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The Old Guy's Garden Record
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. I completed one of my least favorite gardening jobs this morning. I inventoried our commercial and saved seed, returning the seed to our big freezer in less than 24 hours. Sadly, I can't seem to find the Eclipse pea seed we saved this year or our older Encore seed. I'm worried that we may have eaten the Eclipse seed! But I'm somewhat hopeful that it's just lost, as it should have been with the Encore seed that is also missing. Both Eclipse and Encore are endangered supersweet varieties we're trying to preserve. I do have a good bit of older Eclipse seed, so not all is lost.
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Monday, December 4, 2023 - Buying Guides
I'll get this one out of the way up front. If you are holiday shopping for a gardening friend, let me suggest taking a look at our The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners and our Shopping Guide for Gardeners. Both contain lots of things gardeners would like. Now that my advertisement is out of the way, let's move on to December gardening chores. I'm waiting for somewhat warmer days before finishing clearing our East Garden of tomato and pepper plants and cages and our row of zinnias. I also have two asparagus patches to clear and compost. Along with those chores, I'm working inside on our garden plans/maps for next season and figuring out what seed I need to order.
I thought sharing links to the digital catalogs might be helpful to readers. So here they are:
We rinse and dry the egg shells after cracking and then freeze them until there are enough in a quart freezer bag to justify a grinding session. During my farming years, we scraped the albumin out of egg shells, dried and crushed them, and fed them to our flock of hens to supply calcium and cut down on the need for oyster shell for the birds. Two of the catalogs I downloaded this morning had covers that made me smile. It's a fun time of year looking at these gardening wish books.
With several seed catalog covers now available, I updated the animated GIF on our Trusted Seed Suppliers page. I really enjoy the cover art the companies use. I also let a couple of good companies I'd had issues with out of the doghouse and returned them to our Others to Consider section of recommended seed suppliers. I've done business with all of the suppliers listed (other than the Canadian ones) at one time or another over the years with mostly satisfactory results. Vendors that screw over customers don't do very well in the competitive garden seed market. And one can always check out new or unknown vendors through the customer comments on Dave's Garden Watchdog.
With temperatures getting into the mid-50s, I got out and pulled our tomato plants and cages today. Even with the warmer temperatures, the T-posts that supported the tomato cages were still pretty well frozen in the ground. Eventually, I'll need to dig them out and store them for the winter. I also have a lot of tomato trash (dead tomatoes and mulch) on the ground that I hope to rake up and compost.
Our planting of hairy winter vetch, visible in the foreground of the photo above, has covered the part of our East Garden plot that was rotated out this season and will be gardened next season. Also shown is a large, working compost pile. An older pile, elsewhere in the field, should be ready next spring. It's dry here despite several recent rain showers. "Our" pond is a bit low. A neighbor's pond is down over two feet. And the creek down the road from us is dry in places where I've never seen it dry before.
"Our" above is in parentheses, as the pond actually isn't on our property. It's adjacent to our land and part of the 1-2 acre area the East Garden sits on that we mow and help maintain. Besides the waterfowl and one of our dogs in the photo at left, you can see how far down the water level in the pond has dropped this season. As my wife, Annie, often says, "We're blessed to live in such a beautiful setting," despite the water problems.
We haven't had a full sized Christmas tree since the last of our children left home. For the last few years, we've used the small, pre-lit tree shown.
I cleared out some first year gloxinia plants that had finished their blooming cycle and pinned the tree between the remaining two trays of gloxinia plants. With a kitten in the house, I'm not sure how long the poor little tree will stay erect.
The seed orders I placed last Wednesday with the Seed Savers Exchange and True Leaf Market both arrived in good shape today. Other than one more onion variety I'd like, I'm pretty well set for planting in January. After getting caught short on good potting soil last winter, I picked up three forty pound bags of Baccto Lite potting mix today at our local garden center. They were out of it last January when I needed to start onions and geraniums.
Having included some zinnia seed with outgoing Christmas cards today, I replenished our stock of it picking lots more seed heads.
