Tag: peas

Planting a fall bed, best brassica editon

~ Homo neanderthalensis ~ Leave a comment

Well the first of a few hopefully. Despite the perennial issues with cabbage fly, it’s officially brassica season, the best time of year.

Armed with B.t. to deter the moths I rode into battle with my favorite of all brassicas.

Bok Choy!

Joi Choi to be specific, that wonderful variety that resists bolting and tastes just as good as a large head as it does small.

The cucumber bed got ripped out to make room. As did the buggy Swiss chard and beans to the right, but that’s another day- and another post.

Luckily I had a bag of compost in the shed so after some pretty intense weeding I dumped the good stuff in the bed and got planting.

All these beauties need is some mulch and they’re ready to go!

Yes. Perfect.

The strip of bare soil in the back is where I sowed some shelling peas. Legumes and brassicas (at least leafy brassicas) are the perfect soil mates. Nitrogen fixation will help my little cabbages grow big and strong.

The other reason I love Joi Choi so much is that it resists the worst of the cabbage fly. I have no doubt I’ll get a few of those maggoty bastards- but as long as the plants are healthy one or two maggots seems to just be the price of doing business.

Once the peas sprout I’ll put in some support and mulch the rest of the way.

Now onto planning the other fall beds!

Captain’s log: sometime this week

~ Homo neanderthalensis ~ 2 Comments

I never have enough time these days, but now thanks to my job, I have plenty of thyme!

(BOOOOOOOOOOO)

Specifically lemon and English thyme, which I added to my French and big leaf thyme.

Soon they’ll be trying to take over the herb bed too. The other herbs I put in are doing well thanks to the wacko May downpour we’ve suddenly got.

More on that later.

The purple peas are vigorously trying to scale my neighbor’s fence, and they’re putting out gorgeous flowers.

Nice. Snap peas here I come.

In other flowering news- my biggest sunflower has gotten gigantic.

No closer to making a flower head- though it’s neighbor’s the zucchini’s look nice and bushy. And wet. Squash is prone to molds and mildews on the leaves- but if it’s going to keep raining I’m not sure what I can do to stop it.

The cucumbers are soaking it up though. They are obediently growing vertically and soon I can train them up the tripod.

I got more herbs then thyme however- a lemon verbena, a really fancy cilantro, and a lonely apple mint that I’ve seen languishing on the herb table at work for longer than I’ve actually been working there- getting bigger and bigger while nobody bought it.

I’ll buy you you beautiful gigantic apple mint.

But first I had to plant my lemon verbena. That meant getting rid of my sorrel.

Look- I like sorrel, but it’s toxic in large quantities and it was refusing to play nice in its pot- to the point where it was growing its roots through its drainage holes trying to take over the garden yet again. There’s a reason I call all my sorrels Audrey II.

So I put my Verbena in my newly empty rainy grey pot.

Lemon verbena is actually a small shrub or tree. Or it will be. That’s why I put it in a larger pot. It’s deciduous like an oak tree- and will be bare twigs in winter- but it will come back into lemon scented magnificence in spring.

I had more planting to do… but…

Sudden rain attack.

Come on San Francisco it’s May! And I planted your namesake! Give me a break!

I had to wait a bit to plant the rest.

Mister big mint had to go into a plastic pot that once held my blackberry- as I’ve run out of proper pots. Oh well my employee discount will be doing some work in June I suspect. Mister fancy cilantro went into the old pennyroyal pot. the reason my pennyroyal pot was empty was that it had become majorly pot-bound.

Oof. I saved it and put in in my next biggest pot- but it will soon need another repotting. Again… I have some shopping to do.

You may have noticed that I cut the apple mint down to size- And he wasn’t the only one.

My red-stemmed peppermint that I grew from a cutting has gotten gigantic- so I cut him down to size too. And then took the cuttings and put them into pots!

I’m just going to be drowning in mint soon and I’m loving every second of it.

I’m going to have to throw a meet-up in a month to give away plants. That’s a great problem to have.

I’ll leave you all with the poppy the birds sowed this year- blooming away with a bee in one of its flowers.

Wait I lied- I’ll leave you with the most beautiful image a gardener can have in May.

Hell yeah baby tomato!

