Salsa Time

The first year of my garden, I was actually ambitious enough to do some canning and made salsa from my garden.  This year, not so much.  I did can a few beets, but today, I'm going to make some pico de gallo instead.  I've got ripe tomatoes, onions, jalapeños, and cilantro, so all the basics are accounted for.

I only put in one jalapeño plant this year.  I still have some canned ones from two years ago, as well as some frozen slices from last year.  I also only put in two chili plants as I have some of those yet in the freezer from last year.

And, while I'm on the subject of peppers, my mini bells are about ready to harvest.

I planted a larger variety of peppers the first year: pepperoncini, Heatwave (a chili), mini bells, jalapeños, and green and orange bells.  Way too many peppers, most of which I started indoors, and I didn't have a good setup for doing that yet.  Last year, I grew Black Hungarian, Cayenne Red and Thai Yellow in addition to jalapeños.  Still too many.  Black Hungarian, if you haven't heard of it, is a nice little hot, very dark purple pepper - so dark it looks black.

This morning I pulled up all my red beets and laid them in the plot to compost on the spot.  They never seemed to do anything.  I got less than twenty big enough to use this year, and they were small.  The yellow ones, which I planted a couple weeks earlier than the red, did fine.  Yesterday I planted what was my zucchini patch in more yellow beets.  If they mature, that will be great, but if I only get beet greens from them, that will be great, too.

I also planted some some zucchini in what was my beet plot.  The earlier zucchini didn't do very well.   Most of them produced plenty of fruit, but it rotted before it got to any size.   I think it was just too darned wet.  From here on out, we won't likely have the kinds of rains we had earlier, so maybe this planting will be okay.  Also, I put up a tomato cage for them to grow up in; something I'd seen in a comment at Baker Creek Seeds.  If that works, it'll be nice, because it will keep the fruit off the ground, and keep the plants from spreading out into other plots.

I direct seeded a few Brunswick and Napa cabbages on June 30, and they're finally starting to look like something.  They'll need thinning down to just a few good ones pretty soon.  No more than two or three of each, I think, with the small space I left for them.  If they come out okay, next year I'll make more space.  This is the first year I planted cabbages, and I'm not able to brag about my spring crop.

I haven't yet decided whether to plant fall lettuces.

The cat (who still doesn't have a name, and I guess never will) always comes out to the garden with me and finds herself a shady spot.

The lima bean plants are looking good.

Have a great Sunday.

The Hottest Summer on Record

I don't want to think of breaking this year's heat record in the future.  This morning was the first one in weeks that it wasn't too hot to go to the garden when it was just light enough to see, even before the sun "came up".

Basil is flowering, the okra is as tall as I am, and the Mexican sunflower is still going strong.

Plots where I had squash and beets are still fallow and covered with a layer of grass mulch.  I plan to plant more beets where the squash had been, but I may leave the beet plot empty.

Purple Ruffles basil that I started from seed indoors on the 19th of May and transplanted June 29 is happy and beautiful.  Apparently, it loves heat.

So, what's to do at the end of July in my ornamental vegetable garden?  Weeding would be a good bet, but I try to stay on top of the weeds from the beginning, and at least pull a few each time I go out.  I have more weeds this year than I have in the past, but I've decided to call one kind a salad green and let it grow.  Purslane.  So there.  One less weed to pull.

I even found a tomato, cucumber and purslane salad recipe.  Too bad my cucumbers croaked.

Speaking of weeds.  My compost heap is totally overgrown!  I don't want to spray it out with herbicide, so I guess I'm going to have to wait until it all dies and take a shovel out there and turn it under.  I won't think about that monumental chore right now.  Maybe the early winter will be mild and I'll take my sweet time doing it bit by little bit.

This year, I found a nice surprise in my compost pile: potatoes.  Nice little bonus for having done nothing but thrown out some grocery store potatoes that didn't get used before they went soft.  They'll not be organic, but I dug some out already when they were small and roasted them. They were quite yummy. Obviously, there are more to be had.  When it cools off enough to dig.

