Tag Archives: The Raincatcher’s Garden

Blooming Bulbs

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Last fall, we decided to plant naturalizing bulbs and see how they fared.

In a word: gorgeous.

In December, we tucked in about 100 reliable, low-water beauties that are recommended varieties for Dallas. Now we are checking the north field compulsively to see what’s up and blooming.  We haven’t been disappointed.

Steve Huddleston, senior horticulturist at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, has found selections from the jonquil and tazetta families of smaller, multi-flower daffodils are the most dependable for years of color. Huddleston is slated to speak on “Perennials and Bulbs” for the Master Gardener School Class on March 28.

 

Daffodil Cragford‘Cragford,’ a pre-1930 Heirloom with white petals and reddish orange cups falls in the tazetta classification. The first to bloom in our garden, it grows to 14” -16.”

 

 

 

 

Daffodil Falconet‘Falconet’ is another dazzling tazetta with three to five flowers per stem. The petals are a bright gold with a rich orange cup.  Like ‘Cragford,’ it has a nice musky sweet perfume.  Other tazettas you might try are ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Geranium.’  We also planted ‘Hillstar,’ a jonquil variety which is not yet in bloom.

 

 

 

Daffodil Carlton‘Carlton’ has a larger bloom, but only one per stem, placing it in the Division II category. The two-toned yellow daffodil dates from 1927 and is the second most popular daffodil in the world, according to Brent and Becky’s Bulbs.  You might want to plant ‘Gigantic Star,’  ‘Ice Follies,’ or ‘Saint Keverne’ in the Division II category.

 

 

 

 

 

Daffodil Tete-a-TeteTiny Tete-a-Tete daffodils are showing their buttercup yellow petals and slightly darker yellow cup. This popular miniature daffodil usually has two flowers per stem and reaches 4-6 inches.

 

 

 

 

We also planted Dutch iris, grape hyacinths, and tulips.

Inspired? All our bulbs came from Brent and Becky’s Bulbs, one of the country’s respected bulb retailers. The Raincatcher’s Garden receives a portion of your order at the company’s fundraising site Bloomin’ Buck$ (www.bloominbucks.com).  If you’re looking for summer bulbs for your garden, Brent and Becky’s carries elephant ears, ground orchids, and more.

Elizabeth

Pictures by Starla and courtesy of Brent and Becky’s Bulbs

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Perfectly Planted Potatoes Premiers

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

     Just in time for the Oscars:  Potatoes take center stage on the red carpet in this exclusive short video.  It features our own Jim Dempsey, nominated for Best Instructor, and Starla Willis, nominated for Best Cinematographer. Good luck to both!

And… if you want more information about growing potatoes, check out “One Potato, Two Potato, Hopefully More” and “Fried Green Potatoes.”

Carolyn

Video by Starla

 

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Learn the Square Foot Gardening Concept

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Rain or Shine, Come to our Square Foot Gardening Class, Tuesday, February 23 at 11am

at The Raincatcher’s Garden of Midway Hills

 

Taught by Stephen Hudkins, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, Dallas County Master Gardener Coordinator.

We will meet in the Vegetable Patch. If raining, go to Fellowship Hall.

 

Address: 11001 Midway Road, Dallas, Texas, 75229

Public Welcome, Master Gardeners can receive education credit.

 

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Brussels Sprouts

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Brussesl sprouts are an acquired taste.  Hardly anyone under 12, puts  them on their plate. But taste buds change and recipes for Brussels sprouts salads, soups, and au gratin direct us to digest this nutritious crop.

Brussels sprouts planted in the fall at The Raincatcher's Garden

Brussels sprouts at The Raincatcher’s Garden

In Texas we plant Brussels sprouts in the fall. Brussels sprouts like cold weather. It’s a long season crop with 90 days to maturity from transplants and 100-110 days from seed.

Would you like to grow better Brussels sprouts?  Dorothy has a gardening tip:

video by Starla

Ann

Education Opportunities at The Raincatcher’s Garden of Midway Hills

Square Foot Gardening  by Stephen Hudkins, Tuesday, February 23rd at 11am in the Vegetable Patch.

Rain Garden Installation by Dr. Jaber and Dr. Woodson, Tuesday, March 1st at 9am, Fellowship Hall.

All welcome, Master Gardeners can receive education credit. Leave a comment if you need more information.

 

 

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Roses and Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Julia child rose from redneck rosarian

As many gardeners know, one of those easy-to-remember hints for when to prune your roses, is that you should prune nearly all your roses around Valentine’s Day, except for climbers and spring-blooming only roses.

However, with this year’s unusually mild winter, where several varieties of roses are already in full bloom, I found myself wondering whether they should be pruned now or not.  Ann Lamb says that her Julia Child rose is prettier this winter than it has been in any other time, so should she prune it now?  Thank goodness, Dallas County Master Gardener has several Consulting Rosarians in their membership, so the question was put to them.  Many thanks go to Susan Flanagan, Certified Master Gardener and Consulting Rosarian, who along with some of her Rosarian friends sent this response:

       “I just now talked to a friend who knows a ton about roses. There are a few roses (hybridized by Paul Readon) that are spring bloomers only but they don’t do well here.

