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September end news


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:

Vegetable news (First draft August ~13)

 

Broccoli seedlings not off to too good a start. I pulled up all but one row of the newest lettuce seedlings, because it’s been so hot until just recently and they are not growing. I cleaned the beds ups and sowed 1 1/2 rows of new broccoli seeds, a section of new carrot seeds, and a few more onion seeds around the other remaining onions. The pole beans are doing very well, they have more than topped their trellis, and we’ve had green bean crops three times now, about every 2-3 days. The cucumbers aren’t thriving though…they come up and flower, make a few cukes, and then they yellow and fall off. There is one gourd shaped cuke on the vine. Mystery failure…..The tomatoes are doing well, though we lost a few flowers when I accidentally shut off the watering system for a few days ( did I mention it was hot?). The smaller tomatoes are prolific, though none red yet. The Oregon Spring lost more flowers, but the remaining tomatoes are turning red. We’ve had two and they were very good- flavor you don’t get from the store

Summer vegetable garden

Broccoli sprouts coming up, about six of them, I almost forgot I’d sown them because they look like radish sprouts, almost pulled ’em up. They took about ten days to sprout. Carrots getting large, they are very sweet. Green Onions also getting substantial. Pole beans have reached the top of they trellis. Cucumbers flowering already, three on one, I’m trying to train them up the trellis first before they ‘trail’, because they are a “bush cucumber”, not the regular climbing vine type.

The real news is that the tomatoes finally look fantastic! Lots of flowers on both kinds, the larger Oregon Spring and the small Sweet Cassidy ones. The latter is indeterminate and is about 4 feet tall now, finally started forming flower buds before we went out of town. Ten days later they are blooming! We set up a great watering system with drips in the tomato containers and mini-‘sprayers’ in each of the raised boxes. We keep the whole thing under stiff green netting while gone, but I can’t keep the tomatoes in that anymore, they won’t form well and may get diseased. Now if we can somehow kee the deer off of them,,,,,

 The main planter box is still in netting. 4 New (some partial) rows of butter lettuce finally sprouting new leaves….I made sure to thin them out so I don’t eat the cramped plants that won’t leaf out key last time. They like the sunny 70’s weather we’re having now much better than the 80’s and 90’s of June.

Pole beans:

Bush Cucumbers:

Determinate tomato Oregon Spring (already has 2 big green tomatoes and a bunch of small ones):

Indeterminate Tomato Sweet Cassady:


Video Tour of the Back Yard!! 

We increased our upload bandwidth to 30 (30/30) yesterday for my work connection, and it’s letting me upload larger files. Next entry will be the older video tours from earlier in the season, if it lets me, since they show different flowers (also, those tours of the front and back yard are narrated, for better or worse. I’ll have to do another in the late summer or even soon, since the foliage is getting so lush, giving it a different look
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Other pix of plants in bloom: Golden Columbine, Penstemon, White Brodiaea, Mock Orange, etc. Also, a bouquet of our wild flowers for guests.

Take a video tour of the front yard!

Take a few minutes to see the front yard /rock garden, much of which was recently revised (the actual ‘garden’ is in the back. The backyard video will have to be downloaded separately, WordPress is not allowing it right now). 

Dave put in the stone path lining and retaining wall features over the winter, and also recontoured the hill, leveled the terrace, and put a nice capstone on the existing concrete retaining wall so it blends in. A big swath of the rock garden area was dug out about 1 1/2 feet deep, then filled with smaller gravel, peat, soil and larger gravel, to make it a true rock garden habitat so some of the more challenging desert plants could thrive. This area gets all day sun, which is why we wanted to level a terrace for vegetable garden boxes there. You can see four lighter colored petrified wood structures in the rock garden – those are take from the garage of our house at Lopez, the original builder obtained them in the 1960’s, and they are embedded in the gravel area. Many of the plants put around it are small right now, but next year they’ll be more color there: lavender monardellas, yellow desert daisies, orange Indian paintbrush, Lewisia tweedyi, yellow gaillardias and balsam root, pink hookers onions, bluebells, dark purple Setosa iris and pink pussy toes as well as a few others…..

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A few pix of the current garden, still getting salads every few days. Now with onions and carrots, and a few nasturtium flowers for color! 

Dave erected a temporary “fence”, made of two green support rods and stiff green plastic honeycomb netting. He fashioned wire hooks on the rods and sewed the three sides of the netting along the bottom with green plastic coated wire. Each panel can be unhooked and lowered separately to access the plants, but preventing the deer from getting in. They might poke their heads a little into it, but the netting could be sharp against their faces, and all they’d get is nasturtiums and onions, which they don’t like. The lettuce and hopefully the green beans and cucumbers will be relatively safe from the deer. The tomatoes aren’t protected, yet.

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Throwback Tuesday-found pictures of the backyard from just after the landscaping! Found these on the computer whilst perusing…..

About 18 years ago, just after a couple of the vine maples put in the back, while they were still under control!


NOW, compare those with a couple of pix from last summer….(still no video capability)…..

Everything’s coming up….natives! April 14

Pretty much most things need to be poking up by now or they’re not going to….except a few things like tiger and leopard lillies. It looks like all the plants I transplanted, propagated or bought last year have made it through the winter. This includes a couple of pretty Fools Huckleberrys, making a total of four. And our real native High Cranberry, the Vibernum Edule.  We had to take several non-native ones out that someone had sold us years ago, replaced them with another few which also turned out to be non native. We FINALLY ( we think) have determined through exhaustive research of the flowers, found the real thing, we bought ONE.

