Been so busy and having a hard time remembering where i left off.  Time seems to fly and i realise how much has gone by since my last entry.

The cherries were just beginning to turn pink last time and things were looking ok,  the woodchuck had only just started to cause trouble....

these first pics are from early July:



This is how the cherries ended up.

There weren't a lot for the first year of course, but the color was great and the flavor was nice though more tart than i had hoped.  Maybe they get sweeter as the plant matures or they just need sugar when processed.

The color continued to deepen a few more days later.

I have gotten some eggplant,  the flowers are nice enough.

Luna moths are pretty too.

I have gotten some long turnips too, and there are more coming every few days still.  They are good with roasts and stews. They are called Hinona Kabu.  When they are ready,  they raise themselves out of the ground and the exposed shoulders become purple.

Seaberries continued to grow

The gojiberries have been satisfyingly plentiful.   I have no pictures,  but the blueberries have had their best year yet.

The nice neighbors finally cut down that tree that has been breathing down our roof's neck.  This being removed has allowed much more sun to the side bed where many of the berries and the cherry tree is.

This is the full garden shot on 7/13/15

This is the "mouse melon" plant on the same day.

It is very much a miniature plant in all ways. Tiny tendrils,  minute flowers.

 It has since grown quite a bit and produced a few samples which were nice to have. More pics will appear below.

Flavor burst peppers:

These have done well and are tasty,  heavy producers of sweet peppers.

Tomatoes....before i lost control of them once again.

Adirondak potato flower:

Lots of apples:

Yard long bean plants

Aphid infestation on the Stanley prune plum

Short video of a female ruby throated humming bird in our yard- if it loads and plays correctly. Its a lower resolution video anyway.

One of the eggplants after the woodchuck began going after those.

Woodchuck taste-test on the sunflowers

Woodchuck claw marks on the sheet plastic.

Normally they just come to eat,  this one liked to dig and wallow.  Not sure if it was reacting to the habanero pepper spray i made to spray on the plants in hopes of deterring its eating.  It didn't work in the long run.

And then on 7/28/15,  i came home from work to find this:

And what that did to my garden:

I won't be using this plastic again next year like i had hoped to. Will have to buy new.

I did get a cucumber after that,  this was at least unblemished by the falling ice missiles.

A few days later,  the production continued mostly unchecked

The biggest Flavorburst pepper so far. This was a couple days ago. Many of the fruit had been hit by the hail but this one was fine all around.

Here's a fruit that the "mouse melon" produced. We got a good handful more of them this morning. They go by a few common names other than "mouse melon",  like Mexican Sour Gherkin, "cucamelon" and others.  They have a tart cucumbery taste,  not bitter but citrusy. The inside is a little jelly-like with the seeds,  like horned melon,  the skin is a bit hard but not unpleasant,  its more of a thin rind really.  I will grow them again next year.

Well,  that is all the pictures i have for now.  I hope to have another catch-up post in the next day or so.

6-22-15 another post i forgot to finish

The grapes are being ridiculous, just showing off.

The cherries are beginning to blush a bit. I'm going to have to come up with something to use to cover them before the birds notice.

I just happened to notice this branch full of growing Sea berries.

That was as far as i got blogging that day!

War drums...

Oh, yeah.  The woodchuck is definitely back. Ate the rest of the soybeans and went for the daikon radishes. I'm not seeing damage on anything further.  I have today and tomorrow off and its beautiful out except for the wind.  Normally on nice days like this we spend pretty much the whole day outside.  This will discourage raids on the garden.  This evening when we go in i will reapply the hot pepper spray. Sunny skies expected tomorrow as well so there should be nothing to wash away the deterring flavor. Havahart trap is baited with green beans and a few broccoli florets.

It makes me wish i had a troupe of flying monkeys to unleash.

Woodchuck, part 33 1/3

Saw a woodchuck in the left side neighbor's backyard this morning before i headed off to work. It is a big one. I went and checked the garden. It ate all but 2 of my soybeans and nipped off 3 of my sunflowers.  I got out the habanero pepper spray i made last summer and gave everything a light spritz.
Arrived home after work this evening (after a few additional errands) and saw it (him? based on the large size) on the right side of the garden- where the soybeans 'were'...  it exited under the fence.

