Dandelions and Clover Terrorizing Lawns Nationwide!

Through a chain of gardening blogs, I found Garden Rant's rant about the inability of Scotts Chemicals to comprehend that diversity in lawns is a good thing. To Scotts, the only good clover is dead clover, the only good dandelion is a dead dandelion, and the only good lawn is one that soaks up several hundred dollars of their product every year.

Dandelion For Sale In Seoul, Korea

Does this cute yellow flower look like it should be hunted down and poisoned to make a sterile monoculture that covers half of my property? Let's bring back the lawns of granny's time, when they were a vibrant mix of grasses, clover and a few volunteer wildflowers. Bees loved those lawns, birds loved them, children loved them, and they were easier to take care of.

Dandelion In October, White Mountains, AZ

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Growing Lettuce at 110° F

This is my experimental lettuce patch, in a photo taken early this morning. It was planted about 2 months ago in an old compost heap that was planted with tomatoes last summer.  The location under a mesquite tree was too shady for tomatoes, so I tried lettuce, mizuna and Swiss chard. It's leggy and pale from being in the shade, but if it were in the sun it would be dead.



It's surprisingly not bitter and despite the high temperatures, it hasn't bolted. All I did was add a bit more dirt to the top of the heap, soak the seeds a few hours and plant them. It has a drip line, and is being watered 3 times a day for a few minutes each time.

Lettuce Varieties: Rubin and Tango Read more!

Watering Buffalo Grass: It's not rocket surgery!

It's tough being on the bleeding edge of lawn management. For example, how long should I run my lawn sprinklers to water my buffalo grass? How often? No one knows yet, but I think I'm on the right track.

Step 1 was to find out how much water my sprinkler system delivers. The "tuna can" method as explained by the University of Arizona's agriculture department measures your lawn sprinkler's output. UC Davis has a downloadable guide for California that explains a similar method.

Step 2 was estimated from bits of information. The original research for UC Verde buffalo grass indicated that it would survive, and maybe even stay green with half the water that Bermuda grass gets. I also know that deep, infrequent watering is better for lawns.

I had the Phoenix lawn watering guide site calculate the run times I would need for Bermuda grass with my sprinkler system. If you are in California, download the UC Davis brochure and use its watering times.

I converted the number of minutes of watering into minutes per month.

Step 3, I divided the monthly watering time in half to estimate what UC Verde buffalo grass would need. During April and May I watered twice a month, delivering half the water each time. 15 days was a bit too long between waterings; the grass was clearly water-stressed before the next watering session. So I've changed to delivering 1/3 of that amount every 10 days to see if a shorter interval will help.

Calculating your own watering times:
It's not rocket surgery!

Figure out how long warm season grasses need to be watered in your area, based on your sprinkler system's water output. Convert the daily or weekly amount into a monthly watering time.

Deliver between 1/2 and 2/3 of that water every month, split into 2 or 3 watering sessions.
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The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring

Two of the gaudy xeriscaping plants, my rose bush and the neighbor's cactus. I am tempted to sneak over to his yard and steal a few pads to start my own cactus.

Beavertail Cactus (Opuntia basilaris)


Lady Banks Rose (Rosa banksiae)

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Watching Grass Grow: 1 Year Later, It's a Lawn!

Happy birthday to my buffalo grass lawn! It was one year old on Sunday, and a long way from the sea of mud we had last year. This coming year I'll be reporting on the mowing and watering it needs to keep it attractive. it's about 80% greened up, and with the predicted warmer weather this week, it should be completely green by the first of April.



Our goal is not a putting green, our goal is a low-maintenance lawn that uses less water than Bermuda grass. This survived the abnormally hot and dry summer of 2009, and the abnormally soggy winter of 2009/10 with no problems.

I don't know about the Bermuda that I know is surviving in there - the neighboring Bermuda grass lawns went dormant and greened up simultaneously with the Buffalo grass. I'm going to have to control it with low water and neglect and some old-fashioned pulling. Read more!

Green grows my Buffalo ... already!

After a very rainy, almost freeze-free winter, it's warming up. The low temperatures have been mostly in the 50s and the highs in the mid-60s to as high as 78. With that bit of encouragement, the buffalo grass started sending up a few tiny green blades of grass. I responded by cutting them all off.


