Spring Dinner Salad

A combination of spinach, romaine, mixed greens, and chard. Chive flowers aren't just a garnish... they have a fresh chives taste when you first bite into them with a spicy onion kick at the end. Yum! :)

Bolting Bok Choi Batman!

After a week and a half of dry, reasonably warm weather, all of my Bok Choi has bolted. Very sad.

Doing some digging online - I've found this is not an uncommon problem, particularly for newbies like me.

One forum on gardenweb.com had this issue as a subject, and had this post:

"I am Chinese. I know the answer! We eat bok chai in two stages. One is when they are young like a transplant (preferred) and the other is when they grow much bigger ~1/2 lbs. If you need big chai you need to transplant the young ones around september, october and you will get big ones in the spring time. If you plant them in spring just harvet them when they are young. All of them will go flowering in april. It dill well for me when I was in New Jersey."

So one aspect of this is that it seems we should have harvested this round of bok choi when it was still small. The good news is that bok choi sounds like a great over-wintering (year round) crop!

There was also a post on the same page about being mindful of the varietal of bok choi one uses- with an eye towards heat tolerance (There are lots of southern Asia brassicas). I found a great site that specializes in Asian vegetable seeds for future reference. (Lots of potential there)

The other thing is that I think I planted the bok choi in the wrong location.... it's a cool weather crop, and this location gets nearly perfect full sun. I've got a location in mind that gets allot more shade for the next try. So the first round of bok choi has been a failure - but I've learned allot and I've found a new seed source!

Since full sun was part of the 'problem' here... once my helpers pulled the bok choi out and I amended the soil with compost, we planted a lemon cucumber.

Potatoes - first mounding

Of two potato boxes, only one has really taken off in any meaningful way; the other box does have some green finally coming up - so I'm hopeful it'll come around.

Mounding with Cedar Grove compost... I mounded when they were 4-5", and I've left about 1" of growth as per my Growing Potatoes in a Container Guide.

The Annual Role of Dice - Tomatoes

It's mid-May, the weather is warming up, and the tomato starts have been hardened... into the ground they go!

Following the advice of my boss, Bruce (always listen to Iowa farm boys); I snipped the two lowest branches off of the tomato plant and lowered it as far down into the bed as I could, while making sure the next lowest set of branches and leaves did not touch the ground. He told me that roots will shoot out of the stumps where branches once were, and having the additional stalk in the ground improves the vertical strength of the tomato as it grows upwards.

The irrigation system I set up has one drip irrigation port for each tomato plant. I've read that over-watering and over-feeding tomatoes is a common newbie mistake to make, so I'll be keeping that in mind. Engineer the automated irrigation system is proving to be a skill set in it's own right - it's a work in progress.

RainCity is definitely a cool climate for growing tomatoes, so picking the right variety is essential. I've been told that Romas are usually a solid bet; My father-in-law was mindful of this when growing the starts - so we have some variety, but all of them are short season varietals.

Leaf Miners

First it was the weevils, and now, leaf miners.

Amaya informed Amber that the leaf miner bugs

put their babies inside the leaves, and then the

when they hatch they eat the leaves. This is true

of course, what I can't figure out is how she knew

that.

You can see on this chard leaf the damage they do.

If I let them get out of control, I can expect they'll

jump to my beets soon enough.

We have a bunch of magnolia trees in the area - and

we've seen evidence of their eating on their leaves

as well, which unfortunately means they have an

abundant natural habitat all around; and there are

probably millions of them.

I went to Sky Nursery to see what they had -

Originally I was looking for some kind of pheromone

trap (they didn't have one for leaf miners).

However, I did see that the capsicum spray they

were selling indicated it worked on leaf miners.

Perhaps the mama leaf miners don't much care for penetrating a leaf that's been treated with

pepper spray. I sure hope so- because that's about the only mitigation I've found. Other than

that, the only recommended treatment is to cull the infected leaves at first sign of infection, and

hope the little &^#@!*%$ don't find the rest of your crop.

We were able to actually see the leaf miners eating away when we put the leaf under the

microscope. Two that are in focus are on the left. There's more movement in the upper right,

which I'm sure are more of them, but the field of focus is limited.