I've been a bit of a food hoarder ever since the Great Recession. I always buy nonperishable food and toiletries in bulk at Costco. I have a chest freezer in my utility room that I keep full of frozen meat and extra vegetables from the garden. It's all stuff I use anyway (it's not like I'm buying buckets of freeze dried food or MRE's), so I figured it was a harmless habit, but one that I'd probably never really need anyway.
And then this pandemic happened, and suddenly it's all come in really handy. I still have plenty of toilet paper!
Seed saving is similar. Saving seeds is fun, but I figured I was kidding myself to think I'd ever really need it. I don't have any varieties that are unique or special. They are ones always available in seed catalogs or from other gardeners. I could always get more if I have to. I don't have any varieties that are relying on just me to save them or else they will go extinct.
And now since the pandemic, all the seed companies are shut down due to "high demand" that they can't keep up with. I guess suddenly everyone decided they are going to grow their own food.
Since I had the baby, I've scaled back my gardening, and have just been concentrating on my favorites that do really well for me. No experimenting with new things, at least not right now. So I don't really need the seed catalogs right now. I have jars full of all my favorite varieties in my freezer. I only use seed catalogs for trying out new varieties. I have all my old favorites in plentiful supply.
I have enough that I could share them with people. I'm listed on Seed Savers Exchange. I'm assuming, since with the Exchange you request seeds directly from other gardeners, that you can still do that right now while all the seed companies are closed.
I'm surprised I haven't gotten any requests for anything since the pandemic. Actually, I've gotten very few requests overall since I joined. Just one for tomato seeds and two for I'itois onions (I'm waiting for them to mature before I send out bulbs). Maybe not a lot of people know about Seed Savers Exchange.
But suddenly the online seed exchange seems a lot more useful than it did before. Before it just seemed like fun. Now it seems like one of the only safe ways to get seeds right now.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Friday, March 6, 2020
Irrigating with Ollas
My husband Daniel is addicted to Craigslist. This isn't always a bad thing. We've gotten some pretty nice pieces of furniture from there, including the entertainment center that's in our living room right now. I wouldn't advise getting mattresses or couches from there (ew, bed bugs!), but you really can get some good deals on things like entertainment centers, cabinets, bookshelves, tables, desks, etc. They might be free, or they might be a fraction of the price you would pay to get one new. The only problem is you usually need to haul them away yourself, so you need a pickup truck and people who are strong enough to load and unload the thing.
He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.
Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.
The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!
I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.
Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!
What are Ollas?
Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.
Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.
Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.
Pros and Cons of Ollas
So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.
I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.
I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.
There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.
I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.
Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.
And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.
And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.
Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.
If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.
He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.
Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.
The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!
I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.
Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!
 |
| Ollas sitting against the side of my house. |
What are Ollas?
Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.
Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.
Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.
 |
| Ollas installed in the garden. |
Pros and Cons of Ollas
So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.
I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.
I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.
There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.
I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.
Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.
And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.
And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.
Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.
If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.
Friday, February 7, 2020
My Attempt at a Permaculture Food Forest
Remember those fruit trees I planted in my front yard? In the last couple of years I've been trying to turn them into a "food forest." At the very least, I don't want them to continue to be fruit trees sticking out of a lawn of Bermuda and St. Augustine grass, and instead be a garden with fruit trees in it. The "food forest" method seemed like a good way to chip away at the lawn and replace it with a different understory for the fruit trees that doesn't have to be mowed, and might be useful in itself.
Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.
My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.
The Fruit Trees
The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.
Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.
The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.
When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.
The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.
For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.
The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.
Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.
A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.
None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.
The Hügelkultur Beds
A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.
I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.
On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.
Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.
Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.
Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.
How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.
I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.
One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.
At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.
The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest
I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.
I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.
Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.
As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.
Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.
General Thoughts So Far
I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.
A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.
I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.
Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.
The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.
Permaculture seems to be a kind of trendy thing right now, so I thought I'd give it a go. What is permaculture? It's hard for me to explain, actually. The definition seems to be fuzzy. To simplify it as much as I can, it seems to be an attempt to make agriculture mimic natural ecosystems more closely. For example, using polycultures instead of monocultures, using organic methods of fertilization and pest control, and so on. However, when you start reading about permaculture, it can start getting very philosophical and Utopian. Its most enthusiastic supporters seem to think we can Save the World with this technique. It actually reminds me of the Grow Biointensive method in that way, even though they're kind of opposites. Grow Biointensive is actually very unnatural, with all the double-digging and intensive planting to maximize yields. Permaculture seems to be less concerned with maximizing yields on limited space, and more concerned with minimizing inputs of labor, water, fertilizer, etc. The similarity is in their promises to Save the World by growing food for humanity in a more environmentally sustainable way.
Obviously I'm going into this skeptical that it will be quite as awesome as people say it will be, but I have this area in my front yard with fruit trees, so I thought I might give it a shot. Gardening is my hobby. I'm not trying to completely feed my family with this, so if it doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
OK, so what I started out with was a suburban front yard in Central Texas in a neighborhood that thankfully doesn't have an HOA, so I can plant whatever I want in the front yard. The fruit trees went in the front yard because the back yard is too shady. In the front yard we have a cluster of live oak trees that shades the house nicely, with non-native St. Augustine grass underneath them, and then a sunny strip between the oak trees and the street with non-native Bermuda grass. The fruit trees were planted in this sunny area.
My house is in the Texas Hill Country (also known as the Edwards Plateau), which means we have a thin layer of black clay soil on top of limestone bedrock. It's Texas, so the summers are scorching hot, the winters are mild (we get freezes, but it seldom stays below freezing for more than one night at a time), and spring and fall are our rainy seasons. The natural ecosystem here would be a Plateau Live Oak and Ashe Juniper woodland. Permaculture enthusiasts claim that you can make a food forest anywhere, in any type of climate, on any type of soil. OK then.
The Fruit Trees
The first fruit trees we planted, soon after we moved into this house in 2012, were a Wonderful Pomegranate, Meyer Lemon, Satsuma Orange, Key Lime, Gold Nugget Loquat, and an unknown fig variety I got as a cutting from my in-laws.
Pretty soon we found out that Key Limes cannot survive in the ground in our area, at least not until global warming takes away what little winter we have. Apparently Key Limes cannot deal with freezes at all. The first freeze we had killed the entire top of the little tree. I was afraid it was dead, but in spring shoots grew back up from the roots, so we dug it up and put it in a large pot, and that's where it's lived ever since. When it freezes, we take it inside, which be dangerous because it has some nasty thorns. I get a nice crop of golfball-sized limes from it every year.
The Meyer Lemon is only slightly hardier. It might be better off in a pot as well, but it's still in the ground at this point. I try covering it with frost blanket when we have a hard freeze, but it still gets damaged often. Last winter despite getting covered, all of its leaves were killed again. It hasn't yielded fruit in a long time because it has to keep recovering from freeze damage again and again. The main reason why I'm reluctant to put it in another big pot is because we have limited space in this house, and already have a key lime, rubber tree plant, and Norfolk Island pine in big pots that we have to find room in the house for each winter. One of these days I guess I'll have to get a greenhouse, but we have so many other household projects going on, I'm not sure when that will happen.
When we removed the Key Lime, I planted a Kumquat in its place. Now that's a good fruit tree to have in the ground in Texas! Even though the tree is still only about 3-4 feet tall, I get a nice crop of fruit off of it every year, and freezes hardly bother it. We do cover it if it gets into the 20's, but I'm not sure if it even needs that.
The Satsuma is also doing fine in the ground. We covered it with frost blanket while it was little, but eventually it got too tall for that. Every now and then it freezes enough to kill a few leaves, but it grows news ones back in the spring. A couple of years ago we got a bumper crop of about 40 fruits. The fruits are like a large tangerine or navel orange, with thick skin that's very easy to peel. I've heard that in Britain, Satsumas are known as "Christmas oranges," and that is around the time when they ripen. I've also been told that a light frost actually makes them sweeter. While the kumquat consistently bears fruit every year, it seems like the Satsuma is doing that thing some fruit trees do where it has a heavy crop one year that wears out the tree, and then doesn't do much the next year. The year after we had the 40 fruits, it only made two fruits, and then this last year we had a weird late freeze in March that killed a lot of its blossoms, but even after that I harvested 11 fruits in early December.
For the non-citrus trees, the best one is probably the fig. Nobody knows what variety it is, but it gives us a good crop of small figs each year. The figs are light purple and only about 1-2 inches long, so they are smaller than figs from the grocery store, but they are very sweet and tasty. The tree sheds its leaves in the fall and grows them back in the spring, and our freezes don't seem to bother it at all. It's been growing very fast, and it's amazing that it started out as just a little cutting.
The Gold Nugget Loquat has also been growing fast, and has become the largest fruit tree in the food forest. However last spring was the first year we actually got a good crop of fruit off of it. Loquats are a little weird because the tree is cold-hardy, but the flowers are not. They flower in November, grow fruit through the winter, and then the fruit ripens in spring. Every single year we've had freezes that killed the flowers before they could make fruit until last year.
Perhaps the most disappointing tree so far is the Wonderful Pomegranate. The tree itself is beautiful. It's grown really big. It gets large orange flowers on it that the hummingbirds love, and then they fall off and that's it. Last year 3 or 4 of them tried to make fruits, but then when they were about tennis ball sized they split open and rotted. I could tell that happened before they were ripe because the insides were still white. I don't know what it's problem is.
A couple of years ago I added three more fruit trees in a second row behind the first row. They are a Houston peach, an Anna apple, and an Ein Shemer apple. This might be pushing things a bit because they are getting pretty close to the oak trees, and might be in too much shade. We did trim some of the limbs off the oak trees, but I've still noticed that they are starting to lean away from the oak trees to get more sun. But maybe a little shade will help them survive the Texas heat? We'll see I guess.
None of them have produced fruit so far, but last year the peach had some blossoms, got 2 or 3 small green fruits on it, and then they fell off. The Ein Shemer apple has gotten a few blossoms each year that just end up falling off, and the Anna apple hasn't even blossomed. Maybe they just need more time. Apple trees aren't self-fertile, which is why I planted two, so Ein Shemer won't make fruit until Anna blossoms anyway.
The Hügelkultur Beds
A food forest is supposed to have an understory of other plants below the fruit trees. My fruit trees started out stuck in lawn grass. I needed to figure out a way to remove the lawn grass and replace it with something else without disturbing the roots of the established fruit trees. That's when I stumbled upon something called Hügelkultur. This is another thing where I'm not sure if it will work as well as they say it will work, but might as well give it a shot. I decided to start by making a bed between each of my fruit trees and then eventually I'll expand out from there. If nothing else, this will mean I won't have to mow between the fruit trees, which has always been a pain.
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| Melons in a hugelkultur bed last year. |
I modified the technique somewhat from what I read about it. I didn't dig a trench or even removed the grass because that seemed like too much work and also might damage the fruit trees' roots. Instead, I covered the grass with a couple of layers of flattened cardboard boxes. We always have plenty of boxes from Amazon or Costco, so this was a way to recycle them.
