Japanese Gobo
This is a very strange looking plant, almost like a faux Joshua Tree or something. I got the seeds last year from Alan Kapuler’s seed company, Peace Seeds. It’s a big plant, about 2.5 meters high.
It didn’t seed the first year, so it’s either biennial or perennial. If you want to know before me, I’m sure about 30 seconds with Google will give all the details. These prickly buds are sticky and detach easily. They’re very annoying if you get too close when weeding, and get one tangled up in your hair.
It’s about to bloom, and I’m planning to save some seeds. It’s supposed to have a very long root that’s very tasty. It’s supposed to be popular in Japan. I’ve seen the roots for sale in Asian supermarkets here, but I’ve never bought one. I dug up one of my plants last year, but the root was too small to be interesting. After I harvest some seeds, I’ll dig up another plant and see how the root looks.
Anyone have experiences with this plant? Anyone have any advice or thoughts? Recipes?
No-Weed Beans
Over the last couple of years I’ve discovered a really interesting variety of beans.
They are Yellow Forest Beans, an old variety that used to be grown in Friesland, in the northern part of the Netherlands and probably parts of Germany too. They are what Americans would call bush beans and British would call dwarf French beans.
What’s interesting about these beans is they require little or no weeding, at least in my climate!
Ordinarily, this type of bean will grow to smother any weeds, but usually needs a little hand weeding at the beginning or the weeds will overtake them. This bit of hand weeding at the beginning is most of the work required to grow them!
Below is the bed of beans where I didn’t do any weeding.
You can see a few weeds poking their way through, but it’s not very serious. Here’s a picture taken straight down.
Okay, because I’m a diligent gardener, I’ll probably do a little weeding here later, but it doesn’t need much!
Here’s a similar bed of beans of a different variety. Can you see any weeds here? This is going to be a lot more work.
For the sake of clarity and honesty, I did use a weed burner on both of these beds before planting them, and this does reduce the weeds. Next year I’ll try the Yellow Forest Beans without burning the ground first, and I expect to see more weeds.
I also haven’t had a chance to eat these beans yet, because I’ve been trying to bulk up on seeds. I’ll try them in a few weeks. They may not taste good.
All of these beans above were grown on rich soil, where I’ve grown beans within the last few years and so I know there’s good availability of rhizobia bacteria. These things are important, because I think the ability of this variety to compete against weeds comes all or partly down to the plant’s vigor. It’s possible however there’s more than that, for example a growth inhibiting chemical in the roots, that makes weeds grow slower.
Why It’s Important
You might think I’m a lazy gardener, and perhaps that’s part of it, but I do everything I can to avoid pulling weeds or digging in my garden! The problem is weed seeds, once covered, remain in the ground for decades or even sometimes centuries. When you disturb the ground, you bring these seeds to the surface where they grow. This means every time you pull or dig weeds, you’re just creating a self-perpetuating problem. By using no-dig methods like mulch or weed burning, you reduce this problem.
The problem is even compounded further when you grow something like beans, because they fix nitrogen in the ground, which makes the weeds grow all that much faster! If you don’t manage the weeds, not only will the beans not grow well, but the benefit of nitrogen fixing will be at least partly lost as the weeds consume it.
On the other hand, if you have a nitrogen fixing crop that smothers weeds and is largely carefree, it’s of much more value to grow, even just as a cover crop!
When it comes down to it, the limiting factor for almost all of us is the amount of effort our garden takes to manage. By not weeding, much of the effort needed to maintain a garden is gone and we can manage a larger piece of land with more crops if we want. This is also true commercially, where a variety that needs little or no weeding can make all the difference in profitability.
These days of thinning ozone make me a little worried with every hour I spend in the garden. Growing anything that requires less weeding means fewer hours in the sun.
After all, all of these benefits of reduced weeds are what make RoundUp ready crops so attractive. This on the other hand is a sustainable and organic alternative.
The Genetics
Like I mention above, I haven’t tasted these yet. In many ways, it doesn’t make that much difference if these taste good, but rather I’ve discovered genes that can be used with further breeding.
Uncovered History
These are two pieces of ceramics I came across in the last month. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever come across old ceramics here in the ground, so twice in one month is all that much more unusual.
On the top is by far the most special find. This was found by the contractor working on my house foundation, and it’s a 300+ year old piece of Makkumer tile, made by the oldest still operating business in the country, Koninklijke Tichelaar Makkum. It’s also still a family business, passed on from one generation to the next. This will be the last generation however, because the current generation of children have other interests.
The piece of ceramic below, I don’t know much about other than it appears to be part of a lid to something, because underneath is a lip to hold it in place. I doubt it’s more than 100 years old, but I don’t know. I found it while digging in my community garden. The previous gardener had built a foundation for a greenhouse by driving fence posts deep into the ground, and in the course of removing them I had to dig a very deep hole. I found this piece of ceramic about one meter deep.
It’s really quite a vivid blue color for being so old, and it makes me wonder a bit what kind of very toxic chemicals may be in the glaze. Anyone have any idea? Cobolt maybe? We were just discussing this kind of thing here.
EmmaCooper.org
Within hours of me announcing my new domain, fellow blogger Emma Cooper in the UK also announced her new domain, EmmaCooper.org. Emma is a blogger, podcaster, writer, gardener, chicken raiser and who knows what else. She and her partner Pete have been working hard the last days and weeks preparing a new website, where you can read more about her and what she does.
Stumped
One of the advantages of having a garden with lots of water in the ground is stump removal!
Over the last few years I’ve taken on a total of three plots at the community garden, and ended up with a lot of fruit trees. At one point I had five plum trees, three of them full sized, and I just needed to get rid of a few. The plum tree that used to be part of this stump was also too close to the greenhouse, and its roots had worked their way into the greenhouse and were sucking all the nutrients out of the ground. One of the previous gardeners also planted a number of trees too close to each other, and so some of these needed to be removed.
Anyway, I’m done cutting down trees for the moment, and on to stump removal.
The picture above is the second full sized plum tree stump I’ve removed. I learned a lot from the first tree. Most importantly is plum trees, and I hope the other fruit trees I have stumps for too, don’t appear to like their roots to be sitting in water.
Here’s a close up of the stump. Do you see how all the roots go outwards, and are at about the same level? None of the roots go down into the water table.
All I had to do was go around with a pruning shears (secateurs) for the smaller roots and a saw for the larger ones, and cut them off.
Then I could just roll the stump out of the hole. The picture above is the loose stump just sitting on the ground.
