Busy!

Trying to get everything planted in between work (job 1 and job 2) and the weather has been interesting. Some plants are going out a little too soon, while others will be out a little later than I would prefer, but it is all getting done.

We are eating asparagus, the spring lettuces, and spinach from the garden. Over the weekend I brought in the last of the overwintered Swiss chard and chicory from the garden, partly because it was starting to bolt but mostly because I needed the space for spring planting. We ate some as palak paneer (that Joe made, with a mix of chard and spinach), but there is still more in the fridge.

Many more small plants are now out in the garden, but I still have seedlings in pots. Some of the seedlings still in pots are melons, sunflowers, and cucumbers. These like warmer weather than we are having now, so they are good ones to leave for last.

I am going to visit my Mom in Oklahoma for a few days later in the week, and my family has plans for the lettuce and spinach while I am gone, so I have been outside admiring the patch this morning, in case it is gone when I get back. This is about half of the patch, the part that includes the spinach (which doesn't look this good every year).



The dwarf peas ('Wando') aren't flowering yet, but they should be soon. We never get a lot of peas, but that's fine. I enjoy them anyway. When they are done, another kind of squash will go in their spot.



This is one "hill" of the Raven zucchini. There is another 2-plant patch in a bed closer to the house. That patch looks a lot like this one, still just little, but as the weather warms again later in the week, the plants should start to really grow, especially since we got two inches of rain over the weekend.



Elsewhere in the yard, the comfrey is looking glorious. I love those flowers.



And, the earliest of the thornless blackberries is blooming. These canes were planted just two years ago. Last year, I think we got five berries. It is possible that we will get more this year, because I am seeing hundreds more flowers than I saw last year.

Henderson Bush Limas

When I was a kid, I really did not like lima beans, and I am not sure I like them even now, but I have planted a small patch of Henderson bush lima beans anyway. I have found that other vegetables that I thought I didn't like are actually quite good when they are fresh from the garden, so this year I am giving lima beans a chance.

I chose this variety without doing any research at all. They came from a bin at Ladd's Farm Supply up in Euharlee (outside of Cartersville). When I looked at all the different kinds of limas, Henderson appealed to me because it sounded like it came from someone in particular.

Since then, I've found some recipes in a Greek cookbook (from the library) that use lima beans. I just put the seeds in the ground yesterday, so it will be a while, but I am ready for them, whenever they are ready to be harvested.

I've also spent just a couple of minutes looking for the history of Henderson bush limas. The first bit of information I read is from Victory Seeds:

Henderson's Bush Lima Bean 70 days — It is also known as 'Henderson's Dwarf', 'Henderson's Baby Lima', and 'Earliest Bush Lima'.

It was found by chance along a Lynchburg, Virginia roadside in about 1883. It was grown by a local market gardener and passed along to T. W. Woods & Sons. They grew it for two years and then sold the whole stock to Peter Henderson & Company in 1887. Henderson increased and improved the stock and released it to the public in the spring of 1889.

An old-time favorite used for canning, freezing and dry. The seeds dry to a creamy white. The erect, bushy plants are reliable and set pods until frost. About 75 seeds per ounce.

That sounded good when I read it the first time, and I had no real reason for looking at additional sites listed on the Google search results list, but I did, and this is what I found next, from the April 7, 1947 issue of Life:

[Henderson's] last and biggest introduction was the bush lima, which came out in 1889. Previously all limas were pole beans. They grew up long vines that had to be trained up tall poles which made them a nuisance to farmers. Henderson got the bush-lima seed from a Richmond seedsman who in turn got them from a Negro who had seen a freak Lima-bean plant, only a foot or two high, growing in a field of normal pole beans. Henderson bred a true strain of the bush-Lima seed and completely revolutionized lima-bean growing. Today most limas are bush varieties and the Henderson bush lima is a standard by which competitors still measure their beans. (page 55)

I think it's interesting that neither of the short histories is really complete. Also, the collective story shows that gardeners who notice and save seeds from any unusual plants in the garden can have a big influence on the development of new varieties. It also reminds me that, in 1947, the achievement of Civil Rights still was a long way off. That Negro in the Life story was, most likely, the market gardener who supplied seeds to T. Woods & sons.

Of course, it's possible that there is still more to the story, and that these two pieces of the puzzle aren't quite right. Obviously, I will have to do more research.

Lettuces

The last of the seedling lettuces are ready to go out to the garden. For most varieties, this is way too late to be planting out lettuces in North Georgia, but these are the variety called Slobolt. It can take some serious heat before bolting to bitterness. However, it is not the most tender and delicious lettuce around.



