My Bay Area Garden

Planning Your Beans!

2012-01-15T22:05:00.001-08:00

I seem to post about shelling beans a lot. Maybe that's because I'm passionate about them. Beans are nutritious, easily transportable, can be stored for a long time, and yield literally more than ten-fold per bean planted. What's not to like?!

While planning your summer garden, remember to put in some tall trellis or fence space for shelling beans. Many types, like borlotti beans, are wonderful to eat as rich Italian-style green beans, and then can be left to mature for yummy dry beans when you're tired of eating them fresh. Sure, you could freeze them, but if you are, like myself, one of the generation scarred by school cafeteria green beans, the idea of freezing and then actually EATING a green bean pod is anathema. Why not mature them for dry beans instead!

A single 10-foot row of heirloom pole beans will yield two large paper sacks of pods, shelling down to 1 - 1.25 quarts of dry beans under normal productivity conditions-- not super productive, not scraggly. While some years I got more than other years, the weather conditions, and my watering learning curve, have been such that I don't feel comfortable drawing any conclusions about the relative productivity of the different cultivars.

My results were in Cherry 3 bed of the Sunnyvale Community Garden, also known as the Sunnyvale Teaching & Demonstration garden. Types of beans were: True Red Cranberry, Borlotti, Good Mother Stallard, Hidatsa Shield. Most of these beans will not only climb a six-foot fence, they will noodle and doodle and swirl above it for a foot or so, before reluctantly dipping back down onto the fence for support.

If that sounds like too tall an order for you, many dry beans are semi-vining types that grow into a scant bush-like configuration and then send up several tendrils to a height of 3 - 5 feet. I've observed this with Repokob/Tiger-eye and Jacob's Gold. I still haven't figured out a favorite method for growing these. If I'm going to stake-and-string, or put up a trellis, I figure I might as well use full vining types and get more productivity out of the vertical space. On the other hand, they might be good candidates for growing with sunflowers or huge dahlias, since they won't overwhelm the host plant. Or if you have a minimal fence around the garden to keep out dogs and overly-helpful toddlers, these might be a good choice to grow up that fence!

At home, I grow scarlet runner beans up the carport supports of our mobile home. My favorite varieties are Scarlet Emperor (red/purple beans) and Painted Lady (white beans). Sometimes they will come back the next year, sometimes I need to replant-- I have not investigated this with any great diligence. One to two runner bean plants up an 8-foot high, 18" wide trellis will extend along string or plastic lattice between carport supports, and produce approximately 1 - 1.3 quarts of dry beans after shelling.

In my experience, if you have limited beaning opportunities, or limited time, the runner beans are the way to go. They are almost maintenance-free, the huge pods are easy to spot and pick, and they attract hummingbirds and native bees (who sometimes put on quite a show, doing aerial duels with each other over possession of a nice branch of flowers!). Runner beans always seem less "tame" than many cultivars, and they don't seem to know what to do with much fertilizer. Put them down in a nice heap of compost with a little sprinkled bone meal and a teensy pinch of greensand. When they have reached about six feet tall, refresh the compost a little, but do nothing else. Fertilizing, even with compost, in mid to late summer will cause a rush of new growth that is substantially weaker and sweeter than usual, and you will end up with a veritable plague of black aphids-- at least here in Sunnyvale. Nope, benign neglect but lots of water and partial shade is the recipe for success with these beans.

FYI, I have had issues with the harvested dry beans from the Sunnyvale Community Garden hosting bean weevils (Acanthoscelides obtectus). If you see tiny circles at the bottom of your jar of dry beans, you have bean weevils. Get rid of, or clean and refrigerate or freeze, the remaining beans, depending on your particular tolerance for such things. I have grown many types of beans at home (near Tasman & Lawrence) and haven't had any bean weevils. I do the lazy gardeners' method of letting the beans dry on the vine and waiting for almost all the leaves to fall (as long as no rain is coming) so I can see the pods easily. It may be that my lazy method provides enough exposure for the weevils to populate the beans. The jury is still out!

Dry Bean Harvest and Slow Cooker Beans

2011-10-05T14:36:00.001-07:00

It's that time again-- all of my dry beans are now sitting in containers awaiting some quiet time to shell them. This year I was quite preoccupied in the summer, and only grew out two types of dry beans. I had scarlet runners on one of the driveway carport columns, that had returned on their own. I never got around to re-seeding the other carport columns, so unlike last year I have only about a quart worth to shell out.

In my community garden plot, I planted the back trellis heavily with true red cranberry beans. They were quite successful, and I expect to get a quart or so of them when they are all shelled.

Awareness of specialty heirloom beans has been growing, and you can easily try varieties from providers like Rancho Gordo or Phipps Country Store. Since heirloom beans don't hybridize trivially, you can save some when you cook the beans and plant them if you turn out to be very fond of that variety.

If rains threaten, remove pods from the plants, or pull the entire plant, and spread out or hang in a dry place, like a covered porch. Shell beans when the pods are dry and crackly, and beans are hard. If you can prick the skin on a shelled bean with a fingernail, it is not sufficiently dry-- spread those beans out in a single layer on a plate or a fine mesh screen and let dry for a week or two indoors, stirring and turning over daily.

I have read that large quantities of beans can be shelled out by putting in a pillowcase, tying the pillowcase closed tightly, and tumbling in a warm, not hot, clothes dryer, ideally with a couple of those spiked rubber balls used for fabric softening. I can see how this might work, but have never tried it myself-- if you have, please comment and let me know how it worked for you! In older days, folks used to put beans on a large cloth tarp at harvest festivals and someone would fiddle while folks danced, crushing the pods and threshing out the beans. Sounds very Louisa May Alcott, but YMMV and if you have a LOT of beans, get creative!

Slow-Cooker Beans

I make these almost every week for my hubby to take for lunch on workdays. I start with the basics, and add the variants. Takes just moments to set up on Sunday night, and is ready on Monday morning.

3 cups dried beans
cover with water a little deeper than your index finger

Add any or all of the following veggies, subject to the room in your crockpot. It varies widely in flavor depending on the bean type and spicing type.

- chopped medium onion
- chopped 2 sticks celery
- 2 cloves peeled garlic
- 1/2 tsp whole mustard seed
- 1/2 tsp liquid smoke
- 1/2 - 1 tsp sea salt (to taste)
- 1 stalk kombucha dried seaweed
- 2 cups sliced mushrooms
- 2 cups diced squash (summer or winter squash)

Now add any "filling" you may want to use to bulk up the beans into a one-pot meal. Usually we omit the filling and just eat the beans over rice or crushed organic corn chips.

OR a cup of dry polenta meal
OR a cup of rice

Now the spices! First the jazz it up spices (even tho I am a spice-wuss compared to Mike)

- chunk of dried chili pepper (I favor passilas or turkish alma, which I grow)
OR 1 -2 tsps of smoked spanish paprika, ground ancho, mole mix, or passila pepper

Western Style

- quarter to half tsp of good Western bean herbs: savory, sage, basil, marjoram, oregano

India/Curry Style

- half tsp of good Indian bean herbs: cumin, paprika, whole clove, kaffir lime leaf, fresh turmeric if you have it, dried coriander

Asian Style

- half tsp of Asian bean herbs: lemongrass, cilantro, green coriander berry, tarragon, a whole anise, a few cloves

If the pot is not full within an inch of the top, add water until it is.

Cook on High for 4 hours or Low 8 hours or until beans are desired softness.

Add any lemon or lime juice (Asian, Indian) or tomato paste (half a can) ONLY AFTER beans are fully cooked, as acidity keeps them from softening.

A Few Tips and Tricks

My favorite dried beans to use are kidney, black, borlotti, cranberry, anasazi, and scarlet runner. Lots of the heirloom beans have been bred for specific cooking qualities, and it can be fun and tasty to experiment with them. Anasazi beans break down partially into a creamy slurry. Kidney beans stay whole but "make their own gravy". Good Mother Stallard and Hutterite Soup beans are a soup bean which dissolves like split peas do to make a thick soup. Etc. Rancho Gordo carries many classics, as does Bob's Red Mill.

If you garden, you can save dry beans to plant. They are not generally irradiated. Since beans do not tend to hybridize easily, they are likely to grow true to type if they are an heirloom variety.

Some boring day, make up some "packets" of bean spices (I use old prescription jars) so they are mixed and ready to toss into the cooker.

On busy weeks, I use the Trader Joe's or Whole Foods presliced veggies and have the batch going in about 10 minutes or less.

Root veggies don't seem to mix really well with slow cooker beans, at least to my taste. Have tried carrots, parsnips, beets, potatoes, in varying combinations. Overall result was not really appreciated by myself or my spouse.

Don't use brassicas as veggies, either (cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, etc). Kale sometimes works, but the cruciform veggies and cabbage tend to get sulfur tasting with long slow cooking in liquid. If you really want them in there, roast them in the oven and add them after the beans are cooked.

Watering for the Novice Gardener

2011-04-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've been helping some friends learn to garden this year. I absolutely love getting other folks hooked on gardening! Recently someone sent me the following question:

I’m doing pretty well finding info in my Sunset Magazine books and on the Internet. There is one question not in the books and no one seems to agree on the Internet. What are the parameters for when to water? I know I’m not supposed to water in the afternoon on a hot day, but can I water in the afternoon on a cool day? Afternoon on a warm day? How about 6 pm on a warm day?

Watering, ah, always complicated! It's one of those things you set guidelines for, and then kind of muddle along learning by trial and error. To help things along, let's talk about the overall theory of watering plants, so that the novice gardener can get a feel for why and how watering is vital, and how plants respond to watering. Armed with that knowledge, you can then reason things out and generate common sense rules for watering.

So, what about plants and water? Not enough water and you get cell damage and stunted growth. Too much water and you deprive roots of the air they need to do their job, and you risk opportunistic infection by molds, mildews, and fungi. What's a gardener to do? Well, let's look at what plants do.

Plants transpire, emitting water as vapor through pores (stomata) in their leaves. They do it to cool themselves and also as part of photosynthesis. Plants are capable of closing the pores in their leaves tightly to minimize water loss on hot or windy days. Not only does this limit water loss, it will physically cause their leaves to droop so that they present less of a target for the sun.

The answer is to tailor watering to the overall conditions. When you water a plant, even at the roots without hitting the leaves, the pores on the leaves open up from a physiological response. This is why it can be bad to water on a windy day or a really hot day-- you are tricking the plant into leaving its pores too open and 'panting away' its water. The leaves can also get physical burns from water droplets on them acting like a magnifying glass in full sun! On the other hand, you also want the water on the plant and at the base of the plant to drain and dry, so watering at night is usually undesirable-- it also attracts snails and wildlife to your garden.

The best times to water are in the morning before 10am and in the evening about 2 hours before sunset. The hottest part of the day is over (or not started), it's ok for the plants to open their little pores for a couple of hours, and the watering will have dried up and things gone back to normal before any conditions of extreme heat or cold.

If you know you have been watering regularly, and see droopy plants on a hot day, *especially* don't water right then. Some plants, like tomatoes and squashes, are so good at sucking up their pores that their leaves get really really droopy and they look very bad. In the early evening, they should have perked up and look better. If they don't, then water the heck out of them, including misting the foliage so they can take water directly in via the stomata (pores).

Also remember, especially if you have plants in containers, that the first 1 - 3 inches of the soil should be primarily dry, so that the roots are getting enough air. Too much water in the soil can prevent your plant from getting the building blocks it needs to grow. It can also provide standing water for algae or anaerobic bacteria to grow and damage your plant. So you want the soil about 3 - 5 inches (or more) below the surface to be damp, but not wet.

Always love to hear other folks' watering tips and observations, please feel free to comment!

Mini-Meadow Update: It Worked!

2011-03-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

Back in early December, I wrote about seeding a 'food meadow' in my large garden plot. Fast forward a few months, and here is how it turned out: a great success!

Weeds have been light to non-existent, except for one small area where the sheet mulching was too shallow and grass came up. A light session of hand-weeding took care of that.

In this close-up, we see various bits of fennel, carrots, dill, and cilantro are showing their feathery tops above the lettuces. This salad in the making is making me hungry! Alas, it's dark and rainy at the moment, so the greens are safe for now. Tomorrow, though, watch out!

I think the mixed-seed meadow idea has really done well, and I will be doing it again in subsequent years. To do it fully, I'd dedicate an area to it and let a few plants go to seed and keep reseeding themselves. I'm not going to go that far on my main garden bed... I think... but may let a lettuce or two seed out.

Let's Talk About Corn!

2011-03-10T22:19:00.001-08:00

I recently saw a question about corn on a mailing list, and wrote up a detailed answer, which I wanted to share with you, my faithful and oh-so-patient readers. If anyone still checks this blog for updates, that is-- mea culpa!!

Someone wanted to know if they could plant sweet corn and flour corn together, or how far apart they would have to plant it. They wanted to grow flour corn to make tortillas.

What Kind of Corn for Tortillas?

There are several types of heirloom corns: sweet corn, flour corn, flint corn, dent corn, pop corn, and parching corn. One variety may combine several of the characteristics. Apparently field corn, also known as dent corn, is the preferred variety for tortillas.

By the way, to make masa dough for tortillas, dried dent corn must go through a process called nixtamalization, involving lye, before being ground into masa.

Can I Mix Sweet Corn and Non-Sweet Corn?

Here is how corn works-- there are as many silk strands at the tip of an ear of corn as there will be kernels on the ear!
Each tassel of corn silk draws a pollen grain down it to pollinate one corn kernel on the ear. So each kernel on the ear of corn can potentially have a different variety as a parent!

Modern sweet corn (SU1 gene) grown can be grown near non-sweet corn, but the "supersweet" varieties (SH2 gene, usually marked SE for Sugar Enhanced) should not be grown closer than 250 feet from other types (including sweet). (info via UC Davis article ) The supersweet corn silk can pick up other corn pollen, which is generally dominant over the supersweet corn genes, and thus portions of the ear may pick up kernels that are not sweet, and/or have different ripening characteristics.

There was a UC Master Gardener Santa Clara corn trial in 2007 for sweet (SU1) varieties which suggested that Silver Queen or Peaches & Cream would be good choices. These should be able to be grown with or near non-sweet corn.

If you wish to plant super-sweet corn, a UC Davis article for small farmers mentions "Kandy Korn" as a super-sweet variety that needs no isolation from other types. Kandy Korn seeds appear to be available from Territorial Seeds, Gurney's, and Henry Field's.

Can I Get Sweet Corn and Tortilla Corn from the Same Plant?

Yes! Corn has been domesticated for a very long time, and many of the folks doing that also loved some nice young sweet corn, steamed in the husks or roasted! There are some multi-purpose corns that can be eaten young as sweet corn and also left to mature for dent corn.

"Green corn is harvested when the corn is still in the "milk" stage, when the kernels are at their sweetest and can be eaten fresh. Varieties that are sweet when young are Blue Clarage, Bloody Butcher, and Black Mexican/Iroquois." ATTRA.org article

So you could theoretically plant all dent corn of one of the above varieties and still have sweet corn to eat, by harvesting some of the ears early. Some great info on corn varieties can be found in an appendix to ATTRA's wonderful article on companion planting.

Seed Savers Exchange online is a good place to find heirloom corn varieties, as is Victory Seeds, and Native Seeds Search.

Happy planting! Get some corn going this year!

Making a Mini-Meadow

2010-12-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

At the Charles Street Gardens, Sunnyvale's community garden, we have a number of permaculture areas referred to collectively as the Food Forest. I've been reading a fair bit about permaculture over the years. I also have been longing to try some of the more unusual agricultural techniques that are coming out of the movement. In Toby Hemenway's new edition of "Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" I found an intriguing reference to a "food meadow" rather than a "food forest". Since we're not allowed to plant new trees where I live, this sounded great!

The food meadow takes advantage of the garden plot's natural flaw: that it is a clearing ready to be colonized by any and every type of plant. By selecting a mix of wild and cultivated plants that form a natural meadow, we can theoretically hold down weeds and occupy the garden with a healthy mix of plants.

The spring meadow garden mix I've put together will be used on my large garden bed, which is approximately 3x18 feet. I sheet mulched it with Santa Clara SMART Center compost, which has been hot-composted to 140 degrees and therefore is *not* full of active weed seeds-- unlike my own compost, which doesn't usually come up to temperature and is a source of all kinds of seeds ranging from tomato to squash to lots of bunch grass.

What kinds of things did I put in the food meadow? Lots of umbelliferae, including dill, fennel, purple carrots, orange carrots. Some brown seed mustard and some red giant leaf mustard. Lots of different lettuces, some radishes, some beets. Breadseed poppies. Semi-wild salad greens like chickweed, purslane, and miner's lettuce. I'm pretty excited to see what happens!

What about one's traditional garden crops such as summer squash, tomatoes, peppers, etc? Those will be planted in some of the holes left when harvesting carrots, radishes, beets, and the like in early summer.

I'll probably seed the garden bed tomorrow before it rains on the weekend. I want the seeds to get naturally watered, but don't want to lose too many to scratching birdies before the rain sets in!

Strawberry Fields Forever

2010-07-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

One of the best parts of this time of year is the abundance of fresh ripe strawberries. Maybe you are getting a big crop of June-bearing strawberries into the freezer or jam jars. Perhaps you have everbearing strawberries and gather a handful here and there, taking a succulent perfect berry as a reward for your gardening that day.

Not sure what kind of strawberries you have? If you get only one or two ripe berries at a time, but plenty of flowers and unripe berries, your plants are likely to be everbearing strawberries, such as Quinalt, rather than June-bearers. The June-bearing ones do a heavy simultaneous crop during the summer, and then go to sleep until next year. In mild-winter zones like the SF Bay Area, sometimes you will get a light fall crop from June-bearers as well.

Solving Berry Problems

Or perhaps your strawberries aren't doing so well. In that case, let's take a look at some common strawberry problems so you have time to fix them and enjoy some luscious summer strawberries! Here's a handy list by symptom, and some fixes to try for each one. If you know what's wrong and are looking for a specific fix, try the AWESOME pest control page at Extremely Green.

Everything eats my berries before I can get them!

Mmmm, they must be good! Let's look at common berry-eaters.

Birds and squirrels can be defeated with netting.

Snails and slugs can be deterred with a safe preparation such as Sluggo, or with crushed eggshells or coffee grounds. If you have containers, you can apply copper tape around the base and snails and slugs will not cross it. Be sure you look around the edges and rims of your container before applying the tape, as you probably have stowaways already aboard.

Wormy, grey, eel-like things are nematodes, and they live in the soil. You can remove their access to the berries by mulching with a dry material, such as wood chips or straw, or you can repot your berries (in a container) so that they dangle over the side out of harm's way.

There are commercially available mixes of bacteria and spores that combat harmful nematodes that you can order from your local nursery or garden center. I'd suggest planning a repotting of your strawberry planters at the end of the season, with minimal soil retained around the crown roots.

Small, stunted berries

Strawberries need more water than most people realize. Since the berry is mostly water, lack of water will produce small berries. This is particularly a problem for strawberries in containers, including the traditional multi-pocket terracotta planters. If the soil in your strawberry patch or planter isn't moist and dark about an inch under the top layer, it's too dry!

If the berries are 'all seeds' and not really developed, but turn brown, they are not getting pollinated. Strawberries are usually self-fertile, but they need a breeze or friendly bees to transfer the pollen. If your strawberries are completely sheltered from any wind, you might consider moving the planters so they get a light breeze.

Berries aren't sweet, or have little flavor

Ironically, overwatering may be the culprit here. One summer I went away for almost 2 weeks, and left my strawberry pots in a kiddie pool to self-water thru the base of the pot. I came back to the biggest, reddest, tastiest looking berries I'd ever seen-- supermarket sized and photo perfect. And they had absolutely no flavor whatsoever!! They were literally diluted by overwatering.

Sweet but bland or boring berries may lack trace minerals. Be sure to apply greensand or a multimineral mix to your berry patch when you do your winter soil amendments. Also test the PH of the soil-- if it is not even slightly acidic, the flavor of the berries will be 'blunted' and the plants won't do as well. Use an acidic soil amendment such as those available for azaleas and rhododendrons, or mulch with pine needles if you have them available.

Only leaves, no flowers/berries

If your strawberries aren't flowering and producing berries, you may have been feeding them a high nitrogen fertilizer and not enough other nutrients. Dig in a good all-purpose fertilizer, ideally one for acid-lovers like rhododendrons or azeleas.

If the plants seem healthy and you are sure they are well-nourished, have nights been consistently over 55 degrees F for at least 2 weeks? With some of the odd climate patterns we've had, your microclimate may be lagging and your strawberries haven't caught up with the calendar yet.

Fungus on berries

Almost always a problem with poor drainage in a container, or a waterlogged surface layer on which berries are resting. If it's happening on berries in a strawberry patch on the ground, you may be leaving them to overripen, or have poor soil drainage. If you mulch with straw, make sure you water with soakers under the straw, because wet top straw can harbor mold and mildew that will rot your berries.

Correct drainage by adding sand to your container mix or soil patch, making sure that you are using no more than 50 percent compost in the soil mix, and never mulching compost directly onto the strawberry plants-- leave a couple of inches around the crown.

White dusty gunk on leaves

White dusty gunk on leaves is likely to be powdery mildew, usually only on leaves, with little impact on berries (besides there being fewer of them). Drainage control, plus some varieties are not very resistant to it. Hot weather and damp soil breed the stuff, so if you're expecting a heat wave, water sparingly and only in the cool of the morning or evening. Good mulching of the plants can help reduce the heat buildup in the soil and keep the plant cool, so be sure to mulch well in the summertime. If you have containers, consider moving them into the shade for a few days if the temps go into the high 80F range. Try to make sure your berry plants can take advantage of breezes also, to keep foliage dry.

There are few organic treatments for powdery mildew-- preventing it, and pulling leaves that have it, are best. Spraying with neem oil is alleged to stop mildew of various types, as is spraying fat-free milk(!). There are some preparations at your local nursery or garden store that are safe and won't taint the berries-- look for label directions on how and when to apply, and that the produce will be safe to eat.

White lumpy gunk around strawberry crowns and stems

Ouch, you have cottony scale and getting rid of it will be "fun". Not! "Safer soap" and similar safe preparations will help, as will cleaning off the crowns by hand. You will need to spray daily, sometimes twice daily. You might be over-fertilizing, as scale insects are attracted by fast-growing plants in the same way aphids are. Like aphids, the scale might be being farmed by ants, and stopping the ants with outdoor-safe bait will help you control scale. Never use indoor ant traps outside-- they usually contain arsenic, which will leach into the soil and show up in your veggies!

Don't despair, scale can be defeated, but it takes persistence. If your plants are several years old, and you have not been renewing your patch by letting runners root and removing older plants, well, it might be simpler to take out the plants and start fresh next year. It's up to you.

Black/brown stems, leaves shriveling

If you have leaves and stems going fungal, and rotting or shriveling up, this is probably crown rot. Wet soil and high temperatures encourage crown rot. Besides addressing drainage issues as above, you have several options. Crown rot spores can stay resident in the soil, so if your strawberry plants are in a container, you will want to compost the soil in a hot pile or discard it, and wash the container with a mild bleach solution. If your plants are in the ground, consider either making a new bed, or purchasing replacement plants from known resistant varieties. StrawberryPlants.org has an interactive list of strawberry types and is a great source for info on resistant varieties.

If you've made it this far, congrats, and I hope your strawberries aren't having any of these problems! Whether your own berries, or ones from a farmstand or farmer's market, enjoy the berry best days of summer!

Reasons to Love Our Weird Spring Weather This Year

2010-05-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

OK, I admit I'm getting a little grouchy, and perhaps a bit disoriented. I saw ripe raspberries at the community garden the other day and commented that I thought of raspberries more as a summer fruit. "But Strata," someone replied, "it's almost June!" Oh yeah. Easy to forget when you have 61F days and 45F nights!

I always try to find a silver lining in the clouds, and came up with a short list of why I could love our weird spring weather. Now I feel much more cheerful about it!

Cool-weather crops are lingering longer! My peas have usually succumbed to powdery mildew by now, and yet they are still going strong, with new flowers and lots of delicious snap-pea pods. Lettuces are slow to bolt, and my spinach is bolting in slow-motion, so that I can harvest a bunch of tasty leaves. I can live with that!

Rain makes seeds happy. While they might prefer some warmer soil, seeds seem to grow best when they are rained on and there is good humidity in the air. Well, this week and some of last week seems tailor-made for seed germination. I'm going to put out some more pole beans and start some flats of bush beans outside on a patio table. Wish me luck!

There's more planning time. Some of us might feel this is frustrating, rather than useful. I'm trying to get over it. Since it's still too cold to put a number of warm-weather things out, I find myself thinking harder about what to plant, and being able to stick more closely to my garden plan. That's a feature!

