Good morning, ah yes as I sit here “enjoying” this fine typical June day with the mercury around 95 degrees with a high predicted to be around 97. NOAA has this trend continuing through weekend with a “cool down” to the lower 90’s nest week. And of course, marginal chances of rain. Weather Underground paints a similar picture but only hotter with Friday and Saturday hitting the century mark!!! Oh Boy!!! Hold me back!!
Well on a good note the Okra is loving this weather along with the sweet potatoes and the cucumbers.
It is so amazing how eating a cucumber can be so refreshing on a hot day, that is if the day time temperatures don’t get much above 90. Mid to upper 90’s is when Mother Nature plays a terrible trick on the innocent cucumber. It is with these higher temperatures that cucumbers become bitter. Ah but there is a solution to this dilemma. The bitterness is only in the skin. In most cases just cutting off a ¼ to ½ inch off the end that was attached to the vine (not the flower end) will remedy this. With these excessively warm days, the whole cuke will need to be peeled. So, then these little jewels can be thoroughly enjoyed. More work but worth the effort. And of course, there is no special tasks needed when canning cucumbers, since vinegar is already bitter.
Let us hope that this nonsense does not last too long. This too will pass.
This week I will be making the first steps for planting peas in July. That sentence sounds rather nonsensical for West Texas and summer time. I will make a 15 day presowing application of my nematode product. If I can find enough quilts I will lay them over the bed during the day and remove them at night for the next 15 days. Hopefully this will cool the soil. The peas will be germinated but when I set the seeds to soak I will use some Actinovate (an organic fungicide). It is my hope that this will help the peas germinate instead of rotting. Once the seeds have germinated I will plant them and cover with 2 layers of agribon 70. Then with any luck within 70 days there will be a sustained pea harvest for the fall. Some things you have to try. The worst that can happen is it doesn’t work. It may be like my spinach experiment, where I grew spinach into the summer. I succeeded, but the energy in put was greater than the return. This could be the same thing that happens with the peas.
This does remind me of the first year I gardened down here in Alpine. One of the crops I planted was peas. Amazingly I did get a good germination but all the pea plants were maybe 2 inches tall and all produced 1 pea and abruptly expired. This was pre Agribon days. The only thing that gives me hope is what happened with volunteer peas in a sweet potato bed last year in July.
I had let some peas go to seed so that I could collect the peas for future crops. There was a lot of peas that were not collected. I discovered this when I planted sweet potatoes through the pea straw. Like always I covered them with 2 layers of Agribon 70 and kept the sweets damp. It was quite surprising to see several peas had germinated when I was checking on my sweet potatoes. These peas got around 2 feet tall and had fruit. Of course, before they got ripe, the guineas did a through quality control tasting. Vocabulary deleted! But this surprise gave me pause that it could very easily happen, a fall pea harvest. Here again there are some thing you just gotta try! I hope we will all enjoy the fruit from the labors of this experiment.
This week I Harvested chard, kale, carrots, green onions, squash, cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes. Please email for availability
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