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A local TV weatherperson referred to the U.S. Drought Monitor on last night's local news, noting that our region was in the "abnormally dry" to "moderate drought" classifications. The dry conditions have made my first and often only gardening job of the day watering. I have kidney beans germinating, some really sick looking Encore pea transplants battling for survival, and our recently transplanted Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers. Three of the eighteen JLPs I transplanted on Wednesday appear to have died already. I got out our saved JLP seed from last year, as the variety is just 60 days-to-maturity, to reseed here and there in the row.
Here's hoping your outlook is better than ours. Our deep well is holding up pretty well with our increased demands for watering. I still haven't gotten our shallow well back online this year, as the pump needs new leathers. And we're fortunate to have a fairly large farm pond we could scoop up buckets of water from for watering if things get really desperate. Looking ahead, we should harvest peppers, tomatoes, more green beans, onions, carrots, and another celery. (I cut the first one yesterday.) We also have a couple of lettuce plants in the process of blooming and creating seed along with our short peas that I've let go to seed for seed saving. And it won't be long before it's time to start fall crops of kale, carrots, and who knows what else as space opens up in our raised beds. |
As it turned out, the kidney beans I direct seeded on Monday were up today. The peas transplanted on the same day looked for the first time like they might make it. And most of the cucumber plants are looking good, although I got out the Japanese Long Pickling seed to fill in a few bare spots. The Barbados lettuce plant that bolted is beginning to bloom. I'm hoping it can self pollinate, as there's only the one plant of that variety. Our current Barbados seed in the freezer is from 2009. Our green beans are ready for a second picking and our Eclipse peas are now putting on lots of pods we'll use for seed saving. There were lots of little jobs today that didn't require getting on my very sore knees. One of them was spraying our six Earlirouge tomato plants with a mix of Serenade biofungicide and Neem Oil. I'd seen a stink bug on one of our tomatoes. Those and some other bugs are the ones whose bite leaves white material under the skin of the tomato. And as I finish writing this posting at around four o'clock, there are rain clouds showing on radar to the west of us. We might get lucky and catch another rain tonight! Monday, July 4, 2022 - Independence Day (U.S.)
I pulled back the grass clipping mulch where the plants had died, watered the soil, and dropped in two seeds at each site. Instead of burying the seeds in the native soil, I brought our kettle of sterilized soil up and used handfuls of sterile soil to cover the seeds. That soil got watered. Using sterile soil over the top of the seeds may prevent weeds from germinating around the cucumber plants and competing with them. Direct seeding in a bed already filled with transplants may prove to be a mistake. But Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed germinates quickly and is only sixty days from seeding to maturity, so we may get some late cucumbers from today's seeding. I then turned my attention to putting in some transplants I hadn't used as yet and wanted to get out of the way. I had a single geranium, some dwarf basil, a bunch of vinca, and a rosemary. They went in the narrow area beside the double trellis where our spinach had grown previously. Since I'd saved the mulch around our garlic when I dug them, I used that mulch to hold in soil moisture and hold back weeds around the new plantings. I also picked some green beans today, but it wasn't a very satisfying gardening activity. Many of the beans appeared to be washed out in color. Our lack of rainfall has really hurt that crop.
I spent some time cleaning up our front flowerbeds today. I'd let them get overgrown with weeds after an initial early clearing. Fortunately, the weeds hadn't crowded out the hostas growing in the beds.
It arrived today via UPS with some not-so-bad assembly instructions. Unfortunately, it arrived lacking a bolt to complete the assembly. A mad search through our kitchen nuts & bolts jar proved fruitless. But a trip to the garage in the heat of the day produced a fairly usable bolt. Having ordered the butt cart on an impulse, I didn't get around to reading reviews on it until today. Some reviews were positive, but others were a bit disquieting. One reported the cart breaking on its first use. Another complained about its cheap plastic wheels. I was concerned when I read that I was about twenty pounds over the cart's rated weight limit! But I'm hoping using the cart reduces the wear and tear on my troublesome knees.
We got a good harvest of regular garlic, both soft- and hardneck. Our elephant garlics had lots of split bulbs which makes them culls for long term storage. We'll have enough good elephant garlic for planting this fall with a few that we can use for cooking. If you're planning to plant garlic this fall for the first time, it's a good idea to order your garlic this month. Vendors typically run out of the most favored varieties sometime in July or August! Yesterday, I pulled landscape fabric and pins from the cold frame area. The few remaining trays of plants that had been under the cold frame got moved to the edge of our back porch. They'll get lots of sun there, although I'll need to water them regularly. I also put two young sage cuttings in sterile potting mix to root using Clonex Rooting Gel . The Clonex gel is a good bit more expensive that rooting hormone powder, but does seem to work better than the powders. I'm one short on our East Garden sage corner marker plants. One of the four marker plants got mowed down. With our recent warm weather, my watering, and the rain, the Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seeds I started on Monday are up already.