      So my advice is to go ahead and prune all your roses. Cutting off the current blooms will not impede the coming spring blooms. If anything, they will make the roses stronger, as you are pruning out the dead, diseased and crossing limbs as well as the very thin ones. And you are cutting a portion of the top branches. The spring bloom will usually display bigger than the ones that are blooming now.  And again, if you have any climbers that are spring bloomers only, then prune them after they bloom just as you would prune once blooming plants like bridal wreath spirea and forsythia.”

     So, if you want, go ahead and make yourself a beautiful bouquet of roses for Valentine’s Day from those roses that are blooming now. Then prune your roses as you usually would.  With this year’s mild, confusing winter, we may receive ”two for the price of one” flushes of blooms.

Carolyn

Picture by The Redneck Rosarian

 

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A “Herd” of Aphids

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Dallas Garden Buzz

A school of fish, a mob of crows, a gaggle of geese,   A “herd” of aphids?  Well, if you are from an ant species called “dairying ants” or “sugar ants,” you might call groups of your aphid charges just that.

Above: A Herd of Aphids

Above: A Herd of Aphids

As many gardeners know, aphids can be a common problem on plants, especially during the heat of the summer.  These soft bodied insects suck plant sap, wither foliage, and cause a generalized lack of vigor in plants.  Aphids come in many colors (yellow, white, green) depending on the type of aphid and the plant that they are feeding on.  One of the most interesting facts about aphids is that some are said to be “born pregnant.”     Though many aphids mate and lay eggs to reproduce, some aphids are capable of a true  “virgin birth.”  These parthenogenetic generations are produced by unfertilized females.

Aphids not only suck plant sap which eventually withers the foliage, but they can spread diseases from plant to plant.  When feeding on a plant, aphids excrete a sugar substance from their anus.  This substance, called honeydew, is very sticky.  It can also form the substrate for a black mold which blocks out the light from a leaf, thus leading to the further decline of the plant.

Above: Honeydew Close Up

Above: Yellow Aphids Close Up

In the garden, ants and aphids are often seen together on infected plants.  In my experience, beans, peas, and okra seem to be some of aphids’ favorite plants and harvesting produce from these plants is often a challenge from biting ants.  These ants are drawn to the honeydew, which is a perfect food for the ants.  To increase their supply of honeydew, the ants tend aphids like cows.  These sugar/dairying ants “milk” aphids by stroking the aphids with their antennae until they release a drop of sweet honeydew liquid. They even keep their “charges” from straying by chewing off the aphids’ wings.  In the fall, the ants carry aphid eggs into their nests, to be carried back out in the spring and set on the plants.

If you are having problems with aphids and ants in your garden, there are several environmentally safe methods of aphid control.  One of the best methods is to spray the plants with a hard stream of water.  This will kill some of the soft-bodied insects (it decapitates them) and the water will wash many others off the plant.  This method is said to be 80% effective, even better than some chemical controls.

Another environmentally safe control method is to be patient and “let nature take its course.”  Within a very short period of time, where you see aphids, you will also see lady bugs (lady beetles) laying their bright orange eggs on the leaves of infected plants.  The lady bug larva, which looks like a miniature spined alligator, is a voracious consumer of aphids.  Studies have shown that each larva can eat up to 40 aphids in a single hour.  This has earned the larva the name of “aphid wolf.”  Other important beneficial insect predators include soldier bugs, damsel bugs, big-eyed bugs, spiders, assassin bugs, syrphid flies, gall midges, and lacewings.

Above: Ladybug to the Rescue!

Above: Ladybug to the Rescue!

So if you are having problems with aphids and sugar ants, before you get out the chemicals, try some of these low impact methods of aphid control.  Not only will you be able to get aphid damage down to an “acceptable” level, but your biting sugar ant problem will decrease also.

Carolyn

Pictures by Starla

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10 Years of Gardening to Celebrate!

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Merry Christmas y’all. Celebrate with us!

 

 

Video by Starla, of course!

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BRING ON THE RED WIGGLERS

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Dallas Garden Buzz

“Dear Mrs. Jones, Thank you for the best field trip ever! It was awesome! Thank you for helping us make seed balls.  We had so much fun!!!!!”

image

First graders from Lakewood Elementary had a five exclamation point (!!!!!) assessment of their field trip to the Raincatcher’s Garden of Midway Hills.

One hundred and fifty pairs of sneakers never stopped from the moment they hopped out of four school buses on November 3rd .  Every 15 minutes, timers took the students to another station: seed balls, real live clucking chickens, wiggly red wigglers, “name that vegetable,” herbs and compost. Elizabeth Wilkinson, Cynthia Jones, and Annette Beadles organized the field trip.

“Dear Raincatcher’s Friends, I love you! I love you! I love pumpkins!” 

Lakewood -pumpkin measuring

Annette compared the circumference of pumpkins—and first grade volunteers.  Cynthia showed students how to roll, mash, divot, and taco-fold clay, soil and wildflowers to make seed balls for their school.

