Still Food in the Yard, but Less

These veggies are in my smaller dough bowl; if they were in the big one, they would look a little lost, but there is still enough here to really enjoy. We will be eating the okra tonight with supper, along with the tomatoes and some of the peppers.

I had thought that there were no cucumbers left in the yard, but I was mistaken. The little, slightly misshapen cucumber shown here, found in a tangle of vines I was working to untangle earlier today (most of the tangle was headed for the compost heap), will go into someone's lunchbox tomorrow as part of a Greek salad. We have some really great feta cheese from Harry's/Whole Foods!

A little more progress toward the fall garden was made today, too. More seeds are in the ground: lettuces, spinach, some beets. The turnips will have to wait for the weekend.

I was talking with a gardening friend this morning on the phone about fall planting, and he had a plan to drive up to Ladd's Farm Supply in Euharlee/Cartersville to get some plants. He is thinking that they will have collards, broccoli, etc. already.

If they do, that will be great! The usual plant outlets (Home Depot, Lowe's) don't get the fall veggies in stock this early, but the plants need to be in the ground this early. The odd timing is one of the great mysteries for our time.

Found Food: Cauliflower Mushroom

We found a really great fungus over the weekend, a cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis sp.). My copy of the book Mushrooms Demystified calls it both "edible and exceptional."

The mushroom, which doesn't look much like either a mushroom or a cauliflower, was growing at the base of a tree.



Up close, it was beautiful.



Of course, as members in good standing of the Mushroom Club of Georgia, we harvested the mushroom and brought it home to cook. My books all mention that

1. cleaning this particular fungus is not easy, and
2. cooking it so that it eventually becomes tender takes a while.


The books are right. I finally decided that a few little bark bits and dirt specks wouldn't hurt us, and that, even tough, this fungus was indeed exceptional. The texture was, as Joe pointed out, a little like "mushroom jerky," but the flavor was outstanding. I will definitely be looking for more of these!

Stinging Saddleback

Who would guess that something so small and squishy could pack such a wallop? My poor friend Cheryl sure didn't, and she ended up with a painful welt from a little guy a lot like this one:



The one she encountered was in her blueberry bush, and in my yard that's where I usually find them, too. She felt it before she saw it, which is also what happens with me. The one I found today, though, was on the popcorn.

I was cutting the old stalks and leaves up for the compost pile, and happily, I was wearing gloves, AND I saw it in time to avoid the stinging hairs.



The saddleback page from the bugguide website shows the adult moth stage of this caterpillar's lifecycle.

The University of Kentucky's stinging caterpillars page includes other caterpillars to watch out for.

Interestingly, both pages mention that the saddleback is sometimes found on corn. I hadn't seen it there before, but my own yard's corn definitely was home to a saddleback caterpillar this morning!

The University of Kentucky site mentions that the sting can cause "severe irritation," which seems like a huge understatement to me. The bugguide site's description of the sting seems a little closer to the truth, calling it "lasting and painful." Those two words are in line with my own experience.

My friend had never encountered one of these before, even though she is a Georgia-girl from birth. It took a dose of benadryl to reduce the size of the welt she got from the sting, so I hope she isn't ambushed by another one of these ever again!

The Garden of Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner

Last night, the local Master Gardener group met at The Garden, as the sign above the entrance proclaims it, of Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner. The word "garden" seemed like a massive understatement, though.

The first little building I saw driving in was a very cute chicken house.



The Garden is also home to some burros. These compete in shows, dressed up in "outfits," but the ones we saw were just out standing in their field.



Apparently, Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner have been friends for many years. They used to talk about working a garden together, then one day Mr. Kastner's wife heard them talking about it and started laughing. She didn't take them seriously at all, so they got serious about it, and started. Now they have a huge garden, and they give the produce away---to fire stations, children's homes, senior homes, church pantries, etc.

The primary presentation for the evening was by Mr. Hankerson, who is County Manager for my county. He grew up on a farm in Tennessee, and he earned his undergraduate degree in Agronomy, so he had a lot to share with the rest of us gardeners.

