Rob's Rants

Or … Killing Weeds Organically With the Harbor Freight #91033 Flamethrower Propane Torch

I hate your lawn. I hate my lawn too, but I probably hate your lawn more. I hate lawns because of all the absolutely wasted resources expended on the quest for the American lawn. From tons of fertilizers and pesticides to billions of gallons of water that we can ill afford to be splashing around, more energy, time, and resource is expended on lawns than any other crop in the United States. And none of it makes any sense.

And if you think I made up that bit about lawns being a larger crop than any other in the US, you’re wrong. A NASA scientist named Cristina Milesi calculates this sort of thing using satellite data and concludes that turf grass in the United States occupies more than three times the area of the next largest crop, corn.

And if you’re like most people who get suckered in my the Scotts commercials, nearly everything you’re doing to your lawn is probably bad for the planet. Most people grow grass species that aren’t native or even well adapted for their climate, then dump too much water on them and add too much fertilizer in a quest to keep them alive in places they weren’t supposed to grow in the first place. Most of the fertilizer is synthetically derived, using tons of fossil fuels to produce, and then it depletes the organic matter in your soil anyway. And as if that weren’t bad enough, many people still bag their grass clippings (when they cut the grass too short) and send them to a landfill, which forces them to have to add even more fertilizer to keep the lawn alive.

Nope … I hate it. Honestly, if a referendum came up in my town banning all watering of lawns and all pesticide/herbicide and inorganic fertilizer use, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat.

And I do put my money where my mouth is. One of my favorite Internet posts of all time is Paul Wheaton’s post “Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy.” My lawn care regimen is this:

I started with whatever was growing when I moved in, crabgrass and weeds included. And I didn’t tear anything up or start over. What grows grows, what doesn’t doesn’t. During a recent dry summer I had the only green in the neighborhood because crabgrass doesn’t die back in a drought, even though I NEVER water established grass (I will keep seed moist until it germinates).

• Spring: apply a 100% organic fertilizer and pre-emergent weed control (WOW Supreme from Garden’s Alive) . It mixes Corn Gluten Meal for weed control with an organic fertilizer (good information HERE from Iowa State University about Corn Gluten Meal). If there is patching to be done I use a turf grass mix adapted to northern climates (Northern Turf from Garden’s Alive). It’s specially formulated to be drought resistant, slow growing, and require minimal fertilizer.
• Summer: Do basically nothing. I don’t water. I cut it tall (3 inches minimum) and leave the clippings from my mulching mower. If it dies it dies, but it never does. Turf adapted to northern climates goes dormant in the summer and if it’s dry it just turns yellow. But it comes back with the Fall rains. Seriously, I don’t water. Not because I’m cheap (I have a well so no monthly water bill) but because I am morally opposed to watering lawns.
• Fall: One last application of organic fertilizer and weed control.

Over the last three years I have battled through the worst of the weeds, either digging them up by hand or spot treating with an iron based weed killer. Some dandelions survive, as does a ton of clover, chickweed, and sorrel. But this year I’ve added a new tool to my organic arsenal. The Harbor Freight Propane Torch #91033.

See this video for some insight:

What they don’t tell you in that video is just how much of a beast this thing is. I did a quick 1-minute video myself:

Look! Georgia's Weed Free!

So what does this have to do with lawns? Well, burning weeds is a great and organic way to get rid of them. I don’t mean scorched earth get rid of them like Sherman marching across the South, but rather using the heat from the torch to bust up the cell structure of weeds so they die on their own without too much damage to the surrounding lawn.

Obviously this has to be done carefully or else you’re going to set your neighborhood on fire. Which, if it burns up your chemically grown lawn is fine with me. But once in a while I wonder how on Earth they can sell something like this to the general public when they have to put warnings on soda machines to keep people from pulling them over and crushing themselves. But then I read about 7 things that seem even way more dangerous than this which are legal and I move on.

So, how do you use a torch like this to kill weeds? Once again, Captain Youtube ot the rescue. Watch this video from my favorite seed company, Johnny’s selected seeds. Notice he isn’t setting anything on fire!

