New USDA planting map: A few cautions

Whoa everybody! Let’s just step back a sec and take a deep breath.

The US Department of Agriculture revised its zone hardiness map for the first time since 1990. Our area’s “promotion” into Zone 6 from Zone 5 has brought some here to the brink of hysteria.

“Welcome to the warmer zone” reads the headline today in the Kansas City Star. “Gardeners, rejoice! New planting guide map opens up more choices of plants that usually thrive farther south.”

The story gets front page treatment and is illustrated with beautiful sprigs of crepe myrtle in all their pink-hued glory.

But let’s fight off the urge to run to the nearest garden center and take a hard look at what that really means.

The facts: The USDA Zone Hardiness map is mainly a guide for figuring out what plants can survive in the ground outside through the average winter. So it focuses on the coldest average winter lows. Our former designation in Zone 5 had the coldest expected lows at  minus 10 to minus 20. The new Zone 6 raises the expected low temperatures to zero to minus 10.

That change isn’t really news to anyone who has been watching the weather. It’s been 20 below maybe two or three times since we’ve lived here. In fact, any below-zero temperature draws a lot of attention, it’s so rare.

And–news flash–people have been trying and sometimes succeeding with Southern plants here for years. We’ve all seen the crepe myrtle, rhododendrons and the odd magnolia trees. The new zone map won’t make them any less difficult to grow here. It will take years of global warming to do that. Possibly. True, local nurseries may start carrying a few more warm weather varieties, but they’ve always been available from catalogs for anyone brave (or foolish) enough to try them.

Here are a couple of reasons for caution, before you begin digging the hole for that banana tree:

1.The Hardiness Zones are a one-dimensional guide for planting. But plants have a lot of other needs. Humidity, rainfall, shade, wind protection, soil pH. The west Texas panhandle and northern Alabama are both in Zone 7, but that doesn’t mean you can grow the same things equally well in both places.

Azaleas, for instance, will not stop needing moisture in the winter, no matter what zone they’re in. So growing them here is always going to be trickier than it would be in Virginia. A new zone designation won’t really change that.

And let’s not forget summer and spring highs. Tender berries and spinach don’t much like to see 90 degrees in May, and tomatoes won’t set fruit much past 90 either, as was well proved during last summer’s oppressive heat.

2.Snow matters, too. Snow cover actually insulates root systems against the extremes of cold. A mild winter with little snow followed by a cold snap can do more damage than predictably cold and snowy winters. Mild weather also encourages budding. And the zone change doesn’t mean there won’t be freakish cold snaps that will kill flowers and fruit. It was only five or six years ago that we had several nights of below zero in April.

3. Warm winters are not such good news for some plants that have grown well here in the past. What you gain in Southern flowering shrubs on one hand, you may lose in fruit trees on the other.

Apples come to mind. There’s a reason you don’t hear of massive apple orchards in the Bahamas. That’s because apples and other fruit trees need cold winter weather to promote spring growth. If they don’t get it, budding and fruiting will be weak. (Look here for more on fruit trees.)

4.I looked, but couldn’t find a comparable map for insect winter survival. (Hint, hint, USDA). But it only stands to reason that if different plants can now survive Kansas City winters, then different bugs will be landing here soon. Insects have special affinities for certain plants, and when those plants move north, you can expect to see the bugs come with them.

Fire ants, anyone?

Ok, ok. Get excited about the new zone map if you really must. It’s a great dream, I’ll concede that much. But Kansas City will always be Kansas City, no matter what the USDA says.

Posted by: Roxie

 

Changing my mind: Maybe it’s safe to go back to on-line seed catalogs

I was an early adopter of online shopping. When I Christmas shopped on the Internet for the first time, it was still new enough and messed up enough that I got $100 back from one toy purveyor because they were unprepared for so many Internet customers.

Same goes for garden catalogs. My first experience with seed catalog shopping on line was disastrous. The sites were hard to navigate and you couldn’t find anything easily. Then, when I had to call wondering where my order was, I was told that on-line orders actually take longer than if I’d sent it off at the post office.

That was years ago. I never touched another garden catalog web site, because I felt I just couldn’t risk it. You need your seeds and plants to get delivered on time. Nothing is so frustrating as a late order for things that need to be planted by a certain time.

Last year, though, it was my paper-and-pencil order that took forever. So this year, I decided to give on-line garden shopping another try.