On top of that is where I put the wood, which is the main distinguishing feature of this kind of raised bed. In our wooded back yard, we have two big brush piles and some logs. I didn't want to use our oak, mesquite, or juniper logs because I prefer those for firewood, but we did have logs from a big Chinaberry tree that fell down. Chinaberry is such a lightweight wood that it doesn't make very good firewood (it burns up too quickly), so I used those logs to line the outsides of the bed, and then in the middle I put all kinds of stuff from the brush piles that I chopped up with loppers or just broke up by hand if they were really rotten.
Then on top of that you need something nitrogen-rich to balance all the carbon in the wood. I used grass clippings from mowing the lawn.
Then on top of that goes some kind of soil-like substance that you can plant things in. I ended up using store-bought topsoil and cow manure. That is probably not ideal because I had to spend money on that part and buy a bunch of individual 40 pound plastic bags of the stuff and spread them on top. But at the time I didn't have a lot of homemade compost ready for something like that, and since I didn't dig a trench, I didn't have soil that I removed from the trench to put on top.
Then I immediately plant them with vegetables. I've found that I should plant them immediately because the roots of the vegetables are needed to hold everything together. So far the best thing to plant in them seems to be winter squash or melons with long vines. The vines also help hold everything together.
How have they done so far? I started them last summer, so they're over a year old now. For one thing, they DO need to be watered. Some people claim that the rotting wood in the beds soaks up so much water like a sponge that you never have to water them. That is not true in Texas, at least not in the summer. The wood I used ranged from very rotten to very fresh, so the fresh wood may not soak up as much water as the rotten wood, but the important thing is I've still had to water them. So far I can't tell if they need to be watered more or less than a traditional raised bed.
I haven't noticed any problems with the plants having nutrient deficiencies. I've seen some people write online about how the wood draws up too much nitrogen as it decomposes. I do occasionally sprinkle fertilizer on mine, but they don't seem to require any more fertilizer than a traditional raised bed.
One thing that ends up happening is as things decompose, the mound starts to collapse and gets big holes in it. Part of that may be because I used a tangle of sticks in them middle instead of logs, and they were sticks of various species of wood at varying stages of decomposition, so they aren't decomposing evenly. When I plant a new crop of something, I stomp around on it a bit to break up the sticks further and compact it a bit, and sometimes fill in the holes with more compost. I figure they'll eventually settle down into something more solid.
At least some of the vegetable plants seem to enjoy the partial shade they get from the fruit trees during the hottest part of the summer, and the fruit trees have essentially gotten a thick mulch between them that probably helps them in the summer as well.
The Biggest Problem with my Food Forest
I'm trying to grow a fruit and vegetable garden in the front yard with no fence around it in the Texas Hill Country. Nobody else in my neighborhood are bothering to do that, and maybe I'm just in denial about how nuts this is, because maybe I'm just going to all this work to feed the local deer herd. Aaarrrgh! DEER! Yes, I know they are cute. I'm also having to constantly battle them to keep them from eating everything.
I use a combination of various techniques, so I haven't done any kind of controlled experiments to see which techniques are the most effective. I put wire cages around some things (which are ugly, I admit). I spray deer repellent that smells like rotten eggs (gross!). When my husband cuts his hair, I sprinkle that around. I have even hung up socks with Irish Spring soap in them from the fruit trees.
Still the deer sometimes munch my plants. I found out that their favorite fruit tree to browse is the peach tree, but the apple trees are also tasty. Any leaves that aren't protected by a wire cage or aren't too high up are eaten. They eat a few leaves off the pomegranate tree too, but don't like the citrus or the fig leaves. They will also rub their antlers on the trunks of young trees of any kind, so they have to be protected with wire cages.
As for the vegetables in the Hügelkultur beds, I pretty much gave up on legumes of any kind. Despite their value for nitrogen-fixing ability, they're also extremely tasty to deer. They also seem to really like cucumber leaves, but aren't as much into the squash leaves (I guess because they're spiny?). They will eat squash leaves, but it's not the first thing they eat. In the winter, greens like lettuce MUST be under wire cages or they all get eaten.
Maybe one day I'll have to give up on growing anything other than citrus trees, or build a fence around the whole thing, but for now I'm making do.
General Thoughts So Far
I'm not expecting my food forest to be like the Garden of Eden, where I can just pick abundant fruits and vegetables with no labor, no watering, no pests, and no need for added fertilizers. That doesn't sound realistic to me at all. I would think that shouldn't sound realistic to most other people either, but that's how some permaculture websites make it sound. The natural ecosystem in my area is an oak-juniper woodland, not an apple-peach woodland or even a citrus-fig woodland, and there are good reasons for that. You can't get something for nothing, and if you want sweet, juicy peaches here instead of acorns and juniper berries then you have to put work into it. Fruit trees are domesticated trees, so they need human help to grow. Just like I couldn't abandon my house cat in the wood and expect her to survive in the wild like a bobcat, you can't expect to be able to plant a peach tree and then let it fend for itself and expect it to survive like a juniper tree.
A fairer comparison would be between a food forest and other methods of fruit and vegetable gardening, such as my raised bed vegetable garden on the other side of the driveway, where I do more of a Square Foot/Biointensive technique. Is the food forest less work, about the same amount of work, or more work? If it's either of the first two, it might still be worth it.
I expect it might depend on the exact species of plants too. I've already gone over how some of my fruit trees are doing much better than others, the fig and kumquat being the best trees with the biggest yields with the least amount of help from me. For the annual vegetables, I prefer growing vining squash in the food forest because it has more room to roam and spread out. On the other hand, I do potatoes in the raised beds because of all the deep digging required to plant and harvest them. I really don't want to be trying to dig potatoes out of a hügelkultur beds with all the sticks in the way, and I don't want anything that requires digging too deeply because that might hurt the fruit tree roots.
Of course gardens are always a work in progress. There are some plants like tomatoes that seem to do OK in both places, though to be fair I've only grown cherry tomatoes in the food forest so far, and cherry tomatoes are tougher than large-fruited tomatoes. I haven't tried peppers in the hügelkultur beds so far, but peppers are almost perennials in this climate (I've had some live for as long as three years before an especially hard frost killed them), so they might be a great candidate for the permaculture garden, which is supposed to be skewed more towards perennials. And I'm still not giving up on figuring out how to coax my pomegranate, peach, and apple trees to set fruit. I've also started planting I'itois onions, multiplier leeks, and ginger here and there in the hügelkultur beds. At least the deer don't like to eat those.
The important thing is it's been fun so far figuring some of this stuff out.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
My Favorite Seed Catalogs
It's seed catalog season, so I thought I'd let you know about some of my favorite companies to get seeds and why. Where you get your seeds from does matter. You want to get varieties that are well adapted to your climate, and a seed catalog that's based in a climate similar to yours will have more of those varieties.
When I first started gardening, I was surprised about how many seed companies are in New England or the Pacific Northwest. They advertised varieties that were quick maturing for short growing seasons, tolerant of cold, etc. Not very helpful for me here in Texas. What I need is heat tolerance and drought tolerance. After a while I finally found some catalogs based in the South that had more of what I was looking for.
Here are my favorites:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
More of my seeds come from here than any other company. They are based in Virginia, so most of their varieties are adapted to the Southeast. That's a little bit wetter than my climate, but many of them still do well, and I hedge my bets by also getting seeds from the next company on my list. Their website also has lots of useful information on it, and I like the cute gnome pictures on the front of their printed catalog.
Besides the usual things like squash, beans, and tomatoes, they have a great selection of heirloom collard varieties, many of which I haven't seen anywhere else. Their potato varieties have also been serving me very well, especially since potatoes are considered to be difficult to grow in Texas.
Overall, this is my go-to seed catalog that I check first if I feel like trying a new variety.
Native Seeds/SEARCH
This my second-biggest source of seeds. They are based in Arizona, which is a drier climate than mine, so combining their varieties with Southern Exposure's varieties works out great. This is actually a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to preserve crop varieties that have been grown by Native Americans in the Southwest, so I'm happy to fork over money to them to help support their mission. You can get varieties here you can't find anywhere else, plus some more common varieties that do well in hot, dry conditions.
This is where I bought 10 bulbs of I'itois onions that have continued to thrive and multiply in my garden ever since. My favorite okra, Beck's Gardenville, also came from here (and it's a local San Antonio variety). They also have a good variety of melons, but of course their biggest selection is of the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash.
There's also this really neat ADAPTS tool on their website where you can type in your address, and it will find varieties of plants that came from climates similar to yours. I've used this to help me decide which varieties to try next.
Those two seed catalogs above are where I get the vast majority of my seeds from, but here are some honorable mentions that I shop at occasionally, or get some specialty things from.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
This company is famous for their "vegetable porn" catalog and huge selection. Yet I've found that over the years I get fewer and fewer seeds from them. Most of the varieties I did get from Baker Creek that did well for me are also carried by Southern Exposure. I've also gotten a lot of varieties from Baker Creek that did not do well. I think it's because they don't concentrate on one specific region, so I got sucked in by the beautiful pictures and bought varieties that were not adapted to my climate.
Baker Creek's strategy seems to be to try to accumulate as many varieties as possible from all over the world. That means you can get some really interesting stuff that's not found anywhere else, but you also have to be careful to pay attention to where the variety is from. Here in Texas, varieties from the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, or India will probably be OK. But not things from Northern Europe or Japan, no matter how pretty they look.
So basically, I don't actually buy a lot of things from Baker Creek, but it's still fun to browse their catalog and order a thing or two just to experiment with something unusual. They also have huge seed packets with generous amounts of seeds in them, which may be advantageous with certain crops.
Filaree Garlic Farm
This is where I go for garlic. They have the best selection I've found, including the very hard to find Creole varieties. The bulbs they send are always in very good shape, and their website has tons of information about growing garlic. They specify which of their varieties do well in warm climates, and which need cold climates, and also which ones harvest earlier or later, and which ones keep longer.
Sand Hill Preservation Center
This is where to go for sweet potatoes, though Duck Creek Farms is also good. Sand Hill has the largest variety of sweet potatoes anywhere, many varieties you can't find anywhere else. My only problem with them is sometimes they arrive a little late since they are in Iowa, and I am in Texas, so I can plant much earlier here. If you are in a hurry, try Duck Creek Farms instead, since they are in Oklahoma and ship earlier in the year.
I've never ordered any seeds from Sand Hill yet, but they do have some interesting things listed that I might like to try some day. They do have the problem of being based in Iowa, so I'd have to be careful not to order something that's not suitable for my climate.
Seed Savers Exchange
Another one in Iowa, but this gets an honorable mention because it's such an important organization. This is where the whole "heirloom vegetable" trend probably got started, and they also got me into heirloom vegetables. I used to order more stuff from them before I discovered my two favorites listed there at the top. Their retail catalog is OK. It has a lot of the more famous heirlooms, but many that either are also found in lots of other catalogs (like Southern Exposure), or wouldn't do well in my climate anyway (sorry Pink Brandywine tomato).