So this is my new fun. Going around the yard and burning dandelions and other weeds that sneak through the pre-emergent weed killer I put down. No chemicals, no spraying, and a lot of fun.

The Harbor Freight version I bought costs only $19.99 on sale, an honestly, what could go wrong with a $20 piece of Chinese engineering hooked up to a 20 lb. propane bomb? If it makes you feel any better, the gas hose with mine came with “Made in Italy” stamped all over it so maybe it won’t leak and incinerate me.

Good luck, and remember, stop wasting water on your stupid lawn.

Homemade Maple Syrup

What’s the point of living in New England if you can’t make your own maple syrup?

Among products from the garden, maple syrup may be among the easiest because maple trees kind of take care of themselves. If you have any on your property, the rest is pretty simple. Collect the sap, boil it, filter it, and pour it on pancakes.

Getting Started

There are bunch of resources about how to make your own maple syrup at home. Some are on the web, published by state agriculture departments, but most are in print. Maple Syrup is an old-timey tradition – the kind that doesn’t jump to the Internet easily. For Internet resources I found this one from the Michigan Maple Syrup Association, and this one from a website called Rural Vermont.

1. Find a Maple Tree

Before you make any other decisions, you’ll need to answer one important question. Do you have access to maple trees, preferably sugar maples? Ideally you will have figured this out in the spring, summer, or fall, when the leaves are visible and identification is easy. But if you’re like most people you’ll wait until late winter and have to figure it out the hard way.

There’s nothing that I can really add to information you can find Googling “how to identify maple trees.” Doing it in winter can be tough, but I do have a trick. Narrow down the area by looking at leaves on the ground … you may have to dig through snow if you live far enough north to have maple trees. Then, on that first really clear day in early spring when you’ve had a cold below freezing night and a nice warm day, go outside.

See the dark spot -- that's sap running!

You see, maple sap runs best and strongest when a cold night is followed by a warm day (see this from the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association for an explanation). And on the first sap running day in the spring, you can often see trees begin to weep sap. Here’s a picture I took on one such day this February. This is a small tree but is shows the point … on the left branch of the “Y” you can see a dark stain. A wet spot. This is the sap running. A definite sign of a maple tree. This is one of the best ways of confirming if a tree is a maple in the dead of winter.

2. Figure Out How Much Work You Want to Do

You are going to have to collect a lot of sap for your syrup. It takes some 30 or 40 gallons of raw sap to make 1 gallon of finished syrup. If you’re retired and have lots of time to collect, filter, transfer, boil, filter again, and package syrup, by all means, tap all the trees in your yard and go nuts. Me, I have a day job, so I started small. Three trees. Over the course of a six to eight week season these trees gave me  about a pint and a half of finished syrup.

3. Get Your Gear On

It’s not hard to search the Internet for all the stuff you need. And you don’t need much. In fact, the only specialized gear you need are spiles … the taps that go into the trees. The rest of the stuff is optional. But here’s a quick list to get you started:

• Spiles
• Buckets to collect sap (can be re-purposed, like old milk jugs)
• Lids to keep out rain, etc.
• Collection vessel (you’ll get several gallons of sap from each tap in a good week)
• Filters (can be specialized or even coffee filters if you have a lot of time to wait for sap to drip … also paper towels, cheesecloth, old rags, etc.)
• Drill & bits
• Boiling pot or specialized evaporator
• Heat source (fire pit or burner)
• Funnels
• Thermometer (a candy thermometer works well … I use my Thermapen)
• Container for the finished sap

My Maple Grove

I went for specialized spiles and collection buckets that I bought from the Leader Evaporator Company in Vermont. They make all kinds of kits for the home hobbyist, so I sprung for 3 plastic sap buckets for $8.50 each, 3 plastic spouts for $2.05 each, and 3 lids for $3.60 each. That’s $41.85 for the whole kit, plus shipping. Compare that to some starter kits with the same stuff that cost upwards of $80.

Here’s a picture of my buckets hanging in my little maple grove late in the season.

