Whats in a Name?

So green!

I always hate when they change the name of a family. The Apiaceae family will forever be the Umbelliferea family to me. I have a bed of miscellaneous Apiaceae in one bed. I love their different green textures.

The fennel has been slowly sizing up. I pick a few each week to use in my salads. Since these were sort of self sown - I tossed old seed heads on the bed - the plants are way too close together. So eating is my way of thinning. Eventually I'll let some of them go and flower.

The celery on the other hand were sown indoors and spaced fairly far apart. Celery hasn't done so well for me in the past. I've gotten the plants to grow but they never produced that much. This year I have a lot more plants and I've given each one ore space. They are growing better. I've started harvesting the outer most stalks. each week. So far they have been small, but the newer stalks are getting much bigger.

Also in the bed is some celeriac that won't be harvested until fall. But the parsley right near it is doing very well. I pick a few leaves every couple of days to use in the kitchen. I keep a bouquet of them on the counter so I have some fresh during dinner. I find I'm more apt to use it if it is always there.

I'm obviously not the only one to like this family of plants. I've got a small praying mantis patrolling for bugs. I've seen them here and there in the garden earlier on when they were tiny. It is nice to see them growing. I also saw one in the raspberry patch today. When they get full sized they will freak me out a bit. They do get huge. And they look so much like sticks from a distance that I won't notice them until I'm almost touching them. Gack! But I love them anyway. They are such cool creatures.

I do have a plant from another family in this bed. The peas which are in the Fabaceae family. Again they changed the name on me. The name legumes are in common usage here, but it is no longer Leguminosae. Why oh why do they do that? Since I can't eat the peas, they are going to be pulled out. I was just waiting for some seeds to show up.

And they did today. I wanted some amaranth seed. Ones that were bred for greens and not flowers. Though I'm sure their flowers are pretty enough. I've been wanting to try them. I figured if they had calliloo in their names they would make good greens. I've had calliloo in the Caribbean, but most of the time they made it with dasheen leaves. I wanted to know what dasheen looked like and one of my guides pointed out the plants. I'd always called them taro and hadn't a clue until then that you could eat the leaves too. I always thought it was a root vegetable.

I think tomorrow I'll get out and plant my seeds. Though I'm still contemplating starting them indoors first. I could always do it both ways and see what works. I have absolutely no experience with these plants. I just hope I can keep them small enough. The packet says three feet apart, but they are talking about for seed. Hopefully if I keep cutting it, it will stay smaller. Or I can start new ones on occasion. If anyone has any hints, let me know.

Repairing the Damage

Staked Fennel

We had a storm come through on Wednesday. It dropped about 1.5" of rain which we sorely needed. But with the wind and rain a few things got knocked over. Nothing was all that bad except the fennel. It is blooming and setting seed right now and it has a lot of heavy blooms. In fact I can't believe all the blooms on it. But I had no stakes to prop them up with. So I first had to recover some from the corn patch.

Most of the corn in this patch has been harvested, but I hadn't cut down the finished stalks. Or removed the bamboo stakes that I put in after another storm knocked all the corn down. So I went about doing that.

Now that a lot of the plants have been removed, the squash will be happier. It was really trying to invade the paths. In fact it got away from me as it always does.

One branch went up and over my poor current bush and over the fence. After propping up the zinnias on the one side with some string and taking out the corn plants on the other. I found a lot of fruit in there. So my poor current will have to live in the shade for the rest of the year. I haven't seen a lot of the squash set, so any that have will stay.

If you remember from before I said this corn was setting two ears per stalk. That is true. But the second ear usually look like the one above or even less developed. A few have been edible but not many. The first ears are all perfect, but not these ones. So the stalks left have second ears that might do something. I'm hoping.