If you are into seed saving though, you need to get on the Exchange. I started listing some of my seeds last year. It took a while for them to finally get into the 21st century and make an online Exchange (before that it was just in print), but now that they do have it up and running, it is very easy to list your seeds. Online seed swapping is lots of fun, you get to share the excess seeds that you have saved, and you might find something really interesting listed by another member. Seed catalogs are great, but you never know when they are going to run out of or discontinue a favorite variety, so it's always good to have a network of home seed savers as a backup.
So there are my favorite places to get seeds (and other planting materials) for my garden. If you also live in the South, consider giving them a try if you haven't already. Even if you don't live in the South, maybe I've given you some ideas on what to look for when searching for your own favorite seed company.
Happy seed ordering!
When I first started gardening, I was surprised about how many seed companies are in New England or the Pacific Northwest. They advertised varieties that were quick maturing for short growing seasons, tolerant of cold, etc. Not very helpful for me here in Texas. What I need is heat tolerance and drought tolerance. After a while I finally found some catalogs based in the South that had more of what I was looking for.
Here are my favorites:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
More of my seeds come from here than any other company. They are based in Virginia, so most of their varieties are adapted to the Southeast. That's a little bit wetter than my climate, but many of them still do well, and I hedge my bets by also getting seeds from the next company on my list. Their website also has lots of useful information on it, and I like the cute gnome pictures on the front of their printed catalog.
Besides the usual things like squash, beans, and tomatoes, they have a great selection of heirloom collard varieties, many of which I haven't seen anywhere else. Their potato varieties have also been serving me very well, especially since potatoes are considered to be difficult to grow in Texas.
Overall, this is my go-to seed catalog that I check first if I feel like trying a new variety.
Native Seeds/SEARCH
This my second-biggest source of seeds. They are based in Arizona, which is a drier climate than mine, so combining their varieties with Southern Exposure's varieties works out great. This is actually a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to preserve crop varieties that have been grown by Native Americans in the Southwest, so I'm happy to fork over money to them to help support their mission. You can get varieties here you can't find anywhere else, plus some more common varieties that do well in hot, dry conditions.
This is where I bought 10 bulbs of I'itois onions that have continued to thrive and multiply in my garden ever since. My favorite okra, Beck's Gardenville, also came from here (and it's a local San Antonio variety). They also have a good variety of melons, but of course their biggest selection is of the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash.
There's also this really neat ADAPTS tool on their website where you can type in your address, and it will find varieties of plants that came from climates similar to yours. I've used this to help me decide which varieties to try next.
Those two seed catalogs above are where I get the vast majority of my seeds from, but here are some honorable mentions that I shop at occasionally, or get some specialty things from.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
This company is famous for their "vegetable porn" catalog and huge selection. Yet I've found that over the years I get fewer and fewer seeds from them. Most of the varieties I did get from Baker Creek that did well for me are also carried by Southern Exposure. I've also gotten a lot of varieties from Baker Creek that did not do well. I think it's because they don't concentrate on one specific region, so I got sucked in by the beautiful pictures and bought varieties that were not adapted to my climate.
Baker Creek's strategy seems to be to try to accumulate as many varieties as possible from all over the world. That means you can get some really interesting stuff that's not found anywhere else, but you also have to be careful to pay attention to where the variety is from. Here in Texas, varieties from the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, or India will probably be OK. But not things from Northern Europe or Japan, no matter how pretty they look.
So basically, I don't actually buy a lot of things from Baker Creek, but it's still fun to browse their catalog and order a thing or two just to experiment with something unusual. They also have huge seed packets with generous amounts of seeds in them, which may be advantageous with certain crops.
Filaree Garlic Farm
This is where I go for garlic. They have the best selection I've found, including the very hard to find Creole varieties. The bulbs they send are always in very good shape, and their website has tons of information about growing garlic. They specify which of their varieties do well in warm climates, and which need cold climates, and also which ones harvest earlier or later, and which ones keep longer.
Sand Hill Preservation Center
This is where to go for sweet potatoes, though Duck Creek Farms is also good. Sand Hill has the largest variety of sweet potatoes anywhere, many varieties you can't find anywhere else. My only problem with them is sometimes they arrive a little late since they are in Iowa, and I am in Texas, so I can plant much earlier here. If you are in a hurry, try Duck Creek Farms instead, since they are in Oklahoma and ship earlier in the year.
I've never ordered any seeds from Sand Hill yet, but they do have some interesting things listed that I might like to try some day. They do have the problem of being based in Iowa, so I'd have to be careful not to order something that's not suitable for my climate.
Seed Savers Exchange
Another one in Iowa, but this gets an honorable mention because it's such an important organization. This is where the whole "heirloom vegetable" trend probably got started, and they also got me into heirloom vegetables. I used to order more stuff from them before I discovered my two favorites listed there at the top. Their retail catalog is OK. It has a lot of the more famous heirlooms, but many that either are also found in lots of other catalogs (like Southern Exposure), or wouldn't do well in my climate anyway (sorry Pink Brandywine tomato).
If you are into seed saving though, you need to get on the Exchange. I started listing some of my seeds last year. It took a while for them to finally get into the 21st century and make an online Exchange (before that it was just in print), but now that they do have it up and running, it is very easy to list your seeds. Online seed swapping is lots of fun, you get to share the excess seeds that you have saved, and you might find something really interesting listed by another member. Seed catalogs are great, but you never know when they are going to run out of or discontinue a favorite variety, so it's always good to have a network of home seed savers as a backup.
So there are my favorite places to get seeds (and other planting materials) for my garden. If you also live in the South, consider giving them a try if you haven't already. Even if you don't live in the South, maybe I've given you some ideas on what to look for when searching for your own favorite seed company.
Happy seed ordering!
Saturday, December 7, 2019
Seed Saving Projects
Knowing that I wouldn't have much time to garden when I have a newborn baby, I've been trying to reduce how much stuff I had going on in the garden this past year. I decided to focus more on a few seed saving projects rather than trying to grow lots different varieties of vegetables for food. In a way growing seeds is easier than growing food because you just plant the plants and then mostly leave them alone. Instead of trying to prevent the lettuce or other greens from bolting, you just let them bolt. Instead of picking pea pods, cucumbers, or okra everyday to make sure you get them while they're still tender enough to eat, just let them all turn brown and then harvest them all at once. Instead of growing several different varieties of a species, just concentrate on growing one favorite variety so it won't cross with anything else. And if the plants get neglected a bit, tell yourself you're selecting them for harsh conditions.
So once I found out I was pregnant, I went through my seed collection and picked out varieties that were getting a bit old or that I was getting low on, which meant it's time to save a new batch of seeds from them.
I also went ahead and started listing varieties on Seed Savers Exchange. For a while I thought you had to be an actual member of SSE to list seeds, but it turns out you don't. (Or maybe that's how it used to be, but they changed their policy.) I have seeds listed on there now. I've only gotten one request so far, which is disappointing, but maybe I'll get more once the print yearbook comes out.
Here's are some varieties I've saved this year and listed on Seed Savers Exchange:
Cougar Lettuce - I got this lettuce from Bountiful Gardens. When they were going out of business I bought a packet of every lettuce they carried that said it was heat tolerant. Cougar is one that's done well for me, so I saved seeds from it this year. Lettuce seeds are easy to save. You just plant a bunch of lettuce and leave it alone and let it bolt. I've read that lettuce doesn't cross, so you can save seeds from multiple varieties, but I just saved this one variety this time around. The hardest part might be cleaning the seeds since they have this white fluffy stuff on them like dandelions. Last Christmas I requested these seed cleaning frames and screens from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, so that makes it much easier.
Tall Telephone Peas - I originally got this variety from Baker Creek in 2009, and this is the third generation I've saved. I like the big long vines this variety produces. That means I get lots of peas for the same amount of space. I grow them on a tall trellis made of cattle panels turned sideways. I didn't harvest any peas to eat this year and just let all the pods turn brown and papery, and then harvested the mature seeds all at once. Easy.
Texsel Greens - I didn't plan on saving seeds from this, since this was the first year for me to grow them, and I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but they did so well that when they finally bolted I let the seeds mature. They are Brassica carinata, which is a tetraploid hybrid between Brassica oleracea (which is the species that collards, kale, and broccoli are in) and Brassica nigra (black mustard), so they won't cross with any other plants I grow. And they are just like a cross between collards and mustard! The leaves are like collard greens, but thinner and a little more spicy. I got a good harvest of them and cooked them the same way I cooked collard greens, and they grew faster than my collard greens (hybrid vigor maybe?).
I also listed some seeds that I harvested in 2018 and 2017 that have been kept in airtight containers in the freezer. I mentioned that in the description just in case anyone cares about that, but they should still be good. I've got several varieties of tomatoes, Tatume squash, Seminole pumpkins, Sugar Snap peas, and Texas Hill Country Red okra. All of them are varieties that have proven their worth in my garden, so I saved seeds from them.
I tried to save seeds from Tuscan Kale, but they didn't make it. It's definitely my favorite kale to eat. It's so much better than the curly kale my grocery store carries. But it doesn't seem to like this hot climate. I think I planted my kale too late this time. It wasn't able to mature before it got hot, and I waited and waited for it to bolt, but instead it just got totally eaten up caterpillars. I have more seeds, so I'll try again some day.
Genetically Diverse Carrot Mix
Speaking of plants that have trouble making it in my climate, I've also decided to try my hand at so-called "Landrace Gardening." I found out about it from this article in Mother Earth News. I'm not sure if "landrace" is really the correct term for something like this, but that's what this Lofthouse fellow is calling it.
It takes almost an opposite approach from what people usually do with seed saving. Instead of going to all the trouble to keep separate varieties pure and free of crossing, you plant a bunch of different varieties together and let them cross. Then you save seeds from them and plant them and repeat the process until you have a population of plants that are well adapted to your climate.
This past winter I decided to try this out with carrots. I picked carrots for my first experiment with this technique for the following reasons:
So once I found out I was pregnant, I went through my seed collection and picked out varieties that were getting a bit old or that I was getting low on, which meant it's time to save a new batch of seeds from them.
I also went ahead and started listing varieties on Seed Savers Exchange. For a while I thought you had to be an actual member of SSE to list seeds, but it turns out you don't. (Or maybe that's how it used to be, but they changed their policy.) I have seeds listed on there now. I've only gotten one request so far, which is disappointing, but maybe I'll get more once the print yearbook comes out.
Here's are some varieties I've saved this year and listed on Seed Savers Exchange:
Cougar Lettuce - I got this lettuce from Bountiful Gardens. When they were going out of business I bought a packet of every lettuce they carried that said it was heat tolerant. Cougar is one that's done well for me, so I saved seeds from it this year. Lettuce seeds are easy to save. You just plant a bunch of lettuce and leave it alone and let it bolt. I've read that lettuce doesn't cross, so you can save seeds from multiple varieties, but I just saved this one variety this time around. The hardest part might be cleaning the seeds since they have this white fluffy stuff on them like dandelions. Last Christmas I requested these seed cleaning frames and screens from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, so that makes it much easier.
Tall Telephone Peas - I originally got this variety from Baker Creek in 2009, and this is the third generation I've saved. I like the big long vines this variety produces. That means I get lots of peas for the same amount of space. I grow them on a tall trellis made of cattle panels turned sideways. I didn't harvest any peas to eat this year and just let all the pods turn brown and papery, and then harvested the mature seeds all at once. Easy.
