Got Gnats?

Hellos to all.  Long time no see.  My apologies for being away so long.  Gainful employment has proven to be a major bummer on the blogging front.  Turns out it’s also a major bummer on green living front.  The lack of time has made green experiments scarce around here but today I’ve got a doozey.

My little kitchen herb garden has been trucking along all winter.  I’ve lost some good soldiers to lack of light and a cold window sill but for the most part, winter has been relatively kind to my increasingly green thumb.  Recently I’ve developed a common winter problem for house plants - fungus gnats.  At first I thought they were just fruit flies but after carefully ensuring I didn’t have any flies in my worm bin and any nasty rotting produce anywhere, I took a closer look at the little buggers and realized they were something else entirely.

Fungus gnats are little flies that are commonly found in potted plants.  Apparently commercial potting soil can be full of larvae and their hatching may have been triggered by me overwatering my plants while they’re in a semi-dormant state.  They are also super annoying.

After scouring the internet for a non-chemical cure, I started to experiment. 

Step 1: Drying out my plants.  Apparently these suckers thrive on rotting organic matter (aka the roots of my plants) so I stopped watering my plants for 2 weeks.  This of course came with some risks and it appears that I’ve lost one of my basil plants and possibly my oregano  but everything else seems to have survived.  I’m down to watering only once a week and very sparingly.

Cutting back on the water helped a bit but still wasn’t doing the trick so I had to try something else.

Step 2: Cinnamon.  When I saw this idea on a UBC Botanical Garden Forum, I was highly skeptical but I really didn’t want to have to resort to chemicals so I gave it a try.  I started with just a sprinkle on the surface of the soil because I really wasn’t sure how crazy to go but after about a week I went for full soil coverage.

Sad dehydrated parsley with cinnamon soil

Step 3:  Lemon juice.  Again, seriously?  But reason with me for a moment.  Apparently the little buggers are attracted to the colour yellow. So I used a couple of our little soy sauce dishes from the ole sushi set and set them up on the window sills.  The gnats are attracted to it and then they drown in the lemon juice.

See those itty bitty dead flies?

Result?  Victory.  Well, they’re not completely gone, but things have improved dramatically.  I’m still watering only once a week but the flying population in my household has decreased dramatically.  Dare I call this green experiment a success?  Do you have any green pest control success stories?

Harvest Time!

Hey Y’all!  I know I must apologize for my blog absence but things have been pretty insanely busy around here and the poor blog ended up on the bottom of the priority totem pole.  But there’s good news!  It’s Harvest Time!  We finally get to reap all the rewards of all the *cough* time *cough* that we spent in the garden and pig out on veggies!

Well, I guess it doesn’t go exactly like that…

In spite of my best unintentional efforts to kill my garden, the little beast is a fighter and has been producing more than I ever thought it would.  I elected to use a bit of “harvest as we go” to keep things manageable.  I later learned that this is not a new concept – it’s only new to me who is used to Mom pulling everything up on the same day and then making us store everything ON THE SAME DAY.

A special thanks to my little sis’ for helping with some weeding and making me a killer beet salad.

Beet Salad!

Ah yes, the beets.  Not only did these bad boys grow, they grew well and provided months of beet greens for salads and beets…for salads.  

I also ended up with a decent amount of peas considering I only had about 6 plants come up and I accidentally pulled up 2 of them when weeding.  Ooops!  The beans were also a just right amount even though only about half of what I planted actually grew.  Are you sensing a theme here? 

Let’s talk tomatoes.  At one point, one of my tomato plants died.  It was seriously dead.  Brown and dried out and sad looking.  I contemplated pulling it up – but then it came back!  The weather got a bit rainy and by the time I got back to the garden it had miraculously come back to some kind of semblance of life!  Needless to say I was pretty excited.  And then the hail hit.  Jubilation turned to disappointment and I wrote the whole lot off.  Big mistake.  After ignoring my tomatoes for a month, the plants turned into monster plants.  Having missed the prime pruning opportunities, I spent the rest of the summer trying to manage my insane plants.  I never really got them under control.

