This little guy, about an inch long in real life, is a Saddleback Caterpillar.  They are of note for two reasons:

1.  They are a general feeders that will munch on a wide variety of garden plants.  In large numbers, which I’ve had this year, can defoliate a 3 year old blueberry bush in a matter of days.  On doing a garden walk two weeks ago I noticed that all four of the blueberry bushes were in various states of becoming denuded.  A cursory glance at noon didn’t reveal anything so I went ahead and started picking blueberries figuring I would find the predators in the early morning or late evening. That’s when it happened.  I got stung.

2.  The sting.  I’ve been swarmed by ground hornets on several occasions, usually because I ran over a nest with a mower, hit by bumble bees, and fallen into thistle, to name a few ways I’ve been injured by nature’s bounty, and nothing compares to the stings I received from the Saddleback Caterpillar.  I didn’t know what hit me but it hurt like the dickens.  I rushed inside to wash my hand and check the damage, thinking I disturbed a wasp.  There were three stings in total, that I could see, all clustered in the soft part of my hand between the thumb and forefinger.  The pain was like an electrical current pulsing into my hand, and yes, I’ve electrocuted myself before too.

A rash raised up across the back of my hand.  Application of ice took out the peak pain and a follow up with a topical anesthetic made it tolerable the rest of the day.  The next morning the rash and pain were gone.  Though it didn’t last long, it did incapacitate that hand while it lasted.

Control:

I have been hand picking them while wearing a heavy pair of leather gloves and then disposing of them.  This has been fairly successful with only a moderate amount of work.  Though I pulled over 40 off of the 4 bushes the first time out after discovering them, and recovered from the sting, in days since I have only picked another half dozen or so.  Manual control looks to work well, is simple, and only takes a few minutes to accomplish.

From researching it a bit, it looks like they are susceptible to BT if you choose to dust or spray with it.  Be advised, however, that BT will also kill butterflies.

However you choose to handle them, wear protective clothing and be careful.  These little guys pack a powerful punch.

Two years ago we tried our hands at growing garlic here in Central PA and we were astounded with the results.  Growing was easy, harvesting was fun and eating was awesome!  Scott has shared garlic with many online friends and we’ve gifted some to our family and friends as well.  In fact we had enough that we didn’t need to replant until this year.

We get our garlic from Karen and Mike at www.wegrowgarlic.com. They are the nicest people (actually respond to emails themselves) and boy do they grow great garlic!  We’ve found their prices to be reasonable and their selection outstanding.  The first time around we missed out on many varieties because we didn’t order until September.  This year we ordered a week after their shop opened (in July) and we still missed out on some – this stuff goes that fast!

If you have ever wanted to try garlic, make this year the year and go to Karen and Mike’s website here. We grew enough for two years of eating and sharing in a small plot so you don’t need lots of room. Want to know how to do it?  Check out Scott’s post here on harvesting our garlic and you’ll see our tiny plot.  Interplant with marigolds and you barely have to weed at all.  The only thing you really need is decent sun and the plot should not have standing water – the bulbs will rot.

Come on… give garlic a try!

Normally our roma tomatoes do very well, but this year we had a whistlepig eat them during the flowering stage so they have produced very few tomatoes and now are mostly dead.  So sad, but I guess groundhogs need to eat too.

We are lucky though that Spiral Path Farm CSA will be offering 25lbs of organic roma tomatoes for $6 to their CSA members at their next open farm day on August 21st.  We are definitely going to take advantage of that and dry some for later use.

Our dehydrator does a great job with the tomatoes, but if we didn’t have one we’d still be able to dry them in the oven.  For a well done video on how to oven-dry roma tomatoes check out this video by Keith Snow.  He adds thyme to his tomatoes and I don’t like to do that – it can sometimes take on a burnt flavor in the oven.  Better to just store fresh thyme in the jar with the tomatoes I think.  Garlic cloves can work well here too since the tomatoes are to be kept in the fridge or freezer.  Garlic in oil should NOT be left out on the counter or in the pantry.  It can go bad even if submerged in oil.

Last week while transplanting my brambles I was able to relax and enjoy nature’s music: birds chirping as spring descends, the stream swollen from the recent rains rushing along the banks, and carpenter bees buzzing among the first flowers.  With the first day of trout season opening this weekend, today was not nearly as enjoyable, or quiet.  Numerous trucks and their inhabitants were cruising up and down the road scoping out parking spaces and deciding where to fish.  Wanting to have something better to listen to than the rumble of V-8s, I grabbed my iPod before heading into the yard.