Recovering from bad seed starts. Also since it's still pretty chilly for eggplants and peppers and the like, I am able to replant my pasillo baijo peppers. The first time, I planted from saved seed that didn't germinate (too much watering from the bottom). The second time, they were eaten by rogue greenhouse snails or slugs when barely emergent. The third time they fell over, burned down, AND sank into the swamp, err, were eaten JUST as they were getting big enough to transplant from six-pack to four-inch pots. I have reseeded. I can be patient. I also am growing out a Rosa Bianca, since I lost the label on one eggplant and really want a Rosa rather than another kind. La la la, I tell myself, it's not a bug, it's a feature! Even though I'm jonesing to get stuff in the ground outdoors!

Growing out our weed seeds early, so we can mulch. The rainy weather is encouraging the growth of weed seeds, so maybe we can get them all done (ha! hahaha!) and pulled up for the summer. So this one is kind of a stretch, I'm reaching here.

It's a great wildflower year! The frequent rain is bringing out all kinds of wildflowers that are usually sparse, and prolonging the season on many of the standard kinds. Roadsides and garden edgings are spectacular with flowers.

We might prefer some sunny 73 degree days out here in the South Bay, but at least we can try to appreciate some features of the days we're getting instead. Happy gardening!

Mulching for Synergy

2010-05-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

To mulch or not to mulch, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to ... oh, wait, this is a garden blog, not a literary blog. Seriously, though, you'll see a lot of advice about mulch: what kind, when to do it, how to do it, and often the basic principles of mulching go somewhat neglected. There are three basic reasons to mulch your garden. They all boil down to controlling or influencing the soil environment: temperature, light, and moisture. Organic gardeners add a couple of reasons of their own to that list, namely soil bioactivity and fertilization. Mulching is powerful but unglamorous, and we don't have a stable of pictures ready to go on the glorious topic! By the way, mulching isn't just for gardens in the ground. Raised beds, windowbox planters, and ordinary pots all benefit from good mulching.

Temperature Mulch can act as an insulator, keeping soil warmer at night in the spring, or preventing it from heating up as much in the summer. Many vegetable crops have shallow roots. As the soil heats up in spring and summer, the higher soil temperatures, along with the changing length of day, send a powerful signal to bolt and go to seed. Mulching your cool-season crops in the fall helps keep them warm in the winter, and refreshing the mulch after the winter rains helps extend your spring season. Summer crops can also be put in earlier with mulch than without it, if you mulch in the late afternoon while the soil is warmest and use a thick layer that will help retain heat overnight.

Light When you till or fluff your soil in the spring, you help let sunlight into the soil to warm it. That same sunlight also triggers the growth of buried weed and grass seeds. By mulching your garden, you can control where the light reaches the soil. When you wish to plant seeds, simply scrape aside the mulch in that area along the row directly where you'll sow the seeds. For scattered crops, like hills of squash, you can uncover only the exactor spot where you want to plant. Mulch won't eliminate all the weeds, but it will cut down on them dramatically. Depending on what you use for mulch, the color of the mulch can make weeds easier to see as well!

Moisture Here in the Bay Area, we're having an oddly prolonged rainy season. Eventually it will stop, though, and then for many months there'll be no water in the garden other than what we add to it. The clayey soil in much of the Santa Clara Valley has a tendency to bake into pseudo-adobe in the sun. Mulch to the rescue! A layer of mulch creates a barrier to evaporation. If your soaker or drip system is covered by the mulch, so much the better-- all of the water will get into the ground where it belongs, and tend to stay there longer.

Unmulched gardens around here tend to get easily water-stressed, as the soil dries hard in a way that makes water run off, rather than soak in like a sponge. Having a high percentage of biological material in your soil (compost, organic matter, etc) helps hold water, the sun here is just too strong for most gardens and dries out the top two or three inches of soil. As we'll see in a moment, those few inches are fairly critical!

These are the conventional reasons for mulching. Organic gardeners have even more reasons for a good mulch strategy. Read on!

Soil Bio-Activity In organic gardening and permaculture, we actively aid and maintain the soil as a type of living organism in and of itself. In the first several inches of soil there are distinct layers of bio-activity that assist plants in growing, in a symbiotic or synergistic realtionship. Those few inches are where mycelium threads, soil helpers, beneficial bacteria, and other garden buddies are supposed to be at work. Mulch keeps things cool and moist and dark for them, and allows us to condition the soil directly. Isn't this just "temperature, light, and moisture" all over again? Yes and no-- we're acting on behalf of the soil rather than the plant, and may mix things into the mulch, or mulch in layers, to "feed" the soil as an organism.

Fertilization Speaking of fertilizer, that's what mulch can become if used correctly and well. While any mulch will eventually break down and become part of the topsoil, not all mulches are created equal in fertilizer value. As organic gardeners, we prefer to use a variety of mulches and layered mulches to help assist the garden in being productive.

Straw has tremendous insulating value, but usually little fertilizing value. Decomposition of cellulose material like straw or sawdust can actually decrease the amount of available nitrogen in the soil. Watch out for this when applying animal manures, as many manure mixtures are mostly sawdust, shavings, or other bedding material. They'll add nitrogen after many weeks of decompostion, so they're a great choice for a garden plot that is going to stay fallow or just grow a cover crop over the winter.

Alfalfa pellets break down into nitrogen for a long slow boost to plants, and decompose more quickly than straw or shavings or leaves. For a quick pick-me-up, try coffee grounds. They are 'hot', like chicken manure, and supply quick nitrogen. Unlike chicken manure, coffee grounds won't give your plants chemical burns.

Strata's Pick: Cocoa Bean Shells

My favorite mulches that combine fertilization with good insulation are the shredded cocoa-bean shells sold widely at hardware and garden stores. They smell wonderful, build up nice air gaps for good thermal insulation, and draw worms up from the deeper soil like crazy. I have never seen so many worms as when I mulch with cocoa shell.

Why the worm excitement? Worms aerate the soil and make it more friable (crumbly, workable) so that plant roots can grow more efficiently. Worm castings (a fancy name for worm poop) are GREAT fertilizer, and by encouraging the worms to come poop near the surface, the shells contribute fairly quickly to the soil fertility. Sorry to be indelicate here, but worms are basically tubes that eat, and what comes in must displace what came before. (Fellow geeks: worms are FIFOs).

As an added bonus, the cocoa shell mulch also seems to discourage snails and slugs. I occasionally see a shiny trail across them, but only rarely. A mulch of crushed eggshells has been noted as good for repelling slugs and snails, so perhaps the cocoa shells work similarly. I'm just pleased with the results so far.

Practical Tips

Get to it while the soil is still moist with spring rain.
Don't rake or till the soil before mulching; you disturb fewer weed seeds that way.
Mulch should be near, but not touching, the stem of the plant-- some mulches can trigger fungal withering of plant stems. Great vs weeds, not so great for your peppers and lettuces!
If you have a ton of weeds, weed first, then mulch. If the weeds haven't taken over yet, pull the biggies and try to kill the little ones by simply mulching over them.
Use dark mulch to warm soil, light colored mulch to cool it or to reflect sunlight up into the plants.
Scrape back mulch to side-dress plants with compost later in the season, water in the compost, and then re-mulch.
Try to put soaker or drip hoses under, not over, the mulch. Mulch can soak up water and keep it from getting to your deeper soil layers if the drip/soak line is on top of the mulch.

Happy mulching!

A Tale of Three Sisters

2010-05-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

A Three Sisters garden is corn, beans, squash all interplanted, in the style of many Native American nations. I'm not sure where this first was documented; many of us learned about it in grade school during lessons about the Pilgrims. One early authoritative source is Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden, the result of lengthy interviews with a Hidatsa woman. It was published in the late 1800's and includes pictures and diagrams. This first-hand account of Hidatsa gardening practices includes information about tools, recipes, preserving crops, and some keen observations about human nature.

My corn this year is Painted Mountain Flour corn, and the first block is already a few inches tall. For beans, I chose Hidatsa Shield Figure beans in honor of Buffalo Bird Woman. I'm going to break with tradition and grow some melons as well as winter squash. My community garden plot is my only garden space with enough sun for melons. I'll have Sunshine kabocha as my winter squash, and Green Machine melon and Hime Kansen watermelon.

The first block of corn seedlings is already up and about four inches high. Planted May 1st.

Growing a Three Sisters

Some directions say to plant the corn and beans at the same time in hills, and plant the squash after the corn is a foot tall. Others say to plant the beans after the corn is 6 inches tall, and the squash at the same time. I put the squash in first last year, and do NOT recommend it-- the squash grows faster as the weather warms up and shades the beans before they get going! My current plan is to put in the beans when the corn is 6 - 8 inches tall, which should be in about a week, and to put the squash in around June 1st. I started them just this past Monday, so there's no hurry. Last year I'd started squash FIRST, and they were getting too big so I had to put them out. Oops.

The layout of the garden can be tricky. There are several different schools of how to do this. One says to plant all three in one hill, another says to alternate rows of corn-plus-beans and of squash. The theory is the same in both cases, though-- the beans climb up the corn stalks, and fix nitrogen at the roots to help a good corn crop. The squash vines ramble between the hills of corn and shade out weeds, as well as making it more uncomfortable for garden pests to come bother the corn. I found that a 4x18 garden bed is fairly tight spacing for either method. Here's last year's diagram; it didn't work very well, but I'm not sure if that was because of putting in the squash too soon, as above.

This year I am planting one corn per square foot, and leaving some 2x2 foot 'bay windows' along the front for bush varieties of winter squash. Since a bush variety really means "a bush plus short vines" I am hoping this works well. I do wonder if I should have put the bay windows in the back, so that vines would move forward toward the sun, but it's too late now. Will see how this goes-- every year, another experiment!

Reading about Buffalo Bird Woman's garden, one finds that the Three Sisters were in fact usually Four Sisters, the fourth being sunflowers. I usually plant sunflowers along the outside of my garden bed to attract pollinators, and this turns out to be an old, old practice. The Hidatsa often grew sunflowers in hills of three, the same as for corn, but I just plant them in a row due to limited space in the garden bed.

The Flowering Garden

2010-05-07T09:41:00.001-07:00

Adding flowers to your garden does more than beautify it. Early flowering plants put your garden 'on the map' for local pollinators such as native bees and hoverflies. They also attract beneficial insects to your garden, and provide habitat for them while your main garden crops develop.

An ideal garden flower would be fairly self contained, a bit taller than most of your food crops, and flower early in the spring. It shouldn't spread or take over, and shouldn't require a lot of care.

The most common companion flower in vegetable gardens is the marigold, as various species of Tagetes repel some pests and of course are lovely in the garden. I find that snails feast on my marigolds, especially the yellow ones, in such profusion that I needed to find some alternate flowers!

Cal poppies in a nearby ornamental bed.

California poppies are a wonderful attractor for native pollinators, and gorgeous as well. They will usually die in a garden itself, as they are so drought-adapted that overwatering destroys them. However, you can plant a bed of them next to your garden and enjoy the blazing orange blooms all summer! Water lightly once or twice a month, and crush the dried seed pods over the poppy bed, and they will keep coming back.

A Green Fingers cucumber waits for warmer weather to flourish, next to a meadowfoam, or Poached Egg Flower.

Limnanthes is a western wildflower almost as showy as a California Poppy, but much less well-known. I'm growing it for the first time this year. I didn't know how well it direct-seeded, so I grew the first batch as a 6-pack in the greenhouse. Territorial Seeds and other heirloom seed companies can supply Limnanthes if your local seed shop does not have it. I was drawn to it when I read that it does well in heavy clay soil, which describes the Santa Clara Valley soil quite well in my backyard.

The name 'Poached Egg Flower' comes from the bright yellow centers of the white or cream colored flowers. I'm really looking forward to seeing it bloom. I hope it will establish itself in the garden along the verges, the way that alyssum does. I had to pull out my alyssum because the flowing drapery of it was perfect cover for dozens of snails, alas. Perhaps I'd have done better to keep it and just check for snails periodically.

Immature flowering plants: Cosmos and Bishop's Lace

Bishop's Lace, ammi majus, is often confused with Queen Anne's Lace or wild carrot, but in fact is a different cultivar. It's a common cottage garden flower, with big snowflake-like flower clusters floating airily on a tall plant. Butterflies are drawn to it, as well as bees. I thought it would be nice to have some on the outside of the garden. It's not long-lasting, so I hope it will reseed itself and keep going. This is an experiment!

Like the Limnanthes, I started the Bishop's Lace in the greenhouse. I soon found that it was susceptible to overwatering, and ended up with only 3 plants from a six-pack. Fair warning, if you are going to grow it! Bishop's Lace is readily available at most places that stock Renee's Seeds or Botanical Interests.

A couple of square feet of beets behind a pair of agrostemma.

The corncockle, agrostemma githago is another new flower experiment for this year. Tall and feathery, it should do well at the sunny edge of the garden and hold its own with the corn and squash. I chose Renee's Seeds cultivars "Purple Queen" and "Pink Contessa" mix. The package made them look like the pink and purple of the old PDP-11 keyboard. Who says gardening isn't nerdy?

I planted all the cosmos at the same time, but this one leaped ahead of the pack, blooming beautifully and earliest!

Last but far, far from least is my garden flower par excellence, cosmos bipinnatus.

Available in a range from my preferred pink/purple/magenta (Sonata mix) to ornamentally petalled varieties like Seashells or Double Ruffle, to the hot jazzy colors of cosmos sulphurens in orange, gold, and red, or even in dainty white, there is a cosmos color scheme for every gardener!

Cosmos is quite drought tolerant, and does best in dry soils. Many folks, myself included, make the mistake of overwatering their cosmos. This can kill the plant in poorly drained soils. With good drainage, overwatering merely makes the plants tall and spindly. Cosmos attracts bees and butterflies readily, as well as small birds who enjoy feeding on flowerheads gone to seed.

A honeybee enjoys a ruffled cosmos flower.

The plants go to seed readily, and benefit from deadheading. Snip back the plant to a height of 10 - 12 inches in the hottest part of summer, and scatter the seeds in a quarter inch of soil. A light watering at that point will generally get you a crop of fall cosmos, filled in and lower growing, with a rebloom of your original plants.

I've heard a story that the beautifully symmetrical blossoms led the early Spanish Missionaries to name the flower 'cosmos', aka 'harmony'. While that may be apocryphal, it does seem to be the case that the flowers came to California via the Missions, and stayed to the present day.

A Pinch to Grow an Inch

2010-05-03T17:28:00.001-07:00

Seedlings out in the wild to 'harden off' and get ready for planting. A dangerous time!

We've all had it happen. One day there are beautiful little seedlings, with a pair of seed leaves, maybe even with their first true leaf as well. The next day, bare little stems with a munched top. "That Which Eats in the Night" has come to visit. Snail? Slug? We sigh and resign ourselves to starting new seedlings. But wait! There is still hope!

We tend to consider that once the top of a seedling is gone, it's all over. The apical tip, aka the part of the plant that is growing, has been lost. It turns out that there are two things to consider. The first is that in some plants, the true leaves grow under that first set of seed leaves (the cotyledon leaves). The second is that many plants branch along their stems.

Most of these seedlings still have only the cotyledon or seed leaves yet.

A very wise elder gardener recently shared his "pinch" technique with me, while I was bemoaning some beheaded seedlings at the community garden greenhouse. Squeeze the tip of the stem very hard, pinch it at the top. This seals off the tip. At that point, the seedling may form a branching tip or even a new apical tip just below the pinch. Sealing the stalk allows the tiny plant to increase activity up there and you may get a second chance.

How often does it work? "Not every time, for sure, but often enough that I find it worth doing." was the reply. So pinch off those poor little naked stems and keep your fingers crossed. Before you go off to wait, pick up all your pots and six-paks and see if you can find the snail or slug responsible. Otherwise your new growth may get eaten too, and this is a trick that only works the first time!

I've seen pepper seedlings that have lost their tops be saved with the method we discuss above. Also eggplants!

Land of the Giants

2010-04-30T22:52:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year, the transition between winter and spring, or even between spring and summer. Turn your back on the garden and suddenly things have grown to brobdignagian proportions!

The weed-grass in my fence bed has gotten quite tall, cornflowers have sprung up out of nowhere, and the Red Giant Mustard is living up to its name. Those leaves are 18 inches long and as wide as your hand from fingertips to wrist!

Other vegetables of unusual size include a giant chiogga beet, larger than a softball, which we vanquished for dinner tonight. It was still beautifully sweet and tender, and had not gotten even a tiny bit woody. That's one of the great features of chiogga, another reason why it's remained a treasured heirloom for so long. We'd missed this one beet amongst the cabbages and it just kept growing!

Astute readers will note that if the beet is larger than a softball, the cabbage is not particularly large, and they're correct. I plucked the smallest of the savoy cabbages to steam tonight for dinner, leaving the larger siblings in the garden. While beautiful and ruffly, they taste strongly of mustard, which is not a plus in my opinion. Fortunately, my spouse likes them! Here is one of the larger cabbages, ready to pick this weekend before it decides to bolt.

The various herb planters and beds are overflowing with new, tender shoots. Time to do a spring pruning! I'll dry some, freeze some, and have given some away-- I made up herb bundles to include with the Friday "Sunnyvale Cares" donation via the Charles Street Gardens, and dropped them off, along with a couple of huge heads of lettuce.

From left to right, thyme, rosemary, lemon balm, golden sage and oregano shoots, winter savory, and marjoram. Hoo boy do I have marjoram. I have to keep it from taking over the pathway every spring and summer. My friend Stephany is going to teach me to make little herb baskets that you can weave together with some of the long spriggy herbs like oregano and marjoram. Once they dry, they make cute gifts and they're practical: drop one in a pot of soup!

Finally we leave the land of the giants and see a little tomato just getting going for the season. Aunt Ruby's German Green is my favorite non-red tomato. It's a true green, with green inside and a color that lightens as it ripens. It's creamy, low-acid, and smooth-- a tomato you'd love to put on a sandwich but don't kid yourself, you are going to eat it while gardening. So few of these ever make it indoors at our house! Grow big and strong, little A.R.G.G., we are counting on you for sun-warmed garden snacks.

Good Fences Make Good Gardens

2009-07-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

I recently saw a great article on starting mounded raised bed gardens, but was surprised to see that one of the sample photos showed a garden only a couple of feet from the fence. Fences are an incredible garden asset, and making them part of your garden plan will really help you get the most out of your garden.

Fences as microclimates: extend your garden season.
Fences as a trellis: go vertical!
Fences as barriers: support zones for beneficial plants and critters.

MicroClimates Along the Fence Line

A fence line is a naturally productive area, since it creates its own microclimate. If it's got a sunny, southern or western exposure, you can use it as kind of a mini-greenhouse area for perennials that need a little extra boost. An old window or large sheet of clear plastic can make a nice cold-frame against any fence.

In Victorian times, estate gardeners often put an overhang with clear panes of glass along the top of a fence, to trap heat for early-blooming fruit trees. That might be overkill for most of us, but certainly a sunny fence is an excellent place to train fruit trees onto, or plant them in front of the fence. Cold breezes and strong winds are blocked by a good fence, letting your fragile plants enjoy the sun in peace.

If your fence is the northern or eastern side shady side, you have a great microclimate there, too. Lettuces, brassicas, peas, and other cool-season crops can hang on a few weeks longer there. Out of the main heat of the day, your tender seedlings can sit on a shelf on the fence, in pots, greening up and getting acclimated without being scorched and shriveled by a full day's sun. Your winter garden crop will be able to start up for fall a couple of weeks earlier, getting some critical growth in before chilling out.

A Fence is a Trellis, All Year Long

Fences are the ultimate sturdy trellis, letting you go vertical with garden crops and maximizing the productivity of your garden. You can make easy string supports by nailing into the fence, or into a board that you then fasten to the fence (easier to manage!). Some plants, like beans, and vining squashes, will just wedge their little tendrils into spaces between boards, or scamper up a wire or chain-link fence. I've had good luck stapling plastic garden netting to a fence for beans and vines, but it degrades from the sun in a year or two and now I use jute twine.

Tall crops such as tomatoes, okra, or sunflowers are often supported with stakes or cages. Another method is to attach some loops or hooks into the fence and use twine. No big cages to put away or fold up!

You can make a shady area by your sunny fence, to grow lettuce in during the hot summer. Tie twine to a small stake, pound into the ground, and angle it up to attach at the top of the fence. Run beans and cucumbers up the twine, shading the area behind them. Or use long twigs or reed stakes to lean against the fence for a similar effect. If you use tall stakes, with the string at the top, or take string out a ways from the fence, you can make a neat summer playhouse for the kids, or shady spot for a family pet.

Support Your Garden Buddies

How can you use a fence to create an ecosystem of garden helpers? Plan for a permanent 'garden helper bed' along the fence, from 12 to 24 inches wide. Put a soaker hose or drip line along it to keep it watered, and then start populating it with several of the features below:

Mound some dirt slightly in places to create no-till areas for native ground bees, who nest in dirt or under grass tussocks. Scatter some clover seed over the mounds and water until they establish. Make sure your drip line or soaker is under, not on top of, the small, double-handful-sized mounds.
Plant early blooming herbs and perennials to encourage your garden to get on the 'map' for pollinators. Sage, marjoram, and oregano are especially loved-- they spread, though, and you will have to cut them back a couple of times a year, or more.
Start a flower border to attract birds who prey on insects. Sunflowers, cosmos, cornflowers, and poppies will reseed themselves annually, or you can plant a bird-and-butterfly mix. Some butterflies and moths can be garden pests, though, so be careful what you attract! Mixes designed to attract sphinx moths, for instance, will lead to the dreaded tomato hornworms in your garden.
Create some shelters to encourage friendly and hungry toads, lizards, and salamanders who will eat slugs and bugs in your garden. Partially bury a broken flowerpot in soil, put a mound of bark nuggets on or around a big shard of flowerpot or coffeecup, stack a few rocks to leave some large cracks to duck into.
Hang a bat house, birdhouse, or mason bee shelter on the fence. Add a birdbath or water feature.
Make a snail attractor zone, away from your garden, so you can target them. For instance, I plant a line of yellow marigolds, which snails LOVE, and then go out at night with a flashlight to pick off the snails. That way I get them out of the garden and away from my seedlings... and out of the garden before they meet each other and start laying eggs! I also put a small dish of beer out nearby to trap slugs.

Good luck with your fences, and happy gardening!

"Paprika doesn't work for me"

2009-06-28T16:46:00.001-07:00

OK, I didn't mean to post twice in one day, but I was just reading a thread on Dave's Garden forums with this title, and was moved to reply. Reply I did, in what turned out to be copious detail (ah, when we get going, we GET GOING). Alas, I don't remember my Dave's Garden login, and I'm at TechShop laying out garden markers in Corel Draw, so I couldn't post it! As to why I'm reading Dave's Garden at TechShop, I'm looking up how many days various peppers take so I can put it on the markers, and every now and then my eyes wander. :-)

I have also found that there are LOTS of lovely paprika peppers out there that I am not currently growing, and that I need to fix that. My 'Stained Glass' peppers are most likely a hybrid of a generic 'Hungarian Paprika' seedling from OSH or Yamigami's Nursery and the 'Super Shepherd Frying' peppers I grew that year. I grow Turkish Alma and Pasilla Baijo but there are Leutschauer, Szegedi (maybe a landrace, but named after a region in Hungary), Dulce Rojo, Boldog, and I am sure many more.

Making Paprika Peppers Work for You

A couple of things... flavor of peppers, both sweet and hot, varies according to the soil. I've found my peppers have better flavor if I use greensand, organic eggshell, and other sources of minerals, as well as lots of good compost.

Step One: Soil & Ripeness

So, the first step in paprika flavor is the pepper itself. In addition to using lots of tasty soil amendments, you want to leave a drying pepper on the plant longer than you would for a fresh eating pepper. We pick eating peppers when they are glossy and bright. A spice pepper you should leave on until the color deepens and the fruit starts to lose its gloss. You want that fruit to have all the sugars and esters and orneriness that it would have if it were going to go completely to seed. Don't wait so long that it starts to get wrinkled or spotted-- that's too long, and you may have trouble drying it without spoiling. This is concentration one, full ripening.

Step Two: Drying

The second step in paprika flavor is drying the pepper. Don't cook it, don't oven-dry it, just hang it up on a line in a breezy indoor place out of direct sun. Stop drying when it's done: leathery, hard to tear, inner ribs are fully wizened. Don't leave it out on the porch all summer (who, me?! how would I know this? ;-) ) or it will lose a good chunk of flavor. This is concentration two, drying.

Step Three: Show It the Fire!

The third step is heating, ideally in oil. Taste a bit of the dry pepper. It is probably mostly sweet and kinda boring. Now grind or finely chop it (it should be dry enough to grind in a coffee/spice chopper) and heat it in oil. Boom, the taste comes out, including things you could swear were never there. This is concentration three, more properly, unlocking, as this is how you get those little boxes of flavor out where you can taste them.

Do I Have to Grind 'Em Up?

Heck no! I am naturally indolent, so I often just dry my pasilla baijo and alma paprikas and toss them in an old mason jar. I put a doubled piece of tulle in place of the lid, and let the jar sit a bit to make sure all the moisture is out, like when I dry beans. Then I toss a regular lid on them and put them in the cupboard, out of the sun. When I want to use them, I snip off a few matchstick strips, or just tear off a chunk and throw it in the slow cooker with beans. Slow-cooked kidney beans with most of a pasilla in the pot and plenty of onion-- makes even opening a can of good organic beans seem like eating dry cornflakes.

