It's time to garden - September Garden Update

It has taken me some time - years, really - to figure out how the seasons work up here in the mountains of Lempira, and how that should influence our attempts at gardening. It doesn't help that I'm a complete novice gardener, without even a good working knowledge of which plants like cooler weather and which enjoy the heat, which would thrive with lots of rain and which would handle the dry season without tons of help, etc. It has been a slow, tedious process.

I learned last year that there is too much rain during the rainy season for most of my vegetable plants, in spite of our having planted them in raised beds that drain well. I watched a lovely, healthy patch of bush beans turn yellow and fall over last July, and I determined to wait until late in the rainy season to plant my garden this year. Well, it's time to get going!

Since our attempt at planting special beans which would act as an organic fertilizer failed, we have added fertilizer to the garden, and worm compost AND hog manure, and stirred it all up. I hope this will result in a better harvest this year!

The weather in September and October is still rainy, so for now most of the work involves cleaning up in the garden, preparing the raised beds for planting, and starting plants indoors. Boo has planted beet and carrot seeds directly into the garden, but we might have jumped the gun with those. We'll see how they do. We're trying to start some tomato plants and some lettuce in the house, and Boo started two celery plants from the bottoms of a couple of stalks of celery we bought in San Pedro Sula. The last batch we did that way were eaten by some subterranean pest after growing nicely for a while. We're hoping for better results this time.

We already have about half a dozen bell pepper plants in the garden. These are perennials in this climate, if I can keep them alive. They are susceptible to  . . . something . . . that keeps eating off every leaf on every plant. With care, they come back again, but the plants are quite small and don't produce many peppers. Hmm, I think that's because they're using up all their energy just to stay alive!

Here are some of the amazingly resilient pepper plants, now inside of a little screened house

This is the largest pepper we have growing right now, and it is really weighing down its little plant!

This squatty, stunted pepper plant is blooming its heart out!

In addition to the peppers, there are a few other plants already growing in the garden:

This cantaloupe plant started itself from seeds in our worm compost. Although we didn't plant it, we're glad to have it - and it already has 5 melons growing on it!

Today Boo found flowers blooming on our healthy-looking sweet potato plants. These plants were started from some sweet potatoes we bought at the market, and which sprouted in the pantry.

This is the one surviving blackberry bush we have from the sticks we received from up on Green Mountain last year. Only two of the sticks ever sprouted, and one of those died during the dry season - but this one looks good. I wonder when it will be big enough to grow berries?

Yesterday, Boo and I planned out the rest of the garden planting. Neither of us are planners by nature, and our garden has not benefited by this aspect of our characters! We NEED some gardening success, and obviously thinking ahead more would be a good thing! It is my hope that, with the help of Boo and Josiah, we can get the entire garden (nine raised beds, each approximately 3' x 7') planted or ready to receive seedlings this week, as we head into what I hope will be the best gardening weather of the year for us.

. . . the sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn . . .

We don't have sheep.

Now, we don't have corn either. Sigh.

Last night the cows broke into the garden and ate all of our corn plants. Luckily we didn't have much else growing in the garden just now, and those other few items were spared.

The beans which were recommended to improve the soil never came up . . . not even one plant! I'm going to assume we got some bad seeds, as we've grown several types of beans before, and never had this kind of failure rate.

Sigh. I think I mentioned previously - we are in NEED of some significant gardening successes, if we're going to keep up our motivation for this work.

Gardening Woes

I haven't written much about the garden lately - and there's a reason for that. It hasn't been doing all that well. I've been disappointed at the small quantity of food being produced, in spite of lots of hard work invested.

Recently our good friends, Brad and Trish Ward, visited us here in Gracias. Brad is an agricultural missionary, and so he gave me some tips. Basically, it boils down to a need to significantly nourish the garden soil. Our soil is mostly composted cow manure, and that's just not doing the job. Brad suggested that I plant a certain type of bean plant - frijole abono (Russell tells me that the word "abono" basically means fertilizer) - and then once those plants have grown for a couple of months, to till them down into the soil, mulch heavily, and then let the soil sit for another couple of months. THEN I should have better results from my plantings.

