By Kathy Blavatt
Scary yards are popping up everywhere, and I don’t mean just the ones that stopped watering!
My front yard recently turned to Fall colors. It has no need for props this Halloween. It is plenty scary with its piles of leaf mulch, unwieldy cactus, and prolific Spanish Moss.
My plants love to drink my homemade Witches Brew from compost teas … and I don’t mean the drinking kind! Though teas such as Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Mint, and other herbal teas can actually provide a pleasant scent around the yard. But some types of compost teas will have an unpleasant order for a short time.
Some compost teas sprayed on plants attract good bugs, while others make an excellent concoction that can repel bugs.
All photographs by Blavatt
My favorite compost teas are made of slimy things, such as “kelp”, “stinging nettles” that attack any exposed skin that comes close to them, or a bit smelly ingredient that comes directly from my wiggling friends whose castings (poop) come straight from my worm bins.
Mixing yard greens, coffee, compost, soil, seaweed, etc., into a bucket of water, and letting it sit for a few days, creates a plant version of a green-slime smoothie that can be poured directly around the plants. Yummy!
The Old Farmer’s Almanac online has a lot of good information on how to make compost tea.
It used to be when OBcean’s spoke about the “Dead,” it was the “Grateful Dead,” but now another group of the dead is running amuck. These undead spirits are crawling out of the bushes and hanging from the trees.
The spooky gardener on the left seems to be into using bonemeal to fertilize his garden.
As Halloween approaches, even the yards in Point Loma have problems with their manicured bushes spookily watching everybody that walks by.
The last few years have been very buggy, and spiders have taken over! I didn’t realize how bad until I saw this poor guy that became a meal in his front yard.
I recently ran across a “California Potato Bug,” sometimes called “the Old Bald Man.”
Potato Bugs are not poisonous but are known to make scratching or hissing sounds.
Until now, I haven’t seen one of these scary-looking insects in years, and it brought back childhood memories of the first time I saw one of these monstrous hissing bugs.
When I walk around the neighborhood, I watch out for the local bad boys who like to snack on senior grandmas, then sit in granny’s yard in her flannel nightdress. In other words a wolf in grandma’s clothing!
{ 0 comments… add one now }