One Month Later...

Howdy, friends and neighbors!

I apologize for my long absence; it's been a crazy month. So much has happened since my last post! For starters, the strawberries and peas are no longer producing, and in fact the peas have started to die. If you have been watching our Facebook page, you may know that we got quite a few raspberries from Anne Marie's canes (the ones I transplanted this spring are not mature enough to produce fruit yet - next year!) and that I harvested the first of the beets and carrots. I made the beets into a pretty darn good dish: Roasted Beets with Balsamic Glaze, and I added the carrots to a very tasty risotto. Many of the peas went into an alfredo sauce I made. :)

The solanaceae (peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant) have continued to flourish. All of them are blossoming and starting to fruit (although I pinch off the blossoms and berries of the potato plants) and we now have two eggplant - about two inches long apiece - and many tomatoes. The peppers have started to fruit as well, after flowering for some time. All of the above have survived several weeks of very hot weather, with the exception of one pepper: the Thai hot pepper. I think it probably really prefers humid climates, and even though we watered it religiously, the Colorado head and aridity got to it. It was a bummer to lose that little guy, but not a huge loss; I'm not sure what we would have done with so many Thai peppers! The only other ailing plant is a little cherry tomato - the one right in the center of its brethren. I planted five cherry tomatoes, and arranged them like the dots on the five side of a die. The one in the middle is alive, but tiny. I'm not sure what happened - maybe the tomatoes around it blocked a lot of sun, or maybe I was skipping over it somehow when I watered - but it's definitely the runt. I'm not really expecting many fruits from that one, if any, but I'll leave it in the bed just to see what happens.

On to the brassicas! The broccoli are nice and big now, but they still aren't flowering! I'm not sure why this is; they were seeded on time and transplanted pretty much on time, they've been adequately watered and have received plenty of sun... Hopefully they'll bloom eventually. The sooner, the better. The cabbages are doing fine. One of the green cabbages was pretty badly damaged by our hail storm, and lost its apical meristem. As a result, apical dominance was overruled and the plant sprouted four heads instead of just one! I removed the two smaller heads recently, and the remaining two are looking pretty good. They won't be as big as the head on the undamaged cabbage, but they will taste good nonetheless. The red cabbage has a main head as well, but it's a little smaller than the one on the whole green cabbage. Still, no complaints about the progress of the cabbage! The kale is doing great; one is huge, and one is kind of medium-sized (thanks again to hail damage). I really ought to harvest some from the larger one, but to be honest, I'm not sure what to do with it. I know it makes a great green, so I should probably stick it in a stirfry or some such dish. If you want a few leaves of kale, come on over!

I'll lump most of the root veggies together. The beets are doing all right, but they don't really like the heat, so they're a little droopy. I should harvest some of the older ones and use them in something. The carrots are doing fine, though I planted two more rows (about 24 seeds) a couple of weeks ago and they have yet to emerge. I don't like to think that they died, but I'm not sure what else could keep them from emerging. Honestly, they probably weren't watered enough. Hopefully they'll still come up somehow. The onions are doing fine; some of them should probably be harvested soon, as well. I allowed four bolting onions (two red, two yellow) to continue bolting so that they might pollinate one another and set seed, and now their flowers are fully open. I'll have to figure out some way to collect their seeds - it'll be pretty interesting to see what grows from them!

Next, the beans. All of them are doing well. As I said in my last post, the pole beans had some germination issues, and there aren't a whole lot of those. The bush beans did well, with about 75% germination for both varieties. The bush beans also have some blossoms on them, and some of the flowers have already grown pods! Can't wait to harvest those. The pole beans have sent out tendrils, and I have provided them with a trellis pilfered from the peas. The tendrils wrapped themselves around the trellis pretty eagerly, and they have grabbed hold. No blossoms on those guys yet.

Finally, on to the cucurbits! I provided the cucumbers with the peas' other trellis, and they have been climbing that somewhat reluctantly; however, a few cucumber fruits are now developing! A few standard cukes, as well as one lemon cuke. Very exciting! We'll be harvesting those soon. The zucchini and yellow squash, of course, are producing profusely. We have four zucchini, and have harvested from three of them (one is a little smaller, and may never catch up, because it's being shaded by the other three). We have five yellow squash, and two of those are somewhat runty because they were replanted after the original plants died in the hail storm, and now they've been shaded. There are currently three butternut squash (luckily!), which surprises me because I was sure that the ones I replanted wouldn't be coming up - it took them a really long time! None of them are flowering or fruiting yet, because they're so young. The bright side is that they have plenty of room and won't be shaded by other squash. All three types of melons have come up. We have three watermelon, two Tigger, and two cantaloupe (I planted three, but one didn't come up). The watermelon plants are huge, and they are blooming like crazy. One is already producing a melon, and there will be others soon! The Tiggers are also blooming, so it won't be long before they're fruiting as well. The cantaloupe are kinda far behind, so I'm not sure when they'll start blooming, but it shouldn't be too long. The pumpkins...never happened. The two seeds I planted never came up, in spite of my watering efforts, and it just got too late in the season to call Nick about the possibility of buying transplants from him. It is far too late now to think about trying a different variety and starting it from seed, as Frank had suggested.