I mentioned Slobolt on the "Gardening in the South East" group at Kitchen Gardeners International, and the organizer of the group (ejmac) said that the lettuce that lasts longest into June for him is Jericho, an Israeli introduction that can stand the heat here but that also has good flavor. Since seeds for that variety are carried by Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, I will probably try it (in a trial next to Slobolt) next spring to see if I like it better.

The spring lettuces that were planted earlier include this one, Marvel of Four Seasons.



I haven't grown Marvel before, and I really like the color. It is supposed to stay fairly unbitter even as it begins to bolt, so I am interested to see whether that is true in my yard. We certainly are having a hot April, so this year makes a good test for the lettuces. Last year it was so rainy in April, then cool through most of May, that almost any lettuce would have done pretty well here.

The other spring lettuce that I'm growing this year is the variety Capitan.



It is classically green, and it is one of those tender and buttery bib lettuces. In another week or so I will begin using leaves from both Capitan and Marvel in salads, but I am still trying to use up the winter-grown oak leaf lettuces. An overabundance of lettuce is not exactly a problem, but the midribs of those are getting bitter, so we will be having huge salads with supper for the next few days.

I have always grown lettuces with the thought that I want to be able to harvest enough to make a whole salad right from the yard. One friend, though, takes a different approach that allows her to grow and use garden lettuces and other salad greens right through the summer.

She grows a whole bed of those "mesclun mixes" and harvests the leaves when they are no more than about two and a half inches long, then adds those to lettuce that she has bought. The baby leaves give more flavor (and probably vitamins and minerals) to the salad. This is an approach that I have not even considered trying before, but now I am going to think about it...

Tomato Varieties

Seedlings I've started in the house are doing well so far. Nothing looks too leggy and I haven't seen any critters on them yet (some years there is a whitefly problem). The tomatoes are taller than everything else, but that is normal.





Someone asked me this week what tomato varieties I grow. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t simple, because I grow some different varieties every year. However, I do grow Rutgers and/or Better Boy (usually both) every year alongside other varieties because I know they will do well in my yard, regardless of the weather.

They are both disease resistant and productive, and should be equally successful in other gardens in this area. I can’t say how they would do in other parts of the country, though, in different climate and soil conditions and with different disease pressures.

Anyone in this area (North Georgia) who is new to gardening and planning to buy just a few plants to get started should look for varieties that are disease resistant. Those will have the letters “VFN” and possibly more letters and numbers somewhere on the label. The VFN tag is very important, because the problems they stand for (Verticillium Wilt, Fusarium Wilt, and Root Knot Nematode) are commonly present in soils across the whole region. Using disease resistant plants improves the odds of garden success.

I have grown a lot of different varieties over the years, almost all starting from seed, with varied results. Here’s the list:

Brandywine—the tomato that so many people love, dies in my yard.
Mr. Stripey—dies in my yard.
Glacier—dies in my yard.
Dad’s Sunset—dies in my yard.
Riesentraube—survived in my yard the one year I grew it, but the tomatoes tasted like sugar water (I won’t grow it again).
Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter “VFN”—did well in the drought years, but keeled over, from Verticillium Wilt I think, in last year’s spring deluge (I won’t grow it again).
Heatwave—I planted this one year as part of the later batch that goes in where and when the onions and garlic come out. The Rutgers that I planted at the same time were more productive and tasted a LOT better (I won’t grow it again).
Rutgers—the determinate, meaty canning tomato that I plant almost every year; it is productive and tasty, but most of the tomatoes come at once, so it needs to be accompanied by a longer-producing indeterminate type to make sure tomatoes keep coming in all season.
Roma—widely available paste-type tomato that does well in my yard; I’ve grown it in many different years, but last year replaced it with another paste variety.
Wuhib—paste variety that I grew for the first time last year. It did well in the crazy rains, and I will be growing it again this year. More productive than Roma.
Cherokee Purple—I grew this for the first time last year; it produced well in the crazy rains and was incredibly flavorful. I am growing it again this year. Indeterminate type.
Amish—I grew this for the first time last year. It was not especially productive, but it survived in my yard, the fruits were attractive (yellow with pink swirls), and the flavor was incredible. I am growing it again this year. Indeterminate type.
Gardener’s Delight—a cherry type. This lived in my yard, but the tomatoes all cracked before they were fully ripe (I won’t grow it again).
Sweet 100 and its even more productive relatives—cherry type that has done well in my yard in many different years. Productive and tasty.
Better Boy—widely available indeterminate big tomato that has done well in my yard in many different years. I usually just buy one or two of these at a store instead of growing my own from seed.
Costoluto Genovese—the first few years I grew these, they were from one seed packet from a source that went out of business before I could order more, but I had loved these tomatoes. A few years later, I ordered some from another source, but they were not the same; the fruits were less flattened, less lobed and less tasty. I am trying again this year, with seed from a different source. Indeterminate.
Arkansas Traveler—pink tomato that does well in my yard. Indeterminate. I will be growing this again, but not this year.
Winter Red Hybrid (Burpee)—a long-keeper type that I usually plant in late June. Does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and performs well in my yard. However, this year I am trying a different (non-hybrid) long-keeper called ‘Yellow Out, Red In. ‘
Matt’s Wild Cherry—cherry type that produces a whole lot of very small red tomatoes on a very indeterminate plant; the branches reach about ten feet long by the end of the summer, so it isn’t the ideal plant for a small space, but the flavor of the little fruits is excellent.
Yellow Marble—cherry type that I tried for the first time last year (the seed packet was given to me for free); the fruits were too tart, but the plant was in a container, which could have affected the flavor, so this year I am going to put one in the ground to see how it does, both in terms of survival and flavor.

