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The Old Guy's Garden Record
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I started a communal pot of Ventura celery yesterday. I plan to seed some rosemary and thyme later today. I'll be starting cauliflower and broccoli this month. The cauliflower will get seeded in a few days and the broccoli towards the end of the month. Even though the varieties have similar days-to-maturity figures, our cauliflower always takes two to three weeks more than the broccoli to put on good heads. I'll also start some snapdragons and a bit of early lettuce. And one more planting is important. Our first planting of geraniums mostly failed. So I'll be seeding the Maverick and Pinto geranium seed I ordered from True Leaf Market on Monday as soon as the seed arrives. Super Bowl LVII comes around on Sunday, February 12, televised at 6:30 PM ET. I'll be laying in supplies for our annual Texas Nachos Super Bowl feast.
I picked up some factory second Carhartt T-shirts this week from Dungarees. I don't see anything wrong with them. For $13 each, it was a good deal, and they're still available.
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If you're new to growing transplants for your garden and flowerbeds, our how-to, Growing Your Own Transplants, might prove helpful. There's an herb table on page three of the how-to of light and temperature requirements for some of the herbs we grow. For folks needing more extensive information on seed starting, I recommend The New Seed Starter's Handbook by the late Nancy Bubel. Our plant rack is pretty well filled right now. But the bottom shelf is filled mostly with gloxinias headed for dormancy. As the plants go dormant, they get moved to a shelf in a darker part of our plant room. Later when things get really crowded on the plant rack, transplants such as sage, geraniums, and brassicas can be moved to a bookshelf with south facing windows in our sunroom. The cooler conditions of the sunroom actually help make the plants a bit sturdier.
I moved our egg carton petunias from under our plant lights to a kitchen window today. I had to separate some cells of Double Cascades where two plants had grown in one cell and re-seed open cells where seed didn't germinate in our Supercascades.
As long as I can keep our new kitten out of the plants (I bought a new squirt gun this week!), they should do well in the window for three or four weeks. Then they'll need to go into fourpack inserts and eventually into hanging baskets for our back porch. Our high temperature this afternoon finally reached 24°F. With winds around 25 MPH, it was a good day to work inside.
We use the ground egg shells when transplanting calcium hungry plants such as tomatoes, peppers, and brassicas. While lime will help prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes and peppers, the egg shell doesn't raise pH levels as lime can do. That's good for the tomatoes. I use an extra coffee grinder for this chore and for grinding various herbs. We have another coffee grinder for coffee. And there's an ancient third grinder for grinding peat moss. Using egg shells to supply calcium isn't my original idea. I read about it somewhere, although they just crunched their egg shells. When I was farming and kept a flock of around 25 laying hens, we stripped out the albumen, dried the egg shells, ground them, and mixed them with the chicken feed, cutting our costs for oyster shell. So preparing egg shells for garden use was easy for me.
Monday, February 6, 2023 - Seeding Geraniums...Again
I'd ordered ten seeds of each variety. One seed packet had eleven seeds in it. That perfectly filled a Perma-Nest tray with twenty-one three inch pots. I'd germinated our seed last time on coffee filters and broke off some of the seedlings when moving them to three inch pots filled with soil. So this time around, I directly seeded on a bit of vermiculite on top of sterile potting mix in the center of each pot. I then dribbled warm water on the seeds to wash them into the vermiculite. The tray went over a soil heating mat set to 75°F and was covered with a clear humidity dome.
I also processed and froze some asparagus seed I'd collected when cleaning up our raised bed of asparagus. Most of the red to brown seed pods had dried out nicely over the month or so since I collected them. It was just a matter of squeezing the pods to get them to release their seeds. Our how-to, Growing Asparagus, gives some tips on starting and maintaining an asparagus patch. I was impressed with the packaging of the geranium seed we received today. It came in foil lined seed packets with the small seed in glassine envelopes. I'd not ordered much of anything from True Leaf Market since their days as Generic Seeds and later Mountain Valley Seed Company. With excellent germination test info proudly displayed on the seed packets, I'm hoping for better results than our last planting of geranium seed. Our mail today also contained our annual copy of Renee's Garden's 2023 Media Kit with a packet of free seed I'll never plant but will find a home at one of the seed libraries we support.