One of the young men working on our new house construction has said that he would bring me some frijole abono seeds on Monday, so hopefully I'll be able to get those into the ground and growing right away. July and August are fairly good growing months here, as there is slightly less rain than the beginning and end of rainy season (when it's sort of a deluge around here). I'm hoping to grow the bean plants now, have them under mulch during September and October, and be ready to plant when the cooler temperatures and gentler rains start arriving in November.

I hope it works out. Enthusiasm has waned for this whole gardening project, since the rewards have been so minimal, and we really need a major success here!

Although this progress report has been a bit of a bummer, I'm happy to report that Gus has continued to improve the infrastructure of the garden. He, along with Ben and Josiah, have improved the pathways between the raised beds by adding gravel. This has significantly reduced the amount of work needed in just keeping the pathways clear - and really, there's plenty to do in the garden without having to worry about the pathways!

Miscellaneous recent pictures

 

Bubbles (the white one) and Buffalo, just hanging out

 

The bathroom rug Rachel made, from discarded towels. Rachel is accumulating (and creating) a "hope chest" of items for when she and Brandy get married.

 

Our recently planted corn is popping up.

 

Sometimes it gets a bit crowded around here. These are our four cows, plus some cows and horses belonging to a neighbor who helps us out a bit with our animals, and in return we let him graze some of his animals here during the rainy season (when we have lots of green edibles for them all).

 

A common sight here, but so beautiful - mist rising out of the valleys. (Click on this one to view a larger size photo . . . it's worth the click!)

Sorry I've been AWOB

You know AWOB, right? Away without blogging? Anyway, sorry about that. Everything is fine here, I've just had a spell of feeling uninspired. I think that's allowed every once-in-a-while, when one has been blogging along for years, right?

To give some quick updates:

It hasn't been raining much the last couple of weeks, so progress is still being made on the big bridge construction project.

We had a litter of eight labrador mix puppies. They are just starting to walk around a bit, so we'll be setting up their outside cage pretty soon.

The only gardening happening right now is Boo's celery. She's growing celery in a container on her porch, and that seems to be going well, though we haven't tried eating any of it yet.

This week is the monthly session of the pastor training school. The school now runs mostly independently, as the administration and teaching are handled by Hondurans. We still supply the funding (for food, rent, and teaching materials), cook the meals, and provide transportation back and forth from the city of Gracias out to the campus (although we currently pay someone to do this driving, so our menfolk can remain on the bridge site). Rachel and Iris cook all of the meals, and the only reason they are cooking (instead of hiring out the cooking) is that Rachel is able to budget so as to keep the food costs lower than when we had hired cooks, while still providing larger portions. So, for now, with funds so tight, we handle the cooking.

A sister of Rachel's boyfriend Brandy is having her 15th birthday this weekend, and Rachel was asked to bake and decorate the cake for this big event (for those who aren't familiar with Latin American customs, a girl's 15th birthday is a big deal, sort of like the Sweet Sixteen birthday in the US). This is the first opportunity Rachel has had to display the cake decorating skills she learned from my sister Pam, when the two of them worked together on Russell and Iris' wedding cake. Pam thoughtfully sent Rachel some cake decorating tools last year, so Rachel will be starting in on the birthday cake as soon as the cooking for the pastor school is completed at lunch today.

That's it for now.

Miniature Tomatoes

My success with growing tomatoes has not been anything to brag about so far. I've tried heirloom seeds, locally purchased seeds, and regular hardware store packet seeds. I generally get nice looking plants, until they're about 18" high or so, and then things go downhill. I've gotten some tomatoes, but not enough to make up for the time and materials spent thus far.

However, we have a volunteer tomato plant growing in the garden right now, which is producing hundreds of tomatoes. I think this may be a naturally growing local plant, as we occasionally find these plants growing wild around the property. The catch is that these are teensy tiny, miniature tomatoes. I've neglected and abused this plant, the hornworms have taken a shot at it, it's the dry season and I don't make a point of watering it - but nothing seems to even slow it down. Boo brings in a bit more than a quart container of tomatoes from this one plant every day.

These tiny tomatoes taste like regular tomatoes, except that the proportion of skin to "insides" is high, and obviously skinning these tomatoes would be a ridiculous endeavor, so they're not great for cooking or sauces.

