Summer Harvest

This year I'm re-evaluating some things, and evaluating the new ones.  

I haven't had any luck with melons in the past and had given up on planting the.  But then, for some reason, this year I tried a canteloupe type melon I'd never heard of:  French Charentais.  This one is the variety 'Savor'.  I read that you know when to harvest them because the tendril associated with the melon will dry up.  I was watching closely. What they didn't say was, the melon will suddenly turn yellowish all over all at once, and that's your clue to get them before the wonderful aroma attracts raccoons and bunnies to eat them about halfway - enough that you won't want what's left.  Experience is the best teacher for some things, eh?

It's been a very nice melon with firm flesh and a mild, musky flavor.  The plants I put inside a large tomato cage produced several nice-size melons, and the ones that I left free on the compost hill didn't produce much at all.  Of course, they weren't watched over and watered like the ones in the cages inside the garden proper.

French Charentais melon 'Savor'

I think I'll plant two cages worth next year and leave the compost pile for something else.  Maybe compost.  

I harvested what will be the last of the rhubarb for this year.  Three whole plants have given up the ghost.  One more looked like a goner, too, but has put up a couple new little leaves .  I don't know if the others will try to come back next year or not.  The aggravating thing is that one of them was the beautiful red-stemmed plant I paid $10 for this spring.

The packet of 'Rainbow' bell peppers I purchased from Morgan County Seeds said it was going to be an assortment of various colored sweet bell peppers.  Not knowing which seed would produce which color, I just started a few and set them out.  One plant has small dark purple bells that are almost black, and the others all seem to have large fruits that are themselves a sort of rainbow color.  They may have turned red or orange if I left them longer, but they look like they're ready to start drying up, so I harvested them.  Juicy and mild flavored, and very pretty.

I think I'll forego planting zucchini next year.  When I grow them in the cages, they tend to be misshapen, but when I let them sprawl, they take up way too much space.  Also, they're always heavily infested with squash bugs.  This year I tried sprinkling the plants with diatomaceous earth which is supposed to kill soft-bodied insects that crawl across it.  Maybe it would work with worms, but it didn't seem to interfere with the squash bugs.  It did, however, make an unsightly white mess on the plants.

Also, the plants I've put out the last three years have borne fruits that are mostly green after the first couple of yellow ones are harvested.  (Even though they have names like: 'Easy Pick Gold' and 'Golden Squash'.  For now, I have enough frozen from last year for winter soups, and I've frozen some more from this year.  I'd rather use the space next year for another planting of melons.

The extreme heat has done a number on the tomato plants, as I feared it would.  Actually, I thought I might not get any tomatoes at all.  They did set fruit early, and I've gotten several nice fruits.  But then, they just put on tons of lush foliage.  

One of the free packets of seed I got from Baker Creek was a tomato called 'Black Vernissage'.  I set out a couple of plants on the compost hill just for the heck of it, even though the reviews weren't all that great.  It's a pretty little speckled salad-size tomato (in the picture below they're next to a 'Missouri Pink Love Apple' normal size tomato for comparison).  The taste isn't anything special, so I won't be taking up any more space for those in the future.

 As for the cherry tomatoes which I collected seed from my neighbor last year:  I planted out two plants from the seeds of large golden, super sweet cherry tomatoes, and one produced (smaller) golden tomatoes, but the other produced red ones.  You never know what you might get from collecting hybrid seeds.

Not even the ones from the purchased packet of 'Sun Gold' grew to much size, and none of them are super sweet like the neighbor's were last year.  I can't judge them this year, though, because it's been such a brutal year weather-wise.

One thing I didn't have much of this year - thank goodness, and surprisingly - was tomato hornworms.  Here's one I did manage to overlook until it grew gigantic.  

Sadly for her (I'm guessing), she didn't live long enough to lay eggs.  Or, at least, I didn't see any.

The sunflower seeds I planted were pictured as something quite interesting, and unique.  This is the picture from Johnny's Seeds of 'Sunfill Purple':

Neat, isn't it?

Here's what all of mine look like:

Slightly different.