4. Hang ‘em High

Once you find your trees and have some buckets to collect your sap, just hang ‘em up and wait. When you have the right weather, the sap will run. In fact, if you have chosen your trees correctly and the season is right, you will usually see sap running as soon as the tree is tapped. If you want to be careful, you should sterilize your drill bit between drilling holes by dipping it in a mild bleach solution (just a few drops of bleach in a quart or water). Follow the directions that came with your taps for the correct size bit and depth of the hole to drill.

5. Wait. And wait. And wait. And Collect the Liquid Gold

When the weather is right, you’ll get a gallon or more of sap from a 10″ diameter tree in a single day. When the weather isn’t right you won’t get a single drop. This is nature, so it’s not predictable. But every day you should go out to your buckets and collect the sap. When our season started in February, we still had 30″ of snow on the ground, so here’s a tip for people living up north, make sure you will be able to get to the trees you select in winter.

Sap is like any natural product … it can go bad if not properly handled. So you should collect it regularly and keep it cold. If you collect a lot you might be able to store it outside while it’s cold (many people use a clean plastic garbage pail as a storage tank). I filtered it (to get the bugs out … yes, as the season progresses into March the first bugs start to appear) and stored it in either old milk jugs or old 2 liter soda bottles in my refrigerator.

Our season runs from mid February through March. On a good week I collected about 4 or 5 gallons of sap from my trees. On a slow week, only 2 or 3. For the slow weeks I waited 2 weeks in between boiling sessions.

6. Watch Your Pot Boil

My Watched Pot Actually Does Boil

I typically waited until I had 4 or 5 gallons of sap ready for boiling. I did my boiling in an old pot over my propane turkey fryer burner, and finished on the stove. It typically takes 5 to 6 hours to boil down 5 gallons of raw sap.

The reason most boiling is done outside is because you are going to drive off a lot of water … more than many home vent systems can handle. So if you try this in your kitchen, prepare for steamy windows and lots of condensation.

The secret to boiling sap is to make sure that it doesn’t cook too much and become maple sugar. Because the boiling point of a liquid (in this case mostly water) increases with the concentration of stuff dissolved in it, it is possible to determine when the sugar concentration is correct by monitoring the boiling temperature of the liquid. People with experience have calculated that the optimal sugar concentration happens when the finished syrup boils at 7 degrees above the starting point of the sap. But the sap is mostly water and it should boil at 212°F, right? Wrong, that temperature changes with the air pressure which is in turn a function of both weather and altitude. For example, at my house on most days, water boils at 211°F. And so did the sap when I first started boiling it. So my final temperature was 218°F.

Finishing Up

There’s not really much more to this step. Fill your pot, light the fire, test the temperature when it boils, then keep adding fresh sap until your supply is gone and then keep it boiling until the temperature is 7 degrees F higher than when you started. As I said, I usually finished on the stove where the temperature was easier to monitor.

By the way … if you didn’t filter your sap when you collected it, do it now. Bugs make for bad flavor!

7. Pour and Enjoy

In addition to water and sugar there are other compounds in maple sap, and as the solution boils down and concentrates, they precipitate out. People call this “niter” or maple sand. And it needs to be filtered before the syrup is packed. There are special filters that make large production easier, but you can also use cheesecloth or other filters if you have really small batches and time. I used a combination of paper towels and cheesecloth.

The result is a nice clear syrup … which may vary in color depending on the species of tree tapped and the time of year. I got a nice dark syrup seen here.

Liquid Gold

By the end of my 6 week season, I ended up with about a pint and a half of finished syrup in the refrigerator. If you have much more, you’ll need to think about a safe storage method, like hot canning it in sterile jars.

Me, I’ll eat it before it goes bad …

Good luck!

There’s nothing like several weeks without rain and the first heatwave in 17 years to make this growing season in the garden the exact opposite of last year.

