Pole Bean Harvest

 The Blue Lakes are done!  We managed 33.75 lbs over 23 days on 34 square feet.  That’s just a hair under 1 lb per square foot (to keep me humble).  I averaged picking about 3 lbs every two days.  My Lovely Wife tipped, blanched, sliced and bagged them for the freezer.

In years past I’d let the plants stay up the poles for the occasional flowering and an extended season for the odd fresh meal.  But this year I pulled the plants down from their poles as soon the main crop was done.  This was to inhibit the food supply of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug recently (also) imported from China.  

There were fewer stink bugs this year than last year --- I only ran into a handful each picking.  I didn’t see any building population until right near the end of the bean harvest.  They prefer my younger beans and turn them into skinny, limp, rubbery things. 

Taking down the bean plants I first cut all the stems a couple of inches above the ground.  This leaves the roots in the ground where the root nodules that have soil building fixed nitrogen in them can be absorbed into the soil.  

Next I cut out the twine holding the cross pieces at the tops of the poles, then slid the plants down the 10 foot poles.  I pulled out the poles and carried out the spiral like bundles of vines, tossing them into the chicken’s run. 

My hope being any bugs were taken care of by my two birds. To build the soil in the hen’s run I need to add a lot of organic matter to combine with their droppings and these bean vines should be just the ticket for now.   I like to hose off most dirt from the bottoms of the poles before I tie them into a bundle and slide them under the deck’s floor joists.  My poles are very rot free after all these years. 

I left the remaining two poles in the corner with their vines intact – the corner pole being the one that I never picked.  

The plan is for these to ripen for future seed.  I’ve been successfully saving my own Blue Lake seed for over 10 years.  My Blue Lakes are Stringless and are a better selection than many store-bought examples of the same strain.  These last two poles will stay up until the bean pods turn golden yellow.  If they mature but don’t quite dry out before the fall rains come, I’ll lift the whole pole with the vines intact and lay it under the deck to totally ripen / dry. 

I’m hoping the stink bugs will leave these mature beans alone.  Last year after the beans were done, the big evil things moved over to my two hop plants.  

My son TOG had later harvested the hops while I was away and first met up with the stink bugs here.  But his Cascade Pale Ale still tasted most excellent.  

Onion Harvest

The garlic was lifted first.  It is now nicely cured but perhaps a little too dried (I left it in the garage window and the peach tree didn’t shade it quite as much as I thought. We’ll see how it keeps).  18 plants, in 16 square feet yielded 3 lbs of Red Russian hard necked garlic.  That should give us about 90 cloves to use all winter and 18 more to plant in October.  It will store well in the garage which doesn’t freeze and has no motor vehicle living in it.

After that the Stutgart Onions were ready.  Their tops were starting to topple first and once the majority were down, I lifted them and stored them on trays in the shade under the deck to dry and cure.  They are almost ready and I’ll store them in the garage as well.

The Pattersons were last.  As seems quite common with me they started to go to seed near the end of their life, sending up flower stalks which I immediately cut off.  My son TOG had some Pattersons that went to seed about 10 years ago.  But only the ones that were shaded by some trees at about 2:00 in the afternoon grew seed stalks so we have tried to keep them in a full sun location.

Alas, last year the bed next to my onions had raspberries growing tall and many of the Pattersons again went to seed.  I thought all was lost; that these onions wouldn’t store well but it turned out they lasted just as long as the non-hard necked ones – all the way to June.  They weren’t number ones but the stalk’s hard shaft was easily separated from the onion in the kitchen.

Because of the seed stalks, the onion’s other green leaves were slow to topple.  I waited, not watering for an extra week or two and TOG had a look and said they should come out so I finally lifted them. 

They are now curing under the deck and will be ready for the garage in another week.

 

 

They are dry enough to weigh: the Stutgarts gave me 21 lbs and the Pattersons 16 lbs.  That’s from 34 square feet of bed making it 1.09 lbs per square foot -- not as good as last year’s 1.97 but fine.  This year’s Pattersons were smaller than last year -- perhaps due to the lack of well composted horse that I had used before.  (next year I should have some well matured chicken that I acquired this last March).  However, TOG finds non-jumbo onions sell well in his farmer’s market stall.  Not everyone wants a full 1 lb onion.

I may be looking for another storage onion variety.  Patterson is the one recommended by Eliot Coleman through Johnny’s Seeds.  Perhaps our latitude being 4 degrees farther north than Maine makes a difference with day length and toggling to seed production?    

