Gardeners' Holidays 2025: First Sowing

Most years, all we do in the garden to mark the spring equinox is put our snap peas into the ground. And we did do that yesterday, but only after putting in a bit of work in an area that we don't usually mess with this early in the spring: the asparagus bed.

Over the past several years, our asparagus crop has dropped off to almost nothing. We never got more than a few pounds a year, but for the past few years we've been lucky to manage half a pound. Last year we picked up a few extra asparagus crowns as an impulse buy at Lidl and tucked them into some bare spots in the bed, but as we'd tried that before without much success, I wasn't optimistic. I was convinced that our fifteen-year-old plants had simply come to the end of their productive life, and we'd have to start fresh this year by digging up the whole bed and planting new ones. To that end, we invested $8 in a set of ten "Jersey Knight" asparagus crowns on our last trip to the Co-Op.

But by the time the weather was warm enough to put them in, it had already become apparent that our existing plants were not quite kaput after all. In a handful of spots around the bed, little purple shoots were already poking their heads up—and shoots of reasonable thickness, too, not like the skinny little spears we've been seeing for most of the past few years. Brian wasn't willing to dig up these obviously healthy plants, but he also didn't want to rely on them as our sole source of asparagus.

 

So he came up with a new plan. We dug out a U-shaped trench along the edges of the bed, leaving the healthy plants in the middle. We transferred the topsoil, including the layer of leaf compost we'd added, to a plastic trash barrel, and when we dug deep enough to hit clay, we put that into a separate bucket. He spread out the new asparagus crowns in this trench, covered them up with a layer of the saved topsoil, and watered them thoroughly. We covered the barrel of soil and left it out in the yard so that we can easily get more to cover up the new asparagus shoots as they start to emerge. We'll keep the new plants well watered over the next couple of years and see how many of them survive.

Once that was done, we were able to move into the garden proper to put down the peas. Brian reminded me that in recent years, the majority of the peas we've planted haven't come up, so he suggested planting two seeds for every plant we hoped to get. I agreed to this on the condition that he'd agree to thin the plants if the seeds did all come up, rather than trying to spare them all and ending up with too many vines to fit on the trellis. However, when I tried to space the holes I was poking in the soil closer together, I couldn't manage it; I would have had to collapse the existing holes before I'd gotten any seeds into them. So instead, I kept the holes two inches apart and dropped two peas in each one.

I then covered them up and watered them all well with a can of water I drew off from our freshly uncovered rain barrel. After that, I covered the entire row with the modified Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder in hopes of protecting the peas from squirrels and birds long enough to give them a chance to sprout.

Meanwhile, Brian was busying himself planting another crop that doesn't usually go in this early: the parsley. For the past couple of years, we've been seeding this directly in the garden in early April, as recommended on the packet. But Brian thought it was taking too long to grow productive plants that way, so this year he went back to starting it indoors. And as it turns out, this variety of parsley (Flat Leaf) grows really fast in our seed-starting setup. The seedlings, which weren't due to go out in the garden for another few weeks, were already so big that Brian thought he'd better get them into the ground before they outgrew their tubes. So in they all went—enough to fill four square feet and, with luck, provide heaps of parsley for making falafel this summer.

This spring planting binge yielded one unexpected bonus. Although March is too early to harvest any of our actual garden crops, some of the wild plants in the yard are already coming up, including the big tufts of wild garlic. I pulled up one particularly large clump that was intruding on the slope where our honeyberries are and discovered that, instead of the tiny little bulbils it usually has on its roots, it had actually produced a few decent-sized cloves. So we may get to enjoy a meal with at least a little bit of produce from our yard even earlier in the year than usual.

Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: The Changing of the Garden

Most years, Brian and I celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday by picking out new seed varieties from a catalog during our drive to Indiana to visit his folks. However, this year, there were a couple of complications. First of all, the new seed company we used this year, Botanical Interests, didn't send us a catalog—and by the time I realized they hadn't, it was too late to order one in time for the trip. But even if we had received one, we might not have chosen to use it, since Botanical Interests doesn't carry our favorite Carmen pepper seeds. That didn't matter so much this year, since we had a few left over from our last Fedco order. But for next year, we'll definitely need some more.

So we decided to give a different seed supplier a try in 2024. I checked the website of True Leaf Market, which was also on our short list last year, and found that they carry the Carmen peppers and everything else we're currently out of. However, trying to browse True Leaf's website on my phone in the car would have been a bit awkward—especially while trying to take notes of our selections on paper at the same time. So, since we had a little free time today, we opted to do our seed selecting at home instead. 

The seeds we plan to either renew or replace are:

