Avid Gardeners Plant Sale

Today was the annual Oregon Plant Fair at Alton Baker Park. This year, for the first time in many years, I didn't have to work the LCDS booth, so I could shop the Fair with Mom and Beth. While rain was predicted, the weather behaved for the most part. Partly sunny skies only gave way to only one, fairly short rainstorm the whole day. After we made our many purchases at the Plant Fair, we headed over to the Fairgrounds for the Hardy Plant Sale. At the end of the day, I came home with the following purchases:

• Tomato "Indigo" Amethyst Jewel - from Log House Plants. Indeterminate. Slicer, Gorgeous pink w/purple amethyst splashes. Large trusses load up with great tasting exotic looking 1-3 oz fruit. Large production, hang on the vine ability with real tomato flavor. wild Boar Farm Hybrid. Mid-Season
• Tomato "Bumblebee" Sunrise Cherry - from Log House Plants. Indeterminate. Yellow, round cherry tomato with red stripes and a pink interior marbling. Excellent, sweet and tangy flavor. Great in mixes with other colorful artisan varieties.
• Tomato "Moonglow" Heirloom (OP) Grafter from Log House Plants. Intermediate. Gorgeous, brilliant orange globe shaped 6-8 oz fruits have a fantastic sweet-tart flavor and smooth texture, perfect for fresh eating or making a beautiful, unusual sauce. Heavy yields, good keeper. 80 days from transplant.
• Kale "Red Russian" from Log House Plants.(OP) Silvery, blue-green leaves with rose colored ribs & veins. Thick, chewy leaves are great in winter soups and stews or with grilled meat. 50 days from Transplant.
• Pepper "Lunchbox Yellow"  Sweet Pepper from Log House Plants. New mini "snack peppers" have a delicious sweet flavor for fresh eating but are also good for cooking. Tons of the 2-3" fruits mature to golden yellow on tall, strong plants. 55 days to green, 75 to yellow.
• Berben's Thunbergi "Golden Pillar" from the Secret Garden Growers, Canby OR. Golden Pillar Barberry 3-4' multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, upright form, with dramatic bright yellow/gold foliage. Full sun to part shade, won't burn. most soils, deer resistant, average water, easy, USDA Zone 24
• Coreopsis "Red Satin" 15-18" H X 18-22 " W. Full sun, zone 5-9 Blooms summer thru late summer. This hardy coreopsis produces deep wine red to ruby red flowers all summer long. If cut back, it can rebloom until frost. The deep green, threadleaf foliage forms a tight mound.

I also picked up these three metal birds are the Plant Fair. A couple was selling dozens of different designs so it was very hard to choose. I finally selected a Nuthatch, a Chickadee, and a Cedar Waxwing. Now I only need to decide where to place them.

After visiting both plant sales, we made a stop at Down to Earth. I picked up 2 bags of potting soil and the following seed packets:

• Cosmo "Kneehigh Sonata Mix" from Renee's Garden.Sonata Cosmos compact feathery two foot plants are soon covered with spays of buds that open and bloom non-stop all summer long. The blossoms satiny 2" petals in shades of magenta, clear white, soft pastel pink and pure rose, surround cheerful yellow centers. Reliable and long-lasting, with stems long enough for cutting lots of bouquets, free blooming sonatas are perfect for containers, beds or borders and fill the garden with dainty gaiety all summer long. 2' tall.
• Melon "Minnesota Miget" (OP) 65-70 days. This exquisite heirloom produces a bounty of early and true to its name, mini cantaloupes. Fruit measure 4-6" across and have deep orange flesh that is succulent, sweet, and delicious down to the rind. The ultimate melon for short season areas, and the compact plants are ideal for mall spaces or container gardens.
• Cucumber "Marketmore 97"(OP) 55 days. Developed at Cornel University, Marketmore 97 is a great slicing cucumber, and is one of the most disease resistant varieties that we offer. Bitter free and burpless to boot. with vines up to 6 feet long, this northern cultivar bears loads of 9-11", strait, white spined cukes. A first rate addition to anyone's garden. 

