Chores

I'm slowly getting my remaining chores done. Earlier in the spring I would work for hours in the garden to finish things up. Now life is easier. I go out for a short time and do a couple of chores each morning. Nothing takes too long.

The first order of business yesterday was to get my potatoes contained. Potato foliage can get really large and then flop over into my path. My paths here are very narrow to give space for actual growing, but I need to be able to walk down them. So I cut six of my 8' poles in half to get some really sturdy 4' poles. Then I strung some twine around them. I still haven't put the top layer on, but I don't know if I'll need one that high or not.

The next order of business was to stake up the eggplants. Like the stakes near the pepper plants, I'm hoping they become necessary. I really hope they grow. Last night was cold though and not really conducive to those warm weather plants. We hit 45 last night. My melons must be shivering right now.

The last chore was to harvest all the lettuce on one side of my lettuce bed and then replant with my summer lettuce. In a few weeks the other side will be done. I did not follow the pattern I had on the other side. I'm doing a summer lettuce trial and wanted the different lettuces to have about the same conditions. The garlic really does shade a lot of the lettuce bed, but not in the back. So I started each row at the garlic and went out to the edge. As usual I planted way too close together and will pull every other one when they get bigger. Though I planted five types, I'm really only trialing three. The other two are Deer Tongue and Red Sails. Which are my tried and true lettuces. I've got Red Sails going down the hot outer edge of the bed. I hope it grows fast to shade that section. The lettuces in the trial are Jericho, Manoa (from Mac), and Anuenue (from Mac). I was going to trial them last year, but with the house move it never happened. The first is an Israeli lettuce and the last two are Hawaiian lettuces. So far I've found Jericho a very slow germinator and grower. But maybe it grows slow, but well in the heat. I'll find out.

Today's chores are to water the rock wall garden and to reseed the beans that aren't germinating.

Trellises

I got a couple of chores done this morning in the garden. My first was to string the last section of trellis. It is over the bed where the spinach grew. Now it is planted in dried beans, corn, and squash. They have already started coming up. The squash in this bed germinated better than the squash in the other bed. I guess that isn't too surprising since the other bed gets a lot more shade.

Then I had to put the diagonal braces on all the trellises. This will make them much more sturdy in the wind when they are covered in foliage. I wanted to find long thin bolts to attach them. Something I could take off and reuse. But go figure, no one sells 2 1/2" long bolts that are only about 1/8" thick. So instead I used some brass wire I had. I think that will hold very well.

Urban Gardening

And as you might have noticed I brought out the sprinkler for the first time this year. I was going to do a drip irrigation system, but never got to it. I hope it isn't a dry year like the last one. I turned over my trash can and put the sprinkler on top. I do it on the trash can so the sprinkler can get up and over the foliage. Right now that means the peas. as they are the tallest right now.

This weekend I need to get in my summer lettuce starts which means picking what is already there. I'll have to mark the couple lettuces that I want to go to seed. If I don't, you just know they will get taken out. Remember this is the gardener that ate her Ottawa Cranberry seed beans and had to have Granny send her some more.

I also have to get the bamboo stakes in for the potato containment. The potatoes are growing very fast. Give them another week and I won't be able to walk down the aisle to pick anything.

The last thing I have to work on over the next week is getting my fall plan down on paper. I have some of the basics in my head, but haven't gotten to writing them down. I need to start transplants by mid June or they will be too late to produce.

A Tour of the Spring Garden

I know. I know. It isn't really a spring vegetable. But really. It's my first tomato blossom and I just had to show it off. Isn't she pretty? It is on my Cherokee Purple. The one nearest to the walkway which adds to the heat. All the other CP tomatoes have buds on them too along with all the Heinz. Market Miracle is being slow as is one of the two Amish Paste tomatoes that survived.

OK back to our regularly scheduled spring tour. I've got way too many photos, but the light was really pretty last evening. I'll start with yesterday morning however and spinach in Bed 5. I tore out the spinach patch. With the 90F weather we have had (and will still have), the spinach was ready to be pulled. It was an OK year for spinach. It was late to get into the ground so late to be harvested. I lost about a third to a half of the plants to damping off. But I grew it in a full 4'x16' bed along with the radishes. So I still harvested quite a bit of spinach. And when I was done harvesting I made yet another trellis and planted it up in a three sisters garden just like Bed 8.

