More mid season garden notes

There i was looking at my onions together as a "stash"... in my head i was thinking "i really didn't get that much... i dropped the ball".  I was going on about the smaller onions that got shaded and didn't do as well and i saw a few that should have been harvested earlier, or perhaps watered less... watering less would have helped them not show signs of rot i believe.  You can make some mistakes in gardening and make up with them for other minor corrections, like for example not soaking the shady onion patch every day as a matter of prescribed blind master principle.   It's like not watering beets or chard in the beating sun.. the leaves will brown and damage the plant's ability to master it's craft... if you know what i mean.

It was about that time somebody walked into the yard and said "holy mackerel that is one incredible pile of onions... did you actually grow all of that... that's incredible".  Something about dreams and levels of achievement... me being a high yield yearning insane maniac would see a result in a different light as somebody that is awed by the wonder of growing a little food for yourself.

More Hops notes... On a hot day the hops plant towers provide a nice column of shade for our hero as he soaks his soil.  It is my determination at this time that the last few spinach plants are benefiting from the shade on these hot days.  Remember of course that the hops plant is a key breeding territory of our good friends the lady bug.

Here is a hot tip for all of you community gardeners... don't grow zucchini cause every time you go to the garden there is some person there who has grown too much zucchini and is trying to give you some.  No need to take up space in your precious plot for that crop... just be social and share your harvests.  Take it from me... you can only eat so much zucchini bread before the mere sight of a zucchini  turns you a slight shade of green.  It's true... put a zucchini under your throat in the sun and you will see a green shade on your neck skin... and that's about as useful as a zucchini can be.  It's a confused vegetable that is actually in a botanical sense a fruit.  Sure you can use it for things, but there will always be a better option if you want to dial in a nice meal.  Apparently deep frying the flowers is a good tip, but i haven't tried it... it sure would help cut down on the amount of insipid zucchini's  one might have to deal with.  I have a summer squash plant and the trick there is to harvest them as immature while the rind is still tender and edible. Apparently  they are called "summer squash" because of their short shelf life, probably due to the tender rind, as opposed to a "winter squash" that has a tough rind and stores well into winter.  Kids loved them and so did the adults... good test.

This is the bulk of one of my 4 carrot patches... I have to start bringing them in as they will go woody and lose their flavor.  In a perfect world you would go and harvest the carrots as you needed them.. i have made this error before.  I think if that is your plan you have to  plant patches a week apart, and that would be a fair bit of work and focus.  When planting i tend to get into what one might call "savage attack planting"... kind of like an aggressive for check in the game of hockey.  A massive blast of work in a time period that you have free on a particular day... sometimes if you get too tentative time just slips on by and it will seem like a thousand miles of space between what you did and what you wanted to do.  Basically we have lots of carrots and some new space opening up in the garden.  With the beets and carrots coming in i think if i got some starts i could squeeze another crop out of this season.

We were talking about this second crop idea around the dinner table as we were shelling peas:

My oldest daughter recounted a story about her and her friend being over at the house and i had just made a fine carrot, beet and ginger juice and i was going on about how delicious it was... apparently I poured them a couple of glassed and low an behold they weren't keen on it (might be a ginger thing)... as the story goes i was in such a state of triumph i wouldn't accept the idea that my offering wasn't a delectable snack that when they tried to escape without finishing it i called them back to finish up, and i guess i was so happy that they didn't want to let me down the choked it back, only near the end was i able to decipher that perhaps my version of "nectar of the gods" was a bit different then theirs.  Sounds like something that could have happened.

Since we are going with the photographs this is my harvest production team braiding up the garlic... as dad always preached it's good to have a lot of hands for these types of jobs... back then it was me...  tuned me into a good worker which is never a bad skill to have.

Heat wave... go with your horses

Coming around the first corner into the back stretch the peas that shot out early are fading fast... peas are not ideal hot weather plants,  the peas that are coming are not as delicate as the ones that came before.  I was in central and eastern North America for the best of the peas this year but i told a hand full of locals to eat their fill while i was away... no need anything going to waste.  I put the pickling cucumbers right beside the peas and they are now booming, and cucumbers are hot weather plants.  They are my horses right now so i cleared the track (trellis) and let them have it.

It's always hard to bump off a plant but sometimes you have to make executive decisions like this.  In fact i am wearing the goat horns tonight... i let the onions go too long, much like i did the garlic earlier in the season.  I guess i can hate myself less because i wasn't here, but there is still a small knot of failure in my system over this.  Notes on onions... field crop and they need space... the ones that had to compete for sun are plenty smaller than the ones that did not.  All in all i have a pretty good yield of red zeplin and walla walla onions.  I will need to dry them for storage, just another one of those tasks in a gardeners life.  It's a good life of course.  Dad would tie them up by the greens, about 8 onions in a bunch and hang them in the garage for a while... I have no garage only a damp basement, so i will have to find the method that works best... like eating non stop walla walla onion rings, and Greek salads.  I will make onion rings but probably not non stop... a couple of good onion ring OD's and i'll be good.  I made a mean risotto with the walla walla onions and i bet you they would be king hell in a salad (they are sweet). 

My potato box took a hit while i was gone... this whole going away on vacation is having an inverse relationship on my potato yield.  Oh well potatoes are cheap and some are still alive, but i put a melon at the top of the potato box.  It will get full sun and be hot as blazes so we shall see what happens... kind of like a side bet... another horse in the race in that spot and we shall see who wins, with the slight chance of a double victory.

Carrots and beets are ideal right now... good size and tasty, and the beans are forming as they take over the onion patch.  True that i often tend to focus on failures... which is a great learning technique by the way. 

Did i mention the hops are epic?  I had a friend water the house hops and he emailed me about all of the bugs on the plants... did i know what they were?  I said they were probably lady bugs, to which he replied "i know ladybugs and it's not them", to which i replied "look up ladybug larvae"... bingo!  Do it... look up lady bug larvae... cool eh!  You have to love the hops not only to they preserve and flavor beer but they provide and ace breeding ground for one of you garden's most trustworthy aphid attackers.  And that folks is our symbiosis moment.

When coming back from vacation it is always a treat to walk into your garden and see what happened... provided of course your assigned caretakers didn't fall asleep at the wheel... that didn't happen to me.  i believe i do a fair job at stressing the seriousness of hydration to my assigned caretakers. A good litmus test is obviously the state of the garden but also a kind of nervous interaction with the caretaker afterward in which they ask if they did OK.  I have always found if the person is nervous about disappointing you they will do a better job... now i also stress they should feed themselves from the garden at the same time as a means to bring them into the holy and spiritual aspect of the caretakers duty.  But with humans, we prefer to be motivated by fear... so be it.

The chard has gone bananas as well...  if i were a vegetarian i could probably eat completely and solely out of the garden... but i'm kind of more of a meatatarian... it just is that way, these canine teeth don't lie.  Truth is sometimes i think of eating less meat, but that means a bit less meat and more vegetables in my world.  I have located some local organically farmed meat and i am working on spending my money on that kind of meat, i won't buy meat that comes in styrofoam, because that is just insane.  For your serving of meat you need to send some plastic wrap and a sheet of styrofoam  to the landfill?   And this is normal?  Oh i forgot if it is wrapped and stamped in plastic it is safe... yes yes...

Still no tomatoes, but soon there will be a mighty bounty... the plot thickens!