Thursday, December 14, 2023 - Tradescantia Zebrina
The cuttings went into a glass of water on our windowsill to put on some water roots. Once they're showing rooting, the cuttings will be treated with Clonex Rooting Gel and go into deep sixpack inserts filled with Sterile Potting Mix. The rooting compound probably isn't necessary, as I've had good luck rooting cuttings in water in the past. When grown a bit, the cuttings will go into large hanging basket pots. Sometime next spring, one of those pots will replace our current window plant, which will go outside to finish its lifespan under our back porch. Zinnia Seed Another small indoor job today was stripping zinnia seed off the seed heads I collected on Monday. Doing so produced a lot more seed than I expected.
We received over a half inch of rain yesterday, bringing our monthly total to just over an inch. The U.S. Drought Monitor now shows our county in the "Severe Drought" classification. Fortunately, our deep well is holding up so far, but we're going to need some serious precipitation to raise the water table over the winter.
Even though we haven't as yet received our paper version of Johnny's Selected Seeds seed catalog, I placed a small order with them on Friday. The tardiness of their catalog arriving will probably cost them some orders, but I needed to get the last of the onion seed we'll start next month ordered and received. Going through print seed catalogs often produces impulse item orders. And somewhat surprisingly to me, we're pretty well done ordering garden seed for next season.
One of the successes of our East Garden plot has been lining one side of it with flowers. While I've used nasturtiums some years, zinnias have performed far better for us, making a showy display mid-summer to fall many years. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before, but I'm now sharing zinnia seed on the Seed Savers Exchange. We had an incredible harvest of zinnia seed this year. The plants are still standing. Although I've offered to let folks pick seed for free, I haven't had any takers as yet. I'll probably take down the last of the plants this month. One of my all time favorite garden photos is the one below of our row of zinnias with our East Garden vegetables mostly hidden and buckwheat in bloom behind it all.
When writing yesterday's posting about sharing zinnia seed, I got quite a surprise. When I tried to access the Grassroots Seed Network site, I got a screen saying, "Whoops, the Grassroots Seed Network marketplace no longer exists here! Unfortunately the Grassroots Seed Network team has decided to close their Sharetribe-powered platform, and it is no longer available." Also unfortunately, the GSN team failed to inform their listers of a change or closing. I wrote a gardening friend that had been involved with forming the seed network, but she hadn't heard anything about it. She referred me to one of GSN's founders, Will Bonsall, but he hasn't responded to my email. All of my other GSN email messages came via the Sharetribe site, so I couldn't contact any of them. I think the Grassroots Seed Network had a good effect on Seed Savers longtime de-emphasis of their members' seed sharing, as they lost a lot of listers to GSN. New leadership at SSE has reversed the de-emphasis of shared seeds, so there is still a place for sharing ones favorite and/or heirloom seeds.
I moved the wandering Jew cuttings I took on Thursday to deep sixpack inserts filled with sterile potting mix. Each cutting got coated with Rooting Gel. Our internet service from Frontier Communications went down again yesterday morning. This time when my wife called them, they said it would be over a week before a service technition would address the problem!
Monday, December 25, 2023 - 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. Best wishes from Annie and I to you for a joyous and fulfilling holiday season.
I thought that I was done ordering until I saw that the excellent Slick Pik Y26 yellow squash variety had been superceded by a new hybrid. Not wanting to lose our favorite yellow squash variety just yet, I ordered a packet of it from Hoss Tools. And while I'd decided to let starting any Red Creole onions go this year, I added a packet of them as well. The short day Red Creoles mature for us as small onions, but two to four weeks before our other varieties. The rest of our onion varieties are all intermediate or long day varieties.
Since I'm not gardening today, I took a few minutes to tally up our most viewed feature and how-to pages over the last year.
