watermelon germination

Well...only two of the three types of watermelon I planted germinated. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which one I planted where, but I'm almost certain that livingston seed's petite yellow is the one that failed. I'm disappointed and very concerned that even the two that germinated won't set fruit before the weather gets cold. Plus, I'm going to have to be very vigilant about pests, after the trouble I've had with the squash - more on that later.

Next year, I will almost certainly start watermelon seeds indoors. Maybe in the south people can direct seed watermelon and it will ripen in their long growing season, but here in zone 6 it doesn't seem like it will be a success - especially since we had such a late start to summer.

They took a surprisingly long time to germinate - at least two weeks for the first one that poked through (pictured below) and even longer for the second.

pepper update

A few weeks after I transplanted the peppers, they were growing several more leaves and buds, but did not seem to be getting taller. One of the bell peppers does not seem to be growing at all, and is a funny (pale) color. And, one of the strongest ones (bottom right of photo below) was snapped in half - perhaps by a bunny. It is still alive though.


Now they are taller - probably two feet or so.


The peppers I bought, which are jalapenos, have fruit on them and they will be ripe very soon! I am so excited about that.

Though we thought we bunny-proofed the fence, I found a baby bunny in the garden one day when I was out there weeding. I had my dog chase the bunny out, so we could see where the hole in the fence was (don't try that at home! I knew I was risking something awful but we've noticed that our dog stops chasing bunnies and squirrels when she gets close enough to catch them). There are some bushes on the north side of the fence that made it difficult to see the smallest gap between the ground and the fence. My spouse hammered the fence down lower but we will probably have to put some boards down to keep the rabbits from digging underneath the fence. We haven't seen any more rabbits or evidence of damage.

UPDATE: The peppers continue to grow well, and several have fruit set on them. I was hoping to get a total of 60 peppers, and currently I can find 10 peppers growing (a couple of them are pictured below). Currently none of the rainbow bell pepper collection plants have fruit, only the yolo wonders. I have been very dissatisfied with all of the seeds I bought from Livingston.

potato harvest - surprise!

After the last post when I was so worried about my potatoes getting leafroll virus, I took a leaf sample to the farmer's market so I could ask my farmers as well as the master gardener's. The MGs are a great resource and incredibly eager to help, but they usually have to do some research before giving me an answer. They thought it was an insect because they focused on the holes in the leaves, and we looked through their pest book and found a picture of damage done by potato leaf hoppers that looked exactly like the leaf I had brought in. This was actually good news to me - much easier to deal with than a disease.

But then I took the leaf to my farmer, who said there was nothing wrong with it - it was just ready for harvest! I hoped he was right but I was skeptical because the photo I saw looked uncanny, and my resources all indicated that it was too early for potato harvest. But I also know that the farmer is most likely to be right, because it is his full-time job rather than a hobby (even if the MGs are experts, my understanding is that most are volunteers so they just haven't had as much experience as a full-time farmer).

I came home hopeful and decided to yank up one of each variety of potatoes I planted. It was so exciting to find a bunch of real potatoes under each vine! It makes it totally worth the wait:-) But they were pretty small, so I looked up each variety from the seeds of change catalog and found that indeed, these were both early varieties that take an estimated 100 days until maturity. It hasn't quite been 100 days (I was able to use the time stamp on my camera to verify this) so I will wait a little longer, but I am so relieved.

Here is a photo of the harvest from two plants:


Here is a photo of the cranberry red, which was a gorgeous fuschia color!


We will be using them in our food tonight...I'll let you know how the taste compares in a later post!

tomato update

On June 30th, the romas and cherokee purples had blossoms, though the brandywine did not. Every single one of the tomato plants seems to be growing well - a nice surprise since there were several I didn't think would survive, but I planted anyway because I had the space. We were starting to get several little tomatoes on the two tomato plants i purchased, which were more mature than the ones I started from seed.

Two weeks later, every single plant has little tomatoes on it! Way more than I can count. And, I've already harvested one early tomato from one of the plants I purchased. It was DELICIOUS! There is nothing like the flavor of the first tomato of the season.


