Rebar tower for pole beans made by Matt F

Legume Love

  Many gardeners consider tomatoes to be the consummate summer vegetable. They spend hours picking the right seeds from catalogs during the winter, carefully tending the seedlings in early spring, and watering and pruning the vines in July and August.  I like tomatoes, and grow several from seed, but they are not the summer favorites in my garden. 
  We like legumes, all of them. Legumes are members of the bean and pea family. This year I am growing three kinds of peas, four kinds of bush beans, and one each of pole beans, lima beans and fava beans, all in quantity.  My husband and I would be perfectly happy to eat beans or peas every night from June 21 (tomorrow, the start of summer) to frost. Even the dog is a bean fiend, often climbing the garden fences to steal them off the vines.  I have not yet grown soybeans or the foot long Chinese beans, but I look forward to trying them in a year or two when I build more beds in my garden.
  Beans are easier to grow than tomatoes. They don't need to be started inside; they are seeded directly into the garden.  However, gardeners who want a good crop of either peas or beans need to add a  special powder called 'Bean Inocculant', which contains the bacteria that helps their roots pull nitrogen out of soil.  This powder only needs to be added the first year beans or peas are planted in a garden, and   can be bought from most seed companies. 
   The peas went in first this spring, on St Patricks day, and then at about one week intervals for two more weeks. Next were the fava beas, which also like to grow in cool soil.  After the last frost ( in mid May) I began planting bush beans as early crops like lettuce, radishes, spinach and and arugula were either eaten, or pulled up because they were bolting to seed.
 Finally, in early June I planted the legumes that love hot weather- the pole beans and Lima beans. This is the first time I have grown Lima beans.  The variety I planted is 'King Of the Garden', a vigorous vining Lima that can grow to ten feet tall.  Many people think they don't like Limas  beans, but I think that is because no one eats them fresh, largely because they are a lot of work to shell.  Having bought and shelled Limas grown by 'Four Town Farm', a local grower, I know that fresh Lima's are delicate, tender and sublime. I can't wait to share the 'King of The Garden' with both my husband and dog, who I'm certain will agree.

Agrarian Nation: -1873- The Colorado Potato Beetle

Agrarian Nation: -1873- The Colorado Potato Beetle

Hogging the bed

It's raining now, and I'm enjoying the smell of rain, the cool breeze through the slider, the sound of the thunderstorm rolling away to the northwest, and the knowledge that I won't have to water the garden in the morning. The last few days have been hot and dry, and I've been watering a lot.  Last night I left the hose on a trickle in the strawberry bed for half an hour, the first time I've watered the strawberries this year.
 My strawberry bed, planted three years ago, was  originally four feet square.  Last year I lost a lot of berries to mold because the weather was wet.  I almost wept as I pulled fuzzy mold covered fruit after fruit out from under the mounds of serrated strawberry leaves.  During the following summer and fall  the strawberries expanded into the adjacent vegetable bed, tossing runner plants over the six inch wooden boundary, each runner linked to the original plant by a thin green stem.  Soon they were in the straw of the pathway too.
  Now my strawberry bed is eight feet long by six feet wide, and packed with ripe and ripening berries.  In early spring I spread saltmarsh hay between the plants to keep the fruit off the ground and reduce mold damage.  Two weeks ago I made a frame to protect the bed from birds using two ten foot long, half inch wide PVC pipes anchored to rebar. I covered this frame with bird netting which is weighed down along the edges by scrap wood.
  Getting into this contraption to pick berries takes a while, but so far the effort has been worth it.  I've picked a quart of berries each night for the last three nights, and I'd be out there now if it wasn't raining.  Picking regularly is important, not only to get as much of the fruit as possible at peak ripeness, but to make sure any even slightly moldy berries are removed before the damage can spread.
  This rain is good for the garden, including the strawberries, and it will fill my depleted rain barrel.  But I hope it is dry tomorrow, and I can get into the strawberry patch to pick.  I grow raspberries for my husband, but the strawberries are for both of us. Vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries warm from the garden is worth all the work.