Texsel Greens - I didn't plan on saving seeds from this, since this was the first year for me to grow them, and I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but they did so well that when they finally bolted I let the seeds mature. They are Brassica carinata, which is a tetraploid hybrid between Brassica oleracea (which is the species that collards, kale, and broccoli are in) and Brassica nigra (black mustard), so they won't cross with any other plants I grow. And they are just like a cross between collards and mustard! The leaves are like collard greens, but thinner and a little more spicy. I got a good harvest of them and cooked them the same way I cooked collard greens, and they grew faster than my collard greens (hybrid vigor maybe?).
I also listed some seeds that I harvested in 2018 and 2017 that have been kept in airtight containers in the freezer. I mentioned that in the description just in case anyone cares about that, but they should still be good. I've got several varieties of tomatoes, Tatume squash, Seminole pumpkins, Sugar Snap peas, and Texas Hill Country Red okra. All of them are varieties that have proven their worth in my garden, so I saved seeds from them.
I tried to save seeds from Tuscan Kale, but they didn't make it. It's definitely my favorite kale to eat. It's so much better than the curly kale my grocery store carries. But it doesn't seem to like this hot climate. I think I planted my kale too late this time. It wasn't able to mature before it got hot, and I waited and waited for it to bolt, but instead it just got totally eaten up caterpillars. I have more seeds, so I'll try again some day.
Genetically Diverse Carrot Mix
Speaking of plants that have trouble making it in my climate, I've also decided to try my hand at so-called "Landrace Gardening." I found out about it from this article in Mother Earth News. I'm not sure if "landrace" is really the correct term for something like this, but that's what this Lofthouse fellow is calling it.
It takes almost an opposite approach from what people usually do with seed saving. Instead of going to all the trouble to keep separate varieties pure and free of crossing, you plant a bunch of different varieties together and let them cross. Then you save seeds from them and plant them and repeat the process until you have a population of plants that are well adapted to your climate.
This past winter I decided to try this out with carrots. I picked carrots for my first experiment with this technique for the following reasons:
- Carrots are hard for me to grow but not impossible. Joseph Lofthouse lives in a climate that is too cold for most melons to do well, so decided to try a landrace of them that do. My problem is I live in a climate where it's too hot for cool weather plants like carrots. The seeds have to be planted while it's still pretty hot outside in late summer/early fall in order to harvest them before it gets hot again in spring. I also have dense, rocky clay soil. So when I plant carrots, a lot of them don't make it, but usually at least a few of them do. That means I can plant seeds from the few survivors and maybe eventually get carrots that are better adapted to my garden.
- Carrots are strong outbreeders. Unlike tomatoes, which don't tend to cross pollinate much, carrots have to cross pollinate with each other, and they are very prone to inbreeding depression. Lack of genetic diversity doesn't really hurt tomatoes, but it does hurt carrots. So mixing a bunch of varieties of carrots together and letting them cross makes a very diverse carrot population, and I won't have to worry about inbreeding for several generations at least.
- I don't mind having a mixture of different looking carrots to eat. "Rainbow carrots" are trendy right now, and that's just a mixture of different varieties of carrots with different colors besides all orange. And then people sell them at the store and farmer's markets for twice as much money as orange carrots! So my carrots are going to be selected for surviving in my conditions (probably they'll end up having short, stubby roots, better heat and drought tolerance, and maybe faster maturity), but I'm going to try to save seed from different colors of carrots so I'll always have a fun mixture.
So this past fall I planted three varieties of carrots: Chantenay, Atomic Red, and Purple Dragon. I planted more Chantenay than the other two. It's an orange carrot with short, stubby roots, so I expected that it would do the best, so I wanted more of its genetics in my population. Purple Dragon is also a shorter carrot, but the main cool thing about it is it's purple! Atomic Red is long and skinny, unfortunately, but it's red, so I put it in too so I'll have more colors.
Then when I harvested them, I separated out the biggest, prettiest carrots, and replanted them instead of eating them. I ended up with mostly Chantenays, a few Purple Dragons, and 2 or 3 Atomic Reds that could be replanted for seed.
I'm was surprised at how long it took to get mature seeds from them. It took until late summer for the seeds to mature. That's another thing to keep in mind about seed saving. It makes the crop take up space in your garden for a much longer period of time, preventing you from planting anything else in that spot. But maybe that's a good thing for me, since it prevented me from succumbing to the temptation to plant more things in that bed to take care of while I was in in my third trimester of pregnancy. Snipping off the brown carrot seedheads and throwing them in a bucket to finish drying wasn't that hard.
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| Bucket of drying carrot seeds |
I discovered that carrot seeds are also hard to clean. Their seeds have these sticky hairs on them, similar to a very annoying weed I get in my yard called Beggar's Lice, which looks a lot like a carrot plant, so I think they are related. The carrot seeds are not as sticky as the Beggar's Lice, but when I cut off the umbels and pull the seeds out, they do stick to my gloves. At least they smell good while I'm working on them.
I ended up with a lot of seeds from this. I filled up a pint mason jar with seeds and put them in the fridge. I wasn't able to get them as clean as commercial seeds, so there is some chaff taking up that space, but that's still a lot of carrot seeds. That's another good thing about seed saving. I always end up with many more seeds than I'll ever need, so I have plenty to share and swap, but I can also plant lots of seeds and not worry as much about some of them not making it.
I haven't planted any yet, but I plan to soon. I think I'll just toss some of them in the garden somewhere and see how they do. Since I have a lot of seeds, I can plant a lot of them and don't have to worry if a lot of them don't make it. With the new baby taking up most of my time, they'll probably end up being pretty neglected. I might not have time to water, thin, weed, and otherwise pamper these carrots as much as I have with carrots in the past. But that might be a good thing, because if any of them do make it, I can save seeds from them to select them for surviving neglect. If none of them make it, I have plenty more to try again next year.
I also plan to add more varieties in the future. I've had luck before with Danvers carrots, another short orange variety, so I'd like to add that one. And maybe I should add some more colors. I don't really like the looks of white carrots, but maybe some yellow and some other varieties of red or purple. Baker Creek Heirloom seeds has some strange and unusual carrot varieties that might be good to add to the mix.
I can only list pure varieties on Seed Savers Exchange, so I can't list my carrot mix, but I'm still looking forward to seeing what I come up with.
And maybe I'll try this with some other species in the future. I don't really see the point of growing a landrace tomato, for instance, because tomatoes don't mind inbreeding and I already have some heirloom varieties of tomatoes that do well for me, so I'm just going to keep growing those. But there might be some other plants that I might want to try doing this with for similar reasons as the carrots. Maybe landrace beets next?
One more limitation I might have is space. Joseph Lofthouse is a farmer, so he grows entire fields of his landraces. I'm just a suburban home gardener. Carrots plants aren't that big. I planted my carrots for seed about six inches apart, and they ended up taking up about a 6x4 foot space, so that's room for... about 96 carrots? I probably ended up with less than that, but that's still a good population number for right now, giving me plenty to select from. Lofthouse grows a lot of melons and squash, which take up a lot of room. I probably don't have enough room to grow 50-100 melon vines. For those species it would probably also also be best to seek out existing varieties that do well for me and doing traditional seed saving where the varieties are kept pure.
One more limitation I might have is space. Joseph Lofthouse is a farmer, so he grows entire fields of his landraces. I'm just a suburban home gardener. Carrots plants aren't that big. I planted my carrots for seed about six inches apart, and they ended up taking up about a 6x4 foot space, so that's room for... about 96 carrots? I probably ended up with less than that, but that's still a good population number for right now, giving me plenty to select from. Lofthouse grows a lot of melons and squash, which take up a lot of room. I probably don't have enough room to grow 50-100 melon vines. For those species it would probably also also be best to seek out existing varieties that do well for me and doing traditional seed saving where the varieties are kept pure.
Squash Vine Borer Resistant Summer Squash
I've written about this project before, and it's still not going well. To recap, I want to cross Tatume, a variety of Mexican summer squash with long vines that can outgrow squash vine borers, with bush varieties of summer squash like zucchini or yellow squash. I'm still having trouble getting the different varieties of squash to be timed just right so they have male and female flowers on them at the same time and can cross. Tatume takes longer to mature than bush varieties, so won't cross with bush varieties if I plant them at the same time. And since bush varieties grow so fast and then get killed by the SVB's so fast, there's a very short window where they can have a chance to cross with Tatume.
I've started focusing more on trying to get my bush squash varieties to survive longer. The latest trick I've been trying out is covering them with tulle fabric to keep the SVB's away until female flowers show up. Then I uncover them so the bees can get to the flowers. This gives them a head start to grow nice and big before the borers start getting them.
I could keep them covered up all the time and hand-pollinate them, but that seems like a lot of trouble. Squash flowers open at dawn and then wilt after only a couple of hours, so I'd have to be out there hand-pollinating during that short window of time. I'd rather just let the bees do it, but that does leave them exposed.
So last year I saved seeds from Tatume so I'll have an ample supply of pure Tatume seeds to experiment with, but all my other summer squash varieties didn't make it long enough to save seeds from or even to cross with Tatume. So still no summer squash crosses.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
What I've been up to lately
I've been neglecting this blog for a while, but now that I have some time I thought I'd write a few more posts about some of the things I've got going on and then schedule them for later. But first, what's been going on in my life?
Sadly, my cat Basil passed away last year. He was the grey tabby cat you may have seen in pictures in some of my previous posts, because one of his favorite things to do was help me out in the garden. Our other cat, Lily, the black and white one, is still around but she's an indoor-only cat (by her own choice; she thinks outside is very scary). Even though it's been a little over a year since he died, I still miss him a lot. He was a very friendly cat and quite a character. It was fun having him go outside with me and follow me around.
The happier news is that I've got a baby due in September! To prepare, I decided to not sign up to teach any summer classes and instead took the summer off. That will cost me a few thousand dollars, but there are so many things to do to get ready for the baby. I've been making and freezing casseroles, soups, chili, and the like to eat once she arrives. At least by then things should be cooling down and I might actually feel like eating foods like that. And that's more fun than doing some of the other things I have to do, like filling out FMLA paperwork and finding a pediatrician and researching daycare centers. Cooking is way more fun than those things, but I need to quit procrastinating and get those things done too.
I'm spending my third trimester during the hottest time of year, July and August, which isn't really the best timing. I can't do much in the garden when it's this hot and I'm lugging around all this extra weight, but this is kind of the off season for gardens in Texas anyway.
In anticipation of this big life change, I did as much strenuous garden work as I could during the second trimester when I was feeling better (and it was cooler outside), and I didn't plant as much in spring as I normally do so I'd have less to take care of. Now that I'm being forced to slow down, I'm just trying to keep what I did plant alive without adding anything else for a while.
This will be a good test to see which varieties of plants can handle some neglect.
So I've got some drafts saved of posts to finish off and schedule to publish in the next few weeks/months, and then I might have to leave the blog alone again for a while since I'll be very busy this fall and winter. I hope at least some of them will be interesting for people.
