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.

Mulching Onions

The time has come to mulch my onions.  Mulching accomplishes at least two things:  It keeps the roots more evenly moist and discourages weeds. My main season winter storage onions are up beyond 18 inches tall and the weather prediction is for extended warm and dry.  I just did my second weeding by hand and so this is also a good time to cover the soil up for weed suppression.

I don’t like to mulch my onions any earlier than now since it cools the soil and might slow the growth during our cool, wet spring.

One old book I had, classified onions as Light Feeders along with carrots, peppers, parsnips, peas and beans.  I don’t quite agree.  I think onions were classed as lighter feeders because their root balls are quite restricted and don’t reach far out like other vegetables.  But they really do need a rich soil if grown at optimum spacing.

Because of their less-extended root system, they are more susceptible to the drying out of the soil (especially my sandy soil) during dry periods, so an even moisture environment is superior and a mulch helps accomplish that.

Before mulching

My onions are grown in rows across the bed.  The rows are one foot apart and the onions are 8 inches apart within the rows.  That gives 96 square inches per plant.  (Actually I seeded indoors in January, two seeds per pot so many 'plants' are pairs of onions.  Pairs give me slightly smaller onions which isn't a bad thing since mine tend to be so big.)  About the same spacing could be accomplished with 10 inch equidistant spacings but there’s a reason for my wider spaced rows. 

Several years ago, my son TOG had invited volunteers to help hand weed his onion beds as he was falling behind and could lose the crop.  One of the free helpers was a bit rough and heavy handed.  He had a tendency to reach in and often break the taller onion leaves while going after the lower growing weeds.  After a couple of weeks of cooler weather, some virus, fungus or disease whooshed though the beds with the broken leaves and wiped out the crop.

That is why I like my onion rows running across my four foot wide bed with enough space to reach in from the side without breaking any leaves for weeding and mulching.  TOG's multiple rows run down the length of his 30 inch wide beds and once the onions are tall it gets difficult to reach in over a row to get at the weeds by hand.

My mulch of choice is autumn leaves from a neighbour’s maple tree.  This year I used some that I’d stored in a barrel for over two years.  Last year I used 7 month old leaves and first chopped them up with the lawn mower.  Unfortunately, mowing reduced the volume to a quarter of what I’d started with, the mulch was too thin and I quickly ran short.  So this year I just crumpled and broke the very old leaves with my hands before spreading them 1.5 to 2 inches thick over all of the bed.  And I was careful not to damage any onion leaves.  It worked well.

I did the same for my garlic.  

Any weeds that do make it through the mulch are grabbed by reaching in between the rows at ground level.  The sunshine and soil fauna will break the leaf mulch down over the next two months and even though much of it will be gone by harvest time, about the end of July, I really believe mulching onions makes a big difference.

Happy Gardening.

Hilling Potatoes

Potatoes before Hilling

Reading about the old Soviet Leader Nakita Khrushchev Is rather mind numbing – a lot of people died because of him.  The only thing I remember of him when I was a kid was when he was in the UN and took off his shoe, pounded his desk with it and shouted, “You Shut Upf! You Shut Upf!”  More recently I heard that he had complained in the 1960’s that he couldn’t find hardly anyone who knew how to grow potatoes.  

The disincentive through Soviet Collectivization had destroyed the passing on of valuable knowledge of simple things like growing potatoes.  I believe our own industrialized mega-farm agribusiness has accomplished the same thing.  Therefore, I grow potatoes not only for accessing the best tasting varieties of this organic, unsprayed, dietary mainstay, but to know How to grow them and the ability to “tell others also”. 

Heaping the soil around the potatoes is important for production.  I like to do mine when the plants are about 16 to 18 inches tall.  I feel it’s a fine line between allowing enough foliage to support good growth and disturbing extended roots already established by the plants.  If I hill too early, I bury too much foliage.  If I hill too late, I disturb baby spuds in the soil.  Maybe I'm just being picky but I always try for optimum production.

Some texts promote hilling twice.  Some say to hill when the flowers show up and the plants are full height.  My sandy soil tends to hill only so high and a second hilling isn’t usually successful so I prefer single hilling with my in between timing.  

With my soil, hilling is accomplished with my bow rake.  This is when a proper longer handle on a rake is most useful. In heavier soils or when I want to dig slightly into the path, I’ve used my 2 lb. grub hoe. 

Potatoes after Hilling

 The spuds run down the beds in a double row 24 inches apart.  From one path on one side of the bed I reach over the bed to the far path and rake the soil up against the far row of plants, burying the plants halfway.  Then I rake from the centre of the bed up the side of the closer row.  I do the same thing from the opposite path, reaching across the bed for the farther row and raking from the centre bed line for the closer row.

A bit closer view.