• Arugula. True Leaf sells several varieties, most of which were unfamiliar to us. Our first instinct was to go with Rocket, since we've successfully grown it before and know it works in our garden. But the Rocket arugula has one problem: it always bolts as soon as the weather turns hot, leaving us with leggy, bitter plants that aren't really worth harvesting. So when we saw a variety called Slow Bolt, which was actually slightly cheaper than the Rocket and had a 5-star rating from growers, we decided it was worth a try.
• Thai basil. The company touts its Siam Queen variety as an AAS winner, but it's extremely expensive: a minimum of $12.24 per packet, more than three times as much as its other varieties that have better user ratings. We decided to go with the more modestly priced Red Leaf Holy Basil, choosing it over the equally well-reviewed Thai Sweet Large Leaf because its red color will make it easier to distinguish from the regular Italian basil.
• Dill. This is another plant that has a tendency to bolt. Usually, by the time our cucumbers ripen in the summer, there's no dill left in the garden to make dill pickles with. In hopes of mitigating that problem, we chose a variety called Dukat, which allegedly "holds longer at the leaf stage than other dills." One user says it "didn't even bud until July despite unusual heat," which sounds promising.
• Lettuce. The Marvel of Four Seasons variety we bought this year from Botanical Interest performed very well in our garden. It was so bolt-resistant that we were able to keep harvesting it all summer and well into the fall. Initially, we thought True Leaf didn't stock this variety, but it turns out it was just listed under its French name, Merveille de Quatre Saisons. However, the packet it comes in is only 500 milligrams, which might not be enough for six squares' worth of lettuce (especially with a second planting in fall). Rather than buy two packets, we decided to hedge our bets by adding a packet of a blend called Gourmet Mix. Since it includes five different varieties of Bibb, leaf, and romaine lettuces, it maximizes the chances that at least one of them will do well.
• Peppers. The Carmen pepper seeds were the reason we came to this site in the first place, so naturally we're ordering more of those. Their performance this year was actually a bit disappointing—only a dozen peppers off two plants—but we're hoping that's just because the seeds were two years old. We plan to put in two or three of those and fill in with a Banana pepper from our last Fedco shipment, rather than take our chances on a new variety.
• Snap peas. Our trusty Cascadia snap peas did moderately well this year, yielding a total of 26 ounces. That's better than their performance in 2021 (when a deer ate most of the plants) or 2022 (when some of them never germinated), but nowhere near as good as the whopping 79 ounces we got in 2019. Still, this variety has done better overall than any other we've tried, and it gets better ratings for yield at Cornell's Vegetable Variety site than any of True Leaf's other offerings. We're going to stick with it for at least one more year, but if our yields remain lackluster we'll consider a different variety, like the well-reviewed Sugar Ann or Super Sugar Snap.
• Zucchini. The Emerald Delight zucchini seeds we bought from Botanical Interest were a resounding flop. Though described as "extremely productive," they produced only six usable squash off both plants and suffered a bit from blossom end rot. True Leaf doesn't carry the highly productive Green Machine variety that did so well for us in 2021 and 2022, so we're going back to Black Beauty, which we've grown with moderate success in the past.

One other item we'll have to replace in next year's garden is the bird tape we hung up to deter deer. As far as we can tell, it worked—that is, we've suffered no more deer invasions since hanging it (although without a control, we can't be entirely sure if they're only keeping away deer the way balled-up newspaper keeps away elephants). And contrary to our fears, the lines stayed in place pretty well and didn't blow around that much. But this week, Brian discovered that the tape was disintegrating, leaving little scraps of shiny plastic scattered around the garden. So he took them all down, and next year we'll either buy another roll of the stuff or see if we can achieve the same results with something similar, like strips of aluminum foil.

But that's a problem for next year. For now, we've taken care of all the necessary tasks to put our garden to bed for the winter. Our new rain barrel, unlike the old one, has not gone back into the shed; instead we've partially drained it and covered the opening with a trash can lid, weighed down with a brick, so no more water accumulates in it. We've also covered the entire garden with a thick layer of leaves—not just in the beds, but also on the paths. I noticed this year that the back edge of the garden, where leaves naturally tend to accumulate, didn't have weeds popping up all over the place the way the rest of the paths do, so I decided to spread leaves everywhere and see how well they did at keeping the weeds down. We piled a good couple of inches on the paths and more on the beds, and when we plant them in the spring we'll sweep that lot onto the paths as well. Fingers crossed, this may be the solution that finally provides us with a mostly weed-free surface to walk on.

And lastly, we've brought our new rosemary plant—bought to replace the one we unsuccessfully attempted to winterize last year—indoors until spring. Its predecessor didn't survive the winter even tucked inside a plastic bag and piled with leaves, so when we bought this one, we just put it in a large pot that we could carry indoors when the frost hit. And since it was going to spend this month parked in front of a sunny window downstairs, I figured I might as well give it a seasonal makeover.

Happy holidays to all, and best of luck with your gardening efforts in 2024.

Oh, what a tangled net we weave

Last weekend, while puttering around in the garden, Brian noticed two things, one good and one bad:

1. Our honeyberries were starting to ripen. They weren't ready to pick yet, but it looked like some of them would be within a week.
2. The birds were not waiting for that point. A hungry catbird was already on the bushes, scavenging any berry that looked remotely close to ripe.

Brian chased away the invader, but he knew it would be back the minute his back was turned. So, not even taking the time to call me in from the house to help, he hastily ran to the shed, grabbed a roll of bird netting, and threw it over the bushes. He didn't bother to wrap each bush individually as he usually does; he just covered the entire row, willy-nilly, bending the bushes as much as necessary to fit them underneath. He managed to get the whole net in place and held down with bricks just before losing the last of the daylight.

So far, this hasty wrapping job has succeeded in keeping out the birds. The problem is, it more or less keeps us out as well. So while the berries have managed to ripen without further molestation, there's no good way for us to harvest them. I managed to get a few by squeezing my fingers through the netting from outside, and then I tried removing a couple of the bricks and crawling under the netting so that I could sort of feel my way around the bush while half reclining on the slope where it was planted. But neither method allowed me to get a good grasp on the berries and give them the very gentle tug that's needed to distinguish the ripe ones from the almost-ripe. So while I was able to harvest a generous handful, not all of them were ripe enough to make good eating.

Brian thinks we can this problem by simply uncovering the berries and re-covering them more carefully, wrapping each individual bush in its own piece of netting. This will allow us to wrap them more loosely so they're not all bent out of shape. But even with each berry bush netted separately, we still won't exactly have easy access to the berries. Harvesting them will still involve removing the bricks around one of the bushes, pulling up the net to climb underneath, and re-wrapping the bush afterward. With that many steps involved, it won't really be practical to bounce over there and pick a few berries whenever we happen to notice they're ripe.

