All posts by Tom Roberts

The mist today was driven by a 30 mph breeze and seemed to penetrate our skin and the cold did not help at all.
But this is NNY and this type of weather is to be expected in May and early June. As a matter of fact the temperature right now is threatening 40 degrees F. Needless to day we get a bit edgy when the mercury dips below 40 as most of our plants are out doors and it is wet and very windy.

A recent customer, who also works at a local garden center reported they lost a lot of vegetable plants early in May when the weather was so iffy. Some of our Regal Geraniums are just rebounding and the German ivy still does not look up to par, all from the same cold spell.

Our biggest problem right now is the grass which continues to grow even when the weather is too hot or too wet to mow. The gravely is still out of service so we do the “lets follow the push mower all over the place” routine. The whole thing start to finish takes about 2 hours but seems like much more. Come to think about it that’s a fairly long walk. At about 3 mph that would be 6 miles although some of it is backwards. Not sure if we should subtract the backwards part.

The gravely will do the whole thing in about 1 hour because it goes faster and has a wider swath. Problem is we removed the deck when we rebuilt the transmission and something did not get attached correctly when the deck went back on. The trans works great.

When we got the mower 3rd and 5th gears did not work. The problem was the gear selectors, or dogs as we transmission specialists call them, had worn surfaces but we solved that problem with new parts.

Transmissions are fascinating with all the gears and let me tell you some of them are razor sharp as I found out. We dumped all the parts into a vat of kerosene and cleaned them up. After some trial, and the peerless transmission book as a guide, we had the whole thing up and running with all gears functioning perfectly. But the mower deck continues to vex us.

Not for long thought as we now have room enough to bring the mower into the garage and make the adjustments. That is now that the porch window boxes are finished. Pictures to follow as soon as they are painted.

It seemed like the warm dry weather was going to go on for ever. The weather is finally turned to intermittent rain and that is good for the plants in the gardens and we have rain at last.

Plants in the ground need about 1 inch of rain each week or be supplemented with additional water. The trick is to get the water where it is needed with out wasting the excess.

How often have we seen a lawn sprinkler set up in the garden, broadcasting the water over the entire surface. Chances are a good deal of that water will not get to the plant roots being lost to evaporation. This is in part to geotropism which is the action where the roots of a plant want to grow toward the center of the earth as opposed to negative geotropism where the plant above the ground wants to grow away from the earth.

The point is the roots grow down so water on the ground between the plants may never reach the roots. A better way is to use a soaker hose along the plant rows so that the water is concentrated where it can filter down to the roots before it evaporates.

Another method is to pipe water directly to each plant and insure that every bit of water gets where it is needed. A side benefit to this method is that only the plants get the water and the weeds that might grow between may not get so much.

Of coarse with a rain fall of more than an inch of rain the whole area will be wetted evenly and everything grows including the weeds. And the up side to this is a wet garden is easy to weed. The unwanted plants will pull much easier than if the roots are dry. Its a muddy job but some one has to do it !

By the looks of things we are through with the main storm and today will be scattered t storms and it should be more pleasant to work in the gardens and yard now that the temperature and humidity are lower than in the past week. Not that warm weather isn’t welcome.

Since food prepared with garden fresh ingredients tastes the best we will from time to time include our favorite recipes.

In most cases we will call for fresh ingredients but we will also try to give substitutions where we can.
This recipe is for tomato or marinara sauce. We started using this after realizing the caned or jar sauce contained too many things like corn syrup. With a little tinkering this can be altered to fit almost any situation. If it wants to be smooth like pizza sauce put it in the blender. We prefer to make it chunky for pasta and there is no reason this would not work equally well for pizza.

Use fresh tomatoes or canned. If you use fresh you may need to cook it a bit longer depending on the amount of liquid in the tomatoes. Mix up a few different types and colors for interesting flavors and a dramatic presentation.

OK here is what you need. Add or subtract to suite taste. For a larger quantity simply increase the ingredients in an equal ratio.

• 2 cups of diced tomatoes, with about 1/2 cup juice. Substitute 1 large can.
• 1 small can ( 6 oz ) tomato paste. Best to use a brand with no additives or spices.
• 1 large onion.
• 6 cloves garlic
• Fresh basil to taste
• Fresh Greek oregano to taste
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2 tablespoons good extra virgin olive oil
• 2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
• Turbinado sugar to taste ( start with one teaspoon ) Substitute table or brown.
• Optional: Dried or fresh hot red pepper. To taste.

