Turnip Weather

The warm weather has left the premises for a while, which is good news for my cool-season crops.  The mizuna tastes better, and the greens aren't wilting like they were.  It's always a gamble planting crops that like cool conditions when you're this close to the Tropic of Cancer.  You can be in the tropics with just a few hours in a fast skiff.

Had more turnips cooked with potato, and no stomach upset.  So either this variety I planted is milder or I'm tolerating them better this year.

Today I overhauled one of my 57 cm pots by digging out a half-wheelbarrow of soil from the pot, mixing it with compost and rock powder, then mixing a bucket of compost with more rock powder into the remaining soil in the pot.  It didn't take long at all to do that. Then all I had to do was shovel the mixture in the wheelbarrow back into the pot, plant some pole-bean seeds, cover the pot with wire to protect against digging animals, and give it a little sprinkle of water.

Actually it's easier to replant one of these containers this way than it is to refurbish a planting bed in the ground.  There's less bending and stooping, and I don't have to redo an entire bed all at once.

The first of the season's pole beans are covered with little pods...won't be long now before I'll have lots of string beans to pick for my stir fries and soups.  This year I'm growing White half-runner and Rattlesnake.  This is the first time I've used poles with the White half-runner beans and they've really taken to it.  If you don't use poles, they form bushes and short runners.  But I guess they're still pole beans at heart.  I suspect I'm going to get more pods by letting them climb.

I have a good feeling about the pole beans this year.  I think I'm going to get a really good crop by growing them in 57 cm pots with a teepee of large poles around each pot. The only crop failure I've had with pole beans was when something ate all the young plants on me. They went right down the row and ate every last one of them...never did find out what did that.  I suspect squirrels, I have a lot of those here.  I've had the same trouble with peanut plants, something likes to eat the plants when they're young.  And it only happens in certain areas...the bean plants out in my southern container garden aren't bothered at all.  Out there it's the diggers...some beast likes to dig in my newly set-up pots.  So I mulch with wood or cover the pots with chicken wire now.  When the pole beans are tall enough, I'll remove the wire and mulch around them with rotten wood.

Rotten wood is my favorite form of mulch.  The crop roots grow right into the wood and it seems to help them to be able to do that. Whenever I cut down a tree after it's been killed by lightning I stack the wood on the ground somewhere.  Within a few years the sapwood turns soft and I can break it up and use it for mulch.

I would love to try hugelkultur here, but with all these pine trees that would be impossible.  I have to dig out my beds and tear out pine roots between crops.  Hugelkultur beds are supposed to be left for years.  I've learned that crops don't do well at all if they have to compete with pine roots in their beds.

The compost operation is going well now.  I've got two open piles, a large bin, and a tumbler going right now.  Most of it is getting good and hot...I love to see the steam rise out of compost when I turn it in the coolness of the morning.  After I cut back more palmettos and clear more brush, I'll shred it all and fill up two more bins.

If my compost gets hot, and I've got a lot of it going, I'll have lots of good food to eat.  It seems to come down to something as basic as that.  Whoever called compost "gardener's gold" knew what they were talking about. 

Harvesting Turnips

Harvested the first turnip of the cool season...it was OK mixed with mashed potato...good flavor, and not so strong that I couldn't enjoy it.  I also boiled some of the greens...they were pretty good too.

I still have almost an entire bed of these things out there, and the weather is expected to cool down for a while.  That's very good for harvesting turnips, they taste better in cooler weather.  You can't wait too long to pull your turnips, especially if the weather is warm. I'll probably pull them all soon, at least the ones with big roots, and store them in the bottom drawer in the fridge.  Turnips do keep well, that's for sure.

So I can still produce my own food, even if the soil here is poor. Turnips are very nutritious and they're a traditional part of German cooking, which is part of what I grew up with.  My grandmother was a good cook.

I've been growing turnips for a long time now, and apparently I haven't forgotten how to do it.

Photo Tour

Finally got around to taking some pics.

Here's the new container garden just getting started with Red Romaine lettuce and pole beans.

Pole Beans, Red Romaine Lettuce

The turnips are almost ready to pull.

Turnips Golden Ball

Eggplant are now bearing fruit...very nice meals from those.

Eggplant Florida Market

Lots of salad greens now, they like the cool and cloudy weather we've been having.

Lettuce Red Romaine, Mizuna

I'm trying some Poblano peppers in my containers, they seem to be doing well so far.

Pepper Poblano

It's a little hard to see it, I suppose the light could have been better. But that's a nice big pepper center frame.  Poblanos are variably hot, but not too hot to put in salads.  In a stir fry I usually add some Tabasco or Jwala to season the dish, Poblanos are too mild to be noticeable in a stir fry.  They have a nice flavor, it's a little like apple. In Mexico they grow thousands of acres of these and sell most of them dried as "Ancho Chile". When the fruit ripen they become a very dark red color, almost black.  They're hotter when they're ripe.

Moving Along

I don't get things done quickly, but I do get them done.