Mowing the grass short in early spring lets the sun reach the base of the plant where the new growth will come from. It trimmed off most of the dry ends, revealing a blotchy greenish lawn. By the end of March it should be all green.
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Tomatoes In January: Neener, Neener!

Look at the picture, taken January 23, 2010. Those are tomatoes I picked from my garden in the middle of  winter.

The fine print:

• They were picked when they were barely beginning to ripen and ripened indoors.
• They taste better than most store-bought tomatoes, but nowhere near as good as they do in warmer weather.
• Cold nights gives tomatoes the same mealy texture that they get in the refrigerator.
  
• This tomato growing area is elevated, and under the light shelter of a large mesquite, giving it more frost protection than the rest of the garden.

However, in a mild winter area like Phoenix, a small amount of frost protection can prolong your tomato harvest, perhaps until your new plants start producing. Read more!

Watching Grass Grow: It's Dead, Jim

The grass is now mostly khaki, not green. We had a 1-night cold spell and the temperature dropped to just below freezing. Apparently that's enough to trigger dormancy, because over the next week or so the green color vanished. This picture was taken December 12th.

The next question will be "How soon does it get green"? Read more!

Watching Grass Grow: Almost Thanksgiving, Still Green

As the title says, I'm still waiting for the grass to go dormant. Daytime temperatures have been in the 70s and nights about 50 for the past couple weeks. The grass is still growing, but more slowly. I'll probably mow it one more time this year.

Wayne Thorsen, Mr. Buffalo Grass, was here in early November. He doesn't know if the UC Verde cultivar will go dormant at all in this climate. It seems that I'm the on the cutting (mowing?) edge, and have the oldest UC verde lawn in the Phoenix area. Finally I'm trendy!

It's hard to photograph, but there is a faint purple tinge on the tips of the blades, which may be a sign it's going dormant. There are a few annual weeds sprouting through the grass,but nothing like the army of them we had this spring. Read more!

Okra Seeds as a Coffee Substitute?

One of the burning garden controversies of the 1840s was using okra seeds for coffee. The proponents were proclaiming it as the best thing since ... well, coffee.

Okra Seeds A Substitute For Coffee.—We find in the papers* a letter signed J. F. Callen, addressed to H. L. Ellsworth, declaring that the seeds of Garden Okra, when roasted and used as coffee cannot be distinguished therefrom, and many who have tried it pronounce it equal to the best 'Java.' The beverage is perfectly healthy, and as the seed is easily raised, he thinks it "destined at no distant day, to expel from our markets one of the most extensive articles of import."

We know how expelling coffee from our markets worked.

The comment from the editor was: "This sounds rather windy — but the matter can soon be decided by experiments, and we should be glad if some of our readers who have raised a surplus of of the seeds this season would try them as coffee and let us know the result." Ohio Cultivator vol. 1 No. 1 Columbus, Ohio, January 1, 1845

In the interest of science I sacrificed a half-cup of seeds and an hour of my time to toast and brew up some okra seeds. The resulting concoction was drinkable. With a bit of practice, you could make a brown, mellow-tasting, tolerable substitute for decaffeinated coffee. It was definitely better than Postum or Sanka.

Recipe:

Ingredients: 1/2 cup ripe okra seeds

1. Put a heavy skillet on medium heat for about 10 minutes to pre-heat.
2. Dump the seeds into the skillet and stir them frequently or shake the skillet.
   The seeds will go from dark green-black to light gray, then start turning brown
3. Keep stirring at least until the seeds start popping open - about 10 minutes. You can roast them longer, but cover the skillet or they will be all over the kitchen.
   (this would be a good place to use an old-fashioned popcorn pan)
4. Remove the seeds from the skillet and let them cool.
5. Grind the seeds in something (I used a coffee grinder) until they look like coffee. They are brittle and grind faster than real coffee. 
6. Brew, using about half as much water as you would for real coffee. Or twice as much okra as you would coffee.
   

*Instead of the blogosphere posting and commenting, our ancestors used a primitive "store and forward" technology called small town newspapers. Editors subscribed to many papers and routinely reprinted anything they thought their own readers would find interesting.
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