I’ve probably grown more varieties than are on this list, but these are the varieties for which I have records.

Other varieties grown with great success by friends in this area: Early Girl, Celebrity, and Park’s Whopper.

Tomatoes I am growing this year: Rutgers, Cherokee Purple, Amish, Costoluto Genovese, Chinese, Yellow Marble, Olivette (cherry type), and Yellow Out Red In.

If there is space left after these are planted, I will add one or two Better Boy plants.

Soil Temperature

Joe and I went on a walk with the Mushroom Club of Georgia on Saturday. This should be prime morel time. However, people in the group who've been mushrooming for long enough to have "usual places" to check for morels have been checking, and not found any. We were lucky, though, and found a few White Morels (a new species for the group!) on our walk.



One woman in the group had brought a digital meat thermometer, the kind you can get at a grocery store, and stuck it in the ground to check the soil temperature. The thermometer showed a reading of 55 degrees F, which is near the lower end of the range for morel season (which come up in the range 53-60 degrees), but still should be a good temperature.

I had never thought of getting a regular food thermometer for checking soil temperatures, but it seemed to work just fine! This would be useful for gardeners, too. We've had a cold winter, with fewer than usual warm days between the cold ones, and many spring flowers have been slow to come up. I have thought that the soil was just too cool to trigger their emergence.

This year, soil temperature might be a more useful tool than the calendar in deciding when to plant seeds!

Arizona Cooperative Extension has published a chart showing ideal temperatures for germination of many garden crops. Although many will germinate below 55 degrees, the ideal temperature for germination of many crops is 75 to 85 degrees. I don't think, though, that I'm going to wait for the soil to get quite that warm.

The average date of our last frost is the 15th, but I usually wait to plant the summer crops until the 20th, when I am really sure that there is no more danger of frost. This year, I might also go get a thermometer and check the soil temperature, too, to make sure that it is absolutely a good time to plant, before putting the summer crops in the ground.

A Gardening Story

I gave another “how to” talk on veggie gardening last night at the church of one of my friends, but I wasn’t the only speaker for the evening. The guy who followed me is a widower whose mother-in-law just celebrated her 101st birthday. My talk was pretty much about the nuts-&-bolts of gardening here in Georgia, so his talk was a great choice to follow mine.

He told about his own garden and about why he gardens: he just loves it!

He plants a very large garden and gives most of what he grows away. His green beans are State half-runners; he plants an eighty-foot row and has them climb up wire fencing. He cans many, many quarts of those beans every year.

He plants sixty tomato plants each year (all Park’s Whopper), but has never canned a single tomato. What he and his family don’t eat fresh, he gives away. He doesn’t even eat cucumbers, but he grows them, and he gives those away, too.

He told a couple of stories about gardening, and one story was from his childhood. Apparently, his father had a big garden, and the sons did a lot of the work in it when they were big enough. One hot, sunny day, the boys were sent out with hoes to clear out the weeds. They were told that their father would come get them in about an hour and a half.

The boys took off their shirts to work, but it was still a hot day, and the work was hard. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. After a while, a bird flew by and dropped a load down the back of one of the brothers. That brother dropped his hoe and said, “it’s raining. Time to get back to the house.”

That last bit made me chuckle, but there was more. It turns out that that particular brother has never planted a garden of his own in all his life.

