Back Yard Bats

Common Michigan Brown Bat

I found a little bat inside my outdoor sink. He/she was a cute little brown bat. He seemed OK. I thought I it was sleeping because I believe bats are nocturnal, so I put a dish of water in there and I figure he would fly out when he wanted too.

He was in there the next day, so I called a local bat expert for help. She said that he was probably stuck in there.

The thing about bats is that they cannot take off from the ground like birds. Bats need a little bit of height to start their flight. My high walled sink had trapped him in there.

Bats are good climbers and will climb up trees, caves walls. There need for a little height for take off is why we see them hanging on rafters, under bridges, trees, caves etc…

So I ended up putting the cute little bat in a shoe box and setting him next to a tree. He quickly hung onto the tree, and climbed up a little. He then jumped off and flew away.

I wore gloves to prevent being bit. He was not happy about it and he made the cutest little high pitched sound.

Contrary to popular belief, bats are not blind.

What should you do if you have bats in your house?

For starters, remember that bats are our friends.

Bats eat insects that are harmful to crops like moths and they are major mosquito eaters. A bat can eat over a 1000 mosquitos in an hour, which can put your bug zapper to shame.

Bats turn those insect pests into garden gold called guano, a prized fertilizer for gardeners.

If you do have bats in your house the key is exclusion techniques, not poisonous extermination. Exclusion is a process of sealing up your house to prevent bats from getting in.

Extermination will only work on the short term because other bats will get in and it creates a toxic risk to your family.

Bats unfortunately are declining in numbers, so there is a movement to bat conservation that includes home owners and bats putting up bat houses.

Bat Box

I noticed that County Farm Park has several bat houses up.

Community Garden Potlucks Rock

County Farm Park Ann Arbor Gardeners

OK. I have said it before. If you want a really great meal, go to a gardener’s potluck. You never know what you are going to get, but it will all be fresh from the garden and the meal will reflect the culinary energy and diversity of the community.

On a culinary note, I feel that there are a few important cooking techniques that are essential for any gardener to help them use all of their great veggies. In my opinion all gardeners need to know how to make:

1) Stir Fry (Great for a large number of mix veg)
2) Quiche (Perfect for all of those dark leafy greens)
3) Salad Dressing (great taste giver to fresh raw veggies)
4) Pizza (Think Veggie Toppings)
5) Soups/Stews (Think purees, gazpacho, lentil dahls, minestrone, hearty stews, chowders)
6) Roasted Veggies (Thinks potatoes, red bell peppers, asparagus, and mix root veggies)
-And do’t forget to add a healthy bunch of fresh herbs to these dishes

Today’s Potluck Menu:

Cherry tomato tasting
Steamed Eggplant mash
Home made sour Kraut
Mix salad with chicken
Sprouted bread with olive/tomato tapenade
Pan fried veggie cake of dandelion greens and garlic chives
Cellophane Rice Noodles with Dried Shrimp
Baked veggie cake with yogurt dressing
Cabbage, beet, and carrot cole slaw
Bitter Melon dish
Fattoush Salad
Varies Fermentation: Pickled Lemon
Home Made Pizza and Focaccia Bread (Recipe) (My offering)

Note: The pizza shown below uses the entire dough recipe to create a very thick single sheet pan crust pizza. You can probably half the dough recipe and get two sheet pan pizza from the it. I use a sheet pan because it is easier to transport. One of these days I will get some pizza boxes.

Home made pizza ready for transit

Cherry Tomato Sampler

olive tomato tapenade

Baked Veggie Cake w/yogurt sauce

Fattoush Salad

Rainbow Bright Sour Kraut

Steamed Mashed Eggplant

Cole Slaw

Salad with Chicken

Rice Noodles with Dried Shrimp

Pan Fried Veggie Cake w/dandelion and garlic chives

Toilet Paper Mushrooms: Blue Oyster

Some may note my minor obsession with growing mushrooms this year. My plan was to hit the ground running with my Wine Cap mushroom that I planted last Oct.