Like every morning, this morning I went out to capture Japanese beetles.  I also had to spray the asparagus ferns and some roses.  I thought the little buggers were on the decline, but they were certainly plentiful on the shrub roses at the back side of the wildflower garden this morning.  Between them, my string trimmer, and my mother's mowing, those shrubs have taken a beating in the last three years.  I'm probably going to have to hit the ground under them with herbicide in the early spring, spray insecticide regularly, and mulch heavily if they're going to have a chance to live.  One of the three is already looking like a lost cause.  I'm guessing it's a type of witches' broom disease.  Perhaps I should cut that one down before it spreads.

My sister pointed out to me that I'd made an error in yesterday's post, and I've corrected it.  I said that I put acetone fingernail polish on a kleenex in my kill jar.  If you saw that and are back today, it was supposed to say acetone fingernail polish remover.

Let me say here, if when you find future errors (or today's errors, for that matter), please click the comment link above the post and let me know.  I thank you.

This morning's "catch", and that won't nearly be all that were there.

I'm collecting (euphemism for killing) the Japanese beetles off okra in my garden, which is where they hang out and cause damage.  

I've noticed this year with the proliferation of Japanese beetles on the okra there are concurrently lots of granddaddy long-legs (aka daddy long-legs, aka harvestmen, which are not actually spiders).  I hadn't noticed them in earlier years in such numbers.  I'm wondering if they're attracted to something that's going on with the Japanese beetles.  They're generally known as scavengers, eating dead insects, but maybe they're also after something else.  I've read they eat bird droppings, so maybe they also eat Japanese beetle droppings.  There's plenty of that in the okra.  

I'm also seeing ladybird beetles on the okra.  I'm not sure what they're eating either, but generally speaking, juvenile (larval) ladybird insects are eating some stage of pest insects, so that's helpful.  Another reason I don't spray chemical insecticides.  I don't want to kill beneficial insects like grandaddy long-legs, ladybird beetles, bees, assassin bugs and some other insects.  I saw a young praying mantis this morning.  They are weird but wonderful.  

That said, there are some plant-feeding ladybird beetles, including the Mexican bean beetle, but I'm pretty sure these are not, so I leave them alone.  If they are eating the plants, there aren't enough of them to do any harm.

There's one mallow in the wildflower garden, and Japanese beetles like that, too.  It's in the same family as okra.  They especially like roses, and I was surprised to find hordes of them on the asparagus fern, because the other plants they prefer are broad-leaved.  

I keep saying "asparagus fern", but that's not really correct. There's actually a fern called asparagus fern.  What I'm talking about is asparagus stalks that have bolted and flowered.  They look like fern, and so they apparently call that "ferning out".   So I should be saying the beetles are in hordes in the ferned-out asparagus.

Tomatoes are still growing and ripening.  Hooray.  They don't seem to be setting fruit, though, and who can blame them?  It's too darned hot.

Till next time.

Some Mighty Fine Tomatuhz

You say tomāto, I say tomāto.  We're not British.

Now, what about the taste?  I never eat fresh tomatoes any season but summer. The reason is that anything I can get in a grocery store out of season is a very poor substitute.  Taste, texture, look.  They're just not worth it.

But, when spring garden planting time is here, perhaps the biggest and most important decision to me is what kind of tomatoes I'm going to plant. I'm looking for a slicing tomato with just the right amount of acidity and sweetness.   Bacon and tomato sandwiches!  Tomato slices and cottage cheese!  Tomato slices with fresh basil!  Tomato slices and fried okra!

I actually found that perfect tasting tomato the first year of my garden when I planted a "purple" tomato:  Black Krim.  It didn't perform so well, but really, none of my tomato plants were outstanding that year, and I may just try it again next year, even though it tends to have a lot of waste from cracking on the stem end.  They looked great when they were green, but I had to waste about half the tomato due to cracking.

When ripe, they were a gorgeous dark burgundy red. Why I don't have any pictures of a ripe one, I don't know.  Here's someone else's picture of Purple Cherokee, and that's pretty much what Black Krim looked like.

source

I do have a picture of a Black Krim tomato sliced up.  As you can see, the largest slice has a lot of hard green area.  That slice was taken from the middle of the tomato.  So, not a very good ratio of edible goodness to waste.