It is interesting that people have such different reactions to childhood gardening. The one brother, the man giving the talk, developed a real love of gardening, and has kept on planting, tending, and harvesting his whole life. Another brother hated it, and never wanted to have anything to do with gardening ever again.

When I was growing up, my family didn’t have a garden. Sometimes when I talk with gardeners who remember working alongside parents or grandparents out in the garden, I feel a little twinge of envy. That history seems so wonderful, and I don’t have that. But after hearing the story, I’m not sure that the lack of childhood garden memories is such a loss.

My Friend Susan's Upcoming Talk

My friend Susan, the leader of the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry project for which I am a volunteer, is giving a Vegetable Gardening talk Saturday, starting at 10:00 a.m., at McFarlane Nature Park (280 Farm Road, Marietta, GA---off Paper Mill Road, near Johnson Ferry Rd).

Anyone in the area who is new to growing food or who has questions about growing food would probably enjoy Susan's talk. She loves growing food and knows a lot about gardening in this area!

Broccoli, beets, and boron

(An updated version of this post about the micronutrient boron is on my new website, Small Garden News. The update was made in 2019.)

In this area, when a garden’s soil test results come back from UGA, near the end of the report, in tiny print, is a note about adding boron to the soil for broccoli and beets. The recommendation is for 1 tablespoon of boron per 100 feet of row, or per 100 square feet.

Boron, an essential micronutrient for plant growth, tends to leach out of soils that receive a lot of rainfall, and the metro-Atlanta area usually (drought years excepted) gets at least 50 inches of rain each year. That counts as a lot.

The good news is that organic matter helps hold boron -- and other nutrients -- in the soil. This means that gardens to which organic matter has been added routinely are less likely to be deficient.

However, some plants need more Boron than others. Broccoli and beets are two that need more, but the Boron page of the Agronomic Library for Spectrum Analytics has a longer list of high-boron users, referred to as "high response crops," and the list includes other root vegetables in addition to home-garden staples like lettuce and corn. The page also includes a table of deficiency symptoms that might help a gardener figure out whether low boron is a problem in his or her garden.

I’m thinking about this now because I planted the carrot and beet seeds yesterday. Both are on the “high response crops” list, so I will be adding some to their space tomorrow (it is raining today).

Boron isn’t present in the usual NPK fertilizer formulations (which I will not be using again anyway), but it is available in the laundry-soap aisles of many grocery stores, as 20 Mule Team Borax. I never plant as much as 100 square feet of any one crop, so I adjust the amount of borax to match the approximate square footage that I’ve planted.

I usually add the borax to a full watering can and try to move the can smoothly over the planted area for even dispersal. It is also possible to just sprinkle the dry powder over the area, but any wind makes even distribution less likely.

I only add boron to the areas that are planted with “high response crops" each year, rather than the entire garden, because I don’t want to add too much. The problem with micronutrients is right in their category name, the prefix “micro.” They are useful only when present in very small amounts. Too much is as big a problem as too little, and getting rid of what’s already been added is much harder than adding more.

Compost is fleeting...

...but produce stickers are forever. I was scooping compost into my wheelbarrow, to use in the lettuce and spinach bed that I was getting ready to plant, when I saw (yet another) produce sticker.



I find these in my garden, too. Someday in the far-off future, an archeologist is going to stumble across the site of my garden and find this record of my family's produce-purchases. It will be quite a find, I'm sure.

The good news is that, while I was out working in the garden, I noticed that some of the peas managed to survive their too-early planting. There are spaces I will need to fill in with more peas, but I won't have to replant every last one.



The weather is beautiful today--67 degrees F and sunny. More of the same is forecast for tomorrow!

A Gardening Friend

This afternoon I stopped by the house of the Tomato Man in Kennesaw with a bag of potting soil. He had given me some Amish tomato plants last year, and I wanted to make sure I was on his list for this year, too. He seemed surprised that I brought potting soil, but I think he appreciated it.

He and his wife invited me in for a visit, and while he was looking for an article about growing tomatoes that he wanted to show me, his wife told me a story from her childhood. She was born in Kansas, but her father was in the military and they were moved to California when she was small. The aunt that she lived with when he got assigned out of the country (after Pearl Harbor) grew and canned peaches and apricots.

When Mrs. Tomato Man was a girl, she always pulled apricots apart into halves before eating them, and one day a friend asked why she did that. She said that it was because that's what her aunt did. One day when she and her friend were eating apricots, her friend bit into a whole one that turned out to be full of ants.

