Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

A couple of blogs ago, I alluded to now being a good time to add a little something extra in my tea, to goose my plants a bit, and I then explained how I back off giving them anything heavy during July. A basic tea is all my plants need right now.

However, there is nothing wrong with indulging my plants (somewhat akin to teenagers) with some simple sugar. They adore all sugar, but during the month of July, there is an abundant supply of simple sugar to add to my teas. I’m talking about fruit falling off of trees, or being otherwise unpicked, so that I can access the fruit and all that sugar.

In my neighbor’s yard, there is a crab apple tree. This tree does not produce tasty fruit. But quarter those apples and put them in an aerating tea for two days and your plants will thank you. I do the same thing with plums around the property. Some we will eat, but others go directly into teas for the entire month of July. It’s fruit season and I take advantage of the sugar that nature provides for my plants. This is the boost I was writing about. It always blows me away that summer fruit ripens exactly when I need it most.

You want a plum?

Today’s tea features crab apples, horsetail and the long red/green vine is kiwi.

Combining those ingredients with chunks of mycorrhizae, molasses, humic acid and Sea 90 makes a potent vegetative brew.

Bee is here today, continuing their training work on the plants, and joining me as we begin to prune. Predictably, after topping the plants (topped Purple Hindu Kush twice), the plants are filling in. With new growth comes the double edged sword of pruning the smallest growth from the inside of the plant. We also watch the progress of the trains.

One of the things we are finding with plant clips that is completely different from using plant tape, is that the clips can be moved after a few days. The train can be adjusted, or modified, much easier with these clips, than with plant tape. Trains done with plant tape are basically season long trains. With the clips, you can address different parts of the branches and create multiple stress points. More clips have been ordered. They have a role here.

Below is my favorite train so far this season. This is the top top on the Purple Hindu Kush. This top was gleefully stretching toward the last rung of the tomato cage, when Bee spied it and immediately trained her, so that the growth below her would get the same amount of sun as she, and also become a top. This is how you get more tops under the sun.

This entire season is going to be an education in using the plant clips. They are the new toys. 

Speaking of new, here’s a brand new borage flower. Up to now, we’ve mostly had blue flowers, with a few others turning pinkish/purple. Now, we’ve discovered some cross pollination:

Some of you are probably wondering why I take so many pictures of borage, and the main reason is that it’s my favorite companion plant, by far. There are many great companion plants, and we’re fans of marigolds, feverfew, chrysanthemums, calendula, sunflowers and poppies, both domestic and imported. But there is nothing like borage for attracting both the good and the bad (which is good), because the bad will remain on the borage, and not on the cannabis. 

Our property is currently being somewhat overrun by various babies. There is the entire Corvid tribe of our region, crows, ravens, scrub jays, and steller jays. They compete for suet with the Picinae family of woodpeckers, including acorn, hairy, and pileated woodpeckers, along with northern flickers. There are brown backed chickadees (they really do make that sound), towhees and spotted rufus towhees (our current favorite) and of course, nuthatches, who hide nuts in the folds of our buckeye for later consumption.

Btw, squirrels are doing the exact same thing and here’s a fun fact: In the fall the brains of squirrels grow so that they can remember all the nooks and crannies where they’ve stored supplies for winter. Their brain recedes over winter. 

And then there are the chipmunks. They pose a conflict, because they’re really cute, and they’re also really rodents. Last year, they figured out how to climb the pole leading to the black oil sunflower seeds. They were literally sitting inside the seed cage, stuffing all of the seeds into their cheeks, and then they would dump their load in their dens and return for another load. They drained our cage of seeds within a couple of hours. I refilled it, and they drained it again, preventing birds from eating while they were in there. 

Caught in the act!

This joyful new bounty immediately increased chipmunk baby production, because the good times had obviously arrived. We went from a pedestrian couple of chipmunks to 20 plus, with a few probably still in the oven. It was the chipmunk summer of love. I walked by the woodpile one day and noticed one chipmunk having his romantic way with another chipmunk while the one on the receiving end of amour casually nibbled on a sunflower seed. One of our sunflower seeds.