Captain’s log: May 8th 2019

~ Homo neanderthalensis ~ 4 Comments

Ah the first captain’s log of May. I got a lot done today, and I am very tired. I still had the cucumber and pumpkin to plant but this morning I was downtown and…

This is a jalapeño plant I got at the civic center farmers market. I’ve been looking for at least one hot pepper and this seemed a likely candidate. Jalapeños are a little easier to grow than other larger hot peppers. Of course- sweet peppers are a better bet. But eventually my lipstick pepper will be large enough to transplant and the bulls horn is also a sweet pepper- so I’ll give a hot pepper a try. Of course it will go better if the weather is warmer, like it was in late April. Late April felt like summer- early May feels like winter.

Welcome to San Francisco I guess.

I cut off the red peppers for eating, and buried the newcomer up to its neck. Proper pepper planting protocol.

Say that 5 times fast!

The baby potatoes in bags are growing vigorously enough that it was time to put more dirt in the bags. I still don’t know what the hell is going on with the two older potatoes, and I suspect tomorrow I’ll be digging up one of the bags to make sure this isn’t a blight situation.

Here’s an incredibly annoying thing- the bare spot in this bed is where two bean sprouts once were. It looks like some creature just straight up ate the tops of two of my beans. Just- *monch* no more beans.

Of course the beans on the other side are still heavily slug eaten.

Anyways- I put down the sluggo all throughout the garden earlier this week, so hopefully that will be the end of that. This is the bed where I put the pumpkin today, since the Swiss chard never really came up- and if it does later it can just grow around the vines.

In the areas where the beans once were I put two new seeds down so I can have my late season Kentucky wonders. Growing squash and beans together is of course as old as indigenous America (all I’m missing is the corn) so I have high hopes for a few proper pumpkins come Halloween.

Oh god bless the radish. And all the other brassicas, lettuce and arugula in the large fabric bed. Everything is coming up really nice and it doesn’t need too much water.

I built a quick and dirty trellis to go with my other quick and dirty trellis in the cucumber bed. I might put another type of radish in the void under the trellis like I’ve put green onion in front of the other cucumbers. Co-planting is always good.

Here’s my pretty Persian cukes ready to climb up my stakes. As my other Boston pickle cucumbers starts get larger I’ll put them on the other sides.

In tomato news, the first Roma of the sauce pot is growing. It’s a little baby plum tomato! The wet weather isn’t wonderful for the tomatoes but they seem to be surviving just fine. The sun gold still has its fair share of aphids, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering the plant- it’s really bothering me though.

The blackberry vines are both growing well, and as you can see the base of the vine is throwing up some fresh growth. It’s good to know that all the effort I put into acidifying the soil and preparing it is paying off.

The upper zucchini bed is thriving- this is the Magda grey zucchini,

And here’s the greens. I’m worried the wet will cause some molding issues that are so common to squash- but so far it seems ok.

Here’s some fun. The purple peas have so outpaced their dinky stakes I screwed some eyelets into the fence and strung wire between them.

I hope my neighbor likes peas because I think there’s no way I can stop this plant from going right over the fence. The spinach in front is questionable of course, I’m concerned after the heat wave last month it might go straight to seed- but there’s nothing I can do about that.

Another thing I can do nothing about is the criminals. The entire time I was working in the garden I had the peculiar feeling of being watched. Well I *was* being watched by a pair of criminals who were lounging in the carrot bed and spying on me for hours. Here is a quick pic of criminal tortoiseshell fleeing while criminal grey tabby stares at me through the carrot tops.

I can spray for aphids but I can’t spray for cats. I’m just going to learn to live with a pair of criminal spies, sitting on my plants.

They’re really cute criminals though.

Beans glorious beans and how to stake them.

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Well trellis them really. At first I thought I’d just use 6 of the tall stakes and that would be it- but I recalled how last years beans did well on a net and how the peas are quickly outgrowing their stakes… so I broke out the netting.

I used soft ties to anchor the netting to 4 of the really tall stakes. These are the trionfo violetto beans, and they’re growing fairly well. The turnips in front of them might be gone, now replaced with the last of the romanesco seedlings but at least the trellis is up.

Also- growing turnips and beans in the same bed was as stupid as growing carrots with beans last year. Legumes fix nitrogen to the soil- too much nitrogen with a root crop means lush leaves- stunted roots. I have to at some point learn from my mistakes.

I also set up another trellis with the new blue lake bean starts.

Pretty much an identical set up. I am slightly concerned about these new beans though- they look a little eh.

They’ve been immediately set upon by some nibbling pest, and some of them are almost wilting. Now that’s the weather’s fault- yesterday it was 80 and today it was 75. I am in awe at how hot it’s getting, and while it was nice to wear shorts yesterday my tender bean plants would like it to be a little cooler please and thank you.