And what a difference! I usually order from different catalogs each year, depending on what I need and price. This year I concentrated most of my ordering from R.H. Shumway.

This is a company whose paper catalog looks like it was mailed to you from the 1930s. It’s got gorgeous color illustrations of vegetables on the front cover suitable for decoupaging. Inside is plain paper stock that resembles newsprint, complete with old-timey font for the varieties. And line drawings of the veggies. In black and white. No photos anywhere. It practically screams Grampa!

But I’m telling you, they had the slickest, easiest to use web ordering site I’ve ever seen. Better than Amazon. Someone should get an award for it. Who would have guessed?

It’s easy and logical. Vegetable seeds are alphabetical. Then you choose what you want–beans, for example. Then you choose a sub category, bush beans for instance. And then up pops all the varieties of bush string beans.

That probably doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you try it on another catalog, like Park Seeds (where I also put in a smaller order of things Shumway didn’t have). At Park, the categories are bigger and you spend much more time just scrolling through the pictures.

Best of all, the Shumway site had a little box that totals your order as you go. It’s always visible. You don’t have to go off to another page or start the check-out process to keep track. And when you’re done, they give you a printout listing everything you ordered that’s easy to read and print.

One drawback to online ordering hasn’t changed, though. There’s still no button to click for “no substitutions.” Instead, a customer service rep advised me to write it in the box for gift messages, which I did at both Shumway and Park.

I called back the next day just to be sure they got the message. Shumway said it was noted. And Park?

“No substitutions comes up automatically on everything you order,” the customer service rep told me.

I guess all those years of frowny faces on the paper orders made an impression.

Posted by: Roxie

 

Time to start the garden

Happy Martin Luther King Day. The official start of gardening season 2012!

Well, maybe it isn’t for some people. Maybe there are a few early birds out there saying Hah! I already have my garden planned and the seed and plant order sent in. To these people, I doff my straw sun hat and click the heels of my heavy-duty boots.

I just find it convenient to use holidays as a gardening deadline calendar. St. Patrick’s Day is peas, potatoes and onions, Palm Sunday is spinach and perhaps beets and carrots, Mother’s Day is corn, cukes and squash.

And Martin Luther King Day is seed ordering time. Roughly.

I’ve spent the past two days deep under the catalogs, past ordering records and grid paper because 2012 promises to be a major change year for our garden.

You can’t really start a new gardening year without looking at what went wrong last year and what you need to change. And whoa…last year had plenty that needs fixing.

For instance, last year I came to the painful decision that the strawberries have been in the same location too long. I’ve done everything possible–pulled out older plants, added new soil, added new plants. But the bed barely gave us enough for breakfast berries last year.

So this spring, we’re adding 1-2 feet across the front, short end of the garden and starting with fresh strawberry plants. That will mean more work for Mike: Digging out the sod, changing the fencing. But instead of putting the old bed back to lawn, we’ll use it for another crop. Perhaps green beans.

Last year’s extreme heat was also horrible for tomatoes, and as a result, my pantry inventory of tomato products is shockingly low. So this year I’m cutting back on the space normally used for the vegetables that aren’t as popular in our house–eggplants, zucchini, etc. And we’re dialing way up on the tomatoes. I’ve got squares drawn in for 36 paste tomatoes and 12 slicers. Because of the weird wilt we had last year, they’ll be all new seeds and on the opposite sides of the garden from last time. They’ll also be my old proven winners, Roma and Celebrity. No experiments this year.

Likewise, I’ll be planting fewer onions and potatoes to make room for all those tomatoes. And I’m going back to Packman broccoli, Waltham butternut squash, Bright Lights chard and Alibi cucumber, which haven’t disappointed yet.

It’s hard to know how to play the weather. Last year it was punishingly hot for too long, and with today’s temperature starting out 34 degrees above normal at 8 am, it’s easy to be defeatist. But then, we’ve had many, many long hot summers since I’ve lived here. And these are the varieties that have served us well. Or as well as could be expected, anyway.

So time to hunker down. We’ll need to get those seeds back soon so we can begin the basement growing flats. Forget La Nina and global warming. This is going to be the best year yet.

Posted by: Roxie

PS. I may try on-line ordering again this year, instead of sending it snail mail. The first time I tried, on-line ordering was so new that the seed companies told me it would actually take longer to get my order. When I called today, they said that has been corrected. But there’s still no easy way to tell them not to substitute those seeds you spent two days picking out. R.H. Shumway’s customer service rep told me today that you have to put your “no substitutes” message in the box meant for a gift message, then call the next day to make sure they actually read it. Feh.