The official NWS report of the heat we’ve been having for the last week says this:

                  JUL 4   JUL 5   JUL 6   JUL 7   JUL 8   JUL 9

CENTRAL AND WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS

WORCESTER ASOS     87F     92F     96F     93F      -
  FIRST OFFICIAL HEAT WAVE SINCE AUG 26-28 1993

Coupled with the fact that it hadn’t rained in nearly two weeks and we have the opposite summer from last year. And the garden shows it. Nothing will fight back suspected late blight like two weeks of non-stop sunshine and dry weather.

I’ve managed to keep ahead of the heat with relatively little water, because I use a drip irrigation system. I can soak the plant roots deeply with relatively little water and none wasted. My garden system consists mainly of 1/4″ dripline tubing from Dripworks. I have about 50 total feet which according to specs should emit between 30 and 40 total gallons per hour. I usually give the garden a couple of hours of watering  every few days in this heat. And though that may sound like a lot of water, all of it goes to the roots. Compare that to a traditional sprinkler which can put out over 300 gallons per hour and which will soak the leaves and stems creating conditions ripe for fungal diseases.

So this year, I might harvest something! The tomatoes are setting fruit, the cucumbers are coming, and the basil and dill is doing great. And my pumpkins and watermelon (planted late) is doing well too.

Overall a much improved season from 2009.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I thought Late Blight had already begun to affect my garden this year. Thankfully, the crisis seems to have been averted.

The main help was several bright, sunny, warm days in a row. I was able to get the plants into the ground and prune off anything showing signs of discoloration or disease. And I think the sunlight worked its magic and killed off any remaining pockets on the leaves.

So for now I remain blight free. Though we’ve had several days of rain lately and the slugs are coming out in force and devouring everything!

The first strawberries in may garden started to ripen last week while I was away in California. My wife and daughter were luckily home to begin the picking. The growing season has been weird this year, with some very warm days in April to get things started, followed by a cool period in May, and then another heat wave in the last week of May with temps pushing 90° F. So many plants seem “confused” and the strawberries are no exception.

I have three varieties planted: Earliglow (an early bearing variety), Seascape (a day-neutral variety), and Jewel (a mid-late variety). But all three are beginning to set fruit. The Earliglows have the biggest fruit by far though.

This is only the second year for the bed, so the plants aren’t dense and the berries are sparse. I cut back all the flowers and runners last year to help the plants establish themselves. This year, I’ll start to let the runners fill in the rows and make the area more dense.

They are growing this year on top of hemlock mulch. I started them last year with red plastic mulch that made it through the winter. Since I started the beds on a hillside that was pretty much weeds the year before, I wanted the plastic to help with the first year weed control. But now I want the plants to have room to set some runners.

There seems to be mild to moderate slug damage this year – probably 1/3 of the ripe berries showed some signs of being gnawed on. Time to sprinkle the Sluggo snail killer. Otherwise, I haven’t had to spray for anything.

My tomato seedlings are about 8 inches tall now. For the last 6 days they have moved from my basement to a small cold frame I have outside to harden off, or adjust to the temperature and sunlight swings outdoors. Usually this helps grow healthier plants. But I’m afraid that I may have done more harm than good this year.

I wrote about the devastating effects of Late Blight on the tomato crop in New England last year. (And this was a problem all over the Northeast … check out this post on The Big Blog of Gardening.) I vowed that this year would be different. I started seeds bought from a reputable supplier (Johnny’s Selected Seeds) in fresh potting soil in my basement. I kept them on heated mats and under lights in a dry environment for weeks. Then moved the plants outside to my cold frame.

And this morning, I noticed that some of the leaves on my plants were showing small gray patches. Almost like powdery mildew. More distressing were one or two leaves with brown spots … spots that look to me like Late Blight.

Here’s an example:

I guess it makes perfect sense. Inside the cold frame at night, lots of condensation forms. So many mornings I  have opened the top to find the leaves of the plants soaked. And these are the perfect conditions for Late Blight — cool nights in the 50s, daytime temperatures in the 60s, and wet leaves.

When I first put the plants out last weekend I sprayed them with a combination of Plant Guardian Biofungicide and Shield-all II fungicide (both from Gardens Alive). I pulled out and threw five of the worst looking plants into the trash. And I plucked all the visibly infected leaves off the remaining plants. I just hope I’ve caught it in time.

