April 25th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Great ideas for a raised bed that costs $10 in wood. Cedar, to be precise.

Not sure I’d bother with the glue, though.

Raised cedar beds

April 19th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I robbed a couple potatoes from my still-growing forest of potato plants. I hand-dug below a red pontiac plant and a kennebec plant, and came up with a pair of pretty tubers. Both of these would be considered “new potatoes” since they are the earliest from the crop.

The small one was from a smaller plant I pulled a few days ago. The larger red pontiac’s skin is torn from me trying to wrest it from the ground. Maybe I need to cut my fingernails.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the red pontiac had a couple sizable scab lesions.

Potato scab is lesions on potatoes caused by the presence of a bacterium in the soil, Streptomyces scabies. It causes various forms of lesion, either pits or raised welts, seemingly dependent on the growing conditions and variety of potato. It isn’t harmful to humans, but it does render the otherwise pretty potato unsightly. In extreme cases the lesions take on a corky, pithy form that is unappealing to eat.

I knew my soil conditions might be right for scab when I planted the seed potato slips, but I had done some work to try and condition my alkaline soil to help ward off the pathogen. The bacteria doesn’t do well in soils with a pH below 5.2, so boosting the acidity of the soil with compost is something growers often do. (Compost can raise soil acidity). However, I’ve seen warnings that using manure-based composts might aggravate the condition. I used Natural Gardener turkey compost to help acidify my soil some.

For next year I may have my soil tested professionally and amend it accordingly with something more like coffee grounds or another acidic agent that doesn’t contain manure compost. Another factor seems to be to maintain consistently-high soil moisture. This allows other non-harmful soil bacteria to out-compete s. scabies.

Whatever the case, my two potatoes will be breakfast tomorrow. The scab on the red pontiac is easily cut off. I plan to enjoy thinly-sliced potatoes sautéed in olive oil with minced garlic and maybe a bit of chopped garden onion.

bacteria, kennebec, pathogen, potaotes, red pontiac, scab, Streptomyces scabies

April 11th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

Little Mr. is positively addicted to the outdoors. Never fussy out there, and positively flips out when we bring him indoors.

So here he is in his element this evening:

lukas

April 10th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I meant to post sooner this past week, but life shot me a sneaky-fast curveball and I lost my job Tuesday. Does this work for me financially? In the short-term, not exactly. Too much uncertainty. Is it the best thing for me in a thousand other ways? Totally.

But maybe I’ll talk about that in another post.

I took a lot of photos on one of my new days “off” because it was overcast and the light was diffuse. They document my garden’s progress pretty well. I had another ulterior motive for these photos, but… again. Another post.

Onions:
Nearly all of my onions are out of the ground, only a handful are still in place. The stalks haven’t fallen, and the bulbs aren’t very big, so I’m optimistic they’ll still mature a little more.

Strawberries:
I get 1 – 2 berries a day, and they are delicious. But the quantity isn’t very useful. I had five plants this year, two of which aren’t producing because the pill bugs attacked them too strongly in the beginning, and they are now just recovering. Next year I want to plant about 15 plants and dedicate one whole bed to berries.

Broccoli:
So far, one head out of two plants. Both plants were the same size, but only one produced anything. I’m not sure why. I am trying to figure this out, and whether I should whack the non-productive plant or wait. The good head went in an all-garden stir-fry tonight (along with onions, green beans, carrots and snow peas), and it was all delicious.

Lettuce:
Next year, less lettuce. More butterhead. The red sails… gets too flobby in the heat, and develops nasty spines? hairs? along the leaf axis. But it sure is pretty.

Potatoes:
The potato patch looks amazing. I catch a leaf-footed bug occasionally out there, but otherwise the plants look lush and healthy. I certainly hope there are lush things happening below ground, too.

Flowering things:
Gulf Coast penstemon

Texas primrose

Other Things:
My friend Phoebe gave me some of the pink evening primrose I have been seeking. I’m hoping I didn’t wait too long to get it in the ground, and that it snaps back. Otherwise, it looks pretty pitiful. Hmm.

Been seeing Texas spiny lizards multiple times a day in the yard. I love these critters. I’m not sure why. I have yet to get a good current photo of one, but here’s me harassing one somewhere I shouldn’t have been harassing one. (Though I will assure any of my City of Austin Wildland friends who might be reading, this was NOT one of their lizards!)

April 5th, 2011 by Marc Opperman

I took a weekend off from garden projects and maintenance, and went camping at Pedernales Falls State Park instead. The weather was perfect, and the river cold. There were lots of wildflowers to marvel at, and I have a few pictures of some I have yet to identify for myself. It’s Tuesday, and my legs are still sore from backpacking with a 70 pound pack, and my chigger bites still itch. But I enjoyed myself anyway.

A few pictures from Pedernales:

Sunset:

As I mentioned, no real gardening this past weekend to speak of. But I have a morning ritual, and it tends to involve making coffee and eating breakfast until it gets light, and then wandering out in the garden for ten minutes before getting ready for work. I check for bug or critter damage, pull a lot of weeds, and harvest any produce that’s ready. In the past few days that has meant strawberries!

Today or tomorrow, too, I’ll be harvesting a head of broccoli. There’s tons of lettuce ready, and onions falling over daily.

Otherwise, I’m pretty much just waiting for things to get ripe, finish growing, or whatever it is they do.

Snow peas:

Potatoes are flowering, so presumably they are growing some tubers, too. Tomatoes vines are all setting fruit, most of my cantaloupe are past the seed-leaf stage and developing a few real leaves. Everything is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, just slowly. Well, “slowly” for a human.

This is the part of gardening that teaches me patience.