Big Plans

I always make big plans this time of year.  The weather is just starting to moderate a bit, the mosquitoes are winding down, and I've got to get ready for the cool season ahead.  In some years it doesn't amount to much, but we'll have cooler nights for sure and that favors many temperate-zone crops like kale.

My big plans don't usually materialize, things always get in the way.  The biggest problem for me is smoke pollution which is really bad for my asthma.  But I'll plan anyway and hope for the best.

I'm thinking lots of Muscade carrots this year.  They did very well last year, even though I only set out a half dozen or so in the planting beds.  I tried interplanting them with kale and other greens, and they really grew well.  Starting them in little 8 cm pots is a bad idea but I did it anyway to see what would happen.  They were all misshapen with multiple branches to the roots, but in the end it made little difference.  I just broke them up before peeling them for the soup pot.  The important thing...they were BIG...at least a pound apiece.  And they tasted fine in soup.

Modern carrot varieties are way too sweet for me, they test as high in sucrose as strawberries.  But Muscade is a very old variety from north Africa, so that's all I'll plant this year.  I just use them in soup, which I make every other day now.

The other two big crops I hope to plant are White Half-runner beans and kale...probably Vates and Lacinato on the kale varieties. The Vates is what I usually plant, they're very heat-tolerant and RKN resistant.  Those three...pole beans, carrots, and kale...are also very tolerant of the calcareous sand in the South Garden.

I pulled out a sweet potato for soup the other night and it was terrible...totally covered in RKN galls and rotten at the core.  The variety was Hannah.  So things don't always go well for me here....got to get the RKN under control in the 57 cm pots.  I'm hoping plantings of Allium will rehabilitate them for me.  I'm going to use lots of onion seedlings and leek seedlings to suppress them and starve them out.  I've never seen RKN (root knot nematode) infest Allium roots, not ever.  Cyst nematodes will attack onions, but haven't seen them in a while.  This property used to be part of a commercial vegetable farm, that's probably why I have every parasitic nematode known to mankind living here.  But I manage somehow, even when I'm not entirely sure how I'm doing it.

They sprayed for mosquitoes again last night, so I hauled my containers of Malabar spinach indoors to protect them.  I do love my hand truck, one of the best purchases I ever made in my life.