My only two concerns at this point are continuing to stake the plants up as they grow larger and heavier, and canning the tomatoes - I'm worried they will ripen at a pace that will have us continually canning a few quarts rather than doing a big session, as I would prefer to do. Oh, and we will be out of town for 10 days in August and I don't want them to ripen while we are gone!

Potato update

It's not good, folks. I noticed the potatoes weren't looking quite as good toward late June - I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I made a mental note to keep a close eye on them. When I returned from my trip, they were noticeably sickly. They had somehow shrank, the color of the leaves had gone from lush green to almost yellow, and the leaves were curled and dry.

My first thought was that they needed water, but I researched potato problems in my books - found nothing other than potato blight. So I googled the symptoms, and diagnosed the problem as "potato leaf roll virus." On the bright side, this won't completely kill the crop...

But on the (much more weighty, in my opinion) down side, it will reduce the quality and quantity of the potato crop, you can't make it go away once it hits, and... it could easily spread to my tomatoes and peppers. I can see the first hints of evidence that it has spread to two of my tomato plants. I'm very upset and honestly, not sure what to do.

These were certified disease-free seed potatoes, and we know nothing has been planted in this spot for years. It's just frustrating to put this much work, time, and money into something and not accomplish the stated goal.

japanese beetles

Well, it happened. I found dozens of Japanese beetles on the beans, and a few on my potatoes. From what I've observed, they are THE major pest to contend with in central Illinois. I was surprised because all of my friends and neighbors assured me that although they'd heard Japanese beetles were a problem, they'd never actually experienced them. I was not so lucky.

I had already been advised that the best way to get rid of them was to take a bucket of soapy water, set it under the plant, and shake the plant gently. Their instinct is to drop to the ground when the plant shakes, so they land in the bucket and quickly drown. I'll spare you the photo of the floating bugs:)

For me, this was only somewhat effective. Any that fell in the bucket were taken care of - they swim around for a while but they aren't able to get out, so they do die (perhaps cruel, I know). BUT the problem was that many of them would fly away rather than dropping. Perhaps the species is adapting, but I don't even think I was able to get half of them. Plus, it might work for certain types of plants but for the beans, it was logistically difficult to put the bucket in just the right spot.

What I found works best is to wear garden gloves, put one gloved hand underneath a leaf with a beetle on it (in case the beetle does drop off), then pick the beetles one by one and throw them into the bucket on the ground. This way they couldn't fly away, and I could tell if each individual was taken care of by the splash in the bucket. I did this three times a day and sometimes it took a half hour, because even doing this one by one some of them escaped (for example, there are often several on one leaf, and they fly away easily). I would do several loops around the bean bed, staying out there until I couldn't find any more. I found that they were the thickest at the hottest part of the day, which motivated me to get out to the garden at a time I would normally insist on staying inside. Also, I've noticed that the beetles are more likely to just drop off the leaf in the early morning before the sun is out, but later in the day they are more likely to fly away.

I was really panicked about this because they did an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time [see sample of demolished leaf photo below], and I found them soon before we were leaving on a week-long trip. When I returned, I was prepared to mourn the loss of my bean crop...


but to my surprise, the beans were living and continuing to grow. Yes, the beetles were still there and yes, they had continued to do damage in the week I was gone. But they didn't destroy any of the crops. They may have stunted their growth, and we will see what happens in the rest of the summer...but for now, I feel like my bean crop is safe. Hooray!

I would recommend taking care of the beetles the way I did. It can seem daunting to remove the beetles one by one, and perhaps gross - but as long as I had gloves on, it didn't bother me to pick up the beetles. And I could definitely tell each day that there were fewer beetles than there had been the day before at that time. Plus, beetles reproduce, so each beetle you get rid of is saving you exponential headache the following year. I would say about 1/3 of the beetles I find are engaged in reproductive activities when I snatch them and dunk them in the water. After they mate, they deposit eggs in the soil that turn into grubs, that turn into more beetles. Best to nip that in the bud!

Freezing spinach

For spinach, you have the option of canning or freezing. You could probably dry it as well, but for us there was no question - freezing was likely to have the best texture and flavor. But you can't just rinse the leaves and shove them into the freezer - I'm not sure what would happen if you did that, but at the very least it would taste bad.