Early April in the Kitchen Garden

Back on March 25th, we attended Plant Nerd Night at the Eugene Garden Club. As always, I was most excited to see what Alice Doyle from Log House Plants brought to sell. After a lot of mental comparisons and hard decision making, I came home with this "new-to-me" Kale. Kale "Fizz" is described on the Log House Plants website as "tender, finely lobed, light green leaves deepen to emerald green. Use baby greens in salads or full size leaves in steaming, stir-frying. OP."

Log House Plants had so many new and interesting kale varieties for sale that night. It was really difficult to pick only one to bring home. I was taken with this variety's lovely cut leaves and the promise of tender leaves to eat after the first frost.

After I was done planting the Kale, I took stock for the rest of the kitchen garden. The garlic has grown like gangbusters this last month. It is now taller than the hoops which use to support the remay cover.

Just like last year, the "Russian Red" garlic is attaining an immense size. Each plant stock looks like bamboo!

Next to it, the "Chesnook Red" plants look small but they are perfectly normal. Their stocks are now thicker then a finger and they too have outgrown the metal hoops.

It does look like one of the "Chesnook Red" plants had dwarfed, so I will have 14 plants to harvest this year instead of 15. I certainly don't want to save the cloves from a misshapen plant. Fortunately, all the other plants look great.

My real surprise this Spring are the potatoes. Last year I planted 4 grow bags with 2 varieties of Potatoes. Because of an incredibly busy Fall, I only ended up harvesting one of the bags. The other three bags remained outside in the kitchen garden all Winter, exposed to negative temperatures and two snow storms. So I was more than a little shocked when I noticed that the two bags containing "Nicola" potatoes started to grow a few weeks ago. And now, pictured below, the "Dark Red Norland" have just begun to sprout in the remaining bag. So I guess I will have potatoes this year after all!

The Flowering Kale

Last year I grew kale for the first time. I bought a 4-pack of "Tuscano" kale and planted them in the kitchen garden. One of the plants didn't survive for very long. Another was planted too close to the deer fence. It was constantly "trimmed" all Summer and never had the chance to grow very large. The remaining two plants did quite well.

Above is a picture of one of the kale plants as it looked in late October. As you might be able to make out in the image, the leaves did suffer quite a bit of bug damage. I am not sure at this point who liked it so much, but somebody sure did! But the plants were large and healthy over-all. I left them in the garden to over winter.

Kale is a biennial plant, meaning that it grows its leaves, stems and roots the first year. Then, after a period of dormancy over the colder months, it flowers and sets its seed. In March, as I did some clean-up in the kitchen garden, I decided to keep one of the kale plants. I knew that it would soon start forming buds and would then bloom. I was interested to see what exactly a flowering kale looked like. Here it is! My plant is absolutely covering in beautiful yellow flowers. Each flower has 4 petals that open like a star. The blooms remind me of a mustard plant. I don't know if I will keep the kale in the ground long enough for the seed to set and dry. But for now it's a pretty burst of color in the young kitchen garden.

The Kale

I had two "Tuscano" kale plants left in the kitchen garden. I pulled up one and tossed it on the compost heap. But I have decided let the other one continue to grow. As you can see, the plant is now beginning to bolt. Small clusters of buds have formed at all of the growing tips. Each bud should open to a small flower. If pollinated, the flower will then close and set seed. I am curious what a flowering kale will look like, so this plant gets to keep growing for a little while longer. Besides adding some potential beauty to the kitchen garden, the flowers should also act as a good, early source of food for the pollinators. Stay tuned!

