The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 50 – Ridiculous Roots

This was a first year of growing carrots in my newly established raised beds, which I filled with soil that was specifically targeted towards root vegetables – sandy, with zero stones. When I pulled all the roots, I filled the wheelbarrow completely, just like last year.

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

That does not look so bad, does it? Well, I was not disappointed, but I was not thrilled either. There was no rodent damage; in that regard, the raised beds did exactly what was expected of them.

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

But nearly all the roots are multifurcated, some in quite humorous ways that will be bugger all to process. Many roots have some slug damage, especially above ground. And some roots are split lengthwise – probably a result of a combination of heat stress and drought. The raised beds were in partial shade, but since the soil is deliberately sandy, I had a bit of trouble keeping the carrots suitably watered during the heatwaves.

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

I didn’t get the behemoths that I had last year, but most of the roots are still of respectable size. Just the funny shapes will be difficult to process.

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

With 11 kg overall harvest from this one raised bed, I cannot really complain. Really the only issue I have is the funny shapes, which, again, will be bugger to process.

For now, they are in a covered bucket outside where it is cold. At the nearest opportunity, they will be processed, i.e., dehydrated. In combination with butternut squash, we should be set with beta-carotene for a year.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 49 – Sure Slight Soybean Success!

I dried, shelled, and weighed all the soybeans that I harvested.

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

Not a particularly good result; I harvested 30% of what I had sown. So, from that point of view, it is a failure. However, the bought seed had an abysmal germination rate; most of it has rotted in the ground (over 95%). So I took 20 of these seeds – 10 of the biggest and 10 of the really small and still slightly green – and I put them on a wet towel to test the germination rate.

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

This morning, 19 out of 20 germinated. The last one germinated in the evening too. So I am at the very least hopeful that I managed to grow reliable seed for the next year. However, I will probably do things differently next year. I won’t sow a big dedicated soybean patch; I will sow it around the edges of all the grain patches that I will be growing. And at least for some of them, I won’t sow them directly in the ground – I will try to first grow small plants in pots and then carefully transplant them, just as I usually do with runner beans, bush beans, and pole beans. If all that fails again and I get less than I have sown, then I will at least know I cannot grow this crop at all.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 48 – Winter Wheat

In a way, this article could count towards next year’s gardening. I have sown wheat on the biggest continuous patch that I have.

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

The upper half is sown with spelt, the lower half with durum wheat. Why these two species? Because they are significantly more expensive than ordinary wheat.

I am not 100% sure both are winter varieties; I assume they are, because for both species the winter variety is the rule and the spring variety is the exception. If none survive the winter, they will still serve as cover crops, and I can always sow/plant something else in their stead in the spring.

But growing wheat on this large-ish scale poses a problem, one I also encountered with the naked oats (which I plan to grow next year too) – how to separate the grain from the chaff. I will still have too little to thresh with a flail on the ground, so I wanted to build a bucket with a DIY drill attachment for threshing small amounts. I tested a functional idea with the oats already, and I was all set to build it over winter. However, that might not be necessary anymore, for I had a stroke of luck!

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

This is a grain shredder. My father exchanged it for something when I was a kid with an acquaintance at work, who was moving away and therefore did not need it anymore. Then, another neighbor borrowed it to shred grains for cows and chickens, in exchange for allowing my father to mow grass for his rabbits on part of his meadow. And then we all kinda forgot about it.

The neighbor is retired now, and he no longer has either cattle or poultry. And his wife put her foot down – unneeded junk must out, and the grain shredder should be either tossed or returned. We met at the doctor’s when my mother went for her flu shot, and he broached the subject – do I want the shredder back, or should he toss it?

My mind immediately went to using it to thresh the grains I plan to grow next year, and I said I’d gladly take it back.

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

The machine is very old. The motor has Azbuka inscriptions, so it might have been built in the USSR. It was certainly built during the time of the Iron Curtain, because we got it during that regime. It possesses a truly mighty induction motor for a domestic utensil. And it also was in possession of a no-longer-used type of wall plug. I had to change it for a modern version (I also added the wheels when I was at it).

