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.