Death Comes For the Grasshopper(s)

Not surprisingly after 3 hot, dry years, there have been a lot of grasshoppers around this summer.  Grasshoppers and hot, dry weather go together like bread goes with peanut butter and jelly.  I've been noticing a few things that bode a little better for next year, though, and I'd like to share them with you.

The beginning of the summer started with literal hordes of grasshoppers, especially newly hatched nymphs.  The photo above shows a phalanx of said nymphs on a soon-devoured broccoli leaf.  It wasn't uncommon to have hundreds of tiny grasshoppers flying up with every step through grassy areas. 

Now, towards the end of July, there are still a lot of grasshoppers, but the numbers seem to have declined a bit - dozens fly up at every step instead of hundreds.  Sometimes only a few fly up.  I haven't sprayed or made any effort to curb their numbers, so what has happened?

First of all, the weather has been cooler and wetter than during the last 3 or 4 summers.  Cooler, wetter weather is good for plants, but bad for grasshoppers.  Newly hatched grasshoppers can be killed by cool, wet weather.  Truthfully, I'm not sure we were cool enough or wet enough for this to happen this year, but I'm mentioning it anyway.  However, warm, wet weather can also have a negative effect on grasshopper populations....

During warm, wet weather, there is a naturally occurring fungus, Entomophthora grylli, which infects grasshoppers and causes them to climb to the top of vegetation and grasp the stem with their legs, then die.  I've been seeing quite a few grasshoppers seemingly mummified like this.  The best news is that, as these grasshoppers dry out, the fungal spores spread on the wind to other grasshoppers, infecting them as well.

So not only is there one less grasshopper reproducing for next year, but each one that dies like this has also potentially caused other grasshoppers in the area to die as well!  Rather nightmarish...but effective.

Predators have been playing a role in decreasing grasshopper numbers, too.  Just in my ramblings with camera in hand, I've caught shots of several wheel bugs eating grasshoppers. 

I've got a large population of wheel bugs this year;  after such an abundance of prey, I suspect I'll have an even larger population next year!

Spiders, too, eat grasshoppers.  This photo of a black and yellow garden spider eating a grasshopper was actually taken last October, but I'm sure that the spiders I'm seeing this summer are taking out quite a few grasshoppers as well.  (My garden spiders aren't this big yet, but they will be!)

Birds, not surprisingly, eat grasshoppers as well, although I haven't been lucky enough to get any photos of that happening.  Bluebirds, quail, pheasant, meadowlarks, lark sparrows, and lots of other birds are known to eat grasshoppers.

I occasionally see great golden digger wasps around the yard, as in this rather out-of-focus photo from about a week ago, hunting (in this case) on Bradbury beebalm.  If these beautiful, big wasps aren't feeding themselves with nectar and pollen on flowers, they are actively prowling for grasshoppers to sting and paralyze.  Once the grasshopper is paralyzed, the female wasp takes it back to her nests as baby food to lay her eggs on.

The long and the short of it is that grasshoppers are grazers on plants, and a lot of animals eat them.  With bison no longer freely roaming the prairie, I understand that grasshoppers are actually the primary herbivore for this important ecosystem!  Because grasshoppers are so mobile, it's hard to kill them with insecticides.  Ironically, it's much easier to kill the insects that prey on grasshoppers - so any time you spray an insecticide, even an organic one, you are probably helping to increase grasshopper populations, in the long run, by decreasing their predators.

Speaking of spraying insecticides and accidentally killing off insect predators, the last grasshopper predator I'm going to show you today fell victim to some actions Greg and I took several years ago before we knew any better.  While we didn't actually spray, we did kill enough of these predators that their population declined around our yard and gardens for a few years, so we've actually had more grasshoppers than we would have had if we hadn't tried to solve a "problem" we were sure we had.

