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We've been blessed to have all the asparagus we can eat for a couple of weeks now. We should also have lots of spinach and lettuce ready to pick this month. If we get really lucky, we might pick a few peas towards the end of the month.
We're beginning May in pretty good shape. Our raised beds are almost fully planted. I'm waiting a bit before putting our Earlirouge tomatoes and Earliest Red Sweet pepper plants in the ground. They need warm soil or they'll just sit and wait for it. I'm aiming for a May 10 transplanting. I've tilled our large East Garden plot twice already. That's a bit unusual, but the weather worked for us at times this spring. I should be able to plant potatoes in it soon. We have to grow our potatoes early, as our usual July/August mini-drought pretty well cuts off their growth. Started early, we can get a decent crop. The rest of our East Garden crops go in a bit later, as our sh2 sweet corn varieties don't germinate well in cool soil. I'll also hold off on putting tomatoes and paprika peppers into the ground until things warm up a bit more. And at some point, a row of red kidney beans will get planted for our Portuguese Kale Soup and Refried Kidney Beans. At this point, I'm considering direct seeding most of our watermelons other than our seedless varieties that have to be started with bottom heat to germinate well. And I'm on hold on butternut squash until I clear our old compost pile where the butternuts will go.
We still have lots of transplants under our cold frame. There are a whole bunch of lovely geraniums almost past the point where they need to be transplanted. Our Earlirouge tomato plants and Earliest Sweet peppers won't go into the ground until around May 10. And there are lots of flower transplants to adorn our garden plots and flowerbeds.
Vegetables We Plan (Hope) to Grow in 2021 The full list of vegetables we intend to grow this year looks long, but seasoned gardeners may notice some omissions. We grow only what we like to eat. I like Harvard beets, but my wife hates beets - so, only a few beets. Asparagus: Viking and whatever was planted in Bonnie's Asparagus Patch over thirty years ago So there it is. Lots of hopes and dreams for our gardening season grounded in successes and failures of the past. But it's an exciting time for gardeners. Here's hoping for a wonderful gardening season for you and yours.
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I did replace a Jericho lettuce plant that had failed and also thinned our spinach row again. I'm lucky that I got that stuff done early in the day as a light rain moved in. I was still able to pick asparagus later in the day in a fine mist. I also started some more paprika peppers, as I started too few of them in an initial planting. I seeded more Hungarian Spice, Boldog Hungarian Spice, and Sweet Paprika Pepper. These plants will go into our East Garden plot, so there's plenty of time for them to germinate and mature before being transplanted.
We grow our spinach both spring and fall. I usually let our spring spinach eventually go to seed for seed saving. While we love spinach salad, we also enjoy boiled spinach, spinach in Shrimp Portofino, and spinach in omelettes and in egg tortillas. I only rarely can or freeze spinach, and at this writing, I'm at a loss as to why.
Your Annual Nag about UV Exposure
Beyond getting appropriate medical care, protecting oneself from UV radiation while still being able to do the outdoor things we gardeners love is a major concern. The CDC notes that the hours between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. (Daylight Saving Time) are the most hazardous for UV exposure outdoors, with UV rays being greatest during the late spring and early summer in North America. Heavy clouds do filter out some UV, but not as much as you'd think. The trick for we senior gardeners prone to actinic keratoses and/or skin cancers is to find ways to garden without exposing ourselves to too much UV radiation. Keeping in mind the CDC recommendations and checking UV scales often posted on weather sites can guide one on when it is safest to work outside. But not all jobs can be done in the early or late hours of the day. For me, mowing is one of those jobs where I have to be out in the sun at peak UV hours.
When I get into serious gardening in warm weather, I generally wear a T-shirt with a sun protective shirt over it along with a hat. And since I've had cancers in and on my hands, I wear gloves almost all the time when working outside. At one time, Coolibar Here are some related links about UV radiation and protective clothing:
If I were teaching a class on photography, the image below would be a good example of lens compression. Compression is the effect of things appearing to be larger or closer than they truly are caused by the use of a telephoto lens. In the image below, the white blooming buckwheat is actually about forty feet behind the row of zinnias!
My mother was always fond of zinnias. In her honor, I've often planted a long row of zinnias along one border of our large (80' x 80') East Garden plot. I also frequently grow several turndown crops of buckwheat on half of the plot each season. The range of blooms in zinnias is amazing. Here's a rerun from a 2013 posting.
