The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Bursting Butternuts

Since I do not have much experience growing butternut squash, this is a new-ish problem for me. I have encountered this problem with some tomatoes, plums, and cherries, but I did not know it could happen with butternut squash too.

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Four fruits burst in the last week: two lengthwise, two across. The one in the picture broke almost all around; a centimeter more and it would essentially fall off.

I guess this is because the shell hardened prematurely in the heat, and then the fruit grew too quickly after the rain. I had to harvest this one prematurely, and I gave two others to my neighbor because they should be processed ASAP, and we cannot do that right now. The one that burst first has only a small crack that dried out, so I left it on the plant for now. But I will harvest and process it at the earliest possible time too.

I do not think there is anything I can do about this. Even if I watered the plants during the heatwave more than I did, it would not help; they could not take up the water during the day fast enough anyway.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Large Loofahs

The loofahs are a-growing. Yesterday, I counted 8 fruits, 7 of which can be found in this picture.

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Can you find them all? I made the picture larger than normal, so you have a chance to spot all of them. One is really hard to see, which is why yesterday was the first day I spotted it. The biggest fruit in this image is as big as my forearm and is starting to piss me off, because it is at the exact height where it is hard to see, but easy to boink with the head.

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The eighth piece is the first that started early in the summer. It is behind the door to the right and already drying out.

I missed several female flowers and did not pollinate them, but bees and wasps pollinated some of those. If all these fruits manage to ripen enough to be useful, I will be fully satisfied with this crop. Eight fruits should be enough compostable dish-scrubbers for at least two years.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 37 – Cosplaying Cinderella

Except I am the wrong gender, and I didn’t have a costume. And I was sorting peas of my own accord, not at the behest of an evil stepmother.

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I sorted undamaged and damaged peas. In the picture, there are approximately 3,25 kg of healthy-ish yellow peas in the jars. Healthy-ish because I am not entirely certain – some of them do have black spots, which might indicate there is a weevil pupa inside. The same goes for the 400 g of green peas on the right. And on the left are 200 g of badly damaged green peas. Not depicted is about the same amount of badly damaged yellow peas.

The healthy-ish yellow peas will be briefly frozen to kill any potential weevil pupae that might lurk in them. Then they will be used next year as either a pre-crop, companion crop, or even a main crop. To reduce weevil infestation, I will use a technique I read about on the interwebs and tested this year: staggered sowing. I will sow about a third as early in the season as possible and let them flower and fully fruit on some secondary plot. And about two months later, I will sow the main patch where I want them to grow for food. If I fail to grow food-grade peas, still no problem; they will be useful as green fertilizer even so.

The damaged yellow peas I have sown (together with some bad oats) in the raised bed where I had garlic this year. Some will decompose right away, but some will sprout and grow. Either way, they will serve as an organic fertilizer.

The healthy-ish green peas get the freezer treatment too, and they will be used to grow green peas next year as pre-crop with corn. The plan is to sow these as early as possible and harvest them as fresh green peas sometime in May, at about the same time that the Painted Mountain corn is supposed to be sown.

And the damaged green peas will be sown as green fertilizer now in the fall on the patch of land where I grew oats this year.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 36 – Crusty Camels

Another heatwave has hopefully ended, but the rains have not come yet; thus, I stood before the decision – to harvest the Camel potatoes before or after the rain.

Although the camel potatoes were not completely dry above ground, they were in the process of dying, so the tubers were no longer growing. For long-term storage, it is ideal to let the plants completely dry in the field so the tubers develop a slightly thicker and more resistant skin, but that has to be weighed against the fact that tubers grown in the Ruth Stout method are more susceptible to pest damage from both rodents and slugs. And the slugs are dormant right now, whereas they will come out after a bout of rain.

So I decided to rip out the remaining plants and harvest the patch already while the soil is still dry. Even so, there were many damaged tubers, several rodent tunnels, and quite a few slugs huddling in groups that I destroyed mercilessly.

