Grafted tomato plants

About a year or two ago, grafted tomato plants started appearing on the garden scene. As Valerie Easton explained in an Seattle Times article last year, grafted tomatoes “have proved more effective at taking up water and nutrients, they are tougher. Tougher tomatoes are better at withstanding disease, pests and temperature fluctuations. This means a higher yield of larger tomatoes. Perhaps most important in our climate, grafted tomatoes can be harvested over a longer period of time.” With such a description, these sound like the muscle cars of tomato plants, specifically tuned to our challenging Pacific Northwest growing conditions.

I remembered reading the positive review of grafted tomatoes yesterday when I took a “quick trip” to Molbak’s, something that is never as quick or as focused as I intend. Molbak’s is a gardener’s paradise located in Woodinville where I live. It’s also super pricey. I try to do most of my garden shopping at McClendon’s Hardware, but sometimes I go to Molbak’s. I always buy and spend more than I intend. For example, tomatoes were not on my shopping list. But I was intrigued. At $18 a plant (yes, $18 for a tomato plant!) I hope the experiment pays off. If it does, I might learn how to graft myself (per the below video, it doesn’t look overly hard), because I don’t see myself paying this much for tomato plants on a regular basis. Heck, I economically start all my plants from seed, so paying a lot for tomato plants isn’t something I want to do.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how the grafted tomato plant experiment works out. If anything, it’s always interesting to try something new.

Sandy

The Orchard Mason Bees are doing great this year! By far, this has been the best year for the bees since we started hosting them a few years ago. The weather has cooperated well, with enough decently warm days to encourage significant bee activity. I think the orchard and berries will be very well pollinated this year.

Sandy

Mushrooms in rhubarb patch

Mushrooms in garlic patch

We are not a mushroom eating family. Derek loathes them. I can tolerate them if they are a small part of an otherwise non-mushroomy dish. When I came upon pretty sizable mushroom colonies in the rhubarb and garlic beds this morning, I was left with a number of questions. What are these mushrooms? Are they edible? And what should I do with them?

I thought this would be pretty easy to figure out by using a mushroom identifier site. I was wrong! Too many of them look the same to me. If you know mushrooms and could at least narrow it down, that would be great.

Sandy

Meter reading on day 37 of production

Today, we surpassed 1,000 kWhs of solar production! This took 37 days of production, making our daily production a bit over 27 kWhs which isn’t too bad considering our spotty weather during April. As a simple measure, each kWh of energy we produce saves one pound of CO2. As a comparison measure, the average car produces 10,000 pounds of CO2 each year.

Since we are earning $0.54 per kWh, we’ve already earned $546.58 in production incentives. Go solar!

Sandy

Hen with lizard

Hen with lizard

One of our New Hampshire hens found an interesting snack today, a little lizard. She ran around for about 10 minutes trying to eat it herself, but the other hens kept trying to steal it from her. Eventually, she tired of being chased, flipped the lizard up, and it flew straight down the hatch in one big bite. Pretty cool to witness!

Sandy

Update: I’ve been looking at bird sites and think it might be a Red Crossbill. Agree?

Mystery bird

Mystery bird

Mystery bird

Update 5/6: Confirmed! My mother-in-law Muriel confirmed that this is a Red Crossbill. Here’s one more picture from their visit to our feeder again today.

Red Crossbill

Sandy

Poultry box

When we first bring home baby poultry, we keep them in a plastic storage tub in the house. This arrangement works out well for about a week and then the poultry needs to move to a larger home. The last time we had baby chicks, Derek built a wooden box for them. The nice thing about this box is that he can easily flatten it for storage by simply unscrewing the sides. This year, Derek added another element to the box, a nice hinged and screened in top cover. The top, too, will easily come off for storage.

Turkeys in the poultry box

With the box fully set up and ready to go, the turkeys moved into their new home. They look really small in the box now, but within a month we will need to move them to their next home, a chicken tractor out in the pasture.

Sandy

Giant egg

While there is a normal variation in egg size depending on the type of chicken, most of our eggs fall into the medium category. Every once in awhile, though, one of the ladies lays a doozie. As you can see, this egg is much larger than normal. Ouch!

Double yolker

And as we suspected it was a double yolker, two eggs in one.

Sandy

Evening Grossbeaks

Evening Grossbeaks

Evening Grossbeaks

A flock of Evening Grossbeaks stopped by for a snack today and Derek took some shots. True to their reputation, the cleaned out our feeder. Pretty birds.

Sandy

Happy Earth Day everyone! I hope you take a moment today to appreciate this lovely place we all call home and think about even one small thing you can do this year to help the old gal out as we collectively put more and more stress on all her systems.

Check out the Earth Day Network for Earth Day ideas. You can select and commit to an Act of Green as a super easy way to get started.

Sandy