Mostly Pictures

It's been another busy week. I took a vacation week last week and spent this week at work catching up. Sometimes taking a vacation isn't worth it. I've neglected the garden even more than usual this week and it's a mess.

But here's an update anyway. Mostly just pictures.

The sugar sorghum I'm trying has put out seed heads. I'll cut it down in a few weeks and see if it's actually sweet.





I checked my garden this morning and set up some irrigation. My two remaining walking stick cabbage plants looked pretty good. They both had several large leaves at least 18" long and probably closer to 2 feet long. This afternoon, one of them has been eaten by something.





The vine that came up by itself in a flower bed is still unidentified. I thought it looked like a pumpkin but now it's got fruit and I don't know what it is. It's nothing I've ever grown before.





The fuji apple I cut down due to fire blight is putting out new suckers. I'm cautiously optimistic.





Something's been eating blackberries. I think it's a groundhog. At least he left me two.





The upside down tomato experiment on my porch is a limited success. It never got as big as I had hoped but it only gets a few hours of sun a day. It does have a red tomato.




The loofa sponge gourds are getting big. I'm not sure when to harvest or even what to do with them once I do harvest but this was my wife's idea so I'm off the hook. I also don't know how to spell "luffa" so I'll be trying out all possible spellings hoping I get one right.




And finally some of the grapes are almost ready. Several bunches are just raisins. I don't know why.

Vine Borers, Cabbage Stalks, and Pickles

Yesterday I spotted a vine borer moth flying around the lone pumpkin that sprouted on its own in a flower bed. I had pumpkins wiped out by this bug a couple of years ago. It lays eggs near the base of the vine and when they eggs hatch, the little worm eats its way inside. Once in the vine,it just keeps eating and growing. Eventually it's eaten so much that the vine wilts and dies. That's how I found out I had them...one morning all my vines were wilted and dead.

When I saw this moth yesterday, I watered the pumpkin and added a little imidacloprid at the base of the vine. This is one of my favorite chemicals. It gets absorbed by a plant and makes the plant poisonous to bugs but not to us. One bite and it's dead bug. I don't know if it's approved for pumpkins but I won't be eating these anyway so I'm not that worried. Hopefully it will work.

We've had hot dry weather for a long time. We finally got rain last night. According to my rain gauge we got an inch and 7/10. That's a lot of water.




This morning is the first time in weeks that I don't hear a dozen large diesel irrigation pumps running at full throttle in the far off distance. Also noticeably absent is tap-tap-tap of a dozen large irrigation guns that we've been hearing and seeing in all directions. It's oddly quiet.

I have been growing "Giant Walking Stick Cabbage" as an experiment this year. According to the info that was in the seed catalog, these things grow a tall stalk with something similar to a cabbage at the top. The dried stalk is supposed to make a good walking stick. Right now these things look like big kale, and are just growing at ground level. No stalk. I have been expecting these things to make some sort of stalk with a seed head just like lettuce, raddish, spinach, and other similar plants will when the weather gets hot. Turns out I was wrong.

I did some searching and found out that to get the stalk, you need to remove the lower leaves. as long as you keep removing the lower leaves, it will grow taller and make more leaves. So this morning I removed the lower leaves. Now it's looking more like I expected.




Something's been cutting the leaves off of my peppers. Probably a leaf cutter worm of some sort.



Now for some of the good news:

I had my first peach this morning. Not as soft and ripe as I prefer but good enough to eat and actually tasted like a peach. We'll probably only end up with a dozen actually etable peaches between the fungusus, insects, june drop, and other problems but this is my first year getting any peaches so a dozen's better than none. (I almost said 12x better but everyone knows you have to multiply 0 by ∞ to get 12 but somehow a dozen peaches just doesn't feel infinitely better)

The pear I thought I was going to loose hasn't shown any signs of fire blight in a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of summer left so I'm not out of the woods yet but I'm hopeful. It's even still got a few pears on it.