Another quick inspection. Seems nothing further was damaged. (Well i did see some munches taken off the Jerusalem Artichokes,  but it would take a cow to do any significant damage to that.)  He was in full line of sight of our Basset Hound, who likely barked incessantly at him,  hopefully making him uncomfortable enough to not relax and feed.  I set the Havahart humane trap with an ear of sweetcorn.  Its supposed to rain tomorrow.  Woodchucks don't stop eating for rain and i don't know if the pepper spray sticks well. I have work tomorrow. Time will tell.

Getting there

I got the leeks in yesterday.  I'm not sure it was the best place to put them,  right in front of the potatoes...
in the 18 inches behind the potatoes i planted some striped maize.  Japonica striped maize to be specific.  However i was being watched closely by a perky, gray Catbird and i'm not sure if she's going to undo my work.

Lack of room seems to be this year's gardening theme.

When i run the rows North to South instead of East to West i lose a few feet on each row so i have less room. But i do it to enforce a fairly consistent crop rotation thing.  This year, as usual, i overbooked my space. Turns out that the almost complete failure of the root crop row has freed up some space for some of that overbooking.  I put in a whole row of sunflowers there.  In between the sunflowers,  i tucked in the broccoli.  The sunflowers look good,  but the broccoli are pathetic. Barely 3 inches high and a malnourished color.  Most of my seedlings spent too much time languishing in the seed flats with either too much water or too little and fertilizing attempts were somewhat wasted when the trays overflowed with rainwater and roots suffered further when they didn't properly drain.

I got the rest of the squashes in and most of the herbs.  There's a couple flat-leaved parsley, a few lettuce-leafed basil and some pathetic looking Red Russian kale.

This is what i am doing to try and contain some of the overflow.

SOme herbs, some chinese cabbage, assorted salad greens seedlings, flowers and a few pots of herbs i just seeded. I realized with annoyance yesterday that i have no more cilantro seeds.

The tomatoes are looking great. They need pruning and i have to get them staked and twined.  That is planned for today.

Eggplants and peppers.... The peppers already have blooms and little fruit started.

Freshly planted ornamental sunflowers:

A couple broccoli plants tucked in among them.   I didn't want to put the broccoli on plastic. They are heat stressed enough and i don't think broccoli likes the extra heat from the plastic later in the season.

The beans are looking good.  Wish i had allowed room for another row of them.  I might be able to sneak some in on the other side of the cuke/melon row....  early enough so they won't get shaded out?

I have seeds for Yard Long beans.  I read a lot that vining beans are room savers,  but the trellising and staking seems to be beyond my ability to plan for,  so it never happens.  Instead of bush beans i just might sneak in a few yard-long seeds behind the melons....



a little while later....

Tomatoes,  Pruned, staked and weaved.

Another delayed entry....  i started this 2 weeks ago.




__________________________________

Last week, i finally got the rows dug (5/27), the plastic laid out and over 50 new bricks to hold it down.  Then planted the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.  The day before,  i got the potatoes planted in the back row. I also installed a 15' soaker hose under the strawberry bed.  Last Sunday i direct sowed the carrots, parsnip, beets, turnip and daikon radish in just before 3 whole days of steady soaking rain.

I don't remember what day (maybe 3 days prior), but i did start seeds of melons, squash, cukes, sunflowers,  kale, chard and broccoli.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ______________________________________                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                So,  to continue...

I finally got those cukes, melons and squash planted Saturday 6/13.  Well,  except for the two winter squash types- butternut and Red Kuri squash. Those are going in the row next to the potatoes,  but i didn't have time for it.  I just finished a 6 days stretch of work and have my first day off today and it is raining.

I've gotten things in pretty late but at the same time,  we have had such cool weather it wouldn't have done much good to get things in much earlier.  It only just started to get warm enough for melons.  Of course,  while planting the cukes and melons i realised that i had never started seeds for summer squash and zucchini.  The zucchini i wasn't really suprised by because i remember noticing that i thought i had ordered a packet of seeds for a type called Greyzini but actually hadn't. It looks like it never made it on my online order form somehow.... though a type of tomato i don't remember being particularly interested in was there.  I think i simply got interrupted somewhere during order selection and placement and mixed it up.  

