My sucky, sucky year.

[blueadzuki]

I get it. While I am not out of corn yet, I am getting perilously close to having to dip into the the elite/rare material I keep in cold storage against the day when I have the space and resources to do justice to it*.

Then again, I get close to that mark every year. Despite what you suggested, in my case it's more along the lines of the sucky settling down for good (I keep being reminded of the Japanese folktale of the impoverished family who realize that the reason they are having such bad luck is that the god of poverty has taken up residence in their home. So they go all out to make him a feast so he'll feel appreciated in the hope he will be satisfied and leave. But at the end of the meal he says "You know, I WAS about to leave but you have made me feel so welcome I think I'll stay".)

I'm so desperate I may actually offer prayers to the Native American frog fetish I got on Friday from the Native Art Gallery (does anyone know how to say "please bring rain" in Zuni?)



*defined as "When I have access to the space and resources needed to do a proper field of it and get down to the business of cleaning up it's genes and making it into something both reliable and interesting.**

**Interesting to me. I freely admit that, while personally fascinating, miniature flour and dent corn ears are of little practical use outside of decoration, mini sweet corn only marginally more so.

[steev]

While I mostly consider gophers a "survival" food; I'm sure Holly could make them gourmet fare.

[zeedman]

Gophers... that brings back not-so-fond memories of my gardens in San Jose & San Diego. I usually got the upper hand eventually, but not without a lot of effort, and the battle was renewed each year. I miss the climate, but not the gophers.

Springs have been so long & wet here in recent years that I've kind of gotten used to "sucky". Can't plant much in mud. It just means that I start more things as transplants than I had intended, until the garden dries out enough for me to plant. Have a lot of bean transplants as backups, learned my lesson last year when nearly every bean direct-seeded rotted in the ground after flooding rains, and those backups saved the season. I'll be keeping the squash seedlings covered this year until July, which is hopefully the end of the SVB egg laying period... SVB & cucumber beetles killed off all my squash last year.

Lost all my corn last year to the aforementioned flooding rains, I'm holding my breath that the same thing won't happen this year.

[blueadzuki]

Few fresh pics
Another view of the vetches.The original flowers have wilted by now, but you can see two new types in this one, the purple panicles on top and a single flowered white one on the bottom (it't tiny so look carefully; follow the stem below the purple ones down towards the base of the plant.)  

And one of the peas

[blueadzuki]

Quick question.

Does anyone know if, once it has set seed, mustard (seed mustard, not leaf mustard) keeps growing and eventually makes more flowers, or is it one time and that's it. If the latter, then once the seed is ripe and collected. I should probably clip the plants at the base, to give the pink flowered campion more space.

[mjc]

Yes, it's a once and done deal...so clip them.

[blueadzuki]

Thank you.

[blueadzuki]

Two more vetch pics

A clearer one of the little white flowered one (bottom center)


And I finally got a flower on the one I call sessile vetch (since the leaves attach directly to the stem and are simple not compound) 

[mjc]

May 27, 2017 19:45:16 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

However a big part of why I planted azukis this year was to definitively find out whether the green ones I find from time to time in my searches are a legitimate seed color or just tan spectrum ones that where harvested a little early. And to do that, I need some plants in the pot of GREEN azuki seed to come up, grow and set seed, and none has of yet. And since, as of this point, all the new off color material I have been getting in is on the mottled side of the spectrum, if I don't get something by seasons end, I'm not sure if I can repeat the experiment.

Which, if everything else is sprouting as expected, can be another sign of immature/early harvested seed.

[blueadzuki]

Possibly, though it still seems odd to me that seed that was that immature could have full shape and gloss. But I suppose it could be. Lablab seed can be 99% of the way to maturity and still have a germination rate of 0 (or why really, really overripe pods from the Indian grocery store are so rare and precious to me.)

I suppose more proof of this could be that green seems the only color absent (or nearly absent) from the rice beans (which otherwise basically share the same palette, if not the comparative ratios)

I suppose what I should have done is take some greens and start them INSIDE, where they would have had some defense. If I find any more, I'll try that. I suppose I could also check the mottleds I still have some of them probably have a green or greenish base.

[blueadzuki]

The Pink Campion has started to flower

[mjc]

That's looking pretty good there...

[blueadzuki]

Yeah, it's one of the prettier things my seed hunts have produced, like the long leafed slow growing non climbing bindweed relative, the thing with the purple head and the elephant's toenail plant.

[mskrieger]

Beautiful pictures. Your purple vetch reminds me of one of the wildflowers planted on the steeper parts of the UConn Health campus. Right now there are vast swathes of it in bloom, along with some yellow and some white flowers I haven't examined closely.

I've noticed the purple vetch have a glorious but hard to pin down fragrance, only detectable in those broad swaths...lovely lovely lovely

[blueadzuki]

6/27/17

Good news and bad (or at least worrisome news)

On the good side, I have begun to get mature seed from both the mustard and pansies, as well as the vetch (at least, I got some pods from the vetch that had started to go brown, whether they were ready or I had mangled the stem and sent them into early senescence (it's hard to move the mass around to see what is going on without inflicting damage) I don't know. The seed is sorta green, but it'd be sorta green ANYWAY.)

The worrisome thing is that it looks like I have a chrysalis attached to one of the mustard plants; one I recognize as belonging to either a blue or a hairstreak butterfly. This gives me the usual summer dilemma. On one hand I like butterflies, and hairstreaks and blues are pretty enough (and sorta rare around here). On the other hand their caterpillars run HELL on my beans, both common and lesser. The adults lay their eggs on the pods and the resulting larva CORE their way through them as efficiently as a Squash Borer goes through a pumpkin stalk. They're actually about the only predator I have to worry about. And my major producing pot of beans is only one pedestal away. So I'm debating if I should take it down now, or wait until the mustard seed it is attached to matures, and whether the chrysalis goes squish or I let the thing open and then release the butterfly FAR away, far enough to not be my problem. It's the Parsley worm issue all over again.