It wasn’t until I became an iPod owner that I discovered independent media via podcasts.  Now I’m hooked and listen to those more often than my regular music.  Lately, I’ve been listening to a variety of Celtic music programs.  Particularly Marc Gunn’s Irish & Celtic Music Podcast.  He offers up such a fun collection of music across the range of Celtic inspirations.  What keeps bringing to this show is that his music selections, regardless of the genre, all have a similar feel and makes it all flow together nicely.  The audio quality and presentation of the later episodes (2009+) are markedly better than 2008 and earlier, but all are still great so give a listen.

If you like this type of music, other recommendations include, that I listen to, are:

The Cleveland Celtic Podcast
Paddy-Whacked Radio
The 67 Music Celtic Broadcast
Foot Stompin Free Scottish Music Podcast

And there is the question presented in the title: What do you listen to while gardening?

Yes, that is yours truly standing among the heavily mulched strawberries with a shop vac.  What isn’t obvious is why: the several pounds of gravel that was tossed into the bed by the snow plows.  In past years we might find a few stones or a chunk of asphalt tossed into the front yard, but this year was much different.

Shortly before winter came, PennDot tarred and chipped our road in an effort to resurface without laying a completely new road surface.  It was effective until the unprecedented storms that came through this year.  Every plow pass tore up a little bit more which wound up in the yard.

As the snow began to melt I had a nagging feeling that I should get out and shovel off as much of the gravel tainted snow from the beds, but as with most of my efforts, those thoughts turned into action a few days too late and I was greeted by a mess of stone and straw.  Pulling off the straw in sheafs was an impossibility; the stones poured through it like water through a sieve.  Taking my wife’s audible musing, “I wonder if the shop vac will work?” to mind, I was pleasantly surprised that it did.

However, it is no quick feat.  The dust from the stones and the dirt clogs the filter after a few minutes and the straw will occasionally get stuck in the nozzle, but it picks up mostly the gravel and left a fairly clean surface.  The lesson learned? Don’t be afraid to take power tools to your garden to get the job done.

Though the picture isn’t much to look at, that is one of the 7 blackberry canes I transplanted earlier this week. They are part of my Phase I permaculture implementation.  Besides providing habitat and food, it will eventually form a hedge along the eastern edge of the property to help keep the fisherman out of our yard as they walk to the stream.  Should another serious flood occur, they will bear the brunt of the damage and debris coming into the yard.

It has been a nearly a year to get them to this point.  Using directions I looked up on the web last year, I dug out all the first year sucker canes in early April, just as they were coming into leaf.  This was a few weeks late, as Mid-March is about right.

When getting them out of the ground care was taken to preserve as much of the root stem as possible.  I potted each one in it’s own 1 gallon pot with my preferred potting medium: straight Organic Endeavors compost.  Placed in the side yard they received limited full sun and set leaves well through the summer.  No special care was given to get them through the winter and they remained there.  The heavy snowfall Pennsylvania received this year served as good insulation.

As I pulled the pots up for transfer, the roots had snaked out and into the ground around them.  A bit of work was required to loosen them and minimize damage but was promising for my transplant success.  Tossing them in the wheelbarrow and grabbing a digging spade, my little lovelies and I headed to the field.

The warmed, moist soil made digging easy on the warm spring afternoon.  Each hole was prepared and planted individually, with the compost and plant going in together and topped off with the extracted dirt.  These were allowed to settle into the picture you see above.  A few days later they will get a top dressing of a few more inches of compost and a layer of mulch.  What will be used for mulch is up in the air at the moment, but I am thinking leaf mold from beneath the maple or some shredded newsprint.

Potting brambles for transplant provided older canes with well established root systems.  The process was simple and didn’t take too much time.  Though still too early to tell if they will flourish, I have good expectations that they will.

The next stage in this experiment is to transplant freshly dug canes into the field.  I have a few dozen that need to come out of my wife’s flower bed.

As my wife and I are planning to limit our gardening this year, we have decided not to buy any additional seeds and instead put our 2009 remnants to good use. A few days ago I wandered through the seed bins and came up with a large menagerie of ornamentals and edibles to populate the earth with once the soil can be worked.  Flowers, brassica, leaf lettuce, kale, spinach, asparagus, brussels sprouts, peas, peppers, and more will be available to us this year at no extra cost.  Though some will be lost due to decreased germination rates, for our reduced space this year it should be more than enough.

