One more (maybe not actually very) brief garden update 8 July 2009

…and then hopefully a bigger post, say, finally that photo post maybe.  It had been so beautiful here after all the dreary weather that I’ve spent much more time outside enjoying it than indoors typing at my computer!  (Yesterday it was extremely rainy again, but I started this post two days ago.  Today is cloudy and sporadically rainy, though right now it’s just crisp.)

I harvested my first “wild blueberry” (lowbush blueberry – it’s not really wild if it’s in a garden, is it?) this week, and was very excited about it!  I planted a lowbush blueberry at my old garden, but I got something off about the cultural requirements – possibly too much sun, possibly the wrong soil, I don’t know for sure – and it never produced a single berry.   There are very few of them on the one bush, and none on the other one, but given that they were both still in their nursery pots at flowering time and that blueberries often don’t produce berries till the second year or beyond, I am pleased to have any berries at all.  I had never had wild blueberries till my first visit to New England and they’re something that still charms me after all these years living here.  The taste is so different from the “cultivated” blueberries.

Some of the peas look to be yellowing.  Unfortunately they started to do so after I’d already harvested the last peas I think are forming on those plants, so I don’t know as I’ll get to save seeds from those plants.  Others of the pea plants look just fine, though.  ‘Golden Sweet’ is still putting out pods regularly (I’m definitely keeping that one around in future years and future gardens!), and some of the other cultivars are putting out smaller numbers.  The fava/broad bean plants all still look healthy as of now.  Today it is quite cool, in the low 60s with a strong breeze, and it was the same yesterday (plus regular downpours and some thunderstorms), so I’m a bit surprised the peas would pick now to quit, but so it goes.  The beans that are up to flowering size are mostly putting out flowers like mad, and super early bean ‘Yellow Arikara’ still has cute little pods forming on its plants (I haven’t seen it put out any more flowers this week).  It’s interesting that most of the purple-podded beans seem to also have purple stems and flowers that are some shade of purple.  The first scarlet runner bean has reached the top of its five foot pole.  It’ll probably loop around back down another one; that’s what they usually do. The scarlet runner beans haven’t started flowering yet; I don’t know if they’re waiting for a string of sunny days, or…

The peach-leaved bellflower ‘Telham Beauty’ has put out a fresh flush of blooms after all this rain, even though I didn’t deadhead it.  The coral-flowered penstemon is still making the bumblebees go crazy (and still putting out a rather unbelievable amount of flowers and buds), and the gaillardia ‘Tokajer’ is proving quite popular with the smaller native bees. (The latter two plants are new this year.  So far I’ve been quite pleased with both, and the bees don’t seem to mind their tendency to flop over on my windy site [they were both already starting to bloom by the time I planted them, so they didn't have as much of a chance to adjust to the windy site, which perennials often do by not growing as tall as they would under less windy circumstances].)  The cup plant budded up quite abruptly and its big buds look like they will bloom soon.  The sweet alyssum I seeded in myself has finally begun to reach flowering size, and some of the plants have their pretty little white blooms now.  (Still no annual candytuft blooms as far as I’ve seen; typically they start to bloom around the same time.)  The sweet alyssum cultivar that the nursery carried this year smelled like honey, as the white ones seem to always do, but it was a total dud with the bees, who just LOVED last year’s nursery cultivar. So I’m happy to finally have sweet alyssum flowers that they actually like.  (As I’ve posted here before, since sweet alyssum is quite cold-hardy for an annual, I always start out with nursery seedlings and seed in my own sweet alyssum to take over with their blooms as the nursery seedlings get straggly in early summer.)  Elsewhere in the world of direct-seeded annuals:  The nasturtium seedlings (oh, how many there are now! with leaves in so many beautiful colors!) are growing fast with all the rain, and the love-in-a-mist has budded up with it.  The clarkias are still putting out new flowers (though not as many as a week ago), but the annual poppies, corncockle, and baby blue eyes seem to be about through.

Today I planted the two perennials I bought at the nursery on my way home on Monday, a second sea holly – this one with psychedelic lavender-y stems – that I planted near the original (which has been in my garden since my first year here, two years ago), and another anise hyssop.  Sea holly and anise hyssop are two more plants that the bees go crazy for.  Just make sure that you buy hybrids that aren’t sterile.  One reason I like going to nurseries is to see what plants the bees are attracted to – both to find new plants they like, and to see which cultivars are most popular of plants with numerous cultivars.  With the perennial salvias, for example, there are some cultivars they definitely prefer to others.

That was a small bit of planting (though they were in big pots so it took a while to dig the holes!), but since I last updated, I’ve done heaps of other work in the garden.  I’ve transplanted some things that seemed unhappy or that I just thought could be happier elsewhere, and I’ve planted a lot.  I planted the rest of the tender(-here) salvias and agastaches, the lemon verbena (I eventually gave up on the farmers’ market having it this year and bought one at the nursery; it’s a good thing I did, as nobody has plants there as of today, and nobody ever did bring lemon verbena – this is the first year I can recall in my eight years going to this market that nobody sold it), the little celosia plants (a dwarf variety that will never get much taller than it is now), the variegated Felicia, the last tomato (’Black Cherry’), the flowering tobaccos that I bought in Select Seeds’ sale to plant in the front garden (two ‘Mirabilis,’ one ‘Bella,’ one lime-flowered, one ‘Crimson Bedder’ – the last two are significantly shorter than the others; ‘Mirabilis’ is a mixed-color cultivar, and I received one white one and one that’s a medium pink fading to palest pink – the rest of my flowering tobaccos are in back, which is where I’d always planted all of them till this year), the last petunia ‘Rainmaster,’ six hardy lavenders, three echinaceas (the ones that have been in my garden for two (2 of them) or one (1 of them) years now are heavily budded with the first bloom about to open), three gauras, a Santa Barbara daisy (not hardy here, and something I’ve never grown before, but it came in a mixed plant pack that was super cheap so I thought I’d give it a try; it’s in the fleabane genus, which tends to be another one that bees adore), and… other things.   I also finally planted the poor gladiolas; I’d been afraid they’d rot in the cold, wet soil, and waited for a warm, sunny day, but unfortunately now the soil is cool and wet again!  I’d hoped to also finally plant the poor dahlias, but ran out of time.  I did most of my work over the long holiday weekend.