As it turned out, I actually didn't need to buy more netting. Instead, when I removed netting from the zucchini, I put that same netting over the melons. Later, I removed netting from over the tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers, and now that's just extra. I also added the third layer of tires to the potatoes - again, I got the tires from Alpine Tire Center and painted them off-white using paint from the Larimer County Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Center - and filled the tires with soil and leaves. Ben and I still haven't painted fun designs on the tires, but we probably will at some point...maybe.

I went to ReSource for some floor trim to stake the tomatoes. It was very easy to do, except perhaps for sawing the trim into manageable pieces, but I felt pretty guilty because staking should be done as soon as the tomatoes are transplanted into the garden. Obviously, I didn't do that - and the result was that most, if not all, of the stakes tore through some of the tomatoes' roots. The poor little t'maters look okay still, but it was like I was mauling them! It does make me feel better, though, that there are so many developing tomatoes on the plants.

Well, that's all for now! A whole month's worth of updates. Hopefully it won't take me that long to post again. Until then, my fellow Green Thumbs, fare thee well!

WOG out.

Movin' Right Along

Things are swingin' at Westmore! As you may have seen on our Facebook page, we've been harvesting a pea here and a pea there, along with the occasional strawberry. The peas have been of good size and quite delicious - one challenge they have presented, however, is differentiating between the shelling peas and the sugar snap peas. We had marked each variety, but when the cats got under the netting (repeatedly), they not only disturbed the pea seeds and - I suspect - greatly reduced the number that germinated, but they also took away the markers.  Therefore, I have no idea which plant is a member of which variety, and I have to play a "wait and see" game with the pods. The ones that don't get fat quickly are the ones that I assume belong to the sugar snap variety, and the ones that do puff out are probably the shelling peas. So far, we've just stood in the garden and sampled them. Not that I'm complaining about that!

The strawberries have been sort of tricky - we've discovered that they're difficult to see even when they're nice and ripe, unless you're bending down next to the plants and specifically looking for them. I was a little slow on the uptake for the ones that have ripened so far, and we've either missed them entirely or gotten to them when they're past their prime. The good news is that the one or two perfect ones that we managed to sample have been absolutely delicious - sweet and bursting with strawberryness! Their amazing flavor is also impelling us to keep a closer watch on the strawberry patch for ripening berries - right now, we have about ten on their way.

The beans I planted the day after the hail storm are coming up nicely. The Empress and Golden Wax bush beans are coming up the most reliably - the Kentucky Wonder pole beans have had kind of spotty germination, for some reason. Hopefully, they'll all come up soon.

The first round of beets and carrots are getting big! They are really quite leafy, and I believe we'll be harvesting some soon. The second round are coming up and sending out some true leaves. I'll be planting a third round soon!

I replanted some cucurbits a few days ago, this time using two seeds per desired plant. I'm tired of them refusing to germinate! I replanted one cucumber, two yellow squash, three butternut squash, three cantaloupe, and one Tigger melon, and they should come up within another three or four days. If not, I give up! I also still need to call Nick at CSU to see if he has any leftover pumpkin starts that I could buy - Frank says I waited too long to plant our Howdens; they are too long-season to yield much before the season is over if I plant them this late.

About a week ago, I picked up the next three tires for the potatoes, again from Alpine Tire Center, painted them using free recycled paint from the Larimer County Landfill's Home Hazardous Wastes Department, and stuck them on top of the first layer of tires. I also drove in the rebar stakes I'd gotten - two per tire stack, to hold the upper tires in place against wind, shifting soil, etc. I only put on a base coat of light yellow; Ben and I will be adding some colorful designs pretty soon, to make them a little bit less of an eyesore. After I stacked the second tires on, I filled in their centers with soil from around the first tires, covering most of the potatoes' leaves. Then I stuffed some dead leaves around the inside of the tires (where the tubes would go), as per Louis' suggestion. Actually, Louis had suggested straw, but straw is a lot harder to find than dead leaves, and I think the same principles will apply to the leaves. They will probably break down a lot faster than straw would, but I think they'll be fine for this growing season. The potato plants only took a couple of days to pop right back up through the soil again, and now they're going strong once more.

