Seasonal Change

Looks right now like the cool weather is finished.  Predictions are for continuing temps higher than average...at least for the next week or so.  Beyond that is anyone's guess...I've seen frost on my garden mulch in April here.

But a gardener, especially one who's dependent on his garden for a lot of his sustenance, needs to make educated guesses so he knows what to plant.  I'm going to lay my money on warm weather.

Current plans are for lots of pole beans, onions, sweet potatoes, and long beans.  Got to watch out for those drooping vines on the sweet potatoes, though...I spotted a big rabbit contentedly devouring all the leaves he could reach on the sweet potato vines I have growing in big pots.  It's OK, he'll keep them from setting potatoes in the ground.  I want the potatoes to stay in the pots where the burrowing beasts are less likely to find them.  I discovered years ago that sweet potato vines will set potatoes deep in the ground when the soil is sandy and dry.  I happened to dig a deep hole for something and there were potatoes more than a foot below the surface of the ground.

My biggest problem with sweet potatoes is the roaches.  They have the run of things here, my neighbors use a lot of pesticides. That has decimated the normal population of predatory insects, and pesticide-resistant roaches have taken over the whole area.  Such are the hazards of living in an urban area.  The only thing that seems to prey on them is Cuban frogs.  Maybe when the rains start to come regularly, the frogs will deal with the roaches.  It's depressing to harvest a nice big sweet potato, then cut it open and find a bunch of roaches have hollowed it out and made a home out of it.  I don't care for roaches, especially when they show up on my kitchen counters like that.  I think these are Asian flying roaches in the garden....they suddenly showed up here in the eighties.

Fire ants and roaches are inescapable here, the entire neighborhood is infested with them.  Both are virtually immune to pesticides.  I use a compound called spinosad on the fire ants now, and it seems to be working very well.  It's non-toxic to humans and other insects, so it's approved for organic gardeners and farmers.  It's also much more effective than the stuff they sell in the hardware stores and home improvement stores.  It does take a while to work, though...you have to be patient...and it costs twice as much.  But then you don't have to use nearly so much, because it works so much better.  It interferes with the ants' growth hormones, so the colony can't expand.  Eventually it dies off from natural causes.

The pole beans are doing very well.  The first big wave of them is about done now, and subsequent plantings are almost ready to set pods.  I like to keep planting them so I have a continuous supply. I'm planting Rattlesnake and White Half Runner mostly, but I have seeds for other types as well.  I tend to go overboard when I have a new seed catalog in my eager grip.  But I'm running out of time. The common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, won't set pods here in the heat we get from May to September.  So I'll be switching to blackeyed peas and long beans.  Those are in the genus Vigna, which is more tropical.  I got a really fine crop of peas last year from the West African variety Ologwe.  Nothing produces as abundantly for me in the ground as blackeyed peas.  When other gardeners are quitting until November, I'm gearing up for my most productive season.

I do love my blackeyed peas, freshly harvested from the garden.