Some broccoli on the way, headed for a stir fry with beef next week. 

Picked the first shelling peas of the season this morning.  Delightful, no better word for it.  Snap peas have yet to mature, probably next week.

Bought some celery seedlings and put those in the ground April 21.  No luck in trying to grow that from seed.  This will be my first time with celery.  I never touched the stuff until my wife and son started eating it this year.  Now it must be grown!

Seeds started today: lettuce, kale (lacinato and traditional curly), peas (shelling and sugar snap), and spinach.

Welcome spring.  Thanks for getting here early.

What Went Right:

• Peppers.  Thrived like no other veg I’ve grown.  With a longer, warmer growing season than Maine and no discernible pests bothering them, those plants produced pounds of bell, shanti and jalapenos month after month.  I gave away around half of each harvest.  If anything, I need to reduce the number of plants (though I do want to introduce more varieties next year).
• Lettuce, Spinach, Kale and Swiss Chard.  I finally planted spinach at the right time, e.g., in a cool spring, and it did really well.  Felt good after prior years of utter failure.  Lettuce (I’m including arugula and other varieties in that term) and kale did great, though midway through the season a lot of small white flies set up housekeeping in the kale.  Didn’t adversely affect the plant itself, but cleaning cut leaves was time consuming.  Got some seeds for lacinato kale for next year.  I think we’ll eat that more often by itself as well as mixing it in with my traditional variety.  And swiss chard made its first appearance in my garden, doing well despite being dug up a few times by critters.
• Cucumbers.  Another victory after years of failure.  A combination of consistent heat, no pests to hinder growth and a new trellace to climb on, these guys did well.
• Broccoli.  I didn’t quite achieve any grocery store-looking bunches this season, but I consistently got stalks from my plants, which was a vast improvement.  My broccoli was also infested with white flies for a time, and either they or some other pest did some minor damage to its leaves.  Something to watch next year.
• Potatoes.  The bags worked their magic and we had us some great yukon golds and fingerlings.  After a 3rd year of success with this growing method, I can’t recommend it enough.  Pretty much foolproof and suited to gardening just about anywhere you have a little bit of space.
• Yellow Gourd Squash.  A surprise bonus of around 10-15 of these at the end of the season from a volunteer vine at the side of the house.  Made me notice that area receives a good amount of sunlight throughout the day, so I’ll carve out some space next year and put in a 4th bed.

What Went Mostly Right, But Had Issues:

• Tomatoes.  As mentioned in a prior post, I didn’t harvest hardly any until late September, due mainly to overcrowding.  Way too many varieties were crammed in that bed.  I had some blossom end rot on my Japanese Black Trifeles, which I don’t much care for anyway, so they’ll be out of the rotation.  And I’ve got to look for tomato hornworms now and then.  But all in all, we ended up with a bumper crop of maters.  Next year, more spacing, culling the herd and planting fewer varieties (kind of like deciding which children to keep and which to leave at the orphanage if you ask me) and application of soil amendments (calcium, etc.).
• Corn.  I grew an heirloom variety, Dorinny, again this year since the seeds were free from Wood Prairie Farm.  It grew fine and it has a good flavor, but we just weren’t happy with only one ear per stalk and a short ear at that.  I bought a different variety for planting next year for comparison.
• Beans.  Pole beans did great.  Something better to climb on would have given me a better yield – I didn’t harvest as many as in years past, but still ate a respectable amount.  Bush beans did poorly.  I placed them in a bed between corn and tomatoes and they were completely overshadowed by the time they should have been producing like crazy.  Lesson learned.

What Didn’t So Well:

• Squash / Zucchini.  My summer squash hybrid had a complete infestation by the dreaded vine borer as recounted in an earlier post.  It eventually got to the zucchini as well, though I had a reasonable output for most of the season.  Hard to be vigilant and get the eggs off the plants before they get inside, so I’ll have to be ready for some combat next season.
• Peas.  No idea what the heck happened here.  I tried to grow them in spring and in fall in different areas and they just didn’t grow well at all.  Hard to take after great success in Maine with these.  I have a new support system and will try direct sowing some next season to see if they do better that way.
• Beets.  Still not able to get these to grow.  I had plenty of seedlings, but all died or were taken/eaten by critters. Other than placing part of a bed on lockdown somehow, I may have to give these up.
• Melons.  I was able to get one charentais out of a vine before the SVB got to that too.  Canteloupe seeds didn’t germinate.

Overall, I think I did pretty good with the space I had to work in.  I’m getting enough sun in the front lawn in pretty much the proper time of day.  The hindrance of having to clear land and build 3 beds from scratch will be gone next season, which means more time to concentrate on growing things, amending the soil and actually using the compost that’s been breaking down in our bin the past year.  Can’t wait.

Oh, hello.

Mr. E spotted him first, just as we were about to sit down to dinner.  This young buck had about 6 points on him.  My initial theory that the front yard, high traffic area (note the taillight of a passing car on the right) beds will keep the critters away is now officially and thoroughly discredited.  Squirrels, groundhogs, and now deer in broad daylight.  Not much left but vines for him to chomp on.  I’d already pulled a bunch of tomatoes the past few days.

They all basically came in at once – about 100-120 days from seed to harvest.  Ridiculous.  I should have been eating these much sooner, but mistakes were made.  Ah well.  Please don’t let me complain about 30 fresh organic tomatoes for chrissakes!

