Open air roasting

Most things look surprisingly good considering we're not getting any rain.  Of course, I've been watering the garden periodically, but even the cornfields look no worse for the wear.  Yet.  Many of the rose blooms, however, seemed to fry on their stems, and the second flush on some of the plants are at least a third smaller than the first blooms.

And my $10 'Canada Red' rhubarb wilted and put up new leaves twice and then gave up, even though I watered well and tried to shade it a bit.  I should have tried more, I guess, but each time the new leaves came up, they looked great for a day or two.  I'm extremely disappointed, and not happy about the money wasted.  

Ah, well.  I have been able to harvest some of the dozen other green-stemmed plants, but it's been limited due to the damage they sustained when we had freezing temps in April.   I read a note from a St. Louis woman visiting Chicago remarking about the wonderful weather there, saying St. Louis had "the longest winter ever followed by blazing heat."  I don't know if St. Louis is getting any rain, but this past week, we seem to be in a dry corridor with rain a few miles to the south and then a few miles to the north.  Maybe we'll get a turn next.  I hope.

The tatsoi has been lovely, and it's had far less insect feeding injury than in past years.  I decided that if I'm going to grow it, I need to find a way to cook it or use it other than as an addition to tossed salads, so my first attempt was at simply steaming it with salt as I would spinach or beet greens.  It tasted like other greens that I'm not fond of, like mustard greens.  I'll need to find another preparation.  It's so pretty, I hate to eliminate it from the ornamental vegetable garden.

I've pulled up the peas, such as they were, and will save them to plant next spring.  I have eaten very few while I working in the garden, but pretty much, this is my entire year's harvest:

How sad is that?  That April freeze robbed me of my peas.

The lima beans that I later planted in the pea row seem to be coming on ok.

The cabbages are not as riddled with feeding damage this year either.  I don't know if the "longest winter ever" cut back on the worm population or if I managed to get the Dipel on them at the right time this year.  Or maybe both.

'Early Jersey Wakefield' cabbage beginning to form a head

Aside from a few baby leaves off the red-veined sorrel, I haven't made any culinary use of the dock and sizu plot.  I keep thinking I'll boil some sizu and use the liquid to make pink rice, something I read about somewhere.   

One cucumber vine has made it to the top of the trellis, and I've placed a screen across the top to hold it up as it grows across.

Those leaf spots are barely noticeable now, and they were on everything.  So far, I've harvested and eaten two cucumbers, and several more are looking promising.

The 'Savor' French Charentais melon plants are filling up their cage and spilling out.  I'll be lucky if I even know when there's a ripe one in the middle of the cage, let alone be able to get it out.   I decided to let them run out onto the ground at one side so I might at least be able to get one or two melons!

The growth habit of the zucchini plants are better suited to caging.

I've recently harvested four baby beauties like this:

I'm still hoping this row of globe type basil plants will meet together to form a little hedge.  I originally hoped the row of purple basils inside them would make a full, taller hedge behind them.  Not sure that's going to happen.  For one thing, I probably needed to get more water on them.

The first planting of beets looks great, except for the fact that so few of them germinated.  The second planting did better.  I don't know why the first planting on May 2 didn't germinate well.  The second planting was on May 23, and the temperatures were pretty much the same for both.

'Bull's Blood' beets

'Bull's Blood' beets

This is the first time I've planted 'Bull's Blood', and whether it's just the weather this year, or the resistance of the plants, they're virtually free of the leaf spot that all my other beets had in previous years.  I'll try them again next year and see if they do as well.

The okra is coming along.  The outer row of 'Jing Orange' is catching up with the inner row of 'Red Burgundy'.

The insect and disease pressure this year has been mild so far.  I imagine some of that can be attributed to the freezing cold winter and first two weeks in April.

But I did find this telltale sign of insect activity on the underside of a poppy leaf:

Squash bug eggs.  I squashed 'em.

Somebody else was walking around on the poppies.  Can you see the walking stick in this picture?:

I happily let him (or her) continue on.  I know it's not fair that I let it keep eating when I wiped out the squash bugs, but walking sticks tend to be solitary, whereas squash bugs dine in large groups and can destroy plants very quickly.  They also stink and are not cute.  

Speaking of poppies:  Amongst the seeds of last year's 'Hungarian Blue' and 'Lauren's Grape' purple poppies, there was one white poppy - a mutation whose seeds I collected to see whether they would produce plants and, if so, what color.  The first buds looked like they were going to be purple, but they aborted.  And today...

I'll collect seeds of this one, too, and plant them out next year to see if they keep producing a white poppy.  I assume this is a mutation and not from an actual white poppy seed, because the plants I grew two years ago were all purple poppies.  I collected and planted their seeds, and from that generation, a white poppy plant appeared.  I suppose it could be that a parent somewhere back in the generational lineage was white, and this is a reversion to that type.  I'm not a geneticist.

Also, I have enough to try to puzzle out with those marigolds that had one yellow and one red flower to start out (yellow first to bloom).  Since then, they've continued producing only the red flowers.  Two of those plants, however, are producing a form of the flower that neither of the parent plants had - a single row of red petals with a yellow center.  This blended type is what I would have expected if anything out of the ordinary happened due to a cross between the two types.  I still can't explain the one yellow flower they started with.

Pretty, isn't it?  

I'm enjoying the toothache plant.  I was expecting a more pronounced or more brightly colored flower head, but the foliage is very nice.  I think this makes a very attractive ground cover, and, depending upon how it looks the rest of the year, and what happens in the spring, I'll try to keep it in mind if I ever need a  cover for a sunny area.  In fact, I have a couple of spots with varying degrees of shade that I might try it out in.  Out in?

'Grande Amore' has put out its first flush of cherry red blooms.  I like the pairing with this perovskia 'Little Spire'.  (Actually, the perovskia looks even prettier with 'Acropolis' rose, but 'Acropolis' isn't blooming nicely yet.)

The second flush of blooms on 'Shazam!', while still plentiful, are much paler and a good deal smaller.  The yellow underside of the petals isn't even noticeable. I've not seen it do that in the four years I've had it.

I'm so happy that my little 'Siren Red'  crepe myrtle made it through the winter.  I've grown it from a seed I collected from a plant I bought that didn't make it through its first winter here.  This is its third year of life, and it's really sweet.  I don't know if it will bloom this year, but I'm just glad it has managed to thrive. 

Now I have to find a place to plant it this fall where it can get some protection from the howling winter winds.  I just don't know where that will be!  I might simply pot it up to the next size and drop the whole pot into the ground next to the south wall of the house and then bring it back out to the patio in the spring.  I wonder how long I could keep doing that.

Until next time, if you're looking for me, I'll be doing a rain dance.

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.