I can't help wondering if there might be a more elegant solution. This site suggests enclosing blueberry bushes in tomato cages before netting them, but I don't think that would help us much. I've never seen a tomato cage big enough to fit around the largest of our honeyberry bushes, and even if we found one, we'd still have to unwrap and re-wrap it each time we wanted access to the berries. I was thinking something more along the lines of a tent, with poles erected between the bushes and the netting over the top. We'd only have to remove the bricks on one side, the front, to get under the netting, and the pole would hold it up over our heads so we wouldn't have to bend double under it. I don't mean a permanent enclosure, which wouldn't really work on that slope, but something more like this teepee arrangement made from bamboo poles and netting. We could erect the tent around the start of May, pop inside as needed to gather the berries, and take it down once all the berries were harvested.

Hmm...Brian did see a place a few blocks away where some bamboo had recently been cut down. I wonder....

Pest protection upgrade

When we built a deer fence around our garden last summer, we decked it out with streamers that we cut from the plastic bags our weekly shopping fliers come in. These had the advantages of being lightweight, waterproof, and free. It seemed like a perfect way to put a waste product to good use.

We can't say for sure how effective this line-and-streamer fence has been. On one hand, no deer have intruded into the garden since we built it, but on the other hand, there's no sign that any deer have come into our yard at all during that time. So it's not really clear that the fence deserves the credit for deterring them.

But one thing we know for sure is that the plastic streamers didn't hold up very well. In the first place, they didn't stay put. They were so light that they slid along the fishing line with every breath of wind, so they tended to end up all clumped at one end rather than evenly spaced along the line. We tried just repositioning them every so often, but then they started to come off altogether. I'm not sure whether it was wind, rain, or birds that damaged them, but one way or another, the ends of the streamers kept tearing off and leaving only the little knotted bits sliding about on the line. There clearly wasn't enough up there to make much of a visual barrier for the deer.

Our first idea was to replace the damaged plastic strips with some metallic ribbon, which we thought we could pick up at our local dollar store. When they turned out not to have any, we figured we'd try Michael's the next time we happened to be in that area. But when we had to make a trip to Lowe's for a washer to fix the leaking spout on our rain barrel, I decided to look there for something that might work on the deer fence. And lo and behold, we found a product designed for that exact purpose: Mylar flash tape. Right on the package it says, "Scare critters away!"

The instructions say to cut this stuff into strips 2 to 3 feet long and attach them by a 6-to-8-inch length of string. This is supposed to "assure maximum rotation and reflection" to scare away wildlife. But when Brian tried attaching a streamer this long to one line of the fence, it dangled down and got tangled up in the line below. So instead he went for 15-inch lengths attached just a few feet apart. He used most of the roll this way and is thinking of tying the remaining strips to the branches of our plum trees, in hopes that they will offer at least a mild deterrent to squirrels.

So far, the streamers are simply tied to the fishing line by lengths of additional fishing line. We'll keep an eye on them over the next week or so to see how well they stay in place. If they slide around like the previous ones, Brian plans to add a dab of epoxy to each one to hold it in its proper place. But one thing we can definitely say for the new ribbons is that they're much more presentable than the plastic ones: neatly cut and shimmery, rather than flimsy and tattered. I'd say they were almost worth the five bucks we spent on them for their aesthetic value alone.

Our new strawberry bed

When I made the last-minute decision to throw some strawberries in with this year's garden seed order, my plan was to sow the seeds directly in the sloped area of our back yard. I figured if they managed to take root, we could gradually plant more each year until they'd replaced all the grass in that area, and then we wouldn't have to mow it anymore. And if they didn't, oh well, we'd only be out two bucks.

But Brian had a different idea. Our secondary asparagus patch in the back yard wasn't faring too well; the new asparagus crowns we'd planted four years ago in the secondary asparagus bed, next to the rhubarb, had never sent up more than a few spindly tendrils. Last fall, Brian suspected it was entirely dead, and he ended up digging out half of the bed and planting our garlic crop there, next to the rhubarb. So he thought perhaps the remainder of that bed, on the end, would be the best place for the strawberries. The plants wouldn't have any weeds to compete with, and we'd be able to cover them and protect them from predators, increasing our chances of actually getting to eat at least some of the berries.

In the end, we did a little bit of both. We started about half the seeds indoors, using a greenhouse kit someone had given us. As they grew, Brian transplanted the biggest and healthiest-looking ones out of their little greenhouse cells into small pots that gave them a bit more room to spread out. And the remainder of the seeds got planted directly into the ground in that sloped area, where they can fight it out with the grass and weeds.

A complication in Brian's plan came up when the remaining asparagus plants in the proposed strawberry bed poked up a couple of tentative little shoots this month. Rather than kill these plucky survivors, he decided to dig them up and transfer them to our primary asparagus bed on the south side of the house. It hadn't been performing any too well either, not giving us more than a pound or so a year, so he figured it could use all the help it would get. So he crammed the two surviving asparagus crowns into that bed, along with three new ones we'd picked up at Ocean State Job Lot. We don't know yet how well they'll do in their new home, but they definitely have more of a chance there than they did in the back.

With that area cleared, it was time to put the strawberries in the ground. The packet said they'd do best in soil that was "rich and loose with good drainage." Our heavy clay soil meets only one of those criteria, so we amended it beforehand by mixing in most of a bag of composted manure (tested ahead of time to make sure it wasn't "killer compost") and about a quart of sand (left over from our patio project years ago). I just dumped the bag of compost out in the center of the bed, broke up the big clods with gloved hands, and spread it out across the area. Then I added the sand and raked it in.

The space we had to plant in was about 30 inches wide and six feet long. We had a dozen large, healthy seedlings that Brian definitely wanted to fit into it, plus about an equal number of scrawnier ones that we could add if there was any extra room. The packet said to plant clusters of seeds 12 inches apart in rows 24 inches apart, which clearly wouldn't work in this limited space. Instead, we squeezed the 12 plants in using a staggered arrangement that gave each one about a foot of space around it. Brian planted the ones along the back row, which I couldn't easily reach with my short little arms, and I did the rest. Then I fetched the watering can and gave them all a drink to get them off to a good start.

