So, where was I?

It's early August and I'm already pulling up my tomato vines. That pretty much tells you how my summer has been this year. The garden was doing pretty well up until late June, right about when we had a freak derecho blow through town. We were lucky in that we had no property damage and didn't lose power for a week like some people did locally. Even my garden survived intact, but the derecho marked the start of the end.

After the derecho we had weeks of dry, relentless hot weather with little rain. My sweet corn started to tassel when it was only about 4 feet tall, but the heat caused the silks to dry out prematurely before good pollination occurred. My half runner beans got tough and stringy right away. The squash bugs took all my yellow squash, patty pan, zucchini, and pumpkins in just a week.

Determined to save what was left, we set up our irrigation system and began watering regularly. We traveled to Texas in early July and I worried about the garden, but it did fine in my absence with the irrigation. The tomatoes took off and were gorgeous. Tall, full of yellow blossoms, and repeatedly needing more staking to prop up the rampant growth. The okra, peppers, and tomatillos were looking good, but by golly those were the prettiest tomato plants I'd ever seen.

Then right before we left for a week at the beach in late July, I found late blight on my tomato plants. If tomatoes develop late blight in late August or early September, you can often still get a decent harvest in before the fungus kills the plant. However, July is early for late blight in our state. My plants still had small, hard green fruit. I didn't have time to get the material and equipment to spray my plants before we left for vacation, plus sprays for late blight are most effective when applied preventively, not after the plants are already infected. Nearly in tears I realized that there wasn't much I could do about my plants and I didn't know what might be left when we returned from the beach. And recognizing that our regular watering schedule, along with me planting the tomatoes too closely together, hastened the development of this fungal disease didn't make me feel any better.

Every one of my tomato plants was infected when we returned. (To add insult to injury, the corn ears that did develop should have been picked while we were gone and had already started to turn starchy.)

Late blight will infect tomatoes at all stages of development, so now in August I'm culling as much of the green tomato fruits as I can. I tried leaving a few infected tomato fruits on the vine to see if they would ripen more, but the blight lesions simply spread too much into the fruit before it changes color and the whole thing becomes inedible. At least I can cut the lesions out of the green fruit and make pickles with the remaining good part, but it's a lot of extra work that I hadn't planned on doing.

It's incredibly disheartening to pick all those green tomatoes and then pull the vines out of the ground when I should be up to my eyeballs in red, ripe tomatoes at this time of the year. Plus, late blight smells foul. The infected plants are susceptible to secondary bacterial rot and that part of the garden just reeks of decay. Luckily the spores won't overwinter on my tomato stakes and the infested plants won't be a problem if they rot down entirely, which shouldn't be an issue in early August.

So it's been a rough season in the garden. Other gardeners I know in my area have had similar problems with drought, disease, slow plant development, and various unwanted wildlife, so I know it's not just me. On the bright side, we were able to join a CSA through Steve's workplace while at the beach, so we do have fresh local produce each week now. And thankfully I'm not trying to feed my family out of my garden through the upcoming winter, but y'all can probably expect a jar of green tomato pickles for Christmas this year.

Rambling about Brambles

It looked like it would be another good year for blackberries. My wild canes were full of blooms this spring.

Fruit set looked pretty good, and then some questionable visitors showed up.

 

These are rednecked cane borers, Agrilus ruficollis, on the wineberries. The females lay eggs in the canes and the larvae produce gall-like swellings that predispose the canes to breakage. However, they're the least of my worries when it comes to harvesting blackberries.

This is the brown marmorated stinkbug, Halyomorpha halys. It's feeding on the developing drupes of the blackberry fruit. Keep this picture in mind....it'll be more relevant in a few minutes.

Some of the plants are looking pretty good. These are mostly canes growing in part shade.

Some plants growing in sunnier areas are marginally okay. The fruit is ripening but the berries are small or only have a few drupes.

And this is what many of my blackberries look like right now. The excessive heat and lack of rainfall is killing the canes, often right before the fruit ripen fully.

And remember the stinkbug? This is what stinkbug damage on blackberries looks like. Many of the drupes are brown and look somewhat mummified. I've heard that stinkbug feeding with make the fruit distasteful, but honestly....bad blackberries are hard, seedy, and sour so I don't think the fruit could taste any worse.

Combine heavy stinkbug feeding with excessive heat and you get this: brown berries with no juice! Ugh!