This is all very doable with the four foot wide bed.  A narrower bed couldn’t hold a double row of potatoes.  Any small weeds that are buried in the hilling are not coming back.  Later, the close mature canopy of the potato's foliage shades and slows future weed growth so that any weeding is minor and done by hand pulling whenever weeds are noticed while walking by.

One problem I have is my sandy soil erodes easily with watering and I must be gentle and gradual with my water-wanding.  Later in the season I must be aware of any exposed potatoes and quickly cover them by hand so they don’t turn green (and toxic).  These spuds usually show up while watering by hand and dredging muddy, eroded soil from the centre between the rows works quite well for covering them up without disturbing other roots. 

The novelty of growing spuds inside a stack of old rubber tires is cute but not practical.  Where does one find the soil to keep on adding as the plant grows taller?  One single plant can only place so much energy into potato production so why not use all that extra soil for more plants rather than one tall one?  What could be the toxicity of dust and chemicals from the tires?

Four foot wide beds with double rows of potatoes, hilled and well cared for in a good year will give me 50 lbs of spuds from a 50 square foot bed.  

This year I have a couple of test plots comparing different nitrogen sources and different seed suppliers.  I’m seeing differences already and will report as the crop matures. 

Let’s not be like Krushchev’s Soviets.  Potatoes might be ‘cheap’ right now, but I believe many more of us need to know how to grow potatoes for when they aren’t.

Happy Gardening.

Nice Melons

Crimson Sweet Watermelon five days after transplanting.

Hannah's Choice Cantaloupe five days after transplanting.  They're both adapting well and starting to take off.

I’m quite new to the Cantaloupe, Watermelon growing scene.  These I thought of as mostly garden luxury items.  How else could you describe a fruit crop that only ripens over a 12 day period, is tricky to grow, can’t really be stored or frozen, and takes up needed bed space where other more productive and longer keeping vegetables could be grown.

Over the decades I’d occasionally tried a certain watermelon or muskmelon that was ‘easy’ or ‘highly recommended’ for my area, but they always gave poor results.  Technically our cool summers on the Wet Coast are not very good for melon production. Plus, I never knew when they were ripe and they readily succumbed to wilts and viruses resulting in few and small fruits.

Last year that changed.  I harvested 9 decent cantaloupes averaging just under 2 lbs each.  They tasted great and I learned how to tell when they were ripe.  That was 17 lbs from about 22 square feet of bed.  This was closer to my average production goal of 1 lb of produce per square foot.  Last year my Raspberries only gave me .33 lbs per square foot and my Strawberries gave me .41.  So, Nice Melons are always a fun treat that I can now squeeze into my production demands.

Two years ago, I built a new greenhouse.  The old one, 8.5 by 10 feet was built of cedar 2 X 2’s mounted onto a base of 4 X 4 inch cedar fence posts.  It had lasted many years but a nasty winter (south!) wind had grabbed it and tumbled it up the garden and into my hop pole.  The sturdy greenhouse plastic had helped it hold its shape but out in the howling wind I had to quickly slice off the plastic to keep it from blowing away, and it sadly folded like an old lawn chair into a tangle of broken spars and hardware.

My new greenhouse was Bigger – 12 by 15 feet made of 2 X 3’s.  It spanned 3 full beds instead of 2 shorter ones and this extra space gave me the idea of trying some cantaloupes.  Without any planning I grabbed two varieties of seed from off the local seed rack.  They were transplanted in the greenhouse and growing nicely but just as they started to fruit the wilts came and stopped everything.  It seemed the humidity was too much for them – I’d been watering the foliage too much, too late in the day and some virus whooshed through the melons turning the vines powdery white.

Last year I made more changes.  I chose a different variety that was much more disease resistant.  My son TOG (The Organic Grower) gave me some bits of his drip irrigation system to set me up for one bed in the greenhouse.  That bed contained the Cucumbers, Peppers and Melons.  The melon portion also got some landscape fabric set down on top of the drip lines which helped keep the foliage even dryer.  The result was some Very Nice Melons.

This last winter we noticed a bit of a surplus of home canned tomatoes in the pantry and decided to reduce this year’s paste tomato production by half.  This would leave even more room in the greenhouse and so I planned to try some Watermelons this year as well.

On April 12^th I seeded some Crimson Sweet Watermelon and some more Hannah’s Choice Cantaloupe, (both from Johnny’s Seeds) indoors under lights.  Within a couple of weeks they went outside into the greenhouse and continued to thrive in their pots.

I set down the drip lines coming from a header that is attached to a garden hose plugged into a 70 litre garbage can that sits on a small platform outside the greenhouse.  I transplanted the 4 melons into the bed, spacing them every 2 feet down the bed with some extra space in the middle separating the two varieties.  Between each melon I laid a 2 foot wide piece of fabric across the bed held nicely in place by my homemade coathanger wire staples.  That will keep the weeds out and the moisture in.  I fill the garbage can every day in the summer and let it slowly drain on its own.

Let’s see if I can get some Nice Watermelons too. 

Happy Gardening.