Ian Young

Oops, accidental double post.

Sounds like bacterial spot. I have this on my peach tree. The gummy "exudate" is a good sign and I can see your leaves have the "shot hole" pattern.

I think there might be some organic copper sprays but I haven't tried anything for control yet so I can't speak to that. I think you often have to have very accurate timing with sprays for them to be effective, and I'm just not willing to make that time investment at the moment. As far as I know, the infection doesn't hurt the tree itself much, so how much effort you put into control depends on how much you care about the effect on the fruit.

For me the severity of infection seems to vary a lot from year to year. Last year was terrible. This year, despite being extremely wet, it's looking like it will be pretty mild. When the infection is bad, it doesn't spoil the fruit but it can give the skin a very unattractive and unpleasant rough texture. If you're peeling and preserving, it's not too big a deal. It definitely makes them less appealing for fresh eating, though.

Barbara Kochan wrote:You may find that his exceptional fastidiousness is due to a very keen observation and that, but for lesser fine motor skills even this 2.5 years old person could put each seed back with it's kindred, given a few attention breaks.

It's true, I actually think he would do great at identifying like-with-like seeds. He seems to be pretty dialed in to that sort of detail. He's had a great time looking at the different sizes and shapes, and is already identifying a few types of seeds by name, which is pretty impressive (to me at least). Unfortunately, my seed collection has lots of different varieties within the same type of seed, which is where the parental heartburn set in. Even I am not that good!

At any rate, I'm not really complaining. I'm excited to get to share this with him. We've been talking about how planting works and I'm eager to get out into the garden with him once the weather warms a little more. He has a book about gardens and has been naming the vegetables he thinks we should plant: garlic, sunflowers, carrots, and watermelon. All good choices, except I had finally written off growing watermelon after too many years of poor results with our short growing season. Time to give Blacktail Mountain one more try, I guess.

In a previous thread ceramic tile was suggested as a permanent barrier. It has a lot of appealing properties: it's inert, not going to corrode, (hopefully) not going to leach anything bad into the soil, nice and strong, and can be collected free from surplus material. I made a raspberry bed using 12" tall tiles (pics in the other thread) and it has been working great. It sounds like you're looking for something slightly taller. Bigger tiles might be a little harder to source, but they exist. A lot of modern bathrooms and commercial facilities are going with large (18"x36" or something like that?) tiles, so if you could source some discards from a project like that, you might be in business.

I mentioned in the other thread that something I had been using as a temporary solution was corrugated plastic like what's used in political yard signs. Plenty of that around to be discarded after an election. I've had a piece in the ground for something like 4 years and it is holding up just fine. A little bit of degradation along the top where it's exposed to the sun, but the stuff under the soil surface seems totally intact.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:For those who prefer to avoid plastic in the garden, I wonder if overlapping 12" ceramic tiles would be deep enough. I've read that the runners tend to be shallower than the roots of the mature plant. Tile can be had very cheap/free if you know where to look.

Douglas, this comment stuck in my head because ceramic tiles seemed to have the ideal properties for this sort of application, plus I love taking stuff out of the waste stream. It took me a little while to find a suitable quantity, but eventually I nabbed two different sets of leftover tile being given away, one of 12x12 and one of 12x24 tiles (even better).

I dug a trench about 8" deep around the border of the new raspberry bed so the tiles would stick up a little bit—I want this bed to be slightly raised but keep most of the tile under the ground for stability and rhizome protection. I laid the tiles in a simple running bond, and tamped down the soil around them to try to keep them in place. It took a little bit of fussing to get all the tiles straight, level, and tight against each other, but it wasn't a terribly hard installation. My greatest concern was that the bed would suffer from frost heave, that would introduce gaps between the two layers of tiles, and then rhizomes would sneak out the gaps. The bed is on its third winter now and is still looking great, so hopefully it's going to stay like this. I'll probably give it another year or two before I declare success on rhizome containment, but we had some established plants this past summer and nothing got out!

