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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 14, 2011 11:46:23 GMT -5
Taking a snow-day vacation from gardening:  |
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Post by synergy on Apr 14, 2011 14:34:23 GMT -5
20 miles south of us in Bellingham WA they have snow too, its green here and I am planting rhubarb corms.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 16, 2011 22:49:50 GMT -5
Planted 400 tomatoes today: Growing them in the greenhouse for transplanting out in about 6 weeks. Planted 18 of the earliest varieties a month ago. Hoping that larger plants at transplanting will lead to quicker fruiting.
Planted seeds from 10 land-races, 4 wild tomato varieties, and about 100 named varieties.
It's my intention to combine them into 6 land-races by the end of the growing season based on phenotype (how they grow in my garden):
Earliest Fruiting,
Earliest Slicing,
Main Season Slicing/Canning,
Cherry tomatoes,
Seconds,
Promiscuous.
After the snow melted on Friday I planted 600 onion sets. Also planted ~120 tubers as part of my potato breeding project. I killed many potato seedlings by putting them out for some sunlight and not watering them: (Inadvertently selecting for hardiness.) There's about a thousand of them and I only want 150 for planting so I can kill a lot of them before I get worried.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 22, 2011 23:30:22 GMT -5
Still too wet to plow, till, or plant with a seeder, so I gave the tiller a tune-up in the morning, pruned fruit trees in the afternoon, and weeded in the evening. The following crops have germinated: kale, kohlrabi, cabbage, radish, spinach, peas, snap peas, wheat, and turnip. Onion sets are finally starting to grow. (We've had 2X average moisture this April. 5" at my father's house a few blocks away.)
Daffodils are blooming. Soil temperature 5" deep was 53F at sundown after a sunny day.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Apr 23, 2011 6:45:22 GMT -5
I am totally blown away by how many folks are still working with such low temps. It's gotten into the 80s a couple of time so far here. But our weather is not in a normal pattern. It's quite a bit cooler than it should be. The rain brings the temps way down, but not enough to mitigate general growth.
One interesting thing I have noticed is that my house is not full of flies. I have been told that we have a monstrous fly issue because of the nearby pig farm. However, I seem to recall that by the time April is here, so are the flies. Yet, I've only had a couple here and there buzzing around. I'm wondering if it's the guineas?
Joseph, I want the tomatoes!
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Post by bunkie on Apr 24, 2011 12:48:16 GMT -5
me too joseph....some of those 'Promiscuous' ones! ;D
soil's too cold here to plant too. hubby's doing some tilling, so hopefully soon. it's even been cold in the greenhouse. slow start for all the plant babies.
that's a beautiful pics of the snow and your fields joseph!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 28, 2011 0:10:00 GMT -5
I've had three dry days in a row in one of my fields. Today I planted 700 row feet of beets (local seed raised by my father), 400 row feet of sweet corn, 150 Walla Walla onions, 110 big daddy onions, and 60 day-neutral strawberry plants, and then after breakfast... To give a sense of perspective, from where I stood to take the photo it is 240 feet to the far edge of the field, and that is a 40 foot long irrigation pipe jutting into the field from the left edge. It's a U shaped field, so I can't take a photo of everything at the same time. I also tilled, and weeded. I even took time to play. I'm making a video about my newest seeder invention. Hoping to post it soon. Might wait till later in the week though when it is raining or snowing. As a teaser, I have used my new seeder to plant potatoes, and onion plants without bending over... I sure do a lot of bending, or crawling, or stooping.  |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 1, 2011 21:21:15 GMT -5
My local farmer's market is talking about opening a week or two before I expect to have lots of good things, so I planted a flat of chives, and a flat of mints. I figure that they will look good on the table even if they don't sell, and I can take them with me the first few weeks to fill up the table.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 3, 2011 15:56:11 GMT -5
I took advantage of the downtime from our last inclement weather to create a facebook page for my garden. I didn't take nearly enough photos last summer!!! www.facebook.com/Josephs.Garden |
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Post by johno on May 4, 2011 11:39:25 GMT -5
I "liked" your facebook page so I'm getting your updates now. Good job!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 7, 2011 3:19:31 GMT -5
I'm anxious to post pretty pictures of my garden, and I'd hate to bore you with more pictures of plowed fields, and since onions and garlic are the only things up tall enough to see very well, here's what my garlic looked like Friday evening. (I've planted 3 patches like this.)  And yes, this early in the season it's been easy to keep the garlic patch weed free. Lucky I didn't plant the garlic in a patch of Johnson's grass. That's where I put the wheat... I've got great eyesight, but oh my gosh. I'm about ready to till the whole thing under and start over in a place without grass. I already got tricked into tilling under one of the three rows of wheat that I planted. It's been so damp I still haven't got my largest field plowed. I'll put my later crops into that field. However, we were able to till some of the smaller garden plots that I use for plant breeding.  |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 7, 2011 22:29:09 GMT -5
Today was a busy planting day. It's dark now so I can relax. I planted 500 row feet of Cucurbita: Maximas (Orange Warty Thing, small orange hubbard, buttercup), argyrosperma (4 varieties as a land-race), pepos (zucchini blend, croockneck, pumpkins, Acorn), and moschatas (tiny butternuts, huge butternuts, medium necked squash, huge necked squash). I'm sure loving my new seeder. It's much less work than digging a furrow, and burying a furrow. And I'm able to do precision spacing on the seeds, so that they will be much easier to weed later on.
This is my first attempt at growing argyrosperma squash.
I also planted something for a friend which he called a drum gourd. It looks like it is from the Lagenaria genus.
The roots that I dug up for Painted Mountain corn seed were around 3" long.
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Post by mnjrutherford on May 8, 2011 7:43:59 GMT -5
You WERE busy! I'm interested in the roots for the Painted Mountain (PM) though. You said 3 inches, did you mean 3 feet?
I've had the issue of "grass" roots in the back of my mind of late thanks to a recent article in National Geographic about annual versus perennial cereal grains. One photo in the article shows the roots in comparison and the perennial roots were enormously long, around 6' if I recall correctly? Don't quote me, I could be wrong. Regardless, the root mass clearly had more density as well as length and just as clearly would have been sufficiently substantial to hold on to every bit of the soil lost in the droughts of the early part of the last century.
ANYway, that's a lot of words to ask this question, any chance we could develop a perennial corn?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 8, 2011 11:08:44 GMT -5
You WERE busy! I'm interested in the roots for the Painted Mountain (PM) though. You said 3 inches, did you mean 3 feet? ANYway, that's a lot of words to ask this question, any chance we could develop a perennial corn? The Painted Mountain corn was planted on April 26th. Here is what it looked like on May 5th. (7.5 GDD:10C since planting)  And what it looked like on May 7th. (Added another 9.5 GDD since the 5th for a cumulative 17 GDD.)  If the sunlight had lasted longer I would have planted Eastern gamagrass, which is a perennial and may have some potential for crossing with corn. I'd have planted teosinte, which might act as a bridge between corn and gamagrass. Maybe next week. |
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Post by mnjrutherford on May 8, 2011 21:33:16 GMT -5
That's amazing. I didn't comprehend that it was newly planted. No where near long enough for 3 feet of growth, huh? Sounds like an interesting experiment working up in your head. My "wild patch" has some corn coming up in it. Depending on what it looks like in a couple of months, we may consider cutting it to the ground in the fall, covering it all with straw and see what happens come spring. There are cucurbits and beans mixed in as well. We will just have to see what occurs.
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