The rewiring, although simple in principle, was not painless. The machine was tripping the breaker, so I was suspecting I wired the plug wrongly. Luckily, an old friend was willing to assist me via WhatsApp, and he confirmed that I did wire the machine correctly, so maybe it was tripping the breaker for one of two reasons: 1 – the startup current was too high, or 2 – the residual current was too high due to the machine being too old. I despaired, but since I was assured the wiring was OK, I tried to plug the machine into the Variable Frequency Drive I use to regulate the speed on my belt grinder.

And to my joy, the machine worked. The VFD starts the motor slowly, the machine no longer trips the breaker, and I can regulate the speed from 5% all the way to 100%. I hope it keeps working for some time.

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

The principle is simple: inside the drum are two sets of blades: two rotate with the edge, two with the flat, and an outlet is covered with a sieve. Since I can regulate the speed, I can stir the grains relatively gently, as well as bash them to the point of breaking if I want to. For threshing, I will probably remove the sieve completely. And if I somehow manage to grow a lot of grain, I can use a fine sieve to make whole-grain flour too.

This was truly a stroke of luck that does not happen often. I am glad I have honest neighbors.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 47 – Acceptable Agrie

I wanted the title to be “Amazing Agrie”, but alas, the variety fell just short of my standard for that.

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

Some plants were still green, but I decided to harvest them all anyways to curtail  the ongoing pest damage. There was less of it than in other varieties, but it was still substantial, and even some tubers in storage have some wireworm holes that I hope won’t lead to too much spoilage before we manage to process them.

As far as tuber size goes, the variety performed extremely well. I did put aside 100 pieces of circa 50 g tubers as eventual seed for next year, but I had trouble finding enough such tubers – most were significantly bigger.  But all show signs of drought stress – some are split, some are bumpy and knobbly, and all are warty and crusty. All these three issues are due to heat and drought. Still, I did get a lot of very big tubers over 500 g, and several over 750 g.

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

And the record holder for this year is a tuber mere 20 g shy of a full kilogram. Impressive indeed.

Judging by this variety alone, my intelligence must be abysmal, since the old Czech saying goes, “The dumber the peasant, the bigger the potatoes.” But I personally think that saying is more an expression of folk envy than of folk wisdom.

So why do I not consider them amazing? The overall harvest was just about 80 kg, circa 4 kg per m², so not much more than the other varieties.

As far as cooking goes, all four varieties that I grew this year are extremely tasty in all uses, and all are very well suited for potato pancakes, bramborák, and Czech potato dumplings.

I will write about dehydrating them in a separate post.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 46 – Some Slight Soybean Success?

You might remember that I hoped to get at least some soybeans, despite the bought seeds’ abysmal germination rate. And it looks like I might have.

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

The annual weeds that have overgrown everything died off, but the soybean plants still managed to cling to life. And this week, they started to turn yellow. We might get a frost any day now, so I decided to call it quits and harvest them all. I need to mow all of the garden and prepare the beds for winter anyway, so I cannot wait much longer.

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

I put all the harvested pods into a tray, and I am drying them slowly indoors at room temperature. If they behave like other legumes with which I have experience, most of these should fully ripen now and be viable. After they dry, my father will shell them, and I will run a germination rate test. If they fail the test, they should still be good to eat. And if they germinate at a reasonable rate, I will have my own seed for the future. Which would be great. I will tell you the results, when that time comes.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 45 – Pumpkins & Pattypans

I harvested my summer squash a few weeks ago.

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

There are 12 kg of produce in that picture, and only the white pattypan squash are worth speaking of. We converted them mostly into ersatz sauerkraut. One measly zucchini, two small marrows, and a handful of apple-sized green pattypan squash are all I got from the rest. The single yellow pattypan plant made a lot of female flowers, but they were all infertile for some reason, so any fruit that started to develop quickly started to rot.

I had not a single Hokkaido squash. All the plants remained stunted the whole summer, if they survived at all.

Luckily, all that failure was compensated by the butternut squash.

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

The plants covered the trellises from top to bottom and produced, on average, almost two fruits per plant.