While I know that lettuce is self-pollinating, the Jericho beside the Barbados had me checking things out in my ancient copy of Rob Johnston, Jr.'s excellent booklet, Growing Garden Seeds. Johnston wrote, "There is only a slight chance that any crossing will occur, so varieties grown for seed can be adjacent, and the harvested seed will be almost completely true to type." When I was mulching our head lettuce for seed, I almost pulled a plant that appeared to be rotting. But overnight, a seed spike has pushed through the rotting Sun Devil lettuce plant. It's still way too early to count on getting saved seed from these plants, but we could end up saving lettuce seed from the Crispino, Sun Devil, Barbados, and Jericho varieties. I'd planned to save seed from the Crispino and Sun Devil head lettuce varieties. The Barbados and Jericho varieties going to seed are a bonus that makes gardening fun.
The poundage by type worked out to 4 pounds, 13.8 ounces of regular (softneck and hardneck including a 9.4 oz braid) garlic. We only got 3 pounds, 8.7 ounces of elephant garlic, far less than in previous years. Again, that should be more than enough for cooking and fall planting. There were just under two pounds of cull garlic. These were garlics with split wrappers that won't store well long term or others with some other imperfection. I braided six or seven softnecks together, as they store well that way.
Cleaning and re-using sturdier trays, pots, and hanging baskets saves us a good bit of money each season. One other job was collecting Eclipse pea pods for seed saving. There were a lot of brown, empty pods from our dry spell. But the plants are now filled with pods almost bursting from the peas inside them.
Then I turned to rinsing the trays I'd scrubbed and soaked in bleach water. With almost no wind today, it's an ideal day to dry the trays in the sun. A bunch of used pots of various sizes and shapes took the trays' place in the bleach water. I guess I'm getting a bit old and lazy. I was done with my gardening jobs by eleven this morning. And that was just fine with me. If you haven't heard all the hype, tomorrow starts Amazon's two day Prime Day. Note that Walmart is also offering specials. Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale.
Our six Earlirouge tomato plants got another thorough spray of Serenade biofungicide and Neem Oil today. This spray was preventative, as I didn't notice any disease or many bugs on the plants. With just six tomato plants this year instead of our usual twenty-some, these plants need to stay healthy and productive to fill our pantry with canned tomatoes. And the plants are absolutely filled with growing tomatoes. I continue to pick Eclipse peas for seed every or every other day. With today's picking, it appears we'll save enough Eclipse pea seed to share some via the Grassroots Seed Network or the Seed Savers Exchange. Our seed is drying down nicely, and I'm still picking. It will probably be a month or so before I can do a germination test on the seed. On the pea seed germination front, I got a nice surprise today. I'd started a germination test with our tall, early pea seed (a landrace cross of Champion of England and Maxigolt) some time ago and then forgot all about it. When I opened the ziplock bag holding the test, the paper towel holding the seeds was bone dry, but all ten seeds tested had germinated. I finished my tray, pot, and insert cleaning yesterday. I'd scrubbed about eighteen 1020 plastic plant trays yesterday and put them to soak in our garden cart filled with bleach water. Rinsing and drying the trays was pretty easy, although one or two took a bit more scrubbing to come clean. The trays didn't get put away until this morning. The good news of all of this is that I won't need to purchase any new trays for next season. With rain predicted, I brought in a dozen or so onion plants I'd pulled and had drying on the ground. The onions went onto our drying/curing table in the garage, although some of the onions were dry and ready to be trimmed and stored. Gloxinias Sure enough, the predicted rain has appeared today. It looks as if it may rain all day. So an indoor job was in order. I moved sixteen tiny, baby gloxinias from the container in which they'd germinated to fourpack inserts.
Having started the gloxinia seed on June 17, we may see plants in bloom by sometime in December. Our six Earlirouge tomato plants are filled with green tomatoes. This morning, I noticed one tomato, mind you, just one, putting on a little red coloring! We hopefully will soon have our annual celebration of our first ripe tomato(es) by having bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for dinner. Lettuce for Seed
Our row of Crispino and Sun Devil lettuce that I planted intending to save seed from them are putting up seed spikes. I put in thirteen plants in the row, but we ate one Crispino head lettuce. Of the remaining twelve plants, nine are showing signs of seed spikes. There's a lot of rot on some of the plants, so I'd guess that not all nine plants will set seed. Cucumber Plants
Eclipse Peas for Seed I'm just about done picking Eclipse peas for seed. Just a few pods too young to pick remain on the plants. Hmm
This has been a gardening season so far rife with disappointments. Bad weather and then a shoulder injury prevented planting our East Garden with sweet corn, melons, and more tomatoes. When I checked our rain gauge and walked around our raised beds yesterday afternoon, another gardening disappointment became apparent. Something had dug and hunkered down in our wide row of green beans, taking out several feet of bean plants. Even before this damage, it's been a lousy year for us growing green beans.
