Gophers R Us

Gopher lump #2, 11/26/12

I came back from Thanksgiving with my family to yet another round of both good news and bad news. Apparently it was cold here again over the past week, and even though there was no frost, that finally did in the last stalwart melon.  I had high hopes for that one, but I guess it really was too late for melons, like my plot neighbor originally said.  I'll try again in the spring with those.  Also, the gopher has returned to A4.  When it first appeared, it was at the far northern corner, about 3 feet from the pumpkins but not actually touching anything.  That was two months ago.  I thought it had left for good, but the industrious little rodent has been busy this past week: I found no fewer than five gopher hills had popped up in my garden.  While the cat's away, I guess.  My contract with the school farm states that we cannot poison, trap (not even Havahart traps), or kill any animals on the property, even nuisance ones.  Does anyone know of any other tactics against gophers that meet these criteria?  There has to be some way I can stop them from disturbing my garden.  One hill was near the spigot and didn't actually hurt anything, but three were in the corn, and one was in the carrots.  The carrots were mostly unharmed, except for the few that got buried under the heap of dirt the gopher churned up.  Miraculously, none of the corn plants appeared damaged from this, despite their notoriously shallow root systems.  

Blue jade corn tassel,
11/26/12

The corn is actually doing really well, and fifteen out of my twenty-five or so plants are beginning to tassel.  At the moment I have one of my gardening manuals open to the corn section, and I also have a few other internet tabs going, trying to learn a little more about corn biology.  I know a little bit from visits to my great-grandmother's farm in Iowa, like what a tassel is, but not really enough to know how or if I should be pollinating it or even where the female parts of the plant are.  I found a really helpful page from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln that identifies and explains all of the various parts and some odd facts (the ear that forms at the highest node on the stalk will be the largest, for example).  I didn't realize each kernel was an egg!  And apparently pollination occurs when the pollen falls on the exposed silk of the immature ear of corn.  While I have noticed many tassels in varying stages of readiness, I haven't seen any immature ears yet, nor do I have any idea when to expect them.  I thought "I'll just have to play it by ear," and then I realized how bad a pun that was.  Groan.

Green arrow pea seedling,
pisum sativum, 11/26/12

This week's good news is more plentiful than the bad: more of the peas have germinated and are growing well (and my trellis hasn't fallen over yet!), the broccoli has several true leaves, the beans are going nuts, one pumpkin flowered not once but twice while I was away, and the tomato and pumpkin that I thought were killed in the last hard frost have started putting out new leaves.  There's a lot going on there.  The biggest pea plants are about two inches tall, and beginning to send out climbing tendrils.  As a group, they've been slow to germinate, with only about a third of the peas I planted having come up yet.  I don't know if that's normal or not, since my dad and sister planted this varietal for me this spring--the peas needed to go in the ground sometime in March, and I wouldn't be home from school until the end of April, so they planted the peas and radishes for me.

Royalty purple pod bush bean,
phaseolus vulgaris, 11/26/12

My bean, the royalty purple pod varietal, is one I've grown for the past two years and plan to grow again this summer.  I've experimented some with planting time and soil temperature, level of watering, and amount of sun, but I've never seen them this happy before.  This surprised me, because beans are not supposed to be cold tolerant--many of them actually died in the frost two weeks ago.  But they're growing fast, and the one shown is even starting to look a little bushy like a bush bean, which is a new expression I plan to use all the time from now on.  

Cheyenne bush pumpkin
flower, 11/26/12

The biggest surprise to me was definitely the pumpkin flowering.  I hadn't seen any buds before I left, and I thought the plant was still too young or fragile to flower.  I remember how big and sprawling the pumpkin plants I grew in Massachusetts got before they flowered, and consequently thought that at this rate, I'd be lucky to have pumpkins by graduation.  But I wasn't taking into account the difference among regionally adapted heirlooms.  This a a Cheyenne bush pumpkin, selected to form short, stocky, compact plants and perform well in Wyoming.  This regional adaptability may even account for the regeneration of the other pumpkin after the frost, which I actually ties for most surprising garden activity over break.  

