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Garlic June 2008

Most of my hardneck varieties have formed scapes, in various stages of curling and uncurling.

Garlic Scape

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 Scape

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.

Garlic Rust

This plant has it a little worse.

Garlic Rust

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Garden Pictures June 2008

Many Sisters

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

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

Celariac

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

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.

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Farthest Northern Melon Mix

Melon Plants

The melon plants went out yesterday.  These are the same plants Søren is growing in his garden this year and what he grew last year as well.  You can see my plants are much smaller than Søren’s.  I also didn’t prepare my bed with horse manure like he did, I just gave mine a generous amount of compost.

The basic idea with these plants is this.  Melons don’t normally grow outdoors in northern latitudes (this is in respect to the northern hemisphere).  Some varieties do better than others, but none do very well.  So what do you do if you want to try to breed a melon for northern climates?  If they don’t grow at all, you have a chicken and egg situation, because you can’t get them to grow in the first place so how can you even consider crossing different varieties in order to create something more suitable for your climate?

The solution to this chicken and egg problem is for someone in a more southern location to do the preliminary work for you and create a genepool mix or grex, by combining the genetics of a number of different melon varieties which have been shown to be suitable for northern climates.  The idea is I will grow a number of these plants, and be able to select which melons do well in my garden.

A special thanks goes out to both the Seed Ambassadors who brought these seeds with them when they travelled in Europe, as well as Tim Peters who created this Melon Mix.

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Bee Keeping

Teresa of Down on the Farm has recently been posting about their new bee hives, with some great pictures and lots of interesting information. Since she recently took several months off of blogging, some of you may not know she exists or that she is back. It’s worth having a look!

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Small Farmers Excluded from FAO Meeting

The FAO meeting is underway in Rome.

Jeremy of Agricultural Biodiversity is there, and I hope we hear something from him when he has time.

La Via Campesina is there, the international peasant farmer movement, and has already published pictures of farmers wishing to express their own view of the situation being forcibly expelled from the event.

You can download this and other videos and watch them directly on your computer.

It doesn’t look very promising so far, a lot like recent G8 meetings.