What Happens When You Rush Things

Gardening is an inexact science.  You win some and you lose some, and you definitely learn along the way.  For planting the spring garden, I use the average last frost date for our zip code.  Our average last frost date is March 22nd.  If you plant on March 22nd, you have only a 10% chance of getting a frost and injuring or killing your plants.  You can also use the Early last frost date.  That date is March 3rd.  If you plant on that date, you have a 30% chance of injuring/killing your plants.

Sometimes, I subscribe to the "you gotta risk it to get the biscuit" mentality.  I could gamble and plant early, right?  What could happen, really?  So, I pushed things this year, planting the snap beans, cucumbers, squash and cucumbers around March 10th.  Well...  Just so happens, it got down to 34 degrees.  I thought, incorrectly, that things would be okay.  We have lots of trees, the plants were mulched, they would make it.  I was busy doing other things and I didn't even go out and cover them.

All the plants were damaged!  Let's take a look.  Here are the snap beans.  The leaves are burned from the frost.  Fortunately, fresh new growth is being put on.  They'll be stunted, but most of the beans are going to make it.

But look at the cucumbers!  I have 3 varieties planted on a cattle panel trellis.  The cucumbers are hit a lot harder than the snap beans.  Honestly, I think I'll have to replant ALL of these except one on the very end.  I don't know how it avoided the damage.  I will wait for 3 more days to see if any new growth appears.  Then if nothing happens, I'll pull the trigger and replant.

This third photo shows the severely damaged squash, including hills of zucchini, straightneck yellow squash and crookneck yellow squash.  This right here was my main reason for rushing things.  I figured if I got a really early start, I could avoid the squash vine borers.  This pest usually kills all of my squash.  I theorized that by getting a jump on things, I could make a big harvest of squash before the onslaught of the SVBs.  The squash was absolutely beautiful, with big, healthy green leaves.  They would have been blooming in a week.  Then the temperatures dropped and all of the big leaves turned brown and died.

But I'm hopeful.  I see fresh new green growth.  There's an old adage that says, "That which does not kill you, makes you stronger."  If there's any truth to that, perhaps we'll have a strong squash crop.  We'll wait and see.

Finally, in the garden in the side yard, here are my butternut squash and spaghetti squash.  Burned by the frost? Sure.  But these plants will live to fight another day!

There are significant benefits to getting things planted early.  You get plants that produce prior to fighting the high heat and bug and pest pressure.  But there is significant downside risk that may cause you to have to replant everything.  Fortunately, I don't think that is possible.  However, I'm pretty sure I'll be replanting all the cucumbers.  I will try to rush things and plant early again, I'm quite sure, but next time, I'll cover all of the plants.

The Worm Turns

The worm turns is an idiom used to explain a situation that changes suddenly and abruptly.  It's appropriate to use that expression when talking about today's topic.  Cucumbers.  Our spring/summer cucumber crop was stellar, stupendous, and superlative.  Each day we'd harvest all we could carry.  We ate them every lunch, gave lots away at church and to family and friends and lacto-fermented many pickles in gallon and quart-sized jars.  

When the cucumbers in that garden petered out, I planted another row of them on the same trellis, while working some compost into the soil for nutrients.  You never want to take more out of the soil than you put into it.  The cucumbers quickly grew, attached themselves to the trellis, bloomed and set fruit. In fact, just as we ate the last pickle from the pickle jar, the cucumber harvest began to come in again.  We were just starting to bring in a half dozen a day and enjoying them cut up with some salt and pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and then...

And then in one stinking day things turned south.  Worms descended on our cucumbers like the plagues in Egypt.   I guess had I been more vigilant and observant, I could have tried some neem oil on them, but it was not to be.

Just look at the destruction.  A few days prior, the leaves were broad and bright green, tendrils gripping the trellis as hopeful vines inched skyward.  Today we're left with webs, poop and the remnants of formerly productive vines.  

I scratched through the rubble of the failed crop and found the perpetrator, in fact three of them feasting on the last remaining cucumber.  I tossed it over the fence where many hens were waiting and watched with delight as I witnessed the worms got their comeuppance.