They're my one tomato-growing success, however, so I just thought I'd share that with you!

Rain - this makes me laugh!

We've been having a wetter-than-usual dry season this year. When Katy arrived for her visit, back in early January, I explained to her that she probably wouldn't see any rain during her several-week stay. So, of course, we then had rain for a few days each week during her visit - just to prove me wrong, I guess.

On Friday, I wrote about the garden, and how it's a bad time to grow plants because we don't get any rain this time of year. You know what happened next, right?

Yup, it's raining right now. It's not a hard rain, like we get during rainy season, but it's steady - and enough that I won't have to water the few remaining plants in the garden today. I also won't be getting enough power through the solar system to use the dishwasher today. That's okay, though, I don't mind washing dishes by hand, when it's an occasional chore and not the perpetual, hanging-over-my-head, bane of my existance.

It's curious to see this weather during the dry season, though. It's keeping me guessing, as far as what to do with the garden!

Closing down the garden for the season

It feels odd that, while the garden blogs I read are all talking about starting spring planting, we're just entering the part of the year where we need to not be gardening. Here in the mountains of western Honduras we can expect to not receive any rain at all from now until approximately the beginning of May. Starting around mid-April (the exact date depends on how the water in the river holds up) we have to severely restrict our water usage, so we don't completely run out of water before the rainy season starts.

At the same time that we can't use much water, the weather turns hot - we actually have our highest temperatures of the entire year in April. The combination of broiling sun, high temperatures and limited water makes this the worst time of the year for growing plants!

Once the rains start up again things quickly cool down, however the start of the rainy season hasn't proven to be a good time for gardening either. There is so much rain that many plants turn yellow, fall over, and die. I'm hoping to figure out some veggies to grow during the rainy season that really like lots and LOTS of rain, but I haven't figured this out just yet.

Currently, we have about 8 green pepper plants in the garden doing reasonably well, a couple of nearly dead cucumber plants, a dozen or so onions which refuse to swell up, a handful of cabbage and kohlrabi plants (these are inside a screened and shaded shelter, and they're looking happy in there), and a big patch of red bean plants. The red beans were planted from seeds grown by a neighbor, and they seem to be enjoying this weather and thriving. I hope I won't have to stop watering them before the beans are done, as they look rather promising.

Oh, and I forgot about the celery plant, which we grew from the cut off bottom of a bunch of celery bought for kitchen use. I learned about doing this on the "Chickens in the Road" blog, and it seems to be working out pretty well. Plus, there's a huge, rambling semi-wild tomato plant taking over a big part of the garden. I was counting this as mostly a weed, but it's bearing lots of teensy tomatoes (smaller than grapes), and Ben enjoys snacking on those, so I guess I'll count that . . . even though I didn't intend to grow it in the garden! My track record with tomato plants I've intentionally planted is pretty miserable, so I think I should be grateful for whatever tomatoes I get from my garden at this point.

I'm trying to figure out how soon I can start planting again, once the rains start. I think I need to wait until September or October, although perhaps I can start some seeds indoors a bit earlier, and transplant them into the garden when the rains decrease enough. I'm still definitely learning more than I'm producing, but I haven't given up yet!

Cow-proof garden fencing, part 1

Do you remember my writing about our cow getting water from the barrel just inside the garden fence? (If not, you can read that here.) You can see, in the photo above, how easily the cow could push over the fence to get a drink. Unfortunately, the cow - and the bull - could also push the fence over to go into the garden and eat things. That's bad.

When we first fenced the garden, we had in mind keeping out dogs, not cattle. So, we've had to upgrade our fencing. Here are a few photos of our small crew of workers who help us out around the place, putting in our new garden fence.

First they selected small, straight-ish trees, chopped them down, and cleaned off the branches and the bark.





Digging the holes for the posts was arduous, as there are lots of large rocks right at the surface in the garden area. That's part of the reason we plant in raised beds.






To be continued . . .

2 years living on our land: A Retrospective

As a family, we've now lived on the property we own outside of Gracias Lempira for two years. My first night actually sleeping here was Christmas Eve, 2009, although some family members moved into our new buildings earlier, for security reasons. I thought it might be fun - and maybe even a good motivational moment for me - to look back and see what we've accomplished out here on the property in the past two years.

