Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.
This has been a year of disappointing yields. I still have a bit of stuff growing, but I am more than ready to call it quits this year, here in Virginia zone 7.
When I boil it down, it looks like I should grow tomatoes, okra, beans, and winter squash. And not much else. So, tentatively, that’s the plan for next year.
Continue reading Post G24-027: A review of my vegetable garden year.
Tromboncino was an exceptionally productive winter squash in my garden this year, in Virginia zone 7. Maybe a little too productive, if you get my drift. It’s the kind of vine that doesn’t take no for an answer as it attempts to sprawl its way to garden domination.
In the end, two plants plus total neglect yielded about a dozen fruit, roughly 6 pounds each. Area for area, this was more productive than butternut squash, this year, by a large margin.
But how does it taste?
OK. Neither as colorful nor as flavorful as Waltham butternut. But no off notes, either. It’s a perfectly adequate winter squash for adding bulk to (say) a soup, without altering the taste.
Easy to grow, productive, and edible. And an amusing shape. What’s not to like? I’ll be growing this again next year.
Details follow.
The back-story is in this post, below. I grew both tromboncino and cucuzzi (guinea bean) to use the immature fruits as a substitute for summer squash. That, because I’m tired of fighting the squash vine borer.
As a substitute for summer squash, that was a failure. More for cucuzzi, which to me had a distinctive “dirt” undertone, than for tromboncino. But neither of them was good compared to the taste of normal (e.g., straightneck yellow) summer squash.
Post G24-023: Taste test of tromboncino, cucuzzi, and yellow summer squash.
So I killed the cucuzzi, but let the two tromboncino vines live. They turned out to be the most productive winter squash I grew this year, by a large margin.
I won’t be buying winter squash any time soon.
I took my smallest, seemingly-mature tromboncino fruit, and a small butternut, and had it it.
Tromboncino is clearly a relative of butternut squash. Same color. It peels easily, like butternut, but it takes longer to peel, per edible pound, as the long, thin neck of the tromboncino has around about twice the peel area, per unit of volume, relative to the stockier butternut.
The flesh is a paler orange (right, below).
I ended up throwing away the seed-cavity end of the tromboncino. This squash has a large, bulbous, thin-walled seed cavity. I dug out some seeds, but decided that between peeling it and de-seeding it, I’m guessing I’d have gotten another half-pound of usable squash. Didn’t seem worth the effort, so I chucked it. I might reconsider that when I get around to cooking the larger ones. Might also make “roasted pumpkin seeds” out of the bigger ones, depending on the volume of seeds.
Steamed or boiled, tromboncino is blander than butternut. I get no “sweet potato” notes whatsoever. Instead, there’s a faint aromatic after-taste that reminds me vaguely of steamed yellow summer squash. In any event, tromboncino has a distinctively different taste from butternut, but not much of a taste.
In chicken-squash soup, both squashes are bland enough that they contribute bulk, but no noticeable flavor. If I closed my eyes, I would not have known I was eating diced squash as opposed to somewhat-overcooked diced potato.
Assuming this keeps fairly well, I will definitely plant this again, owing to the high productivity and the toughness of the plant. By eye, these two vines (allowed to sprawl) out-produced all the rest of my winter squash combined.
Better yet, once these were established, I did nothing other than kick them out of the way occasionally. (The same can be said for butternut in my garden. Nothing seems to bother it much.)
Compared to butternut, it’s paler, blander, and has an unusual hint of summer squash to it. But that’s pretty subtle, and in a soup or stew, it serves merely as a bland filler. Not necessarily a bad thing, for a winter squash.
See also:
Post G24-025: Squash-off, round 1: Waltham Butternut versus Georgia Candy Roaster.
On today’s menu is winter squash soup, made with rich chicken broth.
Crude recipe is given below, for putting this together in well under an hour, using a pressure cooker.
More importantly, this is a taste-test of traditional butternut squash versus newcomer Georgia Candy Roaster squash. Both of which I grew in my back yard garden this year.
My conclusion is that Georgia Candy Roaster (GCR) is not so much boastful advertising as a statement of limitations. Boiled — as here, in this soup — it’s pale and flavorless compared to butternut squash. I’m guessing GCR actually needs to be roasted to bring out any latent sweetness and flavor.
