Showing posts with label peanuts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peanuts. Show all posts

May 16, 2022

Spring Planting & Growing: Late Edition

Spring's last anticipated frost date divides my planting season into early and late. If the weather turns warm early, I'm always tempted to take a chance and plant early. Last year I did that and we had a late frost. This year I waited. I'm glad I did because we had another late frost this year! We're on the other side of that now, so we're busy planting and transplanting warm weather veggies and crops.

Warm season seeds planted so far:
  • cantaloupe (Hales' Best)
  • cowpeas (Ozark Razorback)
  • okra (Clemson spineless)
  • peanuts (a Virginia type, I think)
  • my landrace cucumbers (F1)
  • calendula
  • sunflowers
  • corn (Painted Mountain)
  • winter squash (Sweet Potato)
  • summer squash (White Scallop)
  • Swiss chard
    • Fordhook
    • Rugy
    • Rainbow blend
  • sunflowers (Russian Mammoth)
  • dill
  • marigolds
  • scarlet runner beans

Plants planted or transplanted:
  • asparagus roots
  • sweet potato slips (Georgia Jet)
  • tomato plants
    • Matt's Wild Cherry (volunteers)
    • Better Boy
  • table grape (green seedless)
  • olive tree (Arbequina, supposedly okay for my growing zone)
  • redbud seedlings

Working on:
  • pasture

Still to plant:
  • green beans (Cornfield, when the corn is about 6" tall)
  • more summer squash & cukes (for extended harvesting)
  • more herbs (hopefully)
  • purple sweet potato slips

Purple sweet potato sprouts for slips

 I got the purple sweet potatoes from Misfits Market. They were excellent keepers and very tasty, so I saved one to sprout for slips. It's been slow, I reckon because it's been a fairly cool spring. Eventually I'll get them in the ground to grow my own.

Harvesting:

Snowpeas

Asparagus

Garlic

Lettuce

Strawberries

Red raspberry leaves to dry for tea

Mizuna

Peppermint for tea

Oregano for seasoning

Waiting to harvest:

Potatoes

Wheat

Multiplier onions

And of course, we're waiting on everything else! The challenge, now, is getting enough rain. We had a very rainy spring but no rain since our last frost, except for an occasional drizzle. Without moisture, things don't germinate or grow, so I'm doing a lot of watering of transplants and baby plants. We're really enjoying the lettuce and snow peas, and I'm hoping with plenty of watering they'll continue to produce. But I hesitate to water newly planted seeds, wondering if it isn't better to wait until it rains for nature to take it's course.

The transition from rainy to not-so-much rain pretty much marks our transition from spring to summer. That, and the days are getting hot. Those days are upon us, so it's definitely time to finish planting and shift seasonal gears.

September 4, 2021

The Status of My Other Experiments

One of the most valuable homesteading lessons Dan and I have learned is to think of new ideas and projects as experiments. Somehow, there is a difference between thinking "I'm going to do this," and "I'm going to experiment with this." The difference might seem subtle on the surface, but it's huge in terms of expectations. An experiment tests an idea, to see if it will or won't work and what aspects need to be tweaked or changed. With an experiment, we don't necessarily expect the outcome to be perfect the first time around; we expect to gain enough information either to make adjustments or decide that the idea wasn't as useful as we'd hoped. That's much less frustrating than seeing something as a failure. An added bonus to the trial-and-error mentality is that our imaginations have become freer to think outside the box. We no longer worry so much about failing because . . . it's an experiment!

I've recently shown you a couple of this year's experiments: using the hoop house as a trellis for a natural shade house, and my idea for trying sprawling cherry tomato plants as ground cover. Here's an update on some others.

Wicking pots

This is an example of something that hasn't worked out as I hoped.

Cherry tomato in wicking pot. Plenty
of sun and water, but still struggling.

