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Aunt Toby Hits The Big Time

Totally shameless “Plug City Arizona” – earlier this year, I went, courtesy of the Broome County Cooperative Extension (ahem), on a bus trip to the Philadelphia Flower Show, where your Aunty goggled at all the orchids, was amazed at how big some people can grow various plants and bought a few things. I bought a rather nice basket and some horse radish roots (which I planted and which seemed to do absolutely NOTHING for a very long time but are now emerging) and I got a small bag of seed potatoes. Do not ask me what potatoes they were – I managed to lose the label from out of the bag. They were ‘German — something.” In any case, they were the first potatoes that I stuck into the ground this spring, as soon as the ground temperature warmed up and when they emerged, I took a picture, uploaded it to flickr.com and put the words “Philadelphia Flower Show” into the description. You now see the result – Schmap guides found it and as they would say, the rest is history.

The way to find it is to click, on the Schmap box, on the photo that accompanies their listing of the Philadelphia Flower Show and click through all the lovely photos in the slide show – my humble potato shot is toward the end. The rest of the photos are truly wonderful and give you a terrific overview of all the terrific exhibits and resources that are available at the show. I find it a little bit ironic that my rather utilitarian ‘tater shot’ is accompanied by all that beauty, but I guess that is what irony is all about, eh?

Keeping Up With the Taters..

Potatoes are from the plant family Solanacea (pronounced Soh-lan-ay-seh-eee, for those that care), which is a pretty interesting family, all told. It also includes such dainties as tomatoes, egg plants, and deadly nightshade (more…)

Loose Ends and Housekeeping

If you are (ahem) old enough to recall the Ed Sullivan Show, then if I mention the words “Italian acrobats with spinning plates”, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. For the less ‘elderly’ among Aunt Toby’s readers, suffice it to say that this family group had a hilarious act whereby they set up poles with plates spinning at the tops and they ran about the stage, back and forth, making sure the plates were spinning and not falling to smash on the floor. The big finale was their all picking up the poles and catching the plates. Voila!!

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up. (more…)

Want Peppers in Northern Growing Zones? Give ’em a Hot Foot!

Up here Chez Siberia might be located as far as the USDA maps are considered, in Zone 4 – but our geography makes it a Zone 3 for sure, which means that growing things like peppers, melons, sweet potatoes, and long season stuff just does..not…work very well. Even when we start plants early and get them in the ground, many times, the soil is just not warm enough for them and they just sit there and sulk.

And when we have had frosts as early as half way through September, we can’t have them sit there and sulk. We need them to get going right away so that they form flowers and make fruit. For years, we tried everything and then, stumbled upon something that just worked great – putting them into plastic milk jugs. Last summer, we had plenty of room in the garden, so I put the peppers back into the garden and got…NO PEPPERS. So, this year, as a demonstration, I’m growing them both ways.

Three of the same variety of pepper plants went into the garden and right next to them, the three plants in milk jugs. The soil and compost are the same. I’ll give them the same care.

And I’ll bet you a nickel that the ones in the milk jugs will do a lot better.

I’ll keep you posted.

More Obscure Vegetables You Can Learn to Love – Chard

In our last episode of “Weird Veggies I Have Known and Learned to Love”, we talked kohlrabi; today it’s that ‘not quite celery – where’s the beet’ thing called Swiss Chard. Chard suffers from a branding problem – how good does it feel saying the word “chard”?

Right?

Broccoli – now THERE’s a word that has a good feel in your mouth – very Italian and dramatic — brock–o–li. “Chard” has no charm at all; they should have stuck with the name that they used to call it, “Silver Beet” – that at least has a little bit of charm to it. Even ‘spinach beet’ which was another name for it, is better. Chard? A marketing specialist would have a field day with this – let’s find the guy who came up with ‘the other white meat’ – that’s the guy we want to rebrand chard. (more…)

Early Frost: The Gardeners’ Blues

Gardener’s Blues
Woke up this morning, it was 28 degrees…
Yes, I woke up this morning, it was 28 degrees
Frost was all over my berries…
The apple blossoms were frozen on the trees…..
Mmmmhmmmmm…yeah…

Well, Aunt Toby did wake up this morning and it WAS 28 degrees F. (more…)

What’s a Weed? What’s My Seed?

It has come to Aunt Toby’s attention that she has neglected the totality of the garden learning experience of some of her little friends. Far be it from me to avoid getting into the, ahem, nitty gritty, of gardening, that is to say “How do I know when I sow seeds, when something comes up — is it what I sowed or if it is a weed?”

Ah….”I’ll know..when my love comes along….”

No, actually, many times you won’t. (more…)

Soil Warming Up!

After my last post, I realized that I should NOT have covered up the garden beds with black plastic while it was still so cool; no wonder they were so much colder than the one covered with the clear plastic. I unrolled the black plastic from the big bed, so it’s had two days of mostly sun(though today the sun was in and out) and when I got home today, I took the soil temperatures again.
Wowee. What a difference some sun over two days made!

The bed that I uncovered, which had been 44.7 degrees on Saturday is now 51.6 degrees F. The bed covered with clear plastic is now 56.7 degrees F — on Saturday, it was 50.9 degrees F.

Sometimes, the sun can be our friend.

Win two, lose two: 4-18 ‘fahm’ report

Well, although this week we’ve had some truly astonishing and wonderful spring weather at Chez Siberia, all has not been ‘sunshine and daffs’ here.

On the plus side, the chicks are doing great. We had to add a second feeder to their box just to accommodate all the ‘boarding house reach’ going on. On the minus side, it was that realization that we are going to have to move these guys out of the basement sooner than I thought; that brought up a whole lot of moving things around in what we refer to here as ‘the barn’ (but was really the original brooder house for the chicken farm that was once here). We’ll be moving more things to make room in one of the indoor ‘rooms’ (south view, lovely neighborhood) for us to set them up in a larger place of their very own. We’ll have to do an ‘audit’ of the premises, though and make sure that we put up something so that if anything actually gets IN, they have a place to escape TO. (more…)

End of March Garden Report

Hope…and other things…spring eternal. I went out this morning to take the temperature in the garden beds and frankly, for all the warming up, the soil is no warmer than it was the last time I took it. And it’s actually very consistent around the beds in the garden also – not more than a couple tenths of a degree difference, which is a good thing.

But, a couple of things that I noticed when we were out there:
1) It’s been a very very dry spring – ordinarily, at this point, not only would the soil be colder, it would be a lot wetter as well; digging in it would have been a disaster – producing our own version of gumbo. When we were putting out the plastic, I wanted to pull up some of the old plants from last year. It looked dry enough so the DH pulled out a shovel and came up with – buried treasure!!! (more…)

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