We have black raspberries, blackberries, and wineberries on our property. There are only a handful of black raspberry plants and they did fairly well, escaping much of the damage I've shown here, but I probably only get a cup or two of fruit from them. The wineberries are just starting to ripen now, and they also seem to have escaped much of the damage as well even though they grow side by side with the blackberries. I think this has to do with how the plant blooms and sets fruit.

For a couple of years I've wondered why I never saw the wineberries in bloom. They have fruit, but I never saw any flowers. As it turns out, their flowers are small and immediately forgetful.

Wineberry flowers are no where near as showy as blackberry blooms. And after flowering, the calyx encloses the developing fruit, which might protected it from marauding stinkbugs.

As the fruit nears ripening, the calyx splits apart. By this time the blackberries are also ripening and maybe the stinkbugs find those berries far more attractive in size, number, and availability than the wineberries.

Wineberries will slowly turn from a bright orange color to a deep wine color. They seem to be sweet as soon as they begin to color up, although the flavor continues to develop until they are wine colored.

Wineberries are a type of raspberry from Asia. The fruit is composed of drupes around a pity core that remains on the cane after the fruit has been picked. Wineberries are considered a naturalized plant at best and can be downright invasive in certain areas. I don't mind having them on my property and I'm wishing I had more of them given the blackberry crop this year.

Early Summer, 2012

A few snippets of early summer for you...

Heucheras

A few years ago I fell in love with heucheras, also known as the coral bells. I have a few splashy ones, mostly green leaved varieties with dark wine-colored veins or with silver patches on the leaves. One has carmel leaves with a reddish underside, while another is a dark burgundy with pink splashes on it. I made sure to bring them all with me to the new house when we moved several years ago. Additionally we have a few of the native coral bells growing wild on our property. They're pretty spindly and have unremarkable coloration to the leaves, so I've left them to themselves in the woods but it's always fun to run across one.

Last year my heuchera varieties bloomed their little hearts out. While these varieties are grown largely for their foliage and not for their tiny white flowers, the solitary bees loved them and I just let them do their thing well into late summer. Heuchera pollen must be brightly colored because I often saw these little bees with bright orange pollen in their leg "baskets" that they use to collect it.

Then I neglected to cut the spent flower stalks and they went to seed. Much to my surprise, I had volunteer heucheras coming up in various places this spring. And the parentage of these volunteers is to anyone's guess.

These crosses are not so much the love child of two consenting adult plants as the whim and fancy of the solitary bees that visited the blooming parents. Most of the seedlings appear to have green leaves with some silvering.

But a few also look like this, with more of a greenish-wine background overlaid with silvering and with dark veins. I'm curious to see if the foliage coloration will change as the plant matures.



It's entirely possible that the bees transferred pollen from my horticultural varieties along with some from the native plants nearby. One of my volunteers has already flowered, so who knows what might show up next year?

Please Canada, Come Take Your Cold Front Back

While we had had some unseasonably warm temperatures earlier in March, we've had a number of frost and freeze warnings in late March and this week. Unfortunately all that warm weather earlier got the growing season off to a great start and now all that tender foliage is susceptible to frost and freeze damage.

Here's a shot of one evening last month, when we had a frost warning. We keep a pile of old sheets and shower curtains to cover things up when this occurs. Our temperatures often fluctuate quite a bit in late March and in April, so there's the yearly dance of sheeting and unsheeting every so often. Removing the sheets in the day is critical as the daytime temps can be high enough to cook the tender plants if they're left covered. Then it's back to covering things up again that evening.

But this week we're also experiencing lots of gusty winds. A cold front from Canada has jumped the border fence and keeps running through our region. Normally some breeze will keep the frost from settling on the plants, but this time it's so cold at night that plants are vulnerable even with the wind. I even saw several snow flakes on Wednesday. And the plants have grown another couple of inches tall so the draped sheets are hard to keep on the plants in this wind, even when weighted down with bricks and scrap lumber. 

So Steve, never one to back down from an engineering challenge, bought some tarps and tented the garden. Thankfully the daytime temps were only in the 50s on Wednesday and Thursday so we could leave the tarps in place for three nights in a row.

After three consecutive nights with frost and freeze warning, if I'm lucky enough to have peony blooms in late April it will be all because of Steve.

Yep, It's Spring Already.

My peonies are coming up. The witch hazel is in bloom. I see tiny sprouts of astilbe, coreopsis, poppies, and phlox poking out of the soil. The spring beauties are in bloom and I spotted a purple hepatica in the woods.

