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.

Planting broccoli and beans, and a triumphant return

Sunflowers, 10/9/12

It's finally gotten cold enough in the last week for me to feel okay planting broccoli and beans, which I did the day before yesterday.  When I went to write about it, I realized I never caught up after my trip home.  I was supposed to text my roommate to remind her to water the garden while I was away, and I realized, on my fourth day home, that I had failed to do so.  Big oops.  My flight got in at midnight on the 9th, and I had class all day the next day, so I didn't get a chance to visit A4 until around 4:30 that afternoon.  I was pleasantly surprised: not only did nothing die, but everything looked happier, healthier, and bigger than when I left.  Maybe I should ask Cheryl to water the garden more often!  The first thing I noticed (from across the farm, since they were visible on my walk over to my plot) were my sunflowers, now considerably taller and bushier, with many sets of true leaves.  The tallest sunflowers are now about 18" high.

Blue Jade corn, 10/22/12

The nearby corn and melons were also thriving, which they have continued to do since I got back--we've had lots of sun and a decent amount of heat, which they love.  The tallest of the corn plants, at right, is now about 12" high and has started sending off shoots to the side.  Some of the leaves are also slightly tinged purple.  One more melon had actually germinated while I was gone, a few weeks behind its friends, which then all had one or two pairs of true leaves.  They've kept up slow and steady, even languorous, growth, and are starting to sprawl down the south and west sides of their hill.  Even the fragile week-old tomato seedlings were doing well enough when I got back that I could separate them where they'd gotten clumped together.  Now they all have true leaves, and the biggest plant has 3 sets of true leaves.  So far the big problem with the tomatoes is that I marked my rows, but I didn't label them, so I can't for the life of me remember which is supposed to be the paste tomato and which is supposed to be the Gold Medal beefsteak.  Ultimately, I'll find out when they set fruit, and cross-pollination isn't a big deal since I'm not trying to save the seeds from these tomatoes, but it'd be nice to know.

Tomato 10/22/12, with true leaves

Fast forward two weeks, and we're now having daytime highs in the 70s and 80s, and overnight lows in the 40s and 50s.  This is what passes for fall in California.  (Thinking the 40s constituted virtually Arctic temperatures, my roommate turned on the heat last night; I, by contrast, woke up sweating, kicked all the covers off, and opened the window.  I had to explain the concept of more than one blanket, because while she can always put on more clothes and blankets, I can only take so many off.)  I'd been waiting on the cool weather crops, because when I first planted the lettuce and spinach the soil was too warm for them to even germinate.  So when the thermometer hit 42 one night, I decided it was probably time for what I think of as the fall set: kale, late string beans, broccoli, even peas.  My inclination with the peas would be to wait, but some people in nearby plots have successfully started theirs already, so that's the project for the weekend: put up some trellises and plant the peas.

Like I said earlier, I already planted the beans and the broccoli.  The beans are my favorite bush bean varietal, Royalty Purple Pod.  The flowers and pods of the beans are deep purple, while the inside of the bean is kiwi-green.  They are tender, flavorful, sweet without being sugary, and delicious raw or cooked.  Cooked, they turn from purple to green.  My mom has declared this her all-time favorite string bean.  The broccoli doesn't have the same storied history with me; it's a varietal called Romanesco that I'm trying for the first time this fall.  The picture on the seed packet shows whorled, apple-green florets.  I'm curious to see how the broccoli turns out, especially since I've found the best way to get to know a vegetable or varietal is to grow it myself.  I thought I knew what all potatoes, lettuce, and radishes tasted like until I grew them, so maybe broccoli is the same way.

A fairy ring of carrots

Blue jade corn seedling, 10/4/12
(zea mays)

I haven't spent much time in the garden this week, between the scorching heat Sunday through Tuesday, the mysterious cold everyone seems to be getting, and the advent of midterms.  It looks like it's benefitting from my salutary neglect, though.  I'm going home for a few days, having convinced one of my roommates to water A4, and when I went out for one final watering and check this afternoon, I saw some small but important signs of progress.  The four melons all now have two good-size true leaves, instead of the one apiece they were sporting on Monday.  The sunflowers are taller and bushier.  Almost all of the corn I planted has germinated and is growing fast--I never expected it to be this successful!  If anything, I thought my lettuce would be reliable and the corn a possible failure, but the lettuce has been 100% unsuccessful while the corn is leaving everything else in the dust.  Today, the corn seedlings are also taller and leafier, looking less like spiky aliens poking out of the ground and more like the grasses they are.  In the sub-plot where I planted the pumpkins, one or two pumpkins and about thirty volunteer sunflowers have germinated.  Sigh.  I never thought they'd be so successful.  They're growing like weeds!  The pumpkin seedling is all by itself, off in a corner, which should be good--it won't steamroller everything else.  I think I'll point it toward the extra sunflowers.  Fight to the death, where the mighty pumpkin tramples all in its path, or, the long and flimsy pumpkin vines climb up the sturdy sunflower stalks.

