Disappointed in Red LaSoda

I had already decided I would not grow Red LaSoda potatoes again. Compared to the other two potato varieties I tried this year, Purple Viking and Rio Grande Russet, RLS grew sickly looking plants, half of which died shortly after they started to grow. The late March freeze may have had something to do with that, but PV and RGR recovered from that just fine, turning their 4'x8' potato patches into lush jungles, while RLS just had a few scraggly plants sticking out here and there with a lot of bare spots.

Now my potatoes are starting to die as the weather turns hot. This is only the second time I've grown potatoes, and the first time was years ago, so I'm still learning here, but I've been told that to harvest fully mature potatoes you wait until the tops are completely dead.

However, I decided that since I wasn't going to save this variety to grow next year anyway, I would sacrifice the Red LaSodas to become the delicacy known as "new potatoes".

Now, I don't know about your mom, but my mom always called any small, waxy potato, especially the red ones, "new potatoes". It was only later I found out that true new potatoes are actually the immature form of any sort of potato. You dig them up before the plant has died to get delicious little baby potatoes. So I probably have never actually had new potatoes. A new first for me from the garden this year, along with garlic scapes!

Of course, right when I decided I would dig up my patch of Red LaSodas, it rained. A lot. I'm not complaining since we really needed it, but it's funny how this always seems to happen at an inconvenient time. At least my rain barrel is full again.

Today it's cleared up, so I braved the steamy atmosphere created by the sun beating down on the wet earth, and started digging.


I started at the really sparse side and dug towards the not quite as sparse side, but it soon became clear I wasn't going to get much. Also, I've never seen so may grubs! What's with all the grubs? Was it all the compost I added? I hope they aren't doing damage. When I stopped to get my digging fork, a mockingbird swooped down and snatched one. I hope now that I'm done they're out there getting the rest.

And here's my harvest! I bought three pounds of each variety and they each got a 4'x8' patch to grow in (cut the seed potatoes into 32 pieces so each got one square foot of space). Washed the potatoes off and stuck them on the scale, and you know what it read? 2.95 lbs. So basically I would have been better off eating the seed potatoes directly!

At least they're pretty. I plan to make them into Creamed New Potatoes and Peas with all these peas I've been getting as well. Apparently this is some sort of popular, classic dish, but probably more for Yankees, because I've never had it. This is not really potato OR pea growing country. I cheat by planting them super early, in January or February, and then they're harvested and dead by May. In fact, my peas are almost kaput. The vines are almost completely brown now, but I've still got 2-3 pounds of peas in the fridge. I'm going to have to plant a lot more next season so I'll have extra to freeze.

I've got higher hopes for my other potatoes. In the foreground here are the Rio Grande Russets, and behind them are the Purple Vikings. A weird thing is that they seem to die from the middle of the patch out to the edges. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but there's a lot more going on, at least above ground, than there was with the Red LaSodas. I hope that translates to more below ground as well. These I will let completely die before harvesting for maximum potato maturity. Supposedly they keep better that way, but it also allows them to get as big as possible, because these plants are transferring the life out of the leaves and into the tubers. That process isn't completely done until the plants are completely dead.
I think I'll put sweet potatoes in where the red potatoes came out. I hope their namesake roots make better use of all that compost and sand I dug into the bed than the red potatoes did.

Unseasonably Hot Weather

This past week has been pretty rough for the garden. It hasn't rained since mid-April, and we've had temperatures in the mid-90's every day for this week. This is about ten degrees hotter than average for this time of year.

In July, mid-90's aren't bad, but in early May, the cold-weather plants are still present (peas, onions, potatoes, etc.) and getting heat stressed sooner than normal, and the warm weather plants are still mostly babies, with smaller root systems, so they dry out much more quickly.

I'm struggling to keep my newly planted okra, beans, peppers, eggplants, and cucumbers alive. I'm out of rain barrel water, so have been using the soaker hose. That'll make my water bill much higher this month. Still, there have been casualties. I'm down to only about six okra plants, two eggplants, two sweet peppers, three anchos, and three chile de arbols. That's less than half of what I started with. I still have time to plant more okra, but it's too late for more peppers or eggplant. I'm also down to only three cucumbers out of ten, and one luffa gourd out of six. I think I will plant some more okra, gourds, and cucumbers in pots under the lights in the garage, not to keep them warm, but to keep them wet enough to germinate and grow a bit before putting them out under the broiler.

