Dry, Hot Weather

We had a wet April but recently we have been in an extended dry spell, and, more recently, very hot weather. In the past seven days we had four days in a row over 90 degrees, one of which reached 101 degrees. With that heat and no rain (and little moisture in the soil) plants suffer. In my garden the cucumbers and summer squash most dramatically show the effect. By early afternoon on those very hot, dry days they looked like they were dying. Their leaves - both cucumbers and squash have lots of leaves and only root in one place - get seriously wilted. Once the sun goes down they perk up again if I have watered in the past day or two. But fruit growth appears to stop. We recently picked large amounts of squash (nearly 10 pounds one day) and cucumbers (more than 10 pounds one day). But now there are no squash or cucumbers to pick. I assume one plant mechanism when it is hot and there is little moisture available is to stop making the fruit that uses so much water.

If I am correct, when we get rain (if we get rain) and cooler weather the little cucumbers and squash will again form and grow.

I had thought that one of the summer squash plants that had really wilted and tipped over had succumbed to the squash vine borer. But I can't find any evidence of damage to the stem of the plant. No frass. No holes that I can find. So maybe the cheese cloth I wrapped around their young stems did work. Time will tell. I hope that the time for the insects that lay the vine borer has passed because I just planted some more squash and cucumber seeds.

My Poor Brassicas and Cabbage Worms

I start many of my vegetables indoors even during the summer. But it seemed wasteful to keep the recent planting under lights in the cellar and so I put them outside in the shade during the day and on the open back porch each night. I began to notice that there was some leaf damage and a few days ago they were looking pretty chewed up as shown in the photo to the right. When I looked at them there was brown "dust" on some of them. Each day the damage was worse. Finally I looked more carefully and noticed the following:

This close the villain becomes clear. See the two parallel cabbage worms on the right most leaf. I found two more worms later that day. The next day I found another four worms.

The source of the cabbage worms is the little cabbage white butterflies that are so common in my garden. I suppose damage to the other brassicas in my garden is from the same source but plants in the garden grow so quickly that the damage is insignificant. And perhaps there are predators (toads and birds) that pick some of them off. The ones on my little seedlings were able to chew away unmolested.

Undeterred I planted all of these miserable looking seedlings in the garden during yesterday's rain. What was in the tray were collards, zen (an Asian green), komatsuna (another Asian green) and dinosaur kale. The komatsuna was the least damaged and the zen the most damaged. I don't know whether that had to do with the chemistry of the plants or simply their proximity to where the eggs were laid.

Next year I will be more observant. The brown "dust" that I observed was the frass (droppings) of the caterpillars (worms). The way I located most of them was by seeing where the frass was and looking carefully in that area.

Full Garden

With the warm weather having arrived the garden is pretty full. Crops like tomatoes and beans are already beginning to take off. Here are pole beans at the base of their trellises. Some are starting to wind around the trellis and begin their climb up.

Tomatoes have begun to shoot up. I tied them for the first time yesterday, while dodging raindrops. For any indeterminate tomatoes (those that continue to grow seemingly forever) I remove any suckers and tie the plants to stakes, similar to the green stake in this bean photo. For my one determinate tomato I use a wire tomato cage and leave the side shoots.

Everything looks good so far with the exception of spinach. Last year I had a huge crop. By this time I had harvested 13 pounds of spinach to freeze as part of the 55 pounds of produce. This year my total is only 46 pounds and less than a pound is spinach. After I planted it rained heavily for several days and I think some of the soil and seeds were washed away.

One of my favorite crops is kale. I grow both Red Russian kale and a dinosaur kale - pictured here. Our new method of preparing the kale is to make "kale chips". I remove the large veins of the leaves and then cut them in half. My wife mixes these with olive oil and grated parmesan cheese and bakes them at 375 degrees until they are crispy. For the two of us it takes about a pound of kale, but that is pretty much the whole meal. I prefer the dinosaur kale because the leaves are more compact and make better chips.

Some parts of the garden are beginning to turn over. The crops that were in cold frames are mostly gone. These included mache, claytonia, kale and lettuce. All of them bolted or are beginning to bolt and about all that is left is a little of the lettuce and that will be gone very soon, probably to the compost pile since I have newer lettuce that needs to be used.

The potatoes look healthy and are beginning to flower. Garlic scapes have appeared and need to be harvested. It is also the season for weeds to grow prolifically.

