Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

A-trellising we will go

I got back from my trip, and my garden was still intact! Meta was watering every day, apparently, and there were three significant rainfalls. The only casualty was the spinach plant I'd been trying to save for seed, which was a wilted puddle of yellow when I came home. It was already going that direction before I left, and I have no idea why. I actually saved two spinach plants for seed, and they both did the same thing. Too much heat, maybe?

But that also meant that my tomatoes and pumpkins were getting out of control. One tomato plant had grown so big and toppled over, smothering the onions, basil and poppies. I had to do some trellising, which is what I spent today doing.

I posted two stakes at each end of the tomato bed and tied two lines of twine (made of recycled jeans) between them. This propped up the tomato plants pretty well, but I spent some time perfecting the arrangement by gently maneuvering the delicate branches between the lines.

I also got a tip at Everdale about dealing with yellowing lower tomato branches. Apparently it's a form of blight that is contracted through contact with the soil. As long as you remove the lower branches, you'll be fine. But you have to wash your hands thoroughly after touching infected branches before touching the rest of the plant.

The flax was also a little flimsy and falling onto the pathways, so I staked some small bamboo stakes around the flax patch and tied some wool around them to keep the stalks upright.

My pumpkin, melon, and cucumbers were also starting to sprawl, so I found random branches and stuck them around the plants in various configurations until they were sturdy, and gently convinced the squash plants to climb up them.

The corn cobs are ripening!

Bolting over bounty

A couple weeks ago, virtually all of my spinach was bolting. "Bolting" means going to flower. When a leaf crop, such as spinach or lettuce, goes to flower, that's not a good thing, unless your purpose for growing them is to harvest the seeds rather than the leaves (in which case bolting is obviously imperative). Bolted lettuce and spinach leaves are more bitter and generally not marketable.

Heat is a factor that accelerates the flowering process, and my spinach spent most of its life span during the hottest days of May and June, so in a way it's no surprise that it bolted. I just wished they had grown a little bigger before going to flower. They were very slow-growing. I think part of it has to do with flat soil I sowed them in, which wasn't ideal and possibly retarded their growth. Also, I probably could have sowed them much earlier than I did and given them more of a chance to grow during the cooler weeks.

So for a while I had been picking off the flowering heads from all my spinach plants (which I had to do every day). But it was getting to the point where the leaves simply weren't becoming more abundant no matter what I did, so I harvested it all at once.

Much of my Simpson lettuce has also been bolting (though not quite as much), and I can only assume it's doing so for the same reasons my spinach did. I did the same thing for the lettuce as I did for the spinach, but ate the bolting heads because they seemed to be just leaves anyway (and they weren't noticeably bitter yet).

I sowed more spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, which I'll plant where my current lettuce resides after it's been harvested. I tried four different types of potting soil mixes - regular 1:1 mix (soil:compost), a 1:3 mix, a 100% compost mix, and a 1:1 mix that happened to have a bit more soil in it than compost. I'm curious to see what's most effective for germination and seedling growth. So far, the 1:1 mix is winning!

Leaf miners

Upon closer inspection today, it looks like little white caterpillars are consuming the leaves of my chard and spinach. It still looks like a disease because you never see the worms until they're so big and the leaf is so disintegrated that they're visible through the remnant membrane, so that's why I thought it was mildew before.

I spent about half an hour picking off all my attacked spinach and chard leaves. I probably should have done that when I first noticed the condition. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.

Update: Jon informs me that these are, in fact, leaf miner larvae. I'm investigating it.

Update #2: Okay, these are definitely leaf miners, because this page describes my dilemma very accurately. They suggest picking off the infected leaves as the first method of control (just as I have been doing). Beyond that, there's not much you can do, unless you want to take the pesticide route. I can see how farmers would be tempted by that option if they have a large crop at risk. The sad thing is, by applying pesticides you damage soil life, which is crucial for healthy soil. And as Jon and I have learned, healthy soil = healthy plants.

Don't deplete my goosefeet

Something is causing the leaves of my spinach and chard plants to deteriorate (both are members of the goosefoot family, which also includes beets, amaranth, quinoa, lamb's quarters, and purslane, if you're interested). It starts with a beige-yellow streak in the leaf, and then grows until, in some cases, the whole leaf is hanging limply and sometimes puffy. Here are some pictures:

I looked it up, and the best guess I could come up with is downy mildew. Perhaps due to the unusually hot, humid weather we've been having. Anyone care to make a better guess?

It's rather disappointing, but I'm not going to be too bothered by it. If all my spinach and chard die off, then all the more room for tomatoes, squash, and oats!