Typical web advice says cracking results from uneven watering.  That makes sense, but I hand watered the first year, and I watered very evenly.  I also watered each of several varieties the same, and the purple ones were the only ones to crack.  Baker Creek Seed Company comments on Black Krim  are all positive, and only one says "They tend to crack easily."  As I said, I think I'll try them again.

The Beefsteaks were large, and produced well, but not particularly tasty.

As you can see, I was growing my tomatoes on poles, staking them and pruning regularly.  It was a whole lot of work.  I liked the looks of the bamboo poles in my garden, versus setting up wire cages, but the main problem turned out to be keeping them upright given the heavy rains and high winds we typically have in spring.  After two years of righting heavy, fallen tomato plants (which didn't always fall without damage, needless to say), I used cages this year.

You might also notice the severe leaf curling on that plant.  Early on, I thought this was happening because of herbicide damage from nearby field crop sprays.  After doing some research, I decided it was most likely due to the cool, damp weather we were having.

Shepherd's hooks, with their buttressed feet may have stood better than bamboo poles if we didn't have so much rain and wind.  I'll never know.

Neither the Brandywine red or yellow plants I grew that first year produced a single tomato.   Mortgage Lifter (red, but you can also get yellow) was a poor producer, despite its name.  Hillbilly (kind of mottled yellow and red) and Mr. Stripey (a striped one - who would have guessed? -  similar to Hillbilly) both did okay.  Several people remarked how delicious Mr. Stripey is, and at least three I know started planting it.  I planted it again last year, but I didn't get lots of production either year.  I might try it again, since it's possible Mr. Stripey doesn't do well staked.

I planted two roma style tomatoes the first year: Black Icicle (purple) and Amish Paste (red).  They were okay, but they're not slicers, and I don't make sauces. I thought I might that first year, but I was overly ambitious.  No more shall I waste space and time on sauce tomatoes.

The second year, the only repeats I planted were Mr. Stripey and Golden Jubilee.  Golden Jubilee is one of my favorites.  It's yellow, so not my favorite tomato color, but, boy, is it tasty.  I've planted it all three years, and it's produced very well each time.

Golden Jubilee and Missouri Pink Loveapple

New varieties I tried last year were Black Prince, Rutger, and Cherokee Purple.  Black Prince and Cherokee Purple are both purple tomatoes, and I was eager to find one that didn't crack so much but tasted as good as Black Krim.  The Cherokee Purple fruits cracked just like Black Krim, and I didn't think they were as tasty. I didn't get much out of Black Prince. The fruits that it produced were kind of small.  Rutger was so-so, and the fruits were also smallish.

Black Prince

This year, I planted Golden Jubilee (of course), Missouri Pink Loveapple (a "potato-leaf" tomato), Old Italian (red) and Brave General (red).

The two red varieties are large, good slicers, but nothing wonderful in the taste department, as far as I'm concerned.  Missouri Pink Loveapple, on the other hand, is not only a nice large slicer, but it's very, very tasty.  This and Golden Jubilee are probably going to be in my garden every year.

What tomatoes we can't eat and I don't give away, I freeze to use in winter soups, so I like to plant lots of tomatoes.

I blanch them, slice them, cut myself, place them on a cookie sheet to freeze, and then transfer them to freezer storage bags.  I left my good knives with my sister one day some months ago to take to the knife sharpening man at the farmers' market.  He did such a good job that I cannot use my small paring knife without cutting myself.  The tip is incredibly sharp.  I've only used it three times since getting it sharpened, and I've cut myself with it each time, even though I'm trying to be extra careful.  I'm starting to become afraid of this knife.

I have two Brave General plants growing.  I put one in a spot that gets some shade through a large part of the day just to see how it would grow.  While it's not nearly as bushy as the one in full sun, it has about the same number of fruits, and they're just as large.  In fact, they're ripening sooner, and I suspect it has to do with the shade, since I read that tomatoes ripen between 50 and 80 degrees, and it's only been under 80 at night, never once the sun comes up, for a very long time this summer. The fact that this plant has as many fruits may be due to something else, though, as the one in full sun has competition from the other tomatoes I crammed in that space, and the one with shade is by itself.  At any rate, I won't be afraid to put future plants in some of the shadier areas of my garden.

