Summer Home and Garden 2021

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Home & Garden

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summer home & garden • 2021

Editor’s Notebook:

By Jim Van Nostrand

Nature finds a way Welcome to this year’s edition of the Missoulian’s Home & Garden guide. It’s packed with useful information, including beginner’s advice from our longtime columnist, master gardener and author, Molly Hackett.

M

y wife, Lisa, and I definitely qualify as novices. Our periodic forays into the backyard soil have yielded uneven results. One season’s work produced a single fruit/vegetable (depending on your point of view) that we forever after dubbed “the $50 tomato.”

One large zucchini plant, however, was highly productive. It fed us, the neighbors, my co-workers at the office — and anyone else to whom we could give away a basket or two or three — for the entire summer.

It was also promiscuous. One season it decided to … ahem … “crosspollinate” with a neighboring pumpkin.

The flesh, when cut, was orange. A hilarious exchange with our Facebook friends ensued over what to name the hybrid. The leading contenders were “pumpzini,” “zuumkin,” “zoopumpkin” and “zuccumpkin.” One friend who had that happen to her described zucchini as “naughty little devils” which will mate with melons too.

One of the offspring (pictured) weighed in around 10 pounds, and yielded a lode of yummy pumpzini bread.

Humor aside, Molly says the plants

themselves don’t actually breed. The cross-pollination happens at the seed level, with the seeds from one season’s planting producing new hybrid plants the next season. Insect-pollinated vegetables such as pumpkins or squash need pollination from flowers on other plants to produce healthy seeds. She’s heard horror stories over the years about strange stuff emerging from people’s compost piles.

You would need to plant different varieties farther apart than is normally possible in a home garden to prevent all cross-pollination, according to a nonscientific online search.

“The varieties to grow safely in one garden include all the squash family, since they are promiscuous creatures which can mix and match with each other,” Molly added. “You are perfectly safe to grow as many as you like, as long as you don’t save the seeds. Nothing strange will happen with plants grown from a pure strain of seeds.”

Knowledge is power. In our case, the accident turned out to be a tasty one.

Jim Van Nostrand is executive editor of the Missoulian. You can reach him at jimvan@missoulian.com

Lisa with a 10-pound “pumpzini” — when cut, the flesh was orange.

One “pumpzini” yielded a lode of yummy bread. summer Home & garden • 2021

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Planting your first vegetable garden MOLLY HACKETT

Dirty Fingernails

After a year of disrupted supply chains and empty shelves in grocery stores, we have fresh thoughts about whether to grow food for ourselves. Our grandparents had vegetable gardens out of necessity; we have them out of choice.

At the same time, the idea of a first vegetable garden is daunting. Where to start? What to grow? How to have success and not tragedy? We do not want to have gardens like the pioneers, nor do we want to live like medieval peasants.

What does a 21stcentury garden look like?

First of all, it is Molly Hackett small. Forty acres and a mule can be replaced by one intensely planted bed, perhaps three by eight feet. Backbreaking work and power equipment have been superseded by hand tools and a watering can.

SET UP If a new vegetable garden requires finding the space, begin by looking at light and shadow. A few vegetables (like lettuce) will tolerate some shade, but all of them are happier in full sun. That means looking for the south or west side of a building, and away from shadows spread by trees. In this dry climate, it also means looking for a nearby source of water. Vegetables need an inch of water a week in hot weather, whether delivered by a sprinkling can, a hose, or an occasional thunder shower. Summer rains are few, and most of the water for the garden will be delivered by the gardener.

If all the likely garden spots are occupied by grass, it is easier to create a raised bed than to dig out the grass.

Cover the grass with newspaper or cardboard, then with a few inches of dirt.

Digging out all the grass roots is work.

Hard work. A lot of work. This is one of the times to keep in mind that gardening is supposed to be fun. Figure out how to keep it that way.

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“The more you spend time with your plants, the more you develop a relationship with them,” says Owen Taylor, founder of Truelove Seeds.