Anyhow,  i started "49'r" yellow summer squash seeds yesterday.  It shouldn't be too late for a prolific and heat loving plant that gets buggy and overgrown before August.

I'm not seeing good results from my direct-seeded plots. I did Red Cored Chantenay and Cosmic Purple carrots, Hollow Crown Parsnip, Cylindra, Boltardy and Golden beets, Hinona Kabu and Shogoin Japanese turnips, the Minowase Daikon radish are the only ones doing well.
I don't think i'll bother trying to grow root vegetables again without making seed sheets (tape) out of them first. I think the 3 days of rain just washed them away or floated them into crevices. What does come come up is in clusters and is a waste from thinning and poor use of space.  Seed sheets at least hold the seeds down and they germinate in a predictable grid pattern which is easier to weed and thin properly.  Is pretty much a whole row of wasted seeds now. I'd try transplanting but i have seen it not work very well for others.

I'm trying melon again.  (Trying Minnesota Midget for the second year, last year they got eaten by a woodchuck shortly after planting).  A sweet melon called Sakatas. It has smallish fruit that can almost be eaten rind and all,  Tom Watson watermelon also.  I think i tried this my first year in the big garden- the year the birdhouse gourd tried to take over my hemisphere.  Tom Watson and all the other melons did not work out at all. I reconsidered watermelon one more time because of the success with black plastic and my sweet pepper yields.  Ogen melon is the next completely new try this year.  The description was so enticing i had to try it.   I have the seedlings pretty close together.  The seedlings may need warmer germinating temps because these smaller melons did not germinate well and look kinda pathetic.  Planting them close hopefully will let the remaining plants utilize space if half of them quit.

The seeds for the Mexican Sour Gherkin didn't come up well either.  I planted 6 cells with 2 seeds each and i think only 3 cells came up with only 4 total seeds germinating.   I may start some more of those seeds,  i really want to get plenty of these. One of my favorite summer beverages the last 2 years has been sliced cucumber and  sliced lemon steeped in water with some crushed mint.  It is incredibly refreshing.  These are described as tasting like a fava-beany cucumber with a lemon-lime hint.  (o-O)    They may make a nice drink when steeped in water.  They tell you to pick them when they are grape sized but they didn't say how prolific the plants are.  Even if they don't make a good fruit/veggie tea,  i still want to try them.

Uggh,  just remembered i forgot to start mint seeds.  lol


The cucumbers i planted are the pickling and slicing type.

For slicing i have Summer Dance and Diva. I planted more picklers since i prefer the flavor and actually don't mind the texture of the seeds and pulp at all.   Those are Boston Pickling, General Lee, and National Pickling.

I'm trying Black Futsu and Red Kuri winter squashes this year. The Red Kuri remind me of one of the first large winter squashes i ever grew called Red Eye.  Red Eye has been discontinued from my usual seed place for quite some time and no seeds remain. Not sure if they are related in any breeding aspect but if they have a similar flavor i want to have that again.   The black Futsu is supposed to have a rich flavor,  nutty like hazelnuts and has remarkable storage qualities.   I have no idea if these plants will take over my garden (i barely have the space for 3 "compact" butternut squash vines)but i'm giving them what extra space i can spare.  The Futsu is supposed to be very prolific and the Kuri on the prolific side but not as explosive sounding as Futsu.

I'm trying edamame soybeans again too. I had tried a type called Beer Friend a few years ago,  but i got the seeds late in the season and planted them the following year. None came up. These  are called Butterbeans and sprouted pretty quickly.  I will probably forget to sow a few every couple of weeks so we don't end up with one bunch and then that's it.


I finally managed to get ahold of some Schizandra plants, aka 5 flavor berry.  I tried growing them from seed a couple years ago and got nothing and then Oikos Treecrops didn't have any left and none available this spring,  but the blog i follow about Sea Buckthorn-- their company does sell schizaqndra pl;ants for a reasonable price,  so i got 3.  I think they came in on May 23 or so.  One looked great, one was so-so and i don't have much hope for the third one but i'll give it some time before i ask for a do-over or something.

This is the good one:

The one on the left is the ok one (there's a tiny green bud just above the farther rim of the pot) and the one on the right, i don't think is alive at all:

i also got these hazelnuts from Burpee this year,  they came along with the 5 Darrow blackberry plants i ordered.

