A Larrapin Garden

I was thrilled to receive my birthday present a few weeks early from my sweet spouse: A New Camera!!  We went camera shopping with the thought of getting a Canon Rebel. But while at the camera store, I kept thinking how incredibly nervous I’d be, toting a $600 camera down to the garden, out to the chicken coop, etc. (Please note the Rebel would have counted for this year’s birthday, 10th anniversary and Xmas present combined!)

Now let me be clear, the Rebel takes amazing photos—my friend Jen has one and her photos are WOW. You can see the whiskers on a spider with the macro lens she has and could probably blow up a print to poster sized and it stay razor sharp. But for five years I’ve been doing just fine with a Kodak Easyshare Z740 and have been delighted with the photos it takes. Mostly I take snapshots and blog. To be honest, I haven’t had a print made in years. So at the store, for less than half the price of Rebel, is the Kodak Easyshare Z981…the modern descendent of my dear old z740. So I had to try it out. If this works, I thought, heck, I may still get another present under the Christmas tree! <LOL>

And I love it. It’s tricked out with bells and whistles that take a little getting used to after the simplicity of the z740. As all the reviews say, the stubborn battery door is indeed stubborn. But the built-in 26X zoom is incredible and it also has built in wide-angle, which is nice. It’s light for a full-sized digital and feels good in the hands of someone who learned photography with an ancient Pentax K1000 that used (gulp) real film and was 100% manual everything. I’m sold. So Larrapin Garden has a new camera. The photos above are from the testing-the-camera series, a friendly little Buckeye butterfly. Below is a cute big-eyed flying friend of unknown name.

In continuing the camera test, below you’ll find the world’s tiniest persimmons we grew on a brand new persimmon tree planted last fall…

…and some of our last Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, which were amazing on a BLT today. Both are accompanied by the chicken-spokesmodels found in the kitchen window…

So the camera’s a keeper!!  Thank you Mendy!!

If you are interested in welcoming songbirds, butterflies and other wildlife to your garden, yard and land as I am here at Larrapin— you want to hear what Doug Tallamy has to say.  His is author of Bringing Nature Home: How to Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, a book that enlightened my planting choices a couple of years ago. The basic premise is that our native songbirds, butterflies and pollinators need more than our well-intentioned feeders, nectar-flowers, etc. They require and are dependent on the native plant and tree species of their habitat. In fact, they can’t raise young without them!

The post and my review of Bringing Nature Home  is here: http://ozarksalive.org/larrapin/?p=196

As obvious as that is in hindsight…I admit I had not always been a fan of the ‘native plants’ thing, as I confess in that post above…

But I’ve changed my ways and the rewards have been quick! The butterfly pictured is a zebra swallowtail, my favorite butterfly in the world so far. I’m just crazy for the pale green and black color combination combined with those sassy orange dots. Fabulous!  They are also known as paw-paw butterflies because at the caterpillar stage, that’s what they eat. In the butterfly stage, they’ll take the nectar of most typical butterfly attractors such as the butterfly bush (Buddleia) shown here. I’d never seen one at Larrapin till I brought in the first paw-paw tree—which is native to the Ozarks but we just don’t have any on our hill.

Let me be clear, the first zebra swallowtail showed up when I still had the paw paw trees in the pots from the nursery!! That was Spring 2009. This year, I saw a few more and indeed, the paw paws had many leaves chomped pretty heavily, but still looked perfectly healthy though they are still waist tall.

And finally, I saw the prize while out watering on one of the many murderously hot August days we’ve had since early July (don’t get me started on the weather…it’s been a rough garden year that way…).  Two zebra swallowtail caterpillars on the heavily-munched little paw paw tree!

I didn’t get a photo but this is what they look like.  And there they were, fat little green caterpillars with their distinctive stripe towards their chubby heads. I was ecstatic. You know you’ve gone over to wildlife when you are thrilled something is eating your plants!!  But that’s why I planted them. And if years from now, I get some paw paw fruit—which supposedly tastes like banana custard—well, that’s just gravy.

OK, here’s an important bit from Tallamy’s book:  If you could only plant ONE large tree in your yard, which one would hold the most benefit for the most species?

Answer: White Oak.  Why?  We’ll, you’ll have to come hear the talk to find out!

Tallamy is a fun and engaging speaker and you are sure to learn marvelous things you didn’t know before. Plus, the proceeds go to two great local causes. See you Friday!!  I’ll be the one grinning like I’ve been eating paw-paws.

OLLI Presents Doug Tallamy: Friday, August 20th 7pm

Osher Lifelong Institute presents a book talk and signing by Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How to Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants. This event benefits Fayetteville in Bloom and the Washington County Junior Master Gardeners. Tickets are $15 to general public, $10 for members of sponsoring organizations: OLLI, IRWP and the Fayetteville Natural Heritage Assoc. There will be a book signing at 6 PM.
This event will take place at UA Global Campus, 2 East Center St. [this is on the NE outer corner of the Fayetteville square]
For questions please contact Cindi at copecindi [at] aol [dot] com or 521-0934.

Thanks for stopping by Larrapin Garden! You can Subscribe to A Larrapin Garden Blog by Email here or via the right-column of the blog at www.larrapin.us . Or, if you do Facebook, you can get our posts by “liking” our Facebook page atwww.facebook.com/larrapin.garden.

