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I once again need to hustle and get our 80' x 80' East Garden plot planted in June. I tilled it once last month and even replaced a corner marker sage plant. We often don't get this area fully planted until mid-June. Half of the East Garden will be easy to plant. I'll broadcast buckwheat seed over it. The buckwheat will get mowed and turned under and re-seeded as green manure possibly three times his summer. The rest of the East Garden will have sweet corn and kidney beans direct seeded into it. Some of our open pollinated sweet corn will go in as transplants to avoid cross pollinating our sh2 sweet corn. Other transplants will include broccoli for seed, melons (cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon), tomatoes, and paprika peppers. I have a bag of seed potatoes for the East Garden, but I fear they'll rot before I get them in the ground. I also have a bunch of Encore pea transplants for the East Garden. We almost had peas and lettuce last month. I'll begin picking peas in a day or so, although it will be a few days until we pick enough for supper. Some of our lettuce is ready to be taken as early lettuce.
We're off and running for the 2022 gardening season. Our raised beds are planted and mostly mulched. I've tilled our large East Garden plot once, making a second pass down the middle of it for our row of tomatoes and paprika peppers. We have lots of transplants under our cold frame for the East Garden, with a couple of trays of melon transplants still under our plant lights that need to be hardened off soon. And I still need to fill in our herb bed with some basil, parsley, and dill.
The pea vines have now reached the top of our five foot double trellis. That's about what I expected. The peas are a mix from our letting the Champion of England and Maxigolt varieties cross pollinate a bit the last two years for seed saving. We probably have some landrace crosses of the two varieties and some that are pure Champion of England or Maxigolt. The Champion of England variety typically produces vines over five feet tall, while the Maxigolt variety usually runs about four feet tall. Both varieties germinate well in cool soil and produce very sweet peas. Our Eclipse peas that I transplanted on May 15 got flattened by some strong storms last month. They are slowly recovering and beginning to attach to their trellis. I also have two trays of Encore peas hardening off on the back porch. They will go into our East Garden plot. Obviously, we really like peas. Our how-to, Another Garden Delicacy: Homegrown Peas, tells how we grow our peas. 50% Off All Remaining 2022 Packets
That made my first job this morning filling in the holes and re-mulching those areas. Beside the ten or twelve holes dug, I also had to remulch several areas previously mulched. Wind, walking in the bed, and the mulch decaying lets weeds sprout where the mulch has been disturbed. So I did a little weeding as well. I moved on to picking peas, but found only seven pods ready to pick. Those peas quickly were added to some Suddenly Salad for lunch. While picking, I saw that I'd forgotten to remove the cutworm collars from the peppers I'd transplanted last month. That's a pretty serious error. While the cutworm collars protect tender young plants, they also limit the plants' root growth. In removing the cutworm collars, I was surprised at how dry the soil was around the pepper plants. That triggered a new job for the morning...lots of watering.
Next to our pepper plants in a narrow raised bed, some of our Crispino lettuce plants are beginning to head. The long row of head lettuce plants is mostly for saving seed from the Sun Devil and Crispino varieties. Hopefully, we'll also get some head lettuce for the table before hot weather turns the lettuce bitter and the plants begin to bolt. Planting the head lettuce in a long, single row isn't best for pollination. I'm lucky that lettuce self-pollinates, although a little crossing with other plants might improve the plants' genetics. But the big thing with saving lettuce or other seeds is that it allows the plants to adapt somewhat to our local growing conditions.
I'd been worried about how few blooms and pea pods our early peas were producing. I did a web search on the subject and got all kinds of reasons, including too much or too little nitrogen, warm temperatures, poor soil, lack of sunlight or water, and on and on. While we've had some really warm days, I guessed that water was the problem and really soaked the pea bed a couple of days ago. I was rewarded today with lots of new blooms.
I moved on to cutting a couple of lettuce heads. I cut a Coastal Star and Majestic Red. When washed, the Coastal Star tasted a little bitter. But that was an outer leaf and the lettuce hadn't been refrigerated. Getting good lettuce in the spring is always tough for us as when the weather warms, the lettuce turns bitter and/or bolts. We do far better with fall lettuce. When doing the harvest, I saw that our one Barbados lettuce plant was beginning to bolt. Rather than pulling it, I may just let it go to seed for seed saving, as our Barbados lettuce seed is really old (2009). And for a touch of humor, I saw a CNN headline that read Lettuce shortage forces KFC to offer cabbage in Australia. I guess if you live in Australia, it's not so funny. Our how-to on Growing Lettuce.
