Gardening with Delightfully, Daffy Ducks

A couple of years ago we adopted two pairs of Peking ducks – sort of. In reality the ducks adopted us. The children of a deceased friend put her ducks on the 56 acre lake behind us. Soon after the ducks arrived on the lake they started showing up at our house. At first they simply waddled up to the house, ate whatever fell out of the bird feeders and then went home. However, it wasn’t long until they discovered the chickens (and all the food they wasted) and their visits grew longer. Now, two years later, these ducks are an adorable part of our daily routine.

We truly love our adorable, adopted ducks

Each morning around daybreak the ducks line up single file and waddle up to our house from the lake. They spend their days hunting bugs, eating bugs, breeding (they do a lot of this in the spring), laying eggs and finally resting. Our favorite duck behavior happens each time we drive up to the house. When they hear our car coming they run quacking to the driveway. They sit outside the car and they quack and quack and quack and wiggle their little tails until we follow them to the coop and feed them. After their evening meal they lounge around a little more and then finally line up again and waddle back to the lake. Yes, my wife and I have really fallen for our adopted ducks. Their goofy antics are just downright enjoyable to watch plus, their love for bugs and nut grass (I have heard they love to eat nut grass but I have not actually seen them do it), makes them just as practical and useful as they are adorable.

Each morning our adopted ducks march up from the lake in a single file line

While I am sure this will bring some comments, we have slowly come to the realization that ducks are much better pets for gardeners than chickens. Don’t get me wrong, we still love our chickens. However, if you love your gardens and you have free range chickens you will quickly understand why I have come to this conclusion.

Over the past three years I have been shocked to learn just how much damage chickens do to gardens. Most of the articles I read before we got our chickens mentioned their “digging and scratching” behavior. However, the articles I read kind of glossed over this. Some tried to sell the behavior as “soil aeration” and other made it sound cute. Let me assure you, it is not cute. The first thing a chicken does when it leaves the coop in the morning is head to your vegetable garden or flower beds to dig and scratch and dig and scratch and dig and scratch some more. While I had hoped that my chickens would be different, they were not. A chicken is gonna do what a chicken has to do. So, after three years of fighting to keep them from destroying my gardens, I am throwing in the towel. I have finally accepted the fact that chickens and gardens really do not mix.

Here you can see some of the defensive measures I have empoyed to try and prevent my chickens from digging up everything in my garden

Over the last three years I have watched our chickens turn newly tilled and mounded rows in flat, shapeless messes. I have seen them eat freshly planted seeds, new sprouts and dig up every ornamental and vegetable transplant I set out. I have also watched them kick fresh mulch out of my beds almost faster than I could put it down. I quickly learned that if I was going to have free ranging chickens and lovely gardens I would literally have to change the way I gardened.

Despite the head aches they caused me, we really loved those silly chickens — so I adapted. For the past three years I have built fences, I have covered my freshly planted rows with chicken wire to keep them from scratching and I have built wire frames to protect transplants and new sprouts. While I understand this is what chickens do, I have finally arrived at the point were I am tired of trying to beat them. The good new is, ducks don’t do any of these things. All they do is roam our gardens and eat our bugs. Because of that, if I switch to ducks for my free ranging pets, I will never again have to cover my freshly planted rows or build wire frames or temporary fences. In short, if I confine my chickens and let my ducks roam free I can garden they way I used to.

Sally and I love our chickens! However, since they are so destructive I am afraid their free ranging days are coming to an end

Before these four adorable birds literally arrived on our doorstops, my wife and I knew absolutely nothing about ducks. However, since they adopted us, we have become such big fans of these gentle, affectionate and somewhat goofy birds that we have decided to let them be our only free ranging bug catchers and keep our chickens confined to the very lovely and luxurious coop and yard that I built for them when we got them. If you are a gardener (and I assume you are since this is a gardening blog) and you are considering raising chickens, I highly recommend investigating ducks too. You can raise and house them in almost the exact same way as you raise chickens. They lay pretty decent eggs (which make wonderfully dense and moist cakes) and they eat your garden pests without destroying your plants or garden beds. I have also heard they love nut grass! If that turns out to be true then everyone I know should get themselves a whole flock of ducks!!!

I share these posts on Our SimpleHomestead Blog Hop. Be sure to stop by. The “hop” has tons of great information from gardeners and homesteaders all over the world!

Don’t feel too sorry for the chickens that will soon be confined. They have a very nice coop, run and yard that is more than adequate for their needs

Spring Time is Weed Time!

If you need a reminder as to why gardening in Texas is so difficult, here it is. According to something I heard on the radio the other day, this is the earliest spring since something like 1884. Despite that, if you planted your “tomatoes” when you were “supposed to” in a normal year, they still got burned by a late season freeze during the earliest spring ever! Gotta love Texas!!!