They are Jefferson and Theta. ...and.... my 6-year-old for scale.  They were planted almost immediately May 21, 2014.

These are the Darrow blackberries:

Lots of potential plums on Stanley this year.  I'm using Surround for spray this year with a few other things.  Application scheduling is always a challenge due to weather, time and proper applicator availability. I might go into that more later.

Stanley still has galls despite my attempt to remove them as instructed,  they are extraordinarily numerous this year and i'm rather irked by that.  After pruning 4 feet off the top of it this spring and its still about 12-14 feet tall,  i'm doubting that i got a dwarf plant and really suspecting that i paid for a dwarf and got a slightly cheaper semi-dwarf.  I really need to find out what to do about the galls.  All Starks advised me was to remove them and disinfect between cuts,  which i did only to be rewarded with a bumper crop of fresh ones.

The blueberry plants are finally starting to pick up size.  This one has had the greatest increase.

Here's the bigger Carmine Jewel cherry tree with unripe cherries.  Hopefully some will ripen fully and we can have our first taste.

Yes!  I can finally see the beginning of sea buckthorn berries:

I got some Moonflower seeds for my oldest daughter to plant in her designated pot.  We planted these about a month ago now.  They came up then it got cold and they haven't moved much since.

There's 4 O'clocks in there too.

The garden this morning

And the seedlings waiting to be planted or given away

And a small project i'm working on.  Labeling all my perennial plants with some more permanent markers than my feeble memory. :0)  There's some botanical name info,  the date i got them and the suppliers' name.

Frustration first: Straw bale gardening....then on to better things.

Its not the technique of Straw Bale Gardening at fault. Its the material sourcing apparently.  Where i live,  i'm smack in the middle of urban and rural.  If i want straw bales i have 2 choices. For cheap (ie. reasonable pricing) i'd have to drive over 40 miles - fuel costs would cancel out the reasonable price.  If i want local i can go to a pseudo "farm boutique" (as in, people who dress and have marriage ceremonies for their hobby animals & mean it) and pay about $10 a bale for their precious straw.  I know that straw should not cost that much. Anywhere from $3-$6 is reasonable,  unless you are a sucker, desperate (like i almost am) or have money to waste.

I don't need perfect, shiny (even certified organic isn't a requirement for me) straw. It can be older, even moldy and someone just wants to get rid of it. I'm going to be soaking it in liquid fertilizer and rotting it anyway. It needs a month to prep and i'm out of time at this point. So maybe this fall i can find someone who just wants to unload some.

Oh,  well.  not really angry, more like annoyed and wanting to just say so.

I think i have certainty of some first time blooming going on this year.

My female "Titan" sea buckthorn may actually be blooming. I got really worried earlier last spring because the male has bloomed for 2 years now - despite being much smaller (and younger) than the female. I was concerned that their bloom time was going to be way too far apart for them to be fertile partners. Searching for photos of blooming female sea buckthorns was extremely difficult but for another blog i follow Seaberry blog .
 and i asked the blogger in that post about it.  Going back to that post today i was able to find that Titan is in bloom and so is 'mister seabuck' (not an official title because it was sold as an unnamed male plant only,  i have no idea if this cultivar has a name or number at all.) Mister seabuck is almost past his bloom i think,  because the brown scales are falling to the ground and are littering a circle around his base.
The visible parts of female Sea Buckthorn flowers are quite hard to see and extremely challenging for amateur photographers to capture. After a lot of pics of blurry plant and crystal clear thumbs i took my fingers out of the way and circled the evidence.

In real life they look almost exactly like the pics on the  Seaberry blog i referenced above.  Here's the male. Hopefully he didn't finish too far ahead and any remaining pollen is still able to get where it needs to go.

Another blooming first.  This is one of the two Carmine Jewel cherry plants i bought in Spring 2012. It was actually the healthier of the two but i had to replant it during summer and then later it got broken by feral cats digging around and jumping on it,  then 5 feet or snow piled on top of it this winter....

But its got flower buds!

The one that started smaller but got more pampered and hasn't been bedeviled by all-sorts is easily 3 times its size.