Keep in mind that we're not farmers, or exactly homesteaders. Allen is still a full-time missionary, and I'm mostly just a housewife and homeschooling mom with moderately severe asthma (which slows me down considerably in most every activity that doesn't involve sitting on the couch). Lots of what has been accomplished outdoors has happened with the help of a small crew of local guys who work for us pretty regularly. When Allen has a bridge project, the crew goes with him and works on that, and when he isn't working on a bridge, they do a variety of jobs here on our land.

So, with all that in mind, I compiled this list.

Inside our two buildings:

First on the list is the successful installation of a solar power system. The path to solar power hasn't been without bumps and setbacks, but at this time things are running pretty smoothly. We regularly run our lights, computers, washing machine, refrigerator, chest freezer, and dishwasher . . . but not all at the same time! Allen and the kids also installed a solar water heating system, with a gas hot water heater for backup.

Allen installed a door in our bathroom (though it still doesn't have a doorknob). If this doesn't seem list-worthy to you, it probably means you haven't ever spent time undressed in a room with a curtain doing the job of a door - trust me, bathroom doors are a major achievement of civilized living.

Outdoors:

We've repaired the fence all the way around the property - which was necessary, as the cows kept finding ways to get out! We've also fenced in two garden areas, and several acres of pasture, for when we don't want the cows to have the run of the entire property. With the cows a bit more contained, I'm hoping we can make some progress on adding landscaping plants around the buildings.

At the top of the property some of the grading of the land has been done - though there's lots more of this to do - and an area of grassy lawn has been established in front of both buildings. Since we started with very little dirt - mostly just lots of small rocks - on the ground around our buildings, the lawn work required spreading huge quantities of soil and manure, and then getting the grass to sprout and grow well during the dry season, so we wouldn't lose all the new soil to erosion. This was quite a big job!

Plants:

We continue to slowly and gradually increase our vegetable gardening skills. Boo is our most reliable gardener, and I'm so grateful for her very responsible attitude, especially when I get sidelined by sickness. We've been moderately successful with green peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, onions, beets, green beans, radishes and kohlrabi. Apparently we aren't advanced enough to grow tomatoes.

We're also working on getting some fruits growing around here. We have wild craboo trees, but most of our family isn't fond of craboo. Russell and David get to enjoy all of that! We've now planted several mango and guava trees, and we've started some tangerine plants from seeds. Eventually you should have to drive through a grove of fruit trees to get up to our house. I also have two berry bushes started. I'll keep them in pots for a while, and hopefully establish a berry patch later this year. Friends have offered to bring us some banana trees to plant, but we've been so swamped recently we haven't had time for that yet. Soon, though, we should be growing bananas.

Russell planted a small field of cane grass for us, which is intended to help feed the cows during the dry season, when most of the regular grass dries up and dies. If I understand correctly, after this grass grows tall, you cut it down partway, and it grows back up again, so it doesn't have to be replanted in the future.

Animals:

Our collection of cattle now includes 1 bull, 2 cows, and a just barely 1 yr old heifer. We recently acquired our first little pig.

Our dogs have given birth to thirty puppies (3 litters, from different dogs) this year. Some pups have been kept, but most are sold. Our current batch of puppies - Rottweilers - are especially adorable, and should be leaving for new homes in the next few weeks.

Our attempts to keep poultry have recently been failures, mostly because our own dogs see poultry as prey. In order to keep any poultry in the future, we'll need to construct some amazingly secure coops. So far, we haven't felt that this was the best use of our time and funds.



Sooo, that's my list. I've been thinking about this, and working on it, off and on all day. I meant to ask Allen and the kids for their input, but they're all in bed now, and I want to go ahead and post this. There's a pretty good chance I'll be adding some additional items to this list tomorrow, after they've had a chance to add their thoughts.