I also finally planted that gorgeous handmade pot that I got as a gift earlier this summer.  On the two ends (it’s sort of rectangular), I planted the two tender-here sweet violets that I bought expressly to put in the pot, and in the middle, I put the yellow rain lilies (AKA Mexican lilies, as they are native to the Yucatan).  Potted rain lilies are supposed to do well in cactus mix, so I edged the pot with regular potting soil for the violets and filled the middle with cactus mix.  The violets are so thrilled about their new home that they’re creeping into the center of the pot and cascading with abandon down the edges of the pot, nearly to the ground already!   I also, also finally brought out the tuberoses that had overwintered in their pots in an eastish-facing room, figuring once it was warm and sunny it was finally good weather to bring them out.  The room had been getting sun finally (on our rare sunny days) in the early morning and evening, and to my surprise, the tuberoses had already sprouted in their impressively dry pots (they hadn’t been watered since they finished flowering inside shortly after our first frost).  I put them in a sunny patch in the back yard and the sprouts have quadrupled in size just in the last few days. (The glads and dahlias had/have also sprouted in their paper bags)

Yesterday I finally planted some of the beans I hadn’t planted before for the same fear as the glads – that they’d just rot in the cool, wet soil.  I’d intended to plant them all, but a downpour started so heavily so abruptly that I was soaked in the time it took me to run up the stairs to the porch with the seed packets and things, run back down, and crouch to plant the handful of seeds that I’d been holding, their tag having already been stuck in the ground.  In the past I’ve grown mostly green beans, wax beans (which I suppose some people consider interchangeable with green beans), Roma beans (which I tend to think of as a marriage between a green bean and a shelling bean), and shelling beans, but this year I’m trying some dry bean cultivars, which I haven’t done in ages. In some countries dry beans are all that are grown, and there are some dry beans that are still quite popular here in New England, especially ‘Soldier’ and ‘Cranberry’ (the latter of which some people use as a cultivar name, others as a particular shape of dried bean with multiple cultivars).  I planted some ‘Soldier’ this year.

Slug predation of my bean seedlings has been so, so bad this year that I put more seeds of each cultivar in than I normally would, assuming some of them will be lost to slugs.  It’s too bad birds don’t much like the front garden since it’s so noisy with traffic and pedestrians, as they’ve been eating a fair portion of the slugs in the back garden.  In happier news, though, I regularly see ladybugs in the front garden now.  The aphid population has definitely been more sharply declining.  I also saw a winged insect eating a green aphid.  I think it was an antlion, but I’d have to check in a book to be sure.  It looked so ferociously cool sitting perched atop a leaf, holding an aphid in its front legs, the bright green aphid so stark against its black legs and body.  I’m always telling other gardeners here to have patience when a pest with natural predators comes – that there have to be a certain number of the pests before the predator(s) will come, as otherwise it’d just be a waste of time, you know?  But gardeners here see their plants being attacked and just can’t not do anything, so very often, they just go ahead and spray.  Be they organic or not, sprays still tend to kill insects rather indiscriminately.  I wish more gardeners had the patience to wait for nature to take care of its own. As the book I’ve been reading points out (and which both I’ve heard and experienced many times before), insects tend to attack the weakest plants first, and “solving” it just by spraying doesn’t do anything about whatever underlying problem brought the insects in in the first place.  (In fairness to slugs, though, they really DO seem to attack plants indiscriminately!  I suppose there’s something different about their strategy at least in part because they aren’t insects and because they can’t fly like most pest insects can.  By the way, did you know that slugs spend the majority of their lives underground?  For all the destruction they can visit upon plants, they also create tunnels, helping to aerate the soil just like earthworms.)

Another Brief Garden Update 3 July 2009

I harvested five more peas today – four shelling peas and a sugar snap pea – and the very first fava/broad bean!  There are a lot more favas forming as well as several more peas, especially ‘Golden Sweet’ (though again that may just appear to be so because, being yellow, the pods are so much easier to spot than most of the other peas) and the purple-podded shelling pea, the latter of which was also the majority of what I harvested today.  There are also many teeny tiny beans on the bushy ‘Yellow Arikara’ bean plants, and the cucumber has several more blooms.  The other pole bean plants have a bunch of buds but have not been flowering at all while it’s been so grey and rainy.  Indeed, this tremendous amount of rain we’ve been having has helped with leaf growth of many plants and helped some plants get taller, but has severely hampered crop flowering and pod growth.   It has also created an ever more booming slug population, by far the most I’ve ever seen in my two and a half years in this garden, and I now often see slugs out in the middle of the day!  Today there is FINALLY some sunshine and it is so nice to see it, and the plants (both crop and ornamental) have been responding already with new flowers even though it’s just been mostly sunny for about an hour.  We are to get yet more storms later today, and the Flash Flood Watch remains in effect in the area.

I noted today that it’s not just the recently planted legumes that have been helped in sprouting quickly by the downpour, but also the nasturtiums!  I lost count at 11 leafed-out seedlings, and didn’t even attempt to count the number of tiny sproutlings sticking up out of the soil beyond the actual formed seedlings.

Reading The PawPaw Patch (link always in sidebar*) provides quite a sharp contrast to conditions here – in her latest entry, she writes of her peas being done for the season, ripening tomatoes, and flowering okra.  My okra and tomatoes are still wee things that have barely grown at all in the past month, and my favas (cold-weather crop) are flourishing.  It’s interesting, though, that we both have cucumbers that have just started to climb upwards; mine put out its first tendrils just a day or two before she wrote a post saying a similar thing about hers.   I guess it nicely illustrates how some plants are more weather- and/or climate-dependent and other plants are more dependent upon the literal time of year.

*[Apologies at how screwy my sidebars temporarily were.  Somehow WordPress reset my design to the original rather than what I'd customized (this was at a point recently when I didn't even log in for a couple of days, so I don't see how I could have accidentally done it myself).  The links and everything else on the sidebar are back to the way they were before, and hopefully they will stay that way this time.]

The bees and other pollinators have been as excited about the dry weather as I have, and in my brief time in the wonderfully sunny garden, I saw a rather absurd number of bees and similar beings.  I suppose that like us gardening humans, they have to cram as much work as they can inbetween downpours.  The salmon-flowered penstemon, Scottish bellflower, and violas have been flowering nicely despite the rain, but most things have been budded up for a couple weeks just waiting for some dry, sunny weather.  My oregano keeps adding new buds, but after three or four weeks, has yet to open a single one!

And now we’ve got a mackerel sky forming, a sign of more rain to come.  But it is nice to have the windows open and to see the sunshine strengthen and lessen as the high, thin clouds come and go.  Time to go back outside and enjoy it while I can.   I’ve been working this week on a post of photos, which I’ll hopefully finish later today once it starts raining again!

