Ann's Air Gardens

Scenes from My MicroGarden

My first Anemone bud Anemone Bud is starting to open.

Snapdragons are taking over the pot that I had reserved for my baby Royal Empress tree.   The Paulownia is healthy looking and the "trunk" is getting bigger in circumference, but it is not gaining much in height.  That is good, as my concern was that it might  get leggy. 

My wonderful neighbor gave me this lilac tree while it was dormant, and although hers budded out much earlier, I am starting to get lots of leaves and a few clusters where flower may soon appear.

The lizards are breeding like rabbits, and so are the rabbits, but a good neighbor put out some gopher traps, so those mangy little critters have been conspicuous by their absence lately.  Yayyyyy!

Also conspicuous by their absence are the leaves on the beautiful Jalapeno plant I have been growing indoors in my Aerogarden.  This morning I awoke to find that 2/3rds of the leaves had dropped off in the night.  There a zillions of little peppers, all about the size of BB's except for one that is ready to eat and a couple more that are about two inches long.  I must have made a mistake measuring the liquid nutes last night.  This has never happened before. 

Sow Thistle's Seed Head

One person's weed is another person's miracle.  Until now, all my sow thistle experiments came from weeds I pulled out of the neighbor's garden.  But soon I will be able to grow my own, indoors, under more sterile conditions.  This is going to be fun. 

Scarlett Runner Beans in Bloom

Scarlett Runner Beans fascinate me in part because of the raging debate over whether or not they are toxic.  Some insist they are and others say they eat them right of the stems.   It did not say anything on the seed packet about them being toxic, but they are safe from me and I from them at present as the flowers which some say are not only edible but delicious, are too pretty to eat, just yet at least:

The blossoms certainly live up to their name.  The University of Florida Extension site states that "Both the pods and the green shelled beans are edible in the fresh stage" and also that Phaseolus coccineus L is a vigorous climbing plant that can grow as high as 15 feet and that the flowers open up to an inch wide.  My plants are small now, but there is plenty of room for them to climb up this wall:

I read somewhere else, that when saving beans to plant next season they should be allowed to dry in the pods until you can hear them rattling around when you shake them.  But it is also said that they do not set pods in warm weather, so it will be a while before I can put that to the test. 

I don't know if this bean has any more of the "poisonous" lectin Phytohaemagglutinin (aka phytohemagglutinin) than any other bean, but that is the chemical that is accused of being responsible for some people getting sick if they eat these beans raw.  Other people apparently have no side effects from munching. 

 

My Small Space Composting Experiment

This little cart was designed for carrying bags of potting soil or peat moss around in the back yard, but it is also the perfect solution to a problem I had in envisioning how to make small batches of compost from my kitchen and garden waste.  I was starting to get discouraged after reading many articles online that insisted that 3' x 3' would be the minimum size space for making humus, unless I went with red wiggler vermiculture.

Except for a few plumbago shrubs, all of my outdoor plants are in pot-in-pot containers in the ground or raised planters suspended above the nice clean gravel pictured here.  No grass to mow, and nothing to weed.  Space is at a premium and I do not generate a lot of waste, so I wanted a very small compost pile.  And I did not want compost made exclusively out of worm casings.  I wanted dark rich sweet smelling compost that would be nice to handle. 

Also, the sunny spots and shady spots in my back yard change places seasonally, so I needed a portable bin, and one that would be light enough to move from place to place.

I reasoned that here in the hot desert the "stew" would break down rapidly if I were careful what I put in there,  turned it frequently, and chopped up the waste before introducing it to the pile.  So my first experiment was with layers of shredded newspapers and egg carton material, spent flower heads, citrus rinds and other vegetative food scraps, topsoil consisting mostly of sand and clay, and recycled potting mix from plant experiments that did not work out or that got transplanted.   To turn the "stew" I just tip the cart over on its side and let the contents roll around, using the gardening tool to break up clumps.  After a couple weeks I noticed that the material was starting to look rich and dark and it smelled really good.   

