Finally pulled the plug on the peas

The pea plants produced one heavy crop and then a whole series of progressively smaller crops as the plants slowly die off on their own. About half the plants have died, and the other half is showing signs of old age. There hasn't been any finite end to the pea production, but it is really starting to trail off. If I let them continue I'd probably get another half pound or so, but I need the space to plant Brussels Sprouts seedlings. Time for the peas to go.

I should have taken a before and after picture, but I forgot to do that, so all I have is an after picture, and a not very good one at that. I don't know why the left side of the photo is blurry, but on the right side you can see the area where the peas used to be. I chopped up the plants a little bit and turned over the dirt, burying the pea plants in the process. Hopefully that will be extra fertilizer for the seedlings. I'll plant them in a few days.

Supposedly Brussels Sprouts like cold weather and will keep growing through heavy frosts and even into December. That cinder block wall on the right side of the picture should help to keep them a bit warm into the cold months, too. Mmm.....Brussels Sprouts.

Tomatoes and Potatoes

Those who know me well know that I don't like Tomatoes. Once they are cooked (pasta sauce, cooked salsa, etc), they're fine. Its the fresh ones that bother me. Not sure what it is exactly about the flavor, but I've never liked the flavor. Now I have another reason to dislike them. They are annoying to grow.

Jaime wanted me to grow some Tomato plants in the garden, so I have two plants that I started from seed. One is a big heirloom variety (Old German) and one is an open-pollinated small cherry variety (Isis Cherry). We also got a Topsy Turvy and a couple of heirloom seedlings to go in it from Jaime's mom. The ones in the topsy-turvy seem to be progressing fine and are starting to flower. The ones I planted in the ground are progressing more than fine.

I knew that Tomatoes aren't the sturdiest of plants, but I had a couple of 3 foot high conical tomato cages to support them. That should be good enough, right? Once it started getting warm, they began to grow rapidly and after they reached about 3 foot tall I realized it was time to put up the Tomato cages. A week later they were >4 foot and were tipping and bending the cages and threatening to fall over. I took 4 foot tall wooden stakes from the peas and tied strings to them to hold the Tomatoes up. I started to prune the new shoots so that they would stop getting taller and start making tomatoes. That didn't work so well. They are starting to grow fruit now, but they basically sent up two shoots rather than the one I had just cut. I have been literally pruning them every day to keep them in check.

Around this time, I put a few random pieces of info together and realized that Tomatoes are actually vines. They have no intention of supporting themselves and would be quite happy to fall over and grow along the ground. Not only that, but the stems will develop roots if they fall over and touch the ground.

Okay, so if they want to be vines, maybe I should let the be vines? The problem is that I have no room in the garden for them to do that. I have only allocated about 2ft X 4ft for the two plants. So maybe next year I could let them be vines if I grow Tomatoes again? A bit of internet research tells me that isn't such a good idea. Apparently the plants are less healthy and less productive if laying down, or as it was stated on one website: "By season's end, it will be an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle."

What ever happened to survival of the fittest?!? If a plant can't stand upright on its own, and can't reproduce well if it falls over, maybe it shouldn't be grown. I'm just sayin'.... At the very least, can't somebody please create a self-supporting Tomato breed?

Ok, back to the current problem. Given self-destructive 4+ foot tall tomatoes that seem to want to keep growing larger, how can I cheaply support them? Here's what they looked like this morning.

I stopped at Home Depot today and they were (of course) out of 8ft tall wooden plant stakes($5 each). I looked all around the store for a long sturdy object that could be used to replace the missing stakes. Copper pipes, steel pipes, PVC pipes, steel rebar, shovel handles, broom handles, wooden trim pieces, etc. All were either too flimsy or cost too much. I don't have the space or the desire to spend $25 each on their nice Tomato trellises. Finally, I found some 1"x2"x8' pine pieces ($2.60 each!). Together with velcro plant ties (which I highly recommend, BTW), the total cost was under $8. I had to cut the wood at angles at one end so I could pound it into the ground, but that didn't take long. The picture below shows what my support system looks like now. The Tomatoes are now free to grow upwards as much as they'd like.

Ok, enough about Tomatoes. Lets move on to a more pleasant topic like Potatoes. Here is a representative view of the Potato patch.