Renee's is one of our affiliated advertisers. So. if you order something through one of our links, we'll get a small commission from the order. A Somewhat Political Statement Since late December, the Politics Monday feature of PBS Newshour with Tamara Keith and Amy Walter has disappeared. Keith has posted something about the segment being "on pause," although she doesn't give much more info. I wrote PBS twice about the situation without any response until last night when I informed them that my contributions to our local PBS and NPR outlets are suspended until I receive an adequate explanation of the segment's cancellation. I got an automated response. If you share my view, you might protest to viewermail@newshour.org. I also informed our two local PBS outlets of my decision. PBS should be more transparent.
Friday, February 10, 2023 - Starting Cauliflower
Our copy of Johnny's Selected Seeds' Seed-Starting Date Calculator suggests seeding cauliflower transplants between February 17 and March 17. My experience with growing cauliflower is that our plants always take a few weeks longer to mature than their similar days-to-maturity brassicas, broccoli. I've often been disappointed when our spring weather suddenly turns hot and our cauliflower yellows and turns bitter. So even if it's a bit early, I started some cauliflower today. Starting the cauliflower this early risks the plants stunting or buttoning from being held too long in their starting quarters. But it's a chance I take as opposed to the cauliflower yellowing and turning bitter from ripening in hot weather.
I seeded eight cells to the dependable Amazing variety, two to Violet of Sicily (also called Purple of Sicily), and two to the Bishop variety that replaced the excellent old Fremont hybrid variety. The seeded sixpacks went into a tray over a soil heating mat set to 77°F and covered with a clear humidome. Cauliflower and most brassicas tend to get leggy immediately after germination if not supplied with good light. Transplanting the plants deeper into the soil can correct this problem, but it's obviously better to give the plants lots of early, close light to prevent the plants from becoming spindly. Our how-to, Growing Great Broccoli and Cauliflower, tells how we grow our brassicas. Starting Geraniums, Round Two
Supper Last Night We feasted upon Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup for supper last night. With just two of us for dinner, I downsized our recipe a bit. I used just half of the listed amount of chicken broth and only a nine ounce package of tortellinis. But instead of halving the rest of the ingredients, I used the full amount. The result was a much richer soup.
Saturday, February 11, 2023 - Trimming Onion Transplants
The goal of repeated trimmings is to end up with sturdy, erect plants about seven or eight inches tall to transplant into the garden in April. We also have a double row of Walla Walla onions planted last September at one end of our main raised garden bed. I got the idea for fall planting onions from an article on the High Mowing Organic Seeds' site, Time to Plant Fall Onions for Overwintering. First Spray for Apple Trees I've been keeping an eye on our extended weather forecast, looking for a warm, dry day without an overnight freeze. Those are requirements for making a first spray of dormant oil on our apple trees. It appears we may have such a day coming up next week.
Dormant oil can smother insects and insect eggs overwintering on or in tree bark.
Sunday, February 12, 2023 - Communal Pots and Uppotting I like to save space under our plant lights by starting fine seeded varieties in communal pots. For tiny seed such as gloxinia, sprinkling the seed across a shallow four inch pot works for us. Communal pots also avoid the disappointment of having empty cells where seed didn't germinate in four or sixpack inserts. And with seed of uncertain viability, one can compensate by spreading a lot of seed. But at some point, all those tiny plants in communal pots have to be moved to larger, individual growing quarters or culled. And then, I have to find space on our now crowded plant rack for the transplanted plants under our plant lights.
Today's uppotting, as I call it, was with a small communal pot of parsley plants. I moved twelve plants into fourpack inserts and found space for them under our plant lights. With the parsley uppotted, I still have communal pots of dianthus, thyme, and rosemary to uppot. And I'll soon be starting our saved Goliath broccoli seed in yet another communal pot. Grant I ran across a garden grant program for schools. I'm a bit perturbed with myself, as I can't seem to remember where I got the info from. But being a senior citizen with variable memory, I did copy the program and its link: Whole Kids Foundation Grant Program. If you have a school garden, this program looks to be legit and possibly worth an application.
So...today I elevated True Leaf Market's rating on our Recommended Seed Suppliers page from Others to Consider to Trusted Suppliers. Besides the excellent germination of their seeds, True Leaf carries seed for the Maverick and Pinto series of geraniums we so like. They also offer the Supercascade and Double Cascade petunia varieties we favor for some of our hanging basket plants. I've not ordered any vegetable seed from them in recent years, so I can't comment on the quality of that seed. But they do have a fairly decent rating on Dave's Garden Watchdog.
