One of the Joys of Maturity
One of the Joys of Maturity |
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One of the joys of getting a bit older is having the time to putter around in the garden. Below is my garden blog. This site also contains sections of recipes and features about specific, and often obscure, gardening lore. I transplanted baby gloxinia plants today from their communal starting pot to individual cells of fourpack inserts. The gloxinias were a bit smaller than I usually transplant, but I'd gotten the seed clumped together in one spot. So instead of moving plants with a tiny corm forming at their base, these were pretty much bare root transplantings.
I'd started this batch of Empress gloxinias on December 18. While I have lots of nice gloxinias currently in dormancy, I wanted some of the Empress variety to breed back into our landrace blend of gloxinias. Our strain produces lots of lovely colors in both single and double (ruffled) blooms, but I've let them lean to a variety that produces unmanageably large leaves.
That seeding was of our landrace blend which has a lot of Empress in it, but the timing may differ for pure Empress gloxinias. Four months is pretty quick to go from seed to blooms. A more accepted figure would be five to six months. And to get true florist gloxinias, one has to wait a year or two for the plants to go through dormancies and really mature. First year plants produce some lovely blooms, but nothing on the order of what's called a florist gloxinia which may have around twenty blooms open at once.
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It's a lazy Saturday here. My one gardening job today was starting some daisies. We've not had a lot of success getting daisies, a perennial, to take in our plantings. I've chosen poor spots for them in the past. I have a new spot picked out for them this year.
I started some Painted Daisies, Alaska Shasta Daisies, and Gloriosa Daisies
Possibly driving my resolve to trim the bushes is that they obscure the view from our west facing kitchen window. That's the window that has our Wandering Jew plant and our egg carton petunias in it. These bushes for years had lots of praying mantis in them. Then birds began to nest in the bushes, either scaring away or eating the mantises. I still hatch out a praying mantis egg case each year in the bushes. I've also cut the bushes off to just about ground level a couple of times. Each time, the bushes grew back even lovelier than before. Tomorrow's high temperature is predicted to be about twenty degrees less than today's. I'm glad I got some outdoor work done today. Our onions are up, sort of. One tray germinated well other than one variety. The other tray was a disaster. While both trays were treated the same, the failed tray may have gotten too much bottom heat from its soil heating mat. That tray also received some older seed. But even the fresh Walla Walla seed from Twilley Seeds germinated poorly, worse than all the rest.
I've re-seeded bare spots in the flats, but probably will have to just start over with the flat with red onions and sweet onions. Both flats are off the soil heating mats, as onion seed can germinate at fairly cool temperatures.
I have lots of supposedly fresh geranium seed on hand (well, three packets of ten seeds each), but wanted to see how the older seed would do. At one time, I started all of our geranium seed on paper towels or coffee filters, only moving seeds that sprouted into pots. To my total surprise, the seed had begun to germinate in just two days. So, I began moving the geranium seeds to three inch pots filled with sterile potting mix with a bit of vermiculite in the center of each pot. Of the seventeen seeds started, sixteen showed signs of germination!
Now I'm trying to decide if I really need any more geraniums.
Note that the product pictured makes twenty-five pounds of sausage and doesn't give directions for lesser amounts. From my experience, about one teaspoon per pound of pork works pretty well for a slightly spicy sausage mix. I thoroughly mixed the additions to the pork and then cooked a sausage patty to make sure I'd gotten the mix right. (That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.) I ended up freezing two one pound packages of really good pork sausage for about two bucks for the meat! With our favorite Jimmy Dean's Sausage running four to five dollars a pound, our homemade sausage is tasting better and better.
Monday, January 18, 2021 - Martin Luther King Jr. Day
After a rather severe trimming, the plant went into the kitchen sink for a good spray and watering. It left handfuls of dead leaves in the sink. But even with the watering, I could tell that the plant was nearing its end of beauty. Wandering Jew plants generally do well indoors for twelve to eighteen months before stems and leaves begin to dry. To have a plant in the window at all times, I begin taking cuttings from the existing plant each year in December and/or January. By springtime, the cuttings moved into a hanging basket are ready to take over in the kitchen, while the old plant goes outside under our back porch for the summer. I currently have two deep sixpack inserts with Wandering Jew cuttings rooting in potting mix. The first set of cuttings I took are just about ready to be transplanted into a hanging basket.
