A Day's Harvest

This is most of what I brought in from the garden yesterday. The cucumbers include both Straight Nine salad cukes and Littleleaf Pickling cukes. The squash is a trombocino. It will feature in more than one meal, because it is a lot of squash. (For reference, the veggies are in my biggest dough bowl; it is more than two feet long.) Surprisingly, we are still getting to pick blueberries. I am bringing in a quart or two each day. There were several birds out picking with me this morning, so that may end soon, but I am very happy to continue putting these into the freezer, the dehydrator, and our stomachs!



The Alabama Black pole beans have not been especially productive, but that may change as we have had cooler weather recently (low 90s rather than high 90s). I hope that's the case, because a rabbit ate all my bush bean plants down to the stems.
I picked the hot peppers, that Joe put in the smoker with a chicken, later in the day, so they didn't make it into the official Harvest Photograph. Smoking the hot peppers is one way to save them for the winter; we use them like chipotles (which, I guess, they are).



I am growing two kinds of little yellow tomatoes this year. The Yellow Marble are the size shape, and approximate flavor of regular cherry tomatoes. They started producing EARLY and show no signs of stopping. I have been taking these in my lunchbox to work every day, and I'm not tired of them yet.

The other little yellow tomato is Olivette Jeune (possibly misspelled). This is like a little Roma tomato: same shape, thick walls, low "juice" content. These were late in starting up production, but they are making up for it now. The plant (I have only one), pictured below, is covered with tomatoes. They've been especially good in salsa, but they have a surprisingly short "counter" life; they start to turn mushy within a few days after harvest, so they need to be eaten or processed as soon as possible.



The squash patch is still healthy and has several more smaller squash coming along. I've had to tear some patches of squash-bug-eggs from the leaves, but otherwise it is problem-free.



The lima beans are also still doing fine. The picture shows the funny flat pods.



The Jimmy Nardello peppers are finally starting to turn red. When they do, they become more sweet than any other pepper I've grown, so I have been just as patient as I can in letting them stay on the plants. However, I will get to harvest these, soon!

Two Good Questions

I gave a talk last night at the East Cobb Library; the topic was "Planning a Fall Garden." I am lucky that I get asked to give these talks, because I get to meet more gardeners!

The group that attended asked a lot of good questions, but two particular questions I had never been asked before.

I don't remember the wording of the first one exactly, but it was, essentially, "which of these fall garden crops grows up to be tall?"

This was from a gardener who was being very careful to plant his small garden with the taller plants along the north edge, so they wouldn't shade everything else. He was trying to maximize the sun exposure of his plants.

I looked down the planting guide that I had created and realized that all the plants on my list were short! If I had put Brussels' sprouts on the list, they would have counted as tall, but everything except the broccoli was to be harvested as a leafy green plant that had leaves coming from around the base. Examples from the list: lettuce, cabbage, Swiss chard, kale, collards, beets, turnips, radishes. All short and bunchy!

Another great question was "how much of one plant (of arugula or lettuce, for example) can I harvest at one time?" I'd never thought consciously about it; instead, I have just worked "by feel." I would say that I usually don't harvest more than a quarter of a head of leaf lettuce at one time, and never more than half of the leaves from any one spinach plant, so 1/4 to 1/2 the plant was my answer.

Out of Chaos...

Today's harvest (not including the blueberries):



It never ceases to amaze me, that in the jungle of growth that comes out of the seeds and wee plants that are set out in April and May, we get actual food. The melons look as though they have swallowed up the whole bed that they inhabit, except for the corn sticking up at the end, but, believe it or not, there are pepper plants in there, loaded with peppers, and okra plants (Cajun Jewel) that have begun to give us okra.



This is the popcorn from another angle; it is starting to make ears! I am very happy with the prospect of more popcorn from the yard! To the right is a trellis (you can just see one end of it) on which three different food plants are growing: salad cucumbers, green beans, and Malabar spinach.



This is one of the cucumbers, poking through a space in the trellis:



This flower is half of why I grow okra. It's beautiful!



And the crazy vines that yield the trombocino squash are starting to make good on their promise: squash are forming! These are tougher than zucchini, but make an acceptable substitute when the squash vine borers have felled all the zucchini plants. The solid stems of this different species (C. moschata instead of C. pepo) are resistant to the borers, so these plants keep making squash all summer long.

Rust in the Garden

One of the great things about working at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, besides getting to hang out with a cool bunch of gardeners, is that it adds a lot to my gardening experience. This week, it added "bean rust" to the list of plant diseases with which I am now familiar.

