Life after tomato season: @ 17 degrees, how is your garden?
I snapped these this morning when it was around 17 or 18 degrees here behind the fence.
A few days from now, once the cold snap passes, I’ll post the same shots to see how things recovered.
Arugula ice sculpture:
Mixed greens on the verge of shattering:
More frozen arugula behind Kale that barely shows the freeze:
Popeye’s favorite:
What is your prediction? Will all recover? Will any recover?
Hardy Volunteers
In August 2010 I spread some arugula seeds in a temporary bed that I overwintered with a scrap of contractors plastic. The plants didn’t do so particularly well; last spring I uprooted the bed and reconfigured the area inside the west half of the boxwood garden. A plant or two came up in one of the new beds shortly thereafter, presumably from the ungerminated seed I disturbed moving the beds. These plants suffered through a blistering summer and I let them run their course and by August they were covered with drying seed pods.
Arugula seed pods are best left on the plant until they begin to brown and dry. The trick is to collect them before they get so dry that they burst open @ the touch.
Obviously several opened as there are volunteers now in the are around the bed and towards the shed where I stowed the seeds. Of course there is a thicket of plants in the same spot as the parent plants; a hearty stand of tasty arugula sweetened by the light freezes that have nipped at it so far this year.
The outliers are the healthiest ones I’ve ever seen though- wild arugula competing with their cousins the wild dandelions for space in the mulch breaks tight against the boxwoods. Yum:
The french breakfast radish seed saving experiment allowed for similar escapees, although these mutant wild offspring look like they were downwind from the Fukushima reactor. Normally these long radishes are harvested about the time they are the size of my big toe. Give one perfect conditions (like in compost next to a rotting Magnolia stump maybe…) and the next thing you know you have a monster FBR:
I don’t pull volunteers 99% of the time- I figure they probably have good genetic stock if they manage to get that far and my usual mode is to let them go all the way to seed (for saving). This practice has given me Tommy Toe tomatoes along the perimeters as well as dozens of beautiful Thai basil plants in and between the beds.
I guess arugula and radish are just now joining the insurrection….
From gourd to sponge
(*The last post was just me complaining about having to do the tree thing so I figured I’d make it up to you with a gourd post.)
Many of the loofahs are drying sufficiently enough to peel; this weekend I decided to process a few to see how difficult this whole deal is going to be.
Processing means:
- Allowing to dry, preferably on the vine, to the point that the gourd feels light and hollow and the seeds rattle.
- Breaking the bottom tip off and shaking the seeds out
- Breaking the top off @ the stem and pulling the “strings” down the sides to break the skins back for peeling. These strings run down the sides under the stripes to the bottom of the gourd. Like opening a FedEx envelope sort of…
- Peeling the skin off
- Once peeled, the skeletal innards should be soaked in water with a good shot of bleach in it.
- After bleaching the loofahs need to be rinsed and allowed to dry.
- Presto, you have loofah “sponges”.
Still too green and heavy to pick and peel:
Supplemental drying on a warm stack of rocks for those whose vines couldn’t hold them off the ground (I also have wire racks in my new ladder shed with a couple dozen drying under cover):
A few peeled (note the half inch deep layer of black seeds underneath in the bin.
These are actually pretty decent; I was concerned they wouldn’t be tough enough or substantial enough to hold up. I think they will do just fine. These are immersed in a bleach solution in a 5 gallon bucket as I type this. I’ll rinse and let them dry in the sun tomorrow.
Border Wars
The weapons:
The border battlefield:
The casualties:
Some explanation:
Actually this battle was the long put off removal of my neighbor’s saw briar bundled cherry laurel tree from my fence. It fell the length of my wire fence and got hung up hovering over the row of boxwoods I had moved to the edge of the yard earlier in the spring.
For six months I was hopeful that I might return home one day to find it removed, or perhaps at least stripped of the 3,139 feet of dried briars that protected the length of the trunk. No such luck.
This afternoon I came up with a scheme that would allow me to remove it while sparing my boxwoods. A come-a-long hand winch and 45 ft of 5 ton steel cable anchored by a stout magnolia did the trick- remarkably I still have all my fingers and all my box woods. I’m a nice guy; I didn’t charge for my services and the logs were all returned to their original owner.
😉
December Garden Photos
Elephant Garlic with the green garlic patch experiment in the background
Closer of the green garlic patch from the previous post:
Cabbage corner:
The divine glow of condensation glimmering in the winter sun:
A peek inside the skin of a drying loofah gourd:
Raised Raspberry bed planted in front of a new long ladder & lawnmower shed
Oops. Broccoli flowering due to inadvertently tropical temperatures inside the hoop house earlier
Garlic Brain Planning Ahead: A Green Garlic Bed?
After planting the largest of the exterior cloves of my largest seed garlic heads, I was left with a hundred or two of the skinnier interior cloves. I thought about planting them “normally” as I did last year, but part of the overkill last year was to improve the size of each season’s heads by replanting only the “largest of the large”.
The problem is that I just can’t make myself throw seeds out, and these interior cloves are still “seed”.