So don't give up on your spice peppers. Give 'em plenty of greensand, let them ripen to the point where they start to lose their gloss, dry them lovingly and carefully, and then reap a panful of awesome flavor on a cold dark winter day.

Out, Out! In, In!

2009-06-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

It's just barely past midsummer, and we're in another heat wave: time to do some summer swapping! I got outside at the leisurely hour of almost-9 in the morning, did some remedial watering, and then worked on my in-and-outs. Nope, not the burger joint! Summer crops!

Out go all the lettuces bolting and going to seed, except for one or two for seed-saving, on the perimeter and upwind of where we like our volunteers to come in. Unless they're an exceptionally mild variety, don't bother trying to harvest any leaves from them if they've bolted to over a foot tall-- they'll be quite bitter, usually.

Into that same spot goes some nice compost, watering, a pass with a hand rake, and the next round of summer beans, some Gold Rush yellow wax beans. I also put a sprinkle of carrot seed, which almost never comes up for me, just in case it decides it likes the shade. I've had a few random carrots come up this way, ya never know. Carrots are allegedly a cool-weather crop, but a neighbor who grows them, flawlessly, says he sows them every month except February. He's amended his soil heavily with sand and grows wonderful leeks, too. I should try sandifying a patch of my heavy clay, but haven't quite gotten there yet.

Out goes the mostly-dead (but with a few blooms to make me feel guilty!) Blue Celeste sweetpea that I trellised into the main garden bed. The ones on the fence have been shedding seeds, and I'll harvest a bunch of seedpods from this one. I've picked up the trellis and put it sideways, going across the other long half of the bed, where it will provide a little shade for some lettuces and various things underneath.

Into the ground, on one end of the trellis, I planted a new variety (for me), Renee's Seeds "Spanish Musica" pole bean. On the other end, my tried-n-true Renee's "Italian Tri-Color" pole beans. In the middle, I've scattered a chiogga/yellow/bull's-eye beet mix, some curly parsley, and genova basil. OK, that last I mostly scattered in the sunny spot between my eggplants, but I always try a little diversity!

Speaking of eggplants, my Ping Tung Long, which I'd all but given up on, taught me a lesson. Keep watering! Even if it looks hopeless! Yes, it was only a two-leaf seedling for ever and ever, since MARCH (!) until we got the heat wave previous to this one in late May. That week of high-80F temps caused it to suddenly pop into leafy life! Now it's actually looking like a 'real' eggplant, with a thick purple stem and a plethora of leaves. Huzzah! I transplanted it today a couple of feet away from my store-bought Thai Lavender eggplant and will keep my fingers crossed.

Sadly, none of my Clemson Seedless nor Red Okra made it this year. One of these days I will grow it. I think it might be like the Ping Tung, I might be starting it way too early and too chilly.

On the outs, the lovely but mostly gone-by cornflowers in the big sunny white planter. I had to cut them off at the stem and then carefully jiggle the roots out to avoid hurting the yellow penny/viola. Surprisingly, most of the cornflower was only one HUGE plant, and just a couple of smaller ones.

Into the gap, the Berry Basket zinnias that I've had in tall four-inch pots since they came up in six-packs in May. They're about a handspan tall and were just reaching the bottom of the pots, great timing! I've got a couple of thumb-sized ones in the six-pack that came up late, and will need to refill a pair of the four-inch pots to get those a bit bigger before putting them out... where? Good question.

Let's see, I also pruned the roses in front, especially the up-from-rootstock canes that had gotten some kind of mildew or fungus from overwatering (sigh, they are VERY sensitive and I need to split off our drip system for the roses). Did more daylily deadheading, so they won't waste their strength making seedpods. Put a tripod up in the Tomato Mistake half-barrel, as it was listing heavily to one side.

The Tomato Mistake. Therein could be a whole blog post! Suffice to say that every year I have some kind of labelling disaster, where I lose track completely of what variety are in what seedling pot or six-pack. One year I dropped a tray of NINETY tomato plants which had been 'labelled' only by my writing the names on squares on 3x5 cards... which completely depended on keeping the orientation of the tray and not on rescuing a jumble of tiny peat pots on the floor. This year I was SO GOOD. I labelled and double-labelled. Ok, one pot with a pair of pepper plants in it had the label in pencil and it washed off, but that is IT. I was STOKED.

On an early trip to the nursery, I saw Reisentraube tomatoes and thought, I have wanted to grow these for quite some time, huge clusters of tiny pointed tomatoes hanging like grapes. I have a half-barrel planter. I will prune and stake and have an adorable small tomato plant with snacking on the patio. HA! HA-HA! Yes, despite being from a store, and having a Real Label in the Pot and everything, my little cherry Reisentraube is in fact some gigantic sprawling cuckoo of a tomato, possibly even a beefsteak variety. It never fails. I have relegated it to the front side-yard, near the daylilies, and have just now had to put a tripod in the planter to keep it upright. There are already tomatoes on it as big as my fist. I have no idea what color they will be when fully ripe, or what kind they are. NEENER NEENER says the Garden Universe. I am still going to keep labelling. Just you wait.

Sibling Rivalry in the Three Sisters Garden

2009-06-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers may recall the earlier plans I published here for a Three Sisters garden of corn, squash, and beans. With my usual cheerful abandon, I ignored various bits of online advice on when and how to plant it. Consequently, things are now somewhat out of control. A normal day in my garden! W00t!

To begin with, the vines you see creeping along the edge of the garden bed actually belong to the squashes planted about halfway down the bed, not the ones that are 'supposed to' be there. The little Black Futsu winter pumpkins don't tolerate chilly weather as well as the robust kabocha types, so they are still dainty rosettes of fuzzy green leaves with a blossom or two, and haven't really taken off yet. Meanwhile, the Hokkori is coming up in the outside lane to steal their thunder!

In this aptly-titled photo, we see the tomato cage trying to resist the encroachment of vigorous squash vines, kind of like trapped shoppers in a mall in a zombie movie. I came to the rescue, but it wasn't pretty. While looking at the small squashes starting to form on the vines, I noticed that the vine giving the tomato cage the most trouble was also the one which was not breeding true to type.

This should be an ebisu-delicata hybrid "Ebicata 2007" that I saved and am planting out. I had banana squash growing nearby, and clearly some happy-go-lucky bee went to more than one squash party on a crazy summer afternoon. I'm not a huge banana squash fan (too bland) and this is the wildest and wooliest of the vines, as well as the primary instigator in the Tomato Cage Invasion. Part of growing stuff out is knowing what to get rid of and what to keep! I trimmed the vines, and then cautiously took out the whole plant and added it to the compost bin, saving the couple of soap-bar sized squashes to eat as summer squash.

This is what they should look like, and the plant sharing that garden section, grown from the same batch of saved seed, has delivered the goods. These are about baseball and table-tennis ball sized, respectively. More where I'd expect them to be this time of year, instead of the huge one just down the row from them.

I didn't try tracing the vine to see if the big one is from the same plant, though it could well be. This one is already at close to mature size of 8 - 10 inches across. Early adopter! I won't pick it until it is mature, otherwise it won't keep well. The stem will be rock-hard and brown-dry, and the rind of the squash will be tough enough that it doesn't casually dent to a fingernail.

This kabocha is new to me, though I think I've enjoyed it from the farmers' market. It's Hokkori, a dark green kabocha offered by Oakland importer Kitazawa Seeds. They're a great source for all kinds of awesome Asian veggies, especially freaky cool greens like chrysanthemum that I haven't learned to eat yet. These juvenile Hokkori are grapefruit and mandarin-sized. How come nobody describes citrus fruit in kabocha terms? Maybe they do in Japan!

This Hokkori is about softball sized. One thing I did while visiting the garden to water was to wipe the dirt off the bottom of each of the little squashes and put a piece of scrap plastic under it. Otherwise the pill bugs start eating the rind where it touches the dirt. If you don't do this, the rind stays light colored and soft where it touches the dirt. When the pill bugs finish with it, the squash looks like it survived some kind of hideous medieval plague, and at worst they break thru into the main part of the squash and ruin the whole thing.

See you on the flip side: it's two minutes to Blogger maintenance, so I'd better finish up! Oh yeah, the sibling rivalry-- the beans are getting shaded out by the kabochas. They weren't as cold tolerant, and the kabochas went in FIRST, because I started them from seed TOO SOON. Lesson here!

Home Hydroponics: Yes, You Can!

2009-06-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

Someone browsing my FlickR stream commented on this picture of one of last year's hydroponic fence planters and asked, "what are the steps involved in starting an eggplant hydroponic growth system?" I wrote a quick answer, and then realized that there are probably readers of this blog who'd like to know, too!

Get yourself a pot with a water reservoir (or make your own), some substrate material (I use perlite), and figure out what you will use for nutrient solution.

I use a commercial mix from the local hydroponic store (ignore all the mixes about "Big Buds", sigh-- they are not for veggies, and they are high-nitrogen anyway so you would get more leaves than fruit). Dry mixes are best, followed by concentrated liquid mixes that you dilute. Don't bother with a premixed solution, you are paying a lot for water!

You might be able to use a combination of conventional minerals, like dusting greensand into the medium, and some bone meal, and then using an off the shelf fertilizer like VF-111 or a concentrated fish emulsion (Alaska, Atlas). I haven't really tried that yet, since the little container of the dry hydroponic mix I have has lasted 3 years already for me, with only a few 4-foot long planters a year and a teaspoon of mix into each weekly. As you can see, it grew some nice eggplants for me! Thai Lavender (long) and Fairy Tale (short, variegated)

I recommend reading up a bit on the net on hydroponics. It's really pretty simple if you are doing it at home, rather than trying to automate it in a commercial greenhouse to produce bumper crops at timed intervals. Sure, if you get the mix too weak, your peppers might take an extra week or two to ripen. No big deal at home, a real big deal if you have a quarter-acre of them in hoop-row greenhouses and a contract to deliver them to some restaurant chain. ;-)

Bloomtacular

2009-05-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

This is the part on Sprockets where we BLOOM!!

We’ve had some chills, thrills, and most recently a little heat wave, and by now just about everything is blooming. The coriander/cilantro is going exuberantly to seed, which helps the pollinators and gives me green coriander to put in the freezer, as well as dry coriander for seed and spicing. The ‘Celeste’ sweet peas have come back for the 3rd or 4th year of self-sown glory. I tried to plant some of the lovely pink ones I seed-saved from the community garden, but no dice: all blue this year.

Fortunately, this year’s new flower experiment, Clarkia, has come to the rescue with lots of eye-popping pink and magenta. These lovely flowers get really big and bushy, and while I scattered seeds of them in a number of places, I had to weed out some of the young clarkia that started crowding out other things. I had no idea what they’d look like, really, despite the pictures on the cover of the seed packet— thought they were MUCH smaller. But I think they’ll join the regulars in my yard, along with the old standbys of sweet peas, cornflowers, and nasturtiums.

Speaking of cornflowers and nasturtiums, the side yard is doing very well. The nasturtiums, interestingly enough, seem to gradually self-select for one color, but it’s a different color in different parts of the yard. The ones along the side porch are almost always yellow. The ones by the fig tree by the driveway are gorgeously glowing orange and red. The scent of them at night is really stunning.

The cornflowers self-seeded nicely in the same planter that I had them in last year, but this year I turned the planter sideways so that we could get more easily into the side yard. I was delighted that the snapdragons that I’d bought as a large potted plant last summer were successful at scattering their seed— these lovely snaps came up on their own in the planter. I moved both of my carnations, one from a pot and the other from the ground, into the self-watering planter as well, and they’re now thriving. When the cornflowers are about ready to give up, it will be time for zinnias. Meanwhile, in the snapdragon/carnation planter, some of that profuse confusion (profusion!) of greenery you see are Pepperbox Poppies (Renee’s Seeds) that are getting ready to lift up their heads. The sharp-eyed will spot some in the side-bed of clarkia above as well.

These poppies are old-fashioned corn poppies, of the type we’d get for Memorial Day every year as a plastic buttoniere sold to support veterans. I’d never seen one as a real flower until these started blooming last week. I very much hope they establish themselves along the fence by the lavender, if they can compete well enough with the borage that takes over every spring. I had four-foot-tall borage out there in March, threatening to cover the lavender. I felt bad chopping it back, but put it in the compost pile to come back to the soil.

Moving along the driveway past the little storage sheds, we come to the runner beans. Last year the Painted Lady runner beans I put at the base of one of the carport supports really took off, winding up the post and along the plastic lattice shading we have along the top. In the mild zones 7 - 9 here, runner beans will build up a nice big root mass and establish as perennials— a great permaculture foundation to build on! While I just grow them for shell beans, I’ve read that you can eat them as snap beans, use the leaves and flowers in salads, and that even the root is edible. Wish I’d known that when I dug a humungous runner bean root out of one of my teeny 3x3 foot beds two years ago, because growing them there shaded the whole bed. I composted it!

Of course, snails LOVE them, and will demolish young runner bean seedlings. The shoots coming up from last year’s beans were eaten down to nubs several times, and I gave up and started new ones from seed— but when the latest round of warm weather came again, there were new shoots, so now I have a double batch going up the first support, as you can see in the picture. The thicker, dark green and fuzzy shoots are from the older root.

In the middle picture, you can see the Delicata squash vine that I planted at the base of some of the supports this year. I figured, what the heck, let’s see how this works. :-)

I’m not out of pictures by a long shot, but I’m out of oomph. Let’s close with the daylilies, thriving in the self-watering planter and clearly getting ready for a bumper crop of flowers this year. These were in regular planters last year, and never did very well, staying small. I realized they needed better moisture control than I could give them in those particular containers, so I moved half my planters from the back patio to along the side fence. The daylilies complement the neighbor’s lavender nicely. In one of the planters, I keep some space for annuals— cosmos last summer, and this spring I put in some vintage pastel stock and the lovely new ‘Sonnet’ pansies to match. They’ll go really well with the daylily colors, too. I had to pluck a LOT of snails out of that section of the planters in February and March to get those to survive, though. Apparently they’re not just an edible flower for people— slugs and snails love pansies. Just peeking up there in pink is a geranium that seeded on the ground from ones the previous neighbors had, and turned out to be JUST beyond the edge of the planters, so it got to stay.

Anti-Snail Recycling for Your Transplants

2009-05-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

Take a 2-liter clear soda bottle, remove the label.

Cut a tall cylinder out of the middle, like a belt or a collar-- a slice out of it. Optionally, smooth the edges or put clear tape over them.

Make a cut so that you have a long rectangular strip. Slit halfway from the top about a half-inch from one end, and from the bottom on the other end.

Get copper-foil sticky tape from the garden store or craft store. Make a line of the copper-foil tape the whole width of one side of the rectangle. It should cross the slits, but you can just slit it. Or tape first, then slit. Hey, this is freeform blogging here.

The tape placement should not be in the middle, it should be offset upward about an inch. Why? Because you will be setting this down into the dirt so the above-dirt portion should be what you center on.

So, now you have a freestanding plant collar that you can either use by itself, or expand to join another collar onto. The copper will keep snails and slugs from climbing it. Sinking it into the dirt around a tender seedling you've transplanted will keep pillbugs from trundling up and girdling your seedling until it falls over like a Paul Bunyan special. (I lost almost all of my from-seed peppers that way last year, had to go buy seedlings, bah.)

You can re-use it year after year, as I do. You can join a bunch of them up to make a little fenced area. Don't let the copper touch the leaves of neighboring plants, they don't like it (not sure why). Also, don't let it touch the ground. I think how it works is that the difference in potential between the ground and the copper gives the snails a little zap.

Sure, you can put copper tape all around your raised bed, but that gets expensive fast, and doesn't keep out the snails that are already in there, hiding down next to the edges.

This post in honor of DreamWidth's opening day, rock on!

Spring Garden Season

2009-04-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's here, and it's in full swing. The past month has been kind of like that song on the radio, "you're hot and you're cold". We went from some early March days in shirtsleeves to a couple of weeks of cold-n-rainy, then some nice daytimes with back down the mid-40's at night. This weekend it's supposed to get into the mid-80's. My lettuce is CONFUSED, I tell ya.

Things I've been doing, some of which may be things to think about doing in your garden:

Greens, greens, greens!

Harvest the first crop of spinach, Catalina Baby, (outer leaves only), and hope I didn't take too much
Plant more spinach, this time a heat-tolerant variety, Oriental Giant (a spinach-alike, really) and a quick to mature type, Nobel 45-day.
Harvest rainbow chard, cutting it all way back to some inner leaves. No leaf miners (yet?) this year, for which I'm grateful.

Peas on Earth, Goodwill to Munch!

Check on your peas every couple of days-- they may need a boost grabbing onto their trellising. I find myself patiently helping them grab the trellis instead of throttling each other. Hmm, sounds like kids!
Pick the first few pea stragglers and eat them as snap peas, whether they are conventional or snap peas. Don't let your pea plant produce full-grown seeds and then think it is done for the season.
Dress their roots with a good layer of compost. In addition to keeping the soil moist, this helps keep it cool. Peas with cool feet will produce longer and be less prone to mildew.
Now that the weather is getting hotter, make sure that you don't spray the pea vines themselves when watering if you can help it, and when you water, do so with plenty of time to dry out before the heat of the day. Once mildew takes hold, it can spread pretty quick.

Strawberry Fields (and Containers) Forever

Strawberries are flowering now; have you fertilized them since tucking them in for fall? This is a really good time. If you wait until the first crop of berries is ready, they may need a long break to absorb nutrients before putting out lots of replacement flowers.
Mine are everbearing, which produce a berry here and there all summer, but if yours are June-bearing, it's doubly important to fertilize as soon as they start greening up and forming flower buds. You're only getting the one shot with the berry crop!
Before you fertilize, especially if you're using compost, carefully pull out all the winter-killed foliage. You don't want rotting vegetation under that compost-- the crowns need to breathe and get good air circulation. This will help prevent fungus problems.
Be careful what you are pulling on, and either snip out the old foliage at the stem, or grab only a stem or two at a time and give a quick sharp yank. It's too easy to pull out the crowns!
If your strawberries are in a container, like mine, check the crowns. The soil levels drop as organic matter is used up, and you may have little strawberry castles raised up 2 or 3 inches above the soil. Fill in with enriched potting soil, or regular potting soil mixed 50% with compost. Be careful not to cover the crowns themselves-- err on the side of caution, because if you cover them, you are very very likely to have fungus or mildew problems.
Container strawberries are sensitive to minerals, too-- be sure to sprinkle some greensand and bone meal or eggshell into your containers annually. Now is fine, it's not too late at all.

Gracious, where did the time go? I guess I've been a bit busy in the garden lately. We haven't even talked about the runner bean seedlings, the tomatoes and peppers, and the squashes. Next time!

Clean Slate Seed Cleanout!

2009-03-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've planted or set aside (or both) portions of saved seeds from last year and the year before. I've been to several seed swaps and shared out even more. Now, with a bunch of seed left, I've got the radical idea to raise a little 'seed money' (get it!) for a new business and sell the rest of my goodies online.

Naturally, I want to give other garden bloggers first dibs! All seeds grown by yours truly, $1/pack plus postage (you choose the postage); I can take Paypal, or you can mail me a couple of bucks. :-)

I've got several packs of a pink/red spicy sweetpea mix that I saved from last summer. They kept up thru the heat and reseeded so vigorously that I didn't need to plant them again! 24 seeds per pack.

Also a few packs of now 4th-generation Blue Celeste sweetpeas. Light, sweet fragrance, great climbers and reseeders. Not as heat tolerant as the pink ones, but still routinely last thru June & July.

Just a couple of packs of Nasturtiums. These are, um, like 10th generation at this point of a six-pack of Alaska jumbo nasturtiums I got in 2003. They self-seed enthusiastically, and both ramble and climb. Mostly yellow flowered, with some orange and occasional deep reds. Lovely for winter and spring salads! A dozen seeds in each pack, and if they fail you, I have oodles more.

A small handful of Cosmos fun-- a mix of Sonata, Picotee (edged), and Seashell types, about 30 seeds per pack. Small birds love to get the seeds before you can, but if you bag a few flowers with a square of nylon stocking, you can save the seeds. :-)

Several packs of a really nice versatile pea that is mostly Cascadia with a little Alaska thrown in. Use it early for a snap pea, stays sweet and delicious through plump-up. When you can see the peas through the pod, the flavor has moved inside and you can use it as a shell pea (if you've had the discipline not to eat all of them earlier). Go on vacation and miss the final round of harvest-- no problem. They dry on the vine and turn into a nice soup pea. I love these and have been planting and saving them for a couple of years now. 24 peas in each pack pod, for a spring and fall planting. Vines will go 5 - 6 foot plus if you start them climbing right away.

One pack of nice yellow Italian style pole beans, black-seeded. I don't recall the exact cultivar, though it likely started out as Renee's Seeds tri-color. I've been saving these for ages. A dozen seeds, enough to get ya going.

Lumpy Sweetie, a pepper hybrid that I've developed, though far from stabilized. The parents are a generic pimiento type sweet pepper and Topepo Rosso, but I know some other things have snuck in there. Thick-walled and sweet, and fairly prolific. Give 'em a try, they're not pretty but they are really tasty and fruity. Two dozen seeds per pack.

Early Cilantro, another umpteenth generation saver, that naturalizes prolifically here. This variety is *not* particularly bolt-resistant, but it starts coming up in early to mid February and gives you fresh green happiness just when you need it most. :-)

Drop me a note if you'd like to adopt a pack or two of any of these and help turn my overflow stack into the next round of seeds. I'll try add some pictures to this post later, lunch hour is nearly over!

Early Garden PlanZ

2009-03-13T00:18:00.000-07:00

A co-worker, upon hearing I was doing garden planning, asked if I used CAD/CAM software. Nope, I told him, Powerpoint! :-)

Usually I use graph paper, but I couldn't find my pad and darn it, I'd been meaning to come up with a template for a while. What I really want are Square Foot Garden colorforms (remember colorforms?!)

First pass at this year's garden plan. 2008 was a disaster since I couldn't compensate for overcrowding with painstaking near-daily garden care: too busy at my employee job.

Note that I have already impulsively purchased two plants which are NOT IN THE PLAN, a Black Krim tomato and a Lolita summer squash. (What are they thinking, naming something that should be picked before it's ripe, with a name like that?! If it weren't an All-America winner, I would not have gotten it. Ugh.

Oh, um, and the tray of Early Butternut was SO CUTE and fuzzy and cotyledon-y with those little sawtooth true leaves just starting. So, um, I picied that up too, but I know just where they are going to go, in that area by the fig tree along the side. (cough)

For our community garden bed, we are planning to do mostly a 3 Sisters setup this year. I blanked at the last minute on whether the beds are 14 or 18 feet long. If they're 12 feet, I am going to have to edit severely, but I am fairly certain they're at least 14 feet.

We were almost the only ones growing corn at the community garden in 2008. There were maybe 3 or 4 other plots, of the 70-plus, with corn, and at least one of those was baby corn.

We're going to go with a nice healthy anthocyanin favorite, Sweet Double Red Corn. It's supposed to be good for fresh, parched, or flour consumption. I'm itching to try my Hopi Blue or to get some Painted Mountain Flour Corn, but let's plant what we already have for now.

My little 4x6 corn patch last year did pretty well, but should have been spaced better. The squirrels ruined a really excessive number of ears-- wish they'd finish one before trashing another. With an alleged top height of 5 feet, the Sweet Double Red should be eas(ier) to net off, unlike the 7 - 9 foot ears of the Golden Queen F1 we grew last year.

I'm happy to make the .PPT file available, as soon as I clear up the question about the CSG bed length.

Slacker's Garden Update

2009-03-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

I'll try to follow up with pictures.

Cilantro is going strong, all over the place. Batavian Nevada, which I'm starting to suspect is merely a fancy name for Black-Seeded Simpson, ditto. Some Merlot and Cimmaron Romaine have come up in the beds, but most are outside the beds. I'm letting them keep going, but have pointed them out to Mike as "take these first". I think I should start another patch of the romaines. The hard rain either washed away or buried too deeply most of the first set.

The favas are about 2 feet tall, and the some of the beets I put in behind and between them are just showing a pair of seed-leaves.

Two square-foot areas of Baby Catalina Spinach are coming up-- one almostly completely, the other lagging severely. Cascadia snap peas on one trellis are about 2.5 feet tall and starting to climb-- the volunteer peas I mentioned in my December update turned out to be Sweet Peas, not edible peas.

I planted a batch of either Cascadia or Alaska (curse my "I'll remember, no need to label" mentality) at the foot of one of the carport posts, and they germinated 100% and are about a 6 inches tall. I need to get them onto wire or string asap, and didn't get to the hardware store for a trellis this weekend.

The little pak choi mostly didn't emerge, so I resowed and have a half dozen tiny seed-leaves showing. This afternoon, Mike and I dibbled a long, long row of onion sets, half yellow and half red, along the little front decorative fence. I put a set of shallots in the corner, and am figuring out where to put the other set.

