Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway had a lot of useful tidbits I hadn’t found elsewhere, such as soil temperatures for germinating (the Johnny’s seed catalog seems to have air temperature? or so I assume, as it’s not specified) and some sections on mustard greens and bok choy. I have added it to my spreadsheet of useful books.
For those interested in cooking (aka not me anymore), it also had a lot of recipes and talked about eating parts of plants that aren’t usually discussed, like radish seed pods and various flowers of vegetables.
I am on a garden-book-reading spree it seems. I just finished The Beautiful Edible Garden (got it as an ebook from Pioneer Library Systems, our local public library). It had a lot of suggestions on how to arrange edible plants into an existing decorative garden. Mostly not relevant to how we have the yard laid out, but probably helpful for others. They did recommend a three-group crop rotation of brassicas, legumes, and nightshades, and ignoring herbs, lettuce, and alliums. So that was similar to The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible which I read a few weeks ago and liked.
Some guest plants are departing, so the Salviagreggii cuttings are moving into the plant window where it’s safer from the cat.
The extremely innocent young cat who definitely did not nibble and step on several seedlings causing the current fortification of the plant window and abandonment of the table as a plant staging area. It looks like two or three of the five cuttings have “taken”, based on the new growth.
Paula and I were going to plant things tomorrow, but it’s looking quite chilly. It’s just gorgeous out right now. So we spent a half an hour or so and got two kinds of onions (yellow granex and white granex) from sets in the beds, two kinds of potatoes in containers (experimenting with burlap sacks, potting soil bag, and cardboard boxes to make hilling them easier to get more potatoes), and seeds of French breakfast radish, green wave mustard, and Oregon sugar pod II pea. The peas we already have a few little vines of but I figured another round wouldn’t hurt to replace some since they blanch and freeze well if we get a lot.
White granex onions with some moss curled parsley from last year.Yellow granex bulb onions with some cabbage and chard from last year.Paula had the excellent idea to show the Yukon gold potato (burlap sacks/top) and Kennebec white potato (box and plastic bag) with their planters. We’re having a big freeze forecast for next week, so I only used half of the seed potatoes in case these die. (Also, I ran out of containers for now.) I am putting potatoes in containers to make them easier to hill dirt around, and also because crop rotation when all you plant is Solanaceae is very challenging.Briar says it was good sleepy sunshine to supervise in. She was pleased.
Last time on parsnip news you can use: “My parsnips (“Harris model”) said on the package I could do either spring or fall planting. While researching whether this was true for Oklahoma, I came across a useful post on an Oklahoma gardening forum (expand the featured answer by “macmex” who is located north and east of us, in Talehquah in northeastern Oklahoma) It sounds like you CAN plant them in fall, but as a biennial, they may flower (“bolt”) in the spring before the roots are big enough to be useful. So, we’ll see what happens with my fall-planted ones, but I have just put out a row of them today and I will put out another row each week until the third week of February and see what happens to those.”
Parsnip seeds before burying. I put a lot because they go bad quickly and thus I might have low germination from these 2019 seeds.
I borrowed the ebook of Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway from the public library. So far the most useful factoid is that mustard green seeds can be planted when the soil temperature reaches 45°F. According to Oklahoma Mesonet we are there now. In the fall, the book says to plant when temperatures stay in the 70s in daytime. I assume that means air temperature. That may be a little harder but we can try!
Wes rigged up a small fan with power supply to pull air through the plant window. Fingers crossed it works! There’s always taking the baby plants in and out each day for sunshine but I’d really rather not. Because I’m lazy.
The small fan. You can see the plexiglass gap there and a larger gap is at the top, which you can see in the next picture. The cause of all this nonsense (Gram the cat) walks by the clamp I need to put back up to hold the plexiglass in place. Briar supervises.
