A dry week

This has been a dry week, warm and sunny but lacking in rain, stressing the plants and causing me to water the seedlings. The rock ledge is close to the topsoil here, which makes the ground wetter when it rains a lot, and dryer when it doesn't, than deeper soil would. Added organic matter helps but only to a point. Meanwhile potato plants are about 16" above the hills and have begun to attract the striped colorado potato beetles, their only consistent pest. Left alone, the beetles will eat the leaves to shreds within a week or so. My two remedies are (1) to remove and kill the bugs, and (2) to dust the leaves with an organic compound called rotenone. The easiest way to remove and kill the bugs is to pick them off the leaves and squash them between thumb and forefinger, and that is what I do. Some drop them into a jar filled with kerosene, but then one must get rid of the bug-filled kerosene safely. Why bother? And so today I removed and killed about a dozen from my four rows of potato plants. I also hilled them for the third time. The Satina and Red Gold (early) got a good stand; the Rote Erstling pretty good; the usually reliable Kennebec poor. I also planted cucumber seeds in the garden with the potatoes today. This is a little bit later than usual for the cucumbers, but they should come in during August and September which is a good time for pickling. I have been eating salad out of the garden. Greens fresh picked and eaten immediately taste wonderful, sweet and flavorful, so much better than supermarket produce. The forecast for the next few days is for showers, so perhaps the dry weather pattern will break.

Planting Dry Beans

Dry beans are so called because they dry in the pod, are threshed or shaken out of the pods dry, will store easily in jars at room temperature, and must be simmered back to softness in cooking; overnight soaking cuts the simmering time and makes it easier to get the right texture without splitting or bursting the bean as it cooks. I planted out dry beans yesterday. The weather forecast was for a heat wave--more on that later--which would bring the ground temperature up above 60 degrees, ideal for germinating beans, squash, cucumbers and corn. I used to plant corn but not anymore; I sometimes plant squash but the yield of the winter squash is low and I don't care that much for the summer squash. Cucumbers will have to go in soon. I planted out four 40' rows of light red kidney, four 40' rows of black coco, two 40' rows of Jacob's cattle, and two 25' rows of Hutterite soup beans. I saved the Montcalm red kidney seed for next year. Before planting I dropped some organic fertilizer atop the soil and lightly tilled it in, then used the earthway seeder which made the whole activity take only a couple of hours, whereas dropping the seed by hand would have taken at least twice as long and left me with an aching back and hips. I'd grown buckwheat in this garden spot last summer, and tilled it in six weeks ago, so that it's been decomposing, adding organic matter to the soil (which certainly can use all the help it can get), and shouldn't compete much with the beans for nitrogen. The buckwheat should have smothered the quackgrass that had been growing up in that spot, more and more each year, till it became troublesome. It remains to be seen what weeds come up between the rows--these are easy enough to deal with--and in the rows, which are not as easy to deal with. Those very close to the plants must be hand weeded young before pulling them up would disturb the roots of the bean plants. That is the ideal, anyway. It's possible to purchase dry beans inexpensively in the supermarket, but growing them is easy, saving the heirloom seed is satisfying, and knowing where what you're eating is coming from is always better than not. Store-bought beans can be old, tough, and tasteless, not to mention the pesticides that may have been used on them. About that heat wave: I drove over to western Maine very early this morning and drove back to the coast early in the afternoon, the temperature steadily dropping from about 86 near Waterville to 77 by the time I got back to the island around 2:30. It would have hit 90 in Waterville by then, surely. The ocean cools the land and the air near the coast in the summertime, particularly when an ocean breeze blows, usually in the afternoon. But occasionally, after a heat wave of a few days, there is no wind, and the ocean exhausts itself; it can get up to the high 80s here, and usually does once or twice a summer. But not today, while the rest of New England sweltered; it was in the 90s in Connecticut and Rhode Island. In the fall and winter the ocean warms the coastal air and land, which makes the growing season longer, though not hotter, than inland. Long-season, and late-season crops can be brought in here, such as Brussels sprouts, and fall broccoli, and various greens, that would be hurt by the colder temperatures inland. Tomorrow it may be warmer or cooler, but probably not by much, here; and a temperature in the high 70s is just fine for the beans to germinate--not only the dry beans but also the edamame and snaps. It will cause the spinach to bolt, though, so I need to harvest it pretty soon. Planting beans used to remind me of Thoreau and his beans at Walden Pond, and Yeats at Innisfree; but now I seldom think of them. Rather, it's good just to do it simply and deliberately, centered in the task, enjoying the work, thinking of the harvest to come, not the weeding that has to go on in the meantime. The beans are fenced, as all the gardens are, against the deer. I will need to make new bags of hair and hang them from the fences within the next couple of weeks. That is not a pleasant job nor do I imagine Yeats or Thoreau doing it.