Kitchen Garden Clean-up

Today I tackled one of my least favorite tasks of the Fall season; cleaning up the kitchen garden. This task was made a bit easier by today's weather - overcast and a very mild 68 degrees. I had already harvested all of the Winter Squash, Onions,  Morning Glory seed, and Tomatoes. It was now a "simple" matter of picking up all of the spent plant material as well as the assorted cages, towers, and plant markers.

As always, it took me much longer than I had expected! Here's the view once my work was completed.

I assumed that the only vegetable that would remain in the garden would be the two "Tuscano" kale. However, the "Galina" yellow cherry still looks good. The 10-day forecast seems mild, so I thought that I would leave it in and see if I could get one more harvest out of it before the first frost.

I am waiting to harvest any kale until the first frost or two. All my gardening books indicate that the kale will become much sweeter after it is exposed to a period of freezing temperatures.

Like so many plants, Kale is architecturally interesting.

There are still many tresses left on the "Galina" cherry that have yet to mature.

Here's the "compost" pile of assorted plant material. I know that the deer will quickly discover this  vegetation and make quick work of cleaning it up. They love tomato plants.

While I worked alone for much of the afternoon, I did have this sweet little bird supervise me for a while. I was able to get quite close to it and it just calmly remained perched on the garden fencing. On the other end of the "assistance" spectrum were these three slugs. Absolutely no help what so ever!

September in the Kitchen Garden

September has arrived in the kitchen garden. While this hasn't been a stellar year by any means, I have had a few success stories.

The Winter Squash finally took off in August and have now covered most of the bare dirt. It is difficult to see where one squash begins and another variety ends. I noticed this week the first signs of powdery mildew on the squash leaves. Now it will be a race against the clock to get the last young squash mature before the plants succumb to the disease. Hopefully a few more weeks of sunny, dry days are ahead of us.

I finally have some nice sized "Butternut" squash on the vines, but none have yet matured. Unfortunately, the deer pushed against my fencing and ate a nice chunk out of three young squash. So the harvest won't be too large this year.

My two "Bush Delicata" plants have struggled. They are just now starting to really set some fruit. I do have one monster "Delicata",  pictured above. What I lack in numbers I made up for with the length of this one!

The Kabocha "Orange Sunshine" vines have done the best of the three varieties of Winter Squash that I am growing this year. One vine has now stretched the entire length of the garden and is still setting baby fruit. This one is about the size of a baseball. I don't know if there is enough warm weather left for it to reach maturity.

This one is further up the vine. It has reach full size and now just needs a few more weeks to mature and turn orange. I am hopeful.

Here is one of the three "finished" squash. They are fully mature and ready to pick.

My onions have done well this year, much like the garlic. I guess it has been another good year for the allium family. I am happy, but not thrilled with the "Frontier " yellow storage onions. They are smaller than the "Prince " yellow stoarge onions that I have grown in past years. Their tops started falling over about three weeks ago and they are now ready to be pulled. It will be interesting to compare and see how they store this Winter.

A close-up.

The red "Mars" storage onions are huge, as always. This variety always performs so well for me.

I need to knock their tops over so that I can pull them out in the next few weeks before it rains.

I can't say that my cucumber trellis experiment has been successful. Certainly, it didn't help having the finches peck and eat most of the growing tips. Now that the side vines have reached the ground, they seem much happier and have started to set more baby cukes.

Here's a mis-shapen "Russian Pickling". Maybe a different variety, grown in a different location, would be happy on the trellis system.

My three "Tuscano" Kale plants keep quietly plugging away. The older leaves keep getting munched on by something, but it keeps producing more and more leaves.

The tomatoes have been a mixed bag of success. One variety that has done really well has been my "Galina" orange cherry. It is starting to get covered in ripe tomatoes. It's time to get picking!

My "Black Krim" plant is my tallest tomato, with the most set fruit, for the third year in a row. It is such a productive plant for me. The tomatoes near the bottom of the plant are starting to change to that lovely red/blackcolor. I bet that I have 20+ large green tomatoes on that plant right now.

