It's time to begin inventorying my seeds.

Every year is another spreadsheet; I'd once thought I could have one spreadsheet for the garden and a couple columns for each year.

Then, I thought, maybe a tab for each category but still an enduring sheet (tomatoes. brassicas and greens. circubits. though non-overlapping categorization is hard).

Then, last ( Read more... )

Ok, let's talk about something nicer. About corn.

Last year I grew several varieties of corn, and the ones that gave any sort of yield were Gaspe (flint) and Magic Mana / Magic Mana starburst (flour). The latter was pretty late-yielding but I suspect the seeds will sprout ok?

Lavender mandan parching corn did not do well. Cascade Ruby-Gold did not do ( Read more... )

I'm writing up more of my variety trials now: starting on the squash and corn. I cannot adequately describe how much joy this brings me: to have access to these varieties, to have done this trial, to spend time thinking about comparisons between plants and fitness for my purposes and variability across years, to write up my thoughts, and even in ( Read more... )

Last night I started up the woodstove; it got down to -5C last night and the mud was frozen this morning for early walking. My house is warm; the pain/slowdown of joints and muscles that my mind is so good at sidestepping is gone and with it a lot of tension and unrecognised cognitive load. I still need to figure out what to do with the roof, but I ( Read more... )

Catalogued my tomato seeds from this year finally and listed them. It's pretty fun.

I'm still shepherding trays of tomatoes through the oven. This season worked pretty well: I brought in a ton of green tomatoes and they ripened at a good pace to roast a couple trays once or twice a week at a time when the additional heat was welcome in the house. ( Read more... )

Our third first frost scare is coming up in half a week or so. One of these is going to be The One. I didn't do much for the previous two but I'm giving serious thought to pulling all the green tomatoes for this weekend.

Given the size of the trial it hasn't been very productive but that is kind of the point: the entire harvest came from fewer than ( Read more... )