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:

• 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Tatume Squash and Calabacitas con Pollo

This year was the first year I grew Tatume Squash, and they've already earned a permanent place in my garden! The most impressive thing about them is that even though they are a member of the Cucurbita pepo species, the Squash Vine Borers didn't kill them! Oh, there was a little bit of damage to the vines, but overall the plants were still able to thrive and make a nice harvest.

This is exciting, because ever since I moved to San Marcos, the only squashes I've been able to grow are cushaws.

Here is a picture of the vines. Yes, they do have long vines, unlike most other summer squash cultivars. That does mean they take up more room in the garden, but it's also why the borers don't kill them. They have enough stems that if some get killed by borers, the plant has plenty of other ones.

Another interesting thing about this variety is the leaves. The leaves are much more deeply lobed than most other squash leaves. I wonder if that helps them be more heat and drought tolerant than other squashes, because they have that advantage also.

It makes sense since they're a Mexican variety. Unfortunately, It's a bit hard to find the seeds. The only place I've seen them for sale is Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I saved some of my own seeds this year to make sure I always have a supply.

The fruits themselves are like an egg-shaped zucchini. They're best harvested when they're not full size yet, though this one in the picture is a bit too small!

Even though I'm sure you could use them for any recipe you use any other summer squash in, I decided for my first taste of Tatume, I should try a recipe from their native land of Mexico: Calabacitas con Pollo, which means "squash with chicken."

There are several recipes for this dish out there, so I looked at a lot of them to see what the common denominators were. It's basically chicken braised in a tomato sauce flavored with Mexican spices, with cubed squash and sweet corn kernels mixed in.

After figuring that out, I didn't end up using a real recipe, so I'm just going to describe how I did it.

Calabacitas con Pollo

You will need:

• 4 pieces of bone-in, skin-on chicken (drumsticks, legs, or breasts)
• 2 Tatume squash
• 1 onion
• 2 or 3 hot peppers, depending on how spicy you want it (I used 2 red Serranos from the garden)
• vegetable oil for browning the chicken
• 2 or 3 cans of diced or crushed tomatoes, or plain tomato sauce, or some chopped up fresh tomatoes (I used tomatoes I had frozen from my tomato harvest that I thawed, peeled, and smashed up)
• about 2 tablespoons tomato paste (optional, but a good flavor booster)
• a couple of handfuls of frozen corn kernels
• cumin seeds - maybe about half a tablespoon
• salt to taste
• cilantro (optional, I didn't have any, but I bet it would be good)

First I browned the chicken in some oil in a Dutch oven on the stove. I used four drumsticks, but I think thighs would be even better. You could use breasts, but I think they dry out in braised dishes.

I set the chicken aside and added the chopped up onion to the oil and chicken fat left in the pan. Then I sprinkled whole cumin seeds over it. I didn't measure, so I'm just guessing it was about half a tablespoon. Cumin has a really nice savory flavor that really went well in the dish. You could use powdered cumin, but I would add that after you put the liquid in. I also added the finely diced hot peppers.

I cooked the onions on medium low heat until they were starting to turn golden. Then I put the chicken back in the pot, and dumped in enough crushed tomatoes and any juice that came out of them until the chicken was just barely covered. If you're using canned tomatoes, I guess it would take 2 cans, but maybe 3. If you don't have enough tomato to cover the chicken, I bet adding some chicken broth would work. You want the chicken to be just submerged in liquid. Then I added about a tablespoon or two of tomato paste, which gives it another level of flavor, and a sprinkle of salt.

Then I put the lid on and let the chicken simmer. This could probably also be done in an oven or slow cooker, but you'd have to figure out how long that would take yourself.

While the chicken was simmering, I diced up the squash. I didn't want my squash to turn completely to mush, so I let the chicken cook a bit first before I added it. After the chicken had cooked for about half an hour, I added the squash, and let that cook until the squash was tender, which took about 20 minutes.

Then I added two or three handfuls of frozen sweet corn straight out of the bag. The sweet corn only needed a few minutes to cook. Once all the vegetables were cooked, the chicken was starting to fall off the bone. Yum!

I served it over white rice (brown rice would work too) with warm flour tortillas on the side (corn would work too). I like things spicier than my husband, so I went easy with the hot peppers in the actual dish, but added Mexican-style hot sauce to my own portion.

A sprinkle of fresh cilantro on top would be nice, but we didn't have any.

If the people you're serving this to are offended by bones in their food, you can pull the chicken pieces out, pull the meat off them, add the meat back to the pot, and discard the bones before serving it. Except I highly recommend that you use bone-in chicken for this. The bones (and skin!) add a lot of flavor to the broth as the chicken cooks. If you absolutely must use boneless chicken, be sure to reduce the cooking time, because meat with bones in it always takes longer to cook than boneless.