Dreamstime The best raised beds have an edging of old boards or other scrap materials to hold the dirt in place. If soil without lawn is available, the garden bed can be at ground level. Raised beds are ideal for clay soil because drainage in the bed always is good. Flat beds hold moisture in sandy soil, which already drains too well. How far the bed is raised is optional. My raised beds have edgings of 2 x 8 boards.

Whether raised or flat, I consider the ideal bed width to be three feet. Though I read often about four-foot beds, I find that too long a stretch for anyone less than six feet tall. Being able to reach the center of the bed, and to reach it without stretching, avoids a tired back at the end of every gardening session.

PLANT Intensive planting has been practiced

in Asia for a few thousand years but only recently made its way to this country. Close planting is designed for gardening by hand, not for farming with heavy equipment. Seed packages give the necessary spacing for plants in a garden row. With intensive planting, the same distance is used between rows.

In other words, rows of carrots are just four inches apart, lettuce is nine inches, tomatoes are three feet. Rows run across a bed, not lengthwise.

This kind of grid gives all the roots room to expand freely. At the same time, it allows full-grown plant leaves to touch the neighboring ones. The resulting leaf canopy shades the ground, preventing hot sun on a July afternoon from drying the soil instantly. Equally important, shade discourages weed seeds from germinating and slows the growth of established weeds.

No vegetable is difficult to grow, so choose the most delicious ones to plant. For a first garden, try growing from seed the vegetables which can be started from seed outdoors. Buy plants for the vegetables which must be started indoors and transplanted to the garden later. Once the gardening methods are under control, there will be years to learn about raising plants on a windowsill for later transplant.

A word to the wise: buy young plants early, while the selection is good. That may mean many days of carrying plants outdoors every morning and back every evening. Experienced gardeners buy the best varieties early, leaving only the inferior ones for last-minute shoppers.

For advice on the details of planting seeds and caring for plants, every gardener is a resource. The gardening community is a friendly lot. Books

also are a dependable resource. Online information is unsorted; it may be helpful or not, depending on the source.

Government agricultural and university websites are reliable.

Pay no attention to hundred-year-old rules about digging. It is not necessary, and neither worms nor microscopic soil organisms like to be disturbed.

Scratch the dirt where seeds will go, but loosen just enough dirt to cover the seeds. Plant, then pat the dirt back in place. Here is a bit of magic: cover the planted seeds with a board or a piece of cardboard. Those seeds must stay damp until they put up leaves, and that will take several days. Keeping the seeds shaded helps to keep them damp, and

they do not need light until they are growing above ground. A piece of cloth laid over the bed will accomplish the same thing as a board. Garden stores even sell white nonwoven row cover for the purpose.

Water the seedbed every day unless it rains. It is not necessary to move the row covers for watering.

TIMING When the seeds hit the dirt is critical.

Vegetables come in two kinds: those that can shrug off a frost, and those that are killed by cold temperatures. In western Montana an unexpected frost can come any night during May. Seeds for tender plants should stay safely in their packets

Christopher Lutter-Gardella prunes a squash plant in his urban veggie garden in Minneapolis.

until Memorial Day has come and gone.

Those vegetables include beans, corn, cucumbers and squash. The tough plants can be started any time during the month of May. They include carrots, lettuce, peas and radishes.

WEEDS! Seeds being miraculous by nature, they sprout. One morning there are many green shoots in the dirt, and this year’s garden has begun. Now, how does one tell which are the plants to cherish and which are the weeds to obliterate?

The easiest way to tell is by looking at where the baby plants have appeared.

If identical leaves are evenly spaced in a neat row, assume that they are

vegetables. A random scattering means that they are probably weeds.

Weeds need not be removed instantly.

By the time that all the vegetable seedlings are a couple of inches tall, their first true leaves will have appeared.

Sometimes that makes baby plants recognizable for what they will become.

Even if they are not identifiable, it will be easy to see if all the plants in a row look the same, or if an occasional one is different. The different one is a weed, especially if it is bigger. Weeds grow fast.

And if a plant looks like grass, it is. Grass would like to have the garden all to itself.

It must be cut to the ground all summer long.