The first summer or two that we lived and gardened here, we started our vegetable garden.  Despite the tall grass that we encouraged to grow on much of the property, we didn't see a large number of grasshoppers.  Some, yes, but not enough to cause noticeable damage.  Generally, our garden plants did superbly, although the tomatoes, in particular, attracted large numbers of black blister beetles.  A few grey blister beetles came too.  Not only were these insects a little creepy looking, but they ate the tomato leaves and made the tomato plants look really ugly.  I still harvested more tomatoes than I could possibly use and there weren't enough blister beetles to defoliate the plants, but definitely there were enough to make the plants look ratty. So I started to handpick the blister beetles, dropping them in soapy water to kill them.  Each morning I would do this, and it wasn't unusual for me to dispatch 50 or 100 each day.  It definitely lessened their populations over the course of the summer.

Even after I learned that blister beetle larvae ate grasshopper eggs, I continued to handpick the blister beetles, reasoning that I was seeing plenty of blister beetles, so it shouldn't be a problem.

In June, 2011, we came back from a trip to San Antonio to find several masses of hundreds of striped blister beetles writhing on our front lawn, presumably in an ecstasy of mating.  Our only thought was how to dispatch them as quickly as possible before they, too, started to eat the leaves of our tomatoes and other plants!  So we put soapy water in our shop vac and vacuumed most of them up.  Problem solved.

By later that same summer, I was seeing very few blister beetles...but hordes of grasshoppers.  As you may remember, the summer of 2011 was horribly hot and dry.  We had 53 days over 100 degrees F. and almost no rain.  By late July of that year, our althea had been defoliated by the grasshopper hordes.

For every adult blister beetle you see, an average of 27 grasshoppers don't get born.  What had we done?

For several years now, we've had so many grasshoppers that by early summer most of our vegetable garden is gone.  Once the grasshoppers hatch out, they devour the spinach, kale, broccoli and cauliflower within days.  Then the onion and garlic go.  The asparagus stalks become dried brown sticks with all the green gnawed off.  Over the course of the summer, all the iris leaves get whittled down to nubs.  Thankfully, 2011 was the only year our althea were entirely defoliated, but their leaves have been severely chewed each summer since then.
 

This year I'm finally seeing black blister beetles on the tomatoes and a few other plants again.  Mind you, I'm not seeing them in huge numbers, but they are there and they are reasonably common.  This year I'm NOT picking them off and killing them.   I'll share my tomato leaves so that, hopefully, the black blister beetle larvae will be feasting on grasshopper eggs over the winter!

The more I learn, the more I realize that I don't know very much.  A blog post I read over the weekend was talking about tangleveined flies as a grasshopper predator.  That's a new species I don't recognize, so now I want to learn more about them and see if I have any of those grasshopper predators in the yard.

There is an incredibly complex web of plants and animals that will generally keep each other in balance and keep the Earth healthy, if we leave enough of them alone to "do their thing."  We humans, though, get pretty cocksure of ourselves and start killing plants and animals off, thinking we know a lot and can surely manage better than Mother Nature does. 

We're not as smart as we think we are.

Hopefully my yard is getting back into balance a bit better again.  Ah, the gardening spirit never fails, does it?  Next year will be better.....

The Garden in the Second Part: Broccoli, and Garlic, and Greens, Oh, My!

What is a garden to you?

Having just walked through my vigorously blooming front flower bed on the way to the front door, a visitor last summer asked me sincerely, "Are you still gardening?"

I have to admit that I was taken aback.  Ah, yes, what else would you call that array of flowers and plumed grasses that you just traversed between the car and the house?  It took me a minute to realize that she meant, "Are you still growing vegetables?"

Yes, I was still growing vegetables, although I was having significantly more luck and fun with the flowers!

Gardening is different things to different people.  Indeed, the entire point of this series of posts is that sometimes gardening is even different things to the same person!  Almost everybody, though, considers growing foodstuffs to be gardening.

Over the last 7 years, our vegetable garden success has swung, year to year, from wildly successful to wildly unsuccessful.  Too much rain, not enough rain, not enough heat, too much heat, grasshoppers (oh, lord, the grasshoppers), blister beetles, late freezes, time constraints, voles, Bermuda grass, bindweed and vacations - the list of challenges varies from year to year, but I can guarantee there will be a multiplicity of challenges to getting a good crop of anything every single year.

