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Outdoors, I still need to clear our asparagus beds of their foliage. Doing so helps prevent insect and disease carryover, and also will make picking next spring much easier. Once the asparagus stalks are out of the way, I'll screen our finished pile of compost, spreading the black gold over the asparagus patches. Our new raised herb bed needs to be cleared of the last of the annuals growing in it. I'm pretty sure the sage plants in it will overwinter, but have no experience with overwintering the perennial oregano, rosemary, and thyme. Inside, there are a few important jobs to complete this month. Beyond caring for our indoor plants, I need to do a complete inventory of the seed we have on hand. Doing so helps prevent re-ordering varieties we have in frozen storage and also alerts me to items I need to re-order. It also is the time when I pitch really old seed that has lost its viability. Print seed catalogs should begin to arrive in some volume soon. I'll spend many pleasant hours examining ones from our trusted seed suppliers before placing seed orders this month.
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Friday, December 2, 2016 - Seed Inventory
I keep our inventory record on a spreadsheet. While I sometimes update the spreadsheet through the growing season as we use up or save seed, I always do a complete update of it in November or December each year. The timing of the inventory is purposeful, as we'll soon need to begin ordering seed for next summer. Some of the inventory is pretty exact. I weigh some seed packets (beans, corn, peas, etc.) and count others. But some of the inventory is perfunctory, simply feeling a seed packet to see if there's enough seed in it to get us through the next growing season. The spreadsheet's amount column reflects my erratic, but effective system, with entries such as "6.8" or "0.5 ounces," "packet," "25 seeds," "lots," "some," and "a few."
We cut our seed bill a little bit each year by saving open pollinated seed. This season, we saved asparagus, basil, cantaloupe, cucumber, dill, peas, pepper, spinach, and tomato seed. We also saved some dianthus, gloxinia, impatiens, and zinnia seed.
Saturday, December 3, 2016 - What Did People Read Here on Senior Gardening This Year? Other than pinching off a few spent gloxinia leaves and blooms, I didn't do any gardening today. I really need to get our asparagus patches cleaned up, but cold, windy weather has kept me inside of late. Wanting to post something here today, I decided to update a posting from last December, our most accessed pages on this site. Note that I didn't include basic pages like this page, the about page, and indexes. So here are the ten most read feature stories, how-to's, and recipes on this site so far for 2016:
The listing is about the same as last year, with only the mulching and melon how-to's being new to the list. Our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers and our Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup recipe got bumped from the top 10 this year. The top three most read stories remained the same as last year. I get more email about growing gloxinias than about any other gardening question. Growing geraniums from seed obviously remains a biggie. I'm guessing that's because potted geraniums in the spring continue to command premium prices.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016 - Garden Planning
Before we start putting together our seed orders each December, I try to finish our initial garden plan of what will go where and when. I started working on the plan for next season in mid-August. Such plans need to show what we want to grow, but also must allow for crop rotation from the past two seasons. While one can cheat a bit and get away with it on rotating some crops, others that are susceptible to soil borne diseases require a strict rotation. Melons, sweet corn, tomatoes, and potatoes are especially unforgiving to both insect and disease carryover. Sixteen years ago, I started using a draw module to map out our garden plots to scale. Doing so lets me figure out how much I can fit in our various garden plots within a few inches, especially our main raised bed. The computer program I use, AppleWorks 6, was end-of-lifed almost ten years ago. But there are lots of garden planning and computer draw programs available. I haven't switched because AppleWorks still works fine on my Mac Mini (running Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.8) and on my MacBook Pro running Sierra (Mac OS 10.12) under the Sheepshaver emulator.
