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.

 

 

Today should end the worst heatwave in recorded history in CZ. It was horrendous because my house does not have AC. Normally, I would not need it either; the thermal mass of well-insulated thick brick walls generally ensures a pleasant indoor climate even when it is hot for a few days outdoors. Not when there is persistent heat without even a slight breeze for two weeks, though. These last three days, the heat got so bad that I was completely unable to do anything, literally except lie in bed with a wet towel directly on my skin to cool me off. Luckily, my parents live on the first floor, and temperatures in their bedroom did not exceed 26°C, which is OK for them. I, on the other hand, had to endure 29°C from afternoon til almost midnight.

Before the heat got this bad, I managed to transplant my beans. So let’s talk about them a bit.

Beans do not make a strong taproot; they make a short and stubby one that very quickly starts to split into thin and fragile roots that do not like to be disturbed. I never had problems replanting them, though, because I always take care to not disturb the rootball during replanting. And this is one area where my clingy clay soil actually helps, because when I let the soil dry a bit before replanting, the whole rootball hardens somewhat and keeps its shape well. I also generally do not let the plants grow too long – I try to plant them outdoors just before they develop their third or fourth leaf.

I transplanted some pole beans near the hedge between my and my neighbor’s garden (with my neighbor’s consent), and for the rest I put some poles near my second walnut tree. These are beans “Konstantin” which have pods without the paper layer, so even if they do not manage to ripen fully, I should get some edibles out of them.

I was worried that the heatwave might harm the freshly transplanted beans, but almost all of them survived for several days, and they already start climbing. Only one pair died the very next day, and that was entirely my fault – when transplanting them, I dropped the rootball, and it shattered. That disturbed the roots too much, and in this weather, the plants had no chance. And one pair was eaten by something, probably voles.

Bush beans from the new supplier did not have as good a germination rate as my own pole bean seeds, but they fared much better than those that I tried before. So I planted them around the Painted Mountain Corn patch as planned. They are still alive four days later, so the transplanting probably succeeded too.

My garden copes with the weather relatively well so far, although I had to pour over two thousand litres of water into it to keep it alive. I even had to water the oats so they do not start dropping flowers. I hope we get enough rain to replenish my reserves.

Lufas love the weather. I have my first fruit growing. This plant started flowering much earlier than the others, and it started with female flowers. By sheer luck, the third female flower started closing at just the same time that the first male flower opened, so I tried to pollinate it. And surprisingly, it worked. The other three plants did not start flowering at all yet, but I do hope they will.

There are indeed new flowers in the making, although this one does not look female from this angle at all. Hur, hur, hur… Sorry.

Figs and grapes, of course, love the hot weather too. I might get a decent harvest this year.

Tomatoes are a mixed bag. I did something wrong this year (I do not know what), and the seedlings were generally small and sickly when I was planting them. In the greenhouse, they recovered and are already starting to flower. Outdoors, however, most of them are still way too small, and there is a huge question mark over them.

Of all the pumpkin species and variants that I planted, only butternuts look really promising. None of them were ravaged by slugs, and now they are growing fast. They are not flowering yet, but they started forming plenty of flower buds. Last year, I got the first female flower in the last week of August, and I still got a usable harvest. So this year, it could be really good. And btw., the only butternut squash that fully ripened last year remained perfectly fresh for five months; they store really well. I am hopeful they will compensate for the total failure that my Hokkaido and Zucchini are very likely to be.

 

Now that we have warm weather, the garden is growing fast. There is a visible difference from one day to the next.

The oats are just about to bloom, and it does look promising, even though about a third of the patch has visibly lower growth due to poor soil quality.

Yesterday, I was worried about whether the Painted Mountain corn would germinate, and today the first plants started to poke out of the soil. If we have a warm September and a frost-free autumn until at least the first week in October, they might even fully ripen.

