that I have seen this year!

The community garden was also plagued with aphids. And by plagued, I mean plagued.

This is a closeup of the blossom of a long bean plant. At a distance, the vine looked black because the aphids were this thick over the entire plant.

If you look closely at that photo, there are a handful of parasitic bugs attacking the aphids. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough to quell the infestation. The only solution was to remove the plant in its entirety.

Oddly, they only attacked some of the bean plants. No idea what made one plant more attractive than the next, given that the beans were in the same soil and climbing the same trellis.

We’ll be lucky to get any Osmia lignaria bees this season as they generally try to already have a nesting site by now. They are a very early season pollinator!

However, there is a second native bee that may likely take up residence and provide effective pollination services all summer. Osmia californica, another mason bee, takes over about the time lignaria is done!

I might order some tubes of Osmia californica bees to kick start the local population.

If you have any interest in gardening or flowers, or follow any kind of agricultural related financial markets, you are likely aware that one of the ecological disasters we face is known as colony collapse disorder.

Basically, the worker bees in a honey bee colony die, get lost, or otherwise just cease to function. The cause has been attributed to pollution, mites, genetic degradation, pesticides, genetically modified crops, and/or a slew of other guesses.

It is a serious problem in that bee driven pollination of crops is what sustains much of the agricultural production in the United States.

Oddly, though, the european honey bee — the bee that everyone immediately thinks of as the One True Way that flowers are pollinated to yield seeds and crops — is actually an imported species and, frankly, a bit invasive at that.

Not only invasive, honey bees tend to be territorial in that they will actively defend their hive. As well, they really aren’t even that efficient as pollinators.

Not surprisingly, there are many native pollinators buzzing or flitting about. In the South Bay, the most noticeable are the carpenter bees as they are gigantic, relatively clumsy, totally non-agressive, fuzzy, and have a noticeably loud buzz while flying.

But they aren’t the true superstars of the native North American pollinators. For that, one should look to the Mason Bee or Orchard Bee (Osmia lignaria).

The mason bee is a rather docile flying insect that is considerably smaller than the carpenter bee. Like the carpenter bee, it is non-territorial, won’t sting unless seriously threatened, and is non-swarming.

The mason bee is an extremely efficient pollinator as a single bee may visit over a thousand blooms per day.

Clearly, this is a bug whose presence should be encouraged!

Fortunately, it is easy to provide housing for such a helpful critter. Roger is standing next to a mason bee home that we made over the weekend. We chose to make one out of a block of wood. However, bundles of reeds, bamboo or — even — appropriately sized straws work quite well, too.

To make a wood based bee house, start with a block of 4″x6″ wood. Soft wood — fir or pine — works best and it must be untreated.

As the nesting holes need to be at least 4″ deep, you’ll be drilling into the 4″ side of the wood.

Draw a grid on the wood with the holes all being separated by approximately 3/4″.

Don’t worry to much about making the lines straight. The bees really don’t seem to care!

At each intersection, drill a 5/16″ or 3/8″ hole that is at least 4″ deep, preferably about 5″ deep (no more than 1/2″ from all the way through).

Hole diameter and depth is rather critical. Any narrower or any shallower and your bees will tend to produce male offspring. The male mason bees don’t live as long and are not terribly good pollinators, by comparison.

A drill press — especially one with lasers — definitely makes this particular part of construction go much much faster!

Once drilled, I also sanded the front face of the house. Not so much because I was worried about the bees getting splinters, but because the wood was soft/wet enough that some of the holes had been a bit blocked by wood after drilling. Thus, sanding opened the holes a bit.

Fit a bit of scrap wood on top of a make shift roof. It doesn’t need to hang over that much. The roof exists mostly to provide a bit of early afternoon shade and to shield the front from water running down it during rain.

If you want, you can stain the outside, but not the nesting holes, obviously.

Mount your mason bee house with a South-SouthEast exposure. It should be at least 3 feet off the ground and should be exposed to the morning sun as the morning warmth encourages the nesting bees to get out and get busy.

Simple enough. I’m not sure we put our houses out early enough in the season. We’ll see. If not, there is always next year!

This year we are making a more concerted effort to actually, like, plan meals and buy what we need as opposed to ending up with the world’s most expensive compost heap from the wasted food bought at the farmer’s market with best of intentions.

As a part of that, I’m also taking a more serious run at the whole gardening thing in our community garden plot.

This actually started last fall when I turned and planted the entire 20′ x 30′ (approx) plot with fava beans. Now, we happen to love fava beans, but not that many. There was an ulterior motive.

Namely, fava bean plants do a brilliant job of pulling nitrogen out of the air and fixing it into the cells of the plant itself. As well, since favas are such a vigorous over-winter growth in this climate, they nicely shade and choke out most of the weeds that would be sprouting about now.