Alternatively, maybe I just got a bad GCR. If the rest of them look or taste any better, I’ll come back and edit this.
In any case, the picture tells the whole story. The butternut (left) and GCR (right) have a depth-of-flavor that matches the depth-of-color.
The Waltham butternut is a thin-skinned, thick-necked, sweet-fleshed winter squash, with deep orange flesh. In this taste test, the boiled butternut tasted much like sweet potato, but perhaps dryer or starchier or more potato-like in texture.
The Georgia Candy Roaster is a thicker skinned, no-solid-neck, starchy-fleshed winter squash, with much lighter-colored flesh. In this taste test, the boiled Georgia Candy Roaster tasted like potato, that is, starchy, but with no distinct flavor and no detectable sweetness.
Boiled, together, in squash soup, the mix of the two works fine. But the GCR is little more than a bland vegetable filler in this context. It’s definitely food, but not much more than that.
Plausibly, GCR squash is a lot better roasted. Just plausibly, this small-and-tubby GCR was some kind of sport. The coloring definitely matched the other GCRs.
My other observation is that the GCR has a much thicker skin than the butternut. I certainly wasted more of it, in the peeling process, trying to pare away any green material.
Neither here nor there. It’s food. This year, it out-produced butternut by a fair margin, owing mostly to the large average size of the fruit.
This dish is winter squash cooked in full-fat, un-skimmed chicken broth.
The only seasoning is salt. The flavor comes from the squash and the chicken. If that’s not good enough for you, perhaps consider cooking something else, before you add flavorings to this recipe.
It’s meatless in the sense that the chicken meat. used to make the broth, is reserved for a separate meal.
Elapsed time is under one hour.
You need
Step 1A: Pressure-cook the chicken thighs: Elapsed time 30 minutes.
Put a modest number of chicken thighs (4 to 10, say) into a pressure cooker. Cover (barely) with water. Heat. Figure on ten minutes to bring the pot up to pressure. Cook at high pressure for 20 minutes.
Step 1B: Cut up the vegetables.
As that’s going on, peel and cut up whatever is going into the pot. The backbone of the soup is squash, but I added carrots and celery that needed cooking.
You want enough to fill the pressure cooker about two-thirds full.
Step 2: Remove the chicken and excess chicken stock, if any.
Release the pressure by running the pressure cooker under a faucet.
Use a slotted spoon or similar to remove the chicken from the pot. Put the chicken aside for a separate meal.
Remove and save any excess stock.
In this soup, you want about one unit of stock for every two units of vegetables. So you want the pressure cooker to be about one-quarter full of chicken stock, to which you add chopped vegetables up to the two-thirds line on the pot. Or so.
Salt to taste. I use a teaspoon of salt for the pot of soup.
This doesn’t need any spices. With any luck, the chicken fat and salt add just enough savoriness to make a fully-satisfying bowl of soup as-is.
Step 3: Pressure cook vegetables for five-ish minutes. Elapsed time around 12 minutes.
Bring the pressure-cooker back up to pressure, and cook for five or so minutes.
Depending on how hungry your are, either release the pressure immediately, or let the pressure cooker cool off for a “natural” release. The longer it sits under pressure, the softer the vegetables get.
Step 4: Open and eat.
If the squash is soft but not fully disintegrated, you have chosen wisely. It is ready to eat.
If the squash has turned too soft, use a stick blender, then pretend that that’s the kind of squash soup you were after in the first place.
This is my fifth year of growing okra. Though it seems like more than that.
Last year, my okra plants made nearly it to the stage pictured above, …
… then it got too cold for them, and there was no more okra for the year. Great sadness descended upon our household.
But this year, for whatever reason — maybe I put them in earlier, who knows — they have reached the point of looking like a big ol’ flower stalk on top, and it’s still fairly warm.
So, while these pictures are not quite seed-catalog good, I figure, any time you see clusters of okra pods, that’s good.
This is Jambalaya okra. I would definitely plant this again. Virginia, Zone 7.
Background: I’m trying two alternatives to traditional summer squash in my garden this year.
For this post, I steamed immature fruits from tromboncino and cucuzzi (a.k.a. zucchetta a.k.a. guinea bean), along with yellow summer squash from the store.
