Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

G23-027: Some further notes on growing yellow mustard in the home garden.

 

Edit 2/24/2024:  At the end of the day, the big fact, that nobody bothers to say, that I didn’t realize, is that you have to harvest your mustard in the cool of autumn. I guess I should have taken a hint from the fact that North American Mustard Belt is in Canada.  Restated, you can’t harvest mustard, in the summer, in Virginia.  By that I mean you can’t get flavorful, evenly-cured, pleasantly-edible, good-looking mustard seed from mustard planted as a spring cover crop, in Virginia.  Which is a pity, as mustard makes a dandy cover crop here. 

Whether or not I can plant mustard mid-summer, and get a decent crop of pleasantly-edible seed in the fall, in Zone 7 Virginia, I will find out this year.

Edit 9/4/2024:   This year I think I’m on the right path.  I planted some common yellow mustard on July 1.  It began flowering circa August 1.  It’s just about done flowering, and has mostly set seed, as of September 1.  And with any luck, temperatures will have dropped enough by the time it’s ready for harvest that I’ll actually be able to get nice, yellow, mature seed.  We’ll see in another month or two.

Original post follows.

This is another one of those notes-to-myself posts.  I’m just getting a bunch of facts that I need in one place, so I can’t lose track of them.  In this case, the facts are about growing and harvesting yellow mustard in the home garden.

I only make two points in this posting.

First, I ought to expect to get about quart of mustard seeds from every 100 square feet of planted area.

Second, I should harvest yellow mustard well before the “dry and crispy” stage shown in most internet videos on this topic.  Professional farmers either harvest it when the field is a mix of green-and-gold, seeds are all fully-formed but up to 25% remain green (for “swathing”, or cutting it to let it dry in the field).  Or they can wait until all seeds are yellow and the moisture content is no lower than 12%.

Edit 3/8/2024:  A good part of the reason you can’t harvest mustard, in Virginia, in the summer, is that the green mustard seed will NOT finish ripening in the Virginia summer heat. The heat destroys the enzymes in the plants required to finish maturing the remaining green seeds to gold.  As a result, what is described as a standard technique for actual (Northern, fall harvest) mustard farmers (swathing) does not work at all in the middle of a Virginia summer.

Search this website for other posts on growing, threshing, winnowing and using home-grown mustard seed.

FWIW, this advice applies only to yellow mustard, not to other varieties.

 

Continue reading G23-027: Some further notes on growing yellow mustard in the home garden.

G23-026 Winnowing, or, Rube Goldberg does agriculture.

 

On the plus side, I bet you didn’t expect a blog post about winnowing.

On the down side, this entire blog post is about winnowing.

Image above: Winnowing Grain, Eastman Johnson, 1879, via https://www.wikiart.org/

Continue reading G23-026 Winnowing, or, Rube Goldberg does agriculture.

G23-025: Springtime drought in the DC area. What can you do?

 

Here in the Washington DC area, we’ve been flirting with drought conditions all spring.  By mid-April, we were at the center of a little isolated area of drought.  Now, we sit at the southern edge of an area of moderate drought extending from Canada southward.   This, per the National Drought Monitor:

Continue reading G23-025: Springtime drought in the DC area. What can you do?

G23-024: Jambalaya okra: Qualitatively different.

 

I’ve been growing okra in my garden for a few years now.

I’m not sure why. 

The blossoms are pretty, as above.  And my wife likes it, so it satisfies the prime directive for vegetable gardening (grow what you’ll eat.)

But as a food source?  What a waste of space. 

I started with Clemson Spineless, the perfect okra for people who lack the courage to try something else.  I went on to grow Heavy Hitter, touted as a super-productive okra with multiple flowering stalks per plant.

Either way, I ended up with plants that didn’t start blooming until they were four or five feet tall.  And then, from a row of ugly seven-foot-tall plants, I consistently got a yield of around 0.5 pods/plant/day.   Which stops completely, well before the end of the growing season (Post G22-061, September 24, 2022).