Sometimes garlic will show signs of flashing, a yellowing that may denote a nitrogen deficiency. Since we've experienced flashing occasionally in our garlic, I splashed leftover starter solution on our garlic area in April. I also gave it a foliar spray of some Miracle-Gro Liquid All Purpose Plant Food (12-4-8) last month.
Of course, towards the end of the garlic's growing period, its leaves will naturally yellow, a sign that the garlic is about ready to dig. If you grow garlic and enjoy cooking with it, digging a head early and cooking with it is a real treat. Also, from our how-to on Growing Garlic, making garlic powder just after harvest is far easier than waiting for the garlic to dry. The garlic cloves peel easier at that point.
We have showers in the forecast for Friday. The rain is a good thing, but it also has made the soil way too wet to do much of anything in our East Garden plot. A good picking of peas today resulted in fresh peas with our supper this evening. It was a funny meal. We'd bought a whole ribeye recently and cut it for steaks. Turns out, the on sale ribeye was too tough to chew even after being marinated and tenderized. So today, I ran steak through our old manual meat grinder, and we had ribeye hamburgers for supper. They weren't any better or worse than hamburgers from ground beef. But my lovely wife noted that the ribeye was actually cheaper per pound than ground beef these days. I almost blew it with one of our hanging basket plants. I'd planted Super Elfin XP Clear Mix Impatiens in a coco basket planter/hanging basket. Coco baskets dry out far more quickly than plastic hanging baskets. I saw yesterday that the plants had lost their blooms and the leaves were slightly wilted. I plopped the coco basket in a large rubber feed pan full of water. By this morning, the plant had begun to bloom again.
Our tall, early pea vines are now filled with pea pods ripening and with more blooms. I froze two half pints of peas today. And as usual, it began to rain as I picked peas this morning. I also noticed that a few of our short Eclipse pea plants have begun to bloom. There's only about twenty feet of separation between the Eclipse and the tall peas, and I hope to save seed from both plantings. That's not enough room for good isolation for seed saving. I try to time the short peas to bloom after the tall peas are done blooming. It just didn't work out this year. Fortunately, there's a row of tomatoes and another of green beans separating the two pea plantings that may be a good barrier to pollinators. The first clutch of hummingbirds here have obviously left the nests they hatched in. My first clue was that the tiny birds emptied a sixteen ounce feeder in just a day. There also was a lot of traffic and fights for dominance at the feeder yesterday. So I hung a second feeder to cut down the mayhem at the feeders. When the next clutch of eggs hatch and the birds leave their nests, I'll need to hang yet another feeder to handle all the birds' feeding needs.
I seeded Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed today to use as a succession crop when our tall peas come out. The JLP variety has a days-to-maturity rating of just 60 days from direct seeding. Starting the plants now should have them ready just about the time the peas are done. Like the tall peas, the tall cucumber vines benefit from growing between a double trellis. I used seed we'd saved in 2021, 2020, and 2018. I also started a couple of cells with JLP seed from Reimer Seeds. Using the same variety from another source helps prevent inbreeding depression which we've experienced in the past with the variety. A good crop of cucumbers this year is important as we're on our last jar of homemade pickle relish!
Looking at our extended weather forecast, I suspect I will be stressing our wells with watering over then next ten days or so. High temperatures will remain mostly in the mid- to upper nineties with little or no rain predicted. Mid-afternoon, I took a couple of buckets of compost out to our pile. I'd hoped to do a little transplanting, but with the heat index at 113°F, I chose to return to the air conditioning inside our house, shower, and watch the January 6 Special Committee's hearing on TV.
The three plants I put in today were started last year and overwintered in our sunroom. I backfilled the planting holes with peat moss and native soil, mixing in some lime and 12-12-12 fertilizer. They got lots of starter solution and a bit of landscape fabric around them to hold back weeds.
While I hate to see the end of our early pea season, we have more peas coming from our short peas. And the timing is just about right, as almost every Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed I started on Friday germinated. Once the early pea vines are cleared, the JLPs will go in their space. And yes, I thinned the JLPs to one plant per cell, but only after taking the photo above right. I'm looking forward to making lots of sweet pickle relish and bread and butter pickles this summer. Since we have several volunteer dill plants up in our herb garden, I may even make some dill pickles for my lovely wife who loves them. Strawberry Moon Space.com: "June is also blessed with what Native American cultures have nicknamed the Full Strawberry Moon, and this year is extra special as it will also be designated as a supermoon to add to its lunar appeal."
Let me add here that if you're considering planting garlic for the first time, ordering your garlic sets early ensures being able to get the varieties you want. Vendors often run out of the most popular varieties by the end of July! Our how-to, Growing Garlic, tells about one of the easiest, most trouble free, and productive crops one can grow in a home garden. And to keep the Federal Trade Commission happy, I must add here that we're a consumer member of the Fedco Seeds Cooperative. If Fedco ever pays a dividend, we'll get some, although that's not why I joined.
