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Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. The Old Guy's Garden Record Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - Catching Up I haven't posted here since the end of May. That's not because I haven't been gardening, but is the result of way too much to do in some very hot and dry weather. After an incredibly wet April (11.39" of rainfall), we moved into a drying period in May (3.9") that is now turning into a mini-drought (no rainfall yet this month!).
Our East Garden
After a slow start, our melons are now doing well despite the dry conditions. I've replaced transplants that failed in a couple of hills and also planted a late row of watermelon. Since it is so dry, I dug bigger holes than usual for the late melons, backfilling with a mix of peat moss, some potting soil that I didn't like much, and garden soil. Each hole got several gallons of water, lime and a touch of 12-12-12 fertilizer. I mulched the new watermelon plants the next day with grass clipping mulch. Note: I finally got totally disgusted with Miracle-Gro potting soil. Each bag seemed to have more and more wood chips and less and less soil in it than the last. I also don't like starting seed in potting soil that has fertilizer pellets in it. Rather than write Scotts as I did a year ago when I got a bag of potting soil that had a pH of 5 (and getting a snotty answer), I just used up the Miracle-Gro for the melons and switched to Baccto Lite Premium for my potting soil needs. Scotts needs to let their potting soil "cook" a little longer before bagging and selling it. Writing them does no good, so I voted with my wallet this time and switched brands. Getting back to our melons, I was pleased today to see one of our Athena melon plants beginning to bloom and put out some good vines. We still have one hill of watermelon that isn't doing very well, but I hauled water out to the East Garden several times over the last week, and that has seemed to help it and the other vining crops.
I picked our first soft head of Skyphos a week or so ago and have been having it on sandwiches and in salads. It's quite good. I've also been watching the one remaining Skyphos plant in our garden for signs of bolting. After a week of 90+ degree weather, it still looks good!
I've also been concerned with our german garlic plants. They started yellowing way too early this spring, something they normally do when they're about ready for harvest. Interestingly, our elephant garlic didn't begin to yellow early. Then I saw our dogs, both males, doing their territorial marking around the yard. They've both been peeing on our garlic, from the side where the german garlic is growing! Oh, my! Even with the few problems we've experienced so far this season, our garden is off to a fantastic start. A little rain would be nice, but we're blessed to have the time and health to spend in our garden.
Friday, June 10, 2011 - Flowers in the Vegetable Garden I'm not quite sure what got me started including flowers in our vegetable garden, but I can't imagine now having a garden without flowers in it. I often use flowers to replace garden stakes marking a seeded row, as the flowers will eventually be a whole lot prettier than a wooden stake. On the other hand, I've never had a deer eat a garden stake. Our main, raised bed garden plot tends to get most of our flowers. Many years I'll devote one of the softbeds at the ends of the plot solely to flowers. This year, our flowers are along the long edges of the bed. The first went in at the ends of vegetable rows, but I later went back and filled in between rows. We generally grow all our flower transplants ourselves, which allows us to pick and choose amongst a far greater variety of types available from seed vendors such as Johnny's, Twilley, and Stokes than would be available at local garden shops and discount stores. While growing ones own transplants sounds like it would be cheaper than buying them, I often wonder if the cost of potting soil, flats, seed, plantlights, and the electricity to run the lights doesn't add up to more than the cost of a few flats of flower transplants each year. But I enjoy growing, or sometimes attempting to grow, all kinds of different flowers from seed.
The bulk of our geraniums this year are the Maverick variety, with a few Orbits thrown in for variety. I'm partial to geraniums with zoned foliage. Maybe I think I'm getting more for my money with the extra color in the leaves, but I think they're prettier than the plain green leaves. We ended up with over twenty geraniums grown from seed this year, although I gave a few of them away to family. The rest tended to get the most conspicuous places in our garden beds, the corners. The geraniums, once established, are usually a sure thing to flower all summer and fall, and the corner locations give them more light than they'd receive at the end of a plant row. My complaints with geraniums are few. The seed can be terribly expensive, although it holds well from one season to the next in the freezer. The plants also look really ratty if you don't break off spent flower spikes. Since I'm used to pinching off dead petunia flowers to allow the plants to put their strength into growth and flower production rather than seed production, snapping off a few geranium spikes isn't a big deal...when I remember.
There actually is a geranium in the corner in the photo at right, but it's hidden by a very healthy cosmos plant. I also like to grow vegetables with some color. You can see a gorgeous, dark red lollo lettuce plant that I may have left in too long just because I like its color in the garden. Besides using flowers as edging and row markers, I sometimes can squeeze them into other rows, such as the magenta snapdragons shown by the pea trellis. There are white snapdragons at the other end of the row. The color mix in the garden is random, as most of the plants are transplanted well before they begin to bloom.
