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The Old Guy's Garden Record
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I picked up sticks and limbs yesterday so I could mow. There's still a lot of tree down, but that stuff will require a chainsaw to clean up. Then I mowed our side yard and the field next to us. Mowing over the rough ground almost always requires a recovery day off afterward. I'm lucky, I guess, that it's raining today.
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And whenever I work with a chainsaw, I always wear steel toed boots. The Skechers Work: Relaxed Fit - Workshire ST boots I have are now on sale for about $30 off at Walmart. Both the chainsaw and boots were good buys.
While I'm going to continue cleaning up the downed tree parts, it has become obvious to me that I'll need to bring in some help doing some of the heavier cleanup. One job I'm looking forward to doing soon is transplanting our Eclipse pea plants into our main raised garden bed. The transplants are ready, and when done, our main raised bed will be totally planted.
There were lots of little jobs to do today, but one of the first was scuffle hoeing parts of our main raised garden bed. Lots of small and medium sized weeds had germinated in and between our vegetable rows. While some of the weeds cut by the scuffle hoe may re-root after some rain this evening, I'll be a bit ahead on weeding.
On my way out to the main bed, I was happy to see a few tomatoes set on one of our Earlirouge plants. The other plants have blooms on them. I also saw that two of the Castle Dome broccoli plants that had buttoned were actually putting on decent heads. And while some critter ate the tops off of all of our beets, our row of carrots has come in strong.
I also spread fertilizer, lime, and granular soil inoculant down the row where I'll put our Eclipse peas and hoed the row. I hope they'll catch some rain this evening to wash them into the soil. One last job today was driving a T-post at one end of the pea row and attaching our rain gauge to it.
Once the peas are out, the bed renovated, and the double trellis repaired from storm damage, I'll transplant Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants into the area. They're a tall variety that requires a tall trellis to support their 16-20" long cucumbers. I'm running way behind where I wanted to be at this time in getting our East Garden plot tilled and planted. But our extended weather outlook seems promising.
Friday, June 7, 2024 - Eclipse Peas
It's a bit late to be starting peas, as they're considered to be a cool weather crop. But the Eclipse variety doesn't germinate well in cold soil. I started our transplants on May 6, using seed saved in 2019 and 2021-2023. There were enough good transplants that I spaced the plants 3-4" apart on either side of the trellis and only had to direct seed about two feet at the end of one row. If the peas aren't as sweet as I'd like due to hot weather, I can still use them for seed saving. Getting the two trays of pea transplants out from under our cold frame made room for our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber transplants and some butternut squash plants. The cold frame's plastic is torn in places, but its usefulness in temperature protection is no longer needed. It does, however, supply some wind protection for tender young plants.
I finally got our large East Garden plot tilled today. It's where our space hogs such as sweet corn and melons will go. I also hope to put in a long line of tomato plants and a double row of Goliath broccoli for seed production. I have seed potatoes ready to go in and plan to direct seed kidney beans. Unmounting our mower deck and attaching our pull-type tiller seemed to take forever. I hadn't done the switchover since last fall, and it ended up taking around two hours! The actual tilling only took an hour.
I skipped liming the area as a pH test showed the ground to be about neutral. When I till again, I'll add fertilizer over the sweet corn area. The transplants to go in will each get a deep deluxe hole. But at this point, I'm guessing the soil will require two more passes with the tiller before it's planting ready.
The plot will need one more pass before planting, as it had a heavy cover of grass, weeds, and the remains of a hairy winter vetch cover crop. While not readily visible in the photo of the whole plot, the row marker stake shown at right is for our annual row of tall zinnias. I set the stakes 45 feet from the back of the plot, giving the area to be planted a 45'x80' dimension. The other approximate half of the 80'x80' East Garden will be planted to buckwheat and eventually another round of hairy winter vetch. Such turndown crops over the last ten years have really improved the soil in the plot.
As a test, I dug a Chesnok Red and a Purple Glazer garlic yesterday. The Purple Glazer was a little small and the Chesnok Red had formed one large bulb instead of individual cloves. Both are signs of immaturity. I'm guessing that I won't dig garlic this year until late this month or early July. As I came in from tilling, I was thrilled at all the apples on our apple trees. I had to tie up our youngest Stayman Winesap again, as it was still leaning a bit from the storm that came through last month. Our older Stayman Winesap had less apples, but was still fairly erect. And our yellow apple tree is filled with immature apples. I noticed a few of them had a blush of red on them.
