Until the Cucumber Beetle struck. It struck and it ate my bush zucchini and was all over every other plant in the garden before I knew it. I was squishing them by hand at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d cover every plant, including the entire forest of pole beans and the fiercely indeterminate Roma plant that seems to be obsessed with forming the densest tomato plant ever grown inside it’s cage, but refuses to grow upwards.

Perusing the forums I frequent, I saw an article about making your garden an inviting place for a toad to live. Toad? Why toads? Well, toads eat three times their weight in bugs, grubs, ants and worms a day. I have a giant population of bugs, grubs, ants, and worms. There’s also a giant population of toads in my neighborhood, which has a wonderful wooded creek running through it. It seems that I practically squish a dozen any time Henry and I go jogging.

Yesterday, I grabbed the broken pot that I was about to pitch and put it in the garden. I also sunk a tupperware container into the mulch/compost so that some of the water would stay in there on days that I didn’t water.

a Toad Home -- complete with water feature and damp compost to burrow in!

Then I went toad hunting! It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was coax the toad into a tupperware with a cracked screw-on lid. He tried his best to escape, but I quickly ran him through the house (the dogs, of course, were fascinated) and let him loose in the back of the garden.

I noticed an immediate reduction (if not outright elimination) of the Cucumber Beetle in particular. I haven’t had to squish one of the nasty buggers ever since I let the little guy out of the toad catcher.

And frankly, I haven’t seen the toad since, but as long as the bug population stays low, I know he’s doing his job!

Here’s a little embedded teaser:

Taking a lesson from Get Rich Slowly, I’m planning to save as much of my in-season produce as I can for later by canning it… especially what J.D. says is their favorite salsa recipe. I also have plenty of items that will get cooked (or partially cooked), frozen, and consumed later.

In the meantime, watch for a new section to appear up top as I start getting produce in the next month or two — I’ll be posting recipes for preserving and using massive amounts of the things I’m growing.

I rent the home I live in right now. Actually, I split it with a roommate who’s rarely home. He lives mostly with his girlfriend in the next town over. One thing I absolutely can’t stand is living in a place that LOOKS like it’s being rented — you know, weeds in the lawn, untrimmed bushes, holes in the fence, blinds out of whack, lightbulbs out… the usual.

One thing that’s consistent with the houses in my neighborhood that are rented as opposed to owner-occupied is the landscaping. It’s usually just the half-dead indian hawthornes and dwarf yaupons that the builder installed. Those bushes, I’m convinced, will withstand a nuclear holocaust … they’re the cockroaches of landscaping. But they are serviceable, drought-tolerant, evergreen plants that are mostly bug-resistant.

Now that I’ve lived here for three or four years, I’ve started to add stuff. At first it was just a couple of Philippine Violets that a girlfriend’s mother gave me. Two out of three seedlings survived to bloom last year, which I was quite proud of!

Barleria Cristata in Bloom

This year, I got a bunch of (already sprouted) Narcissus and Gladiola bulbs free from someone who was digging out a flower bed in order to turn it into a vegetable garden. (And if that ain’t a sign of the times, I dunno what is.) I’m hoping that they’ll survive the transplant. If nothing survives, I’ll be sad, but there’s no financial loss — they were free anyway.

Now that spring sproinged here, the Oleander and Crepe Myrtles have started to send out new growth. Under cover of darkness (not really), I trimmed a few suckers that were showing signs of growth off of the plants maintained by the HOA. I felt kind of bad doing it, but it’s not really stealing — they’d get trimmed in a few weeks anyway, and a part of my rent goes to pay for someone to trim them. But a little bit of root hormone and a spare pot of dirt (which I have *plenty* of!) and I should have a few bushes for my own house in a year or two.

Definitely don’t forget to talk to your family. My never-throw-anything-out WWII-era grandpa had a bunch of Hibiscus seeds stored up in an old tupperware container. After testing to see if they were viable at all by planting and nursing some in containers, I planted the seeds on the shady side of the house and hopefully they’ll sprout in a few weeks and grow to hide the gas meter from the street.