Most of our vegetables are grown in a series of raised beds that Greg has constructed out of wide cedar boards.  We are up to 9 raised beds now, all 8' long, varying in width from 3' to 4' and varying in depth from 6" to 10".  This photo, taken on March 12th after we'd done our spring clean-out, shows our basic bed layout in all its winter starkness.  There is a large cedar to the south, casting the deep shade you see in this picture, but during the summer that's not really an issue. 

One thing we didn't do when we built the beds was to put hardware screen in the bottom of each one to keep out the voles.  THAT was a mistake and it is an issue that is going to have to be remedied, slowly, bed by bed.   Two beds in particular need to be reworked:  sweet potatoes and strawberries.  Voles are a real problem when we try to grow sweet potatoes - we've lost entire crops to the voles.  They like the strawberries, too.  Voles take some of the berries, which is bearable (berry-able?!), but their tunnels introduce a lot of air around the roots, drying them out faster, which is not good in our climate.  Interestingly, the voles don't seem to bother regular potatoes, of any variety that we've grown.

Late last fall, Greg decided to add a couple cold frames to see if he could grow greens over the winter.  We went to the Habitat ReStore to see what we could find, bringing home several discarded double-paned windows for $5 each and a couple large glass light shades.

Surrounding one of our raised beds with straw bales, Greg dug out one end and left the other end at its normal soil level.  In the deeper end, he placed kale and broccoli plants; in the shallower end, he added spinach and lettuce.  Then he laid the double pane windows across the bales. (If you look at the photo above, you can see this arrangement on the far left bed.)  Under the various sized glass light shades, he put in individual broccoli plants.  He also used some plastic caps that we had to try to shelter four chard plants that we already had growing, putting one cap over each plant.  It didn't look pretty (that's an understatement - it looked really trashy), but it was an experiment.  In this view, taken shortly after we put everything up on November 11th, you can see the glass globes with broccoli under them and the individual plastic caps over the chard in the far bed.

Being "blessed" by several bouts with polar vortexes (vortices?) this winter, the individual forms of protection simply didn't provide enough warmth to keep the plants from freezing and dying.  BUT, the plants that Greg managed to establish in the straw-encircled raised bed struggled through the cold spells and started growing luxuriantly in late winter.   He's been harvesting enough kale, spinach, and lettuce for green smoothies every day now for weeks, and we've had some broccoli to liven up salads, too.

Good friends Flip & Shelley heard about our experiments with cold frames and gave us a real, honest-to-goodness, official, cold frame as a gift at Christmas.  Greg got it put up and, as soon as broccoli and cauliflower starts became available this spring, he planted them.  THAT coldframe is a real winner - the broccoli has nice heads forming already and the cauliflower is starting to form baby heads too.  The photo below is of the broccoli and cauliflower that grew under the official cold frame (which we took off last weekend).  I suspect more of these cold frames are in our future, even if they do cost more than discarded double-paned windows....

Meanwhile, sometime in mid March, Greg seeded spinach into the biggest two of the individual glass light globes.  The spinach germinated well and is now producing excellently.  We took all the cold frames off last weekend and I don't expect to have to put them back on again until fall.

In the photo below, the back bed has garlic on the left end, the two patches of spinach from the glass globes in the middle, and masses of (leftover) garlic on the right side.  The front bed is the remnant of the strawberry bed, with new plants added in to fill it back up.  We'll be mulching that soon, just right after we get a decent rain.  (We WILL be getting a decent rain soon, won't we?!  Please?)  The big plants in the path in front of the strawberries are Brown-Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia triloba) that I just enjoy leaving and walking around, benefiting from the pollinators they draw in once they start blooming.  Greg and I don't always agree on the appropriateness of my leaving them in the path to grow up, but so far he's been indulgent in letting them be.