The wasps on the fennel were swarming around the flowers as I staked them up. There was even a white faced hornet (never fear they are very gentle hornets). I really wanted to take a photo of them, but couldn't get the silly camera to focus on them. Then a downy woodpecker landed on one of the stakes in the cleared out corn bed. He happily sat there for a while. I sort of got him in focus. I really need my husband's good camera for this. A point and shoot doesn't do focus on small things well. But this bird has been visiting every day now since the sunflower has ripened some seed. Sometimes I'll walk by the plant and not notice him (since the flowers are 8' high), but then I hear him fly off.

Freed

My poor zucchini as been stuck under a row cover for most of its life. This is the first year I've successfully kept the vine borer out of the zucchini. Of course as you can see above the zucchinis have outgrown their cage and were trying to break out.

I took their row cover off today. It was pretty hard to remove the clips and such on one side as that side is just a wall of cucumbers. I had to get some string up to keep the weak branches from blocking my path totally. I think they are weaker than normal as they don't see a lot of wind under a row cover. Also the row covers holds them up.

Most of the leaves were fine and not showing any powdery mildew or damage, but a few looked like this. They were being farmed by the ants. The good insects can't get under at all to get rid of the aphids so they really took over on certain leaves. I cut them off and tossed them into the compost

I've only had a handful of zucchini so far this year. I'm wondering if the row cover is worth it. I just can't keep the flowers pollinated well and the plants don't grow as well underneath the cover (unlike other plants that seem to thrive under a cover). It won't be long before powdery mildew takes over the plants and they all die off. So do I get a better harvest this way? Or just a later one? Probably the latter. And the cover is a lot of work. I think next year I won't bother.

On better news I succeeded in forcing my fennel to flower. A few weeks ago I cut off some of their roots about 6" from the plant. Not all the way around or anything, but just enough to stress them out a bit and convince them it was time. I want those fennel seeds. And boy are they sending up blooms. Tons from each plant. I only have five plants. I'm hoping this is enough to keep them viable for a lot of years. Seed to Seed recommends ten plants if I remember correctly (not a sure thing). I've only got half that. I guess I'll find out down the road.

A Gorgeous Day

Today I spent a long time out in the garden weeding. It is a gorgeous day. Not too hot and the humidity is gone. At times like this I wish most days could be so perfect. With the occasional rainy day in between to make the plants happy too. But without those miserably humid days like earlier, would I appreciate it as much?

After weeding is the perfect time to take those sweeping photos of the garden. Not that I can really get sweeping photos in a 1/5 of an acre lot with two townhouses on it. And those beds might be all weeded, but the abundant dill and sweet alyssum make it look a bit messy. My circle garden is being taken over by the sweet alyssum. I wasn't going to let it take over quite this much, but somehow it got out of control. It seems so happy that I just don't want to get rid of it. I ought to at least cut it out of the melon bed so they don't get taken over. In a month I'll be saying the opposite. Because you know melons. They will spread. And I'll be trying to keep the melons out of the paths with the sweet alyssum.

The dill has taken over sections of the circle garden too. I was going to keep it weeded out of this section, but the black swallowtail caterpillars were all over it earlier. And I didn't want to hurt them. Now it is starting to go to seed. Such pretty flowers. I know if I don't get them out soon, I'll be weeding this section of dill yet again after the flowers drop their seeds. But so far the flower has convinced me to leave it be. I have dill with mind control. That must be it.

I didn't take one of those "sweeping" photos of the front yard. But I did take a photo of the entrance to our yard. The zinnia bed sits in front of my neighbor's tomato patch. In previous years I grew taller 3' zinnias that fought it out with the neighbor's cherry tomatoes. With my zinnias going through the fence into his tomatoes and his tomatoes coming through the fence into my zinnias. It might be a more peaceful summer this year. These are only supposed to get half that tall. I got tired of propping up zinnias, and am hoping the shorter ones can keep themselves upright. Or if they do flop after a rain, maybe no one will notice as they are so close to the ground already.