But they managed to produce more than just branches….

And we can’t forget about the carrots!  I was kind of lazy about thinning them out and to be honest, I really don’t think it mattered.  Even with harvesting over the last 3 weeks, I’ve got more carrots than I know what to do with.  There’s going to have to be carrot cake, carrot soup, carrot muffins, carrot juice…?

And since my squash and pumpkins produced nothing(!), one of my garden neighbours (who didn’t tend her garden AT ALL) gave me a couple of squash because she had over 30 (did I mention she did NOTHING? Not fair.).  And another one of my lovely neighbours gave me a zuchinni.

Hooray for harvest!

Anyone need any carrots?

July Garden Update, or, Lazy, Lazy Bones, or, Thanks for the Freebie Mother Nature

Well, I should have known better than to brag to the blogosphere that I was keeping up with my garden.  It pretty much guaranteed my imminent failure.  Now, under normal circumstances, I would be feeling really, really terrible, but as anyone in Alberta knows, this summer has brought anything but normal circumstances.  I think I can at least partially blame this garden failure on good ole Mother Nature.

Let me break it down for you…

July saw me start a new job with a daily hour round trip commute (that’s a green failure for another day…).  With said new job, my available garden time dropped dramatically.  But there was still time available.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature has a serious hate on for Alberta this year.  It’s been wet.  Really wet.  After years of near catastrophic drought conditions out here on the wide open praririe, we’ve had the wettest spring/early summer that I can honestly remember.  While this certainly has benefits (woohoo for recharged aquifers and easy watering!), it also has serious drawbacks (massive mosquito infestation).

Rainy weather and mosquitoes that swarm thick enough to form clouds that actually show up on weather radar have made for incredibly soggy and uncomfortable gardening.  One particular trip for watering had me wearing a hoodie in 27°C with mittens to avoid being completely drained of blood.  Another saw me almost lose a rubber boot to mud the consistency of quicksand (it looked solid, I swear to God).

To put it lightly, this garden season has been a challenge.

But things are growing alright.  Weeds.  Lots and lots of weeds.  And not just little ones either.  Giant Friggin’ Weeds.   And they are everywhere.

Before weeding - but after pre-weeding...

After 3 hours of weeding... it's better right?  Right?!

This has led to a whole new kind of guilt.  Forget green failure guilt.  Bad gardener guilt is 10 times worse.  The rapid expansion of my weed garden and a lack of viable weeding time combined to form an epic disaster.  I even resorted to visiting my garden under the cover of darkness to pre-emptively weed before having to show my face in the daylight among all the other, infinitely more responsible super gardeners.

If I thought I’d escaped Keeping Up with the Jones’ syndrome by my resolution to buy less stuff, I was friggin’ delusional.  Forget the Jones’.  Whoever these super tidy garden freaks are, I need to at least pretend I’m trying to keep up with them.

Garden Update: IT'S ALIVE!!!

It’s been a month since I planted my little experimental/plant killer rehab garden and it’s time for an update!

Let the record show that I have been dedicating a minimum 2 hours a week to garden maintenance – which is what I’d planned on in the first place.  I must, however, credit my newly unemployed state for allowing me that time.  I’m not entirely convinced that if I didn’t have my days free for garden folly that the poor venture would be surviving in its current state.

Okay, caveat completed, here’s an update:

I’m fairly certain that my garden plot was grass last year so part of me wants to blame it’s slowness on a lack of soil nutrients.  More likely is the fact that I went to Halifax for a week right after planting and it was probably the nicest week of the season so far.  Either way, my garden is looking a little stunted compared to others.

My Garden - look reeeeeaaaaal close. There's stuff growing, I swear.

On the success side of things lie the pumpkins and squash.  I’ve got one strong looking pumpkin coming up and what seems to be like more and more squash plants popping up every day.  It’s a good thing I didn’t give up on them because it took a solid 3 weeks for any signs of life to show there.  