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

I'm always behind in writing about garden goings-on, so it's time for a real catch-up.  I'm sitting in an airport on the way home for Thanksgiving, with a three hour layover ahead of me, and this seems like as good a time as any.  The pictures in the last entry are about 3 weeks old, as you can see by the dates.  Since then a lot has changed, and it's not all good.

Boule d'or melons flowering, 11/7/12

First, a good thing: the melons began flowering on the 7th!  The flowers are cute, thumbnail-sized and bright yellow.  Because they're cucurbits (in the cucumber family), there should be both male and female flowers on the same plant, with the female flowers recognizable by the unripened ovary at the base.  I'm a little embarrassed to say I haven't been able to tell the difference yet, and keep forgetting to bring a Q-tip with me to hand-pollinate them, since I haven't seen many bees recently.  I've been feeling more and more like it's not too late for melons after all.

The night of the 10th, I was in another town about 45 minutes from my school, and where we were there was a forecast for snow.  I hadn't bothered to check the overnight forecast for my town before I left, and we got a frost--pretty unusual, but not unheard of.  I came back to A4 expecting to find all of my tender tropicals dead: melons, tomatoes, pumpkins, and maybe some of the bean seedlings too.  This is what I found:

My best tomato plant,
killed by an early frost, 11/11/12

and this... (note the thriving weeds in the background, completely unaffected by the frost)

Pumpkin killed by frost, 11/11/12

and this...

Two melons killed in early frost,
the one on the left stayin' alive

Blue jade corn maturing, 11/17/12

However, the other tomatoes, pumpkins, and melons survived with only minor damage.  A few bean seedlings had died in the night, and the basil plant on my porch had some frost burns, but most of my plants survived.  That's not as bad as I had feared.  The second-in-command tomato has flourished in the past 10 days, and is now on par with its deceased sibling.  The corn, carrots, broccoli, and peas were completely unaffected, and are growing steadily.  About a quarter of the peas have germinated so far, and while only 4 or 5 broccoli seedlings have come up, they're looking good with one or two true leaves each.

I had hoped to have some food from my garden to share with friends by Thanksgiving, which likely would have happened if the lettuce I planted had taken on the first try, but as it is, I think I'll be waiting a little while for anything edible.  It's hard being patient when I know how good a garden-fresh tomato or pea is, and when I've heard about the unparalleled deliciousness of garden-fresh sweet corn and can't wait to try it.  But wait I shall.  In the mean time, I've been making homemade hot caps for the plants out of old milk gallon jugs and anything else big enough, so I'll be ready when the next frost comes around.

Picture update

Lest the peas get all the attention, despite the fact that most of them have barely germinated yet, I want to share some photos of the other plants, which are all doing well.  Most immediately exciting are the new arrivals: please welcome the broccoli and bean seedlings!

Romanesco broccoli, 11/1/12

The plants above with the sort of dinky, dark green leaves are broccoli seedlings.  I've never grown broccoli before, but I recognized not to pull these up because they look like all the other brassicas, some of which I've grown (kale in particular).  They haven't germinated to well--only about five of the thirty or so I planted have come up to date.  I'll wait a few days, but I may have to go back and fill in the bald spots in the broccoli patch next week.    

Royalty purple pod bean, 11/1/12

The beans look a little more like real plants, and as a bonus, you can tell they're beans because you can see the halves of the bean as seed leaves.  While they performed well back home, I've had even better success with them here so far--95% of them have germinated, and most of them now have two true leaves.  

Cheyenne bush pumpkin, 11/1/12

The pumpkins, above, are small but mighty.  Of the six I planted, only two germinated, but they're performing well.  They are compact and bushy, which is appropriate given that they are Cheyenne bush pumpkins.

