What is Kavi up to?

Garlic harvest

Harvested hardneck garlic, elephant garlic and shallots today. I've got them all rinsed and curing on the picnic table, but have not had any taste tests yet. By looks alone, Lavigna seems to be the most successful, with the largest cloves.

The tomato plants look great, all with green fruits. I have one little egglplant on the egg plant plant. Mysteriously, all potato bugs have vacated - for the remainder of the season, I hope. The corn looked a little peckish, so I gave it a hit of seaweed/fish foliar feed.

My more liberal open-coop-door policy of late has led to more chickens voluntarily free-ranging. I am glad for them because this is the time of year when grasshoppers are abundant. I know I am gambling with the foxes, though. There will come a time this late summer or fall when chicken appeals to them again, and hopefully I will have shut the door that day. We have had an outbreak of feather-picking recently, and I think that the last remaining Speckled Sussex is the perpetrator. In a perfect world we would still have Olivia, and the feather-picker would have gone to this year's litter of foxes.

The last Sussex is my main free-ranging buddy.

Lazy summer day

After many sessions of hand-picking the ugly grubs, I should temper my recommendation of DE for potato bugs. The DE works great when they just hatch out, but does not seem to bother the larger ones. It's effectiveness is also reduced by rain or heavy dew. I keep picking and picking, yet the Rose Finn Apple fingerling plants have sustained pretty heavy damage. The Green Mountains have fared better. I am sure I will get some potatoes, but I wonder how much the yield will have been reduced. The MOFGA pest report said that short-season varieties planted after late June can escape the notice of adult potato bugs in the Spring. I may try that next year.

Other than potato bug picking, watering, and harvesting things to eat, I have not done much to the garden for several weeks. With the rain we've had recently I haven't even had to water, and everything has shot up about 2' - including the weeds. Shallots and garlic should be ready to harvest soon, but are not quite ready yet. We are looking forward to summer squash and cukes soon. Amazingly, the salad greens have not bolted yet, but the quality is down a bit. Still, what an amazing amount of greens that planting has produced!

The first little green tomatoes sighted are Hog Hearts. It is nice to see so many bumblbees on the borage. The corn is coming along, even with the competition of the nasturtiums.

New potatoes, elephant garlic and fava beans

I decided to "rob" the Green Mountain plants and found a few nice small potatoes for dinner last night. As bad as the fava patch looks with all the sooty mildew and aphids, there are a few pods coming along, so I picked the most mature of them and was pleased to find perfect beans inside the ugly exterior. I also yanked an elephant garlic and snipped some rosemary, thyme and parsley.

Potatoes were roasted with the elephant garlic, rosemary, thyme, olive oil, salt and a little balsamic vinegar. The favas I first shelled, boiled one minute, drained, and then slipped out of their tough outer jackets. With four eggs, the parsley, a little parmesan and salt I made a nice short frittata or tortilla. Favas are great with eggs!

All this was very nice with some Gruner Veltliner.

Garlic Scape Pesto, Diatomaceous Earth

The flint corn germinated in five warm days under the fabric cover. I uncovered it a couple of days ago when I was home for the day, and have since convinced myself that the wadded up aluminum foil festooning the area will deter crows long enough. I am very excited to be growing corn, even a tiny amount as an experiment, since reading about its unique qualities in the Omnivore's Dilemma.

You will be excited too after you read this Fedco catalog hype!

Abenaki Calais Flint Corn OG (88 days) Open-pollinated. An improved strain of Roy’s Calais Flint. The frigid summer of 1816 (“Eighteen hundred and froze to death”) bestowed frosts, snow and sleet every month of the year. In the remote northern valley village of Calais, VT, only one kind of corn survived. Grown by the local Abenaki Native American tribe for generations and given to settlers, it was the sole sustenance for many families. Kept by the Fair family since that time, the corn was saved from extinction when Native Americans in this generation rescued a 10-year-old jar of seed in Roy Fair’s basement, grew it out and shared it again with local farmers. Later, Calais farmers gave some of the seed to Vermont seedsman Tom Stearns who shared it with us. Stearns calls it “the most exciting heirloom that I’ve ever been handed. Incredibly early and able to grow well under cold conditions, it has made mature and dry ears in as few as 80 days.” Most of the 7-9" ears are golden yellow but a minority are a beautiful dark maroon. Although the original strain had 8 rows of kernels, Vermont seed grower Jack Lazor has been selecting 10-row ears for higher yield, strong feeder roots for better standability, and roguing out the sweet corn kernels.

When I hold the wizened little kernels in my hand, I think about how much intrinsic value they hold beyond the $1.60 for a packet. Of course I mean according to MY values - botanic curiosity, human history, culture and technology, and foodcrop genetic diversity. If all goes well in the next 80 days, I will be able to tell you whether the flint corn that kept Vermonters alive in 1816-1817 has culinary merit. In the meantime I am captivated by the little C-4 plants, ankle-high-by-the-fourth-of-July, and ask Kavi why these seeds are worth less than diamonds. Kavi replied something to this effect: people are willing to cut off other people's limbs to get diamonds, or at least pay way too much for them in order to make a point.

This year I cut the garlic scapes before they got woody, and made some nice "pesto" in Madre's Cuisinart. A scape is a flower stalk, which the garlic plant grows after making nine leaves. Not eight, not ten -- I counted. Cutting this stalk before the flower opens supposedly directs the plant's energy into making bigger garlic cloves. The scapes grow in a crazy spiral, and are used in expensive flower arrangements. By "pesto" in this context I mean that I ground them up with olive oil, with salt and lemon juice to taste. So far we have employed the scape pesto on pasta, in scrambled eggs, as a marinade, and when mixed with balsamic vinegar, as a salad dressing.

I have been hitting everything with foliar feeds of seaweed/fish emulsion. Labor intensive, yes, but more fun than weeding! The tomato plants are magnificent, the Swiss chard and mangles are coming along, the salad is going strong, and we are really enjoying the Rat Tail Radish seed pods. The rattlesnake pole beans are growing very slowly, and can't seem to find the poles. I have ceded the favas to the aphids, or rather to the cause of supporting aphid predators. The final test will be to grow favas with the benefit of legume inoculant - if they don't do well with that, than it is just too hot here too soon, for favas.

Squash is doing well, though the "Confection" winter squash is quite a draw for squash bugs, and appears to be stunted from this pressure already. Squash bugs, and their eggs, are easy to hand pick.

The big success story recently has been DIATOMACEOUS EARTH on potato bug larvae. I have been picking potato bugs and smashing their eggs all along, but inevitably many larvae appear. This is not a matter of live-and-let-live -- they can really strip a potato plant. I haven't yet used pesticides in this garden, organic-approved or otherwise, and my research led me to be pessimistic about the effectiveness of either Bt or pyrethrin-based products on potato bugs. So I decided to try a dusting of DE. (This is a long enough posting already so I will let you Google diatomaceous earth.) When I came back two days later, what had been teeming masses of little brown grubs had been reduced to dessicated specks. For this purpose DE should be sprinkled thickly, as soon as the grubs appear, and reapplied periodically.

Did you know that Rose Breasted Grosbeaks are known as "the Potato Bug Bird"? We have 'em. I don't like the idea of a Rose Breasted Grosbeak ingesting any toxin, organic or otherwise. I am happy to know that DE is an ingredient in chicken feed, so if by chance a Grosbeak ingests some while snacking on a Potato Bug, it should be OK.

I wish I could say the same for any predator insects that may be drawn to my potato patch. I am afraid that if they wander into a drift of DE, they are collateral damage.