A broccoli has come up in the square planter, let's see if it thrives. The Bright Lights chard is still with us, but hasn't taken off yet, is only about thumb-size. Something feathery is up and tall in the back corner, but I can't tell yet if it's a bronto carrot or a small fennel; there are several of them.

Oh, and I dug out my seedling heat mats, and picked up (lazy this year!) a bag of potting soil. Usually I make my own, ain't gonna happen with my current work schedule. Time to start tomatoes and peppers indoors. Maybe time past, but at least I'm starting now. ;-)

Much, much, MUCH weeding done this weekend, and a little earlier in the week-- the soil is so saturated that even Nasty Things with Taproots are coming out nicely. My problem children, aka the bunchgrass, come out in big clumps, and the stitchgrass in patches like sod. All into the compost pile!

Some of my mystery flowers are coming up, too-- there are definitely poppies, and there may have been some earlier that I mistook for dandelion-ish weeds (wups). Something reddish-greenish that looks almost like a zinnia is coming up in 3 places-- I think it might ge the clarkia, which I've not grown previously. And some cute little exuberant green bursts of teensy leaves, which I weeded out in a few spots in the main bed are also showing up in my flower planter. Wups. I wonder what those are. I will leave alone any more that show up outside of the planter.

Cornflowers coming up well in the expected places, and many unexpected ones. Have moved a long line of the out-of-place ones onto the front fence, keeping my fingers crossed that they take. They seem ok so far!

Slacker's Winter Garden

2008-12-15T10:22:00.001-08:00

My job has nudged aside my garden to a large degree in 2008, and I've seen a definite drop in the quantity and quality of my harvests. I hadn't realized how critical it was to spend 30 minutes or so every other day in the garden, to nudge, tweak, water, etc, not to mention pick things in dribs and drabs as they ripen. Oh, yes, and as you've observed for 2008, posts to this blog, and pretty harvest pix, really dropped massively off as well!

That said, it's a good incentive to nudge me toward a more slackful approach to gardening, which may be a better match for some of my readers. Winter gardening is a great place to start slacking off, as the winter rains here in California will water deeply and minimize garden hassles. A little floating row cover to keep the Grey Plague (aka aphids and cottony scale) away and it gets downright minimalistic.

I have a tray of red mustard and some lettuces going hydroponically, and this past weekend, cleared old tomato plants and peppers out of the garden. Put out a few cubic feet of compost on the main bed, scattered crushed eggshells from the great TLC Ranch pastured eggs we've been enjoying, and raked smooth, leaving a few lettuce volunteers in place.

I got about 2 quarts of green peppers, which pains me-- if I had gone out in November and put floating row cover on the peppers, they would have been RED peppers, but I got swamped. That's ok. They may ripen indoors, or I can use them green. I'll put them in a bag with an apple and see what happens.

During a 20 minute lull in the local monsoon today, I dashed outside and scattered seeds in the main garden bed: bok choy 'Fortune', carrots 'Royal Chantenay', a baby lettuce cutting mix, and green joi choi. I tossed a few seeds of purple hairy vetch into places as a cover crop, and planted a row of fava beans. A 'row'-- really, I just did a quick trowel into ground, pulled it forward to leave a slot, dropped a seed into the gap, and then pulled out the trowel and gave a quick pat with the trowel to tamp the ground. About 10 beans, each a couple feet apart, and boom, we are done.

I also took an Encouragement Moment to admire my volunteer lettuce and cilantro, coming on strong. Calling them volunteers may be inaccurate: I let things go to seed, and when doing other garden chores, I periodically strip off seeds and scatter them where I want plants later. Only a few come up, but there are so many more than I need, and the birds get fed, the bees enjoy the flowers, etc. I also save seeds and toss them around a month or two later when it's more apropos. Seeds are pretty good about knowing when to come up. The cilantro I tossed around in August is just sprouting now, when I wondered if it had all been eaten up. Was sad that I had no winter peas, and found 3 or 4 coming up where I'd grown them last winter-- moved a light wire trellis into place and will keep my fingers crossed. Have some spicy pink sweet peas I should put out by the back trellises!

Need to take some pix during the next rain lull, but will need to get into the office and probably won't be able to do so. Will try to get some more pix up during the holiday break. In the meantime, see the flickr feed: http://flickr.com/photos/strata/

Edit: I did get briefly outside again, in a moment of sun, and sowed spring flowers: cornflower (aka bachelor's buttons), tho I usually have volunteers, clarkia, alyssum, shirley poppies 'Angel Choir', icelandic poppies, and a mix of spicy pink and fragrant red-violet sweet peas. I noticed that I have volunteer blue 'Celeste' sweet peas where I usually grow them. To tell sweet peas from garden peas: the sweet peas have very flat, almost linear stems between leaves, sometimes in an i-beam-like cross section. Garden (edible) peas have round vine stems.

Our Buddy, Corn

2008-06-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

The corn is as low as an elephant's toe? Just 2 or 3 weeks ago, it was about 70 centimeters and still going strong!

I saved a draft of this post a couple of weeks ago, and really want to get it out there for my garden buddies who may just be getting started on corn. I wish I'd known some of this stuff last year when I tried growing some flour corn in my tiny backyard garden! I didn't take the right kind of care of my corn-- too close together, didn't hill it, and interplanted too heavily with squash-- so I got only a few ears due to aphid infestation and not enough spacing for good pollination. But I still really loved growing a bit of corn of my own, and the first batch of corn flour was worth all the trouble. The difference between fresh-ground home-grown corncake and stuff made from even good organic commercial flour is amazing.

I can't plant flour corn in the community garden, as it would mess up everybody else's sweet corn, so the advice below is mostly about sweet corn. However, except for the staggered-harvest advice, it's all applicable to flour corn as well!

Typical blue and yellow painted corn, in a midsummer harvest pic from 2007.

When planting sweet corn in a small plot, you want 2 - 3 per foot, with about a foot between rows. You also want to plant the northernmost row first (so it won't shade the rest), and then when those plants have a good start, say a handspan above the ground, put in the next row, and so on. That way you'll have sweet corn in small batches. This was another case of "reading after planting" on my part-- I planted the whole little stand of corn in one shot. Well, I'll have plenty to share, I hope!

Two corn tips that I'll be trying this year, courtesy of a very savvy gardener who's been growing in Sunnyvale for over 30 years. The first is that he has great luck starting carrots, notoriously sensitive to drying out during germination, in his corn patch. The shade from the corn keeps the soil from drying out, and carrots apparently sprout and grow readily. I've had really poor luck with carrots, so I'm going to try this!

I saved kernels from some decorative corn purchased in 2003, and in 2007 planted primarily red and orange ones in one stand.

The second tip is how backyard growers can keep those pesky raccoons from pulling down all your sweet corn. Hold up your hand and look at where your thumb meets the hand. If somebody were to pull down hard on your thumb, ow! That kind of pulling is how raccoons pull ears of corn off the plant. Our local garden sensei uses twine, or sometimes even tape, wrapped around the stem and halfway up the cob: about where your knuckle is on your thumb. Do this when the ears are full size but before they ripen-- when all the silk is still green, even at the tips. Without the leverage, the raccoons can't pull the ear off. They may eat a low ear right off the plant, but won't be able to ravage through your little corn patch, pulling a pile of ears off and ruining them. I'll be really interested to see how this works!

Wonderful color but odd pollination due to adverse conditions.

My third corn tip is one that I hadn't known, and that I'm glad our garden coordinator told me. You can't have both sweet corn and field corn in one garden. They'll cross-pollinate like crazy, as corn is primarily wind-pollinated. So that's why I have sweet corn at the community garden, rather than the Mandan Red or Hopi Blue flour corns I had been eagerly waiting to plant there. Because it's all for one and one for all, when it comes to corn. Maybe I can convince everybody next year to try flour or dent corn, but I kinda doubt it. I'll have to see if I can tuck in a tiny patch of flour corn again in our backyard, but the way I set things up this year, it doesn't look good. Dang!

Red and orange cobs from my 2007 tiny maize plot.

Finally, if you're growing flour or dent corn, hilling your corn is really worth doing! I'd thought that hilling corn meant planting it on a mound, for drainage or something. OK, good thing ya can't see me blush! Growing painted corn last year, I noticed the stalks changed color as they got taller, and developed little knobby growths about 20 - 30 centimeters off the ground. Turns out that those are additional roots-- that is, if you hill up the corn when they start to show! Pile up additional soil and those roots will dig in, anchoring the corn more firmly against wind, and maybe getting you an extra ear or two!

An easy way to do this is to actually plant corn in a slight trench, and pile up the soil between rows. When the corn comes up about shoulder high, hill it in (and add some nice compost!) by pulling in that extra soil. I've gotta try that on my next flour corn planting.

I'd love to be able to stabilize this color! I'll be carefully saving from this ear, for sure.

Community Garden Visit

2008-05-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

The bee and butterfly garden is coming into full bloom, just a few paces away from our garden bed.

I really love working in the community garden, and even more so now that we have our own garden bed. For the first year or two, I didn't really want a bed because I have some garden space in our backyard. But enough beds go idle, or neglected, that I didn't feel bad finally going on the waiting list, and this year, the 3rd year of the garden, we got our bed in the January lottery. It was baked hard in the sun, and needed some TLC, but we dug in (literally) and it's a happy, happenin' little place now.

Low-growing plants dominate this third of our community garden bed, so as not to shade the rest of the bed.

The garden beds were laid out east-west, so that they get full sun along the south all day. Terrific! One of the many tips in the mandatory new-gardener class is to arrange your plants so that taller plants are to the north and east. We followed that advice, putting corn in the eastern third of the garden bed and our tomatoes and peavines along the north edge along the bed.

We wanted a lot of sun for our peppers, and some low vines along the south side of the bed. I'm hoping that the tomatoes and corn will also act to filter some of the hottest sun, so that mid-summer won't fry our peppers. We can always rig some sunscreen, though, if that fails.

An icebox size watermelon may or may not make it: the stem has been half-eaten by those darn pill bugs! We're told that ashes from a wood fire or all-wood charcoal are an effective deterrent for these pests, but found out too late for it to do any good for us.

The eye-catching red of this merlot lettuce gives way to bright green at the base of the leaves, so it looks flashy, not weird, in the salad bowl.

Peas and peppers and beans for the middle!

After a slow start, Cherokee Wax and Blue Lake beans are now thriving in the middle section of the garden. Time to start another row or two of beans or soybeans there, to spread out the harvest.

Happy squash plant!

Just a little gal now, this Big Mama kabocha is a bush-type, rather than vining, winter squash-- ideal for smaller spaces. Of course, I planted two of them too close together, because I thought they were vines. Wups. This is why you should read the packages when you start seeds, not when sorting seed packs after transplanting.

The eastern third of our garden bed: corn!

The last third of our garden bed is mostly sweet corn, with some bush beans and dwarf sunflowers around the edges. There's one gorgeous Purple Queen bush bean plant there, which I neglected to get a picture of this time (wups!) and one or two tiny ones coming up. The pill bugs ravaged them and not all of them made it! There's always a lot to say about corn, so I'll save it for next time. Just remember: it's not too late! You can put in 65 - 80 day sweet corn, or even 90 - 120 day dent corn, all the way into June here in the SF Bay Area's mild climate.

Springing back from the heat wave

2008-05-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

Nobody has moved into any of my fence birdhouses yet, alas. I will try putting a few up under the eaves in the shade. Cornflowers came up nicely this year, though!

We had another of our spring heat waves this past week, with daytime temps in the high 90's (F) and daily watering to try to save young plants. The timing was spectacularly bad: traditionally US Mother's Day is the time to set out tender plants like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Many seedlings had only a few days in the ground before the heat slammed into us. This meant that their root systems weren't necessarily developed sufficiently to support the plant during a time of great stress.

More seedlings waiting for kinder weather, or for me to finish preparing the other beds.

I had to spot-water my teensy pepper seedlings in the mornings all week, and hope that providing water directly at the plant would provide a margin of safety. I lost a couple of them anyway, but the majority are good so far. The peppers I transplanted a few weeks earlier into my hydroponic trays, however, adored the hot weather and doubled in size during the past week!

A pair of sweet pimiento peppers flank a ping tung long eggplant.

Other heat-lovers included the basil in my new blue herb planter. It's an ordinary strawberry pocket planter, which I populated with kitchen herbs rather than strawberries. I moved it into 'bright shade' during the heat wave, as the herbs were planted only a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to be sure they didn't cook in the planter. I really recommend making a planter like this, so you won't have to constantly police your herb bed to keep some of the busy herbs like sage or oregano from crowding out and overshading others. My tiny 2 square feet of herb bed had sprawled to over 9 square feet through the fall and winter, and I had to cut it WAY back a week or two ago to get good access back to the fence.

Dual pockets of basil, plus sage, marjoram, italian oregano, and a crown of english thyme.

Normally I'd have beans by now, but I was late to the game and didn't plant my usual Monte's Italian heirloom (a variety of borlotti bean). The pill bugs, aka "The Eaters", have been wreaking havoc on bean seedlings of all kinds, eating away parts of the stem until the leaves hang by a tiny thread. Of a dozen bush bean seedlings, only two have survived so far, and they seem to have gotten 4 of the 6 Monte's Italian that I planted a week or two ago. I need to get some diatomaceous earth and hope that slows them down. I should also be 'baiting' with melon rind, or a saucer lid, or other thing they can hide under so I can remove them. Gotta get on that!

At least my painted lady runner beans came back on their own, an annual that goes perennial in this mild climate. They stopped setting flowers during the week of insane heat, but should get back to it now.

It wouldn't be a garden update if it didn't have a shot of our Garden Helper, usually found napping on the job. It's better than sitting by the bird watering area, thinking impure thoughts, so I won't complain.

Hey, when you're this gorgeous, you need to really max out on the beauty sleep!

Flavoring Your Summer Veggies, Right Now

2008-04-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Recently someone commented on an older posting of mine that some of last year's veggies seemed to have no flavor. I think my reply may be of general interest, so I thought I'd post it instead of just replying privately.

Hi Raqui,

The discolored bean leaves I would say are cold damaged. The plant should recover.

For veggies with flavor problems, hmm. The seed being old is ok and won't affect flavor. If it germinates, it's got all the goodies. :-)

Some varieties of veggie are bred for ripening at the same time, or being drought/cold/heat hardy, etc, rather than flavor. If you feel you were using a good variety, though, the next thing to look at is your soil diversity. Trace minerals account for a lot of the flavor, as well as nutrition, in food. It may be time to get a multi-mineral supplement such as greensand or some custom organic preparation, to enrich your soil.

Just like you can make bread with only flour, water, and salt, you can grow a lot of veggies with only NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) but they'll be pretty wonder-bread bland!

One reason that composting is such a good idea is that you're returning minerals from the non-edible parts of the plant into your soil. We were putting our plants into the city compost bin and picking up free city compost until last summer. Then we realized we were swapping our huge peavines and tomato plants for grass clippings and who knows what. Wups! So now we have a leaf-shredder that we use to shred garden waste, and our own compost bin.

More Stir-Fry Spikes, and A Pleasant Surprise

2008-02-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

The warm weather continues to draw up delicious flower stalks from my Asian greens. I harvested a large colander full of tsatsoi leaves and flower spikes, as well as spikes from my joi choi in the hydroponic fence planters. The choi in the ground-level planters is barely starting to form central buds, as it gets less sun.

I did a very nice stir-fry with some Trader Joe's gyoza (they have both chicken and veggie, btw) in garlic and ginger slices, then added some leftover red rice and red quinoa. I rinsed the stalks and made sure there was plenty of water on them, and put them on top to steam, covered. When they turned bright green, then started to deepen in color, I added the tsatsoi and choi leaves, also dampened, with a little extra water. Another 2 or 3 minutes of steaming and everything was done beautifully. The stalks are substantial, but not crunchy or mushy, and the leaves are still squeaky.

And now for the surprise-- ripe tomatoes! I pulled my poor dead Costulato Genovese tomato bush a couple of weeks ago, as a windstorm had blown off the floating row cover and it had gotten obviously frost-bitten. I harvested the tomatoes still on it, and brought them in to fry up green. After a couple of days, though, they were clearly ripening! So I left them alone to go at it, and they ripened up beautifully. I just had a couple last night over brown rice with yellow split-peas, with broccoli and soy sauce and cheese. Yum! A nice taste of summer from the garden, long before time.

Winter Greens: Getting Spiky About Spring

2008-01-26T21:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome, Weekend Herb Blogging readers!

Not only are winter greens easy and fun to grow, they like to surprise you now and then by deciding that Spring must be here. With all the recent (relatively) warmer rain, some of my asian stir-fry greens seem to have decided to Go For It and see about flowering. Hmm, can you spot the joi choi who is thinking it's Spring?

Fortunately for us, these flower spikes are not only quirkily charming, but are also a special, nutrient-packed treat. Eat flowers? Isn't that just for fancy salads and goat cheese? Nope! For instance, most of us have eaten this edible flower, broccoli!

Broccoli has many tasty cousins to enjoy. There's Italian broccoli raab, and a number of friendly flower spikes that often go by the name Chinese broccoli but which can be anything from flowering choi to various mustards. Here's some tsatsoi that has decided to reach for the sky.

Along with the cultivated greens, we have some tasty stir-frying options mixed among our cover crops. The early flower clusters of culinary seed mustard, such as this lovely example in my side tomato bed, can be snipped and added to other greens, or tossed daringly in a cream sauce over pasta. Yum!

It's not only little Ralphie's mom in Rabbit Hill, always making peavine soup, who can appreciate winter peas extravagant growth habits. The tender tops, not yet in flower, are delicious steamed or gently toss-cooked in light olive oil, with or without matchstick ginger and a little garlic.

Plant some extra peas to snip periodically for the table, or just snip bits here and there for a special treat-- not too much if you want a good crop of pea pods. I think I still have some slack left on the main pea-patch. Thinning them out a bit also helps prevent powdery mildew when the weather gets warmer, but it's not going to be warm enough for that for quite a while yet!

Rain and Little Buddies

2008-01-13T19:25:00.000-08:00

The recent rain has been bringing all kinds of things out in the garden, including our little buddies, the Western Spotted Salamanders.

The ginormous green thing is a standard garden hose. Yes, this is a teensy weensy salamander. We wondered if we still had a breeding population of these little cuties, and apparently we do! I've been laying down pavers with hollow places and bark under them, where they'll get light winter sun and acceptable summer shade, in the hopes of keeping our garden slugs down by natural means. I think it's working!

One of the adult salamanders, on a half-inch garden stake next to the garden hose. Blurry, but you can get an idea that it's about 4 inches long including tail. I've seen bigger and smaller ones in the past 3 years, as well as once an albino one-- adult, so it clearly found good places to hide.

Are there fewer slugs around? I'll put a cautious "maybe" on that. But every little bit counts, and I've always loved salamanders!

Easy Fall Greens via Hydroponics

2007-12-02T00:30:00.000-08:00

Welcome, Weekend Herb Blogging readers. Doesn't that look scrumptious? A crisp, shiny rosette of tsa tsoi, a tangy Chinese green that makes excellent stir fry material.

The best part is that I'm getting these delicious winter greens with almost no work, and I won't be composting them or digging out the planters to refill them with dirt for a second crop. I also don't have to worry about scrubbing dirt out of my sink; a post-harvest rinse and I'm done. How can all this be? I'm growing them hydroponically!

A colorful head of forenschluss speckled lettuce, plus more tsa tsoi; I'd better start my next batch of seedlings, and harvest these beauties soon.

About a month ago I had an 'aha!' moment while cleaning up in the back yard. In an untidy pile were a bunch of 3-foot long self-watering planters, the long window-box type, sitting empty. They're very shallow, so they're only good for things with shallow roots. Another item that needed putting away for winter was a giant 2 cubic yard bag of perlite. It was purchased by accident when I wrote "perlite" instead of "vermiculite" on a shopping list for someone else. Wups. Perlite, though, is one of the better mediums for hydroponics. I knew that I still had a good-sized container of dry mix for hydroponics solution in my garden storage bench. A plan was born!

My favorite red mustard seedlings, about 2 weeks along, with assorted lettuces and some ruby chard. The brown is harmless algae-- my fault for watering the seedlings directly from the top once. Note the handy little water level gauge built into this planter.

Now why did I have hydroponic fertilizer mix around? Some long-time readers may recall that when I lived in San Jose in 2003 and 2004, I had very little usable yard space for gardening-- our rental's sunny space was white pebble landscaping. Undaunted, and because I'd always been meaning to learn this stuff, I went out and got some hydroponic units and grew marvelous cucumbers, tomatoes, squashes, and peppers hydroponically. I'd started out buying gallon jugs of nutrient solution to dilute, but soon realized I was paying a lot for what was mostly water, and that buying dry mix would be better. A tiny bit goes a LONG way, so I still had plenty left over.

My San Jose hydroponic garden in late April 2004. Imagine everything tripled in size about 6 weeks later!

The main cloud around this hydroponics silver lining is that I don't like using artificial nutrient mix. I want to try doing hydroponics on filtered compost tea-- it should work just as well as the mix, as long as I dust some greensand into the perlite for extra minerals. I'll try that in the spring, or next fall, now that I have a baseline to work from and compare.

Self-watering planters are a really excellent choice for lettuce and greens, as so much of the plant is dependent on abundant water to grow crisp and strong. Even if you don't try hydroponics, it's worth putting some lettuce or stir-fry greens into a self-watering planter and letting them party on. You'll usually see a noticeable improvment in growth vs typical ground soil conditions.

Garden Desktop: Full of Beans!

2007-11-25T14:50:00.000-08:00

This week's Garden Desktop doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Well, actually, wait, it DOES. Several hills, in fact!

This past weekend I finally shucked the beans I had drying on a table out on our porch. There are big white and brown Painted Lady beans from the side yard. These did so well, and are so delicious, that I will grow them on ALL the carport pillars next year, rather than on just one. The hummingbirds love the half-white, half-red flowers, too.

The big pink/red and brown beans are Scarlet Runner beans, whose all-red flowers are so popular with the hummies that they fight over them! They are wonderful to create a shady arch or temporary patio cover. I've been thinking of pulling up a couple of the foot-square pavers on our back patio and planting Scarlet Runners there on arches, to make a little afternoon nap nook. I have to figure out first if it will shade the veggie garden beds, though. I don't want that!

The smaller rounder beans are the heirloom that I call Monte's Italian, the nth generation of those given to us by our photographer and diver friend Monte Smith. They hybridize readily, so this year we tried to be careful about growing them away from the other beans. Even so, we got a few crosses with the Scarlet Runners, as shown by some of the pink rounded beans, and possibly with the Painted Lady as well-- the beans are usually a creamy tan color with one to three small dark-brown streaks, and some of them are suspiciously paler, and more similar to the Painted Lady beans in color.

Last year's bean drying, didn't take a pic of this year's.

I saved bean seed earlier in the year, and made sure to save from long, well-formed, plump pods with a minimum of 5 beans per pod. I was usually able to save 2 or 3 seeds of a 6 or 7 pod bean. Last year I just shelled them all and picked out the plumpest beans, and then realized "doh!", I was only selecting for part of the story!

As always, feel free to use and share this Garden Desktop. It's okay to link and publish with a link back and/or attribution, and to use in print for personal or nonprofit use. There's a 1280 x 960 version for larger desktops too.

Mustard Season

2007-10-27T20:54:00.001-07:00

Just in time for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by the talented Pille, we celebrate the beginning of the fall and winter greens season with some heirloom lettuce and a great salad greens that is often overlooked: mustard!

The cool weather coming in is the best time for growing delicious green things for salads, sandwich layers, and garnishes. Our lettuces, which hid from the summer heat, are starting to peek out from where they self-seeded. In the meantime, we'll plant to make up the difference!

Pictured here, on top of some Early Girl tomatoes (which are ripening late, under floating row cover), are fresh leaves of Forenschluss and Cimmaron romaines, and a crinkly red mustard leaf.

Mustard is the great "sleeper green" of the instant gourmet and adventuresome home gardener. Leaf mustard, unlike mustard grown for seed or as a cover crop, has broad leaves that range from mildly zingy to mule-kick strong. The variety I chose, sheerly for robust good looks, is Red Giant, and falls somewhere between those two extremes. I find the leaves by themselves too strong, but they layer nicely between a couple of romaine leaves in a lunchtime sandwich. The zingy pick-me-up of mustard leaves can let one skip the prepared mustard or mayo, handy for a bag lunch brought to work.

If you can grow lettuce, you can grow leaf mustard. Look for it on racks of Botanical Interests gorgeous illustrated seed packets, where Giant Southern and Giant Red are prominently displayed, as well as Mizuna, a sawtooth-leaved oriental cooking mustard green. In your local Asian market, look for "Gai Choi". Mustards come in a gorgeous palatte of colors and textures, too. High Mowing's Organic mustards include the stunning Purple Osaka and their striking "Hotshot" mix.