So it dawned on me I might purposely crowd these in a densely planted bed to create a nice crop of “green garlic”. Next spring, just before the garlic begins to bulb up in earnest, the plants will be ready to pull, similar to green bunching onions or baby leeks. Less pungent than mature garlic but still interesting enough for a variety of applications? Good enough for me (and not a space hog.)
More here: NY Times Health section : Green Garlic
After separating all the cloves of the seed garlic, I planted smallish plots (maybe 2’x2′ max), by dumping a bag of odd cloves out:
Then aligning in a tight grid that used only enough space to absorb the surplus cloves, sort of like this:
The end product became cloves planted on maybe a 2″ grid spacing vs the 6″+ grid I used for the cloves planted to grow full heads. Will it work?
Come see me in April and I’ll share if it does.
Forgotten rounds
While sorting out the garlic harvest last year, there were a handful of smaller heads that were almost perfectly round.  I didn’t think much about it at the time; some are probably still in the stash in the basement.
Apparently I left a couple of smaller ones on Lizzie’s porch; at some point later either Mrs cohutt or I moved them out of the way and onto the rustic “pipe stand”. They have remained there since July, dry under the cover of the porch roof but enduring the heat of the afternoon sun through summer and even a couple of mild freezes in the last 2 weeks.
A couple days ago I looked into their hiding spot and noticed one had changed a little; the dry stained brown “skin” had split. One appeared to be shedding its skin. Odd:
I removed both for closer inspection and found that they were shedding their dry skins; they had survived the harsh conditions and were actually sprouting as the weather cooled.
This normally wouldn’t be that unusual as I a lot of the cloves I’ve planted recently had begun to sprout. In this case though, the cloves weren’t there. These consisted only of a single garlic ball or “round”.
I hadn’t seen “regular” garlic rounds before although I did have an elephant garlic round result from the initial crop last year. (I brought it in to investigate but it was consumed before I figured out what it was; mrs cohutt thought it was an onion and sliced it before realizing it wasn’t.)
So what is a garlic “round”?
A single planted clove sprouts in the fall and adds foliage slowly throughout the winter into spring. As weather warms, the clove (more like a bulb now) begins to swell underground but remains undivided into new cloves. (At this point it can be pulled as “green garlic” and consumed before cloving.) Usually the cloves develop before the foliage begins to die off in June/July and “normal” heads are harvested at that point.
Sometimes though, the cloves don’t develop before the foliage dies off. My understanding is that an early heat wave that lasts more than a few days can cause some bulbs to do this; the heat is what causes to foliage to brown/dry and if it happens before cloves are formed the process just shuts down at the “round” stage.
So is this a bad thing? It depends on what you want. A round has the same flavor as a clove from a fully developed head, so if you hate peeling cloves then….
Also, a round is said to have a longer storage life than a normal head.
Finally, a round can be saved and planted the following fall and usually results in large heads of garlic than those grown in a single year from a single cove.
We will see; these are planted as of this afternoon.
I think these are hardneck, which makes sense due to the fact that most hardnecks do better in cooler climates. It seems logical that the early heat of the south might cause some cloves to develop only into rounds.
15 minute greenhouse door
I was stuck.
A greenhouse with no door.
It had to be:
- Functional
- Cheap
- Translucent
- Cheap
- Easy
- And cheap
Solution:
1″ pvc for the door
Scrap wood for the frame facing
Leftover greenhouse plastic for the body
1 1/2″ sections of the plastic clamps as hinges
Flush / surface mount for simplicity
Damned if it didn’t work
Closed:
(See now why my good judgement led me to put this beauty on the back of the structure?)
Open:
Hinge:
“That was easy”
Thank you, industrious post war baby boomer squirrels
As annoyed as I am by the damage the current band of satanic tree rats inflict upon my garden, I admit that their mischief serves a purpose. (I’ll qualify that with “perhaps once every 50 or 60 years or so.”)
I am both cursed and blessed with a handful of pecan trees over and around my backyard.
Cursed, because squirrels are constantly either burying or uncovering pecans in every corner of my garden. The collateral damage is annoying, especially in beds with seeds or seedlings in the soft soil mix. (As an aside, I had one odd rodent this year whose penchant was to uproot pepper plants.  6 of them in 5 days.  WTH?)
Blessed, because perhaps 60+ years and countless squirrel generations back, the ancestors of my current tormentors planted a pecan at back corner of Lizzie’s house.
This buried nut has grown into a large & productive pecan tree in a most convenient location:
Pecans have been raining down onto the metal roof of Lizzie’s and it appears that there are quite a few remaining. (Note: The ladder didn’t reach the branches very well did it? 😉 )
The harvest protocol that seems to work best here is to use a leaf blower to herd leaves and nuts into a large pile and then lightly blow and separate most of the leaves from the pile.  After the remnants are spread out somewhat, the nuts can be fairly easily collected. Sorting is still needed because so many nuts have been cracked by foot traffic over the flagstone path or tasted then dropped from far above by the current generation of tree-rat. (And why not use one of the wire nut picker uppers? Because nut picker uppers can’t discern between pecans and the occasional poodle poo.  I can. )
I have help- my 7 lb poodle poo producing squirrel patrol unit enjoys pecans and is happy to eat a few of the culled harvest:
Worth the trouble?
Sure.
Behind cohutt's fence 