It's towards the middle of a row I planted half and half to softneck and hardneck garlic. It's not unusual for garlic to emerge during warm days of winter. Later freezes won't help the garlic leaves much, but they usually don't kill the garlics. Not to be left out, our daffodils along the east side of our house are beginning to put on bloom heads. While pretty frost hardy, the plants can be damaged by a really hard, lasting freeze. Wanting to do something outside on a very nice day today, I fired up our recently serviced lawn mower and mowed down Bonnie's Asparagus Patch. Getting last year's growth off the area helps prevent disease and insect carryover. I also mowed down a nearby patch of daisies. A very late seed catalog arrived in today's mail: Gurney's.
I couldn't waste such a gorgeous day. I decided to work our compost piles. The top layer of our old compost pile had dried in the sun and was easy to screen. I quickly amassed a four cubic foot cartful of good compost. The screenings went onto our working compost pile. But when I started to turn some of the oldest part of the pile, I was pleasantly surprised to find that part of the pile pretty fully digested. The cart of compost went onto our raised asparagus bed. It will need another cartful of compost to get it completely covered at a depth I'd like (about 1" of compost). As you may see in the photo at right, the treated landscape timbers around the asparagus bed haven't held up well. Several sections are totally rotted out and will need to be replaced.
And yes, that's my ancient $1 farm auction wheelbarrow in back of the newer compost pile. The wheelbarrow was very old when I bought it forty years ago! It may well outlast me.
I moved on to uppotting a small communal pot of dianthus plants. They'd mostly put on their first true leaves. I like using dianthus plants in our herb bed and at the edge of our front flowerbeds. At the end of my February 6 posting, I shared A Somewhat Political Statement about PBS cancelling the Politics Monday feature of PBS Newshour with Tamara Keith and Amy Walter. After many email and eventually snail mails to PBS and our local PBS stations, I finally received a typical arrogant elite east coast response to my concerns from Daniel J. Macy, Sr. Associate, Office of the Public Editor, PBS:
Excuse my French, but PBS needs to get their head out of their ass and listen to their supporters! If you agree, why not let PBS and your local PBS/NPR provider know. I've sent snail mails to the leaders of WSIU and WFYI, who provide our PBS television and NPR radio, that our contributions to them will be "on pause," just as Politics Monday is, until the feature returns to the air. How's that for a grumpy, somewhat profane old Senior Gardener? And yes, I was a little drunk and totally pissed off when writing this posting.
It appears that PBS Newshour's Politics Monday segment is permanently "on pause." I was somewhat encouraged that after six weeks, some folks at PBS began answering my email and snail mails.
Posted, Ric! Sadly, after PBS's bad decision followed by them stonewalling any information about the decision for weeks, I have no appetite for watching Newshour. The corporate elites at Newshour have spoken, letting us know that the wishes of mere watchers and listeners matter little to them. So much for "Public" television.
It was an "interesting" end to last week. Thursday morning, I went downstairs to get a load of laundry out of the dryer. The clothes were still wet! When I tried starting the dryer, it was obvious that the belt or chain that turns the dryer drum was off or broken...and impossible for me to access. So...it was off to the laundromat to dry our clothes. Friday was mostly spent shopping for a new washer and dryer. The washer had become impossible to level and hopped across the basement floor when on spin cycle. Of course, both of the units were 15 or 16 years old. Late Saturday afternoon, the new appliances arrived and were installed. Brightening my mood a bit, one last gloxinia has sprung into bloom again, although with some pretty floppy blooms.
I filled the large pot with some Baccto Lite potting mix on the back porch. Since the soil was just above freezing, it got watered with hot water. Once the soil had cooled, I moved the plants to the pot. I've found that a teaspoon is the perfect tool for scooping plants out of egg cartons. The large pot of petunias went onto our dining room table with the blooming gloxinia. I think I'll probably move the petunias to a sunny shelf in our sunroom where they should get more light. Our Double Cascade petunias in another egg carton and the rest of the Supercascades will need to be uppotted in some way very soon. They'll probably go into inserts and back under our plant lights in the basement. And I've already trimmed two more egg cartons for seeding petunia varieties that will go into our garden.
