My cabbages are growing in the sunniest part of my backyard garden area. For me, this is the west edge. Even there, they don’t see their first DIRECT sunlight of the day until almost noon.
Feed me
Feed me!
I'm not eatin' that, it has a stinger!
Maybe it’s just me, but the plants remind me of the Audrey II.
I’m looking forward to my first amateur attempt at making fermented sauerkraut soon!
Normally you want to pick all of your lettuce either before it gets bitter from days that are too warm or before it sends up a seed stalk (bolting). To save lettuce seeds, you need to let the plant grow flowers.
The lettuce has bolted
Lettuce flowers
Partially dry group of lettuce flowers.
I cut the whole head of flowers off the lettuce when some of the seeds began to drop onto the ground and took it inside. I let it dry out a bit more in a paper bag.
Find a dry flower
Break open the dry lettuce flower
Here are your seeds!
Lettuce Seeds
More lettuce than your family could eat.
One bolted lettuce plant could easily yield enough lettuce seeds for your whole next year.
…in about 15 seconds.
25 or 30 tomatoes.
These are “Spoon” tomatoes, which are a type of very small currant tomatoes. The ones shown here are the first to get ripe. Later in the year I expect much greater smallness from them. The seeds were given to me as a novelty present this Christmas, so I grew one. These tomatoes are actually quite delicious. VERY full of sugar.
Sun scalded tomatoes
When I finally got around to trellising my community garden tomato plants, they were a huge tangled mess. I pruned back many of them quite a bit just so I could see what I was doing to get them strung up off the ground.
Sunburn!
Unfortunately, many tomatoes that had been shaded up to that point were suddenly exposed to 3 or 4 days of bright, direct sunlight with unseasonably warm 95 degree days.
With no leaves to shade them, the green tomatoes got burnt. Scalded by the sun!
Though these might rot before getting ripe, I am going to try to see if they might mature on their own. Even if they are half-rotten, I should still be able to save some good seeds for next year from inside the other half.
(I do realize that this is probably the crappiest picture online that purports to show Japanese Beetles. Again, it was taken with my cell phone.)
My community garden’s sweet corn is completely infested with these largish beetles. The beetles are covering the corn’s tassels and feeding on the pollen. When that’s gone, they’ll apparently begin eating the silk and quite possibly interfere with proper pollination.
Plus, it’s disgusting to have dozens and dozens of big beetles on my corn. I guess I’m going to get a container of soapy water and knock as many as I can off into their deathtrap tomorrow at lunch. Wish me luck!
I haven’t shown you my community garden plot because I never remember to bring the camera. So here are some blurry cell phone pictures.
Community Garden Plot 10 x 30 feet
At the front right corner is an improvised trellis trying to support 9 tomato plants and already sagging in the middle.
The rest of the space contains alternating hills of either corn and pole beans together, or a vining plant such as a squash, cucumber or watermelon. This is my three sisters garden. It’s a very fun experiment and I think it’s going to work out.
More pics:
Here is an update to my previous post about saving radish seeds.
Dried radish seed pods
I let the radish growth die naturally and dry outside to a nice tan color. I picked off the stems with the seed pods and had what you see above.
Green pod has turned light brown
Just like a pea or a bean, each dry pod contains a few radish seeds. Let’s open one up, shall we?
Hooray, seeds!
I expect the nice round ones are probably more viable than the flat wrinkled ones, since the ones I originally planted were all nice and round.
The verdict is that, yes, I can save radish seeds. And until I absolutely need to, I won’t. It’s a lot of extra work to get these seeds from a plant that would otherwise be picked in 25 or 30 days. I’ll consider it knowledge tucked away for a rainy day.
…is so easy a caveman could do it.
Actually it usually just DOES itself. If left unattended, strawberry plants will send off runners which will root near the parent plant and become self sufficient, removable, separate strawberry plants.
However, we are planning on moving our strawberries this fall to a different place in the yard, so I’m going to try to keep things orderly in the strawberry bed until then.
I don’t see any reason to waste perfectly good potential plants, so instead of cutting off the runners, I’m rooting them in containers.
Rooting strawberry runners in a pot
The sticks are just helping to hold the vine in place until the roots grow.
Strawberry propagation. Ugg.
Pole Bean Teepee Hideaway
Right before we went on vacation, we started a project that will be fun for the boys if it works out as planned. We tied some poles together, laced them up with twine, and dug out a trench from our yard around the base of the thing.
Pole beans growing
We planted pole bean seeds in the little trench. The intention is that the pole beans will climb the tepee and completely cover it, making a little tent for the boys to not only play in, but also snack in, straight from the garden!
View from the back
Here are a few pictures of my developing tomatoes. Unfortunately, two of the three featured in this post are hybrids. I’m going to actively move away from the hybrids in the next few years. That’s the main reason why I am growing so many different tomatoes (18 types this year)… I want to find an heirloom variety that grows well for me in my own back yard. With heirloom tomatoes, I can save seeds each year and avoid relying on a store to sell me more.
As you can see from the pictures below, they have had no lack of water yet this year.
Beefmaster green tomato. Hybrid.
Big Mama. Hybrid paste tomato
Cabin. Rare heirloom tomato. Leaves somewhat potato-like.