BTW: The image at left was taken in the morning. The image at right was taken at around 9 o'clock in the evening!
One last flower to talk about before I just start sharing images is the petunia shown at left. From a distance in the sunlight, it appears as a dazzling white splash of color along the edge of the garden. When I looked through the camera lens this morning, I was surprised to see the faint purple edging on the blooms.
All of the above is the long way around to saying a garden full of blooming flowers invariably makes me smile. We've gotten some much needed rain over the last few days. It's been wet enough that it's been hard to find an afternoon when the grass is dry enough to mow when I have the time. I blew one dry opportunity to mow, as I was out transplanting one more yellow squash and one eggplant in our East Garden when I noticed how the weeds were getting going in our sweet corn. So instead of mowing, I got out the scuffle hoe and cleaned up our six rows of sweet corn. Of course, the weeds that sprouted up against the corn stalks had to be hand weeded, but the scuffle hoe makes quick work of the rest of the patch. I was also pleased to see that the short season sweet corn I'd planted into bare spots in the rows was coming up well.
Our Encore peas have come in. We had our first light picking of them with dinner over the weekend. The second picking made just a pint to go into the freezer. Peas are a lot of work for not a lot to go into the freezer, but they're sure good through the winter. And I finally got around to freezing our beets. Processing beets makes such a mess that I'd put the beets in the refrigerator for several days, but finally froze two pints today and kept another pint in the fridge for fresh use. If you look closely in the cabbage photo at right, you'll notice some bolting spinach. I took the spinach row out several days ago. Growing good spinach in our area is a skill I lack, but we did get several nice pickings before the heat set in and the spinach got bitter and went to seed. It was just enough to encourage me to try a fall planting this year. With the spinach, cauliflower, and cabbage out of our raised bed of brassicas (a row of broccoli still remains for sideshoots), I'm hoping to get our parsley, oregano, and sage planted in the recently vacated spaces. I've gardened since I was a kid, but have never grown oregano or sage, so this planting will be a learning experience for me.
I had an email last month from a southern reader who was having trouble getting her gloxinias to bloom. She was growing them in a sunny window and appeared to be doing everything right. I suggested several things, among them moving the plants to a cooler location. We grow our gloxinias in our basement under plantlights, so they stay a bit cooler than they would upstairs. We bring some of them up when they're already beginning to bloom, and that seems to suite them just fine, as they usually put on a display of blooms for a month. The reader moved some of her gloxinias to a cooler location and they bloomed! (Whew! I'm really glad they didn't all die, as it's really hard to diagnose plant problems from a long ways away.)
I also cut the last two romaine lettuce plants in our main garden, but only got one tiny romaine heart. I kept finding bugs and bug damage as I stripped away the outer leaves of the lettuce. That' a price I'm willing to pay for not eating lettuce that has been sprayed with strong chemicals. We've gotten several nice heads of romaine (and other lettuce) before the bugs got bad.
Note that red lollo lettuce can turn bitter well before it bolts. We have plenty of lettuce in the fridge right now, and the plant I left may already be bitter tasting, but it sure adds some nice color to the area. A row of late green beans will go in what is now an aisle between the old lettuce rows (see the red lollo lettuce as a marker) and our short peas. The peas are just beginning to bear pickable pods and will be done in a week or so. As I worked in the garden this morning, I could hear occasional raindrops on my floppy gardening hat. Despite the heavy rain we'd had overnight, today's gardening showed the value of raised beds and mulching, as I was able to plant from the edges of the beds or on the mulch. Possibly a downside of mulching, or just due to the dry weather we'd had until recently, some of the soil was still pretty dry in spots when I pulled back the grass clipping mulch to transplant. Fortunately, I'd left our four cubic foot garden cart where it could catch water off the roof and had it and the water in our grandkids wading pool to use as a water source for the bed. Both areas I transplanted into got a thorough drenching. All the stripped leaves from the lettuce plus some weeds and our kitchen garbage went to our "new" compost pile that sits just beside a pile that is just about done "cooking." I stripped some of the dry grass, weeds that had gotten started (mostly tomato plants), and compost from the edges and top of the pile to partially cover the new pile. I left it at that point today, as I'd like to have some grass clippings to layer into the new pile to add nitrogen to it and also help it heat up. And...let me share one of the joys of gardening for me. After getting cleaned up, I went back out to the garden to snap a couple more photos. On the way back to the house, I snapped off and ate a broccoli sideshoot. It was absolutely delicious! After getting a good report yesterday morning at my six month checkup from my skin cancer surgeon, I went out in the afternoon and violated most of his advice. I spent five or six hours mowing, raking, and mulching, although I did have on a good layer of SPF 45 sunscreen and my full Coolibar I didn't realize that I'd forgotten to pick peas until it was dark. So this morning, my first job was to pick the few peas that were ready on the vines. The shelled peas didn't quite make up a pint, but little by little we're putting by veggies for winter use.