Since most of our row of zinnias failed to come up last year, I seeded really heavily. Then I used a rake to draw soil over the furrow and firmed it with the rake head. And that was it. No fertilizers. No watering the furrow. It rained this morning and is sure to rain again tonight and tomorrow. My biggest worry other than our saved seed possibly being bad is having a whole lot of maple seedlings coming up in the row of zinnias. There are more maple wings down this year than I've ever seen before. Of course, maple seedlings are easy to identify and pull. And once the zinnias emerge, I'll mulch them with grass clipping mulch. Other than occasionally refreshing the mulch, that's all the care they need for the season. That is, of course, if the zinnias ever come up. Once you grow some zinnias, buying seed can become a thing of the past. While I often buy a packet or two of cheapie zinnia seed off a rack, most of our zinnia seed comes from seed saved in previous years. Once the zinnia blooms brown and black out in late summer and fall, you just need to pick the brownish/black seed heads and let them dry for awhile. After they've dried a week or two, rubbing the seed heads releases the seeds and a lot of organic trash. I don't bother with separating the seed from the trash, as it won't hurt anything in the ground. I bag our zinnia seed in a ziplock bag and keep it in our manual defrost freezer between seasons. If you do a Google Advanced Image Search for "zinnias" from senior-gardening.com, this is what you'll see:
With rain predicted for tonight and most of tomorrow, the zinnias and our other crops should get all the moisture they need. Mom should be smiling in heaven.
Wednesday, May 5, 2021 - Deer Damage Today was a lovely day for gardening...until I went out to pick asparagus. On my way to the asparagus patches I saw that our plantings of brassicas and lettuce had been ravaged. Looking at the unmulched soil around the lettuce, deer tracks were obvious.
Fortunately, I hadn't yet given away our extra transplants. Of course, what was left were not our very best plants which had gone into the ground in our original transplanting. I spent an hour or so replacing the broccoli and cauliflower, but had no extra Brussels sprouts transplants. I did reset what was left of the Brussels sprouts plants in case they might regrow from the roots (not terribly likely, but possible).
I also had enough lettuce transplants to replant that area. To prevent another deer disaster, I cut Irish Spring bar soap around the plantings and also sprinkled some Repels All around the area. I had some Thuricide left in our organics planter. To let the deer know I cared, I added some of our Not Tonight Deer homebrew to the Thuricide before spraying the brassicas. When I was putting away the gallon jug of Not Tonight Deer, the smell of it just about overpowered me. At this point, I can only say that I should have known better. Deer rarely come into our yard, but they have at times. A few years ago, they came in just as our sweet corn tasselled and ate every ear of corn on the stalks. I just didn't think about taking precautions and have now paid the price.
Having cleared some space on our dining room table, I brought a bunch of soon-to-bloom gloxinias upstairs for us to enjoy. The gloxinias coming into bloom are almost all plants started from commercial seed in December. The gloxinia with white blooms showing is an older plant as are the three on the right. One gloxinia is showing a bit of a red bud. It will be fun to see what this group of Empress gloxinias produces in colors.
I Should Have Known With all due respects to The Cyrkle's Red Rubber Ball, "I should have known" that deer damage was predictable in our main garden beds. It's happened before, but only rarely. Nevertheless, it happened, and I'm a bit devastated. I was able to re-plant a whole row of the Goliath broccoli we're trying to save seed from. The rest of the planting was just what we had on hand to put into the ground. I had a good bit of Castle Dome broccoli for the re-planting. The rest is just what we had and pretty much won't be identifiable as to variety. I even plopped in several cabbage transplants that were intended for other areas. On the Other Hand I drug our Weber grill out of the garage today to grill some rib eyes I've had marinating for a day. I've just finished off my second double scotch on the rocks, so I'm beginning to feel a bit better about life and gardening.
I filled our garden cart with bleach water yesterday and put our used trays, pots, and inserts in it to soak. After losing all of our gloxinia plants years ago to the INSV virus, I've become much more careful about cleaning up and reusing garden containers. Fortunately, I had lots of saved gloxinia seed at that time to re-start our plants. Unfortunately, the garden cart has a slow leak in it, so there will be a dead spot in the grass under it from the bleach water leaking out. With it raining, today wasn't the day to try to wash and dry the stuff in the cart. It's supposed to be partly sunny tomorrow, so maybe I can finish the job then. Drying the stuff can be tough if it's a windy day. Getting back to rainfall, we've received only 0.30 inches of precipitation so far this month. April was dryer than normal, yielding less than two inches of rain for the month. So...I'm wondering about our outlook for precipitation in the coming days, weeks, and months ahead. A look at the U.S. Drought Monitor published each Thursday says our area is still in the "Abnormally Dry" status. Note that the images and links below will automatically update with each Thursday's new release of data.