I soaked some milkweed seed today and mixed it with damp vermiculite to begin stratifying it. Per some excellent online instructions, the mix went into sandwich bags and into the fridge for couple of weeks or so. I've not had much luck growing milkweed, but am willing to try again to help preserve the monarch butterfly. Some flower seeds need stratification. Most vegetable seeds really don't, but sometimes germinate better if soaked before planting. More than stratifying seed, we usually scarify geranium and asparagus seed before planting. Scarification involves somehow cracking, scraping, or otherwise weakening the outer shell of some hard seeds. My preferred method of scarification is gently drawing a seed a quarter inch or so down an emery board! Ordering Garden Seed If you haven't yet ordered vegetable seed for your garden, you may find it rather difficult and frustrating to do. While I've fussed here about our tardy order from Fedco Seeds, the current advisory on their web site screams "GO AWAY" to prospective customers.
That's my red line in the graphic above. The green line is Fedco's. And based on their phantom shipping of my seed order on December 31, I'm not buying their "shipping company overload" excuse. But Fedco isn't alone in not adequately staffing up to meet customer needs. As I looked over our page of Recommended Seed Suppliers, I found that Annie's Heirloom Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Reimer Seeds, the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the Seed Savers Exchange, the Territorial Seed Company, and the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative are all having trouble filling orders and getting them to customers. Some are closed to new orders for a time, others are only taking orders a day or two a week. One even begins taking orders each morning, only to stop taking them when they have enough to keep them busy the rest of the day. Having been through all of this last year when people returned to gardening in a big way, and with the pandemic continuing, these seed houses should have known they'd face a similar onslaught of orders.
Friday, January 15, 2021 - Uppotting
Having started hosta, gloxinias, petunias, vinca, impatiens, and dianthus in communal pots over the last month or so, I have a lot of uppotting to do in the next few weeks. I've already moved our hosta plants grown from saved seed to individual pots. Our small, communal pots of dianthus (from saved seed), impatiens, and vinca had put on their first true leaves, so they got uppotted to shallow fourpack inserts today. While the plants are up and on their way, I still used sterile potting mix for the transplanting as a precaution against damping off fungus.
While the dianthus are for our flowerbeds, the impatiens and vinca will go into hanging baskets.
While I'm relieved that the folks at Fedco haven't been decimated by the Covid virus or some other calamity, I'm not very happy with them for the delay with my order and their lack of responsiveness when they knew they had a problem. I had two items in my order that I really needed on time. To protect myself, I'd placed other orders for the critical items elsewhere. But when a company doesn't communicate its failures to customers and you have to double order to make sure you get the items you require, it may be time to hunt for a more reliable vendor. I'm guessing if my experience with Fedco is shared by many others, they won't have the problem of being overwhelmed with orders next year!
Sunday, January 10, 2021 - Starting Some Onions
I had another packet of Walla Walla seed, but it was from the same vendor that sold us inferior (old?) seed that germinated poorly last year. The upside is that the vendor boosted the price of the seed from $1.55 per packet to $2.50 this year, a possible sign of fresh seed arriving. I started out planning to seed one tray of onions. I start the onion seed in sterile potting mix in a slotted 1020 tray in a solid Perma-nest tray. The slotted tray allows the soil to drain somewhat into the solid tray, and the pair give some strength to the trays that are very heavy when filled with moist potting mix.
While that potting mix was cooling, I seeded the first tray of onions. I planted full rows of Clear Dawn, Milestone, and Yellow of Parma yellow storage onions and a row of Southport White Globe white onions. Note that seed for the excellent Milestone hybrid variety has disappeared from the market this year. The open pollinated Clear Dawn, Yellow of Parma, and Southport White Globe varieties remain widely available.
When I was ready to seed the second tray of onions, the soil had remained very wet. When I checked, I found that I'd accidentally pulled a solid 1020 tray instead of a slotted one that would drain excess moisture. I headed for our basement plant room and dumped the sterile soil from the solid tray to a slotted one which corrected the soil moisture problem. The second tray was seeded to half rows of Red Bull, Red Sunset, Rossa di Milano and Red Creole The last two rows in the second tray were seeded to Walla Walla sweet onions. That may prove to be a bit of overkill, but we've had trouble germinating the variety the last two years. Most of our Walla Wallas go into canned green beans and our annual batch(es) of Portuguese Kale Soup.
I seeded the onion rows pretty heavily. I don't mind thinning a row, but I really hate having to go back and re-seed bare spots in the rows. And seeding untreated black seed into black potting mix makes telling how much seed you dropped rather difficult. Having mentioned "untreated," I did add some Captan A couple of our other pages may shed a bit more light on our onion growing practices.
Thursday, January 7, 2021 - Sage to Sunroom
I'd waited to make the move until I installed a new toy in the room. While I doubted the room had ever reached freezing temperatures, I wanted to be sure. So I mounted a max-min thermometer on the wall close to the level where plants would be. The cool temperatures of the sunroom slows down the growth of plants. That's often a good thing for plants like sage and geraniums. TurboTax In these days of the pandemic, it seems like we have a delivery or two every day. One recent one was a disc for TurboTax Deluxe. I'd been watching the price of the software, as it usually drops ten bucks around the first of the year. When it did, I ordered and installed a copy of it. TurboTax Deluxe 2020 (Fed, State, and E-file) now runs at about forty bucks from either Amazon or Sam's Club.
