Garlic tucked in

Or, "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." :)

Last spring I potted up some garlic cloves that had sprouted, which grew up nicely inside my apartment and then yielded these lovely little marble-sized garlic bulblets after the leaves had died. I wasn't sure what I would do with them.

I thought vaguely of planting them outside, but a previous attempt at planting sprouting garlic cloves outside last fall yielded nothing but rotten cloves in the spring. Not encouraging.

But hope springs eternal and all of that, so after my bulblets started sprouting this week, I stuck 'em in the ground. Let's hope good things happen!

By the way, Eating Niagara also has an interesting four-part video series on attempting to grow garlic indoors.

Growing Pains: Growing Garlic Indoors part 1
Growing Pains: Growing Garlic Indoors part 2
Growing Pains: Growing Garlic Indoors part 3
Growing Pains: Growing Garlic Indoors part 4

Sad Trombone: Sick Tomatoes

It's been pretty cloudy and rainy since the end of July, and with the tomato plants already a bit stressed from bearing fruit, some nasty surprises have shown up: I have early blight on my White Queen and Red Pear tomatoes, and a fungal disease and possibly an unidentified something else on my Beefsteak plant.

Early blight on White Queen and Red Pear tomatoes.

Something fungal & something else on Beefsteak tomato.

White, fuzzy spots that you can rub off = fungal to me.

Not sure if this is the end result of fungus, or something else.

Since I think the plants have set all the fruit that's going to appear, and most of them have only to ripen before I harvest, I've been pruning aggressively and hoping that the remaining leaves are enough to sustain the plants until all the fruit is good. With early blight, there's nothing that can be done anyway. Still, the plants look silly with 80% of their foliage gone.

I think that having the three plants so closely spaced together contributed to how quickly they got sick. I definitely could have pruned more aggressively before they became diseased to increase air circulation as well.

I am very pleased with how prolific the Beefsteak plant was, and the tomatoes it produce were definitely the right blend of acidity, sweetness, and sliceability for me. Even though I still have seed that I have saved last year, I will definitely be saving seeds from this year's harvest to add to my stash.

I wasn't expecting such small tomatoes from the Red Pear; they're cherry-sized and Roma-shaped. I was expecting full-sized Roma-style tomatoes. Still, the taste and texture was definitely that of a paste tomato. Despite how prolific it was, I won't be planting these again as cherry-sized paste tomatoes is kind of weird to me.

White Queen was a big disappointment. Tomatoes were a very pale yellow, although they showed a little pink and even red wherever there was a stress point on the fruit (i.e., a lesion or split). They are slicer-type tomatoes, with very weak acidity and sweetness. The plant did not produce very well at all, and the tomatoes tended to split easily. Wimpy taste plus wimpy production equals a plant unsuitable for a balcony.

Red Pears at 1 o'clock, with the rest Beefsteak and White Queens.

First tomato!

Hard to believe that my beefsteak tomato plant looked like this four short months ago.

And started yielding fruit three months later

That swelled and blushed in the sweet July sunshine

And today yielded lunch!

Mystery solved

Just for fun last fall, I collected a bunch of seed from various unidentified plants around the neighbourhood (here and here) and wintersowed them with the idea of eventually identifying them when they flowered.

The first ID of the season is Velvetleaf (Abutilon theophrastii), a member of the mallow family. As you might have guessed, the plant has velvety leaves, large and heart-shaped, alternate, growing from a single (velvety) stalk. They can grow very tall (up to 7 feet), but thankfully mine have remained a manageable 2½ feet. They're still completely out of proportion for the scale of my balcony, but the tactile quality of the plant means they'll be sticking around until the end of the season.

Velvety, palm-sized leaf.

Two velvetleaf plants, one bigger, one smaller.

The cool-looking "king's crown" seed pods are what motivated me to collect the seeds. I had a 20% germination rate with mine, but germination can be erratic, and the seeds can persist for a very long time in the soil.

Dried velvetleaf seed pods. By Boby Dimitrov on flickr.

According to Wikipedia, an alternate name for Velvetleaf is China Jute, hinting at the useful quality of the plant's fibres. Portions of the plant are also edible; I may give this a go later on in the season. It is, however, considered a weed in this part of the world.

Here's some more useful information about the plant from the Illinois Wildflowers site..

Balcony o' Bugs: Oh sh*t edition

So, I found these creepy-crawlies on my budding shasta daisies today. Do they look like aphids to you? How can I get rid of them (organically)?

Weeds of the Balcony, Not-Quite-Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day Edition

Inspired by this tweet, not quite in time for Wordless Wednesday or Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, here it is, the "weed" that's been enchanting me these past couple of days: Willowherb (Epilobium, genus that includes Fireweed).

I only noticed it when its tiny, pink flowers started opening this past weekend. Each flower is less than 1/4" across, with four bilobed petals. They're arranged in racemes, on long-ish opposite pedicels that emerge from leaf axils.

I think the flowers may be opening and closing in response to how much sun there is. It looks like there are four stamens in each flower, but they're too tiny to see with the naked eye and my pseudo-macro photography-fu is failing me.