Don’t believe everything you read 2 July 2009

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of incomplete, misleading, and just plain inaccurate information that’s out there on gardening, most especially gardening with crops.  The very most common thing is for someone to write a book (or site) where they presume that what works for them will work for everyone, and thus writes it in such a way as if it is widely applicable when in reality they are writing about what works for their specific climate or their very specific conditions.  I appreciate it when authors are clear about whether what they really mean is a generalization or something for their specific whatever, and especially if they note what different things are better for different areas.

But there is also a lot of misinformation out there about specific plants/crops.  I believe most writers don’t intentionally mean to do it; I think at least part of the problem is, as many serious gardeners have complained, that a lot of books on growing crops seem to include many things which the author appears to have never actually grown, but be writing about based on what they’ve read or heard from others.  Some of the things I so appreciated about Frank Tozer’s books on organic veggie growing (which I read last month, as I mentioned here) were that he talked a lot about his own experiences growing things and noted both where others’ experiences might be different in different areas/conditions, and where he didn’t have a lot of experience growing a particular crop or didn’t really like the taste of it and thus mostly grew it for a family member.

Often when I read a crop book, I get the distinct impression that the author hasn’t actually grown one of my favorite plants themselves, because I can’t imagine how they could say what they say about it if they ever have.  A prime example is runner beans.  Because runner beans are perennial where they are hardy, many authors make the leap to saying that they love super hot and humid weather.  Now if that were really the case, why on earth would the be by far the most popular green bean in Britain rather than the most popular green bean in Florida?  We aren’t far enough into global warming yet for Britain to be really hot and really humid!  Many people in Britain have only bought air conditioners within the past few years, and there are a good number that still just use fans in summertime.  What exasperates me the most is when I read a book that accurately states where runner beans originated – in the cool, damp, misty mountains of Central America – and still says, “Because of this, they love hot, humid tropical weather!”  In reality, there’s a reason why runner beans have been doing so well here this summer – they love the damp, chilly (for us) weather we’ve been having.  People who planted their runner beans earlier than I did already have plants smothered in flowers.

(As an aside, I’ve found it interesting that my recent post “Runner beans” has garnered a rather obscene number of hits [for this blog's statistical averages] already.  I guess most people who write about them write under the British terms “broad beans” or “horse beans,” since they’re so much more popular as a crop in Britain than here [here in the US, they are usually used as ornamentals], and thus my use of “Runner beans” for the title has led people who search for that term to find that post quite easily.)

Here’s another example that I’ve discovered since beginning this post yesterday.  Many writers use the term “germinate at” when what they really mean is “ideal temperature for germination is.”  For example, many people say that cowpeas germinate once the soil is warm.  Now, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog regularly, it’s been quite cool here for June and July, with temperatures more like April and early May.  For example, right now it is 63 F, and yesterday was pretty much the same.  And the soil is generally going to be colder than the air around it, most especially if it is saturated like it has become here (we’ve moved on from a Flash Flood Watch to a Flash Flood Warning because we’ve had so much rain the ground literally just can’t hold any more).  But my cowpeas/southern peas (and lima/butter beans and tepary beans and gram beans and moth beans, all legumes primarily grown in hot regions, be it low desert or tropical/subtropical) are sprouting!  I noticed late yesterday that they had already begun to sprout.  So, while they definitely have an ideal soil temperature for germination, like any plant does, it is not a hard and fast rule like it is often presented to be.  I think that again this comes from people making the leap from one fact to another.  Because cowpeas love hot weather, people assume that they will only germinate once the weather is hot.  But just because there is a causal relationship between two things, that doesn’t mean that it is corollary, nor that just because it’s most common it means it’s always the case.

And these sorts of things are why I stress to new gardeners that while it is good to consult with others in your area partially so that you can learn from their mistakes and get an idea of what crops/flowers/etc are most common and thus probably likely to be successful where you are (or at the least, be good first things to try), and good to read gardening books/sites to help you learn, it is also good to not assume something is true just because it’s “common wisdom.”

Brief garden update 28 June 2009

I picked 8 more peas today, 5 snap/sugar snap peas and 3 shelling/soup peas (the most shelling peas yet, and the first two of the purple ones, with at least 3 more purple ones looking almost ready to pick).  Pea production really slowed down for a bit there in the warmer weather but it seems to be picking back up.  It looks like ‘Golden Sweet’ produced some new pods and flowers in the warmer, sunnier weather we had for a couple days there, lending a bit more credence to my educated-guess theory that my ‘Golden Sweet’ stock, being from India, dislikes truly chilly (for June) and gloomy and rainy weather, unlike typical garden peas grown in the US and Britain.  And the fava/braod beans are going crazy!  Literally every time I check them, there are new baby pods starting to grow and new flowers.  The bean ‘Yellow Arikara’ is putting out blooms like mad, with several new flowers every day, and the first two cultivars of purple-podded beans have buds on them, ‘Purple Podded’ and ‘Trionfo Violetto.’  The scarlet runner beans have climbed ever higher.  After being budded for at least a few weeks (probably more), the cinquefoil (a perennial flower) finally opened its first bloom today.  It even looks like the cardinal climber (a tender ornamental vine) might have some buds forming, which would be interesting as it took significantly longer into the summertime last year for it to develop any.

The largest penstemon that I’ve planted this year is still putting out scads of new blooms in a beautiful coral color, and at least some of the bumblebees have finally figured out that they produce nectar and pollen, and have started going crazy for them!  It’s rare for me to walk past the plant during the day and not see a bee (usually a bumblebee) at a flower.  It was last year, with the agastaches, that I first realized that bees sometimes have to learn how to seek nectar and/or pollen from flowers they have not encountered before, as (as I wrote here at the time) some of the bees figured out how to feed at the agastache flowers and others left the plants without realizing that they could do so.  By the way, I’ve been seeing a lot of bumblebees and small native bees, and a pretty good amount of hover flies and other pollinating wasps/flies, but I’m seeing almost no honeybees in my own garden or other neighborhood gardens.  Last year there were fewer than previous years, but this year it’s dropped even more.  It’s not very common for me to see them outside of a nursery or a very large garden open to the public any more.

Today is back to chilly (for June) and grey weather, and there’s a chance it’ll rain today.  That’s OK as I’ve got a lot of non-garden stuff I need to do today anyhow.  I hope the warm-weather legumes I planted over the past couple days (cowpeas, limas, yard-long beans, hyacinth beans, and more; see the previous two entries) fare OK in this colder soil.