Rotations in our raised beds are a good bit more difficult. In the past, we've experienced bacterial spot and anthracnose in our tomato plantings. In 2016, blight took out the tomato plants in our main raised bed. Those are all diseases that one must plant around for several years in the future. Even with all of that, our initial garden plan for 2017 is complete. I haven't gotten all of the succession crops planned as yet. And anything other than our already planted garlic is subject to change between now and April. We'll be planting lots more tomatoes, peppers, and peas in 2017. Our open pollinated tomatoes in the main bed this year were hit hard by blight. We'll still grow those varieties again (on clean ground), but will add a number of hybrids to our East Garden to make sure we can replenish our stores of whole canned tomatoes and tomato puree. We'll also need to make pickles again in 2017, as our canned bread and butter pickles stay good for about two years. Making room for the extra tomatoes and peppers, we'll cut our melon plants from two to just one row. I'm also going to try to sneak in a row of trellised Sugar Snap peas between our sweet corn and potatoes. The last time we got a good sweet corn crop, we had a long trellis up at the edge of the garden that seemed to discourage sweet corn hunting raccoons. Of course, I may try using a hot wire to control the deer and raccoons. In our main raised garden bed, our early pea (and succession cucumber) row will be several feet longer, as I eliminated the caged tomatoes we usually grow at either end of the row. I also added a second row of our later planted supersweet peas, as we had an excellent seed crop this year. That will make for a lot of shelling early next summer, but peas are always the first saved vegetable that we run out of over the winter. Since we should have corn in the farm fields around us next season, we can delay growing green beans and plant them as a succession crop after something else comes out. If we plant late beans when we have soybeans around us, bugs from the soybeans migrate into our garden, doing a lot of damage and making me spray a lot with some rather nasty chemicals I'd rather not use.
Since I don't have our succession crop plan in place to show you for next year, I'll share our final garden map of our main raised bed for 2016. The sticks with lines in the center are my measuring tools, two graduated in three foot increments and one in one foot increments. One of the reasons I like the old AppleWorks application is its ability to do multiple page masters. You set up one page as a base, and then add pages with that base as a background. I made lots of use of it in my teaching years for my five-day lesson plans. Gloxinias We continue to enjoy having gloxinia plants in bloom. The plants now in bloom and coming into bloom are mostly the ones I seeded in June. Our older gloxinia plants are finishing their blooming cycle and moving towards dormancy. I moved two potted gloxinia corms onto a dark shelf in the basement last week, as the plants were going dormant.
First year gloxinias usually put up two to ten blooms in their first blooming cycle. After going through their first period of dormancy, the corms are able to produce plants with ten to twenty blooms at a time. Even with a few less blooms, we're enjoying the colors we're getting from our new gloxinias. With frost having taken all of our blooming plants outdoors, it's nice to have plants still blooming inside.
The last plant at right above obviously isn't a gloxinia. It's the bouquet I sent my wife at work from 1-800-flowers.com
While we have a good number of vegetable varieties in frozen storage from Baker Creek, two of our favorites are the Tam Dew honeydew melon and the Ali Baba watermelon. Tam Dew's produce a slightly spicy tasting melon with green flesh. The always dependable Ali Baba variety ripens to long, pale green rinds with delicious, although somewhat seedy, red flesh.
One item I noticed that Baker Creek dropped this year was the Picnic watermelon variety. We still have 18 Picnic watermelon seeds from a 2012 order from them in frozen storage. The Picnic variety is a dependable, widely adapted producer of medium sized, delicious watermelons. For folks hunting Picnic seed, the Seed Savers Exchange Store offers the variety this year. Coloring Contest
Slow Seed catalogs seem to be a bit slow in arriving this year. We may be down a bit on seed vendors' mailing lists, as we don't order a lot of seed most years. And while PDF versions of the print catalogs are a pretty good, poor second best, we've only downloaded four of them so far this fall. From what I've read online on catalog request pages this year, many seed houses plan on getting their catalogs out after Christmas. When we were growing lots of geraniums and onions that must be started in early January, that was a bit late for us. But with our reduced gardening in retirement, we can live with it. I've updated our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers and updated the comments about each trusted supplier and some others as possible sources for garden seed. With our garden plots pretty well cleared and our annual seed inventory done, I'm ready to begin putting together seed orders for next season.
When I went into our sunroom to take our almost daily splashshot of the garden, I was surprised at how cold the room was. The thermometer on the desk read 38° F. When I checked the gloxinias by the windows, they'd obviously gotten a bit colder overnight. So I moved all the gloxinias out of the sunroom, some going to our dining room table and others under our plant lights in the basement. The plants I moved to the dining room table were all first year plants that were seeded in June. Most of them have buds on them, but I think it was just too cold in the sunroom for them to bloom. It's much warmer in the dining room, but even in front of our large bay windows, the amount of light the plants will receive is limited. It won't be long until the whole gloxinia collection will need to go under our basement plant lights...until the plants go dormant.
