Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
Located in Thessaloniki, CityGarden is a new food growing blog. Mary is starting with a few heirloom tomatoes this year, and has an interest in growing more older plant varieties and seed saving in the future.
Her URL has a .eu domain name! You don’t see many of those around.
They have arrived!
I’ve posted before about the repair of my 325 year old wooden house foundation.
Two permits arrived a few days ago, a demolition permit to remove the ground floor and the building permit for the new foundation. The great paper chase is almost over!
Some key points in the permits are:
The technical architect needs to do more work. In particular, I have a common wall with one of my neighbors who is not repairing his foundation at the same time (even though his is in bad shape too). I need to stabilize this wall using support only from my foundation and this requires extra piles and a special concrete structure. The technical architect needs to do another ground test to verify the depth of the stable ground layer and combine this with some more calculations for this special wall support. The good news is I get to bill my neighbor for half the extra cost this support is costing!
Bad News: My ground is seriously contaminated with heavy metals! Good News: The main problem is zinc (Zn), which is non-toxic to humans, in fact it can even be purchased as a food supplement. There are only slight traces of mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb). The ground under my house has to be dug up anyway as part of the foundation repair, so the main consequence is I will have to pay to have it disposed of as chemical waste and replaced with clean sand. The city will also inspect the building site and insure there is no spread of the contamination during the work. If anyone is interested, apparently zinc comes primarily from metal smelting.
An archaeological study is needed, and someone from the city will come and have a quick look when they tear up the floor. If nothing is obvious, the foundation repair can go as planned.
Next Step Quotes
We have requested a couple of quotes from contractors. We have two quotes in. One was just bad, the contractor didn’t understand what was going on. The other was good, but since we don’t have much to compare it with, we don’t know if it’s the right price.
Already one contractor has pulled out completely. He said this business with the wall with the neighbors is just too complicated for him.
We’re waiting for one more quote, but we might ask for more too. The main problem is there are not many more contractors around to ask quotes from.
The air in my garden is full of the smell of rotting strawberries at the moment, and here’s a picture from the garden next to mine where the smell is coming from. Even the birds don’t seem to want to eat these berries.
While the guy that has this garden is a friendly guy, and someone I like making small talk with, he is really disliked in the gardening complex. In particular, he is well known for his strawberries, which take up nearly half of his plot. His strawberries are as modern as it gets, he has connections at the local agricultural university and gets the latest varieties they are working on in the plant labs.
He does almost no weeding in his garden. What’s his secret that he doesn’t need to pull weeds? Well first he just lets his garden grow wild. When he needs to plant something, he clears a rectangle with Round Up, rakes it clean a week or so later then puts his plants in.
He also doesn’t need to protect his plants from the birds. What’s his secret here? He doesn’t care if the birds eat them, because he doesn’t want the berries. He’s just growing the plants for the experience and for the sake of experimentation. He’s quite happy to just let the berries rot on the ground. He’s told me I’m welcome to help myself any time I want!
He’s on the management committee (board of directors if you like) of the garden complex. This is an important position for him, because it exempts him from volunteer hours the rest of us have to put into the upkeep of the garden complex. Other members of the garden management complain he doesn’t do anything. The excuse he has for not doing anything, is that he has another garden in a nearby city, and has to do work there.
I can understand that everyone has different reasons for wanting to have a garden and grow vegetables, but I really don’t understand this guy.
Most of my hardneck varieties have formed scapes, in various stages of curling and uncurling.
A couple of the scapes have also started opening and forming bulbils. In the past I’ve removed most of my scapes to eat and in order to promote bulb growth. This year I’m going to let most of them form. Not only am I tired of eating garlic scapes, but I’ve started to learn that bulbils are really useful. It’s easier to send someone bulbils in the mail, and it’s safer to give bulbils to other gardeners when sharing garlic because you are less likely to spread disease that way.
I am also going to try prodding the garlic plants to make some seeds. I understand this can be done by plucking out the bulbils with tweezers, which will in turn cause the scape to bloom and try to produce seeds as sort of a survival mechanism. I am not expecting success the first year doing this, and I understand it’s a lot of work and takes a lot of patience I probably don’t have.
Garlic Rust has started to appear on the leaves, which is not very good news but was expected. It appeared on my garlic about the same time last year. Harvest is in about 7 weeks, so it’s just a matter of waiting and hoping it doesn’t get too bad.
This plant has it a little worse.
Many Sisters
Three sisters is the famous combination of squash, beans and corn. I’m trying a variation of this with different kinds of corn, beans, squash and cucumbers.
The corn is Double Standard, a sweet corn from Real Seeds.
The beans are True Red Cranberry from Miss Hathorn, Cherokee Trail of Tears from Ottawa Gardener and Kahnawake Mohawk Pole Beans from Michel a reader in Quebec who got some While Alpine Strawberry seeds from me in exchange.
The cucumbers are Achocha from Real Seeds, Spacemaster from an old packet of seeds from Heirloom Acres and Lemon Cucumber an Australian heirloom that was a free packet of seeds with a Baker Creek seed order.
The squashes are Blue Hubbard from Miss Hathorn, Spaghetti Squash from Baker Creek and Zucchino Rampicante (also called Zucca d’Albenga or Trombocino), from a Seed Savers Exchange member in North Carolina.
It looks set to be a jungle in there!
Oca
This is what the Oca plant looks like when it’s growing. These all seem to be doing well. You can see a picture of the tubers in my Lost Crops of the Incas post from several weeks ago. Some of these tubers came from Lieven, and some came from Real Seeds.
Celeriac
This is one half of the raised bed. The celariac plants are getting big and bushy. This is a really easy kind of celery to grow, and it’s really nice in soups.
Crosne
My understanding is this is pronounced like crone, as in old-crone.
This is the other half of the raised bed with my celeriac.
This plant is a member of the mint family (and so it will probably keep growing forever in my garden), but you eat the roots instead of the leaves. I will post more about this later. Frank gave me the tubers for this.