Next to the big plants of cauliflower and broccoli that grew in the cold frame, we've recently added a few plants of specialty cauliflower varieties from Johnson's:  Graffiti (1), Cheddar (2) and Veronica (2).  Those went in earlier this week.  Greg is out planting small onion plants, more broccoli, and more cauliflower this morning.  We have a small patch of multiplier onions in the end of one bed, which I received as a start from Sid Wise several years ago, just as the big drought was beginning.  Despite less than stellar care on my part (as in, during the worst of the drought and heat, I just gave up even walking out to the vegetable garden), the patch has survived and seems to be thriving.  The onions have a delicious bite to them!

In the same raised bed as the multiplier onions, we've planted just a few potatoes - Yukon Gold and Red Viking.  We put them in late and they are just now putting up leaves, but that's okay.  We usually don't eat many potatoes.  It's nice to have a few, though, now and then.

One thing we have PLENTY of this year is garlic.  Last fall, we bought a couple cloves from Hillside Feed & Seed to plant, but the majority of our garlic is from leftover bulbs that were missed when I harvested last summer.  I've taken the time to space out a couple of those clumps, which resprouted and grew over the winter, but there were too many for me to replant all of them.  So the rest remain growing in huge, vibrant jumbles of garlicky chaos.  I doubt we'll get any useable garlic out of the leftover clumps, but it will be interesting to see what we do get.  Surely some of it can be used for sauteing or in salads.

We put in 9 tomato plants last weekend, knowing that we were gambling a bit as we did so.  And we put in one jalapeno pepper, too.  Greg added another 6 jalapenos this morning, but we'll wait to plant the majority of the summer stuff for another week or two...or three...or four.

With the exception of the multiplier onions, everything I've mentioned so far is an annual, but we have 4 different perennial patches going on now in our vegetable garden, too.

First is the asparagus.  There are officially 3 patches of asparagus around the yard.   Patch #1 is a single, large., wild asparagus plant by the front driveway gate that seeded in on its own as far as I know.  Probably a bird plant.  It never gets watered, gets weeded only sporadically, competes against both big bluestem and a pretty little creamy yellow iris patch...and comes up faithfully (and strongly) year after year.  We usually take at least one harvest of spears from it each year - and they taste great. 

Asparagus Patch #2 is the bed I put in a year or two after we moved in, next to the lagoon fence.  Its location was a fatal error, as the Bermuda grass that runs rampant through the lawn is also rampant around the lagoon and has moved thuggishly into this asparagus patch.   Combined with bindweed, which also grows in the lagoon area and which has joined the Bermuda in the bed, it has made dealing with this small bed a nightmare. The weeds have officially won.  I abandoned the patch this spring.  I'm tired of messing with it.

Which brings me to Asparagus Patch #3....  This spring I decided to start a new asparagus bed in one of our raised garden beds.  I dug the bed out to below the bottom of the cedar boards, carefully searching out every stray root I could find.  This is one of our original 4 raised beds, which were placed directly on the old "lawn" when we built them, right after we moved in.  We've fought a bit of Bermuda and bindweed in these beds, too, but after many years of religiously weeding it out, we're finally winning the battle.  I did my best to make sure that I stacked the odds in our favor for the new asparagus patch.   Then I got new asparagus crowns from Johnson's and planted them as directed.  I'm in the process of backfilling the bed as the new spears start shooting up.

Strawberries are the second perennial patch in our food gardens.  They have a raised bed of their own, too.  We had a great strawberry harvest last spring, but between the voles and the drought over the summer, we lost over half of the strawberry plants.  The bed had only been in for about 2 years, so I decided to backfill it with new plants this spring...and pledged to myself to be better about watering this summer.  Next time I start an entirely new strawberry bed, I plan to have hardware cloth underneath it to keep the voles out.