We have a very healthy population of flea beetles at WOG. I first noticed them on the tomatoes, and now they are also on the potatoes and a few peppers. The eggplants alone of the solanaceae have been left unscathed. Flea beetles aren't a big deal at all in small numbers, because all they do is chew little holes in the leaves. Of course, this is not ideal, because it makes the plant take energy away from growth and fruit production and put it toward repairs, as well as reducing the number of photosynthetic cells, which is where the energy comes from in the first place. I have been smushing the beetles I've been able to catch (not many), but I'll have to purchase some Pyrethrum to get rid of them if their population explodes. However, Pyrethrum is a broad-target insecticide, so it would also kill any populations of beneficial insects we've built up, and that's the last thing we want to do. Here's hoping the population stays small, and that the beneficials we have will help to control it.

We also have some aphids. So far, I've only noticed them on the kale - Ben and I were sampling a kale leaf the other day, and I turned it over and discovered those darn little green bugs. Not a whole heck of a lot, but they were on the other leaves as well. I smushed them all, and so far they haven't made a comeback. There aren't any on the cabbage or the other kale plant, as far as I can tell, or anywhere else. Yet. Come on, ladybird beetles!

I finished the entire roll of netting yesterday. The roll was enough to cover the beets, carrots, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, yellow and butternut squash, eggplants, and peppers. Ben was a great help stretching the ungainly netting over tricky hoops - it was a lot easier to do with two people! The only things left uncovered that I'd like to cover are the melons. Gotta get more netting!

That's all the updates we have for today! Thanks for reading.

WOG out.

The Tale of the Hail - and Other Stories

Hello, friendly readers! I apologize for my absence of late. It's been pretty hectic around here - I got a job, and they've kept me working almost every day, so it's all I can do to keep up with the garden, let alone write about it! But I have some time on my hands at the moment, so you're in luck.

My last post covered the trellising of the peas, which involved their (and the onions') de-nettification. Not long before that, I had planted all of the cucurbits, with the exception of the pumpkins. Since cucurbits spread so much when they grow, I gave them plenty of room to frolic and vine as they would. This means that they covered an awful lot of ground in the garden - too much, in fact, to cover with netting. We had enough netting to do so, but we lacked the tubing to make enough hoops. So I just left them all uncovered, with the exception of the cucumbers - they were close enough to the rest of the netting that it was no big deal to extend it over them.

Exactly one week after planting the cucurbit seeds, they began to sprout! I was ecstatic, as the zucchini and squashes sent up huge, healthy leaves, and the cucumbers poked their little heads up. The melons came up more slowly, but were still looking swell. The peas were starting to bloom, and the strawberries were flowering, too. Based on what happened soon after, though, I guess Mother Nature was just having a good laugh.

We got hail. Not a few tiny balls of ice, like we sometimes get in the winter when it sleets. We got real hail.  At the apartment, each ball was about the diameter of a quarter. I'm not sure how large it was at the garden, but Anne Marie said it was really bad. This I saw quite clearly when I went over to the garden the following day.

The first thing I checked was the pea patch. Since they're climbers, their stems are a little more fragile, and each hail ball can do a lot of damage as it plummets through the peas' foliage. Most of the peas had been hit pretty hard - broken stems, tattered leaves - and many had been torn from the trellises and plastered to the soggy ground. The blossoms were still there, barely opened, and drooping forlornly. I wondered if they would open at all, now. The good news was that the peas were still early in the flowering stage; they had not been carrying any pods. If they had, it would have been disastrous. It is hard enough to recover from losing flowers and having to take energy from the blossoms and put it into repairing stems and regrowing leaves - it is much worse to redirect energy from seeds to regrowth. I think most of the peas will still recover and bear fruit.

From the peas, I went to the onions. All of the plants had some damage, in the form of broken leaves, and some only had a few undamaged leaves. A few were bolting, though that was probably a result of the recent hot weather.

Next, I checked the cucurbit seedlings. The cucumbers were fine, having been under the netting. The zucchini looked mostly okay. The four yellow squash seedlings that had emerged were pretty much decimated - it was hard for me to tell where a couple of them were, because they were so ripped up and mud-splattered. The butternut squash were in a similar state. The melons were okay, except for the one cantaloupe that had come up - both of its poor little cotyledon leaves had been ripped off, leaving only the stub of a stem.

The kale was pretty badly damaged. Each plant had only a few leaves before the hail, and some of them had been completely torn off. The cabbage fared somewhat better than the kale, perhaps because it was larger and had sturdier stems. The two broccoli plants didn't look good; one was very badly damaged (and would soon die).

The strawberries did all right. There was damage, yes, and some plants would soon be reduced to only a couple of leaves each. But for the most part, the strawberries looked only slightly the worse for wear.