Its a first-time bloomer too.

(more bad photography)

Last up is a nice bloom from a "Northeaster" strawberry plant that i added just a few weeks ago.  I'm told that i should pick off the flowers this year and avoid letting the plants produce berries. *stomps feet*  Do i really have to?

I'm almost ready for veggie gardening.  My dad ran the tiller through the soil 3 days ago but it rained since then and its too heavy for me to hill up today and i'm busy tomorrow. My plastic sheeting arrived today and so did my liquid fish fertilizer.

Got all of the current seedlings getting hardened off

I'm wicked late getting some things started. I still need to get the melons, cukes and summer & winter squashes started.  I also forgot to start Red Russian kale and almost totally forgot about the okra. I'm behind on some flower seedlings too.

Potatoes are pretty much ready. I'm trying German Butterball (front of pic) for the first time and going with Adirondack Blue once again.

I'm also trying leeks for the first time (off to the left).


This "King of the North" bell pepper wants to bloom already.  If it stays warm i may be able to plant the more tender things in about 10-14 more days.

Well,  there's something else in full bloom today and its making my eyelids stick together.  So,  that will be it for now.

Hello again!

One of my last entries included the sentence: "I'm expecting an interesting winter". Or something along those lines. We certainly did.  The yard had about 4 feet of snow in it much of the season with 6-7 foot drifts not being unheard of.

I'm not sure where to start with this next attempt at catching up.

I guess i'll start with whatever pictures i have that are uploaded.

Last spring i replaced the short 6 foot posts i had the grapes trellised on with much taller posts. I think they are 8 or 9 foot now.  Its been too long since i did it.  I had to cut away all the old wire,  prune the vines away then pull the short posts,  then pound the new ones in. I ended up going no further that year because the posts had no hooks like the shorter ones did. I couldn't simply slip the wire into the slots and be done with it. The taller fences only have rounded protrusions. So i had to come up with something and plastic clips or zip ties would not last and metal hose clamps or muffler clamps would add cost far too quickly. So i came up with this:

It gives the wire enough play to be tightened as necessary.

This was during the post replacement:

The comparison in size can be seen on the right side of the pic, just past the stepladder

I got nothing else done with the grapes that year and they had no support through the heavy snow this winter and were a complete mess this spring.

They look much better now and the vines will be running higher off the ground and will make weed suppression much easier:

I also removed the leftmost Edelweiss and gave it away.   You can see all the dead brown grass that was the weed growth that totally got away from me last year.  The tallest wire goes all the way to the top of the posts where it is painted yellow.

So that got accomplished,  finally!

While i was taking care of that,  hubby was helping clear the garden

About a week ago i prepared a new bed and planted 52 strawberry plants for our youngest who adores strawberries.

It was good timing for putting out bare root plants that had broken dormancy in the mail 2 weeks prior,  the following 3 days were overcast with occasional light rain showers.  So,  with the Remay fabric covering them,  they seem to have escaped sunburn.  I bought the "Three Great Strawberries" collection from Burpee. It was 25 of each "Northeaster", "Tribute" and "Earliglow".  They did short me about 5 plants and some were either DOA or too puny to bother with,  but i only needed 52 and gave the rest of the more likely looking ones away.

I also built myself a new seed starting setup out of PVC.  Earlier in the year i was thinking i might build something out of wooden 2x4s. So i did some research and found this website:
http://www2.arkansas.net/~mgee/growlightstand/growlightstand.html

Many, many thanks go to this person who shared this design freely and made the simple instructions crystal clear.

I took a few pictures of the build in progress but never did snap a shot of the completed stand- which is currently in use.

I did omit the building of the wooden trays and instead used some leftover hardware cloth (a welded metal mesh) and zip-tied it to the support bars.  The project cost me under $50.00 since i already had the light fixtures, chain and the PVC cutting tool instead of a saw.  ---because we know this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to PVC.

I also learned that one can indeed fit 10' lengths of 1" PVC pipe into a closed Nissan Sentra.  Just like my old Hyundai Accent,  its amazing what a family car can haul if you pack it right. :)

Well i guess that is it for now.  Its a beautiful day outside and is expected to be in the upper 70's.

I hope to not neglect my blog this year like i have for the last 2!