It appears from our Weather Underground Extended Forecast that we may get a good rain over the weekend. We definitely could use it.
Sunday, May 9, 2021 - Mother's Day
I'm back to closing our cold frame some nights. We keep having morning lows predicted in the upper thirties. It's supposed to get down to around 35° F tomorrow morning! The current cool spell is predicted to last for a few more days. So I'm not looking to transplant our Earlirouge tomatoes and Earliest Red Sweet peppers until Friday or Saturday. Our lack of a soaking rain ended overnight and today. I just barely got done mowing, raking grass clippings, and mulching before the rain started yesterday afternoon. I mulched some of our onions and the rest of our short peas with some mulch that had sat and cured since my last mowing.
I'm a bit lazy today, so our Mother's Day lunch will come from China Wok, a fantastic restaurant in Sullivan. When they first opened at a previous location, one of our daughters worked there as an English speaking order taker. She's now a nurse practitioner and wonderful mother of two.
It's May 10. Our final frost date for this region is April 14. But we're looking at the possibility of another frost Wednesday morning. We escaped a possible chance of frost this morning by a few degrees. I had closed our cold frame overnight, but those plants aren't the big concern. We have geraniums and lettuce out in our garden plots that could be damaged by a frost/freeze. Our favorite Weather Underground reporting station's 10-day forecast calls for a low of 34° F Wednesday morning. A local TV station a few miles north of here is predicting a low of 33° F.
Such low temperatures this far into spring are way out of the ordinary and normal. I'm wondering if I should cover stuff up for the cold morning. And if so, how?
Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - Marigolds
I used an assortment of old saved and commercial seed for the planting. The newest saved seed was from 2019. The newest commercial seed was from 2018. The seeds got shallowly buried in sterile potting mix in sixpack inserts. I pulled some newly germinated paprika pepper plants from the tray over our soil heating mat this morning. I left the mat turned on and later put the sixpacks of marigolds in the tray covered with a clear humidity dome. I left the soil heating mat thermostat set at 75° F. If my seed is still good, that temperature should pop the plants up fairly quickly. Still Cleaning Pots and Inserts
Oven Cleaning I've needed to clean our oven for some time. The breaking point on that chore came when I spilled some french fries and battered mushrooms in the crack of the oven door. So...I opened our back door and turned off the furnace and set the oven to auto clean. Having the back door open prevented our smoke alarms from going off. When I came inside from cleaning pots, I expected the house to be a little cold. Silly me. With the oven at over 800° F, the kitchen was nice and toasty.
Today was a mowing day, so there wasn't much time for gardening. I'd let the field next to us get pretty high, so it took some time to knock it down. The grass clippings were thick on the ground, but I didn't even try to rake them. Our lawn sweeper can't handle such clumps of grass. I may go back tomorrow and mow over some of the heavy clippings so I can rake them and use them for mulch. Like hay, just letting the clipping sit in the sun for a day or so makes them easier to rake. I did make time to pick asparagus today. Some of our new shoots are thinner than a pencil, a sure sign that it will soon be time to stop picking the delicious spring treat and let the roots build strength for next season.
I sometimes use coffee filters for germination tests. If it's seed I hope to transfer to soil and let grow, roots from the germinating seed don't penetrate coffee filters as much as they do paper towels. I've also done tests with lots of seed varieties on a super large cookie sheet (which gets scrubbed really well before it does any more cookies as some of the seed tested is treated seed).
Thursday, May 13, 2021 - First Tomatoes and Peppers Our Earlirouge tomato and Earliest Red Sweet pepper transplants were at an ideal six to eight week old for going into our garden. The soil in our raised garden beds is moist from recent rains. I knocked down a bunch of newly germinated weeds, mostly maple seedlings, with my scuffle hoe. The only thing holding back transplanting was a soil temperature of around 50° F. That's a far cry from Oregon State's Kym Pokorny's recommendation of 65-70° F for transplanting tomatoes. But our Earlirouge tomatoes are from the Jack Metcalf series of releases of early tomato varieties developed at the Agriculture Canada Smithfield Experimental Farm, in Trenton, Ontario. So I went for it today. I used our truck to haul all the supplies needed for the planting. I had to bring twelve cages in from where they were stored at the corner of a field. That pretty well filled the bed of the truck. I squeezed in a tray of tomatoes and peppers and another with geraniums, planting tools, T-posts, and starter solution.
