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.