Hyacinth Beans and Yard-Long/Asparagus beans 27 June 2009

This morning it was already brilliantly sunny when I awoke.  Enthused by the pleasant weather and the beautiful sunshine, I headed out into the garden to get some work done while the city was still fairly sleepy on this lovely Saturday.  I started out by sowing the hyacinth beans and yard-long/asparagus beans I did not get around to sowing yesterday.  (Descriptions follow the main entry.)  After that, I planted the things that were blooming or about to bloom – the six-pack of robust marigolds I got at this week’s farmers’ market, the three Gloriosa daisies I got at the plant sale at the historic estate, a heliotrope I got from Select Seeds, and the second rudbeckia I got from last week’s market (the untagged one, so I don’t know if it’s another ‘Indian Summer’ or a different cultivar).  I also moved the butterfly delphinium that had become entangled in the bean patch and looked increasingly sad.  I noted that the cucumber, though still only a couple feet tall, already has a bud.  I also noticed that even more morning glory seedlings have come up since yesterday.

The Downy Woodpeckers particularly like my street tree, the honey locust I’m always complaining about, because the same things that cause its penchants for dropping twigs/branches on my garden also mean that it’s got several dead or dying branches (though it is huge and most of its branches are still alive).  As so often happens, this morning one of them (the male this time) was searching the tree for breakfast as I was working in the garden.  It was nice to hear its whinny, and occasionally hear a responding whinny (presumably its mate) from what sounded like perhaps half a block away.   It was so quiet that early here in the city that I could hear the response even with my less stellar human ears.  In my experiences, Downies are extremely curious; in my old garden, they would sometimes sit in the neighbor’s tree (that hung over my garden) and watch me work in the garden, and in this one, sometimes they pause in their locust search to appraise me and my activities.  I think they are quite nifty birds.

After some days of not seeing the ladybug larva, and wondering if perhaps it had turned into an adult ladybug or had been eaten, I spotted a ladybug larva while working, hanging out on the bud of a tender salvia that I planted yesterday (and which I think I forgot to mention at the time).  Of course it may not be the same one – yesterday I also spied a few ladybugs in the garden, so they seem to be reacting to the terrible aphid problem I’ve been having this year now that it’s been nice enough for them to do much flying.  (I hope they eat leafhoppers too, though I doubt it.  The leafhoppers were so bad earlier this summer, though I’m not seeing as many now.  I’m also seeing a lot of slugs since it’s been so rainy, but I know ladybugs don’t eat those!)   May the ladybugs have laid many eggs in addition to doing their own munching away.

I was also right that there are caterpillars (or maybe just one mobile one) on the calendulas that I planted from the farmers’ market earlier this summer.  (I believe they came with the plants, as the problem started nearly immediately after planting.)  They are especially affecting flowering, as they seem to either eat part of the bud or do something else that causes the bud to stop production when partly formed.  They also seem to attract ants, or maybe they attract aphids that then attract ants.  I’ve never seen a caterpillar on calendula before, and did not realize that any ate it.  (I have tried to find out what kind it is, but have only found references posted by other gardeners who also did not know the name.  It is a very pale green that quite successfully matches the color of calendula leaves/stems, making it difficult to spot them for those who don’t have ants clustered around the caterpillars.)

“They” say it may thunderstorm this afternoon, and indeed, by now huge cumulous clouds – bordering already on cumulonimbus – are massing on the western horizion.  I hope it does.  I’d like a good thunderstorm; it’s been so cold we’ve hardly had any yet this year.

I took advantage of High Country Garden’s sale selling off their spring stock (which they, and many other US mail-order companies, do before ceasing shipping till late summer) last weekend, but my plants didn’t ship till Tuesday or Wednesday.  They had the misfortune of being delivered yesterday, which as I mentioned yesterday was the hottest day this month.

Now that it’s finally been sunny again, I need to take some new photos of the garden while the sunshine lasts.

Here is the other lima I sowed; I’ve added it to the previous post as well, but am pasting it here in case anyone already read that one.  I got it from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange this winter, and am not sure why they already removed it from their website.

VIOLET’S MULTI-COLORED BUTTERBEANS 80-90 days [Banks County, GA, saved by 4 generations of Violet Brady Westbrook’s family.] A rainbow of colors – cream, beige, red-brown, and violet-purple, with speckles and swirls. Small seeds have great flavor, good both fresh or dried. 3-5” pods. Semi-bush plants have good disease- and drought-resistance.

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Hyacinth Beans AKA Lablab Beans

As regular readers likely remember, last year was my first one growing hyacinth beans.  I was astounded at the vigor with which they took off once hot weather set in, and how they seemed completely undaunted by the hottest, most humid days my climate could throw at them.  Gorgeous plants usually grown as ornamentals by Americans, they most often have purple stems, purple veining on the leaves, purple flowers, and purple pods with a velvety feel to them, though variations exist (as can be seen below).

Hyacinth Bean (species) The Hyacinth Bean is featured on the arbor in the Monticello kitchen garden and draws countless questions from visitors every year. In the Garden Book in 1812 Jefferson mentioned, “Arbor beans white, scarlet, crimson, purple . . . on the long walk of the garden.” This tender annual vine grows to twenty feet and produces attractive purplish-green leaves, showy rose-purple flowers and pods, and unusual black and white seeds. Although not mentioned by Jefferson, Hyacinth Bean was sold by his favorite nurseryman, Bernard McMahon, in 1804.  Plant seeds in sunny garden soil after the last frost, and give the plants plenty of room. A native of tropical Asia, the unusual seeds and pods are also very ornamental. (Monticello)

Moonshadow (Dolichos lablab) Beautiful purple pods are used in Asia as a curry and stir-fry vegetable. Pick when small and tender, as old pods and dry beans may be poisonous! The long, rambling vine is also very ornamental with lilac-colored blossoms and purple stems. Thomas Jefferson planted this fine bean at Monticello. (Baker Creek)

Akahana Fujimame This hyacinth bean is a beautiful climbing bean that is grown for ornamental purposes as well as for eating. This red flowering Japanese variety is particularly popular. The pods are flat, thick and curved. Young pods can be sliced or used whole, and either boiled or stir-fried. Warning: Hyacinth beans naturally have cyanogenic glucoside (a plant compound that contains sugar and produces cyanide). Hyacinth beans should never be eaten raw. Always cook hyacinth beans well before eating. (Kitazawa Seed Co.)

Shirohana Fujimame This popular climbing hyacinth bean is grown for its beauty as much as for its beans. The fast growing vine produces elegant white flowers that give way to thick, but flat, curved pods. Stir-fry or boil these beans, which can be sliced or used whole. (Kitazawa Seed Co.)