The final step was to build some sort of cage for pest protection. Since this bed isn't within any sort of fenced-in area, Brian wanted to make sure the plants had cover right from the get-go. So after I'd gone inside to get cleaned up, he stayed out there for another hour or so, fashioning a box out of chicken wire and bamboo stakes. According to the seed packet, the plants will grow to a height of 8 to 10 inches, so he made it about a foot tall to give them a little extra clearance. That way no part of the plants will poke out and allow groundhogs or deer to chomp on it.

Now all that remains is to keep the berries watered and weeded and see how they do. Since this variety (Red and Yellow Wonder Blend), doesn't produce runners, the bed shouldn't need to be thinned out every spring. However, the packet says they will only produce well for two years and recommends adding new plants every year for good production. But we'll wait and see how they perform this first year before deciding whether it's worth the trouble of starting and planting out more in the years to come.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Sowing

By the time spring officially begins, our gardening season is already well under way. The process of starting seeds indoors begins in early February or even mid-January, so by late March, we've already got quite an assortment of seedlings coming up. So far this year, we have strawberries, leeks, marigolds, peppers, and most of our tomatoes. (The new San Marzano paste tomatoes we bought say not to start them indoors until seven weeks before the last spring frost, which means about a week from now). And we're about to add our new Thai basil to the collection, since unlike the regular Italian basil, it's apparently best to start indoors.

But up to this point in the year, all the seeding action takes place indoors. It's not until around six weeks before the last frost—which, here in New Jersey, means right around the spring equinox—that we can begin to put seeds directly into the ground. And for us, the first crop to get this treatment is the snap peas.

The variety we bought this year, Cascadia, is one we've used successfully many times in the past. (In fact, we like it so much that we specifically looked for it when choosing a new seed company last year.) But the Cascadia seeds from our new supplier, Botanical Interests, came with a little bit of extra advice on the packet that Fedco never used to give us: "Soak seed in water for 12 to 24 hours before sowing; this is not required, but hastens germination." It also said the seeds could be planted a mere 2 inches apart, rather than the 3 inches we used to plan for. So we decided to soak 48 of the 68 seeds in the packet, leaving 20 to poke into any holes left by seeds that don't come up or get snatched by birds. We put them into a little jar, added just enough water to cover them, and tucked the jar into a cabinet, where it had another jar full of bean sprouts to keep it company.

The 24 hours of soaking definitely made a difference to the peas. The dry, brownish seeds turned plump and green, looking more like the kind of peas we're used to eating than the ones we're used to planting. I went out yesterday, poked little holes roughly two inches apart into the damp soil with a gloved finger, and dropped one fat pea in each hole before covering them all up. My spacing must have been a little bit off, since I ended up with three seeds left over at the end of the row, so I just stuck them into the soil wherever it looked like they might fit. 

Although it had been raining off and on that morning, I gave the row of peas a bit of extra water just to make sure they got off to a good start. Then we covered them up with chicken wire row covers—a slightly simplified version of the Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder—to protect the newly sown seeds from bird and squirrel attacks. We used this same technique to protect the seedlings last year, and it did manage to keep the seeds alive long enough to sprout, although we eventually ended up losing most of the crop to deer. 

This year, though, we may have a solution to that problem too: our new deer fence, a six-foot extension of the existing garden fence constructed from fishing line and plastic streamers. It's a bit of a mess right now, since some of the streamers have escaped while the rest have slid around and clumped up on the lines, but we'll clean it up as the gardening season progresses. Of course, this flimsy barrier isn't really strong enough to keep out a deer. If one decided to disregard the waving streamers and jump over the wire fence, its weight would no doubt break right through the fishing lines and possibly knock over the poles holding them up. But we're hoping our local deer aren't smart enough to figure that out.

Pest protection

For our first 13 years as vegetable gardeners, we never had any trouble with deer. We lost crops to groundhogs, squirrels, and rats at various points, but deer never so much as ventured into the back yard. We assumed in our naivete that the six-foot chain-link fence surrounding the yard was sufficient to keep them out. But last year, we were disabused of that notion, discovering not one, but two deer in our vegetable garden in the space of a month.

After that initial invasion, we started looking into strategies for deterring other cervine intruders. Unfortunately, most of them — deer-resistant plants, deer-repellent sprays, sprinklers, and big, elaborate fences — were either impractical or expensive. But late last summer, we toured the garden of a local guy who's a much more serious gardener than we are, and he showed us how he had modified his chain-link fence to keep out deer by extending its height with a series of horizontal rows of twine strung between tall poles. Since these didn't provide much of a visual barrier, he'd tied some fluttering streamers to each row. That way, a deer wouldn't leap right through the fence because it failed to notice it.

So, this year, as our garden plants started to get big, Brian decided to implement a similar solution in our garden. Since we already had the clear fishing line we'd used for our DIY deer fence in the front yard (which, incidentally, seems to be working so far), he decided to use that instead of twine, relying on the streamers to make it visible to the deer. (For the front yard fence, having it be invisible was the point, since the deer would walk right up to it without realizing it was there and get spooked. But in the garden, what they'd see is a short garden fence that they could easily leap over. We wanted to create something that looked like a taller barrier to deter them from jumping, even if it wouldn't really be strong enough to keep out a determined doe.)

To extend the height of the existing fence posts, we picked up a set of long plastic "plant stakes" from the Ocean State Job Lot for $2.75 each. Brian figured we'd need six, one for each corner and two to go in the centers of the longer sides of the fence, but he got one extra just for good measure. He attached them either by wiring them to the existing fence or threading them through it. 