But no long faces here,  tomorrow I'll work some fresh compost and some chicken litter into the soil beneath the trellis and I'll plant our fall crop of Sugar Snap Peas.  Things turned quickly with the cucumbers - from abundance to abhorrent.  But things can turn quickly again with our crop of sugar snap peas hopefully and prayerfully planted.  If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Phase II in the Garden with Cucumbers and Summer Squash

We made a bumper crop of cucumbers this spring/summer in the garden.  It was a cool snack to have between meals or in a salad as a side dish and ate more cucumbers this year than you could shake a stick at.  We gave a bunch of them away and pickled the rest using the lacto-fermentation method.  Although we still have about a gallon of those left, the inventory is quickly depleting.  With that in mind, I planted a long row of them on the trellis that the sugar snap peas were growing on and they are coming on strong.

The cucumbers have blooms galore and if they set fruit, we'll have a spectacular fall cucumber harvest.  I planted several varieties: Boston Pickling (my personal favorite), Marketmore, and Suyo Long.  The Boston Pickling seeds were from some seed I had saved from 2015.  Knowing that seeds 10 years old would have a poor germination percentage, I planted them real thick.

Lots of blooms on the plants and if you look closely, you can see that we've got some baby cucumbers!

But cucumbers aren't the only plants with blooms.  Right to the north of the cucumber trellis, we've a row of yellow crookneck squash, zucchini squash and straightneck squash.  We have a real battle on our hands with the squash borer.  One day you'll have a healthy plant and the very next, it will have wilted and died due to this terrible pest.  Even if we have a good bit of squash in the freezer, I want to put up plenty more.  The blooms give me great hope that we can have phase two of the squash harvest.

We aren't the only ones happy with the blooms on the squash.  A big, fat bumblebee was knee-deep in squash flower pollen as I snapped this photo.

If the Good Lord's willing, we'll see a maturation of fruit on both the cucumbers and squash and will enjoy a nice harvest!

Mid-October Garden

In one word: DRY.  Of course, that's no surprise.  October is normally the driest of months.  By today's tally, it's been a month and six days since the last rainfall.  There's really no chance to speak of in the 10 day forecast.  I'm all out of the rain water that I sequester in buckets and barrels beneath the drip line behind the house.  All except for one barrel that the honeybees use to drink from.  So I've been running the sprinkler every day.  This is a sprinkler that Mom & Dad got me and we have really put some mileage on it.  We move it from one location to the other in the garden to get moisture in the soil.  This is a photo from a few weeks ago.  Even despite the lack of rainfall, the plants have grown nicely since then.

Amazingly, even as hot as it's been, the bug pressure hasn't been bad at all on the bok choy.  We've clipped all of this and eaten it since I took the photo.  It grows back quickly.  We usually cook these down like you would with any greens, but Tricia adds some ginger, lime juice and grated parmesan to the top of them.  They are really good.  This isn't something I grew up eating, for sure.  In fact, I would have turned my nose up at it, but now, I like it.

We like to plant a big variety of lettuce in the fall.  Even if we get a freeze, if we cover it, we've been successful in saving most of it.  I want to show you a new variety of lettuce we're trying out from Baker Creek (rareseeds.com).  This is called "Flashy Butter Gem" lettuce.  First time we've tried it and we achieved a phenomenal germination rate on it.  We won't know how it tastes for a week or two, though.

The leaves are a nice green color with what appears to be bloodstains on them.  I guess I'll overlook that trait.  Sure is lovely looking, though, with the morning dew beading up on the leaves before the sun evaporates it.  Just a beautiful lettuce.

But you need more than lettuce for a salad.  How about some cucumbers?  We've got some coming!  These cucumber plants looked atrocious the other day as some worms were feasting on the leaves and actually killed two plants.  That's when I dosed them up with some Neem Oil.  I'm impressed with that product.  It killed the pests and the cucumber plants quickly put on fresh new growth.

Lots of blooms coming, too!  I'm excited about some fall cucumbers for the salad.  I've got a few other garden reports coming in the next few days.  Stay tuned (and get out and enjoy this nice weather - it was 52 degrees here last night!)