My wine caps have yet to pop up, but I am still hopeful for a fruiting this year in a few weeks. They can take up to 18 months to fruit, so if they do not come up soon it will look like I will have to wait over winter.

The next idea was to get some Shitake logs started, but it was/is next to impossible to find fresh cut oak logs. Believe me I tried.

Don’t be surprised if you hear a chain saw going in the middle of the night in your yard to see mushroom obsessed vandals in a desperate attempt to score a log or two.

So with my wine caps in wait-and-see mode and no go on logs, I set my sights on Oyster mushrooms.

Oysters can be grown on a variety of substrates including pasteurized wheat straw, coffee grounds, newspaper and I even seen I class teaching mushrooms growing on old phone books.

And then there are Toilet Paper mushrooms.

Toilet Paper mushrooms are by far the easiest ways to get started with growing mushrooms.

I purchase some spore from Chris of Easy Grow Mushrooms, and ordered some special Toilet Paper mushroom  growing bags that have a mess air vent on the top.Trader Joes had the best deal on Chlorine-free Toilet Paper.

Step by Step Instruction

The idea was to grown mushrooms for sale at my booth at The Westside Farmers Market.

They worked like a charm. I got mushroom on 3 weeks with most fruit around the same time.

Chris at Easy Grow said that Toilet Paper Oyster mushrooms tend to be on the same side because the small amount of substrate compared to a good size log, or several gallon bag of straw/coffee grounds.

He was right and I figured that I would not yield enough mushrooms off of my 18-20 rolls of toilet paper to have enough mushrooms for sale.

Each roll yields around 1-2 ounces of mushrooms per fruiting.

My mushrooms looked great and were ready to harvest, so on a lark I figured that I would bring a few to the market to show off.

The response was huge. People gravitated toward these alien looking things. The toilet paper after three weeks gets so morphed by the mushroom spore that it is hard to recognize. Form a distance, people thought it was a hunk of soft cheese.

They were amazed when I said it was toilet paper.

I ended up selling/trading them as mini-mushroom kits.

They make for a fun grow project for kids and would-be mushroom growing enthusiasts.

I will have more next week at the Westside Farmers Market.

Potato Gardening: Horizontal Growing Method

I have been thinking about a possibly new (new to me) potato growing method I call horizontal potato growing.

I noticed that my Potato plants are growing very tall, which is good, but I ran out of straw to mound them up. My eleven bails did not come close to providing the mound height I wanted for my 25 x 25 feet of potato plants in my community garden plot.

I could not help but feel that all of that extra exposed potato plant height could have been mounded up to promote more off shoots and thus a larger potato harvest per plant.

Then I noticed that my tall plants much like non-staked/caged tomato plants flopped over and vined out on the ground.

Flatten vine potato plant

Looking at this, I got the idea of Horizontal Potatoes.

The idea is to train a potato plant (see above picture) which naturally vines out to grow on the ground flat.

With my Horizontal Potato Method, the vines are trained so that as the plant grows outward a ring stake holds the vine flat on the ground in place (see graphic on top). The exposed vines are then mounded up with 6-12 inches of straw/compost.

 

The process is continued as the vines grow outward.

With Horizontal growing, instead of having to mound up several feet of straw/soil per plant, all you would need is a few inches of straw to cover the flat plant vine that is lying on the ground.

These vines can be snaked along plant bed in thin straight rows to allow for maximum intensive gardening.

While the tall mounded potato plant has the advantage of small space for high yield, the disadvantage is the cost of straw/compost per plant and a container if using.

The containers below, although nice and easy to use, cost $10 bag, plus a compost, straw and seed potatoes. I plan to reuse them of course including the soil. The issue is the up front cost, which should pay for itself in a second season. (Keep posted for yield results…this is my first year trying them).

I figure that I would need to use about 3/4-1 bale of straw per plant to mound them up to achieve maximum mound height and yield per plant in my current garden.