Cutting to the ground is the best

Leila Navidi/Minneapolis Star Tribune summer Home & garden • 2021

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way to get rid of weeds. Pulling them is unnecessary hard work. Cutting at ground level kills weeds just as surely, and it is faster. When cut down, most weeds will not sprout again. If they do (as grass will), cut them again. Not only is digging hard work, it also is likely to damage the roots of nearby garden plants. For eliminating weeds, scissor blades are mightier than digging tools.

Leave the cut weeds lying in the garden to dry out and become a mulch which protects the soil from drying. The dead weeds will return their nutrients to the garden, and that is sweet revenge.

TRANSPLANTS If a new garden is grown not from seeds but from purchased plants, they also come in two groups. The hardy ones like broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and parsley can be planted at the beginning of May. Tender plants like basil, peppers and tomatoes should wait until the end of May, when the last frost probably has come and gone. Even so, a weather watch for the next week may save a tomato’s life. Montana weather is notorious for its variability.

CONTAINERS For gardeners who have no dirt, the answer is to grow vegetables in containers. They can be expensive or free, brightly colored or invisible, of a variety of sizes. Every container should be at least five inches deep, but it can be as small as a milk jug with the tapered top cut off. A gallon jug is big enough to grow a handful of radishes or a head of lettuce. A tomato or pepper or potato needs something the size of a fivegallon bucket. Bigger always is better.

And containers need to have drain holes

punched in the bottom, so that plant roots are not growing in a swamp.

Fill containers with potting soil, or with a mixture of dirt and potting soil, or with a mixture of potting soil and compost. Self-watering containers are convenient but certainly not necessary.

Find a location where the containers are in the sun for at least half the day.

Also remember that when hot weather arrives and vegetables have grown large, containers will need watering every day, sometimes twice a day. That is easier if the source of water is not too far away.

1 A day’s harvest of delicious heirloom tomatoes, zucchini and herbs make the work of maintaining a garden worth the effort.

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summer home & garden • 2021

Jack Hanrahan/Erie Times-News

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Turn a lawn into a native plant paradise

A Native Yards crew works on a landscaping project at Tamarack Grief Resource Center in Missoula.

LAURA SCHEER

laura.scheer@missoulian.com

Imagine never having to water your lawn. During Montana’s summers, when the state can go 40 or 50 days without seeing rain, that could save a lot of time and money.

“All of our native plants are adapted to those conditions,” said Giles Thelen, owner of Native Yards landscaping company in Missoula. “You can really mimic that in your own yard and have success and sustainability with your landscapes.”

Started in 2005, Native Yards specializes in transforming your typical green lawn into a yard filled with grasses, wildflowers, trees and shrubs that are native to the Rocky Mountain West. The result requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources and is better for the surrounding environment.

“As you take away your lawn grass and you put in native plants, well you don’t need to fertilize it, you don’t need 8

summer home & garden • 2021

to mow it every week and a lot of times, you really can forget about it and it still impresses,” Thelen said, adding residents who install Native Yard landscaping also conserve water.

Much of western Montana’s landscape is dry grassland, which Thelen recreates in his landscaping work. Some of his favorite grasses to use include bluebunch wheatgrass, Montana’s state grass, which he said is wonderful for all conditions, and native Idaho fescue, which is a bit harder to find, but can live for more than 100 years.

“And my logo grass is the prairie junegrass,” he said, adding it’s the only species from its genus that grows here.

“It’s a pretty unusual thing to have only one representative from a genus of anything, so it’s kind of a special plant.”

Native Yards also uses the abundance of wildflowers that grow in the West to add splashes of color.

“Any day we’re going to start seeing buttercups come up and the yellow bells and the blanket flowers and of course,

the bitterroot, our state flower,” he said.

“Then you get into the asters and the milkweeds and all of these wonderful fall blooming plants.”

Many of his clients are looking to attract insects and pollinators to their landscapes.

“When you bring in the native pollinators, it brings in a lot of other players and it just makes your habitat more interesting, more healthy and more sustainable over the long term.”

At the same time, transitioning to a yard filled with native plant species dissuades neighborhood deer that wander Missoula in search of their next meal.