 A volunteer tomato plant was growing near my cucumber trellis, and I let it.  I don't know what variety it might be or whether it's going to produce anything, but  I'm interested to see what it does.  It sprouted very close to the okra, and now that the okra has grown as tall as me, the tomato plant has become rather spindly trying to get out from under it.  I let it fall onto the cucumber trellis for support.  So far, it only has one small green fruit.

I start my tomatoes indoors, and since I always plan for failure, I have too many plants each year.  But they're as fun to give away as they are to grow

Keeping on top of tomato hornworm damage requires keen eyes and persistence.  Watching for the obvious damage they do clues me in that they're here, but I can usually only see them when they've gotten big enough to devour lots of leaves, and that doesn't take long at all.  They can strip a plant in no time. Tomatoes grow vigorously in summer, however, and they've always managed to make up for the loss.  The problem comes if I don't get to the caterpillars before they strip leaves that shade ripening tomatoes, causing loss to sun scald.

I can't believe I didn't take any pictures of the hornworms.  They're disgusting and fascinating at the same time.  They're also the same color as the tomato plant, and tend to hang along the underside of the leaf ribs, so they're not always obvious until they've gotten huge.  Signs of their presence, however are pretty obvious.  The leaves will be eaten down to the main rib, leaving a Charlie Brown Christmas tree effect, and worm poop is distinctive.  Yuck.

I pick off the worms when I see them and toss them in my kill jar (which is just a plastic lidded container with a kleenex onto which I've poured a little acetone fingernail polish remover, in case this is your first post).  I used to just pick the worm itself, but now I pinch off the leaf they're on and put the whole thing in the jar, after having been bitten by a great big one.  I had no idea they'd bite.  It won't kill you, but it's not pleasant.  Here's a picture from the Farmer's Almanac, and you can see that person is already wise.  There are some nice pictures on that page.

It's all worth it.  

Cool As a Cucumber

Yeah, maybe not this year.

When I started this garden, I created a cucumber "trellis" out of some pieces of wire fencing and eight bamboo stakes.

Of the two varieties I planted that year (Sumter and Marketmore), Marketmore was by far my favorite.  Sumter is supposed to be good for pickling, but for the production, look and taste, I don't see any reason to plant anything other than Marketmore, unless you're making pickles.  If there's a better cucumber for this area, I can't imagine it.

I planted on the 23rd of April in 2014, and Sumter didn't germinate well.  I replanted it on the 12th of May.  We got some very heavy rains that evening, leaving water standing in pools.  The seeds did germinate, however, and I was able to harvest both varieties beginning the last week in June.  Sumter was a kind of blocky, squat fruit, while Marketmore tended to be longer and more smoothly cylindrical, and a darker green.

In 2015, I recreated the trellis but in a different plot.  I only planted Marketmore, and the plants grew lush with wild abandon.  (If cucumbers can be said to do wild abandon.) 

I planted on May 5 and harvested from the second week in July until the first week in September.  Harvest was good.  Very good.  I had cucumbers coming out of my ears, as the saying goes, and gave away many more than we ate.  I even supplied a town-wide dinner event in Blackwater.  (In the interest of full disclosure, that probably draws all of about 200 people.)

Since the vines were so lush, I sometimes missed picking fruit at its prime and ended up with lots that were really too big, but who cared?  I had plenty.

This year, because I had such an overabundance of cucumbers last year, I decided to plant more sparingly.  In yet a third plot, I erected a sandwich board trellis from two individual wooden ones my sister gave me.  I put a roll of wire fencing in the arch between them to give the newly sprouted vines something to get a start on.

I was expecting great things.  Boy, was I disappointed.

I planted on April 22 and began harvesting the first week of this month, July.  Today, I pulled the vines out.  

Harvest was very poor, with unhealthy vines and most of the fruit dying in infancy or dying and rotting within a few days.  It's been a wet, and very hot couple of months this year.  June is usually quite nice, and the heat starts building in July to some pretty stifling days in August and September.  This year, Hell arrived the first of June and has been with us ever since.  

Aside from the weather issue, which may have been enough to do the plants in by itself, as I looked back over that particular plot's history, I found that beets the previous year and okra the first had also done very poorly, both having been hit hard by a leaf spot disease.  But I'm not entirely certain there isn't a fungal disease in the soil in that plot.  Next year, I'm going to solarize that plot rather than planting it and see if that improves the chances for a crop of something in 2018.  