Tomato, 11/1/12 (4 weeks after planting)

The tomatoes are a mixed bag: some are succeeding, and some are struggling.  The one above is the most successful tomato so far.  Two plants are getting big and bushy for their age, about one month old.  At this stage of their lives in New England, they'd still be indoors under banks of grow lights, so I'm impressed with their progress.  The other four plants are smaller, but progressing at an appropriate rate.

How to build a pea trellis that doesn't suck: give up

Finished pea trellises

After much fussing, near-disaster, hair-tearing, and gnashing of teeth, I have FINALLY succeeded in creating some pea trellises and planting the peas.  They're a little unconventional, but I think they'll work--I've seen some similar ones used for pole beans.  It's a good thing I love fresh peas so much, otherwise the whole mess might not have been worth it.

As usual, I was too optimistic in the plans I laid out in my last post--I did not, in fact, manage to plant the peas over the weekend.  Shocking, right?  (Not!)  I finally made it to Home Depot for the supplies late Sunday afternoon, and, feeling very clever, skipped the ready-made fence and trellis material and bought six 48" stakes, a roll of garden twine, twist ties, and some row markers for good measure.  My plan was to go out and set up some pea trellises Monday after I got out of class, then plant the peas.  I should have known it wouldn't work quite that easily.

I've had trouble with pea trellises before--over the summer at home, I managed to drive myself nearly crazy trying to cut wire mesh from a roll with tin snips that kept catching the soft part of my finger between the handles instead of the wire between the blades.  (Lesson 1: work gloves!)  In the end I had to admit defeat and call for backup.  Yet this time I was sure it would be different, since I've "done this before" and everything--ha!  We've never seen this movie before, have we?

Yup, it was a disaster.  For some reason I still can't really explain, I settled on an S shape as the appropriate one.  This was my first mistake, probably stemming from the objectively ridiculous choice of six stakes.  First, the stakes wouldn't really go in deep enough to stay up.  Then I tried to hammer them in and instead of sinking into the sandy hardpack those stakes bent.  I unbent them and dug a hole for them to sit in, but then the dirt was all loose and they didn't stay up any better than before.  Moved the stakes to a slightly different spot.  Tried again.  They went in this time--yippee!  Tied twine to one stake, and began running the twine back and forth between them to make a trellis.  By the time I reached the top, the first trellis was in an A shape, not an H shape.  Took some of the twine out and strung it a little looser.  Trellis maintained A shape, but the twine just hung loose.  I was losing my marbles at that point, and looked for fixed points to tie the stakes to, in an attempt to correct the tension, since now the whole S was out of whack. I tied them to the spigot at one corner of the plot, and two wooden stakes at the other corners, but I was one corner short, and it seemed to have only made the S wackier, anyway.  It was getting dark, and I'd been out there for an hour and a half fighting with some stakes and twine, and losing.  Who loses to some green plastic sticks from Home Depot? I gave up for the night, too embarrassed to even tear down the mess I'd made.

The right trellis

The next two days I was laid low by the most recent cold, and could barely make it out of bed to go to class, much less come up with a brilliant plan to fix my stupid trellises.  Wednesday night, the weirdest thing to happen to me so far on this garden adventure happened--the answer for the trellises came to me in a dream.  I saw them in two pyramid shapes (perhaps technically two tetrahedrons, but I think I'm safe from the geometry police here), self-supported and with another span of twine zigzagging between the two.  When I went out to water A4 on Thursday, I said what the hell and gave it a shot.  To my immense surprise and relief, it did work, and I still had a little bit of daylight left to actually plant the peas before nightfall.  I'd discounted the value of good old-fashioned giving up, but in this case it seemed to give me less pressure and more brainpower to think about it.  Farming and gardening can be very traditional and governed by what people have done before, often with good reason, but there's no reason it has to be that way if you've got something that will work better for you in your situation at the moment.  I don't need my trellises to win any beauty contests, though I do incidentally think they look pretty cool.  I just need them to support my peas as they grow, and if they do that effectively, that's all that matters about them.