Recall that a mere 4 weeks ago, the Potatoes were a vigorous, 3 foot tall carpet of greenery threatening to take over other parts of the garden. Now they are a sad pile of browning leaves with a few sporadic areas of healthy-looking growth. It could be disease or maybe they are just dying off naturally because its their time. In either case, the Potato plants aren't doing much so I've started training some squash vines in that direction (right side of above picture). There are still are a couple patches where the Potatoes are growing, so before fully allowing the squash to take over, I figured I should see if there are any actual Potatoes under ground.

I've read that you can carefully dig around Potato plants by hand before they are fully done and get some baby Potatoes. I had half-heartedly tried rooting around one of the plants a couple times. I looked in a couple spots about 12" from the the stems, but didn't find anything. That seemed to be a bad sign. Today I decided to fully dig up one of the 10 plants to find out for sure whether the plants had time to make potatoes before dying off. I didn't find anything at first and I was starting to despair, but I finally hit the jackpot, right up against the stems. I found 6 respectable potatoes (all within a few inches of the stems). Now I'm excited. That was the smallest, most-shaded of the Potato plants and I still got almost 2lbs of Potatoes from it. I can't complain about that. Here are the Potatoes, fresh out of the ground. The seedlings seen in the picture are baby Brussel's Sprouts that will be transplanted into the area currently occupied by the peas in a couple weeks.

When looking at the roots, I did notice that there were several tiny baby potatoes (around 1/8"). I'm wondering if the plant was still trying to grow more Potatoes, or if that is just how it will always look. In the picture below, you can see a couple of the baby Potatoes. They are on the end of the thick roots that are closest to the stems. The other 3 thick roots used to be attached to Potatoes.

Even if the Potatoes are trying to grow a secondary smaller crop of tubers, I think I will let the squash take over, periodically harvesting the potatoes as the squash overgrows the area. The squash certainly needs the space more than the potatoes at this point. The last picture shows most of the day's harvest (there was also some beans and the tail end of the peas). Those Cucumbers are going to become pickles tomorrow.

July Garden Update

This is what the garden looks like as of 7/12. The first picture is facing roughly south. Topsy Turvy is back left, potatoes mid left, some Broccoli and Kohlrabi front left. Zucchini to the right of the Topsy Turvy, Cucumber is hidden behind the Zucchini, Spaghetti Squash is everything to the right of the Zucchini, and Tomatoes in the immediate foreground.

Facing to the West now. Peas on the far left side, going along the wall there are 4 pepper plants and then a short row of beans at the end. Potatoes in the top right, Broccoli and Kohlrabi right in the middle, some onions at the far right and mid-left, Tomatoes in the bottom left corner, and some more beans in the bottom middle.

It may not be easy to see everything in the pictures, but things are going well. The leafy green stuff is basically done, but other stuff has taken over. The peas have started a second round of fruiting. The beans seem to be peaking now. Onions have stopped growing tops and are developing bulbs. The potatoes seem to be unhappy, but I can't tell if its because its just time for them to go or if there is a more nefarious reason. The recent hot weather has helped quite a few of the plants. The Tomatoes are starting to get out of control and I've been pruning them to keep them at 4-5 feet tall. I would let them keep growing but I don't really have a good way to support them. I've harvested 4 Cucumbers so far and I've been pruning back the vines. Its supposed to be a small "Spacemaster" variety, but its still growing pretty large. The Zucchini is huge and I've harvested 3 zukes so far. The Spaghetti Squash is quite seriously out of control. I prune it back literally ever single day. Every time I cut off a vine tip, it grows multiple side shoots. The vines seem to grow about 6-9" per day! Note the squash vine growing up the fence in the first picture. I cut it off when it got to the top and it actually has 3 squashes on that one vertical vine alone! I allowed the Spaghetti Squash to take over the melon area, as well as the the area along the fence. It still wants more space and I'm letting a few grow towards the potato area in case the potatoes really are done.

I gotta say, so far the garden has produced more than I expected, and it looks like that will continue.