Above is what a spinach root looks like. This is why all the experts say not to transplant spinach. If that tap root can't get deep into the ground, the plant just won't be as strong. Though I know a lot of people do transplant it as it is the only way they can get the dang thing to germinate.

My onions are getting larger finally. Earlier in the spring I was worried that they might all die off. I was losing them one at a time. The outer leaves would get brown and slowly die off. It would work its way to the center. It seemed like something was rotting the roots and the leaves just couldn't be supported anymore. I lost some leeks too to the same thing. This soil is filled with nasty fungi. I hope over the years the balance goes more to the good ones. I gave it a couple doses of fish emulsion and that seemed to perk them up a bit. At least now the onions seem much stronger.

At the corners of the onion bed are some beets. I hate beets. Not a little, but a lot. Blech! So I never grew them before. But my townhouse mates love them. This little patch is for them. It is in a really bad section. Those corners dry out very fast. I should water them more.

You have seen a lot of Bed 6 since it houses my Asian greens and chard. But have you seen the above monstrosity? That bed is four feet wide. The chard in front of it is tall. The michihili cabbage from Mac is taking over the world. It has started to head up. What will I do with it when it is picked? I can't eat that much of anything. I think next year I'm going to find a nice miniature Chinese cabbage to grow. I do have a nice Napa cabbage next to it that is also heading up. At least that plant doesn't have world domination on its mind.

Also at the other end of Bed 6 are my 11 broccoli plants. I have three different kinds. Two of them are starting to head up. Above is the earliest, Packman. It is almost ready to be picked. With the heat, I'll have to watch them closely.

Then there is Windsor which is just starting to form nice heads. The Piracicaba broccoli hasn't started yet. I'm glad to have planted so many types as it will give me more of a spread out harvest at least for the first harvest from each.

In Bed 5 my potatoes are all coming up. Very late since I can't seem to get local seed early in the season. I have a neighbor whose plants are almost knee high. I need to get some bamboo fencing up to keep these guys in their beds. Or I won't be able to walk down the path to pick my broccoli. Potatoes like to flop over the edge too much.

Moving on to Bed 3, we have peas, both snow peas and snap peas. The tall ones in the front are Golden Sweet snow peas. I'm not a big fan of the really tall peas. They tend to get in the way. When I was harvesting the spinach I broke off some branches, because it just won't stay where it belongs. I wanted to try it though as I really want a golden podded pea.

And the snow peas, both Golden Sweet (above) and Blizzard are blooming. It won't be long until my first pea harvest. I can't wait.

In front of the peas are some other plants. I'll work my way to the fence. The first up is my favas which are blooming. I haven't a clue how long it will take before I can harvest them. But they look really pretty.

Next are my carrots. I love how they are all lined up in rows. Something inside me really likes rows better than scattering seed randomly.

Then comes a nice row of bunching onions, some parsley, my dead cumin, an empty spot that needs more cilantro to be sown, and my cilantro. Behind the cilantro are a couple of rows of leeks, one row of celery, and some dill.

The herb gardens are growing well. My chamomile is in bud. I'll be able to pick the first buds soon. The other day I as talking about volunteers. After the first year I should never have to plant these. They will come up every year by themselves. I just have to be lazy and let a few of them go to seed. I'm sure I will. By the middle to end of summer, I'll be bored to tears picking little blossoms and just let them go.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

First the ugly. Blogger is messing up again. Blogger won't let me log in when I'm signed into Firefox and even in IE it won't let me comment on other people's blogs (or my own so I can't answer comments). I'm so unhappy. I want to comment. So for now I'm reading silently. And I can't even use Firefox to create new posts. I have to use IE and it is messing up so I have to edit html instead of doing it in plain text. Blech.

I've had so much happening in the garden recently. Monday got up over 80F and the heat is going to continue through the middle of next week. We have sun in the forecast. So we have hit summer weather. Wow. All at once. One week we have highs in the 50s (one day in the 40s), then this week is mostly in the 80s. My summer crops would grow but many of them were killed off by the cold weather.

Potatoes sprouting

I'll review what lived and died. First the good news. My potatoes are up! My potatoes are up! After planting them so deep, I was wondering how long they would take. It took about 20 days.

