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.

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.

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!

What a July! Temps in 90s…humidity about 90-thousand percent. A four inch rain last week, a five inch rain the other day…  A walk outside means you are drenched in either rain or sweat or both. But things are growing like crazy. Hey! That looks like a watermelon, um, growing up the fence!

Ok, I’d seen the edges of that vine making it’s way up the fence, but I was surprised to see the size of that little growing melon. They are a small variety…crimson sweet I think…but I don’t think the vines will support a full-grown melon hanging in air.

Hmmm. What to do?  Hmmm, how about…

Yes! Finally a use for pantyhose I can get excited about!

I’ll let you know how it turns out. Thanks so much for stopping by Larrapin Garden. I’m a bit behind at posting this month, but I’m going to try my best not to have my usual mid-summer lull!

A Bean Harvest! (14 pound Weenie Dog for scale...)

Today’s a quick and random post! I love my new giant red trug and I love all the beans I picked yesterday! This year we grew Kentucky Wonder Bush Beans and wow are they productive and delicious. We’d been Blue Lake Bush Bean fans for years, but Kentucky may have won out at Larrapin. This harvest was half of a 3 x 20 foot patch…which also has a row of sweet corn down the middle.  still looking fairly puny though…so I’m not sure what I think about that planting method after all. I’ll need to try it with another variety of corn and see if I just picked the wrong horse, er, corn, for this race.

The new garden spot continues to grow rampantly. Everything looked pretty parched in this shot, but it was just before a wonderful drenching rain soaked it all. It will be jungle-ish very soon!  (The purple-rake garden art is a work in progress…please stay tuned..)

Pumpking Seedlings on 6/21

I’d been unable to find pumpkin seedlings at any of my usual gardenstore haunts, so started these from seed. They popped up quick! I’m using a little wooded gadget that makes starter pots from old newspaper. I didn’t like it at first because the cups were so tiny, then I realized you can use wider paper strips to make nice deep cups. Now I love it.

And the pumpkins seem to love it too. These are the same seedlings six days later. The photo is washed out, they actually look very sturdy and green.  I’m preparing a bed for these now and planning a pumpkin/compost pile planting experiment…

In closing this ragged and random post, picture below is the little-known weenie dog weather detector. When Blue—who hates wet grass, being awakened early, late meals or weather below 85 degrees anywhere in his Princedom— stands nervously scanning the sky from the vantage point pictured below…it’s gonna rain. And it did!

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Summer blooms...and water for the creatures...

This week has been so hot I’m filling the water dishes for the creatures every day. The calendar says June, but it feels like mid-July and has for a couple of weeks! Add that to a shoulder injury and the gardening (and blogging/typing too) have been challenging around here. But watching the variety of birds that come to sip at the water and watching garden toads and gorgeous spotted leopard frogs hop away from the dishes as I approach sure makes it worthwhile.

One of the easiest ways to keep water available for all the wild critters is the large pottery dishes meant to go underneath large potted plants. I found the lovely blue ones for just five bucks each up at Ranelli’s produce stand in Tontitown. They are about 20 inches across and about two inches deep. I try to keep a flat stone as a little island in each so the tiniest frogs can safely exit. I’ve seen butterflies alight on these stones too.

The easy part is this: I keep at least one water dish in each major garden area. Since I’m prone to be there at least every other day (these days with a hose already in hand…) it’s easy enough to tilt the dish up with your toe (notice: no shoulder involvement…) then refill, all from a standing position. This keeps the water fresh and eliminates any mosquito troubles. As long as you change the water every 5 days, you’ll not have mosquitos. But the water won’t last 5 days in this heat and neither will your more fragile plant babies…so you’ll be out there anyway!

The five water dishes and the two birdbaths we maintain at all times during the summer have been a huge part of having so many birds, butterflies and beneficial creatures like toads and frogs at Larrapin. Remember Larrapin covers about a half acre, so you may not need so many!

Of course if you have roaming cats you don’t want to lure birds to the ground, so elevated birdbaths, if any, would be safer. Positioning can also help, for example a birdbath at the base of a small tree surrounded by low grass, with no shrubs or hiding areas for several yards, would be safer. We have to use this technique in the winter for birdbaths and feeders, not because of cats but because of roadrunners who will stalk birds when they are really, really hungry…

Go get some planter dishes at your favorite garden store! Chicken Holler in Farmington has an oversized heavy-duty plastic one for about 8 bucks that acts like a mini-pond (It requires a safe-exit rock, surface slightly above water level). I love them. Mine last 3-5 years (when I remember to put them up in the winter…) Here’s to a good, soft, lingering rain sometime very soon…and healthy shoulders!

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Calvin's specialty: Nutrient Dense Produce

Calvin Bey is Fayetteville’s resident guru on organic, biointensive gardening for nutrient-dense produce. I’ve had the privilege of taking his class and continuing to be mentored by this amazing gardener. Today I’m sharing some pics from his open-garden day back in mid-May. Harmony Garden was also featured in the FGNS Through The Garden Gate Tour last week.

Biointensive beds at Harmony Gardens with soaker hoses

This backyard garden covers around 2500 square feet with wide mounded raised beds and spacious walkways. Calvin and Doris harvest 3000 pounds-plus of organic produce that tests extremely high on the ‘brix-meter’ (a way of measuring nutrition in food). In a later post, I’m going to talk about nutrient-density/brix, etc, but today I just wanted you to get a preview of this amazing garden.

Blueberries are tricky here in the hot Ozarks compared to my previous home near Asheville, NC…but as you can see, Calvin is managing. They get gallons and gallons off a handful of bushes. I had the delight of a gift of some of these blueberries — which were easily and by far the tastiest I have *ever* tasted. This brix stuff rocks… Oh, and involves a lot of rock-dust and special ground rock too… more later on that.

Calvin speaking at Open Garden Day, May 2010

Calvin is passionate about sharing the knowledge he’s accumulated through decades of gardening and detailed experimenting with garden methods and amendments.

Biointensive beds at Harmony Gardens

There were dozens of visitors on open garden day, and dozens more on tour day that took a look at this amazing garden. More later on all this!

Daylilies & Milkweed at Larrapin...please ignore that bit of unplucked ragweed! haha!

Tomorrow, Saturday June 12th from 10-3 is the Omni Center’s Peace Garden Tour! I’m looking so forward to having the chance to visit some of these gardens. I particularly enjoy this tour for the gardens that range from elegant to quirky to down-home, all named for the wish for peace. And what is more peaceful (and hopeful) than a garden….

You can get a tour map and instructions from the Omni Center website at www.omnicenter.org to find your way around this delightful self-guided tour that raises funds for peacework here in NWA. I’m particularly excited about seeing my friend Dwain’s garden for the first time! The gardens are very centrally located in Fayetteville for easy getting around — plus each garden has a ‘bonus feature’ of some kind. Fun!  PLUS, each tour participant will be eligible for a free e-book on edible landscaping that I have in the works right now!

Some past posts here at Larrapin Garden blog have featured peace gardens. You can check out Ed’s Woodland Garden, the Julia Ward Howe peace garden, and the late Nancy Maier’s lovely garden — which will be featured this year too courtesy of her partner Marshall.  Don’t miss it! Tix are available at the Fayetteville Farmer’s Market the morning of the tour also at the Omni table. Enjoy!

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.