HoustonVegetableGarden.com

The corn harvest is just about complete.  Unfortunately, I was on my way to Montana by the time the Butterfruit Bi-Color ripened.  I stole an early ear, but I basically just wasted it because the kernels were so small.  The first harvest of Silver Queen was excellent.  About half of the ears had silk worm damage, but it really did not make any difference, although my granddaughter was somewhat repulsed.  I like Silver Queen for its “corny” flavor.  When I was a kid we just ate the field corn as roasting ears.  When picked early it is delicious.  The super sweet varieties are almost too sweet and not starchy enough for my taste.  I have also had good luck with Sweet G-90 and Florida Staysweet.  I have had bad experience with super sweets touted by seed catelogues.  They are probably great for Michigan and New Jersey, but do not do well here.

My daughter liked the Butterfruit Bi-Color better than Silver Queen.  I suppose it is sweeter.  I planted the Silver Queen around March 1.  Some of the seed were planted directly and some were sprouted indoors.  I could not see much difference between the two.  On the butterfruit I sprouted all the seed indoors and planted it in late March.  Supposedly, the super sweet varieties need to be planted later because they require warmer temperatures for germination.  Next year I will try planting the Butterfruit Bi-Color earlier.  Of the sprouted seeds, the ones I planted early, before any green was showing seemed to do better.  Some of the later sprouts did not survive, maybe because of something I did; I don’t know.  I will write something on sprouting seed later.  It is one of Bob Randall’s favorite techniques.

When the corn is almost ready, I plant cream and purple hull peas in with the corn.  Peas add nitrogen to the soil; corn is a real nitrogen hog.  When I was a kid my father often planted them together or alternated rows.  I plant them in sequence.  Peas are an excellent cover crop for the summer.  I also love to eat them.  Peas have always been my daughter’s favorite vegetable.  We always cook them with snaps; that is, young pea pods cooked like green beans.  It’s too bad that people no longer seem to have time to shell peas.  As a kid we sat on the front porch and shelled peas for canning and freezing with my grandparents and grand uncle and aunt.  I heard a lot of stories sitting on the porch shelling peas.

Blackberries have been ripening for the past couple of weeks and will continue for several more based on the large number of green berries.  I got the plants at the January 2005 Urban Harvest fruit tree sale (a don’t miss event).  Kiowa is the only variety they carry at the sale now and I can see why.  Quality is outstanding; large and very sweet berries.  I have been surprised that they produce and ripen over such an extended period.  My previous experience has been with their wild cousins, dewberries.  I have picked dewberries since I was a small child and we still try to have a family berry picking expedition followed by my favorite of all desserts, dewberry cobbler.  The long picking period of the Kiowas has pluses and minuses.  It is nice to have a few berries with our cereal each morning, but I don’t accumulate enough at one time for a cobbler.

After they finish producing I will need to cut off the old canes (a rather messy job as these berries have impressive thorns).  The new canes that come out will produce next year’s berries.  The new canes will need to be headed back some to keep the plants under spatial control.

I was reading the book ‘1491:new revelations of the americas before columbus’ by c.mann and came across the term ‘terra preta’. It is a type of ancient super fertile man-made soil found in south America. It has a high proportion of charcoal in addition to ‘kitchen’ scraps and animal dung. The charcoal seems to hold the nutrient in the soil better and in a plant available manner. Terra preta also supports a larger microbial biomass. Here is a link to the first site to come up from a googlesearch of ‘terra preta’. There are other good sites from the search also.

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm

I decided to try to make some terra preta. I bought a bag of whole foods, no chemical, all wood charcoal. I stomped on the bag to break the charcoal up a bit and mixed it into a patch of my garden along with some mushroom compost and other compost. I planted a mix of corn, beans and squash and they are growing well so I don’t think I have poisoned the plants. I don’t think I have terra preta yet either, so I will continue to add more charcoal over time.

Has anyone else tried this?  I would highly recommend ‘1491’. The ancient peoples of the Americas were expert gardeners and there is some interesting info on that topic in the book.

This week I have been picking the last of the contessa onions.  I got a some left-over sets from the Old 6th Warden Garden last November.  Bob Randall had ordered them and some other varieties in bulk from Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs (www.dixondalefarms.com).  Contessa is an excellent onion.  I ate white bermudas growing up and have always had a bias towards white, rather than yellow onions.

