Successful gardening is necessarily an uneasy balance between being both nurturing, and ruthless. I often have volunteers which pop up in inconvenient locations, but end up modifying the garden plan around them. I have the deepest respect for any plant with enough tenacity to survive my winters.
After reading this I'll now be checking to see if they sprout every couple hours, lol.
This is why I always wind up with waaaay too many plants by June. Thankfully a few neighbours now regularly pop by in early June looking for extras, for both themselves and thier family members that garden. It's painful to throw perfectly healthy starts right into the compost heap, and why occasionally I have beans growing among the perennial flowers..
I see a lowland OP rice being offered in a seed catalogue here called 'Akamuro'. Apparently it has a wonderful smell, ripens to dark orange and can mature from transplants in zone 4. Has anyone grown this rice, or any of the dryland rices? I'm wondering if it's a worthwhile crop to try. Some descriptions say 30-50 stems (tillers) per plant and each stem will make about 100 grains. That alone seems to suggest production would be good.
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'Duborskian' rice is also available and that seems a popular variety as it is often sold out. Birds would probably be a problem tho for any kind of grain....
Blue Grey Speckled Tepary beans also look interesting. I've never grown any tepary beans. Autumn here can be wet though, and they like it dry it seems, especially near the end of their life cycle, so I wonder if a few plants in the greenhouse would work?
There is an unusual pepper that is new out there too, 'Rezha Macedonian'. Looks like it might be good for drying as it 'grows' dry anyway. Not much juice in the flesh with all the striations.
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In an effort to up my legume (SHTF) seed stocks I'm going to dedicate most of my garden to beans and peas again, with a few other things thrown in there too. It's really too bad only one corn at a time can be grown since there is a really pretty 'Floriani Flint' & 'a Dakota Black' corn available right now that I'd like to buy. The only vegetable I can think of which is made 100% of seeds! But I already have too many corn seed packets that have been bought and await growing.
@ducks4you I forgot to mention this at harvest time, but you were totally right about the corn and bean situation. I forgot to pull out my bean plants from the corn patch (they were only semi-runners too, not even pole) and by the time I noticed, the corn was taller and spaced pretty close so I didn't want to trample around. What a mess that turned out to be. The corn needed to be pulled before the beans were dry, the beans were pulling some of the corn plants down and when I harvested the cobs all the bean seeds were destroyed because they were so tangled up in there. Lesson learned!
@jbosmith sad news, Tatiana's Tomatobase was affected by the floods in BC so she won't be offering any tomato seeds again this year.
I grew it last year. They are very slow to grow, doing not much till it's good and hot out. Then they take off and make up for lost time. The flowers are lovely.There is a thread about those on another forum, and because I was interested, I made some inquiries. BC is taking a lot of creative license calling that a bean, because it is a gourd. Apparently a long-season one too. Doesn't mean it's not possible (I'm encouraged by my success with luffa this year) but consider the cost of the seed & the room it will require,. Perhaps not worth trying if space is limited, or could best be used for something more productive.
I gotta admit that I'm still tempted to try growing it; but unless I can find culinary advice, not sure how I'd use it (or if I should). Even the luffas were not very productive; but my Filipino friends treated them like gold. There is a particular soup for which no other gourd will do. Me, I really like the sponges.
Wow! Legos have come a long way! Your daughter has a good eye for arrangement.
It's a lego kit, so there is instructions for assembly for the pot and greenery. Amazingly though, the flowers are totally arrangeable however you like. When she completes the other botanical lego kit Santa got her, a pot of succulents and cacti in various colors, I'll post a pic too. It's incredible the accuracy they are trying to convey with the designs. My son got a Roman Colosseum lego kit, it's pretty neat too.