Saving Bean Seed

Bean seed is easy to save--you need only dry them in the pods and then take them out. By saving seed you can gradually improve your crop if you save the seeds from the most vigorous, earliest-yielding plants. This intervention is called selecting seed. And so over the winter I dry the previous year's bean crop, some for seed and most for eating. The easiest way for me to do this is to gather the plants whole in bunches, tie them together, and hang them upside down on strings running a little below and parallel to the rafters in the barn. Today I took some of the seed beans out of the pods that had been drying all winter, and put them in jars. I will plant them within a few days. The rest I will get out of the pods for eating, but not until mid-June or so. These were dry beans I grew last year, and they are among the varieties that over nearly 30 years I've settled on as the best in terms of earliness, yield, and taste. The growing season on the island for beans starts late. Usually it's safe to plant soybeans and snap beans in the last week of May, when the ground temperature gets into the 50s. Dry beans require ground temperature in the 60s, which usually doesn't occur here until the weather turns warmer, usually during the first ten days of June. It's not frost that puts an end to the growing season for beans, but the rains that usually come in the third or fourth week of September and which, if the beans are left out in them, will mildew them and spread disease which will make them spot and wilt on the vine and over-winter poorly. Frost doesn't usually occur here until after mid-October, although for the last few years there's not been one until early November. Today I took the seeds from the pods in my usual way, by shaking a couple of dry plants at a time with the pods attached, and banging them to the insides of a clean garbage can. The pods shatter, the beans drop to the bottom of the can (along with some chaff and an occasional half-pod), and then after a few bunches are shaken, I turn the can over and pour the beans and chaff into the overturned lid of the can, pick out the few rotten ones, and then in a wind I drop the beans from the lid back into the can, while the wind blows the chaff away. Usually I repeat this a couple of times till the beans are clear, then I put them into bottles, labeled, for saving or planting. Bean seed can be saved for about three years before germination drops more than you'd like it to. I saved the following varieties of dry bean which I will grade from A to F. Light red kidney (good for chile and soup): Vigor B, Earliness B, Taste B, ease of shelling, A, yield A. Black coco (good for chile and black bean soup; also a good shell bean; plump and round): Vigor A, Earliness A, Taste B, ease of shelling B, yield C. Montcalm red kidney (good for chile): Vigor A, Earliness C, Taste A, ease of shelling C, yield B. Tiger's Eye (chile, soup): Vigor C, Earliness C, Taste A, ease of shelling C, yield C. Red Mexican: vigor B, earliness C, taste C, ease of shelling A, yield A. In other years I've been very pleased with the following varieties, which I still grow in some years: Jacob's Cattle, Ireland Creek Annie, Dot Yellow Eye, Flash (shell bean). I've grown many other varieties but overall they didn't please me as much as these. Soups, chiles, stews featuring dry beans soaked overnight can be made in large amounts and frozen in small batches for eating without much added prep time. The more home-grown organic ingredients, the better the taste--and there is some health benefit, to say nothing of the pleasure of growing your own food!