Dice the onion and mince the garlic. Put the onion and olive oil into stainless steel pot and cook on medium flame until the onions begin to turn translucent. Don’t add garlic yet.
Add the tomato paste and continue to cook over medium flame, stirring the paste constantly while it fries for about 1 minutes.

Now add garlic and fry for another minute. Do not burn the garlic. You could also substitute roasted garlic later in the recipe.

Add the tomatoes and stir to combine completely. Reduce the heat to low and let the sauce cook down to thicken for at least 5 minutes or more to desired thickness.

Now add minced herbs, vinegar and sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Adjust the sugar, salt, black pepper and red pepper. Reduce to final thickness.
Unused portions can be kept in the icebox for a week at the most.

Better to freeze it for use later.
To freeze portion try oiling cupcake tins with olive oil on a paper towel or spray oil. Ladle the sauce into the tins and freeze. Now put the frozen tomato pucks into a larger zip lock bag and keep in the freezer.

Options could include bell peppers, meat, wine or whatever.
This really is worth the small effort for a really great marinara sauce.

I made this video a while ago and decided to include it on this blog.

There’s gold on them there plants !

We have been very busy this week potting up plants and selling them. This means I have been turning in early and that is not common but necessary if I am to make it to the end of the day!
The weather has been cooperative temperature wise and we have been able to move almost everything out of the greenhouse.

While some large growers leave everything in we prefer to get the plants out where they can breath. Moving them out allows the plants to harden off and makes a better start for the customer.
Not to mention we simply run out of space in the greenhouse. We could stack shelves but this causes the plants to be crowded with low light and poor air circulation.

So we have made the decision to add another greenhouse this season to have ready for next spring. The size will be 20’ by 32’ and will allow us to grow a wider variety of flowers.
We would go bigger but we do not have the space. Which means the next step is to secure a second location with more space.

The most interesting thing to happen the past few days is the discovery of the fools gold beetle.
We grew bush morning glories, convolvulus cneorum , and this shinny little beetle eats only morning glories !

We were really happy with the blossoms and the way the plants filled out baskets but we also have a problem with bugs in plants we are selling.

Anyway we dumped the plants into the compost and hopefully that will be the end of the critters as well.
It is ironic that this spring voles were attacking the morning glory seedlings in the greenhouses. We dealt with the voles and allotted precious bench space to these plants and only to find out they are the favorite food of the fool’s gold beetle.

We should have researched this species before we grew them and so we will chalk this up to stupid tax and remember to do the research when ever trying a new plant.

We have been busy and there has not been much time to post.

But we also need to take time to work on the sites and so here we are.

The weather is cold and rainy and some of the nights are still too cold to leave some plants out. Which means if the weather report looks like temperatures in the 30’s we have to cover all the annuals.

The solution to this problem, and it is a problem to do this night after night, is to build another larger greenhouse, which we intend to do this summer.

We have ordered some hostas in. There will be about 8 kinds and they will be different from what is locally available. This is just a start and we hope to have a large selection for next year.

Before we can go too far we need to build a hosta house. This will be an enclosure with a base like our perennial beds and a cover of shade cloth on the top and deer netting on the sides. We picked a spot back by the woods where it tends to be shady anyway.
This is not expensive but we need to protect them from deer.

There is a new article in the how to section on how to get rid of ants. This is a method we have used for years with great success. Find it here Getting rid of ants in the home and kitchen/

The Alex Bay farmers market begins this Friday and we have a new spot by the Kinny Drug Store on RT 12 at the Bay. I hope this spot works out because I picked it.

We have to make a display for baskets and bird feeders/house and the chimes so it’s back to work for now. Hopefully we will have more time to post tomorrow.

It has been a few days between posts because we have been really busy with spring wedding favors and the plants. Bed time is about 3:00 am and that cuts down on our sleep time. Which makes us groggy and bone tired. And pressed for time. I am still using the spell check with my email program for the blog. There is a spell check available but I have not had the time to sort it out. When I tried to install it the whole blog locks up and throws an error.

Stoopid computer anyway. The old reliable windows 98 machine started making some funny noises so we broke down and got a newer one. Dual cores running at almost 3 ghz and a gig of memory. You would think it would work OK. Wrong! This machine works about as well as the old one and we have to keep the 98 machine networked in because many of our older programs will not work on the XP Media Edition that came installed on the new one.

