A Seed Saver's Garden

[flowerbug]

@heirloomgal i don't prune our tomato plants either. i figure the plant knows what it is doing much more than i will ever know so let it rip and so far we keep getting plenty of production.

 

[heirloomgal]

a few hours for a few hundred square feet once every few months is pretty low maintenance... if you don't have trees and want to do mulches on pathways you can get by with even less work but it still does end up needing work once in a while because organic mulches will decay and turn into humus and eventually support sprouting weeds so you will want to redo the pathway mulch or if you use gravel for the pathways that also will need to be cleaned sometimes as dirt and seeds get deposited in the pathways (birds, wind, rains, spills, people with muddy shoes who don't listen, dogs digging, moles, etc...).

the absolute least amount of garden effort is to live in a climax forest, but then you won't be able to grow full sun crops very well - there are always trade-offs.

If it's only every 2 or 3 months it's not so bad I guess, I just never weed for more than 15 minutes at a time with my hoe. Just a quick pass and I'm done, and with the hoe I actually really enjoy it. It feels like sweeping to me, not weeding. I almost finished thinning all the rest of the carrot rows today which is much like weeding really and, honestly, it was the most loathesome garden job I've done in awhile. WAY too fiddly. I was almost regretting having planted all the rows! So I guess the periwinkle will have to go. It's too bad because periwinkle is such a resilient and versatile plant, I even put some in the annual planters. But all those ground cover type plants seem to fill up with grasses and such in this yard.

 

[ducks4you]

Sometimes you just have to make peace with them. I have let the softer and easier to pull out grass come into my wildflower bed bc they are creating shade for the wildflower seedlings. They can be pulled later. I lost 1/2 the bed and had to reseed, so I won't be bothered by them.
I discovered this year that the weeds bring up nutrients in the soil. NOW, I know why I have always thrown them into the lawn--it helps the lawn to be fed, too.
I like the idea of mulching and I will be doing much more of it in the future bc 2 of my push mowers are also mulching mowers.

 

[heirloomgal]

I sampled the Hamburg parsley tonight - OH MY GOSH. Delicious! I can't believe how much flavor was in those little leaves, dare I say even better than parsley itself. More of a vegetable+ flavor. I am so going to grow this every year! I definitely did not plant enough. I can taste the soups of autumn already .

So, I was on a bit of a hydrangea craze last year. This was a perennial I've always wanted and never had, so I really went for it. The one PeeGee hydrangea (the only one I paid full price for) is the only one that died over the winter, probably because of it's next door neighbour the cedar. I bought it one year too early I guess, because now the cedar is gone. But all the others magically survived despite all being planted in October from a pot bound state (fall discounted plants). There wasn't many leaves on most of them so I just set them and let them. Right now is when I'm finally able to see the differences between them, there are so many kinds of hydrangea it's mindboggling. Various leaf types, I'm surprised they can all be so different and still actually all be hydrangeas. One of them with the tiny leaves has flowered a little already so it is the real deal. I was honestly thinking that there must have been some mix up, but no.

But as mix ups go, I'm crestfall that my new clematis is not what the tag said it would be. They lied. It's not that fluffy lavender blue poofy bloom that I've seen, it's the ordinary, single petaled dark purple. That is SUCH a pet peeve of mine when they sell you a plant and it isn't correctly labelled. I try always to buy the perennial in flower (like my new red peony) but with my 'red currant' bushes which turned out black (after 2 years of growing them!) sometimes you have to gamble. Drives me nuts though. I already have a dark purple clematis! Ugh!!!

 

[Decoy1]

Do you prune the tomatoes to one stem only?

Yes, one stem. As you say, you’re growing for maximum seed yield. Tomatoes are very generous with their seeds of course.
It would be interesting, though, to compare yields from the two methods. Grown on one stem, they can achieve a considerable height, eight or nine feet in some cases I’m guessing, and often with long trusses of fruit hanging down.
It’s the method Charles Dowding and many English growers follow, and he, of course, is growing for maximum marketable yield.
I imagine that because tomatoes are very often grown in greenhouses and polytunnels here, this method suits as the plants can be both easily supported and also grown close together.

 

[heirloomgal]

Yes, one stem. As you say, you’re growing for maximum seed yield. Tomatoes are very generous with their seeds of course.
It would be interesting, though, to compare yields from the two methods. Grown on one stem, they can achieve a considerable height, eight or nine feet in some cases I’m guessing, and often with long trusses of fruit hanging down.
It’s the method Charles Dowding and many English growers follow, and he, of course, is growing for maximum marketable yield.
I imagine that because tomatoes are very often grown in greenhouses and polytunnels here, this method suits as the plants can be both easily supported and also grown close together.

Wow, 8 or 9 feet, that's quite tall. I can see how that would increase yields significantly!

 

[heirloomgal]

So impressed with this Russian variety. Can't believe how fast it put tomatoes on, despite the transplants being kinda neglected just before planting out. A keeper for an early indeed.

Given the heat and the rains we've been getting, the tomatoes have been happier (and bigger) than the average June tomatoes. I put all the dried bean vines of 2024 in the chipper last fall and everything got tilled into this bed, and it shows. The soil is much more nutritive this year. Bean detritus is garden gold.

The sunflowers facing the sun. Having some fun growing these after so many years without them.

Oh no! My collards are getting holes!!!The plants are so brittle from the rain I can't even inspect them right now for worms without snapping leaves. Darn crucifers.

New pea for this year. I'll need to translate this name I think, because I will NEVER remember how to spell this. lol I checked, it translates to '6 Weeks' in Polish. Thank you google translate.

More adventures in unethical plant selling. I bought a large cell pack of peas in May, only because it's a variety I'd like to have and not seen it available nearby. Until now. It was almost $6 for a lg. 6 cell pack, too much, but to get the seeds I spent it. And low and behold I put them in the sun, they burned up. They'd never been hardened off! So much for 'ready to grow' transplants. I gave up on them, but after a couple weeks they seemed to come around somewhat despite the sunshock, so I clipped off most of what had died and let live what remained green and said let's see. It looks like I may get a few seeds afterall, not a complete washout. 'Ho Lan Dao', dwarf snow peas.

Snow Pea, 'Ho Lan Dow'

(P. sativum) Here’s a success of the NOVIC (Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Coalition) trialing project whose goal is, in part, to increase the availability of organic seed for varieties suited to organic production systems. In the 2013 Oregon pea trials, they threw in a couple of snow...

uprisingorganics.com

 

[Decoy1]

Wow, 8 or 9 feet, that's quite tall. I can see how that would increase yields significantly!

A photo of my tomato chaos just to illustrate the different methods. Sunviva, the tallest in the photo, is a strong grower and is already six feet tall at least, and still June when the photo was taken.