Written By: Kathryn Shay
I’m so grateful for another abundant season of learning more about the environment around me and how growing healthy cannabis in our backyard is beyond kool. This growing season was close to perfect. The heat and humidity seemed to be the initiator that encouraged the happy plants to expand with every breeze and second of daylight; all they asked for was to be watered.
Nature provides elements that enhance our efforts to grow astounding clean weed. It’s a gift. I appreciate magical seeds and sunshine. It sure does help life sparkle.
Backyard growers finished up the season independently prepared to go vote in the U.S. elections with no end of flower power and the liberties to take a puff with a much needed peaceful exhale. Let’s hope our votes bring peace on earth.
Life feels a tad tense in the here and now, so why not take another puff and optimistically put your focus on garden clean up? Composting your backyard garden’s debris will take away most of the noise and gently allow you to observe the soil conditions while collecting seeds from forgotten dried flower, herb, and vegetable remnants to contribute to your seed bank for the next growing season. Garden harvest cleanup conditions your soil to be less susceptible to disease and problem insects, which in return encourages a sunny welcome back next Spring.
Yard tarps are super helpful in 101 ways. For one, they move an extra large amount of branches, stalks, leaves, etc., with ease. Hauling the debris away feels productively satisfying. This is the time of year I am happy that I have a garden kneepad to use because the ground has become wet and cold. Having a handy notebook with envelopes and a pen to label and date seeds to compartmentalize them is a good thing, too.
Fall cleanup is an appropriate time to make soil building a priority and gives a grower hands-on examples of what is hidden in the microbes of fertile soil.
Most often we come across grubs that are likely Japanese or May/June beetles that are ready to overwinter. Japanese beetle larvae are fat and dirty-white, with brown heads and the May/June Beetle are c-shaped white grubs with dark heads.
These beetles feed on decaying vegetation and perennial roots, including the grass roots of your yard. Japanese beetle grubs will live in the sod then surface in the spring and often are the cause of brown or bare spots in your lawn. As an adult beetle they will completely defoliate the plants for pollinators and the ones we like the most. The June/May beetles appear in a three-year cycle and will emerge to feed on the leaves of trees and shrubs.
Using the squish and smoosh method is best for the occasional happenstance when you come across them working your soil. However, applying milky disease spores to your lawn and gardens will control/kill an overpopulation of these pests, but only in grub form, not the adult beetle. This combined bacteria creates an insecticide that is harmless to other organisms. You may apply the spores anytime the ground is not frozen. Here in the Northeast, it may be necessary to apply two applications per year until no indication of beetle damage to your lawn, plants, shrubs and trees is obvious.
In our fall clean up process, we can do our best to squish and smoosh the beetle grubs, but do we really need to exterminate the species that is doing the damage? I think just curtailing its excess is best, even though the biological assistance of Mother Nature and her buddies may be slow to satisfy us. I’m still going with our best attempt to apply common sense organic practices over rushing out to the nearest garden center to buy an insecticide or pesticide powder or spray that will also kill the good bugs and hurt the eco-community. Conscious evolution matters; patience and faith have a good chance of allowing natural controls to come to our aid.
Basic organic efforts in pest management benefit gardens and enrich the growers’ understanding about organisms and insects that are living in our backyard gardens. Encouraging beneficial insects such as ants, aphid midges, assassin bugs, big-eyed bugs, braconid wasps, centipedes, damsel bugs, ground beetles, hover flies, harvester butterflies, ichneumon wasps, lacewings, lady beetles, millipedes, minute pirate bugs, praying mantids, rover beetles, soldier beetles, spined soldier bugs, tachinid flies, tree crickets, tiger beetles, and others. More than 90% of insects are beneficial pollinators, decomposers and predators.
If you are looking to up your game on identifying the beneficial insects to cohabitate within your living environment I suggest “The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control,” edited by Barbara W. Ellis and Fern Marshall Bradley. This book has photos and details so you can learn to identify the harmful pests or the imposters from the authentic beneficial insects because nature has a funny way of disguising friends and foes for survival purposes.
Building bird houses and placing them around your gardens is a good idea. Don’t worry: You’re not spoiling their efforts to find their own source of food. It’s always nice to attract insect-eating feathered friends during the growing season and inviting winter songbirds into our cold season living environment. They’re pretty, too.
The more organic matter you add to your soil — such as mowed up fallen leaves, aged animal manure, and an organic compost — the more you enrich the soil and increase its ability to hold moisture. When a grower adds a fine humus of clean compost onto the backyard garden, the amended soil is ideally constructing soil rich for earthworms and next year’s outrageous cannabis. Earthworms and field worms are highly beneficial.
Unfortunately, I hate to have to mention that there are some nasty earthworm impostors invading our environment right now in the Northeast, known as “Asian jumping worms”! Oh, for fuq’s sake — really? Yup, this is a possible buzzkill that has to be dealt with. The first indication that you have them is that they act like crazy squiggling worms creeping around the soil surface and with that, you will notice a crazy amount of worm castings resembling coffee grinds and cocoon eggs that are terribly hard to see … eww!