Getting back to bad news, our Encore pea transplants have failed. I waited too long to get them into the ground, so I only have myself to blame. Well, our crazy weather this season may share some of the blame. And our one remaining celery plant has bolted. Oh, well. Despite the setbacks, I'm looking forward to getting some fall crops planted soon. Kale, fall carrots, and possibly some lettuce are in my plans. I'm mulling over another try at green beans and/or Encore peas. Tuesday, July 19, 2022 - Fall Crops
I made a list this morning, in no particular order, of things I still want to plant, along with their normal days-to-maturity figures.
I should add here that one can cheat these dates a bit with the use of a cold frame, floating row covers, or whatever else you have to protect tender fall crops from frosts. In determining what to plant, there's a great tool provided by Johnny's Selected Seeds in their Fall-Harvest Planting Calculator Workbook. It's a downloadable spreadsheet you enter your fall frost date and get recommended last planting dates for fall crops. If you lack Microsoft Excel to open the spreadsheet, the free Open Office suite does it well. I avoided trying to grow green beans or any brassicas this fall, as we've had no success with those crops this year. I still need to get our row of messed up green beans, Eclipse peas, cauliflower out of the way before planting. And I'm just beginning to harvest onions. Between the onion double rows are our spring carrots which are also just about ready to come out. The time it takes to harvest and clean up those crops and replant will run us awfully close to our fall frost date. Garlic Reminder If you're planning to order garlic to plant this fall, it's time now to get your order in. Suppliers begin to sell out of favorite varieties by the end of this month! We've gotten good garlic sets from the Territorial Seed Company, Botannical Interests, Burpee Our how-to, Growing Garlic, may prove helpful if you're new to growing garlic.
The peas had run their course. I had taken one small picking for table use and am saving all the rest for future plantings and possibly some seed sharing. I gave up the task just before noon, as the heat index had reached 101°F. I have a lot of grass weeds to pull in what was the pea row and then I'll need to take out our failed row of cauliflower. Beyond that, I have onions to pull and cure and carrots to dig. Once all that is done, I can rototill and begin planting. While cooling off back inside, I brought our sack of Abundant Bloomsdale spinach stalks back upstairs and began pulling seeds off the stalks. I'm only about half way through that job. Yesterday, I found that squeezing snapdragon seed heads in a pair of pliers released the seeds fairly easily. And better yet, the seed is so small that pouring the leafy mix into a strainer allowed the seeds to pass through which removed most of the leaf and stem trash. I took out our failed row of cauliflower plants this morning. Instead of twisting the plants before pulling them as I usually do, I used a heavy garden fork to lift the root ball out of the ground. After clearing the roots of as much soil as possible, I cut off the lower stem of each plant to go onto our burn pile. Brassica roots take forever to decompose. The tops of the plants went onto our compost pile.
I'd pulled some onions over the last few days and left them on the soil surface to dry a bit. Those onions got gathered up into our garden cart and were spread over our drying/curing table in the garage. Then I pulled all the rest of the onions, leaving them on the soil surface to dry in the sun for a day. Many of the onions were a bit smaller than usual. Crowding by weeds and some really strange weather both may have contributed to that. Some of the onions got bent over prematurely by a strong storm weeks ago. But all in all, it appears to be a good crop. Getting back to the failed cauliflower, the plants went into the ground in good shape. But hot weather and variable rainfall apparently caused the plants to button from stress. One Violet of Sicily plant put on a head, but it yellowed from heat instead of turning red. The rest of the cauliflower plants just sat and did nothing. I'll probably try digging our carrots tomorrow.