Powdery Mildew

Since I'm a first year gardener, I'm a bit of a hypochondriac when it comes to pests and diseases in the garden. I was worried about some potato leaves that kind of looked like they had blight, but that didn't seem to spread, so it probably wasn't. There was attack of flea beetles on my Pak Choi, but that seemed to pass. Two of my Broccoli plants seemed to just wither and die, which made me worried about club root. The rest of the Broccoli plants seem OK and when I pulled up the dead plants they didn't have messed up roots, so it probably wasn't that. The newest thing to worry about.....Powdery Mildew (heartofore called PM).

After noticing white spots on a few of my Spaghetti Squash leaves, I started doing research. PM is arguably the most common garden ailment. Its a fungus that attaches to the leaves and can spread rapidly. It drains nutrients and eventually kills individual leaves. It can kill whole plants in bad cases that are allowed to run rampant. It can affect most types of garden veggies, but each vegetable type has a specific species of PM that can infect it, so PM on squash won't infect potatoes. Some species are more suceptible to PM, though. That list of most suceptible plants includes Cucurbits. Turns out that is the actual name for the group of plants that I have been calling "viney plants". This includes squash, melons, cucumbers, gourds, etc. Most of the pictures I have seen online range from white blotches to a general white dust on the whole leaf. My white spots are very well-defined, but I did see a couple pictures that looked like that. The picture below is one of my Spaghetti Squash leaves. Its possible that this is something else, or its nothing at all, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

There are some pretty nasty sounding fungicides that I could spray that should be effective in controlling PM, but I'd rather not go that route if I don't have to. There is quite a bit of talk on the internet about a baking soda solution being effective. This appears to be backed up by studies at Cornell and other places. It is believed that the high pH affects the fungus a lot more than the plant leaves. So I mixed up a batch of 3-4 tsp baking soda, 2-3 tsp vegetable oil, and 1-2 tsp liquid soap with one gallon of water. The oil is to help the solution stick to the leaves, and the soap is a surfactant that helps to disperse the oil evenly throughout the solution. (As an interesting aside, the dispersants talked about so much in relation to the gulf oil spill work the same way and are very similar to dish detergent. They just cause the oil to break into fine droplets and diffuse throughout the water column rather than just floating on the surface.) I sprayed the solution on all of my Cucurbits (Spaghetti Squash, Cucumber, Melon, and Zucchini) yesterday. I sprayed the tops of all of the leaves, and the bottoms of the leaves that had white spots (25% of the Spaghetti Squash leaves and one Zucchini leaf). I really hope that protects them since those plants are doing very well at the moment. Perhaps its not even Powdery Mildew, and I'm just being a hypochondriac.

One thing I certainly am not imagining is bugs on my Broccoli and Kohlrabi. There are a few little green worms and a whole lotta aphids. I saw a few aphids and was just going to knock them off, but after I looked closer I saw big clumps of them on all the baby leaves. Some of the leaves were so infested that they are curled and crumpled. So much for the idea that a natural, healthy, diverse garden will have a balanced ecosystem with predatory bugs to keep parasites in check. Time for some chemical warfare. I pulled out a spray-bottle full of pyrethrins and went to town. Pyrethrins are derived from Chrysanthemums and are certified organic, but very effective against many types of bugs. I think thats actually what is used in most flea sprays.

Time to start freezing

I've been harvesting peas for a while now and they actually look like they are starting to wind down now. So far I've harvested almost 4lbs of them. Jaime and I have only had a couple meals of peas and each meal only used about 1/2lb for both of us. Thankfully, peas should freeze well. I've now got about 2lbs of them in the freezer.

I went out to the garden to pick some peas this evening, and I decided that I should look over the bean plants since I noticed them flowering last week. Turns out the first beans are ready to harvest! I also checked on the Zucchini plant which had a few fruits that had just started growing in the middle of last week and one was already more than big enough (it was over a lb) to harvest. Yikes, time to get eating! Here is my harvest from this evening along with two previous pickings worth of peas in bags.

I'm a little worried about the potato plants. They look like they are dying off, but it seems earlier in the year than that should be happening. I looked online for how quickly they should die off, and all I was able to find was 2-5 months. Hmm. According to my spreadsheet I planted those in mid-April (2.5 months ago). The ground does look like it is pushed up in a bunch of places near the base of the plants so its possible there are potatoes under there. I don't know what else to do except wait and hope.