To put the nitrogen into the soil, the bean plants must be worked into the soil. Last year, I did this largely by hand (with a much smaller number of favas) by digging holes, chopping up the plants with a shovel and turning them into the soil. It worked, but not terribly well as it leaves potentially large air pockets in the soil that plants hate.

This year, I used Blue Blade (pictured at left). Or the scariest damned Make-style hack ever. It is one of the various inventions used by the gardeners in plots around mine. (No, I didn’t make this — if I had, the sides would be a bit sturdier and I would have used nylon nuts to keep the damned thing from falling apart.)

It is a pretty simple device.

• Rip apart an old lawnmower
• Cut a piece of plywood in a circle the same diameter as the lawnmower’s deck
• Drill hole in middle and bolt lawnmower engine to plywood
• Attach blade to bottom
• Attach plywood to a sawed off barrel (In this case, plastic… lending to the fear factor)
• Cut a 2.5″ in diameter hole to the side of the engine
• Attach a plastic tube used to feed in the favas
• Grab a handy stick and jam the engine’s throttle wide open because you don’t have a throttle cable or dead man’s switch anymore

Then? Fire the damned thing up and feed favas, weeds, and any snails/slugs into the tube.

The end result is green gold. A thick mat of minced favas that are easily spread and turned into the soil. Not only does it add a ton of nutrients to the soil, but the fibrous matter loosens the soil quite a bit and makes subsequent planting and weeding tasks a ton easier.

I’m still letting a good sized patch of favas grow to full maturity. Which is frightening. I picked up fava seeds from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply along with a rhizobacteria that grows in symbiosis with the plant to maximize nitrogen yield through excellent plant growth & health. In my case, this means a solid mass of 6 foot tall favas!

Peaceful Valley or “groworganic.com” is an awesome company. They have been very helpful and have an amazing assortment of heirloom seeds.

Or, I should say, Gardening season began in late January, but we are just getting around to starting our gardening in mid February.

Roger and I planted a bunch of fava beans in our community garden plot a couple of weeks ago. Some are destined to be harvested, but most are simply there to fix nitrogen and be turned into awesome mulch.

When gardening, I generally try to set up the garden such that I can flood irrigate. This lets me leave a hose or three running full blast in one area of the garden while I work / weed some other area.

One of our garden mates has this incredibly cool device to chop up fava bean plants and return them to the soil. It is, effectively, a lawn mower mounted in a rain barrel with a hole in the deck through which you feed the plant matter. Quite the frightening device.

Of course, with flood irrigation, the numerous ant colonies within the garden do get a bit upset when their homes are periodically flooded. Roger likes rescuing the ants wherever possible, though some ants do appear to be able to walk on water.

This was a bit of dead plant matter left behind from last year’s gardening efforts. The ants seemed to use it as a bit of a watch tower. An ant or two would run to the top, have a look around, and then run back to tell their nest mates whatever bits of wisdom they had gleaned from above.

All photos taken with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro Lens and an Canon MR-14EX Macro Ring Lite. Not that the ring flash was needed for the photo of Roger, it just happened to be on.

Our neighborhood and community garden has been planting and trading Iris for a couple of decades. Every spring, there are clumps of iris of all different color combinations throughout the neighborhood. When the clumps need be divided, people simply place the removed portions of plant on their yard waste piles. Few of these ever get scraped and hauled away, though, as a neighbor will invariably see the potential plants, grab them, and stick ‘em in a hole somewhere around their own house.

This spring has been a particularly spectacular year. And yesterday’s morning rain and intense ambient cloud filtered light made for a perfect opportunity to photograph some of the beautiful flowers throughout the area.

Actually, the abundance of flowers almost made it difficult simply because framing a shot to highlight a particular flower almost always included a neighboring bloom.

This one is one of my favorite colored blossom. It is all pastels from a desert palette like one that O’Keefe might have used.

White, purple, and a yellow fringed beard. A simple and striking combination.

These grow as a series of plants down the side of my house, planted by some previous occupant. More than a dozen blooms per plant and I think I’ll have to divide them this year. The bloom stalks are upwards of 5 feet tall. These are some very vigorous plants!

Plain purple. Elegant in its simplicity and highlighted by the brilliant orange of the beard.

This pile of flowers was one of the less dense bloom on this particular plant. The original image reveals the fine detail of the purple veins through the light blue of the petals of the bloom. The middle of these flowers is a sort of yellow cave with an explosion of color in it. What a remarkably architecture for a flower.

