September 28, 2017

Good morning,  I intentionally grow my sweet potatoes close together. I have found that there is little market value to huge vegetables.  

My sweet beds are 4.5 feet wide and 45  feet long. The sweet potato sets are planted on a 1 foot by 1 foot spacing. This yields mostly 1 pound sweet potatoes. Not all of the sets planted out survive and so where the mortalities occur, this is where the "lunkers" (2 + pounders) grow. There is a market for some of these around the Holidays when folks have guests. By and large there usually is little to no market for them.

This year I have used a new"potion" in the garden to combat root knot nematodes. It has worked very well for the most part and has made available harvests that otherwise may not exist. This "potion" has also eliminated a fungus in the sweet beds that would form a russet on the tubers. This fungus would not only discolor the sweets but would also severely effect the storage capabilities of the sweets. There have only been  a handful, most of the sweets are nice and pink. This potion has also minimized the nematode effects on the sweets. There are fewer bumps on the side of the sweets where the female nematodes reside and also it has minimized the cracking due to the nematodes.

Most all of my sweet beds have had nematodes in them this year. In years past this has caused a smaller harvest this is not the case  this year. Before starting to harvest my last bed not only having a bounty of sweets to sell at market I presently have several hundred pounds in storage. All of these have nice pink skins so they should keep very well

Getting back to my last bed of sweets. This bed has not shown any real sign of Root knot nematodes and the plants have been much larger than in any of the other beds. Hind sight tells me this should have been my first bed to harvest when I started the harvest back in July.

Usually I expect the end plants to be where the biggest are harvested since there is no competition on one side. Being only five feet into this last bed and the average sized sweet has been 2 + pounds although there are a fair number of smaller sweets. This could get dicey for storage  room. Such a problem to have.

So far in this bed there have been no mortalities. There has been a full 1 X 1 spacing. Surely as the harvest continues there will be some spaces to be found. I am curious to find how big these sweets will be. So far the biggest sweet so is a little over 3 pounds. Not a favorable market size.

I have noted on my garden plan board the locations of most of my RKN infections. The Potion will be used again next year, it has been well worth its cost. Maybe in beds where RKN infections are minimal, I might try an even closer spacing. This might cause me to plant fewer beds but have the same harvest quantities

These are some interesting observations. 

The summer veggies have really slowed this week.

This week I harvested chard, kale, green onions, carrots,lettuce and beans, In storage are sweet potatoes, butternuts and red onions. Please email as to availability.

September 25, 2017

This year has been a good gardening year with some challenges thrown into the mix. But there have been some oddities that I am clueless about. There was the case with my tomatoes even though they made it through the very hot spell did not start to set fruit until mid September. I did not see why they didn't in July and August. Just no Idea.

Also the case of my second squash bed. It was sown in perfect squash weather but for some reason even though there were lots of bees, male flowers and female flowers, for several weeks the squash aborted  all of the fruit. Clueless!

Then recently with this same squash bed and my cucumber beds just over night 90 percent of the plants just stopped blooming. Maybe a few male flowers but almost non existent females. There have been a few cool overnight lows but nothing to shock the plants that I am aware of. Usually these plants just slowly stop producing not just finish overnight.

I am sure there is a reason for all of these things. At this point I am only clueless as to why. But it isn't for lack of pondering. Maybe it will come to me some night while I am sleeping. We can always hope.

Without finding a reason there is always the chance that it will repeat itself.  Or just might the extreme strangeness of this year. Who knows!!

September 21, 2017

Good morning,  how funny it is but I am finally getting fruit set on my tomatoes. I guess it all depends on how warm of a fall we have as to whether these tomatoes mature. With luck they will be able to be harvested and let to ripen over the course of a few months. I am clueless as to why it has taken them so long to come into bloom and fruit set. They have had sporadic blooms but nothing "to write home about". Just one more thing for a weird year.

I was planning to graft my favorite toms on root knot nematode resistant root stock but I am going to hone my grafting skills first. The root stock is fairly speedy,  so I think practicing on saved seeds is the prudent  way to go.

I am going to just grow RKN resistant hybrids next year. Some will be determinate  and a couple will be indeterminate. I want to see what does better to get through the usual hot dry period that we get just before the rains start. I had stopped growing indeterminate's after the big drought of 2011. Back then I was hand watering, now I have a drip system. Like always these plants will be set out early so they will not be staked.

This will be interesting.

Funny that I did find a web site that talked about RKN resistant okra. A paper I was reading was talking about  a study in the south. This was baiting me. The varieties had very unusual names and the shipping costs were huge like $50 for a handful of seeds. Further reading noted Southern India. I have not found any studies concerning RKN and okra in the US. Maybe there is one , I just have not found it or I am not using the right search words.

Even with rampant RKN in the garden I have had decent harvests. it really comes down to adapting to the hand of cards I was dealt. Ah yes if agriculture was easy everyone would be doing it..

This week I harvested chard, some kale, green onions, carrots, lettuce, beets, beans, peas, eggplants, okra  cucumbers, squash, chilies and in storage onions, butternuts and sweet potatoes. Please email as to availability.

It must be noted that the okra, cucumbers and squash have slowed dramatically.  I am hoping they will last to the first freeze. It does not look favorable.

September 18, 2017

Ah yes time for a little update on two crop experiments.

First off  sprouting pea seeds and sowing the germinated seed in August appears to have worked better than I thought it would. Even though bed stocking was low at about 50 to 60 percent, I am getting worth while harvests. These harvests have increased  every week too. Yesterday was the beginning of the third week of harvests. I harvest twice a week,Sunday and Thursday. Yesterday  I harvested what the total harvest was last week, about 3 pounds. There is root knot in this bed and so far does not appear to be  impacting the peas too severely. My hope is that they will last until freezing weather. I am clueless on these matters. I will say I am optimistic to tweek the culture and see if stocking and harvests can be further increased.

