Summertime

Summertime, and harvest-time approaches. We are just taking the first Tomatoes and Chiles. A feeling of satisfaction and reward, a sense of achievement and relief.

Patent pending
Bird-Scarer.
All rights reversed.

What the birds are leaving for us!

Little bastards are very active... The main pests are the Mousebirds and a large and unruly flock of Finches. The Finches demolished the sunflowers I was growing for Chicken food, and have taken to eating the seed out of Tomatoes that the Mousebirds have opened up for them.

In an attempt to create some "ScareAllBirds"1 I made a few CD-mobiles and have strung them up around the veg patch. We'll see how well they work. Personally I am skeptical.

Frankly, none of the gardening books I have talk about the real problems I see in the garden. They bang on about Blights and Aphids, Beetles and Caterpillars, but not one of them mentions Bushbuck (which have played havoc with the Tomatoes and Chiles this season) or Mousebirds! Time for a new gardening book, maybe?

Software Mobile?

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[1] We don't really have much trouble with Crows. They occasionally try to catch young Chicks; seldom succeed. I can't really see how a Scarecrow would be much use against the Crows or the Mousebirds...

First Fruit

Hooray! First Brandywine Tomato of the season! In fact, the first "real" Tomato for the year -- we've been eating quite a few Gold Nugget and Red Cherry Tomatoes, one or two of the (new to us) Resi Gold (which are outstandingly delicious!) but in my mind they're all just "salad"... all those subminiatures. This particular Brandywine is a bit smaller than average, and not quite ripe yet, but, given our luck so far this Summer, I wanted to get it out of the beady gaze of the rapacious Mousebirds! They've been feasting on anything and everything that even hints at turning red, pink, orange or yellow.

Finally some rain!

Some half-decent rains, at last! 36mm so far this month (and its rained some more this morning since I emptied the rain guage) with more rain likely in the coming week. That's already more rain than we had in December and January put together! The soil is looking less parched, though the water has not had a chance to move deep into the ground yet. We plant in hope!

Time to start planning the Winter growing season...

Summer's Sweet Harvest

Well, its not full-on serious harvest time. Not yet. But at least a few things are happening to feed us!

Baby Marrows (Courgettes: Casserta -- drop me a line if you want some seed!) and Yellow Crookneck Squash are... abundant. Not yet at that stage where we're crying "Oh Fuck! Not More Squash!" Still enjoying them. Actually, a great number of the Yellow Crooknecks are mostly there for seed anyway. You see, I inherited a great deal of Yellow Crookneck seed from a kind neighbour earlier in the year, and was very happy! Some years ago I was happily growing this variety of Summer squash, and then I lost them completely -- all the fruits I kept for seed, carefully pollinating by hand, were stung by Pumkpin Fly and vrotted¹ on the vine! So you will understand my great joy at being gifted several packets of Yellow Crookneck seed... until I discovered that the seed was quite old. Six years and more. :-(

I planted a whole lot (perhaps 2-dozen?) in the hope that 2 or 3 plants would emerge, and I got 8. They're just at the stage where the early fruits are forming, but their flowers haven't opened yet, so, this morning, I ran about wrapping masking-tape over the unopened flowers so that they can't open until I want them to! Tomorrow or the next day. I'll remove the tape, the flowers should spring open, and I'll pollinate them by hand, using male flowers from different plants, and then taping them shut again so that Bees can't accidentally violate the flowers with other pollen. (It is possible; I have another variety of Summer squash in close proximity.)

Actually it was quite fun² with one... As I was looking for flowers at exactly the right stage of development, I watched one of our Bees gathering nectar in the bottom of a male Yellow Crookneck Squash, and then, immediately after, moving directly to a female flower on the next-door Yellow Crookneck plant. Bingo! Job done, I just taped the female flower shut. :-D

Other than Squash, we're eating Chillis off the one plant that made it through Winter, but eagerly awating the new season's offering. Same with Tomatoes. It is a very late season this year! The Brandywines are finally forming fruit -- about 3cm across at this stage. The only fruiting Tomatoes are the Red Cherries and a couple (TomatoR1 and TomatoR2) of weird volunteers that we're unable to identify -- so we'll be propogating them forward next year to try and figure out what's going on.

We harvested the Dragon's Lingerie Beans a couple of weeks ago, and left the last few pods to dry-off. Threshed them out today, and the yield is not as bad as it might have been. Notwithstanding that they were badly whacked by rats, we harvested 732g of dry beans from 10m². That equates to 732kg/hA -- not great, but better than many commercial harvests! I was planning to harvest the Hopi Black today, but vistis from neighbours put paid to that...mebbe tomorrow, eh?

Amongst the Dragon's Lingerie Beans that we threshed out I notice a couple of oddities (BeanR3 and BeanR4) that I kept aside to grow separately so that we can find out if they're genuinely something different or merely the result of some environmental factors.