Know thy enemy

  It has been a beautiful week, more like summer than spring-- temps in the 80's,  hot and humid.
Heavy dews in the morning have watered my new seedings more gently than I ever could. With the heat and the burgeoning garden come many hungry insects, and the battle over the garden begins again.
  Cultivated vegetables have been interbred for many generations to produce big, tasty foliage and fruit- tasty to both mammals and insects. I can fence to keep out the mammals, with a little help from Sol, but the insects are a more complicated problem. 
  I don't spray my gardens with chemical pesticides.  Just a few years ago, everyone did. I have a companion book from PBS's 'Victory Garden' TV show from the 1980's which advises routine weekly spraying of many crops with chemical pesticides.  There are several reasons I don't, including concerns about what pesticide residue can do to my health. But I also don't use chemical sprays because they are expensive, and in my small garden I'd rather save the money and invest some time.
  I visit the garden every morning and afternoon, and examine the plants.  I  turn over leaves to look for eggs, I pull weeds and thin seedlings, I pick a few things to eat.  I know my garden well, so I notice quickly if things change.  
  When black aphids appeared on the fava beans last week, I looked at all the growing tips to gauge how many there were-- the plants can handle a modest infestation without much damage. I noticed both daddy-long legs and ladybugs eating the aphids.  If the infestation gets too heavy for these insect predators, I  may wash the aphids off with water, and monitor.  Finally, if I decide favas always have major aphid problems, I'll stop growing them and plant a different bean next year.
  I saw a new insect on the potato plants yesterday, while I was picking off and crushing scale bugs.  It was small and gray, and had a predatory stance, so I didn't try to kill it. I'll go online and try to ID this new insect, so that the next time we meet I'll know for sure whether it is a friend or foe.
  I know cucumber beetles are the enemy.  I have never grown cucumbers, but every summer I wage war with these colorful, zippy black and yellow striped beetles.  They prefer to eat things in the cucumber family (which includes many squash plants, which I do grow), but will nibble on many other plants. 
   I have gotten very good at stalking cucumber beetles on cool summer mornings. I called them zippy because they are very good fliers, and will zip out from under my crushing fingers in the heat of noon, but in the morning they are as slow as college students.  I often find several of them snoozing the morning away inside squash blossoms, and gleefully crush them by squeezing the flower between my fingers.  Unchecked the cucumber beetles will eat leaves to the ribs, but they are even more dangerous as carriers of a nasty fungus that can rot the leaves they barely nibble.  Last year I planted a zucchini called 'Tigress" which was touted as resistant to this fungus, and they did well.  This year I am spreading the squash out around the yard, even in the flowerbeds, in the hope that cucumber beetles won't find them all, or at least, not too early in the summer. 
 And then there are the caterpillars-- cabbage worms, tomato hornworms, the awful army of winter moth caterpillars. For them I have a weapon that is not chemical, but bacteriological-- BT, which when sprayed on a leaf and then eaten by a caterpillar, slows and stops them eating, finally killing those that eat enough. Once again, there is no outright victory, because some damage is done, but I get most of the produce and the bugs get a little. I can live with that.


  

Celebrating the Average

   Last weekend I gave away tomato seedlings. I had about fifty extra plants, and over the course of two days I found new homes for them all.  The first delivery was to to some of the regulars at the local diner where I eat breakfast. I brought a cardboard box full of plants to work and gave them to co-workers and customers, and I even delivered several to my pharmacist. Then things got a bit out of hand when more people asked for plants, and I ended up giving away many of the tomatoes I'd been saving for my own garden. Finally, I came home Sunday night to find that the remaining plants had been sun-scalded, and were barely alive.  I felt like a character in the O'Henry story 'The Gift of the Magi', and lay awake that night wondering if, after growing so many tomatoes, I'd end up at Home Depot buying ones someone else had grown.

  The next day I looked over my remaining seedlings and judged them ugly but alive. I've been nursing them back to health for the last week, carefully regulating the air flow, light and water they receive, waiting for the day I could plant them. 

  Finally, today was it, the magical 'Last Average Frost Date' for my area, according to the charts produced at U Mass Amherst.  Last year I was cocky and planted early, only to have tomatoes blasted black by frost in the first week of May.  

 This year I've waited, but not patiently!  I had a little party in the garden today-- sharing a pile of freshly pulled radishes with Sol in celebration of the  last frost date.  Sol ate his carefully, holding each radish by the leaves with a paw while he gnawed on the root. I tore the leaves off with a twist and popped each spicy red globe into my mouth. We both grimaced with pleasure at the burst of heat as we bit into a radish. 

  Then I planted.  The 'Mortgage Lifter'  tomatoes had survived the scalding best, and were still tall and dark green, while 'Celebrity', 'Gold Nugget' and 'Yellow Pear' were each a bit bleached but had healthy clusters of leaves at the top.  I planted them deeply in beds enriched with horse manure, put cages over them, and hoped for the best.  Just in case I started a few left-over seeds last week after  the big giveaway, figuring I 'd at least get new plants to put out in July.  They've all sprouted, so I've got a back up plan if today's planting doesn't take, or if it does, more seedlings to give away.  I hope all the little tomatoes out there in new gardens are thriving and growing, safe from frost and ready to make lots of fruit.

May 11th pictures

I've got an essay to post, but things have been so busy I have not gotten to it... but here are some pictures from today. It has still been cool, and as a result the plants that like such weather are burgeoning; lettuces, spinach, peas and favas.  I'm holding the tomato and pepper seedlings in the cold frame for at least another week, since they won't make any growth in this cool weather.  Above are pics of: lilacs and lettuce, favas and potatoes (with my jury-rigged cold frame), and Sol's doghouse bed mulched with salt-marsh hay.  This bed will be home to winter squash (butternut and delicata) in a few weeks, and meanwhile the hay will keep weeds from sprouting.