A Seed Saver's Garden

[flowerbug]

Have you tried green tomatoes @flowerbug? Or do you mean the red but unripe ones fried?

always the latter kind for us, i live with a person who is very stuck in her ways. she doesn't like it when i try to grow any other kind of tomato other than the large beefsteak varieties. this season we're growing Big Beef and it's having quite a struggle with all the hot weather and disease pressure (which here normally can be pretty bad anyways).

still my methods of growing them do get a crop when many other people fail. every year i wonder if the plants will produce as they look sad, but they put on fruits and we get between 20-40lbs a plant so that is what we do this for, growing tomatoes, to put up and to eat fresh.

some we give away once we know we have enough canned. Mom is always so happy to give everything away i have to put the brakes on and remind her that we do want to put things up before she gives stuff away. since i do most or all of the planting, watering, weeding, picking, processing, canning, baking, freezing, etc. for all these gardens i do want at least some say in what happens with the results. i don't mind sharing either, i just want to make sure that we have enough for our own needs too.

so, erm, the chances of me growing a green tomato here is about zero. as lovely as all those different varieties appear and i'd love to try them out i won't be able to get it past the management... haha...

 

[heirloomgal]

always the latter kind for us, i live with a person who is very stuck in her ways. she doesn't like it when i try to grow any other kind of tomato other than the large beefsteak varieties. this season we're growing Big Beef and it's having quite a struggle with all the hot weather and disease pressure (which here normally can be pretty bad anyways).

still my methods of growing them do get a crop when many other people fail. every year i wonder if the plants will produce as they look sad, but they put on fruits and we get between 20-40lbs a plant so that is what we do this for, growing tomatoes, to put up and to eat fresh.

some we give away once we know we have enough canned. Mom is always so happy to give everything away i have to put the brakes on and remind her that we do want to put things up before she gives stuff away. since i do most or all of the planting, watering, weeding, picking, processing, canning, baking, freezing, etc. for all these gardens i do want at least some say in what happens with the results. i don't mind sharing either, i just want to make sure that we have enough for our own needs too.

so, erm, the chances of me growing a green tomato here is about zero. as lovely as all those different varieties appear and i'd love to try them out i won't be able to get it past the management... haha...

Well, let me relate a dear friend's experience. Her friend had asked her for some help one afternoon in the garden. Many times my friend had suggested to this lady to put a few flowers in with her pragmatic vegetable garden. No, no she said - it's all vegetable business here, none of that fluff. When the lady asked my friend to work on planting the pea rows, she did so happily. But secretly, she had squirreled some scented pea flower seeds in her jacket pocket, and every foot or so she 'accidentally' dropped a seed in. When mid summer came and the beautiful flowers bloomed among the regular peas, the lady called my friend thrilled about the wondrous flowers she had mysteriously growing in the rows. She had no idea how they could have gotten in with the other peas. My friend simply wondered along with her. ☺

The moral of the story is when mysterious things find there way into the garden, even when not initially welcomed or planned for, happiness can still bloom

 

[heirloomgal]

Ripens and doesn't begin to quickly decay.

Our soybeans may be ready for edamame very soon.

Steve

Hmmm. Probably any of my blue tomatoes. One summer I was able to keep a couple dozen blue shaded beefsteaks for over a month on the counter, in perfect condition. But aside from those, nearly all the tom's I love are not long lasting. The cocktails seem to be able to last longer than beefs, and cherry types the same.

I've always wanted to try longkeepers. But never got to trying them out yet. Need to do more research on the best ones.

 

[heirloomgal]

Ya-hoo! Carrots are starting!

Finally turned blue!

'Stump of the World'. DH went to pick the 2 ripe ones and yanked 2 very green ones off by accident with them. They are blushing now though, so it wasn't so bad.

Couldn't help it. Needed to peek.

Thank God for 'Louisiana' pole! It's like there is a magic protection shield around it.

'Tigre'. Vole got 1st in the row, but in behind these are doing well.

At first the 'Piekny Jas' flowers were not forming beans in the heat. Looks like the cool nights are helping to set pods now. Yay!

'Mitla Black' still doing good despite voles invading the raised beds. Did well in part shade.

Last arrangement of the season I think.

 

[Blue-Jay]

Thank God for 'Louisiana' pole! It's like there is a magic protection shield around it.

Such a pretty pod set you have of Louisiana. This lovely, productive bean is one of my outstanding favorites !

 

[heirloomgal]

Doing a bit of a garden go-over tonight in looking at the different varieties of things I picked to grow this year. 'Opal' basil was not memorable, though the colour was nice. The flavour tasted too much like anise. 'Genovese' is hard to beat for flavour. Not doing potatoes again. Draws too many voles which are so destructive, and caused me MUCH grief this year. But they were delicious! Happily, sesame plants are very suitable for my climate, will grow more plants next year. 'Jing Orange' okra is an excellent, vigorous variety with a fairly compact habit but it needs to be grown outside not in a hot house. I'll plant a row outdoors next year instead. Time to go back to hot peppers. It's more fun, more seeds and simpler. I am having a good bell crop, but seed production is so much less. Given my seed ark is survival oriented for possible troubles in the years ahead, bells just don't meet that criteria. They are the wimps of the pepper world, tasty as they are.

