A Day of Reckoning

Well, the fateful day came, that day when, in accordance with the deals, all the vegetables were dug up and replaced with flowers.  Countless radishes were sacrificed on this day.  And then, at the graduation party, no one went outside to admire the new flowers.

Still, I did get a good sized pile of radishes (which weren't, surprisingly, all as black as "Black Spanish Globe" would have me believe).  and even a pile of diminutive peas.

The carrots were, for the most part, left in the ground and have since had a growth spurt.  They are doing much better than they were before.  Perhaps they were just waiting for some marigolds to be planted near by.

 

Also, I've planted two of the beds in my mother's garden with some seeds I started on my window sill about a month ago.  I'll make a full write up of that later.

Fortunately*

Unfortunately I was sick all last week and my loyal readers were deprived of my garden updates.  Fortunately we have entered another beautiful month here in the sunny Duke City and I can, in one post, catch you all up on what's been happening in my garden.

Fortunately my radish bed is full of beautiful foliage.  Lots of leafy radish greens and smaller carrot greens.  Unfortunately, if I poke my fingers around the base of the radishes, I'm not finding any plump tap roots.  It maybe that, as last year, I grow lots of radish plants but still have a disappointingly small harvest.  According to Mr Brown Thumb this could mean that both my garden beds in the past two years have lacked in phosphorous and potassium.  Additionally, the radishes have run out of time.  As per my agreement with my mother-in-law, it's time to empty this bed of vegetables and fill it with flowers for my sister-in-law's graduation party.  Fortunately, the carrots are small and cute.  I may sneakily leave them in the bed and plant flowers around them.  If I'm lucky the carrots will pull through in ways the radishes didn't.

Unfortunately, the pea pots are another mixed bag.  The plants have not grown as much as I would expect, remaining about a foot and a half tall.  I assume this is because I planted them rather late and the weather is too warm for them.  They really haven't made much use of the tomato cage I so thoughtfully put in the pot for them.  Fortunately, they're still going to produce something!  They are cute pea flowers and even some peas all over their diminutive vines.  We'll get some fresh peas before cucumber plants take their place.

                                                                            Fortunately, the Nasturtiums are coming along fine.  While they do wilt a bit when they're thirsty, they bounce back better than I expected they would.  I expect that in another month and a half or so they're going to be big beautiful plants.  Unfortunately they're also out of time.  That bed too needs to be filled with flowers by the end of the month instead of filled with small vines that might eventually produce some flowers.  I will probably end up buying a flat of snap dragons to fill in the bed, leaving as many Nasturtiums as I can.  I really really want to eat a Nasturtium flower.

Fortunately, the roses have survived my pruning and are, for the most part, covered in lovely blooms.  The two biggest roses are causing some trouble by letting their old branches (that I so carefully pruned) die off and just sending up new growth from the roots.  And on one of them this new growth, though pretty enough and producing flowers, in trailing along the ground.  Which is weird.  Unfortunately, the successful blooms mean I have to start dead-heading which I have never been around to do before.  This means I've very likely to screw up.



*Since this post seemed to be full of mixed-bag type updates, I based the writing off one of my favourite picture books as a child.  I may not have been successful.

Garden Update: April Showers

Yesterday, in the aftermath of the first precipitation we've have in months, I went out to take stock of my little plants.  Most of them are doing great.  I'm suspect that this will be a good year.

There's nothing quite like peas.  They are the heralds of spring!  They grow before most of the other vegetables and the way the seem to stretch up toward the sky lift my heart.  There are about seven plants in each pot and as usual, I'm afraid I over planted a bit.  The peas in both pots seem to be doing great though.  A few of them have grabbed hold of the tomato cage I stuck in their pot.

Carrot with round cotyledon.

Carrot with elongated cotyledon.

The radishes are doing great.  They're beginning to look like actual plants.  Time to thin out the dense spots a bit.  Even more exciting in this bed, the carrots have sprouted!  Back in my college garden I sowed carrots every year and only once got any to germinate so it's thrilling to have some success this year.  I planted a rainbow mix this year so I've been looking carefully for differences in the leaves of my carrot plants.  Some of them appear to have normal looking round cotyledon while others came up long and thin, like grass.  I only assume that they are both carrots because they both came up en masse at about the same time and they're both now sporting their first sets of true carrot leaves.  There's one other surprise in the radish-carrot bed.  Something came up with the radishes that is clearly neither a radish nor a carrot.  I let it grow because I was curious.  I don't know what my in-laws planted in this bed last year but it looks like a very large grass right now.  Any guesses?