An Odd Thought

If this were a more "industrial" setup... if we were not a handraulic self-sufficiency operation... there is absolutely no chance that we would have noticed some different few beans in amogst the harvest. They may turn out to be nothing more than aberations brought on by disease, too much sun, or poor placement in the garden.

But, if we were not processing them by hand we would never have the chance to find out!

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[1] Just remove the "v"...[2] OK, so I have a peculiar and probably perverse notion of "fun".

Yes, We Have No Bananas

I lie.

Anybody got a recipe for Banana Daicqiri? Probably my best bet would be to check Nanny Ogg's Cookbook.

We harvested no less than five bunches of Bananas, and they're ripenng in the shed out of the sun. We missed another two bunches a couple of months ago by cleverly neglecting them until they started ripening on the trees, at which point the Mousebirds took them out -- ate every little Banana in sight, leaving just a stem of blackened, dried-out skins dangling.


Four out of the five bunches are a small fingerling variety -- very tasty. They have a thin skin, so will never make it as a commercial crop since they would not well survive the rigours transport, storage and handling. The other bunch is from an old variety that we got going from cuttings given to us by nearby relatives; the fruits get quite seedy in the middle, and although quite tasty, the texture tends to be floury. Great Chicken food, though. Nothing goes to waste in a self-sufficient holding!



Chucked a few Bananas to the Chooks, and, despite it being a stinking hot day, they came running as fast as their legs could manage. Probably thinking "Oh Thank God Its Not Tomato Again!"

(Thanks to Carey for the picture!)

Tomato Mania

I thought I was going overboard this season with 9 varieties (well, 10 if I count the volunteer Red Cherries that qualify more as a weed than a Tomato,) but "Tomatoes got headache?" takes the prize!

This year I grew Taxi (almost certainly the same as Rebsie Fairholm's "Yellow Taxi" – a very fine cooking Tomato, but not as nice fresh, I thought – Ida Gold, Gold Nugget, Red Kaki, Black Krim, Lime Greed Salad, Cherokee Purple, Tigerella and my pride and joy, Brandywine (which ought to start ripening over the next few days.)

As related elsewhere, the Cherokee Purple's got (mostly) nailed by blight, which spread to the Lime Green Salad Tomatoes.  I started another batch of LGS which are about to get planted out this weekend.  Its very late, I know, but we may get lucky with the weather, so what's to lose?  I was also lucky with a couple of volunteer Cherokee Purple's that appeared beneath the Rattlesnake Bean tepees, so I've been able to save fresh seed, clean of any suspicion of blight again this year.

Currently I am being threatened with consequences dire and dreadly should I dare to bring another load of Tomatoes into the kitchen... and the Brandywines and Black Krim have barely started ripening...! :-)

Garden Update

"Fruit, Pansy, I must have Fruit!"

This is the first year we are getting significant quantities of fruit off the trees we've planted over the years.

We're doing best with Apples and Plums.

We've learned that Plum varieties that don't turn red are best, since red fruits of all kinds (including Chillis) attract vast hordes of thieving Mousebirds.

The Anna Apples pictured here are our best performer, despite the tree in the picture having been severely damaged by a Baboon last year; he took out the main leader brach and left a very large tear in the bark of the main stem.  We painted it with tree-seal compound, and the tree has recovered quite well, though it remains a bit misshaped.


Cucumbers

For the first time I have had enough inventiveness, energy and bed-space for reasonable Cucumbers.  I am trying a variety I sneaked in from elsewhere called "Telegraph Improved", and they're doing really well.I also have Lemon Cukes and Chinese Yellow elsewhere in the garden, though they're lagging quite a bit behind the Telegraph Cukes. I'm hoping to save seed from all three varieties, so they're well separated from one another.

It remains to be seen whether all these Cukes fruit early enough before Fruit-Fly season sets-in. If not, I have managed to acquire some 12% shade-net which I will use to make cages for the plants. Its an experiment to see whether the mesh is small enough to keep Fruit Flies out, and whether the cloth will serve well enough to construct isolation cages when it comes to saving seed from insect-pollinated varieties.

Tomatoes

All nine varieties of Tomatoes are doing really well, and the earliest -- a strain of Red Khaki I have been selectively saving seed for about 15 years now -- are starting to change colour.  Hooray!  Real Tomatoes again in a couple of weeks!  I just hope that we do not suffer too much humidity come February, otherwise we shall surely be struck by Blight again, and I really need to save lots of seed from some of the old heirlooms -- Brandywine and Cherokee Purple -- which are, of course, the most blight-prone of the lot.  I am being particularly religious about keeping other plants clear from around the Tomatoes so that the air movement hopefully keeps the humidity down.

In one sense, now is truly the best time of year in the garden.  The first fruits of our Spring labour is starting to come in, but we're not yet inundated with harvesting and processing, and the Hungry Gap is past.  All the plants are growing vigorously and look healthy, no diseases or pests have taken their toll yet.  The only serious pressure is to cull weeds, mulch and the ever-present water worries.