Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
I didn’t have my camera, but I noticed rust on my garlic plants yesterday.
Most years the rust tends to appear in one place, then spreads out from there. This year all my plants seem to have become infected at the same time.
It’s really hard to say if the milk I used made any difference.
Since I would normally begin harvesting in a week or two anyway, the rust is no real problem this year.
Here’s my first tomato of the year. Started indoors the first week of March, then put out on the 20th of April. It was already setting fruit when I put it out, and I made an earlier post on it.
This was grown outdoors, and I didn’t do anything special with it. Ordinary purchased potting soil. I didn’t pinch off any part of the plant or do anything else to help speed maturing of the fruit.
The small tomato you see in the picture, while a little split and catfaced, is otherwise fully ripe and healthy. The others are just a few days from being ripe.
I don’t know anything about this tomato other than what you see here.
Garlic rust is very much on my mind at the moment. Last year around this time it appeared on my garlic, and it just appeared on Gintoino’s garlic in Portugal.
Søren had a good suggestion last year, spraying his garlic with diluted milk, and I’ve decided to try it this year. I’m mixing it about 1:5 with water, only because it’s most convenient to buy milk by the liter here and that’s what works well to fill my spray bottle and cover the plants. I understand nonfat milk is the best to use, but this is a special purchase here and hard to find reasonably priced, so I’m using lowfat instead. I’ve been doing this once a week for the last two weeks, and will keep doing it about this often or after it rains, until it seems pointless to continue.
There isn’t a practical way for me to do anything close to a scientific study here, with a control section of my garden, because once I have garlic rust anywhere it will spread quickly.
What I understand is garlic rust occurs at a time of high humidity, but not when the plants are wet. In my own experience, I see it break out in my garden most often when the days are warm, the nights cool and the humidity is high. Because it seems to be so tied to weather conditions, it doesn’t seem like comparing the date I got it last year with the date I get it this year is a good comparison.
Anyway, to help me figure out if the milk is helping, I would appreciate if anyone reading this who has garlic in their garden will tell me if and when they get rust this year.
Rust is primarily a European plant disease, so those of you in North America probably won’t see it.
Rust is not usually a deadly disease for garlic, but it does reduce the harvest and causes the plants to die prematurely. Delaying the appearence is what’s really important, because an infection two weeks earlier or later can mean the difference between a more or less normal harvest or one that has to be made early.
In my community garden this seems to be the standard design for a bean support structure. I haven’t really seen them before, so it’s probably not a really wide spread thing, and a lot of people in my garden are from other countries so this may not even be a Dutch design per se.
In my case, it’s 10 poles on each side intersecting at the top and tied to a horizontal pole. In addition, on both sides are diagonal poles for extra support. Wind is a real issue here, and this is clearly intended to stand up to a lot of it. I see some people using single poles, but otherwise everyone else uses this design.
I didn’t have any pole beans last year in the garden, so this is my first year trying this. Does anyone else use this design, or something similar?
Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong with the apple tree on the right in the picture above? I’m sorry because of the background it’s hard to see, but it looks like it’s almost dead.
Here’s a close up of one of the branches. You can see the leaves have almost completely turned brown.
Below is a close up of the smaller apple tree on the left, and while it looks a lot healthier, perhaps it has an infection of some sort? Small brown spots and slightly withering leaves? Maybe it’s the same thing that is causing the problem with the almost dead looking tree?
The smaller, healthier looking tree on the left is the same tree I posted about several days ago that has the canker infection.
Here’s a little more information about the tree on the right:
Last year it produced apples, but after they were about 2cm in diameter they turned brown and fell off the tree. This year it didn’t set any fruit, but it did bloom.
I plan to remove the tree anyway, because it’s too close to the tree next to it (about 1m away) and it’s in the wrong part of the garden. Mostly I’m interested in understanding what’s happening. I’m pretty sure it’s the only pollinator available for the tree on the left, so I can’t remove it until I replace it with another tree of the same flowering period, or I won’t get any apples on the remaining tree.
The ground in this part of the garden is very poor and on the wet side, and the previous gardener was keeping these fruit trees alive with chemical fertilizer which I’ve stopped using. I did put quite a bit of compost around these trees this year. The previous gardener never pruned his trees, but I have been pruning them for the last 2 years since I’ve had this garden. I’ve planted some nitrogen fixing trees nearby, but they are too young and haven’t had a chance to fix any nitrogen yet. I also removed a nearby tree over the winter, so this tree has a little more space than it had last year.
The pH in my garden is mostly 6-6.5, and I did give these trees a few handfulls of lime this spring. While I don’t know exactly what the pH is here, it’s probably close enough to being right for apple trees.