I picked up six-pack sets of lettuces and mustards at our community garden's fall plant sale. Forenschluss, which means "Speckled Belly", is a beautiful variegated romaine with an upright, compact habit. The bronze tones of Cimmaron go very well with Forenschluss, so I've planted them in alternating rows in my garden.

Strawberry Woes: Compost to the Rescue

2007-10-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Most commercial strawberry growers rely on heavy applications of methyl bromide or similar fumigants to combat black root rot, an endemic problem for strawberries. New agricultural research shows that growing strawberries in compost medium can substitute for soil fumigation. Fumigants, in addition to their toxicity and negative effects on the soil ecosystem, are increasingly expensive. Many small-scale growers cannot afford fumigants, yet the poorer yields of associated with black root make going without it unaffordable as well.

Mesh tube bags, sold commercially under a variety of names, were filled with compost and set up with drip irrigation. The strawberry plants were set directly into the compost tubes, and did not pick up the black root from the infected soil. Yields were increased a whopping 16 to 32 times!

Photo courtesy of USDA

In a lovely example of synergy, not only does this represent a more natural and affordable method for strawberry culture, the method frees growers from the ubiquitous use of black plastic. Acres and acres of black plastic are used to mulch between rows in large-scale operations. The tube bags, sometimes called "socks" are available in a wide variety of materials, including natural materials such as cotton or burlap, and biodegradeable plastic meshes.

In the photo above, I've taken a wide shallow planter and used some landscape edging to add a second tier to it. Making a multi-level strawberry planter with compost in mesh tubes would be even easier. I could try adding strawberry plants in a compost mesh tube as a raised edging on my planter beds, or around the base of the beds on top of the chip mulch I use to suppress weeds. I'll have to try that!

A is for Avoiding Arsenic

2007-10-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

We're starting a new series, the "Garden ABC". I thought we'd begin with a little scary information about ways that arsenic could be getting into your garden. That may sound bizarre, but actually arsenic is dangerous at very minor levels. The amounts to which we're exposed, from sources as diverse as coal-fired electrical plants to pressure-treated lumber to municipal water to chicken dinners, add up rapidly. Arsenic is a potent carcinogen, as well as a direct poison. The Safe Water Act would have lowered municipal water levels of arsenic from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb, but it was struck down by the current administration.

We hope that arsenic is not entering your garden through your water supply. If you suspect that it might be, you can request the Consumer Confidence Report on your water supply. The other way that arsenic can sneak into your garden is via commercial chicken manure.

Not Just Chicken Feed

Here in the USA, commercial chicken feed contains roxarsone, an organic (in the chemistry sense) arsenic compound that suppresses bacterial infections in the chickens' guts and makes them gain weight faster. Unfortunately studies are showing that it's secreted in the toxic, inorganic form. As one article so aptly put it, Food for Chickens, Poison for Man. It's banned in the EU and ought to be banned here.

The rate at which bacteria convert roxarsone to toxic arsenic has been widely underestimated until the recent publication of new evidence linking chicken litter and toxic arsenic. The chicken waste is pelletized and sold as fertilizer to commercial farmers. Chicken manure is also sold in dried or composted form at hardware and garden centers. Studies show that fields which are spread with this material are getting noticeable amounts of arsenic.

If you know folks who are giving you chicken manure, check to see if they're mixing their own 'scratch' feed from grains or using a pre-mixed feed that might have roxarsone. There are numerous suppliers of certified organic chicken feed and mash if one prefers a pre-mix.

Gardening as Environmental Stewardship

2007-10-15T10:40:00.001-07:00

Take a little patch of earth and make it a garden. Even if you only grow one thing. Even if it's a hardscrabble piece of bare dirt along the side of a wall, or a pot on a balcony, or a milk carton in a windowsill. That's what I'd like you to come away with, today on Blog Action Day, when we are all talking about the environment. Because WE are an integral part of the environment. Our human actions.

Being involved with maintaining the life of plants will involve you more intimately with the life of the planet. Even better if it's a plant you can eat, because you won't want to eat poison and you'll be more careful about what you use to keep other things from eating that plant.

We started our garden when we moved in, in February 2005. The ground was baked, cracked clay, utterly bare, without even weeds. The previous owner had torn out the dead sod, the lawn that nobody had watered while the place was for sale before he'd bought it. For three and a half years, he never got around to putting in a lawn, a garden, even any ground cover. So the bare ground sat and baked. No worms, no bugs, nothing.

After almost 3 years of hauling in compost, planting, putting down wood chips, letting things go to seed and spread, we now have a little ecosystem all our own. Every year we see new critters not previously encountered. Some of these new neighbors are not so great, like plant-damaging soldier bugs. Others are unexpected delights, like the giant salamanders, the little lizard I saw drinking from a soaker hose, and of course the hummingbird regulars who now understand that peas or beans will be flowering here most of the year (and that our neighbor's hummie feeder will take care of the wintertime).

We've gone from seeing a few bees here or there to hosting a wide array of pollinators: honeybees, to be sure, but also big black carpenter bees, ground-nesting bumblebees, and sleek metallic hoverflies. And we're still learning.

This year we're putting in mustard and vetch as a cover crop on some of the beds, with fall-winter fava beans. We've established alyssum that self-seeds, and cornflowers, and borage, along with plantings of lavender, to try to provide a year-round supermarket for our native pollinators.

We realized that even after just a couple of years, things don't grow so spectacularly as they once did-- we've been putting our virgin clay soil-grown, mineral-rich, organic tomato and bean vines in the city compost bin and getting back lawn-clipping gruel, even if it IS composted. Every eggshell that we've thrown in the trash is a bit of calcium that could have been useful in the garden. I have a few dozen eggshells, crushed into the bottom of a clean milk jug, drying, waiting to go into the garden now. The top of the gallon milk jug is a warming cap for a broccoli plant, and will nurture pepper seedlings this spring.

This fall we bought a lightweight 'leaf shredder' that uses a modified weed-whacker in a big funnel, and we shredded up our plants at the end of summer and mulched them into the beds. I could bang my head on the wall thinking of the cubic yards of tomato plant, squash vine, bean plants, etc that we've stuffed into the city 'yard waste' bin and sent away, but at least we're doing it differently now.

It starts with just a little patch of ground, even a single plant. If you do nothing else for the environment this year, plant a garden. You'll find out that it was really for you, too.

Yes, these are all photos from our backyard. The one below is what it looked like in November 2005. We've come a long way, baby!

Full Circle Farm Groundbreaking

2007-09-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sunnyvale city officials joined board members from the Santa Clara Unified School District and the Sunnyvale Sustainable Gardens non-profit in planting the first fruit tree, a plum, at the ground-breaking ceremony for Full Circle Farm. The farm returns 11 acres of unused land at the Peterson School to agricultural use as a not-for-profit farm and education center that will supply produce to the school district and local charities, as well as sell directly to the public.

Shovels stand ready for the true 'ground-breaking', digging a hole and planting the first of a small orchard of fruit trees that will echo Santa Clara's agricultural heritage and provide fruit for the Farm's school lunch and market garden programs.

A sizeable crowd turned out for the afternoon's festivities, which included informative displays about Santa Clara farming history, conservation strategies related to agriculture, the concept of 'peak oil', efforts to reclaim the former UC/USDA farm station in San Jose before it is developed and lost, and face-painting and rock-painting for children.

All of the tables were decorated with winter vegetable seedlings, planted in colorful pots that had been painted by children at last weekend's Santa Clara Art and Wine Festival. Visitors were encouraged to take a seedling or two home with them. I chose Italian parsley, as my pot of it was accidentally left unwatered sometime this summer.

The collection of local dignitaries paused for a photo op with the commemorative plaque that will mark the tree. I hope to edit this shortly to include names and affiliations-- please leave a comment if you can help identify people!

For even more pictures, see my
Full Circle Farm Groundbreaking set on FlickR.

Winter Squash Pantry

2007-09-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

This year I'm proudly displaying our winter squash as they cure, rather than lining them up along the wall or countertop as clutter. Our printer stand makes a great little pantry for the squashes. Yes, that's a face on one of them. I offered to decorate some pumpkins for someone on Craigslist, and did a sample on a handy squash!

The two squashes in the foreground are both interesting. The big one is part kabocha, and I believe part banana squash. It was saved from a kabocha I bought in a farmer's market. There is a typical-looking small kabocha ripening outside from the same vines, and it is the same lovely gray-green as the very tip of this squash.

Right at that tip you'll see a tiny ridged squash. That is a Black Futsu, a Japanese squash with an unbelievably intense flavor. It starts out a green so dark that it almost looks black (hence the name), and then turns a dusty orange in storage. The parent squash was also small, but at least double the size of this one. There's another tiny one on the vine outside. I hope that they're edible-- one reason they could be so tiny would be that they crossed with some kind of gourd.

I'm starting to think that, while seed saving from the farmer's market is fun, I might want to plant more 'official' seeds next year and get a more consistent harvest. Since I don't have room for more than a couple of plants of any large cultivars, like squashes, a packet of seed lasts me several years and is a good investment. Ironically, I have an unopened packet of Black Futsu that I didn't plant, preferring to use the saved seed instead (as this packet is vacuum sealed).

Garden Wrap-Up

2007-09-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when we take apart the garden and put it back together for winter gardening. We were so busy doing that, and getting sticky and dirty with sap, compost, mud, etc, that we forgot to take pictures! So I did catch-up pictures of the items left over, minus a couple of big stir-frys. This is the time of year when we have the funkiest-looking veggies, as we clear everything off the plant when we take it out of the garden.

As usual, we got a lovely return on our beans. I think beans are one of the great gifts to gardeners. I plant a couple of dozen beans of various types and harvest a quart of dried beans, plus eating several meals of fresh young whole beans. The plants themselves are great nitrogen fixers, and can be shredded and mulched in place on the garden beds at the end of the season, or composted.

This year we added Painted Lady to the runner bean collection, growing it separately on a carport support. The plants quickly climbed up to the roof, and were claimed delightedly by a couple of the local hummingbirds. The Painted Lady beans are white with black squiggles, in contrast to the pink and black Scarlet Runner beans. I've picked out a batch for next year's planting (and for sharing!), from the longest and best-formed pods. Here the harvested beans are drying a bit more on the shelf, along with previously harvested peppers.

Our melon experiments were much more successful this year than last. We also discovered that a local squirrel or rat likes melons (grr!). Despite losing a couple of melons, our mini-melons did very well in the self-watering planters. We got a couple of tiny yellow watermelons, some mini-charentais, and a couple of a variety I've forgotten. I think all of these were supposed to be larger. I don't know if our soil wasn't amended richly enough, or if the cold snaps in the summer did it. I skipped the usual midsummer composting, being away, and I feel that was a big mistake.

Yes, we're being cute here. Still, we find cardboard egg cartons to be a good place to store veggies that we don't like to refrigerate. They allow good air circulation and are handy. I'm thinking of finding some small wire baskets on drawer gliders and hanging them under my kitchen cabinets over the countertop, which would be less cluttery than the egg cartons, and would be safe from countertop spills. There were several Ichiban long purple eggplants in this carton, too, but they went into the frypan before the picture was taken. Really like the Ichiban and the Fairy Tale (shown here) for tenderness and no trace of bitterness.

I've left our big Early Girl tomato plant alone, but the Green Zebra is history, as is the Pineapple Beefsteak and the Persimmon, so we have plenty of green tomatoes ripening up. The startlingly dark one is the Purple Russian; they never got more than a pale pink outside before something four-footed harvested them, or we did in self-defense. I had great hopes for a complex, smoky flavor in this, as is supposed to be true of many black or dark tomatoes, but I found it actually rather bland. Purple Russian tomato won't be returning to my garden next year. I'll try Black Krim or Black Prince, and rig netting so that I'll have a chance of ripening them on the vine.

When you're picking green tomatoes for later ripening, especially if you're pulling out the plant, take a good chunk of stem along with them. The ripening tomatoes will pull sugars from the stem, which slowly withers and hardens. The resulting tomatoes are almost as sweet as vine-ripened, certainly far and away better than supermarket tomatoes, even hothouse ones.

Our plans for a bountiful potato harvest were dashed by the construction of new fence between our property and the neighbors' in the back, as we didn't find out it was coming in until the workmen were already there. They dug out my potato patch to put in a posthole, and I was only able to salvage the area where I'd laid down the standing plants straight out from the fence and covered them with dirt for an extended harvest. That led to a nice batch of small new potatoes, about half of which are pictured here. They were delicious! They are mostly Russian Banana, with a few Russets here and there.

A few larger potatoes survived the shovels of the fence-builders. They'll be chowder someday soon!

Days of Squash and Roses

2007-09-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

Summer is clearly coming to a close here in Silicon Valley. Breezy days in the high 70's wind down to chilly evenings and cool nights. I've got floating row cover over our peppers already and one of the eggplant beds.

Our roses are blooming again after a severe pruning in early August. The ultra-hot weather didn't do them any favors, even though I cut back on watering them to try to stave off any mildew or fungus problems. I'm participating in the Apartment Therapy 8-Week Cure, and one of the first things that comes up is to bring in fresh flowers. OK, they say 'buy', but I can just go out front right now, so I did.

Normally I'd have cut dahlias, but mine, alas, were just destroyed this past weekend by workers putting in a fence replacement. They might come back for the season or they might not-- they were completely uprooted. I reburied them and watered; worst case, they die back for this season. I'm planning on moving them this winter anyway. Still, there were a LOT of blooms left, and I'm sad about that.

What I think will be the last of my squashes are in now; I planted the ebicata kabocha too late, and it got hit with powdery mildew during our hot spell and hasn't set fruit yet. Too bad! But the red kuri / kabocha cross came through very well, and I may get another straggler from my Waltham butternut.

When the nights get cold, the squashes toughen up and get ready to pick. If you still have some ripening, be sure to gently lift them off the ground and make sure they're clear of little pillbugs or other critters trying to eat into the rind. Use a piece of old potshard or a tile to get them off the ground, or even rest them on the vine itself. There are two primary signs to look for in squashes. The first is that the stems will start to get hard, and may turn tan or shrivel up. Butternuts typically need a pair of bolt cutters to snip off the vine! The other sign is that the skin hardens to the point where it is difficult to mark it with a fingernail. Store fresh-picked squashes on a screened porch or on an open, well-ventilated shelf for at least a week or two to let them shed excess moisture. I keep mine on an open shelf as decoration, and gradually use them up in winter.

If you haven't grown your own squash, don't worry-- the ones at the Farmer's Market are perfectly lovely. Buy them now, when the markets are fairly swimming in them, and store them yourself at home for later. Don't wash them, but if they're dirty or mucky, you can polish them off with a barely damp cloth. Treat as you would your own fresh-picked, and let them cure a while before putting in a cupboard.

The rest of the garden is still busy turning out, as Mike's late grandmother would say, "a bissel of this, and a bissel of that". A friend of ours came over and we responded to the plethora of ingredients by making ratatouille, a perfect solution to lots of ingredients in quantities too small to make any one of them the centerpiece. OK, there are always huge quantities of zucchini; we balance them off against the rest of the ingredients that way!

Harvest Snapshot: Sept 10

2007-09-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

September harvests usually end up to be something of a mish-mash, and this one is no exception. Fortunately, the best veggie stir-fry has lots of different kinds of veggies, and we're definitely getting good material for that!

Time to round up the winter squashes and bring them inside. Make sure there's plenty of airflow where you store them, and let them 'cure' for a bit in the open air before putting them into a cupboard. Butternut squashes may drip slightly from the stem for a day before settling in, so make sure they won't drip on another squash.

Harvest Snapshot: Aug 24

2007-08-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Garden volunteers make up a nice part of this harvest. The colander of yellow cherry tomatoes comes from self-seeded plants along our side yard. We moved some dirt around last fall, and apparently it had some tomato seeds in it. The pak choi was a straggler from a planter that had been harvested previously and was dumped in the side yard to help build up the soil layer there. I was very surprised to see it during the hot-weather season, but suspect its location in the fence shade is why it survived so well.

Zucchini and beans continue in mass quantities, often going straight into the freezer or the saute pan from the garden.

Harvest Snapshot: Aug 17

2007-08-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

The usual beans and zucchini, and the beginnings of pepper season. Our particular picoclimate gets pretty chilly at night, so our peppers take longer to mature. Near the top left you'll see some tiny purple bell peppers, and in there's a long very dark green pasillo baijia chili at the very front of the tray. That's a mild to medium chili used in making mole; it dries to a rich chocolate brown, and is supposed to have a complex flavor of which 'hot' is only a part. This is the first year I've grown them.

Another pepper experiment is in the lower left, the small round 'Alma' variety paprika pepper. Supposedly both spicy and fruity, Alma is a very pretty plant, with creamy white peppers that ripen to yellow and then to a deep orange-red. I have this one drying on the bookcase right now, along with the pasillo. It's turned a deep wrinkly red.

Garden Desktop: Delicate Harvest

2007-08-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Today's garden desktop celebrates some of the finer things in garden life-- delicate strawberries, a baby fancy bi-color squash, and the aptly-named "Fairy Tale" eggplant. Enjoy!

Higher-resolution versions available by request, leave a comment here if the one at FlickR isn't large enough for your desktop. I've stopped posting the 1080 versions by default.

August 12 Harvest Snapshot

2007-08-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

Dry bean season is here, partly from the time of year and partly because I stopped picking young beans a week or so ago, to let pods mature for dry ones. These are the heirloom I call "Monte's Italian", given to me in 2003 by a friend from the photo club. He got them from his family in Italy. This year they returned true to type, as my back-fence neighbor Jack didn't plant beans, so no cross-pollination occurred.

The larger harvest is, of course, dominated by zucchini. Good thing we pick them small... when they don't get away from us. Just a single day can make a (literally) huge difference in the life of a zucchini. I grow the "Mediterranean" zucchini from Renee's seeds. I believe it's a French or Italian courgette variety, as it is ridged rather than smooth. The best thing about this variety is that it has a wonderful flavor when small AND still has a very good flavor and texture when large. Even very, very, VERY large. The generic dark green or black zukes one finds in the seedling section of the hardware store have very little flavor, even when tiny, and become appallingly bland and watery when they get huge.

August 7 Harvest Snapshot

2007-08-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

Garden Desktop: Dahlias

2007-07-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like dahlias for summer bouquets. Long-lasting, intensely colorful, and in a variety of shapes and sizes. Best of all, they're easy-care perennials that will come back for you year after year!

July 26 Harvest Snapshot

2007-07-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

Harvest Snapshot: July 22nd

2007-07-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

A wonderful assortment of veggies greeted me upon my return. No strawberries in this picture, as I wandered through the garden munching them. We lost a few to overripeness, but most were cheerfully ready for a garden snack. A number of zucchini came and left while I was on vacation, faithfully transported into the office or eaten outright by my darling hubby, Mike.

Flowers abounded, as my dahlias burst into bloom during early July, and have been going strong ever since.

The summer squash that I planted too early, and which were shocked by cold, are now starting to tenatively offer up flowers, and even a squash or two. The small white patty pan squash and the two-color yellow-green summer squash are, I hope, the first of many.

Some of the cherry tomatoes were splitting from a daytime watering (wups!) but they all went promptly into the freezer, making a nice flat quart bag. Ditto with the non-cherry ones, which needed halving or quartering and went into a separate container. I like to freeze them flat, for quick freezing and thawing, and also in the right quantity for most of my cooking, which is for only two folks, me and Mike.

I was really shocked at how much change can happen in only a couple of weeks, though, when those weeks are in July and the hot-weather plants kick into high gear. Wow! Bush beans that had barely come over the top of a six-inch (15 - 20 cm) support mesh are now two feet tall and covered in flowers. Their counterparts planted two weeks previously rewarded me with a big double handful of beans, shown here.

Vining beans, such as my 2nd crop of Runners and my Chinese Noodle beans, had just come up and reached barely knee-high when I left on July 8th. The same plants today are over my head, nine and six feet tall (3 and 2 meters) respectively. The second planting of maize corn was similar height, knee-high, and has now doubled in size, while the first planting has sprouted ears in many places. One, as you can see in the picture, was ready to pick!

A Visit to Eugene, Oregon

2007-07-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

I didn't take many pictures on my trip to Seattle and to Eugene, as I was in 'real life' mode, and not really being a spectator. I also spent most of my time hanging out with folks, rather than touring public gardens. Well, next time! But I had a great time, and wanted to share a few garden-related pix with y'all.

Gray's Nursery was breathtakingly blooming with walls of hanging petunias and spectacular frontage plantings. I had to go in and tell the manager that I'd never seen such a gorgeous display outside of National Parks! I also wish I'd had a wide-angle lens to truly convey the splendour of it all. I stood in the parking lot (out of traffic, of course) for a long time looking at the huge walls of color.

I tried a number of different exposures and angles to try to get a nice desktop-type shot of the petunias, but it was mid-afternoon and brightly sunny. At last, a petunia desktop, which currently adorns my laptop, and is here to brighten your day at work.

I was completely impressed by the numbers and varieties of huge trees on the streets here. Most were types I recognized, but some, like this one, are unfamiliar. Is this a chestnut? Or are those some kind of persimmon? If you know what this is, please let me know.

While a truly iconic Eugene street scene would feature bicycles, I couldn't resist snapping this adorable classic Vespa scooter, parked on a curving curb between two great cafes (Sweet Life and Planet Eugene). The sky and the scooter were the same color, and seemed part of one piece. Olympians getting an iced chai to go?

Harvest Snapshot: July 8th

2007-07-08T19:33:00.000-07:00

A quick run through the garden while packing for my trip, but plenty of goodies. Self-defense picking of zucchini. (Is there a THEME here?!) More tomatoes, including some Green Zebra, and some nice cucumbers, too. I put the salad veggies, which Mike doesn't generally eat, into a soft-sided cooler and brought them on the train with me. The attendant, Cynthia, who really likes fresh tomatoes, had never seen the green kind before, but thought they were great. :-) Posting post-vacation, with a back-dated post, which is how I know.

Harvest Snapshot: July 5th

2007-07-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

A slow day in the garden, but we didn't need any fireworks there. Some tomatoes put in an appearance, with the ubiquitous zucchini. Can you believe I planted two? If only it was cool enough after 8am to fire up the oven for zucchini bread; by the end of the day, the house is still in the mid-70's, and doesn't truly cool down until the wee hours of morning. Someday I'll get a convection oven, which cooks quickly and cools down quickly. Ah well.

The first peppers of the season, a pair of sweet bananas. Most of my pepper plants are still small and scraggly. I'm not sure what's up, but I seem to recall that last year they didn't really get going until the hot dog days of late July and early August. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Garden Visiting? Seattle, Portland, Eugene

2007-07-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

I'll be on vacation in Seattle this coming weekend and most of next week, then heading down to the Portland area and to Eugene. I'd love recommendations from readers in those areas for public gardens to tour, or specialty garden centers to visit (native plants, orchids, heirloom veggies, etc).

I'd really enjoy meeting some Northwest gardeners, too-- how about coffee or tea meetups? Drop me an email or a comment if you'd like to get together while I'm in town!

Harvest Snapshot: June 29th

2007-06-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

What better way to welcome in Weekend Herb Blogging than with fresh herbs?

Time to cut down the overgrown variegated sage, which likes to crowd out everything else, and nudge the variegated oregano back as well. Also snipped some of the big fuzzy spicy oregano. I thnk I'll have more than enough rubbed sage when I get done (MORE than enough!) but I can always package some up for gifts. I'd like to get another Biergarten (Beer Garden) sage, the oversized leaves were nice to fry crisp in a little olive oil and use as a tasty and stylish garnish. The same can be done with the variegated, but the lighter color leaves tend to look too brown to me and not as attractive. The flavor is more subtle, too.

Believe it or not, with the vast and spreading lavendar bush in the backyard, I actually hadn't considered cutting lavendar. I'd bought some dried in bulk a couple of years ago, and hadn't used it up. However, lately I've noticed that some things aren't setting fruit the way they should. I've started using some foliar feeding, which may help, but I really think the problem is the lavender. Between that, and all the borage over there, it's like having one of those chocolate fountains at a party. Who's going to make it all the way over to the healthy veggies tray? Only the really dedicated!

So trimming the amount of lavender down to where at least SOME of the bees decide to check out the other end of the garden is a good idea. I'm also letting marjoram, cilantro, and a couple of lettuces to go flower at the far end of the garden, and have transplanted at least one borage seedling. Need something special over there to distract the pollinators from the endless lavender party! Normally I'd try to choose stalks that were primarily buds, with few open flowers, as those will retain their scent longer. In this case, I was fairly indiscriminate.

One thing that's great to do with lavender is to make sachets for drawers and sheets. The easiest way is with the little gauzy bags sold at craft stores for wedding favors, but one can also use squares of tulle. Bind several stalks with ribbon, trim the stems so they look neat, and put the bag over the flower heads. If you're folding a square of tulle over, just tie it with ribbon. Wind some ribbon around the stems in a complementary color, and tie it off in a double bow. When we were on sabbatical in the motorhome a few years ago, I did white tulle and blue ribbon and hung them in our bedroom from the white and blue curtains, and got a lot of compliments.

