The Garden Chronicles - Week 12
It hasn't rained in almost 3 weeks, not since the remnants of Cristobal blew over. After a crazy amount of spring rain, it's just hot and dry now.
Figures, right?
- Wednesday -
The germination under boards experiment.
It worked well.
I think I'll start doing it regularly. I'll need to pick up some more boards, though.
Pretty good results for a hot, summer planting.
There were 3 toads and a cricket frog enjoying the dampness under the boards. Here's one of the toads next to the hole he wallowed out for himself, right in the middle of my seed row.
Here's the cricket frog.
- Sunday -
The gate's back with a fresh coat of paint.
I cleaned the finished peas out of the 2 middle trellises.
Corn.
It's growing fast.
The Rutgers tomatoes.
Lettuce.
Carrots.
The new carrot plantings. The row on the right was under the boards. I know it's hard to see, but it came up much better than the other one.
Finally some beans. Not exactly impressive growth, though. They were coming up strong, and then several just up and died for some reason. I found an old packet of seed from 2018 and used it to fill in the gaps. It's starting to come up between the bigger plants (and it's 2 years old). Must be a bad year for bean seed or something.
Turnips and beets.
I've started pulling them.
Kohlrabi.
Filling out now. I've never grown these before, but I think they're almost ready.
The Big Beef tomatoes.
The biggest one so far.
A few more.
The backup eggplants in the ground with stakes. The other ones aren't doing well, so these are the last chance for success this year.
Blackberries starting to ripen. The netting is on the frame now to protect them from birds, but it's invisible to the camera, apparently.
Watermelon plants.
All but one of the nearly-drowned peppers are putting on new growth.
1st and 2nd cucumber plants.
Starting to produce.
The backup peppers are growing pretty well.
Cantaloupes, with a pepper on the end of the trellis.
Three butternut squash plants. The one in the foreground is small because I had to replant it. The kohlrabi on the right will be done and gone before the squash needs that space.
The zucchini side plot.
Several zucchini coming on.
The planter, with two batches of lettuce and some backup butternut squash that I'm probably going to toss.
What's left of the beets and turnips I picked above. The beets are cooked and cut up, the turnips are raw and cut up, and that's a bowl of beet greens that have been cleaned up (bug damage and stems removed) but haven't been cooked yet.
See you next week.
I'm off to do some watering. It's a daily chore now. I could really use some rain.
LOL. Ok, I shouldn't laugh, but I'm laughing with you, not at you. I watered last night, after harvesting a bit of lettuce and replanting my cucumbers because they just quit growing. We also went from too wet to dry in a pretty short period, then had rain this morning (of course, since I watered last night).
My strawberries, which are supposed to bloom and produce throughout the summer, have stopped blooming. They're nice and green, though, so I guess they're healthy enough.
There's been a few scattered showers in my area. Some surrounding towns got drenched yesterday, but it completely missed me. Lots of lightning and thunder in the distance, though.
What variety of cucumber are you growing?
That happened to us last weekend. I think it was Saturday that we were under a flood watch, and hardly got a drop of rain. The storms fizzled out crossing the mountains.
I actually had to go get the seed packet
It just says "slicers". I don't know much about different varieties of cukes.
After we talked about lettuce going bolt, I looked for some romaine seeds. Couldn't find any locally. Guess I'll have to look online.
It just says slicers? I hope they work for you. I'm growing Marketmore 76, my old standby. They take the heat without getting bitter.
Yeah. The seed supply is pretty much gone in every store I've been in. It's been that way for weeks, actually. Strange times must have inspired more people than usual to garden. You might actually have a hard time finding any online because of that.
Just slicers. IIRC, there wasn't much selection when I went shopping for seeds, maybe for the reason you mentioned. I can find seeds and plants, but not the selection I'm used to seeing. I can usually find several varieties of cucumbers, but I only remember seeing this one.
The fence around my garden needs some repair, but I can't find fencing supplies, either.
The last rain we had was over a week ago and all it did was settle the dust, it was supposed to rain upwards of 2" last Saturday night and NOT A DROP, the next rain this coming up Friday, maybe.
Cut worm and rabbits took care of my cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and some peppers. The fence is doing it's job on the deer but apparently doesn't work for the rabbits.
I don't grow cucumbers because the local farms grow machine harvest and we're allowed in after harvest to pick up the missed cukes. The farmers who grow cucumbers frown on the gardeners growing them because the gardeners don't treat for downy mildew and it spreads on the wind to their fields causing them to spray for it. And if they don't catch a rain soon the first fields will be bitter and nubby.
Oh, man. Sorry to hear that.