Then, with me helping to hold the line taut, he ran fishing line from pole to pole, wrapping it and tying it round each one. By the time he was done, there were three rows of fishing line about two feet apart, extending the height of the existing fence from three feet to nine. (They extend across the top of the garden gate as well, but Brian just ducks his head to get under them, and I'm just short enough that I don't need to.)

The only element that's not quite finished yet is the streamers. The material for these needs to be lightweight so it won't cause the fence to sag, but also waterproof so it won't disintegrate in the rain. We experimented with bits of ribbon from our gift-wrapping bag and some silvery tinsel strands that blew into our yard from who-knows-where, but we didn't have enough of either to do the entire fence. 

I have a notion that maybe we can get the material we need by cutting strips out of the plastic bags our weekly ad circulars come in. They're light enough, and the material won't look any worse than anything else once it's cut up; the question is whether we can find a way to cut it neatly. But it doesn't cost us anything to try, since the bags are free and we don't need them for anything else. So it's certainly an ecofrugal solution.

Of course, we don't know yet how effective this makeshift fence will actually be at keeping out deer. Since the incident last summer, we haven't actually seen any in our back yard, so it may not get put to the test for a while. But if our shiny new deer fence turns out to be unnecessary because there aren't any more deer to deter, that's a win in my book.

Waste not wood, want not wood

COVID wasn't the only outbreak to hit New Jersey in 2021. Last summer, we also experienced an incursion of the beautiful but destructive spotted lanternfly. These pesky critters lay their eggs on trees, and when they hatch, the nymphs feed on their sap and excrete a substance that can cause fungal growth. At the height of the infestation, Brian and I were squashing a dozen or more of these critters every time we went out for a walk.

However, squashing them one by one can only do so much. The really important thing, officials told us, was to get rid of the plants most likely to host the bugs, particularly tree of heaven. This plant is itself an invasive species, and a particularly common weed in our area; before I knew its name, I referred to it as "stink weed" because of its distasteful smell, which is something like a cross between peanut butter and skunk. We'd always made a point of uprooting it whenever we found it in the yard, but unfortunately, a few of the tricksy weeds had managed to hide themselves away behind the shed, where we didn't spot them until they had grown to tree-like proportions. So when the lanternflies invaded, Brian went out there with a saw and cut them down, while I busied myself trying to kill as many as possible of the hundreds of lanternflies scattered across their surface.

This left us with several fairly substantial lengths of wood, each a few feet long and ranging from about two to six inches in diameter. At first, Brian propped these up against the shed to serve as a "decoy" for other lanternflies. And we did continue to find, and squash, more bugs on these logs for a week or so afterwards. But eventually, the bugs were gone and the wood remained, just sitting there with no obvious purpose.

Fast forward to this spring, as we're getting our garden ready for planting. Along with all the weeding, we're making note of things that need to be repaired, such as the boards that form the front border of our rhubarb patch. They were originally placed on their edges and partially buried to make a sort of wall, but the underground portions have rotted away, causing the wall to collapse inward. And as I was trying to figure out if there was any way to fix this without buying new boards, I noticed those tree-of-heaven logs still leaning there against the shed and thought, well, why not?

So I hauled the boards out and replaced them with some of the longer tree-of-heaven sticks. These make a rather rustic-looking barrier that actually looks nicer, to my eyes, than the old boards, and will probably hold up pretty well since they've still got the bark on them. That used up about half of the wood. 

I didn't think of a use for the rest of it until this weekend, when I was attempting to spread mulch around the honeyberry bushes on the north side of the yard. I say "attempting" because this is a particularly awkward spot for mulching; the slope is very steep, so the mulch has a tendency to slide downhill. Rather than staying around the bushes, where it's needed, it piles up at the bottom, leaving unsightly patches of bare ground cloth behind.

However, there are some spots on that slope where the mulch does stay put. There are a couple of large boulders (some natural rock, some concrete) buried in the side of the hill that impede its downward slide. So, in an attempt to keep the mulch contained, I started hunting around for more rocks and other heavy objects that I could use to shore up the slope. But I was only able to find one sizeable rock and a few brick fragments, so I decided to try grabbing the remaining tree-of-heaven logs and using them to make a sort of border near the bottom of the slope. 

I'm not sure how well these will work to corral the mulch. They may end up sliding down the slope themselves, or the mulch may tumble over and under them. But they're probably better than nothing, and even if they do no good at all, it gets them out of the way. 

It's not exactly a major money-saver. But it is about as neat an embodiment of the ecofrugal motto "Waste not, want not" as you could ask for.

Plum loco

Over the past few weeks, Brian and I have been keeping an anxious eye on our plums — specifically, the ones on the Opal tree, which are the first to ripen. We had already manged to harvest several, but there were still a lot of half-red ones on the tree. We know from experience that if we pick them too soon, they won't ripen indoors, and they'll just go to waste. But we've also discovered that if we leave them too late, something else is liable to get to them before we do. 

This year, we seem to have done a fairly good job foiling the squirrels with our paper collars coated in Tree Tanglefoot. Unfortunately, other pests have stepped in to take over the assault where the squirrels left off. Last week, I spotted a doe in the front yard calmly helping herself to both plums and foliage, and I got within about a foot of her before she finally decided to start ambling away. Fortunately, she could only reach the parts of the tree within three or four feet of the ground, but that limitation doesn't apply to the birds, which have taken to pecking at the plums on the topmost branches and then dropping them about half-eaten to the ground. This makes a huge mess of the yard, and while the smallest groundhog sometimes comes through and munches on the fallen ones, he doesn't do it regularly enough to clean them up entirely. (We even caught one human red-handed in the act of plundering our plums, loading up a bag she had brought with her. When Brian called to her to stop, she insisted on giving us some money to pay for them, so I guess we've technically sold our first home-grown crop.)

