Starting steps

As I've mentioned before, starting things is easy; keeping going is more difficult. Presumably, this is a general human-condition thing. Since I missed the window to start fall-planted plants, in July, my impulse is to flop around and decide not to do anything.

But large open areas in the garden make me feel guilty, so I bought some lettuces and put them in.

And also, buying plants makes me feel guilty, so I managed to sow some peas.

I also should sift my compost and turn it to raise the heat, if I don't want to be dealing with constant volunteers.

Maybe digging potatoes thoroughly would be a good idea, too. Sigh. I planted, and that's all I'm going to focus on here. Also, supports should probably be made soon. Very soon. Maybe I'll have Eric lash me together some bamboo!

Turns out that if you hack off or break off an old, nasty, aphid-covered kale plant?

You can have a second flush of yummy baby kale, at least enough to hold you through until the combination of the few kale plants you did plant in July plus the nursery pack you bought starts to make winter amounts of new kale. Plus there are a couple of pounds in the freezer yet. We actually ate some the other night. Yay for memory!

And this may look like a redneck yard mess, but I assure you it's deliberate. Carrots can be tricky to germinate, especially somewhere like here, where it looks as though it's going to rain any minute, but really it's just fog that will blow off, leaving only warm afternoons to dry the top bits of soil. Carrots are picky. If they're not kept just wet enough, they turn up their little orange noses and refuse to germinate. Babies.The idea is that the tarp keeps the top layer nice and moist. Or at least moister than if I had no old tarp thrown over the bed. The bed which is covered with acacia leaves.

But I like carrots, a lot. Not enough, apparently, to glue them to toilet paper as seeds for perfect spacing, like Granny does, but certainly enough to sow them like an Amish teen on Rumspringa, and then enough to pull baby carrots for salads until they're spaced correctly. If they sprout, that is.

Also, I pull the tarp back when I pump a morning bath out onto the bed, which also has snow peas and sweet peas in the uncovered bits.

Guess what used to grow in this bed?

That's right!

Kale! Kale I didn't have to plant, kale from neglected, gone-to-seed plants.

The only question I have is should I just let them grown, and shovel some nice chicken manury stuff around them, because kale is a depleting kind of crop, or should I attempt to transplant them to the few areas I have listed as "kale" in the plan? I'm not sure it really matters, but I did do some thinking about my soil the other day, and figured a way to track how the heavy-medium-light feeders rotation was going.

Beds vertically, time horizontally, and color coded red-yellow-green.

Looks like, with a few exceptions, I'm actually doing something like proper attention to the feeding needs. Doesn't mean a run to the stable wouldn't come in really handy, especially as the beds sink as the organic material is used up, nor that making liquid manure fertilizer wouldn't be really smart. But I'm not completely out of line.

And that's good to know.

I don't have a complete answer to my question of yesterday, but here's a video of a worker being unceremoniously dragged out of the hive. She didn't seem to be moving much, so maybe she was stung first? Maybe she died of natural causes? For the drones, maybe the workers don't feed them and they're weak? You see if you can decide:



It's still nature red in tooth and claw in the bee yard.

This lovely wasp looks just like a wolf with her head buried in a caribou, no?

And in this video, you can see why they remind me of wolves. Especially when one comes in and two of them tussle, and then you can see a drone leg getting cut off and flung aside. It doesn't take much to make me feel like it's high drama in the yard:



I hope interesting things are happening in your gardens.

Tomato time

During a break in the rain today, a friend of mine and I

Set up the funky linear cage system I like to use for the tomatoes

Perhaps I should have placed the tomatoes in first, but by carefully reeeeeaching through the 6" openings in the mesh, I managed to tip each of the first eight seedlings into holes made on a slant, so that they'll make more roots along their stems and hopefully grow very happily

Of course, it's not supposed to rain again, at least not this week. Wonder if it will again? I did lay out the hoses carefully so I can hook them up to the irrigation system if needed.

And tomorrow? I'm going to heavily harvest spinach ahead of the dry weather. Tonight's dinner was a bowl of leaves sauteed with garlic and dressed with a tiny bit of vinegar. The namers of the "Gigante d'Inverno" weren't kidding! 

I think the one next to it is Monstreux de Viroflay, but it's not such a monster.

Starting seeds makes me feel a bit less like a garden slacker. I know, I should have been doing it all along, but actually doing it counts.

So today, I used my new Haws can

to water in:
Drunken Woman Frizzy Head lettuce
Tom Thumb lettuce
Merlot lettuce
Territorial Seed's Heirloom Blend lettuce
a romaine whose name escapes me
Lacinato kale
Red Russian kale
Breadseed poppy
Indigo
Marigolds
Bloomsdale Long Standing spinach
Monstreux de Viroflay spinach
Hibiscus for tea
Italian flat-leaf parseley
sage.

Seems like a long list for only three flats. The pepper cuttings are hanging in there, so not obviously dead at least.

Before I start any more seeds, I'm going to have to either repair or replace the light fixtures and get new bulbs.

Anatomy

Daphne's and Kate's comments reminded me that not everyone came from my other blog, where I chronicled getting the bees, hiving them the first time, the first harvest, etc.

The first time I got bees, I believe they swarmed out of the neighbor's walnut tree:


And for vocabulary purposes, this is a screened bottom box. It allows varroa mites to fall out of the hive, and provides for good ventilation. The bees keep plenty warm, and airflow is a plus for hive health. One end is open, so the bees come and go through that into the deep hive body.


The bottom boxes are about 9" tall, and they are called, appropriately enough, "deeps." Inside each are ten frames of plastic foundation in a wooden frame, running front to back. They hang down like file folders, and the bees draw out comb on the foundation and move within the hive. The babies are raised in the bottom part, in a roughly ball-shaped nest.


In my case, the yellow top short boxes are about 6 1/2" deep, and they're called supers (because they go above the deeps), and the extra stores of honey go in there. Some beekeepers put "queen excluders" between the deeps and supers, so that no babies can be laid in the top. I personally don't care, and if the hive is managed well, the bees keep their babies downstairs. Some keepers use only mediums, with three making up a large nest area, because they're just easier to lift than a full deep. Bees and honey are heavy.


The boomer hive is still pretty great, even with the nonsense we'd perpetrated on it last week. Tomorrow is the day to see if our attempted queen rearing worked so far.

So, enough anatomizing the bees, on to the rest of the parts of the garden.

The new babies awaiting transplanting -- tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, and a couple of cucumbers.


The red kale is in full bolt, unfortunately. I was hoping to eat a lot more of that, and I'm not sure that it's going to taste good any more.


My nemeses are still around -- fortunately I barely care about chard at this point:


The lacinato kale has decided to join the bolting club, before it even got big enough. I thought I was going to have to leave it in the bed, but now I think it's going to be dinner very very soon.


Almost ready to plant, although the bees are giving me a bit of trouble when I'm out there, and Heiko, I'm going to plant potatoes AND tomatoes at the same time. Don't tell your neighbors.


I hope it works!


The bees must have gotten to the apricots, because they're about as big as a chicken's brain.


Teensy plums, too.


Anyhow, I know I tend to throw everything into a post, but hopefully when I blather about bees it will make sense from now on.