The Stutgart onion sets were only a last minute grab since I was facing an unknown lockdown and I thought it may be useful to grow more onions than I’d already seeded indoors.  I’m surprised at how well they did and will watch them for taste and storage qualities.  But I’ll keep looking for the perfect winter storage onion for the Fraser Valley.  

Happy Gardening.

Strawberry Planting

It was a week later than I’d hoped.  The bed of potatoes that the strawberries were replacing lasted longer than expected but eventually the spuds came out.

After clearing the Pontiacs out of the 50 square foot bed, I weeded its edges and raked it relatively flat.  Then I sprinkled on 3.5 lbs of Alfalfa Meal and 1.5 lbs of Rock Phosphate (slow action stuff like bone meal).  I didn’t add any lime since strawberries prefer the acid end of the pH soil spectrum.

I stirred in these amendments with my little electric Mantis tiller then I re-raked the bed flat and smooth with the flat side of my bow rake.  Next, using my row marker, I ran 4 lines, each one foot apart down the length of the 4 foot by 12.5 foot bed.

In my strawberry bed I’ve been using the same strips of black polypropylene landscape fabric for several years.  These 4 foot by 1 foot pieces are a bit frayed but still block the weeds very well.  

My other pieces of equipment are some homemade staples made from wire coat hangers.  Each coat hanger is cut and bent into four 8 inch long staples that are shaped like an old guy’s wooden walking cane with a squared off handle.  The staples are pushed through the landscape fabric and into the soil to hold them in place.  

Each four-foot strip receives 6 staples – two at each end and two in the middle.  The first strip is placed across the width of the bed starting at the end of the bed.  Then I transplant four young strawberry plants along the edge of the first strip at the row marker line intersections.

A new fabric strip is then snugged along that row of four plants and stapled into place.  Then four more plants are planted for the next cross row, alternating plants and fabric strips down the length of the bed.  

The young plants were a bit more pot bound than I’d preferred.  I like the root ball to hold together when slid out of the pot but these already had some roots peeking out the bottoms of the pots.  I was at least a week late.

The new plants are watered in with some fish fertilizer and after that work there is very little left to do until the crop ripens next June.  I make sure I snip any new runners off the young plants until growth stops in the winter.  Also, there’s the occasional bit of weeding among the plants between the strips.  

During winter I re-insert any staples that are lifted by the wind or frost.  Next year in mid-March I pull the end staples, leaving the middle ones in and lift the fabric on each side to apply a bit more Alfalfa meal then gently scratch it in with a hand cultivator and re-staple the pieces back down.  In the spring, even the minor weeding is finished once the new strawberry leaves shade out any new growth.

From this year’s bed we harvested 21 lbs of exceptionally large, sweet and flavourful, Organic Shuksan Strawberries.

The more plant growth I can get this fall the better the production should be next spring with a chance to meet or beat last year’s level.  Lord willing.

Happy Gardening.

 

First Blue Lakes

 

They’re looking really good.  Picked 2.5 lbs in this first picking.  No need for the ladder this early in the season.  Of the 14 ten-foot poles, I’ll leave the corner pole closest to the corn unpicked for seed.  

With no rain for the last 23 days, mostly sunny and warm, watering has been intensive – almost every day with the wand in the bean bed.  The beans are equally spaced so tightly throughout the bed that the few hesitations in watering resulted in some yellow leaves at the bottoms of some of the plants.   

So far there are no sightings of the new nasty Brown Marmorated Stink Bug from China  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_marmorated_stink_bug  that showed up at my place last year. They started out looking like long legged ticks then grew bigger to chunky short legged spiders and finally to full sized, shield shaped bugs the size of dimes.  They sucked juices out of the growing beans.  It looks like wimpipedia has removed all previous references of the bugs coming to the west coast in shipping containers from communist china.

Last year’s crop was badly staggered and extended from poor seed germination.  This year’s crop had much better, uniform germination and should be quicker and shorter.  Hopefully this might help beat the bugs this time.

Next year, with this good germination I may consider slightly wider spacing – going to 8 inch square centers throughout the bed.  If the beans are competing for water so intensively they may be competing for nutrition as well.  Closer spacing might give me more beans but wider spacing could give me more nutritious ones.  And this really is all about feeding a healthy family.

Happy Gardening.

Early Potato Harvest

The Alta Blush are in.  I dug them by hand the way my son TOG does.  He likes to sift his hands through the bed wearing gloves and gets all the different sizes of spuds.  He really preferred to treat the soft skinned earlies with gentleness.

When I had helped him out with my vintage potato rake (it looks like a five tined bent pitch fork) I could sense his concern for his spuds.  Even when I had covered the steel tines with rubber tubing he still wasn’t too pleased.  And now, five years later, I’ve gone over to his preferred harvesting method.  For the earlies at least.

