PNW: September 2014

What wonderful daily harvests, Rose! Your son must feel pretty proud of growing his own healthy apples like that. Great life lesson about working toward the future even though you can't always expect immediate results.

What kind of broccoli did you plant, and what made you choose that particular kind?

Nice size kolhrabi, turnips, and broccoli for having matured in the heat of summer.


I've never grown conjoined cukes before.


I'm guessing that they were laying against each other as they grew.  The growth wasn't much more than skin deep.

Dang! Very NICE!

Wow, I've never even heard of that.  Weird and cool find, boffer!

Wow, aphids are coming out in force in this part of the PNW. I found them crusting the greens in the school garden, in the little gardening area I have behind the house, and in the garden where I have all my tomatoes. They're really slamming my mustard plants! I hope they still do okay, because those plants have been a big success for me and I really like eating fresh mustard greens now. But the leaves are starting to curl in around their edges around the giant aphid colonies hiding underneath. I squished every one I could with my fingers and wiped all their frass off the leaves, then sprayed with insecticidal soap and neem, but came back to look an hour later and there were more aphids all over the place! This may be shaping up to be a pitched battle. Sure hope I win, because I have a lot of chard and kale starts, and plenty of greens planted already. I've got a lot of hope (and potential meals!) pinned on them this fall/winter.

Beans out back are still producing like crazy. I've picked out some pots I'll leave unpicked so I'll have some seed for next year.

We're replacing some ground cover we don't like out front with a different ground cover. That means pulling and chopping up and carting away a huge number of densely packed roots, some thick as tree roots, up and down our steep hillside. I came in a little wild-eyed from the heat and work a while ago. I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the day if I can. I'm in decent shape, but I'm no 20-year-old anymore.

Argh, aphids!   I had them last year and, after spraying them hard with water a couple times, ended up pulling out the whole bed of greens and replanting.  Fortunately it was early enough in the season.  But I've learned that I need to plant greens in more than one box or garden, far apart, just in case.

I also had them in my indoor winter garden in the box window and sprayed them with pyrethrin,.  That got rid of them but I also learned how dangerous that is for cats.  I never used the Ivory soap that I swear by now but will try that if they show up again.

BOIL THEM!

CC

Marc - you never said how your Dragon Tongue beans were progressing.  Did you ever harvest any?  How did you like the taste.  What about the royal burgundy beans.

CapeCoddess wrote:Argh, aphids!   I had them last year and, after spraying them hard with water a couple times, ended up pulling out the whole bed of greens and replanting.  Fortunately it was early enough in the season.  But I've learned that I need to plant greens in more than one box or garden, far apart, just in case.

Ugh, I hope I don't have to do that. The plants are so healthy and productive!

I also had them in my indoor winter garden in the box window and sprayed them with pyrethrin,.  That got rid of them but I also learned how dangerous that is for cats.  I never used the Ivory soap that I swear by now but will try that if they show up again.

BOIL THEM!

I never knew that about pyrethrin. I don't have cats now, but will again someday. Good to know. Is pyrethrin bad for dogs?
CC[/quote]

yolos wrote:Marc - you never said how your Dragon Tongue beans were progressing.  Did you ever harvest any?  How did you like the taste.  What about the royal burgundy beans.

yolos, I did get some, but one day I went out to the garden and the tops had been severely sun-scorched on almost all of the dragon tongue beans. The plants had been looking great and were just starting to come into their first flush of daily production, but they were never the same after that and have since then given me almost no beans. Additionally, moles have started popping up in the bed and disrupting the plants, so both the dragon tongues and the royal burgundies there are almost a total loss. I've only got a few pods out there now out of over 60 plants I suppose, and I'm going to leave them to dry for seed.

At home I'm growing some more Royal Burgundy, but I didn't plant any Dragon Tongues. I quite like the RB's. They're vigorous and productive and seem to like my semi-shady environment at home. I found their taste mild but satisfying, and it's hard to beat how spectacular they look on a plate, especially mixed with the usual green beans.