I hope your tomato transplants made it through the late season cold snap. If they didn’t, I hope you have enough left to replant

If you took my advice and planted your tomatoes last week then I hope you got them covered before the cold weather came in. If not, I apologize. There was a 95% chance it would not freeze. Since it froze anyway many of you will probably need to replant if your tomatoes lost most of their leaves. This late season cold snap also hit ornamentals. If you had already put out tender flower transplants they likely got burned as well. Pull them up and replant if more than 50% of their foliage was burned.

Some weeds are too pretty to pull! Even though they are a bit invasive, I leave most of the buttercups that pop up in my beds

If last weekend was the perfect time for planting, then this weekend is the perfect weekend to get control of the weed problems that are “popping up”. I get a lot of weed control questions on the blog. For an organic gardener, the options are fairly limited. You can pull them, hoe them or spray with an acetic acid mixture. Only problem with acetic acid is it kills everything. So if you are trying to kill a few dandelions in the middle of your beautiful lawn, cover them with a shield. A great trick is cut the bottom out of a jug. Place the bottomless jug over the weed and spray your herbicide into the top of the container. This will limit the amount of grass, or other plants that are potentially affected by overspray.

Concentrated acetic acid is a great organic weed killer.

If you go to the trouble of pulling and chopping all of those weeds this weekend, be sure to mulch afterwards. The best way to control weeds is to prevent them and nothing does that better than a thick layer of mulch. I am lucky enough to have a truck so I get my mulch in bulk from my local landfill. I use wood chips in my ornamental beds and spoiled hay in my vegetable garden. Any dead, organic material will work. Another thing I often use in the vegetable garden is newspaper. If you wet newspaper and then overlap several layers over an area it will dry and form a very good barrier. Cover it with mulch to make your rows and beds look a little mote tidy.

Sweet Green is a high notrogen, organic fertilizer that works as well on your vegetables as it does on your lawn

I also get a lot of lawn questions this time of year. Here are my tips. Do not put out pre-ememrgent weed and feed products now. It is too late. The fertilizer is going to feed the weeds that have already germinated. Instead, mow your lawn on your lowest setting. In fact I would do this for the next two or three weeks in a row. This will kill most of the weeds that are growing now. After mowing put out a high nitrogen fertilizer like “Sweet Green”.

Another great thing about spring is the chickens start laying again on a regular basis!

A Garden Visit With Harry Cabluck

I love this sign that Harry has hanging in the back of his garden

Over the next twelve months we will be visiting with 12 gardeners from all over Texas. They will be sharing some of the knowledge that allows them to garden successfully in our beloved, but climatically challenging state. I have a masters degree in horticulture and I have gardened for years. However, most of my gardening knowledge came from visits with other gardeners. I hope these monthly visits will provide you, and me, with a few tips and tricks that will help us all become better gardeners.

Patty and I visited harry Cabluck and his incredibly well done garden earlier this month. We were blown away by how well down it was. Always humble, Harry gives much of the credit for his garden infrastructure to his good friend Tom Lupton.

Patty and I visited Harry Cabluck and his incredibly well done garden earlier this month. We were blown away by how well done it was. Always humble, Harry gives much of the credit for his garden infrastructure to his good friend Tom Lupton.

Our first gardener is Harry Cabluck. Harry gardens in the back yard of his central Austin home. While his garden is not the biggest I have ever seen, it is one of the neatest and most well managed gardens that I have ever been in. Harry was gardening organically long before it was “cool”. He collects rainwater for irrigation, makes tons of compost, has the nicest cold frame I have ever seen and grows tomatoes from seeds (click here to read how Harry grows his tomato transplants) and then grafts them onto other tomatoes that he has grown from seed.

Garbage bags over tomato plants Thursday, March 19, 2015, in Austin, Texas. ( Photo/Harry Cabluck)

Harry uses a piece of string and a rubber band to quickly and effectively secure his garbage covers to his tomato cages

Harry gives his beloved tomatoes a head start by growing them in an ingenious cage method that he developed. As early in March as he can, Harry plants the tomatoes he started in January in his neatly bordered beds that are extremely well worked with compost. He then takes a 55 gallon trash can liner, splits the end and bunches it around the tomato plant. Then he uses his heavy duty cages to anchor the the trash bag in place. To keep his trash bag liner secured to his cage he uses an ingenious string and rubber band fastener that is incredibly effective and easy to use. With bags in place he is able to easily pull the bags up over his frame at the earliest sign of cold weather, high winds or heavy rain. I was so impressed with this cage method that I seriously considered changing the way I grow tomatoes! Now let’s hear more from Harry:

Cabluck garden on Tuesday, May 13, 2014, in Austin, Texas. ( Photo/Harry Cabluck)

Name: Harry Cabluck

Location: Central Austin. **City garden of three 100-sq. ft. raised beds. We rotate a plot holding 12-15 tomato plants a year.