The tomatoes are doing ok. I've started finding little baby tomato fruits on them. I also found a bunch of eaten leaves. Hornworms! At least, I assumed that's what they were. I didn't find any of the 5 inch monsters, but I did find some much smaller caterpillars that may be one of their earlier instars. I went ahead and sprayed all my tomato plants with Bt, an organic insecticide that only kills caterpillars and doesn't harm any other forms of life (at least, that's what I'm told).

Speaking of caterpillars, something is also eating my parsley, dill, and cilantro in the herb garden in the front yard. I'm going to leave those alone, because I have a feeling those are being eaten by parsley worms, which are the larvae of the black swallowtail butterfly. Besides, all those plants are bolting now anyway, now that its so hot. I would like to collect seeds from those plants, but the leaves probably don't taste good now anyway, so I'm letting the caterpillars have them.

About the only plant that seems completely unfazed by the heat is the Chihuahua Landrace Cushaw Squash I got from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. They say they got these seeds in the Chihuahuan desert in northern Mexico, which is the same desert that covers Trans-Pecos Texas and parts of southern New Mexico. I've visited this desert several times, and figured if this squash is from there, it should have no problem with summers in the Hill Country. So far I seem to be correct, with it growing away happily with all other plants looking a bit singed, at least.

I'm afraid this weather may be only a taste of things to come. Last summer was one of the hottest and driest on record, with hardly a drop of rain and temperatures getting up to 110+. The summer before that wasn't much better. I remember something on TV I saw with a climate change scientist talking about how, "we need to stop thinking of this as a drought, but just how it is going to be from now on," referring to places that are forecast to become drier in the coming decades. That sounds like a smart attitude to have, so I'm researching the gardening techniques of the desert southwest and hunting down varieties, like this cushaw squash, that are adapted to hot and dry conditions. If the Pueblo Indians could do it, without soaker hoses even, then so can I.

Sounds of Summer Nights

It's May Day, which is more or less the beginning of summer for me. While spring is marked by the blooming of wildflowers, summer I associate more with sounds. Not that I didn't appreciate the profusion of Indian Blanket replacing the bluebonnets along the sides of the trail during our evening walk through Prospect Park last night, but what I really noticed were the sounds of nocturnal creatures who have turned their minds towards love as the nights warm.

Of course, one hardly ever actually sees the performer, but I hunted down some pictures for you along with the sounds so you can put a face with it.


Hiking down the trail, we were surrounded by the tiny little peeps of Cliff Chirping Frogs who perch in limestone cracks and crevices in the Hill Country.

Hiking towards the ponds, we started to hear the much larger, and louder Southern Leopard Frogs. They sound much louder in person than they do in that recording. They almost sound like they're chuckling at us!

Soon the frogs were joined by some avian accompaniment.

I'm actually really excited to hear one of my favorite summer nighttime sounds, the haunting song of the Chuck Will's Widow. These strange-looking birds are close cousins of the Whip-Poor-Will, but while their better known relatives migrate further north before settling down to breed, Chuck-Will's-Widows spend their summers right here.

Finally, what's nighttime without owls? On the way home, walking through our neighborhood, we were delighted to hear the cutest owl we have.

Eastern Screech Owls make kind of an eerie sound as well. I remember trying to go to sleep on several camping trips, sweating on top of my sleeping bag, listening to dueling screech owls calling across the forest.

So there you have it, the sounds of summer have arrived. The only thing that's left are the cicadas, and they don't show up until things get REALLY hot. Maybe there's a reason why the best summer singers are also nocturnal.

Full Egg Moon

The English name for the full moon of April is the Egg Moon. I guess that's because Easter is usually in April. I haven't been getting a lot of eggs in my CSA bag lately. The Native American name is the Pink Moon, referring to pink flowers, but there aren't a lot of pink flowers blooming around here (except for pink evening primrose), so I'll go with Egg Moon.