I’ve always wanted to not miss any spuds, not even the smallest ones.  This was partly due to my thriftiness but also to my strict rotations -- to not transfer diseases with volunteer potato plants the next year.  Now there’s a third reason.  My younger son’s shared garden plot had a progression of volunteer spuds for several years ("Oh, look at the nice potato plant!  It came up all by itself.") and now there is an increase in wire worms.  Those nasty, half inch long, thin, yellow-orange critters that dig into most roots and soil vegetables.  They’re not that easy to get rid of and so are not a good thing to have living in a soil near you.

I filled a two gallon bucket with new potatoes and weeded any small but over mature weeds at the same time.  The weeds with seeds went into my curbside compostables can.  Younger weeds went into my own compost box.  Since these beds were brand new, first year beds taken from the lawn, I retrieved a good collection of stones as well.

The spuds were dumped onto the lawn and sprayed down to get all the dirt off them.  Gone are the days when we were taught that water washing was bad for them.  Years ago it was always a dusty day to try to slap the dirt off the cured spuds before storing.  As far as we can see, washing immediately after harvesting has no negative effects.  

The potatoes were then weighed in batches on my small garden scale and then placed gently into a Lug – an industrial plastic type of box with ventilation holes that is stackable as well as nestable for empty storage.  These are great things the commercial growers use for their blueberries and I’ve managed to collect several Lugs from the side of the road that have escaped from their trucks. 

The Lug in the picture contains 42 lbs with 4 spuds having beetle bites and one a bit green from the sun (which we’ll cut and discard the bad halves).  I had already picked 9 lbs earlier on July 19^th which makes my crop of earlies, 51lbs from 74 square feet of bed.  That’s not one pound per square foot but still a decent crop for early season spuds.
 

My potatoes are planted in two rows, two feet apart, lengthwise down the bed.  The plants are spaced 18 inches apart.  After this year I believe I’ll plant the early season ones closer – probably 16 inches apart.  These Alta Blush had smaller plants than my main season potatoes so a bit tighter spacing should work.

After a day and a night under the deck out of direct sunlight, the lug will stay in a dark basement room with good ventilation and a light blanket over it until the garage is cooler in a month or so.  (The old adage of letting the spuds cure in the sun didn’t always work for me.  I once grew some Kenebecs that would turn green even if they only dreamed of daylight.)  In September, whatever isn’t eaten or given away by then will go into the potato bin in the corner of the garage.

My main season potatoes will be harvested soon. 

Happy Gardening.

Garden Progress Report, August 2nd.

Potatoes:  Almost ready to dig.  The early – Alta Blush are all set.  The 3 beds of mid-season Pontiacs (store bought seed) in a week or so.  Will know the poundage soon.  Some of my 18 plants of Chieftain (home kept seed) have some strange, stunted plants and leaf shapes. – some strange virus I’ve never seen.  I thought perhaps it came from slicing the seed spuds before planting, but my younger son used some of mine and kept his whole with same result.  So will definitely only use home kept seed potatoes for emergencies.

Onions:  Stutgart (sets) tops have fallen and will be pulled soon.  Patterson F1 (seeded indoors Jan 10^th and 22^nd) are still upright and watered occasionally.  Will lift soon.

Cabbage:  Hybrid Storage Green are doing exceptionally.  The 4 square feet per plant spacing seems perfect.  The black plastic mulch is working well.

Kale:  Winterbor F1 is doing very well.  We just don’t need even two plants.  The greenhouse will be rolled over them for the winter to extend the season and kickstart the spring.

Beans:  Blue Lake Pole (my seed).  Will start picking in a few days.  The tight spacing demands watering every day.

Peas:  Sugar Ann Snap.  Went way higher than usual 2 feet and fell over making a mess for picking.  Could have pulled them by now but will wait for saving seed.  Next year will sow only 2 rows across bed and build supports to 4 feet high.

Squash:  Honey Boat Delicata.  Three plants growing into my small bunch of corn are doing well but leaves are a bit 'cloudy' looking.  I’ve not pruned any growing tips and fruit set looks good.  These should keep into February.

Corn: Golden Jubilee.  Hard to find at road stands so grow a dozen for the two of us.  Just love the real corn flavour.  Almost overtaken by the squash but got above them and should do well.  Concerned about corn being a raccoon magnet.  Hope my electric fence will work to keep them completely out this time.

Carrots:  Bolerro F1.  Germinated a bit sparsely but are filling out adequately.

Parsnips:  Albion F1.  Slow but steady, will finally thin.  Must order new seed for better germination. 