The third perennial patch is a crossover between vegetables and natives:  a patch of Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) that I planted last spring.  Actually I planted 2 patches last spring - one behind the back garage and one by the compost pile.  Both were doing really well until Greg decided that the ones behind the back garage were weeds and sprayed them with Roundup.  As soon as I said something about how strange it was that they were all yellow and dying, he looked guilty and confessed that he'd forgotten I'd planted them there.   I may try them there again - it still seems like an excellent spot for them to get a little wild!  This time I'll put a sign up....

The patch of Jerusalem artichokes by the compost pile did well last summer, but about the time I thought I'd dig up a few to eat, I noticed several vole holes.  Deciding that the voles were quite capable of eating all of the tubers on their own, I refrained from harvesting any for us and waited to see what was left for us this spring.  By the time I took this picture of the holes less than 2 weeks ago, new plants were germinating and I knew that I hadn't lost them all.

I'm happy to say that the Jerusalem artichokes were much hardier than the sweet potatoes, when faced with the same enemy!  Despite an obviously thriving vole colony that still seems to be happily  ensconced among the roots, the Jerusalem artichokes are coming up strongly this spring.  Next winter I'll harvest them without fear.  Meanwhile, if anyone finds a garter snake they want to rehome, I have the perfect location!

Note:  the wires across the Jerusalem artichoke patch are simply to keep the dogs from running through the young plants as they grow.  Huge German shepherd feet are not kind to tender plants.  The wire also helps to keep the lawn mower at bay....




Our last perennial patch is brand new this spring:  raspberries.  Greg built a trellis, based on a design he found on the internet, and we purchased/planted 5 'Royalty' raspberries at the Outdoor Landscape & Living Show last month.  Royalty is the variety that was most highly recommended for this area during the talk on small fruits that I attended 2 years ago during the Annual Master Gardener Conference in Manhattan.  All 5 plants were bare root;  3 have leafed out and are looking good.  Two have no signs of life yet (but the roots looked fine when I planted them).


So, enough again.  Next on the spring tour will be the native plants and flower beds.  It's a good thing I'm getting these garden over-views done now, because enough insects are coming in to the native flowers already that I can see I'm going to be quite busy this summer, photographing and identifying everything I find in the yard!

Three in One: Gardening for Different Purposes in One Landscape

I've been wanting to share posts of how great the garden is looking this spring, but I haven't been able to decide what to emphasize or what other gardeners might be interested in.  After starting several posts that fizzled from a severe lack of focus, I realized that I actually have 3 separate gardens, all combined into one overarching landscape.  It's easiest and most rational, then, to post about each garden separately.

However, I even get myself into trouble when I try to list the three separate types of gardens I have!  Which is the most important or the biggest - and therefore entitled to be showcased first and talked about the most?  Which is nearest and dearest to my heart?  Yikes!  I sure manage to create problematic mountains out of non-problematic molehills!

Okay, so here goes....

I'm going to start with my decorative/heirloom/memory gardens - these are plants that I inherited when we purchased our house, that I've rescued from gardens about to be lost, that I've chosen because they are heirloom varieties that appeal to me, that have been given to me, and so forth.  These are not native plants - they hail from Japan, Turkey, China, and many other parts of the world.  They are "traditional" garden plants.  (Yes, I DO grow non-natives!)

Right now the heirloom garden plants are the showiest, probably because native prairie plants tend to green up late, knowing that the weather is likely to be fickle well through April.

Here, for example, is a portion of my back courtyard bed from about two weeks ago.....

The flowers that are making a splash in this photo are a beautiful hellebore, as well as heirloom daffodils and hyacinths.  More on the specifics in the next post.

Next on my list is the vegetable garden.  This is pretty straight-forward, although I do mix it up a bit by utilizing raised beds to raise some perennials and natives in until I know where I want to put them in the flower beds.  Doing this not only helps me place things more rationally in the garden, but also brings in pollinators for the vegetables when the flowers bloom.  Greg experimented with different kinds of cold frames over the winter this year, which makes the vegetable garden look significantly messier.  The messy look has been well worth it, though because we've been reaping rewards as far as early greens and a head start on broccoli and cauliflower this spring.

