Vegetable garden: About 12 broccoli plants growing. These were sown around the middle/end of August, after other seed sowing attempt failed, I think due to heat. Also a bunch of onions, and a handful of carrots. The carrots won’t get very far this time of year anyway, but if I encourage the brocoli to grow (and with cloches) we might get some late fall and even into winter, and onions usually have no trouble overwintering – the native ones do well. I have the kind of brocoli that can over winter or grow early in spring, a common type (walsham 29 I believe).
Green pole beans still doing great. We have enough for a large stir fry of Szechuan style beans every few days. It apparently likes fish fertilizer, and seems to flower a lot when it is fed, which is every 3 weeks or so. It also likes being picked, and makes more beans when you keep any seed-producing beans off the vine. So as soon as they look like ‘peas’ are forming they should be picked. They are supposed to be good through September, but they are still going strong and even putting out new foliage as well as flowers. Maybe climate change has alllowed this, it has been a warm summer. Sudden drop in temps from 80’s to the low 60’s recently, but now it’s back into the 70’s and sunny for a while, maybe we’ll have an “Indian” summer.
Tomatoes at their end. I didn’t like most of the Oregon Spring, won’t get that one again. The tomatoes were mostly mealy in texture, and they split very easily which caused more texture problems. Not particularly great taste, though a few were good. The Sweet Casady was good, but it eventually got attakced by what I think are winged aphids, losing many, actually most small branches. There are only a few bugs on the plant at a time but they sure do kill the leaves, and when they attack the stems of flower or fruit those die, too. There was already a lot of fruit on the vine when this happened, as well as new leaves and flowers – the plant had been doing well. The fruit itself was great, but the loss was from suddenly losing the leaves which are the source of their sugar, or the fruit dropping because it’s stem was killed. Such a violent yard I have. I may have caused the problem though, in that I overwatered the plants thinking they were still too dry (after I accidentally cut off the water for a couple of days), and ended up creating a wetland habitat for those mite-like bugs in the planter itself. I could see them jumping out of the planter when I watered, and it wasn’t till later that I saw them attacking. Lesson learned, hopefully. I still like the idea of the cherry, plum or other small tomatoes, they are less likely to fail in general.
Still have a bunch of asparagus starts that have lived under the planter all summer, getting watered and a little sun, not planted out! We have no place to put them, unless we make some compromises somewhere. Asparagus needs a minimum 20″ x 20″ planter, or in the ground.
Deer in the hood….in the front yard this time. They don’t appear to have eaten anything there, but did leave hoof prints around. They also sometimes trample stuff. I’m a little worried that they will get more tolerant of some of the native plants as the winter sets in. They have already eaten OLD trillium leaves, now they are nibbling on the False Azalea and Geum leaves, all of these normally die back over winter but we’re still quite green. In spring, they eat the flower buds of one of the heurcheras and the Brodiaea, and nibble some of the Bluebell leaves. The key is going to have to be volume – overwhelm them and the fucking voles so there’s sustainable carnage.
BTW, I spotted a vole coming out of a tunnel he’d created near the new bog, the little shit. I’ve only actually seen the bastards a few times, once as an owl pellet. He came out, stopped and turned tail back in. Later I noticed that a new type of bog lily we bought for our yard last year was dead – the bulb eaten, at the end of one of his tunnels. Luckily it had already sprouted another offspring overwinter, so there’s still one there, unlsss the little shit comes back and gets it.
Deer tracks:
ellensgarden.us 