'Winter Luxury' pumpkins have done well, but they needed quite a bit more water than I realized. My leaves had begun powdery mildew surprisingly early. Forgot that they were so thirsty, but it was very hot. Also did not have their vines running in a practical area, though it seemed ideal in the beginning. They eventually eliminated my end walking path. Will need to restructure that back garden end for the vines to ramble without limits.

As for beans, I think I observed a valuable lesson in spacing. Almost all my plants were spaced 6-8 inches, and the rows about 2 1/2 -3 ft apart. 12 inches between plants in a row would be better, much as that spacing would be halving my plant numbers. My main garden has a definite vulnerability to fungal problems given the reduced wind. I thought this year would be different, but heavy rains did arrive, and the lack of moving air really proved problematic. Bush beans have so much better chance with loads of space around them. Lesson learned. Also, transplants are an excellent way to start beans. I think in certain situations they can make a seed crop MUCH more likely to succeed. Plants handle inclement weather SO much better than tiny seedlings, and really give the plant a powerful headstart in maturing seed. I didn't do many bush bean transplants, but of the ones that I did, many are done drying some of their pods.

With the peas, double rows give more fresh peas, and reduce the success of a seed crop given the crowding. I've always done single rows, this year was an experiment. Single rows are better. Also, my snow pea varieties were more fragile to insect damage (while drying down) though most were fine. During the heavy rains though, the shape of the large pod, which is not supersnug to the peas (inside) in neither width or length, drew predators. The tight little (dry) shell pea pods had no damage at all. All the more reason to grow snow peas as tall as possible. The best pea variety all season, for many criteria, to my surprise, was 'Edna's Sugar'. I'd never heard of it before, and wow, this one was worth trying out. There is a few I may not try again, like 'Aristagreen' and 'Hatif D'annonay' because they didn't seem to do well. 'Edna's' beat nearly everyone for the 1st place position.

 

[heirloomgal]

I wonder why the African beans I've grown always tend to be the first to dry? I would have thought they'd be be longer season beans. 'Kabarika' was early last year too. Either way, I'm happy I can rely on them all for seed!

FPJ & Mbombo Green

'Edna's Sugar' snow pea

'Goose Gullet' from P.E.I.

French fries! Ate these with Soylent Green burgers lol

Pumpkins are starting to dry down and colour up a wee bit. Can't wait for pie!

The runner beans are still blooming like crazy. The hummingbirds seem to quite like them, and frequent them often now. I'll be curious to see when the blooms end and how many seeds I'll collect from the 7 plants.

I've started letting the sweet pea flowers go to seed. Not much time left to enjoy 'America' flowers!

 

[heirloomgal]

After seeing a new bean plant start to die every second day, or even each day, I set out traps. The traps did not catch the vole, or more possibly mole, and though I caught some mice, I basically gave up hope of solving this problem this year. It's just gone on too long now, it's become a race against the clock. These critter (s) are just going to keep going, so hopefully some of my pole beans will simply mature before they're killed. DH tells me these things have a main run, with satellite runs off the main. Well, I was blessed today to miraculously see this next to the only covered path between 2 gardens:

So I pulled up the wooden pathway -

This is definitely headquarters! So, there is still hope to end the destruction. At least I've removed their main cover. Funny how life works, just when I surrendered to a seemingly unsolvable situation, a bubble of hope appeared on the horizon.
BLESSED!

 

[digitS']

I have flooded vole burrows.

It is somewhat of a slow process with the hose. I figured to allow water to run slowly through the hose for 15 or 20 minutes.

Once, it was a little humorous. I'm standing there near the end of the time and a vole swims up thru the pool of water ..! I was so surprised that I just stood there and looked at him. He shook his head to get the water out of his ears and ran off into the neighbor's lawn grass, disappearing immediately! It was probably very likely that this one vole wasn't the only resident and there was no indication that any others survived the flood. There was no vole activity noted in that area of the garden after this.

Steve

 

[Zeedman]

Could be voles, but also possibly either gophers, or ground squirrels.

Voles will eat almost anything, but really love root crops, tomatoes, and beans with ripe seed. In the case of beans, they will chew through the pod to harvest the seeds within. Voles have a telltale - they like to chew plants off at the base, for reasons only they understand.

Pocket gophers close the entrances to their burrows, and push out mounds of soil from their many-branched burrows. They tend to burrow under a row, and pull whole plants down from below... "disappearing plants". They were a major problem for me when I gardened in California, and they are very active on SSE's farm in Iowa. I don't know if there is a species endemic to Ontario though, and they almost never leave a burrow entrance open.

Ground squirrels have one or more open entrances in concealed locations. They emerge from their burrows to feed. Their main nest may be some distance from where they feed, but they will dig short bolt holes near a food source.

Hope something here proves to be helpful.