Mid-August Update - Hilltop Beds

Last Thursday, it rained...a lot.  How much is a lot?  This much:

My new rain gauge (courtesy of Bonnie Plants)
was included in my OTHER goodie bag from the Fling
 

Over 3.5 inches in 24 hours.  Of course, I had watered the garden the day before as the soil seemed quite dry.  These days, you just never know - half the time when they call for rain, we only end up getting a sprinkling or two.

The hilltop garden is still a whopping mess, weed wise, as things have been on hold up there in favour of dealing with the weeding and mulching in veg area #1 as well as the front of the house.

The paths may be weedy, but I’ve more or less kept on top of the weeds in the beds themselves.  That's one of the reasons I love raised beds...weeding is more of a pleasure than chore.

The asparagus is still growing well – each new stalk is just that little bit thicker & taller than the prior ones.  I’m so excited about how well it seems to be doing.  Even though there is not much difference in the bed overall from month to month, I want to chronicle what small changes there are.

Asparagus Beds
 

The sweet potatoes are growing, but very slowly.

Sweet Potatoes
 

I did move the bin a couple of feet so that the fence wasn’t shading it as much, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.  Hopefully there's more going on in the soil than on top of it.

The chamomile is flowering like crazy & I've even had to put up some rebar & twine to hold it back as it was shading a couple of the asparagus plants.


Chamomile
 

I have to get around to harvesting some, but it's been either too hot (harvesting chamomile is a LONG process) or the plants have been moist from rain (which it's doing now) or dew.  I see tons of sand-like seeds all over the base of the plants & I have a feeling I may have a volunteer issue with this one...didn't Daphne warn me about that?

The Yukon Gold potatoes have almost completely died back as have the Linzer potatoes, so those will be dug up soon.

Potato Bed
Note the strawless corner where we dug up
the big potato from last week's Harvest Monday
 

It doesn’t look like the other varieties are too far behind either.

When it comes to the eggplants, there’s good news and bad news.

Eggplants
Looking fairly good from this vantage point
 

The good news is that I finally have little eggplants developing:

Ping Tung Eggplant
 

Slim Jim Eggplant
 

The VERY bad news is that it looks like my plants are similarly affected by Verticillium wilt, just like Michelle described in her recent post.

Leaf curl/wilt possibly indicative of Verticillium wilt
 

In fact, it was Michelle’s post that alerted me to the situation.  I had simply attributed the droopy, discoloured leaves to a dry bed which needed a good watering.  Well, I watered the bed and then we had that day of rain and then some – the droop is still there.  Yikes.  Opposite ends of the continent, completely different climates and here we are experiencing the same eggplant devastation.  I don’t have ready access to the Actinovate that Michelle is using as a drench, so I’m just going to take a wait and see approach.  Hopefully I get some mature eggplant before the plants call it quits.

The peppers (which you can see right beside the eggplants in the first eggplant photo) do not seem to be affected at this point.  I have read that peppers may take longer to be affected and, if this disease arrived on the eggplant seeds, then it would also make sense that the eggplants would be affected before the peppers.

Anyhow, on to the peppers, which are in two beds.  Both beds are split in half, lengthwise; half the bed contains peppers or peppers & eggplant and the other half contains beans.  Each length of bed holds two rows of peppers.  I have 10 varieties of peppers this year - only a few more than the two I grew last year ;)

Jimmy Nardello

Hungarian Hot Wax
 

Pepperoncino



Melrose



Stocky Red Roaster
 



Tam Jalapeno
 

Anaheim



Ostra Cyklon



Padron
 

Corne de Chevre
 

When I planted up the eggplant/pepper bed, I had thought that the beans I planted were pole beans but they ended up being bush beans – this turned out to be a fortuitous mistake.  The other pepper bed does hold pole beans but the bottom growth on the bean plants has now covered many of the pepper plants in the back row.


Pole Bean/Pepper Bed
The back row of peppers (on the left of the bed) is covered with bean foliage
 

Bush Bean & Pepper/Eggplant Bed
Everyone in this bed is getting lots of sun
 

The Gold Marie, especially, is a very aggressive pole bean.  I’ve actually decided to remove the vines, which I will do in the next day or so.  They do not seem to be flowering anymore and the remaining pods on the plant are either shriveled with no seeds inside or very deformed.

Deformed pods on Gold Marie
 

I think I have harvested more than enough of that variety anyhow – over 7 pounds in the last week.  The beans are good but I’m not in love with them the same way I was with the Golden of Bacau, which were more tender & sweet.  I stopped growing that variety because it appeared that the seeds were infected with bacterial brown spot.  I think that next year I’ll try to find another source & grow it again.

My favourite dried bean – Cherokee Trail of Tears – is doing well:

Cherokee Trail of Tears
 

I actually planted some of my old seed for this variety on one end of the trellis and newly purchased seed on the other end (with Gold Marie in between), just so that I could differentiate between them.  This was a bit of precaution, just in case the purchased seed (which comes from another source) performs differently.

Normally, I would simply save some seed each year, but in both years that I grew this variety, I planted it beside the Golden of Bacau & it ended up with bacterial brown spot on it as well.  Since I had such great results with those original seeds (and we all know how the same variety can sometimes yield very differently depending on the source), I wanted to make sure to save seed only from the original purchase.

This year, I'm also growing two more dried beans, Walcherse White & Vermont Cranberry, which are the bush bean varieties in the pepper/eggplant bed:

Walcherse White

Vermont Cranberry
 

The corn bed is pretty much devastated but I am getting tiny cobs developing on some of the broken and/or chewed up stalks, one of which I showed of on Harvest Monday.  This one looks like it also has harvest potential:

Mini-cob
Looks much bigger in the photo than it actually is
 

Luckily, I didn’t clean up any of the broken stalks or debris as I figured they would create an obstacle between the critters and the off chance of any corn.

The butternut squash is finally vining well & I've been winding the vines along the edges of the bed in my corn protection efforts:

Butternut Squash
 

And eye spy a few baby butternuts - how exciting!

 

Baby Butternut
 

There haven’t been a whole lot of male flowers blooming, so I've been going out there with a paintbrush each day.  So far, I have two squash that have set & one that hasn't, but I see at least 2 more that are on the verge of flowering.

The straw bales are basically the same as before:

 

Straw Bales
Not much action going on here
 

After a few weeks of feeding them with concentrated fish emulsion, I pretty much gave up as I wasn't seeing much of a difference.  But see that larger squash plant (2nd one from the bottom)?  It's a Sweet Mama squash and I recently found this on it:

 

Sweet Mama had a baby
 

Surprise, surprise - I'm pretty sure that it has set, so it looks like I'll get at least one squash from the bales this year.  And as we all know, in the veg garden one is better than none.

Till next time...