the little wild kingdom

[flowerbug]

first planted peas and Purple Dove beans are flowering.

yesterday's garden club meeting went ok. the three regulars. was good to see them and chat, but we didn't stay too long this time, i was tired and ready to be back home. even found a book to read (which is turning out ok thank goodness).

weeded the last part of the long skinny garden and got all the gardens watered that needed it for sprouting and seedlings and then went back to the long skinny garden to screen some gravel from the dirt and then soaked it down good so i have a chance of getting a shovel in there tomorrow for planting (hopefully can get it done at last tomorrow and Saturday morning if needed). i have tons and tons of bean sprouts coming up.

tomatoes are flowering. the plants have finally gotten established and are now in their prime growth spurt. told Mom that tomorrow was going to be a nice day for getting the tomato cages done as she was planning on doing something else but tomorrow will be the coolest day for the next several and those cages need to get put on. she wanted to do some painting of some decorations and stuff but i think i talked her into doing the tomato cages instead. she can frog around with painting some other days... it's easier on her to do things when it isn't so hot outside so i'm trying to help her out by pointing her at projects she would normally do anyways but hoping to schedule the harder ones for the cooler days and in the morning when it's more tolerable.

i did take a few pictures the other day and need to do something with them eventually. not today...

amazingly with all the stuff Mom has raked up and done the past four days it's really looking nice out there, going to get more pictures tomorrow or Saturday (when planting is done!).

 

[flowerbug]

did take some pictures today after finishing planting, watering and then finishing mowing. hot and humid today and was glad to be done.

celebrated by eating some ice-cream and taking a nap and reading.

still need rains.

a lot of sprouts up and growing. hoping to get these last few batches of seeds to sprout and grow in time for a harvest of some kind.

also have some less formal things to plant as experimental cover and to help break up some harder soil and perhaps give me some organic goodies to bury at the end of the season. i hate to leave all this space bare, but i also am not going to be busting dirt to plant it so i'm going to try to put down some small holes and see if the plants can drill their own roots through this ... we'll see how it goes.

 

[flowerbug]

...
also have some less formal things to plant as experimental cover and to help break up some harder soil and perhaps give me some organic goodies to bury at the end of the season. i hate to leave all this space bare, but i also am not going to be busting dirt to plant it so i'm going to try to put down some small holes and see if the plants can drill their own roots through this ... we'll see how it goes.

so far they have sprouted. don't let anyone tell you you can't grow stuff in hard packed dried out clay. water it enough to poke a hole deep enough to bury the seeds and then put them in there and then put the soil back over the seeds and firm it a bit to hold everything in place. then water them and keep them moist enough to sprout. now i get to see how far they can drill and what comes of them.

 

[flowerbug]

some kind of bug, not sure what it might be either a fly or a moth or something else? interesting which is why i took the pic...

mooshrooms!

poppies of a darker shade than what we normally have around here.

creeping thyme flowering, filled in well, keep going!

tomatoes coming along, slowly this year but they'll get here eventually...

low water in the two drains where they meet, at the lowest flow i've seen.

water flowing better a few days later after a few inches (5cm) of rain. the western branch (coming from the right) is showing some cloudy water but that is not unusual because that one comes from fields with drain tiles and they are usually left bare so nutrients will come down through those tubes. the south drain comes from more covered fields and shows the tannins and is normally pretty clear of silt.

 

[flowerbug]

here are some more recent bean garden pictures but i don't have the varieties listed for each part or many individual variety pictures.

the earliest beans planted May 4th are the Purple Dove (lower left part of this picture) the rest of the beans in this picture were planted later in May and into June. Lima beans didn't do as well sprouting this year (it was cold!).

Purple Dove flowers...

other beans gardens...

the little dots of green to the left foreground are the very last beans planted (Adzukis) to see how they do in compacted clay soil with minimal disturbance (just enough to poke a small hole in the ground and get the seeds planted).

 

[flowerbug]

saw my first bumblebee of the season today. i was really worried that they were all gone so i'm so glad to see that one. the squash and melons will hopefully give them a good boost.