Friday, December 9, 2016 - SESE Seed Catalog
Our print copy of the 2017 Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog arrived in today's mail. It somehow seemed appropriate to me that I got to spend a pleasant hour or so on a snowy day paging through the catalog. The Southern Exposure Seed Exchange offers lots of good, mostly open pollinated vegetable varieties. If you hunt a bit, you'll also find a few hybrids. Last year, we got our start of Abundant Bloomsdale Spinach from SESE. The new variety was developed in cooperation with the Organic Seed Alliance. Mother Earth News has an informative article about the new variety.
In years past, we ordered and were pleased with Yellow of Parma onion, Kevin's Early Orange pepper, and Hungarian Paprika seed from SESE.
Saturday, December 10, 2016 - A Year in Our Garden - 2016 (Garden Review) Rather than doing the month-by-month review I've done in the past, I decided to look at what worked, what didn't, and what fell in between this gardening season. I've summarized our results in a table below. Our garden plots were somewhat limited again this year. Last season, we didn't plant our East Garden plot due to my hip replacement surgery in May (2015). I tried to not overdo things this year, as I'm still rebuilding muscle strength lost from when my hip was bad and I babied myself a bit too much. Our East Garden that often has lots of crops was limited to yellow squash, melons, sweet corn, and potatoes this year. Well, I did plant sage plants around the plot as corner and halfway markers and a long row of zinnias down one side and another long row of nasturtiums down the other side.
Our raised beds were somewhat reduced from years past. I planted about half the spring carrots and lettuce as usual. I also cut back our planting of peppers, other than the open pollinated Earliest Red Sweet variety which we're trying to save from extinction. A single row of spring green beans was planted instead of our usual two. The spring planting of green beans was due to the fields around us being planted to soybeans. We got our beans picked and canned before the usual horde of Japanese Beetles migrated from the soybeans to our garden plots. Here are the results from our 2016 garden. While it looks like we did pretty well, there were more total crop failures that we usually experience.
In gardening, you're going to win some and lose some each season. We got beat up pretty bad on sweet corn, potatoes, and tomatoes this year. But we had a bumper crop of butternut squash with just three or four plants producing a hundred winter squash. Our spring broccoli was a disaster, but our fall broccoli filled our freezer with delicious broccoli florets. We had another great crop of garlic, lots of peas and green beans, and so many carrots that I donated some to our local food bank.
Our eighty foot row of zinnias along the north border of our East Garden were spectacular this year. Zinnias are easy to grow, and I had lots of saved seed to make the planting economical. I had to seriously weed the row just once early on. I later was able to hold back weeds with grass clipping mulch. Canning - Cool Storage - Freezing - Drying We only canned green beans, applesauce, and Portuguese Kale Soup this year. We had lots of canned tomatoes and pickles leftover from last year, although the pickles are disappearing fast.
Our carrots are stored in Debbie Meyer Green Bags in the vegetable bins of our refrigerator. I've been trying to use the few spring carrots that have put up shoots from the tops, but for the most part, the carrots are storing well so far. We usually can store our fall carrots well into spring this way. We froze peas, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, pepper strips, some cull carrots, and asparagus this year. After using some of the frozen asparagus, we'll skip that one next year. We dried rather than canning our kidney beans this year. We also dried cowpeas. From our herb garden, we dried thyme, rosemary, dill seed and dill weed. I didn't attempt drying any parsley, basil, sage, or oregano, as we still had lots left from previous seasons. We really enjoyed having fresh herbs when cooking growing just a few steps from the kitchen this year. Seed Saving We save seed to cut our costs in the future and to help preserve some good, but endangered vegetable varieties. Our main targets for seed saving this year were Abundant Bloomsdale spinach, Earliest Red Sweet peppers, and Who Gets Kissed sweet corn. We saved a lot of seed from the first two, but deer and raccoons consumed all of our sweet corn this year! Two of three would yield a superstar baseball batting average of .667. Of course, two of three yields 67%, a failing grade in most schools. I'm choosing to be happy with what we got. Other saved seed, in no particular order, includes Carpet dianthus, dwarf basil, Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers, Moira and Quinte tomatoes, Eclipse and Encore peas (both of which are PVP protected, so I can't sell or share seed, but can grow and save enough for us to re-plant), hosta, zinnia, asparagus, cantaloupe, gloxinia, and impatiens.