(Photo/Harry Cabluck)

Years gardening: 43+. First gardened as a child in late 1940’s. My mother had a green thumb and a source for manure, as her father was a dairy farmer. As an adult we have had small plots in Dallas and larger plots in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio. We made good use of our Troy-Bilt 6 hp rototiller. Often improved the soil in these gardens by importing soil, manure and/or spoiled hay.

Years in this plot: 20. **Our backyard was once the corral area for a nearby home. When we moved in it was black gumbo clay that would hold ankle-deep water for a few days after each rain. De-ionized the soil with gypsum. Built multiple compost piles 20-feet long before starting to plant in 1995.

Tomatoes under lights Sunday, March 2, 2014, in Austin, Texas. ( Photo/Harry Cabluck)

Favorite crop: Tomatoes. Usually start 60 seeds in trays under lights in the garage in January. This is the first year to use LED’s instead of T-5 or fluorescent lights. Hope to yield 36 heirloom/hybrids along with 18 rootstock for grafting. After starts in trays become root bound, transplant to four-inch pots. Some 12-15 pots stay under lights, the remaining pots are moved to the cold frame. Sometimes need to run an extension cord and heating pad to cold frame. Usually give away the tomato plants that are not planted in our garden. Crop rotation includes basil, green beans, arugula, spinach, marigolds. January crops include greens, carrots, elephant garlic, shallots, gumbo onions. Would like to attempt parsnips. Have never had good luck with sweet peas.

Best tips: Make good garden dirt.

Compost!!! This year’s compost pile of ground leaves, mixed with kitchen scraps, cottonseed meal, bat guano and molasses, seems to be the best ever. In previous years used cooked barley malt (byproduct of brewery) mixed with coffee chaff (byproduct of air roasting). That stuff needed to be turned at least once daily, as it would putrefy.

Harry composts directly in his beds

Although not necessary, we get great results using our cold frame and 800-gallon rainwater catchment. A two-inch rain on our 20X20-foot garage roof will fill the tank. It is usually empty around July 4.

Make use of store-bought soil for seed-starting and transplanting. Happy Frog brand seems best. Don’t waste time and money on cheap tomato cages. Read Bill Adams’, “Texas Tomato Lover’s Handbook.”

Cold frame in Cabluck back yard garden Saturday, March 7, 2015, in Austin, Texas. ( Photo/Harry Cabluck)

Pest control: Havahart traps for varmints. For bugs, mix a one-gallon cocktail containing 50-squirts Tabasco, one ounce of liquid seaweed, one ounce molasses, one ounce fish emulsion, dash of dishwashing liquid…when necessary add BT. I love my Hudson sprayer.

Weed control: We control weeds by cultivating and mulching regularly. **Best stuff seems to be wood chips. Long-tined rake, six-inches wide, four tines.

Biggest challenge: Thwarting the squirrels and leaf-footed bugs. **Would like to have a moveable pergola, because a hoop house is always a challenge to erect and doesn’t look good.

Favorite amendment: Cottonseed meal AND anything with trace elements…especially glauconite, WHICH seems to help blossoms set fruit in heat and cold.

Do we preserve: No. **Not large enough garden, small yields.

Favorite advice: Have a good friend who has great ideas. ***Thanks to Tom Lupton.

What would you like to do better? Would like to learn more about tomato biology. How to ensure more tomato blossoming and fruit set and how to improve brix.

Week 38 Tips for the Zone 9 Garden

Well, I have a problem. All of the broccoli and cabbage transplants that I put out a couple of weeks ago are now gone. Something has eaten every last one of them. So, this weekend I will be replanting and trying to figure out how to control whatever it is that is eating my brassicas. Since I will be applying organic pesticides this weekend I thought this would be a good opportunity to review some of the major organic herbicides and pesticides available to the home gardener.