And finally, I had enough cucumbers and dill to make a batch of pickles. I made some last year that were not terrible but were too salty. This year I changed the recipe a little and increased the amount of vinegar and only used half the salt. I used my own cucumbers and dill and had to buy garlic. I did spears, flat round slices for burgers, and long flat slices for sandwiches. We'll know if they're any good in 8 weeks.

So far so good

It's summer, it's hot, and a lot has happened since my last post on the 8th. Two weeks ago I was loosing peaches and my pears had what looked like fire blight.

The permanent plantings

So far, so good. The peaches stopped dropping and I've still got a lot left on the tree. I'm assuming there was just too much fruit ont he tree and it was natural thinning.

Peaches, almost full size

I've had to cut out a couple of more branch tips on my pears as they curl and turn black to keep the fire blight from getting a real foot hold but there hasn't been any new damage in a week so I'm hoping I'm out of the woods. The few pears that were on my two small trees are still there and starting to look like pears.

pears looking like pears

The apples have been doing well. They've got some brown spots but nothing that's really going to hurt them. They're not pretty enough for the supermarket but I'll eat them.

apples

The only other permanent planting that's doing anything interesting is my grapes. I've got grapes, lots of them. Most are hidden under the leaves but you can see a couple of bunches on the left side of this picture.

grapes

Now onto the garden.

You might remember that I'm trying some giant walking stick cabbage this year. I think they're doing well. I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing but they're not dead. This is one of this year's odd ball plants I'm trying. I should have walking sticks in no time.


The corn and sugar sorghum is looking good. Actually, only about half the sorghum came up but that half is looking healthy. Corn always does well until just before it's ready to be picked. Then beetles eat the silk, worms move into the husk, or earwigs take over.

The broccoli came on unusually early this year. I cut the first heads a couple of weeks ago and it was already full of worms. I'm going to let the rest go to seed without cutting any more. I just want to see how that happens and I can buy broccoli at the supermarket without worms. If I was starving, I could eat the broccoli. Thankfully I'm not.

The onions are looking great. I don't have much luck with onions so I don't know what's different this year. Usually, they get rotten right at the ground line in the early spring.

corn and a sparse row of sorghum

Celery is starting to look like celery, The lettuce and other greens are past their peak and should be sending up flowering stalks to make seeds soon. I've never tried planting lettuce from my own seeds but I have had them go to seed and ended up with a yard full of lettuce in the fall. There are hundreds of little 1/4" diameter carrots.

everything else (almost)

I planted 5 tomatoes. Three regular full size tomato plants and two grape tomatoes. They're not doing well. I don't know what's wrong. They haven't grown much, they look a little wilty and the color isn't really as green as they should be. There are a couple of diseases that can do this but they've been like this for three weeks and if it was a disease, they'd be dead.

I've still got some room left so I think I'll try some new tomato plants on the other side this weekend.

underachiever

I had planted 8 cucumbers. only two have survived. The two look good but I'm also growing dill and was hoping to can some dill pickles. I went looking for cucumber plants last weekend to replace the dead ones but no body had any left. It looks like I need to finish stringing the trellis for the cucumbers this weekend. I am going to try growing them up on a trellis to keep the cucumbers off the ground.

lonely cucumber

Eat Your Peas

I know it's spring because plants are starting to sprout. The peas I planted on March 25th and 30th are staring to pop up. I saw the first one on Wednesday and about half the seeds were up this evening. Only 51 days till we have real peas. I can't wait to push these things to the side as I eat my dinner. Having peas with dinner is like going out to meet girls and taking your ugliest friend along. You bring the peas to make the rest of the food look eatable. I believe God was very clear with his intentions concerning peas when he failed to make them out of meat.

Peas, Punishment Food

The two peach trees have already peaked and are starting to drop petals. The Pears are just getting ready to bloom. Last year, I had a total of three pear flowers but no pears. This year, the two trees are completely covered with flower buds. I mean hundreds. I know you aren't supposed to count your pears before they hatch but it's looking good so far.