If I had to survive off okra calories, I’d need to plant a couple of square miles of the stuff.

Upshot:  After growing it for few years, I thought I knew okra pretty well.  Lowest-yielding plant in my garden.

Jambalaya Okra

This year I decided to try Jambalaya okra.  This is a relatively new variety that gets a lot of on-line praise for being early and productive.  A simple search with Google shows me two different professional growers, in hot climates (Georgia, Texas) that describe it as “the most productive okra that they have ever grown.”

Yeah, well, I’ve read stuff like that before.

Some of the descriptions sounded like outright fantasy.  In particular, some sources said it would start producing okra pods from plants just one foot tall.

Yeah, uh-huh.  Sure thing.

But this past week, well, that turned out to be true.  I spotted an okra blossom on a plant that was way, way too small to be producing fruit.  Then, damned if they all didn’t start blossoming and setting pods.

There they are, above, with a Sharpie in the picture for scale.  Neither of the plants above is a foot tall yet.  But there they are — blossom on the left, pod on the right.

This is an F1 hybrid, so you can’t save the seeds for next year.  Each year’s seeds have to be produced by specifically cross-pollinating the two parent varieties.  They are priced accordingly, typically around 20 cents per seed, in small quantities.  (Versus something like 3 cents per seed for Clemson Spinless).

I haven’t picked a pod yet, but this is already looking way better than any okra I’ve grown in the past.  Qualitatively different.  I have a second set of seedlings, ready to go in the ground, using seed from a different supplier.  So I’ll see whether I just got lucky, with the first set of seeds, or whether this okra really is as early and productive as this first batch suggests.

Any lesson here?

This is shaping up to be the second time this year where a previous under-performing food plant surprised me.

Earlier, it was Snowbird snow peas (Post G23-017).  Until I tried that variety, I always considered peas to be useful for filling garden space until it got warm enough to plant something productive.  This year, by contrast, all said and done, I got just over five pounds of snow peas out of roughly 16 square feet of garden space.  Didn’t even need a trellis.

Now it’s Jambalaya okra.  Getting down to business way earlier than any okra I’ve grown before.

I guess the lesson here is that the most important part of gardening is selecting the right varieties.  I’m no better at growing peas this year than at any time in the past.  And okra pretty much grows itself, no care needed.  The entire increase in yield, between prior years and this one, was in stumbling across the right variety.

Who know?  Maybe somebody has bred a tasty kale, and I just need to find it.

Edit Fall 2024:  Two years later, and I cannot sing the praises of Jambalaya okra enough.  This year’s plants are still producing heavily as of 9/20/2024.  This, following weeks of high production. 

To the point where I don’t think either my wife or I would be upset if okra season ended soon. 

The upshot is that I’ve finally found an okra that’s not a waste of space.  Based on my limited experience (Clemson Spinless, Heavy Hitter, some red okra, some Burmese okra), I doubt I could find a higher-yielding okra than Jambalaya.  Nothing else has even come close.  My conclusion is that if this is an average season, 20 Jambalaya okra plants provide enough okra for two people.  YMMV.  Here in Virginia, USDA hardiness zone 7.

G23-022: Ladies and gentlemen … the beetles.

I hung a couple of bag-a-bug (r) Japanese beetle traps yesterday.  The scholarly literature suggests that these do more harm than good.  I believe the opposite.  So, every year, I hang two traps near my garden.  I think they keep the Japanese beetle population down, if used correctly.  Follow the instructions, hang them well away from and downwind of the space you are trying to protect.  The idea being that as beetles fly upwind, lured by the scent of your delicious landscaping and garden plants, they will be diverted by the lures in these traps and DIE DIE DIE.

But this post isn’t about Japanese beetles per se.  It’s about growing degree-days.

Growing degree-days and my pest calendar

Source:  NC State University growing degree days explorer.

I used to think that various insect pests arrived on or about some fixed calendar date every year.