---------------------------------

Gus adds:

Installed the satellite internet (how could I have neglected to mention this???)
Built the raised beds in the vegetable garden
Installed a permanent water line down to the lower (farther away) garden
Built a storage loft above the bathroom
Built a new water storage tank for the neighbor with whom we share a water system (although this didn't improve our property, it did improve our water supply)
Installed a sink in the bathroom
Put in the stone walkway in front of the bodega

Our busy time of year

We're expecting the arrival of our container shipment "any day now." In case you haven't learned this from following the reports of our container shipments in other years, "any day now" means we really don't know when the container will arrive, but we need to be ready for the arrival at very short notice. In anticipation of bringing all the donations into our bodega/house, we did a major cleaning a few weeks ago. Since then, we put up the Christmas tree and a few other decorations, as extraneous activities like putting up decorations come to a halt when the work related to the container shipment begins. Of course, daily life takes it's toll, and piles of current stuff have encroached into the area which needs to be cleared out to receive all the new stuff. This work has to be high priority, since the container is due to arrive "any day now."

It's also time (and past time) for me to write up and send out a newsletter. I've decreased the frequency of our newsletters in recent years, since so much information is available on a more timely basis here on the blog (and with pictures), but I do try to make sure that letters go out a few times a year, and especially to put one out at the end of the year, to sum things up for those who faithfully support our ministry with prayers and donations. It has become harder to write the letters, because I know most people who read the letters also visit the blog, and I want to think of things for the letter which haven't already been covered here - and since I blab so much here, finding un-blabbed info can be difficult.

I also need to update our main website, which has been woefully neglected lately. This however, is a really big task, and I believe it will be even bigger than usual this time. The program I've been using for years now to maintain the website has officially entered obsolescence, and I'm going to have to learn to do this work a new way. Sigh. I suppose I should say that having to stay abreast of new technology keeps me young, but in reality it just makes me feel old and tired. I'm pretty sure the website update will have to wait until after the holidays.

Additionally, this is our best time to grow vegetables in the garden. Our weather is much less extreme from November through March, and we really need not to waste these productive months - but finding the time for planting, weeding and other garden chores is hard right now.

Soooo, I guess I'd better get back to work!

Another Poinsettia Post

November 1st


November 18th

When Boo read what I wrote the other day about our poinsettia, and saw the picture I posted, she noticed that the plant is much redder now than it was when that picture was taken. I've been sick (a headcold with asthma complications, which always seems to lay me pretty low), so Boo has been caring for the garden lately and I hadn't seen it. Yesterday Boo took the updated picture, above, for you to see (and for me to see, too).

Poinsettia Redux

Perhaps some will remember the saga of my Christmas poinsettia from last year. If not, you can find that here.

I'm happy to report that the poinsettia plant is alive and well. When it grew strong, we put it into a pot, and planned to set it on the front porch of the bodega. We never did move it, however, and it still sits in the garden, its pot in a partly shaded and somewhat weedy location next to the water barrel.

Apparently the plant is happy with this level of care/neglect, and I noticed the other day that it is starting to turn red! Christmas must be approaching.



Now I'll have to decide . . . do I bring this happy and healthy plant into the house for Christmas, where the chances are that I will either kill it or at least commit near-planticide?

What do you think? It sure would look pretty in my kitchen . . . at least for a while . . .

Another gardening update - berry bushes!

Do you remember those dead-looking sticks I received last month, when I wanted to propagate some of the local berry bushes for use on our property? In case you don't remember, here's what they looked like upon arrival at my house:



Though these sticks did not appear promising, we stuck them into buckets of soil, and have been tending them faithfully. Two of the sticks, which had obviously been harvested with a bit of root attached, started to sprout new growth fairly quickly. Here's what they look like now:






The remaining sticks still just look like sticks stuck in soil, but we haven't given up on them. Under the dirt, we hope there are roots forming. One of the rootless sticks has given us a bit of hope:



I'm excited about how this is working out! I've purchased seeds to try to start berry plants, but starting from local cuttings - plants that I know can live and produce in our climate - gives me a much greater chance of ultimate success.

November Garden Update

This month marks the end of my first year of in-the-ground gardening! I did do a bit of container gardening the year before that. I haven't produced much food, but I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm trying to feel encouraged by the increased knowledge, rather than discouraged by the lack of results.