While our chickens eat a lot of bugs I still have to spray things like Bt and spinosad from time to time

BUG CONTROL

Bt– Bacillus thuringiensis has been used to kill soft bodied pests in the organic garden for a very long time. I suspect that what is eating my broccoli is either a little green caterpillar called the cabbage worm or another green caterpillar called the cabbage looper. Both of these pests can be controlled fairly well with Bt. Like all pesticides, organic or not, Bt should be mixed for a single use. Bt rapidly degrades in the sunlight. Because of this, spray the plant late in the evening, covering all areas of the plant where the bug will eat. If you mix too much Bt, add more water too the mixture and leave it out in the sun. In 48 hours the mixture will be completely inert. NOTE: Bt does not kill pests mmediately. You may need to apply three times to get maximum effectiveness
Spinosad –. If you pests are tougher than caterpillars you will need to use spinosad. Spinosad is a live bacterium that speeds up a pest’s metabolism to the point where they stop eating and die within a couple of days. Spinosad has been shown to be effective against caterpillars, leaf miners, fire ants, hornworms and even fleas. Like Bt, spinosad breaks down in heat and sunlight. However, it can remain active for five to seven days. Only use spinosad if Bt has failed as it will kill bees and other pollinators
Neem oil – Neem oil is a plant extract that is mostly effective against aphids and scale insects. It can kill some insects if they are covered when they are very young (rigt after hatching). It has also been shown to prevent some insect eggs from hatching. It is not very effective against mature beetles like stink bugs or other leaf footed bugs

Large, broad leafed weeds like thistle and dandelion can be easily controlled with acetic acid

WEED CONTROL

Acetic Acid – Acetic acid is available in concentrations up to 20%. Concentrated acetic acid is very effective on a wide range of both grassy and broadleaf weeds. I have seen dandelions and crabgrass begin to wither 30 minutes after the initial application. Vinegar is best when applied to young plants. Established weeds may need a second or third application to finally kill them. Be careful when applying vinegar. Overspray can kill things you don’t want to die. I use a spray bottle and a shield when spraying close to my desirable plants. If you want to spray a wide area, then a pump sprayer works well too.
Horticultural Molasses – Neil Sperry recently said that Nut Sedge (grass) is the cockroach of the gardening world. I agree. I have tried everything to control nut sedge. This year I read an article by Howard Garrett (The Dirt Doctor) about using horticultural molasses. Well, I tried it and it works—kind of. While it killed all nut grass in the cracks of my brick patio, it did not do much damage to the nut grass that was growing in my beds. I applied the molasses at full strength.

I share these posts on Our SimpleHomestead Blog Hop. Be sure to stop by. The “hop” has tons of great information from gardeners and homesteaders all over the world!

Week 34 Tips for the Zone 9 Garden

Well, I learned an expensive lesson today. If you water your black gumbo yard for 23 hours it still will not close up the cracks that the July and August heat have made! Yep! I ran the sprinkler ALL DAY, And yes, my wife asked me if I had turned off all of the water before we went to bed last night. Oh well, live and learn. At least I know my trees and primrose jasmine are now DEEPLY watered as they head into fall.

Even though it is hot and dry, this is going to be a great weekend in the garden. Forecast says highs in the low to mid 90s with a chance of showers. So start early, drink lots of fluids and get a big part of your fall garden in the ground.

Provide ample fertilizer and water to any veggies that are still producing

Vegetables

Remove old mulch and burn it – I use spoiled hay to mulch my vegetable garden. Regardless of what you mulch with you will need to remove any that is left and bag it or burn it. Do not put it in the compost. Spent mulch is full of bug eggs and larvae. A warm compost pile is the perfect place for garden pests to over winter
If its growing, feed it – I still have okra, purple hulls and tomatoes growing in my garden. This weekend is a great time to feed them. Side dress with finished composed or give them a foliar application of fish emulsion or other water soluble product. If using commercial fertilizers apply a high nitrogen blend at a rate of 1 cup for ten feet of row
Plant potatoes – You can plant potatoes now. It is better to plant small, whole potatoes, as opposed to cut up pieces, in the fall. The extremely warm soil will rot potato pieces that are not thoutoghly scabbed.

Cannas are great, heat tolerant plants that bloom all throughout the summer.

Ornamentals

Weed, feed, water and mulch – August is a tough time on existing plants and a tough time for establishing new bedding plants. Take advantage of slower growth rates to remove tough weeds like Bermuda. Once an area is weeded, sprinkle a little fertilizer, mulch and water. Water every three or four days. This will get your beds in prime shape for planting later in the month

Trees and Lawns

Baby your pecans! – The shells of pecans are beginning to fill with fruit. Keep your pecan trees well watered to ensure your best possible crop
Cut out bag worms – If you see bag worms forming in your trees, cut them out before they get too big. If you have missed them and you have a large mass, use your long handled pruners to open up the webs to encourage the birds to come in and clean up larvae
Be on the lookout for chinch bugs – August is prime time for chinch bugs. While chinch bugs can definitely do a lot of damage to St. Augustine lawns, they can be controlled if caught early. My buddy Randy Lemmon (host of Garden Line on KTRH) has a great article about how to identify and treat them. Click here to learn more.

I share these posts on Our SimpleHomestead Blog Hop. Be sure to stop by. The “hop” has tons of great information from gardeners and homesteaders all over the world!