Finally I end up at my beloved native plants.  Yes, these are the plants I hold closest to my heart.  Not only do they bring a lot of botanical beauty into the landscape, but they provide food and shelter for a myriad of animals that enliven the landscape with their presence and their activities.

I speak of the native plants as separate from the heirloom gardens and vegetable gardens, but in reality, I have all 3 combined throughout most of the garden.  It just seems easier to talk about them separately, since I grow them for such different reasons.

So now I've set the framework - in my own mind at least - for a quick look at 3 different "gardens" around our yard this spring.  Rather than make one exhaustively long post, I'm going to summarize what's been happening in 3 separate posts.   It will be interesting to see which different "gardens" appeal to more people and why!

Bits and Pieces on May 1st

It's May 1st.  My larkspur just started to bloom, while the lanceleafed coreopsis and Missouri evening primrose started blooming a couple days ago.  Helen Jane's rose is almost done.   Looking back to photos from last year, my flower gardens seem to be about 2-3 weeks ahead of spring, 2011.

I finished weeding out the backyard buffalo grass over the weekend.  We plugged it last summer, during the beginning of "the heat," and the plugs were still healthy and strong.  It looked better than the buffalo grass in the front, which we didn't get to until August, but it had some areas where a particularly vicious mix of little barley, undead Bermuda grass, and annual brome (Japanese, I think, but maybe downy) were attempting to completely take over.   Here is a photo, showing how much it has filled in...but how much it still needs to fill in, too.  Hopefully the predicted heat, combined with our recent rains, will take care of that, now that I've got the competition out of the way.

In the vegetable garden, the 2 Brandywine tomatoes that Greg took a chance on (planting in mid-March) are looking "full and fluffy" and have started to flower.  At least we should get a couple tomatoes this year!  The first 6 broccoli plants are ready to harvest...although the harvester is not ready to deal with them, yet!  The broccoli is a full month ahead of last year.

I've been trying to get out for walks along the trails this week, to see what's blooming.  The boys, of course, accompany me.  Blue, especially, enjoys a quick cool down in the pool of the draw every time we head back towards the house.

Once Blue has cooled himself down in this pool (which in MUCH less appealing than it looks in the above photo), he quite frankly reeks!  Being a young and energetic German shepherd, he is likely to wander off and get himself into trouble if I leave him out unattended.  So I rarely do so.  I've taken to hosing him down when we get back to the house, but it only helps to a certain degree.  Consequently every walk is now followed by a period of uncertainty in which I have to measure the total certainty of wet-stinky-dog-in-the-house versus the near certainty of young-idiot-dog-doing-something-like-visiting-the-neighbors'-horses-to-bark-at-them-in-the-hopes-of-getting-them-to-run.   In farm country, this latter behavior is grounds for rapid termination and therefore it's not to be taken lightly.  Usually near certainty wins out over total certainty before said dog is completely dry...so my house has taken on a definite eau de wet, muddy dog.  It is not a pleasant perfume, but Blue's enjoyment of his regular "bath" is so deep that I feel unwilling to deprive him of this relatively harmless ritual.  (And, truthfully, I'm not sure I could stop it, short of stopping the walks altogether.)

Moving on to a less odoriferous topic, I've seen my first snake of the season - a young garter snake in the back yard.  The dogs and cats didn't even notice it!  In fact, I was afraid Becker was going to lie down on top of it, but he ended up a foot away.  Then I had a hard time keeping Blue from stepping on it while he plagued his big brother, trying to get him to play a bit more actively.

(If you look carefully in the middle of the photo, you'll see a dark line leading away from the big shepherd - that's the snake, trying to "get the heck out of Dodge!")

This morning I saw my first hummingbird of the year, so I've put up the feeders and I'm hoping that we'll have a pair nest in the yard again this summer.  Since their nests are tiny and well camouflaged, I've never actually found one, but we've had a pair stay around all summer for the last several years, leading me to assume they are nesting somewhere nearby.