Tomaotes on the sides and carrots in the middle

My tomatoes are doing fabulously. Even the ones that weren't covered. I'm worried about disease with all the rain they got though so I sprayed them today with an asprin and worm tea. The eggplants that were already planted survived just fine. There is a bit of yellowing on the lower leaves, but not much. This heat ought to perk them up. I planted a fifth one in the bed on Tuesday from a later seeding. The basil all lived through it and looks fine. It is small but looks happy enough. The peppers mostly are doing OK. They didn't grow at all but none of them succumbed. The scotch bonnets are the worst off with some yellowing of the lower leaves. But a lot are doing great.

Zucchini with huges leaves, gardener with dirty fingers

The zucchini looks great and with the heat has started to grow. I see the first leaves forming. The corn is mostly up. Some has rotted and been reseed.

And the bad. All my already planted cucumbers died off. So no Diamant cucmbers for me this year. I used the last of my seed up. It really isn't much of an issue. I had some Little Leaf cucumber seedlings waiting in the wings. I've planted those and also some more Little Leaf seed as I had room for five more. The squash seed mostly rotted in the ground. I had one butternut come up and die in the cold. And I had one come up and live. Losing the squash wasn't much of an issue. It was a try at an early planting. If it dies, I replant. I replanted. You never know what the weather will be like in May. Sometimes it can get into the 80s and sometimes it throws you highs in the 40s.

Then we get to the beans. As you probably know I'm doing a big bean trial this year. I planted a lot of early beans. But they just can't handle weather like last week when we were 15 degrees below normal. I planted them in a warm week. So they started to come up and then died off. Pretty sad. Things I don't have replacements for and won't be able to reseed - all my yard long beans (no biggie, I'll try again next year), Fortex (no biggie, I tried it for three other years and liked Kentucky Wonder better), Soissons Vert (I'm more of a dried bean person than a shelling bean person anyway), Ga Ga Hut (ACK my pinto trial, I do have seed somewhere of these, but couldn't find the packet, but bad bad bad, two did live and I'll let them grow). I reseeded Turkey Craw, Tarbais, and Norridgewock. And seeded more Mexican Pinto and Kentucky Wonder to fill in the gaps left by things I don't have. I also seeded some Rattlesnake beans to replace the Ga Ga Hut. If I find my packet then I can put that into the late seeded bed.

Of all the beans the Apache Red did the best. It is almost all filled out and growing. I'm hoping it grows and produces well as it will be my kidney substitute then. A bean that can survive last week has got to be good here. I have my fingers crossed. The second best of the beans was the Mexican Pinto. There is almost a full stand of those up. I had to fill in a couple of gaps but not many.

All in all the summer crops are off to a decent start considering the spring weather we had. Soon the melons will go in. After today they will be hardened off enough and with 80s in the forecast it is a good time to get them in the ground.

As for the spring crops a lot have been harvested. I harvested a lot of Asian greens that were ready to be picked so there was a huge gap in the Asian green section. I planted some more Asian greens transplants to fill in. I put in tatsoi, choy sum, yakatta-na, kohlrabi, and some komatsuna. I'm thinking the lettuce needs to be harvested soon. Not that I haven't been, but if the hot weather keeps up they will all bolt and get bitter. I have some babies in the wings growing. They have a couple true leave right now. They will be ready to go out in two weeks I think. Then I'll need to sow some more successions. It never stops does it? Once one thing comes out, I've got to have the next ready to go in.

Potato Planting and a Bean Preview

Yesterday I wanted to get out into the garden and plant my potatoes before the storm came in. So I went out not long after I got up. I've tried other ways to plant potatoes, but never Jeavon's way. Laura introduced this to me and I figured I'd try it.

I don't know what Jeavon's says about chitting potatoes or letting cut potatoes scab over. I do know that research says chitted potatoes have a better chance if you plant early. Cold wet soil can rot a potato out if it isn't already growing. The same is true for letting the potato scab over for 2-3 days. For me I don't think it mattered either way since they are getting planted fairly late and the soil is pretty warm and dry. I still chitted them. I didn't have to chit them for long since they were already started when I bought them. Then a couple days ago I cut them into pieces. I needed exactly 50 pieces for a 4'x8' bed. I had 10 Russets, 20 Kennebec, and 20 Yukon Gold.