Then there is all of that time spent mounding some odd 50-100 bails of straw. Of course I can mound the plants up with soil, but we are talking about heavy/hard work shoveling a heck of a lot of soil.

In theory the flat ground potato plant will continue to throw off underground/covered shoots. Potatoes are basically an upside down tomato plant with the fruit growing undergroud/cover.

 

My 2-3 feet tall vertical plants could have been spread out on the ground and be covered with a minimum of straw.

One plant may grow 3-6 vines that will each growing 2-5 feet horizontally (or more) which would be fully covered to provide a maximum yield potatoes. (In Theory)

Less plants, less seed potatoes, less straw/mound cover, less work mounding potatoes, easier harvest and more potatoes…that is the idea.

All of this is a theory. I will try it out next year.

Brian

Ann Arbor Blueberries

Here they are. This is our first harvest of blueberries this year. They came off of two blueberry plants that are yet to be planted.

I live on a street in Ann Arbor called Blueberry Lane. Everyone asks me if there are blueberries lining the streets when I tell them where I live.

Until this year the answer was always no.

My thoughts were toward the black berries bushes that have taken over Oregon. Just about every non-majorly landscape area/streets will have a huge blackberry bush in Portland.

I figured someone should plant some blueberries to make the street name official, so after a really, really late start in the garden because of all of that Spring rain this year (remember that), we decided to get a few blueberry bushes to make up for the lost early Spring harvest.

So far we have enough for about one bowl of cereal.

CB

 

 

Potato Gardening: Ann Arbor Project Grow Potato Challenge

Growing Potatoes

The traditional method is to dig a trench and place the seed potato inside and cover it. Then as the potatoes grow, soil is mounded over them.

I have used this method with good results, but the problem is that it is very labor intense (all that digging) and harvesting is a pain because I end up spearing many potatoes with my garden fork and end up not finding them all.

So this year I am trying something new.

The first was the Straw Method:

1) Take your loose soil bed (Top with some compost)
2) Place (or throw) a potato on top of the soil about a foot apart for each other(no digging..yah!!)
3) Cover with soil
4) Cover with a little straw
5) When they grow to about 6-8inch, mound up with more straw
6) Repeat step five until you have a large mold of straw around your potato plant
7) Stopped mounding when the plant flowers

The idea with this method is that the potatoes will grow outward in the loose straw providing a huge crop with ease of harvest (just uncover the straw)

Potato Bag Method

1) Put some compost about 4-6 inch at the bottom of a potato bag. I bought special potato bags, but I think one of those nylon grocery bags would do fine with a few holes cut for drainage in the bottom.
2) Place 3 small seed potatoes in the bag away from each other.
3) Cover with straw once they get 4-6 inches
4) Cover with potting soil when the grow another 4-6 inches for the second mounding
5) Cover with straw then soil until the grow over the top of the bag

Note: You can use other containers like plastic storage tubs, large pots, or wooden crates. Some people use car tires and stack them, but I do not recommend this because I feel tires can be toxic.

With both methods, harvest once the plant dies back.

Michigan Morel Mushrooms 2011

Michigan Morel found in my front yard

This is an extreme close up of the Morel I found in my front yard. I dashed into mushroom hunter mood and harvest it before I realized I was not in the woods and I could have left it to grow bigger (opps).

It has been really rainy this year and the cool weather may mean a last morel season, which I take as a good sign.

For the last two years, I have not found any. This year I found one at the start of the season, so I am already up.

Hopefully I will get some this year, so I can post some recipes.

Good Luck Fellow Morel Hunters

CB

Realted Post

Michigan Morel 2011 Report cccccccccccc

Bee Roads in England

‘Bee Roads’: UK Creating Network Of Wildflowers To Boost Declining Bee Population, by MEERA SELVA

LONDON — Farmers and landowners are being asked to plant rows of wildflowers along the edges of England’s fields to create a network of “bee roads” to boost declining numbers.

Conservationists said Tuesday they hope the wildflowers will provide food and shelter for wild bees, honeybees and butterflies, which play a crucial role in pollinating crops.