Ruby Moon Exotic looking ornamental climber with gorgeous sprays of amethyst blossoms followed by glossy deep purple pods. Show stopping on fence or trellis! (Renee’s Garden Seeds)

Purple Moon [Another bean that's been taken off the site that was selling it just this past winter! Here is the description from the seed packet:] This popular climbing hyacinth bean vine is grown for its beauty as much as for its beans. The plant growth is vigorous producing brilliantly colored red-purple flowers. The bean pods [are] also red-purple in color, with a flat, thick and curved shape. (Kitazawa Seed Co.)

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Yard-Long Beans AKA Asparagus Beans

Red Noodle The unusual purple-red color of this yard long bean is familiar in southern China. The beans can grow up to 22″ long. The plant is heat tolerant and grows vigorously. The bean will lose its red color when cooked. These beans are stringless, sweet and tender. Cut into 2″ sections and deep fry, stir-fry, steam or add to soup. (Kitazawa Seed Co.)

Mosaic The variety name, Mosaic, describes this bean’s color. The pod’s purple, red and green colors create a mosaic pattern. It generously produces 16″ long beans that are crisp. These beans are most familiar in Southern China and are highly prized because of their sweet, tender pods. Cut into 2″ sections and deep fry, stir-fry, steam or add to soup. (Kitazawa)

Tsu In Yard long beans have been cultivated for centuries in India and China. This variety is unusual and recognized for its beautiful purple color pods. A generous producer of 16″-20″ long beans that are soft textured. The bean’s purple color is retained even when cooked. These beans are tender and stringless, and can be used with meats or with other vegetables in quick stir-fry dishes. In addition to the pods and seeds, the young leaves and stems are also edible when lightly steamed. (Kitazawa)

Kurojuroku This fast growing and generous producing variety of yard long bean thrives in the heat. Each vine yields dark green slender pods 14″-18″ long that contain 10-20 black seeds each. One of the most popular varieties grown, these stringless beans are highly prized in Asia because of their sweet and crunchy pods. (Kitazawa)

Planting plants, planting seeds / Cowpeas, Lima Beans, and more 26 June 2009

African daisy (yellow bloom) with lantana 'Citrus,' marigolds, annual ice plants (succulent foliage), Felicia heterophylla (blue blooms), foliage of Swan River daisies (ferny), and Mt. Atlas daisy (white blooms). This area is one of the very hottest in the garden, as it's where the retaining wall corners meet and it gets a lot of sun. I often move things out of here as their seasons pass. It had already gotten too hot for the African daisy before today and I've moved it. Mt. Atlas daisy is one of the very best groundcovers for searingly hot spots (I've no idea why it's so little-known here in the US!), but its bloom period is up by now. And Felicia heterophylla has its season, from spring to early summer, and then it's over; most of them have already set seed and died (though the one pictured is still alive). In the African daisy's place, I've planted one of the dwarf sunflowers and rudbeckia 'Indian Summer,' the latter of which did extremely well for me in that spot last year after I made sure it got adequate water for its first few weeks.

I planted some plants and some seeds today.  Our warmest day yet this month clocks in at a normally-not-hot-for-late-June low-80s F.  I put in replacements for the stolen plants – a santavila, a Swan River daisy (the fifth in the garden this year), and a plant that seems to only be known by its botanical name, and which I’ve never even grown before, but figured I’d try, as there were so few annuals left in small pots at the nursery (just like with the perennials, they sized up to almost all huge pots by mid-June this year, which I don’t recall them doing [with either kind] in previous years).  I also planted another tender salvia, another penstemon, the sunflowers grown for seed (4 of the 5 ‘Mammoth’s), the dwarf sunflower I picked up at this week’s farmers’ market (a second ‘Big Smile’), the sad-looking six-pack of salvia ‘Marble Arch’ (mixed colors in white, purple, and rose) that I picked up at last week’s market but hadn’t had the chance to plant,  a silver thyme, and, um.. some more stuff.  I also moved a few more things to new spots.

After taking a break, I went back outside and finally planted most of the warm-weather-loving beans, as with our average temperature for the past month having been an astoundingly low 59 F, I’d been worried the seeds would just rot in the cold and frequently wet soil.  I planted my four lima beans and several cowpeas, as well as one tepary bean (haven’t grown them in a while), a gram bean, and a moth bean (have never grown either of them).  As I’ve mentioned here in recent months, this is my last try with lima beans here in the North.  I’ve planted them in a different location than in the last 2 years in this garden, so we’ll see if that makes a difference.  I planted the other beans near them as well, as they all have somewhat similar cultural requirements and all prefer less water than the rest of my crops.  In addition, I planted the sword bean (also haven’t grown that before), the winged bean (ditto), and two edamames (soybeans), one that had accidentally gotten stuck in with the warm-weather beans and which I thus hadn’t planted, and one that I ordered with my autumn seed orders since the edamame plants are still so small anyhow.  I’d also meant to plant the hyacinth beans and yard-long/asparagus beans today, but I found that after all the work involved in expanding the bed to make enough room for all the cowpeas (including digging up two giant rusted panels, which took an incredibly long time and quite a lot of effort in a patch of sunlight on this hot, humid day), I was just too tired to snake my way into the middle of the bed (a delicate process) to plant them close to the scarlet runner beans.  I like planting things of similar size together, and hyacinth beans and yard-long beans are just as prolifically huge as scarlet runner bean. (Well, I’ve not actually grown yard-long beans before, but that’s what I’ve read.  Hyacinth beans sure are, though.)  See the end of this post for descriptions of the beans I planted today.

I also did some work yesterday, this time in the back garden.  I finally put up the bird netting, using metal plant tags to anchor it (that’s why I hadn’t done it before; I had to go out and buy them), and plant supports (the hooping kind for stalks) to hold the netting up off the largest seedlings.  As of this morning, when I last cleaned and refilled the bird bath, it was still working to fend off the super destructive squirrels from digging in my crop pots, but I haven’t checked on it since.   The process involved in doing that was much longer and more painstaking than I expected, and ate into my gardening time.  After completing it, I finally planted the nemesias, browallias, and most of the (back garden’s) violas, all of which had been growing (and blooming) in pots since I bought them in the spring.  This year my nursery started carrying a white browallia, and I just don’t get the point.  I’ve always thought that everyone else loved browallia for its pretty bluish flowers, just as I do, and I don’t get why anyone would want to plant a white-flowered cultivar.  Unless they’re using it for contrast with the blue ones, I guess?

This is our 17th day in a row with rain.  It rained again overnight, and then again during the day, though it was sunny before and after.  Now it’s clouded up again and it looks like thunderstorms are headed this way.  The newly planted plants sure appreciated the rain (it occurred between my two stints in the garden today) and I imagine the seeds would like a good soaking now that they’re in as well.