Pumpkin!

 

And count another success on the tomato front.  My heirloom Beefsteak tomato plant, which I thought I’d lost to frost, has miraculously come back to life thanks to some rain.  The other plants are pretty bushy despite my trimming efforts but everyone else’s tomatoes seem to be doing the same thing so I’m not quite worried yet.

Spinach seems to be the clear winner for me at this point.  I’ve even harvested some already so score one for the early harvest!

Spinach!

Everything else is growing veeeeerrrrryy sloooooooowly compare to the other gardens which look this:

Apparently I should be growing potatoes...

The weeds are growing though.  They’re growing like crazy.  That’s where my 2 hours a week goes.  Weeding.  Holy moly.  But if butt muscles from squatting in the dirt count as success, then count one for that.

No One Wants Your Used Crap – And Other Garage Sale Lessons

It’s that time of year.  The leaves are out, the birds are singing, and people everywhere are trying to unload their worthless crap on others.  Yes, it’s garage sale season.  I have very mixed feelings about the phenomenon that is the garage sale.  On one hand, it’s a great exercise in re-use - all those bargain hunters giving a second life to all that unwanted stuff; the treasures waiting to be discovered.  On the other hand they kind of make me sick to my stomach.  If there is a hell, I’m certain that there is a special level where there’s a garage sale everyday (it’s probably near the top so it’s accessible to people who think that garage sales are DA BOMB).  

I’d managed to avoid helping my mother with any of her previous garage sale attempts – which is quite the feat considering what a champion manipulator she is.  My mother has a serious hoarder tendency and with my sister’s impending move to Vancouver this fall, she and I decided to take some covert action while Mother is on holidays and hold a garage sale with the goal of divesting the family of the excessive piles of crap that have accumulated over the years.  It taught me a couple of things that I’d like to share so that you too can learn from this horrific experience.

Garage Sale Lesson #1 – No One Wants Your Used Crap

Let’s face facts, People.  No one wants your used crap.  Well, some people do – but they only want the weirdest stuff and they probably want it for free.  But seriously, many people have a serious aversion to buying used goods.  It probably doesn’t help that most of the items that end up in garage sales really belong in the garbage, but just take a look at any thrift store and you’ll see what I mean.  There is more used crap out there than there are people to buy it.  I had a chance to attend the first day of the Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence Conference in May where one of the presenters shared the fact that approximately 70% of goods donated to second-hand stores ends up land-filled.  There just aren’t enough people to buy all of it.

This, of course, brings up some pretty philosophical questions about our consumer habits (like why do we buy all this shit in the first place?) which could be (and probably has been) a master’s thesis.  

Garage Sale Lesson #2 – There’s a fine line between “saving for reuse” and “hoarding like a crazy person”

My mother excels at re-use.  I suppose I could learn a thing or two about the 2^nd most important R from her, but there is such a thing as taking things too far.  For instance, why use the lovely re-usable aluminum water bottle that your daughter brought home from a conference when you can carry around an old mustard jar as a water bottle?  Or, why throw out this 1980’s crib when someone might be able to use it 30 years later?  BECAUSE IT’S NO LONGER SAFE IS WHY!!!!  (Also, see lesson #1).

Uh, I think the only person who still wants to play with this doll is Chucky.

Sorry.  I let my frustrations get the best of me for a second there.  Don’t get me wrong –
re-use is an important aspect to living a greener existence, but if your kitchen counter is so covered with old margarine containers and empty jam jars that the space is no longer useable, it might be time to let a couple of those bad boys go to the big recycling depot in the sky. 

The key part of the word re-use for me is USE.  If you’re not actually going to re-USE an item, then let it go.  My sister is a much better example of a re-user and I’m sure she learned some of her mad skills from dear old mum, but even she knows that if your living space starts looking like a trash heap, you’ve got to make some changes.  Or maybe become a mixed media artist and actually use the friggin’ shit.

