Hot, Dry Weather: Tree Check Reminder!

I know life is busy, so here's a reminder to head outside and spend a few minutes of quality time with your new trees! Check the moisture level in the soil to see if they need some water.
Here's the quick version:

• Dig down a few inches into the root ball.
• If the soil is wet, head back inside for a cool drink of your own.
• If the soil is only damp, or getting dry, give the tree a long, slow drink instead.

The longer, more detailed version is at your fingertips on our landscape tips page.
You can also check our our moisture monitoring tutorial if you'd like to learn more about it. (This one's a downloadable pdf file)

A few things to remember about transplanted trees and water:

• A tree can be considered "new" for the first three years, or even four, after it's planted
• Rain is usually insufficient for transplanted trees, so be sure to check on them even if it's rained.
• Mulch is important for helping a tree to settle in to its new home.
• Keeping the soil completely saturated all the time can suffocate roots or cause disease.

Organic? But what about those bugs?

This past week I was admiring all that's happening in the gardens and Hoop House 1 (as I've come to call it now that Hoop House 2 is about to go up). I was admiring the bok choy with its beautiful green & white leaves almost ready to harvest; thinking about thinning the garlic and adding some to the first week's CSA boxes...and being relieved that my carrots have finally started to come up and I can see some of them. Still didn't have any lettuce up in the bed I planted a month ago, so I did a germination test. The seeds seemed ok. It must have been me: I didn't have enough water on the bed the first time around. So I replanted in another space and left the first one for now. I want to see if giving the first bed some more water will bring those stubborn seeds around!

My poor bok choy were eaten to half their original size!

This morning - Saturday - I wander into the hoop house to check on the temperature and you could have knocked me over with a brick! The beautiful bok choy were half eaten! Top to middle, the whole bed had been chewed up by insects...my cute little row of turnips, too. We won't be having bok choy in our menu this week, but I hope the organic measures I took today will allow those babies to recover by next week. Almost 14 days? We'll just have to wait and see.

This is how I hope they look when they recover

All this has me thinking about the first time we tried Bok Choy a couple years ago. The pretty little plants got to a nice 8 or 10 inches tall, and they were eaten. That first time, I just let the planting go because I didn't have anyone counting on it and we were learning a dozen other crops at the same time. Now, I'm setting my sights on finding out how to handle this and the pests that attack our other cabbage-y friends.

The better news about the veggies is that the onions, beans, peas, radishes, peppers and a handful of tomatoes are all off to a great start. On Thursday Mike and Mike laid three rows of plastic mulch in the main garden, plus one looong row of plastic where we'll grow zucchini for the food bank. As soon as the ground is dry enough to walk on we can start planting! As Scarlett said, "tomorrow is another day."

Recycling your Real Christmas Tree

Good news on the environmental front: there are many ways a real Christmas tree can be recycled after its job is done in your home. Many municipalities offer curbside tree pickup on certain dates after Christmas, and some of those use the trees in chippings for mulch. In the city of Grand Blanc, for instance, the mulch collection program picks up right after the holiday just for Christmas tree collection.

You can check with your city or township to see what they offer; in my experience a web search for "recycle Christmas tree (city name)" is the best way to check it out. But...if your pickup doesn't include Christmas trees for recycling in Oakland County, you can do something about it yourself: take the tree to a county park. The Oakland County Parks have a great drop-off program that includes 11 park locations. You can take your undecorated tree to any of these parks during their normal hours and add it to the stacks of other residents' trees. You can check out their web site, Destination Oakland, to learn about hours and other details.

This photo from the Oakland Press shows a Parks staffer
helping with Christmas tree dropoff.

After helping a friend recycle his tree this way a couple of times, I can say that as the end date of the program, January 16, rolls around, those stacks of Christmas trees are pretty impressive! It feels good to know that so many people are interested in keeping this recyclable resource out of our landfills. And the best part is, the wood chips made from these trees is made available to the public free of charge starting just a few weeks later. They can be useful for making paths in the yard/garden, and if applied after composting for a few months can also add some great nutrients to the garden soil.

Curious about other methods of recycling a real Christmas tree? The National Christmas Tree Association has some very interesting reports to share, from rebuilding coastlines to manufacturing flu vaccines.