The morning glories are abruptly coming up.  The majority were seeded in near where I cleared the cowpea patch today, and I saw several tiny seedlings coming up.  I seeded in nasturtiums a couple mornings ago, but I have yet to see any nasturtium seedlings.  Though I seeded in the zinnias at least a few weeks ago now (possibly longer), I’ve yet to see a single zinnia sprout.  Perhaps they are like the morning glories, waiting for a warm day.  I also noted while out there today that the scarlet runner beans and the cardinal climbers appeared to have grown at least a foot each on this sunnier, hotter day, and that many things had put out new blooms.  Additionally, the first buds appear to have developed on one of the morning glories I planted as a young plant.  And the beans ‘Yellow Arikara’ are still flowering (they actually seem to have even more flowers now than before).  Pea production has slowed but not stopped, and the fava/broad bean production seems to be continuing apace despite the weather. Perhaps they are provided some extra shade by the now-taller pea plants on the trellis.  It would be interesting to see if it could be replicated in another garden – the supposition being that the favas are bushier at first than the peas, and thus though planted on the north-by-northeast side of the main pea trellis, they still get a good amount of the sunlight coming in, and then, as the pea plants start to bush up and reach their full size, the more dappled amount of sunlight actually helps prolong the favas’ lives.  Is this supposition correct?  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll see how the upcoming days go for the favas.

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Today’s Legume Seed-Ins

Miscellaneous

Tepary Bean ‘San Felipe Pueblo White’ Large white seeds mixed with enormous (for a tepary) light tan, flattened seeds. White and lilac flowers, large leaves. A collection from 5200 ft. in New Mexico.  (Native Seeds/SEARCH)

Sword Bean ‘Akanata Mame’ This sword bean cultivated in Japan produces pinkish-red flowers and beans. The beans, which have a ridged edge, are harvested when they are still immature, or when they are roughly 4″ long. Prepare these beans as you would snap beans. Maturity: Approx. 70 days (Kitazawa Seed Co.)

Winged Bean Every part of this climbing tropical bean—from the leaves and flowers to the pods and tubers—is edible and high in protein. The winged pods are best and most sweet when picked very young, about 3″-4″ long. Cross-sectioned pods have four corners. Prepare these delicious beans as you would snap beans. Maturity: Approx. 75 days (Kitazawa Seed Co.)  Adding the description from Baker Creek’s catalog:  (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus) This is one of the most unique beans; it produces delicious pods with four winged edges, the leaves are cooked like spinach and the roots have a delicious, nutty flavor. This high-protein bean is an excellent crop and is so useful in the kitchen. The plants are tropical and do best in warm areas. They will not produce well when the days are long, so it may not yield until fall. Soak seeds 24 hours before planting. We have had a hard time keeping any winged beans on the shelf ever since Mother Earth News ran an article on this bean.

Edamame ‘Envy’ Early 80-day variety is great for the North. Perfect for Edamame, fresh shelling or dried; nice green-colored beans have good flavor; developed by the late Prof. Elwyn Meader, UNH.

Edamame ‘Davis Family Blend’ 75 days.Vigorous 3 foot plant. Harvest plump, green pods before any yellowing from late August into September. Pale green or yellow seeds. Can be boiled in the pods when young and tender. Called edamame in Japanese cuisine. A favorite of the Davis family’s community supported farm. (Turtle Tree)

Moth Bean Phaseolus aconitifolius (Mat Bean, Mother Bean) Indigenous to India, and highly drought resistant. The sprawling mat-forming plants do well in very hot weather (to 100-120 deg. F) and protect the soil. Small pods 1-2 “ long,1/2” wide contain 4-8 /tiny beans. In India the young pods are a vegetable and the dry beans are used like lentils as “dal”. Very high protein at 22-24%. It alone did well in drought-stricken north Kenya. In California trials as a green manure it smothered all weeds except milkweed. (Bountiful Gardens)

Gram Bean/Mung Bean ‘Black Pod’ (Vigna radiata) Gram or Mung beans have so many uses. Popular in all of Asia; can be used in soups, stews, curries, breads, fermented, for sprouting and so many other uses; so easy to grow. This variety produces pods that ripen to black with small, green seeds.  (Baker Creek)

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Lima Beans (AKA Butter Beans)

Jackson Wonder (Bush) 66 days. Standard southern variety. [Introduced 1888. Originated by Georgia farmer, Thomas Jackson]. This popular heirloom variety yields well under hot, dry conditions. Contains 3 to 5 seeds per pod. Seeds are buff-colored with purple-black mottling. Good especially as a fresh or dried butterbean. Also does well in northern areas. (all my limas are from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange)

King of the Garden (Pole) 88 days. The most widely grown heirloom lima. [Introduced in 1883 by Frank Platt after selecting 5- and 6-seeded pods of 'Large White' pole lima.] Produces 4 to 7 in. long by 1-1/4 in. wide pods, containing 4 to 6 large creamy-white seeds with honey-like flavor. Vines grow to 9-1/2′ and bear heavily over an extended season. An old favorite of excellent quality. (SESE)

Worchester Indian Red (Pole) The hardiest lima we offer. [Introduced in 1990 by SESE. Reported to be of Native American origin, pre-1868.] Produces medium-sized limas on heat and drought-resistant plants and is a prolific producer under adverse conditions. Seeds range in color from dull red to dull maroon-red. This variety still exhibits a wild trait: a few pods spring open (shatter) when the pods are completely dry. (SESE)

Violet’s Multi-Colored Butterbeans (Semi-Bush) 80-90 days [Banks County, GA, saved by 4 generations of Violet Brady Westbrook’s family.] A rainbow of colors – cream, beige, red-brown, and violet-purple, with speckles and swirls. Small seeds have great flavor, good both fresh or dried. 3-5” pods. Semi-bush plants have good disease- and drought-resistance. (SESE; no longer listed on their site)

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Cowpeas (AKA Black-Eyed Peas, Southern Peas, and more)

I had no idea just how crazy I had gone with the cowpea acquisitions this year until I sorted my beans this spring!  It just goes to show that I should really keep a running list of what I’ve bought/swapped after each purchase/swap (or better yet, write out everything I’m planning to buy/swap beforehand), but hey, at least life’s interesting this way.  We’ll see how the cowpeas do with their own patch this year instead of being planted on the edge of the pole bean patch as in the last two years here (without the greatest success, or I wouldn’t have changed it – although they’ve done better than the limas).