On a similar note, Greg reported that most of the nest boxes are occupied, including one that has a bluebird incubating eggs in it, but I'll have to post more about those later...after I've done a little more observing and maybe taken a couple photos.  The blooming and breeding season of 2012 is certainly off to a rip-roaring start this year - now I've got to see if I can possibly keep up!

Summer Time...But the Living Ain't Easy

This is truly a long, hot summer. Today was the second time we've reached 111 in the last few weeks. We haven't had a really good rain in months. In fact, we feel lucky if we get enough rain to wash the dust off the leaves. The cracks in the soil are inches wide and gaping. Even my native perennials and grasses are struggling and I've resorted to deep watering a few to nurse them through the summer.


Farther away from the house, the prairie we're trying to restore is struggling too. It greened up nicely after the burn this spring and looked good until about a month ago, but now it's parched. The grasses should be almost up to the dogs' backs, but they are barely ankle height. The deer skull was almost completely hidden by vegetation in mid June; now it's almost as fully exposed as it was after the burn.

I saw a piece on TV a week or two ago asking for suggestions on how to visually show heat. It's hard. A picture of someone sweating? ...or of a dog panting? ...of a plant wilting? Somehow none of them can begin to convey the angst of the sapping heat and drought that has got us in its grip.

Grasshoppers seem to be doing phenomenally well, though, at least in my yard. And blister beetles. I've decided to nurse my tomato plants along just enough to keep the adult blister beetles fed, hoping that they'll lay lots of eggs and produce lots of baby blister beetles to eat all the gazillion grasshopper eggs we're going to have. (Every blister beetle eats about 21-27 grasshopper eggs as it grows to maturity. Doesn't that sound wonderful?!) With this heat, there's no way I'm going to get any tomatoes anyway, so at least the plants are providing us with some benefit!


The prairie is showing its severe side. I think often of what this sort of weather must have been like for the poor pioneers trying to keep themselves fed and watered without any of our modern conveniences. I feel grateful for our well and for our air conditioning every day. I know that this, too, shall pass, but some days I get a little shaky, wondering what would happen if it didn't...

The Harvest is Pouring In, Part 3

So that leaves us with the squash, the potatoes and onions.

The squash is actually a summer squash called Costata Romanesca. I planted all of my squash late (the July 4th weekend); this is the first one to produce fruits that I can pick. The vines and leaves of this squash are HUGE. The leaves are about 2' across, the vines are short and tightly packed with leaf stems, blossoms and fruit. We've eaten one of these squash, which I prepared by slicing, then sauteeing with onion in butter. It was excellent.

Knock on wood, so far planting the squash late has worked very well this year. I've had much less trouble with squash bugs than usual. We'll see if I get any winter squash, however. They take longer to mature, so they may or may not produce well before frost.

I've left the center plate for last. The onions on it are not unusual - just yellow and red onion sets from the local grocery store. I don't know what I'm doing yet with onions, so the bulbs are very small. I'll figure it out one of these days.

The potatoes are different, however. Like the tomatoes, squash and Italian sweet peppers, they are all heirloom varieties from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The big, yellow potatoes in the back are Yukon Golds. I planted them in late May but, despite their late start, they did quite well. I started with 2 1/2 pounds of seed potatoes, which I cut into 11 pieces/plants. I harvested about 14 pounds of potatoes, and they are wonderful - blemish free and so tasty!

The rosy red potatoes are Red Cloud and I planted them (and the last variety, Rose Gold) VERY late - sometime in early-mid June. They didn't do very well as far as potato production went before the black blister beetles basically brought their life cycle to an end. The Rose Golds seemed like the most attractive to the blister beetles of all 3 varieties and they were stopped in their tracks very early, leaving me with a fair number of very small little "fingerling" size potatoes that don't amount to much. I've been debating replanting both of these last 2 varieties as a fall crop, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

So that's my mid-summer harvesting so far. As far as producing the most poundage, the winners right now are the Yukon Gold potatoes, the Garden Peach and the Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, the Costata Romanesca summer squash, and the jalapeno peppers. Now I have to get very busy canning and storing all these wonderful gifts from the garden!