Pushing the Limit

We plant heirloom (non-hybrid) seeds, so we try to save seeds from year to year.  It saves money, for sure.  Most years I also purchase seeds just as "insurance."  To save seed, you must research as saving bean or pea seeds differ from saving tomato, squash, and cucumber.  The hardest thing, however, about saving seed, is you want to save seed from your prettiest, biggest, most healthy harvest instead of eating it.

I have several drawers full of old medicine bottles and supplement cannisters that are labeled and stashed away.  Most years I'll plant a row of purchased seed and also a row of saved seed.  I want to rotate them using the first in - first out method.  What we've found is that as time marches on, the vigor and germination rate falls off.  To compensate, if my seed is really old, instead of planting a seed every four inches as some calls for, I'll plant a seed every inch.  

I have a whole bunch of Boston Pickling Cucumber seeds saved.  That is my favorite variety, although I grow 3 other varieties.  Boston Pickling are smaller, crisp, and have small seeds.  They snap and crunch when you bite into them and as the name suggests, they are perfect for pickling.  I pulled these saved seeds out of the drawer.  I saved them back in the spring of 2015.  They're almost 10 years old, but they've been kept dry and out of sunlight.  Let's plant them and see what they do.

I poured a bunch of seeds in my hand.  They look fine, but you can't judge a book by its cover.

I planted two seeds per seed pot, watered them and set aside.  In just a little bit, we had some growth.  We also had some with no growth.  Out of 12 seeds planted, four of them came up, giving us a 33% germination.  Not too good.  I'll remember to plant the rest of these next spring and I'll plant them very very close to make up for the low germination.

This evening I checked on them and they have their first true leaves on them and they look healthy.  I'll get these transplanted in the garden beneath the trellis tomorrow morning.

We had a spectacular crop of cucumbers this spring and enjoyed cucumber salads daily with fresh dill and blueberries.  Hopefully, we'll have a nice fall crop of Boston Pickling Cucumbers from seeds that are almost a decade old.

Hunters and Gatherers

I have been listening to a podcast about Davy Crockett.  So interesting!  The podcast is one that my uncle shared with me.  It's called "Bear Grease."  I'm hooked.  It's some fellas from Arkansas that are talking all things country - from squirrel dogs to catfishing on trot lines.  But my favorite, so far, a series on Davy Crockett!  It's an in-depth look at his life and the time that he grew up in, back when men were men.  The series, up to the latest posted, talk about his childhood, and his bear hunting exploits and it will get into his political career and the Alamo in upcoming segments.  

Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, Greenest state in the land of the free,
Raised in the woods so he knew every tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three
Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier

In thinking about Davy Crockett, I remember being a kid and me (or my brother) getting a coonskin cap as a souvenir on family vacation.  I tell you what, when I put that thing on my head, I felt like I was a woodsman.  Who needed grocery stores or clean clothes, or baths, for that matter?  With a coonskin cap on my head, I was King of the wild frontier.  As it turns out, stores are mighty helpful (and I think my wife decrees that baths are mandatory).

I will say this, though.  Last month, our grocery bill was only $150.  The Good Lord has blessed us with a productive garden.  We've been eating lots of fresh stuff from the "Farmacy" out back.  It is warming up and I want to share a refreshing, cool salad we gather and throw together for lunch.  Come with me and we'll do a little hunting and gathering.

The blueberry bushes are yielding berries, and if we can beat the mockingbirds and blue jays to them, we can pick a couple of pints each day.

They are big, plump and sweet!

Now, let's meander by the herb garden and pick a handful of fresh dill.

Let's grab a basket and head out to the garden and pick some fresh tomatoes and cucumbers.

We'll chop up the cukes and dill, crumble some feta cheese, sprinkle some blueberries, and sea salt and black pepper and then drizzle balsamic vinegar and olive oil and toss it up.

That's a cool, refreshing, crisp salad, right there.  Right from the back yard.  I'm not so sure Davy Crockett would have enjoyed this, though.  He'd have bear backstrap and taters for lunch instead, I'm sure, but he would still approve of trying to live off the land.

Quick Look at the Fall Garden (The Salad Rows)

Let's take a look at the Fall Garden.  The spring garden is tailing off with only okra and butterbeans producing still.  Well, our many varieties of peppers and eggplant are starting to really produce after a dormant summer slump.  Today, we'll look at the salad rows.  We have one full row with various types of leaf lettuce.  We've enjoyed salads deep into winter by covering these rows during freezes.  Here is the most prolific variety of leaf lettuce - the Black Seeded Simpson.