The poor production could be blamed on our weird weather so far this season. But I'd also let weeds grow up in and around the carrots. My bad! The good news is that the small carrots, or can I charitably call them baby or gourmet carrots, will be delicious tonight steamed in chicken broth with lots of homemade garlic powder on them. And it appears that our spring carrot crop will tide us over until we harvest fall carrots. I plan to direct seed the fall carrots in the next week or so, once I get the raised bed cleared and tilled. Our Earlirouge tomatoes are now coming in. I picked a first tomato a couple of days ago, but it needed to sit and ripen a bit more. Today, I found four fully ripe tomatoes with more on the vines beginning to show some color. When I do it right, we grow some great crops of carrots, tomatoes, and garlic. Here are our how-tos on those subjects:
I'm still working on cleaning up our main raised garden bed. I'm working around a bunch of flowers and a now six foot double row of carrots as I dig some grass weeds with incredible root systems that our walking tiller can't defeat. Our fall plantings in this area will be delayed a bit, as we had some strong thunderstorms this evening that dropped a little over 2 3/4 inches of rain on us.
The Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants I transplanted in late June are beginning to bloom. Most of the blooms are male, but female blooms will soon follow with ripe cucumbers in just a few weeks. That's a good thing, as I need to can lots of Bread and Butter Pickles and Sweet Pickle Relish, as we're out of both. I continue to enjoy our various snapdragons in bloom. Despite the two snapdragon varieties we're growing this year being hybrids, I've been saving seed from them. (I have germination tests going on the saved seed to make sure the seed isn't sterile as some hybrids produce.) I'm going to try cutting back and transplanting the snaps that grew at the center and ends of our row of Eclipse peas. They're just in the wrong spot. I recently read that cutting back old blooms encourages the plants to produce more blooms. While I'll gladly cut back all of our snaps as I save seed, I'm not sure cutting back and transplanting will work, but it's worth a try. Monday, July 25, 2022 - Cucumber Blossoms I mentioned our Japanese Long Cucumber plants yesterday beginning to bloom. I commented on only seeing male blooms. A closer look this morning revealed several female blooms.
The immature fruit is just behind the bloom on a female blossom. I think this is the same with all Cucurbits. Tomatoes, Weather Outlook, and A Good Read
Our extended weather forecast shows that the heat wave is apparently over for us. During the hot weather, I tried to do what gardening I could in the cooler mornings. But it got hot real quick each day. One day last week, one of our local weather reporting stations showed a heat index of 114°F just after noon! I wrote last week about planning for our fall garden. Garden writer Barbara Pleasant gives her take on the subject in a good read, Planning For a Bountiful Autumn Garden. Hummingbirds
We obviously have more hummingbirds visiting our feeders than we've had in the past. But soon, probably mid-August, things will let up as some of the birds begin their fall migration south. I'd read somewhere that increasing the sugar content of the homemade nectar before the birds migrate helps them gain weight for the trip. I couldn't find the original article I got this info from, but found one that has a whole section on fall sugar increases for nectar. I don't stray far from our usual 4:1 water to sugar ratio, but come in somewhere around 3.5:1 in the weeks leading up the birds' exodus. I stay with the enriched ratio until the last of the migrants, usually in October, disappear from our feeders. Wednesday, July 27, 2022 - Wet Soil and Computer Stuff I happily picked tomatoes and peppers today after the rain had stopped. We got another inch and a quarter of precipitation overnight and this morning. A local TV weatherperson showed our area having received about seven inches of rain this month. This is the time of year when we're usually into our July/August mini-drought. I almost lost a shoe last night trying to pick tomatoes. The soil is so wet that when I stepped on some mulched soil in our main raised bed, my shoe sunk in several inches. By this afternoon, I was able to carefully pick tomatoes, always staying on the mulch as my shoe was leaving inch deep impressions.
So I'm now in the process of setting up a brand new computer. I'd avoided such an upgrade, as our installations of Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office wouldn't survive the upgrade to a newer operating system. Gimp and Photoshop Elements along with Open Office should cover photo editing, word processing, and spreadsheet needs on the new laptop. I'm still at a loss for an Adobe Dreamweaver replacement. Adobe is gouging $21 a month for the app, which I refuse to pay. So I'll continue searching for a lower cost replacement. In the meantime, our installations of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 (including Dreamweaver) and Office 2008 on my older computers will have to carry the load. Thursday, July 28, 2022 - An Early Japanese Long Pickling Cucumber
Our strain of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers came from a single seed that germinated in 2008 from a 1994 seed packet that had been in the freezer for years. Of course, going with just one seed eventually led to inbreeding depression. I lucked out finding the cucumber variety offered from Reimer Seeds. While their strain of JLPs are a bit shorter and fatter than ours with a 68 days-to-maturity rating, breeding them into our strain cured the inbreeding depression. When adding their strain, I'd only put in a plant or two for pollination, only saving seed from plants of our strain. I have two Reimer strain plants in this year among our other 16-20 plants. Odd thought: I wonder where the girl holding a JLP cucumber on the seed packet is now? Seed Saving I saved seed this morning from some way overripe Earliest Red Sweet peppers and some Earlirouge tomatoes. I'd sort of ignored the ERS peppers. Their flesh wasn't really anything I'd want to cook with, but they had good seed in them. Some of the Earlirouge tomatoes I'd picked were really ripe. While not enough to can, there were just enough ripe enough for seed saving. And there's eight or ten more on the kitchen counter for fresh use...with one in the fridge for our salads tonight. Digging Carrots
We continue to store our carrots in Debbie Meyer Green Bags in the vegetable bin of our refrigerator. We've had good luck in storing fall carrots dug in October in green bags that stay fresh until spring. And about that dinner...