“Our native wildlife, the deer and even the rodents and everything, love to eat these plants that you buy at the nursery,” Thelen said. “They look good and they’re pretty and you plant them in and all the deer sees is candy. But if you put in a plant that the deer experiences in its natural habitat on a daily basis, like a dogwood shrub for example, maybe it

Courtesy photo will taste it initially, but then it will let it be.”

The company takes a fresh approach to landscaping every yard, depending on where the sun and shade hit. Once Native Yards finishes a landscaping job, it takes about two years for the new installation to be established.

“That means it has enough roots to take care of itself though periods of stress like drought,” he said.

Thelen said the landscaping Native Yards puts in is not only beautiful and low maintenance, but it’s good for the environment.

“These landscapes have been here long before we were here, our ancestors were here … so I think it’s our role here on Earth to try to make it a little better than when we got here. All I can contribute is one plant at a time.”

For more information, call 406-5432532.

Read

Find your style

“City Farmhouse Style: Designs for a Modern Country Life”

By Kim Leggett and Alissa Saylor $21.66, amazon.com

Resources A book, a magazine and a TV show that can guide your farmhouse-style journey:

Modern Farmhouse Style magazine By the editors of Modern Farmhouse $12.99, amazon.com

Watch

“Fixer Upper” Chip and Joanna Gaines put farmhouse design on the map in a new way. Catch their show on HGTV.

Learn how to bring the timeless look into your home HGTV

Lauren Corona | BestReviews ges ma t i com uc on . od a z Pr a m a vi

Y

ou don’t need to reside in a rambling old manor house or live way out in the country to bring a farmhouse style into your home. Since modern farmhouse decor is fairly neutral, it’s a timeless look that will see you through all manner of interior-design trends.

It might not be the most innovative style, but that’s what makes it suit a wide range of homes and retain its popularity over the years. Read on to learn more about farmhouse style and how to make it work for you:

Consider your color palette‌

When choosing furnishings and accessories for a farmhouse-style home, it’s important to choose your color palette carefully. It’s fine to have some color in the mix, but stick to muted tones rather than anything too bright or bold.

You might choose to add pops of color here and there to brighten things up. For instance, you could add a couple of ochre or deep-mustard throw pillows to a gray sofa to add some interest. The Rizzy Home Self Flange Throw Pillow is a nice choice and comes in a handful of colors that would work with farmhouse decor.

Use reclaimed wood‌

Reclaimed wood is a big part of rustic farmhouse style. Or if you can’t find any pieces you like made from genuine reclaimed wood, you could opt for furniture that looks as though it’s made from reclaimed wood. We love the UMBUZÖ Reclaimed Wood Dining Table, made from solid reclaimed pine and fir lumber.

If you’re looking for smaller reclaimedwood accents, a reclaimed picture frame is perfect for displaying photos or prints.

Don’t be afraid to mix and match‌

The farmhouse style is all about your decor looking natural and organic. It should look like you gradually accumulated all the pieces in your home over the years and it’s a happy accident that they work together rather than appearing as though you intentionally cultivated a farmhouse style. This is easier said than done, but the key is to mix and match.

You don’t want to buy matching coffee and end tables or buy a full matching bedroom set; rather, you should choose pieces that complement or contrast one another in interesting ways. You might choose a vintage chest as a coffee table a reclaimed wood side table and then buy a sofa from a big-box store. You can also go mix and match with plates, bowls, mugs and other tableware if you choose. Either buy a few different sets or buy mix-and-match dinnerware sets with pieces that look similar but don’t match exactly. For example, the Noritake Hammock 12-Piece Dinnerware Set features bowls, salad plates and dinner plates in the same color but different patterns. summer Home & garden • 2021

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Dealing with garden pests MOLLY HACKETT

Dirty Fingernails

The idea is enough to strike down any gardener with terror. All that work getting the soil ready, planting seeds, starting plants, setting them out, watering, weeding ... then the pests arrive. They eat all the vegetables and ruin all the flowers before the poor gardener has a chance to look at the produce.

If this is not a true story, it is every gardener’s nightmare.