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Again, each of these crates contains 4 kg of tubers, except the middle one in the lower row, which contains 3,5 kg of the tiniest ones. The sack on the left weighs approximately 5 kg and contains 100 pieces of seed potatoes for next year. Not depicted is a bucket with circa 7 kg of heavily damaged potatoes that will need to be sorted and processed quickly.

Even though I put aside seeding potatoes, I am not so enthused about this variety as I am about Bellarosa:

  1. The overall result of 43,5 kg from 5 kg of seed is slightly better than Bellarosa, especially considering that they were partially destroyed by mice in the spring. This variety sprouted later and had a slightly longer growing season.
  2. There was no blight, and the pest damage was slightly more than with Bellarosa. This was somewhat offset (the overall number of damaged tubers is about the same) by my not damaging as many tubers with the rake, but the waste from that bucket will be substantial.
  3. The size of the tubers is more spread out than with Bellarosa. I got one 4 kg crate with just 12 tubers, which is impressive. But overall, the tubers do seem smaller on average – 12 kg of big, 16 kg of small, and 3,5 kg of tiny tubers fit for storage.
  4. The plants did survive the heatwaves well, but…
  5. … as the title implies, the tubers seem to be much more scabby/warty than Bellarosa. So despite the name, they did not cope with the heat quite as well. This is mainly a cosmetic issue, but it slightly increases the waste from peeling.

So still not impressed, but content with how this turned out. We shall now test which meals these are suitable for and whether they can be dehydrated.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 35 – Thistle Test

I love thistles from an aesthetic standpoint, but in the garden, they are admittedly a huge pain in the wherever.

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One huge Carduus acanthoides emerged near the south wall of my house among the runner beans. That is a place where it actually does not disturb me in any way. It does not impede mowing the lawn, watering the beans, or moving around the garden in general, so I left it grow. It is beautiful, and pollinators love it.

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I especially like the spiky flower buds just before they open. They can be dried and painted for nice decorations, but I am not going to invest the effort in that. I enjoy them outdoors when walking by.

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Thistles are pioneer plants capable of driving their roots even through compacted loam very deep. And they are not perennial, so they are actually good for the soil because the roots decompose after two years, leaving channels in the clay through which water can seep into the soil. That way, they help to de-compact it over the years.

But what am I actually testing with this thistle right now, I don’t hear you ask? Well, nothing gardening-related, actually. After eight years, my phone was getting slow, and the battery was no longer holding charge for very long. And to top it off, I dropped it, and the loudspeaker started to sound crackly. So as much as I did not want to, I had to buy a new one. And after a whole day of setting it up with all the apps I use, the thistle provided a nice opportunity to test the camera.

I learned that it makes nice macro pictures, as long as I do NOT use the built-in macro mode. All pictures made in the macro mode were blurry and just 1600×1200 px. I got better results by taking the pictures in the default mode and cropping them afterwards, just like I did with my old phone. Funny how that works.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 34 – Bellarosa Bounty

I harvested my first potatoes of the year, the very early variety “Bellarosa”.

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Since I was growing these on top of the lawn under old compost mixed with some soil, moss, and tree leaves, I did not have to dig. I merely carefully raked the muck aside and picked the tubers off the ground. They did look quite nice, although they were not all nice. But that is normal.

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Each of these crates contains 4 kg, except the far left one, which contains 2 kg of the smallest tubers. There were also approximately 8 kg of tubers that had various degrees of damage from mice, slugs, insects, or the rake. Those will need to be processed, i.e., eaten, fairly quickly.

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I put aside 100 pieces of 40-60 g seed potatoes for next year because I do want to grow this variety again for the following reasons.

  1. Overall, I harvested about 38 kg of potatoes from 5 kg of seed. This is not fantastic, but it is good, especially for a very early variety with very short vegetation.
  2. There was no blight, and the pest damage is relatively minimal.
  3. I am especially pleased with the size of the tubers and the ratio of big/small/tiny – I got 20 kg of big, 4 kg of small and just 2 kg of tiny tubers in shape good enough for storage, and that is good.
  4. Since I grew them in the Ruth Stout method, it was relatively little work for quite reasonable gain.
  5. Despite not being planted deep, the plants fared reasonably well in the heatwave.
  6. Despite the heatwave, most of the tubers are quite nice-looking and not warty. Which is a cosmetic issue, but even so. They are also mostly round and not funny-shaped, which is a plus for peeling.