As you may tell from the photo above, I was blessed with a very pleasant day to be working in our garden. I began the work by spacing out six tomato cages to go in a narrow raised bed. I pounded in three T-posts to anchor the tomato cages, as tomato cages top heavy with fruit tend to blow over and uproot the tomato plants. We live in a rather windy area.
Each planting hole got about a gallon of starter solution. The solution today included Quick Start 4-12-4 fertilizer, Serenade biofungicide, and a little Maxicrop Soluble Seaweed Powder. The Serenade soil drench can prevent problems such as blight later on in the tomatoes. The Maxicrop is mainly for the peppers that grow better with a little of it. And the Quick Start is obviously to get both crops off to a fast start.
Last year, I transplanted our Earlirouge tomatoes on May 1. We had a cold snap shortly thereafter and a dry spell. The plants stalled out and didn't produce well until mid-summer. I saved seed from them, but didn't really want to trust that seed. So when I started our Earlirouges this year, I used a variety of saved seed. One plant today was from our seed that has been in frozen storage since 1988! Other plants were from seed saved in 2014, 2019, and 2020. I even used one plant from commercial seed from the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative. They got their start on Earlirouges from seed we shared with them.
You might wonder at my caging our pepper plants. After years of having brittle branches heavy with peppers break off, I tried cutting down some old tomato cages to support our pepper plants. It worked like a charm. We still lose a pepper branch here and there, but not like we did when we didn't cage our peppers. This year's pepper plants were all from seed saved last season. It was an exhausting day, but one where I feel a real sense of accomplishment in getting these transplantings done. Our raised beds are now completely planted and mostly mulched in. I still have some weed cleanup to do around our carrots and beets before mulching them.
Our Earlirouge tomatoes are in. I love the puffy clouds and blue sky in this photo.
Putting in the pepper plants completed planting in our main raised garden bed. You may notice geraniums at the corners of the planting. I put in nine geraniums today around the tomatoes, peppers, and in a planter on our cistern. I'm looking forward to having time to add some more geraniums, petunias, vinca, and even some marigolds along the borders of our raised garden beds. With our raised beds now planted, I'll be turning my attention to getting our melons, squash, sweet corn, potatoes, kidney beans, and others planted in our large East Garden plot. The beginning of a gardening season is always a busy and exciting time for me. I've touched upon a lot of subjects where I give fuller information in our feature and how-to pages. Here are links to some of them:
I do share seed for both the Earlirouge and Earliest Red Sweet varieties via the Grassroots Seed Network and the Seed Savers Exchange. For gardeners living outside our climatic region, I suggest purchasing such seed from commercial vendors when available. Their support in preserving some endangered varieties has taken a load off of my chest.
Friday, May 14, 2021 - Pea Blossoms
Our tall, early peas are a landrace mix of Champion of England and Maxigolt. While I like both varieties, I let them cross and saved seed from them last season.
I hope to spread a little compost along the row of short peas. Compost seems to give peas a real boost. This planting of the Eclipse and Encore varieties is really important to me. I did a big planting of the varieties last year. Cool temperatures and a lack of rain doomed the planting. I also planted them in the poor soil of our East Garden plot. The planting was a total failure, so we need to have a good crop this year for table use, freezing, and of course, seed saving. While we hope to save seed from both our tall and short pea varieties, there's little to no danger of them cross pollinating. Isolation for seed saving can be accomplished by distance between varieties or by time. Our tall peas will be done blooming well before our short peas bloom. While I purposely let our Champion of England and Maxigolt peas cross last year, I also let our Eclipse and Encore peas cross some. Encore is a parent in the Eclipse linage and both varieties are supersweets. Note that the Bayer/Monsanto/Seminis patents on the supersweet pea varieties expire this year. Rain - Possibly, Lots of It After a rather dry April, our extended weather forecast includes the chance of lots of rain. With our raised beds now completely planted (other than flowers), the rain will do us good. It won't help much in getting our East Garden plot planted.
While I may grump and stew a bit about wet weather conditions preventing getting our East Garden planted, the rain should do us some good. There's no terrible rush to get our melons, squash, sweet corn, and kidney beans planted. Getting potatoes in early is another matter. But on the whole, I'll gladly take the rain to raise water tables. I'm guessing that we'll have another typically dry July and August this year.