Beets:  Winterkeeper.  Really old seed but with excellent germination.  Coming along fine.  Will stay in ground with carrots, parsnips and rutabagas for winter.

Rutabaga:  Helenor.  Doing well, exceptional germination, show water stress first.

Tomatoes:  Tiren F1 paste.  Have been topped at ceiling of greenhouse at 6.5 feet.  Last flowers are pollinating soon.  

Mountain Magic F1 – topping now at 8 feet. Performing well.  

Sun Gold – 8 feet, need stool to service, very tasty.  

Bolseno F1 -- good red slicer, glad I have this one plant, dependable.

  

Chef’s Choice Orange – New test, rather on the non juicy side.  Will keep looking for the perfect beefsteak slicer.

Cucumbers:  Socrates – fantastic, 22 slicing cukes, each a half pound, spaced over 33 days so far.  Mild, sweet.  Will train across the whole north roof line in greenhouse if it will go that long.  Marketmore 76 – only 4 slicers so far and have hit 6 foot ceiling.  But found one escaped side shoot near bottom of plant and will train that as new leader.

Sweet Red Peppers:  Super Shepherd.  Coming along decently.  Show water stress easily – just learning drip irrigation in that one bed for first time.  Will use tomato clips with strings once the crop gets heavier.   Must save seed this year.

Cantaloupe:  Hannah’s Choice.  An experiment – don’t know what I’m doing, need to learn how.  This is second year learning.  That was the cause for the drip irrigation experiment.

Lettuce:  Encore Lettuce Mix.  Finished – still have some in the fridge.  Last overgrown plants went to hens yesterday.  Seeded indoors for fall plants last night.

Spinach:  Olympia.  Long gone.  Just seeded more in pots for transplants for fall with lettuce.

Garlic:  Red Russian.  Harvested – good crop.

Fruit production is a whole different topic for another time.  But my Figs:  Desert King are ready to pick.

 Happy Gardening.

Why Go Organic?

A Peanut is not a nut, it is a bean, a member of the legume family including beans, peas and clovers.  An English Horn is not a horn nor is it English.  It is French and a Woodwind.   A Horned Toad is not a toad, nor is it an amphibian.  It is a lizard and a reptile.    Love is not a Feeling, it is an Act of the Will.  The Sex Act is not an act, it is a Progression.  Going Organic is a bit like sex.  My journey into Organics has been a Progression.

One year, long ago, I had no energy.  I’d walk the dog in mid afternoon and return so tired I’d have to take a nap.  After supper with my family, I’d go to my evening shift at work and drag my knuckles around all night.  

At work we had a clerk, a driver that would take me to the different spots at the work site and wait for me while I performed a certain task and then I’d get back in the van and he’d drive me to the next place.  But he was rather tuned out and was rarely parked close to me when I’d completed my chore, so I wound up having to walk a small distance each time to get back in the van.  I was miffed and pooped.

In my early adult years, I enjoyed donating blood to the Red Cross.  However, my hemoglobin was always a bit on the low side and to test that they’d have to get a second drop of blood to slide down the little cylinder full of transparent blue liquid and the drop would very slowly sink to the bottom or even stall half way down. Not heavy enough – not enough iron?  Eventually I decided to keep my light hemoglobin for myself.

With that in mind I thought my fatigue was due to my low blood count.  So I religiously ate Raisin Bran (a good source of iron in the raisins) and I also ate liver.  But I was still pooped.  This went on for months.

Finally, one day I skipped the Raisin Bran.  That evening I had more energy!  That was strange.  I bought Organic raisins and added them to just regular Bran Flakes.  All was well!  It turned out the pesticide residues from the raisins were killing my energy (and the California farm workers).  It was about that time that we Progressed over to Organic peanut butter as well – peanuts were another one of the ‘dirtier’ foods.

A couple of years later I was low energy again.  For several months.  This time it was the decaffeinated tea I was drinking a lot of.  I guess the dry-cleaning fluid they were using to wash the caffeine from the tea didn’t all return to the vat.  

Several years ago, I had an issue with a strange pain in my bladder.  It was gone in mid-summer but came back in the winter.  This went on for a couple of years.  I was almost ready to see my doctor when we figured out what it was.  In the winter we had access to cheap bell peppers grown in our local British Columbia hot houses.  In the summer we ate our own home-grown peppers.  No bladder pains then.  But if I ate store-bought ones in raw strips or in salads, the ache came. (cooked peppers seemed to be okay).  Probably pesticide residues in the peppers.  All perfectly safe, nothing to see here, move along.  The pain has never returned since I changed to only Organic peppers

The food industry has great license to get away with all kinds of things.  Nutritional science has been a fraud for many decades.  Any group that can endorse ‘Enriched White Bread’ as healthy is totally corrupt. (it should have warning labels)  When we lived up in the Frigid North, the local radio station instructed the locals not to put out enriched white (or brown) bread crumbs for the birds.  The birds would fill up on those empty calories, sit on the wire over night and freeze to death.  But no nutritionist desiring to keep his job can ever mention that enriched elephant in the room.