Monday, December 12, 2016 - Another Seed Catalog
I might be tempted to order more Tropeana Tonda red onion seed. In our 2014 Onion Trials, the variety produced large onions that retained red edges well into the onion's core. Sadly, the variety also split or doubled a good bit, making it a poor choice for long term storage. The STS catalog is attractive, well illustrated, and includes lots of tips on how to save seed. Its layout sometimes made it hard to tell what was what on a page. It also lacked an index, something I think all seed catalogs should have, preferably at the end of the catalog.
I also found some small, 1 1/2 x 2 inch, zip top bags I may use inside our paper seed packets for tiny seeds such as gloxinia. The seed tends to get stuck to the self-adhesive closures. I previously have not used small plastic or glassine bags for sharing seeds, as tiny seeds stick inside the bag from static electricity. A tip a few years ago from Mike Bryce solved this problem. He rubs the outside of such seed bags or packets with a fabric softener sheet (Bounce, Downy, etc.) to neutralize the static electricity and make the seeds easily flow out of the packet! Works like magic! Thanks again, Mike! Right now, it looks like my order for Sow True Seeds will be pretty small. Plastic bags and some onion seed will run $6.25, although I'll get tagged for STS's $3.99 minimum shipping charge. One Step Forward, A Step and a Half Back I learned today that my Social Security allotment would go up 0.3% per month. I also got a letter from my bank, saying they were adding a monthly service charge to our checking account...that was a dollar more than the increase in Social Security. I guess our government and the bank are working together to help keep me healthy. Otherwise, I probably would have blown the Social Security increase on a Big Mac each month.
More important to our gardening, one of the seed catalogs we'd been looking for arrived today. Twilley Seeds is a bit unusual amongst today's seed vendors, as they still do not offer online sales. So ordering from Twilley requires either a phone order or filling out a mail order, just like in the old days. I became a big fan of Twilley Seed years ago. During the 1980s, we grew two to four acres of Twilley's then new sh2 supersweet corn each year for roadside sales. Although I don't buy our sweet corn seed in twenty-five pound bags anymore, we're still big fans of their Summer Sweet corn seed. Twilley offers an excellent selection of open pollinated and hybrid vegetable varieties. Prices are reasonable, especially on some of their small packets of flower seed. I quickly put together a tentative order for fourteen items. When done, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Twilley had halved their previous minimum shipping charge to $5. I won't be sending the order until some other seed catalogs come in for comparative shopping. Shopping Guides
I mentioned these pages last month, but will run them by you once again. I updated our Senior Gardening shopping guides. Giving the link to your significant other might produce some nice results. • The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners - a page of useful items that make great gifts for gardeners • Shopping Guide for Gardeners - the tools we use in our garden I guess I should also mention here that I continue to update the information on our page of Recommended Suppliers. Today's new info was the improvement in Twilley Seed's shipping rates. Wednesday, December 14, 2016 - Fedco
One doesn't have to be a member of the cooperative to order from Fedco. (Members do get a 1% discount.) We stocked up on green bean seed from Fedco over the last few years due to their considerably lower prices for half pound packets of bean seed.
The organization of the black and white seed catalog is a bit unusual. While most seed houses alphabetize their listings, Fedco groups them by general seed type. While a bit unnerving at first, a good index on the back cover of the catalog gets one to where they want to go pretty quickly. Since I page through major seed catalogs cover-to-cover, I happened to notice the unusual groupings. Fedco has an excellent rating on Dave's Garden Watchdog (DGW rating). Our page of Recommended Suppliers carries the following, rare bold faced statement: "Possibly the best value for your dollar in purchasing garden seed!" Fedco's web site supports online ordering. One can also order by mail, but not by phone or fax. As I mentioned last week, one can download the PDF version of the catalog. Do note that Fedco doesn't begin shipping seeds until January 4, 2017.