I got out fairly early this morning and transplanted a bunch of herbs and flowers. I'm glad I did as our recent weather forecasts haven't proved very reliable. It was supposed to be pretty nice today, and it was while I was working outside before noon. But since then, strong cool winds seems to be preceding a big storm system headed this way. I had big plans for this afternoon including a big T-bone steak from the grill for supper. Instead, I suspect I'll be watching it rain outside and dining on a fried bologna sandwich. With the weather change rolling in, I grabbed my Canon T5-i and recorded some of what I'd done this morning. I put parsley, basil, and dill into our herb garden around our shallow well.
The oregano is also starting to bloom. I think that is something you don't want if you're going to harvest and dry the oregano for cooking. I'll need to take our good kitchen shears out and cut down the oregano soon.
Oftentimes jobs that should take just a little while extend to hours long projects. Today, it was doing a light weeding around our carrot plants. The seed had been slow to germinate. When it did, weeds also emerged in and around the rows. So I took some time to use my soil scratcher to disrupt the weeds as best as I could. While trimming, weeding, and transplanting, I realized that the soil in our main raised garden bed was really dry. Our East Garden plot is still too wet to till, frustrating me greatly. But our main bed really needs a good rain. Our tall, early peas continue to add more and more blooms. With a good rain, that should equal more and more filled pea pods in a few weeks.
I moved a tray of lovely tomato plants to our back porch yesterday. These are the tomatoes that will go into our East Garden plot in a few weeks. While they're against the side of the house right now for protection from too much wind and sun, they'll go under our cold frame in a day or so to begin hardening off. While our treasured Earlirouge tomato variety provides most of our tomatoes for fresh eating and canning, these varieties add a little to that abundance. Our excess goes to friends, family, and our local food bank. The warm smiles we get when delivering beautiful tomatoes to folks makes the effort worthwhile.
This tray contains our Moira, Quinte, Crimson Sprinter, and Bradley open pollinated varieties, and our Bella Rosa, Dixie Red, Mountain Fresh Plus, and Mountain Merit hybrids. There's also some hybrid Honey Bunch and open pollinated Red Pearl grape varieties.
Even with rain predicted for tomorrow (promises, promises...), I drug the hose from our rain barrel out to our row of early peas that are beginning to bloom. They could use the moisture, and it will empty the barrel in case it really does rain tomorrow. Starting Melons and Squash
I started Athena and Sugar Cube cantaloupe, Tam Dew honeydew, Ali Baba, Blacktail Mountain, and Crimson Sweet Virginia Select open pollinated watermelon, and Farmers Wonderful, Red Ruby, and Kingman hybrid triploids. For our squash, I started Slick Pik, Waltham Butternut, and South
Anna Butternut.
All were started in sterile potting mix with the seed going in just an eighth to a quarter inch deep. While melons and squash don't require light to germinate, I like the sprouts to get some light as soon as they emerge. I set our soil heating mat thermostats to 80° F. Our How-To, Growing Great Melons on Heavy Clay Soil, tells how we start and grow our melons.
Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - Freezing Asparagus
Picking the asparagus proved to be interesting. Our raised bed has produced most of our asparagus spears so far this season. But it didn't have many yesterday or today. Bonnie's Asparagus Patch, a second patch just off our property that we care for, had been slow in producing so far this season, but had lots of spears from thin to what we jokingly call fenceposts. Not being terribly experienced at freezing asparagus, I followed some excellent instructions from The Spruce Eats' How to Freeze Asparagus by Leda Meredith. All of our asparagus had been washed after picking. So my first job was to trim off the ends of the spears and pile them into the deep basket of our Tramontina 8-Quart Covered Multi-Cooker. It's pot leaves a couple of inches of space under the basket to boil water to steam stuff like asparagus spears.
Last year we were able to pick asparagus until the end of May. I'm not sure when we'll quit picking this year. The universal recommendation is to stop picking when your asparagus spears are smaller than pencil thickness. Some of ours are that thin, and we leave those to grow. But we're also still getting lots of larger spears which we pick every other day. Our narrow bed of asparagus is the Viking variety and has both male and female plants. Bonnie's patch is mostly male plants with a few female from seeds that migrated from our patch to hers.