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I'm going to let our blend of Champion of England and Maxigolt tall, early peas go to seed. As they mature seed pods, the snapdragons planted around them are coming into bloom. I'll only get a brief respite from picking and shelling peas, as our short Eclipse pea plants are blooming and have a few pods on them. By late fall or early winter, most of the gloxinias will be in or headed into their required annual period of dormancy. So today, I started gloxinias from seed saved last year. Since first year gloxinias take about five months from seeding to bloom, that should give us a few plants in bloom over the winter. Sunday, June 19, 2022 - Father's Day - Juneteenth - Lettuce
From our Growing Lettuce how-to:
Garlic
To make sure I dug one garlic from the end of each of our four rows of garlic. The digging yielded four mature garlics, although the one elephant garlic had split its outer wrapper. That makes it a poor candidate for long term storage. So it will get used for seasoning, garlic powder, or even a trip to our local food bank. It appears that we'll once again have a bumper crop of garlic.
As I'm somewhat prone to do, I left several garlic scapes to "bloom." Although none of them produced "blooms" as spectacular as our 2014 Best Garden Photo, one of them turned out to be fairly pretty. We usually grow four fifteen foot rows of garlic spaced eight inches apart. In row, we space the garlics eight inches apart. That yields about eighty garlics if all the cloves produce. And that's about two to three times as much garlic as we'll use in a year's time. After saving garlics for planting in the fall, the excess goes to family, friends, and the food bank. Tuesday, June 21, 2022 - A Change of Plans I've finally had to admit that my shoulder injury isn't going to heal quickly enough to plant and care for our large East Garden plot. So last evening, I dumped our tomato, melon, and paprika pepper transplants into our garden cart to go onto our compost pile. Typically, I drop off extra transplants at our local food bank, but these plants had gotten way too large to transplant. Abandoning our East Garden plan also means no sweet corn, potatoes, or yellow squash and probably no kidney beans or Encore peas. I might be able to squeeze in the kidney beans as a succession crop in our main raised garden bed. I'm hoping I can get a good cover/smother crop of buckwheat on the East Garden by scalping the grass and overseeding it. While my lovely wife has banned me from mowing this summer due to my neck and shoulder injuries, I do sneak out and do small mowing jobs when she's not around. Some Cheerier News I've been trying to grow daisies in a spot at the back of our yard for years. I'd turned an area there for an isolation plot years ago, only to find gray clay soil an inch down and orange clay below that. When our beloved dog, Mac, died in 2016, I buried him at the site of the isolation plot and tried starting daisies there. We occasionally got a bloom or two, but the plants never overwintered until this year. So now at long last, Mac truly is pushing up daisies. Wednesday, June 22, 2022 - Grilled Chicken
Curing/Drying Table
The table isn't anything fancy, just a 4' x 8' sheet of 5/8 inch plywood over some sawhorses. I actually use four sawhorses...two quality ones at either end and a couple of plastic cheapies underneath to catch the sag of the plywood when it's loaded. I think I'm ready to dig garlic! Thursday, June 23, 2022 - Digging (Lifting) Garlic
The garlic will need to cure on the drying table for about two weeks. Once the leaves have dried, I'll trim them off a couple of inches above the garlic bulbs and also trim off the roots. Then the garlic gets bagged in old mesh potato bags and stored in our basement plant room. With our onions beginning to bulb, I'll need to get the garlic off the drying/curing table soon to make room for onions.
The snapdragons planted by our early tall peas and our short peas are beginning to put on quite a display of blooms.
The poor snapdragons get overgrown, first by peas and then by cucumbers later on. But they usually survive and produce more lovely blooms in the fall. The snaps at far left are the tall Rocket Mix variety. Next to them are the shorter, hybrid Madame Butterfly variety. With the garlic out, I'll need to rototill the area soon and decide what succession crop to plant.
I also picked about twenty Eclipse peas. They're maturing slowly, but should pick up with around an inch of rain overnight. I tilled the area where our garlic had grown. I added fertilizer, lime, and peat moss to the soil before tilling. I'd hoped to rake the bed and plant kidney beans, but my bum shoulder said "no more" after wrestling the tiller around. Kidney beans, Encore peas, and Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers will be succession plantings done this week. Although we've had some serious setbacks due to weather and injuries, I'm excited about getting our next round of gardening started.