Yesterday they were planted in the Jeavon's method. As you double dig the bed plant the potatoes 9" down and 9" from each other. My garden doesn't really need to be double dug at this point. The soil was put in last fall and I have 18" of good soil all the way down. But I followed the procedure and made a trench and then loosened the "subsoil". Then put in the seed potato.

I ended up with an extra Russet after planting. Whoops. I had the count perfect when I cut them, so somewhere in the Russet section is a missing spud. Well no matter. The other potatoes will just have to full in.

I finished at 8:15. It wasn't all the much work and wanted to get more done. After breakfast I went out and built another trellis along the back of the three sisters beds in bed 8. I've started numbering the beds. I have eight beds all alike. I think I should give them names though. A number is so impersonal. Anyway the three sisters beds are not normal three sisters since I've found they don't work here. The beans just overtake the corn and smother it. So what I'm doing this year is to plant pole beans long the back foot of the bed up trellises. In the front will be blocks of corn with squash roaming in from the ends and middle. I'm thinking the corn will be in blocks of 12 (3x4). I hope it is good enough for pollination.

Anyway I digress. There will be two 4'x16' foot beds for my three sisters. and one 4'x8' section for summer squash and beans. So I have about 40 feet of beans to plant up. Most of this will be in dried beans.

I have 19 varieties of beans to trial. Some are just little packets of five beans, so those will only get a foot of space as I plant pole beans on 6" centers.

Bed 8 (16' long):

• Fortex green beans from Jane
• Kentucky Wonder green beans
• Green Yard long beans from Jane
  
• Red Yardlong beans from Jane
• Soisson Vert shelling beans from Jane
• Turkey Craw Dried beans from Michelle
• Mexican Pinto from SSE Yearbook
• Ga Ga Hut Pinto from the SSE Yearbook
• Painted Lady runner beans from Mike (for the trellis over the path)
  

Bed 5 (8' long):

• Apache Red dried beans from SSE Y
• Norridgewok dried bean from SSE Y
• Tarbais Alaric shelling bean from SSE Y
  

Bed 2 (16' long and will be planted late since I have to wait for the spinach to come out) all dried beans:

• Cherokee Trail of Tears originally from the Ottawa Gardener, but I've been saving it for a couple of years now
• Aunt Jean's Pole, Rattlesnake from Mike
• Lazy Housewife from Jane
• Petaluma Gold Rush from Michelle
• Borlotto Linguia di Fuoco from Jane
• Ottawa Cranberry. The Ottawa Cranberry came first from the Ottawa Gardener then I grew it out and sent some to Granny. Then I ate all my seed stock except for the previous years. So Granny sent it back to me. So it is a well traveled bean. It started in Canada; came to the east coast of the USA; went to the west coast; then came back to the east coast.
  

Dang that is a lot of beans to trial. I hope I can keep them all straight. It won't be easy. But I'm hoping to have a selection of maybe six beans that I like after I'm done. But the reality is I will have 10 or more. I have to learn to pick an choose better but it is so hard to cut out the varieties.

I'll Be Busy

Yesterday was more about getting more work than actually doing it. The first order of business was to go out in the morning to Weston Nurseries. The front yard of our landscaping was going in this weekend. Well the rest of it at least. The edibles in the front had already gone in.

We got: a 'Radsunny' Knockout Rose, a Callicarpa 'Early Amethyst', three 'Mountain Fire' Andromidas, three white creeping phlox, a 'Jelena' witch hazel, 10 'Sulphure' epimediums, and five 'Mrs. Moon' pulmonaria. This will fill in most of our front yard foundation plantings and the small bed at the end of the rock wall garden in the north corner of the yard. We will have to come again and pick up the side and back yard plants next week.

When we got home my townhouse mate asked me if I wanted to go for a bike ride. I hesitated since I wanted to plant up the end of the rock wall garden that will just have flowers. But then I remembered that I needed my seed potatoes. I called Wilson's Farm yet again (I've been doing this every day for a week now and weekly before that). Finally they said yes. They had their potatoes in. The bike path goes right down to Wilson's Farm so I said yes to the bike ride. I'll plant the bed another day.

Now the potatoes are chitting by the back door (Kennebec, Yukon Gold, and Russet). I can see some signs of life from them already, but a week in the sun, or at least a few days ought to do them good.

