Category: Garden

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

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.

Post #1786: Least-effort applesauce

 

Peel, core, and quarter apples.

Way too much work.

  • Wash, peel off the plastic produce stickers.
  • Toss into a pressure cooker.  Add a cup of water.  Heat slowly to avoid scorching.  Cook for eight minutes at pressure, followed by natural release.
  • Mash the results.
  • Run that through a Foley mill.
  • Sweeten to taste.
  • If necessary, boil to reduce to the desired thickness.

The back story here is that I got a great deal on pears at my local Safeway, a few weeks back.  I thought I was buying green-skinned pears for 99 cents a pound.  What I actually bought was a bag of completely unripe yellow-skinned pears.  Which I then set aside for just a bit too long.  Hence, the need for a quick way to turn them into pear sauce.

In any case, I’m not one of those people who truly enjoys cooking.  I cook in order to have something to eat.  The less effort and less energy input, the better.

To be clear, I didn’t think this up.   My wife routinely makes apple sauce by quartering the apples, tossing them in a slow-cooker, and then running the results through a Foley mill.

My key innovations were to be too lazy to quarter my over-ripe pears, and too impatient to let them cook in a slow cooker.

Thus, pressure-cooker-Foley-mill pear sauce.  The results are a bit “rustic”, in that the occasional particle of cooked pear skin makes it into the sauce.  IMHO, it’ s not worth the effort of peeling them, to avoid that.  YMMV.

G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.

 

The second part of the title is a joke.  See below.

The first part of this post just verifies that you can, in fact, grow no-dig potatoes in leaf mulch.

The second part examines the astounding levels of internet-based bullshit manure regarding vegetable yields, and in particular, potato yields.

Edit, 7/12/2023:  Near-total failure.  Never going to do this again.  See post G23-041. Edit 2/10/2024:  If I had to guess why this failed (but an earlier try using straw bales worked fine),  I think that the dark, compacted leaf mulch allowed the potato tubers to get too warm.  That would explain every aspect of the harvest — few, small, knobby potatoes.  Potatoes are a difficult crop at best in the South, due to high summer temperatures.  Trying to grow them in Virginia, with just a thin, dark mulch covering the tubers — in hindsight, that was a bad idea.

Continue reading G23-16: No-dig potatoes using leaf mulch, and how manure increases potato yields.