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One of the Joys of Maturity


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The Old Guy's Garden Record

February 12, 2025


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Tuesday, February 4, 2025

I was a bit upset with myself as I didn't do any outdoor gardening yesterday during a beautiful, warm, February day. I did split some pots of geraniums that had multiple plants in them. I also re-seeded the few pots of geraniums that hadn't germinated. And using different seed than my first try, I re-seeded a couple of communal pots of snapdragons.

Oregano trimmed out of herb bed

Doing only slightly better today, I got out and cut back our oregano in our herb bed. The oregano always attempts to take over at least one side of the bed each season. I still need to clean up the sage, thyme, and rosemary on the far side of the bed.

Chewy.com

 
 

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Our Senior Garden - February 1, 2025WoodpeckerI didn't do my usual end of the month posting yesterday. I was simply too bummed out with what is going on in our nation and world. Wars, plane crashes, and a president going wild. A near month of snow cover didn't help.

I re-seeded some of our egg carton petunias today that hadn't come up. Likewise, I also re-seeded the impatiens. Both plantings were from very old seed. I was fortunate that one variety of petunias from old seed did emerge.

A bright spot yesterday was getting a dozen jumbo eggs for $4.99. With tariffs apparently coming on from a misguided president, I suspect eggs and a lot of other stuff will get a lot more expensive in the coming weeks. (Sorry to be so political on a gardening site. But Trump's callous disregard for people in this country is unforgiveable. I pray each day that the Lord will give him wisdom and empathy.)

With the snow pretty much melted off, I'm feeding birds on our well cover. Annie had been giving them seed and leftover, old breakfast cereal on the back porch through the snows. A red bellied woodpecker is shown at right. We've been fortunate to enjoy seeing them since we've lived here. Generations of the birds have nested back by the pond, often scolding us as we walk to the barn and pond.

Botanical Interests High Mowing Organic Seeds FTC Required Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, High Mowing Organic Seeds, Park Seed, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. We're also a consumer member of the Fedco Seeds Cooperative. Park Seed True Leaf Market

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Some Geraniums UpWeather Underground Extended ForecastI was pleasantly surprised this morning to find that seven of the fifteen pots of geraniums I seeded on Friday had seedlings up. Over the years I've had varying results in raising geraniums from seed. Getting good seed from a reliable vendor and bottom heat (75°F) seem to have corrected some of the previous problems.

Our extended weather forecast from the Weather Underground looks pretty favorable for finally getting some outside work done in the next week or so. Daily high temperatures in the forties may allow me to finish the garden cleanup I didn't get done last fall.

We lost one of our dogs over the weekend. Daisy, a thirteen year old red beagle cross died a quiet death at home. We had tumors removed from around her anus months ago, but the cancerous tumors returned and spread all over her body. While she remained happy and active for some time, the cancer eventually caught up with her.

Daisy

After Daisy passed, we let her body lie for a couple of hours for our other two dogs to sniff. They both seemed to go into mourning for a day or so.

The Home Depot

Friday, January 24, 2025

Our Senior Garden - January 24, 2025Onions germinatedToday's high temperature is predicted to hit 24°F. But a thaw should begin tomorrow with most of the rest of the month's high temperatures above freezing. That should allow me to get some pepper and tomato cages out of the now frozen ground. I also still need to clean up our asparagus patches.

Our tray of onions has pretty well germinated. I may need to re-seed a couple of spots. The tray had to go to the top shelf of our plant rack. Left any lower, cats may try to use it as a litter box.

With the onions off one of our soil heating mats, it was time to start some geraniums and snapdragons. I'm starting fewer geraniums this year than in past years.

I seeded twelve three inch pots to Maverick Red geraniums and three to Pinto Salmon. The pots were filled with sterile potting mix topped with some vermiculite. Some of the pots got more than one seed, as every seed probably won't germinate.

Snapdragons and geeraniums seeded

The snapdragons seeded were all from saved seed, some mixed varieties and some Madame Butterfly. And since both snapdragon and geranium seeds germinate better with some light, the seed went on top and into the vermiculite. After seeding, I used a syringe filled with warm water to wet the seeds and somewhat wash them into the vermiculite.

The tray of geraniums and snapdragons went over a soil heating mat set to 75°F.

A2 Web Hosting

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Heat wave! grin It got up to 22°F today! Tomorrow and Friday will still be cold, but then we're supposed to have above freezing high temperatures for a week or so.