While I was out weeding, guess what I saw? Isn't it gorgeous. I think I'll pick it tomorrow for dinner. Tonight I'm having my first fennel ever. I've never grown it before or cooked with it. I'm going to have it on a pizza no less. Caramelized fennel and onions with a little ham. I'm still trying to decide if fig jam or plum sauce would make a better pizza sauce for it. Any opinions?

I want to leave the rest of my fennel for seed. The packet I bought had barely any seed in it and I hear it can be a real weed if you let them go to seed. It reminds me of zinnia seed. The packet I first got was so tiny with only 25 seeds. It isn't like zinnia seeds are hard to harvest or don't put out a lot of easy to collect seed. So why only 25 seeds? Since then I've just saved it myself. But Seed to Seed says that Florence fennel can't be grown for seed in the northeast. Is this true? Has anyone else been successful here? I've found a couple of mistakes in that book that say you can or can't do something here that I disagree with (not that I remember what they were, but I do remember disagreeing with it as I read it, probably out loud too). So maybe they are wrong with that too?

If you live in the northeast and have grown fennel for seed, let me know. If there are any tricks, I'd love to know that too. But I can always try stressing the plant out. Growing guides say not to transplant as it makes the plant bolt. Hmm I can do that if necessary. I hate mistreating them that way though if I don't have to.

Clearing Out and Planting Up

Yesterday I showed you the bed I had my lettuce in. If you were looking, you would have noticed that I also had a lot of dill in the bed. I never plant dill anymore. It volunteers everywhere and is quite a weed. I didn't weed it out of the bed as I wanted to pick and dehydrate it. As I was picking I noticed one black swallowtail caterpillar munching on the dill. They are really common here and I often have to move them to another plant when I need to clear a bed. This one though was on some dill in the path, so I just let it be. It won't be long before this bed is all planted up with melons but for now it gets to wait. We have a two day cold spell and I'll wait to start melons once it is over.

I did want to plant up one bed though, the old kale bed. But first I had to harvest the last of the kale blossoms and rip the old plants out.

Between the plants I had some cilantro growing. I debated with myself over whether to pull it or try to plant around it. Since I was planting parsnips in that location I decided I'd better just pull it to eat small. I really wanted to loosen the soil up for the long rooted parsnips. I've never grown parsnips before and don't know if I've given them enough time, but I'd love to have more things for winter storage or maybe early spring picking. I didn't have any beds available for them earlier.

In the middle of the bed I planted parsnips. On one side I planted a mix of mizuna, salad turnips (will they grow in the summer?) and beets. The other side I'm leaving empty for a succession crop. I put a doubled over old row cover on top of the soil to help keep it moist and to keep the soil in place the next couple of days. We have wet weather predicted, though I don't think any really heavy rains are in the forecast. From what I hear parsnips take a long time to come up so I'll probably leave the cover on until they do. The cover helps keep the soil moist and makes watering easier.

While I was out seeding I seeded some Red Sails lettuce in the lettuce bed and some fennel next to the older fennel. I've never grown fennel before either. The earlier planted fennel are doing very well, but again I don't know how well it will do in the summer, but it never hurts to try.

And last but not least of the chores was to put up a cover for the cucumber and zucchini. It won't stay on all season. But the cucumber side will stay on until they start to run well and need their trellis. I do it to keep the number of cucumber beetles down. The zucchini side will stay on until the borers are gone. In my eternal quest to have zucchini survive the borers I've tried covering them in the past unsuccessfully. They always seem to find a way in. But maybe, just maybe this year my zucchinis won't die so quickly. Maybe. Or maybe the zucchini will outgrow the cover long before the borers are gone, and then I'll have to pull it off. I've never had a year that I've had way too much zucchini. I know I'm supposed to, but it just never happens. My townhouse mates get some every year, but no one else does. I keep crossing my fingers for that zucchini glut. Not because I love it so much, but I hear about it all the time and somehow I think I'm missing something. Probably not. My yearly chard glut just makes me work to get rid of it all.