Pictures: The seedlings destined for the garden

 

African Marigolds, cv. Crackerjack mix. You can click on the images to embiggen them.

Rose de Bern tomatoes on left, Stupice on right

Happy Rich broccoli on left, Stocky Red Roaster sweet pepper on right

Tennessee 90 Burley on left, African Marigolds on right

More African Marigolds on left, Lovage on right

Quicksilver has a project going

Freedom primocane bearing blackberries interplanted with Tagetes lucida

A close-up of one of the blackberry plants. They small leaf with the reddish tint is new growth.

Rose de Bern tomatoes on left, Tagetes minuta on right.

Rhubarb seeds planted April 21

Just starting to push

Things are looking dry out-West.

 

According to this article, 75% of the water used in the West per-year comes from melting snowpack.

The water is used for domestic uses (drinking, laundry, flushing toilets and so on), industry (manufacturing, car washes, cleaning parts before painting) and agriculture.

Water for agriculture is allocated via a complicated set of rules. If your share of the allocation looks like it will not be enough then you have to make some tough choices. Do you sell you herd now (good prices, cattle in good shape) or later (other producers dumping their herds, your cows looking scrawny)? How many do you send to market? Do you hold onto some of them and hope to get lucky next year? Regardless, it will take the region many years for the cattle herds to rebound to previous numbers.

The same thing happens with orchards. If you know you will not have enough water, which trees do you water and which do you let fend for themselves and likely die? Do you water just as many trees as possible just enough to keep them alive or do you water fewer trees enough to bring in a good crop? 

Orchard trees are not like wheat. If you sacrifice 40 acres of walnut, plum or almond trees (for instance) then replanting might involve $800k and five years or more years before you see a return to production.

My advice to readers is to plant onions and carrots in your garden this year.

Hat-tip to Coyote Ken 

Bonus images

 

An untimely rain and tab-clearing

There I was, carefully placing seed potatoes into the row. One-two-three. Move. Another one-two-three. Move. One foot apart. Skin-side-up. The potatoes probably don't care about the precision but I do.

Then, from the south a rumble that sounded like thunder. Could have been a truck, though.

A few seconds later. More thunder. Definitely thunder. It sounded closer.

Crap.

293-294-295. Move. 296-297-298. Move. 299, 300. Stand up. Stretch. Move the bucket of cut seed potatoes into the shade and tip it over so it will not fill with water.Start the tiller and run it into the barn. Roll the push mower into the barn. Walk toward the house in a sprinkle of rain.

The sprinkle turned into rain. We picked up about 0.2". I went out after the rain and the ground was to wet to do any more planting. Just barely too wet.

The grass was too wet to mow.

I didn't hit any of my goals yesterday.

Some days are like that.

The good news

I seemed to have cracked the code for staying peppy.

It was the lack of salt.

I was drinking powdered Gatorade + 1/4 tsp of salt per quart at breaks and I felt peppier after my second and third hours than I did after my first hour. I probably should have loaded up on the electrolyte before I went out working.

I drank about 28 ounces of the mix at each break but nothing during the hour of work. 

Some tab clearing

Fencing: The garden I planted the broccoli in has a 4' woven wire fence around half of it and a 52" fence made of feedlot panels around the other half. At the bottom there is 1" poultry-netting that is 24" tall attached to the taller fence. In some places I have 1" plastic netting which the rabbits have turned to Swiss Cheese. I need to upgrade that.

Yes, deer can easily jump over 4' fence. But most of them are lazy and don't do it when forage is abundant and they are not frightened.

Storing potatoes: Last year was a "Fail" in terms of the ERJ household storing potatoes. 

Digging the potatoes had been sort of a last-minute thing. Some of them had frozen. Some of them had only the thinnest bit of their top surface frozen.

Back in the day, there was a story of a disgruntled employee who tossed frozen potatoes underneath the hanging files in a dozen file cabinets shortly before he quit. Two weeks later there was a noticeable but difficult to find odor. A week after that the office was uninhabitable due to the stench. The potatoes had autolysed to slime which in-turn had dripped through the slots in the bottoms of the drawers and impregnated the paper filled hanging-files below them.