"Moonglow" is a new variety for me this year and it has done fairly well. The first of its fruit are starting to turn yellow. As you can see on this garden tour, a few more weeks of sunny, dry weather would be very welcome.

The 2012 Kitchen Garden Inventory

Now that we have hit the midway point in the month of July, it's time for me to take my annual inventory in the gardens. Unfortunately, I am still planting down in the big garden, but the kitchen garden at the house is complete for another Summer. This garden faces south and receives full day sun. Logically, this is where I plant all of the heat lovers. Here is a listing of everything residing in the 2012 kitchen garden:

Seed

• (8)Garlic - "Chesnook Red" - Down to Earth
• (8)Garlic - "Nootka Rose" - Down to Earth
• (8)Garlic - "Silver Rose" - Down to Earth
• (10)Cucumber - "Russian Pickling" - Seed Savers Exchange

Plants

• (2)Winter Squash - "Bush Delicata" - Mountain View Farm
• (2)Winter Squash - "Waltham" Butternut - Mountain View Farm
• (2)Winter Squash - "Orange Sunshine" Kabocha - Mountain View Farm
• (1)Tomato - "Galina" - Hayhurst
• (1)Tomato - "Valencia" - Mountain View Farm
• (1)Tomato - "Fantastic VF" - Hayhurst
• (1)Tomato - "Matina" - Log House Plants
• (1)Tomato - "Black Pear" - Log House Plants
• (1)Tomato - "Moonglow" grafted - Log House Plants
• (1)Tomato - "Copia" grafted - Log House Plants
• (1)Tomato - "Julia Child" grafted - Log House Plants
• (1)Tomato - "Black Krim" grafted - Log House Plants
• (5)Kale - "Toscano" - Log House Plants
• (10)Onion - "Mars" - Hayhurst
• (12)Onion- "Frontier" - Hayhurst
• (2)Morning Glory - "Feringa" - Log House Plants
• (2)Morning Glory -"Heavenly Blue" - Log House Plants
• (1)Morning Glory- "Mixed Colors " - Log House Plants

Here are my two "Bush Delicata" plants. The very first male bloom opened today and I can see immature female fruit at the crown of one of the plants.

These are my two poor old "Waltham Butternut". They are alive but not exactly thriving. They just hate getting transplanted so I really need to grow my own plants from seed next year like I did in 2010.

Here are the "Orange Sunshine" Kabocha. As you can see one plant is much bigger than the other!

Here are the "Silver Rose" garlic plants. They still haven't reached the stage where half of the leaves are yellow, so I haven't pulled them yet. From what I can see though, the bulbs look to be sizing up nicely.

Here is my row of  "Frontier" yellow storage onions. The bulbs are starting to grow, but seem to be a bit smaller than my old favorite "Prince" that I have grown the last few years.

Here's a close-up.

As always, the "Mars" red storage onions are growing like crazy. They are such a reliable large size onion.

The tomato plants are starting to get covered in pretty yellow blossoms.

My little "Fantastic VF" tomato has already set a few fruit.

The kale are so glad to be finally planted in the ground after spending way too much time in their six pack cells. I am pleased that last week's heat didn't seem to bother them at all.

The cucumbers have finally taken off. They loved last weeks heat, doubling in size and turning a dark, healthy green. Hopefully it won't be too much longer before they have grabbed a hold of the trellis.

Each year it seems that I have one volunteer plant come up in the garden. And each year that plants out performs all of the other plants that I have internationally sown. This year's overachieving volunteer is this pink strain of morning glory "Mixed Colors". My one plant has climbed onto my new tower and is rapidly covering up three of the sides. It is such a pretty shade of pink and I am thankful to have something performing so well in this challenging year. As always, mother nature is a better gardener than I am!

Next to the fourth side of the tower I planted two plants of morning glory "Feringa". I grew this variety in 2010 and just loved it. It is a mix of deep purple and pink blooms and will look really nice paired with the volunteer plant.