Leaves are opposite, dentate with short, short petioles at less than 1/8" long. Lower on the plant, branches appear to emerge from leaf axils.I guess they'd be called suckers if you were talking about tomato plants.

I've yet to figure out the species. It is well-behaved (so far) and quite small at no more than 9 inches tall. Some species of Epilobium can be weedy apparently, propagating abundantly via rhizomes and/or fluffy seeds.

Pulsatilla update

Here's a couple of Pulsatilla species that I sowed indoors around March 26th. They were transplanted into the cedar planter that I built in late May, and are still quite small (the second true leaves only developed after the transplant). That's a Canadian dime (same size as an American 10c piece) in the pictures for scale.

Pulsatilla campanella

Pulsatilla pratensis subsp. nigricans

Ink and Penstemon and I are having an informal grow-along. She reports that her black pasque flower is also still quite small, and that there's quite a long way to go before flowers can be expected. Hopefully they will survive to see that day. Year one, I suppose, is devoted to growing out those spindly roots.

The prairie crocus (Pulsatilla patens) seedlings that grew up with these guys didn't make it through the hardening-off process, but a seedling did appear May 30 in the wintersown pots, so there's hope yet.

Wintersowing 2011 Wrapup: What worked and lessons learned

In January and February, I set out a series of recycled plastic water containers filled with potting soil and sown with seed that could undergo or absolutely required cold stratification. I did a tally the other day to see how my wintersowing experiment went.

I was disappointed. Some seed performed excellently and a few did OK. But overall, most seeds had very poor germination rates (20% or less) or failed to germinate at all. I was shocked at the no-shows from what I would have thought were surefire wintersowing successes like the New England Aster and two of the three Asclepias species.

Wild chicory, one of the rare seeds liked wintersowing

It's possible that one contributing factor is the unusually wet and cold spring we have had; I read Monday that Montréal experienced double the average precepitation for this time of year. As a consequence, the potting soil was wet for prolonged periods of time and a lot of the containers became green with moss or (what is possibly) algae. I can see how the plants preferring quicker drainage would be unhappy.

Mossy!

Another possibility is seed source. All of the alpines were from Rocky Mountain Rare Plants' (RMRP) going out of business sale. None of them have been great performers wintersown or under lights (but worse when wintersown), despite many of them sold as easy 70°F germinators.

Amusingly enough, a few of the ungerminated pots surprised me with sprouts Monday morning when I went  to throw them out. This convinced me enough to keep some of the other containers with no apparent germination around for a little longer (**).

Would I repeat the experience? I'm not sure.

I would definitely plan better if I did it again. I struggled to find somewhere to plant the abundance from the excellent performers. The early emergence of the spinach and bok choy in April caught me completely off guard -- they bolted before I could get them in the ground as it were.

Happy bok choy, spinach, red orach

I would probably make up a custom, soilless mix rather than bagged el-cheapo potting mix to better control drainage and unwanted fungus / moss / algal growth. When it became clear that my containers were waterlogged, I found it difficult to add drainage with it already full of medium; it would be far easier to tape over extra drainage holes to reduce drainage than to make new ones.

But mostly, the large number of poor performers tempered any joy I had from seeing the other sprouts emerge even though I know that some of these might be hard to germinate under any circumstances.

The one huge benefit to wintersowing is virtually eliminating the need to harden off the little guys since they were exposed to the sun's deadly rays from the beginning (the containers were uncapped). I've managed to kill off or damage a not insignificant amount of seedlings grown under lights while hardening them off (and, it seems, the more precious the seedling to me, the more likely it would die a quick UV death) this spring. I've had zero deaths from hardening off in the wintersown bunch. To be extra cautious, I let them acclimatize to the elements for a couple of days by removing the duck tape keeping them shut, and then cut off the top of the containers altogether.

WINTERSOWING 2011 RESULTS (full spreadsheet here)
Excellent (80-100% germination)
Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia)
Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm')
Shasta Daisy (Leucanthemum × superbum 'Alaska')
Blanket flower (Gaillardia × grandiflora 'Goblin')
Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) *
Rampion (Campanula rapunculus)
Chicory (Cichorium intybus)
An aster of some kind (100-0670) *
Spinach (Spinacia oleracea)
Bok choy (Brassica rapa chinensis)
Red orach (Atriplex hortensis)

OK (50-79% germination)
Mystery peanut pod seeds (100-1046) *
Prairie gayfeather (Liatris spicata)

Poor (1-49% germination)
Echinacea (Echinacea purpurea)
Mystery flower pod (100-0660) *
Prairie crocus (Pulsatilla patens) (RMRP) ***
Black pasque flower (Pulsatilla pratensis subsp. nigricans) (RMRP) ***
Pulsatilla campanella (RMRP) ***
Teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris) *
Blackberry lily (Belamcanda chinensis)
Caucasian Bellflower (Campanula bellidifolia) (RMRP)
Gunnison's mariposa lily (Calochortus gunnisonii) (RMRP)
Avery peak twinpod (Physaria alpina) (RMRP)
Tibetan blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia) ***

Failed to germinate
Alp lily (Lloydia serotina) (RMRP) **
Alpine kittentail (Besseya alpina) (RMRP) **
Stemless gentian (Gentiana acaulis) (RMRP) **
Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)
New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)
Blue Queen salvia (Salvia × superba)
Prairie coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) **
Bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) **
Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)

* Personally wild-collected
** Second chance
*** Provisional pending ID of seedling (is it a weed lookalike or not?)