Downstairs under our plant lights, the onions I seeded last week are beginning to emerge. That's about on schedule, as onion seed often takes seven to ten days to germinate. The image below shows some mold getting started. That's not uncommon in such seedings over a heat mat. I thoroughly sprayed the flat with Captan fungicide.

Onions coming up

And one of the gloxinias I seeded in August has put on buds. Gloxinias grown from seed can begin to bloom at five months old, although more often at six months.

Gloxinia putting on bloom buds

And in one of those things you do at this time of year, I ordered, downloaded, and installed Turbotax today. I'd previously ordered the tax package from Amazon, but it arrived without a license code. I got a full refund, but decided to go with Sam's Club this time around. The order came with the necessary license code, so I'm ready to go on taxes (yuck) when all our documents come in.

Gardening is a lot more fun than doing taxes!

1800Flowers

Monday, January 20, 2025 - Martin Luther King Jr. Day

We started out this morning at 2°F. We have a couple of sub-zero mornings predicted before this cold snap passes.

I awoke this morning warm and toasty under the covers and considered heading back to bed in a day that will see a convicted felon and all around horrible person inaugurated as our country's 47th President. I fear it's going to be a long and tumultuous four years.

Instead, I got up and thanked the Lord for another day. My lovely wife had our coffee brewed already. And while I had visions of baking bread today, said wife wanted a Quiche she'd bought at Sam's Club for dinner tonight. That made supper easy. And I may yet make bread.

Botannical Interests

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Our Senior Gardeen - January 18, 2025Weather Underground Extended ForecastWith a couple of above freezing days and some overnight rain, a lot of our snow pack has melted. Unfortunately, we go right back into the icebox next week with at least one sub-zero morning.

This kind of weather isn't unusual for southwest central Indiana. But we've been blessed with some mild winters of late, so a real winter is a bit of a shock for everyone.

Well, not quite everyone. I have some cousins who live in Alaska and a son and sister who live in Minnesota. They know about winter!

My gardening today was confined to watering plants under our plant lights and starting some flowers for hanging baskets. I seeded a small pot of Cora Cascade vincas, another small pot of impatiens using some very old seed, and some Supercascade and Double Cascade egg carton petunias.

Starting hanging basket flowers

I'd planned to start some geraniums, but realized that I was out of sterile potting mix and space over our soil heating mats. I started another eighteen quart kettle of potting mix, but it's still cooling down on the back porch after an hour and a half in the oven at 400°F.

Garden Tower Project

Friday, January 17, 2025 - Our Seed Listings for 2025

We're certainly not in the business of selling garden seed. I do share some of our favorite seed varieties through the Seed Savers Member Exchange (SSE). While we save seed from lots of vegetable, herb, and flower varieties, we only share our superstars. Listed below are our seed offerings for 2025 from seed grown out this and last year. Days-to-maturity are in parentheses.

Deep Red Tomatoes

I still offer two Jack Metcalf varieties. I've dropped our listing for his excellent Earlirouge variety, as we got lousy results from last year's crop. If you really want seed for that variety, the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative offers it from seed we donated to them years ago. Our Moira and Quite Jack Metcalf varieties again produced bumper crops of medium sized, deep red tomatoes last season.

Quinte tomatoesThree MoirasMoira (66) - Moiras have been a longtime favorite variety of ours for their excellent flavor and deep red interiors. Seed produced in 2024.

Quinte (70) - Also known as Easy Peel, our Quinte plants produced unusually large tomatoes in great volume in 2021. Quintes are another Jack Metcalf variety. As with most of his releases, they are an early, semi-determinate, open pollinated plant. Quinte tomato seed is also available from the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative, grown out from seed we gave them. Seed produced in 2024.

Both our Quinte and Moira tomatoes have increased in size in recent years. Rather than some special breeding, I'm guessing that is due to me adding a shovelful of compost to each planting hole.

Underripe Crimson Sprinter tomatoesCrimson Sprinter (65) - An early, medium sized Canadian heirloom slicer developed by Professor Thomas Graham at the Ontario Agricultural College. It is said to be “the earliest cultivar to carry the famous crimson gene for high lycopene.” Its semi-determinate vines filled and overflowed our five foot tall tomato cages and produced lots of delicious ripe fruit with deep red interiors. Seed produced in 2023.

Our how-to, Growing Tomatoes, tells all about how we grow our tomatoes.