Growing Edamame

On Tuesday I planted out four rows (about 80 feet) of green soybeans, what the Japanese call Edamame. These are nutty and sweet tasting, high in protein, and when combined with other ingredients they make a nutritious dish. I started growing them in the mid-1980s, trialing a variety called Butterbeans from Johnny's Selected Seeds. I've experimented with several other varieties since then, but Butterbeans is the best for flavor, reliability, and yield. As with peas, I use an earthway seeder purchased for about ten dollars at auction. Its great advantage is that I don't have to bend over and drop the seeds in myself, although for nearly twenty years that is what I did, planting about 1,500 feet of bean rows including dry beans as well as the green soys. The harvest is time-consuming as the beans need to be shelled after they are parboiled, then frozen in small batches to put into soups and stews or eaten as a side dish with garlic and olive oil. In addition I planted out a row of green snap beans (Provider) and a row of yellow wax beans (Golden Butterwax). The best green snaps are a variety called Levi Robinson but they do better when the soil is a little warmer, as do the dry beans. Yet my organic farming neighbor Nathan, who lives ten miles away on the mainland, gets his beans in ten days before I do. Maybe he is operating on global warming time while I am still working the calendar that worked for me in the 1980s. His microclimate is a few degrees warmer than mine at this time of the year, though.

Tomatoes

Most of the apple blossoms have dropped by now, blown by the wind, except for those on the late-bloomers like the Baldwin. Usually the early-ripeners are the early bloomers, and so it goes: the Baldwin is a winter apple, which means it does not fully ripen on the tree before the winter comes. On the first of June Marta and I planted the paste tomatoes and the slicers that I'd grown from seed. We use IRT mulch, a kind of plastic that Fedco sells which is spread atop the soil and warms it--which makes a real difference in yield and earliness. The coast of Maine, with its mild summers and long, cool falls, is not tomato-heaven. Late varieties are difficult to bring in. And so I grow the early ones, and also the short (determinate) ones when possible. They all sprawl atop the mulch. Deer will jump the garden fence if tall varieties are staked; the stakes (for pole beans also) seem to attract the deer. This is something I learned in the 1980s and it's one of the compromises of gardening here. Of course, I might invest in 8-feet high chain-link fences around the garden, but that's expensive, ugly, and seems technologically inappropriate. More to my liking are the cheesecloth bags I make and fill with hair from the barber shop, which I then tie to the low (four-feet high) fences. The smell of the human hair seems to discourage the deer and other animals. A scarecrow or two in the middles of the gardens also helps. The law of unintended consequences teaches it's best to try to co-exist with the pests (including deer) by discouraging them but not eliminating them. Back to planting tomatoes: we slice a hole thru the mulch and plant the tomato seedling, which has grown in a small yogurt container, lower in the ground than it set in the container, with a tablespoon of fish meal and bone meal worked into the soil at the base of the plant. Compared with pea and bean planting, this is labor-intensive, requiring kneeling and digging. But we got about 20 paste tomato plants and an equal number of slicers through the mulch, along with some peppers and eggplant (also warmth-loving). Of course, the mulch is ugly also, but it keeps the weeds down and on balance because it's inexpensive and works so well, I'm not opposed to it. Garden aesthetics have to yield often enough anyway, when it's vegetables and productivity that come first, in a challenging spot to grow a garden. Over the years, I've experimented growing many varieties of tomatoes, from the most modern to the heirlooms. As with other types of vegetables, the variety that grows well here may not do so well 20 or 200 miles from here, so it's trial and error. Among the most successful here are Bellstar (paste) and Sungold (cherry). Some I grow because of their taste and earliness (Cosmonaut Volkov), others because of their yield (Heinz paste), others because of their keeping qualities (Burpee Long Keeper). I've grown the ones that are reputed to taste the best (Brandywine) and found that they just don't yield much here. At one point I decided to grow heirlooms that could be found in the earliest seed catalogs from the 19th c. and put in one or two plants of varieties such as Chalk's Early Jewel. None of these were especially outstanding, but it was fun to grow them from seed and taste them. A good tasting, good-sized, early, slicing tomato is just not possible here, under the conditions that I grow tomatoes. It may be that with special coldframes or tunnels it could be done, but that is more technology than I want to fool with. Over the years I've gradually tried to be more efficient with gardening. The perfect, as they say, is the enemy of the good.