As with all bad dreams, it helps to take a few deep breaths and assess the reality of the situation. It has been said that any creature with two legs or more Molly Hackett can become a garden pest. Fortunately, nearly all creatures (including nongardening humans) are benign. Few are destructive.

GOOD BUGS Among the invertebrates — the vast numbers of animals without backbones — most bugs and worms are not enemies of a garden. Instead, they are a gardener’s allies. The healthiest, most productive gardens are those swarming with little creatures both above and below ground.

Butterflies are pollinators, certainly, but so are multitudes of smaller and less noticeable insects. More flowers are pollinated by beetles and flies than by their giant and colorful relatives.

The garden soil is a small world of its own, filled with life forms as big as nightcrawlers and as small as bacteria, invisible to human eyes. If that world in the soil is healthy, the plants growing there will be also. Caring for good bugs turns out to be far more beneficial to a gardener than killing bad bugs.

For one thing, there are in any garden never more than six kinds of pest insects. All the others are either friends or bystanders. That leads to the first 10

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Beneficial species of ladybugs kill aphids, chinch bugs, bean thrips, grape root worm, spider mites and mealybugs, among other garden pests.

Brent Wojahn/The Oregonian principle of controlling pest insects — never, ever use a broad-spectrum insecticide. Those chemicals will do exactly what they promise; they will kill most of the insects they touch.

Since so few insects are damaging, the insecticides kill most of the gardener’s insect friends. Their death leaves the garden without defenders against new pests which may arrive.

If there is one kind of pest insect — a cutworm, perhaps — living in a garden, it is certain that there are several other insects which would like to eat that pest.

The more beneficial insects that live in a garden, the more they kill off the pests, often before the gardener sees a problem.

When insect pests get out of control (and that can happen because they reproduce so quickly), the first thing to do is to identify what is damaging a plant. Sometimes it turns out not to be a bug, after all. Take the matter of notches in the edge of pea leaves. Young leaves may look as if they had been nibbled around the edges, but that particular damage is done by cold weather. Leaves which grow later will be undamaged

because night temperatures have warmed.

FLEA BEETLES There are a few common pest insects in western Montana and different ways to control each kind. Flea beetles arrive early. They seldom are seen because they are tiny and black, and they jump away like fleas. They are noticed because their feeding leaves visible holes in leaves, about the size of pinheads. Even the holes may go unnoticed at first. But as the leaf expands, so do the holes; eventually the gardener sees quarterinch holes in leaves. No bug is visible because the flea beetle is long gone. It has a short life and probably died before its feeding was evident.

What to do about flea beetles?

Nothing at all. The amount they ate was too tiny to affect a plant; only the growth of the hole with the growing leaf made the damage look great.

ROOT MAGGOTS However, flea beetles can eat enough of a tiny seedling to cause harm. In

that situation the answer is a cover, the same answer as for root maggots. Each kind of root maggot is an immature fly; each kind eats only one vegetable. The common root maggots in this area are the ones which eat tunnels in radishes, onions, and turnips (both white and yellow varieties). Since there is no way to kill root maggots once they are eating, the answer is not to feed them.

Root maggots become small flies. The flies perpetuate themselves by laying eggs, just one egg on the stem of each plant, where the stem emerges from the ground. The egg hatches, the maggot crawls down to the root. It feasts on its specialty, grows up, and flies away.

When a gardener covers a susceptible crop, the adult fly has to find another garden to lay its eggs. Covers are made of fine netting which does not block either sunlight or water. Covers must be put in place, draped loosely over plants, as soon as the first green shoots appear.

Covers need not be sealed to the ground around the edges, because flies do not crawl in. Covers can be made of insect netting, lightweight row cover, or nylon net; they are inexpensive and reusable.

Vegetables grow under the covers until near harvest time, and their roots will be unblemished.

CABBAGE WORMS Cabbage worms tunnel into the leaves of all members of the cabbage family, including cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. The worms arrive later in summer, when plants are nearing maturity. They can be prevented in the same way as root maggots, by covering the crop to prevent egg laying on the vegetables. The same kinds of mesh covering are used so that crops can continue growing underneath.