I recently made the mistake of leaving my seed storage box on the dining room table. Of course the toddler immediately notices it and wants to know what's in it. Seeds? He knows what seeds are and demands to see them. Well, of course I want to nurture his interest in gardening, but I also want to have seeds left to plant. First I think I can sell him on taking just a few seeds per envelope. This works with some careful coaching, and he's having a good time pushing them around the table and talking about sunflowers and pumpkins. I can sacrifice a few seeds, I have extras. But then, because he's a weirdly fastidious little dude, he wants to put the seeds back. Back in the correct envelopes, though? Good luck on making that happen with a 2.5 year old. I not only want to have some seeds left to plant, I want to have seeds that will grow into what the envelope says they are.

Luckily, after several nights of heartburn at dinner as the kid requests "I want to play with SEEDS" again, I hit upon a solution. It was time to clean out some old seeds of rejected varieties or too old to be viable. Two big handfuls of seed packets I no longer need? I know someone who could use those. So now my seed box is tucked safely back in the basement and the kid has his own seed collection that he is free to use. He's even getting pretty good at sealing the reusable envelopes back up. I'll thank myself for this later!

Dave Way wrote:I’m wondering about the variety of tastes of different varieties. I tried them for the first time last summer in south central BC. And they were terrible. Not hard and dry but just awful-tasting. I spat them out and so did the kids. I’d love to include them in my food forest here in Northern France ( and by coincidence, someone I know in the nearest town just offered me one of his bushes two days ago).
Any thoughts? Is it an acquired taste or more likely just the wild variant we were eating from?

Dave, I've spent several years puzzling over this question. I don't have a ton of room so I'd rather rely on the advice of others and pick right the first time. Opinions on serviceberry seem to be all over the place, though. The only conclusion I've reached is that I think the quality of the fruit must depend heavily not only on the variety, but also on some set of site-specific variables (climate? soil? rain?).

For example, I'm pretty sure Eric Toensmeier has written that his 'Regent' (A. alnifolia) serviceberries were mealy and bad and he tore them up. But I have a young 'Regent' bush and the berries have been absolutely fantastic—juicy and flavorful. I'm in Minnesota, still the same biome and a similar USDA zone as Eric, but there must be some other reason that we've had completely different experiences with the same cultivar.

Unfortunately, that doesn't leave a lot of advice to offer you other than to try some different species and cultivars. My plants started producing after 2 years, so if you have similar luck you'll get results from any experiments before too long, at least. I don't think they're an acquired taste, no. I've had berries from my own bush and from boulevard trees that are likely 'Autumn Brilliance' (A. × grandiflora) and both have been quite good. They're in very much the same camp as blueberries, mild and sweet and inoffensive. They might not turn out to be your favorite fruit but they certainly should not be "spitters".

I could see this working. I think the key will be getting the cardboard broken down pretty fine, like a pulp. If there are big pieces in the mix, they'll probably compromise the structural integrity of the blocks.

I would definitely plan to include some perlite in the mix for aeration. Since the blocking process compresses everything so much, I could imagine a mix of pulp/castings/compost turning into a real brick that stays too sodden if it doesn't have something to lighten it up a bit.

I think playing around with a blend of coir and pulp sounds promising, and you should play around with the ratios in general. You might find you need more or less pulp to compost in comparison to what the peat and coir recipes call for.

Pittmoss looks interesting, thanks for sharing that idea! I hope it becomes more widely available. I'd love to see some additional peat alternatives crop up. Coir seems to be a pretty good product, but a little more competition would be good for everyone.

Blake Dozier wrote:I've only ever used peat moss for soil blocks. I don't want to sidetrack this thread with another topic, but do you mind sharing why you avoid it?