So although I am not super impressed, I am quite content with how this specific variety turned out. We will now cook a few meals with them and try to dehydrate them to see what uses they are best suited for.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 33 – Getting Grains

I extracted and weighed the oats. Let’s talk about it.

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The sheaves did dry into a very nice golden colour, although possibly still not quite enough. Maybe the threshing would be a bit easier and less laborious if I let them stay a few more days. But I wanted to be done with this so I can concentrate on other things. Also, the sparrows apparently thought I harvested the oats for them.

It did take a few hit-and-miss experiments to get a process that works for a small batch.

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First I put one sheaf heads-first into a thick plastic bag, and I chucked nuns at it for a bit. That softened the straw and loosened most of the grains, although unfortunately not all of them. I think to loosen all of them, the sheaves would need to stand outdoors for much longer, and possibly it would help a bit if they got rained on and dried again. I do not know for sure; there is not much knowledge about this floating around anymore – it was lost to combine harvesters. My mother only knew how to make the sheaves; she was doing it as a child.

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After the straw was a bit beat up and softened, I stripped the panicles into the sack using a thick leather glove, and I poured it all into a bucket. To thresh it thoroughly, I built an improvised drill-powered thresher. First I used only the wooden spokes. It worked, but not particularly well. Then I added bits of chain on the ends of all spokes, and that improved the performance quite significantly. When I have time in the workshop, I will probably build a better and more permanent structure from metal, because I want to grow more grains next year.

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If we had a bit of wind, separating the grains from the chaff would be easy. But we have almost dead calm, so I had to use an electric fan that I fortuitously was able to purchase last month. It did not work as well as natural wind would because of the limited cross-section of the airflow, but it did work. Unfortunately, the grains still need to be a bit sorted and cleaned manually, which is difficult without Cinderella, on whom such a task could be shifted.

So, what did I get? Approximately 3600 g of clean grain, circa 170 g/m². That is about half of what I was hoping for, and about 70% of what I would still consider a good-ish harvest. According to all the info I could find, 300 g per m² should not be impossible; indeed, most sources mention yields even 500g/m² or more.

I can only speculate about the reasons for such a poor yield:

  1. Poor soil. It was visible in the growth that about half of the patch had significantly poorer soil. The plants there were good 10 cm smaller, and the panicles had visibly fewer blossoms. I did fertilize the patch, but evidently not quite enough for it to really matter. This is a real-life demonstration of why most fields around here were transformed into pastures.
  2. Heatwave. The heatwave did have a negative effect. It was at exactly the wrong time, and as a result, the plants did not develop some flowers into grains. I did water the patch, but I waited a bit too long with it.

I still consider it a success in the sense that I learned something worth knowing. And I think it is worth pursuing growing naked oats (and other grains) next year on another, bigger patch of land. I will till in a lot of organic fertilizer and compost into that patch in the fall, so it decomposes and dissolves into the soil over winter, and I will do the same for the patches where I wish to grow various kinds of wheat next year. We shall see what comes of that.

As far as work goes, it is much, much cheaper to buy the oats, even organic ones, than to grow them on a small scale. I would estimate I needed about 4 hours in the spring and about 8 hours for the harvest. But it was mostly very light work, except the tilling in the spring, and the second time it will be a lot shorter, because I will know what I am doing. And I will not be tilling tough turf grass the second time, too – that also needs to be taken into consideration.

