Project Update 2.1 - Corn!

So, corn. This might be my biggest failure of the year (so far at least - we still have 3 months to go!). As I posted previously, I didn't plant enough corn for the silks to be wind pollinated effectively. The plan was to get out there a couple of times a week and collect the pollen from the tassels to sprinkle on the silks. Well, I maybe did it twice. All summer. This is partly because the french round squash was so damn prolific that I couldn't really get to the corn to pollinate it. Partly cuz I'm lazy, let's be real.

Left side of the garden with epic squash, a jungle of tomatoes and both corn plantings.

So what we got was 6 or 8 ears of corn about 6 inches long and about half of them were decently pollinated - most of the kernels (at least 3/4) were plump and juicy and had great flavour. The other half were pretty pathetic. We're talking less 2/3 of the kernels were shrivelled and lame. We also had a few hilariously tiny ears - one of which was no more than an inch and a half long with about 7 formed kernels.

The first corn harvest!

The reason I'm getting a second chance for romance with hand pollination, is the corn we planted from seed has put up tassels now, and is working on silks. These plants are much more compact than the others - shorter and stockier - and put out tassels (red!) at about 3 ft high.

Emerging red corn tassels.

We pulled one of the squash plants a couple of weeks ago (powdery mildew all up in my life), so I will no longer be able to use that as an excuse. The plan now is to get a bunch of smallish paper bags and some twist ties, and just leave the damn bags tied to the corn to collect the pollen. Then, once all the silks are out, I will gently bend the stalks so the bag of pollen is right-side-up when removed, and use a paint brush to apply the pollen to the silks. This is the plan. We shall see if I stick to it :)

Project Update 2.0

A quick update on some of our garden projects:

Lazy Potatoes
We finally harvested one of the lazy potatoes crates! I LOVE digging through the dirt to find potatoes; it's proof that there is way more going on under the soil than we assume. The red potatoes are still growing strong - their stalks are still green for the most part. The yellow potatoes on the other hand had completely died back. So I dug em up, and this is what we got in terms of big-enough potatoes:

I ate a couple of these guys baked and they were delicious! Very potato-y. There were also twelve teeny tiny potatoes, most smaller than a thumbnail. I decided to see if I can get those to grow any larger, so I replanted them in the crate, and lightly covered them with soil. We'll see if anything happens by the time the red guys are ready for harvest.

Pomegranate

It took a couple of months, but all of the blossoms have officially dropped off my beloved pom. Sad face. On the upside though, I was free to prune back the extra branches and numerous suckers that have sprouted this year. I did a little research into different styles of pruning, and decided to keep three main stalks. This will give the plant more of a bush appearance than a tree appearance, and since my pom is a dwarf variety (i think...bought it before I had myfolia.com to supplement my shoddy memory) a bush shape made more sense to me. Plus, I couldn't bear to cut it back to just one stalk after all the hard work it put into growing the rest this year.

The pomegranate in the spring, shooting suckers from the base and pretending

like it was gonna make me some fruit.

Pruned pomegranate with only three main stems remaining

and criss-crossing branches removed.

There appears to be two main methods of pruning a pomegranate: the landscape aesthetic and the fruit-bearing priority. For the former, you trim branches down to the trunk, as well as most/all of the suckers, and any criss-crossing branches. If you leave one stem, you will eventually have a tree shape to your pomegranate plant. I opted to leave 3 main stems to maintain the plant's natural vase like shape. And I think the foliage is pretty, so there's that.

The second method is generally used by commercial fruit growers who want to increase their yield and have little need for an aesthetically pleasing plant. For this method, all stems and branches are shortened to increase spring growth and therefore flowers anf fruit. There is also the advantage of keeping the plant compact and the fruits easy to harvest. But you are left with an unsightly stump from which all the branches grow.

When I pruned my pom this weekend, I decided to use the cuttings to try to clone my plant. I had four good looking cuttings, 8-14 inches long. I've dipped them in rooting powder and placed in our kitchen to hopefully do their thing! One of the clones, I can already tell, is not going to make it. But that still leaves 3 possibilities, so fingers crossed!

Photo snapped three days after cuttings were taken; most seem to be doing pretty well.

Tomatoes From Seed

I've mentioned numerous times that we started our tomatoes super late, so I'm not going to get into that today. But it is very interesting, if not exactly surprising, to note a few differences among tomatoes all started from seed at the same time. The plants that are in-ground have out-grown and out-produced the container tomatoes by easily 5x-10x.

Sad looking container tomatoes. The clear container tomatoes no longer exist due to an

unfortunate run in with the neighbor kids' basketball.

The five plants in the garden have taken over; even plants that would normally grow prolifically, like the artichoke and tomatillos, have been dwarfed by the tomatoes. The plants reached about six feet tall with a spread of 8-10 feet last week (that's per plant, not all together) and are still producing massive amounts of flowers.

It's a jungle in there.

In an effort to get more sunlight onto the tomatoes themselves, I've been pruning back the leafy green growth once or twice a week for the past month. And honestly, they bounce back so quickly, you can hardly tell. I finally decided to trim the ends of all of the plants in an effort to keep the growth under control and also force the plants to focus on the tomatoes that are setting and ripening. My Riviera plant at this point has over thirty good sized fruits, and easily as many flowers still left on the branches.