One of the great things that he said was that "the soil test is the best fertilizer there is." This is so true. Knowledge about the soil's pH and fertility levels is what the gardener needs most in order to be successful.



The garden's soil looks like the same red clay that is in my yard, but it has been amended almost yearly with mixed stable-bedding and manure (horse). One year the soil test showed that the pH had gone up over 7, an effect of the horse manure, so they had to skip the manure for a couple of years, but the gardeners are sure that the bedding and manure has made a big improvement in the texture of the soil.

The Garden is large enough that tractors provide a lot of the "muscle" on the property, but not all of it. Most of the weeding is by hand (hoe or rake, actually), in spite of the size of the garden, so some areas had some weeds, but others were pretty much weed free.



Among the many crops in the garden is a big patch of straightneck squash. Some have been felled by the squash vine borers, but plenty of plants here are still alive. This (above) is the second planting of summer squash this season.

I took a picture of a tomato plant, in spite of the weeds, because I am so impressed by the sturdy staking of the cages. I've seen the cages of heavy wire (concrete reinforcing wire?) before--that's what Grandpa Bill uses back in Choctaw, Okla., and we have some cages like that at the Plant-a-Row garden, but these were staked with those steel T-bar fence posts. No matter how top-heavy the plants get, or what kind of storm blows through, those cages are staying upright!

The trick is getting those posts back out of the ground at the end of the season. These guys have a machine to do that, but if I used these at home, they might be in place permanently.



These two gardeners are great at succession planting, too. In the picture below, some kind of Southern peas is nearing maturity on the right, but the just-planted soybeans have a long way to go. The gardeners planted these for edamame, which is pretty popular and high in protein.



I have no idea how many pounds of sweet potatoes this wide row (below) is going to produce, but it's going to be a lot. Looking down these rows made my garden at home seem pretty puny. Keeping this up has to be a lot of work, and the two men admitted to working hard, but they also said it's their relaxation after a day at work, or on the weekend.



They've planted lots of different kinds of peppers, and they were all beautiful.



The peppers, though, are all in raised beds. The two men said that they were going to be planting more in raised beds to help drainage. Some parts of the property stay wet too long after a rain, and they are thinking that raised beds are the way to go, to eliminate this problem. For irrigation now, the garden uses well water that flows through pipes the men laid themselves, to overhead sprinklers they set up themselves.



My pictures of the okra didn't turn out well enough to post (it was getting dark...), but the okra was amazing. The variety was Clemson spineless, the same variety we use at the Plant-a-Row garden, but theirs was bushy and less than four feet tall, even though it was obvious from the thickness of the stems that the plants were very mature.

At the Plant-a-Row garden, our big problem with Clemson spineless is that it gets way up over eight feet tall and is hard to harvest, as a result.

I asked about the short okra, and Mr. Hankerson said they prune it early in the season. This makes it short and bushy. The bushiness makes it even more productive, because pods form on every branch. It really was amazing.

Corn was growing in a big raised bed, and the men said that cucumbers had already finished and been pulled out. I don't remember right now what else I saw, but there was a lot.

The book that the two men have relied on over the years for gardening advice is Garden Way's Joy of Gardening by Dick Raymond. It seems to have worked well for them.

Report from Hotlanta

When we first moved here (back in 1990), a lot of Atlanta's advertising included the word Hotlanta as a substitute for the city name. I never really understood why they would advertise that sometimes it gets uncomfortably hot here, but I am not in marketing.

This summer has been particularly hot, so it should be no surprise that some of my garden crops aren't doing as well as I would prefer. The cucumbers, in particular, are pretty much dead:



One of my friends asked today whether any of the flowers on her plants would actually set fruit in this heat (we've had a lot of days in a row with highs in the mid-to-high-90s). The answer is, "it depends." Tomatoes don't usually set new fruit in this kind of heat, but they will keep on maturing fruits that have already formed (if they don't cook right on the plant).

Specifically, though, she wanted to know about cucumbers. My experience with cucumbers, ones that are actually still alive and flowering in high heat, is that they might set a few fruits, but that the cukes that form will be oddly shaped from the uneven pollination that will occur. Pepper plants, though, and maybe the eggplants, which are much more heat loving than other crops, are more likely to keep on fruiting through the heat.