That’s not exactly correct.  As it turns out, various species emerge, pretty much like clockwork, after a given amount of springtime warmth has occurred.  That warmth is typically measured by growing degree-days with a 50 degree F reference point.  In effect, it’s an estimate of the cumulative time and extent to which the air temperatures in an area exceed 50F.

Both the Japanese beetle and the squash vine borer show up right around the 1000 growing degree-days.  Once you’re aware of that fact, you can pretty much set your calendar by their arrival.  Last year, they were right on time (Post g22-023, Post g22-024).

Last year, my first Japanese beetle occurred on June 18.  But this year is running a bit cooler than last.  Which means a bit later than last year.  Based on growing degree days, we’re about 100 degree-days behind where we were last year.   Which, at current temperatures, should be about four days.  That means I ought to see my first Japanese beetle on or about June 22 this year.  And my first squash vine borer not long after that.

So I have my Japanese beetle traps up now.  I can forget about them until it’s time to take them down and dispose of them.

G23-021: Dance of the mustard flowers.

 

Recall that I swore my mustard plants were moving.

Heliotropic?  That is, moving to face the flowers into the sun?

Maybe.

So I did a little time-lapse video.  This is one day of the mustard bed in my garden.  Roughly 8 AM to 8 PM, with a brief interruption in the middle to add a tin-foil shield.  All condensed into about 30 seconds via YouTube.

The dance of the mustard flowers appears far more complex than simple heliotropism.  And far weirder.

Enjoy.

 

G23-020: Mustard-induced hallucination, or is mustard heliotropic?

 

As an aging individual, sometimes I see things that aren’t there.

Bearing that in mind, I swear that my mustard plants move over the course of a day.  At least the younger ones. They seem to face their flowers into the sunlight.  Which would make them, technically, heliotropic.

Like sunflowers.

But with mustard, you get nothing near as showy as sunflowers.  Sunflowers stake their whole reputation on that.  With mustard, it’s a lot subtler.  It leaves me guessing whether they actually moved, or whether I’m just imaging it.   You look at the bed in the AM sun, and you say, are those plants doing what I think they’re doing?  Or is that just an effect of the angle of the sunlight?  Repeat in the P.M.

And, unlike sunflowers, where you have big, individually-identifiable blooms, with mustard, it’s more of a herd phenomenon.  The whole stand of mustard seems to be leaning one way or the other, depending on the time of day.

OK, fair enough.  I find the perception of diurnal mustard movement to be mildly entertaining.  And almost totally ignored on the internet, which is perhaps even more amusing.

But is it real?

First, the heliotropism appears to be somewhere in the mustard gene pool.  You can find the extremely rare internet reference stating that some varieties of mustard are heliotropic.  Like so:

Source:  https://www.picturethisai.com/wiki/Sinapis_arvensis.html.  You have to open links to find this particular text.

Next, can I catch them in the act with a couple of simple snapshots from my phone/camera?

Eh, maybe.

In this first shot, I’m using a weedy vine in the background as a landmark.  Note that the stem that was bent right (around 1 PM) was fully upright by evening.

This second example is closer to what I actually experience.  Around 1 PM, it sure looks like all those stems are leaning toward the sunlight.   Note the strong leaners circled.  But, but the end of the day, those strong leaners are gone, and things just … seem a lot more vertical.

Honestly, I think I’m going to have to set up a video camera can catch them in the act.  That will be tomorrow’s task.  And if these move, as I think they do, compressing a day of video into a few seconds should show that clearly.

Stay tuned.

Post G23-018: The lesson: Pick the right variety?

 

The New Testament clearly justifies getting rid of unproductive plants (see Post #G23-012, Luke 13:6-9 and the Chainsaw of Time).

I find no guidance on getting rid of excessively productive plants, just because keeping up with the harvest is a burden.

Tentatively, I’ll have to put such an act in the same category as wasting food.  Which would make it a minor sin, as I was raised.

