Harvest Hopes and Bright Blossoms

A variety of zucchini squash known as 'Eight Ball' for obvious reasons. I figured that if I was going to venture into the dangerous territory of growing summer squash, I might as well grow something that would be fun to stuff.

My garden continues to mature at an amazing rate. A burst of cool air has descended on Minnesota, but it's brought with it brilliant sunshine. The combination is making my cole crops very happy but is still bringing along my hot-weather-lovers nicely. Sadly, the crisp nights and slanting sunlight remind us how close fall is. I was hoping to put in fall peas and spinach, but there won't be time for the peas to mature. Next year I'll have to plan better.

The median last frost-free date is September 28th here, so I have just over a month for my garden to finish its production. Some of my plants will be OK until it dips into the mid-20s, which generally happens after the first week of October. The full story, with median frost free dates and growing season for many locations in Minnesota, can be found here.

Fortunately, some of my vegetables that were sluggish to start may just mature within that time. I've also harvested many turnips, radishes, and greens, and my summer squash are just starting their profusion. Even my cabbages appear to have survived the evil moth attack of a couple of weeks ago and are beginning to head beautifully. Below is a pictorial update of the garden.

My tomatoes are a complete mess, but starting to be a tasty one.

After some windy storms my tomatoes have blown down, despite my earlier efforts to stake them up. At this point I'll leave them down since I'm afraid of snapping the brittle stems. They will probably mature anyway, and might even do so better now that there's more light shining into the densely planted area.

My beans are finally starting to set fruit, though they are still only knee-high and will probably not produce the yield they would have had with a full season. It's still very exciting. This is the French filet bean, 'Cupidon'.

I planted these watermelons on a lark, but with another month to mature, they may yet be edible. They are certainly adorable either way.


Likewise, I took a chance planting these cucumbers from seed. The ones that had enough space and sun have already begun to flower and make fruit. These are 'Amour' pickling cukes.

Savoy and 'Stonehead' cabbages looking good and forming heads. I think the savoy cabbage will be great for things like colcannon (I'll post the recipe later).

I planted some flowers here and there in the garden to encourage pollinators and add extra color.

A wee spider valiantly standing guard (or maybe just chilling in her hammock?) on a stalk of 'Golden' purslane.

I call this 'Squash Blossom Jungle'.

The flowers are really tucked down in the depths of the plants, which are quite poky, by the way. I haven't made any fried squash blossoms yet because I'm afraid I'll accidentally harvest female flowers, reducing my squash harvest. The male blossoms seem to be on stalks, while the female ones are more sessile against the stem, so I might be able to get some blossoms without causing harm.

Here's a cheeky little bee visiting a female flower (IIRC) with a load of pollen.

I still can't believe how adorable the teensy patty pan squash are right now. They're a bit more slow-growing than the zukes, but they will be SOOO delicious.

Who needs cabbage roses when you can have rose-like cabbages?

My 'Red Acre' cabbages aren't doing so well. In the past my red cabbages have grown better than the green ones, but this time they're struggling. These seemed to have difficulty getting established and are more sensitive to water stress and evil moth nibbling.


Anyone who can name this 'moon food', as Dan calls it, wins a box of donuts!

Harvest Season Gets Underway

The other day I went to all the trouble of taking and uploading pictures and then I completely forgot to update my blog with them! It's 35 days after my main planting on July 17th and already I'm harvesting things. Here are some photos from August 19th, showing the progress of the garden and some of the fruits of my labors. These are in no particular order.

The garden, just over one month after planting. The tomatoes are almost as tall as me and I've given up trying to stake them up. So far they have lots of flowers and green fruit.

I planted this cabbage from seed and it might just have a chance of setting fruit before the snow flies. No flowers yet, though.

Scarlet Queen turnips--they are just so beautiful. Their greens also grew a lot taller and straighter than the other turnips, making them even more distinctive.

My first turnip harvest! Definitely the most adorable vegetable, I am looking forward to making them into tasty pickles this weekend as more mature.

I was too exhausted to do anything with the greens so I guiltily composted them.

Here's a closeup of some of the caterpillar damage.

Amazingly, though, the cabbages are starting to head. I may need to sprinkle them with bug killer again once the rain lets up, but they are well on their way to being sauerkraut now.

My first bean blossoms. Come on little guys, you can make beans before winter, I just know it!

And hooray! My first tomato of the season (Rutgers variety). It was tomato-tastic, though one side was home to some kind of naughty bug. I ate the rest though and it was like mainlining summer.

So that's the update as we zoom headlong into fall. Yesterday at the bakery I took an order for a cake for the day after labor day! It's really just around the corner. It's amazing that I was able to pull off this garden and it's been very rewarding, even though harvest is just beginning. It's my first real garden and the results are amazing. After our deluge a week ago we had more dry weather, so I started watering again. Today, though, we had a nice gentle rainfall that will help the plants to fill out.

First Harvest - Shunkyo Red Radishes

Hooray! I have my first real harvest from the garden, beside the leaves of mustard greens that I've been picking here and there. These radishes are righteously spicy, so I wasn't sure what to do with them at first, since they'd overpower any kind of salad. I wrote to the wonderful Maangchi for some advice, and sure enough she replied with a tasty kimchi recipe. I'll cross-post the results with the food blog in a few days, after the fermentation is complete. For the time being I'll admire my beautiful and bold radishes. Soon it will be turnip time!

Update and Caterpillar Nightmare!

Another obligatory cloud shot. On this one I was having fun with negative space, and I like the effect.