I've had to fight Japanese beetles on the okra so much that I'm not getting to harvest a lot.  Spraying with Sevin means you can't harvest for three days, and in that time, the pods can easily get too big.  I figured I could use them for seeds next year, but I've decided I hate fighting those beetles too much.  This year, the farm land that's way too close to my garden is planted in corn, and the beetles aren't attracted to that, but last year it was soybeans, and they came in hordes. Horrendous, horrible hordes. Next year it will be beans again, and so I think I'll not even bother giving them okra to boot.  So sad.  I do like okra.  Maybe every other year.

Foregoing okra won't help with the roses though.  The nasty little buggers love roses maybe more than anything.  In order to have any flowers at all, I have to keep spraying with Sevin, which leaves a white residue on the leaves, and even at that, it's nearly impossible, because they burrow down between petals.  And this is what just a few will leave within an hour or so:

And when this many attack, it's a matter of minutes until there's nothing left but a nub:

Makes me so mad.  If I want roses while the beetles are present (from June through September!) - and I do - I have to spray the buds with toxic insecticide as soon as they start to show color, then spray them again when they begin to open, and then cut them and bring them indoors when they're open enough to keep opening.  Grrrrr.

I'm going to look for an insecticide that will kill them which has a different mode of action from Sevin next year, as I've already sprayed that three years in a row, and I'm concerned about the development of resistance.  

But, on the bright side, I have been getting some pretty bouquets: 

'Neptune'

'Dark Desire' and 'Winter Sun' with white Lisianthus

'Neptune' and 'Winter Sun' with blue Delphiniums, 

purple Yarrow, and purple Lisianthus

'Neptune' and 'Winter Sun' with blue Delphiniums, 

purple Yarrow, and purple Lisianthus

The Queen Lime series of zinnias has also made for some lovely bouquets (and the Japanese beetles don't care for them as much).

And, glory of glories, we're having a spell of normal hot summer weather - in the 80s!  What a relief.

 Cheers.

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.

A little rain to soothe us

And some morning fog to start the day after too many days of unseasonable heat.

I got sick of handling the little six-packs of peppers and basils and decided to go ahead and plant them in the garden a little over a week ago.  I didn't have any grass clippings for mulch, but I did still have some bags of maple leaves I'd collected last fall, so I ran over them several times with the lawn mower until I had a wheelbarrow full of nice-sized pieces to perfectly mulch the newly planted beds.

After a lot of tedious work, I had planted and soaked down two beautifully and thickly mulched beds so that on these hot days the ground wouldn't dry out quickly, and any little weed seeds that sprouted would be smothered.  

Well done!

Until the following  day, that is, when a scirocco from the Sahara blew all day long.  This is what it left:

Better than nothing, I guess.

These beds had okra in them last year, and when I added a couple inches of compost to them, I left the old okra stubs and roots in the ground.  My idea was that I could easily plant peppers and basil in the spaces between the roots, and the roots would rot away, amending the soil.  It turns out to have the added benefit that it's something of a deterrence to moles going through under the surface.  This is a huge plus.  The little pests almost wrecked the lettuce patch this year.  It looked like they were having a party under there, and the plant roots were getting pushed up and losing contact with the soil, and then wilting.  I had to keep going out and tromping on them to get them back down.  Of course, tender little lettuce plants don't like to be trod upon.  

Finally, I have a red-stemmed rhubarb plant!  After only thirteen tries.  Here's the story:  I found it at Springwater nursery.  I had to pay $10 for it, too.  It better live.  The variety is 'Canada Red'.  

The potatoes I tossed into the compost pile are coming along.

The second round of lettuces is coming up between the first rows, and I've got more lettuce than I can handle, despite the moles.  I'll be giving away bags full. 

That freezing weather we had the first two weeks in April did a number on the pea germination, reducing it to about 20% of what I planted.  They're producing pods now, but I don't think there'll be enough for a harvest.  They will just have to be one of those things that I eat raw while I'm working in the garden.

I planted the lima beans on the 12th, figuring they'd be perfectly happy in this early heat, and they emerged four days later.  Normally, I would be planting limas after the peas had produced all they were going to and I pulled out the old plants, which last year was the first of June.  This year, they'll be in there together for a while.  That pathetic stand of peas certainly won't crowd the beans.

