I noticed the front yard radishes had made a break for it, so I went ahead and cleared out everything but the garlic. These raised beds I put in in August aren't getting enough light to produce anything substantial anyway and they'll need to be moved.
Sowed August 21st in 100 degree heat.
Mostly Scarlet Nantes - a variety I'm over the moon for. They seem determined to live which is necessary in my garden. I also got a few purple carrots. I think these are Renee's Purple Sun, but who knows. These were extraordinarily tasty and I'm sorry I didn't get more of them.
I also cut a head of Renee's Blush Batavians lettuce, which has had truly shocking bolt resistance despite a few 85 degree days. Especially compared to my Joker lettuce, which bolted immediately and my Red Sails lettuce which is looking at me sideways. Everything went into a "things I have around" chicken Cesar salad.
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This house has ugly brown counters, an ugly brown dining room table, and a roommate who has recently taken up pottery so now we also eat off of ugly 10 pound brown slabs.
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They all also have bad spider mites, which seem indifferent to my various treatments. I've decided to recalibrate my thinking from "Why do I never get tomatoes?" to "Each tomato is a miracle."
Mites. Miracles.
I immediately ordered a 50lb bag of Neptune's Harvest with chitin and something called "Saponins of Quillaja Saponaria" which cannot be shipped to half the states in the union, but can somehow be shipped to California. I also stopped by OSH for a dozen packets of french marigold seeds which threw by the handful everywhere there was space. I'll turn it in like a cover crop when things need to go into the ground. Gardening is so relaxing!
Welcome to Harvest Mondays! Feel free to post whatever you can, whenever you can. Your salad sounds yummy, and we are having one tonight for dinner though the lettuce is not homegrown. Yuck on the mites and nematodes though. Mites are always tough to get rid of here, and they seem to particularly like my cucumber vines.
ReplyDeleteHeyo! Stoked to see you have a blog now. I remember you commenting on one of mine a while back and really wishing your name had a link to somewhere. Anywho, glad there's another salty angelino in the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteGreat post, great voice, great funny writing - love it.
Spidermites are miniature Supermans, hurt only by kryptonite and soapy water sprays, in my experience. And they start at the bottom of the plant and work up. By the time you see them on the tops leaves, you're in in trouble. 2tbs soap in 1 gallon of water. In theory, "potassium salts of fatty acids" or "potassium laurate" has to be the active ingredient in the soap, but I've used Method dish soap as well as that Dr. Bronners religion juice to the exact same effect. You gotta spray like every four days though at first and have jacked hand muscles, but if you've only got a few plants it's worth it. It will also kill some beneficials like spider mite destroyers and lacewing larvae, but won't bother ladybugs or any hard shelled buggos. I accidentally blasted a praying mantis straight in the face once, didn't even seem him, but after a bit of drunken wobbling, he seemed fine.
As for nematodes, I read somewhere you can also 'fumigate' them by crop rotating with certain brassicas, like mustard and even arugula if I recall. Might be worth looking into if you enjoy eating mustard greens anyway.(gag) I've also read you can grow sacrificial carrots right next to tomatoes, and the nematodes will go bananas for the carrots and leave the tomatoes alone. But in full disclosure, I've luckily not encountered nematodes yet, so I should probably just keep my trap shut. Keep us updated on how the marigold/god dirt works out!
That's good to know about the potassium salts. My mom told me to use dish soap and I tried to explain to her that dish soap is different now than it was in the 90s - like I use costco eco detergent. I can use it on my cast iron - and she insisted it would be fine. It was absolutely not fine. She also told me to use a ratio of ONE TO EIGHT PARTS. Unsurprisingly the mites did not even notice and my backyard immediately turned into a sorority car wash. We're going to be washed away on a tide of foam.
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