Sunburn

Over the weekend, I asked Tom to build me a sort of shade covering for the peppers. This is what he came up with and I love it. The covering is agribon, the same stuff we use to protect from frost in winter. I didn’t want the peppers to be totally enclosed, I just needed a little light protection from the intense sun in the heat of the day. This is because my peppers are suffering (and suffer every year) from sunburn.

That whitish spot at the top of the fruit is the sunburn. It’s not the worst thing in the world; the rest of the pepper ripens normally and can be used, cutting away the damaged area. But it is a real nuisance when every single one of your peppers has it. It seems to affect the bells worse than the corno di torno types, but even those get it sometimes. And here’s the thing - peppers are sun lovers! Sun worshippers! They need heat and sun to be at their beautiful best. But in our area it’s a little different, and here’s my theory about that. As you can see from the picture up top, our pepper plants never really develop that full, leafy, luscious green look that plants in other parts of the country get. It’s because of how dry it is. I have drip irrigation on these plants as I do all of my garden, and while that keeps them alive and producing, it’s not enough to produce the kind of lush vegetation that would protect the developing fruit from the direct rays of the sun. As far as I know, sunlight on the actual fruit has no affect on ripening or sweetening - it all comes from the effect of the sun on the leaves. But the plant has to protect itself from dryness somehow, and it won’t sacrifice fruit because that’s how it reproduces. So what can it sacrifice? Some of the leaves. Hence, my plants are puny but still produce a good amount of fruit.

This is just a theory. You can help me by letting me know if you live in a rainy part of the country and grow peppers. How do your plants look?

Anyway, I’m hoping the light shade cover will take care of the sunburn issue. I get it on my tomatoes, too, but it’s impossible to provide any kind of shade cover at the moment because the trellises are too big. Maybe that’s a project for next year. Shade cloth every summer over this end of the garden?

Tom has also built me a stand for my dehydrator (in full use in summertime), which keeps it out of the way but convenient. He’s become quite a dab hand at these projects, and I’m so grateful!

A nerdy side note: Do you know what your state rock is? If not, you can look here.

Our state rock is Serpentine (or Serpentinite). You can find this all across the state and is a beautiful greenish color. It is formed from igneous processes, that is, volcanic, and then is metamorphosed. I was hiking in Sunol Regional Wilderness yesterday, and once I got up into the hills, there was lots of this stuff lying around, as well as degraded sheets of it on rock faces, which is basically asbestos. Asbestos is formed as the rock weathers and erodes. The dust, of course, can be quite dangerous, but I think the rock is really lovely. There are whole plant communities that thrive on this sort of substrate, a very specific list, which is helpful to know if you live in a place with a lot of serpentine. How will you know this? You need to look at the geologic map of your property. (I wrote a post about this in the Spring of 2019.) You might enjoy finding out your own state rock and how to identify it while you’re out hiking!

It Happened AGAIN

Hundreds of shallots, hanging on new racks in our dining room, looking beautiful. We had grown them from October to May, cured them over the chicken coop, tied them into bundles. Given many away. Been cooking with them regularly. Two days ago, a black aphid hanging out at eye-level on the wall by the piano; '“hm, what’s an aphid doing in here?” then yesterday, passing by the rocking chair which is underneath the hanging shallots, noticing the floor littered with black things. I look up. The shallots are covered, simply covered, with allium aphids.

We cut them down, we take them outside, we clean the floor and the walls and the rocking chair thoroughly. We sit and talk, what to do now, can they be saved. Allium aphids will eventually eat the bulb, in storage, if the greens are gone. We decide to chop them all up and freeze them. In the process of that, noticing them everywhere, in the bulbs too. Some bulbs are already rotted. Frustration and annoyance and pure disgust. We throw them all in the green bin, unwilling to put them in our compost and possibly breed more aphids.

Neotoxoptera formosana, the onion aphid, or allium aphid. Dark red to black. They do not lay eggs; the females give birth to pregnant females. Populations increase very rapidly. The aphids carry viruses and can cause disease in the plant. They prefer juicy green leaves but will eat bulbs in storage.

image credit: influentialpoints.com

So. Failure. Again.

What happened? I was too angry and disappointed at first to think about this from a logical standpoint, but after a good sleep and some time to calm down, I can start to figure out the chain of events that led to this.

Much like the disaster of Chernobyl (have you watched this on HBO yet? SO GOOD), there wasn’t just one thing that caused the problem, but rather a group of things.

One, the soil was probably not sandy enough or loose enough to keep the bed well-drained. Two, I grew them alone, without another crop - intercropping with a flowering herb or annual (such as clover) would have brought more predators down in to the bed. Three, we had a hot spell (a week of temps near or at 100) in April that caused the plants to start bolting, which caused me to think (reasonably) that the plants were done growing. Four, I didn’t remove the irrigation the last 2-4 weeks of growing, which would let them dry out in the soil before harvest. Five, I harvested them too early, with too much green growth still on them (it’s hard to leave them in the ground long enough, with the summer garden needing to go in). Six, I didn’t let them cure long enough, and I had so many that they were crowded in the curing space (preventing good airflow). Seven, and final nail in coffin, I brought them into the house where predators couldn’t keep the aphid population in check. If even one aphid was left alive on a stalk, the population would grow exponentially until finally covering the shallots completely.