Yes. All of our stored potatoes got pitched. I went through the buckets a few times and sorted out what I thought were the good ones only to be wrong and have to start over. By the third sorting...Mrs ERJ suggested that potatoes are not expensive and maybe I could write it off as a lesson-learned.

And now it is a lesson-shared.

Miscellaneous

Yesterday, we had a kid slowly come putt-putt-putting up the driveway on a quad. He was wearing a helmet, which is unusual around here. He came ALL the way up the drive and SLOWLY turned around. My spider-senses tell me that he was scoping out the property for stuff to steal. He was going VERY SLOWLY as he looked inside the garage (the door was open).

It is probably time to display the gas can filled with water and with a 1/2" of gasoline floating on top. I prevent accidents by tying several wraps of red baling-twine around the handle of the decoy gas can. Red means "do not use". Blue means "mixed gas".

Just sayin'. Ain't the first time we have had this problem. Two-gallon gas cans seem to be the most popular with thieves. Five full gallons is too heavy and awkward to carry. One-gallon isn't hardly worth stealing.

More of the same, sweat and Amazing Grace

Today's work ticket

Take Quicksilver to a garage sale. I will give her a dollar for helping in the garden. I expect her to buy a stuffed animal with it.

Update: She bought a pair of sandals. 

Plant more potatoes. I had a shipment of seed potatoes show up yesterday. I want to get four-hundred feet of row planted.

Update: One-hundred feet is about 100 "hills" of potatoes. I am averaging about 2 hills a minute. I work an hour and then rehydrate and sit under the ceiling fan for twenty-minutes. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don't think I am going to get to mowing today. 

Plant the last four fruit trees. I have two Liberty/Bud-118 and one each Winecrisp/MM111 and Galarina/MM111 left.

Mow grass.

Heat

Image from Wikipedia

I am not dealing with the sudden onset of heat very well this year. I need to buy some sweat-bands to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I am also thinking about purchasing a straw hat because I cannot find the one I wore last summer.

At least I can sweat. I worked with a guy who went through chemo-therapy and his hair fell out. He said the summer he had no hair was the hottest summer he ever endured. I think the damage to his hair follicles also damaged his ability to sweat.

Quicksilver Music Moment

Amazing Grace. 

All work and no play makes Joe a dull boy

On today's work-ticket

Plant a tree in Southern Belle's orchard. One of the pear trees I planted last year never grew. I will be planting a Galarina apple that is grafted on a MM-111 rootstock. Since the dead pear is in the north row, an overly-large tree will not shade the other trees in the orchard (at least not very much).

---Added at 11:00 a.m.: There were two pear trees that needed replacements. I planted a Winecrisp/MM-111 in the southwest corner and a Galarina/MM111 immediately to the north of that tree. That gives her two Liberty apple trees, one each of Winecrisp, Galarina, Melrose, Fuji, Gold Rush, Harrow Sweet pear, Contender peach and Red Haven peach. She also has five hazelnut bushes, mostly cv. Somerset.--- 

Share some trees with the gentleman who remodeled our bathroom. He is building his own personal house for his retirement years and one of his goals is to produce as much food on the three acres as he can. He also asked for pruning and grafting lessons.

---Added at 6:00 p.m.: This ticket was punched by 4:32 p.m. The gentleman was a quick student and very capable with his eye-hand coordination.--- 

Plant potatoes in the garden. At a minimum, I want to plant forty hills of Red Pontiac for early potatoes. The detail that makes it awkward is that I want to put them in the row closest to the path for ease-of-harvest. I am contemplating moving the path so it runs up the middle of the 100'-by-40' plot. 

---Updated at 1:15 p.m.: I was assisted by Quicksilver in the garden and the Red Pontiac early potatoes are in.