From what I've learned about the weather here, I'm treating November as my version of "spring." We're currently cleaning out the garden, which had become weedy and overgrown during the rainy season, and we're starting to plant. So far we have onions, radishes, green beans, green peppers, cabbages, kohlrabi, cucumbers and beets (plus one volunteer tomato plant) in the ground. We recently had trouble with the cow pushing over the wire fencing and walking around in the garden (I'll show our solution to that in another post). All that to say that the garden is a busy place right now, and it looks a bit messy at the moment, as you'll see in the pictures.

During the rainy season we improved the garden by putting down gravel on the pathways, to keep down the weeds. Who wants to have to weed pathways?






One of our experiments has involved growing plants inside of a screened, shaded shelter. As you can see in the photo below, the cabbages and kohlrabi inside the shelter are looking good - they haven't be gnawed much by insects or stressed by the intensity of the sun. We're considering expanding our use of this type of gardening.



My biggest gardening challenge (among my many gardening challenges) thus far has been my lack of knowledge about what to expect from the weather. The seasons here aren't easy to describe. The year is roughly evenly divided into rainy and dry, and there's definitely one cold part of the year for about 2 months and one hot part of the year for about two months (and a whole lot of nice warm months the rest of the time), but the changeovers between these "seasons" don't line up with one another. It is rainy and warm-to-hot from May until October. It is quite cold and humid (but not rainy) November through January, but then, as the dry season progresses, the temperature rapidly rises until we have our hottest time of the year, in April. So basically, we have both the hottest and the coldest months of the year during the dry season. In spite of the drastic temperature change and the lack of rain during the dry season, it still appears to me that this time is my best hope for growing veggies.

I'm still working to figure this all out, though, so I'll have to let you know later if my analysis and conclusions turn out to be correct!

Wow!

We're already seeing some growth on those dead-looking berry bush cuttings we received last week! Well, only on one plant so far, and it was the best looking one of the bunch, as it had some roots connected to it. At any rate, I'm delighted to see that we've got some activity here.

Take a look:



Wahoooooo! And yes, I am easily excited. LOL.

October Garden Update

I haven't posted much about the garden lately - but it's not because we haven't been working at it. It's more because we've had so many failures lately.

I've learned, though. I now know that too much rain is not good for the garden. Probably lots of you already knew that, but sometimes I just have to try for myself and find out. Yep. Too much water = dead plants. Even though I'm gardening in raised beds with good drainage, my plants weren't able to overcome the sheer quantity (and probably also the driving force) of the rains we get during the rainy season, which is basically from late April/early May through October.

With the end of the rainy season in sight, we've started getting ready to really grow some food, maybe. Some plants need to have their seeds placed right into the ground, but others can be started inside and then transplanted.

Right now, I have green peppers growing in little pots:



There are also some sunflowers just starting to come up:




I learned a few weeks ago that there are wild berry bushes (I think they're raspberry, but they might be blackberry, and I don't really care which they are) growing on a mountain not too far from Gracias. I hired one of the pastors that comes into town for the pastor school, and who comes from a village on that mountain, to bring me some cuttings. I'm not knowledgeable about this kind of thing, and neither was this particular pastor. Here's what he brought me:




I've seen plants that looked deader than these come back to life, so I have hope that these will gradually grow into plants with berries. We'll see. Right now I have some sitting in water, and some planted in very wet dirt . . . I'll let you know what happens with these.

Hurrah for me - I've saved seeds!

Even though I'm a brand new gardener, I'm trying to learn a skill which many gardeners don't seem to bother with too much - I'm learning to save seeds from current plants for future plantings. This isn't as easy as you might think!

A few months back, someone accidentally left the garden gate open, and a dog got in and dug around in the area where my green bean plants were just getting started. The plants were about 3 inches tall at the time. Some got pulled up, others just got mashed a bit, and some were destroyed. I knew I wasn't going to get enough of a harvest from the few plants I had left, to actually put a serving of green beans on my family's plates any night at dinner, so I decided to let the few plants mature and try saving the seeds for a future planting.

I tried to read up on the details of this process, but as is so often the case, the details weren't really suited for my tropical yet mountainous location. Most of the information I found assumed that I would be trying to save the seeds for months, in order to wait out a winter and put them into the ground in the spring. Since I don't have a winter here (or a spring, for that matter), I thought it might be possible to take a short cut, and not dry the seeds as thoroughly as the directions indicated.

