Three days of devastatingly hot weather were still not enough to dry the oats completely. I threshed two sheaves and got about 500 g out of them. Which is bad; it means I might expect as little as just 3 kg from the whole patch. But I did not thresh the second sheaf completely, because the grains still did not want to separate from the chaff, so I put it aside for now, and I am letting it dry a bit further. The weather forecast so far does not include any major rain; at best, we could get a very light shower.

But there is some progress on the loofah front that I’d like to mention.

I tried to grow two varieties of garlic and three varieties of onions in my new raised beds. The raised beds that I did my best to fill with uninfected soil. All crops failed, though for different reasons.

The seed-propagated shallot failed so completely that I do not even have a picture of the failed harvest, because literally zero plants grew to a size worth talking about.

The other two varieties did fare better in the sense that I did harvest something worth eating, but the bulbs are really small.

The main reasons why the onions failed were two:

1. The seed snails did not work out very well, as I wrote in the spring when planting them out. The roots attached to the landscaping fabric and when I was planting them out, they got damaged, and the plants had to grow new ones.
2. The spring was very cold, and the plants did not grow at all for a very long time. I gave some surplus seedlings to my neighbor who planted them in their greenhouse, and she told me they grew OK there. So it seems that to get reliable-ish onions, I will probably need to devise some portable polytunnel shelter for the raised beds.

At least the onions did not get any fungal disease this year, so in that sense, it was a success. I bought permaculture seeds of old variants to try out next year, and if those fail too, I won’t grow onions anymore.

The carrots that shared the same bed with the onions are still growing, but they will not be as good as those I got last year. For reasons unknown to me, the seeds had a difficult time this year taking off, and about one-quarter did not emerge from the ground, despite being pre-germinated just like last year.

And the garlic…

I have 8 heads of garlic Janko, out of 10 cloves that I saved and planted from last year. And I do not know how many heads of the variety Dukát I got. In the picture it looks like an OK harvest. However…

Half the plants were infected. I put them in the hottest and sunniest place in the garden to dry out (a gravel path), and I will burn them afterwards. I think it is white rot, Botrytis porri. I will have to try a different fungicide next year, or I will have to forgo garlic completely, since it is evident that this fucking plague is now everywhere in my garden. I will have to look at this issue a bit more thoroughly, because it does not make sense to spend more on fungicides than I would on the garlic itself.

Hokkaido, zucchini, marrow, and pattypans do not look promising, although I should get some, at least of the last sort. The butternut squashes, on the other hand, have grown like mad, and they were completely unaffected by the slugs. And today…

… I got the first three female flowers. I hope my attempts at manual pollination worked, because unfortunately, there weren’t very many male flowers open at the same time, and some were already closing.

However, this is really promising. I got the first female flower full seven weeks earlier than last year, so even if we get the first frost at the average time (end of September), I could look at a substantial amount of fully ripe fruit. I do not want to get my hopes up; that’s usually a surefire recipe for disappointment, but there are plenty more buds in the making and the vines are still growing in length by about 5-10 cm a day, with some reaching the very top of the trellises already.

I only wish the loofahs were flowering too. They are not; the vines still only grow in length, even though they have reached the roof of the greenhouse already.

Let’s talk legumes, baby!

Well, maybe I got my wires crossed a bit there, but legumes are important in the garden, and I have a lot of them around, so I think they do deserve some attention.

Nothing to see here, because this is a freshly tilled patch where green peas were. I harvested about 2 kg of peas from 250 g of seed, which is not very impressive tbh. If I were growing peas to save money, it would not be very efficient. But I am mostly growing peas to improve the soil, which is why I immediately sowed this patch with peas again, this time with yellow peas. Those won’t be harvested at all; they will be tilled in green as a fertilizer sometime in August/September, after which this patch will be sown with durum wheat to test if I can grow it here.

Yellow peas started to swell up, so I do hope to get my own seed for the future to compensate for the very disappointing germination rate of bought seed. However, this probably won’t be impressive either, because many pods are attacked by pea weevil Bruchus pisorum. This pest is a problem in my garden, and there is not really a good solution.

Leftover green pea seeds from last year had a nearly 100% germination rate, and it looks like I might get a 1000% dividend. I am letting the whole patch fully ripen to get my own seeds. This variety grows extremely fast, so it is eminently suitable as a green fertilizer both in the spring before other crops, as well as in the fall after the main season. And the green peas are very tasty too. But the seeds are fairly expensive, thus the effort to grow my own.

White runner beans are starting to bloom. But surprisingly, some plants have red blossoms, so there was some cross-pollination with the red runner beans. Which is annoying; I wanted to get a pure white strain, and I am getting red blossoms from white beans. The hybrids will be perfectly edible, but…

Various bush beans are starting to look less pathetic, and first flower buds are showing up too. I do hope to get my own seeds for the next season; buying bean seeds over the last few years has been very frustrating and disappointing.

Alfalfa is now knee-high and flowering. I won’t mow it; I will let it grow until the end of August, then I will mow it and till it in. A lot of weeds sprouted in the alfalfa patch, whose seeds were suppressed in the lawn. That will be a bit of a problem the next year, when I want to grow spelt here.

And now let’s switch to native legumes that are important in my garden.

I did mention already that I wish to gather seeds of the bush vetch Vicia sepum to propagate it more around my garden for the future. But that is not the only native legume for which I have plans.

White clover Trifolium repens grows anywhere on the walk paths, and I intend to encourage it to do so by not mowing it too short. It is a pesky weed in a vegetable patch, but a valuable asset elsewhere due to its ability to resist being trodden on and to alleviate soil compaction.

Bird vetch Vicia cracca grows in the meadows outside my garden, and I found a plant in an area where it was not mown when making hay. I will harvest its seeds, and I hope to propagate it in my garden too. Fast-growing, local nitrogen fixer, excellent for composting. And when it sprouts as a weed in a vegetable patch, it does not compete much with anything and is easy to manage, remove, or simply leave to be.

Several patches of red clover Trifolium pratense appeared in my front yard. I have mown the lawn around them so the heads ripen. I want to harvest the seeds too. It is an excellent nitrogen fixer; in my area it grows better than alfalfa, and bumblebees love it.

And the last legume whose seeds I wish to propagate around my garden is bird’s foot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus. It is not as fast-growing and big as others, but it is pretty, pollinators of all kinds love it, and it is reasonably drought-resistant. Thus, another good local alternative to alfalfa.

The main downside to all these native plants is the same one that alfalfa has – the seeds are teeny tiny and fairly difficult to harvest. We shall see whether I succeed or not.

For many of these, to my surprise, it is also possible to buy seeds – they are sold by a shop selling beekeepers’ equipment and accessories. Although I would prefer to get seeds from local plants. These are uncultivated wildflowers, and thus they should be pretty genetically diverse across CZ, and indeed the whole of Europe. With seeds from local plants, I have a guarantee that they are genetically adapted to the local environment. Seeds from plants that were, most probably, grown in a warmer climate and better soil at lower elevations might not do as well here.

I am still really seriously considering buying a packet of seeds of each in the spring, mix them up, till the poorest soil in my garden (my front yard), and sow the mix there to see if something comes of it. The seeds are not that expensive, and it might be worth it even if they have a poor germination rate.