The Harvest is Pouring In, Part 2

Continuing around the tabletop display, the next tomato to the right is Old Virginia. This is another new variety for us. We have 2 vines planted - one is looking great, the other is browning out badly. The flavor of the fruits is excellent. I don't know if the little bumps on them are typical of the variety, or if this type is attracting some bug (that I'm not noticing) that's feeding a bit on the fruit. I suspect the former, although the description in the catalog said nothing about them.

The last of the heirloom varieties I tried this year is the one fruit perched on top of the jalapeno peppers in the next bowl. This is Granny Cantrell's German. I've got 2 vines planted - one has never done well and has no fruit set on it at all. The other vine is growing reasonably well, but hasn't set many fruit and is browning out badly. I haven't tasted the fruit yet - this is the first one that has been produced. Unless the taste is truly incredible, I have to assume that I won't grow this variety again. It may be fine for Kentucky (where it originates), but it doesn't seem to like south-central Kansas.

The last type of tomato I'm growing is Rutgers, a typical hybrid that I was given by a friend. Interestingly, it was the first vine to set a fruit, but that first fruit ripened after the first Green Grapes, Garden Peaches and Arkansas Travelers. The vine has browned out as badly as any of the heirloom vines, so if this variety is supposed to be resistant to anything, I'm not impressed. The few on this plate are the sum total of fruits that I have harvested so far, so I haven't taste tested any.

Sharing the plate with the Rutgers tomatoes are Jimmy Nardello's Italian sweet peppers. While the bushes aren't as prolific as the jalapeno bushes, they are doing very well and producing quite a few fruits. Raw, the peppers taste very much like thin, sweet green peppers. I haven't experimented much with them yet, but they are fun to see in the garden.

One more post should finish up my explanations and descriptions for now....

The Harvest is Pouring In

I'm having a grand time taste-testing all of the different vegetable varieties we've grown this summer. There are several new ones and a couple tried and true. Here's a photo of the variety that we've been getting lately....

All but one variety of the tomatoes are heirlooms from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. In fact, I guess we got all of our heirloom seeds there this year, including the squash, peppers and potatoes in the photo too.

It's an interesting summer as far as tomatoes go. I got them in the ground somewhat late this year (about May 20th, if I remember correctly). They didn't start producing for quite a while, and I only got my first ripe tomatoes about a week ago. Until a couple weeks ago, the vines looked healthier than I've ever seen tomato vines look, but once they started actually producing fruit, about half of them started browning out VERY badly. Instead of losing a few leaves from the bottom up, they've lost most of the main leaves on the vines. The fruit seems fine, however. Anyway, on to the descriptions....

The sunshine yellow tomatoes are called Garden Peach and they have an interestingly soft but thick skin. I only have one vine of this variety planted out and it has produced more, so far, than 2 or more vines of each of the other varieties. However, it is browning out very badly this year, so I don't know how long it will continue producing. The taste is very good, although the soft, thick skin can be a little disconcerting.

Next to them on the right (I'm moving clockwise) are the pinky-red Arkansas Traveler tomatoes. We grew these when we lived north of Topeka and they were one of our favorites there. They still are a favorite, even down here. Arkansas Traveler tomatoes continue to set in higher heat than most tomatoes and they are incredibly flavorful. I have four vines of this variety this summer - 3 look very good, while the 4th (which started producing earliest) is browning out badly.

The yellow-green cherry tomatoes next around the circle are Green Grape tomatoes, another of our favorites from years before. Another that is still a favorite now. In fact, the reason the Green Grape bowl has so many fewer tomatoes than most of the other bowls is not because the vines are producing less, but rather because they are so perfectly sized to pop in my mouth that I can't resist doing it on a regular basis. I have 2 vines of Green Grape this summer - one is looking great; the other is browning out very badly.

I'll continue this in another post, as it's easiest to identify each of the types of tomatoes and so forth by highlighting the photos.