If I double the yield and halve the work time, it would be almost profitable. And I think it is doable, only it will take a ‘hole ‘nother year to find out.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 32 – Little Loofahs

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.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The loofahs started to drop the female flower buds that were emerging at the stems very early in the season, which was getting me a bit worried that this whole enterprise might be a bust. Which it still might be, but there is hope now. About a week ago, a new flower bud emerged in the tangled mess at the top of the greenhouse, and it matured and flowered very quickly. I was able to pollinate it, and it grows fast – today, it is about 15 cm long and getting bigger every day. I tied it with twine to the greenhouse construction, so if it gets too heavy, it does not rip the vine.

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Today, another one opened, and I did my best to pollinate it again, although there were only two male flowers open at the same time. In the heatwave, the doors to the greenhouse are constantly open, so insects get in there too. I hope they help too.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And more female flower buds are hiding in the green tangle. They are not easy to find – I can find one one day and not find it again the next. Luckily, the flowers are bright yellow, so once they open, they are easy to spot.

According to Google, loofah fruit needs about two months to fully mature from pollination. I have weather data for my garden for the last 12 years, and in this time, we never had the first frost before the end of September, and sometimes we even had it as late as the beginning of November. Loofah is sensitive and will probably die before the first frost, but hopefully not before the fruits reach enough maturity to be able to go the rest of the way indoors.

One thing is clear, though – no matter how they taste, growing loofahs for food is not a viable endeavor here, not even in the greenhouse. If I wanted to grow expensive water, cucumbers would be a better option.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 31 – Absolutely Abysmall and Atrotious Alliums

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.

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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…

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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…

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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.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 30 – Obtaining Oats

Teh whezzer forecast for the next few days is: another heatwave. Thus, I decided to harvest my oats.

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Here is my little field of gold this morning shortly before the harvest. There are still some specks of green in there, but according to what I could find on the internet, this is the stage when naked oats should be harvested. When it is too dry during harvest, it tends to drop the grains on the ground. I have no personal experience with this crop; this is the first year I have tried to grow it, so I hope the information I found is accurate. When extracting the seeds manually from the flowers, they are hard and ripe.

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Oats is not insect-pollinated, but I had an opportunity to spot one of the IMO prettiest butterflies that are to be seen around here. I could not fetch my proper camera for fear of it flittering away, but the tiny beauty was kind enough to let me snap an adequate picture with my phone. I am not a butterfly expert; all I can say with certainty is that it is a member of the family Lycaenidae.

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I thought about how to go about the harvest. I have a scythe, and I do know how to use it, but I was afraid of the aforementioned seed dropping, and I thought that bashing the growth with wide scything sweeps might be detrimental. I considered harvesting it with a sickle, but then I remembered that I have a tiny battery-powered hedge trimmer. That proved to be perfect for the task, and it took me just slightly over half an hour to cut the whole patch.

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I cut it really close to the ground, and if you do not know better, it now looks almost indistinguishable from mown lawn. There are a lot of weeds in there.

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I was far enough with processing the woodpile that one of the old flooring mats on which it was dumped from the truck became available. I laid the oats on it during the harvest just to collect them all in one place.

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And finally, I bound the stalks into sheaves with twine and stood them on the mat. Now I should hopefully get some advantage of the incoming heatwave, and they should dry out nicely. The heatwave should not be long, and it should break with some rain on Friday, so I hope it will completely dry before then so I can thresh it on Thursday afternoon.

As far as that goes, I do not have a process yet. I do not think this is enough for a flail; I will need to devise some small-scale threshing method.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 29 – Pretty Polinators

I realized that I have a pretty expensive camera, but I haven’t been using it for a long time except for photographing my mother’s gingerbread creations. So this morning I took a break from heavy lifting, and I took the camera to take some pretty-ish pictures of the pollinators that like to visit my oregano patch. I did not manage to make very many because I did not have the battery fully charged prior to this spur-of-the-moment action, but I did get some. And I did not bother with the macro lens.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Butterflies do not have a long life, but some manage to have it pretty rough and survive even so, as this specimen proves. Faded colors, chewed-up wing edges, yet still it flies.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Peacock butterflies are probably the prettiest butterflies that live around here. They look drab, almost coal-black with their wings folded, but stunningly beautiful when they flash their eyes from time to time to scare off or confuse predators.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There were multiple bee species present, but they were turning their hairy butts towards me and generally being uncooperative and blurry.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And of course several bee-mimicking hoverfly species were also present, being just as uncooperative as bees.