Above: Top is zuchetta, middle is yellow summer squash, bottom is tromboncino.
Here are my impressions
Steamed immature tromboncino squash tastes quite similar to yellow summer squash. The only giveaway is a slightly bitter note that yellow summer squash completely lacks. I’d phrase that as yellow summer squash tastes “sweeter” or perhaps “nuttier” than tromboncino.
(I’ve seen tromboncino described as having a “cucumber” note, and in hindsight, maybe I’m tasting a bitterness similar to that found in the undesirable part of a cucumber. But only a touch.)
Immature cucuzzi gourds? Quite a bit different from yellow summer squash. Charitably, even steamed, they have sort of a raw-green-bean note. Uncharitably, they kinda taste a little like dirt.
Not much. Not even close to spit-it-out bad. But a little goes a long way, when it comes to tasting like dirt.
In times of famine, sure, I’d eat either one.
The upshot is that if I were pining for summer squash, I’d get it at the grocery store. Second choice, I’d eat immature tromboncino. It’s not bad. Put some pasta sauce on it, and I wouldn’t know it wasn’t summer squash. But if the only option were guinea bean, I’d find something else to eat.
All of this, because the presence of squash vine borer in my area makes it a real chore to grow “regular” summer squash. Either I spray my plants for weeks on end, or I lose them to the vine borer.
Or I try something weirder, of which, growing then eating these two immature fruits as if they were summer squash, is one. Because, in theory, the squash vine borer won’t bother these alternatives. Or, at least, won’t outright kill them, usually.
Taste aside, the icing on the cake is poor productivity. At least, so far, for me, both have had abysmal yield. They are both sprawling, large-leaved squash/gourd vines that take up a lot of space. But fruits are few and far-between. (At least, in my garden, this year.)
Edit 9/8/2024: My two tromboncini vines finally started producing a reasonable number of fruit in late August. Large fruit. Very large fruit. If these will mature before first frost, tromboncini will have redeemed itself as a reasonably productive butternut-type winter squash. I still wouldn’t grow it as a summer-squash substitute.
For both plants, I can now stop eating the immature fruit and let some of it mature. Maybe. Tromboncino is in the butternut squash family, and apparently produces pretty good winter squash. So, mature, it ought to taste more like a butternut squash, which would be fine. The cucuzzi, it’s a gourd, but in theory I think you can eat that one once it’s mature, as well. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that.
So the cucuzzi’s days may be numbered. I think I’d rather let the trombincino take over its space. (Edit 8/10/2024: About a week ago, I sliced through both cucuzzi (gourd) vines that I planted, at the roots. And yet, a small part of the cucuzzi vine appears to be alive. I know not how.)
YMMV.
I don’t mean anything cosmic or metaphysical by saying that time is nonlinear in the garden.
I’m just trying to figure out when I should start clipping the flowers off my tomatoes.
And I come up with the ridiculous answer of “now”.
This post explains how I arrived at that answer.
Image source: WalMart.
Answer: Now.
Question: When should I start clipping the flowers off my tomato plants?
Really?
Yep.
For the sake of argument, assume it takes 55 days to manufacture a ripe tomato, under ideal growing conditions. That is, 55 days elapse between the time the flower opens, and the time the ripe tomato is ready to be picked.
Further assume, correctly, that I place little value on green tomatoes.
How late can my tomatoes flower, and still give me ripe fruit?
For sure, frost kills tomato plants. Halloween is my expected fall first frost date. So, any tomato flowers opening after September 6 are probably useless to me. That’s 55 days prior to expected first frost. If first frost occurs on time, those late flowers won’t give me any usable fruit.
During last year’s bumper crop of green tomatoes, I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned to plant my tomatoes earlier.
But in addition, I learned that green tomatoes are permanently damaged by 50F nighttime temperatures. This and other fun facts are summarized in:
So if I want ripe fruit, it needs to ripen up before nighttime temperatures routinely drop to 50F or lower. Eyeballing the weather for the past five Octobers, that happens around October 7 in my area. Or 21 days before typical first frost.
As a result, the entire tomato-ripening timeline needs to shift back by 21 days. Because I don’t merely need to avoid frost. I need to avoid nights under 50F. I need to start cutting the flowers off my tomato plants not on September 6, but on August 16.