At any rate, I went out this AM to putter around my backyard garden.  Forty-five minutes later, I was still bending over my 14-square-foot pea patch, picking the last of just over a pound and a half of snow peas.  That brings the total for the year to about 4.5 pounds of peas.  No signs of a slowdown yet.

I guess for talented gardeners, that would be normal.

For me, it’s unprecedented.  Until now, peas have always been a placeholder in my garden, filling the space until it got warm enough to plant something productive.  Better than nothing, but not by a whole lot.

I’m doing nothing differently, so it has to be the variety:  Snowbird.

The joke here is that I chose these solely because I was too lazy to put up a pea trellis.  The choice had nothing to do with supposed high yield.  Snowbird was one of the few bush-type snow peas that would stand on their own, without being given a trellis to climb.

Sure, the Burpee catalog talks about yield:  “Very early, erect, dwarf plants 18” tall produce amazing numbers of 3″ pods in groups of two to three.”

But you’d have to be an idiot to take that at face value.  When’s the last time you read a Burpee seed description that said “treasured for their mediocre yield and so-so disease resistance”.

My only problem with this is that it’s throwing off my schedule.  I have such disdain for peas, as a food crop, that I already scheduled this patch of garden to be re-planted to okra.

The okra seedlings are up, but the peas won’t yield.  Or fail to yield, as the case may be.

As garden problems go, that’s a good one.  So these peas are turning out to be the first pleasant surprise of the 2023 gardening year.  Snowbird is now my go-to snow pea, and I would definitely recommend them to a friend.

Post G23-017: A burdensome pea harvest with Snowbird peas.

 

Edit 5/24/2024:  In hindsight, the Snowbird peas were good for eating fresh, but not cooked.  Frozen, then cooked, they were stringy.  Occasionally, spit-out-a-wad-of-string, stringy.  But they were fine when raw and crisp.

Also, the yield is shaping up to be much poorer in my second year of growing Snowbird peas.  The bed of pea plants doesn’t look anywhere near as nice as last year.  The peas plants appear sparse, and short.  No idea why the stark contrast to last year’s abundant crop.  But this year looks much more in line with peas being a mere placeholder in the garden, as described below.

The upshot is that this is a fine snow pea, but not as good as you’d think, reading the original posting.

Original post follows:

For me, peas have always been something that you grow because you can.  Toss them in the ground in early spring, and you’re guaranteed to get something.  Not a lot, but better than nothing.

They’re kind of a garden placeholder.   When the weather warms up, you cut them down and plant something better.

But this year is different, and I’m not quite sure why.

I followed the same ritual this year as in the past.  I used pea inoculant, and planted the peas on St. Patrick’s day.   They came up right on time.  Started picking snow peas about a week ago.

But unlike prior years, these peas just won’t quit.  Today I spent the better part of an hour picking snow peas, and ended up just shy of two and a half pounds of them.  That’s on top of the pound and a half already blanched and frozen.  Plus a few handfuls eaten along the way.

That’s from the roughly 14 square feet of garden bed pictured above.  Judging from the new blossoms on the plants, they’re nowhere near done yet.

Qualitatively different from prior years.  So many peas that I got tired of picking them?  Never had that happen before.

The only real difference this year is the variety — Snowbird.  In the past, I’ve gone with traditional vine-type peas (e.g., Oregon Sugar Pod, or Sugar Anne snap peas).  But this year, I didn’t feel like putting up a trellis for the peas.  Snowbird is a dwarf, bush-type snow pea.  If you plant thickly enough (and put a few sticks in the ground), the entire pea patch will stand up on its own.  As above.

So I’m going to chalk it up to the variety.

I’m sure there are gardeners out there who routinely get this kind of yield out of their peas.  But this is a new one on me.  Changes the whole way I view them.

Anyway, as my reward for an hour of pea-picking, I’ll get to spend the next hour in the kitchen blanching and freezing vacuum-packs of snow peas.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.