Peppers

Earliest Red Sweet (65) - The Earliest Red Sweet bell pepper variety produces peppers a bit smaller than popular hybrids. But what its peppers lack in size, it makes up for with an incredible volume of peppers, especially late in the season. Seed produced in 2023-2024.

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Note that I sometimes add some ERS peppers to our Hungarian Paprika peppers when making ground paprika. I didn't have to in 2023, as we were overwhelmed with true paprika peppers.

Here's a tip from our Growing Peppers how-to that suggests a solution if your pepper plants don't perform well for you. For years, our pepper plants looked good right up until the time they set fruit. Then they'd languish and eventually die. On a luckshot, I began adding a little Maxicrop Soluble Seaweed Powder to my transplant solution for the peppers. Our pepper problems magically vanished! Apparently the seaweed had some necessary element in it that our soil lacked. Maxicrop is a bit expensive, but it doesn't take much of it to do the trick.

Paprika Peppers

Paprika peppersBoldog Paprika peppersI grew and dried so many paprika peppers in 2023 that I didn't grow any last season. Our jar of dried paprika is still quite full. So this year's offerings of the Boldog Hungarian Spice (71) variety and Hungarian Paprika Spice Pepper (70) are from seed produced in 2023.

Cucumbers

Japanese Long Pickling cucumberJapanese Long Pickling (60) - I'd grown Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers for years. But after a five year hiatus from gardening after I lost our farm, I found that seed for the excellent variety was no longer available. I did, however, still have a few seeds preserved in the freezer over the years. Just one seed germinated, so I began saving seed and propagating the variety. Things went really well for the long, thin cucumbers for several years before we ran into inbreeding depression. So I bred in some cucumbers of the same name from Reimer Seeds, only saving seed from our cucumber plants. The crossing revitalized our strain of the excellent cucumber without changing our strain's excellent characteristics.

Lots of Japanese Long Pickling cucumbersWe use JLPs for pickles and pickle relish. They're also good for slicing, although not quite as good as pure slicing varieties. Note that JLPs require trellising, as the vigorous vines grow over five feet tall. Since we grow our JLPs as a succession crop after our tall, early peas, they grow between a five foot tall double trellis. Seed produced in 2024.

Flowers

Cranberry Tiger/Double Brocade cross gloxiniaGloxinias on our dining room tableGloxinias - Our gloxinia seed was derived from crosses of the Empress, Cranberry Tiger, and Double Brocade varieties. It produces a variety of colors in single and double blooms. Properly cared for, gloxinias can last for years and years. Seed produced in 2023.

Zinnias - Zinnias were my mother's favorite flower. In honor of her, and because they do so well in our East Garden plot, I often border the plot with an eighty foot row of them.

Our zinnias were originally from the State Fair variety, but over the years I've bought seed packets of other varieties and mixed them in. The result is a mix of very tall and shorter zinnias with a wide variety of blooms. Seed produced in 2024.

Zinnias and buckwheat

Seed Savers Exchange

Thursday, January 16, 2025 - Starting Onions

I started our onions today. I seeded a flat to five varieties. I did a half row each of Red Zeppelin and Rossa di Milano from packets of year old seed. Onion seed typically is only good for two years even when frozen. I used fresh seed to plant full rows of Red Carpet, Yellow of Parma and Walla Walla.

Onions seeded

Because a full flat of wet potting mix is really heavy, I use a slotted 1020 flat for the soil and put it in a sturdy Perma-Nest flat. The combination of a slotted and solid flat also allows for bottom watering the onions.

How We Grow Our Onions

True Leaf Market

Monday, January 13, 2025 - Something New

Pork Sausage Seasoning15 Bean SoupWe still had a large chunk of ham left in the fridge this morning. We’d had ham sandwiches, some delicious ham and beans, and ham salad, but there still was lots of boned ham left. So after looking it up online, I ground the ham, added someĀ A.C. Legg Blend 10 Pork Sausage Seasoning, and a bit of lard. It made a tasty ham sausage, but I didn’t add enough lard to make the patties stick together well.

I cooked a ham sausage patty each for Anne and I. They came out pretty spicy, as the seasoning mix is made for seasoning lots of pork. An eight ounce package of the seasoning mix seasons twenty-five pounds of pork! The ingredients for the seasoning mix are listed as just "Salt, Red Pepper, Sage, Sugar and Black Pepper."