Backyard wilderness

I snapped a few more pictures of the patch of mystery-could-be-anemones down by the compost heap earlier this afternoon. It looks like the plants are getting ready to flower.

Next to the maybe-anemone patch, I also spotted a few of the lovely violas that have been gently rampaging around the front yards (such as they are) in the neighbourhood. My landlord will inevitably mow them down, and I would dearly love to see them next spring in my big cedar planters. What's the best way to move one or two of them upstairs? Alternately, what do the mature seed heads look like?

Mystery compost heap neighbour

Trouble in the compost heap? Mine seems to be full of fruit flies and sprouts this week, but it doesn't appear to be turning things into compost very quickly these days. I blame it on the cold and drizzly weather, but I secretly wonder if something's gone wrong. Maybe it needs a good aerating mixing.

I must've done something right in the past though, since the whole area around the heap is a lush, dense sea of these leaves growing 6" off the ground. No flowers that I can see. I wonder what they are.

Front

Back

Edit: Preliminary guess due to a complete fluke while browsing OntarioWeeds.com is that it’s Anemone canadensis, so it should be flowering soon.

Snowdrop and winter aconite mystery, more planting out

I had planted snowdrop bulbs and winter aconite corms in cedar planter #2 last fall in hopes of seeing a nice display this spring, but the thaw has come and gone I saw nothing but weeds emerge from the soil.

Curiousity got the better of me today and I dug up the contents of the planter only to find that the corms were still bare, hard little marbles, and the bulbs were mushy with no signs of shoots or roots.

I’m not sure why neither bulb nor corm got established, although I strongly suspect that the medium was perhaps a little too heavy for their liking and what roots they did send out in the fall rotted off. Or perhaps it was too cold for them to overwinter in a balcony container, despite mulching them amply.

I have way too many veggie starts for the amount of available planters on my back balcony, so I planted out the remainder of the kale, broccoli, and bok choi in cedar planter #2 after digging in 1/3 cup of dried chicken manure.

I don’t recall what I put in the planter as substrate, but when these veggies mature, I’ll probably end up amending the medium with lots of perlite to lighten it up.

Planting out in the back balcony

The vegetable seedlings hardening off on the front balcony have been getting unreasonably large in their solo cups over the past couple of weeks while I’ve procrastinated on planting them out. I finally went to the Home Despot this morning to gather the necessary supplies.

Each container was filled with Berger BM-1 all-purpose mix (suprisingly cheaper per unit volume than Miracle Gro potting mix) and amended with vermiculite (~ 4 litres for the big containers) and dolomitic lime (~2 cups for the big containers). 1/3 cups of dehydrated chicken manure was mixed into the top 6 inches or so of the mix.

The containers seemed huge when I picked them up through Freecycle, but now that they've been planted, they all seem a little crowded. There's four broccolis (two each of Di Cicco and Purple Peacock) in the 16" container on the left; a bok choi, two Red Russian kales, and a Wakefield cabbage in the middle 19" container; and an orach, a collard, and a Dino kale in the 12" container on the right.

Between the fancy new medium that I made, the crowding, the lack of sun on the balcony (it probably gets 3 or 4 hours of morning sun), and the squirrels and neighbour’s rat-dog that live back there, I’m not sure how the veggies will do. I’m hopeful, though.

I was going to plant out the spinach too - I eat lots and it's the primary reason for this veggie patch - but upon closer inspection, it appears that all of my starts have bolted already. I'm not sure why this would be since it's been cool and wet for most of the spring. Could it be because they are a little rootbound?

Moonflower craziness, seedlings + lithops

I don't know why I was so shocked yesterday when I saw that my moonflower seeds had exploded into growth only 4 short days after planting given what happened last time but I was. This time around, I think I got the moisture level right because there's no white mold. Hopefully, they don't turn purple or get eaten by bugs.

Moonflower top growth

Moonflower bottom growth

Speaking of getting eaten by bugs, here's what nice and healthy bug-free bok choy looks like. Beautiful, isn't it?

In fact, all of my second generation (for 2011) seedlings are pretty healthy looking, although some of the older parts of the stems growth on the orachs and brassicas look a little skinny and weak compared to the newer growth (i.e., thinner at the bottom of the stem than at the top). The transition between skinny and fat at the node where the seed leaves grew from. This could probably be corrected by growing them next time at lower temperatures and with the lights a bit closer after germination.

Second gen seedlings 2011

Di Cicco Broccoli

Red orach

Orach

As for my lithops, they all seem to be doing interesting things. There are nice plump lithops and then there are wrinkly-looking guys. Some are changing colours, others are retreating into the ground, and yet others ... are they supposed to look like that?

Is this normal?