Left side of arc: 'Improved Maestro' bush peas; right side: Henderson's Bush lima beans

Speaking of beans, the runner beans I planted next to the cucumbers on the trellis are being attacked by something.  I sprayed them with neem oil, which is a natural, all-purpose insecticide, miticde and fungicide.  Since I've not seen what's eating on them, I'm hoping this will mitigate the damage.  It's not nearly enough to interfere with the plant growth (yet), but the reason I planted them there was to grow over the trellis and look pretty.  They're beginning to confirm my suspicion that this might just be a jumbled mess instead.  

Whoever is eating on the beans doesn't seem to be interested in the cucumbers.

This arrangement is definitely going to take some serious management and vine training.

I haven't had any luck with the melons I've tried before, but this French Charentais variety ('Savor') looked so good in the description that I had to try it. 

I've put three plants on the compost pile with no support, and three in the garden proper, which I caged beside the yellow zucchini.  (I had to buy the zucchini, as the year-old seeds I planted failed to germinate.)

I hate putting up the cages, because they detract from the beauty of the garden, but once the zucchini plants grow up into them, they get covered with foliage, and picking the fruits is easier than if they're on the ground.  Also, they don't seem to get so many squash bugs.  Here's hoping the melons will benefit from the cage as well.  It's going to be a little tricky to remove the fruits, though, since they're not going to fit through the cage wires (hopefully!).

 

The cabbage row is growing large, and somebody is already eating it.  I don't know for certain who it is, but since a likely culprit is cabbage worm, I'll need to start applying Dipel, which spoils the beauty when you use it in powder form, but that's all I have.  And the melon/zucchini cages have already spoiled the illusion that this isn't a vegetable garden.

The purple Zi Su (Perilla aka shiso) is a disappointment.  The description of the taste said it's a cross between mint and basil.  I guess that's a fair description.  But the leaves are kind of hairy, and I don't like that.  Maybe it doesn't like this terrible heat, because it always looks kind of droopy.  I won't be planting it again, but the Baker Creek description mentions using it for color to make pink rice.  I might try that.  In fact, the strange flavor might just be a good one for rice.

(That reminds me - sidetrack:  I put some peeled hard-boiled eggs (brown eggs) in the liquid from my pickled beets, and within a couple of days they were a beautiful dark magenta all the way through the white and a little way into the dark yellow yolk.  I should have taken a picture of the slice.  Very pretty.  Fairly tasty.  But then I put some in the liquid from a jar of Kalamata olives.  After three days they were a not particularly attractive color, but boy, did they taste delicious.)

OK.  Out of the vegetables and into the  cut flower and rose gardens.

This is not what I was expecting from the Gaura (also purchased from Springwater):

The foliage is gorgeous, and that flower color is amazing (until it fades to a pale pink), but I was expecting the flower to be borne on a tall stalk, swaying in the breeze.  Maybe this is just an artifact of the bizarre weather we're having and the first flower production of the season.  I'll find out with time.

You just can't beat this 'Sparkling Sapphire' baptisia (purchased last year from Helmi's) for show:

But you can match it with this pink lupine (grown from seed purchased from Baker Creek, overwintered from last year):

A watched pot never boils, nor does a watched flower ever blossom.  I've been tracking this giant allium for days.  It's pretty cool the way it's unfolding, though.

Check this out:  I collected marigold seed last fall from my plants that had done so well.  Since I had three or four different varieties, I tried to keep the seeds separate.  I figured it was a long shot they'd come true to the parent plants since they were all close together and expected at least some crossing.  What I didn't expect was that the cross would produce a plant that had two different varieties on the same stalk!

When I saw this, I thought I'd simply gotten two seedlings growing together that appeared as one, but those two flowers are branched off the same stem.  

I've seen trees and shrubs that have been grafted to have more than one variety of fruit or flower, but I've never heard of a plant doing this on its own.  In theory, at least as far as my education goes, those flowers should be similar to each other, if not to the parent plants, but for one to be completely like one parent and the other completely like another parent is something I've not heard of.  I'm eager to see what the continuing blooms look like.

Always something surprising when you're growing your own plants.  

Fingers crossed for more rain. And a little cooler days would also be nice.  This isn't July.

'Karl Rosenfeld' peony and dark purple bearded (German) Iris