If I want to pick ripe tomatoes before nights begin dipping below 50F, flowers opening after August 16 are useless to me.
Source: Gencraft AI
Everything in the garden slows as we slip into fall. It slows, in part, because we see less sunlight. It slows, in part, because temperatures drop.
Back-of-the-envelope, I guess that October days produce about one-third as much plant growth as August days. In my climate (Zone 7). That compounds a roughly 50% decline in growth due to temperature (October around here is about 10C less than August, which cuts the speed of a typical chemical reaction in half), along with having only about 70% of the sunlight that we see in August. I’d then guesstimate that September days produce perhaps two-thirds the growth that August days do.
This means that the entire month of September accomplishes only 20 days’ worth of growing and ripening under ideal conditions. And October only adds 10 days’ worth. More formally, if October 7 is my end-of-season date (beyond which I can expect 50F and lower nights), then to get the equivalent of 55 days of perfect growing conditions, I have to start clipping off my tomato flowers on July 30. Or, two days from now.
If my tomatoes take 55 days to go from flower to fruit, under ideal growing conditions, then I should start clipping the flowers off approximately 93 days before expected first-frost date.
Or, more-or-less now.
This sounds absolutely ridiculous. But I swear it’s true.
Of the additional (93 – 55 =) 38 days that arise from the factors discussed above:
The flower-kill date moves up by 21 days, because the actual practical no-damage cutoff is 50F nights, not frost.
The flower-kill date moves up by a further 17 days because fall growing conditions are not ideal, and everything in the garden slows down in September and October.
I, like most gardeners, have a hard time cutting new flowers off my tomatoes. Or, off my vegetable plants in general. If nothing else, it’s an admission of finality for the year. The only fruits I’m going to get this year are the ones that are already set, on those plants.
This year, I’m going to test the theory by marking a selection of flower bracts on my tomatoes now. (Probably just put a twist-tie around them). Then letting one or more rounds of new flowers survive, beyond the marked bracts. Then seeing which of those led to mature fruits, before nights turn cold in the fall.
I’m pretty sure, for example, that cherry tomatoes take less time to develop than full-sized (slicing) tomatoes. And I’m pretty sure that my early-season tomatoes also take less time to mature than slicing tomatoes. And so I strongly suspect that the right time to start clipping the flowers is directly correlated with the size of the final tomatoes.
If so, that should come out clearly in my end-of-season observations.
I should preface this by stating that I drive an EV and heat my house with a ground-source heat pump. So I’m hardly against substituting electricity for direct combustion of fossil fuels.
But the data are what they are.
Best guess is that all types of lawn-care type activities, both residential and commercial, including mowing, leaf blowing, and so on, together account for as much as 2% of U.S. gasoline consumption. Residential (non-commercial) yard care of all sorts accounts for maybe 0.6% of U.S. gasoline consumption.
Since C02 production is directly proportional to gasoline use, that means residential lawn mowing is rounding error in terms of global warming impact.
For the average American, using an electric lawn mower in no material way offsets the global warming impact of driving an SUV, truck, or car. Choice of car is more than 100 times as important as your choice of lawn mower.
I hope nobody is surprised by that, despite the ludicrous estimates of the environmental impact of lawn mowing that can be found on the internet.
Source: Saint Philip Neri and the chicken, 16th century, as quoted by Pope Francis.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018
Often attributed to Mark Twain, circa 1900.
The point of this post is to estimate what fraction of U.S. gasoline use is attributable to lawn mowers.
Each gallon of gas burned creates roughly the same 20 pounds or so of C02. Therefore (ignoring NOx, nitrogen oxides), the fraction of gasoline consumption attributable to lawn-mowing will tell me the contribution that gasoline-based lawn mowing makes to global warming, relative to gasoline-driven passenger vehicles, in the U.S.
In other words, residential lawn mowing’s share of gasoline burned is lawn mower’s share of C02 released. And that shows how U.S. gas lawn mowers (in aggregate) compare to our passenger vehicles (in aggregate), in contributing the world’s warming.