Currently, Walmart shows the Tramontina Gourmet 4-Piece 8-Quart Covered Multi-Cooker as out of stock. But there are similar options available. I tell about how we started our asparagus patch many years ago in Growing Asparagus. Of course, I started our patch from seed, the hard way to do it. I'd recommend starting from crowns purchased from a reputable vendor. Still being pretty much a rookie at freezing asparagus, I consulted some online experts for how-to's:
Other Stuff
I spent a few minutes today recording the bloom colors of each new plant on their plant tags. It's a job I often forget to do. And while a plant is dormant or out of bloom, there's no telling what color they bloom. Our softbed of lettuce, celery, beets, carrots, and onions is looking good. The first transplanting of lettuce got eaten on along with our brassicas by deer. A combination of possibly good luck, our dogs, Irish Spring soap chips, Repels All, and Not Tonight, Deer seem to have deterred the deer. Of course, the lettuce didn't get any Not Tonight, Deer, as a leaf crop might retain some of the taste and smell of the product. A few of the melons and squash I started on Sunday have already germinated. I'm thrilled. Sadly, the rain that was once predicted to yield almost two inches of precipitation has produced less than a half inch of rain for us. I'm not sure Thursday's Drought Monitor report (calculated today) will show us out of the Abnormally Dry classification. And while I've probably overdone it, here's one more picture of our tall, early peas putting on lots of blooms.
Right now, it's a toss-up whether our next harvest will be of lettuce, peas, or spinach. I think that's a good thing.
I spent several hours working on our raised bed of asparagus and only got half of it weeded. While I took and used my Fiskars soil scratcher and Cobrahead Weeder a bit, most of the work was just pulling the weeds by hand. While I'm really not all that tidy, the pulled weeds went into a bucket and later onto our compost pile. I don't need any more chickweed growing in our yard. All but one of the melon and squash plants I started on Sunday are up. The one germination failure was some old (2016) Farmers Wonderful watermelon seed I'd used. Fortunately, I had ordered a fresh packet of it from Johnny's Selected Seeds, so I brought four seeds in from the garage freezer and re-seeded the excellent seedless variety.
I sprayed the tomato plants with Not Tonight, Deer to discourage further damage. I didn't go all out on critter defense, as they only tasted two plants and apparently didn't like what they got. I have several replacement Earlirouge plants on hand, but I'm going to wait and see if the damaged plants recover. And I'll probably leave one or two of our dogs outside tonight to fend off invaders. With temperatures predicted to be in the mid-80s today, I turned our air conditioning on this morning for the first time this year. As always, I heaved a sigh of relief when it turned on and functioned properly. Getting back to our asparagus patches, I'll work in some balanced fertilizer to them when I'm done weeding and they're not putting up too many new shoots. They'll also get a good covering of compost. Most of our compost each year goes to the asparagus patches.
This has sort of become asparagus week. I finished weeding our raised bed of asparagus this morning. I also picked some nice asparagus shoots.
We'll still have weeds emerging in the bed. But once I quit picking, I'll scratch in some balanced fertilizer killing weeds along the way and then cover the bed with an inch or so of compost. The asparagus will eventually canopy, denying weed seed the light it may need to germinate. And I still have Bonnie's Asparagus Patch to weed.
I noticed that yesterday's release of the U.S. Drought Monitor still showed our area of Indiana in the "Abnormally Dry" classification. I'm guessing the report assembled on Tuesdays didn't include the rain we got then. From the Drought Monitor page:
It appears that we won't see any more rain until mid-week next week. We're probably okay on soil moisture for now, but will need another good rain by next week.
Sunday, May 23, 2021 - Pea Pods and Weeding Asparagus
Like our raised bed of asparagus, I'd let Bonnie's Asparagus Patch get overgrown with weeds. I didn't get too far in cleaning up the patch today, but got started. My biggest problem in the weeding was not snapping off emerging asparagus shoots as I leaned on one hand in the patch while uprooting weeds with the other hand. Our raised bed of asparagus produced heavily far earlier than Bonnie's patch this year. While it appears that our raised bed of asparagus is nearly ready to rest, Bonnie's patch is putting up lots of pickable shoots. It's just hard to see them through the weeds. I wore myself out pretty quickly today and only got one other gardening job done. I replaced one of the Earlirouge tomato plants that had been damaged with another Earlirouge plant. I've Seen This One Before
Reminiscent of our 2015 Best Garden Photo, I found a red pea bloom amongst our otherwise white blooming landrace cross of Champion of England and Maxigolt peas. I wondered if I should rogue out the pea plant, but instead left it in place. Whether something came in on a bee last season, or this was just part of the parent plants' heritage, I don't know. But the bloom was pretty, so I let it be.
