It’s still early days so we haven’t had a lot of seedlings. Radishes, certainly. And the sets we put out are firming up nicely.
It’s worth discussing a few entries.
We’re putting in corn this year. We haven’t planted corn for some time. We like Bloody Butcher as a variety of hard corn. It has a meaty flavor when we make corn breads or other corn based meals. It also grows to eight feet tall with big ears. Bloody Butcher is more of a statement than many other varieties.
We’re also trying the three sisters method as we saw it practiced by a few Native Americans on some videos we saw. In the past, we grew in rows. This year we’re trying small groupings interspersed with squash. We will likely add in some beans but we haven’t decided what. We have four squash planted: a pumpkin, spaghetti, a butternut, and a cushaw.
We tried cushaw squash and very much liked it. We only got a single fruit but it was huge. It tastes well and gave good seeds so we saved them and planted them this year.
We went all in on carrots this year: Atomic Red, Danvers, Yellowstone, and Dragon. I like red carrots. We’re also going to try a very large carrot from Japan known as Manpukuji. These carrots grow as long as five feet. We planted them in the very deepest part of the new garden. We don’t expect five feet—the soil just isn’t that deep. But it might be a fun experiment. It’s a 120 day carrot so we don’t have high expectations.
We also have another couple of code tolerant carrot varieties that we’ll be planting later in the summer to harvest in the fall.
We’re going to try sugar beets again this year. I put them in a fairly deep area of the garden with the hope they’ll grow better. I’m still figuring out how get at the sugar in the sugar beets in a home garden sort of way. We’ll see how that goes.
We went in hard on radishes, too. We planted four varieties: French Breakfast, Sora OG, Cherry Belle, and Round Black. I like radishes. Sue me.
The final experiment we’re trying in the main garden this year is gungo or pigeon peas.
These are a perennial pea in many of the areas where it’s grown. That, unfortunately, is not an option for us. We could possibly grow it year round in the green house but there is always a winter pollination problem. Regardless, we’re trying it in the main garden first.
These peas are small—say, half the size of a regular pea. They don’t like overwatering or cold—again, this is a “we’ll see” sort of planting. Usually, with peas or beans, one soaks them first and then plants them. I’m not really sure that’s the right thing to do here but we did it anyway. It’s supposedly a quite prolific.
Pigeon peas and regular peas are both members of family Fabaceae, but different genuses. Pigeon peas are genus Cajanus and regular peas are genus Lathyrus. Pigeon peas are a perennial—often grown as a short lived shrub. I did read it can be grown as an annual but I’m not sure if that’s really viable. If we get germination, we may end up putting it in a pot—something I also understand is definitely viable. We could pollinate by hand. If it was good enough for Mendel, it’s likely good enough for us.
This is a good thing.
It’s been our intent to grow as much of our own food as possible. The original idea is that this way we know the content of our food as well as what varieties. There are environmental ideas as well—food we grow and preserve don’t make CO2 the same way as buying produce and other things. That said, we still go to the grocery store so maybe it’s just a wash.
But we’ve been seeing a lot of stories on food insecurity lately. It’s not only because of Orange Voldemort’s war (See here and here.) and his policies (See here, here, and here) but those on the margins are being forced into hardship just by the rise in costs.
There have been some ongoing food issues we’ve been concerned about for some time. Rising drought problems in areas that depend on fossil aquifers is one. The way industrial farm practices seem to innately ruin the soil where they used—causing an increase in those same destructive farm practices. But it has seemed that those issues were far enough ahead of us we might be able to prepare for them.
We didn’t expect to have a president that would destroy those mechanisms of government that might execute that preparation or create a world economic situation that would bring those issues home immediately. We were thinking we would suffer benign neglect rather than malicious malfeasance.
But, at least, more people are gardening.
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