Unfortunately, in my first attempt, I didn't let the seeds mature long enough on the plants, before I tried to use them, and I also didn't dry them enough after I collected them. None of the ones we planted came up. I gave them plenty of time, but this was during our recent water shortage, so eventually I felt I should stop using water on this empty spot in the garden, and I gave up on them.

There were still some beans on the parent plants, so I left those to dry on the plants longer. While it was a bad time of the year for watering, it was a good time for drying. I gradually collected a handful of beans. Most every day I pulled another green bean, with about 5 or 6 seeds in it. If I pulled the bean too early, the seeds inside were white, and those didn't dry into plantable seeds. If I waited long enough, the seeds were a purplish-blue, and they dried - just sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter - into seeds that looked like the ones I'd purchased and used to start the plants in the first place.

Here are some of the seeds, just out of the garden:



Here is the bowl of dried and drying seeds:



Toward the end of last week Rachel planted these seeds in the garden, as well as a small number of seeds I still had left from my previously purchased seeds. By planting the purchased seeds, I'd have a control for my experiment. If the purchased seeds grew and the ones I harvested didn't then I'd figure I must have done something wrong in harvesting my seeds. If neither group grew, I'd figure my growing conditions were bad.

But . . .

This morning, there are green bean plants sprouting from both groups. I'm excited!

My garden at the end of March

Yes, I do know that it's April now, but I took this picture a few days ago. The garden is still doing pretty well. We currently have Roma tomatoes about the size of small grapes, cucumbers (from a volunteer plant, so we'll see whether they turn out to be edible or not) about 2 inches long, teensy little ears of corn, cabbages about the size of softballs (from seeds I planted back in November!), and occasional yummy peas (I definitely need to plant more pea plants).

I've got lettuce plants going to seed, lots of garlic sitting around doing nothing special, some newly planted beets, radishes, and onions, and a second batch of corn just starting.

I let some of my green beans stay on their bushes until the seeds were big, and then I tried planting the seeds. So far, nothing has sprouted. Either I didn't let them mature enough, or something else went wrong . . . or maybe if I'm just patient a bit longer, something will come up.

This is the very worst of the dry season, so it's very hot, very sunny, and very dry. I'm watering the garden multiple times each day, especially when I have new seedlings coming up. So far I'm planting all my seeds directly in the garden, and that's been working out okay, except for the seeds I've saved from previous plants. Clearly saving and using my own seeds are skills I still need to work on.

I'm continuing to have to fight off grasshoppers and leaf cutter ants. If I were trying to garden without the use of pesticides I think I'd have to give up. I am trying to use the pesticides sparingly, however. Generally, if I can keep the bugs from eating the tiny newly sprouted plants, then when those plants get older they do okay even when they are somewhat nibbled. If the bugs attack the tiny new plants, though, those plants tend to just die. Oh, I had an attack of leaf cutter ants of a different variety than I'd seen before, and they were eating only the garlic plants. I specifically planted garlic because it supposedly repels most insects, so I thought this was kind of funny. Anyway, I won that battle, and at the moment things are under control in the garden . . . at least the last time I checked, a few hours ago. However, I never know what I'll find when I go out there!

From the garden - RADISHES! Featuring the mutant radish!

I've been harvesting radishes for a few weeks now. They're quick and easy, except when some unknown insect comes at night and eats all the leaves off the plants. I've learned that radishes have trouble growing tasty fat roots when they have only gnawed off bits of leaves remaining attached to them. This time the destruction didn't come from leaf cutter ants - I recognize their work. I'm thinking the monster grasshoppers ate the radish leaves. But, as I had radishes planted in two different spots in the garden, some survived to show up on the blog, and in our dinner!

When I was pulling up radishes this afternoon, I came upon this mutant:



I wish the picture was better - I'm not so good at closeups with this camera. While in the ground, the radish had split in several directions. I'm thinking this was caused by the fact that we had a lot of rain for a few days earlier this week. I've been watering the radishes steadily, but I think the sudden influx of that much water just overwhelmed this radish, and it grew too fast for its skin. Anyway, that's my guess.