I love that these are easy to water and with no evaporation of moisture, but I was disappointed that the tomato plants haven't grown well. I used good soil and plenty of compost, so what's the problem? I figured it out one recent sunny day when I put my hand on the pot. It was hot! Our summer shade temps are typically in the mid-90sF (mid-30sC), which puts them in the mid-100s (around 40°C) in the sun. I got out my soil thermometer and discovered that the soil temp in the pots was 100°F (38°C). So even though the plants had plenty of water, they were struggling with the heat.

Sunchokes for hopniss trellises

That link will take you to my first groundnut (hopniss) harvest post, and show you the smooth Jerusalem artichokes I planted in the bed. I read somewhere that sunchokes stalks make good supports for the hopniss vines.

Blooming sunchoke in the foreground,
hopniss on a trellis in the background.

Unfortunately, I didn't think this worked all that well. For starters, the hopniss started growing before the sunchokes, so I ended up using the trellises anyway. I have one or two hopniss vines growing up sunchokes, but mostly they've climbed the trellises. So, not exactly a fail, but not a success either.

Nitrogen fixers for the garden

In the past, I've sprinkled Dutch clover seed in my garden beds to supply nitrogen. This only works moderately well at best. Germination wasn't that great, plus clover tends to prefer cooler weather than our summers offer. So this year, I experimented with different nitrogen fixers - hopniss (ground nuts) and peanuts.

I can't remember if I mentioned planting my smallest hopniss tubers in the little garden bed on the side of the hoop house. I'm a big fan of diverse locations for perennials. I think it's a good idea to have a backup planting in case one location succumbs to something unintended. Anyway, they have happily used the hoop house as a trellis in companionable cooperation with the volunteer cherry tomatoes. They've helped my summer shade house be a success. 

Groundnut vines & cherry tomatoes have
completely taken over the hoop house.

In addition, the groundnuts have given the tomatoes a nitrogen boost, which they love. It hasn't protected them from late blight, but I'm getting tons of delicious cherry tomatoes.

The peanuts were planted in various garden beds, where they've done well.

Sweet potatoes with peanut plants (lower right corner),
with volunteer morning glories and cherry tomatoes.

Everything is thriving. The bonus will be harvesting a few peanuts, to boot! So this is definitely a success and will be standard gardening procedure for me in the future.

Landrace experiment

Before I give you my update, I'll refer you to two posts to explain what this is and why I'm doing it. 

I'll also preface it by clarifying that I just started this this year, so I won't have actual results at least until next year. I chose two species to start - winter squash and cucumbers.

Winter squash from landrace seeds.

Early this summer, I planted a landrace winter squash from seeds I received through Permies.com. It has struggled for most of the summer, but finally responded to lots of hurricane rain and is now looking pretty good. I'm guessing it struggled so much because it was bred in the Pacific Northwest, which has a very different climate than I have in the southeast. I'm also guessing that it survived because as a landrace, it had the genetic strength to not die. The squashes are small and pumpkin-like, but I will get quite a few.

Landrace winter squash.

I'm looking forward to tasting them and saving the seed. And their offspring will hopefully be interesting because in the bed next to them, I planted sweet potato squash. The vines have intermingled freely, so I'm pretty sure I got good cross-pollination.

Sweet potato squash (spotted leaves), tomatoes, and black turtle beans.
Can you see the 2 squashes? The spotless leaves are the landrace vines. 

The sweet potato squash has truly thrived for me. Early on, I found clusters of squash bug eggs on some of the leaves, but those were discarded and the plants now show no evidence of insect damage or disease. So to add that to my winter squash gene pool will be a real plus!

Of the cucumbers, I have mature fruits from a mix of about four varieties, mixed and planted in the same row.

Very mature cucumbers ready for seed extraction.

These will be the cuke seeds I'll plant next year. (For anyone interested, I have a cucumber seed saving tutorial here.)

I think that's it for my experiments this year. Anyone else do some experimenting? I'd be interested in what you did and how it's turning out.

November 17, 2020

Sweet Potatoes, Rice, and Peanuts

First frost is the decisive end of the summer garden. We had two light ones back-to-back at the beginning of the month, and although they weren't killing frosts, they did enough damage to set fall harvest in motion.