The closest cucumber farm to me, that I'm aware of, is something like 3 counties away. Good thing, I guess. I don't spray anything on mine and I'd hate to feel like I shouldn't be growing them. It wouldn't feel like summer to me without cucumbers from the garden (then again, I can say that about several other things as well). I actually just picked my first two last night.
The ground right around me isn't very favorable for crop farming. It's too rocky. Sure, there's the occasional field of corn, wheat, or beans here and there, but not like other places west of me, off the plateau, where it's field, after field, after field. There's probably more cows right around here than anything else. There's actually a dairy right across the road from me. Pretty sure nothing I grow could mess cows up, thankfully.
The Friday rain is now gone in the forecasts.
The owner of a pickle plant near here goes to Brazil in the winter to supervise pickle production in that country, he went to a farming symposium while down there and he was asked where he was from, he told him the area around here in Michigan, the man replied "Oh, you're from the highest horsepower per acre in the world", he had never heard that before as well as no one else around here. But when you think about the crops grown in the area and the equipment needed to work the ground, plant, spray, and harvest. The worst crop on the ground (HP equals soil compaction) is sugar beets at harvest time, you have the tractor and topper, tractor and harvester, the trucks ranging from tandem dump trucks to semi's, and then because it is usually wet during harvest the tractors to tow the loaded trucks out of the fields. To keep the trucks out of the field and to lower the compaction a local farmer bought huge dump carts, and of course each of those require another tractor, to load the trucks out on the road or a dry area of the field instead of the trucks following the harvester around the field.
I added another photo that I took after I came back in from watering. It's some of the beets and turnips from today, ready for eating. Second from last.
The blackberries, except for a couple of them, look more like raspberries. Do they darken to that extent?
No problem seeing the cricket frog, of course, but I couldn't detect the toad. Of course they're well camouflaged.
The black raspberries growing wild on my land get to be almost as dark as blackberries when they're ripe.
My blackberries are coming along a bit more slowly than Dig's. There are plenty of ripe raspberries, but they're in a creek bed and hard to access.
My wild raspberries are slow ripening this year
My blackberries are slower than usual. Usually by late June, either I've picked them all, or the birds and bears have. This year, most are just now starting to bear fruit - nowhere near ripe.
You and Charger are making me jealous. I've never found any wild raspberries around here.
They look like them, but they don't stop at red. They go from green to red to black as they ripen. You don't want to eat a red blackberry.
If you mentally divide the picture into 4 quadrants, it's in the lower right corner of the upper left quadrant (if that makes sense). It's head is overlapping the carrot seedlings. The little hole it hopped out of is the depression in the lower right quadrant.
GOT IT. I was looking for something much smaller which is why I didn't see it, and now I see that the toad has pretty well filled the lower right quadrant of the upper left main quadrant. (Since I made sense of your description you'll make sense of mine. LOL)
Looking good. The corn and lettuce look really good.
Don't think I have ever seen a cricket frog. Toads all kinda look the same.
You really called it with the weather a while back. The too much rain to none at all thing.
I was delighted to get off the farm at 18 and have absolutely no interest in planting a garden - but your articles are just so darn peaceful I can't keep from looking at them.
Thanks. Peaceful is good these days, with everything that's going on.
Its been a weird gardening season here in mid Wyoming some peoples are going nuts and others look dead. , got a lot in the ground as far as root crops in mid may , thought I lost them but some bounced back , have had to replant the carrots 3 times now , , lost all my tomatoes , and thought I lost the cauliflower and broccoli , till I thinned out the explosion of weeds that came up in less than a week, those two are doing better than expected now , as for the squashes planted in the beginning of june , due to weather are holding their own . out of 6 bell pepper plants I have 2 left and I am holding out against hope that the rasberrys I planted on the property line somehow come back next year . weird year weatherwise between temp changes ( snow on the 18th of june) and little rain or usual natural moisture .
It was a cold spring here, too. Several late frost/freeze warnings, and pretty wet. I probably put my garden out too early, because social distancing was making me stir crazy. So some of my garden's failures are my fault. Actually, I'm going to blame it on coronavirus.
I feel your pain. I lost a batch of tomatoes this year, too, and I'm on my third try for beans (if you can believe that).
That would probably just make me throw in the towel. I couldn't do much of anything with snow that late. I don't know how you do it.
I really enjoy the chronicles.
Do you pickle any of your produce ?
I don't do any canning, but I'll sometimes make little fresh batches of pickled beets, and also cucumbers and onions. You just slice things up in a bowl, cover it with vinegar and water, and let it chill and 'cook' in the fridge for several hours. Anyone who grew up with a garden is probably familiar with stuff like that, especially the cucumbers and onions.
I know this isn't gardening . . . but my best friend makes these brandied cherries that are to die for!
He also does some preserves that are also to die for!
cherries make some mighty fine brandy