Growing up, I had never planted lettuce, so it was a new crop to learn.  In fact, when the lettuce got big, I'd pull it up by the roots.  Not smart!  My wife told me, "Why don't you cut the leaves off from the different varieties and they'll re-grow over and over?"  Why didn't I think of that?  This was the start of the "never ending salad bowl" during the fall and winter.

Here's a patch of Red Romaine.  It looks spiffy next to the Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf lettuce) that is it's neighbor to the east on the row.

Here is a mix of lettuce called Rocky Top Blend.  It must originate from Tennessee.  It has a nice mixture of different varieties and different colors.

And finally here is a variety of lettuce called Oak Leaf lettuce.  Yep, you guessed it.  The leaves mimic the appearance of an oak leaf.  The colors are different, the leaves are different, but I think that most lettuce tastes the same.  I'll admit I don't have a refined palate.  There was a salad mix I planted one time that was "spicy," you might say.  It had arugula, radicchio, and endive along with others.  It was just too strong for our tastes.  The varieties I have planted are all sweet and tasty. 

Along with every salad, you'll want to slice up some cucumbers.  This is the first time I've attempted to grow some in the fall.  If the frost holds off, we'll have at least ONE cucumber to cut up.  There's lots of blooms and lots more on the way!

Tricia likes to slice up homegrown tomatoes for the salad.  We've got lots of tomatoes coming.  I've trellised them using the Florida Weave method and they are happy, adding inches of growth each and every day.  Annie, the Nubian Goat, is coveting the tomatoes.  If she could, I promise you, she'd be in there making a mess of the garden.

We have lots of blooms and lots of tomatoes coming!  We'll see if we can get a harvest in before the first freeze hits.  The Old Farmer's Almanac shows November 26th to be the first FROST date for our area.  We can protect these from a frost, but not a hard freeze.  We'll watch and see what happens.

While I was pinching off suckers that grow in the tomato plant's 'elbows' and squeezing to death four or five late season Army worms that were feeding on the tomato plants' foliage, I saw one of our honeybees that was busy (as a bee) pollinating one of the tomato blooms.

That concludes the salad rows.  I'll show you some of the other rows a little later this week.  We still haven't planted a few fall/winter crops like mustard greens, spinach, and turnips.  Those will likely go in once the okra finishes up.

As the Worm Turns

For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from generation to generation.    Isaiah 51:8

Last week we picked the very last cucumber off the vine.  They had been producing since spring.  We have eaten a lot of cucumbers this year!  Production was off the charts, especially with the Marketmore variety.  But all good things come to an end.  I told Tricia that we'd have a brief time of no cucumbers, but...

Not to worry.  I had planted some Boston Pickling Cucumbers from some seed we saved in 2016.  They ALL germinated and were beginning to vine.  It was time.  I took them out to the garden, put a little composted chicken litter down in the holes I dug, and planted the cucumber plants.  I trained the vines to wrap around the trellis.  The cucumber plants were happy.  I walked inside thinking, "We'll have cucumbers for most of the year!"

There's an old saying about not counting your chickens before they hatch.  The very next day, I walked out to check on the cucumbers and this is what greeted me:

Some little green worms were wiping the edges of their mouths with handkerchiefs and then burping loudly after devouring every green leaf off of every cucumber plant!

I had transplanted spaghetti squash in the garden.  So far the worms have not discovered them.  These right here are butternut squash.  I think I'm going to keep them right here on the patio for a little while - or at least until I can pick up some Neem Oil.

The tomato plants I planted for the fall crop are looking healthy.  If the Good Lord's willing, we may have a fall crop of tomatoes, but then again, we may not.  Here is the first tray:

And here is the second.  If you look down to the very bottom of the photo, you'll see a six-pack with just dirt and no plants... yet:

Those are Round 2 of the fall cucumber crop.  If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again.