I did a little online research before composting the pea vines. While I'd sprayed the vines with a fungicide, there was a good bit of powdery mildew on them. While there are varying opinions online, the consensus seems to be that composting kills powdery mildew and its spores. So our vines went onto our compost pile.
I started down the fifteen foot row spacing the Encore transplants several inches apart. I quickly realized that I wasn't going to get all of the 72 transplants I had in the row at that spacing. So I began digging short trenches and put in four to six plants at a time. Even after a good rain, each planting hole or trench got a good shot of starter solution. Peas are a cool weather crop. Even though this planting is only for seed saving, I don't know if the peas will bloom and produce seed in the dead of summer. Hey, I'm not sure if the plants will survive the transplanting. To help the young plants along, I mulched them with grass clippings to hold in soil moisture and hold back weeds. I haven't as yet decided on whether or not to trellis the short Encore peas. If they take, a trellis will help produce a cleaner seed crop with less rot from peas on the ground or mulch. Kidney Beans
I started out today with the planting area tilled and fertilized. All I had to do was smooth out the planting row (footprints from planting the row of peas) and plant. I made a shallow furrow with my garden hoe, sprinkled some granular soil inoculant down the row, and then watered the furrow. I spaced the seeds about an inch and a half down the row before covering them with a generous inch of soil. I'll need to water the kidney bean row daily until the bean plants emerge. We use the kidney beans in our Portuguese Kale Soup, Texas Nachos, and to make Refried Beans. I'm really hoping this crop is successful, as we ran out of our own refried beans mid-winter, as we didn't get a crop of kidney beans last season. I continued preparing one of our narrow raised beds for some cucumber transplants. I've found that following our tall, early peas grown between a double trellis with vining Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers works well for us. The sixty day variety produces long cucumbers good for slicing, but that excel for bread and butter pickles and sweet pickle relish.
Tomorrow, I'll hoe in some fertilizer and lime before transplanting and mulching the cucumber transplants. And yes, all of the snapdragon plants around the trellises have survived so far. Dill
While the dill is in bloom, looking down the plants one can see dill leaves that save well as dill weed for cooking. The dill leaves won't be good for cooking soon as the plant works to produce viable seed. I won't be harvesting the leaves or seed, though, as we have lots and lots of dill seed and weed saved in years past.
Hummingbird Feeders
We're currently going through about five pounds of granulated sugar a week to make nectar for the birds. We use the recommended 4:1 water to sugar ratio for the nectar. It's a small price to pay for the enjoyment we get from watching the birds at our feeders. Tuesday, June 28, 2022 - Peas Again I'd hoped to transplant cucumber plants today. But I awoke this morning with my body in full protest after my ambitious gardening activities yesterday. I'm finding that as I age, I often have to take a day or two off after a day of heavy exertion. Today was one of those days. By afternoon, I thought I felt good enough to at least pick a few peas. My back was killing me from the bending required to pick the Eclipse supersweet peas. Shelled, the peas picked made about a pint. I put half of them in a pan for supper and blanched and froze the rest. Sadly, those will be the only Eclipse peas for our table this season, as I'm going to let the pea plants produce seed for seed saving. With the patent (PVP) on the Eclipse variety having expired, I'd like to be able to share some seed with other gardeners. BTW: Despite the heat we've had, the Eclipse peas were delicious. Not content with just shelling the Eclipse peas, I also shelled the peas I had drying from our tall, early peas. I really wasn't happy with the production of those peas this year. Dry conditions, heat, and possibly the crossing I allowed of two varieties may all have contributed to lower production. Gloxinias
Our dining room table is filled with gloxinias in bloom. I need to get started hand pollinating some of the flowers for seed saving. I also need to spread the plants out a bit in a couple more trays. By the time the newly seeded gloxinias come into bloom, the plants on the dining room table should be in their required annual period of dormancy. Each year as old and new gloxinias begin to bloom, it's exciting to see the varying colors amongst the single and double blooms.
Wednesday, June 29, 2022 - Cucumber Transplants In
My first job was to hoe in some lime and 12-12-12 fertilizer in the planting area. Then I began transplanting the JLPs, putting them fairly deep in the soil, as the plants had gotten a bit taller than I'd like. Each planting hole got a generous amount of starter solution. I fortunately had a good amount of cured grass clippings to mulch in the new planting. After mulching, I went back and watered each plant again, as some of the plants were already showing some stress from the transplanting. Tightening the clothesline wires that support our nylon trellis came next. And then I wove some of the taller snapdragons that had fallen over into the netting. This planting, along with the kidney beans seeded and Encore peas transplanted earlier this week will require daily waterings until the plants get going. Even with a good rain last week, our soil is pretty dry in the raised beds. Thursday, June 30, 2022 - June Wrap-up
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