Cabbage worms are the young of a white butterfly. Seeing a white butterfly flying around a cabbage plant is the signal that it is time to cover. However, seeing a white butterfly anywhere else is not a cause for alarm. There are several kinds of similar white butterflies. Only one causes problems, and it is seen only

around cabbages and their relatives.

A second way to control cabbage worms is with a natural bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis. With its name abbreviated to Bt, it is available as a spray with several different names — Thuricide and Caterpillar Killer are two of them.

Bt will kill all kinds of caterpillars, so it should not be sprayed everywhere.

It would kill the caterpillars of favorite butterflies. It can safely be sprayed on cabbage family plants, though. The only caterpillars there will be cabbage worms.

Plan to spray once a week as long as white butterflies are around.

APHIDS Some aphids are obvious at some times during the year on some plants.

The aphid types are all different; each variety chooses only one kind of plant to feed on. Aphids can be killed, but they seldom are worth the bother. Aphids do little damage; they are noticed mostly because of their sticky honeydew. It is especially important to watch and wait before trying to kill aphids because they are food for beneficial insects and birds.

Leaving the aphids to be eaten is good for the garden and the ecosystem in general.

If an aphid outbreak seems unbearable,

the easiest, cheapest, and best way to kill aphids is with a hard spray of water.

They will be knocked off plants and do not have enough brain to find their way back. Is it true that water does not get rid of aphids because they are back the next day? It is not. Aphids the next day are a whole new generation; they are born every day or two for a couple of weeks.

Water spraying may have to be done every day for at least a week, but it is effective. Of course, it is possible to add chemicals to the water, but why? New aphids still will be born the next day, and the added chemicals may kill beneficial insects.

ANTS Ants are common in gardens and do no damage. To the contrary, they are useful in aerating soil. If ants insist on building a home in an awkward place, it is easy to persuade them to leave. Ants like dry ground. To remove an anthill, lay a hose next to it, with water running at the smallest trickle possible. Leave the hose for 48 hours. By that time the ground will be soaked and the ants will have disappeared, taking their eggs with them.

LEAFCUTTER BEES Flower gardens may be visited in midsummer by leafcutter bees, which cut scallops out of the edge of leaves.

Roses are a particular favorite. The bees cannot be killed with any insecticide since they do not eat the leaves. Instead, each leaf circle becomes a front door, sealing the place where the bee has laid an egg and provisioned it with food.

That egg will grow to become a bee next summer.

Leafcutter bees should not be killed.

They do not sting, and they are superb pollinators. If a bee cuts holes in a favorite plant, simply lay a mesh cover over the plant until the bee finds another plant for making doors.

GRASSHOPPERS Late summer brings the scourge of grasshoppers—in some years a plague, in other years barely noticeable. While there are organic baits which can be used to kill grasshoppers, they are most useful when the grasshoppers cover a whole field. Also, they will not cause a noticeable decline in grasshopper numbers for a year.

The easiest way to deal with

grasshoppers is to be proactive. If their route to a garden is a frightening road, grasshoppers will feed elsewhere. They did not acquire their name without reason; grasshoppers love tall grass where they can hide. Mowed grass exposes them to all the birds which eat grasshoppers. A mowed strip as narrow as three feet will give grasshoppers pause. Few will cross it to reach a garden.

If grasshoppers already exist in a garden, there are two ways to kill them. They can be hand picked in early morning, when they are climbing up plants but are still cold and moving slowly, or in the evening, when they are climbing down to hide for the night. Also, badly eaten plants can be sprayed with neem oil extract, a botanical insecticide which does not harm beneficial insects. Neem does not kill grasshoppers instantly; they stop feeding instantly and die within a few days. Neem is most effective when grasshoppers are still small.

In summary, gardeners should consider all insects as beneficial unless one is caught eating a plant. If that happens, the gardener should attack with the specific weapon targeted for that specific pest.

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Visit us now at MontanaShedCenter.com or call 406-698-7797 Visit us at 2201 W. Broadway Missoula, MT 59808 summer home & garden • 2021

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summer home & garden • 2021