This is what bean rust looks like on the top of a leaf:



And this is what it looks like on the underside of a leaf:



This bean variety is State Half Runner. The poor plants were already beset with Mexican bean beetles, but this is, potentially, worse.

I had brought my copy of Ellis and Bradley's Organic Gardeners Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control with me on Wednesday morning (our usual work time) to look up what was wrong with our cucumbers (another post...). It definitely came in handy! Photos on page 34 made the problem easy to identify, and this is what the book says:

As this fungal disease progresses, leaves turn yellow and drop. Spots also appear on pods and stems. . . Rust usually develops in late summer. To control, spray sulfur as soon as you see indications of the disease. Plant cultivars that are rust-tolerant, such as 'Burpee Stringless,' 'Kentucky Wonder,' 'Roma,' 'Spurt,' and 'Sungold,' to prevent problems.

After reading this, we looked up sulfur in the index, to learn more:

Sulfur is probably the most commonly used organic fungicide, although plain sulfur is more a protective measure than a control. Sulfur doesn't kill fungal spores, but it does prevent them from germinating on the plant surface. Another useful control is lime-sulfur, which can kill recently germinated disease spores. (page 348)

And then we found this:

A severe limitation to the use of sulfur is the foliar damage it causes in hot weather. (page 369)

In essence, we have a problem. If the rust progresses - and in this hot weather it will - the plants could lose all their leaves, which would definitely impair production. If we use a sulfur spray, the leaves could become damaged in this hot weather, which would impair the plants' production. It's almost one of those "danged if you do and danged if you don't" situations. Our fearless leader, however, has decided to try the sulfur.

Small Fruits

A great thing about this time of year is that we have plenty of fruit to eat without going to the store. This quart container heaped with (mostly) blueberries, Yellow Marble cherry tomatoes, blackberries, and three tiny plums is from this evening's walk through the yard after work.



In the last two-to-three weeks, we have had berries made into syrup for pancakes, berries by the handful as snacks throughout the day, berries packed into little containers for the freezer, and berries in the dehydrator to use like raisins in recipes later in the year. I take little yellow tomatoes in my lunchbox to eat at work. I am guessing that, currently, none of us is in danger of developing scurvy.

Progress of My Melon Experiment

Anyone who has been reading along may remember that this is the year I am beginning the process of dehybridizing my favorite melon, Sugar Nut Hybrid. The first step is just to pollinate the female flowers with male flowers from the same variety and save the seeds from that first "cross" to plant next year.

In other words, this is the easy year. I almost made it harder for myself than it needed to be, because I am growing other varieties of melons in the same garden patch. The good news is that I was (at the last minute) smart enough to start the Sugar Nut melon plants almost five weeks earlier than the other melons.

This means that instead of working to isolate the female flowers by taping them shut or covering them in some way to keep pollen from the other varieties of melons away, and then hand pollinating the Sugar Nut melon flowers, I just need to be careful to save seeds from the first few melons out of the garden.

In essence, the flowers were isolated by time, rather than with physical barriers.

The first melons are coming along nicely. They take a long time to ripen, though, so if will be awhile before I have seeds to save.






Next year, the real work of selection for "the perfect melon for my yard" really begins. Wish me luck!

Update in Pictures

It's been awhile since I walked around the yard with the camera, so that's what I did today. I missed some areas of the garden, but this is part of what's going on:

The key-lime tree that spends the winter indoors snagging us all on its insanely long thorns is doing a good job of making limes this year. If all goes well, a couple of these will go into a celebratory Gin & Tonic in August, when they begin to ripen.



In a few days, this could be the first cucumber of the season to make it into the kitchen. This variety is Straight Nine (not eight!).



These flower buds should be okra in the frying pan in just a couple of weeks. Joe has been asking when the okra will be ready, so I am glad to see that these are making good progress. This is the dwarf variety Cajun Jewel that I usually grow, rather than an experimental "short" variety that could shoot up eight or more feet like Louisiana Short did last year.



This pepper, Feherezon, is a new variety for my garden. We have eaten quite a few of these already. I can state with confidence that they are good on the grill when stuffed with that Mexican crumbling cheese.



The popcorn has passed the "yummy to bunnies and crows" stage and is looking healthy. Last year, a patch just about the same size made more than a quart of dried popcorn, and we had a lot of fun popping and eating it over the winter. I hope this year's patch is as productive! It is the same variety, from the same seed packet -- Dakota Black.



This tomato, Wuhib, was productive and good last year. It looks as though it will be at least as productive this year. This is a big cluster of tomatoes!