This is some good news for what has been bad news for the bees for years. When you take someones food supply (flowers) and pave it over for citys, mini malls and mono crops, there is little wonder why they not doing as well.

But we gardeners can do our part by planting a row of flower for bees this year.

Dedicate some of your garden this year for native wild flower plants and then sit back and watch the bees come.

related post: You Bee the Gardener

French farmer jailed in shooting over truffles

photo found at http://8ateateight.com/

Here is a link to a story I read today.

Truffles AP

I am not sure I mentioned it before, but I have been obsessed with the idea of starting a truffle farm in the US. One of the set backs besides not having a farm, or the money or the experience, is that I live in Michigan, which is zoned too cold to grow them.

Most think that truffles are a luck of the draw crop. Growers have to hunt for the semi precious food and they consider themselves fortunate if they have this king of mushrooms growing on their farm. Truffles can run $500-1000 a pound.

So, when I received my territorial seed catalog and saw that they were offering hazelnut tree that were inoculated with a french truffle, I saw my truffle farm in the US as a distinct possibility.

Oh, sure it will take 3-7 years before I get a single mushroom, and the investment would be huge, but I would be growing truffles.

I can see it now, Me and Emily on our mostly hobby farm with a few animals for show, a great veggie garden, and few yurts out back for a farmy tourism B and B, or rather Yurt and B. We would also feature a farmy gift shop. But the real business would be the truffles. I would invite great chefs from across the country for harvest season to come to the farm and cook meals for me and my friends in exchange for a basket of fresh picked truffles.

Then of course a wake up from  my dream.

But this article, which talks about a french truffle farmer shooting and killing a would be truffle thief puts a damper on my plan (more like a fancy for now).

My pristine valley of dwarf hazelnut trees with truffles would require penitentiary style fencing and security if I were to not suffer a run on my truffles from would be thieves.

Of course none of this has happened and I am still in the fancy stage, but this story of a French truffle farmer needed to defend his farm to tragic results puts a little damper on the plan.

Wine Cap Mushrooms: At The Westside Farmers Market 2011

As most know, this was my first year at the farmers market. We offered micogreens, and baked goods (pocket pies, focaccia bread, cinnamon cake, and more). With my first year under my belt, the thought is about next year. And those thoughts are on Mushrooms.

Easygrow sells a number of mushroom kits at the AA Farmers Market. The picture above shows a kit for Winecap Mushrooms, which are a large mushroom like portabella, but boost a better flavor.

Also in the works are some mushrooms grown on logs. The plan is to grow shittake. I want to offer a third, but I have not decided on the variety.

Some mushrooms like mitake can take two years to fruit. The idea is to have the mushrooms ready for sale next summer.

Easygrow also sells morrel kits, which can be hit or miss and take up top two years to fruit too, but I just have to get a few and see.

Winecap growing procedure:

1) Find fresh oak wood chips (call around to area tree services)
2) Find a shady spot, about 4 x 8 feet
3) Spread a thick layer of newspaper, and lightly wet down
4) Layer a 2-3 inch layer of wood chips on the paper
5) tare off some balls from the starter kit, and place on the wood chips every 8-12 inches apart in rows, using a diamond pattern off centering them from row to row
6) wet down, and add another layer of chips and wet down some more
7) If using two bag (kits), seed another layer
8) top again with another 2-4 inches of chips
9) spray the whole pile down
10) cover with some straw (helps with moisture)
11) Place a short fence around it to keep out critters like skunks that like to dig up the pile (optional)
12) let sit over winter or start in the early spring for a fall harvest

Enjoy the Harvest

Here are pictures of the process for growing winecaps

First Layer: Thick layer of Wet Newspaper and fresh oak wood chips

Pile of fresh oak wood chips, about 2-4 yards

First layer of chips

More pictures coming!!!

I got so busy hauling wheelbarrows of wood chips that I forget to take the pics of the finished bed.

Update: Here is a picture of the finished mushroom bed minus the straw.