Corrientes Collected in Nayarit, Mexico. Extremely hardy and prolific, with dark red seeds. Excellent as green beans or shelled. (Native Seeds/SEARCH)

Texas The color of red sandstone, this cowpea is from the Eagle Pass area of Texas. They were described as a heat tolerant ‘pole bean’ with superior flavor. (Native Seeds/SEARCH)

Haricot Rouge du Burkina-Faso An heirloom from Burkina-Faso, West Africa. Colorful, red-purple pods have deep red seeds. This pretty variety produces well even in extreme conditions.  (Baker Creek)

Sugar Cream Delicious, cream-colored peas are great dried or as snaps. Robust, yellow flowered vines produce heavy yields of this southern heirloom that has been grown for generations. (Baker Creek)

Cream 40 (Texas Cream 40)— 65 days Texas Cream 40 is a distinct, early variety. The semi-bush growth is very prolific. The pods are six to eight inches long, medium sized, and slightly curved. The seeds are small, kidney-shaped, and white with an orange eye. (Victory Seeds)

Big Red Ripper (Mandy) 70 days. [Heirloom from VA and NC] Large number of peas per pod. A good flavored table pea with 10″ long pods containing as many as 18 large peas per pod! Reddish-green pods are borne high and are easy to see in the foliage. The vines are resistant to very hot, dry summers. Use fresh or dried. Very popular with our Texas customers. (Southern Exposure Seed Exchange)

Peking Black 80 days. Flavorful, large black peas. [From the collection of the Southern Seed Legacy via grower Harry Cooksey.] There is a bit of mystery about this variety’s origins. But there is no doubt that it produces an abundance of delicious black crowder type peas on vigorous disease free plants. (SESE)

Whippoorwill 85 days [Brought to the Americas from Africa during the slave trade, grown by Jefferson at Monticello.] Once the standard for southern peas, this variety is drought-tolerant and will grow in almost all soils. 5′ vines produce loads of 7-8″ green pods with a purple tinge. Mature seeds are small and light brown with black speckles. Seeds are good eaten green or dried. (SESE)  Editorial note:  This is a legendary cowpea, considered one of the oldest still in cultivation in the US.  There are said to be two types being grown now in the US, one the true heirloom, another a more modern variety with the same name (possibly originally developed from the heirloom, but I’m not sure).  There is a way to tell which one you have, which I am currently forgetting the entirety of, though I believe part of it is the size of the leaves.

Colossus 58-65 days [1972 Clemson U. release] One of the largest and best of the crowder peas. Light-brown seeds in straw-colored, purple-tinted 7-9” pods. Very prolific, easy to shell. (SESE)

Arkansas Razorback [1960s U. of Arkansas release] Very colorful red-and-white calico peas with good flavor. Yellow pods on moderate 3’ vines. (SESE)

Peas, favas, and Arikara beans 23 June 2009

Pods of pea 'Golden Sweet' ripening on the 12th: One of the most unique things about this pea is that the areas of the plant right around the flowers/pod are also a golden yellow, as you may be able to tell in this photo.

I harvested 11 peas this morning, the most yet (by 1 pea).  There were 10 more snap/sugar snap peas as well as the first shelling pea.  This cool, rainy weather has slowed flowering, but there are many peas already ripening on the vines.  It looks like there will be several more shelling peas ready soon.  The weather seems to have especially negatively affected ‘Golden Sweet,’ and I am wondering if this is because my stock came from a market in India (according to Baker Creek’s catalog) and perhaps it finds this weather especially unfavorable as a result.  There are also many fava/broad beans ripening now and it looks like the first couple are almost ready to harvest.  The fava beans seem completely undaunted by the weather, still putting out flowers daily and they appear to have more pods ripening each day as well.  The Arikara beans (cultivar ‘Yellow Arikara’) have started flowering!  I noticed it this morning, but spent very little time in the garden yesterday so it could have begun then.  They are only a couple of feet tall.  (They are bush beans)  I hope the coming heat wave does not kill them before they can produce anything like happened last year.  For those that have not read previous entries (or missed the relevant ones), Arikara beans are rare in that they actually prefer relatively cool weather despite being beans.  Hot summers typically kill them.  They were developed by the Arikara tribes of what are now the Dakotas in the US to produce in the short seasons there.  They can be planted earlier than any other garden bean I’ve yet found.  I have no idea why sources (even most of those selling them) typically do not mention this fact as I find it the most valuable thing about them.

My plans to work in the garden like mad (before the coming heat wave) have been hampered by this weather.  It’s so incredibly humid and misty that I got sticky just harvesting the peas and checking on the other crops!

Two days to go / Planning perennial crops 22 June 2009

One corner of the front garden: In focus in foreground, cilantro 'Salsa,' African blue basil 'Kasar,' white-flowering stock, and a perennial salvia. Pea plants and many other things behind them.

Today was just plain too cold and raw and rainy to plant the rest of the bean seeds as I’d hoped to do.  It had been raining and gusting most of the day, and was pouring by the time I got home (and still gusting).  The temperature has been hovering around 60 F all day, but with the wind gusts it feels much colder – more like April than late June.  But the weather is supposed to change abruptly, in that way it does here in New England, on Thursday, with highs in the upper 80s F and lows that will be warmer than our recent highs. So I have two more days to get the rest of my warm-weather crops transplanted before actual warm weather finally returns.  I am thinking I will plant the beans on Thursday or Friday, after the heat (and hopefully sunshine, which has been too rare here!) has finally warmed the bed back up.  While cool, rainy days aren’t favored by most for doing gardening, they are favored by most transplants as being less shock-inducing, so it would be better to get the rest of the transplants in before it gets hot, ideally tomorrow or early Wednesday morning so that they’ll have a bit of rain and grey as they first settle in.  I can’t believe it’s after solstice and I’m still talking about transplanting tomatoes, tomatillos, and chiles.  But the ones I transplanted in late May/early June have barely grown at all in the past three to four weeks, and I’ve heard similar stories from many other local gardeners.  (And yet the neighborhood nursery has already sold off their vegetable plants and a large portion of their herbs, a move I just can’t figure out.  If ever there was a year to have crop plants stocked into late June, this is it!  But they’ve been making many odd stocking decisions this year, after laying off their manager – who used to do most of the ordering – late last year.)

The box with the bird netting (and more of my autumn seeds) came this evening.  I can only hope that the raw weather was as unpalatable to the squirrels today as it was to me.  I’m planning to put it over the big pots tomorrow.