I also planted Speedy green beans, and like them too. They seem to stay pretty thin, especially at the stem end, but that's okay. I tend to pick beans very young and tender anyway, mostly because I don't know how big they are supposed to get and I want to pick them before they get so mature that the plant thinks it's time to stop producing. It will take experience to teach me the best time to pick. The lightly marinaded Speedies and the RB's bedded on some nice bright white shredded daikon, with a stripe of finely diced red onion running across their middle and a drizzle of balsamic, were outstanding and looked too fancy for the house. I felt like I should have had to fill out an application to be allowed to eat them. That was fun to serve a guest.

I and everyone else really liked the DT's taste too. Next year I'll grow all three beans again for sure. And what a spectacular looking presentation that mix could be on a plate: a green bean, a purple bean, and a bean (DT's) that's green with purple stripey patches!

This is my first year planting bush beans, and despite my bad luck in one of the gardens I plant in, I'm very happy with them and they will become a permanent part of my garden.

How does pyrethrin harm cats?  I no longer use it, but my first cat, Princess, died of lung cancer.  Around that time, I did use it occasionally.

Donna,  From what I have read, cats are more sensitive than dogs.  By sensitive I mean that a dosage of something that a dog can survive, does not mean that a cat of the same weight will also survive.  There is another topic where some of us discussed pyrethrin and our pets.  Think of what dogs will eat and roll in.  They give themselves a good shake and think they smell just fine!   Cats groom themselves so they will ingest their environment.
https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t16965-pesticide-use?highlight=pyrethrin

Thanks, Sanderson.  I did read this information last year, but I didn't see anything specific about pyrethrin and lung cancer.  So, I still don't know if that could have been a factor.

Marc Iverson wrote:Tomatoes swarming up outside their bed ...

Marc - I love the look on the outside of those concrete blocks.  Did you add stucco or did they come like that.  Our am I just seeing something that is not there.

Yolos, in my part of the country, we call them 'split face CMU'.  You can google that term to see color options.  I find them very attractive, and have built garden walls and columns with them.

Yeah, that surface is part of the cinder block, actually easier to find around here than ordinary cinderblocks.

Around here we usually have bricks in two colors: gray and "brick" unless you go to a stone specialist. But I've only personally ever seen cinderblocks in the usual gray. We've found there is regional availability to the shapes you can buy, but a specialist can make or order various colors and surface textures.

One nice thing I found out when getting these -- we got many of them at a steep discount. They are very hard to transport without getting chips or cracks in them here and there, but too bulky and heavy to ship back when damaged. So they regularly get discounted. We got some with very small chips out of the corners or sides, and on the inside long surface that would be facing the dirt and invisible, for a lot less than full price. You could never tell by looking at the finished beds.

Our beautiful summer continues as does the gardens harvesting

our weekend harvest



Tomatoes, Potatoes, Lemon & straight cucumbers, cantaloupes, apples, green & yellow beans, butternut & crookneck squash

still have more tomatoes coming (SFG bed #2 ) San Marzano



some of our tomatoes are huge .....in the picture below are Amish paste from a plant that lost its main lead, so I let 2 suckers take the lead....I don't understand how we are getting different tomatoes from the same plant? here they are side by side on the same plant



here is another large tomato from the same plant as above (Amish paste) it sure doesn't look like an Amish paste....




Indigo Rose tomatoes sure are pretty, but we don't care for the taste *blah*....the chickens love them though!



we only have those 3 tomato plants in our SFG bed #2
Amish paste, Indio Rose, San Marzano...why are some of the tomatoes so huge?



Im finding that I sure do love the art of gardening as well as consuming it



10 foot sunflowers



growing out of cinder blocks in with our herbs ( we did give them some liquid F a few times)



Lemon cucumbers from the back garden....our son missed these ones to eat...LOL...they were allowed to grow and boy are they delicious!



and best for last.....we made the 1st apple pie from our sons apple tree!



happy gardening
rose who hopes to be able to update you soon with our watermelons

Wonderful, rose.

Wow, so much cool stuff, Rose!

Those lemon cukes are huge! ... what's that growing in your cinderblock holes? ... I like Indigo Rose tomatoes; they don't taste quite like tomatoes almost, but still good to me, in their own way ... those San Marzano's are so densely packed, they look terrific! ... I love that pic of the tomatoes spilling out of the white bucket ...