Also, when I pulled up the plants, there were gazillions of baby squash bugs and shield bugs (aka stink bugs) scurrying around.

I'm thinking it's not likely these were killing the vines on their own, but they could certainly have been enough to push a stressed plant over the top.  I had a look at the roots, and while they seemed healthy enough, they weren't very plentiful.  

And I did see what is apparently borer damage at the base of a couple of the vines.  That would definitely put the kibosh on them.

Since the vines are too leafy to check for vine borer damage in the stem bases, I'll try the vine borer trap method described in the Farmers Almanac.

While I don't like to indiscriminately kill things - even insects - I couldn't let all those little bugs go on living, since they would then be targeting what's left in the garden that they like: my tomatoes.  That just would not do, so I went for my "use only in case of an emergency" garden insect killer:  spinosad, a natural substance with insecticidal properties, under the label of Captain Jack's Deadbug.  How macho.

Spinosad  is a contact poison, meaning it has to get on the insect to kill it.  You can't spray the plant and expect the insect to die from ingesting spinosad.  It isn't touted to have a quick knock-down rate, allowing bugs to remain alive for a period, and presumably still eating, but I've found that - at least Captain Jack's formulation - knocks them down within a couple of minutes.  That could mean that Deadbug has another ingredient in it doing the knocking, but I don't see anything on its MSDS (safety data sheet) to indicate that.  Perhaps I just spray the heck out of it and overwhelm them.  It also works on insects you don't want to kill, such as bees, so you have to be specific about where and when you spray it.

As for people and pets, spinosad has a very low toxicity.  But don't drink it.  And yes, they do test these things on animals, I'm sorry to say, even dogs.

Interesting note from Captain Jack's:  

Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew® contains Spinosad (spin-OH-sid), a product first isolated from a naturally occurring soil dwelling bacterium that was collected on a Caribbean island from an abandoned rum distillery.

Here's a little video story about it, complete with kettle drum music.

I threw the old vines on a burn pile rather than my compost pile where the bugs would just reappear next year.  The Farmers Almanac says interplanting nasturtiums will help repel shield bugs, but I planted nasturtiums fairly thick on each side of my cucumber trellis, and while there were no bugs on them, you can see by the picture above they certainly weren't repelled from the area.  (I like to have a few nasturtiums in the garden because the flowers are edible and look so pretty on a salad.)

The Almanac also says to delay planting squash (and presumably cucumber since it's in the same plant family) until the early months of summer to avoid the bugs' favored timing (only one generation per year), and I think I will try that next year - or wait until at least the end of May. 

So, that's it for cucumbers this year.  There's really nothing like a fresh cucumber from the garden before it's been refrigerated.  When we were kids, we used to take a vegetable peeler and salt shaker to the garden cucumber patch.  I can still remember that as a summer treat.

Till next time.

Okra - Southern Staple

I love okra.  I'm not crazy about it breaded or boiled, but sliced up and fried in a little coconut or vegetable oil until it stops "sliming", it can't be beat.  Salted and served with freshly ripe tomatoes and a side of cottage cheese, and it's a meal I could eat every day, and some times twice a day.  Who needs meat?

I don't think okra seedlings transplant easily, but I don't know why I think that.  At any rate, we get plenty long enough summers here in mid-Missouri to direct plant the seeds, and as many as I grow, I would never be able to raise that many seedlings and transplant them anyway.  I do soak the seeds overnight to give them a head start and then keep the seeded areas moist until they germinate.  After that, I water if we don't get enough rain to keep them going.  Or, I should say I would water, because in three years, I haven't had that problem.

Since these guys grow best in hot weather (they must be loving it this year), there's no point in planting them too early.  I did just that the first year, but it was a fluke.  I planted Jing Orange (a red variety) and Midget Cowhorn (a green variety) that I ordered from Baker Creek Seed Company (organic seeds of heirloom and rare varieties suitable for Missouri) the first of May.  That wouldn't have normally been too early, and I didn't know the weather was going to turn so cool and wet.  The seeds just rotted in the ground.  I replanted Jing Orange seed I had left over on June 1, as well as some Clemson spineless (a green variety I got at Walmart), and they did okay, with the exception of a leaf disease I'll talk about more later.