When I paged through our Fedco Seeds catalog today, I found the entry at right on page 36. Since I'd already replaced Copra in our garden plan for the coming season with the open pollinated Clear Dawn variety, I wasn't heartbroken. But I did find Fedco's entries for Copra, and their suggested replacement, Patterson, pretty interesting. I also included the Clear Dawn entry since it ran underneath the other two and it was bred from the Copra line. Note that the Milestone hybrid onion variety could also serve as a suitable replacement for Copras. We also found the open pollinated Yellow of Parma variety to be a possible storage onion for us. Even with a good bit of Copra seed still on hand, our planned onion varieties for next season are Clear Dawn, Milestone, Red Creole, Tropeana Tonda (?), Red Zeppelin, and Walla Walla. I'm still messing around with open pollinated red onions, anticipating the day when my favorite red onion, Red Zeppelin, disappears from the market. Obviously, not every hybrid will last as long as the venerable Big Boy and Better Boy tomato varieties which have been around for about 50 years. I'm not totally adverse to growing hybrids, but I also like finding good open pollinated varieties that should remain on the market for years to come. Gone I'm cooking the cowpeas we grew for the first time this year for dinner this evening. The peas are actually the heirloom Granny's Little Brown Crowder Peas, the "signature pea" from Granny's Seeds. Sadly, the Granny's site disappeared from the web this summer. While there still is a Facebook page for the Indiana seed house launched in 2014, no new entries have been made since June. I suspect that breaking into the seed business is really, really tough. Friday, December 16, 2016 - Vegetables We Plan to Grow in 2017 Seed catalogs continue to trickle in. Our initial garden plan and seed inventory are done. As I began to put together our seed orders for this year, I decided to make a list of all of the vegetables and varieties we hope to grow in 2017. The list looks long, but seasoned gardeners may notice some omissions. We grow only what we like to eat. Asparagus: Viking Bush green beans: Burpee's Stringless Green Pod Beets: Pacemaker III Broccoli: Premium Crop, Goliath Cabbage: Alcosa (savoy), Super Red 80, Tendersweet Cauliflower: Amazing, Fremont, Violet of Sicily Carrots: Bolero and Dolciva (winter storage), Laguna, Mokum Cantaloupe: Athena, Avatar, Roadside Hybrid, Sarah's Choice, Sugar Cube Cucumber: Japanese Long Pickling Herbs: basil, catnip, dill, oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, thyme Honeydew melons: Diplomat, Tam Dew Kale: Dwarf Blue Scotch, Lacinato, Red Ursa, Vates Kidney beans: Red Kidney Lettuce: Crispino and Sun Devil (icebergs), Nancy and Skyphos (butterheads), Defender, Winter Density, and Coastal Star (romaines) Lima beans: Fordhook 242 Onions: Clear Dawn, Milestone, Red Creole, Tropeana Tonda (?), Red Zeppelin, Walla Walla Shelling Peas: Champion of England and Maxigolt (early, tall), Eclipse and Encore (short) Snap peas: Sugar Snap, Bend and Snap Crowder or Cowpeas: Granny's Little Brown Crowder Peas Peppers: Earliest Red Sweet, New Ace, and Red Knight (reds), Gold Standard Potatoes: Red Pontiac, Kennebec Pumpkin: Howden Spinach: Abundant Bloomsdale, America, Melody Summer Squash: Saffron, Slick Pik Sweet Corn: Jaws, Summer Sweet 6800R, Summer SWeet HiGlow SS3880MR (all yellow sh2), Who Gets Kissed? (open pollinated se), ACcentuate MRBC, Summer Sweet Multisweet 502BC (bicolor sh2s) Tomatoes: Earlirouge, Moira, and Quinte (open pollinated slicer/canners), Bella Rosa, Mountain Fresh Plus, and Oh, Happy Day (hybrids), Maglia Rose Watermelon: Ali Baba, Blacktail Mountain, Crimson Sweet, Farmers Wonderful and Trillion (triploids), Moon & Stars, Picnic (and/or Congo), Mama's Girl Hybrid Winter Squash: Waltham Butternut If I've counted correctly, we have 101 varieties, vegetables, or herbs listed above. I actually wimped out on linking herbs, as I have several packets of each we grow, other than common sage. Of the 101, 34 are hybrids. Going, Going, Almost Gone I wrote earlier this week about hybrid onion varieties coming and going. The listing above contains some discontinued hybrids we still have seed on hand to grow. Eventually, our saved seed will run out or go bad, and