With other things to do and a jar half full of dried oregano, I'd let our oregano almost come into bloom. The vigorous herb plants had grown to nearly two feet tall. I'd already been cutting the oregano back where it threatened a sage plant on one end and a couple of dianthus on the other end of one side of our raised herb bed.
After taking two sprigs of oregano for some spaghetti sauce I had cooking, it was time to cut the oregano. I attacked the unruly oregano with a quality pair of stainless steel shears. They made quick work of the oregano, which sadly went onto our compost pile. I'm planning on drying oregano from the regrowth in a month or so.
Our little patch of oregano is from just two plants. One is Greek oregano and the other Italian. I'm not enough of a connoisseur to tell the difference in either taste or appearance of the two types. I planted them in 2016, and they've survived our winters since then. When done, I poured a little leftover starter solution over the oregano. Our Raised Herb Bed After years of just looking at a shallow well in our back yard, I plumbed the well in May of 2016. The well pump is currently inoperable until I replace the pump leathers and blow out the muck at the bottom of the well. In October of that year, I put in One Last Raised Garden Bed. It was a narrow bed around the well to be used as an herb garden. While the oregano and sage plants have been fixtures in the bed, there's room each season for a few other herb plants. This year, I put in parsley, basil, and dill. Walking around the other three sides of the bed, this is what you'd see.
Wednesday, May 26, 2021 - Not My Best Day Critters once again struck our lettuce and brassicas. This time they wiped out our lettuce that was almost ready to pick. Five or six broccoli plants and a couple of cabbages survived the onslaught. Our dogs were outside all night, but must have hunkered down in their doghouse in our garage, as it rained off and on all night. The last time our brassicas and lettuce got wiped out was a rainy night.
You might also have noticed some strange weeds in our softbed. They're almost all petunias from the Perseverance petunias I grew at either side of our main raised bed last year. The vigorous petunias about took over that end of the bed, and I resolved to never grow them again in a limited area. I do have several Perseverance transplants that are doing well on our back porch, but they will only go into the open spaces of our large East Garden plot. Something we have established from our recent bad experiences is that the critters don't seem to like celery, onions, beets, carrots, dill, or geraniums. Adding to my morning misery, I saw that almost all of our spinach plants were bolting. I'd noticed a couple of the plants going to seed yesterday and intended to pull them and harvest from the rest today. The Abundant Bloomsdale spinach variety is supposed to be "bolt resistant," but I guess our current stretch of eighty degree days were just too much for it. I'll let the plants bolt for seed saving and hope for some good lettuce and spinach this fall.
Not All Is Lost - Our Zinnias Are Up!
Saving the row of zinnias will require a lot of hand weeding. But weeded, mulched, and bare patches re-seeded, they could make quite a display of blooms by July. Weeding Flowerbeds I got started weeding the flowerbeds around our house today. I cleared out two on the east (lee) side of our house. I'd transplanted painted daisies
The soil in the beds was dry and mostly hard. I used my Cobrahead Weeder and Fiskars soil scratcher to break up the hard soil and pull out a cartful of weeds. I was surprised to find lots of thistle weeds. But with our bird feeder getting filled regularly, I'm guessing the thistle came from it.
On my journeys around our yard, I stopped to marvel at a couple of second year dianthus in full bloom in our herb garden. Dianthus Seed Ordering My recent germination tests of sweet corn seed didn't thrill me. So, I ordered some fresh sh2 sweet corn seed from Johnny's Selected Seeds on Friday. To my pleasant surprise, my seed came in the mail today. Apparently, the backlog of orders and post office problems with seed orders may be a thing of the past.
While messing around online this evening, I found an interesting article on CNN, Give kale a chance - or fall in love all over again - with these 7 dishes. While the author clearly missed our outstanding recipe for Portuguese Kale Soup, she offers some nice recipes for using kale, an easy to grow and nutritious brassica.
I, of course, made a small donation to the teacher's request. Sometimes the simplest things are put out of reach just by dollars. I'm hoping the teacher gets her level of funding. While I was teaching, my students and I were blessed with a grant that put multiple laptop computers in my classroom. Along with my wife and my efforts to put a computer in each of our students' homes, it made an incredible difference in their learning.
Friday, May 28, 2021 - Still Weeding With a half inch of rain overnight softening up the soil, I began weeding the small flowerbeds on either side of our front porch. Usually these beds have some hostas and dianthus that have overwintered. This year there are just some hostas and a whole bunch of nasty weeds.