Cluster of Riviera tomatoes.

There are more art-tomatoes forming on the Black Krim, and that first one I mentioned in the megablooms post is getting to be an impressive size.

Black Krim art tomato!

As it stands right now, it looks like we will be harvesting hundreds of tomatoes at the end of September, so DudeLife and I are already plotting to get a few more flats of canning jars for sauces, salsas, pickled green tomatoes and whatever else we feel like doing. I have a feeling we'll be giving quite a few of them away to friends and family as well. I can't wait!

Project Update 2.1  (corn, squash, seed saving and vermi-compost tea!) to follow soon!

Adventures in Pickling!

We did a little maintenance harvesting after I got back from my trip to NY in July. A couple of these, a few of those - not enough for any major endeavors, but just enough to take my first stab at pickling our garden bounty! I happened to have a couple of canning jars around the kitchen that we usually use to store herbs, and all of the necessary ingredients. We picked a handful of padron peppers, some bunching onions, 5 or 6 carnival and tonda carrots, and garlic that has been drying for the last few weeks. I’ve never pickled anything before, so I picked a simple recipe from one of DudeLife's fancy cookbooks and went to town.

 Harvested garlic before the drying process.

Fresh picked padron peppers.

The Pickling Process: Peel 5 cloves garlic and 5 shallots or small onions. Slice carrots. I decided to leave the peppers whole, but they could be sliced as well. Pack sterile jar full of vegetables. Add some peppercorns and spices (I added whole mustard seed, ground cloves, fresh and dried dill, red pepper flakes, a little cayenne pepper and a bay leaf). Bring to a boil 2 cups white vinegar, 1 cup water, 1/4 cup coarse salt. Pour over vegetables to fill jar. Seal and refrigerate, giving at least a few weeks for things to get pickley.

Pickle batch numero uno.

We opened the jar up this weekend, and I'm pretty proud of our first attempt! The flavor profile of the pickley-spices was pretty good. The only thing I will be changing for sure moving forward is the amount of salt this recipe calls for - waaaaay too much. I will be cutting the salt in half the next time.

Alas, we pickled a second jar before a couple weeks before opening the first, so those ones will likely be too salty as well. The second batch was similar to the first, in that there were garden carrots, padron peppers and garlic. But we also added in sliced white and red onions, a few new mex twilight peppers and 4 or 5 super spicy dried peppers that my friend Candice grew and mailed to me.

New mex twilight peppers: fruits grow upright, start off dark purple, fade

to light purple streaks, then ripen yellow to orange to red.

Lesson Learned: Never, Ever Rent a Place Where The Landlord Lives on Site

Oy, where to even begin. We’ve been in our new house for about 5 months now, and until recently we hadn’t had many problems with our landlady living beneath us. Alas, times have changed. Last week our landlady came upstairs and informed us that she will be refinishing the fence and then repainting the exterior of the house. Which is cool, classing things up a bit would be nice. What wasn’t cool was the fact that it was 7pm on a weekday, and she wanted all of my container plants moved away from the fence by the next day so they could begin work on the fence. So we moved them that night, in the dark, to the center of the back patio. And then…

Nothing. They sanded part of the fence along the driveway but never made it to the backyard area. Aaaaand now they appear to have given up completely? I’m not exactly pleased about having everything in disarray, especially for no reason, especially because the landlady has had so much attitude with us lately. I’ve posted before and after pics of the container moving sitch.

Then last night we came home to a note on our door, from the landlady, informing us that the house painting will be happening first and all of the plants in the alley and against the house need to be moved by tomorrow to the “right side of the property” whatever that means without any context.

Now, the fact that she misinformed us last time and now I will be moving all of the plants twice (some of which require at least 2 people to move) would, alone, probably be just an annoyance. But she has also stipulated that during the two weeks of work, we are not allowed to be on our front stoop ever, any plants not immediately moved to a satisfactory (yet unclear) place will be thrown out and that we should be prepared for noisy construction from 7am-7pm until at least 9/15.
Oh, and she wants to do a monthly inspection of our apartment “to assess needed repairs”. Which is total BS. And no. Not gonna fucking happen. We are not children, or in transitional housing. Aaaand I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in California.

We pay our rent in full and on time, and honestly we’re pretty lame. We hardly ever party or get rowdy, and rarely have people over. Honestly, we’ve had one gathering, a housewarming party over a long weekend, that was over at 11pm. If she had said “I’d like to set up a time and date to walk through the property to see what needs to be fixed,” that would have been one thing. But she is demanding full access to a space in which she doesn't live, threatening to throw out any plants not moved to whatever location she has in her head, and demanding we don't sit or smoke on our own front porch and instead use the back yard. Which would be weird even if the backyard wasn't totally fucked right now. Seriously. Check out these before and after pics from the plant move, and then try to tell me that's where we have to hang out.

Before: tidy & organized 

After: A total clusterfuck of plants and furniture

Doesn't this look inviting?

We were really hoping this would be a long term living situation, but it’s looking like that won’t be the case. I’m not sure why she has her knickers in a twist, but if this is what we have to look forward to from here on out, we’re going to have to start looking into other options. This is ridiculous. And it makes me sad. I wish she would just tell her what she's pissed about so we could fix it. But alas, she won't return voicemails or phone calls and her only communication setting seems to be attitude.