Monday, February 20, 2023 - Spraying
My drive to do an early spray came from the bountiful harvest of yellow apples we got last year. Sadly, I didn't spray them enough, so there was lots of sooty mold to wash off the surface of the apples and lots of buggy spots to cut out. But the apples made some great apple pies and applesauce. This first spray was with straight dormant oil. I hope to follow up in the next few weeks with another dormant oil spray, but with some Fung-onil mixed in. We have trouble with sooty mold on our trees and apples. Hopefully, some fungicide will help prevent that. As the apple trees begin to bud out, I'll blow any pretense of growing organic apples by using Bonide Fruit Tree Spray, a chemical cocktail of the fungicide Captan Compost Again
Before spreading the compost over the bed, I sprinkled some 10-10-10 fertilizer over the bed. Then as I used a rake to spread the compost, the fertilizer got worked into the soil a bit. I had one more gardening job I wanted to do today, but had to put it off for a few days. With our Supercascade and Double Cascade petunias just about ready to be moved from their egg cartons to larger quarters, it's about time to start some petunias for our garden. I'd picked up a packet of Royalty Mixed Colors petunias from a Burpee rack in Walmart. But when I looked and later searched for the packet of our favorite garden petunia, Celebrity, I couldn't find it. So starting the second round of petunias will have to wait until an order for the seed comes in.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023 - Chicken Meatloaf While I had a pretty good sized to-do list for today, I started the day by grinding some chicken tenders. This task was borne of some $1.99 bone in, skin on chicken breasts I picked up on sale at the grocery yesterday. I cut and froze the breast meat and tenders last night and boiled and boned the rest, giving us some chicken and broth to freeze for future use (chicken and noodles/dumplings, Portuguese Kale Soup, Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup). The breast fillets went into our big freezer. The ground chicken got used this morning making chicken meatloaf from a recipe I found on The Spruce Eats. I'd frozen the tenders to make grinding easier, as soft meats don't grind well in our ancient, hand crank meat grinder. While the tenders ground well, it was cold work. I followed the recipe only substituting Italian breadcrumbs for regular ones and leaving out the onion since the breadcrumbs contain onion.
The resulting meatloaf was delicious. This recipe is a keeper.
Today turned out to be another petunia day. After a morning dentist appointment, I found the Celebrity petunia seed I'd ordered on Monday had arrived in the mail in record time. So I set aside other plans and seeded an egg carton each to some Royalty Mixed Colors petunias from a Burpee rack in Walmart and our favorite garden petunia, Celebrity. The seed went onto sterilized potting mix with warm water dripped over the seeds to wash them into the soil and to help melt the pelletization of the Celebrity seeds. They're now under plant lights, as petunias need light for good germination, and over a soil heating mat set to 76°F.
And about that Celebrity seed. It turned out that it came from a company operating under another name that has been on our When Hell Freezes Over list for over ten years. Their offenses? They had incredibly rude customer service and persisted in selling seed treated with neonicotinoids, even after it was found that those chemicals were extremely harmful to honeybees. I'm a little mad at myself for not checking out the vendor name better before ordering. The link earlier in this posting to Celebrity seed is to a more responsible seed vendor. A Facebook posting about hummingbird migration got me looking for current hummingbird migration maps. I found that Hummingbird Central already has a 2023 Hummingbird Spring Migration Map posted. "Our hummingbirds" typically arrive in mid- to late April.
Thursday, February 23, 2023 - Moon and Jupiter Around nine o'clock last evening, I looked out our west facing kitchen window and saw the waxing crescent moon and a small bright spot. I hustled outside with my camera and snapped several shots. Once back inside, I used the free, open source Stellarium astronomy software to identify the smaller bright spot as the planet Jupiter.
With a little fiddling with the controls, Stellarium will show one the sky at various times and dates. Clicking on a bright light reveals the name and info on a star, planet, or constellation.
Garlic Coming Up A lot of our garlics planted on December 2 are breaking the soil surface. That's not unusual during warm winter days, but it's still reassuring to see that we should make a nice crop this summer.
Apple Pie Day After sharing on Monday about our apple harvest, I got a real craving for homemade apple pie. So I bought a bag of Golden Delicious apples and a box of Pillsbury Pie Crusts the next day. I got around to making an apple pie today. Other than using half brown sugar instead of all granulated sugar, I carefully followed Pillsbury's recipe.