The first thing on my list was sweet potatoes. I waited as long as I could, since the bed in the garden never seemed to grow well. Of my two plantings of slips, these were planted first (April 5th and 6th). But that particular bed is at the top of the garden and has never held soil moisture well, so the plants never grew well, even with my inverted bottle waterer experiment.

Photo from last August.

The sweet potatoes in the African Keyhole Garden, on the other hand, did fantastic.

The slips in the keyhole garden were planted June 9th.

The difference in the harvest is just as amazing. 

On the left are the largest from the keyhole garden.
On the right are the largest from the garden bed.

It wasn't a huge harvest because my slips were late to grow, but I'll take whatever I get and be thankful for it. 

Another surprise was my rice. We planted a small plot of it last June, and I admit I was doubtful about the seed, which I saved from the previous summer. I'm pretty sure I harvested it too early, so I doubted it was mature enough to be viable. Amongst the (unwanted) volunteer grasses, I assumed it was a no-show. Dan even mowed the patch, and I never watered it, even during our hot dry spell. What a surprise to finally realize I had scatterings of mature rice plant growing there!


I hand harvested these by cutting off the heads. The yield was a bowlful.

Rice harvest so far.

There are still a few unripe rice plants, but even so, I won't get much of a harvest. But at least it's a seed crop for next year. 

Lastly, my peanuts. They're supposed to be harvested when the leaves start to turn yellow and about 70% of the nuts are mature. Well, the plants never yellowed, but they did suffer some frost damage. I checked on them the other day and discovered that between soggy soil and a return to summer-like temperatures last week, they were starting to sprout! So I pulled them.


One thing I observed is that where the vines laid on the ground, more peanuts grew.


That gives me information about how to increase production next year.


The last step is to dry them, and I hope that stops them from sprouting so I can have seed to plant next year!

Of the summer garden, my Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes and Cornfield pole beans are still producing. 



Neither got much frost damage. Looking at the weather forecast, however, I suspect that will come to a frozen end soon. 

June 29, 2020

June Garden Photos

It's hard to believe 2020 is half gone! Time for a garden update. My garden recovered from its slow start this spring. As soon as the temps starting going up, almost everything took off and made up for lost time. So I have lots of photos to show you. Ordinarily, I would divide them into two blog posts, but June is about done, and I need a record of the garden for the month. So here it is.

The first part of June was spent finishing the winter garden harvest and cleaning things up. Then it was on to finishing the summer planting.

Harvest included the last of the multiplier onions, a sample of our volunteer potatoes, and snow peas (which are now done).

Multiplier onions and new potatoes.

I showed you our winter wheat harvest in this post, and told you about our heritage wheat harvest in this post. Here's a photo showing you the difference between the two varieties' seed heads.

Heritage Hourani wheat on the left and commercial seed wheat on the right.

We're still processing the winter wheat, so I haven't gotten to the Hourani yet. It didn't do well, so I don't have a lot of it. But I'll save it, plant it, and hope for a better outcome and more seed next year.

Of my perennials, the blackberries are done and my eight surviving strawberry plants are putting forth a flush of berries.

I tried to propagate these last year, but most of them didn't survive the dry & heat.

A pickings-worth.

We're starting to harvest some of our summer produce too.

Bush beans are producing well. I usually plant Tendergreen,
but this year I tried a new one - Provider. I got a gallon of
beans at my first picking! And that was for a 24-foot row.

Dar cucumbers, also a new variety for me. This is the recommended picking size.
They are dual purpose (table and pickling) and don't seem bothered by pests. (Yet).

Tatume summer squash, a Mexican variety that has stood up to our heat and wilt.
The small ones we eat in salads and as veggie sticks, the medium size I slice
and saute with onions & basil. The large ones are for stuffed summer squash

Seed Saving. Cool weather plants going to seed for this fall's planting: snow peas, fava beans, radishes, and lettuce.

Lettuce flowering for seed.

Purple plum radishes going to seed in the Orangeglo watermelon bed.

Clean-up has been getting cool veggie beds ready for summer planting, although there is some crossover with cool and warm weather vegetables sharing the same bed. In the photo below, I had a bunch of volunteer turnips and radishes sprout between two bordered beds.

