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Seasonal Notes from the ManyTracks Garden by Sue Robishaw It was a tough winter for many
plants -- the snow didn’t come until late, but the cold came early. The ground
froze deep. Friends even lost their oregano! My oregano survived, but the
Lemon Balm didn’t, nor did the Thyme, much of the mint, and most of the Sage,
except for one hardy low branch, which I sure appreciated. Thankfully, the Lemon
Balm had self sown last year and I found a number of them growing around the
area. I couldn’t harvest much this year, but will hopefully have a good crop
next. But spring arrived with early warmth, hot weather, cold frames off. Oops -- cold frames back on with a cold snap the end of June. Then hot and dry. Then very dry. And hot. So went summer. Until fall when it turned cold and wet, starting with our first frost September 4. Such is the life of garden. I’m used to dealing with cold, and frosts, and cloudy. But hot? Oh well, looks like I’ll have to get used to that, too! As always, the garden fed us well in spite of all the fussing about the weather. Some crops loved the weather, some became quite ornery, and others didn’t care one way or the other. Most all of my crops and varieties have been selected for their adaptability to the cold, so I can’t blame them if they complained of the hot. But even with the unusual (to us) heat, we had to deal with late and early frosts. My garden notes include this admonition: Don’t plant tender plants individually here and there throughout the garden. Plant them together, in cold frame size blocks even if you don’t think you’ll be needing to put cold frames on them, because you probably will. Good advise, now if I will just heed it in the future! TOMATOES -- They loved the heat! I planted six different varieties this year, and once again my old standby Earlirouge came out on top. The rest were new, with Mary’s Paste being a bit spotty with fruit but a good sized paste, and Poll Robson being an interesting color of dark orange over dark red, but the latest maturing. Victorio was a prolific grower of vines -- too weedy for me. Extra Eros didn’t have great fruit, but they ripened fairly early. They were many shades of red, light orange and medium orange -- pretty but hard to judge when they were ripe. The last was Big White. Not a lot of fruit, but impressive large and meaty globes, and not too bad with maturity. I’ll probably give this one a go again. The PEPPER plants loved the heat as well. Too bad that didn’t manifest as a great crop of peppers. We have such a hard time with this crop, I felt sure the heat would be good. But apparently my plants didn’t like setting fruit in such weather. But they did do the job eventually, and I had a decent crop of green fruit. Even if I didn’t get the elusive ripe-red-in-the-garden (or in this case, with the heirloom Georgescu, dark-yellow-in-the-garden) crop, I was happy to have what I got. Bad wilt in the CUCUMBERS -- my own seed of Northern Pickling from 1998. I was hoping to get a few plants to survive to save some "resistant" seed, but no go. I’ll need to plant a large crop in future years to see if I can come up with some plants that don’t succumb to the wilt. And make SURE if I do that I ferment the seed -- could that have been the problem? There will be rationing of pickles this year. This should have been a good year for the CORN. I continue to grow my own
cross of multiple short season, open pollinated, sweet corns so I have a lot of
diversity. And I continue to plant early, especially when I want the corn to
mature so I can save seed, as was my want this year. I researched as I could, without finding much encouragement for successfully combatting these guys at this late date. So I thought about it, sprayed the plants with Dipel, put fresh wood ashes around each plant, and made sure I let the birds know how much I appreciated all they did in the garden. I don’t do much for them, except provide water, but they do much for me! Particularly, the wonderful little Chipping Sparrows. Either the timing was right, the weather was right, what I did was right, the birds had some good feasts, or the borers decided to bore elsewhere. Anyway, I didn’t have any more damage and ended up with a decent crop of corn, though the maturity was more variable than usual. We ate a lot of fresh corn, dried a good amount of green corn, and harvested enough good dry ears in the fall for seed. There were a lot of corn worms and I killed many of them on the silks, keeping an eye out for them whenever walking by the corn. I planted half my corn in plots of 4 rows, the other half in plots with two rows of corn and two of beans. The 4 row plots were somewhat better, and easier to manage. Since I almost always end up having to cover the beans because of late frosts, having half the plot in corn didn’t work very well. This was the year for DRY BEANS -- one of my best harvests ever. A very good
year, with most of the pods dry and ready for harvest the first of September. I
had planted some in the north shade of an apple tree and they were definitely
later maturing. They need to be out in the full sun. BROCCOLI did well in spite of the heat. At least those that made it past the cutworms (note -- use TALL cardboard collars, these guys simply stood on end and ate the stems off above my regular collars). And the root maggots. I hadn’t had that problem for many years and had gotten quite lax about putting wood ashes around the roots when transplanting, and around the plants thereafter. So, another note -- use wood ashes! It isn’t as if it’s even that much of a job. But, how easily we forget past problems. The PAC CHOY I started early inside and transplanted out to grow for seed likewise did well -- it loved the heat, bolting early to set a generous crop of seed. But, am I going to be sorry about that early bolting for future crops? I won’t know until next year. It’s an uneasy line for seed saving -- you need the plant to bolt and set seed early enough to mature that seed for harvest, but you want a nice non-early-bolting genetics for growing the crop. The best is to have a long enough time to rouge out the early bolters. Easy enough in the spinach, not so easy in some of the other, longer season greens. The POTATOES that did well did very well, those that didn’t, didn’t. Unfortunately, I have to accept that one of my favorites, Ackersegen, has "run out". It is a great, long storage, white, buff potatoe that did well for many years, but my seed has apparently succumbed to one or many viruses and I didn’t have any good hills to save seed from this year. And I’m going to let the Menominee and Harmony Beauty varieties go, too. After many difficult years they simply aren’t thriving. In spite of these failures, the rest of the crop made up for it with a large harvest of good sized tubers with little scab (hooray!) to keep us in good eating into next spring. We did have blight, but not enough to effect the harvest. I had a rough time keeping up with the harvest of my SNAP BEANS this year. A problem I can live with. I continue to be enthused with the old timey Black Valentine bush bean, and the Valentine Red is pretty good, too. They keep us in snap beans all summer and manage to mature a good enough amount for seed next year. I also like the Uncle Tom’s, though they’re a bit smaller and not as prolific. But they’re a good companion to the others and I have to love the name -- my Dad was a loved and favorite Uncle Tom to many of my cousins. All in all, a good year and a lot of good eating. I even had a good crop of grapes! 14# of beautiful bunches that translated into many jars of beautiful grape juice. # # # For more gardening and homesteading information
see . . . Updated 10/19/2006 Copyright © 2004 by Sue Robishaw Comments or Questions? Contact Information
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