My heart is heavy as I write today. An unruly mob inspired by the President stormed and broke into the Capitol building during a joint session to certify the results of the Electoral College. Responsibility for this lawlessness falls squarely on Donald Trump. After four years of his horrible presidency, he now is attacking our democracy on his way out. Sunday, January 3, 2021 - Ordering Garden Seed
First, order early. Seed vendors quickly ran out of seed last year. A difficult growing season for some seed producers will probably negatively impact the availability of some vegetable seed varieties this year. Second, use only known and reliable seed vendors. Bargain garden seed often turns out to be a disappointment. I maintain a list of trusted seed suppliers that we've used for years. Third, watch out for gotchas on shipping rates. If you only want a packet or two of seed from a company, their shipping rates may make such a purchase cost prohibitive. Fourth, if you have a manual defrost freezer, don't be afraid to order larger seed packets. Freezing leftover seed preserves it quite well (other than onion seed). Here are a couple of good articles on seed viability and storage. Note that we get far longer storage by freezing our old seed.
Lastly, keep track of what seed germinates well and what doesn't. Be mindful of the seed supplier of seeds that don't germinate well. Seed houses often sell seed they've had in storage for years.
Saturday, January 2, 2021 - Getting Started
Beginning a new gardening season is always exciting. We have sage, hosta, gloxinias, petunias, vinca, impatiens, dianthus, and some asparagus started or seeded. I'm looking forward to starting our onions and geraniums this month. I received an email on Thursday from Fedco Seeds saying that they had shipped my order. Their web site had stated that orders wouldn't begin shipping until January 4. Since the order includes a packet of onion seed I'll need later this month, I was glad to see that order wouldn't hold me up. I'll also be starting geraniums from seed this month. With geranium seed, it has become a crapshoot as to whether supposedly fresh seed ordered will germinate well. I still have a bit of geranium seed leftover from last year that germinated well. So, here's hoping.
You'll notice that I've entered our local frost free date in the image of the calculator above. I also deleted a few items to get the vegetables we might plant included. Also note that the page continues to a good listing of flower varieties not shown here. Even using guides such as the one above and past experience, weather conditions can still work against a gardener. I transplanted our Earlirouge tomatoes into a raised bed on May 1 last season. A freakish late frost followed by dry conditions stunted those tomatoes much of the season. The rest of our tomato varieties transplanted into our East Garden plot on June 5 and 6 gave us all the tomatoes we could eat, can, and give away. On the other hand, the Johnny's guide suggests direct seeding peas as early as March 3. We try to seed our tall, early peas at some point in the first two weeks of March. Of course, we do treat our seed with Captan to prevent rot in the wet, dry, and sometimes frozen soil. Grousing, complaining?
Actually, seeing the birds is well worth the cost. The red bellied woodpecker shown at right is from a long line of red bellies that have stolen dog food from our bowls on the back porch for years. When we walk back to the barn, the woodpeckers always scold us. There's been a nest or two of them there for ten or fifteen years! And "red bellied" is a somewhat inaccurate description of the birds' appearance. Wikipedia notes, "Its common name is somewhat misleading, as the most prominent red part of its plumage is on the head." The cardinal in the image at right is just a pretty bonus. We are also seeing a lot of blue jays. While pretty, they tend to bully the other birds visiting our feeder. And from the past, they're not one of my favorite species. When I was farming, we kept two beehives. One did well, but the second was failing. One day, I noticed a blue jay sitting on an old fence post near the hives. It was picking off honeybees as they flew by. I dispatched the blue jay, but the second hive eventually failed. The bright spot in this story is that the one filled and the other empty hive sold well at the farm auction that sadly closed out my farming years.
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A notice on the Fedco Seed site says they're not accepting orders until this weekend. Frustrated by not receiving my order in a timely fashion and not getting a prompt response to my email inquiry, I called Fedco this afternoon. A customer service agent related that Fedco is currently "overloaded" with orders. He also related that there is no tracking information on the orders shipped out the same day as mine.
fungicide to the water I dumped on the trays. We often get some mold on the soil surface of trays started over heat mats covered by a clear humidome. Do note that the onion seed was all covered with potting mix, as it doesn't require light for germination.
Our seed orders for the coming gardening season have been placed and mostly filled. But I'm guessing that many gardeners are just getting around to ordering seed for next summer. I have several suggestions to offer.
usually tells us when to seed and how (light, total darkness, optimal temperature for good germination).