 

[flowerbug]

yesterday's bean and pea harvest and later cooking and experimenting...

first of all i prepped and cooked up the Purple Dove beans. they were picked a bit later than i wanted, but as i was cutting them up i decided to leave a lot of them in the bowl to be cooked even if they felt stiffer than tender. i did cook them longer to make sure they did get a chance to become more mushy, but it was ok and they are edible. i didn't notice too many being extra chewy in the bowl of them i had. i didn't do any as shellies.

in comparison my usual method is to cook them for about 8 minutes to get them just cooked but not over cooked. yesterday's timing went, bring them to a boil and then cook on power level 2 for 15 minutes and then the 2nd batch i bumped to 20 minutes power level 2. i kept eating them and had to tell myself to stop eating them. so, yes they were still edible to me (hard for green beans of any kind to not be edible as i'd eat them canned if i had to).

the next part of the experiments was to go through all the peas i picked and decide what i was keeping to dry down for seeds and what to eat.

my main mistake in pea production this year was not checking out how big the different varieties were going to possibly get. the ones i'd previously grown several times i knew how big they could get, but the other four varieties i planted next to those also got pretty big so they all sprawled together. i had to go through and separate the plants as i was picking. the varieties were all distinct enough or spaced enough that i should be ok for the two dark seeded types i put in.

ok for varieties i grew two rows of peas labelled Dark Seeds Rare, Midnight Snow, Biskopens and Mummies and then too closely next to them the three rows of the large pods (Green Beauty and some other type mixed in).

the work i need to do for the large pod varieties is to get the rather bland tasteless pods and seeds apart from the others that do have more taste and also larger pods. i pretty much need to just plant a single row of these plants with one seed per square foot and then eliminate the plants that produce bland and smaller pods - they are edible they just don't have much taste. that did not happen this year. they are all mixed together again. so that experiment failed, but provided me more information as to how to proceed if i do plant them again (i probably will since i hope to turn under most of the strawberry patch and plant peas in there next year - we'll see if i can get that done... haha).

of the other four peas planted Midnight Snow was really easy to find and pick and also tasted ok when fresh peas, there was a slight bitter finish to them that i wondered would persist once cooked and i found out that cooking did get rid of that. yay! after cooking the water was purplish so i decided to test it to see if it would work as a pH indicator (Mom was soaking something in vinegar so i had a sample sitting right there to be used as a few drops were all that was needed - yes, it worked as the liquid turned pink when any vinegar was added). to make a scale i could have set up small containers and used distilled water and then done dilultions of 90% down to 10% and then used the colored indicator solution to see how many drops it took to turn something pink and then no change (measuring indirectly pH and buffering capacity). so via this indicator solution now i know for sure (what i knew before but it was nice to verify it) is that the water from the well here is alkaline. to what degree i do not know but i'll likely have some more pH indicator water available at some future date and i can play with it then.

the cooked Midnight Snow were good to eat. i ate a few of the others fresh, not really great as compared to the large pods or the MS. pretty much my goals for these experiments were to get more seeds (i didn't have many) and refresh my stock of seeds for the four varieties and then to also see how edible they might be if there were enough seeds and pods. the other part of the test was just to see how productive these were in our typical garden soils and conditions and to check how big they got and what future spacings or if i should provide supports for them in the future (in all cases i think i really should but it's not easy for me to do this and i really prefer to just block plant and let the plants hold each other up). it would make for cleaner pods and cleaner harvesting but i guess i don't mind losing a few if they are too dirty (or just eat them anyways after rinsing off as a bit of minerals are probably good for me )...

 

[flowerbug]

3 inches of rain yesterday evening. roof still leaking in the same spot as before. grrr! sent a note to the roofing guy...

 

[flowerbug]

more rains, but at least not enough to cause any further roof leaks that i can tell.

two more days of rains now. weeds are really going to get a shot from these rains and that i can't get out in the mud for a few more days. most of the gardens are in decent condition. i just have a few where some squash plants popped up that need to be taken out and also some purslane removed before it can drop seeds.

yesterday we had enough of a break that i could go out and try to take some more pictures and i also checked the ditches out back to see how high they had gotten. several feet of water flowing in them now and you can see in one ditch where a milk bottle is snagged a few feet higher in a bush along the edge.

the insect is called a Rose Plume Moth.

 

[flowerbug]

i tried something this morning and i'm pretty sure after about 20 seconds of getting into it i should have stopped.

using an old tube of caulk to fill in the bottom of the door to the shed where the black ants have eaten into it.

first thing that should have made me stop. dripping coming out of the tube of caulk. i thought it might have been water that'd gotten on it by accident when i set it down. nope. it was the caulk itself.

start squeezing it out and it is really runny. ok, well keep going perhaps it will firm up when it dries? high humidity? no, that won't be a problem with drying time... etc...

at the worst in a few more hours i go out there with some rags and wipe off what will come off and call it good enough. i can't put it back up with goop dripping off the bottom.

lesson for the day, don't be a bonehead...

couldn't wait too long as a chance of incoming rains and i sure didn't want to be out there cleaning it up and putting the door back on in the rain (if it happens). so it's all back together now and the cruddy caulk is wiped off and in the trash.