You can also get some plain muslin drawstring bags, or sew tulle pockets, and put lavender buds or flower heads inside and use them in the dryer. I like to add a sprinkle of Mexican cinnamon chunks, or broken cinnamon stick. The resulting scent is wonderful-- fresh and spicy but not cloying. Highly recommended!

If you're really gung-ho, you can weave lavender wands. Some great instructions, with pictures are available at Garden Gate Magazine and at Dharma Trading. It looks more complicated than it is, I've done it and you can too!

Harvest Snapshot: June 26th

2007-06-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

The first of the red kuri squashes are in. They could have waited a bit longer, as the stems were not fully brown, but had gotten tough. In general, wait until you can't break the skin of the squash itself trivially with a fingernail. I wanted to harvest these two a little bit early to encourage the plant to set more fruit. Otherwise it might give up and just ripen the other 2 or 3 on the vines, having made seeds already.

The tray is approximately 14x20 inches. Yes, I blinked-- the HUUUGE zucchini in the back was one I ignored a few days ago because it was 'too small yet'. You can see that this time I even picked the 'too small' ones. Fortunately, my husband's manager (and co-workers) haven't been overloaded with garden produce yet.

Blast From the Past?

2007-06-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will notice some back-dated posts showing up. I'd created a number of drafts, ready to post, and for various reasons haven't been able to do so. I'm just clearing the backlog, and soon we'll be back to our regularly sporadic updates. :-)

Harvest Snapshot: June 23rd

2007-06-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Trombetta climbing summer squash, more Romanesco zucchini (Renee's Seeds), cucumber 'homemade pickles', red onion started from set in January.

Beans from left to right: Monte's Italian Heirloom (private, via a friend), purple italian pole beans (Renee's Seeds) x Monte's, green italian pole beans (Renee's Seeds).

I didn't deliberately cross the Renee's purple pole beans with the Monte heirloom, but given the times they were growing and the proximity, as well as the great change in the bean shape, I'm guessing that's what happened. The flavor is superb, so I'm happy with that. Normally the purple pole beans look like the green ones, rounded and pencil shaped, in contrast to the flatter purple beans of Purple Queen bush bean. It is also possible that they crossed with Purple Queen, but the broadness of the pods makes the Monte's cross more likely. The fun of saving seeds at home, when you just let the local pollinators decide what works! :-)

Harvest Snapshot: June 13th

2007-06-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

Young garlic (planted Dec or Jan), Monte's Italian heirloom green pole beans, Purple Queen bush beans, a few Yellow Wax beans, some everbearing strawberries, a Pak Choi.

Garden Desktop: Lime Thyme

2007-06-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'm really fond of thyme, and even more so of citrus-flavored thyme. This lime thyme started out as a 4-inch pot in 2003, and was then planted in the ground, where it became a large clump. When we had to move planters for the neighbor's fence, it turned out that the thyme was right where the fence would go. I was able to uproot it in a cluster and re-pot it. Here is 1024x768 lime thyme desktop.

Harvest thyme in the morning, before the sun hits it, and let the sprigs dry on a saucer or in a colander. It's easiest to strip the tiny leaves from the stems when thyme is partially dry-- when fully dry, the stems break, and you end up with little sharp bits in the thyme. Here's some English thyme I harvested this past fall, next to some variegated sage.

English thyme, lemon thyme, and variegated thyme are all pleasant additions to one's garden beds, where they will provide welcome spring greenness and summer flowers that draw the bees. In sunny, hot portions of the Bay Area, put thyme somewhere that it will get some shade, preferably in the hottest portion of the day. A deep pot, which lets thyme trail over the sides, makes it easy to relocate your thyme to compensate for the area's somewhat extreme seasonal sun and temperature changes. Thyme loves dampness, unlike many other herbs, and does really well in a self-watering planter.

Harvest Snapshot: June 7th

2007-06-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

Greens from Violetta cauliflower. Never got heads from the Violetta, that hot spell in March/April really confused them, and I planted in spring rather than fall. Ah well, next year. A couple of spring potatos, Russets that naturalized and pop up in various places after we couldn't bear to toss a few bought ones that went bad. Plus a late chiogga beet or two!

In the colander, a spring or two of cinnamon basil, some strawberries, more zucchini, yellow wax beans, Purple Queen bush beans, some thyme, a couple of early Monte's Italian heirloom beans, a Trombetta climbing squash, and a couple of nasturtiums to garnish a fruit salad I'd planned on making.

Harvest Snapshot: May 29th

2007-05-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Romanesco zucchini (Renee's Seeds), everbearing strawberries, and a few assorted beans-- purple and green 2nd generation Renee's Seeds Italian pole beans, and a couple of yellow wax beans.

Flower Power: What's Blooming?

2007-05-25T17:07:00.000-07:00

Some things that I planted, and some that volunteered are blooming up a storm, making me realize that I need to get a bunch of my summer annual standbys started in flats! No, I'm not one of those virtuous folks that grows everything from seed, I wish. I've certainly enriched the coffers of Orchard Supply Hardware, Loew's, and Yamigami's Nursery this year, especially after losing various plants to various mishaps (too much sun, too much water, That Which Eats in the Night, etc). I adore pink and white snap dragons, and put up with the yellow ones in the mixes, but I usually buy them at stores as they have them earlier than I have the patience to start them.

But there are still things that I love to grow that are too expensive or hard to find in stores, or that are just so *easy* that I can't imagine buying them, like the cornflowers I've been planting from a $5 shoebox of seeds that my husband brought back one day from the ham radio flea market. "I saw these, and figured, why not?" Lots of folks have enjoyed those seeds, as I've given away packets to individuals and then donated most of the rest to the Sunnyvale Community Gardens-- if you see bright blue and pink cornflowers, deep red single poppies, and lots of baby's breath, they may have come from that shoebox!

The other half of the Blue Celeste "exhibition" sweet peas are blooming-- all but one rotted out last year in the spring rains, but fortunately I didn't plant the whole package, and saved the rest for this year. They are marvelous, and I've completely fallen in love with sweet peas. I'd never seen the kind on long stems before, and didn't quite understand what all the fuss was all about! There's a garden bed in the community garden that has some nice lattice put up and is growing sweet peas on the shady side of it-- gorgeous!

This is the first year we have no nasturtiums in the backyard beyond a few around the corner. Fence got 'em when it blew over in the storm and had to be replaced-- the contractor had to dig, alas. But the ones in the side yard seem to be doing really well in the partial shade on the side of the house. They haven't blown out yet for the season, nor been aphid infested (keeping my fingers crossed). They keep naturalizing from seed, and I was able to move some clumps before the contractor got to them all. These are the 5th or 6th generation from some 'Jewel' mix that we bought back in 2003. Still going strong!

The day lilies are blooming, and a couple of very early gladiolas. While I wanted both for cut flowers, I usually don't have the heart to cut them! Dahlias and Asian Lilies are coming up, yay! Gotta stake 'em up before they get much futher along, lest they fall over and pull themselves out of the ground. Ditto on some of the gladiolas.

Old-fashioned stock, with its wonderful pinks and pastels, is a sweet-smelling favorite. It's either re-seeding itself of it blooms a LOONNG time! The honey-sweet smell of alyssum is always welcome, and while I do buy a six-pak of it now and then, once I plant it (and stop overwatering it!) it naturalizes and stays pretty. The clove-spicy pink carnation in the corner smells marvelous, but needs to be dead-headed regularly or it will stop blooming. I usually try to pick things that don't need that kind of hand-holding. Sprays of lavender, a big french lavender that started out as a small pot 2 years ago, bring all the bees around to visit.

Snap Pea Trials for 2007

2007-05-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

One shortcoming in our South Bay clay soil is that it can be hard to balance moisture without waterlogging plants. The peas I'd been growing, Super Sugar Snap, did okay in San Jose, in 95112-land, but here in Sunnyvale they had big issues in the combination of clay and my-yard microclimate. Seemed like it was too cold and wet for them to grow, or too hot for them to avoid awful downy and powdery mildew. I tried Oregon Sugar in 2006, hoping that they'd do better than the Sugar Snaps.

I figured that the 'Oregon' part might protect them, as it's kind of wet there, but it seems to be the drainage issue that did them in. I also found them to be perhaps excessively vigorous, producing vines taller than my head but not with the volume of peas you'd expect from vines that huge. As you can see in this photo from a year-and-a-week ago, that makes for pretty pictures, but I wanted more peas. And I got 'em!

I tried Sugar Snap, Cascade, and Suffolk Snap peas this year, in 3 separate areas of a dozen or so plants each. I've been feasting on whole-pod peas for the past few weeks, eating fresh right out of the garden-- another joy of Not Spraying for the organic gardener. Have only put up a couple of quarts in the freezer, but them's the breaks! Would rather munch them fresh.

The Sugar Snap and Cascade both turned out to be 'compact', e.g. only about 3 to 4 feet tall, and bushy. I had to patiently keep turning their attention to the trellising. I suspect they'd do as well or better free-standing in a spare tomato cage. Next year I'll endeavor to remember to try that, and plant spring peas of those types in a cage where I want a tomato. The Suffolks reached for the sky nicely, topping out at 7 feet. Picture is from Jan 29th, sown in ground without pre-sprouting on Jan 1st or 3rd.

Flavors? The flat-pod stage definitely favored Cascade over either of the other two. Sweeter and 'greener' tasting. Once the pods began to swell, though, and we had a dash of unseasonable heat, the story changed. The Suffolks are by far sweeter tasting, with a large measure of sugar moving to the peas inside the pod. The Cascades also have sweet peas, but the pod flavor flattens and has a slightly bitter aftertaste. The Sugar Snaps are pretty consistently 'good' in both stages, which is to say that they taste great until you taste the better of the other two, at which point you say, "hey, these only go up to 5 and these others go up to 11, hmf".

I have gotten some peas from the Suffolks that have some very different characteristics from the main batch. Namely, the pods have shrunken to almost translucency and withered, but without splitting. The peas inside are whole and sound, and beginning to dry. I speculate that this is a recessive coming out that has potential to be a shelling pea variant. Some of the standard pods have the tan-n-wrinkly thing going, and a few remained plump and green but split open when fully ripe. I'm saving the wrinkly pods to dry for seed, and will sow a small test patch in the fall, away from other peas, to see what happens. Will post pictures when I get a chance.

Harvest Snapshot: Spring Herbs

2007-05-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

My garden and a book project have been keeping me way too busy, but the book project is finally put to bed and I am going to give myself a mini-vacation for a week or three! I celebrated by going out this morning while it was still cool, but not damp, and snipping a big basket of herbs to dry. They looked so good that I thought, hey, I should send this to Weekend Herb Blogging! From left to right, marjoram, variegated sage, greek oregano (spicy!), and variegated oregano. A couple of young garlic that I pulled as well are laying across the basket.

The herbs I will separate and dry on a plate, indoors on the bookshelf or armoir top, out of any direct sun. The young garlic I snipped up like scallions or chives, and put in the freezer. I don't pre-wash it, so it freezes up nicely without ice all over it. Put it in soups, stews, or drop in a roasting pan with veggie end-snips (which I also freeze), spray with oil, and pan-roast as the base for a rich veggie stock.

I don't pre-wash most veggies, since I don't use any sprays or pesticides in my garden, other than point-treating any stubborn aphids with Safer Soap. This year, knock on wood, no real aphid problems other than some Gray Plague in my broccoli when it got too hot for a week, and I took the floating row cover off (doh). I've been letting various weeds stand as attractants to the aphids, and sure enough, the 'phids go there instead of on my tender beans and peas, at least so far. When they have frighteningly infested the attractant weeds, I carefully snip those off and get them the heck out of the garden (carefully! so none will fall off!). Seems to be working so far.

Oh, my usual Garden Help does not care for garlic, but was coaxed into happiness with a treat and a kind word. Here is her little smiling face for all my fellow kitteh lovers out there. :-)

Beware of Moth!

2007-04-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

No joke, unfortunately. The light brown apple moth (LBAM) from New Zealand could disrupt California agriculture very badly, and has recently been detected in the SF Bay Area. Not just big agriculture, our backyard gardens too, whether flowers, veggies, fruit, or a mix of all three. This little moth's caterpillars love a lot of plants here, and have no native predators to keep them in check. The official How You Can Help against Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM) brochure (PDF) says:

This includes but is not limited to: oak, willow, walnut, pine, redwood, eucalyptus, apple, pear, citrus, peach, avocado, roses, jasmine, strawberry, table and wine grapes, berries and other ornamental shrubs, bushes and trees.

The brochure includes detailed pictures of the male and female moths, the caterpillars, and coccoons, as well as the sample traps being placed in California counties to detect the spread of the moth.

If you see rolled up leaves on your plants, pluck the leaf and stomp it to a smeary green spot, or put in a ziploc bag and dispose in the trash. Notify your county agriculture commission with your address, date, and the type of plant. Contact info for Santa Clara County. Not in Santa Clara? Choose from list of California counties.

A quarantine zone has been established. If you live within a quarantined section of the county, please don't share plants with people outside the zone. If you live outside the quarantined section, please don't buy plants or accept them from individuals or stores inside the zone. The moth got in via plants, fruit, and cut flowers from NZ, parts of the UK, and Hawaii. Be cautious about importing plants or flowers from sites mentioned on the quarantine pages. Light Brown Apple Moth Quarantine Maps (PDF) for SF Bay Area, by county.

Now if only somebody could quarantine MY garden against "the Eaters that come in the night". Generally snails, slugs, or earwigs, many a promising 3 - 4 leaved seedling has vanished, leaving only a green stem. Time to replant teddy bear sunflowers, this time in larger, transplantable pots rather than a 6-pack where I have to set out tiny seedlings. Bah. And they got several of my eggplants, too! Just when I thought it was warm enough to start taking the recycled-plastic-bottle cloche caps off of them! Actually, several years of hand-picking snails in the garden is paying off, as their numbers have been drastically reduced. But it only takes ONE hungry slug or earwig to clear out a single-seedling buffet. :-(

A tip for folks making cloches-- I was using 2-liter soda bottles, because they are clear plastic. I have switched to translucent milk jugs, after discovering the hard way that seedlings protected at night will fry during the day and wither outright. Doh. So unless you make a habit of going out and taking off all those little caps early in the morning, use translucent, rather than clear, plastic.

long time, no post!

2007-03-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a fair bit of gardening since the beginning of 2007, but have been too busy to post about it much. I also love to include pictures in my postings, and find the Blogger interface too unwieldy to quickly and easily post. Tends to turn into an hour session when I add photos! Also, I get SO much "help" in the garden. Doesn't she look helpful? "Look, mommy, I found the hose for you!"

We've had lovely rain here, such that when I thinned some golden & chiogga beet seedlings last week I was able to pull seedlings from the soil almost intact, and successfully transplant them in a neighboring empty space. Huzzah! If two were growing just too close together to risk that, I merely pinched off the stem at ground level and enjoyed a little ultra-fresh bite of beet greens.

I have been long-absent from the Weekend Herb Blogging ranks, but would like readers to know I am still there in spirit! This will be my first post in ages.

I have discovered yet a new way to cook chard, mostly just like the old way but even more marvelous. I snip it fresh from the garden into a hot frying pan, stir it about and let it wilt a little, toss in a quarter cup of water and generous dashes of the Magic Ingredient, then cover and steam until the ribs are still a little crunchy. Can turn the heat off part-way, in face. The "Magic Ingredient" in this case is this heavenly balsamic chardonnay vinegar with lime oil & lime juice. We picked it up on impulse at the San Jose annual Harvest Crafts Fair in the convention center over Thanksgiving weekend. The lighter taste of a white-wine based balsamic plus the zing of the lime really makes the earthy flavor of the chard stand out. What a winner!

For a perfect light lunch, I fry up cubes of tempeh in a couple of tablespoons of grapeseed oil, turn them over, and then drizzle them liberally with the Trader Joe's concentrated pomegranete juice (no added sugar). Keep them moving over medium heat so they don't scorch, flip them over a bit, and pair them with the chard, in a bowl or in a wrap. Who knew that eating healthy could be SO delicious!

At a seed swap recently, someone asked me if chard was better in the first year or the second. Having overwintered some chard this year (my faithful Bright Lights), albeit more by accident than by intent, I can say that it seems better this year. That may be from growing during the colder part of the season, though, as last year I planted mine in late spring. The colors seem more vivid, the leaves are more wrinkly, and they squeak a little when they rub together.

It's gardening time!

2007-02-04T00:29:00.000-08:00

Well, okay, it's *always* gardening time. But especially now that the nasty temps in the 20's have gone away for a while, and we're getting days up in the 50's and low 60's (farenheit, I'm a barbarian, I know).

I've been gradually taking down the old stuff and putting in the new stuff, and much too rushed to post about it. There was more triage than anything else, like taking down last year's tomato plants, and rescuing about 11 feet of bulbs where a fence blew down in one of last month's wind storms. I managed to get a solid several hours in over the past week or so to plant things, and some of the items I tucked hastily into the ground around New Years', such as peas, are just coming up now. At last!

Speaking of gardening, how about some gardening and planting calendars for Santa Clara Valley? We have several good ones to share with you. Let me know if you have one that I haven't mentioned, please.

Master Gardeners of Santa Clara Valley, has their guide to cool-season crops for Santa Clara Valley. It is indexed by the plant name, rather than the month, but makes up for that small flaw by listing specific varieties found to do well here in their trials. Even better, they list suppliers for each variety!

Not a spring/fall gardener? No problem, the Master Gardeners' list of warm-season crops for Santa Clara Valley is also available.

Common Ground Organic Garden Supply, is hosting this free month-by-month planting calendar for the SF Bay Area. There's a gorgeous printed calendar version, with much more extensive information and planting tips for sale at their store in Palo Alto.

Not surprisingly, there is also a Master Gardeners' month-by-month garden tips reference.
An article from one of Sunset Magazine's gardeners on garden tasks for February is very helpful in setting up bulbs and flower seeds for a good procession of bloom in spring and summer.

I highly recommend John Jeavon's book "How to Grow More Vegetables (Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You can Possibly Imagine)". That well-thumbed tome, along with Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening", are the mainstays of my garden bookshelf. I'm becoming more and more partial to recommending Gayla Trail's "You Grow, Girl" for beginning gardeners, since it's such a fun read and has so many crafty ideas in it too.

Next time we'll talk about what to plant together, using the art of companion planting to pick good neighbors for your crops, and things you can double-plant to get two harvests out of one area. I planted beets and carrots mixed in with my broccoli and cauliflower, for instance. I planted radishes with my cabbage, because they're compatible and also because the radishes will be ready to pick just when the cabbage is threatening to overwhelm them. We'll also talk about what to plant in or around your garden to attract beneficial insects such as native pollinators.

Can't wait to get started on companion planting? Common Ground is also providing a free web guide to companion planting. Have at!

Extending the Harvest: Peppers & Dill

2006-10-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

We're back for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Pat. These are sweet peppers from early October, including Jimmy Nardello, Super Shepherd Frying, and Hungarian Paprika. I'm drying some for use in soups and stews, but they can also be snipped up into strips, double bagged, and frozen straight from the garden. No blanching or water-dipping, please.

I wasn't doing much blogging during the summer, due to a huge work project, but I do want to mention this tip for next year's garden. I was tired of messing with shade cloth, but didn't want to sun-scald my peppers. So I planted a few zinnias among the peppers, and made sure to snip them so they'd branch out. They shaded the peppers beautifully! A couple of weeks ago, when I picked all those peppers, I cut out most of the zinnias-- now that sun is a scarcer commodity, they need all the sun they can get! I noticed that a couple of the more productive plants were getting paler green, so I did a side dressing and watered it in. Finally, I put floating row cover over the whole thing, anchoring it to the trellis in back. I have a new crop of peppers ripening now. I may be able to get a 3rd extended crop in early November, if the daytime temps stay in the high 60's, even though we're hitting the low 50's at night.

Last time, we said we'd talk a little about dill. Here's a nice big mound of dill that I processed two or three weeks ago. The key to having nice dill is to snip it dry and put it in the coldest part of the freezer. If you need to rinse it, fine, but make sure it dries out fully, otherwise you'll have a lot of unwanted ice on it when you are ready to use it. Put it in water when you cut it, just like a flower, to keep it fresh until you can snip it. Otherwise it will wilt and lose quality, as well as being harder to handle.

What I do, as you can see here, is to snip the dill into small leafy sections and set aside the thick stems. I don't shred it entirely, as then it becomes a paste when frozen. I try only to snip little sections off the stems. It seems like it will take forever, but in fact it's very Zen and goes by quicker than you think. The reward is excellent, fresh dill flavor when there's no fresh dill to be had! I save the stems separately, as they are good to put in soup or a stock where you don't want to strain all those little dill-lets out.

This is the first year I've successfully grown dill from seed. It sprouted long after I'd given up on it, in fact. When I've purchased dill seedlings or pots and planted them in garden beds, they've done well but usually were attacked by aphids before I could harvest them-- or I was letting them go to bloom to attract beneficial insects. I am really liking the quality of dill I got by using young plants under 18 inches tall and basically taking the whole plant. I will try planting some more dill for winter harvest-- the cilantro likes to grow in the fall, and I am hoping the dill will as well. It's always a learning experience!

Drying Herbs for the Winter

2006-10-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

After slacking off from gardening and garden postings for most of the summer, working on a big project, I'm back for Weekend Herb Blogging this week (and, I hope, on a regular basis). I've been snipping various herby bits out of my garden now and then for the past month, and realize there might be some interest. I put up a big bunch of dill, partially filled my marjoram bottle (yay), and am working on more. Here it is!

It's that time of year to trim one's herb gardens. Firstly, it's a chance to put by some of that herbal goodness for the winter. In many climates, a second set of clippings is able to be harvested, especially if one covers the herb bed at night with floating row cover or light muslin. Secondly, it's a good time to shape and prune perennial herbs for beauty and future productivity. One can also prune back herbs which are taking over the spots reserved for other herbs. In the small bed in this photo, after pruning, one can now see the wooly 'spicy oregano', a small moss-green spot, next to the now-revealed soaker hose. Previously, the summer savory was crowding it out, as well as sending up a thicket of tall woody stems. Most of those I've pruned off-- the stems can be dried and burned in the fireplace for a nice smell, or used as small skewers to flavor things.

The silvery 'curry plant', which does smell like curry, is mostly for appearance and novelty. I harvested some, but mostly trimmed it back so as not to shade my favored culinary herbs. It's visible beneath the rosemary here. Snip your herbs on a cloudy morning, after the dew has dried off but before the day warms up and the sun comes out. You'll get more essential oils in the herbs that way. Handle them as little as possible, putting them directly on a tray where you can dry them. Some folks bag and hang them, I just set them on our bookshelf in the dining room, out of direct sun and kittycat interference. From left to right: summer savory, curry plant w/rosemary on top, greek oregano, variegated oregano, wooly 'spicy' oregano. I like to mix the multiple oreganos in a crumble, though I will often reserve a stem or two of the whole plant aside for garnish or to use alone.

In this photo, we see purple sage and variegated golden sage, with a big bunch of lime thyme. I've since hung the sages on a little plastic dowel suspended between two bits of suitable clutter, and have spread the thyme out and turned it. The sage takes a long time to dry out. I'll keep it as whole leaf-- not sure how to make rubbed sage, and I still have some that I bought. I like to use the whole leaf in bean soups and various stir-fry preparations. The thyme I will strip from the stems and put in the jar. I use cleaned plastic prescription jars/bottles for my herbs. They're amber-walled, which protects the herbs from breaking down in the light, it's recycling, and I can write on the side with a sharpie. I can also toss them into a bag to go cook at a friend's place or go camping-- no glass to break. It's not elegant, but it works for me. :-)

Next week I'll show you how I harvest dill and freeze it so that it's fluffy and as good as fresh (almost). Check your dill for 'the grey plague', those awful aphids. I had to harvest ALL of two dill plants that were severely infested at the base of the stem. I lost a couple of small fronds, but the bugs hadn't made it up the stem yet to the tall parts. It's too dreadful to try picking the things out of dill fronds, ugh.

Fighting Global Warming in Your Garden

2006-09-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

I read recently that the average family of 3 that composts yard and garden waste is actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 125 kilograms/year. Given the amount of 'garden gone wild' trimmings we have hauled to the curb for municipal compost pickup (about 45 kg last week alone!), I figure that our family of 2 did about 200kg, which works out to a quarter-ton of GHG neutralized. Yay!

See this EPA report (PDF) on municipal composting for more facts and figures. Also consider looking up your area in the Grassroots Recycling Zero Waste Network and see what you can do!

Sunnyvale Community Garden now in Google Earth

2006-09-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Google chopper did a special, scheduled flyover of the Sunnyvale Community Garden on Charles Street a few weeks ago, and the data has now been integrated into Google Earth.

The map-style satellite pic is available for those who don't use the tool itself. Looks darn nice from the air, especially considering it's been a weed-ridden vacant lot for so many years.

Hats off again to the dedicated folks at Sustainable Community Gardens who worked for over 2 years to make this garden happen at all, and then were ready for spring planting in 2006 in only 2 or 3 months!