In previous posts, I showed how a modern (overhead-valve) lawn mower engine stacks up against a typical car, in terms of pollution per hour (Post #1775 and related posts). (Pollution being defined in various traditional ways (e.g, particulates, nitrogen oxides.) In round numbers, an hour of mowing produces roughly the same pollution as an hour of driving a typical car.
While “pollution” as used above includes particulates and smog-forming emissions, it doesn’t include C02 at all. Yet, while most smog-forming emissions are relatively short-lived, the increase in atmospheric C02 from fossil-fuel combustion is a nearly-permanent addition to atmospheric greenhouse gasses, in the context of a human lifespan. (As in, like, forever — here’s a little something published in Nature Climate Change to brighten your day REFERENCE). Most of it will still be affecting climate 300 years from now. A good chunk of it — say a quarter — will still be warming the climate millenia from now.
(Separately, the big shocker to me was finding out that gas in gas cans is major source of pollution. Per my actual test, old plastic gas cans (“Blitz cans”) are ridiculously permeable to gasoline, and gas stored in old plastic cans is a large source of smog-forming gasoline vapor. This, apparently, is why the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has such stringent standards for gas cans. And why, until recently, “CARB-compliant gas can” was synonymous with “awkward to use”.)
Post #1773: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 3: Why do all gas cans suck?
For the estimate above, I did my own number-crunching, with clear documentation as to sources of data and details of calculation, because estimates on the internet are all over the map. The plausible estimates were mostly published by state governments. The ludicrous ones appear to come from fanatical but innumerate environmentalists.
And, of course, it’s the ludicrous ones that get recirculated the most. You might think that’s something unique to the internet, but per the quotes above, the internet merely speeds up and amps up long-noticed aspect of human nature. Lies are juicer than the truth, and propagate accordingly, seemingly regardless of the medium of propagation.
In any case, to validate my prior estimate (an hour of mowing is like an hour of driving), I decided to look at estimates of the fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption that goes to lawn care.
And — no big surprise — those estimates seem to have the somewhat the same bullshit nonsense level as the estimates of the pollution generated by an hour of mowing. So I thought I’d take an hour this morning and try to separate fact from fiction, on this question.
Source: OFF-HIGHWAY AND PUBLIC-USE GASOLINE CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION MODELS USED IN THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION Final Report for the 2014 Model Revisions and Recalibrations,Publication Number – FHWA-PL-17-012 June 2015
The U.S. consumes about 136 billion gallons of gasoline per year, of which 91% is for light cars and trucks (Cite: US Energy Information Agency).
The U.S. has about 130M households (Cite: U.S. Census Bureau, via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Ergo, by the magic of long division, average annual U.S. gasoline consumption works out to be a nice round (136B/130M =~) 1000 gallons per household.
(Separately, this squares with survey-based estimates showing about 650 gallons of gasoline consumed annually per licensed U.S. driver (CITE), and, based on harder statistics, about 230M licensed drivers (CITE). (That is, 650 x 230M drivers /130M households =~ 1150 gallons of gas per year, per household).
I use about 2 gallons of gas per year, mowing my large suburban lawn, using a mower with a modern overhead-valve Honda engine. I’m guessing that’s an upper bound for per-household use, as my yard is larger than average.
This suggests that gasoline use, attributable to household lawn mowing, accounts for somewhere around (2/1000 =~) 0.2% of total U.S. gasoline use.
But, per the EPA graphic above, households only account for about a third of all gasoline use, for all types of lawn care (e.g., mowing, leaf blowing, snow blowing, and so on). So total U.S. gasoline consumption for lawn care, of all types, by all sources, would therefore be about 0.6% of all U.S. gasoline consumption.
Separately, the same EPA source (for the graphic, above, Table 42) directly estimates 0.9B gallons of gas used for residential lawn care activities annually, and a further 1.8B used for all types of commercial lawn care, for a total of about 2.7B gallons of gasoline use for all types of lawn-care type activities. This would therefore amount to (2.7B for lawn care/137B total =~) 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption.
” Mowers consume 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline annually, about 1% of U.S. motor gasoline consumption.”
Source: Clean Cities Guide to Alternative Fuel Commercial Lawn
Equipment, U.S. DOE, 2011.
Source: RC groups.com
I’d say that’s more than enough research to get a usable answer.
