I have managed a little gardening, and I'm harvesting string beans now. The smoke is still very bad, I get it every day. Thousands of acres have burned, and the wind doesn't always carry it off. At night it settles in, so the mornings are difficult to deal with. I often have to wait for the afternoon breeze to do any work outside.
This year I grew some beans I hadn't grown in decades. I remembered that they were better tasting in my stir fries and steamed, so this year I planted them again. Usually I grow White Half Runner beans because they seem to do well in my sandy soil, but I skipped them this year. Excuse the pun, they're sometimes called Skip Beans.
Instead I grew Landreth's and Black Valentine in containers where the soil is much richer, and they have been fabulously good in the kitchen. I'd forgotten how good string beans can be. They call them green beans here now, since the varieties are usually stringless. They're all just varieties of Phaseolus vulgaris.
The carrots were a big success, but a disappointment nevertheless. They're too sweet for me, so I'll have to parboil them and soak them in water for a few days to get rid of the excess sugar. I don't get along with sugary meals. Modern carrot varieties have as much sugar as ripe strawberries. I was hoping the African variety I'm growing would be less sweet, but that was a mistake. Everything seems to be bred for sweetness these days.
I'll just process the carrots like I do the sweet potatoes with parboiling and soaking, that seems to take care of the problem. But of course you lose a lot of flavor with soaking. I page through the seed catalogs and every description seems to emphasize the word sweet. I guess everyone is addicted to sugar these days.
It seems odd that the weather is cooler here in March than it was in February and January, but that's the case. Makes it hard to know what to plant, that's for sure. I'm in the process of grubbing out roots in the South Garden in preparation for planting of Vigna unguiculata variety Ologwe from Nigeria. I only have five plants going in pots, so it's critical that I get them producing seed. The variety has been discontinued in the catalog, and it was by far the best producer of "cowpeas" aka "blacked peas" I've ever grown. So seed saving is going to be critical. I had saved some seed that year, but something got into them and ate them all. I should have stored them in the fridge instead of leaving them on the carport like I did. I saved the variety from oblivion by coaxing the original seed from the packet to grow a few plants.
When I grew them in 2014, they took over most of the garden and climbed the fencing as well. I even had to move the vines to mow the grass south of the garden that year. And they rooted everywhere they sprawled. So five plants should be enough to raise a good crop in a planting bed. My beds are about a meter wide and about 8 meters long...not sure if that's accurate. I'll have to check when I set up the bed again.
I've pulled several cartloads of Pinus roots and Panicum repens rhizomes from the subsoil under the planting bed. The soil has all been removed, and will be returned after amending it with compost and granite dust. I'm determined to police the garden better this time around, it got heavily invaded with roots and rhizomes while I left it fallowed. The Pinus roots are particularly bad, they seem to secrete toxic terpenes to clear away competing roots from the soil they invade. Soil infested with Pinus roots smells like industrial waste. I'm going to try maintaining a clear perimeter to a depth of 50 cm or so by grubbing it monthly with my big hoe or cutting a narrow trench with a digging bar.
Panicum repens is the worst garden weed I've ever encountered. Most of the plant is deep underground, so surface hoeing doesn't work. You have to go deep into the ground to find its rhizomes, which is of course extremely time-consuming and laborious. But it seems to advance slowly, so I'm hoping a cleared perimeter will stop it once and for all. It is really frustrating to pull weeds that keep coming back again and again, so I'm going for total annihilation.
Nobody ever said gardening is easy. It's OK, I like digging in the ground, it's good therapy for me. I once knew someone who had to dig up a clogged drain field at work...he was really angry about it, but in the end he had so much fun that he dug up his backyard and started a garden. Had to be the strangest motivation for gardening I've ever heard of.
Incidentally, if you have Latin phobia, that's unfortunate. Anybody who reads my blogs will encounter it often. Scientific names avoid confusion, common garden plants can have dozens of different names in different cultures. If you think I'm going to be apologetic for being pro-science, it's not going to happen...not ever.
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