I'm wondering where that red blush on the last photo above came from. The tree was supposed to be a Stayman Winesap, but has consistently produced nice yellow apples. Whatever, I'll gladly take whatever it produces. It's apples make great applesauce and apple pies.
Save 39% on Select 23-Gauge Hardware Cloth I started my morning gardening today by watering our row of Eclipse peas and then collecting ripe early peas for seed saving. Our Eclipse peas looked pretty dry and weary even though they'd been thoroughly watered a day ago. Some of the early peas for seed saving were showing mold on the outer pods. Where they're getting enough moisture to mold baffles me.
It's really dry here and our extended weather forecast doesn't show much chance of precipitation over the next ten days. Putting seed in the ground and even transplanting stuff even with generous watering is an iffy proposition in such weather conditions. But our days of summer weather seem to be quickly slipping by. I tilled the back half of our East Garden plot this morning. It's the part that will be planted to tomatoes, sweet corn, potatoes, and so on. It's getting a little late in the season for planting, but we should have enough good weather left for stuff like sweet corn to mature by late August or early September.
I left the front half alone, as I plan to seed it to buckwheat this evening and lightly till under that seed. Currently, my lovely wife is going to pick up buckwheat seed from Graham Grain in Terre Haute (IN). The photo at right shows the difference between the untilled and tilled portions of the plot. Once the untilled part is seeded to buckwheat, I'll set our pull-type tiller to shallowly mix the soil to incorporate the buckwheat seed. Buckwheat is pretty forgiving seed that will sit and wait for soil moisture and sometimes germinate anyway in dry soil conditions. As I work at gardening this season, an old Danny Glover line from the first Lethal Weapon movie keeps coming to mind. I cut my wrist when attempting to drop the mower deck out from the lawn tractor so I could mount our pull-type tiller. Like Glover, I muttered, “I’m too old for this sh*t.” But I find that I'm really getting excited about planting our East Garden plot at least one more time. Annie got home with the buckwheat seed a little after two. But by then, it was 92°F! I'll need to get up early tomorrow morning before the heat sets in to do the broadcast seeding and tilling in the seed.
Today's gardening fun was seeding an eighty foot row of zinnias down the middle of our East Garden plot. I made a fairly shallow furrow with our garden hoe and then watered the furrow. I was generous with the seeding, as we have lots and lots of saved zinnia seed. Usually, the buckwheat and zinnias go into the plot last. But with our current dry spell, I'm hesitant to begin transplanting stuff, although I may try in the early hours tomorrow. Daily highs for the next ten days are predicted to be in the upper 80s to mid 90s with no rain in sight.
Defying the weather conditions, some of our lettuce has remained healthy and sweet. I picked four lettuce yesterday and after washing and drying the leaves was pleasantly surprised that the lettuce was still sweet. Of course, we have some lettuce plants bolting now from the heat and just being too old.
I'm certainly not complaining about the bolting, as this year is about as late as we've ever been able to pick good, sweet lettuce.
The vines of our planting of tall, early peas have finally browned out. I did a heavy picking of the vines this morning for seed saving. When I pull the vines in the next day or two, I'll probably find more mature pea pods to dry for seed saving. Once the vines are out, the soil will get renovated a bit and Japanese Long Pickling plants will be transplanted into it. JLPs are a sixty days-to-maturity variety, so we should have cucumbers for fresh use and canning fairly soon. While I enjoyed some outside morning gardening and still have lots of stuff to go into our East Garden plot, a good bit of the rest of my day will be consumed with cleaning and pulling our pull-type rototiller from our lawn tractor, and cleaning and mounting the mower deck.
