I see I haven't posted here in a while. I've been busy in the garden, not sure why I slacked off writing about it.
The pole beans are a huge success. I wish I'd finished setting up the bed, but I did plant out about a third of it with pole beans. I'm currently picking pounds and pounds of bean pods for the kitchen...lots of good nourishing food. I could have used more of them for shell beans or dry beans after I picked enough green beans for the kitchen. But I never did get back to finishing that planting bed. It's time to plant long beans and blackeyed peas now, so I guess I'll switch to those for the rest of the planting bed when I finish it.
The variety that produced so much is White Half Runner. It does climb OK if you set up poles for it to climb...and it gives you a lot more pods that way. In fact I would say it climbs just as well as Rattlesnake.
I did well with greens too...lots of those for the kitchen. They're getting a little old for raw eating now, but I got all I wanted of turnip greens, radish greens, and chard. I grew an all-Japanese greens section this season...Sasai radish, Mino Early radish, Nozawana turnip greens, and Umaina chard. I like the Sasai radish best for raw snacking, but they're all good. The Mino Early is too prickly for raw eating...I grew that variety for the roots.
The Umaina chard is really good in soups and stir fries. Chard can vary widely in flavor and palatibility. I don't like the kind they sell in most seed catalogues...the Asian and European varieties are so much better.
I've also moved ahead with the 57 cm containers. Instead of just adding compost and replanting them, I'm fallowing the soil in barrels after mixing in compost and rock powder. This discourages RKN, which has always been a big problem for me in this warm climate. That's root knot nematode. They can totally destroy a plant's root system until there's just a useless little club under the surface of the soil. Okra is especially vulnerable to this pest.
I tried crop rotation, but it didn't work well. Fallowing seems much superior, but you have to keep the soil moist and well supplied with compost. That way the parasitic nematodes have to compete in a microbe-rich environment with no roots to feed on. That really decimates their populations. I fallow the soil for a minimum of a month...and often much longer if I'm having RKN issues.
I think if you let fallowing soil dry out, the nematodes go dormant as eggs and then re-emerge in large numbers when the soil is hydrated. So I put the soil in barrels and keep it moist, or water the beds regularly even when there are no plantings in it. Of course you also have to mulch or weed during fallowing...no need to produce great crops of weed seeds.
I'm also harvesting other crops...carrots, two species of kale, Malabar spinach, mustard greens, etc. Got to keep planting and growing if I want to keep eating. I've got some long beans starting to set pods...that's Vigna sesquipedalis. Those are very tender and good-tasting, much milder than the pole beans.
