Today feels like a fine autumn day, here in Vienna, VA. So I thought I’d write something unalloyedly nice. On the screen porch, feet up, sipping iced tea.
Listening to the katydids sing. As I type.
Or whatever those damned bugs are. Maybe the right name is locusts, but locusts get such a bad rap that I’ll cut them some slack and call them something nicer. You might find that loud chirruping annoying, where you live. But where I live, the katydids are Nature’s white noise machine. They mask what would otherwise be unrelenting traffic noise, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and so on.
I say autumn day, because the air is cool and the humidity is low. After the heat and humidity of summer, this is a welcome change. So it feels like fall, even if the autumnal equinox is still almost a month away.
Here are my observations on three nice things that are happening in my garden.
My sunflowers are tall.
First, I’m not kidding. I’ve grown “mammoth” sunflowers before, but these are freakishly large. The one shown is a legit 10′, via tape measure. The porch chair is there for scale.
And she’s got sisters. All the tallest in this row exceed 9′. All together, this makes for a nice view, from where I’m sitting right now.
Better yet, these are extremely well-behaved. Usually, my sunflowers topple over at this point. I kind of have to corral them if I want to keep them standing. But not these. These seem to have stalks like small tree trunks, and no tendency to topple. And they have numerous blooms per stalk, which keeps them flowering.
And the bees? The bees definitely like these flowers.
To the point where picking the tomatoes — shown above — is something of an exercise in caution. Luckily, the bumblebees just want to get on with their jobs. Brush up against a bumblebee, and it’ll just buzz in annoyance as it finds another flower to land on.
And the birds don’t much seem to like them. So I might have some sunflower seeds at the end of this.
Which is good. Because I have absolutely no clue what variety these are.
For as nicely as they turned out, they are, in fact, a total mistake. I didn’t want giant sunflowers. I didn’t think I was planting giant sunflowers.
What I actually wanted in that space was okra. Food. And if you look hard enough, below, you can see the rather sullen-looking red okra, being upstaged and overshadowed by the giant sunflowers.
I bought some packs of mixed sunflower seed from The Rusted Garden Homestead. Then at some point I sorted the seeds. I’m not sure why I did that, exactly, but I assumed that little seeds would generate little sunflowers. I assumed wrong. But it turned out well anyway.
I just wish I knew the variety.
My okra is good-looking.
Beyond a doubt, Jambalaya okra is the most productive okra I’ve ever grown.
The problem is that it’s still okra. To be clear, we’re a pro-okra family. On the question of “is okra actually food”, our answer is a firm yes. And it’s hard to purchase good okra, as commercial farmers tend to let it get large enough that some is woody. So there is a sound reason to grow it yourself.
It’s more a question of yield. Where prior varieties (Clemson Spineless, Heavy Hitter) gave me a consistent half-pod/plant/day, Jambalaya spikes that all the way up to almost one pod/plant/day, on average. In fairness, they bear for a fairly extended period of time. But it just never seems like you’re getting much, on any given day.
I’ve now learned a few things about okra.
One, you should grow some just because it looks nice. It’s in the mallow family (which you might have guessed from the picture), and is related to hibiscus.
Two, you should grow it in rows, not blocks as I did. Growing it in blocks just makes it to hard to see the mature okra pods. And it only takes a couple of days for an edible-sized pod to grow into a huge inedible woody pod.
Corn is a hoot.
I’ve never successfully grown corn before. And, to be honest, it’s not yet clear that I’m going to do that this year. But my little block of afterthought corn seems to be doing just fine.
I understand that corn grows tassels at the top of the plant, grows silks on the ears, boy-meets-girl, and food results. But I’ve never seen it play out in real time. And, as an American, it seems like at some point in my life, I should.
In any case, I put in this little patch of Silver Queen, mid-summer, because, as the phrase goes, you can’t hardly get that around here any more. And my wife has a strong aversion to the “super sweet” corn that has long dominated both our commercial and farmers’ markets. Plus, the potatoes that has formerly occupied the space had already gone on to a better place.
In any case, the tassels come out at the top of the plant. At that time, there’s nothing that even remotely resembles an ear of corn in sight. So you start reading to see if that’s normal, and you soon realize that, under adverse circumstances, you can get the equivalent of corn premature ejaculation. The boy-parts are out there, they do their thing, and they’re done before the girl parts are ready.
Farmers have a more polite term for it. But the upshot is, you’ve only got about a week-long window for any particular tassel. So tassels out, no silks in sight, and that’s worrisome. If boy doesn’t meet girl, the hero will disappear while playing guitar at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
But then, right on cue, what looked like a few odd extra leaves suddenly begin to look like little skinny ears of corn. Silks first peek out, then fill the end of the sheaf of leaves. And, in theory, you’re in business.
It’s still a fairly hit-or-miss enterprise. The pollen drifts down from tassel to silk. In order for that to result in fertilization of corn kernels with high probability, you really want to grow a large block of corn. I lost a few plants on the way, so at this point I have fewer than the recommended bare minimum of about 16, planted 4×4.
But we’ll see. I did right by this corn. Dumped the recommended amount of nitrogen on the bed before planting. Kept it watered. Top-dressed with some compost.
So far, it has passed the primary test of garden plants, which is failure to die. So if, on top of that, I get a dozen edible ears, I’ll call it a success.