My tomatoes have been unusually good this year.  At least the squirrels and I agree on that much.  I planted (from seed indoors) Merced and Arkansas Traveller for slicers and Sweet Chelsea for a plum variety.  Sweet Chelsea has always given outstanding results.  It is early, flavorful and productive, but be prepared for a vine rivaling Jack and the Beanstalk.  Merced has been good this year but in past years I have had problems with it not ripening well.  The top half stays white and pithy regardless of how long it ripens.  This year the quality has been very good.  The dry spring has probably been good for tomatoes in Houston soil, provided adequate water has been provided by irrigation.  I do not think all of my historical problems with Merced and other slicers has been bugs.  I have aggressively all but eliminated stink bugs by the recommended organic method–squashing them between the thumb and index finger.  I am about ready to give up on Arkansas Traveller, recommendations of others notwithstanding.  The plants are large and healthy but it set very little fruit early.  Even now the plant only have 5 or so smallish tomatoes.  The squirrels got the only two large ones. These late tomatoes will not likely be very good.  Tomatoes ripening at over 90 degrees never seem to be very good to me.

That was the “Now” part.  The “Then” part is how we raised tomatoes commercially on the farm/ranch I grew up on in Lavaca County.  Until the early 1950s tomatoes were an important cash crop to the farmers there.  The sandy land was well suited for tomatoes; much more so than for cotton and corn.  Yoakum still has an annual Tom-Tom Festival.  Probably most do not know that “tom-tom” was for tomatoes, not native American drums. Raising tomatoes involved a lot of hand labor.  The seed were planted in hot beds in January, were transplanted to cold frames and finally to the field.  Transplanting to the cold frame was done using a 12″ wide board with pegs on it.  The length of the board was the width of the cold frame.  It would pressed in the soil to make holes for the transplants.  We knelt on it to plant the tomatoes and make holes for the next group.

We planted about an acre.  Each tomato had to be watered when it was planted.  We pruned them by removing the suckers where the limbs joined the trunk.  I am not sure why we pruned them; it was just the way one did tomatoes.  Probably pruning resulted in earlier maturity.  Early season tomatoes brought the best price and the market typically weakened later in the season.  We picked them when they are reached full size, but showed no pink.  Tomatoes with pink or any deformity were culled at the market.  We ate the vine ripened “cat face” tomatoes ourselves.

Tomatoes were a major money crop, but the market crashed in the early 1950s and the farmers gradually quit raising them.  Large mechanized farms in the Rio Grande Valley using migrant labor made the small Lavaca County farmers uncompetitive.  Today we have come full circle and are trying to get small farmers to raise produce and sell it locally. Many are willing to pay higher prices for quality now.

The final batch of beets was harvested and the onions are going fast.  Beans are at their peak.  The summer squash is growing well.  The varieties planted are tahiti, tatsume, sunburst and calabasa (actually a gourd).  These varieties are all reasonably immune to the dreaded vine borer.  It is almost impossible to grow the traditional summer squash in Houston because of the borer.  In the outlying areas larger planting seem to fare better.

 The sweet potato slips are planted.  We made a longitudinal mound in one of the beds and planted them around the top.  The edamame are growing well.  I have never raised the and am interested to see how they turn out.  They take a long time to mature.

A lot of mulching was done using hay (obtain from Walbash on Washington Ave.).  Easy and cheap, but not as good as native mulch (made from hardwood trimmings).  I usually put newspapers under the hay to help block weeds, but we did not.  Later we will get hardwood mulch and top off the mulch.

The squirrels have been picking a lot of my tomatoes.  I find them on fence ledges and various other squirrely places.  They seem to be gourmets; they prefer Arkansas Traveller to Merced.  Unfortunately, so do I.  I got the pellet gun down from its hiding place from the grandkids and am popping them with about 6 pumps.  It seems to be getting their attention.  I also put some frost cloth (which I use after transplanting) around the bottom of the cages to make it more difficult for them to find the tomatoes.  If that fails I will go up to 12-15 pumps and get lethal.

 Bob Randall, Urban Harvest director, says the way to handle squirrels is to cut off their escape path and scare them half to death waving your arms, hitting branches etc.  The problem with that approach for me is that I can’t cut off their overhead escape routes.  We have too many fences, buildings, trees and other nearby escape routes.

The green beans are coming in.  I planted the first group of Derby in early March and we have picked a large of beans for the past several weeks.  They are “resting” now, but as only Derby does, they will come back for a full second picking.  You can’t beat Derby for quality and quanity. 

I also planted some Provider, a complimentary packet of 15 seed I got at the Urban Harvest gala.  They are ok but the yield has been low.  I also planted some Maxibel, seed I got from the Urban Harvest seed store.  The verdict is still out.  Production is average, but they are an interesting long slender bean.

 Over the years I have tried a large number of varieties.  Most work ok, except I have never had much luck with the highly touted Blue Lake varieties–they are probably for cool, Yankee gardens.