I am totally disgusted with the level of quality in goods and services these days and equally amazed at the low expectations the general public demonstrates when accepting the low quality, but that’s a topic for another post.

But we are catching up on orders and that’s good.
Everything is starting to fill out, plants are booming and looking nice. In the past we were shooting for just before memorial day figuring on that is when people around here begin to plant. But 2 things have happened.

Thing one is the big box stores start getting plants in at Easter. This way people may be inclined to buy if we get a unseasonably warm day or weekend. The pansies and violas are fine for the cool weather most all of the annuals are sensitive to cold and need to be protected.

The second thing to happen is the influx of people from other parts of the country. Many are from the south and they are not familiar with our fickle climate.

Our solution is to try and be a little earlier. When a customer want to buy early we can let them know that the cold weather will probably ruin the plants if they start early with no protection.
Anyway this is the reason we need more greenhouse space. If we are to have stock ready to sell early we must have room to store them rather than placing them out doors as we have done in the past.

More space will allow us to grow more as well. We are limited to the varieties we can accommodate with the one greenhouse. The only thing to consider is what size and type of structure to go with. But this is thinking ahead. It has been really dry and we have plants to water.

SO who thought it was a good idea to post in the morning? I was under the misconception that the morning hours have more time in them than the evening ones.

We spent a good portion of the day raking leaves at Santway park. Santway park is a tract of land that was left to the village by a Dr Santway years ago. He rightly thought that a park would be a tourist attraction.

So a group of residents, present company included, have taken it upon themselves to spruce the place up.
It was nice to see so many people come out with rakes and shovels and other implements of destruction to pitch in. The crew was as young as 7 and as old as, well some of those ladies are well advanced in years, well beyond 70.

After punishing the rake for the middle of the day we came back to walk the lawn mower around the homestead. We have a rider but there seems to be a miss adjustment in one of the linkages and I just can not bring my self to look at it.

When we bought it used for $50.00 we just needed something to do the lawn. There were no gardens, no greenhouse, and no flower beds. Even then it took about a hour to do the whole thing. Now with all the obstructions its more like a obstacle course.

The only thing we did today was to water some of the plants. The winter over perennials in the gallons are cleaned up and all put back in the beds. It will be interesting to see all of what comes back.
As it is the lupines, monardia, rudibeckia, fox glove and a lot of herbs are showing their heads. It’s been so dry that we will need to water everyone of them tomorrow. This sunlight is getting the plants looking nice but at the expense of time and water.

Even though the days are very nice, cool but bright, the evenings and night are cold. A customer from near by said the out door thermometer read 22 the other night and I believe her.
Anyway we are fairly fagged out with all the raking, mowing, going to the dump and general messing around we did today so this is it.

Hopefully we will get a chance to work on the herb garden fence tomorrow. We have a really cool design in mind, taken from a fence we saw in an old movie. If it turns out as nice as we envision we will be posting a how two and photos.

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After trying to posing the last thing at night I have decided to switch post time to the morning. The problem is time, and my level of consciousness late at night.

There are a number of activities that keep us busy during the day including making and shipping birdhouses, shipping wedding favors, working on the gardens and in the greenhouse and dealing with customers. Not to mention picking up materials and running errands.

This leaves the evening for making wedding favors and working on the web sites. Since we normally, ( or usually as nothing is normal around here ), work on wedding favors until about Midnight, work on the websites and most correspondence falls to the time after that which can easily be 3 or 4 in the morning. By that time of night the most important thing is getting some sleep. Writing is difficult and easy to push aside.

This will not do since the goal with the blog is to make a daily post.
So we will try mornings for a while and see what works best although I have a hunch that mornings will be a better time. Maybe notes would help remember what happened last night. One benefit to morning posting is that dreams are still fresh in the memory.

For example, last night I had a dream that a couple we know from where we used to live, Black River, had bought our old house. In the dream the wife was mowing the lawn with a ride on lawn mower but in reality this is ridiculous as the lawn was about 30 feet square. A goat would have had no trouble doing it in a half an hour.

Anyway she was going around the lawn when she became stuck. The more she tried to escape the deeper the mower went. After a while she had a hole about 8 feet wide and 12 feet deep with the lawn tractor at the bottom. Sand was cascading into the pit and on to her head. I remember thinking why doesn’t she turn the mower off.

