First Crop

I dropped off the first food bank crop on July 24. Right now, it's beets, summer squash and peas. The peas were not as prolific as I had hoped. I think the heat wave that hit right when the peas started to flower might have affected their productivity. Normally, it is still cooler the first week or two of July. Well, the melons liked it, and that is all that matters. I already pulled my snow pea vines and seeded some Sugar Ann snap peas. I had good success with Sugar Ann in spring 2011. This is the first year I've tried for a fall crop of peas.

Chioggia and golden beets picked for the food bank.

 
I cut off the beet greens before delivery because food bank participants want vegetables that look like they came from market. Anything too exotic, such as eggplant, kale or yellow cucumbers, is not desirable. Perfectly globe-shaped Early Girl tomatoes get snatched up quickly, knobby heirloom tomatoes not so much.

"If I hear one more person say how much they love heirloom tomatoes, I’m going to punch them right in the face," says Annette Bening's character in "The Kids Are All Right." That's two good movies with the same name. "The Kids Are Alright" is a midnight movie classic about The Who. I wonder if Pete Townshend likes heirloom tomatoes?

For some hybridization of an heirloom standard, go here.

Fava Bean Chili

Shelled fava beans have an outer skin that should be removed when cooking fresh. To get rid of the outer skin, boil the beans for a minute or two to loosen the skin. Then it should be easy to pull off. It is time consuming to cook the beans this way, but the result is an extremely soft and buttery bean. For dried beans, it doesn't matter as much if you leave on the outer skin. Just cook them a long time. I used a crock-pot for the chili and the beans turned out fine.

Fava beans grown in 2011. Green pods dry on the bush to become
a purplish-black, with the dry beans being slightly less dusky.

Some fresh Bogatyr garlic to go in the chili. I planted cloves in a
backyard raised bed in October 2011 and harvested the bulbs the
second week of July. This hardneck garlic variety from Russia
produces small bulbs, but the taste is outstanding.

Almost as good as Nalley.

Going Live

After using my camera for 10 years, I now realize it has a video option. Guess I should have read the instruction manual more thoroughly.

These are some food bank rows in the community garden. The row of beets is ready to harvest. The vegetative growth on the pumpkins in back is quite impressive. Most of this stuff was direct-seeded the third week of May.

This is Hopi red-dye amaranth. These were volunteers. I like the burgundy color in contrast to all that green.
 

A Good Start

Harvest began this week at my community garden plots. Slow to start, but easily the potential to be my best harvest by far in the four years I have gardened there. Snow peas were the first to mature. Now they are nearly tapped. I ate most of them while I wandered around my plots. I get the munchies when I am out there.

Some of the goods from this week: two kinds of summer squash,
Chioggia and golden beets, and snow peas.

There are seven other gardeners who are growing plants I started. Mostly squash. It's the desert island vegetable at the community garden.

Catching Up

Progress is encouraging in my garden this year. The past week or so has been quite warm and the plants responded accordingly. I finally got watermelons established in one of my backyard raised beds after some problems with starts damping off within a day or two of planting. 

The lineup in the melon bed is now five Golden Midget and three Saskatchewan watermelons, and one charentais cantaloupe. I lost five Saskatchewan starts before my last three took hold. They are beginning to vine, so it should be clear sailing from here.

I planted my last melon start today at my plot in the community garden. It was a Tigger melon that is set in between four Korean Star melons. There was a volunteer sunflower growing in that spot, but it toppled over a few days ago. I staked the one side where it kept leaning, then it fell over on the other side. It is just as well. The sunflower established a massive root system that would have sucked out a lot of nutrients better consumed by melon vines.

I achieved 100 percent success with 19 mixed melon starts surviving transplanting to my garden plot. If you count the one Ambrosia melon vine growing with the cucumbers, I have 20 melons total in my garden plot. But I don't count it using the same criteria as the other 19 because I bought it at a variety store garden center. All of the other melons I started from seed. Plus, there were actually three Ambrosia melon starts in the 4-inch pot I bought. One damped off, the other I pulled to end its competition with No. 3. So if I count Ambrosia, I am no longer 100 percent, and I like to be perfect.