We're having an early spring this year after a mild winter. Heck, I've got snapdragons that never completely died over the winter. I thought we might get the garden tilled in mid to late April, but I think we'll be doing it earlier than that. I've got snap peas that need to get planted soon.

Hellebores For Joyce

I keep forgetting to post on Wordless Wednesday, but I didn't have anything really interesting to show yesterday as it was.

Not like today, when I found the hellebores starting to bloom in the flower beds out front.





I have two plants, one a Pine Knot Strain and the other was unlabeled when I bought the seedling at a yard sale. I no longer know which one is which because the tags were lost sometime last year. No matter, I love that mix of greens, plum, and pink in the speckled blooms.





Winter is beginning to fade and spring is on its way!

Mid-winter Trip, 2012

Steve and I recently spent a long weekend trip in the Charlottesville area. We ditched Ally and the dog at Grandma's in Roanoke and immediately celebrated our new childless freedom with french fries at McDonald's.

(Yeah, we don't get out much. We're working on it.)

During our trip we visited James Madison's home Montpelier. There's a walled formal garden on the estate that was renovated in the early 1900s by Annie du Pont, after the duPont family purchased the property in 1901. The garden is beautifully landscaped with sweeping beds, boxwood hedges, symmetrical layout, and marble urns and statuary.

The brick walls surrounding the garden, with the horse stable beyond it.

I'm not a big fan of formal gardens, but I do find them impressive in terms of the landscaping and the effort it takes to maintain all that symmetry. 

Being the dead of winter, there weren't many plants to look at beyond the boxwoods and some other evergreens, but the statuary was impressive.

I'd like to have a pair of these urns, but they're not something you can just pick up at the local garden center.

And then it hit me....we have a pair of matching almond colored toilets that Steve took out of our house. I've been waiting to find the perfect project to use them in this summer! I was thinking about filling them with water and adding some goldfish for a water feature, but now I think I'll fill the bowls and tanks with potting soil and putting in some plants instead. I could have a tall, arching daylilies in the tanks with some nasturtiums spilling out of the bowl. Or maybe a mounding clump of coreopsis in the bowl and some sweet potato vine in the upper tank. The possibilities are endless!

The hard part will be deciding to position the toilets at either side of the entrance to our driveway, or flanking the steps to the gazebo.

Pumpkin Update

We grew close to 100 small sugar pie pumpkins this year, most weighing 5-8 pounds. That's a lot of pumpkin! I heard that there's a pumpkin shortage due to bad weather in the northeast this year but that's not the situation in Plum Creek.



And what do you do with that many pumpkins? We donated most of them to Ally's daycare center for their fall festival earlier this month. Those that weren't used there were adopted by a first grade class in Riner for a fantastic class project. The remainder of the pumpkins will either find new homes or be eaten throughout this winter. I'm hoping they keep well, but we'll still be eating pumpkin butter, pie, bread, and soup from now until spring!

We were at the Sinkland Farms Pumpkin Festival this weekend with friends and each kid got to pick out a pumpkin for themselves. Ironically Ally insisted on picking out a pumpkin that's virtually identical to the fifteen piled up on our front porch. Oh well.

If anyone is looking for seeds, I highly recommend Pinetree Garden Seeds at https://www.superseeds.com 

They have a good selection at reasonable prices. I'd offer some seeds from the ones I've grown, but pumpkins are a bit promiscuous and will readily cross with other pumpkin varieties, so I couldn't vouch for what you might get from any of my seeds. In fact, my Jarrahdale pumpkins this year looked more green than blue and were much lumpier this year than in 2010. I can't wait to see what we get in 2012.

A Letter to Myself to be Read Next March

Dear Self,

No doubt you've already gotten tons of gardening catalogs in the mail and you've been drooling over the possible choices for the garden since January. I'm here to remind you of a few things.

1. For God's sake, please reconsider planting more than 30-40 tomato plants next time! We had more than 60 plants in 2010 and we lost the battle of keeping them picked too early in the season. Yes, I know we planted that many just in case a tomato plague came around and wiped out most of the crop, but ya know what? Nary a plague appeared and the plants all did just fine. Pick a couple of varieties and then put out no more than 10 of each variety. Trust me, it'll be okay.

2. Yes, plant Sungold tomatoes again! Yeah, Sungolds are a hybrid but you can't beat that sweet taste. Be sure to get another black tomato, maybe Black Krim. Brandywine was good, but stingy on the yield. Tigerella was good, but they're pretty small. We want some larger tomatoes next year for sandwiches. Subartic Plenty doesn't have the flavor of other varieties, but you were still picking them in late September. Just remember to check the seeds you have leftover before ordering more!