When we got back from the bike ride there was a package by the door. My last fruit trees had shown up. Ginger Gold and Honeycrisp apples for the back yard and a Green Gage plum for the rock wall garden. I guess we will plant those this weekend too. I've got a lot of work to do, but for this I'll have help. All four of us will be out working this morning.

2009 Overview Potatoes

I hadn't grown potatoes in years, but this year I decided I had enough space to try a potato bin. I bought two pounds of Kennebec seed potatoes in April. I chitted them for five days on the windowsill. Then I trench planted them on April 28th in a 4'x4' section of the solanaceae bed. There were 10 little seed potatoes. I didn't feel a great need to cut them up so didn't.

Bin on June 11th

The big experiment was the potato bin. I made a fairly rustic 4'x4'x2' bin to put over the planting. As the plants grew I filled the bin with dirt then compost. I kept doing this until the bin was filled 18" high. I then get tired of filling it up and quit.

Some varieties will set potatoes all the way up the stem as you cover them up. I had read that any main season potato will do this, but earlies won't. It turns out that Kennebecs aren't so good at that even though they are a main season potato. Two plants set potatoes up the stem, but only a couple. The rest never did. My bin was a bust and in addition it was a lot of work hauling dirt and making sure the stems were always covered.

Kennebecs were vigorous growers

I'm still glad I used Kennebecs. This was the year of the late blight epidemic. Due to our cold wet June and big box stores selling infected plants, the whole northeastern part of the country was infected. The potatoes got blight starting in June. I only saw a couple of leaves. I kept the plant well cleaned of blighted leaves until they got so big I couldn't find the leaves in the tangled mass of foliage. The Kennebecs grew very well. It turns out they are resistant to late blight.

Nothing else bothered the potatoes much. I saw the poop of the tomato horn worm on the leaves. I never saw the worm. I didn't know they ate potatoes. I had so much foliage on the plants that one horn worm coudn't do enough damage for me to find him.

The tubers were dug on September 11th, two weeks after I cut back the foliage. I cut it bad due to blight starting to take over and not because they were dying back in any other way. It is best to wait at least two weeks for two reasons. The first is that it lets the skin toughen up before digging. The second is that it helps kill off the blight spores before they could touch the potatoes you are digging. If you dig right away those spores could get on the tubers and they would rot. After two weeks, many of them will have died off. My final tally was 16.5 lbs. Which isn't bad for trench planted potatoes, but sucks pretty bad for bin planted ones. I did have a couple of tubers that were infected with blight. They were tossed.

Will I do things differently next year? If I ever do a bin again, it will be a small bin. If I plant Kennebecs I'll just trench plant them. I do love the the variety. They are quite tasty potatoes and easy to peel since they don't have deep eyes and are smooth. I don't know if I'll have the space in the solanaceae bed for potatoes next year. Next year that bed will be my smallest of the beds.

Maybe I should try the trash can method instead? I have a trash can that is falling apart and has holes in the bottom already. I've been using it the last several years to hold up my sprinkler so it can get over all the plants. If I use it for potatoes I'll have to find a replacement. I'll also have to find out what varieties can be used in bins. But I may forego the next experiment. Seed potatoes cost way too much through the mail. It is about as cheap to buy potatoes at the farmer's market as it is to grow them from mail order seed. I can get them locally which is cost effective, but I have limited choice in varieties. If I can't find an appropriate variety locally, I won't do it.

Digging Potatoes

Today was the day of reckoning. Did I have any potatoes in my bin? Did the late blight take them all out? The weather was cooperating for a change. I didn't have time until Thursday to dig them up and the rain held off. In fact it was mostly sunny for the two days beforehand. After no rain for a week and a half it seemed like the stars were aligning for me.

I dug up a few shovelfuls of the compost filling the bin. No potatoes. Then what did I see? Could it be? A three inch potato stuck up its head up just waiting to be plucked out of the bin. Yes! Then nothing and more nothing. That was the only potato from that side of the bin. The other side had better luck. It seemed there was one plant that actually set potatoes up the stem. The potatoes weren't big, but hey they were potatoes.

Here they are in all their glory. OK so it wasn't a lot. I'm guessing Kennebecs don't like setting all along the stem. What made some do it and not others I'll never know. But I wasn't done yet. When I planted, I trench planted the potatoes before adding the bin. I still had the trenches to dig up.

