Coldest June in 30 years!

We've been setting records for lowest high temperature in Cascadia this month. We had a burst of freak heat a while back, and nothing but cold, wet & grey since. Most crops & gardens are way behind, and now we have to start thinking about beating the first frost date!

Seven Trees is no exception. The only happy plants are the assorted greens and the potatoes. The corn, squash, peppers & onions seem to be in suspended animation, waiting for the sun to return. The beans have somehow miraculously begun to sprout, even though it's about 15 degrees colder than it should be. The tomatoes are pouting, and I've slowly been replacing the worst-looking ones with store-bought starts. Potato bugs nipped the heads off the melon starts in the greenhouse, but the replacements are coming up fine. Our real tragedy came to light today, when I noticed the previously happy-looking cukes wilting to nothing. Upon closer inspection it seems they have given up on summer and are starting to rot in the ground. So I started new ones in the greenhouse today, in hopes the weather will turn in time to get a crop in before frost.

Here are 2 ideas we're trying to mitigate some of our challenges. The potatoes are hilled with straw instead of dirt. This should give the tubers a place to form that the wireworms can't inhabit. I'll give them another pile of straw next week, and then we wait for buried treasure. The plastic doohickeys are rain ponchos for the tomatoes. Blight tends to spread and grow when water splashes spores from the ground onto the leaves. Now that we have soaker hoses for watering, we can cover them from most of the rain. Right now I have them down really low to act as mini-greenhouses. Hopefully they will catch & hold a little heat to help the plants hang on til the sun comes back. When that happens, we'll loosen and move the rain hats as needed to keep the tomatoes from getting too hot while staying dry.

Here's a batch of nettle tea (the garden kind) almost ready to use. I'll dilute it half with water, and scoop out the nettles to put on the compost pile. The plants really seem to love it when they're in the growth stages.
Stella, Doug & Nash, scrounging around the barnyard. I just locked them out of the grazing paddock for the night, so they have to eat hay (the roughage is good for them) and clean up some of the grass they've been ignoring. Still not sure about Stella's hoped-for pregnancy. Good thing Nash is here for another couple of weeks. And latest news is that we'll have Ryder here in August, so lots to get ready before we pick him up.
And this is what happens when you leave stuffed gators unsupervised overnight....looks like the dog toy version of an upset tummy. Or maybe Stewart was trying to make an artistic statement! In any case, another expensive toy bites the dust.

Tomato blight and wireworm woes

We've had some serious gardening lessons this summer.

- Plant blight-resistant tomato varieties, and if you see black spots on a plant, pull it up immediately.

- When you break virgin sod for new garden space, don't plant potatoes there for a couple of years.

- If summer is warm and wet, be prepared to lose a lot of veggies, no matter how careful you are.

Here's the story:

We spent hours poring over seed catalogs to pick just the right varieties of tomatoes this season. One for canning, one for drying, and a few ultra-early ones. One of our crop strategies is to plant some strains of veggies that are cold-weather tolerant and early producers. The idea being that we can get at least some of our harvest in sooner, in case of drought or other garden trouble. So we chose Beaverlodge from Territorial Seeds, and also planted a few Siberians from the neighbor.

Across the garden path, we tilled up more yard to make what would become the potato patch. Encouraged by the tasty spuds we grew last year, we picked out an early red and a later russet, and planted 15lbs of seed taters. Everything was growing gangbusters, the Beaverlodge set fruit incredible early, the red potatoes came out of the ground perfect and yummy. Then the rains came. Not just any rain, but warm monsoon-type rains. Soon after we noticed a couple of potato plants with black spots on the leaves, but since it didn't seem to spread, we assumed it wasn't the dreaded blight we'd heard so much about. Most tales of blight involve nearly overnight ruination, plants and spuds turning to black mush right before your eyes. So we pulled the plants out just in case, and thought nothing of it.

Until more rain seemed to bring on the black-spot in the Beaverlodge row. We thought it still couldn't be "the blight", and waited & watched. Well it was the blight, or one of its many variations. It spread quickly, and the continued rainy weather wasn't letting the millions of green tomatoes ripen anyway. Some tomato varieties held out longer than others, but even now, the last row of Polish paste tomatoes is a lost cause. They'll be pulled up like the rest.

As for the spuds, well the blight never did get going there. Must be resistant varieties. But what the blight spared, the wireworms and millipedes are wrecking. What we didn't know is that wireworms live in lawns and eat the roots of grasses. Turning the sod removes the food source, and they hang around a season or two, eating what they can find. In this case, our russets. The millipedes are pretty much endemic to most garden soil here, and normally don't do much harm. But they eat damaged plant matter, so the bites made by the wireworms were the perfect welcome mat for the millipedes. Suffice to say, the potatoes aren't inedible, but we'd rather not eat them given a choice (our Scots-Irish ancestors must be rolling in their graves!). So we'll harvest them and cook them up in batches to feed to the critters. Another old-timey tradition, as most farms had giant potato boilers in an outbuilding for the sole purpose of cooking spuds (they have to be cooked to convert the nutrients into edible form) for hog feed. And depending on whether or not the weather drives the wireworms away in time, we may end up with a few decent tatties after all. Since the crop has been compromised, we're not going to rush to dig & store them. One way of keeping spuds, at least until full winter hits, is to leave them in the ground. We plants the Buttes to mature when the weather cooled, so they wouldn't sprout if we left them in longer. So it will be interesting to see how well this low-energy storage method works.

Next season we look for disease-resistant maters/taters, and rotate into unblighted ground. The newly-broken garden areas won't have root veggies planted for a season or two, giving time for the wireworms to disperse. And we'll let the hens help by eating up bugs and turning soil when we let the garden go to winter rest. The weather will do what it wants, and we'll just learn as we go. Luckily lots of other crops came if strong and we are preserving as much as we can.

Mid-summer garden

The potato patch is no longer the lush jungle it used to be. The right-most row of reds, which now looks like a dust heap, provided around 100lbs. of potatoes. Still more to harvest from the 2nd row, and the Buttes are using the last bit of photosynthesis as the tops die back to keep on growing. You can see the little corn patch to the right, coming along well, and back center with the red tops is the amaranth.
The new contender for garden jungle are the tomatoes. No matter how often we wade in to sort them out, as soon as our backs are turned the vines are leaping over the twine and kntting themselves into an impenetrable barrier. Lots and lots of green tomatoes forming, so the canner and dehydrator will get a workout soon.
Stew is supervising our pre-BBQ clean up. He still thinks he's getting a trip to the beach, but he'll have to make do with a romp around the yard with Fergus today.
The squash pit. The orange one in front is a potimarron, a French variety that is supposed to taste like a cross between pumpkin and chestnuts. Behind them are the delicatas, and furthest back are the long island cheese pumpkins. Still not sure about the squash harvest this fall. The weather has been so strange we'll be happy to get any.
And the biggest watermelon in the greenhouse so far. There are a few more forming up, but this one seems the most happy.

Weekend @ Seven Trees - in pictures