Handsome example of reuse of old refrigerator drawers by Edmonton craft artist Roxanne Nesbitt

Garage Sale Lesson #3 – Anything you buy becomes instantly worthless the moment you pay for it

Okay, let’s talk economics.  One thing my mom never quite seems to grasp (aside from #’s 1 and 2) is that you will never recover the money that you paid for an item, no matter the condition on garage sale day.  She, and many other people I know, have a hard time letting go of stuff because she can’t handle the fact that stuff becomes nearly worthless the instant you buy it.  

When I was a kid, my mom used to take my sister and I on epic sale adventures.  My mom would go anywhere to catch a sale.  She’d buy in bulk – even if we didn’t really need the items (sound like something trendy today?  Cough, extreme couponing, cough).  She’d call it an ‘investment’.  Fact of the matter is that almost no consumer good out there appreciates in value.  Just as a new car depreciates the moment you drive it off the lot, so does everything else.  Resale value of that $50 coffee table book you just bought on Amazon – 50 cents.  Maybe a $1 or $2 if you’re lucky.  Those fancy dishes you asked for in your wedding registry – hell, I can get that shit at Value Village for $5.  

Garage Sale Lesson #4 – Garage Sales are a Waste of Time and Money

In some cases, your stuff could be costing you money.  This is especially true if you think about the opportunity costs of hosting a garage sale.  If you’re doing things on the level, you’ll probably need a license (requirements and costs depend on your jurisdiction).  Then you’ll need signs to direct suckers, I mean bargain hunters, to your sale – that means signage materials or premade signs.  Then you need labels for all your crap – more dinero.  

And then there’s your time.  How much is your time worth to you?  Consider what you make an hour.  There’s no way in hell that you’re going to make that in a weekend sitting on a lawn chair in your garage.  Even if you make an awesome haul and get rid of tons of stuff (which you probably would have had to pay for someone else to take away), you will never ever make as much as you could have doing something more productive.

Garage Sale Lesson #5 – Avoid Garage Sales at All Costs AKA Buy Less Stuff

I’ve recently discovered that I don’t want to turn out like my mom.  And by recently I mean it’s been my life goal since I was maybe 10 years old.  What I’ve actually recently discovered is that I don’t want my life to revolve around my stuff.  I really need very little to survive in this world beyond food, shelter and a little self actualization.  None of that really requires a lot of stuff.  So I’ve been challenging myself to live with less.  That means making a conscious effort to curb my spending on consumer goods including – gasp! – shoes, my one mortal weakness.  I hope that by reminding myself of this horrific garage sale experience I can avoid ever having to do it again.  And as green as re-use and buying second hand can be, buying less crap in the first place aka reducing is definitely greener.

Confessions of a PLANT KILLER!

Part of my battle to live a greener existence is my talent for killing plants.  I often try and fail at maintaining houseplants and I’m certain that I’m not alone.  But I can’t help but continue my efforts.  There’s something so creepy about living in a space that doesn’t have anything alive in it other than its occupants.  Plants make my rented apartment feel a little more homey and not quite so temporary.  I hope that by learning to keep houseplants, I'll learn some transferable green thumb skills to help me grow more of my own food.

Despite my best intentions, I don’t always succeed.   The garden experiment is part of my road to recovery as a plant killer (although that’s not going so well – more to come).  Another part of it is a quest to green up my home life with an indoor herb garden.  For some, this is an easy feat.  For me, it is an exercise in will.

When I first moved into my apartment last year, I was determined to have a mini herb garden.  I had grand ambitions with eco features in mind.  Instead of purchasing pots for my herbs, I fashioned my own by using a can opener to remove the tops of pop cans and planted my seeds.  I excitedly watched my herbs sprout and then proceeded to kill them.  Too much water, then too little water, too little space and then eventually, complete disinterest.  A bona fide recipe for disaster.