 

Not afraid to say it: We need winter

This is the time of year I just turn off the local weather stations. I just can’t stand all the political correctness.

No, it’s not a liberal vs. conservative issues, or even Democrat vs. Republican. The kind of PC speech I’m talking about in the Kansas City TV market involves snow. And cold. And winter weather.

Here it is in a nutshell: Warm weather good. Cold weather bad. Snow very bad.

Sure, you may get the occasional forecaster who grudgingly allows that there should be a little snow. At Christmas. “For the kids.” Once in a while maybe someone will say that they miss the wintertime. But then the other anchor will quickly step in and get the last word about the badness of snow, perhaps adding how dangerous and injurious winter storms can be.

It’s too bad. Because in being so politically correct, our local weather forecasters are missing an opportunity to show people why their job matters, and how the weather impacts us all, directly and indirectly.

From the Kansas City TV weather perspective, this winter has been GREAT! Only the tiniest hint of snow. Temperatures in the 50s in January, even.

And I won’t lie–I did enjoy the lower-than-average heating bill that came yesterday. But from a gardening perspective, warm winters are not such happy news. The plants and insects that live in our latitude have evolved for and expect winter. When we get spring temperatures in January, it sets the stage for a lot of heartache.

Fruit trees come to mind first. Keep the temperature high for long enough–and right now we’ve had a lot of 50s and some 60s punctuated only briefly by seasonable 30s–and you get premature buds. Unfortunately, we’ve lived here long enough to have seen some other Januaries where people wandered outside in shorts, and we know where it leads. No spring here ever starts in January. In March, when we expect it to be warmer, we’ll have a string of cold that kills all those early buds. And all hope of apples, cherries, pears, etc. for 2012 will be lost.

“A green Christmas, a white Easter,” as the saying goes.

Then, there are the bugs. Insect life cycles often include a dormant period to coincide with winter temperatures and lack of food. If we have spring all winter, that can mess things up. And if there’s one more thing I don’t need in the garden, it’s an unbalance in the harmful vs the beneficial insects. Or even an invasion from who-know-what-kind-of southern insects that usually can’t survive here.

Even a little snow cover can sometimes act as insulation against a brutal cold snap later on.

Our deck last year. Let we forget.

La Nina gets a lot of the blame for this year’s warm winter (as well as a drought in the Southwest). From the looks of it, La Nina is on its way out of here by early spring. And some colder weather is supposed to be on the way sooner, but not until Thursday. So there’s hope for all us un-PC winter lovers.

Posted by: Roxie

 

Do without horse manure? Neigh, not us

Horsesh*t!

With the presidential primaries only weeks away,  political horse manure is in no short supply. Neither is the real stuff all that scare, given the nature of the beasts that produce it.

But Roxie and I had been worried we wouldn’t lay claim this year to some horse manure for our garden before the ground froze. After all, we skipped last year’s application because of my sloth, and our yields suffered for it as we don’t use chemical fertilizers.

So once the winds settled and we were able to have our annual bonfire in the garden space, it was job to lay in a supply of natural fertilizer. That meant ringing up my long-time source, a friend of ours who allows people to keep horses in her pasture.

No luck. While horses still used the pasture, the practice of collecting all that manure and composting it behind the barn had ceased entirely after this woman’s husband had passed a couple of years ago. We could come out and take a look for ourselves, she said, which we did and found no trace of the manure mound I dug into two falls ago.

So I started calling stables, even offered a bounty on Craig’s List: $50 for anyone willing to deliver a pickup load of composed horse or cow manure to the vegetable paradise in Lenexa.

Why composted rather than fresh? Because you don’t want horse apples in your garden, if you can help it.

Reason No. 1: health concerns. Should the material not break down by spring, then you risk contaminating your spinach, lettuce and other crops close to the ground with ecoli and other bad stuff.

Reason No. 2, in our case, anyway: the big black dog would probably love to roll around in the stuff. Ick. And as we allow him to sit on the couch with us, double ick

Luckily, someone responding to the Craig’s List ad  suggested we try one of the large stables in southern Johnson County. Several phone calls later, it was time to rent a pickup and scoop up a couple of loads before the rain hit.

