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.