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

I harvested nearly all of them this week. The plants started to die off due to powdery mildew, an inevitable outcome of the way-too-hot summer. I did not do much to try to combat it; it wasn’t necessary, since most of the fruit was at full size already.

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

I got 37 squash so far, with a total weight of 56 kg. There are probably still about 4 kg of unripe squash outside, still somewhat growing, so I will probably get to 60 kg total. We already ate some, and we gave some away too, since there is no way we can manage to eat and process all this.

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

I got two huge baskets of mushrooms in exchange for four of them, which is nice. I made smaženice from those in the picture (mostly blushers and parasols). The rest were mostly boletes, which I dehydrated. I do not have time to go mushroom picking this year, so this came in handy. Our stockpile of dehydrated mushrooms was starting to dwindle, and this replenished it for at least two years.

Now I will probably have to quickly process some of the remaining butternuts too, because about 50% developed brown spots on the skin. I have no experience with these, and I cannot find reliable information on how they affect their shelf life. Thus, I will probably do my best to freeze, dehydrate, or can all the affected fruits ASAP, with setting one perhaps aside to see how it goes.

Salmon Steak With Butternut Squash

I wasn’t planning to write about this, but when I arranged the final product on my plate, I thought I might want to share it, so I snapped a quick picture with my phone.

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

After eating the meal, I obviously decided to share it, since you are reading this. I really enjoyed it; I will definitely cook it again, and I’ll improve it. Here is the recipe:

Squash: Cut the fruit lengthwise, deseed, and peel it. Cut into ca. 12 mm (Ann Halfaninch) slices. Cook until soft on low/medium heat in steam to prevent it from dissolving into mush. This will take about 20 minutes, about the time it takes to make all the rest.

Horseradish paste: Wet dehydrated horseradish powder with freshly squeezed lime juice to make a very thin paste. A teaspoon of horseradish powder is enough for two steaks.

Salmon Steak: Salt both sides, wait a bit for it to release juice, then sprinkle both sides with equal amounts of crushed Basil, Rosemary, and Oregano, as much as can stick to the surface. Heat olive oil in a pan to ~180°C (356 Freedummheit), sear on both sides, then lower heat to medium/low and slowly fry both sides until cooked through, without overtly charring the outside. A lot of the spices will fall off; that is why an excess was added at the beginning. Once the steak is done, put it on a warm plate, skin-down, and spread the horseradish paste on the surface while it is still hot.

Sauce: Finely cut small red onions and brown them in hot olive oil. Add a few cut cherry tomatoes, salt, about a spoon of soy sauce, and a sprinkle of white pepper, and stir on medium heat until the tomatoes dissolve. Thicken the sauce with one small slice of cooked squash.

Serving: Put the squash slice and sauce on the plate beside the steak. Pour a bit of olive oil on the squash and sprinkle with salt. Enjoy!

I did enjoy it indeed; that’s why I am sharing it. But I think it could be significantly improved. Butternut squash is a bit bland, and olive oil with a bit of salt didn’t quite cut it; the accompanying sauce was good, but still too mild-flavored for the squash. So next time, I will add a fifth part to the dish – aioli.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 44 – Black Beans?!

This is what standard runner beans from plants with red flowers look like:

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

There is also a variety with white flowers and pure white beans. I tried to grow a few of those last year, but the germination rate was very poor, and I got barely fifty white seeds to plant this year, hoping to get more for the future. However, as readers will remember, last year I was growing the ordinary variety too, to fill the empty space due to the aforementioned poor germination of bought seeds. I was aware that I would get some hybridization, because I had that before. The result of hybridization last time was plants with half red, half white flowers, and seeds that looked just like the standard, except the pink/lilac colored parts were light brown/beige.
This year, I only planted white seeds, and I was surprised to get some plants with full red flowers from them. Well, I am even more surprised now.

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

So far, I got a handful of “standard” lilac-black seeds, a lot of pure white seeds, and a bunch of pure black seeds. I have never seen pure black runner beans before, so I asked Google. Varieties with this color do exist, but on a cursory search, they are only grown in the UK and not sold in CZ.