The agave that I repotted is not looking so good.  It, and most of it's pups, have lost their happy green-blue color.  Now it mostly matches the wall.  In the research that I've done since the repoting, it looks like I shouldn't have watered them all after I was finished and I should have left them under the porch instead of against a sunny wall.  Live and learn, I guess.  I'm still hoping that it's succulent constitution will give it the strength to survive.

Lastly, two weeks ago I threw some seeds into the planter around the mailbox out front.  I didn't record the varieties and threw away the seed packets so I don't know exactly what I put in there.  I know there were some nasturtiums because, as I've said before, I'm curious how they do in our dry climate and I wish that everything I planted I could eat.  There were also some snapdragons because their color matched the nasturtiums and I know my mother-in-law likes them.  I also added in some sort of red lettuce for two reasons.  First, I thought the colored foliage would look nice with the flowers and secondly, I really like mixing flowers and vegetables.  The second reason goes against my mother-in-law's gardening ideas so I guess a minor act of rebellion is a third reason.  We'll see if she notices.  Yesterday, I noticed that something, one tiny little cotyledon, was poking out of the soil.  It is, of course, way to small and immature to identify so we'll just have to wait to see what's coming up out there.

What is it?

Kitchen Scrap Gardening?

Imagine for a moment that you've bought some carrots at the supermarket to make pot pies.  Most of the carrot, of course, gets diced up, cooked, and eaten.  If you're a gardener then the peelings should already be headed to you compost pile to be broken down into good stuff for your plants.  But if you really want to squeeze a little more usefulness out of that carrot, perhaps you can save the top and grow a whole new carrot!

This is a prime example of why I am, perhaps more than any other adjective, a frugal gardener.  Anything that I can acquire, repurpose, or make for free I will.

I remember first coming across this notion in an old children's book of projects*.  It suggested using both carrot tops in a tray of water and a sweet potato suspended in a glass to grow an indoor jungle.  I must have tried the carrot-in-a-tray idea a dozen times growing up but it never worked for me.  Usually the carrot dried out and the cat was blamed for drinking all the water.

Now, however, I can now report some success!  In January I set up an experiment at a local children's museum to see if the tops of carrots (and some other, similarly structured vegetables) would grow in glasses of water.  All the samples were prepared similarly, with most of the root and any leaves removed before being suspended in a glass of water.  The water was refilled as needed and completely changed a couple of times a week.  Here are the results so far!

The carrots seem to be preforming best.  As seen in the photo, both carrots have lots of leaves and roots filling their cups.  It is important to note that the carrots in a manner very different to the other samples.  They produced roots fairly quickly (a week or two, I believe) but didn't put out any leaves for at least a month.

One of the two radishes is doing well.  It produced new leaves quickly, followed by root growth.  The other radish reportedly turned to goo within a week and was thrown out.

Only one of the two turnips is shown, though both turnip tops produced leaves and then roots.  The turnip shown quickly sent out lots of leaves and roots, followed by a tall stalk that now has small flowers at the top.  After two months some of the leaves it first produced started dying.

The beets needed to be watched closely.  For the first month they tended to leech red pigment into their water and grow a slime where they contacted the water.  This was regularly rinsed off.  The beet shown sent out leaves within a week followed by roots soon after.  The other beet grew leaves just as fast but didn't produce any roots until two months later.

While these results demonstrate that the discarded tops of root vegetables can grow new leaves and roots, they do not yet show that they are capable of regrowing the tap root that we would like to harvest (aside from the possibility of eating the turnip and beet greens).  Will these carrots ever produce a new carrot?  I don't know yet.

Other questions remain also.  Will the vegetable tops root in soil in addition to water?  What other vegetables can grow this way?  I have read that onions can be grown in a similar way from their discarded bottom ends.  I also remember reading somewhere that lettuce can grow again from their root ends.  Pineapples can supposedly be grown from their discarded tops, though I've never had any luck with this.  Avocados pits can, famously, be sprouted in a glass of water.  What other grocery store produce can yield good seed?



*On a side note, if anyone can remember the title of that book, I would love to know.  I remember it being illustrated in a style similar to P.D. Eastman, if that helps.