My tomatoes at Penland have finally succumb to the late blight. I'm sure its because of air movement. I trellised my tomatoes at home at just the right time, but at Penland, I waited just a week or two too long. Some of the vines are still aive but barely. I really just want the tomatoes on the vine to get ripe, but its kind of weird, they just aren't the same from a blighty plant.
The chard is 3-4 feet high and incredible, the peppers are getting up to 5-6 feet and doing great. They don't seem to be putting on fruit as quickly as before, maybe because of the cooler nights. The parsley, basil, cilantro, and green onions are all doing awesome.
I only recently learned about male squash flowers. My Upland Sweet Potato winter squash is a cucurbita moschato, so it is resistant to the vine borer. My friend, Turtle, at Pearson Garden in Asheville, who gave me the seeds with the idea to grow them out and save seed, had the same experience I did...it flowered really late, like the beginning of August. When my squash finally did flower, it turned out to be almost all male flowers, on long stalks with no bulbous fruit right behind the flower. I didn't get a fruit until the end of August. I really hope that one and maybe a couple more ripen, so I can at least replace the seed I used to propagate this rare breed.
I brought home my silver queen corn stalks this week. At the bottom of my 100 foot by 60 foot garden at Penland is a row that gets 5 feet wide in the middle instead of 3, but comes to a point at both ends. I never put compost on this bottom row, or complete organic fetilizer, so it was more spartan than the other rows. I made squash hills about every six feet and put three plants in each hill. I the put two rows of corn on either side of this row of hills, with the corn at about 4 inch spacing, with some doubles. I then sowed the rest of the row with buckwheat. The corn barely made any ears by the time the flowers came out on top and Terry Boone, the man that mows at Penland and tilled and cultivated the field for free, said that it probably wouldn't do anything. I got about 12 ears out of the two one hundred foot rows, but the chickens and sheep are loving munching on all the foliage and small ears.
At home, we had our first hop harvest!! It went into the Java Porter. The vines are hard to trellis high enough (one of Jason and my first interactions was me standing on his shoulders to pound in 10-12 foot bamboo stakes). They are also hard to keep down to one or two vines per plant. The hops also don't smell that fragrant compared to the hop pellets. They sure taste good though!
The mesclin, lettuces, daikons, kale, beets, and carrots are all doing spectacularly except for the Rouge D'Hiver lettuce and Tat Soi, whose seeds we saved. I don't know exactly what I did wrong. Maybe you just have to sow a lot more than you think you need. Some did come up and maybe if I save their seed, the plants will be stronger. It has been so wet, that the lovage and parsley both here and at Penland have been rotting at the base.
I have been cutting the seed heads off of the miscanthus and throwing them on the burn pile, hoping to stop more seeds from being produced. I am also digging them methodically, which I think would work eventually, but whew! Hard work!
Time for the weekend!
Blessings,
Cooper
