Broccoli is Alive

This picture was taken March 29. So much for "40 days to Maturity!" on the cauliflower (it is supposed to be an early-maturing hybrid). It sounded too good to be true. The bed seems no worse for wear for the near drowning last week. More fertilizer spreading this afternoon. We got more rain today, and I got home too late to dig, so I spread it out, at least. Must dig next few evenings. Planting season is very, very busy. Some days I really do not like working away from home and at home. I just cannot do it all as well as I would like. But I can try, and I'll sleep well when I finally crawl into bed tonight.

Spreading Fertilizer and Planting Borage

I'm trying to pre-empt the cabbage worm invasion by planting borage in the broccoli/cauliflower plot and inspecting the leaves for eggs periodically. We'll see how it works.

I'm also preparing the bed for the Big Corn Planting, April 11. Lots of "organic" fertilizer and some Miracle-Gro Garden Soil going in (needs some improvement, being a thin layer of topsoil over solid clay, with rocks and debris from 80 years of continuous habitation). I even found several child's marbles in the bed when I dug it last year and the year before. Found another marble this year. I'm going to dig it soft, dig in the amendments, and hope the corn grows high. Incorporating the stalks and the bean vines I hope to interplant with them should go a long way toward alleviating the thin-soil problem- just in time to revert it to lawn so we can sell the house when I graduate. C'est la vie.

Tomato Seedlings

Look at these! These are Arkansas Traveler seedlings from saved seeds, from a tomato I grew last year. This is cool! I always thought seeds were something you just had to buy every year, that you could not save them for reasons I never considered deeply. Now I know that the cycle can be repeated.

These are Japanese Black Trifele seedlings. They're supposed to be Russian purple-brick colored pear-shaped tomatoes. I bought the seeds this year from Baker Seed company. they're supposed to be heavy producers. We'll see how they do in my yard.

Gardening is an adventure. These plants will acclimate outdoors for a week (unless we get a cold snap or another deluge), then go in the ground next week-end. We are blessed.

What Do The Slugs Know That I Do Not?

I put out beer bait tonight for the slugs. There are very, very few out there! I've caught maybe a dozen, and I looked at the usual hangouts- almost none! Where are they? I captured 2,499 of them by the end of  last night- have most of them headed for less hazardous pastures? Is it too cold and windy? Is it going to frost, and they're staying sheltered? It makes me nervous to see a marked change in habits of an animal or group of animals, because they can sense things we cannot. We'll see in the AM.

Rainy Season

This is my broccoli bed on March 7. I'll take more pics of it next week, after I see if the plants can survive the deluge.
I looked at my garden journal for last year, and in the 9 days leading up to April 6, we got over a foot of rain. This year, we've had about 4 inches of rain so far in the last 4 days, according to the National Weather Service. I looked out my window yesterday to a scary sight- it looked like I was trying to grow broccoli in a rice paddy! The clay subsoil was turning our backyard into a pond. The flower beds are slightly raised and the brick walls have drainage holes, so they were OK, but the middle bed was not. I remembered a tiny trench I dug last year leading away from the bed, choked with leaves. I re-dug the parts filled in by the fall bed-dig and dug the leaves out of the other part. The yard has a gentle southerly slope toward a small sidewalk that funnels water to a neighbor's driveway. By later in the day the soil was sodden, but water was no longer pooled around the plants. The driveways in our neighborhood are all shaped to catch runoff from the yards and funnel it to the city drains. It is a neat system, as long as we do not get many inches of rain in a short period. Then it backfires and we get street flooding from the excess runoff. I'm thinking some household cisterns and catchment ponds might help. If each of us had a cistern holding a few thousand gallons of runoff water (maybe where a septic system would be if we did not have city sewer) for watering grass or gardens in the dry season, and if there were catchment ponds on the public lands and in common areas of residential developments (many here do have these, because the outlying areas of Memphis, where the growth is, are often on low-lying ground), maybe the flash flooding (it is here and gone in a few hours) wouldn't be so bad. 

I need to get out there and work. My borage and nasturtium plants really need to go in the ground. I may just transplant them to individual containers, and try for next weekend (planned to be the Big Planting Week-end), because the ground is just too wet. We got more rain last night, and even more is forecast for Monday night, Tuesday, and Thursday. Spring!

Hot (Pepper) Science

The April 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a wonderful article about a young scientist named Joshua Tewksbury this month. He studies capsicums, the pepper plants ranging from tame bell peppers to cayennes to naga jalokias. He explores the forests of Bolivia looking for wild capsicums, to see how they evolved in hotness and how the capsaicin benefits the plants in the wild. This one is worth the price of the magazine, if you're into peppers at all. Cool stuff.

Slimed!

I have now officially caught over 2000 slugs (2028- yes, I counted all of them!) in the backyard (4 from the poor dying lemon-tree pot on the porch) in the past week. On 3/22 I caught 432! I was really grossed out by that. Some of them were large, but most were tiny.

I have discovered that slugs have some really interesting habits. Last night in the rain, they were climbing the outside walls of the garage looking for shelter, and moving faster than usual in that quest. Tonight, a cool but dry evening, they were lounging at ease on dead leaves and bricks, and a cabbage seedling. . 

You might think I was recatching the same ones over and over, but I'm dropping them in soapy water in a plastic container with a screw top, and screwing the top down tightly. They aren't getting out alive. These are new slugs nightly. I don't count those that get away.

I'm going to buy some beer this week-end for the baiting. Hand catching is gross (some of them exude slick slime, others sticky slime, so your catching hand gets awfully slimy and dirty), and time-consuming, so I hope the baiting will be effective, too. The mulching with various natural prickly things really didn't seem to make much difference, except as a basic barrier. The picking off seems to be doing better.