In general terms of harvesting, and for documentation’s sake, we had a lot of peppers, cucumbers and squash (despite the pests) in the past month.  So many peppers we decided to can 12 jars’ worth of jalapenos and long green hots for the first time.  Much easier process than we expected.

The potato bags were emptied a few weeks ago and we ended up with about 6 lbs. of yukon gold and fingerlings altogether.  Beans have been coming in OK, but not as prolific as in years past.  Part of that was due to the location of the bush beans – they were too close to the tomato jungle and didn’t get enough sun.  Tomatoes certainly didn’t have the volume of fruits I was expecting from the amount of plants I put in the ground.  Why?  It got too crowded in the bed too fast and the fruits struggled to get their share of sunlight.  Next year I’ll plant less and space them further apart.

And I had a volunteer squash vine show up on the side of the house.  It’s apparently a perennial.  I remember it from last year, but thought I had pulled the vine at some point.  Nice surprise at the end of the season to get some yellow squash.  This location is getting a proper bed next year.

The Squash Vine Borer (Melitta curcurbitae)  New to me this year, but the bane of existence for the majority of people growing squash.  A few weeks ago, when my squash plants should have been producing 5 or 6 fruits per plant, I was only ending up with 1 or 2 mature fruits at most, with some of the smaller guys withering up and dying on the vine.  Leaves were also wilting.  And then I looked down at the base of one of the vines to see this:

Frassed Out

No question, it was the work of SVB larvae.  As they eat their way through a stem, they leave a pile of yellow-orange droppings resembling wet sawdust, called frass.  Over the next few days, 5 of my plants fell victim to SVB.  All were Zephyrs, a summer squash/zucchini hybrid that is mostly yellow in color, which is what attracts the adult SVB.  All were pulled and put in the trash.  There are a few ways one can try to save the plants with open-vine surgery, applications of Bt, etc., but I just didn’t have the heart.  I still have 2 healthy plants.  Next year, more vigilance!

The Tomato Hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata)   eventually turning into a Five Spotted Hawkmoth.  Also new to me this year.  While one can easily miss the TH on one’s plant’s due to their green color, these guys easily caught my eye as they’d been parasitized, covered in wasp larvae.  But those suckers did some damage.  A couple of developing tomatoes had been munched on and 4 or 5 stalks had been chewed off (each of which had 3-5 small toms), which I thought was the work of a groundhog or squirrel.  Solution: lopped off the branch they were attached to and put in the trash. No serious harm done here as long as I don’t see any more.

Tomato Hornworm

The Japanese Beetle (Popillia japonica Newman).  Southern NJ has the distinction of being the first place these lil’ bastards were found in the U.S. according to this fine USDA publication.  And boy, have they proliferated.  In fact, you’ll hardly ever see them by themselves.  They prefer the company of others, brazenly having orgies on your plants.  I first experienced them in Maine, when skunks dug up chunks of my lawn looking for their larvae to snack on.  Once the larvae reach maturity, they fly out of their holes and start to chow down.  Though they’re quoted as eating a large variety of fruit trees andvegetable plants, they’ve only appeared on two of my crops yearly without fail: basil and bean plants.  Haven’t bothered to figure out why, I just want them out of my yard.  In Maine, I put a decidedly non-organic grub treatment on the lawn to get rid of the larvae for the first couple of years we were in the house and before I started gardening in earnest.  That seemed to reduce the adult population in subsequent years with no lawn treatment.  However, I still had beetles showing up on my plants – those were picked and executed on the spot.  Again, there are milky spore and other organic treatments out there which I have yet to try.  The aforementioned USDA report has good information should one decide to follow an integrated pest management plan to, er, manage these guys.  The photo below is taken from the University of Wisconsin.  I’ve never managed to photograph them myself, I was always too enraged at the sight of them that they were squashed into oblivion before I thought of taking their picture.

Japanese Beetles

The Cabbageworm.  I mentioned these in a post last year when they attacked my broccoli and kale.  While I saw similar bite marks on both plants this year, I never caught them in the act.  My remedy, as with the other pests has been limited to diligent searching and destroying.  Gardener’s Supply has a list of items you can try if this is a real problem for you.

With all these pests, you’ll notice I didn’t say “get rid of” when mentioning remedies.   One can only reduce the population in one’s area and must accept a certain amount of veg loss each year.  This was a real hard truth for me to comprehend.  Clearly, most commercial farmers refuse to accept losses and cover their crops with pesticides.  Right now, I just can’t bring myself to do that, organic or otherwise.  My livelihood certainly doesn’t depend on it.  So once I decided to accept some loss, I started planting a little extra at the beginning of the season to compensate.  Now I just have to get past the occasional grossness of nature.

The Somegarden is doing well aside from some blossom-end rot on my Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes.   None of the other varieties have been affected so far and I’ve been growing these for the past 3 years without this problem, so I guess these guys need more calcium than my soil can provide them.  I’ll need to work some bone meal in there this weekend.

A number of cukes are on the way, as well as zucchini, corn, beans, beets, potatoes and a jungle’s worth of tomatoes.  In the meantime, we’ve picked about 12 Shanti hot peppers so far and yowzers, they are as advertised. Oh and kale, lots of kale.  Sigh.  They do make nice chips if you’re so inclined.  Good recipe here.