Simply stunning. The subtle golden browns of this bloom are of a color spectrum that one might not expect to find in nature. And “brown” does not typically evoke “popping with life” kind of thoughts, but this flower is certainly an explosion of life.

Again with the orange beard.

The ant almost looks as if it is genuflecting prior to entering the inner sanctum.

I’ll have to go out with my tripod in hand to try and capture the exquisite architecture of these flowers. One of my favorites.

Another excellent knot site.

Did a bit of gardening today. Beyond the typical weeding and planting, I had to make some vertically oriented growing structures for beans and grapes. That is, I needed trellises.

In the past, I have used concrete netting (i.e. wire mesh with 6″ openings) and, when feeling extra lazy, I have used pre-boat trellises (jasmine in our atrium, for example).

Expensive, that. A far less expensive solution which also has the added benefit of being fully customizable is to build trellises myself using posts and twine, rope or wire, depending on how long the trellis needs to last.

You’ll need two critical tools to make this easy. First, you’ll need a post driver. Why the Amazon product link doesn’t show the driver, I don’t know.

Anyway, a post driver is simply a steel tube hollow one one end and weighted on the other with a couple of handles. You slide the post driver over the post you want to drive, lift up, and let it drop (or pull down if you want to drive faster). The post driver does the work of driving the post without the risk of smashing the crap out of your feet.

So, grab your post driver and some posts. I use both wooden and metal posts, depending on what is available. Sometimes, I’ll drive a metal post really deep, then a wooden post a couple of inches deep next to it, and tie the two together with my wire clamp tool to make an extra tall post (as I did for the grape trellis).

Now, you’ll need to make the actual trellis. If you intend for it to last more than a growing season — a grape trellis, for example — I would suggest using wire, fairly thick rope, or something weather resistant. For a bean trellis, use jute twine (product link pictured).

Laying out the trellis is simple. Tie a tight line between the tops of the posts, then the middle, and finally the bottom. The posts will move and the top has the most leverage and, thus, will cause the poles to move the most when tied. If you tie the bottom or middle lines first, they’ll go slack when you tie the top line. If necessary, you can drive a couple of posts at an angle a few feet away from the verticals and tie lines from the bases to the top of the verticals to support the verticals. Think tent lines here.

Once all the horizontal lines are tied, you can run lines vertically. Instead of tieing a bunch of individual lines, I tie a long line at the end and then loop it up-down-up-down-up across the whole trellis. It can easily be adjusted as you go, though you have to be careful not to make it too tight or else the first verticals will go slack.

Done.

But, wait, you say… what kind of knot? Well, funny story there. I suck at tieing knots. Just suck. Don’t know which one to use and whatever I tie falls a part. I compensate through the use of wire ties and duct tape. What a waste; a stupid handicap, really.

I decided to fix this and found the most amazingly useful instructional site ever for learning to tie knots. Beautiful presentation; each knot is broken down into individual steps with photographs of each step. Along with each knot is a discussion of what it is useful for– what problems it solves– and failure modes.

So, I learned and then used the Round Turn and Two Half Hitches exclusively. Worked extremely well. Restate: It works better than any knot I have every tied before (typically, granny knots and square knots).

By the time I had my bean trellis all tied up, a couple of other gardeners were taking notice! My grape trellis is composed of wire for the horizontals and jute twine for the verticals. The jute will rot after a season or so. By that time, the grape vines will be well enough established to fully support themselves on just the wire. Or I can just tie some more jute into place, if I have to.

I have long wanted to make meat jerkies and to dry various foods. With the bumper crop of peppers from my own garden and cheap “irregular” fruits available at the farmer’s market, it was time to finally do something about this desire.

I picked up the Nesco GardenMaster food dehydrator from Amazon (pictured/linked at right).

It includes 4 drying trays, a leather drying insert, a “small things” drying insert and can expand to up to 30 trays. At 1,000 watts and with the thermostat on the front, it will maintain drying temperatures between 95 and 155 degrees.

In other words, the Nesco is a fairly industrial strength unit. Well built. Fairly loud.

Loud enough that I would suggest putting it in a room with a door that otherwise has good ventilation. You’ll definitely want the ventilation if you are drying things like garlic or hot peppers. Otherwise, the surrounding room will become quite the little gas chamber. Even with an open sliding door, I managed to fairly seriously pepper spray myself while drying a bunch of habanero peppers!

The unit seems to run about 10 to 15 degrees hotter than the thermostat indicates. As I’m using a probe thermometer, I’m not sure exactly where I should be measuring temperature. As well, since it can stack to 30 trays and I’m only using 3 or 4 at a time, I would bet that the heat will vary as I add more trays.