If you don't have Tatume squash, the flavor of it is most similar to a really good zucchini. It has a nice nuttiness to it, and the flesh is firm so it stands up to this kind of cooking method without getting mushy too fast. Yellow squash would probably be good in this too, but it has a much different, sweeter flavor.


Now that I've finally found a C. pepo variety that can survive in my garden despite the borers, I'm already wondering if I can do some breeding experiments with it. Maybe I could transfer it's borer-resistance to other squash varieties. I've never actually tried something like that before, but that's what I get for reading Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. I wonder what a cross between Tatume and a yellow crookneck would be like, or maybe a patty-pan..

Oh well, Tatume is a very good squash variety in its own right. I'll probably be growing it year after year, since all other summer squash I grow get completely eaten up by borers.

This is a great example of the advantage of heirloom varieties. If you have trouble growing the standard varieties of a crop, maybe you just need to track down a local heirloom that's adapted to your area. This is also why it's so important to preserve heirlooms, because you want to make sure that local heirloom still exists.

The Thunder Moon

Once again, the Thunder Moon is a good name for this month's full moon (which was about a week ago - oops), since we got a bit more rain. The Cenizo in the front is in full bloom with its beautiful lavender flowers. My husband has built a nice xeric garden around it with some agaves and prickly pear cactus.

In the back, the Tatume squash is doing very well. Usually C. pepo varieties are very susceptible to borers, but I haven't done anything to protect it from squash vine borers, and it's still producing some fruit. The borers have gotten some of the vines, but it has plenty more.

I have some fruits at various stages on the vines. Here's a little baby one with the flower still attached.

When they get bigger they turn a dark green, similar to a big round zucchini.

And here's one that's fully ripe. Even though Tatume is supposed to be a summer squash, I'm letting some ripen to collect seeds. I'm just excited to have found a summer squash that doesn't get killed by squash vine borers!

The Moon and Stars Watermelon had one little melon on it, but it ended up shriveling up and dying. Now it's just growing vines. I hope I get some melons from it eventually.

The okra are growing among the watermelon vines. I planted them a bit late, so no fruit yet, but the plants themselves are doing OK.

The peppers I planted in the back aren't doing too great. For some reason, they aren't making a lot of fruits, and the ones they have made either got sunburned or pecked by birds.

Some of the sweet potatoes are doing well, and some aren't. This variety, an orange one called Diane, is doing the best so far, making some long vines.

The Calico lima beans are growing into lush vines, but with hardly any bean pods. I've harvested maybe seven beans so far. I'm starting to wonder if they need bean inoculant. I've never used it before, but ever since I've been growing beans at this location, they just don't yield well, and the beans I do get are puny.

The Dr. Carolyn tomatoes are the last tomatoes I have still producing. Their flavor wasn't that impressive at first, but as it's gotten later in the year, they seem to be getting sweeter. Maybe the heat concentrates the flavor.

The rest of the tomatoes look like this. Still a few green leaves, but no more fruits.

The eggplant is still the only thing in the front garden the deer haven't munched, which is interesting. That's not what I expected.

The peppers in the front, which are the ones that survived last winter, are finally growing back after we put chicken wire around them to protect them from the chickens and deer.

I've got only two Waltham butternut plants left that might now get a chance to grow since we put chicken wire around them.

The Rattlesnake pole beans are still getting eaten like crazy by the deer. Well, now I know not to plant beans in the front without a lot of protection.

 

We actually aren't have too bad of a summer this year. We actually got a couple of good rainstorms, once of which dumped 4 inches of rain on us. The deer and chickens are causing a much bigger problem than the weather this year.

 

 



The Firefly Moon and Summer Solstice

The summer solstice was last weekend, so the days are getting shorter again. However, we're still just starting the hottest time of the year, and temperatures have been going over 100 for the last several days.

In the back garden, the Tatume squash is sending out long vines, but Squash Vine Borers are getting some of them. It hasn't set any fruit yet. I'm not giving it any special help to see if it really is resistant to SVB's. It would sure be nice to find a variety of C. pepo that can produce a good crop despite SVB's.

The Moon and Stars watermelon is sending out vines too. To be fair, I did plant the cucurbits late. I'm not sure if they're going to have enough time to make a good crop.

The Christmas Lima beans are getting very lush. No sign of any beans yet though, but the vines sure are impressive.

The Corno di Toro and Chapeau de Frade peppers I have in the back are starting to make little fruits.