The bed on the left is planted with peanuts and okra. On the right are snow
peas, dill, and cucumbers. Between them is volunteer turnips and radishes.

Initially, I was going to remove them because they're probably from cross-pollinated seed. But I decided to let them stay as living mulch between the two beds because the flowers are very attractive to bees and pollinators. The stalks tend to lean and shade the beds, however, so I trim them back and feed the trimmings to the goats. Win-win-win.

Radish and turnips trimmed back. Okra and peanut bed with a layer of compost.

I'll probably collect all the seed from them and use it for winter pasture. Root crops are great at loosening the soil.

After I picked those strawberries I showed you above, I weeded and mulched the bed. My problem in this part of the garden is sheep sorrel. It's an edible plant, but it tends to make a nuisance of itself.

Strawberries and garlic, weeded and mulched.

Growing: More things planted in April and May.

More tomatoes in front, the Tatume squash in back.

One thing that continues to grow slowly is the okra. This is a new variety for
me - Jing. I didn't mean to plant it with peanuts (yellow flowers) but I somehow
miscounted my beds from my garden chart and planted them on different days.

Pretty little peanut flowers. I planted peanuts last year, and they did
great until all the tender little peanut pods disappeared. Eaten?

Stowell's evergreen sweet corn. A small patch for summer corn on the cob.

Planting:

Speaking of corn, I learned something interesting in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog. I learned that the original Three Sisters pole bean is a shade tolerant variety.

Cornfield pole beans for my corn patches.

I thought the seeds were pretty so I snapped a shot.

Can you see the bean seeds in a row on the left? I planted them in a shallow
trench between corn rows, popping in the seeds then covering with compost.

Two weeks later, they're happily growing between rows of corn.

Genuine Cornfield Pole Beans growing in the shade.
Lamb's quarters in there too, which I harvest as a green.

They aren't stretching out for some sun. I'm amazed! I actually prefer pole beans to bush beans because the leaning over and squatting to pick them gets tiring. With pole beans I can stand up and pick.

And here's my third sister.

Long Island Cheese Squash, another of my slow growers, I planted it when I
planted the corn. Not having a decent rain for the past month hasn't helped.

From the same catalog, I also learned about an easy to shell corn variety called "gourdseed."


Texas Gourdseed, a bi-colored long-toothed dent corn. 

12 days later...

I planted them later than the sweet corn to avoid cross pollination,
but growth so far is sporadic. I'll replant the bare spots, today. 

Once they are tall enough, I'll plant cornfield beans in this patch too. Their third sister is Candy Roaster squash, although you can see a Tatume vine in the background in the above photo.

Last pictures - sweet potatoes. These have been slow to sprout this year, so planting is late. I have two varieties, Vardaman (purple leaves) and Nancy Hall (green leaves with purple veins).

Growing sweet potato slips on the back steps next to sweet basil and coleus.

Both stored well this past winter. In fact, we had the last of them as oven-roasted sweet potato fries the other day. This is notable because my sweet potatoes usually develop black spot, which hastens their demise. But we didn't get that last year. A testament to my soil building efforts? I hope so.

Nancy Hall sweet potato slip. I'm tucking them into my
collard bed the same way I did my tomato transplants.

OBSERVATION: I planted these in my winter collards bed. One end of the bed still grew collards and clover, the other was pretty much empty of plants. Both ends were heavily mulched with wood chips, and I also want to note that I hadn't been watering this bed. I started at the unplanted end and noted that when I dug down, the soil was very dry. In the living plant end of the bed, I discovered that the soil still retained moisture. I can't explain the mechanism behind this,  EDIT: I take that back, I think I can explain it. Mycorrhizal fungi harvest moisture elsewhere and transport it (and soil nutrients) to plants in exchange for liquid carbon. My observation points to the validity of keeping living roots in the ground as much as possible, and is confirming my new approach of gardening by the four soil health principles.

Finally, that's it! For now, anyway. Your turn. How does your garden grow?

June Garden Photos © June 2020 by