I'm not sure what the other issues might be, but the most common complaint against peat moss is that it's a non-renewable resource. Mining of peat bogs is environmentally destructive (and if I recall, might also be a significant carbon emitter). It's the kind of thing that we need to eventually stop doing, so gardeners are starting to experiment with ways to get the same results with other materials. Coco coir is popular and has some good upsides. I've been soil blocking with coir for 3 years now and have been very happy with my results.

I have a friend who runs a small-scale organic farm in Iowa. He says he loves the paper pot system, but it took careful control of a bunch of variables (bed preparation, planting speed, etc) to get good results from it. It didn't sound like something that would be worth the time or $ investment for a home garden.

Other home seed starting options:

I really like soil blocks. I think those come the closest to the paper pot system at a home scale in terms of being able to churn out a lot of small transplants that are super fast to plant out. And no waste!

For bigger starts (like tomatoes), I use folded newspaper pots. I should draw up a diagram for the pattern sometime. They take a little bit of time to fold, but they work great, they're free, zero-waste, and non-toxic (our local printer uses soy-based ink).

I'm in a pretty similar area to you and have been pondering this same question for the past 5 years. I decided that I wanted something that in addition to suppressing weeds, was either useful (food, flowers, nitrogen) or was a native plant (because "native" tends to be shorthand for exceptional wildlife value + low maintenance). Here are some things I've tried:

Pussytoes & skullcaps (full sun): native, kinda cute, good in hot dry sun. But they don't spread very fast and I am not sure about their weed-suppressing abilities.
Creeping veronica (full sun): spreads nicely, a lovely mat of flowers for a brief period, handles foot traffic, seems to be fighting off competition very well in my terrible weedy boulevard. Not especially useful other than the flowers.
Creeping thyme (full sun): There are different varieties and I think the weed-fighting abilities will vary. Nice flowers. It's edible, but will you reach for it when you have an upright thyme plant nearby that is easier to harvest and not dirty? Hasn't been 100% hardy for me.
Violets (any): I like these, because they are pretty, native with great wildlife value, edible if you care to eat them, tolerate tons of foot traffic, and show up voluntarily. I've been encouraging them but don't have them massed in any one area yet. I'm guessing they won't be great at out-competing weeds.
Canada anemone (full/part sun): I sourced this one because I was looking for more native groundcovers. It's a bit taller so not for foot traffic areas, but spreads well and nice flowers.
Poppy mallow (full/part sun): Same idea as Canada anemone, but this one hasn't spread at all for me. Pretty, not much of a groundcover.
Dutch white clover (any?): A classic, and all-around good at what it does. Not going to overcome established weeds, but good if you let it get established first.
New Zealand giant clover (any): Taller and very lush. I have been thinking this would do a good job but haven't given it a proper trial yet.
Yarrow (full/part sun): A bit taller, but can be very dense. Pretty. I'm not sure if this is a native here or not.
Dandelions (any): Not like I sought them out, but you know. Unfortunately, even if you let them get huge and dense and happy, they still don't keep out other weeds very well.
Partidge pea (full/part sun): Maybe technically the herbaceous layer, but I think it deserves a nod for being a vigorous annual that reseeds readily, is native, is gorgeous and hugely popular with bees, and fixes nitrogen. I have a big stand of this that has been expanding each year and thoroughly keeping everything else at bay.

On strawberries, the different species and common names get confusing, so it's worth asking which kind you've tried. Fragaria x ananassa is the cultivated one—I haven't tried this in a naturalized setting. Fragaria vesca, "alpine strawberry", is the one I most often see billed as "wild strawberry". It has small sweet berries, doesn't spread much (or at all?) by runners, and generally behaves itself. Nice plant, not a great weed suppressor. Fragaria virginiana is the one that's native around here. Also small sweet fruits, but spreads by runners like mad. I planted six plugs a couple years ago and they have formed a huge solid 10'x30' carpet of plants. There's a few shoots of quack grass making a go of it, but the strawberries are winning. If you're looking for a proper groundcover, Fragaria virginiana seems like the clear way to go.