Re different shaped tomatoes, I have that on my Better Bush tomato plant -- one that's comparatively quite big with a pointy bottom, whereas the usual is a medium sized round. I don't know why. There were a lot of hot nights when that tomato first formed, but who knows if environmental conditions have anything to do with it.

The green Amish Paste tomato looks enormous! I wonder how much it will end up weighing.

Marc Iverson wrote:Wow, so much cool stuff, Rose!

Those lemon cukes are huge! ... what's that growing in your cinderblock holes? ... I like Indigo Rose tomatoes; they don't taste quite like tomatoes almost, but still good to me, in their own way ... those San Marzano's are so densely packed, they look terrific! ... I love that pic of the tomatoes spilling out of the white bucket ...

Re different shaped tomatoes, I have that on my Better Bush tomato plant -- one that's comparatively quite big with a pointy bottom, whereas the usual is a medium sized round.  I don't know why.  There were a lot of hot nights when that tomato first formed, but who knows if environmental conditions have anything to do with it.

The green Amish Paste tomato looks enormous!  I wonder how much it will end up weighing.

This picture was taken in Aug. of our SFG area, you can see the sunflowers growing out of the cinderblocks on the right hand side 

these sunflowers are now 10 feet tall




happy gardening
rose..... who needs to buy a food scale

Really? Holey moley. We have 10-foot sunflowers growing in the school garden,but they are in HUGE pots. I never would have suspected that a plant as robust as a huge sunflower could grow in that tiny hole!

Marc the sunflowers surprised us too....I did feed them some liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks.....it will be interesting once we pull them out to see what their root mass looks like.

happy gardening
rose

Geez Rose, you always seem to have an amazing garden!  And I feel grateful to be on the receiving end of your garden art.  

My Supersonic tomatoes do that thing with 2 different shapes growing together on the same vine.  I just thought it was the result of saving hybrid seeds and that they were taking after their 2 parents.  Are yours hybrids?

CC

A local nursery that operates as a charity reopened to sell fall plants this week. I bought a four-pack of purple sprouting broccoli, which I remember reading good things about, for only a buck-fifty.

Going online, I read that it is normally planted in the spring for harvesting in the fall, or in the fall for harvesting in the spring, or even in the spring for harvesting next spring, all depending on the particular type of sprouting broccoli. Oh well, I guess I won't be eating any of these over the winter, and these guys are going to have to be babied for a long time.

Up-potted maybe ten Perpetual Chard into 4-inch pots, from the vermiculite seed bed I started in a tupperware container. I'm waiting to do that with some kale too, but they are growing very slowly. Usually vermiculite gets everything to its true-leaf stage, but some crops find it more difficult than others. I think the high-heat days we are having aren't helping my kale, a cole crop after all, develop very quickly. I hope they don't use up the energy they had as seeds before it's time to transplant them.

Tomato plants in my "good" garden bed are rapidly developing yellow leaves. But they're also rapidly developing tomatoes still, so it's a race. It doesn't quite look like late blight. Not sure what it is. The tomatoes in buckets, many of them, are just starting to produce. We're going on nearly four months of temps in the high 90's to 100 or so, so it's been a long, hard summer for them. It's hard enough being in a bed in those temps. It must be a misery in buckets.

The air is smoky around here. After a very long hot dry season, we've been extremely lucky not to have had more fires. Now we're getting smoke from far away, but still fairly thick. Hope it doesn't hurt the plants. It seemed to last year, spreading new disease and/or making existing disease take a firmer hold.

Pulled up a lot of roots today. It's basically using an axe to separate roots enough to grab them, then deadlifting them until they're thin enough that they can be pulled in the normal way. By the time I was done, my eyes could hardly focus, I staggered through lunch, and had to take a nap. People who have deadlifted or squatted know what I'm talking about ... really heavy lifting can make you so tired it overloads your system and sometimes you can barely make it through your post work-out meal. I'm going to be glad when summer is over, and I hope it snows very, very hard so I don't have to do this for a while.

Marc, Where did you have to pull roots? Were they invading the boxes?

Yes, it's the fire season. Two days ago it was really unpleasant to work outside.