But something tells me that my tomato crop is doomed this year. I mean, if there are already enough spores floating around to infect my plants, then many gardeners are going to be in trouble this year.

In one of my earlier garden posts I implored people to start their own vegetables from seeds rather than buying some mass produced seedlings raised by the thousand in some Mexican greenhouse. The benefits of selecting specific varieties are great – you can choose specifically for conditions that match your geography. Here in New England, we have a short growing season. Usually not much longer than 150 days between frosts. Choosing your own varieties lets New England gardeners select fast maturing varieties.

When a commercial greenhouse selects plant varieties they tend to emphasize things you wouldn’t – like plant strength and drought tolerance so that the plants will witstand a couple of weeks being shipped across country on a truck and won’t wilt when the Home Depot or Lowe’s people forget t water them a couple of days. Flavor isn’t always high on the list of characteristics.

If you can’t choose and start your own seeds, then the next best thing is to work with a greenhouse as local as possible. Mainly because a local business has an interest in selling things that will grow well in your local climate. Selling a bunch of plants that grow a few scraggly vegetables that taste like garbage isn’t exactly good for business.

Today I found another source here in Grafton, Massachusetts: Mapel Plants. Mapel has been around for 20 years, but is one of the best kept secrets in town. The owner, John Mapel has run a small greenhouse business along side of his other gardening businesses for years. And he stocks a variety of vegetables and herbs that are selected for flavor and for their ability to grow in this part of the state. My first clue that Mapel takes an interest in people’s success: they won’t sell warm-season vegetable plants before May 15th. Especially after the warm weather we’ve had recently, he is kind enough to remind people that we won’t really be frost safe until near the end of May. In fact, even though last weekend the temperatures hit 90° F, today it hasn’t climbed out of the 40s and we’re expecting frost tonight. I’ve seen a lot of small tomato seedlings in people’s front yard gardens that might not be there tomorrow.

Mapel has a great selection of the common vegetables and herbs, but they specialize in tomatoes, including some hard to find heirloom varieties. The list of varieties is posted here. In addition they have a variety of annual and perennial flowers and a selection of native New England wildflowers that they’ve propagated from ones growing on their property.

Mapel plants is the kind of local business I like to support. My wife and I grabbed a few things to supplement our garden this year and I’m sure we will be going back. Mapel plants greenhouses are only open from May through June, so don’t wait to check them out. Take a ride through one of the nicest parts of Grafton up Brigham Hill Road and check them out.

Almost two weeks ago I started my seeds for this year’s garden. I just updated the table in that post with the dates for the potatoes I just planted along with some sprout dates, etc.

I also thought I’d record a bit about how I started the seeds this year.

One glance at the table will show you that Johnny’s Selected Seeds is my primary source for vegetable, herb, and flower seeds. For the record, I have no affiliation with them, receive no free stuff, and don’t even get a discount. But when I find a local company that has a great inventory, excellent service, and a lot of knowledge they are willing to share, I am happy to promote them. In the sever or so years I’ve been ordering from them they have never messed up an order. And all of their seeds are top quality and I swear I get nearly a 100% germination rate on everything I plant.

Now, about how I start my seeds.

I start everything on a table in my basement under a single, double-tube fluorescent grow light, and on top of warming mats. Most of this equipment came from my parents’ house after my Dad gave up gardening a decade ago so I have no idea where much of it came from. I suspect Gardener’s Supply, but I can’t be sure. The light frame holds two flats with a little room in between. The flats are suspended over the heat mats by about one inch.

In the flats I usually use peat pots for the seeds, but this year I switched to Cow Pots, which I first saw on an episode of Dirty Jobs in the Discovery Channel. Again, these are made locally to me in Connecticut, and they promise to solve a problem I’ve always had.

