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.

Undercooked Lasagna

Joe is out of town with the camera, so there won’t be any pictures until he gets back. He’s taken a group of students to Belize for a Maymester course, so it seems likely that he might need the camera more than I do.

I have almost finished planting the summer vegetables. Part of the delay is just the life-in-general stuff that happens to everyone, but part of the delay is that the layered leaves and manure in the new garden beds that were created “lasagna style” aren’t as decomposed as I had hoped they would be by now.

However, I have planted in them anyway. Four tomato plants went in a few weeks ago, partly as a test and partly because they had outgrown their pots. I have to say that they looked pretty bad for a while, all pale and scrawny, but just in the last week they have greened up and are starting to grow. This seems like a positive development, so this weekend I set out more little plants in those two beds.

There were another dozen or so pepper plants in little pots that are now planted in the decaying leaves; four Sugar Nut melons are there, as are three Straight Nine cucumbers, three Malabar spinach, some flowers (China asters, nasturtiums, an extra sweet basil), and some bean seeds (Alabama black half runners).

After looking at the remaining space with the eye of someone who likes to have a LOT of plants in the garden, I have started some Dakota black popcorn, Cajun jewel okra, and Schoon’s Hardshell melons in little pots to go in, too. It will all fit. Really.

Elsewhere in the garden, I’ve cut the rest of the spring lettuce and crammed it into the fridge before it can bolt and turn bitter. The boy and I are eating salad twice a day, every day, until it is gone (or until Joe gets home to help eat it, whichever comes first). The peas are getting plump, so tonight’s salad had some barely cooked, freshly picked peas on it. I have a little asparagus in the fridge for one of tomorrow’s salads, but I will have to stop cutting the asparagus soon. Maybe now. In another week, there should be little beets.

One of the Chinese tomato plants has tiny green tomatoes on it. Most of the other tomato plants are flowering. One plant, the Olivette Jeaune, looked decidedly puny until just a few days ago. It is only slightly larger than when it was planted, but it has greened back up and looks healthier. It had been a sad shade of yellow. I hadn’t thought before that it was even possible for the color yellow to look sad, but there it was.

The zucchini are beginning to flower, but the first flowers to open have been female, which seems odd to me. Usually, the first flowers are male. These first flowers won’t make mature zucchinis for the kitchen because they haven’t been pollinated, but I am sure that I can figure out some way to add them to a salad.

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.