First Look

It was in the mid-80s today. The plants are loving it. Here is a first look at the community garden this year.

Dwarf grey peas in flower. They were direct seeded May 7.

A Korean Star melon start a week after planting.

A Howden pumpkin vine starting to prowl.

A row of fava beans in the food bank plots.
They were direct seeded May 18.

Sunset in the garden.

Tree Varmit

So I have explained the critter situation to some degree, but I neglected to explain the connectivity of it all.

There is scrub jay pair who dominate the backyard. Other visitors, including a flicker, submit to the will of the jay. When I first moved here, there were several flickers. They dissipated after I screened off an attic vent they had breached to pull out fiberglass insulation to build their nests.

To bring back the flickers, I buy prepackaged blocks of seed and other goop stuck together that I hang from a tree branch. (It is marketed as woodpecker food, anyway.)

The squirrel, who gets harassed by the jays, has decided it is easier to hang upside down and pick away at the flicker food block than getting a meal from a squirrel box that I put up specifically for him. He eats there occasionally, but it doesn't seem to be a big enough challenge.

A morning snack.

The food block is hanging below the squirrel's left.

You talkin' to me?
(I'll bet he doesn't act like that when the jay is around.)

Angry Bird

I have an ultra aggressive scrub jay who spends a lot of time on my deck railing because I put food out there. The food isn't all for him, but he eats most of it and chases away everything else.

In repose, contemplating world domination.

A frequent visitor who gets chased through the trees by the jay
when he tries to get something to eat.

Another frequent visitor. Click on the image to see a lager version.
The jay will buzz him while he eats bird seed off the ground,
striking him on the back with his beak.

A raccoon shows up right after dusk during most months, but when the days grow longer, he wanders around when it is still light. If I don't put seed on the ground, or other food (dog food, critter crunch, lasagna, fruit, soup, etc.) the raccoon will climb into a large bush in front of hanging bird feeders and swing from the branches to knock the seed to the ground. He breaks off branches and crushes the flowers below.

The seed and other food also feeds a colony of mourning doves and a striped skunk, who I have run into several times when I have taken out food after dark.

The End Begins

I planted the last wave of melons in my garden plot today: three charentais and five Tigger. This is the first year I am trying Tigger. The Tigger starts were a bit leggy due to poor light in their infancy, but a few of them had decent root mass that should set quickly.

A healthy Tigger melon start a day before planting.

The first two plantings of melons look great, especially the first wave, Prescott and Korean Star, both of which have set and produced new growth in just four days.

I wish I could say the same for the backyard raised beds. The original four Saskatchewan watermelons died and one of the five Golden Midget watermelons is dead. The four surviving Golden Midgets look healthy but lack vigor. I replaced one Saskatchewan with a new start. I have two more. Another hole was refilled with a Lambkin, which immediately got attacked by slugs. Plural because I picked two three-quarter-inch buggers off the poor bastard this morning. It's too bad because my other two Lambkin starts were planted June 29 in my garden plot and already have started to crawl.

My garden, if you consider the raised beds, plots and food bank, is planted for 2012. There will be some inevitable changes to the lineups, which are updated in the Garden Schematics tab above.

The food bank plots have matched my original expectations the best. None of the first plantings have changed. I'm going to have a lot of beets, green beans, fava beans, zucchini, winter squash, pumpkins and cucumbers. The only weak spots are in the shadow of two volunteer sunflowers: one dead tomato plant and minus-six beets. The sunflowers will be bloomed out in a couple of weeks, so they will come down and the dead spots can be filled with something else. I have a couple of things in the works, but success is more of a thirsty man's mirage than a sane man's reality.