Last week, after Brian and I had spent a laborious hour cleaning up fallen plums in the yard only to find it covered in corpses again by nightfall, Brian finally blinked. He went out and gathered all the plums he could reach without a ladder that were ripe enough to come loose when pulled. The next day, he fetched a stepladder and went for the ones slightly higher up, while I roamed around below gathering up the fallen ones and setting aside those that looked like they might still have some edible material on them. By the time he was done, he had picked all of these — 47 pounds in total.

This presented us with a new problem. We knew we couldn't possibly eat that many plums ourselves before they went bad, so we would have to either preserve them or share them or, most likely, both. We had some success canning plum jam in 2019, but the crop we got then was nowhere near this size. If we wanted to preserve all these, we'd have to make a lot of jam — and this was only the first tree's worth. (It is possible to freeze plums, but with only our little fridge freezer, we just don't have the space to store many.)

Brian had already picked up some Pomona's Universal Pectin, the variety that works best for low-sugar canning, at the George Street Co-Op in New Brunswick. Unfortunately, they had only one package — enough for maybe four batches. Yesterday, he spent a very sweaty morning putting up his first batch of eight half-pint jars in 90-degree heat, using the recipe that came with the pectin, which called for very little sugar and quite a lot of lemon juice. Right now, he's working on a second batch using Kenji Lopez-Alt's recipe from Serious Eats, which is lower in lemon and higher in sugar (though still much lower than most recipes made with plain pectin). But at four pints per batch, the equivalent of about four pounds of plums, four batches won't make much of a dent in our 47 pounds of plums. And even if we can find more of the Pomona's pectin somewhere, we just can't process them fast enough to turn the lot into jam before they spoil.

So basically, in addition to eating all the plums we can swallow ourselves over the next week or so, we're going to start feeding them to pretty much everyone we come into contact with. We'll put out a big bowl of fresh plums for our RPG group on Tuesday, Brian will take in a bunch to work to offer to his coworkers, and anything that's still left on Thursday will go with us to Morris dance practice, which is finally resuming after a 16-month hiatus. And if there are still plums left over, we'll drop by my parents' place on the way home to spread the wealth around still more.

And all this is just for one tree's worth of plums. The Mount Royal plums, the blue ones, are just starting to ripen now, so we'll probably have to go through the whole process again with those, and possibly yet again with the Golden Gage plums after that. And by the time we're done with all that, we'll probably never want to see another plum again.

On the plus side, it does give us an early start on our holiday gift shopping. No matter what else we may or may not find, we'll have enough home-canned jam for everyone.

Oh, deer!

Over the years, Brian and I have faced a variety of pest threats in our vegetable garden. We had to go through several iterations to develop a fence capable of keeping out groundhogs, and we gave up on eggplant in 2012 after losing our entire crop — four tiny eggplants no bigger than my thumb — to squirrels. We've battled with varying degrees of success against rats and, of course, against the pesky squash vine borers that infest our zucchini. (We're hoping that we've finally managed to foil them this year with Bt spray.)

But the one four-legged pest we've always thought our garden was fairly safe from was deer. Not only was the garden itself fenced against groundhogs, but it was in a back yard surrounded by four to six feet of chain link fence on all four sides. And, on top of that, deer just didn't tend to wander into our neighborhood, which is about a mile from the park and wooded areas they call home. In the 14 years since buying this place, we'd seen deer only a handful of times on our property, and only once in the back yard.

But alas, that is no longer the case. Over the past few years, the deer population in our area has steadily grown — a trend that was apparently accelerated by the pandemic, which cut down on their main predator (traffic). And as they grew more numerous, they started ranging farther afield in source of food. So in the past year or so, it hasn't been uncommon to see deer walking through residential neighborhoods and browsing in yards. We've spotted them several times in our front yard eating grass or browsing on the lower leaves of the plum trees, but they didn't impinge on the vegetable garden until last month, when Brian went out to water and caught one red-hoofed eating our beans. When it saw him, it leapt over both the garden fence and the chain link fence behind that in a single bound, as easily as you might step over a crack in the sidewalk.

It's not clear how long the deer had been out there, but it had managed to do quite a bit of damage. It ate all the pods off our snap pea vines and most of the vines themselves, effectively eliminating any chance of our getting more of a crop than the three measly ounces we'd managed to harvest so far. It also ate quite a bit of lettuce and nibbled off the tops of a bunch of the green bean plants and a good portion of one pepper plant. The only things left unscathed were the prickly squash and cucumber vines, the highly aromatic herbs and onions, and the tomato plants, which I guess just don't taste very good.

So at this point, two things were clear. First, if we wanted to have any sort of harvest at all, we'd have to find some way to keep deer out of the garden. And second, trying to fence them out of the entire back yard was more or less useless. The chain link fence was no barrier to them at all, and even if we were willing to go to the trouble and expense of installing a stockade fence high enough to deter them, it would block out the sunlight our plants need.

Since our makeshift invisible deer fence has been pretty successful at protecting the flowers in our front yard, I was all for trying to figure out a way to add something like that around the garden enclosure. But Brian was convinced that wouldn't work. In the first place, the posts at the corners of the existing fence aren't tall enough, and even if we could extend them somehow, we'd have to leave a gap where the gate is so we could get in and out, which would also leave an opening for the deer. And besides, they would still be able to see the lower portion of the fence, so they wouldn't hesitate to jump over it.

Brian thought our best strategy would be to block their access to the back yard from the side yard. Although deer could get into our back yard from either of the neighbors' yards or from the parking lot behind us, he thought the side yard was probably their primary route of entry. There's only one barrier for them to jump over there (the garden gate), and it's not a particularly high one. But what could we add to that area that would be a barrier to the deer, but not to us?

