First Cabbage Harvest

My cabbages came back from the brink a couple weeks ago and are quickly becoming harvest-able. All my cole crops are happy for the cool weather we've been having, though if it continues I fear I will be harvesting only green tomatoes. Today I harvested my first savoy cabbage, picking one that isn't as large as it could get, but which will clear out some space for its neighbor to mature. I cut an X into the stem I left behind, which supposedly will encourage the plant to make 4 more tiny cabbage heads. We'll see.

I'm thinking of making this one into kimchi. It's not Chinese-style cabbage, but the head is loose enough that I may be able to get the salt in.

Not much else has progressed dramatically in the garden since my last post. I harvested my daikon radishes for kimchi, but they were a touch disappointing. I'd hoped they'd be bigger and/or I'd have more of them, so I wouldn't have to buy radishes from the store, but I think I'll have to. Next year I can plant a larger, longer-maturing variety for more kimchi, though.

That still didn't put a damper on my garden enjoyment, as you can see here:

Does my baby have my nose?

This past week I've just been harvesting delicious summer squash and thinning my green onions. My carrots are coming along and I ate one of the white ones today--it was wonderfully sweet and zingy. Next year I'll plant way more carrots, because they're just so much better when you grow them at home.

Hopefully the weather will warm up a bit to give everyone's garden plants the last little jolt they need. I've been talking to other people and most of them have tons of unripe tomatoes still too. My cabbages have set a lot of fruit but they're still too tiny to harvest--I'm hoping they'll all ripen at once for pickling.

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).

Carrots are Catching up, General Update

Carrots

My carrots are starting to emerge, so perhaps I didn't doom them to rot in the ground after all. The dill and cilantro seeds I sprinkled around at the last minute are coming up too, so perhaps Apiaceae simply take a little longer to get going.

Other Veggies

On the other hand, many of my collards and beans have not yet emerged, so I may have to re-plant. We're going out of town this weekend, so I'll give them until Monday to hustle up out of the soil.

One of my cabbages died (a Red Acre) out of the 15 or-so others. That's pretty good for a plant that's known to transplant poorly. I still have a few extra seedlings, so I'll put another one in. The red cabbage has looked the most unhappy, so I don't know if it's the variety or how they were treated before I got them. Hopefully the green varieties will keep doing well.

The peppers are back to wilting again, but now they're growing dark green leaves up top. I can only assume that's a good thing, as I have no idea what to think at this point.

Water Management

I think I was over-watering things, so I'm going to pull back a bit. I'll try to keep it more around the recommended 1" per week, with the exception of the seedlings, which I've been watering every 1-2 days to keep the soil moist.

Phenology

The corn in our 'neighborhood' is finally tasseling. It's so tall we can't see the road anymore, which is nice. Hopefully the harvest will be good after such a crazy spring.

Planting the Seedlings: Tomatoes, Peppers, and Cabbages

This weekend I began planting the starts. I planted:

July 11th : tomatoes
July 13th: cabbages and peppers

I also threw the dill plants into the ground because they were looking so wretched. I have little faith that they'll survive, but it's worth a shot. I still have more cole crops to plant, it's just a matter of finding sunny space for them.

Variety-wise, I basically went with what was available at the garden stand. The tomatoes are a random assortment including Better Boy, Brandywine, Rutgers, and some yellow full-size and cherry toms. The cabbages included Savoy, Stonehead, Discover, and Red Acre. The peppers weren't well-labeled, but I think they were all sweet peppers.

For all the seedlings, I tried to mix the varieties around so that I wouldn't have all of one type in a single location, in case that spot's bad for growing.

I also took a few approaches to the planting itself. The tomatoes were really leggy, so I removed their bottom leaves and buried them quite deep. Since they were already so tall, I had to mound soil up around them to keep the stems buried. This might have been a bad approach from a water management perspective. I mulched heavily around the mounds using oat straw. I placed the tomatoes in the second row from the north. They will get excellent sun there, but won't be shaded by taller plants. I may have spaced them a bit close--I used a checkerboard pattern with ~24" between plants, giving 3 offset rows in the mound. If I get a single tomato out of this I will be amazed.

When I watered the tomatoes I noticed that a lot of the water was running into the walkways, so I took a slightly different approach with the peppers. These I placed on the furthest north mound, where they will be next to the green beans, but not in their shadow. Between the peppers and the beans I made a trench, where most of the water flows. I hope this will make a little reservoir of moist soil whenever it rains or I water. I have not mulched these yet and I'm not sure if I will.

For planting the cabbages I got cleverer still. I placed each cabbage plant in a small depression, so that they will be surrounded by moist soil after I water and the water won't run into the walkways. I mulched heavily between the plants to discourage weeds, hold more water, and keep the soil cool. I've heard that cabbage roots are delicate and they often don't survive transplanting. I tried to be gentle with them, but they were terribly root-bound in the pots. I teased the seedlings apart while holding the rootmass in a pail of water--a technique I perfected on swallow-wort, of course. So hopefully these little guys will survive. I would really like to put up a bunch of sauerkraut from my own garden.

Next I need to plant the herbs and I'm trying to monitor the garden to find a sunny spot that's not in high demand from vegetables. I will be receiving my seeds early next week and then I will plant those.