we'll have to find replacement varieties we like. Hybrid varieties that appear to be discontinued, but may be available online somewhere if you hunt really hard, include some of our favorites: Super Red 80 cabbage; Premium Crop broccoli; Melody spinach; Pacemaker III beets; and Laguna and Nelson carrots. Maybe With all the vegetables listed above, there are still a few more I wish I could squeeze in somewhere in our garden plots. I'm going to have to move our two isolation plots next spring for crop rotation purposes. If I get that done, I may add Spanish Skyscraper peas, Mohon's greasy pole beans, and some celery to the listing above. Headed for Some True Winter Weather
If the spirit moves me, I may even get our asparagus patches cleared. Of course, the finished compost pile is now frozen, making screening and spreading it over the asparagus patches difficult to impossible. Please note that I've included a plug for my darling niece, Libby, and her wonderful husband, Wayne, here. They serve on the mission field for Christ in Cambodia. If you're looking for a Christian mission to support, please consider them and their work for our Lord. Sunday, December 18, 2016 - Cold
After taking care of our three canines (who often come inside to nap, warm up, and get a bite to eat and a drink), I took my laptop to my office to complete a long overdue backup. As the backup worked, I used my main computer to work on a couple of features/book items about seed catalogs and storing garden seed. I often work ahead on items I may use here or elsewhere. With the laptop backed up, I grabbed our daily splashshot from the very cold (33° F), unheated sunroom next to my office, started a backup on my main computer, and headed for the kitchen (laptop in hand) to finish this posting. Feasting on a small bowl of Portuguese Kale Soup, I completed this short posting on the laptop. I managed to be in my easy chair for the kickoff to today's Colts-Vikings game. Later I bundled up in a hoodie and my heavy winter coat and took compost out to our compost pile. Dumping our kitchen compost bucket was easy, but dumping a cart of plant parts and dead hanging basket plant rootballs was a bit harder. I'd left that stuff in our garden cart. Rain had frozen in the cart, making using a garden fork necessary to pry the frozen material out of the cart. Walking the hundred yards back to the house, I was walking into the wind. While I'd not noticed the cold while dumping the compost, the wind producing a zero degree wind chill made my cheeks rosy. I later used that wind to help winnow some asparagus seed. I'd picked the seed a few weeks ago and let it dry in a bowl until today. While I watched our Colts play, I pinched the asparagus "berries," releasing the seed. Then I winnowed the seed outside in the wind. I don't think I'll be starting another asparagus patch in this lifetime. But I save a bit of seed from our asparagus every few years, just in case. Our asparagus patch is the Viking variety. Roots for Viking asparagus are still available, but not seed (that I can find online). I'm not sure what variety of asparagus out other patch is, as it was planted long before we moved here. Obviously, a good asparagus patch can last for a very long time. Blame it on Save-A-Lot I completed our lazy football and soup day by making a batch of our Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup. Our Save-A-Lot store had a special on bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts this week (89¢/lb), so I froze chicken breast fillets and boiled down and boned the remains for some nice chicken and broth. Our dogs enjoy the skin and so-so boned carcases. They're country dogs, always dragging some road kill or poached deer parts into the yard, so we don't worry much about feeding them well-boiled chicken bones and scraps. This batch of soup got a bit more asiago cheese than usual, as our frozen asiago had turned powdery and a lot of it crumbled off the frozen block. I think the real secret of success with this soup is the well-seasoned Swanson Chicken Broth we add to our broth in making the soup. We use it with both our Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup and our Portuguese Kale Soup. Anyway, the soup was great, and I'll definitely remember to take my generic Lipitor tablet this evening.
