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.