Anyway the husband reached into the pit with one arm, grabbed her by the back of the shirt and pulled her out in a single motion. Again this is contrary to real life as she is bigger than he. There was a lot more to the dream but this is not a dream blog, however a dream blog would not be a bad idea.

Since a very young age I have remembered my dreams in detail. In facts there have been times in my life when I would prepare for dreaming before falling asleep so that I could use lucid dream time to solve problems or work on making decisions and of course flying !

So yesterday we potted up about 20 baskets with things like red ivy geraniums and German ivy, scented geraniums, pansy and violas and mixed baskets using sun coleus, black eyed Susan vine, bush morning glory and alyssum. To day the plan is to make up some herb baskets and some more petunias.

Yesterday we had the first customers of the year. I found a five dollar bill in the box and Phyllis sold 4 big Martha Washington geraniums. We have a slow start up here and while the big places have been selling had over fist for the past month, we are just getting going.

We are still bringing some things in and covering others at night because the temperature is dipping into the mid and lower 30’s. We had a few plants brunt and ruined the other day because we misjudged the weather and that was a bitter lesson. These were plants we nurtured for months and they were damage by one night of cold. That will never happen again.

Plans for today include finish cleaning up last years perennial stock, pouring bird feeders, making some more baskets and working on the herb garden fence. There may even be time for a walk.

We have a 20′ by 20′ herb garden which has been more or less an on going project for the past 2 years.
The basic layout is a 20′ square, with four 8′ square gardens, one in each corner and a walk way path, 4′ wide and in the shape of a cross or I guess its more a plus sign. Thus goes getting the herb garden into shape.

This setup gives us 4 separate gardens in one and we are developing each one in an individual theme. The theme we are working on now is the terra cotta container garden.

We started by removing any sod and raked the bed level. Then we put landscape fabric down and covered the whole deal in pine bark nuggets. The pine bark nuggets differ from pine bark mulch in that there is pine bark in the pine bark nuggets. I have never ever found so much as one piece of pine bark in pine bark mulch. For all I can see its ground wood with some color added. That’s not to say it’s not handy.
But we wanted the look of the bark and it worked fine. It took us five of the 2 cubic foot bags to cover the area in a layer about 3 inches thick.

The this particular garden in made up of potted herbs. We try to use a variety of pots and herbs. We clear a spot in the mulch the size of the pot so the pot is sitting on the landscape fabric then we just fill in around it with the bark. This part of the garden is working out fine. We will be posting photos of the completed garden when it is finished.

The snakes really like the sun shine and I caught 3 of them fooling around on top of a water barrel. The barrel is in the sun and makes a nice flat area for them. I’m not sure but they could have been making whoopee as this is the time of year they mate. There were 3 small ones and one larger. I believe the larger one is the female and the others are males.

When I startled them the female dropped to the floor but the other 2 hung around. I put them over by the full water barrel and they both took long drinks. One of them had his head completely submerged. He could have been looking to see if there was anything to eat in there. They really like leaches, I am told. We fed one a worm the other day as that is also a favorite food for small garter snakes.

And it was another day gathering rocks for the well. There is a waterline going in from the Alex Bay to Redwood and they are unearthing lots of stone which we glean from the piles in the right of way. We would not go onto private property to get them but we figure anything on the right of way is fair game. By the way the right of way is 66 feet wide or 33 feet from the center of the road.

This reminds me of a story about a book, a school house, a key and a Thousand dollars but that’s a story for another time.

The sun came out this after noon and put us in the mood to tidy up the grounds. Every spring it the same routine. Do what we did last fall only backwards. Cleaning up the yard junk is a necessary task every spring.

Since we do not have an equipment building yet we are forced to wrap everything in site with plastic tarps. Of course we can not just tuck the tarps in around the corners like a fitted sheet. We must tie the tarps up with stout cord lest they run off with the implements.

There were a number of odds and ends laying around and big bags of greenhouse plastic to be taken care of. It looks better now and before long we will have people walking back and forth and we want it to look nice.

We also made a display for the bird houses and feeders. One day last week we were walking on the island in Black River, and we found the top 10 feet of a large pine tree. It has been down for many years and the bark is missing but the random branches make perfect hangers for feeders and houses. We even put a few chimes out. The pictures will be up soon.

Well the birds are starting to sing so its time to hit the hay.