The soil yielded lots of beautiful potatoes. There were some really large ones too. The largest sadly got pronged by my digging fork. It seems I'm not all that good at digging potatoes. I damaged quite a few in the process. Maybe I should let the skin harden more than two weeks?

Here is the bucket filled with the potatoes from the trenches. That seems more like it. The yield for the 4x4 area was 15lbs 8oz. I used 2lbs of seed potatoes. This is not a stellar yield but not too bad considering the blight. The bin basically did nothing. It made me work really hard, first filling it up and then emptying it.

I did lose some potatoes from blight. Kennebec is resistant, but frankly the potatoes had blight in them since June so it is not surprising. Oospores (spores from sexual reproduction), which can survive without a living host, are rarely formed - though it has been possible since the 1990s, supposedly it rarely happens that the two pathogens meet to mate in the northern states. Zoospores (asexual spores) can't survives without a living host. So the odds are that the only way this nasty disease will survive to next year in my garden is if I leave any tubers in the ground. If you have ever dug potatoes you will know that it is hard to get all the tubers without missing any. It is common for potatoes to "volunteer" from missed tubers.

When I was piling up the bin's compost (which will be added to the top of the solanaceae bed when all the plants are removed), I saw the above potato peeking out. I even missed potatoes in the compost that I moved. Later this fall I'll double dig the old potato bed. This was the plan from last spring and seems like a really good idea. I'm contemplating sifting the soil as I go just to make sure I've got them all out.

Well the potatoes were a lot of work. I'm really loving eating them though. Last nights dinner was the first of the broccoli - YUM - and garlic mashed potatoes with homegrown potatoes, garlic and oregano. OK so I had some parmesan encrusted chicken to go with it. I can't wait to try some homemade french fries.

Fall Cleanup Starts

Yesterday I was very busy in the garden. I decided it was clean up day. I was going to do this over the holiday, but I kept going for hikes and came back too tired to even think about cleaning up the garden.

The first chore was to weed the fruit garden. The weeds were starting to take over and the crab grass was going to seed. Whoops! I saw a very bad weed that made me bring out the gloves to dispose of it - poison ivy. I had a little seedling pop up in the middle of the Dutch clover. The clover is also a weed, but I let it grow. I wish it would shade out the all the other weeds, but it doesn't seem up to the task.

The next chore was the patio. It was covered in debris from my trees. I'd been putting this off for months. I get annoyed with it all every time it rains because it turns to mush. The Autumn rains look they might start soon so I swept it all up.

Then it was off to the vegetable garden. I picked off all the dried beans; got some more dill seed; and did a good search on the lettuce plants for little seed puffs. I wanted all of the dried things off before any rain started. The forecast is for very cloudy weather for the next four days. We may or may not get rain, but if we do everything will stay wet because of the lack of sun. This is bad for things that need to be dried.

Katydid that jumped into my harvest bowl

I noticed that three of the bean poles had all the bean picked off so I removed the plants and poles from the garden.

The next chore was to take down my dying tomato plants. I swear the Sungolds and the two black cherry varieties will just keep out growing the late blight on their leaves, but their stems were starting to get infected. The only way to keep the spores out of the air is to get rid of them. So that is what I did. I cut their stems up into little tiny bits and buried them under the tomato patch. I do this with my tomatoes every year. I never compost tomatoes, but I bury the waste in the garden where they grew that year.

Before the tomatoes were removed.

After. A garden without tomatoes. How sad.

I wanted to empty the potato bin out too. The plants were cut down two weeks ago. We have had mostly dry weather. Nice potato curing weather. Notice how I'm being optimistic about having potatoes under the bin? Yup I'm still holding out hope. I hope that Kennebecs don't like bins and only set the potatoes in the level that they are planted. Sadly it was time to go in to make dinner. Actually it was past time to go in to make dinner. So the potatoes will have to wait. I'm hoping for mostly dry weather for a while yet to keep those potatoes dry, but probalby not. I'm busy today, but maybe on Thursday I'll have some time to dig them out.

Destruction

Something came over me this morning. I'm not sure quite what it was. Maybe it is the coming fall and my mind was on cleaning up the garden. Whatever it was I was quite hell bent on destruction.