If you're a Sunnyvale resident, you can apply for the waiting list for a garden plot. However, they also need folks to take care of the Food Forest and other public plots, and there is a special area for differently-abled gardeners and senior gardeners, which may not be full yet. Contact them at the link above to find out more.

Mixed Harvests

2006-08-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

We're just coming into the Attack of the Prolific Tomato times, but up to now it's been, as my husband's grandmother used to say, "a bissel of this, a bissel of that". For instance, the mixed bag shown in this photo: cherry tomatoes, some wax beans, some chinese long beans, a papaya pear squash, and an heirloom or two. What's a gal to do? Mix, match, and save, as the mood strikes. Hello, weekend herb bloggers! I've been so busy lately that I haven't posted, gotta fix that!

For instance, I still prefer wax beans by themselves, with a little bit of butter. I normally use healthy olive oil on things, and light olive oil for cooking, but there are times when butter is mandatory. My grandmother cooked yellow wax beans with a nice lump of salt pork, but that doesn't fly with my Jewish-raised hubby. Fortunately, garden-fresh beans will last quite a while in the veggie crisper in an open plastic bag, so it only takes a few days to get enough to steam separately.

The chinese long beans are still new to me, but they seem to taste just like any other bean, yum. Our original vision was one of stir-fry, but that hasn't quite happened yet. I've given some away, and will experiment with the rest. The plant itself, unfortunately, has been subject to savage aphid infestations that I've been unable to hold in check. I'm going to just have to take it down soon, I wash them off, I safer-soap them off, and a day or two later they're back in force. The ants are helping them, bah. I may try some this fall in our greenhouse, after I put up tulle or screen over the vents to keep aphids out.

The tomato problem is not yet a problem, as it's still a delight to eat them fresh. The little salad tomatoes, such as Green Zebra and Tigerella, shown here, are a tempting pluck from the plant when passing by the back garden area. We have a squirrel that is being VERY obnoxious, stripping the Black Plum tomato from the ground up. It also yanked a Hawaiian Pineapple off the vine, namely the yellow one in the first picture, in the foreground. Rodent teethmarks in this big tomato where it pulled, then was startled away, will be cut out. I've been ripening it under a glass bowl with a banana or two, and it's doing nicely. The Aunt Ruby's German Green is slightly tart, with a kind of creamy texture, very nice.

Blossom-End Rot: Scourge of the Tomato Hordes

2006-07-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Composed July 15, posted July 25, Blogger used to let ya change the date when you had a draft saved up!

Just when you think that nothing stands between you and more tomatoes than you possibly know what to do with, disaster can strike, in the form of blossom-end rot. A brownish or blackish patch appears on the very bottom of a tomato, and spreads. If only a small patch, the tomato can be harvested and used-- just cut the patch away. It's not guaranteed to spread, but it can do so. A really bad case will spread up to the whole bottom half of the tomato, which will quickly become an oozy smelly mess. Heartbreaking!

Here is a small paste-type tomato with a minor case of blossom-end rot. Fortunately, the other tomatoes on the plant seem unaffected. Its brethren on the same cluster are also normal, so this particular tomato must have been having a bad day. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out, though.

If you'd like to minimize your chances of finding out about this first-hand, there are a lot of things you can and should be doing. Blossom-end rot often appears first when the weather gets very hot and dry, and the tomato is going into its heaviest bearing phase. For many Bay Area gardeners, especially in the South to mid-Bay, that time is about now.

First, let's look at the factors that go into blossom-end rot. It's fundamentally caused by an inability to get minerals, water, and nutrients in the right ratio to the right place. However, the situation leading to this could be any one, or combination, of the following:

Simple lack of water. Lack of water can start blossom-end rot on a day to day basis, but once it starts, it will continue on affected fruits.
Lack of available minerals, specifically calcium, and to a lesser extent, magnesium, due poor soil or competition from other plants.
Dry, hot winds that evaporate water from the plant faster than the plant can replace it.
Over-fertilization, leading to sudden growth spurt demanding more nutrients than readily available. Especially easy if foliar feeding with too rich a mix.
Using blossom-set sprays which encourage the plant to start more fruits than it can currently support.
Sudden change in watering, such as trying 'drought watering' during heavy fruiting, or having someone over-water plants while you are on vacation.

How to keep this situation from arising?

Keep a regular watering schedule of deep waterings, and adjust them appropriately as the plant grows and bears. If you've been watering shallow and often, rather than deep and seldom, you are in for a long summer: your tomato plants probably have not bothered to root deeply, and you'll have to keep watering them frequently to get them through the summer.
Get a simple, under $10, moisture meter from the local hardware store, the kind with prongs that you press into the soil. On days which are supposed to get hot, dry, and windy, check your plants before you go into work, or in mid-morning if you have the flexibility. If the soil does not read 'moist' at the 6 - 8 inch layer, and you are due to water within a day or two, do it now.
If you see your plants drooping when you get home, and/or when there is not bright sun overhead, mist them heavily to help normalize the water in the plant. They can take it in through the leaves. Look at the top few inches of new growth to decide what's 'drooping'; most tomato varieties have straight tips. A water-starved plant will let the top couple of inches droop over, like someone slumping after a tough day.
When you plant your tomatoes, in addition to compost you should add bone meal or a cal-mag supplement. If the supplement is 'prilled', that means it's pelleted: make sure the box says it's safe for veggies. Some iron supplements are prilled with material containing arsenic, for instance, and are unsafe to use on citrus or veggies. The manufacturers shrug and say "the product is labelled for lawns only". Anyway.
Mulch your tomato plants with at least an inch of compost, cocoa hulls, straw, or other plant material. The feeder roots near the surface are responsible for accomodating changing conditions in moisture and nutrients to deal with day-to-day growth. The mulch will prevent the top layer of soil from drying out. I prefer compost, though if I had a bigger garden, I'd use straw over compost. The compost gives the plants nutrients directly, whereas cocoa hull or straw will take long enough to break down that it won't contribute significantly to this year's garden, only to next year's when you rake it into the beds after clearing them out. Note that if you are mulching for the first time, water first, then mulch, then give the mulch a soak-down. Otherwise you will interrupt your watering cycle, as the mulch will suck it up. If you are watering under the mulch via soaker or drip, ignore that last, and just spray down the mulch a bit to keep it in one place and avoid having it sponge up water from the soil, away from your plants.
Full-grown plants bearing fruit will need an additional dose of nutrients and minerals as they begin to settle down to ripen the fruit. They need this at least a couple weeks, ideally longer, before they REALLY need it, as these things take time to break down to a useable form. Watering on top of compost mulch will take care of the nutrients, by and large, but minerals will need to be sprinkled around the plant (6 - 12 inches from the stem, where the feeder roots are greatest) and scuffled or raked into the compost/mulch. If you are using a drip or soaker that is under the mulch, you'll need to scrape back some mulch and work the mineral supplement lightly into the top half-inch or so of soil. Then re-cover it with the mulch you scraped back.
Be cautious about using foliar feeding after your plant is about half-set with fruit. You could push it into overcommitting. If you are a very experienced gardener (much more so than myself), you probably know enough not to overdo it. I'm not sure about it myself, so I don't want to lead anyone astray. I first did foliar feeding this year, while trying to save some tomatoes which had to be moved as almost-mature plants (long story, involving neighbors' construction project). I tried it on some of the non-moved plants, too, but didn't want to go crazy with it. :-)
Don't try calcium sprays and the like. From what I have read, those are not going to do you any good, unless possibly you spray them on the soil around the base of the plant. Nutrients fed into the leaves tends to stay in the leaves, giving them more 'excess' sugar production to send to fruits. Dissolved minerals, on the other hand, especially calcium and magnesium, form layers of mineral salts on the leaves if used heavily, and can interfere with normal photosynthesis. Think about the white stuff that gets all over your nice shiny plumbing in places with really 'hard' water-- same kind of thing. Not what you want on leaves.

I hope this helps you with your tomatoes. If somebody from your local Master Gardener extension program says something different, listen to them and not to me! Otherwise, I think I've got the basics here. Good luck, and good gardening.

Enormungus Scary Garden Update of Doom

2006-07-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

Did a ton of gardening this morning, in both the front of the house, above, and the back. Still more to do, but I got way too much sun. You'd think that splashing cold water out of the hose onto my upper arms and face (while filling up the self-watering planters) would clue me in that I was getting sunburned. When I felt like doing it again, and again, and again, and kept doing it? Well, let's just say sometimes I get a bit too focused!

I redid the front area so that I could add perennials, like the dahlias, and the clumps of lilac, sage, and geranium on the edges. The frontmost bed will be for annuals. The one advantage of our clay soil is that once you get raised beds with some good light mix over the dirt, everything roots down into the clay layer and needs much less frequent watering. I've still been taking garden pix, but no time to post them on the net lately. Watered everything, mulched some more things with compost, tied up the big sunflower that wants to fall over-- and discovered that the ants are aiding and abetting its colonization by cottony scale, where the side flower stems join the main stem. Had to blast them out of each joint, what fun. At least I was in shade at that point.

I had already had to clean scale off the little Meyer lemon potted tree a few days beforehand, blasting each and every leaf, top and underside, with water. Boy, that was fun-- not! It seems to be recovering. Gave it a new top-dressing with compost, and a deep watering, and the leaves are definitely greening up again, but with considerable scarring from the little nasties. When processing the photo for uploading, though, I see there are still a few scale on it. Time to do it again, argh!

I'm starting to get tomatoes here and there, and finding that a bunch aren't what I thought they were. Some are easy to verify. This is definitely my Green Zebra, and next to it, a Hawaiian Pineapple. I have an Aunt Ruby's German Green about which I'm pretty confident, too.

On the other hand, this is so not my much anticipated Black Cherry. I thought maybe if I let the tomatoes ripen more, they'd darken, but no. Saw a Black Cherry in the Master Gardener tomato trials plot of the Sunnyvale Community Garden a couple of days ago. They go right from dark green to a chocolate-red color. Bzzt!

As for its buddy here, into which I put so much toil and worry while rescuing when I had to move all my raised beds? Well, it's definitely not my even more eagerly-awaited Noir de Crimee. Well aich ee double hockey sticks, as my Grandmere used to say.

No problem, I'm sure they're good, but I don't know if I got the seedlings mixed up (easy to do with a zillion tiny pots) or if some of the seed from eBay was from folks who don't know how to really breed tomatoes. There are basics like putting a bag over the flowers and pollinating with a paintbrush so that you are sure you are breeding true. Definitely a 'learning experience' with regard to labelling while starting seedlings, and while transplanting them!

I've been seeing a tremendous variety of pollinators lately, including large black carpenter bees and various types of tiny bees. I feel that my strategy of letting various things go to seed, and planting a mix of flowers and veggies, is really paying off in diversity. Here's some volunteer lemon balm and savory; note the tiny buzzy dude at twelve o'clock, in the top third, on a lemon balm leaf. I accidentally sprayed a new bug out of the air while filling the watering can. It was quite striking, gleaming a metallic dark blue, almost navy blue, and with dark wings. It hung out on the patio table, flicking its wings to dry them, for a few moments before flying off. Of course, I had already put the camera in the house on one of my trips to fetch something. I think it was a Blue Mud Wasp, though the picture on this website does not do it justice-- seen from above, it was really pretty, not scarily-waspy at all.

Keeping a saucer of water available on a stand in the garden also helps. It's supposed to be for birds, but I think a lot of insects drop by to avail themselves. This photo is from back in April. The stand is now across the path from its previous location, and there's barely room to get back there between the tomatoes!

The ones along the fence are all supposed to be paste tomatoes, except for the one cherry, a Principe Borghese. The one that's supposed to be Amish Paste is making fruits that start out with the oblong classical 'paste' shape, but several have rounded out and reached almost beefsteak tomato size. I have no clue what the heck is going on. Boy howdy, am I going to be a better labeller going forward!

There's so much more to tell, but I need a better workflow than Blogger and FlickR, and all of us probably have stuff to do! But please do follow the links on any of these photos (except the bird bath) to the full set of my July garden pix. More tomatoes, more flowers, including the daylilies I need to do a separate post about, insanely out of control lettuce going to seed (yes, that is a 3-foot tall tomato cage!) and more. Have a great summer, hope to post more soon!

Garden Desktop: Mexican Sunflowers 2006

2006-07-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

Last year I started my Garden Desktop series with the wonderful Mexican Giant sunflowers that I grew from Parks Seeds. They're back!

They self-seeded a number of offspring, not all of whom survived the combination of snails and of my garden-bed relocations. I was delighted to see, however, that a couple of them came through with flying colors. I need to take them down at some point to move the greenhouse back about 3 feet, to clear a maintainance/inspection cover in the ground. However they're so pretty that I just can't quite bring myself to do it!

Easily 10 - 12 feet tall, with stems a few inches thick. We have some very strong winds here occasionally, so I took the precaution of staking the smaller pair, winding some tomato tape around the stems and back to the stake between them. The little finches who live nearby are already very excited about the ripening flower heads. :-) Here's the 1024 x 768 version. If you have a higher-res desktop, drop me a comment and I'll upload the 2592 x 1944 version for ya!

Another Reason to Grow Organic

2006-06-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

The results from a study funded by Michael J. Fox's Parkinson Foundation, the first large-scale analysis of its kind, were announced today by the Harvard School of Public Health.

People routinely exposed to various pesticides had a 70% (seventy!) greater likelihood of developing Parkinson's Disease. When results were correlated for age, gender, and other risk factors, this enormous discrepancy clearly emerged.

Ask what the gardener is putting on your lawn to make it so green. Read the labels on 'bug spray', the kind you use outdoors on plants and the kind you use indoors. Think about how many pesticides simply build up in one's system, and how exposure is lifetime cumulative to many of the worst. Is it really worth it?

Not a Good Week: Garden Destruction

2006-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'm getting through this past week by gritting my teeth and doing what I can. It turns out that my 22-inch wide raised beds next to the patio were on the wrong side of the property line. So I had to move them. With mature plants. If you are cringing, yes, you get it.

I was able to keep the rootballs of many things intact, and move them into the big tubs that I usually use to pick up compost from the local recycling center.

My little herb garden seems okay so far, knock on wood, though the chamomile is still wilty, it had fairly deep roots. The peppers and eggplants were relatively shallow-rooted (6 - 10 inches) and seem to be doing okay so far. The tomatillos are reasonably perky, though they are starting to lose leaf color. I have some VF-11 and am going to try foliar feeding. Very intimidated, have not tried this before. I have been spraying the tomato & tomatillo plants down periodically with plain water, to try to compensate for the lost feeder roots, to keep the foliage from dying off.

The tomatoes are the hardest hit. The magnificent Aunt Ruby's German Green is still mostly wilted, though some bottom and midsection leaf recovery. The Hawaiian Pineapple has come mostly back to life, am cautiously hoping. The Santa Clara Canner is still fairly wilty, really goofed the rootball on that one. The tricolor Italian pole beans are a total loss, alas, even though I moved their rootballs and trellis section carefully.

I ordered a bunch of self-watering planters from Gardener's Supply, quite the budget-breaker, but at least they'll last for many years, and can go up on the patio. I may need to move the greenhouse, too, as there's a gas maintainance cover there. I don't want to risk having to yank everything out of the greenhouse some winter if they need to work on the gas. Mike is trying to argue that will not happen, but then I listened to him and to the property manager when the issue of the property line first came up about 6 - 8 weeks ago. They said 'no, no, don't move anything yet, you may not have to'. But if I'd moved stuff there and then, while the tomatoes were still under a couple feet tall, I wouldn't have the carnage of today.

The last planter has the bulk of my Scarlet Runner beans, going up 6 feet of trellis, the Black Cherry tomato, and the Noir de Crimee black tomato. I am going to have to face moving it today. Sometimes I think I should just rip the plants out and put them in the yard waste recycling bin and start over, but I cringe at the thought. I need to do one or the other, though-- move them again into a self-watering planter and hope they recover, or start new seedlings. We still have 60 - 90 reasonable growing days, in theory, though I don't think tomato seeds started now would get to bear before the August heat shutdown. They might still bear in the cooler September weather, though.

I may post pix later. Right now I'm too overwhelmed by it all. I shouldn't be, I suppose, as I still have my garden squares on the other side of the yard, with my paste tomatoes, my Tigerella and Green Zebra, and a couple of other things. Not like those poor folks in South Central Los Angeles, who just lost their community gardens of a generation or more. But it still majorly sucks.

Garden Desktop: Rainbow Chard

2006-06-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Rainbow chard is aptly named, covering almost the whole spectrum. It's delicious as well as beautiful. Young, tender leaves and stalks can be used to brighten up salads, while the mature chard makes a tasty steamed green similar to spinach. Let your chard go too long, until it's huge and tough? Use it in recipes that require chopped kale, it's a fair substitute. Chard comes in many colors, and to my way of thinking, the more the better! This is a widely available cultivar called 'Bright Lights'. I think it lives up to its name quite well!

If you are thinking that chard looks similar to beet greens, you are quite correct. Chard was developed long ago from beets, and bred to produce leaves instead of a beetroot. Chard in general lacks the characteristic bitter flavor of beet greens, although very large mature stalks seem to carry their share of the oxalic acid that gives beet greens that tang. Chard seed looks almost identical to beet seed, which means that it's large enough to be planted by hand rather than scattered like lettuce. Growing chard is quite simple, almost a matter of 'plant the seed and stand back'. I like to soak the seeds overnight before planting, as they will germinate much faster that way.

Don't have a garden? Chard will thrive in a flowerpot by a sunny window or on a balcony. A windowbox of brightly colored chard looks fresh and breezy, and will give you leaves until the hot dog-days of high summer if you pick it regularly. Snip the stalks down at the base of the plant, leaving only the smallest 2 - 4 inch leaves to continue growing. In about 2 weeks, you'll have another crop. Or simply snip every leaf bigger than 8 inches (leaf length only, not stalk) every few days.

If planting outdoors in a garden, a couple of caveats apply. Here in the Bay Area, chard is a favorite of thrips and leaf miners. Their larva can blight and ruin large sections of leaf. I've found that using some floating row cover works wonders. The chard appreciates a little more protection from evening chills, and the moisture-preserving effects of the row cover. Take a little section of 2-foot flower-border wire, chicken wire, or similar and bend it into an arch, like a little quonset hut. Fasten floating row cover to that with plastic bread ties or cable ties, and you have a nice re-usable cover for your chard and for other tender seedlings. You'll want 12 - 18 inches height for the chard-- it will grow taller, but it's getting tougher and bitter at that stage, so harvest at the 8 - 12 inch leaf stage for the best flavor and texture.

Hop on over to My Bay Area Kitchen to see some of this yummy chard in action.

Having a Bloomarific Day

2006-06-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

I went to a conference in Boston, caught a cold, and came back early. This morning I took Mike's new/used camera out to the garden to play with and to see how things were doing. Um, yow. I was gone *how* long?! I'm astonished by what four days can change during the 'off like a rocket' part of the growing season.

The first thing to catch my eye were the scarlet runner beans. When I left, only a few blossoms peeked out from under the leaves, in contrast to what you can see today. I've got high hopes for the scarlets. I have no idea whether I've over or under planted, as I don't know how productive they will turn out to be. Interestingly enough, there are one or two plants with white blossoms in both this batch and the batch of 8 - 10 scarlets that I planted by the squash arbor. We'll see what happens, should be interesting.

Sharing the trellis-end with the scarlets is a "Black Cherry" tomato, and I couldn't resist a peek underneath to see if they'd started setting fruit yet. Yes! How marvelous. I don't think anyone else is setting yet, but I haven't taken a detailed survey. Certainly I've got blossoms galore on both the "Noir de Crimee" black tomato in the same planter, and the "Aunt Ruby's German Green" a couple of planters down, but I haven't seen fruit yet. I used all of the canned tomatoes making turkey chili two weeks ago, so we're down to some quartered romas and some whole sungolds and yellow-pears in the freezer. Can I use them up before the 2006 crop matures? I'd darn well better!

Encouragingly, the tomatillos have gone from small stalks about 3 weeks ago to fractal branchings of dozens of flowers. It's been hard to keep up with them and nudge them into and out of the coated-wire cage I put around them. There are some branches near the base that snuck out and proceeded to fan and fan again, so I might have to rig up some supports when they start to fruit, lest they snap off. But maybe this year I'll have both tomatillos and tomatos at the same time, for salsa. Of course, my peppers are way behind, and my cilantro has already gone by. I'll start some more cilantro in a shady area and see if I can get the stars to align this year. :-)

Last, but by no means least, I noticed this gorgeous little bloom, our first eggplant blossom ever! This is "Lavender Beauty", a thin, long style eggplant. Unlike the "Lil Spooky" and "Ping Tung Long", both of which I started as seedlings, this plant was an impulse buy from OSH or Sunnywind. I couldn't resist the picture of the mature fruit, a rich pastel lavender streaked with white. The shade of the flower is about the same color. I've never tried growing eggplant before, so this is exciting. My little hand-raised guys are just starting to feel warm enough to leaf out fully, in contrast to the Lavender Beauty. I still have a lot to learn about starting seedlings and providing for their needs! Maybe I'll heat the greenhouse next spring, or try using black 'waterbed' bags for passive solar smoothing of temps.

Garden Desktop: Nasturtiums

2006-05-21T11:33:00.001-07:00

This week's Garden Desktop is also a Weekend Herb Blogging feature! Nasturtiums are a wonderful addition to any garden. The leaves, flowers, and seedpods are edible, they self-seed easily, and they attract pollinators with their sweet, but low-key, fragrance. They thrive in poor soil, and don't need deadheading of spent blooms in order to continue blooming.

Some nasturtiums are climbers, and some are ground covers. They all enjoy spreading, so don't plant them very close to anything you don't want overwhelmed! They make a great fence cover, with their lovely splash of color, and come in many color varieties and showy double-blossom beauties.

Any list of edible flowers is incomplete without the nasturtium. As you've seen here before, they can turn a simple salad into a fancy gourmet salad, and can adorn cakes and cheese trays. NPR's Splendid Table has a recipe for nasturtium pod capers, slightly differing from the Poor Man's Capers recipe at PlanTea, home of the UpBeet Gardener newsletter.

I was surprised to hear that the young seedpods are used, rather than the flower buds. Given the spiciness of the flowers, I'd think the latter would make more interesting capers. Seeds of Knowledge offers some cultivation tips and recipes, and the interesting tidbit that the dried seedpods were ground and used as a pepper substitute during the shortages of WW II. That's pretty nifty-- and since the capers recipe says use young, still-tender seedpods, if you find the other kind then you can let them develop fully and then save some to replant and some to experiment with grinding.

Garden Quote of the Day

2006-05-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

Me, taking apart and washing a cabbage I picked yesterday: "Wow, there's an amazing amount of, um, habitat in a cabbage. It's like some kind of huge condo complex."

Spouse: "I really enjoy the things you are growing and cooking for us. I will enjoy them even more without hearing things like that."

It's some kind of loosely heading cabbage, and let's just say it was a good idea to pull the leaves off and rinse off each one. But it was *nothing* compared to the time that my friend Celeste and I made salad from organic lettuce in New Mexico. Not when the 3rd rinse bowl still looked like the aftermath of the Titanic, with no lifeboats in sight. I guess that there wasn't a single patch of green anywhere in the desert except that lettuce patch. If we weren't so fussy, we could have gotten a full day's supply of protein just from that salad. Eeek.

My cabbage was tame, tame, tame, in comparison, just a slug or two and some venturesome aphids in the onesy-twosy kind of numbers. OK, I had to peel off the huge outer leaves of the cabbage to get the aphids down to onesy-twosy. Next year, floating row cover. Slugs I can handle, they don't multiply geometrically. I wish I knew what to use the outer leaves for, other than the yardwaste/compost bin. They seem way too tough to use for cooking.

Speaking of floating row cover, the little hoop of it that I am using over the chard is working really well, no leaf-miners (thrips) on it yet. In San Jose, they pretty much destroyed the same kind of chard at all leaf sizes. I didn't know to use the floating row cover then, as I didn't know what they were. I just knew they were completely gross. :-)

Steamed fresh chard is turning out to really rock. I didn't like it when I tried chard from the store, seemed too bitter. The key seems to be picking it when small, at about half the size or less of the huge leaves in bunches from the store. Picked small, even the stems are tasty and not stringy. I just put in another patch of beets, and one of Asian spinach. Maybe I will tuck some more chard in somewhere too. It's yummy.

May Garden Update

2006-05-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

I've been on vacation, and catching up with work, and taking TOO MANY pictures. So here's garden set showing the changes since last time. It's astonishing what 3 weeks will do when the weather warms up! The barely 3-foot-high peas of April 24th are now the 9-foot-high peas of May 14th. Yow.

Nasturtium volunteers, 2nd or 3rd gen Jewels mix. Last year they were being a weed, this year I am encouraging them strongly to go up the trellis, and pruning those shoots that go astray. Heavy rains meant lots fewer ants this year, so cleaning nasturtium blossoms for salad has been easier, yay. Thinking of pulling some buds for pickled pseudo-capers this year.