The New Season Begins

Because I had surgery on April 11th I planted as much of the garden as I could before April 9th. Right after that we had two fairly sunny days followed by days of rainy weather. Some of the transplants were scorched but they seem to be slowly getting established.

In the past week we have begun using some of the plants that made it through the winter. We harvested about six pounds of leeks that were left over from last year. The leeks were not protected from the snow in any way. (Similarly there are scallions in the garden that wintered over.) Today I picked some of the lettuce, mache (corn salad) and claytonia for our lunch time salad. We could pick some kale but we still have frozen greens to use up first.

I haven't yet gotten back to gardening, other than transplanting some of the lettuce that we grew in the cellar and harvested during the winter (see the earlier post about Indoor Lettuce). Tomorrow it is supposed to be quite warm (close to eighty degrees) and I would like to plant potatoes.

Yes! Winter is Over

I returned from North Carolina two days ago. There was no snow of note anywhere on the drive back except in our backyard. But now that is gone. As a clear sign of Spring I put up the outdoor clothes line. Even better, the soil temperature was around 60 degrees and the soil was at that desired state of being able to "be worked". I got out my shovel and dug several areas of winter rye. Admittedly it had not grown all that well and so it was very easy to dig it under.

The new season awaits.

Indoor Lettuce

I'm harvesting lettuce from what has been growing in the cellar. I have four trays - three that I started at the same time and one that I started later. So far I have harvested lettuce seven times, usually right around 3 ounces each time. While that isn't a lot we make the greater part of one meal from the 3 ounces. Sometimes we add carrots, cheese, olives or hard-boiled eggs to make a salad but more often we add a tin or two of sardines to the lettuce.

For the first harvest I picked some of the outside leaves from all three trays - a slow, tedious process. After that I harvested one tray at a time. As shown, I put the fingers of one hand around the lettuce and hold it while I cut it about an inch above the soil surface. I have now cut each tray twice (in addition to the first time when I picked off the outside leaves). I will be interested to see how many times I can cut the plants back and have them regrow. I suspect not more than once more. In the next day or two I will harvest the fourth tray for the first time. I started those seeds on December 1 which means two months from sowing the seeds to the first harvest. For the earlier lettuce I started them October 29 and the first harvest of very small leaves was December 8 and I didn't harvest again until December 31. Two months from planting seed to first harvest is what I have in my outdoor plan - start lettuce seeds March 1, transplant out April 1, begin harvesting May 1.

I planned earlier to harvest some of the kale and mache from the cold frames outside but that hasn't happened. I only cleared the snow off during the one warm spell (it got into the 40s) but they are all covered again and we are expecting another 12 to 18 inches of ice and snow early tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the first day when we have ten hours of sunlight and I was planning to keep the cold frames clear from that date on but will wait for a warmer day to go out and remove the snow.

This is a Different Year

This has been a winter of snow - over 100 inches so far in this area. It also seems colder than usual, the January "thaw" having been two days of temperatures in the high 30s, low 40s right around New Year's Day.

I looked back at last year's posts to see what was happening at this time last year. I had just put the first of the new cold frames in the garden and there was certainly snow there then - looks like it had packed down to about 8-10 inches. But I wrote about sunny days when the temperature inside the new frame was in the 60s. I recall that there were days when the air temperature got into the 80s. That's not this year.

A photo of what the cold frames look like now would show some humps in the snow. I did clear them off back when it was warmer in early January but they are covered again.

One of the things I am doing now is planning this year's garden. I have a lot of old cedar fence slats that are rotting behind the shed. I removed some that had been near the wall under the eaves of the shed and were still in pretty good shape and have those in the garage, but when spring comes I need to sort out the rest. Maybe I have enough to make 4' by 3' or 5' by 3' frames to put into the garden to help in planning. That would divide the garden up into smaller areas that might be easier to plan and easier to keep the plans from year to year. It is helpful to know where the tomatoes and peppers and potatoes have been grown in past year to try and maintain a rotation but I haven't kept such records.

I did a presentation at Edible Gardening CNY about planning a garden and it has encouraged me to do a better job of that in our own garden. I've accumulated the facts about spacing, time to plant, time to expect harvesting to begin (and end), and which plants don't grow well together and will use that to plan each bed.