The bluebonnets are starting to fade and drop their blossoms, replacing them with seed pods that will eventually burst and throw pebble-looking seeds everywhere. Replacing them are Indian Blanket, a very cool looking daisy-like flower with a dark red center and yellow rim.

I like these full moon posts even if nobody else reads them, because I was able to go back and look at my previous ones and see how much progress the garden has made. A lot can happen in a month!

I've made more progress laying out paths and beds in the garden, but as you can see, the Bermuda grass is catching up with me. I'm still using RoundUp to carefully spot-treat it when it comes up in cracks, and digging up and burning as much as I can. I hate how when you try to pull it up, it just breaks off in your hand.

The Scarlet Runner beans have started flowering. The butterflies seem to enjoy them. They also seem like something a hummingbird would like, but I haven't seen a lot of hummingbirds yet, even though the nectar is disappearing from our hummingbird feeder. Maybe they just get up earlier than I do.

I gave up on the old lima bean seeds and started planting regular pole beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) instead. These are Kentucky Wonder, and I'm probably going to plant some Blue Coco as well.

Their legume brethren, the Tall Telephone peas, have been putting out plenty of pods lately. Looks like this is a good variety after all. Both the fall-planted and spring-planted plants are doing well, though the fall-planted ones are much bigger. I'm trying to save the peas up to cook a dish with them, but it's hard to not just eat them all right in the garden. Fresh peas straight from the pod are another one of those wonderful things you can't get anywhere else but a garden.

This is where my lettuce used to be. It's gone now. It had started to bolt and got infested with some sort of green caterpillars, so I pulled it up. The beets are still doing fine, and I interplanted them with some bush beans to fill in the gaps. I like to have my plants close together to crowd out weeds and also shade the surface of the soil to conserve moisture. Bush beans are a good plant to fill in any gaps between plants before weeds do. I just stick them in here and there wherever I can. An added bonus is they do that nitrogen-fixing legume thing.

The collard greens are working on some seed pods now. I wonder how long it will take to get mature seeds from them. The chard, on the other hand, is more heat tolerant than I thought. While the collards and lettuce have already bolted, it shows no sign of switching from leaf to seed production. Poor Daniel may still have another couple months of me trying to get him to eat chard mixed into everything.

The garlic is still green. I made the mistake of pulling one up, and it hardly had a bulb yet at all. I asked online when is the usual time for garlic to be ready in my area, and was told I've still got ANOTHER MONTH! Ugh, that's a long time.

The Rio Grande Russet potatoes are also flowering, though disappointingly the flowers tend to drop off without a fruit in sight. The other two potato varieties aren't flowering at all. Not all potato varieties do, since domesticated potatoes have become used to not having sex, but sometimes if they do flower, they will make a little fruit that has actual seeds in it. These seeds can be planted with interesting results. Or so I was told. I was hoping I could try that out for myself, but now it looks like they might not quite make it to the fruit stage.

Some other nightshades are more sexy. The tomatillos have a lot of flowers on them. No fruit set yet, but I know they will eventually. Same thing with the tomatoes. I'm really looking forward to them. Strangely, blogger's spellchecker doesn't recognise "tomatillos". It wants me to change it to "tomatoes". That's not the same thing!

The peppers and eggplants are still puny. This is one of the bigger specimens. I really should have planted them earlier, or maybe given them a heat pad during the winter. They grow really slowly when they're not warm enough. I went ahead and planted them, and a few of them died because it's been dry and warm for a while and they were so small that they dried out fast. That's a shame.

The dry weather has also affected the okra. We had a rainy spell that coaxed the seeds to sprout, but that was followed by a dry, hot spell that killed at least half of them. Tiny little seedlings just dry out so quickly! It's like one day they seem fine and the next day they're fried to a crisp. I planted more okra seeds than I needed, but enough died that I might go ahead and plant more to fill in the gaps. On the one hand, okra is very prolific, so I might not need many plants, but on the other hand not only is it a staple of Southern American and Indian cuisine (two of my favorites), but it pickles and freezes well too. I should be sure to grow plenty.