Journal coverDear Garden Friends, Thank you for a great time! I love my journal!

Jan Larson assembled 150 journals and sharpened pencils, one for each child.  They carried their journals all day, making notes at each station.

 

The field trip was even the topic of discussion at a Lakewood hair salon.  Jan was telling her stylist about the field trip, and a young woman in the next seat joined the conversation.  “Are you talking about the field trip to the Raincatcher’s Garden?” At Jan’s nod, the mom said she was a chaperone on the field trip and remarked that it was “amazing.” 

With some tears, the Lakewood visitors returned to their classrooms, long-used “temporary” buildings outside an old East Dallas school in need of major repairs.  The forty master gardener volunteers, including DCMG board members, might have kept these thoughts from Rachel Carson in mind:

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

Elizabeth

Pictures by Starla, poster pic by Cynthia

Learn with Lakewood!

Sign up for a field trip!

 

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Fall Tomatoes at The Raincatcher’s Garden

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Dallas Garden Buzz

Listen to Dorothy! I always do! Here’s our fall tomato report:

 

We have talked about green tomatoes almost as much as red, ripe tomatoes:

Green Tomato Primer

Fried Green Tomatoes

Dorothy’s Chow Chow

Fall Tomatoes

Ann

Video by Starla

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October: Harvest, the Last Hurrah!

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Dallas Garden Buzz

At The Raincatcher’s Garden we are offering not only our regular 4 activity station field trips, but also shorter, monthly-themed lessons w/follow-up activities that are based upon connections and the cycles of nature.  We began tracking these patterns with ”September:  Change is Coming” anticipating the turn of the season in the fall garden and planning ahead for spring wildflowers.

 Keeping w/in the monthly theme is “October:  Harvest, the Last Hurrah” in which we introduced our pumpkin unit, Pumpkin Circle, the Story of a Garden by Mary McKenna Siddals & Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons.  The title encapsulates the content of the book perfectly.  By studying life cycles, we learned about the “seed-to-seed” story of a pumpkin, then, related that to the “seed-to-seed” story of the entire garden. 

Pumpkin Class is in Session

Pumpkin Class is in Session

Pumpkins are historically & culturally significant; they were originally domesticated in North America (9000 year-old-seeds have been found in caves in Mexico) and continue to play an important role in holiday celebrations from Halloween Jack-o’-Lanterns to our traditional Thanksgiving feasts complete w/pumpkin pies, breads, muffins. 

Children also love pumpkins for their variety of colors and sizes, some of which are so outlandish and unique.  We even created our own “Pumpkin Patch” with specific samples of pumpkins, gourds, and squash. 

Factoid: Did you know there was a website with video of Libby’s canned pumpkin that details how “pie pumpkins” were developed specifically for their 16 oz cans?  Or, that our beloved tradition of carving Jack-o’-Lantern pumpkins comes from an old fable about a mean, stingy man named Jack who, after his death, was doomed to roam the world carrying a carved-out turnip illuminated by glowing coals, hence, the name Jack-of-the-Lantern or Jack-o’-Lantern? 

The most popular of our varieties, hands down, were our gnarly, orangey-green-colored Native American Squash, weighing in at almost 30 pounds, slightly less than the weight of our smallest 3-year-old visitor from The da Vinci School, and the Knuckle Head Pumpkin, a warty orange oval that raised the “Ick Factor” for ugly.  

As part of our study of the Scientific Process we used our carving pumpkins for “Pumpkin Math” – estimating & measuring (number of seeds, circumference, weight, lines/creases), recording data (individual charts for ESD Primer class & volunteers’ results for our 3’s & Pre-K groups), then reporting & analyzing our results.  Using standard & non-standard measurements, we also compared our weight in pumpkins, estimating first, then using our trusty bathroom scale, & guessing our waist measurements, then tape-measuring to compare that to the circumference of the pumpkin. 

Pumpkin Math with Master Gardener Mrs Beadles

Pumpkin Math with Master Gardener, Mrs Beadles

One child reported, “I weigh 4 carving pumpkins (8 lbs each) + a Cinderella Pumpkin + a Fairy Tale Pumpkin!”  Many of our 3-year-old and Pre-K visitors had smaller waists than our sample pumpkins which averaged 24-27 inches.  After all of the slicing and dicing and eviscerating was done, we separated seeds and pumpkin goop.  And, we still had survivors which eventually fell to the carving knife. 

Pumpkin Goop and Pumpkin Carving with EDS kids

Pumpkin Goop and Pumpkin Carving with ESD students

Later, we enjoyed a treat of toasted seeds (pepitas) and Elizabeth’s delicious pumpkin mini muffins.  Our young visitors returned to their respective schools excitedly reporting these facts and more to anyone who would listen.  

Annettte

Pictures by Starla 

More about Pumpkin:

The Power of Pumpkin

Layered Pumpkin Pie in a Jar

Pumpkin Cheese Ball

Creamy Southwestern Pumpkin Soup

 

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