 I have many, many fawn lillies around now, though most are still young and only leaves, in a couple of years it will be quite pretty, meadow-like. Most of these I have propagated from seed, but some are mid-range age and should bloom soon.  I don’t know if any of them will be pink, since I mixed the seeds together with the white and off white ones, but so far none of the pink seeds that I planted in a pot have come up. Though, the pink plants that I do have are vigorous and one has now produced quite a bunch, oh, and a whole lot o’ trilliums, too.

Now blooming: trilliums, Fawn lillies, Silk flower, Darba Incerta, Monks hood and some of the Blue eyed Mary in planters. ABOUT to bloom?: Chocolate Lilly,  some Penstemons, Pussy toes, some Bear Grasses and some more fawn lilies.

Too early for the flowers of Columbines, Lupines, asters, irises, and for the sunflowers: Mules ears,  Arrow leafs, and Gaillardia, though the leaves are coming up. 

Huckleberries…..we replenished our supply of deciduous last year. I don’t think all the ones we had were planted in good areas, except for the two thriving red huckleberries. Some plants were lost to hot dry weather or just never thrived, and these survivors I transplanted to better places this spring (plant rehab). I’d  forgotten that id bought two groundcover  Vaccinium Membranaceums last year, so now we have three of those part shade plants, and two more sun loving ground cover Vaccinium Deliciosums for the front yard. These are all good black huckleberries. We added three taller Vaccinium Parviflorum (upright red huckleberry) to the lower back yard so we have six total now. We also also have an older Vaccinium Ovalifoium which is upright/deciduous/black huckleberry, which I transplanted and it is in rehab. In addition to the deciduous, there are a bunch of evergreen huckleberries, in various stages of health and size….some have been crowded or shaded but they are part of the bird-scape and provide winter forage.

Rest of the crew….


Spinach and carrot seeds popped up at 8 days, and the ‘bunching’ onions or green onions on the 10th day.  The spinach is a “baby spinach” which is a type that has individual rounded leaves, not bunches (not “baby” at all!), and the seedlings look linear/branching, not rounded seed leaves like the lettuce. Looks like I’ll have to mark my rows better for seeds; it is true that once you’ve covered over the seeds with soil, it’s pretty hard to tell where the original line was. So the radish lines cross the spinach line and some lettuce, so what? They are loving having the cloche to keep them cozy warm like a hot house, and the radish leaves are huge already and it’s only April 3. Makes me tempted to start the cucumbers early inside the cloche,  yet I don’t think they like the transplanting needed to give them access to the trellis….technical issue I’ll have to address.

Full disclosure, this is not my cornucopia below. We started our garden way too late last year for much of anything, since we didn’t have the planter bed until end of May. But we are planting all of these things this year(see prior march posts), except green onions instead of leeks:

Veggie garden for the Pacific Northwest ! 

Actually planted one week ago (MARCH 24), after we set up and filled the second of our raised planter boxes. They are 4 x 2 feet, and raised about 3 feet off the ground. Next to each other, they are 16 square feet total planting space:

The photo below is peering in……the radish seeds sprouted after 4 days, the lettuce after 6!! Probably due to the cloches, keeping the cold rain out.

We bought two large plastic and metal cloches to extend the growing season and speed up some of the plants by providing warmth and protection from all the cold spring rain we’ve been getting and from sprout-eating vermin. Unfortunately, sprout eating vermin appears to likely involve deer now. We found deer prints in the soft ground in the back yard yesterday, and of course caught one red handed last fall, the first sighting of a deer in the twenty two years we’ve lived here. I didn’t want to bother with the fabric type cloches, those would blow away with our first good wind!  Even these need little metal spikes to secure them. They cover most but not all of the space, but this works for an early planting.  I will probably remove these cloches and plant along the uncovered borders when it warms up. Also got a square metal trellis that attaches onto one side of the planters for the bean and cucumber vines. Soil is potting soil in the back one from last year, and some compost, soil and peat in the front one (dave filled that one). I mixed in some vermiculite and fish fertilizer in each, especially the non-composted one.

I planted the early spring garden: spring onions, carrots, butter lettuce, spinach and radishes inside, and nasturtiums on the corners outside. Except for the north side, with the bean & cucumber trellis. 

Next phase will be the later spring stuff, like pole beans and cucumbers, and finding tomato plant starts. I will be looking for tomato plants that advertise tolerance below 55 degrees…..we had too much ‘flower drop’ happening last year, losing many potential tomatoes to the inevitable temperature dips. So far no tomato starts to buy, must be too early.

Summer sowing is broccoli, and maybe brusssel sprouts ( only got broccoli seeds so far). Also endive is supposed to be good to plant then, for fall. Lettuce is supposed to be cold loving, and if they are protected with cloches, supposedly I can get lettuce nearly all year. But Lettuce doesn’t like the heat. Bulb onions, garlic and leeks are the other fall plantings. Carrots are supposed to be sensitive to the waning light and warmth, so they stop growing in the fall. I actually had tried a container of carrot seedlings from late last summer and they germinated fine but basically stopped growing, though they did withstand all the below freezing temps and snow we had. They are tiny white things that aren’t worth eating, so I turned over the soil in the container.

Recommendations are to take cloves from storebought garlic heads and plant them pointy tip up about two inches apart, in October. This is faster, easier and cheaper than seeds, since we always have some cloves in the house.