Carrots developing true leaves, 10/4/12
(Daucus carota)

Speaking of volunteers and--ahem--sowing one's own problems, the first of the carrots are getting frilly little true leaves.  They seem to be growing mainly in a circular area about two feet in diameter, with a few loners scattered around elsewhere.  Most sources seem to agree that dill, radishes, and parsnips are bad companions with carrots, but I'm not worried, since I'm not planning on planting any of those here in sunny SoCal: I can't really justify growing root vegetables here, given the sandy soil and constant sunshine all the leafy greens and tropicals love so much.  As for dill, I'm one of those rare people who will eat just about everything (no, really--octopus, rutabagas, reindeer, kohlrabi, raw milk, etc.) but is totally impartial to dill.  The carrots will go just fine with everything I'm planning to grow, even if they aren't in neat rows like most of the others.  Whatever, I've never really been big on rows anyway--it's just one convenient way to organize, and when it stops being convenient, it makes sense to use some other formation, even if that formation is a fairy ring of carrots.

I hope everything keeps up this growth and success while I'm away, and doesn't die of heat.  Hopefully my roommate can help in that department.  In the meantime, I'm excited to be getting home to see my family and the original garden that started this.  I'll be saving seeds from radishes and lettuce, harvesting the last of the potatoes, planting garlic, and making hot sauce out of the summer's bumper crop of Thai chiles.  I might also get to try the sugar pumpkin I grew this summer from seed I saved last Thanksgiving.  Should be a fun few days at home!

It's still not cold

Boule d'or melon seedlings
(Cucurmis melo)

Mondays have become my garden work day because my class schedule allows me to be out there working by 3 PM, but as soon as I stepped outside, the oven-like blast of heat let me know today was not my day.  To me, as a child of the North, October means apple cider, sweaters, leaves changing colors and falling, and the weather GETTING COLDER.  A high of 102 is not colder.  Wrong direction.  

I may not like the heat, but the plants all seem happy.  One of my garden books says "Melons love heat," and that maxim has certainly proven true here.  Four of the seven I planted in the hill have come up, and now they are getting their first true leaves.  The plants are about an inch tall, with about a two inch wingspan between their seed leaves.  This is my first time growing melons, so I don't yet have a strong sense of what they need from me.  I often worry they'll dry out, especially after I missed watering them on Sunday, but they seem fine.  

Blue jade corn seedling
(Zea mays)

The corn I planted a week ago has begun to germinate, which I was not expecting--the seed packet said this varietal germinates in 10-21 days.  For me, part of gardening is detective work--many of the plants I grow I have only seen in adult form.  The first time I grew spinach, I pulled up about half of the seedlings, thinking they were weeds.  Oops.  So this time I was patient, and a quick Google search confirmed that the mysterious grassy-looking plants were in fact my baby corn plants.

The spinach and butterhead lettuce I planted two weeks ago still haven't germinated, so I guess the soil temperature is still too high for them.  I'll try again once the weather and soil both cool down a little, in three weeks or a month.  I'm still holding out hope for the tomatoes and habañeros, which haven't come up yet, but they've still got time.    

I thought I spotted pumpkin seedlings today, but nope, those were just more volunteer sunflowers.  All over A4, the sunflowers are doing incredibly well: the ones I planted two weeks ago all have at least two pairs of true leaves, which are small but furry.  More volunteers are appearing every day, and they all seem healthy and vigorous, so I relocate them instead of culling them.  

Sunflowers, 2 weeks after planting

I hate waiting for the seeds to come up, or accidentally trampling what I didn't realize was a seedling, but watching the baby plants grow so fast at the beginning of the season is one of my favorite things about gardening.  Coming back to see the changes happening daily, like with the sunflowers right now.  Back home, much of this happens indoors, in seed flats under banks of grow lights.  The tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and zucchini all begin their lives in repurposed egg cartons filled with potting mix. I don't have any grow lights here, and my roommates and I can only eat so many eggs, so I'm direct seeding this first round of plants, hoping that the warm soil temperature will be enough to get them started. Hopefully, after collecting a few egg cartons (or just biting the bullet and buying some seed flats) I can start the next round of tender plants on my sunny southeast-facing porch.  Maybe I should put my musical training to good use and sing to them, to see if they perform any differently, or germinate any earlier.