The earliest clusters of Wuhib are turning red. We will be able to use these in cooking in the next few days. This means no more canned tomatoes for the summer!



The zucchini plants have been "done in" by the squash vine borers, but we will have more zucchini-like squash in a few weeks. This is a baby trombocino/zucchetta squash. When it and all its siblings are bigger, they will taste and look a lot like zucchini, but will hold up to long cooking better.



These are yellow marble cherry tomatoes and some ground cherries. I've never grown ground cherries before, so they represent one of my "adventures in gardening" for this summer. I've eaten wild ground cherries; they grow in Oklahoma (where I tried them first) and here in Georgia, as weeds, but these taste better.

Beating Up the Tomatoes

A couple of people have asked me recently why their beautifully big, green, and healthy tomato plants have no flowers and fruits. It is perfectly understandable that they would be confused, because anyone would expect that a healthy plant would be a productive plant. Weirdly enough, it is possible for a plant to be too "green."

Usually, a plant (the kind from which we expect fruit) that is all lush green leaves and stems with no flowers and fruits is getting too much nitrogen.

I heard the N-P-K combination in commercial fertilizers explained once as Up-Down-All Around. The nitrogen (N) is for top growth (Up), the phosphorus (P) is for root growth (Down), and the potassium (K) is for "all around" growth. That is an over-simplification of what the nutrients do, but it gets the basic point across and is easy to remember. And what it helps us know is that, somehow, those lush tomato plants have had access to too much nitrogen.

There is no easy way to get those plants to make tomatoes that I am aware of. Eventually, given enough time, the nitrogen will become less abundant in the soil and the plants will flower. However, it could take many weeks of waiting, depending on how much fertilizer was accidentally used on the plants.

My step-dad Grandpa Bill, though, has said that such plants can be stressed to get them to flower. Grandpa Bill is in his 80s and has been gardening in Oklahoma for his entire life, so he knows quite a bit about gardening. He says that one way to stress those plants is to just "whump 'em." A hail storm can do this for you, and if you are in Oklahoma, hail storms are common enough that a gardener with too-lush tomato plants can just wait for one.

When no hail has been forecast, he has known farmers and gardeners to actually whack the plants with sticks, to get them bruised enough that they have to use up a bunch of nitrogen in tissue repair. In a week or two, the plants start to flower.

I have never had the problem of too-lush tomato plants, so I have not yet had the experience of beating up my tomato plants, but I would really like to see this personally.

Another, less weird way to stress the plants might be to do some pruning. The plants would then use up nitrogen in the new growth that they would put out to replace what was lost.

It's an interesting problem.

An "Alliums" Harvest

I harvested most of the regular onions, multiplying onions, and garlic -- plants that are all in the Allium genus -- over the weekend. The job was an aromatic one! I am lucky that the house has a shaded front porch; I can leave them all outside on trays to dry for a while.

There aren't as many onions as usual this year, because I had given more room to the garlic. They came out pretty well, though, and we will be eating these for a couple of months.



I had also planted some little bulbs from the multiplying onions (sometimes called "potato onions" though I don't know why), and these made more little onions. Every year I debate whether to replant these -- using the little onions in the kitchen is a bit of a hassle -- but every year I plant a few that I have saved from the summer's harvest. Even though they are a hassle, they are free!



The tray in the center of the photo below holds the harvest from some grocery store garlic that I had planted. Originally, this is all I had planned to plant, and it would be enough to last until about Thanksgiving. The bulbs need to dry for several weeks before use, to let the skins dry enough to easily peel away from the cloves, so it really represents about four month's worth for my family.

Then, a friend wanted to try some different garlics, but her garden space is even more limited than mine, so we agreed to split a "starter pack" of different garlics.

The tray on the left holds the variety Inchelium Red; the tray on the right holds the Polish White. I didn't have as many little cloves of the Polish White as the other kinds, so I didn't expect to have as much of a harvest from that variety, but it is interesting that the bulbs are so much smaller than for the other varieties. This is something to remember for my yard!



The bulbs that I harvested are all soft-neck varieties of garlic. There are also some hard-neck garlics out in the garden, the variety Chesnock Red and the one heirloom bulb from Rabun County, Ga. The leaves on these are still green, rather than the shades of tan and brown that the other garlics had all been turning, so I left them to mature a while longer.



The hard-neck varieties form scapes, which are the parts that usually flower and set seed. In the picture above, they are the curved bits at the top. I have read that these are edible, and I decided to find out for myself just how edible they were. I trimmed off the scapes to saute in olive oil to serve on pasta with peas and grated parmesan cheese. The scapes made the olive oil nicely garlicky, and the bulbous ends of the scapes, the part where the flowers were forming inside, were good to eat, but the long pointy ends were tough.