There’s resources all over if you take the time to look at them. A master gardener’s club is a good place to start if you’ve got absolutely nowhere else in town to look. Garage sales and moving sales are also good. One of my friends just moved halfway across the country and left a bunch of pots and a large aloe plant for me. And look for community resources like Craigslist or a local forum where people talk. You might make some new friends and get more involved in the community as a result — two things that always bring great returns for the time you invest.

Last night, my milk went bad and I ended up pouring half of the small bottle down the drain. Then it struck me — the plastic is nearly the same as the plastic in the planter tags! I bet I could use it! Whipping out my trusty box knife, I quickly decapitated the milk bottle and slit it to end up with a flat sheet.

Milk bottle with the top removed and the middle split.

Cutting that flat sheet into strips produced nicely sized tags for writing.

Then cutting those strips at an angle produces nearly the same thing that you’d buy at the store.

Cut the middle at an angle

They go easily in the planters, and since they’re food safe, they’re unlikely to leak anything bad.

Milk bottle tags in use!

I like to track a lot of information about plants. I want to know the planting date, the date any transplants were made, and what “series” it was … how many times I planted each thing and maybe even why. I cut my strips a little wide so that I could write all that down and still have space to spare. I used a regular old sharpie permanent marker to write the name of the plant and the other information I track.

Ok, it’s well known that I’m not a southerner. And if there’s one thing southerners hate besides not-southerners, it’s hippies. When people hear I’m from the west coast, they start asking the weirdest questions.

And it’s all true. I know a few lesbians. I have some Ani DiFranco MP3s. I wear wool sweaters in the wintertime, I own a pair of birkenstocks and a pair of Tevas, and I have worn both while wearing socks. I go hiking. And… *gasp* — I believe firmly in reducing my footprint on the earth in the form of recycling and re-using things I’d otherwise throw out. Shocking!

One of the things I end up with a lot is beverage containers. They usually go right into the recycling and out to the curbside, but this year I’ve saved a bunch of them to use as planters. Why? Well, there’s an intermediate stage for a lot of my plants where they’re not quite ready to end up outside but definitely outgrowing their containers. As a result, I need to “upscale” transplant a bunch of stuff.

My Collection

(Yes, they were stored in a spare dog crate used for guests to keep the mutts out of them…)

For your average planter, you need something that will hold dirt, something that will keep the light (mostly) out of the root area, no top for the plant (and hopefully a lip that will allow you to easily extract the plant and it’s dirt later) and holes in the bottom to drain out excess water. A used beverage bottle is, with a few small modifications, capable of providing them. And since you’d just be throwing it out anyway, why not use them?

I’m using two sizes. The first is the normal size of a water bottle. I’m using these for small plants that will only be in there for a small amount of time, or for starting much bigger faster growing plants that need to be planted deep — sweetpeas and greenbeans are a good example of this kind of plant.

You can't see them, but there's green beans planted two inches deep in what used to be a gatorade bottle.

It’s worth noting that I used only clean food-quality plastic containers, and took steps to make sure that they weren’t harboring any bad bacteria or chemicals. Well, besides the plastic itself.

When implementing this idea, the most important things to remember are those “Dark” things and the “drainage” things. For drainage, I drilled holes in the lowest points of all the bottles.

Drilling drainage holes

I didn’t take a picture of it, but I have the bottoms of the plants wrapped in black plastic doggy doo bags. (No not used.) They’re held on with rubber bands. I can easily lift the plastic bag to check on root growth and decide when the plant has developed well enough that it can be moved outdoors.

The best part is definitely the price. Free is awesome.

Free ended up not being so awesome. I potted a lot of seedlings in these pots, and none of them lived to make it in the ground. The main problem was the leggy seeds problem; I didn’t have enough light for my early-start seedlings. The problem with most of the hippie planters ended up being that they were difficult to get plants out of without completely turfing the root system. For those that were easy to get the seedlings out of, something about the plastic didn’t seem to foster good growth. I’m clueless to explain why, but I’ve put all of my chopped up plastic bottles back into the recycling bin.

Now to get my hands on a bunch of copies of the Battalion. I used to only use it as fish wrapper, but it seems that there might be other uses…

More updates on the garden tomorrow. My face seems to have grown a snot faucet with no on/off valve, so I’ve been playing hooky from work and staying indoors.