My garden as of August 10th. The weed pressure has been very minor since I planted so late and the weather's been dry. Even in a large-ish garden I don't have to do much control. The landlord has since mown the surrounding weeds down.

It's been ages since I last updated and things in the garden have changed. We had several weeks of dry weather and then some soaking rainstorms, which seem to have jolted the garden out of its dry slumber. My tomatoes are thriving, my beans are finally getting ready to flower, my peppers are flowering, and my turnips have shot up like crazy. Since most people around here are already harvesting the above vegetables, we'll just have to see if these catch up.

My 'Garnet Giant' mustard greens are doing well. They're tasty, but zingy enough to need cooking. I love the color.

My first acorn squash. I got this on impulse at the garden store and put it in a neglected corner of the garden, but it seems to be doing well after a couple weeks of droopiness.

Does anything smell as good as a tomato plant? Oh I hope these make it to maturity!

This shot would have been cooler if I had a manual focus. In the foreground is a cucumber I bought as a seedling, and in the background are seeds I planted. In the few days since I've taken this photo, they've developed at least 2 true leaves.

When I planted this garden I tried to remain detached, since it's my first time with a real, full-size garden, and I had no idea if I'd succeed. I couldn't help but get emotionally invested, though, and now I'm terribly upset by the possible demise of my cabbages. This is worsened, of course, by my desire to make gallons and gallons of sauerkraut.

It turns out that the pretty white butterflies that were 'gracing' my garden are known as 'Introduced Cabbage Moths'. They ugly eggs at the base of the petioles of cole crops, which hatch into velvety green caterpillars. RAVENOUS green caterpillars. They go to town on the leaves, leaving shot holes and eventually destroying or at least greatly reducing yield.

They tend to be a problem later in the year because they've had months to reproduce. It probably doesn't help that the garden was surrounded by massive weeds that the landlord hadn't mowed, where the moths could have been chilling out and reproducing on cruciferae family weeds.

These were nifty until I realized they were massacring my cole crops :'-(

This head of savoy cabbage isn't too badly affected by the evil worms, but you can see some of their naughty nibbling.

So, even though I swore I wouldn't go to great lengths to save my garden from threats, I did anyway and bought up some insecticide at the hardware store. I wanted to start with tamer stuff so I got insecticidal soap and pyrethrin dust. My attempts at control were interrupted by a trip to the City and an all-day rainstorm, so the damage got worse.

I started by picking all the caterpillars I could find off of the leaves and throwing them in a bucket to drown. Then I started spraying both sides of the leaves with the insecticidal soap, but the squirt bottle was a piece of junk and would stop working every 3-4 pumps. This drove me nuts, but I got as far as I could before it got dark (about 2/3 of the plants). After a day and a half, when it stopped raining (this morning), I gave up on the insecticidal soap and switched to pyrethrin dust. It stuck fairly well to the leaves and was much easier to use than the soap--I focused it on the stem and petioles. By this time, the eggs had swollen ominously. It's supposed to kill insects on contact, so hopefully it killed any that hatched this morning. Unfortunately it poured rain today and washed the powder off a few hours later. Pyrethrins are quickly de-activated by sunlight, so perhaps I didn't loose that much activity anyway. In the future I will apply it in the evening when there's no rain predicted.

Who knows if my efforts to save my cabbages will succeed or not. I'll probably apply the pyrethrins again, and then consider that enough. There's always the colorfully rustic local farmer's market. There's only one stand that seems to grow vegetables professionally--the others are just people who planted extra and shelled out $5 to put up a stand at the market. Oh yeah, and the old lady who sells the junk out of her house and uses the market as an opportunity to chat with everyone in town. She specializes dogeared dime-store romance novels :-P

The collards don't seem to like the heat, so I may need to seed a third time, or just give up on them. You can see an evil moth on the left, just waiting to wreak more havoc.

The 'Carson Yellow Wax' beans haven't sprouted at all, much to my disappointment. I'm not sure if it's a bad batch of seed, the heat, or if the resident critters just like to eat the seeds right out of the soil.

Other than the cabbages, things are going pretty well. There are some plants that don't like the heat, so I may do yet another planting. They're doing a little better with the mass of cool air that's hanging over MN, courtesy of Hudson Bay. Let's hope it persists (as it's predicted to)...despite the cold, wet spring the crops seem to be happy this summer and MN is expecting a record harvest (though of course that's due to a record corn PLANTING, thanks to crazy high prices).

Tomatoes have been Staked

Another breathtaking cloud on the march.

If my tomatoes were vampires they'd be so dead. I staked most of them up using the wire frames that my landlords left with the barn. I have 21 plants (or rather mounds--some contain more than one tomato plant) and I staked up the western 2/3rds of them with the wire and did my best with the boxelder branches I cut a few weeks ago. I will definitely need to keep monitoring the tomatoes and tying them up as they grow. A couple of plants were damaged by lodging and a couple were damaged as I staked them, but hopefully they will recover.

So far two of my tomatoes are infected with what seems to be bacterial wilt. One died completely and the other is wilting and looking like it's walking towards the light. If the second one dies I will try a diagnostic test in which you put the infected stem in water and see if it exudes a nasty slime. If it does, it died from bacterial wilt. One additional symptom is yellowing of the lower leaves, which I didn't see, so it could be a different problem altogether. See factsheet here.

At this point I think the most likely explanation is that the stems got fertilizer burn and the ones that had it the worst are the ones dying.