The first up was my potato patch. They had flowered hmm maybe a little less than four weeks ago. The blight was really starting to take hold. Kenebec potatoes are resistant but not by any means immune to blight. I didn't see it deep in the bottom foliage for a long time but it was there. The other day I moved away some of the pretty green leaves and saw to my dismay massive late blight sending spores all over the place. Sigh.

Potato bin cleaned out (note the unwalkable path)

I ripped all the foliage up and packed it up into some nice black plastic bags. I tried to clean up all traces of any potato leaf. Underneath it all it was dripping with dead leaves. The potatoes had covered some of my tithoina and the tithonia was mildewing out. I don't know if tithonia gets late blight or it was just a bad case of some other mildew, but the two plants were pretty bad off. I ripped them up too. I'll leave the potatoes in their spot for a little while yet. I'll let the sun kill off some of those late blight spores before I dig them up. I'll probably dig them up during the next good dry spell (if we get one).

Then it was over to my tomato plants. There were a few more blighted leaves that were taken off. I noticed that almost all the Market Miracle tomatoes were either gone or turning red. I picked them all and ripped down those two plants.

The Black Moor tomato was getting blight all along its stems. I picked the one last tomato that was close to ripening and ripped the rest of the plant out.

By now I was having quite a bit of fun ripping out my plants. I looked at my Early Ssubakus Aliana and noticed she was getting worse. She doesn't seem all that affected by the blight, but she was turning yellow and not just her tomatoes. The irrigation system that I hacked together watered her too much. Her poor roots were probably rotting. I figured I ought to rip her up too. First I harvested just under three pounds of her fruit. Then off to the plastic bag for her.

By this time I had two full lawn and leaf bags. I'm going to leave them out in the sun today. Then I'll haul them to the transfer station. Sigh I usually don't throw very much away. Things get composted, recycled or reused, but the blighted plants will get dumped.

Since I was still in a destructive mood, I decided to clear my paths. The poor marigolds didn't have much room in their beds to grow, so they elected to spill over into the paths. I've been letting them grow there, but I've been getting annoyed by them. It has been so humid recently that the dew takes until about 11am to dry off. I can't pick anything in the morning without getting soaked walking by the marigolds. I cut them back so I would have some nice paths. While I was at it I cut back the tomatillos so they wouldn't be stepped on in the paths.I hauled a huge pile of waste to the compost pile.

Overview with my cleaned out paths

I don't know why ripping up plants is so cathartic. Maybe I'm taking my aggressions out on the plants, or maybe it is just the order that I achieve afterwards. I do like having a cleaned up garden and I love being able to walk down the paths without stepping on things. I will miss the waft of marigold scent though and I will miss picking massive quantities of tomatoes, but I still have my cherries at least until the blight gets them too.

Around the Garden

In the bottom bed the Music Box sunflowers are finally blooming. The single Lemon Queen has buds but isn't quite there yet.

The Sungold F2s keep setting more and more tomatoes. I take more foliage off as it gets diseased. We have a chronic spot disease that we get every year. I'm not sure which one (my money is on Septoria), but it tries defoliating most of the plant. It never succeeds as the tomatoes seem to keep growing.

The potatoes and pineapple tomatillos look happy. I get a few tomatillos every day but they are so tiny I haven't done anything with them yet. The potatoes have put out a few flowers but not many. Waiting for potatoes is an agonizing process for me. The other plants I can pick a little now and more later. The potatoes are just too much waiting with nothing to show for it in the middle of the summer. I guess winter squash is the same, but right now I want potatoes for baked fries.

Near the potatoes are the most beautiful cluster of dill heads. I'll be sad in a way when they finally set seed and get cut down.

In the middle bed the beans are very happy. I'm glad something is happy there as the other plants are struggling.

The cucumbers finally set their first cuke. These are parthenocarpic cucumbers so they don't need to be fertilized. Still the little cukes shrivel up and turn yellow. They didn't like our weather much. The squash isn't much different. I finally got one zucchini last week. I hand fertilized another, but still it shriveled up. The Costata Romenesca zucchini were just putting out female buds that didn't even get a chance to open. The bud would rot away before that. Finally it looks like they are willing to set zucchinis. I see a female blossom about to open on both plants. As to the winter squash, the Neck Pumpkins are just starting to run. The Magdelena Big Cheese has a bit of a jump on them. I even see a tiny female bud.