Brian's makeshift attempt at a solution was to grab a handful of long bamboo stakes we'd originally bought for staking the taller plants in our flowerbed (spoiler alert: that didn't work) and use them to increase the height of the fence in the side yard. He did this by threading them into the existing fence along a diagonal, creating a crisscross pattern on top. This design raised the height of the fence by a foot or so while still allowing the garden gate to swing open. The flimsy stakes wouldn't actually be much of a barrier to a determined deer, but he hoped they'd form enough of a visual barrier to deter them from attempting the jump.

Alas, this was not successful. Early this morning, he spotted another deer in the garden and ran downstairs to chase it away (first arming himself with one of our patio chairs, lion-tamer-style). To evade him, the deer first jumped right over the remaining chairs and table on the patio, then sailed over the garden gate, right between the gaps in the bamboo stakes. He has since attempted to reinforce the crisscross pattern with a few more stakes pointing straight upward, but frankly, I'm not optimistic.

So I'm now looking into other strategies for keeping deer away. An article at Savvy Gardening proposes several strategies:

1. Plant only deer-resistant plants. Since we're selecting plants on the basis of what we want to eat (and are capable of growing), that's not a good approach for us.
2. Use deer repellent sprays. The problem with these is that, in addition to needing to be reapplied "religiously," they generally smell vile and would be equally effective at deterring us from entering our own garden to water, weed, and harvest. Some that don't smell too bad are bars of soap, bags of human hair, and predator urine, but the author says these also don't work that well.
3. Scare them away. Shiny and noisy things don't work for long, but the author says motion-activated sprinklers will genuinely freak the deer out. But they'd also be a big hassle for us to install and move around frequently as suggested, not to mention we'd frequently get sprayed by them ourselves. And they'd use a lot of water.
   
4. Build a fence that works. This could mean:

• A fence they can't see through, since deer will only jump a fence if they can see what's on the other side. This doesn't work for us, because it would create too much shade.
• A barrier of "large, irregularly shaped rocks," which deer don't like to walk on. The problem here is that we're not that crazy about walking on them ourselves, and we would need to in order to enter the garden.
• An electric fence. Not crazy about this option, since it's a lot of work and also poses a hazard for us and other wildlife.
• A double fence. This seems like the most feasible approach. Basically, it would involve erecting a second fence four to five feet outside the existing garden enclosure. A single four-foot fence isn't a barrier for deer, but two fences that height are too much to clear in a single bound and too close together for two.
  

So our next garden project is likely to be the construction of an outer fence, probably just a simple one made from posts and deer netting or chicken wire. This one won't need to keep out groundhogs, so it won't need a skirt or a baffle like our current groundhog fence. It also won't need to go all the way around the garden on all four sides, since the shed and the rear fence form a barrier on two sides. We can just run the fencing from the back fence to one post on the left side, across to a second post on the right side, and then back as far as the shed. And, of course, we'll need a second gate in front of the first so we can get through.

This is a big job, so we probably won't get started on it until next weekend at the earliest. Watch this space for news of how the construction goes, and how successful it is (or isn't) at foiling deer intruders.

Our new invisible deer fence

For all those who have been wondering how we've been faring in our battle to protect our new flowerbed from groundhog attacks, there's good news and bad news. The good news is, the hot pepper spray we made to deter the little furballs seemed to be effective — against them. The bad news is, it does nothing at all to deter an even bigger pest: deer.

The deer population in our town has really grown out of control in recent years, and since the only predator normally keeping them in check is cars, the COVID pandemic has only accelerated the trend. As cars and people have retreated from the roads, the deer have grown bolder, walking straight into people's yards to eat anything that looks tasty (and barely budging even when humans come within a few yards of them). And apparently, that category decidedly includes several of the plants in our flowerbed. The Johnny-jump-ups (violas), apparently a particular favorite of deer, were pretty much demolished, and even the coneflowers, coreopsis, and yarrow — all purported to be deer-resistant — have not gone entirely unscathed.

So, when my weekly gardening newsletter from Mother Earth News tackled the subject of deer control, I read it with interest. To my surprise, there was actually one idea in it that seemed not only feasible, but quite easy and cheap. And that's how we ended up with this new deer fence around our flowerbed:

You can't see any fence there, you say? Well, neither can the deer, which is precisely the point.

You see, deer can jump over pretty much any fence they can see. Brian once spotted one in our back yard, which is surrounded by a chain link fence 4 to 6 feet high on all sides, and when it saw him, it leapt right over the fence like it wasn't there. Any solid fence tall enough to keep out deer entirely would also block out most of the sunlight — not to mention blocking our view of our plants, which would basically defeat their whole purpose.

However, when they walk into a barrier that they can't see, apparently, it completely freaks them out. Or at least, that was the experience of one Henry Barrett from Holly, New York, who told Mother Earth News in a letter that he had successfully kept deer out of his garden with a barrier made from "20-pound-test, monofilament fishing line" — one line strung around at a height of 4 feet, and another at 2 feet. The two lines form a barrier too high for the adult deer to step over and too low for the youngsters to walk under.

When I read that, I thought, "Hmm...if we put a post at the corner of the flowerbed, we could run fishing line from that post to the porch railings along the front of the bed, and from the post to the front end of the raspberry trellis on the other side." And Brian recalled that he had a suitable metal post, similar to the ones we'd used for the trellis, out in the shed, so all we would actually need to buy was some clear fishing line.

We found this easily enough at Dick's Sporting Goods, in the back corner of the store that Brian refers to as the "killing stuff" section, where they keep all the hunting and fishing gear. (Ironically, even though neither of us has ever hunted or fished, this is the part of the store we visit the most, since it's also where we go to refill the canister for my seltzer machine.) It cost us a mere $5, our only cost for the project, for 330 yards — way more than we could possibly need. As you can see, what we bought is 12 pound test, not 20, because we forgot to check the description before heading out to the store, but we figure it shouldn't matter too much. The purpose of the line isn't to keep the deer out by force; it's just to create a barrier that will "spook" them when they walk into it. And if it ends up breaking, oh well, we can go back and get some of the heavier stuff; it's still cheap.