I’m really freaked out to think about squish stomping on possible creepy worms, especially when I’m high, so goddess knows this is a big-time buzzkill. I don’t want to play this game anymore, hahaha. What’s with this zeitgeist already?
These crazy worms dramatically change the soil chemistry, destroy soil organisms, and will harm your outrageous weed plants’ roots. They will quickly eat the leaf litter before it has a chance to make organic matter for your gardens and for our forests. These Asian jumping worms are asexual and will reproduce at an alarming rate.
They are often coming from garden nurseries that don’t use 130-160-degree-heat-treated bulk mulch or compost and/or imported them from someplace else. Beware of the source! Remember that composted soil that has been prepared with the highest standards to prevent these creepy worms from happening is the best stuff for your grow besides preparing your own compost.
Stay aware and keep to your organic goals/instincts when buying plants and compost. Be hands on and eyes wide open.
High heat temperatures is the only known cure to truly abolish them. Abrasive materials such as biochar and diatomaceous earth have shown to kill some of the adult jumping worms, but the hard-to-spot cocoon eggs in the very topmost soil levels of the garden will overwinter.
Commercial garden stores will recommend and use toxic products like Sevin. There is no guarantee that this poisonous chemical will remedy the crazy worm and its cocoon eggs, and then dang, there goes all the efforts toward a healthy and sustainable neighborhood ecosystem!
Solarization will destroy them. In late spring or early summer (they are late risers, even though they are not deep burrowers) cover moistened soil with a sheet of transparent polyethylene for two or three weeks or until the temperature exceeds 104F for at least three days. That should kill the worms and cocoon eggs and most importantly won’t leave toxic waste in your family’s backyard soil.
Having experience planting gardens closer to Father’s Day than Mother’s Day leaves no worries about giving our outrageous weed plants enough time to grow. They will have plenty of time, and that way you can keep the tarp on longer if it hasn’t reached close to 104 degrees for three days yet. It’s a collaboration of nature and good intentions. Keep the faith and save your money because chemical monopolies do not have our best interests at heart.
Safety matters, so be certain when buying any potted plant with an unusual amount of worm castings to take warning. Follow your instincts and look below the surface when purchasing compost or plants and use solarization if you suspect they may be in your garden. Pursue the challenge because in the end it matters.
Yeah, independence vs. ideology is a challenge … if I was unfortunate to have acquired these crazy worms or even suspect it, I would begin a mission and lay transparent polyethylene sheets and bury the edges on the gardens this Fall as you are preparing the gardens for life in the cold. Pray for a very warm early Spring so it doesn’t disrupt the planting season. Any leaf litter/mulch needs to be blown off the transparent tarps to allow the heat of the sun to do its thing as soon as the snow melt is gone.
Unfortunately, the deep-dwelling beloved earthworm surfaces earlier than the late-May/early-June creepy crazy Asian jumping worms do, so when we pull those transparent tarps off suspected gardens in hopes of saving the good earthworm, well, that’s asking for a miracle.
[CROSSHED] Harvest and Seeds
On a much better note, I am still in the process of harvesting my 2024 cannabis plants, since I grew male and female plants to produce seed. The female photoperiod plants took all of October to mature and so, as I write this, I’m yet to have cured and stored all of the flower. My goal was to collect a bank of outrageous organic weed seed and if I don’t get to a quality curing and storing of the flower, I will jar and possibly freeze the banged up flower and trim to pull out when I’m free to make some oil and tincture treats over the winter. Goddess knows we are grateful to have a bountiful harvest year after year, so thankfully lack of smoke isn’t a problem.
Christmas gift giving to my stoner friends and family is going to be super easy for me this season: A glass or pottery vial full of outrageous organic weed seeds will jingle all the way.
My mission for this past growing season was to begin a substantial stash of seeds. I purchased a few packets of regular and feminized seeds from Seed & Soil in Monroe; they sell their own brand and also Humboldt Seed Company’s seed.
I sowed three regular seeds in pots inside where they received an abundance of March’s eager sunshine. They popped into the happiest little sprouts in no time and continued their growth there until late April, when I put them in the ground. Yeah, I was being a bit reckless planting them outdoors so early, but they were so strong and healthy that I figured if a frost was probable I would cover them. There were two females and one male. I didn’t regulate them, I just let them do their thing. I spaced them quite far apart and the female plant flowers were chock full of gorgeous seeds by September and matured into October.
DSince it’s been years upon years since I have had buds with seed, I don’t think I ever grew anything but feminized photoperiod plants, previously. So, busting up the flowers, some dried and some fresh, to collect the seeds was incredibly aromatic but also a sticky mess that I’m not eager to reproduce. Remembering how album covers were the easiest way to separate flower from seed, I randomly pulled out Who’s Next and got it done. Well mostly!
Wishing Joy to all and peace on earth this holiday season and through the New Year.