I gave her an 8" long stick to use as a gauge to space the potatoes but she was a little bit unclear on the idea.---

I also decided to split the 100' length into two, 50' sub-parcels for ease of management. The west half is about 4' higher and the soil dries out and warms up more quickly than the east half. The early potatoes will be planted in the west half. That is NOT where they would be planted if I followed my usual "Plant the first items closest to the entrance to the plot" habit or "Start along a fence so the rows are efficiently spaced".

Well, well, well, would you look at that!

 

Twenty-one broccoli transplants into the ground!

Those were not on the work-ticket. Updated 2:30 p.m.

Quicksilver Musical Moment

Dance Monkey How do you say "Joyous abandon"?

Bonus headlines

This hospital treats many patients with "mental health issues"

Evil! Crazy-people need attention the way normal people need oxygen. They are performing for their "tribe" to get the "fix" that they crave.  They do that by inflaming the outrage of "the other side". This will not end well.

Planting asparagus

 

Today's adventure was to plant 60 asparagus plants ins a 60' long row.

First I tilled.

Then I trenched

 

The crowns look like octipii migrating in formation. The internet said that is not necessary to spread out the roots.

Looking up the row

The shorter stick in the foreground (that runs up-down in the photo) is 4' long with blazes every 12". I used it to space the crowns. The longer stick in the background is an 8' furring strip that I used to "calibrate" the compost application. One bag for every 8'.

Love is planting a row of asparagus because your wife loves asparagus. I can take it or leave it. I don't see what the big deal is. But if this makes her feel cherished, then it is time well spent.

Incidentally, the Caledonia Farmers Elevator on M-50 east of Charlotte has very large crowns of Millennium hybrid asparagus for $1.50 each. Best get them while they are in-stock. 

I also planted 7 fruit trees to round out the day.

3 hours time-on-task with a high temperature of 80F and no wind. Time to start taking electrolyte rather than plain water. I am worn out.

More than you ever wanted to know about rhubarb

More than you ever wanted to know about rhubarb

Rhubarb (sometimes called "Pie plant") varieties. 

The site advises buyers to not put a lot of trust in variety names. Some propagators plant seeds and call the seedlings by the mother's name. The seedlings will NOT be identical to the mother.

Two varieties that the authors of the website like are Canada Red and MacDonald. 

Most rhubarb from seeds are the variety Victoria which was introduced in 1837 and was very, very good for its time. The authors write:

Green-stemmed varieties, such as 'Goliath' or 'Victoria,' tend to be more acidic and potentially more fibrous than red-stemmed varieties....Victoria is often not recommended due to its frequent habit of producing flower stems; used almost exclusively for indoor winter forcing. 

Additionally, the prolific production of seeds results in seedlings crowding the rhubarb bed which necessitates more maintenance in terms of thinning or digging and replanting.

Expect variation in quality since much of what is available in commerce are not clones of the original Victoria plant. Rather, "Victoria" is a swarm of similar varieties that may or may-not resemble the original. Sadly, this is probably the most common rhubarb "variety" available to the average gardener. 

I will say that nothing attracts more pollinators than rhubarb when it is in flower. It must be blazingly bright in the infrared band that corresponds to sugars in the nectar. Sadly, they are attractive to pollinators for about three days unlike horseradish which feeds pollinators and parasitoid wasps for three weeks. 

The next most common rhubarb seeds in commerce are probable Glaskin's Perpetual. Glaskin's Perpetual was introduced to commerce in 1920 and is lower in acid and fiber than Victoria.

Final thoughts on rhubarb from seeds

Seeds are dirt-cheap. There is nothing to prevent you from planting a boatload of seeds and then sorting for the reddest stems. My thought process is that the seedlings with the reddest stems are more likely to have modern selections (which were selected for red stems and low fiber) in their recent ancestry. That is, you might be able to use red stems as a proxy for tender, lower-fiber stems.

A second thing about seeds is that most plant virus do not cross from the mother plant to the embryo. Plants that are propagated vegetatively tend to collect viruses which slowly drag-down vigor.