There are a few soybean plants here and there. I will wait about a month until they are all visible well, and then I will sow green peas in areas where they failed. If the weather stays warm long enough, I might get some of my own seed for next year, although most definitely not enough to actually eat. Next year, I will not grow soy in rows, but in clusters of 5 plants. That way I can try to start enough plants in cups early and plant them outdoors once the frost risk is over, as I do with other beans. It won’t allow for large-scale growing like direct sowing in rows does, but it should still allow me to cover a reasonably large patch.

The green peas that I intend to let fully ripen to get my own seeds for next year are very lush and vigorous. I hope this continues and I get a few kg of viable seeds, because this variety grows very fast and is thus suitable not only for food, but also for improving, protecting, and fertilizing the soil as a cover crop.

The green peas intended for actual harvest for food look nowhere near as lush, but I should still get my work’s worth out of the patch.

The yellow peas look vigorous and healthy too, albeit the growth has bald spots due to a poor germination rate (only about 50%). These were actually sold as a green fertilizer, but they grow slower than the green peas, and they apparently need higher temperatures to start growing. However, I would like to get my own seeds for the future, because these peas are more suitable for producing dry seed for long-term storage.

Alfalfa is growing, but it is not what is in the picture. This is bush vetch Vicia sepum.

The seeds are very small, but the pods are big enough for manual harvest and shelling. So this year, I decided to mow my lawn around these and to collect as many seeds as possible. If I succed to get reasonable amount, then next year I will till a patch dedicated to these to get even more seed. The plant is not edible, but it is an excellent nitrogen fixer. And unlike alfalfa or peas, it is a local plant – it is guaranteed to thrive here. I only need to help it spread more than it is capable of doing on its own.

Da potatoes are a’ growin’. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is even ugly. But they all started to flower, and the flowers aren’t ugly. It also means that about a month from now I will probably be able to harvest the early varieties.

The indeterminate variety “Agrie” has white flowers, and it is the one that contains most of the “ugly” plants, unfortunately. Some plants have dark green, curled-up leaves, which might be a sign of too much nitrogen. In all probability, I did not spread the fertilizer wide enough in some areas. About 70% of the plants look normal, so it is not a total catastrophe. We will see what comes of it.

The second indeterminate variety “Dali” has white flowers too, and all plants look healthy.

Both indeterminate varieties could do with some more hilling up, but I do not have the material to do so. Which is unfortunate; a few plants were damaged by strong winds. They are just too tall and frail due to how abnormally quickly they grew. I am not experienced in applying fertilizer, and it seems my soil was more fertile than I thought.

The very early variety “Bellarosa” has light pink flowers and light green leaves. These are grown in the Ruth Stout method, which is not conducive to over-fertilizing, but it is very good for slugs. Whenever it rains, I collect quite a few of them in this growth. The slug infestation is nowhere near as severe as it was two years ago, but I still suspect the tubers will be damaged by them as well.

The early variety “Camel” has flowers of an even darker shade of pink. Even the green parts have a reddish tint to them, and the growth is thus distinctly darker than the adjacent “Bellarosa”. They are also smaller and sturdier than all the other varieties. These were damaged by voles or mice, so there are a few bald patches in the growth and a few plants are stunted. However, the rest took off well, and they look healthy.

Overall, potatoes do look promising, albeit not perfect. I will not be satisfied if I get anything less than 300 kg, but if I get more than 200 kg, it will be worth the effort.

This weekend, they all get a second dose of fungicide to prevent blight. These varieties should all be resistant, but it is better to be safe than sorry. I was successful in keeping my potatoes blight-free for years, and I do not want to break the streak.

 

Some plants are taking off and looking promising.

Alfalfa is almost knee-high, and even the bald patches have some plants here and there. The yellow peas (on the far end of the photo) also look healthy, albeit they still have not started to bloom.

The first patch of green peas is full of pods now, and they are beginning to swell. I hope to get several kg of canned/frozen green peas from this. And I still have three 0,25 kg packets of green peas to sow during the summer if something else fails and I have spare space. Which I shall have because…

The soy beans failed spectacularly. There might be a soybean plant somewhere in this picture, but I cannot find it. I can find several plants in the field, but they are very small and sickly. The reasons are several.

