Plum tree blooming on April 6, a week or two later than usual.
2017 was a year that didn’t go according to plan, and thus
neither did this blog. However, I’m back to the blog now and intend to continue
making posts on an irregular basis. And that means it’s time to report on what
the garden told me in 2017.
I had expected to raise seedlings in February and March of
2017 for spring planting as I have in past years, but life had other plans. It’s
easy to find vegetable seedlings for sale if you don’t care about what
varieties you buy. I had to make do with what they had for sale, which for the most part did not
match what I wanted to grow.
The most important question I asked the garden to answer was how
much I could raise in 1,024 square feet of bed space. That includes 100 square
feet planted to strawberries and another 100 square feet planted to raspberries,
with the remainder in vegetable, root, and grain crops. Over the past few years
the area devoted to food crops grew larger than the amount of time I wanted to
spend on it, plus I grew more than we wanted of some crops. The 2017 garden
area was about half of the 2015 garden area. I also asked the blackeyed peas to
tell me if I could grow them on much less cottonseed meal (an organic source of
nitrogen) than I use for vegetable beds, and the pole green and yard-long beans if I
could grow them on no soil amendments at all, as part of my long-range goal to
reduce inputs I need to obtain from outside the yard. I also got a new
human-powered garden tool in 2017, a Hoss wheel hoe, that I hoped would make
some of the work of preparing and weeding garden beds easier on my body, and I
bought two bean towers to grow pole beans on.
The garden gate: the two panels at center left.
However, after I planted the lettuce seedlings, I again
found rabbits in the garden, eating the lettuce. We hadn’t had time to mulch
the brush pile; in fact, it had grown during the year. The rabbit resort
residents had figured out how to break into their dining hall. Chasing one of
them, I noted it leapt through the wide openings at the top of the fencing.
After pondering on the situation, I realized I had enough old fencing left to
turn it upside down and attach it to the existing fencing. The small openings
on the outer layer would then cover the large openings on the inner layer,
preventing rabbit access. With that change in place, the rabbits found other
food sources easier to access, and we ate lettuce, carrots, beets, and sweet
potatoes in 2017. Last autumn I finally hired a tree service company to shred
the rabbit resort and scattered seeds of native flowers where the resort had
been, to provide food and shelter for pollinators. I expect less rabbit
predation in 2018, though the cover afforded by the tall native plants may attract
more rabbits to the area near the vegetable garden in future years.
The 2017 growing season weather
As I’ve noted before, the highly variable nature of weather
in the US Midwest makes it a major factor in what my garden can provide. For
this reason, I’ll recap the weather and suggest how it affected the crops that
I grow.
Spring 2017 was warm and very wet. The last frost date,
March 16, was two to four weeks earlier than usual. I did not have my rain gage
out in early April, but the St. Louis NWS official station is only a few miles
away so it is a good proxy. It received 10.37 inches of rain in April, almost 4
inches above normal! April was warmer than normal as well. May also featured
above-normal rainfall of 6.7 inches and warmer than normal temperatures.
Seedlings planted in those months did very well, but seeds planted in the
wettest weeks rotted. Luckily conditions improved later in May and early June
when I planted the corn and bean seeds.
We received 2.8 inches of rain in June, 4.2 inches in July,
and 2.9 inches in August; between the rain and some supplemental watering,
moisture proved sufficient. June was a little warmer than normal, July much
warmer than normal, and August a little cooler than normal. The cooler weather
in August made it easy to get direct-seeded fall crops started. The heat and
humidity of July were hard on crops like peppers, cucumbers, and zucchinis but
other summer crops grew and produced well.
Autumn conditions turned quite dry, with only about
0.3 inches of rain in September, though we got close to normal rainfall in
October at 2.8 inches. While September started cool, with the morning low
already down to 48F on the 2nd, the second half of the month
featured an impressive heat wave to end the month at above-normal temperatures
overall. October was warmer than normal until about the last week, with the
growing season coming to an abrupt end on October 29 with a hard freeze of 25F.