The French Red Shallots are still very green, even though it looks like it's time to dig up the potatoes and garlic. I'm not sure how dead-looking the tops of shallots are supposed to be before you dig them, but probably more than this.

In the front garden, my husband has been building wire cages around the tomatoes to protect them from the deer, which keep eating the fruits and new leaves. It's helping to protect what tomatoes are left, but a lot of damage was done already. Looks like I'm going to have to go to the trouble of building a fence around the whole garden eventually.

The contrast between the Rattlesnake beans in the front and the lima beans in the back shows the kind of damage the deer can do. They've had all their leaves eaten right at deer-level.

The peppers in the front were being eaten badly too. They weren't eating enough of the plants to kill them, but were making it hard for them to grow a good crop of fruits by stunting their growth. Now that Daniel has cages around them I hope that they can catch up.

The butternut squash I planted in the front are also getting badly eaten. I'm kind of surprised deer even like squash plants, because they have those irritating hairs. I don't like touching them myself.



Weirdly, they still don't like eggplants. I'm getting a good crop of eggplants except for the occassional one pecked by the neighbor's chickens (but apparently the chickens don't actually like them either because they just peck them a time or two and then stop). No sign of any eggplant leaves being eaten by deer.

Finally, I did get a good crop of tomatillos, which I've been accumulating in the fridge to make roasted tomatillo sauce, but the tomatillo plants seem to be dying off. They were the first nightshades to be planted, but I'm surprised they're tiring out before the tomatoes.

I have decided to take cuttings from the tomatillos and tomatoes, and root them in water to try planting for a fall crop. If you'll remember, last year I tried to grow a fall crop of tomatoes from seed, but they didn't get to ripen in time. It may end up being another waste of time, but I wonder if cuttings will go faster. I have room in the back garden (where the deer don't go!), so I think it's worth a try.

Greening Moon - belated full moon update

I'm back! Last week we went on vacation to the Big Bend area, and before that I was really busy with final exams and getting final grades in, so May's full moon post is about two weeks late.

May is supposed to be our wettest month, and we did get around 3 inches of rain, which isn't actually that much, but better than we have been getting.

Lots of things have been happening in the garden that probably deserve their own post. First the neighbor's chickens were causing a lot of damage digging up things in the front garden, then while we were on vacation the deer found it! I also got my sweet potato plants from Duck Creek Farms and planted them. I've been harvesting a few paste tomatoes, but I think the deer are eating a lot of them too. That makes comparing yields from the different varieties I planted difficult. I might have to leave out that bit of data this time around and just compare things like plant vigor and heat tolerance.

I knew I was risking things by planting my Rattlesnake beans in the front, and sure enough, the deer have been eating the leaves off of them. The funny thing is it looks like my deer are lazy, and are only eating the leaves in the middle of the vine, not bothering to bend down to eat the ones near the ground, or stand up to reach the higher ones.

The chickens dug up a lot of the beans, so in their place I planted the rest of my Waltham Butternut squash seeds. There were from Seed Savers Exchange in 2009, and I guess they were getting old because I was having trouble getting them to germinate. I went ahead and planted all the rest of my seeds in the ground before we left, and when we came back some of them were sprouting.

The deer are also eating the ends of the shoots on the tomatoes and peppers. I guess the new growth is more tender. Some of my peppers are getting fruit anyway, but I'm sure the deer have eaten a lot of the blossoms.

Weirdly, they don't seem to like the eggplants. The remaining eggplants I have that didn't get dug up by the chickens are making fruits now. This variety is Fengyuan Purple, and the eggplants growing on it are really long and skinny! The biggest one I have so far looks like it's over a foot long. Guess I need to make some more Thai Green Curry paste to make these into curry with.

The tomatillos aren't looking so good. I've harvested a lot of them, but now it looks like they're starting to die down. I don't know if it's because they aren't getting enough water or something else. The deer haven't bothered them either, even the ones outside the wire cage my husband made for them.

I should be harvesting lots of tomatoes now, but the deer have been mostly beating me to them. When I got back from vacation there were hardly any ripe ones to be found, except for a few that look like this. This is a nice big Red Brandywine with a big chomp out of it. Another annoying this is it appears deer don't know the difference between a ripe and an unripe tomato. Maybe because they're colorblind? I found lots of green tomatoes, including a really nice Opalka that was the size of a Poblano pepper with bites out of them.

The only thing I have left to plant is my okra. Some of them took a really long time to come up, which isn't that unusual with okra. I got three varieties from Native Seeds/SEARCH, all from Texas: Beck's Gardenville, Eagle Pass, and Hill Country Red. I know I'm a bit late on okra planting, but okra can really take the heat, so I think they'll be OK.