Imagine my delight today when I went out and found this little fellow writhing around in the mix:

The unappetizing grey color is due to the fact that I had just poured a couple of emulsified grapefruit rinds over the good stuff and was mixing it in, when the worm surfaced.  I had to shoot the picture fast as my little friend kept burrowing back in, trying to disappear.

I Want to Grow Mushrooms

For some reason, the raised planter that I set up over a stack of garden pavers and two recycled shower doors has given birth to all sorts of cute mushrooms.  They are wild and of varieties unknown to me, so I certainly would not try to eat any of them, but it makes me think that perhaps I could bone up on mushroom horticulture and use that area to propagate some edible mushrooms.  That sounds like a good project for next spring.

In the meantime, however, I have been playing with some of the colorful weeds that sprang up in my backyard up in the Laughlin area where I spend some time, especially this time of the year when it is SO beautiful up there.

  This one is pulse (Fabaceae), which also grows wild along Amboy road as you come out of Twentynine Palms. The word pulse is used for many legumes and in particular the edible seed parts of peas and beans, but Fabaceae is a beautiful weed, with lovely clusters of leaves and giant stalks of brilliantly colored flowers.  Surprisingly, it is related to Kudzu, the plant that ate the South. 

These showy yellow flowers that line the roadsides as well as my backyard are called Desert Dandelions. The flowers look a lot like dandelions, the nondescript leaves are very different.  They are in the same classification as common dandelions except for the genus which is malacothrix  as opposed to Taraxacum.

The species of the Desert Dandelion is glabrata .

Sonchus arvensis or Field Milk Thistle is a medicinal plant. 

The Sow Thistle featured in my previous post is Sonchus oleraceus.  A similar plant (Sonchus tenerrimus)  is also edible.  According to a Wikipedia article, they are both cooked in spaghetti in Italy.  I'll have to try that.   Another article says that Sow Thistle is also eaten in New Zealand as a vegetable, mostly by the native Maori, and that when cooked it tastes somewhat like chard.

frequently eaten in New Zealand as a vegetable, particularly by the native Māori. When cooked it tastes a little similar to chard.

Spiny sow thistle (Sonchus asper) is also edible, but if the spines don't get you, this plant contains an irritant which is said to be similar to poison ivy. 

Being careful to avoid the aphids that the Sonchus attracts, I have also tried leaves of the Smooth Sow Thistle raw as a salad green and they are indeed milder in flavor than chicory or dandelion greens. 

Update on the Sow Thistle

The Sow Thistle blossoms really are quite pleasant to eat except that since the plant is such an aphid magnet one has to be very careful not to get "extra protein!"  The leaves are quite good, too.

Since first posting about Sow Thistles, I have done some experimenting with the aphids, by the way.   I brought some of the plants inside where I can keep an eye on them and keep them aphid-free for eating.  But other plants I put outdoors next to different flowering plants and vegetables to see if the aphids on the Sow Thistle migrated to any of the other plants and so far they have not.  The anecdotal wisdom on this is that the variety of aphid this plant attracts stays on the Sow Thistle and brings natural enemies of the other variety of aphids, the ones that attack our domestic plants.  I haven't seen any lacewings yet, but neither have I seen any aphids on any of the other plants in my yard.  Awesome!  Now it is time to study up on natural enemies of the white fly, if any.  Haven't seen any of those here yet either, nor any more of those awful Sphinx Moths.  

Since all the "dandelions" around here are either Sow Thistle or some prickly tough kind of desert dandelion, I asked my brother to send me seeds from the nice big tender dandelions that invade his yard.  He did and although they took a bit longer to grow than expected, finally today I had enough dandelion greens to saute with my breakfast eggs. 

It is amazing how sweet and tasty the leaves become after they are cooked in a little butter, as they are rather bitter when eaten raw.