It wasn’t the same stuff we were used to, field  manure mixed with black dirt. What we got instead were stable sweepings, a mixture of manure and fine wood bedding that’s soaked up urine as well.

Is that a good thing? A couple of websites I’ve checked suggest that it is. Another says beware of stable sweepings that are heavy on wood shavings that haven’t been composted long enough.

I guess we’ll have to see. The stuff looks and smells …rich, I guess you’d say. And if it works out, we now have a guaranteed supply for as long as the stable stay in business.

Posted by: Mike

The droids they’ve been looking for

When we started gardening back in the ’80s, it was mainly a way to feed our family better, fresher and cheaper food than we could get at the grocery store. Add a little concern for the environment in there and that was basically it.

Who knew then that gardening would become the meeting point of so many big political and social issues? Farm subsidies, corporate control of the food supply, school lunch programs, city codes, you name it. If you garden enough to read about it much, you’re going to keep finding all kinds of connections. You come to expect them.

There is one connection I wasn’t prepared for, though.

Robots. Gardens and robots.

As I was looking around on Wired.com this weekend, I came across this story entitled, “These may be the Droids Farmers are Looking For.”

Farmers are looking for droids? I had no idea.

But then that’s because I come at gardening from the individual perspective. Part of the pleasure of it (in addition to beating back food corporations that want more of my money) is getting in touch with nature and Mother Earth and all those hippie sounding things. It seems to me you get into gardening to escape the droids that inhabit your office life.

Then I remembered all those teenage summers detasseling corn. How truckloads of high schoolers wearing garbage bags with holes cut out for the arms and head (to keep us dry from the dew) would plod through the mud in the suffocating airless heat amongst the  8-foot corn stalks, taking out every tassel in the “female” rows.  Just a few years later, I’d heard that most of the crews were replaced by machine detasselers.

Yeah. Farmers are looking for droids. Always have been.

In the Wired story, cute little robots grab potted shrubbery at a nursery and line them up a few feet away.  This is a back-breaking job that takes a lot of expensive manpower. Apparently, landscaping businesses and the stores that supply them have been trying for years to automate.

So I guess it’s no surprise, really, that robotics is a continuing interest when it comes to agriculture. Anything that will improve the bottom line in tough times is going to be pursued. And it brings in a bunch more uncomfortable issues. Fair pay and immigration policies, to name a couple.

I’m torn, though. I have to admit that I’ve always been a tiny bit comforted that certain aspects of farming have defied automation. I always thought of it as nature’s way of keeping us in our place.

Yet low-paying farm work is mind-numbingly hard. An eight-hour day detasseling or walking beans was exhausting. I couldn’t wait for the season to be over. And those are probably cushy farm jobs, compared to what else is out there.

Robot gardeners, wheeling up to plants and administering water and fertilizer like so many Roombas…Sure, it could be the future. But will the plants like it? Or will the corn grow better if a human being whispers into it’s ears?

I haven’t seen any science on that yet.

Posted by: Roxie

First frost: Just the beginning of the end for home gardens

Someone once said the difference between gardening and agriculture is that in  agriculture, you have to make a profit.

My grandparents were in agriculture. I am a gardener.

For gardeners, life sometimes gets in the way of that bushel basket of beautiful fresh-grown food.

Indeed, that’s how it’s been around here the past two weeks, as I’ve struggled to keep on top of  a 750-student piano, voice and music festival I ran for my music teachers’ group. Watching the garden and getting it ready for fall were the least of my concerns.

But now the festival is over (it went well, in case you’re curious) and there’s time to look around. Mike took up most of the slack, digging the sweet potatoes and tearing up the squash vines. I had just enough time to get the last green tomatoes and peppers out before the first expected frost.

It was 32 when we woke up this morning. Time for the garden to enter the sleepy phase.

I say sleepy because there’s still quite a lot happening. Tomatoes and basil are done, judging by how the leaves looked this morning. But the brave little kale that has been struggling against bugs and dry weather can outlast a mild frost. There still may be hope for baked kale chips yet. And of course it will be planting time in a couple of weeks for garlic, which stays in the ground all winter.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll tear out the old plants, tomato stakes and cages. We’ll get some aged manure and work it into the ground and we’ll plant the garlic. And then we’ll tear out the rabbit fence and that will be it. The garden will be at rest, and we’ll retire to our books and catalogs and dream of a better year in 2012.

