The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Katie’s Krops

Katie Stagliano and her giant cabbage.

What do you get when you cross a 13 year-old girl with a giant cabbage?

The answer is Katie’s Krops. 

Katie Stagliano is the founder of Katie’s Krops, a healthy food movement that’s teaching kids to grow their own food and feed the less fortunate in their communities. 

Katie is featured on Everyday Health this Saturday.

The story is wonderful, and I don’t want to give it all away—so please tune in to your local ABC channel this Saturday. Get your kids to watch too, it’s quite a good lesson for all of us. 

Episode 5 of Everyday Health airs at 11 am this Saturday on ABC here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Why I Love Early Girls

O.K., I get it.

Heirloom tomatoes are da bomb. 

Some of this season's heirlooms

Every time I go into grocery stores—or to parties—I’m bombarded with these beautifully colored, interestingly shaped fruit.

The colors of the fruit can be pink, yellow, purple, or black. The fruit comes in so many different colors they look like fruity Easter eggs.

I try to be cool and hip, so I plant hip groovy heirlooms but they are hard to grow, so I end up being the dorky loser gardener. The plants get diseases, and pest infestations. And they don’t seem to produce much fruit. 

Heiloom tomato plant suffering from late season wilt.

Along with the difficult heirloom varieties I also grow the usual suspects like Better Boys, regular cherry tomatoes and my favorite: Early Girls. 

Early girls

Here are the reasons why I love Early Girls:

They are prolific.

They produce early and often.

They are resistant to diseases and pests.

You can’t beat their taste. 

While all my heirloom plants are dead, my Early Girls keep growing and producing.

This tomato is also well suited to dry land farming  or gardening techniques. This means that the tomatoes are not watered after they are planted, so they develop deep roots to seek out moisture. Because the plant receives little water the fruit becomes super flavorful.

Early Girls also do well in coastal gardens where the weather is cool and overcast during the growing season.

I love them. 

Think I’ll go pick some right now.

Heartbreak: Confessions of a gardener with ADD

I feel like the protagonist in one of those sad self-sacrifice movies where the main character must give up her baby, or shoot her dog, or fly her plane into the enemy’s camp, or fly her spacecraft into the bad guy’s warship, or stay on the meteor to set the explosives.

It is time, sniff, to, sniff, tear out my garden. My tomatoes have late blight, my squashes have powdery mildew, it’s all so, sniff, messed up—wwwaaaaah!

My tomatoes are loaded with fruit. It is just not fair. 

I have read that it’s my duty to pull out plants infested with powdery mildew because if I don’t, the spores from the infected plants will spread not just to my other plants—but also to my neighbor’s garden. 

The guilt was eating at me. 

I couldn’t infect my neighbor’s plants. Then I peeked over the fence at my neighbor’s garden and realized that there were no spores on this earth that would make his plants look any worse. A lighted match was the best thing I could do for that “garden.”

An Appropriate Ending.

I have been asked by several people, “what happened to the lions?” 

Well, quite simply, they moved on. 

Mountain lions will stick around usually for 2-3 days after they have made a kill and will feed periodically until the kill starts to get icky. That is my scientific term for it—icky. Then other creatures have their turn, like bobcats, skunks, vultures, and insects.

Before the lions left Alicia’s house, they moved the buck to another location. One that seemed more appropriate.Nature is so interesting and mysterious. I couldn’t help but come up with my own scientific theory as to why they dragged their kill to Alicia and Bernie’s picnic table. 

I would like to believe they were trying to share. Perhaps to say “Hey, thanks for letting us stay in your front yard and scare the bejesus out of you these past few days.”

“Thanks for letting us slay a large deer in the middle of your driveway and pick at the carcass at our leisure.” “Thanks for not calling the sheriff so that we would become carcasses ourselves.” Above all Alicia and Bernie, thanks for being understanding—and not hysterical—humans.”

David from the Open Space Authority said it best: "The way Alicia and Bernie handled a couple of pumas in their front yard gives me hope that we have a chance to protect these animals."

 

Double the Fun In Alicia’s Wild Kingdom

The mountain lion left the carcass of the big buck at the base of Alicia’s backyard hill. 

The buck seemed too big for the lioness to drag any further. Alicia woke up before dawn and looked to see if the buck was still there 

She noticed that the carcass had been eaten further. She watched it and waited patiently to see if the lion would return. 

She didn’t have to wait long.  The lioness approached the carcass a few minutes later and Alicia almost snorted coffee out her nose when a second, smaller lion joined it.

Mama and teenager.

Holy Venison, Batman! 

The day before, when Alicia first reported to me from her Wild Kingdom, she said the mountain lion looked so big she thought for sure it was a male. I said, ”Well at least it’s not a mama with cubs, that might be a real dangerous situation.” 

Oh crap.

The cub seemed older, more of an adolescent than a baby. It was nearly the same size as its mother, probably about a year old.

The female lion is wearing a radio collar.

The pair of lions started to feed on the carcass. According to Alicia the meal was cooperative and carried out in a very orderly manner, unlike dinners at my house.

  Mountain lion doing the dishes

After the two mountain lions had finished their meal, they took turns burying the carcass, which, I guess, is the mountain lion’s version of the doing the dishes. My kids don’t do the dishes without a fight.

  Maybe tomorrow night I’ll give them a choice between washing plates and burying a dead deer. 

The Mid-Peninsula Open Space researchers came up in the afternoon and placed an infrared field camera near the carcass. 

In the next couple of days it should record some great insight into the everyday life of a mother lion and her offspring. 

Heaven knows I could use some tips.