I believe that is Clemson spineless on the left, and Jing Orange on the right.  The date stamp on the picture is September 2, 2014.  If you look closely at the plants on the right, you can see the dark red stems, leaf veins and seed pods.  Don't they contrast nicely with the dark green leaves and the pale flowers?  I love these red okra varieties.  Too bad the reds don't stay red when cooked.

 Since I preferred the red for the ornamental value (the pods turn green when you cook them), last year I tried several varieties from Baker Creek Seeds, all red:  Burgundy, Bowling Red and Red Velvet.  These I planted the first of May like the previous year, but the weather was much better.  They germinated within a week, and I harvested good pods from the second week in July through the first week of September.  Burgundy didn't germinate that well, and I replanted it the first week of June, with the same poor results.

The other problem I had the first year was that the leaves wilted and died leaf by leaf at a fairly rapid rate.  I kept picking off the diseased leaves and burning them, knowing that a plant needs its leaves to grow, but figuring the wilt would have spread more quickly and killed them anyway had I left them there.  I figured dying from lack of leaves at least didn't put any other plants at risk, and didn't permit the disease inoculum to build up from fallen leaves.   Since I didn't know what disease they had, I couldn't take a tailored approach, so just went with general sanitation measures.

Now that I think about it, the second year I planted beets in that same plot, and they didn't do well.  This year I planted cucumbers, and they're dying.  It's possible there's a soil fungus in that plot and the wilt was from that rather than a leaf disease.  I need to consider that for next year.  Planet Natural says that crops reported as having resistance to verticillium are lettuce, peas, beans and corn.  I think I'll solarize that plot next year, rather than plant it, and then plant beans or peas in it the following year.

I can't tell any difference in taste between red or green okra, or between varieties in each color, so for okra in my garden, it's just a matter of what looks good and performs well.  Therefore, this year, I decided to just plant red of any variety but Burgundy, since that one didn't germinate well last year.  I didn't order my okra from Baker Creek Seeds this time, though, because I wanted to try the varieties sold at Morgan County seeds.  The only problem was that when I went there to get my okra seeds, they only had one red variety:  Burgundy.

I bought it - and plenty of it so a poor germination rate would still result in enough pods - along with some Fife Creek Cowhorn (a green variety).  I soaked my seed and took them in two different cups out to the garden where I proceeded to plant beaucoup Burgundy seeds.  Then I went to another piece of ground and planted the Cowhorn.  Well, I thought that's what I was doing, but when I looked at my cups after I'd finished, I still had a full cup of Cowhorn seeds and very few Burgundy ones.  One thing it's always good to do when you're making a garden:  pay attention.

I didn't have space left in the garden except in a small corner by the lettuce, in a spot that's shaded during the middle of the day, and another tiny spot that gets a bit more sun.  They didn't grow very big in those places, and they aren't producing much.  As it was anyway, the spot I had set aside for them originally, but planted with Burgundy by mistake, gets some shade during the day, and so I have a good experiment in full vs. part sun for okra - or at least for Burgundy.  As you might guess, they do much better in full sun.

All those Burgundy seeds germinated just fine, so I have one of the densest okra patches you've ever seen.  It's like an okra safari when I go out to pick in the full sun patch.  I'm not getting much off the thin, short plants that are in partial sun.  They're only about waist high, whereas the ones in full sun are now as tall as I am.  I started harvesting this year the first week of July and am still getting lots and lots.

I started to wonder if refrigerating the pods toughens them.  I  feel like maybe it does, but I guess fresh is always best.  The Glad food storage people have these tips for okra on their website:

So, I'm doing pretty much everything wrong.

I thought I had read something once upon a time about not leaving pods on the plant, because if it starts ripening seed, it won't produce new pods.  I've been cutting off pods that get too big and tough to eat and saving them, but I'm wondering if those seeds will be any good.  I'm going to start leaving some on the stalks and see if those plants stop or slow down production. Then I can leave some of the last pods of the year to set for seed and compare them to the ones I've already picked and saved.