One place we will be getting around the no new seeds is that there will be some new plants.  Tomatoes are hard to get going here in our valley so 4 or 5 plants will be bought from our local garden supply shop.  An additional 25 crowns of day neutral or everbearing strawberries will also be added to our strawberry patch after suffering more than a few losses over the past two seasons.  Keep your fingers crossed that the ones I find this year are as good as our initial purchase.  Those produce these lovely perfectly sweet quarter size strawberries from early June through until the first heavy frost in mid October.  Though not nearly as productive as June bearing, we can harvest a pint a day from our 60 square foot patch every few days while they are in season.

Overall I am looking forward to this season as one of change.  The time saved on shopping, shipping, and sorting will be put to planning.  That planning should lead to a garden that I can look to as productive and enjoyable rather than stressing over where things are going wrong.

My wife and I sat down a few days ago to decide on what direction our garden was going to take.  After spending several years struggling with too much space and not enough time, we started by deciding how much we were going to plant.  Answer?  Not nearly as much as we have tried in the past.  Currently there is gardening space in front yard, side yard, and field, with approximately 220, 400, and 800 sq/ft in each area.  Our desires to grow great are huge, but time requirements elsewhere have proven to be substantially more demanding than we expected when we first started down this road 3 years ago.

That leaves us wanting to do a kitchen garden in the front yard focusing on the essentials: cucumbers, peas, onions, tomatoes and strawberries.  Cucumber, peas, and onions will start from seeds indoor well before the last frost so we can have an extra planting or two as the season progresses.  Tomatoes will come from our local garden supply house.  The variety and quality are hard to beat for not much more than a pack of seeds, without the frustration of getting them to germinate.   Ever-bearing and daylight neutral strawberries adorn the strawberry patch already, but there are a few places that could use a few fresh crowns.  One pack of 25 should be enough.

The side yard are is getting dismantled this year and the cinder blocks that form the perimeter moved back into storage.  It was a nice location but I have learned through experimentation with this area just what a difference a micro-climate can mean to growing conditions.  Moisture would settle in after a heavy dew and never quite evaporate.  When the rest of the yard is comfortable and windy, the air around this section was humid and stale.  So many differences abound on our little acre.

Experiments will go out into the field.  In an effort to not buy any new seeds this year and put the remnants of 2009 to good use, anything left over that doesn’t go in the front will get placed here.  With that unknown multitiude will also go some planned for Halloween pumpkins and birdseed sunflowers.

Last on the list is another test: transplanting brambles.  Six blackberry canes were potted up during dormancy in the very early spring and allowed to set good roots over the summer.  Once the hard frosts break and the ground becomes workable again they will get placed along the periphery of the field.

Planning gets the process started with the first plantings only a few weeks away.  A few short months from now the work can begin in earnest and before too long winter will be a memory and we can harvest the first taste of summer: a ripe, juicy tomato on the forth of July.

I know that I have been writing a lot lately about Celiac disease, living gluten free, cooking gluten free, and reviewing products safe for those with gluten issues, but that has all been because it has been a large part of my life since the diagnosis.  Simply put, it is a huge change that has ramifications over your entire life.  Food is one of the 4 essentials for life.  If you haven’t been exposed to it before, the other requirements are water, shelter, and clothing.

As I get into the swing of things with the diet and life in general as a Celiac patient, it isn’t as all consuming on my consciousness. The rest of life opens up and I can focus on the other large aspect of this blog: gardening and actually growing food.  Stuff you dig up out of the ground, covered in dirt, run under water to wash off, and turn into something fantastic for your family and can then sit down and eat and share camaraderie while nourishing your body.

It is great exercise to boot.  Nothing like wielding a hoe with vengeance in 90 degree summer sun to work up a good sweat and remind you of what it is like to be alive.  Warm moist earth is the smell of life.

This is just a friendly reminder that we are moving into fall and if you live in an area threatened by heavy forsts and snow that you should mulch your strawberry crowns to help them survive the coming cold.  Four inches of clean straw has helped ours survive last winter, which included a few days that dipped down to 0.  ’08-’09 was a record year for the number of days below freezing.  I lost count at over 40.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the winters here are what I consider mild for a temperate climate: we only experience a couple of days where temperatures dip to 0 or  below over night, with only a month where temps stay at or below freezing.  Usually if we get a couple of inches of snow, it doesn’t stick around for more than a week, except in the shadows cast by the house and trees.