The good news in all of this is that there were some nice new potatoes under the dead potato plants. The rest of the potatoes look very healthy. I do wonder if they're putting on too much top growth in our rich, raised bed soil, but there's little I can do about that. The hilling was a bit difficult due to the close planting of the two rows of potatoes and a nearby row of peas. As you can see above, the crops in our main raised garden bed are thriving now that they've had several good rains in the last week. Our forecast for the next three days includes a 40-50% chance of thundershowers each day. And I'm not complaining a bit. Sunday, June 19, 2011 - Father's Day
As you can see, Hutch does good work. I bought lumber for shelving last week and can't wait to get started building inside and using the "new" garage.
While I didn't even get my hands dirty in the garden today, I did take time to snap a couple of shots of our main, raised bed garden plot. All the rain we've had recently makes everything in the garden look better. Our carrots are just entering the picking stage. I dug a couple of thin ones and had a taste a day or two ago. They should be ready to dig in a couple of weeks, although I'll have to be careful digging. While our onions are beginning to bulb, they won't be ready to harvest when the closely planted carrots need to come out. Our one row of green beans is trying to bloom. I read somewhere, but can't remember or find just where, that lightning at night will slow or prevent beans from blooming. Maybe that's just a "rural legend," as opposed to the usual urban legend. But we've had almost nightly thunderstorms for a week now, and our beans that should be blooming aren't! I went ahead and began mulching under the beans and our kale row. I may hate myself for it later, as it's hard to get grass clippings off the beans. But as dry as things were for a while, I'll put up with picking grass clippings off the beans if I can hold moisture in the soil. I'm pretty sure we'll move back into another extended dry spell soon.
We currently have two compost piles. One pile is almost ready to use, while the other is building. As I screen compost from the pile on the left, undigested material screened out goes either on the new compost pile on the right or on our burn pile if it looks like it won't decay. I dumped the last of our overwintered and shriveled garlic and onions on the new pile today.
BTW: R.H. Shumway's quickly and courteously made good on my claim on our sweet potato plants. The plants arrived more dead than alive. I put them in water with a clear cover and was able to save four or five of the dozen plants shipped. Shumway's didn't quibble about part of the plants surviving and issued a prompt refund.
I should add a note here that we make no pretense at being organic gardeners. We use no pre-emergent herbicides and as little pesticide as possible. One reason we grow our own is that we like knowing what we eat has been grown in a healthy manner. We also use commercial fertilizers as necessary, but again favor compost and good soil management over commercial products when possible. I admire the organic growing community, but simply am not able to go totally organic and grow what we want and need.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - Digging Garlic As I write this evening, it's raining heavily outside. Fortunately, I got my gardening done early in the day and had enough time left before the rain began to mow the lawn.
I started digging garlic at the ends of our garlic bed, lifting out a half dozen bulbs from each end with a garden fork. There's no magic to digging garlic. One just needs to get deep enough under the bulb to lift it and loosen the soil enough so that you can gently pull the bulb out by the stem. If you wait until the stems and leaves have dried a bit more, you'll need to completely lift the bulb from the soil with the garden fork, as the rotting stem will probably break if you pull on it.
I let our garlic dry on the porch. When the tops become pliable, I like to braid some of the garlic for storage. I use a string in the middle of the braid to add some strength to the braid and to hang the braided garlic. The rest I let dry until the tops can be twisted or cut off (with no green showing inside). I store the garlic bulbs in old potato bags. If you grow garlic, don't make yourself wait until it's fully mature to use some of it. Freshly dug and chopped or sliced garlic is a real treat in a variety of cooked dishes. I mentioned in my posting on Sunday that our onions were beginning to bulb. Shown above are some Milestone onions with some carrot greens peeking through. We usually plant our onions in tight (6") double rows, leaving just enough space in the row between onions so they won't touch at maturity. We grow Milestone and Pulsar for yellow onions. Both store well and have good flavor. We also have some Red Zeppelins that store surprisingly well for a red onion, and Walla Wallas for sweet onions. Walla Wallas, like most sweet onions, don't store well, but can be chopped and frozen for winter use. Thursday, June 23, 2011 - More Garlic
The photo at left shows all of the garlic we've dug so far, with yesterday's "dig" being the whiter bulbs at the top of the photo. The Boundary Garlic Farm has some great pages on growing, curing, and storing garlic. There's also a really interesting page about producing garlic from bulbils, the "garlic flower" that forms at the top of what is commonly known as the garlic's"seed spike." I may let a few of our elephant garlic flower next year and try propagation from bulbils. I found another good page about growing elephant garlic, but must first issue a caution about the page. Google (and the Firefox browser) both warn that the Grow Your Own site is a "reported attack site" that may download and install malware on your computer. Since I work on a Mac and almost all viruses and malware are written for Windows, I went ahead to their excellent Elephant Garlic page. The Safe Browsing diagnostic page for growyourown.info gives more info about the potential dangers in visiting the site at this time.
