Tag Archives: urban gardening

Heat Wave Gardening

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The most important thing we’re trying to do in the summer garden is recover from the nine-day heat wave that has stressed or killed our project plants this year. It was an unusually dry winter here in Northern California, so soil moisture was already low moving into a dry and warmer than average spring. Shifting to an evening watering schedule has given the plants more time to recover before the heat of the day dries the soil.

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We are covering all the growing areas with straw mulch, even seed beds, and increasing the mulch until it’s several inches thick after plants are growing well. We are also testing out these Terra Cotta Aquacone Watering Devices from gardeners.com. I bury the terra cotta in the soil with only the top lip showing and upend bottles into them to help keep soil moisture where it is needed. Seems to be working well for these young Luffa starts.

Sweet Potato Vines

If you can tell which variety these are by the leaf shapes–please share!

One crop that seems perfectly happy with the weather is the sweet potatoes. Finally! The experts at Sand Hill Preservation Center say, “It takes about 1,200 heat units for our early varieties to reach a decent crop of usable sized roots…The question you must then ask yourself is, ‘How is 1,200 heat units determined?’ To get heat units you take the day’s high temperature (maximum) and the day’s low temperature (minimum) and add them together. Then divide by two and subtract 55 from that. That gives you the day’s heat units.” So, if our daily averages during the Heat Wave were at least 90 during the day and probably warmer than 60 at night, that gives us easily 20 heat units a day. Two months of that and we have a nice crop of delicious sweet potato pies! Of course, the heat wave did eventually break, but even so, if we stay at historical average temperatures for the rest of the summer, that still gives me plenty of time to enjoy sweet potatoes by fall.

Borlotto Beans

Another wonder of the heat is that we had beans drying down by the 4th of July. If I am very nice to the runner and Borlotto bean vines, we have time for a full second cropping of beans this year. I was so excited by this prospect that I started another dozen perennial bean vines just the other day. They should have plenty of time to get established by fall and then start cropping early next spring.

What helps your garden survive the heat? Share your ideas with us in the comments.

Hot Pepper Have-to-Haves

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The first of this year’s pepper seedlings has sprouted! It’s a Pizza pepper from several year-old Territorial Seeds meant for planting in 2009. After my recent trials with onions seeds, I was glad to see that these held their viability.

On February 15th, I planted six seeds each of  Pizza, Fish, Joe’s Long, Matchbox, and Chervena Chujski peppers. In a few weeks I’ll compare the germination rates and seedlings of the varieties.

Pizza peppers from this same pack of seeds did well for us in 2010, growing late into the fall and producing lots of thick-walled peppers with a little zip to them, but none of the sting some of our hotter peppers bring. I love these for fresh eating in dips, in salsa and in summer pasta dishes.

The Fish peppers grow on beautiful multi-colored plants and carry an irresistible  bit of heirloom history. William Woys Weaver, author of Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, says, “the Fish Pepper…was an African-American heirloom that began as a sport or mutation of a common serrano pepper sometime during the 1870’s…raised almost exclusively in the black community for use in oyster and crab houses…It was one of those “secret” ingredients favored by cooks and caterers to spike a recipe with invisible heat, for the Fish Pepper was used primarily when it was white, and it could be dried to retain that color. This feature was a culinary plus in the days when cream sauces reigned supreme.”

Fish peppers were prolific on very small plants through our unusually cool summer last year. The six seeds I have started came from Mike the Gardener, and I also plan to start a few more plants from saved seed to compare the fruits at harvest. I like these dried and ground into pepper flakes or powder and added to stews, chili, or barbecue sauces. I may even sneak one or two into the homemade ketchup recipe this year.

Another heirloom, Joe’s Long peppers, are listed as having came over from Italy with the Sestito family. My husband’s family is Italian and that gives me an excuse for lots of wonderful varieties I grow, including this one. Plus they look so darn cool. Check them out on the Bountiful Gardens website where I ordered my seeds. I’m looking forward to trying these fresh and also experimenting with them dried.

I’m planning to grow peppers in containers on the patio this year, a warm and protected spot they should like, and the Matchbox peppers are often recommended as a container variety. I received seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library in an Edible Garden gift basket during the holidays. I’m looking forward to the “sugary-hot” spiciness of these guys. I enjoy adding hints of sweetness to stir-fries, braises and sauces and plan to try these in chili as well. And I hope the plants will complement the colors of the Fish peppers I plan to have growing nearby.

The last pepper in this early batch is a sweet pepper, the Chervena Chujski from Landreth. I was tempted by this variety because it is supposed to be good for both fresh eating and roasting, which we love. Last year I could have used a whole lot more peppers that were good for roasting. I plan to try the Chervena Chujski grilled, hand-roasted over a gas burner, and smoked. If they are productive, I will also pickle some of them.

Which peppers will get space in your garden this year? I’d love to hear what you are growing and what you turn them into once they get to the kitchen!

Five New Beans

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Dried BeansMy mother-in-law can’t seem to stop herself from growing enough green beans for a small army, so I do the drying beans at my house. Mostly ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’ black beans, California Black-Eyed peas and a few colorful soup beans like ‘Jacob’s Gold’ and ‘Speckled Cranberry’. This year I’m also experimenting with some types of beans I’ve never grown before; ‘Scarlet Emperor’ beans, Four-Angled beans, also called Winged beans, Yard-Long beans which are also known as Snake beans or bora, both white and yellow Lima beans and tan Garbanzo beans.

Bush Beans growingWe’re using a number of different kinds of vertical supports for the beans, many of them homemade with bamboo. In Vertical Gardening Derek Fell reports that he’s able to harvest ten times more pods from his pole beans than their bush counterparts. Still, I couldn’t resist planting a bed of bush ‘Cannellini’ beans. We love ‘Cannellini’ beans but there just wasn’t a pole variety of them I wanted to try. I can substitute ‘White Emergo’ beans instead of the smaller ‘Cannellini’ in recipes, and they grow on big sturdy vines, so they will have to do for the pole variety this year.

Akahana Mame FlowersThe ‘Scarlet Emperor’ Runner beans have an 8′ arbor to climb, which I hear they will need. They were the first beans to germinate in the Dirt to Dinner garden this year. I planted a few of them on March 9th just to see how the ground temperature was doing and up they came! I guess there’s a reason they are so popular in England. I was attracted to the idea of growing a perennial bean plant but I’m also looking forward to their reportedly “showy” flowers, though we haven’t seen any yet. These gorgeous blossoms are from an ‘Akahana Mame’ growing on a teepee with ‘Louisiana Purple Pod’ and ‘French Climbing’ beans for effect.

'King of the Garden' Lima BeanThe Winged beans and the Yard-Long beans are planted on either side of an 8′ trellis with sesame plants growing through the center. Imagine an A-frame with garden netting hanging down on either side. One side of the netting gets ‘Four-Angle’ beans planted along half of it. The other side of the netting gets ‘Red Noodle’ planted on the opposite half. That way the sesame growing in between gets sun from both sides where the beans aren’t.  The last beans to go in are the Limas. They like warm soil, which is in short supply again this year. It takes several days for them to emerge from the soil and spread their wing-like seed leaves. I’m nervous a bird or bug or varmint will devour them before photosynthesis even begins but keep your fingers crossed for me. We’re trying ‘King of the Garden’ lima seed from both Baker Creek and Bountiful Gardens and ‘Golden’ Lima beans from Seed Savers Exchange. If you’re experimenting with new bean varieties in your garden this year, let us know what’s working well for you and how you’re growing them.