I say that, of course, while my own eggplants look like heck. They do have fruits on them, though!



And while the cucumber vines are definitely "done" in my yard, other plants seem to be just fine, even in the heat. I have created a planting calendar for my fall garden, based on times to maturity and counting back from the first frost day, that has Swiss chard as being planted in July and August. However, I had a space back in June and decided to plant some chard seeds then, and the little plants look just fine.



By the time the weather starts to moderate in mid-September, these will be eating size. Apparently, chard can be planted all summer long, and I need to revise my planting calendar.

The Malabar spinach, which shares a trellis with the dead cucumbers, is doing well in the heat, too. I haven't eaten any, yet, but we have a stir-fry planned for later this week, and some leaves will be going into that meal.



Elsewhere in the garden, peppers are green and growing, just like they are supposed to be in the heat.



And the Heritage red raspberries are putting out their second flush of fruits.

Back from Colorado

We've been to Boulder, CO, to visit our oldest son who is in graduate school at CU. The trip included lots of hiking, and some pretty funny moments involving one slightly chubby mom (me!) and some very steep hiking trails. Here I am with my oldest son:



Getting up onto the ledge was easier than getting back down.

While I was gone, a Very Good Friend came by to water my plants and check on the garden (Thank you, Cheryl!). The weather here while I was gone was HOT, so she came by every day to make sure that the plants growing in containers hadn't all cooked right in their pots. I was happy to see that she had kept things harvested. Steady harvesting leads to more production, for many crops!

One of the crops she checked on (and watered) was my laundry basket of straw that had been inoculated with oyster mushroom spawn. I have a shiitake log out in the back yard that is a year and a half old and has yet to produce mushrooms, but I started this laundry basket just about 10 days before heading out for our trip. Look at it now!:



I put the basket together at a cultivation workshop with the Mushroom Club of Georgia. The workshop was a lot of fun, and these mushrooms are very good to eat. Joe thinks they are more tasty than chanterelles!

Also while we were gone, the limes matured enough for eating. When we got back, there were 28 limes on my tree. There are fewer now, because we've brought some in to the kitchen (for cucumber/tomato/sweet pepper salad, all chopped up small, with lime juice and olive oil; on the oyster mushrooms; in iced tea). This pretty good level of production may be enough that the rest of my family will tolerate the little tree's living in the dining room, by the back door, all winter long, in spite of its thorns.

Squash Tales

This is a picture of my sister-in-Louisiana's garden. The last time I actually saw the space it currently occupies, I was helping my sister mark out the garden with stakes and string and then spraying the spiky weeds that lived there with RoundUp. I am so glad she sent me a picture! It looks a lot like I imagined it, and the plants look great.

My sister has bought most of her seeds at the local "feed & seed" store, but some plants were given to her by a friend who is a Very Long Time Gardener (decades). One plant that he gave my sister to grow was supposed to be a cucumber, but the plant is producing zucchini.

This would normally be fine, except that my sister's husband really does not like zucchini. This particular plant is growing and producing like crazy. When my sister was telling me about it, I was reminded of a cat we used to know. This cat wasn't especially social, but it seemed to know when someone was around who didn't like cats. He would hone in on the cat-disliker and hop into the person's lap and just purr away.

The cat pretty much ignored all the rest of the people, who all liked cats, who might be nearby.

This squash plant is like that cat. It is producing abundantly, copiously, for a family in which the man of the house has to actually leave the house when squash is on the stove, because the aroma of its cooking is so overwhelming for him.

Of course, the zucchini in my yard, longed-for as the plants matured and treasured when the squash were finally produced, have all keeled over (weeks ago!) from the squash vine borers.

However, at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden where I volunteer, one of our gardeners went through the squash patch and carefully sliced open infested stems, pulled out the larvae of the squash vine borers, then covered the wounded stems with dirt. Many of these plants have continued to produce squash for weeks beyond what we would normally expect, so squash-stem surgery is going to be a standard treatment in the upcoming years!

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.