The Kentucky wonder beans I sowed from seed however are all sprouting on queue. These little guys won’t need a trellis for a while though.

The peas are quickly climbing up their stakes, I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to have to use eyelets and wire to secure them to the fence soon.

As you can see I’ve put the spinach seedlings in front of the peas- sowed the bare area with some mizuna mustard greens because god knows I love a brassica. I’ve been super diligent about checking the roots of all my cabbage family crops- so far no more cabbage fly- looks like they were just devouring my turnips.

This trionfo violetto is already reaching for its trellis-

Aren’t beans grand!

Finally putting some seedlings in the beds

~ Homo neanderthalensis ~ 3 Comments

Hallelujah! It’s finally planting time! I mean, it’s still going to rain off and on until mid-April, but it shouldn’t be anything like the deluge of past months. So it’s time.

First the zucchini!

Yesterday I found some aphids on the back of the leaves. Green aphids, which are pretty minor on the aphid scale of badness, but aphids nonetheless. Easy enough to kill them and then spray a little insect soap- but considering the absolute explosion in the ladybug population in the last few weeks- I’d rather have nature take care of my aphids.

Luckily the roots looked pretty good.

Now those are some good roots. The plant itself looked a little pot-bound but the roots were fine. All three squash went into the ground in the bed next to the apple tree.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on them- I’m not sure if all of them will take- but now that it’s warmer I’ll probably plant more via seed- and maybe a few from plants I buy, so I’m not worried about my squash this year.

I’m gonna have so much squash.

The peas also need to go in- their roots are little less well grown.

But the plants are putting out tendrils so they need to be in the ground and staked. One of the peas I put in the ground did sprout, but none of the other did, so that’s what the six-pack of seedlings is for.

Luckily I found some old bamboo stakes inside and I put them up.

It’s a bed that doesn’t get a lot of morning sun, but plenty in the afternoon, so it’s good for peas, and also greens. Not so much for beans or cucumbers. Eventually I’ll put some greens in front of the peas, since only a few of the radishes I planted by seed came up.

But what about my largest sunflowers?

One I put in the bed with the zucchini’s- hopefully the flower will attract more bees to the later squash flowers.

The other I put in a pot by the fog tomatoes.

To attract bees to the future tomato flowers!

I really have to update my garden map- maybe tomorrow after I mow everything. It’s really starting to get busy- There’s even some flower buds on the baby sungold tomato which is crazy! I’m hoping the bees will come in time. Soon I’ll put out the bee house- but I really have to wait until all the rain is gone for that.

But at least I’m not cooped up inside from too much rain.

Pre-rain planting, and re-planting aka last seeds of 2018

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Well last seeds of 2018 as long as they take. Which in the case of the peas is… questionable.

First things first- the dill plant did not rally, it died. So I ripped out the dead plant, put a little more soil in the pot, and sowed some dill seed right on top.

Wow! It’s a sexy photo of dirt!

Yeah this isn’t going to be the best post photo wise.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting to see if it comes up. You can’t bury the dill seed too far, it needs light to germinate. So it might take some trial and error before anything sprouts. (Which is why I really wanted the plant to take instead of sowing from seed, but you can’t always get what you want.) It’s gonna rain tonight so that’s why I’m doing my planting now.

Now I’ve wanted to rip out my heat damaged lettuce for a while, and I thought a good winter crop would be some kind of pea. Problem is- I actually didn’t have a ton of pea seeds that weren’t super duper old.

This was the one that was least old and most tasty. Who doesn’t love snow peas?

I was hoping I had a packet of sugar snap, but alas it was not to be…

Mind you if these don’t come up I am totally buying some sugar snap seeds but, hopefully these come up.

I thought I’d grow something else too.

So I love turnips. And I’ve grown them before fairly successfully! I made the mistake of growing them during the summer unfortunately though- and maybe half my turnips were gobbled up by cabbage grubs at the time. The other issue was that I planted them in the ground and not in a raised bed which was just begging for trouble.

Which is why you plant your cabbages in the winter!

It was pretty easy to dig out the bad lettuce, add a few liters of extra soil, and sow my seeds. A back row of peas, and a front row of turnips.

I’ll have to thin the turnips once they come up- and they will come up. I’ll probably only get like 5, but I’m the only one in the house that loves turnips so that works. And if I want more it’s fairly easy to tuck a few turnip seeds in another bed or pot if you have the space, they’re a fairly low maintenance crop.

Whether the peas come up… is a question mark.

So here’s one more sexy photo of dirt!

Yay! Dirt!