Sadly, my cat Basil passed away last year. He was the grey tabby cat you may have seen in pictures in some of my previous posts, because one of his favorite things to do was help me out in the garden. Our other cat, Lily, the black and white one, is still around but she's an indoor-only cat (by her own choice; she thinks outside is very scary). Even though it's been a little over a year since he died, I still miss him a lot. He was a very friendly cat and quite a character. It was fun having him go outside with me and follow me around.
The happier news is that I've got a baby due in September! To prepare, I decided to not sign up to teach any summer classes and instead took the summer off. That will cost me a few thousand dollars, but there are so many things to do to get ready for the baby. I've been making and freezing casseroles, soups, chili, and the like to eat once she arrives. At least by then things should be cooling down and I might actually feel like eating foods like that. And that's more fun than doing some of the other things I have to do, like filling out FMLA paperwork and finding a pediatrician and researching daycare centers. Cooking is way more fun than those things, but I need to quit procrastinating and get those things done too.
I'm spending my third trimester during the hottest time of year, July and August, which isn't really the best timing. I can't do much in the garden when it's this hot and I'm lugging around all this extra weight, but this is kind of the off season for gardens in Texas anyway.
In anticipation of this big life change, I did as much strenuous garden work as I could during the second trimester when I was feeling better (and it was cooler outside), and I didn't plant as much in spring as I normally do so I'd have less to take care of. Now that I'm being forced to slow down, I'm just trying to keep what I did plant alive without adding anything else for a while.
This will be a good test to see which varieties of plants can handle some neglect.
So I've got some drafts saved of posts to finish off and schedule to publish in the next few weeks/months, and then I might have to leave the blog alone again for a while since I'll be very busy this fall and winter. I hope at least some of them will be interesting for people.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Bountiful Gardens is Going out of Business
Heads up everyone! One of my favorite seed companies, Bountiful Gardens, is going out of business. Everything is on clearance and selling out fast. Better go there are order all the varieties you want before they sell out. They are closing December 13.
My favorite thing about this seed company has always been their wide selection of greens, especially ones that tolerate hot weather. They have heat-tolerant lettuce varieties that I don't see in any other catalogs. I just ordered a packet each of all of them, plus a few other unusual species of greens that most other catalogs don't carry.
When I first got into seed-saving, I read a lot about the problem of seed companies going out of business when they're the only one that carries a particular variety of plant, and then the variety goes extinct if home seed savers don't maintain it. Honestly, I wasn't too worried about that. I thought it was an exaggeration. I mean, come on, how many times does that actually happen? And if only one catalog was carrying that variety anyway, was it even really that great of a variety to begin with?
I don't believe that anymore after finding some varieties that did really great in my garden that really are only carried in one seed catalog. I still think that it probably doesn't happen that often, but it does happen.
So go to www.bountifulgardens.org and if you see anything interesting or unusual, snatch it up now before it sells out! And then when you grow it, if it does well in your garden, save the seeds.
My favorite thing about this seed company has always been their wide selection of greens, especially ones that tolerate hot weather. They have heat-tolerant lettuce varieties that I don't see in any other catalogs. I just ordered a packet each of all of them, plus a few other unusual species of greens that most other catalogs don't carry.
When I first got into seed-saving, I read a lot about the problem of seed companies going out of business when they're the only one that carries a particular variety of plant, and then the variety goes extinct if home seed savers don't maintain it. Honestly, I wasn't too worried about that. I thought it was an exaggeration. I mean, come on, how many times does that actually happen? And if only one catalog was carrying that variety anyway, was it even really that great of a variety to begin with?
I don't believe that anymore after finding some varieties that did really great in my garden that really are only carried in one seed catalog. I still think that it probably doesn't happen that often, but it does happen.
So go to www.bountifulgardens.org and if you see anything interesting or unusual, snatch it up now before it sells out! And then when you grow it, if it does well in your garden, save the seeds.
Friday, August 5, 2016
A Snag in my Zucchini Breeding Project
Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans.
Here's a quick update on how the zucchini breeding project has gone. It looks like this is going to take longer than I thought.
Since summer squash usually put out male flowers before female flowers, I planted Tatume a couple of weeks earlier than Costata Romanesca this spring, since I wanted to use Tatume as the female parent. What I need for that is male flowers on CR and female flowers on Tatume at the same time.
The Tatume plants were up and growing when I planted Costata Romanesca, but as soon as the CR seeds sprouted, they started growing very fast.
By the time CR started making male flowers, Tatume just started making vines.
By the time CR started making female flowers, Tatume had just started making male flowers.
By the time CR started making fruit, Tatume was still just making male flowers. At this point I thought maybe I could try switching things, and making CR the mother and Tatume the father, so at least I'd get something. So I didn't harvest any of the zucchinis for eating (like I had planned to do), and instead left them on the plants to mature.
And then the Squash Vine Borers showed up. The CR plants started to collapse. The borers even bored into the fruits themselves and made them rot before maturing.
By June or so, the Costata Romanesca zucchini plants were all dead, without even making one good mature fruit with seeds with Tatume as their father.
Now, in early August, Tatume is still around, still growing vines, and still only making male flowers!
I don't know what its problem is. Did I plant it in a bad spot? Is it not getting enough sun or nutrients? Why won't it make fruits?
It's almost that time of year where Texans can plant more summer squash for a quick fall crop before it gets too cold. Since it looks like my Tatume squash are going to survive the summer (which is one of the great things about that variety), I'm going to try planting more zucchini to try again for a cross this fall. And I might have to be less picky about which one is the father and which one is the mother and just try to get any mature fruits at all.
See? I told you growing summer squash in Central Texas is tricky!
Here's a quick update on how the zucchini breeding project has gone. It looks like this is going to take longer than I thought.
Since summer squash usually put out male flowers before female flowers, I planted Tatume a couple of weeks earlier than Costata Romanesca this spring, since I wanted to use Tatume as the female parent. What I need for that is male flowers on CR and female flowers on Tatume at the same time.
The Tatume plants were up and growing when I planted Costata Romanesca, but as soon as the CR seeds sprouted, they started growing very fast.
By the time CR started making male flowers, Tatume just started making vines.
By the time CR started making female flowers, Tatume had just started making male flowers.
By the time CR started making fruit, Tatume was still just making male flowers. At this point I thought maybe I could try switching things, and making CR the mother and Tatume the father, so at least I'd get something. So I didn't harvest any of the zucchinis for eating (like I had planned to do), and instead left them on the plants to mature.
And then the Squash Vine Borers showed up. The CR plants started to collapse. The borers even bored into the fruits themselves and made them rot before maturing.
By June or so, the Costata Romanesca zucchini plants were all dead, without even making one good mature fruit with seeds with Tatume as their father.
Now, in early August, Tatume is still around, still growing vines, and still only making male flowers!
I don't know what its problem is. Did I plant it in a bad spot? Is it not getting enough sun or nutrients? Why won't it make fruits?
It's almost that time of year where Texans can plant more summer squash for a quick fall crop before it gets too cold. Since it looks like my Tatume squash are going to survive the summer (which is one of the great things about that variety), I'm going to try planting more zucchini to try again for a cross this fall. And I might have to be less picky about which one is the father and which one is the mother and just try to get any mature fruits at all.
See? I told you growing summer squash in Central Texas is tricky!
Friday, January 8, 2016
Introducing the Squash Vine Borer Resistant Zucchini Project
It's a new year, and I'm rethinking what I do with this blog. It had gotten boring and tedious for me, but after taking a break for a while, I thought about some things I could write about that might make things more interesting.
One of my Christmas gifts was The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe. I already had Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener, so I was really glad to receive her newest book.
When I first started this blog, I was unemployed and gardening was a way to feel like I was doing something productive with my time. Now I have a full time job, but gardening is still very important to me for a lot of the same reasons Deppe talks about in her books.
She talks a lot about seed saving and plant breeding, and says that all gardeners should do it. I've been saving seeds for years, but I think it's finally about time I try my hand at a breeding project. If nothing else, it sounds like a lot of fun, but maybe it will also result in me getting a really useful new plant variety, or maybe even distribute to other people in my region.
A project like this should have a clear goal, so my goal is to breed a zucchini squash that can produce a good crop despite the bane of all people who attempt to grow summer squash in my area: the dreaded Squash Vine Borer.
Because of SVBs, the idea of having too much zucchini so you have to sneak some onto your neighbor's porch is a fantasy to gardeners around here. Squash Vine Borers are moths (actually really cool looking moths) that lay their eggs on squash plants. The caterpillars then bore into the squash plant’s stem and eat them out from the inside until the whole plant collapses and dies. They especially like Cucurbita pepo and Cucurbita maxima. (Cucurbita moschata and Cucurbita argyrosperma are resistant.)
Most summer squash is in the species C. pepo. Whenever I try to grow zucchini, pattypans, or yellow crooknecks, I might get a squash or two before they collapse from getting eaten from the inside by those darn borers. I haven't even tried growing any of the winter squash varieties of C. pepo like delicatas or acorns because I'm sure they won't make it to maturity.
But I have an idea for a solution! Tatume is the only C. pepo summer squash variety I’ve found so far that gives me a good crop before succumbing to the borers. I think that’s because unlike most summer squash varieties, it has long vines instead of a bushy growth habit. That allows it to outgrow the borers and root at the nodes. Borers still get into it, but I still get a decent crop of squash from it. Most other summer squashes die before I get any fruit at all because they have such short stems that the borers eat them up really fast.
People like bush squash because they take up less room, but I don't think that helps any when you don't even get any squash at all from them before the borers kill them. I know I'm kind of going backwards here, but I want more vigorous, viney summer squash varieties instead of compact bush varieties.
One of my Christmas gifts was The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe. I already had Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener, so I was really glad to receive her newest book.
When I first started this blog, I was unemployed and gardening was a way to feel like I was doing something productive with my time. Now I have a full time job, but gardening is still very important to me for a lot of the same reasons Deppe talks about in her books.
She talks a lot about seed saving and plant breeding, and says that all gardeners should do it. I've been saving seeds for years, but I think it's finally about time I try my hand at a breeding project. If nothing else, it sounds like a lot of fun, but maybe it will also result in me getting a really useful new plant variety, or maybe even distribute to other people in my region.
A project like this should have a clear goal, so my goal is to breed a zucchini squash that can produce a good crop despite the bane of all people who attempt to grow summer squash in my area: the dreaded Squash Vine Borer.
Because of SVBs, the idea of having too much zucchini so you have to sneak some onto your neighbor's porch is a fantasy to gardeners around here. Squash Vine Borers are moths (actually really cool looking moths) that lay their eggs on squash plants. The caterpillars then bore into the squash plant’s stem and eat them out from the inside until the whole plant collapses and dies. They especially like Cucurbita pepo and Cucurbita maxima. (Cucurbita moschata and Cucurbita argyrosperma are resistant.)
Most summer squash is in the species C. pepo. Whenever I try to grow zucchini, pattypans, or yellow crooknecks, I might get a squash or two before they collapse from getting eaten from the inside by those darn borers. I haven't even tried growing any of the winter squash varieties of C. pepo like delicatas or acorns because I'm sure they won't make it to maturity.