1. The seeds themselves had only about a 60% germination rate when tested separately. And even some of those that sprouted looked weird; the roots had no proper tip for burrowing into the soil and curled in on themselves like a pig’s tail.
2. Some seeds sprouted, grew several cm long, and suddenly the whole seedling emerged above the ground, lay flat, and died due to exposure. I am completely dumbfounded by this; I have never seen anything like that, ever.
3. Many seedlings were damaged by slugs, because their emergence from the ground coincided with cold and wet weather.
4. This bout of cold weather was really cold, below 10°C at night in June, which is weird and not really good for the garden.

There are some soybean plants here and there, but overall, I will be lucky if I get a handful of unripe soybeans at the end of the year. Great disappointment. If I get some viable ripe seeds, I will be really surprised. Lesson learned – I might be able to grow a few soybean plants if I pre-grow them in pots as seedlings and put them outdoors when they are tall-ish. Or to grow them in the greenhouse. But my location does not allow for large-ish scale growing.

The white and brown bush beans do not look much better; the seeds mostly rotted away (0% germination when tested separately indoors!), but at least enough emerged so it does look like I might get enough plants to get my own quality seeds for subsequent years. To sow them directly into the soil for large-ish-scale growing, I will probably have to do so in the first week of June at the earliest. Thus, I need to find some variants with a short vegetation period, and that might take some time. On that front, we get to the title of today’s post.

I mentioned to my nephew the poor germination rate of bean seeds these last two years, and he told me about a webshop with a money-back guarantee for seeds that do not germinate. They also purposely sell variants that allow saving one’s own seeds for the future, heirloom varieties, and genetically diverse mixes that allow for one’s own selective breeding. The seeds are expensive, but I bought 48 seeds of an old bush bean variety that should have a short vegetation span. I planted them in pots to get them started quicker in the greenhouse, and I hope to have some plants to grow outside once the cold spell subsides and the summer begins in earnest.

And to plant them, I had to make a new vegetable patch. Luckily enough, I was making hot compost again, and it burned this ca 3×3 square in my lawn. The burned parts were really easy to till with a garden fork, because the composting not only killed all the grass, it completely dissolved its roots. The hardest work was around the edges, where there was still live, tough grass. I wish I could make huge compost heaps to kill grass on large areas.

However, 3×3 m is a small patch for my garden, but it is a bit much for a handful of beans. But I did not buy only beans; I also bought several other seeds for the next year, and I am especially excited about these:

I wanted to try this crop for years; I knew it existed, but I did not know the exact name of the variety, so I could not find seeds. And coincidentally, this supplier had them, and they were not prohibitively expensive. So I bought 300 seeds, and I sowed 60 of them today to test them.

It is the variety “Painted Mountain,” and it should be exactly what I need at my elevation – hardy and with short vegetation. Ideally, it should have been sown last month, but it still might fully ripen if the fall is frost-free until the middle of October. Which is not a guarantee, but it might happen. And whilst it will not be as sweet as a modern sweet corn variety, it still should be perfectly edible and tasty for an early harvest. In any case, I soaked the seeds in water overnight to expedite germination by a few days.

So now I have a 3×3 square sown with corn, and around the edges I will plant the bush beans. A two-sister patch, if you like.

I already have another corn variety sown in the garden, as does my neighbor, so there might be some cross-pollination, but probably not much, and it should not affect the quality for an early harvest (and I won’t need to save my own seeds this year). And for next year, I have already discussed the issue with my neighbors, and we will both grow only this variety.

And to finish today, I harvested the first significant amount of strawberries this year, 1850 g. There were nearly no slugs on them, which surprised me, though I am definitely not complaining. If the weather gets warm and sunny now, I might look forward to a substantial harvest this year. I hope I get one; we already ate all the marmalade and dehydrated strawberries from two years ago, and we need to refresh our stock.

I had such a surplus of tomato plants this year that I decided to make another makeshift shelter to grow them outside the greenhouses.