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Bees and butterflies get all the press when it comes to pollination, but some beetle species are important in this regard too. And they are often very tiny.

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There were also smaller butterfly species there, and I did not manage to capture all those present by far.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 28 – Bee Busy

All the assorted pumpkins are growing and flowering, but only the butternut and partypants look promising.

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I have five butternuts that are now about 1 kg and still growing.

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Almost daily, I get new butternut flowers, and I do my best to pollinate them manually. In two cases, those attempts failed already, because there were no really fresh male flowers open at the same time. But mostly, the plants still progress, and the number of fruits should still go up for at least a few weeks.

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Real bees do like the flowers too, as does an assortment of beetles. And occasionally slugs. Luckily, the slugs prefer wilted flowers over fresh ones, so once old flowers start to drop off, the slugs leave the freshly open ones alone.

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I mostly do not bother manually pollinating the other pumpkins, because I do not have very many healthy flowers for it to be worth the bother. Luckily, insects bother even so, so I should get at least my work’s and the seed packet’s worth out of most of them. Although the bulk of the assorted failures will be compensated by the butternut plants.

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The loofahs are flowering, but still only male flowers. Several of the female flower buds stopped developing and eventually wilted away. I have no clue what the cause of this is. Maybe the weather is too cold – after the heatwave that started the summer, we have now had several weeks of the same weather that we had at the end of May. Nighttime outdoor temps have even dropped below 10°C for three days in a row now. This also means that outdoor tomatoes are not doing particularly swell.

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The bell peppers are really puny so far, and the plants grow at a snail’s pace. I probably won’t bother overwintering these the next winter, and I will try to grow new pepper plants of a different variety. I also won’t grow them directly in the soil in the greenhouse the next year, but in large containers. That way, I can move them to a sunnier place when the weather is really warm – my greenhouse is in partial shade. Tomatoes do not mind, but peppers apparently do.

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The potatoes Agrie are indeed an indeterminate variety, since they keep flowering even on plants that already did so. In the meantime, the Bellarosa variety began to wilt (as it should), and it might be ready for harvest sometime next week or so.

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I harvested more oregano than I can use in a year, so I left the rest of the plants to flower as much as they want. They attract a lot of pollinators – bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. None of which I managed to take a picture of.

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Pollinating a few pumpkin flowers every day is not much work, but I have been extremely busy even so – I have ordered circa 7 metric tonnes of wood scraps for winter fuel, and I need to bag, weigh, and store it all for winter. That is a lot of work, and I have to insert rest days into it every few days; otherwise my hands would probably fall off at the shoulders. Each of these bags weighs 20 kg. I would prefer smaller, 10 kg bags. They are much easier to handle, but they are not sold in a UV-hardened variant, so I am stuck with these behemoths. And filling these only 50% is not a financially wise option, since they are quite expensive. The smaller bags are cheaper, but since they are not hardened, they tend to disintegrate after a year or two. And it is not fun when a bag decides to fall apart at the exact moment one carries it down wet stairs in freezing winter.

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And lastly, there will be a series of knife-related posts again on my knife blogge. I got a small commission for a santoku akin to the one with an olive wood handle that I made a few years ago. And there will also be a series of knife-related posts on Affinity, because I will recycle the blade in the picture above. I found it in the pile of wood scraps. It was probably used by the sawmill workers to cut packing straps and other heavy-duty work. It was badly mishandled (evidently) and really badly sharpened. It was also a bad design even when it was brand new – this type of integrated bolster not only adds a lot of completely unnecessary weight to the blade (which might be considered just an opinion), but it also objectively makes it more difficult to maintain a sharp edge and to sharpen it properly when blunted. I will write a bit more about that knife-design trivia too.

Once repurposed, I will decide what to do with the blade. I will probably just give it away to someone.

 

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 27 – Squashes Start

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…

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© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

… 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.