PNW: May 2014

Sounds expensive ... but worthwhile, in the long run.

Marc Iverson wrote: landrace squash.

??

Marc Iverson wrote:Sounds expensive ... but worthwhile, in the long run.

we paid about 35 dollars for a whole roll of garden cloth which 6'x 250' and the hoops are like 1.30 a piece ......both of these items we can reuse too....not free but worth it.....otherwise everything would get eaten up.....I keep telling my husband its an investment and will pay off   if we remember to use it!   

hugs
rose

FamilyGardening wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote:Sounds expensive ... but worthwhile, in the long run.

we paid about 35 dollars for a whole roll of garden cloth which 6'x 250' and the hoops are like 1.30 a piece ......both of these items we can reuse too....not free but worth it.....otherwise everything would get eaten up.....I keep telling my husband its an investment and will pay off   if we remember to use it!   

hugs
rose

Nice price. I find it impossible locally to get wider than six feet, and even that sells out quick, so hoops have to be quite low. And when a rabbit tears its way in anyway, it's not so cheap at all! Still, you got a nice price.

sanderson wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote: landrace squash.

??

Mother Earth News has a great article or two about landracing. It's letting your stuff cross-pollinate freely (sort of race each other to see which is best fit for the land) until you wind up with the best survivor. It's an old way of doing things that adapts things especially well to regional locales and microclimates, but is also getting some more popularity due to people like Sepp Holzer and his hugelkultur ideas, in which he recommends taking the best plant from the worst soil to get yourself a really productive survivor that will be worth capturing the seed from and making one of your mainstays. Squash is one of the especially easy crops to do this with, supposedly.

Marc great info on landracing....very interesting!

we too can not find the garden cloth in wider then six foot....what we did this year is staple two pieces together up at the top in order to get it wide enough to have higher hoops.....

sorry to hear about your rabbits....thank goodness the only rabbit we have here is in our refrigerator for Sundays supper   hubby picked one up yesterday for us to give it a try.....

we do have to be careful with the garden cloth as it does catch on things and will rip easy.....

happy gardening
rose....who just discovered this morning that the rat was back in the green house and ate off the tops of all the sunflower seedlings.....eeerrr....I know its a rat because he left his droppings behind....I need a better green house!

Dang, that's a disappointment. How do you think he gets in?

Marc we have one of those inexpensive green houses that you cant really close up tight...so its very easy for him to get in....plus the zipper is broken on the door so its wide open.....but I think I found a solution.....we have 2 clear totes that we used for our chicks brooder that were no longer in use....so I resowed the sunflowers and stuck them and our beans that are just coming up into the totes and put the clear lid on it   and they are now in the green house housing our precious seedlings that the rats just cant resist!

happy gardening
rose

Went to the school garden today and was in charge of giving the lesson. For some reason I felt especially nervous about it, but everybody liked it and even the adults were asking me questions about hoop houses afterward. Just the usual PVC over rebar kinda structure. Anyway, the kids seemed for the most part genuinely interested, especially when I let them bend the PVC down into a hoop shape so they could see even the smallest among them were strong enough to make a hoop house.

Then I went into the plant clinic. We have to have at least 13 volunteer hours there. It was interesting, the people were nice as always, and I learned about the resources there. I even came up with some answers to the problems people brought in, so I made myself useful. All in all a good gardening day!

On the home front, I went to my neighbor's place to check my brussels sprouts. The caterpillar damage hasn't gotten any worse, but it's still very bad. By this point I have to think the plants have been permanently harmed. They were planted last fall and now we're close to summer and I still haven't seen a sprout, so although they are beautiful plants, I guess they've been a waste for me. Not sure why.

Peas are looking wonderful, and finally I got my first few flowers! But it's getting to be too late for peas. I wonder if the soil they're in is too rich or something. Maybe I should try to stimulate their flowering ...

Planted a bunch of tomatoes in trenches last week. They've turned up and are looking good. Some of my other tomatoes have mottled leaves and don't look good, though. We had late blight last year and I have a bad, bad, bad feeling about this ...

My tomatillos still look wonderful! I think they may be the thing I grew best last year, and could be the thing I do best with this year.

Transplanted cukes and peppers look very happy. Not sure about some of my onions. So many bolted, and the remainder aren't as robust as they could be. New strawberry bed looks very healthy, but the berries are so small. I'm not sure if they're not supposed to be, though, as neither of the two people who gave them all to me knew what kind they were.

Am anxiously awaiting direct-sown Armenian cucumbers and beans to sprout. Beans are covered against birds etc, but cukes aren't. It's only been a few days, but I'm impatient for things to get going. I had such a difficult summer last year, and our winter was cold enough to kill off or make unproductive most everything else, even stuff that was under row cover.

In starter pots I've got malabar spinach, shisto, toy choi, and lettuce planted. Nothing rearing it's head yet. I'm starting to worry, but maybe that's just my style and there's nothing wrong.

Marc Iverson wrote:
Some of my other tomatoes have mottled leaves and don't look good, though.  We had late blight last year and I have a bad, bad, bad feeling about this ...

Oh, I hope it doesn't happen!

May 2, 2015

Have you grown these radishes? Cincinnati Market. Ray pulled these up this morning. They are still small.

Debs... likes weird stuff

Gosh Deb, they look like red baby carrots. How do they taste?

CC

The tiny ones do taste a little earthy.... I'll keep you posted.