Reading about the history of spelt and emmer today, I discovered that Wikipedia has a category devoted to underutilized crops—it’s a term of art in agricultural biodiversity circles—highlighting 95 crops that don’t see a lot of agrarian action these days. There’s some interesting stuff in there, like Dioscorea opposita, the lube yam, and the only […]
Over the winter, the neglected remnants of our summer garden had come to resemble the setting of an H.R. Giger painting and, last weekend, C and I could stand it no more. Much cleaning and clearing happened on Sunday and — though the raised beds aren’t ready, yet — I’ve gotten a small start on […]
August is a pretty exciting month in our garden. Grapes, peppers and early cascade tomatoes are ripening. We’ve had to pick green beans every other day or so for the last couple of weeks. The potato plants are lush and blooming thanks to some tweaking of the drip irrigation system. The lemon cucumbers are bountiful […]
Ripe Figs
The Italian Honey Fig tree has set an abundance of fruit this year and it looks like the first figs of the season are ready for picking.
From my experience, figs aren’t really ripe until they appear a touch over-ripe and ready to fall off the tree. Look at the fig with brown spots […]
Strawberries in
Mid-July
I was surprised to find a few ripe strawberries in the garden this morning. Looks like the berries in the back left of the strawberry patch are ever bearing. I wish I could remember the name of that particular berry (Hood?). The berries themselves are not your typical store-bought strawberry shape, they are oddly […]
The Fasolds have long since topped their strings and are now engaged in further sky-reaching endeavors, twining around one-another in an attempt at the Indian rope trick of sorts. They’re all a-flower now — started sometime mid last week — so I should expect to see some wee beanage on them shortly.
The Climbing French, on […]
I was redirecting a few Fasolds that had strayed from their allotted strings the other day and noticed that they were all twining in a counterclockwise fashion (as seen from above). Apparently this is the case for almost all beans, though runners twist clockwise for some reason. Can’t say I’d paid particular attention before. Whaddayaknow.
The lettuce has bolted. All of it. I blame several days of temps around 100°F, but they probably weren’t long for the table anyway. A couple of weeks of salads didn’t begin to put a dent in the rows that I planted (all at once, I might add. Thus the merits of succession planting are […]
Success!
The beans emerged last weekend — the Fortex were followed by the Climbing French within a day. All the tomato plants are still small, but they are blooming and growing. The strawberries are still producing, but at a lesser rate than last week. Still, I had enough berries for my cereal this morning. The lettuce […]
On the subject of the hedge, I had a couple of plant ideas for the curvy bed that C has recently re-exposed. Perhaps we should investigate mosses? Scotch moss likes shade and even flowers part of the year.
Then again, nix mosses — an ornamental grass would be a more appropriate scale for the giant hedges. […]
Netflix in the house