We rinsed the spinach leaves by dunking them in water, shaking them around, and then putting them in a colander. My spouse rinsed them before tearing off the parts he didn't want to preserve, while I removed the parts I didn't want before rinsing. I think either method is fine but my method meant having to change the water fewer times. Sometimes a clump of dirt or a little big would come off, which is a normal part of growing food. We just picked the parts we would want to eat if we were making a salad - we probably could've included more leaves, but I wanted this frozen spinach to be extra good! In the photo below you can see the bowl of spinach ready to be blanched.


Then, you blanch. This stops the growing process. We decided to use the steam blanching method rather than the immersion blanching method. For immersion blanching, you put the spinach in lightly boiling water for two minutes (precision is important when preserving food). For steam blanching, according to my resources, you just increase the time by 50% - so three minutes. We used a steamer pot and put a very thin layer of leaves in.


Then, you ice bath them. This stops the cooking process. This was kind of difficult - we didn't have enough ice on hand. But we did the best we could and I would just spoon the steamed spinach into the ice bath, swirl them around with my hand until they felt cooler than room temperature. Then we put them in a colander to drain.


Then, you remove the excess water. The more water you remove, the longer the spinach will keep in the freezer. My source recommended using a salad spinner, but we didn't have one so we did the best we could using a spoon to squeeze as much water out as possible. The following photo shows my spouse trying to squeeze as much excess water out as he could - even though we thought the spinach was well-drained, once it was in the bag we could see that there was a lot of water still hanging around.


Then, you put them in bags. We used quart-sized freezer bags and labelled the date, the vegetable, and any other information. For example, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to remove the stems or not so we did one with stems, one without. We're almost certain that you don't have to remove the stems, which is nice because doing so is time consuming. But, perhaps it will taste better.

We harvested enough for two quart-sized bags. In the future I will try to do more to get more water out, because I can tell there are a lot of ice crystals in the bags already. I don't think this will hurt the flavor as long as we use it relatively quickly - I'm guessing three months? I will say that we sampled some of the spinach and the quality - both taste and texture - was phenomenal when judged against the standard of supermarket frozen spinach. I'm excited to see how it holds up!

Sixth planting

Today I did the sixth and final planting - until I start working on fall crops. I was supposed to plant watermelons and asparagus, but the store-bought asparagus still hasn't poked through, and I've decided to wait and see if anything ever happens with it before planting the seeds. I will still be able to compare growth, and this is just easier.

The watermelon turned out to be difficult to plant, only because I have read wildly different recommendations on spacing - everything from 18 inches to 15 feet! I decided to go with the seed packet instructions in case it was specific to the variety, but even those were quite different and it didn't seem to be related to the size of the watermelon. I planted Crimson Sweet from seeds of change, Sugar Baby from territorial, and Petite Yellow from livingston.

Because the soil still hasn't quite warmed to where it should be, I'm using the cold frames to help the seeds along. I did the best with the space I had and planted them 3 feet apart - just one hill of each variety. I'll let you know how it goes!

First harvest!

We had our first harvest tonight! I never thinned the spinach, so I finally did that tonight while also harvesting leaves from the plants that i left to grow. Harvest is one of my absolute favorite parts of gardening. I feel such a sense of accomplishment because even though the soil, seed, water, and sunlight really did all of the work, I had an integral role to play and it honestly makes me feel so confident. There's something about being able to grow your own food that just makes you feel like you are capable, like a pioneer surviving on the frontier.

As I've mentioned before, only one of the spinach varieties germinated, but we still got a good crop. We brought in two giant bowls full. The spinach was delicious and soon, I'll tell you how we preserved it!

