Pea Takeover

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.