The greenhouse is working out wonderfully, and I'm reminded that I'm once again putting out squash seedlings long before it's really warm enough for them. Next year I have to remember to put my squashes in large pots in the greenhouse and let them get well established before transplanting. The tiny squash seedlings outside have fared vastly less well than their greenhouse counterparts, with most adding only a few true leaves. Look at what the kabochas in the greenhouse are doing in comparison! Live and learn, this gardening stuff is complicated!

Vacation? I'm not ready!

2006-04-30T21:28:00.000-07:00

I spent a good chunk of today stringing soaker hose around my garden beds, so that the cat-sitter can water things by just turning on the faucet-- since he or she will have to hand-water several potted trees and my gladiolas, geraniums, and etc. I'm going to line up several of the planters at the loose end of the soaker hose and loop it around them, so that it's as easy as possible. Also potted several tiny things out of 3-inch pots and into big pots, so that I can water them once and they'll be ok.

Another thing we need to do before we go on vacation is to eat this little cauliflower. This is a picture of it from last weekend, when it was about softball sized. Now it's twice that, and still firm, but starting to have a 'bad hair day' as it thinks about bolting in the recent warm weather. Wups! Better have it for dinner tomorrow! Also need to pick peas, as the sugar-snap pods are plumping up, which makes them stringy. We also need to eat a whole bunch of lettuce, as I had to pull out a small section of the lettuce bed that was overshadowing a tomato-- lettuce liked the colder weather more than the tomato did. Missed the Weekend Herb Blogging deadline running soaker hose around until dark, mea culpa.

I also moved the two potted fig trees, a Violetta and a bargain 'mystery fig', out of the greenhouse today. We haven't moved the greenhouse to its rightful home, off of our patio deck, and temps are in the 80's there during the day even with all vents and the door open. The figs love to respire, and are using up about 3 gallons every other day. There's a good breba crop of figs, as you can see in this photo (about half again the size of a ping-pong ball but still very hard) and I hope that moving the trees outside doesn't mess them up. After they finish with the spring figs, they're both getting transplanted into 32-gal plastic garbage cans, with a deep watering pipe. My old porch fig tree on my apt balcony thrived in that scenario. I'd like to put one of them in the ground here, but the park management takes a dim view of non-dwarf trees, and these would definitely get BIG.

Some of my tomatoes are growing suckers, so I pinched them off this weekend. The tomatoes at the local hardware stores are HUGE, making me grumble internally about 'so why do I go to all this trouble raising seedlings?', especially since there are so many heirlooms available this year-- Lemon Boy, Brandywine, Black Krim, Black Prince, Mr Stripey/Tangella, etc etc. Heirloom tomatoes are now mainstream. Well, I'm still growing a few I haven't seen, and all those foot-tall, thumb-thick tomato plants in 4-inch pots will spend the next several weeks growing their roots out, so we'll probably all get tomatoes at the same time anyway. Or so I keep telling myself!

Pictures! We promised Pictures!

2006-04-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

It's nicely overcast, which means I can take some snapshots of all that work we were doing yesterday in the garden! Voila, the barren wasteland that *was* going to be our greenhouse is now a gardenscape. We're going to put the greenhouse behind the patio instead, as the sun patterns are better there: the side garden location depicted would blast the greenhouse with too much sun in the summer, and not enough in the winter. And it's visible from the street, which irks park management. So now only a pretty gardenscape will be visible to the neighbors and passers-by, and the greenhouse will be a couple of steps off the back porch, which encourages management of it in bad weather.

I decided to go for mixed flower and veggie beds, as I wanted a garden I could sit out in, and that would be pleasant to view. I also love bringing flowers indoors, and wanted some things that would be good for cut flowers. I'll be planting zinnias, cosmos, cornflowers, etc to that end later as well. In the close-up, we see lobelia next to an Amish Paste tomato, then a couple of anchor perennials-- a pink-flowered yarrow (currently only a tiny fern-like clump) and a tall fragrant dianthus; at the far right there's a clump of french lavender. Along the border are alyssum and viola, with fragrant stock next, then Wonderland Mix poppies. Next row from the poppies are some Genovese Basil seedlings, and then a triad of Yolo Wonder peppers are caged.

Finally, since this is Weekend Herb Blogging, here's the new little permanent herb bed I created in the side garden. Clockwise from noon we have variegated sage, variegated oregano, lemon thyme, 'spicy' oregano (and it is: don't let that cute fuzzy look fool ya!), sweet marjoram. I wasn't sure what to put in the middle, so I popped a couple of dwarf snapdragons in there for color.

The garden is finally starting to shape up, hurrah!

Let There Be Chip (and Lilies)

2006-04-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

A week of no rain has resulted in the side garden being dry enough to lay down weedblock and chip, and lo, the Sunnyvale SMaRT Center finally had chip-- we've arrived too late to get any in past weekends. For good measure, we conducted a huge cilantro harvest and levelled out Cilantro Hill, the mounded topsoil from levelling the side bed area. Another 3x3 foot bed was set up, paths were laid out and chipped, and suddenly the side garden looks like a GARDEN instead of a construction zone. Huzzah!

Mike mixed a couple of barrow-loads of potting soil for me- two parts store-bought potting soil, two parts compost, one part each vermiculite and perlite. I had received some daylilies ordered via eBay on Thursday, and they really needed planting! I think the folks might have given me some bonus plants, or perhaps I just wasn't counting. I filled two long shallow planters and one large square planter, and still needed to tuck a few daylily crowns into garden beds here and there. Yeep. They are looking somewhat draggly, as paper-wrapped mailed plants sometimes do, but I am hoping they'll perk up by tomorrow.

What did I get? Too darn many daylilies, but I hope to have them for years, and I chose colors that I like, that go well with each other, and that go well with other flowers I like to grow. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The lilies were packed very well and carefully, roots were clean (no mold, rot, etc), and bundled into tag-labelled groups. Of course, I immediately got the tags MIXED UP, so I finally just planted willy-nilly and tossed the tags. I know, I know.

SILOAM DAVID KIRCHHOFF Daylily Double Fan

OLALLIE LIME Daylily Double Fan

PAPER BUTTERFLY Daylily Double Fan

IMPERIAL FANFARE (Thomas 85) Daylily Double Fan

JACKIE'S CHOICE (Morss 90) Daylily Double Fan

SILOAM RIBBON CANDY (Henry 81) Daylily Double Fan

UNIQUE PURPLE (Childs 79) Daylily Double Fan

[Photos by excellent daylily seller nrb44 via eBay. Top to bottom: Siloam David Kirchoff, Olallie Lime, Siloam Ribbon Candy, Paper Butterfly.]

Crops of the Americas Stamps Coming Soon

2006-04-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

These great new stamps, featuring traditional crops from the Americas, will be available sometime during this year. I'm planning to stock up!

Thanks to the folks at Turning Toward the Light, a garden and woodland conservation blog, for the pointer.

Garden Goodies

2006-04-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes, and not nearly enough blogging. Mea culpa! As you can see, things are coming up all over. We've gotten several nice batches of broccoli cuts for dinners, but I had to pull the 2nd patch of broccoli due to a sudden infestation of grey aphids. Perhaps I ought to have tried harder to rescue it, but they had gotten quite a foothold while I was ill for almost a week and not keeping tabs on the garden. Have planted yellow and purple bush beans where they were pulled, so the bed is percolating at least.

There's a nice feeling about being able to pull together a dinner salad for 5 - 6 folks from the garden, especially just in time for Weekend Herb Blogging. Batavian Nevada lettuce seeded a few weeks ago joined the new 'cut and come again' mesclun mix and some nasturtium flowers and tender new nasturtium leaves to make a yummy salad. Nasturtiums are a gorgeously edible flower, but many folks overlook the leaves. Added judiciously to a salad, they are excellent: chew one by itself, and you'll get a tangy, peppery mouthful that may be too much to handle. One bonus of the chilly, wet weather-- almost no ants to chase out of the nasturtium blossoms. You really want to inspect those closely before putting in a salad. I tend to cut or pull the petals off-- you lose the sweet/hot nectar reservoir of the flower, but you also discard any ants. I'm growing two types of viola as well, but I always seem to forget about adding them to salads. They're just so pretty right where they are!

Garden Desktop: Mesclun Seedlings

2006-04-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

Young mesclun lettuce mix seedlings in one of our raised beds. A splash of spring color! Full-size image at link is 1280 by 960, for larger desktops.

Aw, go soak yer phaseolus!

2006-04-04T00:59:00.000-07:00

What's that? Them's fightin' words? Vulgar language? Not to us gardeners!

We're talking phaseolus vulgaris, better known as our friend the bean. It's time to start 'em in six-packs indoors, or even put them outside, if you haven't already. But first, just like you would for cooking, you want to soak them. OK, not precisely like you would for cooking, if you tend to do the boil-then-soak routine. Lukewarm or room temperature water, please, no boiling. Soak beans for planting no more than 12 hours. Overnight is ideal.

At that point, you can either plant directly, or you can put them in between damp paper towels to sprout slightly before planting. You have to be very careful not to knock the sprouts off if you do this. I've done it with peas routinely, but I usually just soak and plant beans.

The beans on the right are a mix of purple and yellow pod bush beans. The ones on the left are mung beans, also called noodle beans or yard-long beans. Cellophane noodles are made with the dried bean flour, but I'm growing them for the bean pods to use in stir-fry. I looked them up and they're not a phaseolus at all, they're a vigna, a vigna unguiculata to be precise. The folks at Wikipedia say they're a v. radiata, but I tend to trust the University of Melbourne bean specialists a bit more. I'm hoping they take to soaking as nicely as regular beans. This is the first year I've grown them. The beans, not the specialists. I've never grown specialists, as far as I know.

If you find beans that you like at the store, you can probably plant them. I set aside some Scarlet Runner beans and some Gigandes beans that a friend brought to me from Phipps Ranch. I soaked the first batch of Scarlet Runners last week, and I have some beanlets in 6-packs out in the greenhouse. Unfortunately several of them have been topped off by snails but I moved them up onto a shelf last night, and put copper tape around the legs of the shelf. And stomped a few ginORmous snails last night out in the rain.
I completely encourage you to try Scarlet Runners, btw-- the cooked bean tastes almost like chestnuts to me. It's a rich, complex flavor that has nothing to do with pintos in a can. I was wow'd, and said "These are SO going in my garden, toot sweet!" (Tuit de suite, but you know what I mean.)

More Doing Than Writing!

2006-03-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

I've had 'update garden blog' on my to-do list for a while now, and can't believe it's been almost a month. I've been out in the garden several times each week, though, so at least I have a good excuse. I now have a few dozen assorted tomatoes and peppers and an eggplant or two that I started last month, all transplanted to 4-inch pots (and in some cases, 2-liter soda bottle 'pots', to build a nice deep root structure). I have space for maybe 9 tomato plants, of course, and possibly a dozen pepper plants (or 10 and a couple of eggplants), so this will be entertaining. I've already given away my first tomato seedling, a tiny Tigerella destined for a container on a sunny patio. My seedlings are now on a plastic shelf with copper tape around the shelf legs, as That Which Chomps in the Night has topped off two Super Shepherd Frying Pepper seedlings and a Jimmy Nardello. Curses!

Radishes are coming up, early peas are blooming and second set of peas are about a foot high. I've got some scarlet runner beans starting in six-packs in the greenhouse, but I'm worried that they haven't sprouted yet and it's been over a week. Tiny, hair-thin scallion and carrot leaves are up in the salad bed, as well as cute dime-sized mesclun leaves and the beginnings of beets and chard. We're getting broccoli side-shoots from the de Cicco broccoli, but had only one small head from the lone romanesco broccoli. I'm thinking of sowing a second broccoli crop, but need to check into the temperatures first-- will it stay cool enough long enough? What *is* cool enough? This is the first time I've grown broccoli.

The garden to-do list is *enormous*-- will try to take some pix and post them soon, in between all the other stuff. Need to start my leeks, cucumbers (mini-pickle and mediterranean), some basil (lemon and genovese), daikon, shiso, start melons in the greenhouse, get kabocha and summer squash started in the greenhouse, transplant the cukes and the spaghetti squash that I purchased in a weak moment :-) and pot the new rose geranium that I found amidst all the boring unscented geraniums. I also need to transplant a 6-pak of alyssum, transplant what's LEFT of the two delphiniums in 4-inch pots (snail victims), etc. I transplanted all the big self-seeded zinnias from the corner of the garden where we're moving the greenhouse onto, only to find this week that the snails have eaten them down to leaf ribs. I will have to start making flashlight rounds vs the snails.

Urban Gardening by Necessity

2006-02-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

A friend forwarded to me a story on the rise of urban permaculture in Cuba. An Aussie permaculture team visited there during the horrible economic crash and helped get people in Havana started on sustainable agriculture. It's resulted in quite the cooperative culture change.

Going through a minor famine and economic readjustment is not required to start working with permaculture, but it's certainly reassuring, and inspiring, to see that urban gardening can actually substantially feed an urban population. There's a tremendous amount that we could do here in Silicon Valley, given the terrific climate and opportunities here.

Garden Desktop: Cilantro

2006-02-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

We have an incredible amount of volunteer cilantro on a mound of soil in the back garden. Mike levelled the site where the greenhouse is supposed to go, scraping the topsoil off carefully to re-use in the greenhouse beds after we move it. That particular chunk of topsoil is where I'd let a huge cilantro go to seed. I saved a lot of the seeds to plant this spring, but it hardly seems necessary at this point! This one is 1024 x 768; larger image available on request, just leave a comment.

Unsung Heroes and Open Source Seeds

2006-02-18T20:24:00.000-08:00

A recent scholarly paper illustrates strong parallels between open source software and access to heirloom seeds. Out on the agricultural frontier, links between farmers and geeks are being forged, as farmers tap into the global Internet and discover the need to apply Open Source principles to seeds.

The fight against patented seed varieties goes back many years. The late Professor Elwyn Meader of the University of New Hampshire was a noted opponent to plant patenting, arguing that if even one dollar of taxpayer money went into developing a plant variety, it must be made available to the public. A wonderful biography and tribute to Prof Meader was recently published by Fedco Seeds, and that is where I learned of the existence of this unsung hero. The photo you see here is from a USDA report on strawberry development, and links to the brief biography of Prof Meader included in the report.

Meader's efforts in plant breeding and propagation spanned the 1930's into modern times, and searching heirloom seed catalogs one finds him credited with dozens of varieties. If you garden with heirloom varietals, especially in cooler climates, odds are that you are growing something he developed. Golden Midget watermelon? Elwyn Meader. Royalty Purple Pod bean? Elwyn Meader. Sweet Chocolate bell pepper, and Applegreen eggplant? Elwyn Meader. Mid-season Bush Cherries? You guessed it. Meader Highbush Blueberry? Meader Persimmon (self-pollinating)? The list goes on and on. Meader's work is particuarly appreciated in the lower USDA zones, and in climates like the UK, where standard varieties often fail to set fruit or produce well, due to lower temperatures.

Now fast-forward back to seeds and open source. An article on so-called SuperOrganics illustrates the new route to improving plants without burdening them with patents or creating potentially harmful transgenic varieties. Merely map the genome of the plant, and use that knowledge to pick and choose among traits in several varieties of the plant. Once you know what you're breeding for, and can screen the offspring, the process of developing a variety with the desired traits can be shortened for patient years to impatient months. And, in the process, the genome has the potential to become protected by GPL-style licensing.

One pioneer in this process, Richard Jefferson, developed a useful marker gene as a grad student and protected it with licensing. Researchers and farmers can use it freely, yet the big agribiz companies like Monsanto have to pay to license it-- and with those revenues, Jefferson set up CAMBIA, "an international, independent non-profit research institute pioneering Open Source Biology and Informatics to support Patent Transparency." Does that rock, or what?

Garden Desktop: Spring Lettuce

2006-02-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

This week's garden desktop is young Batavian Nevada lettuce growing in one of our raised garden beds. This is 3rd generation seed, saved from the original Renee's Seeds mixed lettuces pack I started in 2003. A couple of volunteers came up in the same pot as the grapevine we moved to our new place, so I planted them along with the grapevine. They thrived all summer in the shade under the vine leaves, and then bolted in the late summer heat.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of new Renee's Seeds 'cut and come again' mesclun mix that I just sowed this past weekend. I'll have to tuck away a late sowing to let it go to seed, and keep saving!

Let the Games Begin! Seed-Starting Mania

2006-02-10T21:24:00.000-08:00

I have had a 3x5 card on my desk for over 2 weeks, with everything on it crossed off except 'START SEEDS'. Argh! Last night, finally, I got my game on and started spring seedlings. I admit that one of the complications was that I had to rearrange the porch to actually create useable space for a folding table near the outlet, so that I could use my new seed-starting mats. But still.

I'm still not sure how many tomato plants I can realistically put into my rearranged garden beds. I also, of course, want room for lots of peppers and an eggplant or two. Things like beans can vine up into the sun, or in the case of yellow bush beans, fit into a small sunny row at the edge of a bed. It's the towering redwood kudzu of indeterminate tomato plants that requires the complicated space planning. There will *not* be a yellow pear tomato this year. Last year, despite frequent prunebacks, it turned into a tomato TREE, going not only up onto the neighbors' carport roof but trying to grow into their storage shed through the vents. Yargh. We're going to put something a bit tamer in that spot this year, yes. But let's cut to the chase: What did I start?

Early Girl, Better Boy, Stupice, Moskvich, Gregori's Altai
Amish Paste, Yellow Plum, Black Plum, Principe Borghese
Noir de Crimee, Black Cherry, Santa Clara Canner, Aunt Ruby's German Green
Hawaiian Pineapple, Pineapple, Tigerella, Green Zebra
Ping Tung Long (eggplant), Lil Spooky (eggplant), Toma Verde (tomatillo)
Super Shepherd Frying, Hungarian Paprika, Hungarian Yellow Wax, Jimmy Nardello (all peppers)

I haven't even planted one-of-each of all the varieties of tomatoes I acquired this year. Even in the 1 - 2 dozen seeds per packet homegrown / small-supplier form, I suspect I will just plain not have to buy tomatoes ever again. Of course, I certainly *will*, because there's bound to be something I really want to try. But I digress. This set of seedlings has onesy-twosey of a couple of things, but is mostly in groups of 3 or 4. I figure one for me, one to make sure there's one for me, and I never seem to have a problem finding people who want good tomato seedlings. In fact, instead of proferring them to all and sundry, I might just give a few to my bestest buddies and trot the rest of them down to the local flea market this year. I have things you won't find at the local hardware store, and if I can get a buck or two each for some seedlings in recycled 4-inch pots, I won't feel quite so bad about how much I spent on tomato seeds this year.

Just as the best way to feel bad on a dive vacation is to divide the cost of the trip by the number of useable photos you got (oooh, BAD move!), I am going to not think about all I've spent on seeds, perlite, garden tools, raised beds, the greenhouse, etc, because otherwise I will feel absolutely dreadful. Besides, I'm psychologically incapable of spending that same amount on a CSA subscription for a box full of mostly kale, which I don't really eat. I'd just blow it on retirement planning or repainting the house or something. And that's no fun, right? Right! It's not just a hobby, it's a sacred calling. So there.

Besides, I'll be starting a ton of Ace, Better Boy, and other rugged, garden-novice-compatible tomato seedlings for the new Sunnyvale Community Garden later on, so I'd better start my stuff while I can. And my 3x5 card? It's still there, with "START SEEDS" crossed off, but next to it written "START ROOTS". I'm really, really behind on getting carrots, beets, radishes, and chard into the new beds...

First-Timer's Club for 2006

2006-01-31T19:57:00.000-08:00

Many of us garden because we love growing things, especially improbable things. And many of us garden to excess because we are enthusiastic, or maybe a bit bonkers. I bought how many kinds of heirloom tomatoes where I can really only grow 5 - 7 tomato plants? You know. That kind of thing. But every year, many of us try to add something different or new to the garden. I call it "joining the first-timer's club".

Often there is a book to blame for a sudden burst of enthusiasm, and that was definitely the case for me. I picked up a used copy of Rosalind Creasy's "The Edible Asian Garden" at Powell's on our fall trip to Portland. After sitting down and reading it, I was buzzing with ideas. I planned on adding everything from amaranth to tsat-tsoi to my garden. Then I got realistic about what I could really grow, and what we'd be likely to actually eat and use. But even after the realism, there were some things that made the cut. Woo-hoo!

Eggplant, long Japanese type

I've always had a fondness for eggplant, especially eggplant parmesan. My hubby has claimed great loathing for eggplant, though, so I haven't tried growing any-- I can satisfy my occasional eggplant cravings with dinner out or a trip to the store. However, Mike recently encountered YuShiang Eggplant (garlic eggplant in brown sauce) and tried some. Aha. He says the long Asian types of eggplant are 'sweeter' and 'milder' than the giant purple Barney Eggs style, and that he would like to try cooking with it at home. So I am going to be growing eggplant for the first time. It's supposedly very much like tomatoes or peppers to grow, so that shouldn't be too difficult. Famous last words!

Daikon, Japanese radish

Ditto for growing daikon, basically a very long radish. I'm going to try to get a short variety, since I have only about a foot of raised bed or less before "Welcome to the World of Clay". I'm encouraged by how soft the soil got in the beds this year, but there are, alas, limits. The daikon I see in the local Ranch 99 and similar is vast and huge, and I hope represents some giant variety rather than the norm. I found a 'Minowase' variety that is supposed to get approximately 2 feet in length and 3 inches in diameter, and that sounds good to me. Some of the daikon I see in the markets is double that size!

One reason in particular that I'd like to grow daikon is that I love 'oshinko' type Japanese pickled daikon, the bright yellow variety. A problem for me, a diabetic, is that it's made with sugar or corn syrup. I had pretty good luck this year making bread-n-butter pickles with sucralose (splenda), and would like to try making my own oshinko with it. Apparently the way it's made involves baking at low temperature for many hours. Those experiments will be the topic of another column. Sure, I could just go out and buy some daikon and see how it works, but this way I get to grow a new plant! :-)

Chinese Long Bean (Asparagus Bean)

I'm thinking Chinese Long Bean will be my 'new new thing' this year. OK, it's just a bean, but I'm kind of intimidated just thinking about it! I'm planning to try a deep red variant offered by Baker Creek. Never having grown Chinese Long Bean before, I set out looking for info. So far I've found a couple of very valuable facts-- first, they do fine on a 6-foot trellis, although they may go up and then wind downward again. Second, someone on a garden forum elsewhere said that they need a cowpea type inoculant instead of a normal bean type.

Now I've not used inoculants on my peas or beans thus far, but had considered doing so this year. The scoop is that legumes can harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria in root nodules, thus enriching the soil where they grow. The catch is that they may not do so by default. If the bacteria are present already in your soil, they can colonize. If not, like sourdough or yogurt, you need to use a starter to get your plants going with their little symbiotic buddies.

So, what are you planning to grow this year that you've never grown before, and that you generally think will be a really cool challenge?

Last 2005 Peppers

2006-01-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I covered some of my pepper plants to extend their season. Over the weekend we cleared out that section of the garden and bid a thankful farewell to those plants. It's always tough pulling up plants!

Here is the third, and final batch of peppers; the ones ripening in the earlier blog post are the second batch. I'm truly astonished that we had flowering and fruit set on these plants in mid to late December, but the unseasonably warm weather and large, established plants are probably the key factors. We also have a kit greenhouse on the patio, right in front of the pepper bed, which probably provides some warmth as it cools slowly in the evening, and also blocks the cold north breezes of our winter storms.

The Marconi Gold peppers were about 20% smaller than the ones that ripened during their proper, warmer season, but they are still sweet and good. The Tulip Tree lipstick peppers stayed green, didn't like the cold at all. The Tequila Sunrise was very hardy, and while the fruits weren't very sweet, they still had great pepper flavor. I think Tequila Sunrise might do well as a container plant to bring into a greenhouse or onto a sunny porch in shorter-season areas. It was a nice compact plant, and quite lovely with the yellow-gold peppers.

My garden 'vacation' is coming to a close. The 'keep your fingers crossed' peas planted in December are now a bit over a foot tall, and going strong. I have another batch soaking which needs to go in the ground today or tomorrow, and also have some ornamental fragrant sweet peas soaking as well. For obvious reasons, they'll be planted far from each other! I'm kicking myself for not getting more beets and radishes in, since the handful I have in now are coming along. Maybe this weekend?

Meanwhile the violas and dianthus that I put in back in November are happy, if enduring a bit of snail damage. The violas continue to bloom cheerfully, and now the long spikes of the blue irises are rising, and the thick stubby points of the daffodils recently emerged. Time to do some flashlight patrols for snails on warm nights, and maybe start putting out the saucers of beer!

All my east coast and mid-state gardener readers, don't despair. Spring is coming to you too! And all the seed catalogs are now arriving, making it a perfect time to curl up on the couch with a cat and a cup of tea and a clipboard. Sometimes I think planning the garden is as much fun as growing it, never mind that it never seems to work out as planned.