But I have an idea for a solution! Tatume is the only C. pepo summer squash variety I’ve found so far that gives me a good crop before succumbing to the borers. I think that’s because unlike most summer squash varieties, it has long vines instead of a bushy growth habit. That allows it to outgrow the borers and root at the nodes. Borers still get into it, but I still get a decent crop of squash from it. Most other summer squashes die before I get any fruit at all because they have such short stems that the borers eat them up really fast.
People like bush squash because they take up less room, but I don't think that helps any when you don't even get any squash at all from them before the borers kill them. I know I'm kind of going backwards here, but I want more vigorous, viney summer squash varieties instead of compact bush varieties.
It also makes sense for Tatume to do well here because it’s a
South Texas heirloom. Having long vines is only one of its advantages. It's also much more tolerant of heat and drought than other C. pepo squash. It probably has other useful genes that help it survive in Texas besides just the gene for a vine growth habit.
The fruits of Tatume are sort of like an oval shaped zucchini. They are green when at immature
eating stages, and turn yellow when mature, looking a lot like a small spaghetti squash. They taste just fine, so if Tatume is just fine, why not just grow Tatume and that will be my one variety of summer squash I can grow?
Part of the reason is just for the heck of it, so I can try out a breeding project. But I also think it might be good to have more varieties of C. pepo I can grow here than just one. Crossing other varieties of C. pepo with Tatume could give me all kinds of different fruits on Tatume's drought tolerant, heat tolerant, squash vine borer tolerant vines.
I decided to start with crossing Tatume with a zucchini.
Maybe later I can try with other varieties, but I think zucchini is a good place to start because zucchini isn't as different from Tatume as some varieties. I won’t have to deal
with trying to change the fruit color that way, since Tatume is already green like a zucchini. They're also both good as summer squashes. Starting out crossing Tatume with a winter squash like a delicata might be complicated because then I'd have to select for fruits that are good as winter squash. I'll see how it goes with the Tatume/zucchini cross and then think about making other Tatume crosses.
The next step was to choose which variety of zucchini to use for the cross, since there are several. Carol Deppe and several other people consider Costata Romanesca to
be the best zucchini, so last year I tried it out. I got the seeds from
Bountiful Gardens. I planted six plants, and got three fruits, one on one plant
and two on another plant. The other three plants all died from borers before
producing fruits, though they did make some male flowers that may have contributed
pollen. I ate one fruit off the plant that had two to see if it really did
taste as good as people say, and it did. I let the other two fruits mature to
see if that was even possible, and they did manage to mature before the plants
died of borers, but just barely. I saved the seeds from the survivors, and I
also have 16 of the original seeds left in the packet.
Costata Romanesca seems like a good zucchini, so now I have
the parents for my new squash variety picked out. Next comes deciding which will
be the mother (to get fruits and seeds from) and which will be the father (to
get pollen from). The choice here is obvious. Tatume needs to be the mom and CR
will be the dad. It’s easier for a plant to make male flowers and pollen than a fruit with
mature seeds, so the mom should always be the better survivor of the two. I
just barely got any fruits when I grew CR, so it makes a lot more sense to get
pollen from CR and have Tatume make the fruits.
That means this year I should make my cross. I will need to
grow both varieties, and get some female Tatume flowers pollinated by male
Costata Romanesca flowers. Then the F1 seeds inside that Tatume fruit will have
Tatume for a mom and CR for a dad.
After I get the F1 seeds is when things get tricky. Then
what do I do for the next generation? Self the F1’s or cross back to one of the
parents?
I want my new variety to have long vines, not bushes, so I
needed to find out which is the dominant trait. I looked it up and, bad news,
vines are recessive to bush. It’s a great example of how the “wild type” is not
always the dominant gene. That’s going to make it harder than if vine was
dominant. You’ll see why.
I don’t know what the real abbreviation for the gene for
vine vs. bush, so I’ll use B and b. That means Tatume is bb and Costata
Romanesca is BB. The F1 hybrid would then be Bb. That means my F1 generation
will all be bushes since bush is dominant. Not good news, since bushes are the
ones that are more susceptible to SVBs.
If I backcross the F1 to Tatume I’ll get more vines but also
more Tatume-like fruit. If I backcross to CR I’ll get more zucchini-like fruit
but also more bushes, so it looks like the best thing to do will be to self the
F1’s. I’ll grow all F1’s that time around and let them cross with each other.
I’ll have to give them extra pampering so I’ll get some fruits, since they’ll
all be bushes being attacked by SVBs.
The seeds I get from that batch will be the F2 generation.
That’s when things get interesting. When they are grown, if Gregor Mendel was
right, they will be ¾ bushes and ¼ vines. Finally the vine trait will be back!
In that generation, it will be easy to weed out the bush plants and only leave
the vines. Carol Deppe says one way to do this is to sow the seeds thickly and
then thin out the smallest plants pretty early on. The ones left will be mostly
vines, since the viney plants grow faster than the bushes, long before their
final growth form is obvious.
If I cull all the bushes early on I will just have F2 vines
left to produce fruits, and then I can finally start selecting for fruit
characteristics. The F2 vines should have a mixture of different fruit types,
so I can start selecting for the most zucchini-like ones, and not saving seed
from the Tatume-like ones.
Here’s my plan year by year:
Year 1: Grow Tatume and Costata Romanesca and pollinate
female Tatume flowers with male CR flowers to get the F1 seeds.
Year 2: Grow out the F1 seeds, which will all be bushes with
whatever fruit characteristics are dominant. Let them cross with each other.
Year 3: Grow out the F2 seeds. Pull out bush plants and
leave only vines. See what kind of fruits the vines make. Save seeds from the
most zucchini-like fruits.
Year 4: This depends on what the F2’s from last year
were like. I might have to grow out some more F2’s, or I might try growing some
F3’s. At this point space will be my main limitation. Since I can only grow out maybe a dozen plants at a time, I'll just have to see if I get lucky and find some that have the kind of fruits I want.
This means it will be at least three years before I even
have a chance of having a vining zucchini like I want. However, since both Tatume and Costata Romanesca are perfectly edible summer squashes, I can still eat any of the squashes I don't want to save seeds from. There's not much to lose.
One thing that might speed things up is if I can grow two
crops a year, since we really have two short growing seasons here rather than
one long one. The spring summer squash crop is usually dead by July or August
of either SVBs or heat and drought, but I might be able to grow a fall crop
that might have time to mature before it freezes. It would be worth a try if I
have enough seeds. That means I could get to the interesting F2 generation by
Year 2 instead of Year 3. Then by Year 3 I'd already be at the stage where I have only vines and am selecting for fruit characteristics.
So that's the first breeding project I'm going to do. I've got some other ideas for things I'd like to try, but I'd better not get ahead of myself. This will be a good start.
Take that, Squash Vine Borers.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Garlic and Onion Harvest 2015
The heavy rain we had this spring and early summer wasn't appreciated by all of my Alliums. Some of them did all right, but others had problems with rot. That's why I'm posting about them a bit late this year because some of them had some problems during curing.
All of my garlic and onions were planted on September 21, the Autumn Equinox, last year. I planted three varieties of perennial onions: French Red Shallots, Yellow Potato Onions, and I'itois Onions, five varieties of garlic: Red Toch, Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, Nootka Rose, and S&H Silverskin, and two varieties of leeks: Elephant Garlic and multiplier leeks.
The Yellow Potato Onions, Inchelium Red Garlic, and Nootka Rose garlic were all new varieties I got from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Harvested June 11
I got these French Red Shallots back in 2013, I think, and this the first year I got enough to eat as well as plant (and even give some away to family members). The first year I planted them, a lot of them rotted, but they must have adapted or something because now they are doing great.
They're just like little red onions, with a sweet mild flavor. They're small, about the size of golf balls, but I'm very happy with them, especially when I see the price of shallots at the grocery store.
Harvested July 2
The shallots' cousins, the Yellow Potato Onions, didn't do nearly as well. Long after all the other Alliums were harvested and cured, the YPO's and Nootka Rose garlic still looked like they weren't ready. I finally gave up and harvested them anyway, and I found out that a lot of the Yellow Potato Onions had rotted. They are supposed to be easier to grow than shallots, so I emailed Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to ask them what they thought happened. They thought it was because of the wet weather, and said onions especially don't like that.
It's like we either have to little rain or too much! The onions in the picture are the ones that weren't rotted, so I'm going to try planting them again and seeing what happens.
I also grew I'itois onions again, but don't have a picture for them. These are the ones I got back in 2009 from Native Seeds/SEARCH. They did great, as usual.
Harvested May 11
Even though the Elephant Garlic was one of the first Alliums I harvested, apparently I was still too late. As you can see from the picture, all but two of the bulbs fell apart into individual cloves as they cured. Next year I need to remember that Elephant garlic is ready very early, and I'll try digging them up as soon as they send up scapes. This year I cut the scapes and then left them in the ground a while longer, and I guess that was a bad move.
As usual, I got lots and lots of bulbils, as you can see in the picture, but so far I haven't had much luck with growing those. You're supposed to be able to plant them and they grow into larger solid bulbs, that you then plant again to grow into full sized bulbs with cloves. When I've planted them before they didn't come up at all. If I have room I'll try again this year.
The other type of leek I grew again were the multiplier leeks I got from my SCA a few years ago. As usual, they're doing great. They're almost doing too well and are becoming almost like weeds.
Harvested May 12
This was my best garlic this year. It's an artichoke variety that I'm trying out for the first time, and I'm happy. It's very similar in appearance to its fellow artichoke, Lorz Italian. I haven't done a taste comparison yet. I got several bulbs of a good size. Don't have much else to say except this one is a keeper.
Harvested May 27
I'm still happy with Lorz too. It didn't do quite as well as Inchelium Red this year, but I still got some good sized bulbs from it. It's also a keeper.
Not pictured is Red Toch, which I harvested on May 12. I only got a few undersized bulbs of that one. It's also an artichoke, but Lorz Italian and Inchelium Red are both doing so much better, I've decided to discontinue this variety.
Harvested July 2
This is the garlic that gave me the most problems. It's a silverskin that I tried out new this year, to see if it was better than S&H Silverskin. I finally gave up and harvested it in July along with the Yellow Potato onions even though it wasn't ready, and some of these turned out to be rotten too. I'm torn about whether to replant this one or not. There were a couple of bulbs that looked like they might have produced cloves, and the biggest bulbs of this one were bigger than what I got from S&H Silverskin, but it took so long before they were ready to harvest. I like to rotate sweet potatoes after my garlic, because usually my garlic is out by May or June, just in time to plant sweet potatoes, but this year I had to make my sweet potatoes wait for Nootka Rose.
Harvested May 12
I've planted this other silverskin before, but it's never done very well. The bulbs are always very small. I wonder if maybe silverskins just aren't a good type of garlic for me. They're supposed to be the longest keeping garlics, which sounds good, but that doesn't help much when the bulbs are so tiny they're hardly worth peeling.
Summary:
Keepers - Lorz Italian garlic, Inchelium Red garlic, Elephant garlic, multiplier leek, I'itois onion, and French Red shallot
On Notice - S&H Silverskin and Nootka Rose garlic, Yellow Potato Onions - These will all get another chance, but if they don't do better next year, I'll probably discontinue them.