I now have two orders from Chewy hung up in the FedEx delivery system, one dating back to January 5. Although our roads have been cleared for days, they can't seem to make it to our house in the country. To be safe, I do use 4-wheel drive to get in and out of our driveway. But once on the road, I shut it off as unnecessary. For us, FedEx has become an unreliable shipper!

Park Seed

Saturday, January 11, 2025 - Throes of Winter

Throes of WinterExtended ForecastWhile the temperature today just sneaked above freezing, we're definitely into the throes of winter. We received another three or so inches of snow yesterday over the six plus inches we already had on the ground.

I'd been avoiding clearing our snowy and ice covered steps. But my lovely and much younger wife cleared them this afternoon.

Our last seed order, from Johnny's Selected Seeds, arrived in the mail yesterday. I need to make a trip out to our garage freezer to bring in seed for onions, petunias, vinca, geranium, and impatiens that I want to start this month.

High Mowing Organic Seeds

Friday, January 10, 2025 - More Snow

Our Senior Garden - January 10, 2025Wandering Jew cuttings pottedIt's snowing again today. The predicted new accumulation is between two and three inches. That's on top of the six plus inches already on the ground.

Everyone I talk to around here is sick of winter already. But I feel a little funny about complaining considering the horror folks around Los Angeles are going through with wildfires destroying their homes.

The only gardening related activity for me today was moving the Tradescantia Zebrina (Wandering Jew) cuttings I had rooting in water to a sixpack of potting soil. Even though each cutting had good water roots on it, I dipped each one in rooting jel before poking them into some sterilized potting mix.

Stark Bro's Nurseries & Orchards

Monday, January 6, 2025 - Snow

Our snowy Senior Garden - January 6, 2025Over six inches of snowThe predicted snow arrived last night. Although the Weather Underground had variously predicted eight to fourteen inches of snow accumulation, my old ruler showed just over six and a half inches. Other areas got hit a lot harder.

Our road has been plowed, although I doubt we'll be going anywhere today. Since this snowstorm had been predicted for days, we had laid in all the supplies we need.

The last heavy snowfall here was in 2014. That was the year both Annie and I switched to 4-wheel drive vehicles. Both vehicles are still in good shape, so we continue to drive them.

The Tradescantia Zebrina (Wandering Jew) cuttings I put in a jar of water a few days ago now have water roots sprouting from the joints along the stems. From the cuttings rooting in potting mix and these water rooted cuttings, I'll start two or three hanging baskets of the plants. One of them will replace the Wandering Jew hanging in our kitchen window with the others going outside.

Chewy.com

Wednesday, January 1, 2025 - New Year's Day

Happy New Year

Cuttings in potting mix
Cutttings in water

Wandering Jew PlantWe've had a series of Tradescantia Zebrina (Wandering Jew) plants hanging in our kitchen window for over a decade. We got our start of them from a daughter who now has some of the plant's offspring.

About every twelve months, I take and root cuttings from the most recent plant, as the variety only stays nice for about eighteen months. While I used some rooting jel for the cuttings that went into sterile potting mix, some backups just went into a jar of water on a kitchen windowsill. The variety roots pretty well either way.

Another small job for today was rinsing the plant tags I'd had soaking in bleach water. The bleach pretty well removes the "permanent" magic marker writing on them. While the tags aren't terribly expensive, bleaching them clean makes ordering tags every year or so unnecessary. Of course, the tags eventually become brittle and break from outdoor conditions and/or the bleach.

When to Start Seeds

Dave's Garden Frost Page for 47882When we start our herb, flower, and vegetable transplants from seed is based somewhat on past experience. I also rely on a very helpful interactive tool from Johnny's Selected Seeds, their Seed-Starting Date Calculator. Entering an average frost free date obtained from Dave's Garden, the seed-starting calculator yields a long list of vegetables and flowers with date ranges of when to start them. Do note that the calculator only lists seed types that Johnny's sells.

I went through our Johnny's print catalog last night, finding two items I'd like to order. Our stock of seed for the wonderful Sugar Cube mini-cantaloupe is getting a bit old. And I found an interesting, new, small seedless watermelon variety, Kalahari, that I'd like to try.

Botanical Interests High Mowing Organic Seeds FTC Required Disclosure Statement: Botanical Interests, High Mowing Organic Seeds, Park Seed, and True Leaf Market are some of our Senior Gardening affiliate advertisers. Clicking through one of our ads or text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. We're also a consumer member of the Fedco Seeds Cooperative. Park Seed True Leaf Market

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