I began digging our carrots today. I'd planted four varieties along a double row, so I dug a bit at each end and in the middle to get a sample of the varieties we planted. Since it rained heavily last night, I loosened and lifted the soil a bit to get the carrots started coming out and then was able to pull them down the row without digging.
Our "take" today after trimming tops, roots, and grandchildren (and grandpa) sampling a few was just over three pounds of carrots. Since I dug about three feet of the fourteen feet of double rowed carrots we have planted, I think we'll have plenty for next winter.
Atomic Reds are supposed to be "high in lycopene," a substance which may help reduce the risk of contracting some cancers, although the Wikipedia entry on lycopene relates that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "has cast significant doubt on the potential for lowering disease risk, showing no link between lycopene and prevention of prostate cancer." Lycopene is also available in red tomatoes. An "FDA review permitted a highly limited qualified claim to be used for tomatoes and tomato products which contain lycopene, as a guide that would not mislead consumers, namely:"
Since I like both carrots and spaghetti sauce, I'm not going to worry much about lycopene and the FDA. I do think I'll grow some Atomic Reds again next year, though. Our other carrot varieties include Mokum, Sweet Baby Jane, and Baby Sweet. All are hybrids, and as with all hybrids, one is at the mercy of breeders for availability. Baby Sweet seed is no longer available, and we pretty well used up our supply of that seed this spring. Sweet Baby Jane has proved to be an acceptable substitute. The Mokum variety is an excellent early, baby carrot variety, producing sweet, tender roots when picked early. Getting Ready for the Fall Garden...Already!
Once I consulted the calendar, I was mentally kicking myself for not getting our fall cauliflower started a week or so ago. I keep forgetting that our favorite variety of cauliflower calls for 75 days to maturity from transplanting, while some of our broccoli matures in just 58 days. Hoping for a long summer and a late first frost, I went ahead and started pots of Amazing (75 days) cauliflower, Premium Crop (58 days) and Goliath (76 days) broccoli, and Alcosa (72 days), Super Red 80 (73 days), and Tendersweet (71 days) cabbage today. If I can transplant in four weeks, we should be okay on all of the brassicas above, but if the transplants take six weeks to get up to transplanting size, it will be close to see if we get the harvest or the frost takes most of it. Thursday, June 30, 2011 - Fighting Weeds in the East Garden
I also resorted to using Roundup herbicide to control the weeds in the aisles. (And yes, I'm well aware of the dangers in using Roundup and other herbicides.) The wind was fairly calm Wednesday morning, ideal weather for spraying. To be sure there was no drift onto the melon plants, I used a sheet of plywood as a barrier between the areas being sprayed and our melons. After mowing and raking on Wednesday, I spread mulch along the edges of the already mulched melon rows this morning. A good bit of hand weeding of weed breakthroughs in the existing mulch was also necessary.
I'm just happy at this point to have three good rows of melons and be able to stand on the garden soil without sinking into the mud! No Hot Wire This Year
Of course, I only got two of the Nite Guard units and four are recommended. I hung ours today from a tomato cage and noticed them flashing this evening. We'll see how they do. I have noticed this week that the deer (clear hoof prints in the mud) have taken a liking to your sweet potato plants! I've mentioned our experiment in green manure/cover cropping several times this year. I seeded buckwheat and alfalfa in May to an area we'd gardened for three years that had fairly serious soil compaction. Earlier this month after getting a dandy stand of buckwheat with good alfalfa growing under it, I mowed the plot to allow the alfalfa to take over (and left the buckwheat cuttings on the ground to enrich the soil). Even though it was still too wet out for general mowing on Tuesday, I went ahead and mowed the alfalfa again to knock down the last of the buckwheat and a few weeds in the area. I have a brand new mower this year, but the alfalfa was so thick that it nearly clogged the mower! I won't be taking hay or using the alfalfa for mulch this year. The idea is to grow a thick stand of alfalfa and allow the root systems to go deep into our heavy clay soil in the East Garden to help break up the compaction. I plan to turn the alfalfa down next spring...and grow a whale of a sweet corn crop...with very little added fertilizer.
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