Lesson learned:)

Some things I've learned about beans, particularly pole beans:

Thin them before they begin to vine!!!!!!! Sure, we probably should've known better - but we're busy and it didn't seem like a big deal until I'd spent four hours of a Saturday gently (read: s-l-o-w-l-y) and methodically unravelling bean vines. Since we hadn't installed the trellising system yet, they had nothing to wrap themselves around except each other. It was painstaking work - but the good news is, since it's been several weeks since this happened, we know it didn't damage any of them. I was worried because some of them broke, and some of them looked very wilted after the whole ordeal. But they bounced back. It was like unraveling a huge ball of delicate chain necklaces that all look exactly the same. I wish I had a picture of how inter-twined the vines were, but I was too focused on the task at hand.

The other thing - stay on top of the weeds. Once we installed the bird netting, we weren't able to weed...and once we took the bird netting off, we prioritized thinning the beans over weeding, for better or worse. Then the beans got too tall to reach in and weed, particularly with the trellising in the way. This is one of the biggest changes I would make next year - I think I would have spent less time weeding overall if I had made more of an effort early on to hoe the small weeds. I would also use bark or grass clippings or some sort of mulch, to suppress the weeds. On the beds we prepared and planted later, we've done this, and it's made a PHENOMENAL difference.

By the way, all of the beans that we thought were bush beans have turned out to be bush beans. This is a relief, since I was worried about trellising in an earlier post. And although I'm irritated that the cannellini beans are bush instead of pole, it hasn't caused any practical problems.

celery update

The celery is growing well in its new outdoor home! It is not ready to be blanched yet, but it is definitely getting there. I'm happy to report that all of the celery plants survived the transplanting process - there were one or two of them I had concerns about. We did have some big storms that knocked some of the dirt from the hills into the trenches, but I do not believe that they is a big problem - just an inconvenience.


Ignore the grasses and weeds in these photos - I weeded those that were at the bottom, possibly competing with the celery root structure, but when I began pulling the grasses growing on the tops and sides of the trenches quite a bit of dirt fell in. I am trying to minimize that until the celery is ready to be blanched.


I will find out if the extra dirt is a problem when I harvest. I think it will just be a matter of breaking the stalks off and washing them well. My guess is that it would only be a problem if you were going to store the whole plant or sell it at a market. But I could be wrong - perhaps having the dirt in between the stalks will make the celery disease-prone or will make it rot. We'll see!

trellising

We decided to try something new with trellising systems. Mainly because we wanted to do it cheap - tomato cages seem to regularly cost 10+ each, a price we could not afford for 22 plants. We bought bamboo poles, put them in the ground, and zig zagged twine across to support tomatoes. We did a similar thing for the pole beans. The bamboo poles were quite cheap - maybe 10 or 20 dollars total for all we needed for both crops.

It just isn't working, for either crop. We could instantly tell that it wouldn't work for the tomatoes, as the poles weren't strong enough for the plants even before they set fruit. Below you can see a photo of the poles as we were beginning to tie the string around.


The bean poles were better supported, my spouse used anchors and counterweights but it still dragged the strings way down. i thought they would be six feet high but they are less than four feet when we first installed the trellising. The situation has gone from questionable to bad, as some of the bean poles snapped in a storm. My spouse fixed them, but a couple of weeks later the beans have gotten so heavy that the poles are bending way down. I think it is too late to try something new so we will continue to prop up the current trellising systems. The photo below is from the day we first installed the bean trellising.


The poles came in a package so we couldn't really tell how strong they were until we got home and began trying to put them in the ground. I think we both knew it probably wasn't going to be a successful experiment but we tried anyway. I will definitely do something different next year - either I will look for some free or cheap rebar or I will have my spouse build me a large sturdy wooden frame for stringing the twine for the beans. I do not have any ideas for the tomatoes yet - even if we got free tomato cages, I would rather not use them because in my experience they are not strong enough and they are awkward to store. If you've got ideas, hit me.

Potatoes are blossoming!

You can't see the blossoms too well in this first photo (but look how big the potato plants have grown!)


Here is a close-up of the blossoms on the german butterball potatoes.


And here is a close-up of the blossoms on the cranberry red potatoes. They're purple and pink!


According to my sources, when the blossoms appear that means new potatoes are ready to be eaten. Because I want them as storage potatoes, I will wait until the greens wilt and die to harvest any. Though I am curious to see how the potatoes are doing and it would be fun to dig one up and eat it, I'm trying to be patient :-)