The pie was good, but not as good as the ones I made last October. The only difference in the pies were the apples. Apparently fresh apples make a better pie. I guess that's part of why I go to the trouble of maintaining our own apple trees.
Friday, February 24, 2023 - Starting Broccoli I'm getting an early jump on starting our broccoli this year. I hope to transplant our Goliath broccoli in clusters of four plants close together for pollination and seed saving. Broccoli isn't normally self-pollinating, so more than one plant has to be in bloom at the same time for insects to cross pollinate the blooms. If I can get the Goliath broccoli transplanted in early April, I should be able to harvest seed in September or October. Goliath along with Premium Crop were our favorite and most dependable broccoli varieties for years. Then a year before Stokes Seeds left the U.S. retail market, they dropped their unique strain of the broccoli which consistently produced huge main heads and many sideshoots. So...I had seed left and began growing Goliath broccoli for seed saving as well as for fresh use and freezing. I started three deep sixpack inserts (18 cells) of Goliath and another sixpack with four Premium Crop and two Castle Dome broccoli.
The first year I tried saving seed from the variety, I never had more than one plant in bloom at a time. Then in 2019, we had almost a whole row of broccoli plants bloom together. Besides being incredibly productive, Goliath broccoli has proved to be rather pretty when in bloom.
Saturday, February 25, 2023 - Spraying Advice Facebook friend Doris Fish sent me a message with links to Paul Gautschi's YouTube, Controlling scab and other fruit tree diseases. While we haven't had problems with apple scab, his advice on the timing of fungicide sprays was informative and may help us keep our trees clear this year of fungal problems such as sooty mold. Rooting Cuttings
From a PennState Extension document, Apple Rootstocks: Capabilities and Limitations:
Having lost trees in our mini-orchard and yard to fire blight and root rot, this rootstock appeared to be a winner. While the Geneva 222 cuttings were showing some signs of rooting and life, the six cuttings I took from our volunteer apple tree appear to still be dormant. They went back onto the bottom shelf of our refrigerator.
Sunday, February 26, 2023 - Washing Trays and Such
I started scrubbing things pretty much in order of value. Permanest trays now run above $10 each, so they got scrubbed with a brush first before being laid out on the ground to dry. (Note that Amazon and the Greenhouse Megastore appear to have the lowest prices on the trays.) That's seventy plus dollars worth of trays drying on the ground! So you can see why I do this stuff. Standard 1020 trays went next, slightly out of cost order (about two bucks each for the heavy duty ones). After coming inside to warm my hands a bit, I moved on to washing our large collection of hanging basket pots (which run about four bucks each with hangers). Eventually I got around to washing six, four, and three inch pots. Lots of pots! At one point, the wind picked up a bit, but quickly laid back down. This job had to be finished today, as it's supposed to rain with high winds tomorrow.
In 2014, I somehow brought the INSV virus into our plant room. I ended up losing all of our gloxinia plants at that time to the virus. Fortunately, I had lots of saved seed to start over with. But the experience made me very careful about our plant room. I don't bring in purchased plants or gloxinia corms anymore. No plants that have been outside go back into the basement plant room. Some occasionally will go to our sunroom. And all used pots and trays get sterilized somewhat by going through a bleach bath before going back into storage in the plant room.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023 - February Wrap-up
My second seeding of geraniums germinated at 100%!! We now have far more geranium starts than we'll need for our garden, but I'll find a place for them all somewhere. Excited about starting our early peas soon, I checked my supply of Nature's Aid Granular Soil Inoculant yesterday. While I have enough of it left for the early peas, I ordered some more from Hoss Tools for treating the soil for our later plantings of peas and green beans. And I brought in our pea seed from our big freezer in the garage to have them handy for planting. Our current extended weather forecast suggests that tomorrow might be a great day for putting pea seed in the ground. I also brought in our last two packages of frozen peas from last season.
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and the insecticides 
I started rosemary, thyme, geraniums, cauliflower, more petunias, and broccoli this month. Only four of our rosemary seeds germinated. And in moving them to a fourpack, I broke off two of the stems. Fortunately, we still have a jar on our spice shelf filled with rosemary.| Affiliated Advertisers |
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