While I got both beds weeded, I wasn't totally happy with the job I did. I'm going to have to go back and weed again in a few days, possibly with a scuffle hoe. Once the weeds are tamed in the flowerbeds around the house, I have dianthus and impatiens transplants ready for the front beds which are shaded much of the day. Petunias and impatiens will go in the side beds that already have some daisies and impatiens in them.
Our tall peas this year are a landrace blend of the Champion of England and Maxigolt varieties. While I've planted the separate varieties for years, I saved seed from them last season. The peas weren't as sweet as usual, but were still delicious. I attribute the decline in flavor to possibly poor plant breeding on my part or the warm daily temperatures we've had for a week or so. With a forecast for cooler temperatures over the next five or six days, I'm hoping for better pea quality from our pickings.
Sunday, May 30, 2021 - Petunia Weeds
Giving Up on Spring Brassicas - Planting Green Beans The last damage to our brassicas and lettuce ended any hope I had of harvesting any lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, or Brussels sprouts this spring. Buying transplants or direct seeding would only produce plants that would be bitter when they matured in hot weather. I'll try again this fall. For some reason, the critters that last damaged our crops, didn't eat the Goliath broccoli plants I'd replaced after deer ate the first bunch. They did eat all the rest of the broccoli and cauliflower. I'm guessing the culprits were rabbits this time, as there were no deer tracks in the garden. Also, I also saw a couple of brave rabbits traversing our back yard yesterday, apparently unafraid of one of our dogs that was watching them. It may sound cruel, but I smiled this afternoon when I spotted rabbit fur just off our back porch. With the rows of broccoli and cauliflower destroyed, that opened up the area to be used for the intended succession crop of green beans, just a good bit earlier than I had planned.
While it took a good bit of time to switch over from brassicas to green beans, it didn't require any tilling or soil amendments. The soil in the area was thoroughly tilled this spring and I had put down lots of fertilizer, possibly too much for green beans, when transplanting the broccoli and cauliflower.
I made a shallow furrow with a garden hoe down each row, sprinkled a bit of granular soil inoculant into them, and rather carefully spaced out seed in the narrow rows. While I've successfully grown green beans in wide rows in the past, our needs don't require that many beans to can. And I find narrow rows easier to care for and harvest than wide rows. Note that while the seed shown in the image at left is white, several of our varieties used today were brown seeded varieties. The white seeds just show up better in photos. The varieties seeded were Burpee's Stringless Green Pod I did add some flowers at the ends of the rows and also sprinkled a bit of Repels All over the area to discourage hungry rabbits and digging dogs. Every season I have to decide whether or not to mulch our beans. Mulching holds back weeds and holds in soil moisture, but also adds grass clippings that have to be separated out when processing the beans. With bare soil, one gets more bean rot from pods touching the soil, and of course, one has to keep the bean rows weeded. With this planting, the previous planting of heavily mulched brassicas made the mulching decision for me. Mulch it is. I still have one more bean planting to do. I'll plant kidney beans in our East Garden plot sometime next month. After growing kidney beans for several years, I now wonder why I didn't do so earlier in my life. They're easy to grow, harvest, shell, and dry. I tell how we grow all of our beans in our how-to feature, Growing Beans. Odds 'n' Ends
I also pulled a few weeds that emerged through the mulch around our row of Earlirouge tomato plants. Other than a couple of maple seedlings, most of the weeds were squash or melon type sprouts. That's not surprising, as the bed got a coating of compost from our compost pile that often doesn't heat up enough to kill all the seed in it. With our tall, early peas producing, I realized that I needed to get our succession crop ready for when the pea vines leave our double trellis. I was going to bring some Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed in from our garage freezer, but realized that I had a "retail" packet of the seed in our kitchen freezer. So I started sterilizing a kettle of potting mix for the cukes this afternoon. They'll get seeded tomorrow.
Monday, May 31, 2021 - Memorial Day (U.S.)
Picking peas brings up the issue of what comes next after the pea vines are spent. Cucumbers, of course. I started three deep sixpack inserts (18 cells) of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers today. I used sterile potting mix for the planting, covering the seeds with an eighth to a quarter inch of moist potting mix. The Japanese Long Pickling cucumber variety produces tall vines and long, slim cucumbers. The cukes are excellent for making bread and butter pickles and not bad for fresh slicing. We grow this variety each year as a succession crop after clearing our tall, early pea vines from the double trellis they grow on and between.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
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But losing all of our brassicas still really sucks.
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