In the meantime, here are a few pictures of the last growing season days:

Why oh why couldn't this have happened a month ago?

 

The darker sweet potatoes are Georgia Jet, which I bought to replace some Centennials that didn't survive transplanting. If they taste good, maybe we'll try this variety again next year.

 

We pulled in one big and three small but beautiful heads of cauliflower--that we planted in April! It was like a practical joke. Variety: Amazing.

 

And lastly, a reader wrote in recently with a question about Listeria and cantaloupes. She wanted to know whether it’s safe to compost cantaloupe rinds.

We weren’t able to find a really good answer to this. If your compost pile is in the sun and you check with a thermometer that the core gets to 140 degrees F, that is enough to kill most of the diseases and viruses, but we did not find any specific advice on Listeria.

However, many people (like us) have compost piles that don’t get enough sun to reach that temperature. If that’s your compost pile, I’d keep cantaloupe rinds out of there, at least for the time being.

Anyone else out there have some expertise on this?

Posted by: Roxie

Listeria: Could it happen in my garden?

It’s tempting to blame Big Food and poor government oversight on the waves of disease and death caused by contaminated food.

Case in point: Listeria-tainted cantaloupes from a farm in Colorado. Eighty-four illnesses, 17 deaths, 19 states. So far. An article from the Associated Press today says that modern agribusiness practices make it easier for huge farming operations to accidentally infect thousands of people across the country. Those same practices also make it trickier to trace the distribution route and warn people.

So hooray for our local food and  home gardens. We’re all safe, right?

That would be an assumption you could make. But you would be wrong. No one knows exactly how the Listeria made its way onto those cantaloupes. The bacteria is found pretty much everywhere in nature–soil, water, sewage, animal carriers. Hence, home gardens and small farms are just as vulnerable as the vast expanses of Big Food.

And with Listeria, you don’t want to mess around with assumptions of safety. The fatality rate can be as high as 25 percent (compared with 1 percent for salmonella). Hardest hit are, as usual, pregnant women, elderly and people with compromised immune systems. And–best of all–you might not notice any “flu-like symptoms” until up to 70 days after you’ve eaten the cantaloupe (the average is about three weeks, though.)

Past outbreaks of Listeria involved meat and unpasteurized cheese and dairy products. The recommendation was always more heat to cook out the bacteria. That’s another thing that makes this troubling. You don’t cook cantaloupe (if you do, please send a recipe.)

So to protect your farm and family (farmily?) you have to take precautions. Most of these have to do with our old friend, the perennial top suspect on food safety’s Most Wanted list–Feces.

Chances are that Listeria winds up in the soil and water (and on your produce) from that manure fertilizer that also helps everything grow so well.

To keep it out, we gardeners need to manage the manure and also the watering well. The Colorado State Extension office has some excellent suggestions on these things, that you can read in detail here. However, I’ll summarize:

*Never put fresh manure directly into the garden. If it still looks and smells like manure, it’s too soon. It needs to be broken down, over several months,  into something drier that looks more like soil.

*Properly composted manure is safer than that which has been “aged.” To compost manure, it must reach 130 to 140 F two days out of a 5-day cycle. Then it should be aged at least 4 months. Manure you buy at garden stores is normally done this way.

*If you aren’t sure of that temperature, your manure is simply “aged,” as ours is. In that case, you should apply it in the fall. Work it into the soil, rather than leaving it on the surface.  There should be 120 days between the time you put it on and harvest.

That means we’re starting to think about lining up our supply right now. Aren’t we, Mike?

*Watch your watering, too. Be sure animals don’t have access to your garden water, and check around for possible runoff from animal pens or neighboring gardens that might not be as well managed.

Yes, keeping on top of all this is a bit of work. But control over these things is one big advantage home gardening has over the factory farms of Big Ag.

And it’s worth it.

Posted by: Roxie

 

There’s still hope

Last time I wrote about the garden, I was sickened and disgusted with the way this season has gone. The stupid mistakes, the marketing lies, the unlucky weather patterns.

Today, I’m taking most of that back. Not all of it, because heaven knows I still made a lot of foolish mistakes this year. But most of it.

Such are the mood swings of gardening.

When I wrote last, we were still reeling from weeks of above-average temps and spotty rainfall. But since then, we’ve had a couple of good rains and the temperatures have evened out to a nice pleasant run of mid-70s. And ahhh–what a difference that makes to the garden.