When you have a garden, every day is an adventure!

Tomato Update

We ate the first tomatoes of the season last night, with the first zucchini and peppers, but I think we might have cheated. One of the tomato plants that set a lot of early fruit had leaves that turned yellow and then wilted. A lot of leaves. Most of the leaves on the plant, in fact. So, I pulled up the plant and put it in the garbage and brought the green tomatoes into the house.

The two tomatoes in the picture above are from that plant, which was a Red Chinese. Apparently, this particular variety is NOT resistant to verticillium wilt. I have replaced that plant with a gift from a friend, a tomato of the variety Eva Purple Ball (thanks Susan!). However, there is another Red Chinese out in the garden, and it isn't looking as robustly healthy as its neighbors in the tomato bed. It will probably need to be replaced soon, too.

The good news is that it isn't too late to replace a tomato plant!

Other tomato news: the first two little tomatoes on the Yellow Marble tomato plant were ripe today, and we ate them. Last year, I grew this variety in a pot that was filled with MiracleGro potting soil, and the tomatoes were very tart. I wondered about the effect of the soil on flavor, so this year I planted one of these in the ground. This year the Yellow Marble tomatoes taste like cherry tomatoes, and they aren't too tart! This, to me, is an interesting finding.

Just an Update

There's a lot going on in the yard, but it isn't all edible. These flowers are wonderfully huge, and if you get close enough to try to smell them, the red pollen from the anthers gets all over your face. The flowers come in orange,



and yellow,



and in a purpley-pink that we didn't get a picture of. Some of the floral action, though, is edible, like the flowers on this dill:



It would be really great if the cucumbers were ready now, but they aren't even close. I am going to have to hope that some of the dill that is further behind in its development will hang back long enough for me to use it in pickles with the cucumbers.

Also making good progress right now are the peppers. The next picture down shows the Czech Black, the peppers that I am growing as a jalepeno substitute. According to the information I read, these are supposed to have good, jalepeno-like flavor but also have a bit less heat.

It isn't that I'm a total pepper wimp, and Joe grew up in South Texas so he can eat some pretty hot peppers, but last year's jalepenos were too spicy to even think about eating. That wasn't the first year that our jalepenos have been blazingly hot, so I am trying these in the hope that we can actually eat all the peppers we grow.



Another crop coming along nicely is thezucchini. We never get the huge crops that people complain about up north, but it looks as though we will get enough for several meals before the squash vine borers kill the plants.



While we were out in the yard, one of the neighborhood kids from the group of friends we refer to as the "little rascals" saw the camera and wanted to try it out. Joe showed him how to use it, and he did such a great job taking a picture of us that I am posting the result:

A Too Wet Garden

At the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden (PAR) this morning, we had planned to plant the sweet potatoes. The ground was pretty wet, though, like it had been last week, so we decided, after forking up the soil a bit to try to get some air into it, that we would wait yet another week (the slips have been ready to plant for three weeks now).

We looked around at other parts of the garden, and some are doing really well. The summer squashes look good, some of beans (both pole and bush) look good, too, but other beans still haven't come up, and there are holes in the lines of okra where seeds haven't seemed to germinate. The melons haven't all come up, either, and it's been long enough that it is a safe bet they aren't going to.

Even worse, the tomatoes looked miserable. They had looked almost as bad last week, but this week more are dead. We decided to dig one up to try to figure out what was wrong. We started by lifting off one tomato cage and pulling the leaf mulch back from the plant, and this is what we saw:





It turns out that most of the tomato plants were drowning. Luckily, one of our gardeners had her camera handy, and she took pictures so we could show the gardeners who hadn't been able to come to the garden (thanks Gloria!).

The PAR garden has a new irrigation system, installed on Earth Day (for free!), but it apparently is doing too good of a job. Since it is a new system, even though it is miles better than what we relied on before, it is going to take a while to get the watering schedule just right. Before we left, we readjusted it to water less often. If the garden is still wet next week, we will tweak it again.

After discovering that the tomatoes were trying to grow in a marsh, we went back and looked at all the blank spaces in the rows of plantings, where seedlings had not emerged, and it looks as though all the blank spaces are in little depressions in the garden that were wetter than surrounding areas. The seeds probably rotted in the ground.

In an effort to save the remaining tomato plants, we dug them up and I brought them home to plant in a wooden flat filled with Miracle Gro potting soil. Hopefully, they will all recover so we can replant them in a week or two.