Late June Update

Strange heat wave here.  Never seen anything like it.  But most things are growing well.

Onions:  Doing well.  Close spacing and leaf mulch helped keep weeds to a minimum and moisture levels even.  Watering every second morning with water wand.

Strawberries: My Lovely Wife's picking has finished.  35.5 lbs from 44 plants in one 50 square foot bed.  Now the new runners have been guided into the 50 elevated pots and those will be the start of a new bed once the early potatoes are finished.

Potatoes:  Doing well.  Decided not to cut off the flowers after reading about diseases entering through leaf and stem wounds.  If I can get another extra week or two before the viruses hit, I should be able to more than make up any loss to fruited flowers.  We’ve been buying spuds for one month.  Probably will start stealing my own earlies in a few weeks.

Corn and Squashes:  Doing well.  It will take much work to keep the trash pandas out of the corn.  I’m currently trying to get them to really enjoy mini marshmallows.  They like them but won’t fully enter the live trap yet.  I have hopes.  I harvest a zucchini every other day.

Lettuces and Garlic:  Coming along nicely.  Pre dug our first garlic bulb.  Our old stuff was very mushy.  The different leaf lettuces have been providing all spring.

Peas and Beans:  Peas are late and today tips were stressing to heat.  Beans are starting to climb the poles.  Germination from my home grown old and new seed was very good.  Watering daily with watering wand is needed with close plantings.

Cantaloupes are doing very well.  Watermelons, not so much.  Some leaf loss, not sure why.  Will search out disease resistant watermelon variety for next year.

Root Crops:  So sad.  Germination was so poor.  It was all my fault.  I didn’t place the usual burlap sheets over the bed to ensure even moisture.  The rows in the shade of the greenhouse did fine.  The rest will need to be reseeded soon.  Will lose poundage this year.  Always learning or reinforcing past knowledge.

Cucumbers:  Doing great.  Already picked 11 slicers from the Socrates plant.  The Marketmore plant is progressing well.

Tomatoes and Peppers:  Progressing nicely.  Nothing to eat yet.  Some plants are already six feet tall.  Trained up twine to the ceiling of the greenhouse with plastic clips.  Running three leaders for each tomato plant.  Experimenting with two and three leaders on the peppers.  Have no clue if it will work but that is still to be determined.  The idea was to get the crop ripening more gradually over a longer period of time.  Always learning.

Cabbages:  Looking good.  They like the weed free black plastic mulch and so do I.  One side shoot broccoli plant should produce a good long time.  

Saw a small rabbit in the next door neighbour’s front yard.  And he skipped through her fence with ease.  Never seen bunnies in the subdivision before.  Another reason to have the backyard fully fenced with solid boards and a concrete curb.  I hope to be working on the last long section soon.  At least I bought myself a new saw.

Happy Gardening.

Mid-June: The Pace Slows

The mad rush is mostly over.  I finally got the carrots, parsnips, beets and rutabagas seeded in my pair of root crop beds.  Everything else is planted and in the ground; there’s no more tilling, raking, marking, mulching, seeding and transplanting.  Now it’s just weeding, watering, training, trellising, thinning, pulling and picking.  I can finally slow down.  And get some other yard chores done.

Strawberries:  My Lovely Wife is in the middle of picking the strawberries – a good crop of Shuksans, big and juicy but not quite sweet enough due to a bit less sun than needed.  Once they’re picked, I’ll be setting up my 50 pots to train new runners into for next year’s bed.  I’m always fleeing the strawberry root weevil and I did see some in amongst the berries this year.  So every year the strawberries need to be moved to a new location.

Raspberries:  The Willamettes will be ready in a week or so.  But the new Tullameens are suffering with partly naked lower canes and less top growth than I’m used to.  Perhaps the root weevil too but maybe something else.  They supposedly suffer from root rot but with my sandy soil that shouldn’t be the problem.

Pole Beans:  My last year’s home saved Blue Lake Pole Bean seed had a great germination rate: 100% while my old 2015 seed did well with 89%.  They’ve stalled in this weather but soon they’ll need poling and a bit of training.

Cucumbers:  We ate our first Socrates yesterday.  Last year the single plant in the greenhouse put out 58 half pound slicing cukes until October.  The Marketmore plant is looking healthy too.  Both are trained up twine at the north end of the greenhouse; the Socrates needs tomato clips but the Marketmore just needs help winding up the twine.  All side shoots are removed as they climb until they hit the ceiling, then I let a new shoot nearer the bottom to take over or at least compete as the old leader chugs across the ceiling on the north side.

Peppers:  Had an aphid problem with them in the greenhouse.  Sprayed with Safers Insecticidal Soap.  It worked.  A couple days later I found the culprits – there were ants nesting under the landscape fabric on the other bed of melons.  They farm the aphids like dairy cows and even keep the lady bugs away.  

I scooped up a bunch of the ants with their occupied soil and dumped them in the chicken’s run and then flooded the remains of the little nest a number of times.  Out here we don’t get real ant hills, at least not yet.  These ants enjoy the dry of the greenhouse and I wasn’t diligent enough in keeping the soil moist before tilling and planting.  Next year I’ll be sure to scoop out any small nests before tilling.

Squashes:  They’re slow right now like the beans and corn, with our cloudy, cooler weather.  I hope they catch up with this better weather coming for this week.

I am enjoying some cycling after hours when the roads are quieter.  But I really need to attack the back fence.  It needs some major encouragement to keep out the raccoons and keep in the privacy.  The plan is to do a semi-rebuild.  Of course, that was the plan last year too.  But then there was cycling.

Happy Gardening.