When the Tomato Man got back with his article, he handed it to me but then started to tell me his favorite part: Tomatoes were at one time (a very long time ago) thought to be poisonous; they are, after all, in the same family as the deadly nightshade, which can actually kill people if they eat it. But back in about 1830, a guy named Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, who according to the article is kind of the Cool Hand Luke of tomatoes, took a dare to eat a whole basket of tomatoes. Everybody figured he'd be dead at the first one, but he lived.

The Tomato Man made sure that I knew all the basics about tomatoes before I left, which was very sweet. I am incredibly fortunate to have struck up that conversation with him at the local Home Depot last year when we were both perusing the seed racks. If I hadn't, I would have missed making two friends.

And, I am extra-glad I stopped by early because it turns out that this year his garden is going to be much smaller. He has been retired for a long time. He was in the aerospace industry, designing parts for fighter jets. One jet in particular was for the Korean War, which is a clue to his age. Last year, his usual garden was just too much work.

This really firms up my commitment to save seeds from the garden this year. If I don't, this particular strain that has been grown locally for a couple of decades might be lost.

I asked where he got the seeds for his Amish tomatoes originally, and he said that he ordered them from a catalog. He didn't remember which one, but he did remember that the description said they were the only tomato grown by the Amish families in one particular area. The description also said that the Amish saved seeds for it every year, which is how he got the idea that he could save the seeds, too.

The plants produce tomatoes that are large, meaty, tasty, and multicolored. One plant can produce some tomatoes that are all pink, some that are all yellow, and some that are striped or swirled (both pink and yellow). Like many heirloom tomatoes, they aren't prolific producers (think Brandywine), but they are well worth my effort.

Planting Schedule Update

My Louisiana sister sent a link to an Old Farmers Almanac web-page that can create a planting calendar by zipcode. The page linked above is for the planting calendar for Marietta (not my town, but the one that the Almanac found). I was happy to see that, for the most part, the OFA agrees with my own standard schedule for most garden plants.

One big exception is potatoes; the OFA lists an April (!) planting date. I use an early-to-mid-March (depending on the weather) planting date for potatoes, and I am not alone in this.

One late February when I was up at Ladd's Farm Supply, I was talking with an old guy, one of the guys who has been growing food for decades in a huge enough garden that it needs a small tractor, who had already prepared rows for his potatoes and was planning to plant them when he got home that day. I remember feeling like a lazy-bones in comparison!

This year it has been so cold that the daffodils are almost a month late in blooming, so the April planting date might not be too far off for this year, but most years planting that late will leave potatoes trying to mature in the heat of July. That just doesn't seem right to me.

The OFA did have some other good news for me, though. It turns out that most of my already planned planting dates are also the ones recommended for people who are planting "by the moon." I know people for whom this is important--they say it really does make a difference, and I am ready to take all the help I can get.

Fertilizer News

Last week a link to Tom Philpott’s article “New research: synthetic nitrogen destroys soil carbon, undermines soil health” showed up on Energy Bulletin, one of my favorite news sites. The article was originally published in Grist.

The article’s title pretty much says it all: a couple of recent (2007, 2009) studies by soil scientists working in Illinois (and a 2009 study by soil scientists in Iowa) support what some very old sources — published before WWII— had claimed, that use of synthetic fertilizers is bad for soil. What’s bad is that the readily available nitrogen speeds up growth of soil bacteria and fungi; as they grow, they do their usual job of decomposing organic matter more quickly, which results in soil with lower organic matter content.

It has been thought that agricultural soils on which plant debris had been left and then turned under would serve as storage for carbon, which could help mitigate climate change, but the new studies suggest that the industrial farms that rely on synthetic fertilizers are not going to be useful as carbon sinks.

In addition, soils that are lower in organic matter drain less well, hold less moisture, hold nutrients less well, and have lowered numbers of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. As the spaces normally held open by organic matter in the soil close because of the loss of that organic matter, the soil compacts and air is squeezed out. Roots need those air pockets, and so do many members of the community of micro- (and not so micro-) organisms that live in the soil.

I’m writing about this for a couple of reasons. The first is that not everyone who reads my blog reads the same websites that I do, so they might have missed this news. The other is that I had just about decided to save some money this year by using some synthetic fertilizer on my veggies. Obviously, I am going to have to change that plan (back to the cotton-seed meal, kelp meal, etc).

I would say that “Ignorance [was] bliss,” but I am glad to be able to avoid harming my garden’s soil. I may have to drive back out to that horse farm for another load of manure, though.

NOTE: The article discussed here is one in a series posted on Grist about soil nitrogen. Tom Philpott has written them all.