A tasty mouth-watering peach.

A Fruit Basket full of Bosc Pears

Everything in the Garden/orchard/fruit rows got fertilizer this evening. I bought a cheap bag of low quality fertilizer last year. Fertilizer is sold using 3 numbers that tell you how much actual nutrient is in the stuff. A typical formulation would be 20-20-20 which is 20% Nitrogen, 20% Phosphorous, and 20% Potassium. I bought a mix of 6-0-2. I actually bought it because I wanted something with lots of Iron and this stuff had Iron but as fertilizer it's pretty light.

So I dumped cup fulls of this stuff all around. Each tree got probably 5 lbs of fertilizer, the grapes, berries, asparagus, and everything else is growing out of a mound of fertilizer. If this was the good stuff, that much fertilizer would burn the plants and probably kill them but I think I'll be okay.

Remember the walking stick cabbage I planted in baby food containers? Well I did, and they're sprouting too. I'll soon have 8' tall cabbage-topped walking sticks to take on all my walks.

(Soon to Be) Giant Walking Stick Cabbage.

Cabbage on a Stick

Looks like I'll probably blog on the weekends. That makes sense since I'll mostly be working on the garden on the weekends.

The weather's finally warming up. It was in the 60's this afternoon and pretty comfortable. The peaches are in full bloom. In third grade science, I learned that each flower will eventually become a delicious peach. Growing my own peaches taught me that they'll all be eaten by bugs, infested with worms, or just fall off the tree for no apparent reason.


I spent a little time today fixing some things around the garden. It's still to cold and too early to do much actual gardening. I turned on all the irrigation stuff and found a few drip emitters that weren't dripping. Replaced those with new ones. The openings in these things are so tiny that a speck of dirt will plug them up. I buy the cheap ones so there's no way to take them apart for cleaning. Instead of wasting money on the good ones and keeping them forever. I save money buy buying new ones every few months. I'll have to rethink that.


Drip emitters drip water slowly right at the base of the plant. I turn the water on in the evening and by morning everything's been watered. I use some sort of drip irrigation for the grapes, blackberries, blueberries, asparagus, and strawberries. I've also got some small spray emitters for the fruit trees. I'm a lazy guy. Watering by hand is like work.



When testing everything, I also found some soaker hose that had been cut in several places. Oddly enough, the cut pieces were right in the same spots that I used a machete in the fall to cut my asparagus plants flush to the ground. Mysterious.

Every year, I like to grow some oddities. Last year it was sugar sorghum (like sugar cane but not tropical), birdhouse gourds, parsnips, and sugar beets. I killed the sorghum when I sprayed weedkiller between garden rows on a windy day. The birdhouse gourds did great. We ended up with over a hundred really big gourds. The parsnips never came up and neither did the sugar beets.

This year, I've ordered some oddities again.


I order weird seeds from seedman, the superhero of seeds. He's got a lot of weird stuff. This year I'm going with Anise, Luffa Sponge, more Sugar Cane (I'll just be more careful this time), Peanuts, and Giant Walking Stick Cabbage. I got my seeds in the mail just this week.

The Giant Walking Stick Cabbage was supposed to be started indoors a month and a half ago. Oops. I started it a few days ago in babyfood containers sitting in the laundry room window. If they make it, I'll transplant them outside in another month or so.



I've never seen Giant Walking Stick Cabbage but it's supposed to grow a straight stalk 8' high and then a cabbage like thing grows at the top. You can eat the cabbage like thing and if you dry the stalk it makes a great walking stick. no matter how you look at it, it's a win-win. You get cabbage which everybody hates and a walking stick you probably don't need.

On a non-gardening note: I was checking out my friend, Fairgirl's blog today (don't think just or reasonable. Think albino), and I see she's linked to my blog on hers. So it's only fair (just or reasonable) that I do the same. You can check out the post and her blog here. She gives a disclaimer about some blogs not being politically correct. I think she's talking about me.