Which is curiouser and curiouser. If I get enough black seeds, then next year I will sow only them, and we shall see what comes of it. I will probably have enough white seeds to save for the future. I also might try to grow all three varieties at once, each in a different part of the garden. That will reduce cross-pollination, but it will not eliminate it. It is a bugger. I wanted to grow two runner bean variants – white and red – in alternate years. And now I have one pure red strain in the cellar, white seeds that are somewhat unpredictable mongrels, and an intriguing new black variety that will probably throw some unexpected curveballs too.

I know that my pure red strain should remain viable in the jars in the cellar for at least two more years, so there is no big rush to renew those. I think I can afford to experiment. Especially since no matter what I do, the remaining beans will be perfectly edible. The worst that can happen is I won’t get pure color strains, but a technicolor seed roulette.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 43 – Disappointing Dali

I harvested the third potato variety that I grew this year, and as the title says, I was disappointed.

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

There were a lot of big tubers in there and an acceptable amount of small & tiny ones; the size distribution was not an issue. In fact, I could barely put aside 100 pieces of ~50 g seed potatoes for next year since most tubers were significantly bigger. I am still not fully decided if I will plant this variety next year, but since it does reasonably well in the Ruth-Stout method too, I am still considering it. If I decide against it, we can eat those taters too.

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

The worse-than-expected problem was pest damage. Not only did I get approx. 9 kg of tubers damaged badly enough that they need to be processed asap; there were several spots with dead stalks above the ground, but no tubers underneath. They were all eaten by mice/voles. Based on how often that happened, I estimate the damage to be 10-15 kg, plus whatever we will have to cut and throw out of this bucket.

There is no late blight on the tubers; they look mostly reasonably nice and healthy. But the overall harvest was less than expected.

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

I got circa 65 kg of tubers for storage. This is about the same yield per seed as what I got from Bellarosa and Camel, despite longer vegetation time. And I can confidently blame it all on effing rodents.

BTW, you can see a mouse trap under the weighed bucket. I’ve already caught two mice in my garden shed, and I’ll probably need to set traps more aggressively during the winter. A working cat would help a bit, but then I would need to buy feed for the cat, so the savings would be essentially nil.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 42 – Topsoil Tilling Tiles Trouble

Just after I wrote my answer to dschultz under my last post about why I am inflicting the double-dig torture on myself with my heavy clay soil, I went to my garden to till another row on the potato patch, when suddenly the garden fork hit resistance just barely 10 cm under ground. As I do in such a case, I tried to reposition it to work around the obstacle, expecting it to be a larger stone or maybe a half brick. Occasionally, I dig out even a whole brick, and the biggest thing I dug out so far was a ca 30×40 cm phyllite paving stone. But I could not find the edge, and when I did, I could not get the fork deep enough to lever the seemingly big thing out. Then I managed to pry several small pieces off.

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

It turns out that just under the surface were buried several white tiles. I did not think much of it at that moment; an occasional tile or a piece of ceramics is not uncommon. And I continued to search with the fork and pry the tiles out.

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

Then a whole stack of tiles came out, and several more after that. At this point, I decided to put the tiles into a separate bucket.

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

I thought, maybe I will fill the whole bucket, and I did not want these tiles to be completely mixed with the stones I sort out of the soil, because the tiles are not as useful as, for example, road pothole filler. I was wrong about the bucket.

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

I almost filled two 10-liter buckets with these pure white tiles. There were several stacks buried in that place. And, funnily enough, it appears they were at the edge of the onerous piece of land. After this, the soil became suddenly less stony and much easier to till.

I already had proof that I was not working on a natural topsoil, but these tiles are definitive proof that something other than grass was on this piece of land before my time, probably before my grandfather got the house after WW2. I do not have a way to identify the age of the tiles. I did not look for any manufacturing markings yet, but they are definitely older than 50 years, since my whole life there was nothing but grass in this part of the garden.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 40 – Double Digging

So, the end of the growing season is nigh. I have started digging out the potatoes, although I have stopped for now, since most of them still have not died back. But I am continuing to expand the usable area of my garden. And to do that, I have to use the double-dig method for tilling soil.