Taking a quick look at the herb garden, the Esperanza is starting to overwhelm things again, like I knew it would. The other plants aren't doing too bad though. Herbs really like being in the ground much more than in pots. Once I planted all my herbs in the ground, ones that had been in pots on my apartment balcony for years, they really took off. In the background here is the Mexican oregano flowering like crazy. To the gnome's right is marjoram, while to his left is thyme. Elsewhere in the herb garden I've got Greek oregano, rosemary, peppermint, orange mint, catmint, catnip, lemon balm, yarrow, skullcap, horehound, parsley, and now a few different kinds of basil.

I'm still waiting on the potatoes to die down. It's taking longer than I thought it would. I also haven't harvested the garlic or shallots yet. The garlic still doesn't look good, but the shallots are still pretty green.

This is Tatume squash, a Mexican heirloom that is in the C. pepo species but is supposed to be more resistant to squash vine borers. I planted five, and it looks like the borers already got one, but the others are doing pretty well, so we'll see.

The Moon and Stars watermelon plants are also doing well. I planted four of them. I also just planted three Melon de Castilla plants, a cantaloupe from Native Seeds/SEARCH. 

The Christmas Lima beans are in the back, so the deer aren't eating them, and they're doing great. They're just starting to get blossoms.

Here are my sweet potatoes I just planted right before we went on vacation. They probably deserve a post of their own. They've just gotten settled after transplanting and are starting to grow.

The fava beans just aren't doing too great though. It started getting hot just as they were making pods, so I think they just didn't have enough time. This fall I'll have to plant them much sooner.

OK, that's my update. By now I should be getting my summer crops in if it wasn't for the darn deer.

The Grackle Moon

Thursday was April's full moon, and I'd say that the warm-season crops are just about all planted. Finally time to relax a little bit after the frantic March and April planting season and watch things grow.

Here is the front garden. The only thing left to do is mulch that last bed, but I'm waiting until the pole beans get a bit bigger and start climbing the poles. Getting the front garden ready took up a lot of my time, so some of the planting was a little late this year.

I put sticks over the ground to keep the neighbor's chickens from digging up the sprouting beans. That seems to be working so far.

Most of the peppers that survived the winter are coming back nicely. I transplanted them to the front garden, but I'm afraid a few of them might not have survived the trip. Or maybe they're just taking their time.

The tomatillos already have lots of fruit on them. The husks grow first, and then the fruit grows into them (right now the fruits are about the size of marbles).  I got the seeds from an online trade, and they were supposed to be purple tomatillos, but they sure don't look like it to me.

In the back, the Tuscan kale is starting to bolt. I think I'll go ahead and let them and save seeds from them. I'm not going to plant anything in that spot anymore. It's too shady. Too close to an oak tree. The Elephant garlic is starting to make scapes, but it looks like the Romanian Red garlic is all dead now.

The potatoes are starting to turn a little yellow, and I can't tell if that means they're starting to finish up and get ready for harvest, or if they haven't been getting enough water.

The arugula seed pods are starting to dry and shatter. I've been going out there and clipping pods off to save seeds, but a lot of seed is ending up on the ground anyway. I guess I'll have lots of arugula volunteers.

I just planted some Calico lima beans around two bean tepees right next to this year's new pepper plants. I put these pepper plants in the back to isolate them from the peppers in the front for seed saving purposes.

I've started harvesting peas, but only enough to eat fresh right off the plant. The peas are turning out to be a disappointment this year. I think it's a combination of planting them late (after we moved here in March), a dry winter, and then the trellis I made for them keeps falling down and damaging the plants. I'll do better next time, when I will plant them in fall (like I usually do) so they can grow through the winter, and I'll be sure to build a much sturdier trellis for them.

The fava beans are starting to make pods. I'm not sure if I'll have enough to eat some, or if I should just let the seeds mature to increase my seed supply and plant more this fall.

The herb garden is doing great. The roses are finally starting to bloom, about a month later than they did last year. I trimmed back the esparanza and now it's coming back.

I planted watermelons, squash, cucumbers, cantelope, and okra seeds in pots to buy me a little more time to decide where I want to plant them, and to let some of my winter crops finish out before I plant them out. Also, some of the seeds were kind of old, so I wanted to make sure they were going to germinate. I also have basil plants in pots I need to plant out soon.

I've been getting lots of compliments from neighbors about my front yard vegetable garden. I'm really glad I did that. I think it might actually be a better spot than the one in the back (less shade, less rocky), and I'm feeling rebellious because a lot of neighborhoods don't allow front yard vegetable gardens at all. It's like I'm stickin' it to the Man!