“Honey?,” I yelled. “We gotta do something about this.”

They were threatening to come inside the house and make themselves at home, and I’m not exaggerating. So Karen put up a baffle, which prevented them from getting into the seed cage, and she also started trapping them in our humane cages. They were relocated to the other side of the creek from where we live. They have everything they need there, and they cannot easily return to our house. There were several that remained here.

We are not so kind with rats, who are also having babies at this time. 

There was a mother deer who recently had her foal up our hill. She was born here as well, so the comfort and familiarity is something you don’t always see in deer. Watching the two of them saunter around, and explore our property together without fear has been a delight. Watching the baby spring and sproing and hopping around going boinga-boinga has been a constant source of joy.

We are waiting for baby quail. The annual procession of grass height birds slipping through the dirt and over the property like a whisper or murmur has not yet begun, and we’re a little concerned. There are juvenile red shouldered hawks born nearby and they shriek a lot, as young hawks do. This might be keeping the babies hidden, or there might have already been an owl, or otherwise a predatory hit on them that we don’t know about. But we usually have many babies here by this time and we know that lots of quail laid their eggs here. Annually, we’re used to seeing 20-30 chicks whittled down to 4-5 by natural selection. Some get carried away right in front of our eyes. 

On the other hand, a source of pure joy right now is the Royal Kush in bed 18.

She was barely out of the ground about ten days ago. She’s going up an inch a day now.

Watching her take off and grow this summer is like watching a preview for next summer when I plant many feminized seeds directly into my beds a month earlier than this plant, on May 1, and then watch them do their thing. This one is playing catch up, and is being allowed to grow without transplant, exactly as she was designed to do. We’ve also done this kind of thing in bed 18 before with a Harle-Tsu. This is going to be fun to watch and document.

More than ever, I am understanding the danger and damage from every single transplant I’ve ever done. I can see where there was some root damage caused by dropping 3-gallon plants into the gopher cages. If the roots were not tightly bound, it would be almost impossible to not have any damage. I know the plants that had the hardest time this year. Like both the white CBG plants and Hawaiian Dream. Perhaps not coincidentally, those plants are all flowering already. They’re feminized seeds and they got heavily stressed in the transplant, so this isn’t a surprise. In terms of the transplants this year, the only surprise is that there weren’t more that flowered early. 

Lesson learned, and in future grows, I’ll start more feminized seeds directly into my beds. Watching it happen this year is magic. I’ve never seen such effortless spacing from a plant that is known for being compact.

Update on the aviary plants:  The White CBG is flowering and growing. She’s sort of like a large auto flower.

The White CBG

And though she’s not very good looking, amazingly, the ACDC in the aviary that I deflowered a couple of weeks ago, suddenly and explosively decided that veg growth was a good idea for now. So she’s growing like crazy and we’ll just have to see what becomes of this mess:

It’s a hot mess in there, but we’re going to get some medicine out of her. I even moved the extra light back into the aviary, to give this plant supplemental light starting at 5:10 am. She loses light earlier than the other plants. As crazy as she looks, a plant that has been stressed like this one is liable to produce some powerful medicine for our dispensary. We’re sorry she didn’t get to grow as intended, because I think she would have been a giant. That was my fault. But she’s rebounding, and her presence and exploding foliage are almost as medicinal to watch, as the flowers she’ll eventually produce. She is Ruderalis, so something like this isn’t all that tough for her. She comes from wild stock.

Finally, I must acknowledge that both of our bat houses appear to be occupied, and I am once again collecting their guano for drying and eventual use. It appears that at least six live in one of the smaller houses, and I counted 19 come out of the big house that we put up a couple of years ago. A brutal mosquito season is nightly being made less difficult by the bats. I haven’t seen babies yet, but they’re coming soon.

Perhaps in response to my last blog, I’ve been focused on positive things. Noticing them, and reminding myself of them. Surrounding myself with them. Trying to become more positive in my own heart and outlook. Thankful. Grateful. 

Simple Pleasures.

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