As for insect pests, grasshoppers and Japanese beetles like okra leaves.  A lot.  I don't spray chemicals on my food crops, so the insects just have at it.  Unless I catch them.  The first year was a boon for grasshoppers.  Or maybe that was last year.  I've hardly seen any this year.  Too darned hot, maybe.  Japanese beetles are a different story.  I've never seen so many as the invasion we're having this year.  I did finally get some carbaryl and sprayed the roses and asparagus ferns to knock down the hordes, and I go out early every morning and knock them off the okra leaves into my kill jar (a plastic lidded container with a kleenex doused in fingernail polish), or they'd make quick work of my plants.  This is what one or two can do to a leaf in a day's work:

Thanks for leaving the veins, but it's the chlorophyll the plants need, ya bums.

Till next time.

Late July - What's Still Standing?

Tomatoes and okra.  Nature's compensation for Missouri's brutally hot summers.  The perfect meal.  Add a little cottage cheese, or turn that tomato into a sandwich with crispy bacon and mayonnaise...and Bob's your uncle!

I'll talk more about those later, but today I want to talk about what's gone belly up that I would have expected to still be harvesting.

I planted lots of onions this year because last year's crop didn't last me through the winter.  I planted red, white and yellow onions, and I staggered the planting dates from the end of March when the ground was workable through mid-May. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of planting them at the edges of most of my plots where I, the cat, and other night-loving critters trampled a lot of them getting to the sweet stuff.

Then it rained and rained and rained.  I like not having to water the garden, but I prefer having to water it to having it drown.  From the 18th of April through to today, I've had more than 20 inches in my rain gauge, and on the morning of the 6th of July it was completely full at 5-1/2 inches, so I don't know how much more rain we actually got that night, but a nearby town was reporting 9 inches!  Actually, it's a good thing we've gotten the rains we have, because since the first of June, it's been blisteringly hot.

The point is, I had to pull 99.9% of my onions because after that heavy rain, the ground was so saturated, they were starting to rot.  The later plantings had not gotten very large, but those will be good for roasts (which I never make!).

The first year, I didn't plant any onions, since I really can't tell the difference in the taste of fresh home grown ones and those you buy at the grocery, and they take storage space, not to mention garden space, which I had totally used up in trying oddball things and three to four varieties of everything.  (Over-ambitious first time garden syndrome.)

The second year, I planted white, yellow, red, and cipolini, a variety I saw at Morgan County Seeds, which is yellow and flattened, rather than round, but I didn't have much luck with it.  

When I harvested my onions, I hung them to dry on a coat rack in the shade.

I also planted shallots that year (the reddish gold bulbs in the picture are shallots), and had a wonderful harvest of large, tasty bulbs.  I planted some this year, but not one came up.  I read somewhere recently that the best bulbs to plant for onions are the smaller ones.  No reason was given, but the shallots I planted this year were huge.  Maybe that was the problem.  I should have used them for cooking.

I harvested onions last year from the second week in June through the third week in July when heavy rains forced me to get them out of the ground.

This year, I had too many onions for a coat rack, so I set up a tomato cage and hung them there.  I'll soon be taking them down and storing them.  I thought the cellar would be a good place, but I think it's too humid right now.  What do I know?  Little or nothing about everything, as an old San Francisco friend of mine used to say.

But, I've gone from no onions to lots of onions in the garden.  I love the onions.  I like to pull up a big fat bulb, I like to watch them dry, and I like to smell the bruised tops when I'm gardening and not paying attention to where I'm stepping.

I also have a crop of Egyptian walking onions from a few bulbs I got at Powell Gardens in Kansas City.  I dug the whole thing up this year and replanted from bulbs.  It was getting out of hand.  A friend said she calls those type bunch onions.  The greens of these are very large and mild, but they don't make much of a bulb - it's more of a swollen base.  The bulbs you plant are produced from the flowers at the top of the plant.  They come up on their own in the spring, and so I use the greens while they're small and the only onion in the garden.

Okay, I focused a little too much on the onions.

What the heck happened to my cucumbers?  They are all but dead.  I've seen some squash bugs on them, but I don't think that's what's killing them.  They may be speeding up the demise, though.  I'm guessing it was too wet or too hot, or a combination one-two punch.  Most of them died on the vine.  I'm going to pull the plants out this week if they don't shape up.  Probably tomorrow.