The heroes of the night were the potatoes. I'm not sure whether the house had somehow protected them, or if their foliage was dense enough that the damage was less stark, but they actually didn't look all that different from the previous day. They would rebound within a couple of days, and would soon be overflowing their trainer tires.

Now, on to the other updates. The day after the hail, I planted the remaining solanaceae, in addition to a few varieties of fabaceae, and two pumpkin seeds. First, I put in the beans. I planned to use a three-legged trellis (similar to the ones we're using for the peas) for the one pole variety we have, so I planted those seeds in three groups of six, each group in a circle around a stick to mark where a leg of the trellis would go. I planted ten seeds of each of the two bush varieties.

Next to the beans, I planted the tomatoes. Although I had plenty of seedlings, I only planted five cherry plants, four slicing plants, and five paste plants. The remainder of the seedlings will go to ReSource - apparently their garden didn't do so well with the hail. Unfortunately, the leftover seedlings aren't doing very well in the coldframe (which is where I put them after transplanting their brethren). I think it must be too hot in there. I shall take them to ReSource soon.

In the middle bed, next to the onions, I planted the eggplant. I put in nine Black Beauty and two Swallow - the Swallow were all that remained of the many eggplant babies Ben and I got from Drew. I have several Black Beauties left over, as well, which are also going to go to ReSource ASAP.

Next, adjacent to the eggplant, I planted the peppers. First, I put in six Gourmet. Next were six Sweet Bullnose, then six Early Jalapeño. Finally, I put in one Sweet Chocolate, one Santa Fe, and one Thai Hot, all three from Drew. I have some leftovers from the first three varieties, which, again, are going to ReSource.

Finally, I put in about twenty broccoli plants, all Di Cicco. There aren't any healthy-looking leftovers of these, so I don't think ReSource will be getting any, unfortunately.

After all that, I sawed off some more tubing for netting hoops, stuck some rebar along the bed where I'd planted the beans and tomatoes, bent the tubing from one rebar to the next, and stretched the netting over it. Then, I staked it down. If it hails again, the tomatoes, beans, and zucchini will be protected, but the peppers, eggplants, and onions won't be - yet.

I went to ReSource a couple of days ago, and got some more tubing for hoops. One of the next things on my To-Do List will be to make hoops for the section of the garden that has in it the onions, eggplants, peppers, and melons, and then to stretch the net over them. Unfortunately, I think the broccoli, potatoes, strawberries, kale, and cabbage will have to go unprotected the whole season - so hopefully, we won't get any more big hails.

Well, that's all for now. As always, thanks for reading!

WOG out.

Bookcase + Sliding Shower Door = ?

Well, I finally did it. Yesterday, I seeded eight varieties of seven crops into three flats and put them all into a makeshift coldframe.

What is a coldframe? you may ask. Well, it's more or less a tiny greenhouse. A lot of people use them over the winter to grow fresh salad greens and such - it's a basic structure to provide season extension. We're using it to keep it warm enough for the crops I seeded - the soil is not warm enough for them yet, and the nights still get too cold for them to be outside, but they needed to be seeded now or we'd miss the boat! We were going to use some space in the true greenhouse of Anne Marie's friend Drew, but it was so crowded in there already that we didn't want to take up more of his space. Hence, a coldframe.

To build our coldframe for cheap, we went to ReSource Fort Collins and, with the help of our good friend BigFoot, bought a large used Ikea-style bookcase and a sliding glass shower door that fit over the front of the bookcase, in addition to some old moulding trim, which is going to be used to make some trellises for peas, beans, sunflowers, and tomatoes. The bookcase shelves and the accompanying support pegs were removable, except for one shelf. We had to saw that out of there, which proved to be fairly easy. Then we laid the bookcase down on its back (the cats loved that, of course, and had to explore).

Then, the seeding began. One at a time, I filled each of the flats with potting soil and wet it down very well. Then I double-checked which crops needed to be started, and seeded broccoli, eggplant, two varieties of bell peppers, hot peppers, cherry tomatoes, paste tomatoes, and slicing tomatoes. I hadn't really thought ahead very well, so I had to make some crop variety markers out of strips of a corrugated cardboard box. They'll absorb water and rot pretty quickly, so the plan is to buy some real markers today and replace the cardboard ones ASAP.

When everything was seeded, I arranged the flats in the bookcase/coldframe and placed the shower door on top. It was actually a little small...but I used my public school critical thinking and problem solving skills, and grabbed one of the shelves we'd taken out of the bookcase earlier. I stuck the shelf in the bookcase near one of the ends and replaced the shower door...and voilà! A fully functional coldframe. :)

Here's hoping the plants actually grow!

WOG out