Tired and Ratty Garden Update

 

Welcome to the garden! This is the view from what used to be the south side entrance, but which has become the main entrance, now that the previous main entrance, through the berry section, has been veiled in bird netting. The blueberries are almost over, but our day-neutral strawberries are ticking along. Bird netting was a great idea.

From here, things look pretty good. The sweet potatoes aren't quite as lush as in some years, but they are essentially healthy and doing well. Beans and lettuce are sharing a bed on the other side. Let's look at them...

 

You can certainly tell that we bought a lot of new bean seeds last winter and planted them in small blocks. Not all of them are doing equally well.

 

 Even the best - this is old favourite Arikara Yellow - are showing some signs of virus. 

 

This new one, which is actually a mix of supposedly very early dry beans, is showing a high level of both virus and fungal problems. This is, I believe related not only to weather stress, but to the fact that we appear to have bean weevils in the garden for the first time. I believe they are, in themselves, more of a nuisance than anything else, but it seems pretty clear they are also passing around diseases. I'd say we have bean yellow mosaic virus, which is being followed by an opportunistic fungus.

Our original bean cross (Blue Lake x Cherokee Trail of Tears) is not doing all that well this year. It continues to have good resistance to the anthracnose (which has pretty much brought the Blue Lake beans to a halt already) but it is not doing so well against the virus and fungus infection. In addition, I am finding most of the beans too large and too coarse. We'll probably do some more selection and grow it out at least one more time, but I think we are moving on to better crosses.

These two crosses, in fact, which are still producing good quality beans and show next to no disease problems. The first one is the F2 of the cross we were so excited about last year,  ((Octarora x Cherokee Trail of Tears) x (Blue Lake) or possibly (Blue Lake x Cherokee Trail of Tears)). These two are both disease resistant and highly productive, as well as quite delicious. My only wishes are that they started producing a little earlier than they do, and that the beans were longer; but I think both those things can likely be improved with further selection.

But enough about beans. Here's some popping sorghum which we are growing for the first time this year. I was starting to get nervous about the fact that it was nothing but leaves, but last week it suddenly sent up large flowering shoots. It's well over our heads at this point, like the corn which can barely be seen on the right hand side of the picture. 

We ate the last of the corn last week. We had enough to  freeze some of it. It all comes ripe in the course of abut 10 days and now it is over. This is one of very few corn varieties we have successfully grown in 12 years of gardening. That is the influence of the fence, although I'm pretty sure the type may have helped too. This is Astronomy Domine, which is a developed mass cross or grex of many different varieties, hence the variable colours of the corn kernels, although plain yellow and yellow-white bicolour predominated for us. Resistance to critters is one of the things it was selected for, and it seems to have it. Much as we liked it though, it does take up a lot of room for the amount produced (as all corn does.)

Our watermelon breeding project this year just makes me cry. They were planted and came up just before the terrible frost at the end of May, but we didn't lose more than a couple of seedlings, amazingly enough. However, they subsequently grew slowly due to our very cool weather in June and were late to begin forming fruit. There were loads of male blossoms but many fewer female blossoms than usual; a definite sign of stress. I'd say we have somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the usual expected volume of fruit. There's also been trouble with mice or other rodents finding the ripe ones before me and eating them. However, there are going to be some. We've picked about half a dozen although we have yet to try them. In spite of all their other troubles, they seem to be reasonably pest and disease free. Apart from the mice, I mean.

We grew cucurbita maxima for the first time in about 5 years. No real named varieties but a mix of open pollinated seeds. They were doing absolutely beautifully, until they weren't. They weren't because we had a bad, bad outbreak of vine borers for the first time in years. The maxima are plainly their first choice, although they seem to have moved on to the zucchini. Emergency surgery saved a couple of plants (although most of the patients died) and we hope to have a few of the squash that were far enough along ripen anyway. We'll see.

Our potatoes. Oh dear; our potatoes. The beets in front of them look and are excellent, but man, those potatoes. So sad.

There are hazelnut bushes along the east side of the garden, specifically about 10 feet away from this bed. As they have gotten larger, the contents of this bed have done worse and worse. Lasts year it was our butternut squash and we really didn't get any. This year it's the potatoes turn to fail. Those bushes have to come out, that's what. 

There is also some kind of virus running rampant in the potatoes. A lot of them are grown from seed, and we will at least be able to select for virus resistance. We do have one that looks pretty good in spite of everything. Most of the others, though: just bad. Good thing I'm not even supposed to be eating potatoes, because I won't be eating very many. 

The carrots got started very late after multiple re-seedings, and are sparse, but we're hoping that means they have enough room to get large. There's going to be some, anyway.

Hurray! The tomatoes are actually pretty good! This is the "eating tomato" bed, which starts to ripen earlier than the "canning tomato" bed, by design. They are rolling in and we are eating fresh tomatoes. The canners are starting too, and we have made our first (half) batch of tomato sauce. Thank goodness something is doing reasonably well. 

Mr. Ferdzy tried a new method of supporting the tomatoes this year. He suspended strings from wooden braces, and clipped the plants to them with special clips you can buy for this purpose. They have much less septoria leaf spot this year than usual, and in general seem to be doing pretty well. Whether that's the new system, or whether the fungus got knocked back by May's cold spell, I couldn't say. Given all the other fungi running rampant, that seems unlikely. But whatever it is, I'm very grateful. Last year the tomatoes were dismal, so this is a nice change. 

Plainly we are going to need to make some changes next year in how we deal with pests. I haven't gotten into how bad the brassicas are, but they are suffering terribly from swede midge and have for several years. Now we have bean weevils. There's something eating the carrot flowers. Leek moth are a fixture. The one good thing; potato beetles have been barely seen; I think our next door neighbour stopped growing potatoes and that may be why. He did not hand pick, but dumped pesticides on them with the result that his potatoes were crawling with hordes of pesticide-resistant beetles. I think they were using it as sun-tan lotion, honestly. 

So overall, this is shaping up to be a disappointing year, between vegetable breeding projects not going as well as hoped, and the difficulties of backwards, mixed up, yet extreme weather and the influx of new pests and disease problems. Not giving up, but definitely feeling a bit discouraged.