Almost all gasoline in the U.S. is used for private on-road light vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs). Per the EPA cite above, 91% of it.
From the perspective of global warming, that’s the problem.
The amount of gas used by household lawn mowing is regrettable, but it’s rounding error in the big picture.
Buying an electric lawn mower in no way expiates the sin of driving a gas-guzzling car. Or, really, any car, for that matter.
Keep your eye on the ball. Despite what you may read on the internet.
I never did find a direct answer to this via the U.S. EPA. By looking at the earliest versions of their work, I infer that the original split between residential and commercial yard work is by ownership of the equipment. Initially, it was referred to as “privately owned” versus commercial equipment.
The upshot is that if a commercial service cuts somebody’s yard, the EPA likely counts that as commercial use. So to get apples to apples, I likely need to move some part of the EPA’s commercial use back to the residential sector. That is, if I really intend to assess the impact of mowing one’s yard / having one’s yard mown, relative to the impact of cars.
This will increase my initially-cited estimate of 0.6% of using gasoline being used for mowing. But, by how much?
Best I can tell, something like three-quarters to four-fifths of Americans mow their own lawn. (You know what I mean: Of those who have a lawn … e.g., CITE). But that really ought be to weighted by lawn area, as it’s almost certainly true that the larger the private lawn, the more likely it is to be cut by a professional. I did not find that information anywhere, so …
If I stick with the lower cited number and pretend that only three-quarters of residential lawn mowing is done by individuals (that is, using privately-owned mowing equipment), because three-quarters of people with lawns mow their own, I need to adjust the initial 0.6% upward to 0.8%. (The EPA residential sector estimate omits about a quarter of U.S. residential lawn mowing, because a quarter of private lawns are commercially mown.)
The conclusion is unchanged. In the U.S., gasoline used in lawn care is trivial compared to the gasoline used by passenger vehicles.
Today is one of those sultry summer days where Nature just can’t quite seem to make up its mind to rain. Or not. It’s overcast, humid, hot, and windless.
Not that a little bit of rain is going to make much difference at this point. My garden water barrels have been empty for most of June.
June 2024 is going to be the second-driest June on record in this area. The records, in this case, go back to circa 1960, for Dulles Airport. Even if it does finally manage to rain, it’s not going to rain enough to change that.
According to NOAA, Dulles Airport (one of the weather stations of record for my area) has received a total of just 0.69 inches of rain, so far, this June:
Source: Weather Underground, historical weather for Vienna VA
National weather service monthly precipitation data (Google link for Dulles) show the following:
For Washington, DC, the NOAA precipitation record goes back to the 1930s. There, 2024 is shaping up to be the third-driest June, edged out by 1988 (as above) and by 1940.
Dry, no matter how you squeeze it.
If if have learned nothing else from back-yard vegetable gardening, it’s that I would surely starve if I had to grow my own food.
So far this year, I’ve had poor yields of peas, potatoes, and garlic. My 100-square-foot potato bed yielded just under 50 pounds of potatoes, most of which were small (but still edible) potatoes. (Thus giving me the potato yield assumed in the movie The Martian, see Post G23-016. If I eat 2000 calories per day, my 100-square-foot potato bed generated enough food for nine days.) For my garlic, I suspect I’ll be lucky to end up with a half- ounce of usable garlic per square foot, from a roughly 64-square-foot bed.
And now, my little patch of garden is surviving courtesy of my municipal water supply. Absent that, pretty much everything in the garden would be dead, given the drought.
On the plus side, my investment in surface-laid irrigation is paying off (e.g., Post G22-027). Right now, I’m using a mix of 1/2″ dripline, 1/2″ drip tape, and some “bubblers”. To water my garden, I dial in an hour on my hose timer, and walk away. Beats the heck out of toting watering cans in the heat.
Most plants can’t make use of anywhere near the full intensity of summer sunlight. Perhaps you knew that, but I didn’t. Depending on the plant and the conditions, photosynthesis maxes out at as little as one-seventh or -eighth of the intensity of noon-day sunlight (at my latitude). Anything beyond that is wasted. Continue reading Post G24-019: Photosynthetic efficiency, or finally understanding the back-yard garden trellis.