Finally, now that it's gotten warm, I've been rushing to plant my Cucurbitaceae, that is, squash, melons, cucumbers, and gourds. I'm having the same problem with direct-seeding them as I have with the okra, keeping them moist enough during their delicate seedling stage. I seem to have better luck when I plant them in pots first and then transplant them once they've gotten a few true leaves. I can keep the pots sheltered while the seedlings are small. The bigger plants, once put out in the garden, don't seem to dry out as fast. This year I'm planting a few different kinds of squash and melons along with luffa gourds. This is another garden plant family that give you (relatively) instant gratification because they grow really fast.

Daytime temperatures have been pushing the high 80's lately, though it still gets cool at night. Probably by the next full moon we'll be in the 90's. Eek! I hope by then I'll have something else to eat besides chard and peas.

Thai Shrimp Stir-Fry

I originally planned to post a lot more recipes to this blog than I've been doing, so today I'm fixing that somewhat by posting this recipe, especially since it uses FOUR ingredients from my garden (garlic scapes, carrots, cilantro, and multiplier onions).

The inspiration for this dish came from Thai Spicy Basil Shrimp from Tigers and Strawberries, but altered to fit what I had on hand. Stir fries are nice that way. Once you have the basics down you can play with them quite a bit and they'll still come out yummy.

Tigers and Strawberries is where I learned my stir-fry technique. Before that stir-frying was overly complicated because I felt I had to cook each ingredient separately to make sure each was done the right amount. Now I know what order to put the ingredients in so they all cook together harmoniously.
If you want to become a serious stir-fryer, one thing you gotta do is get a REAL wok. DO NOT get one of those non-stick Teflon ones from the nearest bigbox store. You should go to a specialty store and get a CARBON STEEL one (or do like I did and ask for one for Xmas).

You need a wok that can stand up to as much heat as you can pump into it. Hopefully you know that Teflon is not good for high heat cooking. Not only does it break down the Teflon, causing your pan to not last nearly as long, but that hot Teflon also releases toxic chemicals into the air, enough that people with pet birds are always told to not cook with Teflon because the fumes can kill the bird. Now, I'm not a bird, and birds are more sensitive to air pollution than mammals, but if it can kill a bird, I doubt it's good for me.

That said, I do have a set of Teflon pans. I only use them for low-heat cooking, mainly eggs and pancakes. They were a gift, so might as well use them for something.

As you can see, my carbon steel wok is pretty dirty looking. It's supposed to look like that. Carbon steel woks get "seasoned" in a similar way to cast iron pans. I won't go into the details of that now, but if you do go ahead and get a real wok, you'll have to season it. You can look up instructions on how to do this on the Internet. After that, the wok just gets better from use. Mine has been pretty well loved.

My wok also came with a little stand thingy to go on the stove, since the bottom of the actual wok is round. This works just fine for me, but some woks have flat bottoms so you don't need a stand. I think the round bottoms are more traditional, since it makes stirring more easily, but I'm sure the flat bottomed ones work fine too.
When you cook in a wok you should always have the heat at least at medium-high, if not cranked all the way up. You want that wok absolutely SEARING HOT. Food thrown in this wok flash-cooks, preserving nutrients and giving you that authentic wok flavor. Yes, you will need your vent fan on. I do OK cooking on my electric stove cranked all the way up, though gas would be better. The very best wok cooking I have done is outside on my charcoal grill. Once the coals are glowing hot, remove the grate and put the wok directly on the coals. Plus it's outside so you don't have to smoke up the house.
You also should have all your ingredients ready before you begin. With slower cooking methods you can afford to be chopping more veggies while other ingredients are already in the pan, but with stir frying you should have everything chopped up and ready to go before you heat up the wok. Once the wok is hot, things move really fast, so you should be prepared to just dump each ingredient in right away and keep your attention on the wok. It's really easy to burn something if you're not paying attention.
OK, so enough blabbing about wok technique. How about the recipe? Remember, stir fry recipes are just guidelines. Eyeball measurements, use what you have, substitute freely, and adjust to your own tastes.
I only made enough to serve 2, so double if you need to.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and de-veined

Shrimp Marinade:
1 tsp. cornstarch
1 tsp Thai fish sauce
1 tsp. honey

About 2 tbsp oil or fat with a high smoke point, such as canola, peanut, lard, or schmaltz leftover from the last time you made chicken stock (that's what I used). Don't use olive oil. It can't stand the heat.