Peat pots promise to degrade when planted, but they simply never do. Honestly, I’ve planted them with seedlings in them, had a mediocre garden, then pulled up the plants at the end of the season only to find a nearly intact pot still attached. In fact, I have little pieces of peat pots that I’ve torn up and thrown onto the garden and they still come up in identifiable pieces two and even three years after I’ve dropped them there. So, for the last few years I’ve started my plants either directly in flats or in peat pots which I tear off the seedlings and compost separately. Cow Pots claim to degrade much better and not bind the plant roots. This is good. I intend to put them to the test.

But my first experiences with them have been positive. I suggest you check out their web site and give them a try.

For soil, I’m not too fussy. I usually grab a couple of bags of whatever Lowe’s has on sale at the beginning of the season. I fill the pots, plant the seeds, and let the go for a week or two. I will often plant four to six seeds per small pot and then thin down to one or two after a couple of weeks. Keep them watered and everything should be fine.

My Grow Light Setup

I do keep my grow light adjusted to just a few inches above the seedlings so they don’t get too leggy, and it is on a times so it’s on for 18 hours and off for 6. Then I just keep the flats watered.

After about a month (which would be around May 10th) I move the flats outside to a stand-up cold frame/mini greenhouse that holds about 4 full flats. I’ll give them a couple of weeks there to adjust to the natural sunlight and temperatures. Then it’s into the soil.

This system has served me well for many years. After that first round of plants makes it into the soil I will often start my second round of late summer plants like watermelon and pumpkins, as well as a second round of things like lettuce and basil. These I will often start in the outdoor cold frame, but occasionally inside if we’re having a very cool summer.

Last week I got a start on this year’s vegetable garden. We had had a week of unseasonably warm weather earlier in April (a high temp of 86.6 °F on April 7^th! Seriously – our last frost date is usually April 27^th) so I and a lot of people in New England decided to get going earlier than normal. I know full well that we could still see a frost and the soil isn’t nearly warm enough to sustain tender seedlings, so I’ve started anything tender inside in my basement, but I was at least able to add two inches of compost and some fertilizer to my beds and turn over the top couple of inches of soil.

Anyway, here’s a table listing what I’ve put in the ground. I’ll be tracking the progress throughout the season.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last summer’s weather was absolutely awful for gardeners in New England. After a slow growing season from unseasonably cool and cloudy weather, a Late Blight epidemic simply swamped most of the tomato and potato crop.

I was happy to see that my favorite seed supplier, Johnny’s Selected Seeds posted an article on their blog specifically dealing with this subject.

Among their recommendations is one I wish more people would heed:

Grow or purchase tomato seedlings that are healthy — do not purchase or plant any seedlings that have disease symptoms.

I can not stress this enough. There is speculation that the Late Blight epidemic was fostered by contaminated tomato seedlings distributed through stores like WalMart, Home Depot and Lowes. As a New York Times article on the subject said:

Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April. The wholesale gardening company Bonnie Plants, based in Alabama, had supplied most of the seedlings and recalled all remaining plants starting on June 26.

Ultimately, the tomatoes I so carefully grew from seedlings in my basement, from seeds of varieties I specially selected, were wiped out by people who just bought some diseased crap from whatever store they happened to be shopping in. Please — if you’re too lazy to start your own vegetables from seed, at least buy your plants from some reputable local nursery (Mahoney’s Garden Centers in Massachusetts always have a great variety of vegetables that they grow themselves in varieties selected to specifically to grow well in Massachusetts).

After last year, I tried to pick up any fruit that was laying around and I burned it. Then I burned the vines that had dried over winter. I will be planting a variety of plum tomato called Juliet which has always been fairly disease resistant in the past, along with an heirloom variety called Brandywine. And I have my copper-based fungicide ready to go, because I’m sure my neighbors weren’t as careful to burn all their exposed plants like I was so I know there is a reservoir of Late Blight waiting to pounce. We can only hope that it’s a dry, sunny summer.

Additionally, I have used a drip irrigation system for the last 5 years to prevent leaving my plants with wet leaves more than the natural rain does. So as long as we have a regular rainfall schedule this summer, I should be in good shape.

Good luck to all gardeners out there.