Seed Orders I began placing our seed orders for next season today. It didn't take long, as I only placed orders with two companies. I have a few more items to order, but today's orders contained geranium, petunia, and onion seed, all items we need to get started next month. Long ago, I used to spend hours poring over seed catalogs as I made my annual selections for seed orders. When finally corrected to reflect our always limited budget for seed, I'd carefully place the handwritten orders in envelopes and mail them off.
One order today required filling out an order form, as Twilley Seeds still doesn't support online orders. I did notice that they got their online catalog published. I ordered sixteen packets of seeds from Twilley and four from a company that's been on our When Hell Freezes Over list the last few years. We'll see how that second order turns out. I only have four or five more items on my to-order list, but each comes from a different seed house. I'll probably just do without on those items, as ordering one packet of seed with companies' minimum shipping charges is cost prohibitive. The Twilley order shipped for a friendly $3. Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - Saving Stuff I've already begun saving stuff for next year's garden. I'm saving used, wax paper coffee cups and egg shells so far. Who knows what's next. Coffee Cups as Cutworm Collars
After ten days or so, I cut the cups down both sides with a good pair of kitchen shears and pull the cup halves to encourage more root growth. By that time, the plant stems have hardened up enough to resist cutworms, and the plants need space to put out lateral roots. Our supply of coffee cups comes from two sources. When I can find them on sale, I stock up on Dixie Grab N' Go Hot Cups & Lids
Long ago in the bad old days, I used to spray diazanon insecticide on the ground to stop cutworms. Since it was banned for residential use in the U.S. in 2004, I've found our cutworm collars to be equally effective and obviously less dangerous to the environment. Applying poisons on and around things we're going to eat always seemed to be a bad idea to me. Egg Shells
I rinse, dry, crush, and freeze all of our egg shells. Later, they go into an old coffee grinder we use for everything but coffee and are ground into the powder we sprinkle in the transplanting holes for our tomatoes and peppers. Since egg shells break down pretty slowly in our compost pile, I figured that grinding them might speed up their process of decay and sharing calcium. Note that the jury is still out on this trick. I'm planning on growing a lot more tomatoes next season than in the last few years, so maybe I'll be able to see if the egg shells help. Also note that just adding calcium to the soil may not cure blossom end rot. Earlier this year, I found an excellent University of California Cooperative Extension Service article by Cindy Fake, Managing Blossom End Rot in Tomatoes and Peppers. It explains in layman's terms that blossom end rot is not only a calcium problem, but also a problem caused by variable soil moisture conditions that may prevent sufficient uptake of calcium to the developing fruit. If you grow tomatoes and peppers and fight blossom end rot each season, this article may have some answers for you about controlling blossom end rot.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016 - Winter Solstice
Without much to write about gardening today, I decided to put together and share our annual animated GIF of our Senior Garden for the year. I take these shots out of our rather high, second story sunroom window. While I don't take one of these splashshots every day, I get one most days to top this page. That allowed me to pick the best shot from somewhere in the middle of each month for the animation. Friday, December 23, 2016 - Posting Deleted Saturday-Sunday, December 24-25, 2016 - Merry Christmas
Luke 2:10-11 (ASV) The image above is a "scene from a life size nativity at the Luxembourg Christmas market." It was taken in 2006 by graphic artist Debbie Schiel who lives in Far North Queensland, Australia, and shared on the royalty-free stock.xchng site. The scripture was copied from my installation of the free Macintosh Online Bible. There's also a free version for Windows users. On my iPhone, I currently use the ESV Bible app. Best wishes from Annie and I to you for a joyous and fulfilling holiday season. As is usual for the first day of mail delivery after Christmas, we had a deluge of seed catalogs yesterday. Catalogs from Burpee, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Territorial Seeds, and Jung Seeds along with our seed order from Twilley Seeds filled our large, rural route box.
I didn't follow my usual practice of poring through each seed catalog cover-to-cover, but only because I didn't have the time. With a beautiful sunny day, I spent my time rinsing out a bunch of pots that had been soaking (and frozen for a few days) outside in five gallon buckets of bleach water. Even though I only have a few seed varieties of seed left to order, I'll probably go through each catalog as time permits. I often find something new and/or interesting when I examine the catalogs, although that can quickly get expensive.