Vegetation:
2 shallots, minced (I used a handful of my multiplier onions)
1 thinly sliced fresh Thai or cayenne chili - OPTIONAL (I left it out, Daniel has bad heartburn)
3 elephant garlic scapes - ended up about a cup cut into bite sized pieces
2 carrots, julienned
*Here you can substitute any vegetable you want. Green beans instead of garlic scapes would be good. Red bell pepper instead of carrots. Maybe some mushrooms. If you don't use garlic scapes, add some minced garlic in with the shallots.

For the sauce, about a tablespoon each of
fish sauce
lime juice
chicken or shrimp stock
*But really, I just squired/splashed some in.

A handful of fresh cilantro (or Thai basil if you have some, or some of both), or frozen if yours has bolted, like mine has (that is, if you had the foresight to freeze some cilantro before that happened).
Method:

Mix shrimp with cornstarch, fish sauce, and honey. Let marinade for at least 30 minutes. While you're waiting, cut up all your vegetables and have them ready to go. You can mix the shallots and chile together in the same bowl and the scapes and carrots together in another bowl since they'll be going in the wok at the same time.

When shrimp is done marinading, heat up your wok until it starts to smoke. Add about a tablespoon or two of your oil or fat, and then add your shallots and optional chiles. Stir them around a bit until they've gotten fragrant, and then add the carrots and garlic scapes. If you were stir frying with a less delicate meat, like chicken or beef, you would add that before the veggies, but shrimp cooks very quickly, so you add the veggies before it.

Once the veggies have turned brighter colors and maybe have a few browned spots on them, dump in the shrimp along with all its marinade. Stir fry and cook until the shrimp has curled up and started to turn pink. Next add more fish sauce, some lime juice, and some chicken or shrimp stock to de-glaze the pan and make a sauce. You don't want stuff floating in sauce, just a little bit to coat the food.

Throw in the cilantro, and stir until the liquid has dissolved any browned stuff off the pan and thickened into a nice sauce, and the cilantro has wilted. Dump it into a serving bowl and immediately rinse out your wok while it's still hot (much easier to clean that way).

Serve over rice or rice noodles, unless you're cutting carbs like Daniel is. Sprinkle with Sriracha sauce if it's not already spicy enough for you.

Garlic Scapes are Yummy

I'd heard of garlic scapes before, but never had the pleasure of tasting them until now since I've never (successfully) grown garlic before.

As you can see, my elephant garlic has put up scapes. They're some sort of flower head type thing that hardneck garlic and elephant garlic grow towards the end of their life cycles. None of my hardnecks have put up scapes, at least not yet, which may be because hardnecks don't like warm climates. The elephant garlic, on the other and, has put up some nice big ones.

From what I've read about growing garlic, it is generally advised that you cut them off so that the garlic plant doesn't waste energy on making a flower head instead of making a bulb. The bonus is that garlic scapes are yummy.

I wasn't sure how big I was supposed to let them get before I cut them off, so they ended up being about a foot long. Looking up recipes, it looks like you can make pesto out of them, grill them, or what I thought sounded the best, stir-fry them, so that's what I did.

Turns out they have the texture of green beans with the flavor of garlic. Good because I like both of those. Mine might have been left on the plant too long because they were a bit fibrous and strong tasting (I had garlic breath for a while afterwards), but they were still good, and it was neat to get the chance to try a new vegetable.

If the hardnecks never end up putting up any scapes in this climate, I might just plant extra elephant garlic next year to make sure I get a good supply.