I used the portable trellises to do so by wiring five pairs slightly offset to stand in an A-shape and then using the last pair for a roof to support the plastic foil. I then planted the tomatoes between the A-shapes so when they start to grow in height, they can lean on the trellises. We shall see how this goes. The biggest problem could be temperature. If the summer is too cold, tomatoes won’t grow outdoors fast enough. The second big problem could be sunshine. This area gets only about 6-8 hours of direct sunshine; the first half of the day it is in shade. In my experience, tomatoes do not actually need direct sunshine to thrive; temperature is more important. But like all plants, they need enough light to photosynthesise, and I am not entirely certain they will get it here. Well, we shall at least see if these trellises work for this purpose.

Things are growing. Some well, some badly.

The indeterminate potatoes “Agrie” look promising. They are now tall enough to be hilled up, which I will do this weekend.

The same goes for “Dali”, although those might need a few more days to reach sufficient height. These two varieties look really promising, they even were not damaged by late frost.

The very early variety “Bellarosa” was damaged by late frost, despite being covered with white cloth. But the damage was not very severe and it appears that the plants are recovering now.

The early variety “Camel” is a headscratcher. They still did not all emerge from the ground, and those that did are still tiny. Some were also probably destroyed by voles who had nests under the PVC mats. But that only explains the empty spots, not the stunted plants. Maybe they will take off later.

The garlic “Dukát” looks promising, albeit the leaves are a bit yellow near the tips, so I added nitrogen today (very dilute KNO3 solution). Mulch from old leaves works very well at suppressing weeds.

Onions and carrots, on the other hand, look downright pitiful. The seedsnails for the onions did not work well – using the landscaping cloth was a mistake, plastic wrap would work better. On top of that, they really suffered in the cold May weather.

For some reason, the trick with egg trays did not work for the carrots either; only about a third emerged from the ground. I think I made a mistake and buried them too deeply. I tried to sow some seeds directly into the soil now, it should still result in reasonably sized carrots, if they manage to survive the heat

Spinach from seeds sown directly into the ground failed again; spinach from seedlings fared a bit better, though still nothing to write home about. It just seems I do not have the soil or climate, or both, for it. I will harvest it this weekend, and I will plant summer squash in its stead. That was the plan all along, only I was hoping to harvest more Spinach than I realistically will.

I concentrated on increasing my ability to grow things vertically in several ways this year. I already mentioned some in passing, but let’s write specifically about just that.

I completely reworked the supports for runner beans near the south wall of my house. Instead of running the clothesline in a zig-zag fashion between the rain gutter and the poles at the bottom, I run it in such a way that each pole has only one clothesline running to it from a wire support on the gutter. The wire supports also serve a secondary role of strengthening the gutter laterally (it got bent out of shape by heavy ice and snow). I also increased the number of plants that can be planted there, so hopefully, I will get bigger harvests and a better coverage of the wall against the hot summer sun.

I repaired more of the old aluminium fencing that my father used to keep poultry in check. I used it last year as a trellis for butternut squash, and I am trying to do the same this year. Growing butternut squash vertically allows for denser planting of the plants and thus better use of space.

Unfortunately, all my butternut and hokkaido plants are rather pathetic. I was away from home for three days, and I did not want to burden my nephew with having to drag them indoors every evening, so I left them in the greenhouse. And as bad luck would have it, it was exactly those three days when the weather was so cold that even in the greenhouse the temperatures fell below 10°C. As a result, all my winter squash plants are yellowish and sickly looking. But I got them outdoors a month earlier than last year, and most of them are starting to grow healthy green leaves again, so they might not be lost yet.

I also had several aluminium frames approximately 180×90 cm in size. I repaired them, and to convert them into portable trellises for beans, tomatoes, and pumpkins, I covered them with PVC-coated welded wire fencing mesh.

I made 12 of these portable trellises, and I hope they last me for years. This year, I intend to use them mainly for an improvised shelter and support for tomatoes, because I have more tomato plants than fit into my greenhouse, and I do not want to throw them all simply away.

To finish the post, have a look at some very nice Aquilegia blossoms.