Nesco, the manufacturer, has a very useful web site which includes recipes, full documentation, and various other information. I submitted a query via their customer support link and was nicely surprised to have a response in my mailbox in a couple of hours. I have since exchanged several emails with Gerry in Nesco’s customer service who is obtaining calibration information from the company’s engineering department.

I’m damned impressed. Good customer service, that!

So… what have I dried with it in the week I have owned it?

Peppers

I have dried both Hungarian Paprika and Green Habanero peppers. Separately. Both dried quickly and I finely ground the product to produce a very fine, extremely tasty, very spicy rub. Good stuff! My parents have done this many times and it should hold a decent spice for up to a year, likely more if I were to freeze it. I dried these for about 15-20 hours at 130 degrees; probably a little bit longer than was necessary in this particularly efficient dehydrator.

Make sure it is stored in an air tight container.

Plums

Nope. Didn’t make prunes. I took some plums from the farmer’s market, sliced them, and dried them until leathery — about 6 hours at 125 degrees or so.

Wow.

The flavor changed big time. The result was a super concentrated plum flavor with very little sweetness. Completely delicious. I suspect that drying them for not quite as long and then baking an open faced pie with a creamy filling would be absolutely delicious as the plums would reconstitute themselves a bit from the liquid in the cream sauce.

Grapes

Making raisins is stupid simple. Takes about 15 to 25 hours at 130 degrees, depending on how dry you want them. The result is just ridiculously yummy. As I can get excellent quality seedless grapes at the farmer’s market for less than $1.50/lbs, I have pretty much been producing batch after batch of grapes.

I wonder what my electric bill is going to look like??

Tomatoes

In the unlikely chance that one of the heirloom tomatoes doesn’t get eaten, I have been thin slicing them onto the “small stuff” insert (keeps the drips down and it can be easily bent to peel off the product) and drying until crispy.

While yummy as an alternative to a potato chip, crumbling the resulting chips into sauteed vegetables or over corn on the cob is incredibly tasty.

The flavor completely changes. Becomes an incredibly intense tomato flavor with little of the acids? I’m not sure how to describe it other than that adding a little lemon or lime juice as they cook into the foods yields a citrusy tomato essence that is divine.

Next up?

I’m going to dry a bunch of garlic, tomatoes and basil, then grind it all together to make my own kind of italian seasoning. I’m betting it will be an incredible replacement for the raw garlic in garlic bread!

Now that she is aware of my recent addition to my kitchen arsenal, my friend is going to force her family’s jerky recipe on my (Heh… yeah… “force”). She is also threatening to prepare stuff to be dried and bring it in to work. Fine by me as long as she makes enough extra to pay my larder tax!

I’ll also be keeping an eye out for bargains at the farmer’s market. The odd bins are often chock full of goodies that taste perfectly fine, will dry great, but are bumped up enough to drive their price down!

Yum!

It is tomato season here and I’m starting to reap the rewards of a couple of wonderful heirloom tomato plants. Likewise, our local farmer’s market has a cheese vendor [again -- she went missing for a while] who sells the tastiest cheddars and parmesan-esque cheeses.

Here is a delicious dish made from the two:

• Thin slice one large, very ripe, heirloom or heirloom style tomato
• Lay the slices out, evenly spaced and not touching, on a cookie sheet (Lacking a silpat, oil the pan first).
• Lightly salt and pepper the tomato
• Grate or thinly slice some kind of parmesan or parmesan-like cheese over the top of the tomato slices. I used an artisan cannonball cheese from the local farmer’s market. Something relatively dry and crumbly, but not totally dry.
• Put the oven on hi broil and place the cookie sheet on the highest shelf
• Cook long enough for the cheese to melt and then brown just slightly.

The end result is an explosion of hot juicy tomato with a crunchy cheese shell. Easy and awesome. I would have taken a picture of the result, but it didn’t last long enough to do so! Got pictures of before and after this time.

Update: OK — grated the cheese this time. Much better. And I thought I used more. However, the grated cheese has a lot of volume for very little content. Next time, I’ll about double the amount of cheese used.

And there will be a next time. These were delicious. Even better than last time. And, yes, those are huge slices of tomato.

This morning, the garden was particularly beautiful.

Fortunately, I had my camera in hand.

These were shot with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens. It is an awesome piece of glass. Serves very well as a macro lens, for taking portraits, and as a general purpose fixed length lens.

Well, when the deformity is on a plant. For some reason, the various gigantic Agapanthus we have growing down one side of the house have deformed buds. Instead of growing straight up — nearly six feet straight up — the buds are growing in zig-zags and, in a couple of cases, have curled around a full 360 degrees.

No idea why. Regardless, the plants will successfully bloom and go to seed.

The full sized images are pretty cool. The one on the right has almost all of an orb style spider web in it.