I've got two pots set up in the new container garden north of the house...pole beans and lettuce.  These pots are a hundred liter capacity, I'm way too fed up with all the various nuances of the obsolete British system of gallons and cubic feet to deal with it anymore.  It's called the American system here, but it's a relic of the days when we were a British colony.  The British have abandoned it mostly, some diehards still cling to the old ways of doing things as you might expect. 

From now on when I shop for things like pots I'll look for the liter capacity and ignore the rest.  There are four different gallons in use, but only one liter.  Most writers seem to regard these big pots as #25 pots, but actually I think they were originally designated as #20 size, since they really only hold about 20 gallons of soil...which would have to be measured in dry gallons, not liquid gallons as everyone seems to be doing lately.  But as I said this is only historical info for me, I'm done with gallons and cubic feet...also with rods, furlongs, cubits, hands, or whatever archaic systems people still use in places that are disconnected from the rest of the world.

I should point out also that the reason I don't get a lot of work done in the garden relates to my disability, which I would rather not bring into things in this blog.  Gardening is my escape from all that.

So anyway, my first batch of nursery containers...100 liter size...should show up any day now.  What's holding me back right now is the compost, it's going a bit more slowly than I expected.  But I should have enough to set out a nice row of pots in the new section soon.  I have two piles going and they're both getting warm.  The newest one is steaming in fact...go microbes!  It takes me about five or six weeks for a batch to run...if I shred it first.

I've also set up a bunch of 34 cm pots recently.  Those hold about 23 liters of potting soil.  I keep recycling those by dumping them in a wheelbarrow, mixing with compost, and shoveling the soil into a fallowing barrel where the soil stays for about a month before I reuse it to set up pots.  This gives time for the soil microbes to work for a while and time for pathogens to be devoured by the high level of microbial activity.

The turnips will be ready to pull soon.  They're starting to make nice fat roots and all my worries will soon be over with that crop...assuming they're edible...LOL.  I never seem to get around to photographing them...too bad I can't just give them a camera and ask them to do selfies.

I'm also harvesting my eggplant...they're absolutely delicious.  I thought I'd developed a sensitivity to eggplant and I would have to give up eating them.  But it turned out to be a bad batch of seed that produced plants with inedible fruit...awful stuff that burned my throat and gave me indigestion.  They tasted OK, but they were definitely toxic...they probably had back-crossed with some wild eggplant in Thailand where the seed originated.  Eggplant do grow in the wild there, I've found out.

So watch out for bad batches of seed...it can happen.  I currently advise buying seed from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at rareseeds.com or from Southern Exposure at southernexposure.com. But I'm sure there are many other good sources.  I don't want to name my source for that bad seed...I noticed that variety...Masego...has been discontinued in their catalogues.  So they must be aware of the problem. Nobody's perfect...everything else I bought from them has been excellent quality.

New Garden Site

Just got started today on a new site for containers north of the house.  I decided to go ahead with plans for more large pots, and this spot gets more sun than the others at this time of year.

I'm using #20 pots on concrete blocks, this seems to be the most efficient way to garden at my location.  My native soil is all burned out and sandy and it gets bone dry in the cool season.  That makes it so hard to keep garden beds moist.  My neighbor has a watering system and just floods his garden with water every evening with a timer.  That's not my way of doing things.  In containers I can more efficiently use my irrigation water.

The first pot at the new site is going to be pole beans.  Those are tried and true producers of nourishing food for me.  They're not as fine and tender as the "green beans" they sell in markets these days, but they're highly productive and they taste good to me.  I've always liked pole beans.  Usually I grow them in planting beds, but this year I'm trying them in the big pots to see if I get more pods in the better soil.  Next pot is going to be Romaine lettuce, they're overdue for transplanting...and I could use something mild for salads.  My digestion has been put to the test lately with all these radishes and the mustard greens I've been gobbling up.  The radishes did very well this year, as they usually do.

I've been trying to figure out which gardening method works best...containers large or small, planting beds, etc.  So far it looks like #20 nursery pots on concrete blocks is the winner for efficiency and healthy plant growth...plenty of room for roots to expand, no root invasion from trees and shrubs, easiest to set up, better grade of soil, better control of plant-parasitic nematodes.  In the planting beds there's no getting away from PPN, they live in the surrounding area and just migrate in again if you deter them.  But with a lot of fallowing, I've been able to reduce their numbers in my potting soil.

At ten bucks a pot delivered, plus a few dollars for the block, you can't beat the price in my opinion...not with the prices they charge these days for produce.  If all goes really well, who knows?...maybe I'll be able to grow a substantial portion of my food and greatly reduce my grocery bill.  It sure would be nice....I always remember one of the rules of business management...reducing expenses is the same thing as raising income.  I consider my gardening as my job now...no reason not to consider it as such.  I do work for food.

The turnip plants have filled in the row now, and they're starting to make turnips.  This is a milder variety of turnip, so I'm looking forward to those.  I've never grown a whole row of them before, due to the way they give me indigestion at times.  So it's a gamble, and I'm hoping for the best...as gardeners always do.