Just about the time the grill was hot enough, it began to sprinkle. I put the steak on anyway. When I turned it, the rain had increased, so I put the lid on our Weber Original Charcoal Grill over it. The steak was delicious. A large T-bone, just one, feeds both Annie and I well with some still left over in the fridge! I used to laugh about my mother and father, when they were still living, going to Waffle House and ordering one dinner with two plates. Now at 74 years old and Annie approaching 65, I understand decreased appetites. Daisy Duke, our terribly overweight red beagle cross, got the bone from the steak. Our other dogs, Petra and Pepper, cleaned up the leftover steak, baked potato, and candied carrots on our plates. Carhartt Summer Bag SaleSaturday, July 30, 2022 - Tomatoes I'd hoped to can whole tomatoes today, but we don't have quite enough of them ready yet. The quality of the tomatoes picked so far isn't good, as the tomatoes have lots of cracks and splits. Such stuff can be just from the variety, but that's not usually a characteristic of the Earlirouge variety. I'm guessing that long dry spells followed by lots of rain caused fast growth that split and cracked the tomatoes. I gave up trying to grow sweet potatoes several years ago, as our usual summer weather pattern of very dry weather followed by good rains would split the sweet potatoes. Later pickings should produce some better looking tomatoes. And the plants themselves are showing good growth. Lettuce for Seed
We also have four Sun Devil lettuce plants putting up seed spikes. Only one is close to blooming, but they have plenty of time to bloom and set seed. Our last saved Sun Devil seed was from 2019. Both the saved Crispino and Sun Devil seed in the freezer germinated well this spring. The three lettuce plants in our main raised bed that got away from me and bolted are all doing well. They've bloomed with two of the three about ready to be cut and dried for seed saving. I suspect that if you were in the business of growing lettuce for seed, somehow staking the plants might be necessary. Most of our blooming lettuce plants are leaning or falling over.
I'm really happy that we may get some good seed from the Barbados summer crisp lettuce plant (above left). It's a variety we like, but new seed for it isn't commercially available anymore. Our frozen seed is from 2009. Interestingly, the Majestic Red (above center) or Better Devil romaine plant's seed pods dry down to a red color. Guess I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but I was. And I'll need to somehow protect the Jericho lettuce blooms (above right) from the mowing crew. Successful Germination Test Our saved Eclipse pea seed came in at 4.6 ounces and germination tested at at least 80%. Cucumber Vines Some of our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber vines are already outgrowing their five foot tall double trellis! I may have put down a little too much nitrogen when I planted them. But they're blooming and setting cukes, so I should soon be putting up pickle relish and bread and butter pickles. Computer Changeover
I found Apple's default desktop image for the Monterey OS disappointing. Fortunately, I set up the new laptop by importing data from my 2018 Mac Mini which used dozens of family, pet, and garden photos for rotating desktop images. The one at right is from Merom Bluff overlooking the Wabash river, a site close to us. Yesterday when beginning to make Best Grilled Chicken Breast, I realized that all my favorite recipe bookmarks were on my old laptop. I'll need to fire it up one last time to gather bookmarks that are only on its hard drive. Sunday, July 31, 2022 - July Wrap-up
While I felt like it was an iffy month of gardening, when writing this posting I realized that we'd done pretty well. We harvested tomatoes, Eclipse peas, onions, and carrots and one really early cucumber. I stored ten pounds of garlic in our basement plant room. I got our kidney beans started as well as some gloxinias from seed that may bloom this winter. I also started a couple of sage cuttings. I also cheerfully watched a bunch of lettuce plants bolt that I hope will produce seed. And I washed what seemed like a zillion trays, pots, and inserts. I also turned 74 years of age this month and have found that a heavy day of gardening often requires a day or two of recovery before I can resume my gardening passion. Getting old is a bitch, but it sure beats the alternative. Wishing you health and happiness and the good Lord's blessings, I hope this month's blog has imparted a gem or two to your gardening experience.
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