Thursday, December 29, 2016 - Garlic Check
I'll need to keep checking the mulch and the garlic monthly, as grass clippings and leaves are prone to mat. If they do, I'll rake off the mulch, although I'd rather have it in place as long as possible. The mulch helps prevent heaving of the garlic cloves. Of course, once the garlic cloves have put up sprouts, they've also put down some roots which should prevent heaving. Christmas Presents
My lovely wife, Annie, got me some wonderful gardening presents for Christmas. I'd specified that I wanted an Earthway Hand-Operated Bag Spreader/Seeder A bit of a surprise were two galvanized buckets. Annie had gotten me a fairly large galvanized bucket for my birthday. I raved about it so much that she got me two more, one of which is just the right size to fit under the pitcher pump I installed over our shallow well in May. Seed Catalogs
As far as eye appeal goes, the Burpee As I perused the Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog, I frequently noted items we order from them. We get most of our lettuce seed from Johnny's, along with a lot of other good varieties. It just turned out that we had enough seed on hand that we didn't need to place an order with them this year. I was disappointed to see that Territorial Seeds no long carries a couple of seed varieties we'd previously ordered from them (Pacemaker III beets and Milestone onions). Their catalog lacks eye appeal, but they did supply the very best garlic sets we've ever gotten several years ago. I don't order from the Jung Seeds catalog, but we have a lot of seed packets in frozen storage from their R.H. Shumway outlet. The Shumway catalog arrived today. I've continued to order from Shumway over the years partly as a bit of a nostalgia thing. I like the woodcut illustrations in their catalog. Shumway remains a good source for us, as they carry five of the six bush green bean varieties we grow at good prices for half pound packets. The also carry the open pollinated Reid's Yellow Dent field corn that we grew on the farm for a few years. Friday, December 30, 2016 - Cold Snap Coming
December has been an interesting weather month here with some abnormally high temperatures and one low around 2-3° F. We'll warm up a bit through Tuesday, before the front hits on Wednesday and daytime high temperatures will remain below freezing for several days. Beyond making sure our vehicles start, I'll need to be on my toes keeping thawed water available for our dogs. Fortunately, I got the last of our used flower pots out of their outdoor bleach baths yesterday. They've now been washed, rinsed, dried, and are stored in our downstairs plant room. Most of our weather data comes from the Weather Underground. There are two, good reporting stations in our immediate area. One is outside Merom, Indiana, just a few miles south of us. The other is in Robinson, Illinois, several miles southwest of us.
Our seed orders this year were greatly reduced from last year as we have a lot of good seed left in frozen storage. Most of our new seed came from Twilley Seeds, a vendor we've used for many years. I also gave Stokes Seeds another try after not using them for several years. I may order an item or two here and there before we begin planting, but we're pretty well set now for the 2017 gardening season. This Year's How-to's and Feature Stories I was going to link to our end-of-year columns here, but realized that I could easily list all of the how-to and feature stories I published this year. There weren't that many.
Windy
I left out our usual, monthly animated GIF of our raised beds, as I'd already loaded up this page with a year-long animated GIF of the garden last week. I did, however, put together the monthly GIF and uploaded it here. Thanks! To all the readers who took the time this year to write and comment, share tips, criticisms and photos, my sincere thanks. Reader feedback provides valuable insights into the gardening practices of others and often helps me decide on what to write about and what to leave out. It also nice to just have access to other gardeners to chat a bit. A special thanks goes out to those of you who have used our Affiliated Advertiser links when making online purchases. Senior Gardening isn't a profit producing site, but the small stream of income it provides helps. Happy New Year and best wishes from Annie and I for a healthy and successful 2017 gardening season. Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening
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Rotations in our large East Garden plot are pretty easy since we rotate the 40' x 80' planted area 90° each season. The remainder of the full 80' x 80' plot is planted to a cover/turndown crop.
When the excellent Pulsar hybrid storage onion disappeared from seed catalogs several years ago, I became concerned about finding replacement varieties for it and other hybrid onions we grew. Our 
, more for the lids which we wash and reuse than the cups. Our 
We have now reached the 
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