In the top bed the lettuce is hanging on, but not growing very quickly. I have more seedlings inside to put out soon. The Asian greens are growing. I really need to harvest them, but haven't gotten to it yet. I keep traveling and saying to myself, "I'll wait until I get back to harvest so they don't have to stay in the fridge." Then I get back and pick all the other things. I just don't have time to eat it all. I'm leaving again this weekend for a short trip then again later in the week. Aaarrrrggghh! It is too bad my husband won't eat them. I could set him up with lots of veggies while I'm gone. Instead I went over to my neighbor and gave her all my snow peas.

The snow peas are the only peas left. They look terrible, but they keep producing on pretty new shoots. They take up 2 1/2 sqft of ground space and just keep putting out little bits every couple of days. I'd take them down if I thought they would stop, but they keep going. I'll see how long they last. At some point I may not be able to stand looking at them any more and just take them down to make the garden look prettier. They are such ugly plants right now.

Well that is not quite all the garden, but most of it. I forgot my eggplants which are still sitting there and not doing much. They bloom. Nothing sets. The onions are growing. I don't think they will get as large as they ought to for storage. The leeks keep getting bigger. Hmm I didn't check on the carrots. And the peppers keep producing. The serranos got picked again today. The jalapenos will need to start being picked next week. The chard chugs along as always. And many of my herbs are flowering. The cilantro is setting a lot of seed this year which I hope it keeps. Last year it mostly mildewed before picking time.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Usually I'm pretty good with my photos. I take more than one from different lengths. This morning I must have been a little too complacent with some of them. Sometimes they come out well though. The above butterfly was taken with my little camera. It usually won't focus on something like a butterfly, but since the big camera was nowhere around I took a chance. Sometimes the planets align and it just happens.

Other times it doesn't. I was going to show you some photos of my chard. The one above turned out OK, but right now the leaf miners are back and I wanted to show the phtotos of eggs up close. These things are tiny. The early morning light isn't all the strong. I should have taken lots, but I didn't. So I have nothing to show you but white blurs. I can tell you that the white eggs are tiny, white, and long and thin, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words and it is certainly worth much more than the four I describe it with.

Since the leaf miners are back I'm supposed to scrape off the white eggs every couple of days. They hatch in about four so you can't leave them too long or your leaves are history. Well I became a bit complacent about looking for them too. I had to remove a couple of leaves. I'll try to keep on top of it from now on.

Then I tried to photograph another milestone event in the garden. Luckily all my neighbors are asleep at 7am so they couldn't see. Not only did I do my little happy dance, but I helped out with sex in the garden. I took photos of the great event. Yes it is the start of the great zucchini glut. The first female blossom opened this morning (Dark Green). With three male flowers opened on the other zucchini (Costata Romanesca) and me wanting them for my lunch, I decided to pollinate the female flower by hand. I ripped the anthers off the poor males and liberal wiped them over the stigma of the female. Then took the males in for lunch. Hmm writing this makes me feel a bit like a black widow spider, but I like squash flowers in my salads.

Sadly all of the whopping two photos didn't come out. So I had to go back into the garden this afternoon. The flower was all closed up. Once pollinated, she had takes off her fancy dress. I think the celebration is over. If all goes well I certainly won't be celebrating in a few weeks when I can't get rid of them all. Why oh why did I plant four zucchinis?

At least my salad was festive. I had lettuce with snow peas, tomatoes (donations from Debra - whose flowers are not Sungold yellow but orange-red - and Zelda), and squash blossoms. The salad was dressed with my garlic scape dressing. The cole slaw features my cabbage, carrots and onions. The pickled snap peas get a bit gray when pickled, but they taste divine. They feature my peas, dill, hot peppers, garlic and onions.

As I was taking my replacement photos I of course noticed all the things that still need to get done in the garden. The wind had blown over the potato foliage so it was draping down over all of my tomatillos. I grabbed two stick and proceeded to prop them up with some string. Now the tomatillos that have grown up the side of the cage can finally get some sun. The the potatoes finally have a few buds on them. Now I just need about another month or so before they are ready. They take so long. Note to self: if I grow potatoes again, use a much smaller space.