No more cases of damping off since Wes has added the fan for me. Many plants were ready for watering! So I think the fan is helping dry things out.
Plant window ventilation
Loofah processing continues
Great progress has been made.
Loofah processing
Wes has been cleaning and bleaching the loofahs and has put them out to dry in the yard on a string.
Notes to self on growing mustard greens
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!
Airflow to prevent damping off?
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.
Damping off fungus attacks
Well we are having some damping off fungus in the plant window. Lost the only surviving tommy toe tomato seedling and a lot of onion seedlings are falling over. I had hoped we left enough air circulation despite our cat blocking plexiglass but apparently not. The chef is looking into tiny fans to put there. I’ll have to start another tommy toe too.
Anybody need any loofah gourd seeds?
Wes and Paula cleaned off last year’s loofah gourd harvest. We have almost two pounds of seeds. That is almost a kilogram for our science readers. Wes was annoyed we did not get tare for the bag but it’s a very light bag, and I didn’t want seeds everywhere. Let me know if you want seeds. We might be able to supply you…
Wes has some sort of plan for the loofahs themselves. There is a whole rubbermaid tub full of those. This is from maybe half a dozen plants.
Mulching the peach tree
Paula came over this afternoon for a masked visit outside. We put down cardboard around the new peach tree and covered it with cedar mulch.
Data visualization for garden borders
The household welder/chef has begun the process of edging the garden perimeter (Figure 1).
Learning about the best parsnip planting times
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.
I also read everywhere about parsnip seeds that they do not keep well. Mine are going on two years old now so I put a lot out to make up for potentially poor germination rates.