September cauliflower "Amazing"

Let’s start with the cauliflower. I’d written it off as an abject failure because the slow-to-mature variety didn’t head up before the weather turned hot. Every time I looked at those leafy but headless plants I felt the failure all over again. But we didn’t pull them out because, well, we were just too lazy.

This week, our sloth was rewarded. We got two nice white heads of good-tasting cauliflower. Yes. September cauliflower. Who’d have thunk?

That’s not all, though. Plants that I’d thought were done for the season have been on a steady rebound. The tomatoes–even the Romas–now have fruits again that are close to full size. I picked one yesterday that was small, but red. They don’t have to redden up, though. All we need is for them to be a good size. If frost comes too soon, we’ll pick them and let them ripen on a table in the basement.

Peppers are coming back, so we’ll at least get some. And the chard is still beautiful, bless it’s heart. Mike’s kale is well up and beginning to get some better sized leafs. And who knows what’s under the sweet potato vines that are invading new territory faster than the British empire builders?

So there’s hope yet for this autumn garden.

Now if we could get the stock market to keep on the same steady course…

Posted by: Roxie

Step One: Own your mistakes

What a weird year this has been. As Mike wrote last week, disappointments have far outnumbered triumphs in this year’s vegetable paradise. We’ve blamed the weather for much of this, and rightly so.

But if we’re being honest, the weather can’t be held responsible for everything. Sometimes–much as I hate to admit it–the culpability lies glaringly at my own feet.

So what follows, ladies and gentlemen, is a run-down of this year’s sins, under the heading of My Own Stupid Fault.

Roma tomatoes–Yes, it did get too hot for fruit to set for quite a while in July, and part of me was grateful. That way, I could hide behind the evil heat wave and never admit the dumbest gardening mistake I’ve made in quite a few years.

It happened back in the spring, when I was transplanting seedlings to the outdoors. I draw out my garden every year on a piece of gridded paper and use that as my plan. When I got to the end of transplanting that day, I had a mystery. Too much space was left over elsewhere.

This never happens. After staring at my garden, then down at the paper, then back at the garden for a while like an idiot, I finally realized that I’d skipped my extra two feet of walkway between two of the tomato rows. Instead, I had three rows of tomatoes adjacent to each other, making the middle row very hard to get at.

This is also very bad for air circulation and can promote the spread of fungus–so bad that I preached against it in our book.

But by then,  there were 30 some plants in the ground. I wasn’t about to go back and dig them all out. I figured we’d just live with it this year.

Result: Leaf fungus during one of the wetter springs we’ve had.

Roma tomatoes II: Did I mention there was another stupid thing I did regarding tomatoes? No?

This had to do with the seed saving. Romas are not hybrids, so the seed is savable. But the trouble is, if you have other tomatoes too close, there can be some cross-contamination of the gene pool. So I try to throw out the seeds every 3 or 4 years and buy new. This year, though, I was trying to save money so I thought we could go another year on 4th-generation seed.

Result: Several plants bore tiny round fruit akin to cherry tomatoes–but without all the overproducing clusters. As such, they were next to useless.

Strawberries: If you keep growing strawberries in the same plot year after year, you’re asking for trouble.  The various diseases that can affect them will collect in the soil and make them weaker by the year. This is true of most plants and is the reason we rotate crops.

I had, in fact, seen trouble coming in the strawberry bed. But in my hubris, I thought I could get berries for one more year by encouraging runners to start new plants. This way I would avoid having to spend the money on the new plants.

Result: The bed is now completely wiped out. We had hardly any berries at all this year.

Cauliflower: I vowed two seasons ago never again to plant the variety “Amazing” because it took soooo looong to get a developed head. So this year I ordered another kind.

But I put off making the seed order too long, apparently. When time came to plant my seeds in the basement, my order was nowhere to be found. In desperation, I planted the only seeds I had on hand, which were leftover Amazing.

A week later, my order cam in and I also planted the other variety. But by the time April and transplanting came along, those Amazing seedlings just looked so good….

Result: We got two heads before early hot weather struck. Then nothing. But here’s where laziness sometimes pays off. Instead of tearing out the headless plants in the blazing heat, we left them. Two of them actually produced heads a week ago. And they tasted fine.

No matter how long you garden, there are always plenty of mistakes to be made. But repeat after me:

I’ll never, ever do that again.

Next year’s going to be much, much better.

Posted by: Roxie