The dryness and heat did not favor fall crops. I concentrated watering on the
tomatoes, leaving the fall greens, lettuce, and root crops at the mercy of the
heat and dryness.
The 2017 results
Despite my disappointment at not being able to grow some of
the varieties I wanted and the disruptions due to various aspects of life, it
was a good year. I harvested over 500 pounds of vegetables, roots, and dry
beans, about 33 pounds of dent corn, and 30 pounds of berries in the 1,024
square feet of fenced-in garden space, in total the best yield I’ve obtained.
The blackeyed peas did fine on reduced nitrogen, the pole beans did fine
without any amendments at all, and the wheel hoe proved its worth in reducing
the effort and time required to prepare beds and weed paths and beds with
widely-spaced crops.
I’ll discuss each crop briefly below. Following that is the
table of results for 2017, from which the crop vignettes are derived. The left
side of the table shows the crop, variety, date planted, and yield in pounds
per 100 square feet for the best previous year. The right side of the table
includes the same data for 2017 plus the area I planted and the weight I
harvested out of that area.
Potato onions, garlic,
and leeks: the aforementioned life conspired to prevent me from removing
the mulch on these crops till early April, about a month later than is ideal.
While the elephant garlic leaves grew through the top of the mulch, most of the
‘Inchelium Red’ garlic and potato onion leaves were unable to grow through the
mulch before they exhausted their food stores. As a result, the elephant garlic
yielded well but the other garlic and the potato onions yielded poorly. I ended
up with a lower weight of potato onions than I planted the previous autumn, not
exactly sustainable. Fearing that I would lose the ‘Inchelium Red’ crop
altogether, I purchased a new garlic variety, ‘Lorz Italian,’ to plant in fall
2017. As it turned out, I had enough ‘Inchelium Red’ to plant some of it as
well as the ‘Lorz Italian’ and elephant garlic for 2018. As for the leeks, the
blackeyed peas planted in the bed to their south flopped onto them in late
summer, killing some of the leeks and checking the growth of the rest. At least we got enough for two batches of leek-potato soup.
Bok choy: I
didn’t find seedlings for this crop at the nurseries I visited in the spring
and the seeds I direct-sowed failed to germinate, so I grew it only in the
autumn. Its low yield relative to the best year can be attributed to excessive heat and
dryness and no supplemental watering, and possibly also to some shading from
the corn crop in the next bed to the south. In addition, one of the four plants
I grew died before harvest.
Spring-planted
cabbage and broccoli: the broccoli planted at one plant per square foot
yielded over twice that planted at one plant per four square feet and beat the
previous best yield to boot. As for cabbage, the unlabeled but probably hybrid
variety I planted in 2017 failed to out-perform the heirloom ‘Golden Acre.’
Fall-planted cabbage
family leaves and roots: most of these were adversely affected by the hot,
dry weather, my not watering them, and perhaps excessive shading from the corn
plants in the next bed to the south of them. In addition, I neglected to thin
the direct-seeded root crops, which reduced their yields compared to the best
of previous years. In spite of the difficult conditions, the kale and arugula
yielded as well as the best previous fall-grown crops, while the mustard greens
yielded only about half of the best previous (a different variety, so that may
have had an effect).
Lettuce: I didn’t
find any seedlings of any of the varieties I like to grow for the spring crop,
instead choosing to buy an unlabeled frilly red lettuce. It didn’t yield that
well and we preferred the tastes of all the varieties I grow compared to the
red frilly variety. Surprisingly, since the heat and dryness of autumn killed
some of the seedlings after I planted them, enough survived to match the best
yields I’ve obtained previously.
Carrots and beets:
while the beets yielded a little better than the best previous yield, the ‘Danvers
126’ carrots suffered from poor seed germination due to too-old seed. The
‘Cosmic Purple’ was a free package from one of the seed companies I ordered
from, and its seeds germinated much better. It wasn’t a bad carrot, either.