After having planted a fair amount of stuff in the back garden over the past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking about more perennial crops that I could add to that area.  Alpine strawberries seem so happy back there that I’m considering trying to locate more varieties to add some, well, variety to the planting, as all the ones I have now are the same kind.  I’m also thinking of adding ramps, which I grew in my old, moister shade garden, and wood nettle (ditto), and groundnut (which I grew in a sunnier, drier spot in my old garden, with so-so results, possibly just because it was close to the raspberry bramble).  All three are native to the US, though I don’t think they are all are originally native to my exact locale.  All three are available from Tripple Brook Farm, a nursery towards the other side of my small state, and one which I utilized to stock unusual plants (especially natives) in my old garden.  They had high quality, good sized plants then (significantly larger than what most mail order companies send, and worth the generally higher cost), so I am hoping they still do today.  I see on the edibles section of their website that they’re still selling wild rice – and I still wish I had appropriate conditions for it!  Maybe someday…  If anyone reading this has recommendations for other unusual perennial crops, especially ones for partial shade to mostly-shade in compost-enriched soil, I’d be quite interested to hear them.  Care to share?

One Thing I’ll Never Understand 21 June 2009

I will never understand why some people think it is OK to steal plants (or flowers, for that matter) from gardens.  This evening I noticed that at least two of my plants are missing from my front garden – my favorite creeping snapdragon and one of my creeping verbenas.  It looks like there are a couple more holes, but I can’t remember for sure yet if there are more stolen plants or if the person was just digging around in a messy way that makes it look like more things were taken than actually were.  (Since they took creepers, it’s also possible that they’d rooted as they went along and it was a messy process to steal them.)  It’s not as irritating as some of the things that have happened – like the first plant I had stolen here, when I’d raised a tall verbena from the seedling I bought it as to a 6 ft. tall plant and then someone literally walked INTO the middle of my garden (at least all the plants appear to have been stolen from right by the retaining wall this time), dug it up, and took it late in the year; or when someone stole my Oriental poppy blooms just after they opened – but it still annoys and baffles me, and it’s already late enough that my local nursery no longer carries the plants that were stolen (which is where I originally bought those ones).

Someone recently tacked some signs up a couple blocks away notifying the neighborhood of a thief that had been stealing things from gardens and porches, so at least I know it’s not just my garden this time, but still – this pattern shows that someone seems to actually be creating their garden by stealing from other peoples’.  If you want free plants, there are certainly nicer ways to go about it – such as, you know, actually getting to know other gardeners, who will then give you extra plants and/or seeds.  I don’t get why anyone would both want to create something pretty and alive (a garden) and be willing to rob others who are doing the same thing to accomplish it.

Work in the garden today 20 June 2009

Pansy, violas, and baby blue eyes: Too bad this photo isn't as good as it looked on my camera's viewer. It does at least finally show what the easy-from-seed California native annual, baby blue eyes, looks like (center).

Licorice plant 'Silver Falls' with snapdragon: Licorice plant has done really really well over the past couple of years in the hottest part of my hot, windy front garden (it is tender, so I just plant a new one each year). I especially like 'Silver Falls' because it has smaller leaves than the species. This snapdragon has 'Cranberry' in its name; it's one of the creeping kinds. The snapdragons are putting out a lot more blooms than in this photo now that it's rained so much. That's bacopa (another tender plant) creeping away on the right, in case you're wondering.

I spent a while working in the back garden today, on the same bed I primarily worked on the last time I worked in back.  I planted six more foxgloves, six columbines, the rest of the flowering tobaccos, the lemon balm, the lovage, one of the hardy begonias, two germanders, the coleuses (6 of them, if I recall correctly), the other penstemon for partial shade, and … probably some things I’m forgetting.  I also transplanted the non-’Telham Beauty’ peach-leafed bellflowers that had been in front into the back bed, to try to minimize possible cross-breeding in the future, and moved the ‘Telham Beauty’ that hasn’t bloomed into the front.  I also moved a couple things in front – the sundial lupine has gotten really shaded by the cup plant and has yet to bloom, so I moved it to a sunnier position, and I moved the German ornamental onions (the kind of onion that makes a circle of leaves) to a sunnier spot because they were on the edge of the crop bed and had started to be shaded by the cucumber.  That bed in back is FINALLY actually looking pretty full instead of like it’s sporadically planted with bare spots between the plants if you look ground-wards.  It’s nice to see it looking better.  I’m going to need to expand it to fit the lowbush blueberries, as their final size should be at least a foot wide each, and there’s not enough room for them in the area that’s currently dug up.  The one that bloomed in its pot has berries forming, by the way!  Yay!

Other than adding the lowbush blueberries to that bed, my next main plan in back is to work on the bed next to it, the other bed that gets partial shade (though most of it gets more shade than the bed I’ve been working on).   The colchicum leaves (for the autumn-blooming colchicums; their leaves appear in spring and die around now, and then they bloom, leaf-less, in autumn) are dying down now, and most of that area will once again be bare, so it would be nice to have something in that spot that will grow up as the leaves are dying and cover the area after they go.  I’m not quite sure what that would be, though.  I have a Baptisia I haven’t planted, but if it’s happy it would get so big that it might block the sunlight to the colchicum leaves.

I’d hoped to work in the front more as well, but that didn’t happen.  After doing the plantings in back, I cleaned out the bird bath again and put some worm castings on the bed so that hopefully they’ll start soaking in in the downpours that are supposed to come (again) later tonight.  The local nursery just started selling worm castings this year, which is nice, as previously I’d had to mail-order them, but the nursery’s supplier is pretty expensive, so maybe I’ll go back to mail ordering anyhow.  I put worm castings on the crop bed in front earlier this week as well, and the plants seem to have positively responded (I had no experience with this brand of castings prior to this).  Obviously worm castings from worms in one’s own garden are the best, but I’ve felt for a while that if you can find a reputable source for them, adding them to the garden while you’re working on building up the soil helps the plants and, ironically, also seems to help encourage more worms.

Now I just need to get someone to come help me spread the next batch of compost over the beds (it’s a big batch!), and find a leaf shredder or a push mower to chop up the leaves in the pile in back so that I can mulch the back beds with them.  I’d like to start having a living mulch under the crops in the main crop bed, but it seems difficult to find much information on living mulches that are for somewhat shady spots (since the crops would block a lot of the light) instead of for stuff like “underplanting orchards.”  So I’m still trying to figure that out.  All the stuff I’ve been rereading and reading (depending on which thing) lately on soil systems has been getting me back into doing much more conscious strategizing about how to make the soil and the surface ideal environments for plants and beneficials, rather than just adding compost as regularly as I can.  Now that I’m seeing the Robins almost every day (often multiple times a day) and, at dusk today, spied what I think may have been a pair of Catbirds (I suspect my alpine strawberries will disappear much faster now!), I am also feeling some positive reinforcement for what I’ve done so far.