The actual job of putting up the fence was pretty easy, too. The hardest part was hauling out the old metal post and pounding it into the ground at one corner of the flowerbed. (As you can see, it's not in such great shape, but when we checked new ones at Home Depot, they weren't significantly nicer, so we decided to just go with it.) This displaced one of the phone line insulators we'd used to create a decorative barrier around the bed, so we just stuck the extra resistor on the awkward sort of hook that sticks out from the top of the post. This hook was rusted in place, so we couldn't remove it, but having the resistor on top makes it easier to spot so we won't bump into it by accident. We can always hang a decorative basket or something on it later.

Then we simply tied one end of the fishing line to the railing...

...ran it around the post...

...and tied the other end to the top of the raspberry trellis.

We repeated the process with a second line at the 2-foot mark, and there it was: a new stealth fence to deter the deer. (It won't stop the groundhogs, of course, so we'll have to continue spraying the plants as well.)

Now all we have to do is wait and see if it works. Even if it's only partially effective, a solution that requires only a one-time investment of $5 and half an hour of work is hard to beat.

Re-plumbing a plum tree

Brian and I were lucky enough to come out fairly unscathed from Tropical Storm Isaias. Unlike Sandy eight years ago, it didn't take out our power, and we'd had the foresight to stash our recycling bins and patio furniture in the shed, so we didn't lose any of those. However, there was one casualty. As we watched the storm from our kitchen window, we could see our plum trees swaying in the wind, and we realized that one of them, the Mount Royal, was actually listing to one side. By the time the storm was over, it looked like this.

It hadn't actually been uprooted, but it was completely blocking the sidewalk, and we obviously couldn't just leave it there. But at the same time, we didn't want to lose the whole tree when it was still more or less undamaged.

Brian went out and tried pulling on it from the house side, and even with his full weight on it, it wouldn't budge. But we thought there was a chance we could right it if we could sort of put it in traction: apply a continuous pull on it from the house side with a band around it attached to a stake. We could push it from the other side at the same time, and once it was upright, the stake would help keep it that way.

So Brian started hunting for tools to do this job with. And lo and behold, he found a cargo strap he'd once received for Christmas, with a ratchet attached to it for tightening it. We'd never used it for its intended purpose, but it looked like just the thing for the present task. He also found a two-by-four that he was able to cut to a point on one end with his miter saw (another Christmas gift, received from his dad) and pound into the ground with a sledgehammer (also a gift, this one from our late friend Tim). So, in a way, all of them were helping us get this job done.

Before attempting to hoist the tree, Brian thought we'd better lop off that one big low-lying limb that was blocking the sidewalk. This would reduce both the overall weight of the tree and the distribution of that weight toward the sidewalk side, making it easier to push in the other direction. But I was hesitant about removing such a big limb all at once, so I persuaded him to try just cutting off the three longest branches extending from it. If that wasn't enough, we could always take off the whole limb later.

So he got out his trusty pruning saw (yet another gift, this one from his brother) and started sawing away at the branches. And even without removing the whole limb, this took off quite a lot of mass, as you can see from the pile of branches we were left with.

Then he put the belt around the tree on one side and the stake on the other and started tightening it with the ratchet, while I pushed on the tree from the street side. As it grew tighter, it looked at one point like it might slip upward off the stake, so he got out the saw again and cut a notch in it to hold the belt securely in place.

Eventually, with a combination of pushing and ratcheting, we were able to get the tree to a nearly upright position. With the belt holding it in place, it didn't look like it was in any immediate danger of going over again, but it was still a plum out of plumb. We didn't feel entirely confident that it would remain upright if another strong storm hit.

Brian had sent an email about this to his brother, who has some training in tree health, and he sent a response saying he thought that entire large limb was going to have to come off. His view was that the top of the tree was too heavy for the roots, and it was going to need some "tough love" to cut it down to a size its root system could support.

So, a couple of days later, we were back out there with the saw, slicing off the tree limb piece by piece. We trimmed off all the remaining branches, then cut off the main limb itself in two big chunks. While we were at it, we took off all the other branches below the level of the belt, since we knew some of them were going to have to come off anyway (one of them was sticking out far enough to obstruct the driveway). By the time we were done, we had an even more significant pile of branches...

...and a rather denuded-looking tree, which we were able to ratchet up another couple of notches, to the point that it was approximately vertical.

So far, the tree is showing no ill effects from its surgery. However, what we have now clearly isn't a permanent solution. Brian is convinced that even with its lower branches shorn off, this tree can't be trusted to remain upright in any kind of heavy wind and rain; because of the way it's boxed into a corner of the yard, its root system simply can't stretch out far enough to support it. So we'll probably end up having to secure it with a more permanent anchor-and-cable system, which in turn will make it pretty much impossible (as opposed to merely inconvenient) to mow the grass in that part of the front yard.

So, one lasting effect of this storm will be forcing us to make up our minds and select a ground cover for the front yard, or at least part of it. We already have some barren strawberry plants in our back yard, and we could try to take cuttings from those and get it established in the front. They don't actually grow densely enough to block out all weeds, but pulling a few weeds from between the strawberry plants should be better than trying to cut down a whole forest of them with the weed whacker without tripping over the tree cables.

Another possible silver lining: trimming off those lower branches means fewer routes for squirrels to get up the tree, which could make it easier for us to protect the plums from squirrels by applying Tree Tanglefoot to collars around selected branches. We could even try applying it to the cables themselves, which would pose no risk of harming the tree. If these changes allow us to get more plums off this tree in future than we did this summer (though perhaps not quite as many as we had last year), it could be a blessing in disguise.