Potatoes: both of
the two varieties I grew yielded well. I preferred the taste of ‘Yukon Gold.’
Cucumbers: I had
difficulty getting them to germinate in the excessively wet soil of early May.
When I finally got them to grow, they grew well enough until the heat wave of
July broke their spirits. But at least we got enough to enjoy fresh cucumbers and to make
some pickles.
Winter squash:
not only does ‘Burpee’s Butterbush’ taste as good as ‘Waltham Butternut,’ but
it yielded 2 1/2 times better and is a smaller, easier to manage vine. And for
the first time, I got several ‘Kakai’ pumpkins with mature hull-less seeds, the
feature I grow them for. All told I grew about ¾ pound of seeds, which I
roasted and eat as snacks.
Zucchini: we got
a decent yield of these, though like the cucumbers they didn’t care for the
excessive heat and humidity they experienced in July, the vines dying by the end
of the month.
Sweet potatoes:
‘Hernandez’ yields well and the voles left us most of the crop, but its vines
crawled through the two corn beds to its north, and it grew small tubers
into both of those two beds as well as the one I planted it into. We aren’t
fond enough of sweet potatoes to eat that many, and they require more effort to
harvest than any other crop, including potatoes. I won’t grow them again,
preferring to use that space for something we like better.
Sweet peppers:
despite the heat and humidity, ‘Better Belle’ yielded respectably and tasted
good as well. It appears to be a hybrid seed according to results from the
search I did on it, so I couldn’t save seeds from it if I could find them for
sale. Nor did it out-perform the best yield I’ve obtained from the ‘Italian
Frying’ seeds I’ve saved for years. ‘Gypsy,’ a pepper that I think was bred for
cooler summers, performed poorly in my garden. I didn’t grow any hot pepper
varieties in 2017.
Tomatoes: all
four of the varieties I grew yielded well. Oddly, the label on the ‘Arkansas
Traveler’ tomatoes I bought claimed them to be hybrids, while the seed
companies I buy the seeds from label them as open-pollinated, and I have saved
and re-grown those seeds myself. The tomatoes from the seedlings I bought
didn’t look quite the same as those I have grown in the past, nor did they seem
to taste quite as good, so it might be that there are two different tomatoes
out there with this name. If so, I prefer the heirloom version I’ve grown in
the past. ‘Cherokee Purple’ was every bit as tasty as Carol Deppe says it is,
and ‘Old German’ tasted good enough to grow again, plus its yellow fruits with
red stripes looked appealing next to the pink and purple fruits of the others. ‘San
Marzano’ is a widely available paste variety that yielded almost too well.
Pole beans and vining
cowpeas (aka yard-long beans): the bean towers proved their worth, as they made it easy for me to
find and pick the beans off the plants as they grew up the strings. I had
to drive a stake next to one tower and tie the tower to the stake to keep the
tower from leaning after strong winds pushed it partway over. I also planted the beans
earlier than in the past and was rewarded with higher yields despite not
amending the soil they grew in at all. I’ll keep growing them this way as long
as the yield holds out.
Cowpea/blackeyed pea:
the variety I grow is supposed to have short vines, but they seem rather long
to me, and the seed company I bought them from says the trade allowed the vine
length to increase. As noted in the entry on leeks, the vines crawled into
their bed, and also crawled up the raspberry canes on the other side. For all
that, I doubled my previous best yield, and this with very little added
nitrogen. Better growing conditions? Earlier planting? I don’t know enough to
say, but I’m in favor of it.
Dent corn: this
yielded almost twice as much as in 2016, perhaps in part due to being planted
earlier. This variety makes a good-flavored corn mush, so we can eat it for
breakfast instead of oatmeal. Good thing; it’ll take us awhile to get through
last year’s and this year’s crops.