This year was supposed to be different.  I’ve managed to keep a houseplant alive for 2 years now and I was confident that there’d be hope for me.  But alas, another green fail.  I remain a plant killer.

It all started off so well…

The herb garden went from the simple basil, parsley, chive trio to a rather ambitious array of things I don’t even know what to do with.  I blame the lovely ladies at the Glen View Greenhouse south of Miquelon Lake for the extra encouragement and excellent sales job.

English Thyme and Peppermint - Before

The massive herb invasion included: 2 pots of basil, 1 Italian parsley, 1 English thyme, 1 Greek Oregano, 1 Chocolate Mint, 1 Peppermint, 1 Lemon Balm, 1 Lemon Verbena.  I’m also attempting chives from seeds and a pot of parsley from seeds that ended up getting planted before my epic trip to the greenhouse.  I really don’t know what I’m going to do with it all but at least my apartment will smell awesome – if I can keep them alive.

The first casualties have been the thyme and peppermint.

After : (

Unfortunately I was overzealous and had them situated in my west facing front window which gets lots of sun.  Too much sun apparently.  I returned home from a trip to Halifax (only 4 days!!!) to find them completely fried.  My attempts to resuscitate them have been, so far, unsuccessful.

I supposed I can also count the chives as a casualty since they haven’t bothered to sprout.

Everything else seems to have survived so I guess it counts only as a partial fail.  And I have managed to use my fried herbs even if the plants are dead.  But it’s not what I had in mind and certainly not exactly the best way to start things off…

Are you a plant killer?  Have you tried to rehabilitate yourself? 

A Gardening We Will Go

Ah yes, my first blog post of my strange adventures in green living... For more info about this blog check out (surprise!) the About this Blog tab.

As a child growing up in Edmonton, gardening was a bit of a mixed bag.  Part chore, part summer boredom relief, I never really got into it the way my sister did.  It could have been my mom’s haphazard gardening philosophy, but more likely it was my decision to live in an apartment after fleeing the parental nest.

Apartment balcony gardening wasn’t really high on my list of priorities while I was in university.  Working nearly full time hours to pay for school barely allowed for college fun time let alone time to think about a garden.  And really, let’s be honest, between school, work and excessive alcohol consumption, it never really crossed my mind.  I bought a planter one year thinking that I’d spend mornings on my balcony drinking coffee and tending my flowers.  Oh, the naïveté of youth.  I think the planter lasted a month.  I barely spent enough time at home to open the balcony door.

Thankfully, times have changed.  Maybe it’s a bit of growing up but for the last couple of years I’ve been feeling the itch to flex my green thumb.  There have been a couple of terrible attempts at patio tomatoes and a mini pumpkin patch that yielded one baseball sized fruit.  Pretty solid fails.  However, the itch has become increasingly itchy with all of attention being given to local food and the potential for economic savings.  Gardening, it seems, is cool these days and I just can’t resist.

This year I’m taking the jump.  After some careful encouragement and a timely dose of bad/good luck, I got a plot in the city’s Community Garden.  (Why the bad/good luck?  You see, I’m supposed to be on holidays in Nova Scotia right now but thanks to the never ending work in the good ole Alberta oil patch, my one true love and travel companion was called back to work and the vacay was cancelled.  But at least I have time to garden, right?)

So, seeds and borrowed tools in hand, I went off to plant my garden.  I survived the mosquitoes (only 15 new bites!) and the garden is in!

Here’s the run-down: 1 hill of pumpkins, 1 hill of squash, 3 mini bell peppers (I’m planting from seed), a row of sugar peas, a row of beans, a row of carrots, a row of onions, a half row of spinach and 3 tomato plants. 

It’s small but I really didn’t want to go too overboard and plant more than I could handle (which was a serious temptation).  I have no idea what I’m doing but I think I’m on the right track.  I’m not expecting to halve my grocery bill, but I’ll be pretty happy if I can actually eat something I’ve grown.  Let’s just say, considering my previous failures, I’m expecting a learning experience :)