Discontinuing - Red Toch, due to being consistently outperformed by the other artichoke garlic varieties I have in my collection
Even with the failures, I still have plenty of Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, and Elephant garlic to eat, plus a lot of French Red shallots.
All of my garlic and onions were planted on September 21, the Autumn Equinox, last year. I planted three varieties of perennial onions: French Red Shallots, Yellow Potato Onions, and I'itois Onions, five varieties of garlic: Red Toch, Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, Nootka Rose, and S&H Silverskin, and two varieties of leeks: Elephant Garlic and multiplier leeks.
The Yellow Potato Onions, Inchelium Red Garlic, and Nootka Rose garlic were all new varieties I got from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
 |
| French Red Shallots |
I got these French Red Shallots back in 2013, I think, and this the first year I got enough to eat as well as plant (and even give some away to family members). The first year I planted them, a lot of them rotted, but they must have adapted or something because now they are doing great.
They're just like little red onions, with a sweet mild flavor. They're small, about the size of golf balls, but I'm very happy with them, especially when I see the price of shallots at the grocery store.
 |
| Yellow Potato Onions |
The shallots' cousins, the Yellow Potato Onions, didn't do nearly as well. Long after all the other Alliums were harvested and cured, the YPO's and Nootka Rose garlic still looked like they weren't ready. I finally gave up and harvested them anyway, and I found out that a lot of the Yellow Potato Onions had rotted. They are supposed to be easier to grow than shallots, so I emailed Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to ask them what they thought happened. They thought it was because of the wet weather, and said onions especially don't like that.
It's like we either have to little rain or too much! The onions in the picture are the ones that weren't rotted, so I'm going to try planting them again and seeing what happens.
I also grew I'itois onions again, but don't have a picture for them. These are the ones I got back in 2009 from Native Seeds/SEARCH. They did great, as usual.
 |
| Elephant Garlic |
Even though the Elephant Garlic was one of the first Alliums I harvested, apparently I was still too late. As you can see from the picture, all but two of the bulbs fell apart into individual cloves as they cured. Next year I need to remember that Elephant garlic is ready very early, and I'll try digging them up as soon as they send up scapes. This year I cut the scapes and then left them in the ground a while longer, and I guess that was a bad move.
As usual, I got lots and lots of bulbils, as you can see in the picture, but so far I haven't had much luck with growing those. You're supposed to be able to plant them and they grow into larger solid bulbs, that you then plant again to grow into full sized bulbs with cloves. When I've planted them before they didn't come up at all. If I have room I'll try again this year.
The other type of leek I grew again were the multiplier leeks I got from my SCA a few years ago. As usual, they're doing great. They're almost doing too well and are becoming almost like weeds.
 |
| Inchelium Red |
This was my best garlic this year. It's an artichoke variety that I'm trying out for the first time, and I'm happy. It's very similar in appearance to its fellow artichoke, Lorz Italian. I haven't done a taste comparison yet. I got several bulbs of a good size. Don't have much else to say except this one is a keeper.
 |
| Lorz Italian |
I'm still happy with Lorz too. It didn't do quite as well as Inchelium Red this year, but I still got some good sized bulbs from it. It's also a keeper.
Not pictured is Red Toch, which I harvested on May 12. I only got a few undersized bulbs of that one. It's also an artichoke, but Lorz Italian and Inchelium Red are both doing so much better, I've decided to discontinue this variety.
 |
| Nootka Rose |
This is the garlic that gave me the most problems. It's a silverskin that I tried out new this year, to see if it was better than S&H Silverskin. I finally gave up and harvested it in July along with the Yellow Potato onions even though it wasn't ready, and some of these turned out to be rotten too. I'm torn about whether to replant this one or not. There were a couple of bulbs that looked like they might have produced cloves, and the biggest bulbs of this one were bigger than what I got from S&H Silverskin, but it took so long before they were ready to harvest. I like to rotate sweet potatoes after my garlic, because usually my garlic is out by May or June, just in time to plant sweet potatoes, but this year I had to make my sweet potatoes wait for Nootka Rose.
 |
| S&H Silverskin |
I've planted this other silverskin before, but it's never done very well. The bulbs are always very small. I wonder if maybe silverskins just aren't a good type of garlic for me. They're supposed to be the longest keeping garlics, which sounds good, but that doesn't help much when the bulbs are so tiny they're hardly worth peeling.
Summary:
Keepers - Lorz Italian garlic, Inchelium Red garlic, Elephant garlic, multiplier leek, I'itois onion, and French Red shallot
On Notice - S&H Silverskin and Nootka Rose garlic, Yellow Potato Onions - These will all get another chance, but if they don't do better next year, I'll probably discontinue them.
Discontinuing - Red Toch, due to being consistently outperformed by the other artichoke garlic varieties I have in my collection
Even with the failures, I still have plenty of Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, and Elephant garlic to eat, plus a lot of French Red shallots.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Potato Harvest 2015
One of the things I got done over the July 4th weekend was harvest my potatoes. The tops had mostly died back, and it was getting hot out there, so it was time for them to come out.
Potatoes are difficult to grow in Central Texas. They don't like freezing temperatures, but they don't like hot temperatures either, so that leaves only a small window where they're comfortable in a Central Texas garden. They also prefer acidic soil, and my soil is around pH 7.5 - 8.0.
Therefore, for the past few years I've been on a learning curve figuring out the best way to grow them. I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, because this year they did well enough that I have plenty of potatoes for eating as well as saving some for replanting.
I planted six varieties of potatoes this year. Two of them, Red Pontiac and Purple Viking, are varieties I've been growing for several years now, and they continue to do well. I originally got them from Potato Garden. To try out some new varieties, I bought the Cook's Potato Mix from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which has one pound each of four varieties: Caribe, Cranberry Red, King Harry, and Rose Gold.
I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking on January 18. I'm still trying figure out how early is too early to plant potatoes. Most sources say I'm supposed to plant them around Valentines Day, but I have been trying to push that date earlier to make sure they have plenty of time to mature before it gets hot. If I plant them too early, they start to grow a lot, and then if we get another hard freeze, they can get badly damaged. That happened when I tried planting some in November 2013, which turned out to be way too early. Luckily I didn't plant all of them that early, so I could plant some more later in January of 2014 when the first planting froze to death.
Potatoes are heavy feeders, so another thing I tried this year was to really work the soil well and add a lot of goodies to make sure they had plenty of nutrients. I used a modified version of John Jeavons's double-digging method, but without the double part because my soil is too compacted and rocky down there. Basically I dug a trench out from the end of the raised bed, put that in a wheelbarrow, laid the seed potatoes down in the trench, sprinkled some organic fertilizer and compost on top, filled in the trench with soil from the next trench, and repeated the process until the whole bed was planted. The last trench was filled with soil from the first trench. Then I spread even more compost on top. The resulted in seed potatoes about 8-10 inches deep, with very loose fluffy soil with lots of organic matter covering them. It was a lot of physical work, but I think it turned out to be worth it.
One mistake I made was waiting until the potatoes had sprouted and grown a lot of leaves before mulching them thickly with hay. It was still pretty cold and damp when I did that, so pillbugs got under the hay and ate so many leaves off my Red Pontiac plants that they died. I would say about half of them died from that.
I received my seed potatoes from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in early March, and planted them March 7. I treated them the exact same way as the Red Pontiac and Purple Vikings, except this time I put the thick hay mulch on top right away. That way, they didn't leaf out until their stems had grown up above the mulch, and the pillbugs didn't eat them.
All of the potatoes were harvested on July 2, and here are my results.
Here's the description SESE gives for Caribe: One of the earliest and prettiest potatoes you'll dig. Deep purple skin with snow white flesh. Can be quite large with good yields. Good for boiling, baking, and frying. Lovely as a new potato. Very early maturing.
Well, they turned out to be the ugliest of SESE's potatoes! They yielded the highest, but the tubers were all cracked and knobby and rough.
But I did some research online and found out it may not be all the potatoes' fault. We had a lot of rain in the spring and early summer, and this can cause some varieties of potatoes to grow this way if they get a deluge of rain while the the tubers are growing. The tubers end up taking up too much water too quickly and the outside of the tuber cracks.
I considered whether I should give this variety a second chance or discontinue it. I didn't really want to eat them because of all the deep cracks full of dirt. This variety might be too similar to Purple Viking to be worth keeping. They're both purple skinned and white fleshed, and PV has already proven itself worthy.
Finally, I decided I will use them in an experiment. I'm going to try fall-planting these for a winter harvest. I've read about how you can plant potatoes here in August or September to maybe get a harvest before our first freeze in November or December. It's cutting it close because you're trying to grow them in that small window between weather that's too hot and weather that's too cold, and sometimes potatoes planted in the hot weather of August rot, but since these tubers are messed up anyway, if they don't make it I won't be too upset about losing them.
It would be nice to get two crops of potatoes a year. I don't really have anywhere good to store potatoes over the summer. You're not supposed to store them in the fridge because that ruins the taste, so the only other place is to put them in my pantry, which is really too warm to store potatoes optimally. During the day when we're at work, the air conditioner is set to 82 degrees to save electricity. Potatoes are ideally stored at 50 degrees. There's nowhere in my house that's 50 degrees in the summer!
So I can't really use potatoes as a long-term storage like they do up north, and instead they're a seasonal treat to be eaten quickly before they sprout or rot. It would be nice to have a second harvest in December because that would be long after the summer-harvested potatoes are gone.
SESE Description: Considered the best of the red-skinned, red-fleshed varieties. Excellent for potato salad because of its low starch content. Smooth texture and high yields.
While harvesting the potatoes I accidentally cut one in half and noticed the flesh really only has a pink blush. I wouldn't really call it red. This is also the variety that gave me the smallest yields. Besides the cut one, the ones you see in the picture are all I got, and they appeared to all have come from only one plant.
But the potatoes I did get, especially that one in the foreground, were so pretty that I decided to keep all of them to try replanting next year. Why did that one plant do well while the others had nothing? If they had all done as well as that one plant, I would have gotten a lot. Maybe I can get them to do better next year.
SESE Description: A new firm-fleshed round white potato from Cornell University that holds its shape well when boiled. These early and productive plants have hairy leaves, thanks to a wild potato from Bolivia, which deter pests like the Colorado Potato beetle. Great for potato salads, boiling, sautes and soups.
Of all the new varieties I got from SESE to try this year, King Harry did the best. It's the only one I got enough of to eat some as well as save some for replanting. The potatoes I got where very nice-looking round potatoes with blemish-free smooth skin.
The plants were considerably more vigorous than all my other potato varieties (though I didn't notice the leaves being significantly hairier). It sent out long sprawling vines, flowered profusely, and then made two big handfuls of potato berries for me! It must be the genes from that wild Bolivian potato.
I kept the potato berries to save the true potato seeds from to try growing them in the future. I've tried growing true potato seed before from some "purple potato seeds" I got in a GardenWeb swap years ago, but they never got big tubers. Maybe since King Harry has already proven itself as a good potato variety in my garden, it's offspring will also be good.