As for the germinating of parsnips, I had better luck with just sowing the seed and trying to keep the seeds moist. Out of a bed that is 25 feet long , 4 1/2 feet wide. the spacing is 4 inches by 1 foot, there is less than 10 percent that has poked their heads above the soil.this does not encourage me to continue growing parsnips. A fellow gardener is sprouting parsnips and they sowing the seed in pots to be transplanted once the seeds have become plants. this intrigues me, but I will be interested to see how this may effect the roots. I really like parsnips and I may just have to put on my thinking cap and see what I might be able to do. There may be other options but there are some real constraints. maybe I can find a parsnip that is more tolerant of warm weather to germinate. All is not lost with parsnips but the prognosis does not look good.

On the other hand the peas have been a real success. 

September 7, 2017

Good morning, Deb and I have been very fortunate not to have very many wild predators attack our flock. Most of the flock kills has been from "range dogs". I have heard ranchers call them "town dogs". Usually once the bird is killed it is off to the next one. No interest in eating just killing. These attacks are rare too but much more common than the wild kind.

The biggest reason for this is we have trained our birds to go to coop at night. Wild predators are much more active at night. Broody hens that we can not find or don't know about are usually the victims. Knock on wood we find most of these hens and get them safe. Usually the clue that we have a hen out is are broody poo's. We won't go into any further description but it sets me looking for the hen.

Probably the biggest day time threat  from wild animals are raptors. We have had both sharp shinned hawks and road runners hunt the chicken feeder. These guys do not send up the chicken alarm call because these guys are after the house sparrows.

Usually when the roosters spot a hawk it is a single alarm and all the birds run for cover. Shortly the roosters give the all 's clear and the barnyard is back inaction.

Recently all the hens were going off like there was a huge "egg off" The strange thing was this was in the back yard under the mulberry tree and stranger yet I never found any eggs. I had noticed this going on for a few days. It was about this time that I noticed one of the bante hens with blood on her face. Bante's aree incredibly  shy so I had to make my observations from a close distance (4 or 5 feet). She was a bit lethargic but no real prominent wounds.

I was taking a nap and all of a sudden there was a huge ruckus around the mulberry so I decided I really needed to check this out. As I was exiting the back door I noticed a coopers hawk take off from a white object and the barnyard became quiet. Sadly the white object was the hen mentioned earlier. She wasn't dead but near death. This caused me to have another one of those act like an adult moments.

Anyway now that I am "clueful", I would promptly go to the mulberry and chase off the hawk. After a number of times the bird left the property. I still expect to see it again but it has been a couple of weeks since.

Ah yes I am aware now.

This week I harvested chard ,green onions, carrots,lettuce, beets,summer squash, cucumbers, okra, chilies, beans, and eggplant. In storage sweet potatoes, butternuts, and bulb onions. Please email as to availability.

September 4, 2017

It is a bit frustrating that this is the second year in a row that I have not had tomatoes for the full season.

Next year I am going to try a few new things. First will be grafting my favorite toms to root knot nematode resistant root stock and the second will be to grow hybrids that are resistant to RKN. I have found a hybrid that is also resistant to hot and cold temperature swings. There are great hopes for this one because for the last couple of years we have had late freezes and above normal heat.

The root stock that my favorites will be grafted to are also hybrid. It must be noted that the seeds are from Johnny' s Selected Seeds and all of these hybrids were created through trial and error hybridization. No GMO's.

I have started some tomato seedlings and plan to practice grafting the tops back onto the bases.. There are a number of things to be careful with: the base stem needs to be the same diameter as the top, most of the leaves need to be removed so there is not too much water draw by the top, humidity needs to remain high (a closed plastic container tall enough to hold the plants), and they need to be kept in a warm dark place until the tops begin to grow.  If successful this would be my preferred plan and I could grow all of my favorite tomatoes. This may take some practice.

Most all of the hybrid tomatoes are determinate but I am going to try some Indeterminates also.  

This past year it was my plan to have a 2 month delay of my first tomato planting from my second. It was hoped that the first planting would harvest out before the heat and start the new growth and flowering process while the second would be harvested through the heat. This did not work. Because of this it is back to the drawing board.

Besides the use of the hybrids I may even try some shade cloth over a tomato bed. A 25% or 50% may be enough to keep the air temperature  down. Last spring just before the heat broke I registered 106 in the garden. This was brief for about an hour before it dropped back down to a chilly 103 until late evening when it cooled into the upper 70's. It would be my hope with shade cloth  lengthy exposure  over 95 could be prevented. This is the temperature where tomatoes and most other veggies start to go dormant. Can I achieve 10 degrees cooling? No idea. One thing to note, May and June usually have our lowest humidity readings (single digits), so with very little moisture in the air the shade should provide some cooling. 

There is the possibility that fabric might contribute to some warming but there are a number of reasons to keep the covers on and most are related to insects. Two of the worst are thrips and leaf hoppers. Thrips is a vector for tomato mosaic virus and the leaf hoppers are the vector for Western curling disease. If either one of these pests were to inoculate tomatoes with these virus',  the only thing that can be done is pull the plants. The fabric helps prevent  leaf hoppers and thrips from making contact. I am surrounded by native vegetation and this is where these pests reside. In extremely dry springs they migrate to the garden where there is moisture. 

So to say the least next year will be once again filled with mystery and discovery.