Instead, I began pulling our browned out tall early pea vines. I checked the vines as I pulled them and harvested a good many pea pods for seed saving. Most of them were dry enough that they would have begun to split and shed seed in a day or two. Once shelled, dried, and frozen, today's picking along with previous pickings should give us enough seed peas for planting next March. I still have some weeds to pull in the narrow bed the peas grew in. And the double trellis will need some serious work, as the weight of the pea vines along with a severe wind storm left its posts a mess. Fortunately, the trellis netting is still in good shape. After some soil renovation, I'll transplant Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants into the bed as a succession crop. The spinach plants that had grown alongside the peas got smothered when a recent storm blew over the pea vines. The spinach was a total loss, even for seed saving.
By the time I was done, it had gotten way too hot out to consider transplanting cucumbers into the bed. Also, the soil there was bone dry. It will get whatever water we have saved in our rain barrel. Our current dry spell has really damaged our planting of Eclipse supersweet peas. Even though I've watered the planting every other day, lots of the transplanted pea plants haven't made it. I plan to re-seed the row with fresh seed, hoping to get a seed crop from it.
This lovely cutting got blanched and frozen for future use. I first soaked it in saltwater for an hour...and only found three cabbage worms in the water. Obviously, our sprays of Thuricide helped keep the plants free of worms. Even though we still have broccoli and cauliflower in the freezer from last season, I'll be starting our fall brassicas in a week or so. Our usual star varieties of cauliflower, Amazing and Fremont, look really sad right now. Only two Di Sicilia Violetto red cauliflower plants still look healthy. I finally remembered to pull the cutworm collars I'd put around two very small Earliest Red Sweet pepper plants. Surprisingly, the plants are doing quite well. I wonder if having to send roots deep because of the collars helped them. Of course, the two plants are still much smaller than our other ERS peppers, some of which have blooms and peppers on them. I've also been snapping shots daily of our oregano. It's now in pretty much full bloom, something we've not previously experienced. In the past, we've harvested and dried the oregano or simply cut it back to keep it from overgrowing surrounding plants.
I transplanted into our recently refurbished narrow bed today. It previously contained our tall early peas.
The first to go into the bed between the double trellis were about twenty Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants. The transplants had gotten really tall. A quarter inch of rainfall early this morning wet the top inch or so of the soil, but I still liberally watered each planting hole with starter solution. Once the cukes were in, I somewhat tightened the clothesline wires that support the trellis netting. Along the south side of the bed, I put in dill, parsley, celery, and basil. I'd intended just to put in parsley and basil, but grabbed the wrong plant out of the flat they were in...twice. We're just about out of saved dried parsley, so getting some more parsley plants in was a priority.
As usual, each transplant got a deluxe planting hole. I dug a foot deep and wide hole for each plant and added a shovelful of compost and another of peat moss to the holes. A light sprinkle of lime, a heavier sprinkle of ground egg shell (to fend off blossom end rot), and a handful of 12-12-12 fertilizer got worked deeply into the soil of each hole. Then each hole got two gallons plus of starter solution before I squished the very tall tomato plants into the mud. I formed a trough around each plant to hold in any rainfall...should we ever get some. My remesh tomato cages got anchored to T-posts, as we get some really strong winds here that can tip over caged tomato plants heavy with fruit late in the season. Once I get back to mowing and raking, the tomato planting will get mulched for weed control and moisture retention. As it got hotter outside, I decided to take a break. That turned into quitting gardening for the day. But I was able to leave all the supplies for planting on our pickup truck.
While out in our East Garden, it was hard to miss that some of the buckwheat I'd seeded over the west side of the plot has begun to germinate. It took a while, as the soil was bone dry. We have thunderstorms headed in this afternoon. We certainly could use a good rain. I drug the hose from our rain barrel out to our planting of cucumbers and other stuff last night. Fifty gallons of rainwater didn't make much of a dent in the dry soil conditions. Without a good rain or some serious watering, we'll lose some of that planting.
As I come in from working in our East Garden, I'm always amazed at the crop of apples growing on one of our apple trees.
The garlic went onto our makeshift drying/curing table in the garage. I'll turn on an ancient box fan to aid the curing. Typically, it takes two to three weeks for garlic to dry down enough to trim tops and roots and bag and store the garlic bulbs. As I moved the garlic from the cart to the table, I tried to sort out cull garlics that had split wrappers or anything else wrong with them. They'll be the first garlics I dehydrate to make garlic powder. Our how-to: Growing Garlic.