I took that picture the first week of June when they were still looking like they might pull through.  This is what they looked like last year on the last day of June (same variety: Marketmore):

At one point this year, there was so much water in the soil and in the air that heavy guttation was quite visible.  Crying cucumber vines.  

The squash I planted this year was a substitute for the one I really wanted because I didn't order seed in time and purchased some at Morgan County Seeds where they didn't have the Golden Zucchini. I bought something I thought would be close: Gold Rush.  I was harvesting Golden Zucchini into August the first year of my garden, and late July the next year.  I don't remember much except the abundance of squash bugs the first year.

This year, I had something go terribly wrong, as individual leaves started dying off (which happened the previous year, if I remember correctly), and then entire plants overnight.  I pulled up the last one a few days ago.  It's been so hot I couldn't work up the energy to care enough to investigate, but also because the fruits weren't nearly as pretty as Golden Zucchini.  I hope the problem was a vine borer and not a soil fungus.  Perhaps next year the heat won't be so Satanic, and I'll do better.

Golden Zucchini

And, lastly, my beets seem to be done.

I have a gardening friend who's been doing it successfully for years, and she says she plants her beets in May.  University of Missouri Extension has a vegetable planting calendar that tells us to plant beets from March 15 - April 15 in central Missouri (north is a bit later while overlapping, and south is earlier, such is the difference in climate), and then again August 1, which I think I'm going to do this year.

(Before I get into my experience with beets, I'm going to disagree with the MU Extension people on this guide.  Golden Detroit beets do bleed, it's just that their color is not so intense as red beets.)

Anyway, here's what I've done with beets so far:

I love beet greens.  They're better than spinach because they're sturdier, and better than other sturdy greens like mustard greens because they're mild and sweeter.  I planted them in my first garden with the idea that I didn't even care if I got beet roots to eat as long as I had greens.  It was very cool and wet that first year, and what I think was cercospera - or at least it was some leaf spot disease - took them as soon as they got big enough to eat.

I had planted  one golden variety: Golden.  Who knows why they named it that, eh?  And three red ones:  Bull's Blood, Detroit, and Cylindra.  I got them all from Baker Creek Seeds.  The Golden variety didn't succumb to the leaf spot like the red ones did, and I got some decent roots from all of them, despite the blighted leaves and insect feeding.  It was a boon year for grasshoppers.

Last year, I decided to try more varieties.  Keeping the Golden that I'd had good luck with, I grew the following red varieties:  Boltardy (supposedly, it doesn't bolt as readily, but none of mine bolted last year before I'd harvested them so I don't know why I thought that would be a good idea), Red Ace, Detroit Red, Detroit Dark Red, and Cylindra.

I planted mid-March.  Cylindra didn't even come up.  The cool, wet weather we had that year didn't come until mid-April, and it lasted for about a week.   Detroit Red had heavy leaf spot, so much that I cut it back to the ground the end of April to reduce the innoculum that could spread.  I tried a second planting of Golden and Red Ace at the end of June, but the germination was very poor.

At any rate, I managed to get some harvest from mid May to the end of June.  So, I wouldn't maybe think I should be harvesting anything this late this year otherwise, but, I'd noticed that the red beets seemed to be more likely to get the leaf spot, and I figured this year I'd plant them a couple of weeks later than the yellow beets to try to avoid the cool, wet weather.  I planted Golden on April 23, and Detroit May 7. Everything looked great for a little while, but the insects eventually set in on the yellow beets (they like that sweet green, too, I guess), and my red beets are still just sitting there.  The tops are large, but I've harvested all of four beets.  The rest are just tiny roots.  I'm beginning to think they'll perform differently each year depending upon the weather.  

Golden, June 1, 2016

My daughter-in-law taught me how to roast beets by smearing them with oil, wrapping them in foil, and putting them in the oven.  Lawsy, Miss Scarlet, are they ever tasty.  I also cooked the baby ones by slicing and sauteing them and then throwing in the green tops.  Heavenly.

I canned a few golden ones as sweet & sour beets.  That's good, too.

Are you a beet lover?  Do you grow onions?  How do you harvest and store these veggies?

Till next time.