In grade 12 I took an easy, beginners guys foods class and the dear old teacher loved putting wheat germ into most everything we baked.  This was the part of the grain that was refined out of the flours and was perishable and so she always kept it in the fridge.  For many years my Lovely Wife baked our own bread using Stone Ground Whole Wheat Flour.  It was sure good for our kids and us.

Several years ago, a new local company named  Silver Hills https://silverhillsbakery.ca/ , based out of Abbotsford, started selling Sprouted Grain breads.  These were made with totally non refined grains.  In fact, the grain had to be alive – it had to sprout before it was made into bread.  I was so thrilled to finally get store bought bread that was more than okay for you.  It was great for you.  The majority of their ingredients are Organic and they supply much of North America.

Why not sprouted Regular wheat instead of Organic?  About 6 years ago I’d read about some wheat farmers spraying glyphosate on their almost ripe grain.  This is the main ingredient in Roundup, the herbicide that kills most everything except GMO’d corn and other engineered things.  The glyphosate was classed as a ‘desiccant’ and deemed perfectly safe so the farmers were encouraged by our friends in Monsteranto to apply it to their wheat fields 10 days before harvest to ‘stop’ it, i.e. Kill it.  This facilitated the smaller, later, immature grain heads to dry and mature along with the main crop.  This couldn’t be happening!  

My Lovely Wife has four sisters and one of them married a Dirt Farmer way up in Fort St. John.  He was currently the crop insurance inspector and he would know if this activity was happening.  It is.  It turns out many chemicals are deemed safe if they pass through your system fast enough to avoid absorption.  As in “Just passing through. Nothing to see here. Move along.”  We now aim at only Organic flours and breads.

Recently I read of a strange commonality with brain disorder patients – was it Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s? – that many had experienced chronic constipation before getting their illness.  Hmmm.

Just a few years ago we were eating some summer store-bought potatoes.  We love them baked in our toaster oven.  These had skins that tasted bitter.  Later while driving past a Fraser Valley potato field in the Matsqui Flats, I noticed how the whole field’s tops had all died at the same time.  My spuds succumb unevenly so this was rather strange.  I talked to another brother-in-law (four sisters, remember) who lives nearby and he said they ‘knock down’ the tops with glyphosate for an easier harvest.  Ahhh!  Now we’ve progressed to buying only Organic potatoes when we run out of our own.

That same brother-in-law in Matsqui lives next to one of the many blueberry fields in the area.  He is astounded by all the sprays the neighbour puts on his berries.  In the Fraser Valley it’s rare to see a tractor pulling a cultivator, -- they’re almost always attached to sprayers.  One blueberry grower who also had a bit of U-pick on the side stated that they use no sprays,… except for a mildewcide --- that one is needed because the processor won’t accept anything without it.  

While walking through our daughter’s local supermarket in southern California, I noticed lovely blueberries in their little clear boxes with stickers on them stating they were from Pitt Meadows, B.C. --- just down the road from me.  At first, I was so proud.  They were in pristine condition and had travelled 1300 miles.  It must be the refrigeration?  Nawh.  We’ve now progressed to only picking Organic blueberries. (I can’t grow my own) 

Recently my Lovely Wife brought home some BC Okanagan Cherries.  They were lovely, large, plump, crisp, and sweet.  After downing a bunch I noticed that half of them had wounds or marks on them and I started to test if any of these had a bit of a rotten taste.  None of them did.  So, I chose the most deformed, deeply marked ones.  Not a single bit of rotten flavour.  Guess what had been sprayed on those cherries?  We now definitely need to Progress to only Organic cherries.

I used to have the ‘harmless’ vice of sunflower seeds in the shell.  I’d have some most evenings.  And my throat would get swollen.  These seeds never had any bug bites in them like some sunflower seeds used to.  Lack of bug damage was probably not a good sign.  And cracking a mouthful probably held more than just salt.

Changing over to Organics has been a Progression for us.  I hope I’m not too late. 

These are just some of the negative issues involving my change over to Organics.  (I guess I’m a glass half empty guy)  There are so many positive issues when consuming and growing Organics that hopefully will be put out in other posts.

Happy Gardening.