The peas just keep right on growing. I expected them to slow down by now, but they seem bent on taking over the whole garden and the surrounding lawn. Instead of working themselves up to a big set of pods, this variety has been giving me a steady harvest of delicious peas. You can find them at rareseeds.com, look for Ologwe peas.
The past few days I've been setting up 34 cm pots with okra, pac choy, and onion. It's raining every day now, so I don't have to spend time with the watering hoses. My rain gauge registers about a half inch a day...that's a little over a centimeter. Today there's a tropical wave over us, so as it passes we'll likely get some substantial downpours.
Some types of seed last longer than others. I'd like to plant radishes now, but first I want to test my old seed. Radish seeds will sometimes stay viable for several years if they're kept dry, even longer in the fridge. At three or four dollars a packet, I don't like to buy replacement packets if I might have viable seed left from previous years.
Of all the radish varieties I've planted, two stand out for me...Everest and Hattorikun. Everest grew very well and the roots were mild and crisp. I just noticed that the description in the seed catalogue says that they can be grown year-round in the Tropics, so I might order a packet of those. I don't have any left-overs. I always thought of radishes as a cool-season crop, but some varieties seem to have remarkable heat-tolerance. The roots on Everest are about twice the size of a large carrot when it's time to pick them.
Hattorikun grew right through June in a pot, but by then the greens were tough and inedible. Hattorikun is grown for the green tops, not the roots. Radish greens are good in salads and stir fries, I'll vouch for that. Just treat them well if you want the greens...otherwise they'll be tough and bitter. People are like that too, I've noticed. I've seem more than my share of bitter people. Radishes are one of the easiest crops to grow in a garden, but they do best in a rich, loamy soil...like most garden vegetables.
My Evergreen onions in the South Garden have divided into lots of little onion plants. Suits me...I think I'll dig them up and replant the little ones in containers. They seem to do best in my containers where the soil is richer. All those years of amending my potting soil with compost have given me a black, mucky soil that grows just about anything...except cucumbers and squash it seems. I've given up on those, they reach the point of making fruit and then die. It could be RKN, root-knot nematodes. They're very common in all my garden soil. I try to favor nematode-resistant varieties.
Guess I'll go try to upload some pics I just took of the peas and part of my container garden. I keep forgetting how to set the exposure on the camera, my memory has problems lately. I'll get it eventually, I've only had the darn thing for a dozen years now, and I still don't really know much about it. For some reason gadgets aren't fun for me anymore like they used to be. But I manage somehow.
The onion bed is in the right foreground, half-buried under pea vines. That stuff that looks like weeds in the left foreground among the pea vines is weeds. It's hard to get in there and weed the pathway with all those pea vines sprawling around. The weeds are mostly Dactyloctenium aegyptium, which incidentally has edible seeds. Africans use the seeds as survival food when their grain crops fail.
This is just one part of my container garden. The big plants are okra Clemson Superb, the vines are sweet potato Liberty and Porto Rico. That big spindly thing is an okra plant that's lost its leaves but still makes pods. It's the variety William Woys Weaver calls "Stubby". It's also known as "Old Fashioned Okra". Sometimes the pods are as fat as cucumbers. They're spiny, but tasty...good fried or in soup. Some kind of fungus destroyed the leaves.
This last pic is a shot of two pots of sweet potato vines, Porto Rico in the foreground, Liberty further back. These are all 57 cm pots set on concrete blocks in this part of the garden. They hold about 20 dry gallons of soil. If you don't know what a dry gallon is, don't blame me. I try to use the metric system as much as it's practical. I don't like fractions, rods, furlongs, two different miles, fathoms, pecks, bushels, four different gallons, etc. Metric is so much easier. In metric the 57-cm pots are about ninety liters give or take. That's a lotta doit.
Those intensely hot days when the heat stayed oppressive throughout the daylight hours may have gone. We're getting slighly cooler weather now...still hot, but not like it was. Each day the intensity of the sunlight wanes a little bit as we move toward equinox.
The peas continue to grow. They're sprawling over half the garden now, with no signs of slowing down. I've been picking enough peas for a meal every few days and they are outstanding...never tasted better. It makes me feel sorry for the people who have to rely solely on supermarket produce. You have to have your own garden, or know someone who does, in order to develop an appreciation for food.
I pulled out the eggplant. I kept getting sick from the fruit, I think the variety I was growing had too much solanine. Seems I have a sensitivity to solanine. I'm laying off Solanum tuberosum for a while, they have solanine too. That's the common white potato for those who have a phobia about scientific names. There must be a name for that...people who fear dictionaries, books, and online search engines. They seem to rely totally on "what people say".
Also I'm going back to a method of composting I used decades ago at a different house. It's called sheet composting. Instead of a bin or pile, you lay the plant debris and other biodegradable trash in a layer on your planting beds and cover thickly with mulch. The soil beneath improves as the material breaks down, and the plants can often extract nutrients directly from the trash with the help of micorrhiza which grow in association with the plant roots. I'm just trying it for a while, until I can get back to making compost in bins. I just haven't kept up with things lately, and sheet composting is much less labor-intensive.
The mulch is coming from a sunny spot on my property where a variety of weeds, sedges, and native plants grow in a little meadow. I just go out there with my sickle and harvest a cartload of hay now and then for mulch. After the grass stops growing, I'll probably get back to making compost the usual way. This time of year I have to spend too much time mowing to keep up with the gardening...I don't have a big rider-mower. Lately I get out of breath just doing light work around here.
The okra and the other hot-weather crops like Basella are doing well. I do love my okra. Tonight I made a nice stir fry with Basella, okra, Jwala peppers, pinto beans, and rice. Some of the okra plants are so tall I have to bend them over to reach the pods. Okra is a tropical plant, and when the cool weather comes I'll switch to other crops like mustard and string beans. But even though the heat is hard to deal with, I'll miss my okra. It's my favorite of all the vegetables, but I've learned to change with the seasons, just like the plants in the surrounding woodlands do. September is a good month to plant onions here, and who doesn't like onions? I'm going in big with White Lisbon this year if all goes well...can't have too many onions.