3. Thou shall keep the tomatoes staked and the paths between rows mowed.

4. And put fencing up for the damn beans even if they are considered bush beans. They'll run all the way over to Radford again if you don't.

5. Remember you're gonna have to rotate the garden around this year. No planting the corn right where it was last year and the Jarrahdale pumpkins don't like being so far away from the sprinkler.

6. Yes, plant corn and okra again next year. And the tomatillos need more room.

7. And then we come to the peppers. Fooled You jalapenos are tasty and safe for the non-heat seekers in the family. The anchos are also good, mostly mild with only a little heat. You need to include a hotter variety for the salsa, though. Again, don't plant so many next time. They all did really well and they're prolific as bunnies.

8. Reconsider your fear of the pressure canner. You can't just make jelly out of everything, and you need a pressure canner to make just about anything else.

9. Speaking of which, repeat after me: I will not try to use those rock-hard, unripe little green tomatoes in any recipe from now on. Any recipe calling for green tomatoes is referring to green tomatoes that are soft and have lots of gel in them. The other ones are bitter and have an awful taste to them and you can't disguise that flavor no matter how much sugar and spices you use in that chutney, cake, or what have you. You might as well go ahead and tell your family and friends that you regret having inflicted them with that flavor while you're at it. Blech! I don't know why we didn't realize this sooner, but go forth and sin no more.

10. Unless we've signed up to grow pumpkins again for Ally's school, plant half the pumpkin patch with Jarrahdales and the other half with a pie pumpkin. We got over 100 Small Sugar pumpkins but the flavor wasn't nearly as good as we had hoped. Maybe try those Rouge vif d'Etampes pumpkins that look like Cinderella's pumpkin next time?

Really, that's about it. We had a great garden in 2011 and we'll probably have another great year in 2012. Some years the pumpkins are the star, some years it's the peppers that steal the show, but it's all good. Just remember to till early, apply the compost early, and then till again before planting. Stake the tomatoes, fence the beans, and keep everything picked to keep those yields coming in!

Regards,

Your Self

Nearly Wordless Wednesday, August 17, 2011

I have several plants of "Sweet Million" cherry tomato this year. One of them grew so tall and so full of fruit that it bent the 5 foot tall 1 x 2 inch wooden stake over at the base. The bent over plant was threatening to take out another cherry tomato beside it, so I chopped it down and salvaged the fruit regardless of whether it was red or green.

All of these tomatoes are from one plant.

I have four other "Sweet Million" plants in the garden.



The tomato plant I cut down was the smallest one in the row.

Details at Eleven

In an unprecedented move, the Department of Agriculture raided an unlicensed all-you-can-eat bean buffet in Christiansburg, VA, that had become popular with undocumented Mexican bean beetles over the summer. Citing concerns for food safety and the blatant disregard for the economic injury level, the Bean Czar authorized the removal and destruction of a dozen plants known as “Half Runners.” Each of the plants is thought to have supported a multitude of bean beetle families whose fate remains uncertain. Particularly cruel was the use of a small black and tan dog that routed the area after the removal of each plant. Survivors were heard moaning, "Yo quiero mi frijoles." Families of the victims have begun referring to the event as “The Gleaning” and are organizing a protest in response to the day’s event.

Garden Update, July 2011

Since I'm in denial that it's already August, I thought I'd post an update on my garden circa two weeks ago.

The garden gates.

Sweet corn.

Okra.

Green tomatoes.

Green tommy toes.

Ripening Tigerella tomatoes, a striped variety. You can see that I recycle strips of fabric and selvedge to tie up my tomatoes. 

That green twisty mess in the foreground? Those would be half runner beans. 

Funny thing about the beans...the description said that they would be mostly bushy so I thought "Perfect! Just what I need for my first attempt at growing beans!" And they are mostly bushy on the bottom. It's just that the half that's the runner part is trying to run clear over to Radford. (Note to self: You will fence the beans next year.)

One evening's harvest: patty pan squash, eight-ball zucchini, half runner beans, sungold tomatoes.

Young pumpkin vines in the pumpkin patch.

Young pumpkin vines yearning to escape the fence. (Steve took the fence down about a week after this picture was taken, and now the pumpkin vines are trying to join the bean vines over in Radford.)

The compost pile in all of its stinky, funky, ugly glory.

And now a reason to head indoors.