The deer were long gone by the time our dog went around the pond to where the deer had been. My first gardening job this morning was measuring and staking out our rows for potatoes. I haven’t grown potatoes for several years and am looking forward to having fresh potatoes once again. After staking and stringing the rows, I liberally spread 12-12-12 fertilizer down the rows and also spread soil sulfur. The latter is to lower the soil pH down to a level more conducive to good potato growth. The yellow soil sulfur also neatly marked the rows for tilling.
Our thirty year old walking tiller refused to start this morning, so I used a shovel to make a furrow for the potatoes. The soil was still soft from being tilled a few days ago. The furrow got watered with a Serenade solution to help the potatoes come up and to help prevent disease. When I brought our seed potatoes up from the basement, I realized that there weren't enough to plant two rows. I had to cut the seed potatoes to have just barely enough for one row. But after three hours of work, our potatoes were in.
Today was a mowing day. I'd let our lawn go way too long as I worked to plant our East Garden. Three days of waiting for WD-40 to work its magic on our mower blades also slowed things down. Someone at the shop had really torqued down the blades. With the WD-40 and a two foot pipe on my heavy duty ratchet, the bolts finally broke free and I could sharpen the mower blades. After mowing our front and back yards but not the side yard or field, I drug our garden hose to our narrow raised bed of cucumbers, basil, and parsley. Some of the cucumbers and basil looked in really bad shape from the hot, dry weather. Even though it may rain tomorrow morning, I soaked the bed.
Before starting to mow, I had brought in and begun to soak some cull garlics. They were ones with bad wrappers or other flaws that would cause them to rot early on. When done mowing, I pulled the garlic bulbs apart, trying to get as much skin off as possible. Then I spread the cloves out on a cookie sheet to dry. Tomorrow, I'll trim the tops and bottoms off the cloves and cut up the larger ones a bit. Then they'll go through our food processor, set to slice, and then onto dehydrator trays for drying. I'll set our food dehydrator at 95 to 110°F and let the garlic dry (in the garage) for two to three days. Then it will go through an old coffee grinder to make garlic powder.
Saturday, June 29, 2024 - Garlic Powder
After about three hours of trimming and skinning, the cloves were ready to be sliced in our food processor. I know, that's a lot of time to put in for something that is still fairly cheap from the grocery.
I found that the sliced elephant garlics tended to stick together in clumps of four or five slices. While I tried to separate them, some are still stuck together. I'll need to work them apart a bit as they dry over the next few days in our food dehydrator. I started out the drying process with the dehydrator set to 110°F. I'll cut it back to 95°F as the garlic dries down. With all the work that goes into making garlic powder, you certainly don't want to burn it. First Tomato!!
The tomato came from a plant grown from Earlirouge seed saved in 2009. The variety is an early tomato developed by Jack Metcalf at the Agriculture Canada Smithfield Experimental Farm, in Trenton, Ontario. Earlirouges have deep red interiors and wonderful tomato flavor. Pea Germination Test I started a germination test on Monday of our early peas that are currently drying down. I was pleased to see we got 100% germination from the ten seeds tested. One pea despite a tiny sprout was also rotting a bit, so I'll probably record the batch at 90% in my records.
Sunday, June 30, 2024 - June Wrap-up
Our East Garden is finally underway with 10 tomato plants and a row of potatoes in. The rotated out portion of the plot has been seeded to buckwheat. I hope to fill up the rest of the plot with melons, squash, sweet corn, and kidney beans. Our main raised bed has bell peppers, onions, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and green beans all growing in it. Not doing so well is a planting of Eclipse peas. The open area of the bed where the garlic came out will probably get direct seeded to kale.
Our two rows of green beans are in bloom. I found a couple of beans on them, but the plants are suffering from our dry weather. I may drag out our soil soaker hose for them. Of course, that's how I ran our well dry last season!
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
It's been an unusual month. Too wet, too windy, too hot, and too dry, all slowing progress in our garden. But we harvested peas, lettuce, broccoli, and garlic this month. The garlic is curing on a table in our garage while our dehydrator runs filled with sliced cull garlic cloves that eventually will be ground to garlic powder. Putting up peas, broccoli, and garlic this month is a real plus.
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