Current News You Can Use

When I was a little girl, my daddy told me that all the canned “pumpkin” sold in stores was not pumpkin, but butternut squash.   I spent many years growing   and sometimes buying pie pumpkins and making pies out of them, and very proud of their authenticity I was, though they were different from regular pumpkin pie: lighter colored and flavored, and coarse-textured.   Then I grew butternut squash, and I found that Dad was absolutely right; the baked squash was exactly like what was sold in the cans as “pumpkin” and it made a rich, deep colored, smooth-textured pie.   So now, of course, I use butternut squash for pies. Our pilgrim forefathers may have baked pumpkin pies at the first Thanksgiving; certainly the traditions built up by advertising tell us so.   But there was an explosion of plant breeding in the 1800’s, and when butternut and other such rich baking squashes appeared, their marketers weren’t going to let little things like a name or a tradition...

Black Walnut in a bank parking lot.  A good street tree, apart from its nuts, but they are better than plums. The Grants Pass City Council has finally decided to get out of the cheap compost and wood waste disposal business and save about $200,000 a year.   Our sewage solids will be trucked to Dry Creek Landfill to become methane and make electricity.   The Jo Gro property will be leased to Republic Waste Services, where they will continue under that name, accepting wood waste and yard waste and making compost with the latter, but it will be without bio-solids or city subsidy, at prices Republic chooses.   This means that the City will also not be picking up bagged leaves for free this year.   It is unlikely that Republic will either, since they have to compete with Southern Oregon Compost, which certainly doesn’t pick stuff up for free. Since the City will not be picking up leaves for free, this gardener will be not be either, but I will pick up load...

I knew gardening was in real trouble when the Mayor proclaimed National Garden Week, to honor gardening.   It’s like a week to honor housekeeping.   But housekeeping is harder to do without. There is a worse thing than a lot of competition: not enough competition.   It shows in our local gardening business.   There are not enough people willing to pull weeds for other people for money.   There are so few of them that most landscape maintenance companies cannot find them and have stopped looking.   They mulch, spray, mow, hedge, and blow, but don’t pull weeds.   They plant color annuals in blocks of potting soil and boxes.   Some spread “weed barrier” cloth and cover it with bark or rocks, in a vain attempt to stop weeds from growing.   It doesn’t work very long, and the cloth eventually shows and is ugly.   They mow over goatheads with riding mowers, spreading them from one property to the next on their tires. When a nec...

It has been difficult to hire real gardeners in Grants Pass, and throughout the dry interior of the West, for more than a decade.  There are many people who will mow, hedge, spray and blow, but few willing to pull weeds.  That’s because the cities have cut off the supply of poor gardeners who are not intimidated by weeds and weeding, who know the work from their youth up.   My favorite kind of sprinkler, a copper water spinner.  The blue tubes are misters. They didn’t do it on purpose; they were trying to save water.  In Grants Pass, they were probably trying to not have to build a new water plant, not trying to save water for the fish in the river, which are not endangered in our river.  Oregon mandated metered water, and Grants Pass and many other cities went further, charging higher rates for higher tiers of use, with the lowest rate covering just enough water for one person’s household use, which made the rates lowest for single people on small...

Bermuda grass is one of the most feared perennial weeds around, even in the areas where it is considered a good lawn grass.  It greens up easily in summer with good watering, but it goes dormant for the colder half of the year in our climate, so in this area it is a weed.  It can travel up to 18 inches deep and easily travel under 6 feet of sidewalk to come up on the other side.    Bermuda grass, traveling over 4 x 8 sand. But its large, strong rhizomes (traveling storage roots) are also its greatest weakness.  They are fat and shiny, 1/8 to ¼ inch thick, easy to see and sort out from loosened soil.  Their feeder roots are thin and wiry, with no food storage.     Dug Bermuda, showing its shiny rhizomes. Like crabgrass, its annual, or considering it lives until frost, tender perennial, relative, they don’t re-grow from feeder roots.  We know they are related because they have the same seed stalk, with four arm...

Baker Park is a boat landing on the Rogue River just above Riverside Park, the first and most central park in the city of Grants Pass.  It has an old fire station up front by East Parkside and Parkway, followed by a bench next to a sidewalk facing away from the river and toward East Parkside and the fire station.  This is the only bench in the park.  It is backed by a mass of live and dead blackberries and other weeds, which continue down the east side of the sidewalk to the parking area and bathroom. It has a bathroom at the top end of the parking area, with a trash can outside it.  There are two more trash cans by the boat landing.  These get emptied frequently, if not daily, but the City apparently doesn’t hire people to pick up the litter that is strewn from top to bottom of the “improved” area and gets worse in the unimproved area, the vast majority of the city’s land upriver.   It is landscaped only on the west side to its bor...