Tags: birds, books, Live Local, pollinators, wildlife-friendly

My Grandmother always said time speeds up dramatically as you get older. But I confess, I thought she meant when I got HER age, not mine now! Wrong. Time is going so fast my head spins. But come to think about it….I guess I could have grandkids, pretty respectably, at my age. Dang, that’s sobering….  Back to GARDENING!

Many of you know that I injured my right shoulder this spring somehow with a combination of digging rocks/tilling rocks/planting trees in rocky soil/breaking ground on new garden spot/ and a non-ergonomic desk set up.  As bad as the digging sounds, the desk may have been a primary offender! Thanks to a miracle-worker of a holistic physical therapist, a gifted massage therapist, and living with a master swimmer (who is getting me and my formerly-injured shoulder in the pool despite my natural tendency to love swimming as much as your average house cat)—I’m starting to believe my gardening days may continue into ripe old age, despite the speeding clocks apparently located there.

But how DID it get to be time for Fall Planting already?!

Since today is an official resting-the-shoulder-day I popped over to one of my favorite garden blogs, Skippy’s Vegetable Garden, and checked out the personalized planting calendar she has developed. You can put in your local frost date and generate a spring or fall  planting calendar of several types of garden vegetables. (When you visit the calendar generating page, note there are separate links for fall/spring plantings.)  I entered a frost date of 10/30 for Fayetteville and got these dates:

I’ve never been much of a fall gardener, but want to turn over a new leaf, so to speak.  Skippy’s garden is up in the Northeast…so I’m wondering if there are needed adjustments to make here in the northwest corner of Arkansas. Hmmm. Think I’ll send this post over to my gardening mentors Calvin and Jennifer and ask for advice. I’ll let you know what I find out. In the meantime, do you plant in the fall? What are the dates you start your favorite fall crops? Please post them in the comments if you are reading online, or reply to the email if you are getting this via email subscription! More later on this, but I feel very lucky to have gotten a new bush-bean bed planted just day before yesterday! We’ll see what happens.

Thanks for stopping by Larrapin Garden! You can Subscribe to A Larrapin Garden Blog by Email here or via the right-column of the blog at www.larrapin.us . Or, if you do Facebook, you can get our posts by “liking” our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/larrapin.garden.

Tags: fall garden, how-to, seasons

For several years now, one of my favorite plants has been Gayfeather (Liatris). It’s great for growing on the sunny side of  the mulch ring around young fruit trees because bees love it. Great because the bees will then pollinate your fruit tree while they are visiting. Evidence of this bee attraction below! In mid-July the blooms are fading now, but just a few weeks ago when these photos were taken, every time I’d walk by there could be a dozen or more bees enjoying the long spiky blooms.

Bee bloomer shot:

These photos are of course bumblebees, but the wild honeybees have been showing up this year too, to my delight. (Next year we may become beekeepers! I’m so excited. Gotta take the class, etc. ) I have two friends now who keep bees who I hope will become mentors…  But back to liatris! It’s a native prairie plant and once established, is pretty tough and doesn’t need any coddling. It will get lanky and fall over if it isn’t in full sun for at least 5-6 hours (at least at my house this is true.)  It grows from tiny bulbs and once you have a clump, it’s easy to dig up in the fall, divide into several little bulb clumps, and suddenly you have many.

Liatris blooms, after serving as buffet and bounty to the bees, will attract goldfinches once the flower stalks turn to seeds. A good reason to not get all prissy and clip them off once the blooms fade!  Watching a sunshine yellow goldfinch plucking seeds off the top of a flower that still is purple along the bottom is a color frenzy I still hope to capture on the camera.  They produce zillions of seeds though I haven’t had them spread around here..though I wish they would!

And if all that isn’t enough to sell you on liatris (which you sometimes see on sale in the bulb bin of Lowe’s) then how about this: After watching the bees clamber all over the blooms in the daytime, at dusk you will find the same fat bumblebees curled up sleeping in between the blooms, looking as if they are dreaming of tomorrow’s sunshine and nectar.

A final shot of my furry friends:

Like my brother Stephen told me recently about his new garden, it’s just great shopping for groceries in your own yard! Over the last week we’ve harvested zucchini, acorn & butternut squash, plus the pretty white and green squash which came off a plant that was supposed to be an acorn squash… The bell peppers and italian sweet peppers are producing moderately. Meanwhile, the jalapenos are so loaded with peppers they were nearly breaking the plant with the weight!

Green beans and purple hull peas are producing great. Green beans are Kentucky wonder, the bush variety, and it’s won us over the long time favorite blue-lake bush beans. (I’m less fond of the flavor of a pole bean and have less luck with them…)

The purple hull pea variety is ‘coronet’ (from the farmers’ co-op) and they’ve been *the* most productive ones I’ve ever tried. We got a bushel off a 3 x 24 bed. This is the first year we’ve had any luck because purple hulls are the deer’s favorite, favorite veggie of all time it seems. So far, knock on wood, the fence-plus-Ada-combo is working. The tomatoes are Arkansas Travelers which have been wonderfully productive and disease resistant too so far.

Hope you are enjoying the mid-summer bounty! What are you harvesting this week?

Sometimes its hard for me, in the middle of one season, to remember what the opposite season is like! Hard to believe this bounty above all came from a spot that looked like this (below) back in January. Wow!