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

For example, I tilled the patch on which I grew oats, and as I expanded it, I also removed the dead stump of my late apple tree. But doubling the size of the patch is not what double-dig means.

I took the garden fork to the whole area, and with the first shove I removed and turned the turf. And after I moved a whole row of turf aside, I took the fork again to the same spot, dug it as deep as it would go, and turned the underlying clay too. That way I aerate the soil up to 30 cm deep and I also had the opportunity to remove a lot of stones.

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

I removed 5 small buckets (about 25 l overall) of stones from that patch, including one half-brick and one ceramic tile. Next year, I will probably only grow peas on this piece – first green peas for food, then yellow peas as green fertilizer. That plan might change depending on the weather forecast in the spring.

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

I ploughed the alfalfa field, and it was difficult. Not because of the alfalfa, though. One difficulty was ryegrass, which creates underground runners that are tough like ropes. The second difficulty was the weather – it did not rain quite enough to soften the clay. I am not done with this piece yet; I will have to run it with the plough across this run later on. But I have to get a bit of rain before that; otherwise, it will be like trying to plough concrete.

In the top left of this picture, you can see that I am currently tilling this year’s potato patch, where the Ruth Stout method successfully killed the grass again. I am using the double-dig method too, and it is exceptionally difficult. Not only is the topsoil layer even thinner than in other places in my garden – only about 10 – 15 cm- but the underlying clay layer is very stony and, above all, compacted. I am now taking a break from all manual labor, because I am totally exhausted.

And here is one of the possible reasons why some parts of my garden are so difficult:

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

I dug this out yesterday evening in the potato patch. It is a quartz cobble, and it looks a bit like a potato in this picture. In fact, I did mistake it for a potato for about half a second. But the most interesting things about its history were revealed when I washed it.

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

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

Looks quite nice, doesn’t it? And it is the perfect size for a paperweight or a decoration, which is why I took it home and washed it. But why do I keep writing about a stone? Let’s look at another two quartz stones of similar size from my garden.

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

Even a layperson sees that these all look quite dissimilar to one another. To my knowledge, they have very different geological histories, albeit with some similarities – they all started as sedimentary rocks. (Any actual geologists are welcome to point out any errors that I might make).

The cobble started as sedimentary sandstone that was subjected to immense pressure over millions of years until it mostly fused. But the layers and pores of the original sandstone are still very much visible. Then the massif was broken up by some geological process, and the resulting gravel was churned by running water long enough to make the stones essentially ovoid. This particular stone was then broken again and churned some more until the sharp edges were slightly rounded. And that way the stone arrived at its current shape – round top, flat-ish bottom.

The other two stones look dissimilar to each other, but they both share the same original story. They started as shale, but instead of just pressure and time, it was subjected to prolonged, intense heat from an underground magma flow. As the magma cooled into granite, the shale underwent partial melting and metamorphosed – some parts of it retained the layered structure of the shale, but with changed mineral compositions. This new rock is called phyllite, and it is the blue-greyish parts of the right stone. But some of the shale underwent so much heat that quartz completely separated into nearly pure chemical, albeit not as a pure crystal. And that is the stone on the left and the white parts of the stone on the right. These stones were never subjected to river flow; they were slowly broken off the bedrock by erosion via temperature changes and plant roots. The phyllite was thus slowly transformed into clay again, with large chunks of hard quartz in it. That is why these stones do not have the sharp edges of a rock shattered through impact, but neither do they have the rounded shape of a cobble.

It is evident that these two types of stone cannot originate in the same area naturally – and it is the first one that does not belong here. I am nowhere near a river, in fact, I am near the crest of a hill. It is the phyllite that is the bedrock here. And the cobble is evidence that this particular piece of land is not fully natural topsoil. It is possible that there was a building, a walkway, or a road there where imported cobblestones were used as filler. Or there was a heap of unsieved river sand used when building the houses.

There is no way to know exactly, but this entirely natural stone is just as much evidence of unnatural topsoil as the half brick and ceramic tile are.

 

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.