Rain

Looks like we're finally starting to see some rain in significant amounts.  Right now there's a squall line coming this way, with rains of up to five cm predicted.  We had a few rain showers over the past week, so the ground is no longer powder-dry.

The smoke pollution has been a big problem for me lately, so I haven't done much gardening.  There isn't always a strong odor, but the pollution lingers in the air from hundreds of fires around the State.

I have managed to upgrade the plantings in the 57 cm containers. I decided to rotate them with onions and leeks after discovering heavy root-knot infestation in all of them.  Plants in the genus Allium are immune to root knot...though they are susceptible to cyst nematodes and sting nematodes...both of which I've had trouble with in the South Garden.

My carrots were a mixed bag during harvest.  The plants grown in containers with fallowed soil were usable, but the ones I rotated by just mixing in compost and replanting were massively infested with root knot.  They were completely covered with ugly knobs, deformed, and rotting away from some kind of secondary disease. Well, live and learn...no more planting susceptible crops like carrots without prolonged fallowing.  The fallowing doesn't eliminate parasitic nematodes, but by starving them out you can greatly reduce their numbers.  But you have to keep the soil moist or the nematodes just lay lots of eggs, which hatch out and massively infest your crop as soon as you moisten the dry soil and plant in it.  I've had plants just die outright in newly moistened soil.

Just a reminder here...the vast majority of soil nematodes are beneficial to plants, it's only nematodes in a few genera which have taken up the life of parasitism.  It's often been said that the main obstacle to tropical and subtropical crop growing is the abundance of plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) in warm soils.  That has been my experience in gardening here in the subtropics.

Actually my location may no longer be subtropical.  We haven't had frost here in years, so it's possible we've shifted to fully tropical conditions.  Our cold snaps are now brief and not very intense...and the cool season has been greatly reduced in duration.

I'm ready for the rains to start and the smoldering fires to finally be extinguished.  I have seedlings of molokhia, mustard, chili peppers, collards, long bean, sweet potato, onion, etc. that are all ready to transplant from their 8 cm pots.  All I need is better air to breathe.

The collards are an experiment, don't know if they will grow in tropical heat.  I'm trying the variety Georgia Southern...just a few plants.

I did discover something new.  Leeks are not, as I was led to believe, a crop limited to cool climates.  It is true that the variety I always grew, Broad London aka American Flag, is heat intolerant. But I tried some Carentan leeks and they actually grew faster in the heat than they did when it was cooler.  So I looked up leeks online...and found that the earliest known accounts of leek growing are from ancient Egypt, not northern Europe.  Egypt is definitely a warm place.  Once again, I was misled by gardening books and catalogues.  So I planted all my seedlings in one of the 57 cm pots and so far they're doing fine.  It always seems to be true that varietal choices are extremely important.  Carentan leeks are French, while Broad London you can guess where they are grown. Both varieties are described in Vilmorin's book on vegetable varieties, so they are both very old heirlooms.

I do like leeks in my soups or in stir fries, and they are one of the toughest vegetable crops you can grow.  Something ate my onion plants in two containers, but would not eat the leeks...which may have been protected by their outer husk.  So leeks it is.  I've always grown a few leeks in my gardens, but from now on I'll be growing a lot more of them.  Nothing gives a soup a nicer flavor than a leek.