Unlike the advice some vets give, our dogs get some leftovers. Since we don't have leash laws in our county, our dogs run free when outside, often eating road kill or parts from a field dressed deer. Last week, they were taking turns on a deer foreleg! So anything we give them is probably healthier than what they find outside, although we have one very fat beagle cross.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor released today still has our county in the "Severe Drought" classification. It's going to take a good bit of precipitation this winter to raise ground water levels and fill depleted creeks, reservoirs, and ponds. Seed Catalogs
We received two seed catalogs in today's mail, both from the same corporation. Jung corporation supplied us with its seed catalog along with the venerable old favorite from R.H. Shumway. During my farming years when Shumway was family owned and located in Illinois, we ordered hog pasture and field corn seed from them. While those days are long over, I still appreciate their catalog with its woodcut drawings of their offerings. The Shumway catalog got my usual cover-to-cover look. On the not so positive side of seed catalog offerings, I placed second orders for catalogs with two companies I've had issues with in the past few years. One was selling old seed that didn't meet federal germination standards. I called them on it, and they admitted they had a problem there. The other was arrogant about getting their seed catalogs out late. While both snuck back into our Others to Consider class on our Recommended Seed Suppliers page this year, both will soon be relegated to our When Hell Freezes Over classification without an adequate response to our catalog requests. I'm guessing that I've been placed on some kind of a black list of theirs. Names? Nope! Denying links to serious offenders is far better punishment than displaying any links to the offenders.
Two more lovely print seed catalogs arrived in today's mail. Due to the tardiness of their arrival, neither the Burpee nor the John Scheepers catalogs will likely produce an order. I did, however, linger a bit over the listings of seedless watermelons and golden beets in the Burpee catalog.
Today's mail contained the order I placed on Tuesday with Hoss Tools for some Slick Pik Y26 yellow squash seed and a packet of Red Creole onion seed. While they don't have a print seed catalog, Hoss Tools offers a lot of good garden seed varieties.
Sunday, December 31, 2023 - New Year's Eve
Our year of harvests began with lots of delicious asparagus in April. May brought us fresh lettuce, more asparagus, spinach, and broccoli. In June, we began a bountiful harvest of our peas seeded in March. Our broccoli planted for seed production burst into bloom, and we got what was probably our best harvest ever of cauliflower. Our overwintered Walla Walla onions were ready for harvest in July. Since the sweet onion variety doesn't store well, I chopped and froze a lot of the onions. The rest of the onions came out a few weeks later as did our garlic. We got some nice beets, but a rather poor harvest of spring carrots. And after some heavy rain early in July, the drought set in. Succession plantings of cucumbers, fall brassicas, carrots planted in July and August got heavily mulched and watered as much as our deep well could support. I did run it dry one day watering green and lima bean rows. And July and August are when our tomatoes begin to come in. Instead of canning whole tomatoes this season, as we had lots left from last year, I canned tomato purée. We also gave away lots of tomatoes, yellow squash, and bell and paprika peppers. We dried and ground lots of paprika. And August produced a small but tasty harvest of sweet corn, the first we've had in a few years. And we canned lots of green beans. Throughout the season, we harvested and dried lots of herbs: paprika, rosemary, thyme, and a ton of oregano. While many folks' gardens are done by October, ours produced butternut squash, fall broccoli and cauliflower. I didn't dig our fall carrots until early November! But we got enough to last us until spring. Our kale got damaged by a frost, but that was okay, as we still have lots of canned Portuguese Kale Soup from last year. I got our garlic planted mid-November. And of course, garden cleanup dominated the month. I still don't have everything cleaned up, but am in pretty good shape for next spring. I've left lots out here. Oh yeah, we saved lots of garden seed this year. Personally, 2023 has been a tough year. My lovely wife lost both of her birth parents. She also retired in June, opening up a whole new chapter in our life together. We shared rounds of Covid and my neck, shoulder, and back injuries persisted, but were actually better than in the last two years. I also lost twenty-five pounds over the season, a testament to the good exercise gardening provides. We thank the Lord for continued time together and wish our readers a healthy and happy new year.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
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I placed our first seed orders for next season this morning. Since we start petunias, onions, and geraniums in January each year, it's important to get orders placed early. The 
It's been and interesting and productive gardening year. That we got some really nice harvests late in a droughty season was surprising.
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