As for harvesting any of the bulbs, the leaves of the garlic are just starting to die. They're supposed to be half to three-quarters dead before they're ready to harvest. Some of the Chet's Italian Red plants look like they're about half dead, so I'm planning on digging one up next time I need some garlic to see how it looks. Worst case, if it's not ready yet and still too "juicy", I'll just have to use up that bulb quickly and give the others a little more time. The other varieties are not as far along as Chet's as far as leaf dying goes. Chet's also has some of the biggest tops of any of the other varieties. I'm surprised how much the tops of the garlic varieties vary in size and number of leaves. If big tops translate to big bulbs, than Chet's is probably going to end up being one of the best garlic varieties for me.

The Sweet Potatoes Have Arrived

I almost forgot that I ordered sweet potato slips from R. H. Shumway's several weeks ago. It's not exactly my first choice in catalog. Sandhill Preservation Center has a much better variety of sweet potatoes (and that's an understatement), but it turns out they've had a bad crop and wouldn't be able to ship any slips to me until late May at the earliest. That's a bit late for me since things are already good and warm in my neck of the woods.

So Shumway's it was. I ordered their Sweet Potato Heirloom Collection which has six slips each of five varieties. Hmm, actually their website says it should only be four slips of each. Well, I got six slips each, so that's cool. There's White Yam and Nancy Hall, which are both white sweet potatoes, Porto Rico and Vardaman are orange potatoes with shorter vines than most (and Vardaman's vines are a neat purple color instead of the usual green), and then Beuregard is a regular long-vined orange rooted potato. That should be a good selection to start with. Maybe next year will be better for Sandhill and I can try ordering some other varieties from them.

Sweet potatoes aren't even related to "regular" potatoes. Sweet potatoes are in the species Ipomoea batatas; same genus as morning glories (and the vines look very similar), while "regular" potatoes are Solanum tuberosum in the nightshade family along with tomatoes, eggplants, and chile peppers. Interestingly enough, I think I. batatas were actually the first plant to carry the name "potato" ("batata" became "potato" somewhere along the line), which means sweet potatoes should really be the default potato, and S. tuberosum needs a better name to distinguish it. I don't like "Irish potato" because they aren't from Ireland, but South America, and I don't like "white potato" because some sweet potatoes are white, and not all S. tuberosum potatoes are white. Yams are something entirely different as well, an African native of the genus Dioscorea. I guess that makes "sweet potato" a better common name for I. batatas than "yam".

Now you can see why botanists prefer Latin names.

What is a sweet potato "slip"? Well, it's pretty much a rooted cutting of a sweet potato vine. I got mind wrapped in wax paper with some sphagnum moss in a box with breathing holes labeled "live plants".


There's Porto Rico unwrapped and White Yam next to it still in it's wax paper and rubber band. Now I have a problem. I don't really have anywhere to plant my sweet potatoes in the garden yet! I made the mistake of planting squash in the remaining empty spaces (I told you I forgot about the sweet potatoes on the way), so now I have to wait until some of my cold weather crops, like the garlic or carrots or regular potatoes, are harvested. Some of the garlic looks like it might be done soon, but in the meantime I couldn't leave my sweet potatoes in their little wrappers.
I ended up planting them in pots so they can sit tight and wait until space in the garden opens up. I hope they don't mind. The slips are pretty tall and spindly. When I plant them in the garden I'll put them in good and deep so they'll grow roots (some of which may become big fat sweet potatoes) along the buried stems.

Speaking of freeing up some garden room, I harvested one bunch of my I'itoi's Onions that I got from Native Seeds tonight. They're multiplier onions that are supposed to do better in hot climates than other onions. I got them because the catalog said they have a "shallot-like flavor" and shallots are EXPENSIVE at the grocery store, so I was hoping I had a good substitute with these. I got 10 sets but only 5 survived the brutal summer, and then those expanded into big clumps. Now their tops are dying back, so I thought I'd try digging up a bunch. I was disappointed to find them looking a lot more scallion-like than shallot-like. Maybe this fall I should get some actual shallots and try them out. I'm going to let this clump dry out and "cure" and see how they taste. They sure did multiply a lot! That clump of onions there came from just one little set the size of a garlic clove. Even if they do turn out to be more like scallions they're probably still worth growing for how tough and prolific they are.

I wonder if I can squeeze in some sweet potato plants once I dig up the rest of my multiplier onions.