Putting Some Stuff in the Ground in August

We march forward toward September and the gradual reduction in temperature and humidity that will be welcomed with rejoicing by yours truly.  The okra continues to produce in abundant fashion.  As I write this, Tricia is 'cooking some okra and onions down' that she'll freeze and we'll use in gumbos throughout the winter months.  Cucumbers, believe it or not, have had a rebound and are producing once again.  

Speaking of cucumbers, I've got to tip my hat to an elderly gentleman who dropped by the house this spring and gave me some cucumber seeds.  They were of the Marketmore Heirloom variety, and I've got to report that they were the stars of the show, producing steadily throughout the hottest of months when my Boston Pickling and Suyo Long varieties faltered.

Anyhow, I planted a few seeds in some seed pots to get the fall garden underway.  Here are some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash:

And here are some spaghetti squash.

In a little experiment, I planted 12 Boston Pickling Cucumber seeds from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  What do you know?  All 12 sprouted.  We achieved a 100% germination rate on some seeds we saved 6 years ago.  Not too shabby.

Having that all planted, I got out my Vegetable Planting Guide to see what else I could get my hands dirty with.  Well, it told me that it is time to plant Irish Potatoes.  Right now.

Our feed store does not sell seed potatoes for fall crops.  What we must do is save seed potatoes from our spring crop.  I dug through the bin of potatoes and picked out a dozen small red potatoes (Lasoda variety).  All of the potatoes from the spring are holding up good, stored in the dark in a well-ventilated hallway.

You can see that most of them have (at least one) nice eye growing on them.  That gives me optimism that we'll have spuds this fall.  It is always a risk, right?  The choice is, I could eat these 12 potatoes and really enjoy them.  Or, I could put them in the dirt and see if I could multiply a dozen potatoes four or fivefold?

I'm taking a chance.  I won't put them in the cooking pot.  I'll put them in the planting pot.  I'm trying an experiment this year.  Instead of putting them in the ground, we will try our hand at growing them in pots.  The area where I normally plant them is already populated with purple hull peas and blackeyed peas that are about to put on pods.  No room for potatoes out there.

I filled 12 nice sized landscape pots with the rich compost made from the rotted wood chips in our mulch pile.  It's black and moist and teeming with earthworms - a good medium to grow potatoes in.  Once the potatoes are up, I'll dose 'em up with some composted chicken litter.  Another plus is that, if we get an early freeze like the one that killed my potatoes a couple years ago, I can pick up the pots and bring them in the garage and save the spuds. 

Here are the potatoes planted before I put 3 1/2 to 4 inches fresh compost on top.  I'll be watching over the next several days to see when they sprout.

We have rain for the next 5 or 6 days forecast, but once that is past, I'll look to what else I can put in the ground.  I'm thinking it's time for a couple rows of snap beans.  Happy Gardening Fall Gardeners!

Making More Cucumbers Than We Can Eat

A bumper crop of cucumbers is not a problem.  It's an opportunity.  Most everybody around gardens and has excess cucumbers.  We're eating cucumber and onion salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar every day.  We're also making tzatziki often.  We can't catch up and the cucumber supply continues to build.  So what do you do?  We make dill pickles!

First we brine them in salt water overnight.  These are organic Boston Pickling Cucumbers.

We rinse them off in a colander.

The canning jars, lids and rings are all sterilized.

The cut up cukes are packed tightly in the pint-sized canning jars along with garlic, peppers, dill, and herb and spices.

All the while we're boiling a vinegar solution on the stove with pickling spices.  A canning funnel is used to fill each of the jars with the pickling liquid and then the lids are placed on the jars and the rings tightened finger tight.

We place them in a big pot on the stove and ensure that the jars are submerged beneath the water at least a couple inches.  This is water bath canning - no pressure.  Once the water comes to a boil, we set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes.

When the timer goes off, we remove the jars from the pot of water and set on a cooling rack.  Then we listen.  Can you hear it?  One by one, the lids begin popping as the jars cool.  That means they're sealed.

I put them on the window sill while the morning sun was shining through.  Always a nice sight.  For now, we'll stack the jars of pickles in the pantry.

As our supply of pickles grow, we'll continue to make pickles and stack them up in the pantry.  It's always nice to have a good supply of pickles to pull out of the pantry, pop the lid open and snack on dill pickles.