Caribe is the only other variety that flowered this year, and it never set fruits, but it might have contributed pollen to the King Harry seeds. I hope so, because that would give even more genetic diversity. It would be interesting to grow these seeds out and see what I get.
Overall, King Harry is definitely a keeper!
SESE's Description: Rosy red skin with a creamy delicious deep yellow flesh. Dry flesh is perfect baked or steamed. Disease resistant.
Rose Gold was the second best of the new varieties. It's supposed to be very similar to Yukon Gold, but with with a rosy blush to the skin. It didn't give me enough to eat some, but I still kept the ones I got for replanting next year to try to increase. The tubers I did get looked very nice. I would like to have a yellow-fleshed potato in my collection.
Summary:
Purple Viking - still my favorite
Red Pontiac - still good
King Harry - the best new variety; definitely a keeper
Rose Gold - giving it a second chance
Cranberry Red - giving it a second chance
Caribe - replanting in August as an experiment
I now have several pounds of Purple Viking, Red Pontiac, and King Harry to eat. The other day I roasted some chicken thighs with some of the potatoes that got impaled by the digging fork during harvest, and they were delicious. I like to roast chicken thighs and potatoes sprinkled with herbs like rosemary and sage, and stir it a bit as it cooks to let the fat that melts out of the chicken coat the potatoes and get them all nice and crispy. Mmmm!
It may be my imagination, but homegrown potatoes do taste better than store bought. And they were grown with no pesticides!
The potatoes I plan on replanting go in the spare fridge in the garage. Storing potatoes in the fridge makes them convert some of their starch to sugar, which makes them taste weird, and that's why you don't want to store potatoes you want to eat in the fridge. But if you're going to plant them, then who cares what they taste like? Keeping them in the fridge will keep them from rotting before it's time to plant them again.
Planting them in late January seems to work well. I think I had to cover them with frost blankets a time or two, and I did have that pillbug problem, but I still got a lot of nice big potatoes after doing that.
I look forward to seeing how the varieties from SESE do when planted earlier. When I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking in January and the SESE varieties in March, I expected the earlier planting to be ready to harvest earlier than the later planting, but that turned out to not be the case. They were all ready to harvest at around the same time.
At first I thought that earlier planting made no difference, until I dug them up and found out the earlier planting had much bigger tubers. Ah ha! I've made a discovery! The vines die in late June or early July no matter how early they were planted, probably triggered by the hot weather. But if they are planted earlier, they have more time to grow larger tubers before hot weather. So there is an advantage of planting earlier, but not the one I thought it would be.
Potatoes are difficult to grow in Central Texas. They don't like freezing temperatures, but they don't like hot temperatures either, so that leaves only a small window where they're comfortable in a Central Texas garden. They also prefer acidic soil, and my soil is around pH 7.5 - 8.0.
Therefore, for the past few years I've been on a learning curve figuring out the best way to grow them. I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it, because this year they did well enough that I have plenty of potatoes for eating as well as saving some for replanting.
I planted six varieties of potatoes this year. Two of them, Red Pontiac and Purple Viking, are varieties I've been growing for several years now, and they continue to do well. I originally got them from Potato Garden. To try out some new varieties, I bought the Cook's Potato Mix from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which has one pound each of four varieties: Caribe, Cranberry Red, King Harry, and Rose Gold.
I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking on January 18. I'm still trying figure out how early is too early to plant potatoes. Most sources say I'm supposed to plant them around Valentines Day, but I have been trying to push that date earlier to make sure they have plenty of time to mature before it gets hot. If I plant them too early, they start to grow a lot, and then if we get another hard freeze, they can get badly damaged. That happened when I tried planting some in November 2013, which turned out to be way too early. Luckily I didn't plant all of them that early, so I could plant some more later in January of 2014 when the first planting froze to death.
Potatoes are heavy feeders, so another thing I tried this year was to really work the soil well and add a lot of goodies to make sure they had plenty of nutrients. I used a modified version of John Jeavons's double-digging method, but without the double part because my soil is too compacted and rocky down there. Basically I dug a trench out from the end of the raised bed, put that in a wheelbarrow, laid the seed potatoes down in the trench, sprinkled some organic fertilizer and compost on top, filled in the trench with soil from the next trench, and repeated the process until the whole bed was planted. The last trench was filled with soil from the first trench. Then I spread even more compost on top. The resulted in seed potatoes about 8-10 inches deep, with very loose fluffy soil with lots of organic matter covering them. It was a lot of physical work, but I think it turned out to be worth it.
One mistake I made was waiting until the potatoes had sprouted and grown a lot of leaves before mulching them thickly with hay. It was still pretty cold and damp when I did that, so pillbugs got under the hay and ate so many leaves off my Red Pontiac plants that they died. I would say about half of them died from that.
I received my seed potatoes from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in early March, and planted them March 7. I treated them the exact same way as the Red Pontiac and Purple Vikings, except this time I put the thick hay mulch on top right away. That way, they didn't leaf out until their stems had grown up above the mulch, and the pillbugs didn't eat them.
All of the potatoes were harvested on July 2, and here are my results.
Red Pontiac and Purple Viking
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| Red Pontiac and Purple Viking |
I planted 20 Red Pontiac plants and 16 Purple Viking plants and they all did great. The fertilizer must have helped, because I don't think I've ever gotten potatoes this big before. I got plenty to eat as well as save some for replanting next year. Even though the Red Pontiacs were damaged by the pillbugs, you can see I still got a respectable crop from them. I planted fewer Purple Vikings, but got the biggest yield from them.
I think Purple Viking is still my favorite potato variety. Red Pontiac doesn't always do as well, but one advantage is it's earlier than Purple Viking, so I'll keep growing both.
Now for the newbies from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Caribe
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| Caribe |
Well, they turned out to be the ugliest of SESE's potatoes! They yielded the highest, but the tubers were all cracked and knobby and rough.
But I did some research online and found out it may not be all the potatoes' fault. We had a lot of rain in the spring and early summer, and this can cause some varieties of potatoes to grow this way if they get a deluge of rain while the the tubers are growing. The tubers end up taking up too much water too quickly and the outside of the tuber cracks.
I considered whether I should give this variety a second chance or discontinue it. I didn't really want to eat them because of all the deep cracks full of dirt. This variety might be too similar to Purple Viking to be worth keeping. They're both purple skinned and white fleshed, and PV has already proven itself worthy.
Finally, I decided I will use them in an experiment. I'm going to try fall-planting these for a winter harvest. I've read about how you can plant potatoes here in August or September to maybe get a harvest before our first freeze in November or December. It's cutting it close because you're trying to grow them in that small window between weather that's too hot and weather that's too cold, and sometimes potatoes planted in the hot weather of August rot, but since these tubers are messed up anyway, if they don't make it I won't be too upset about losing them.
It would be nice to get two crops of potatoes a year. I don't really have anywhere good to store potatoes over the summer. You're not supposed to store them in the fridge because that ruins the taste, so the only other place is to put them in my pantry, which is really too warm to store potatoes optimally. During the day when we're at work, the air conditioner is set to 82 degrees to save electricity. Potatoes are ideally stored at 50 degrees. There's nowhere in my house that's 50 degrees in the summer!
So I can't really use potatoes as a long-term storage like they do up north, and instead they're a seasonal treat to be eaten quickly before they sprout or rot. It would be nice to have a second harvest in December because that would be long after the summer-harvested potatoes are gone.
Cranberry Red
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| Cranberry Red |
While harvesting the potatoes I accidentally cut one in half and noticed the flesh really only has a pink blush. I wouldn't really call it red. This is also the variety that gave me the smallest yields. Besides the cut one, the ones you see in the picture are all I got, and they appeared to all have come from only one plant.
But the potatoes I did get, especially that one in the foreground, were so pretty that I decided to keep all of them to try replanting next year. Why did that one plant do well while the others had nothing? If they had all done as well as that one plant, I would have gotten a lot. Maybe I can get them to do better next year.
King Harry
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| King Harry |
Of all the new varieties I got from SESE to try this year, King Harry did the best. It's the only one I got enough of to eat some as well as save some for replanting. The potatoes I got where very nice-looking round potatoes with blemish-free smooth skin.
The plants were considerably more vigorous than all my other potato varieties (though I didn't notice the leaves being significantly hairier). It sent out long sprawling vines, flowered profusely, and then made two big handfuls of potato berries for me! It must be the genes from that wild Bolivian potato.
I kept the potato berries to save the true potato seeds from to try growing them in the future. I've tried growing true potato seed before from some "purple potato seeds" I got in a GardenWeb swap years ago, but they never got big tubers. Maybe since King Harry has already proven itself as a good potato variety in my garden, it's offspring will also be good.
Caribe is the only other variety that flowered this year, and it never set fruits, but it might have contributed pollen to the King Harry seeds. I hope so, because that would give even more genetic diversity. It would be interesting to grow these seeds out and see what I get.
Overall, King Harry is definitely a keeper!
Rose Gold
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| Rose Gold |
Rose Gold was the second best of the new varieties. It's supposed to be very similar to Yukon Gold, but with with a rosy blush to the skin. It didn't give me enough to eat some, but I still kept the ones I got for replanting next year to try to increase. The tubers I did get looked very nice. I would like to have a yellow-fleshed potato in my collection.
Summary:
Purple Viking - still my favorite
Red Pontiac - still good
King Harry - the best new variety; definitely a keeper
Rose Gold - giving it a second chance
Cranberry Red - giving it a second chance
Caribe - replanting in August as an experiment
I now have several pounds of Purple Viking, Red Pontiac, and King Harry to eat. The other day I roasted some chicken thighs with some of the potatoes that got impaled by the digging fork during harvest, and they were delicious. I like to roast chicken thighs and potatoes sprinkled with herbs like rosemary and sage, and stir it a bit as it cooks to let the fat that melts out of the chicken coat the potatoes and get them all nice and crispy. Mmmm!
It may be my imagination, but homegrown potatoes do taste better than store bought. And they were grown with no pesticides!
The potatoes I plan on replanting go in the spare fridge in the garage. Storing potatoes in the fridge makes them convert some of their starch to sugar, which makes them taste weird, and that's why you don't want to store potatoes you want to eat in the fridge. But if you're going to plant them, then who cares what they taste like? Keeping them in the fridge will keep them from rotting before it's time to plant them again.
Planting them in late January seems to work well. I think I had to cover them with frost blankets a time or two, and I did have that pillbug problem, but I still got a lot of nice big potatoes after doing that.
I look forward to seeing how the varieties from SESE do when planted earlier. When I planted Red Pontiac and Purple Viking in January and the SESE varieties in March, I expected the earlier planting to be ready to harvest earlier than the later planting, but that turned out to not be the case. They were all ready to harvest at around the same time.
At first I thought that earlier planting made no difference, until I dug them up and found out the earlier planting had much bigger tubers. Ah ha! I've made a discovery! The vines die in late June or early July no matter how early they were planted, probably triggered by the hot weather. But if they are planted earlier, they have more time to grow larger tubers before hot weather. So there is an advantage of planting earlier, but not the one I thought it would be.
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