In a Mirror Dimly

There’s a lot of gardening misinformation out there.  And there’s so much people don’t know.  So what makes my information the Truth?  What makes my experience and knowledge the Gospel (Good News)?  

I was reminded of what’s out there when a rather Good (deep, thought provoking) blogger, Francis Berger mentioned he had expanded his vegetable garden and was inundated with weeds.  He was asking what to do, short of napalm.  Some of the responses were encouraging and considerate: this kind of hoe or that many inches of wood chip mulch (ugh) and how to keep at it a bit everyday.

My observation was the same old one: “They don’t know!”  Sure, we all have some knowledge of where the seeds should go in and what the vegies should look like when they’re ready, but it appears that gardening skills are rather unknown to most.

But why should I figure I’ve got it all figured out?  I have no specific education, no degree, no legal qualifications.  I just have what I’ve gleaned through my years of reading and my hands on experience.  

It reminds me of the verse in I Corinthians 13:12.  

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. (RSV)   

This was written about 1,950 years ago when mirrors were made of polished bronze and they didn’t work very well, things were dim, unlike the mirrors we have today.  My gardening knowledge is only partial and dim and sometimes I get it wrong and try to learn how to correct it.  We live in a fallen world where things often go wrong. (Yesterday I found my pepper plants were full of aphids -- never had that before)  I'm still learning day by day.  But in the meantime, my help may be a good starting point of what’s out there.

I feel I may have one other modest quality: Discernment.  This is a bit different from knowledge or wisdom.  It’s an ability to figure out what is right or wrong;  what is good or bad.  There are so many mistruths out there.  Even lies that have been told for many decades.  

Like the lie of Enriched White Bread.  That sin should have been exposed many years ago by the nutritionists, but it hasn’t.  So instead, people are over fed and under nourished and the population suffers from diabesity caused in part by the lie of empty white bread. 

Silver Hills Sprouted Wheat Bread originates from the Fraser Valley.

Perhaps my discernment has led me to picking up the better practices and abandoning the poorer ones.   I’m not an expert.  Just someone willing to share his journey.  My gardening information is a bit like: “One beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”  Just hopefully not white bread.

Happy Gardening.

Bean Seeds and Seeding Beans

I waited a week later to plant my beans.  We had a patch of cool weather and I wanted to be sure of good warm soil temperatures for proper germination.

My bean seed is a personal selection of the old standby: Blue Lake Pole.  They were the go-to bean of choice (industry standard?) 30 years ago with great flavour, vigorous growth, good pollination and fine quality green beans for freezing.  Blue Lake had such a good reputation that some lower growing bush varieties were calling themselves Bush Blue Lake even though they were still much blander tasting as many bush beans tend to be.  But Blue Lake had one problem for the Seed Sellers: they were open pollinated and anyone could save their own seed.

Ten years ago I ran into a few backyard growers that complained of the stringiness of their store bought Blue Lake seed.  ‘String’ beans of the olden days were where you had to hand break the bean’s stem tip end and strip the ‘string’ down the length of the bean before processing.  (I’ve had to do that with some snap peas recently).  Blue Lakes had never been stringy before.  

It would seem the producer was harvesting his seed without any selecting for only positive traits.  Some unwanted (pollen) characteristics had been let in, or perhaps the seed was so cheap that they wanted to just keep costs down and purity of seed wasn’t a priority.  I solved these backyard growers’ problem by gifting them with some of my Personally Selected and Saved Blue Lake seed.

Saving bean seed is moderately simple.  Once the beans have established themselves, I pole them and save one pole of 4 to 6 plants for seed saving.  I don’t pick any beans from that pole the whole season.  Then I select only those beans that are long and straight, let them dry on the pole and store for another year’s planting seed.  I must only plant the one variety so no other beans will cross pollinate them. 

However, saving seed is like wine – not every year is a good vintage.  Some years my saved bean seed has had poor germination. 

2015 was a very good year. 

2016 -- I don’t remember. 

2017 was very poor quality seed – or so I found out later. 

2018 was my gardening sabbath rest and I grew nothing but fall rye and red clover. 

2019 -- I seeded my newest (2017) Blue Lake seed and only 64% came up so I reseeded the empty spots.  Twice.  That gave me a more extended ripening crop with plants at three different stages.  Plus, that was the first year the (chinese) Brown Marmorated Stink Bug showed up.  They really enjoyed my longer producing tender crop.  With the resulting bug damage, I kept no seed from 2019.

2020 -- I still had my old 2015 seed and it germinated amazingly well.  We got a good crop and that year and had very few Brown Stink Bugs.  I saved a pole of beans for seed.

2021 -- I really need to wean myself off my old 2015 seed but don’t want to risk a crop failure.  So I planted 60% with my new 2020 seed and 40% with 2015 seed, and I waited for the soil to really warm up.  This year’s bean bed is a bit larger than needed so I should be able to handle some germination losses.  And I believe it’s always preferable to have too many green beans in the freezer than too few.

The bean bed was fortified in my preferred way.  Beans are listed as soil builders and they are, but they still do better with a bit of nitrogen.  I added 4 gallons of one year old composted chicken manure, 1.75 lbs of Rock Phosphate and 1.5 lbs of Lime.  This was nicely tilled in then raked flat with the back of my bow rake. 

 

With my row marker set at 7 inch intervals I drew lines down the length of the bed and across the bed for 7 inch square centres.  I hand pressed one bean seed onto each line intersection with the seed sitting upright on its end about .75 to 1 inch deep.

Now we water and wait.   We’ll see how these new (2020) Bean Seeds are for Seeding Beans.  I’ll keep saving the old 2015 seed until I know that the new crop isn’t stringy or have other defects.

Happy Gardening.