Our garlic crop was also compromised by these same mistakes, though we haven’t yet (knock on wood) noticed an aphid explosion. The Spanish red garlic came out ok, though the size of the bulbs and cloves is too small. The German red garlic came out ok (though very small), but somewhere in the curing step, about 90% of them started to soften and rot, and we were able to keep only about 10%. Not ideal.

The amount of expense, and really TIME, that it takes to grow these crops is huge. This is not a small loss. It is extremely frustrating. At first I said to Tom, maybe we just can’t grow them here, maybe they just take too much time and we’ve had too many failures, maybe our first few successful years were just luck? But after figuring out the list of reasons why they failed, I see that I can do better growing them. I can’t do anything about the weather, but I have a plan for that too.

So, this Fall, here’s what I’m going to do. One, order seed bulbs directly from the grower (Filaree Farms has been recommended to me). Two, I’m going to plant them later, in November rather than October. Three, I’m going to plant less of them, only one bed for shallots and one bed for garlic. Four, before I plant, I’m going to break my no-till rule and make sure the soil is loose and that I’ve added plenty of compost and maybe some grit to increase drainage. Five, I will interplant with crimson clover, which should add a place for the good bugs to proliferate. Six, I will plant them in a place that has more shade in April (and maybe cover them too), and not in the place where I want to put tomatoes next year, which need to go in May 1, which is part of Seven, I will leave them in the ground until June. Eight, I will remove the irrigation lines for the last month of the growing season. Nine, I will make sure they are totally ready before harvesting. Ten, I will cure them differently, in a different place, allowing more airflow and more time (this will be difficult because they need to cure in shade). And finally, I will allow them to cure for longer, and inspect them thoroughly, before I bring them in the house.

Having a plan makes me feel better, but I’m still extremely pissed and sad about the fact that I’m going to have to buy shallots for another year.

I’ve been preparing a talk for some students that are coming to visit this coming week, and it has become clear to me that I need to talk a little bit about failure, because it happens. Even when you’re doing everything right (which I wasn’t this time), some things just don’t work, and it’s hard to figure out why. It can be difficult to weather those failures and still keep going. And so I’m interested; how do all of you, my readers, handle these disappointments in the garden? If you have a story to share, please do so in the comments.

The Wheat is Lodging

When you grow wheat, you begin to see what an important crop it is in our country. Google-research a problem with, say, kale, and you'll get a bunch of websites written by folks just like you and me. Google-research a problem with wheat, and BAM: You've got the big guns weighing in, from the USDA to the Land Grant Universities. According to the USDA, wheat ranks third among US field crops in planted acreage, production, and gross receipts. (You can guess the top two crops, I imagine.) However, wheat planting and production are actually down this year, due to lower returns and changes in government programs, as well as increased competition from global wheat markets. 

Again according to the USDA, wheat, along with corn, soybeans, cotton, and potatoes, accounts for about 80% of all pesticide use in our country. 

This makes you wanna find your local, organic wheat farm, doesn't it? It sure does for me. It also sure as hell solidifies my resolve to continue baking our own bread with said wheat.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying our own wheat-growing experiment. There are some definite downsides. The main one is space, which is certainly a limiting factor. The ratio of biomass-to-product is quite high; the huge stalks take up quite a bit of room for such little return. You have to plant a LOT of wheat to get any kind of poundage at the end of the process. It's also a long-growing crop; I planted these seeds in October, and the plant probably won't be ready for harvesting until late May, at the earliest. This is an issue when I want to get summer crops in the ground at the beginning of May at the latest. Some crops, such as potatoes, should go in in February. In order to do that, I'm going to have to cut some of the wheat early.

There are lots of positives to growing wheat, though, not the least of which is how beautiful it is. It couldn't be any more GREEN.

Other benefits: The aforementioned biomass is actually a boon, as it can be used in several ways; as fodder for the chickens, or as a mulch for my summer plants. Finding organic straw is difficult, and I've basically made my own. It has acted as a wonderful cover crop over the winter, mixed with crimson clover as an understory plant. Live roots in the ground year-round really promote soil life and health. I mean, just LOOK at all the sunlight that's been captured in these beautiful leaves.

Here's another downside, though, at least in my garden. My wheat is starting to lodge.

Lodging is when the wheat falls over. It's happening in every one of my beds. The outside rim of each bed is fine, beautifully upright, and then the inner portions have keeled over. There are many reasons this could have happened, but I don't see that any are applicable here. The plants could be suffering from excess nitrogen (never a problem in my beds, trust me when I tell you that all my soil nutrient tests come back deficient in nitrogen, which is why I planted clover too - but the nitrogen nodules in the roots of the clover won't be available to nearby plants until after I cut down the clover and let the roots rot in the soil). They could be suffering from a deficiency of potassium (though my soil tests say this nutrient level is ok). They could have fallen from high winds, which I suppose is possible, but honestly, are our winds higher than those in the Great Plains? I don't think so. It hasn't been particularly wet this winter. Interseeding clover is supposed to help with this issue, and I did that. 

The only thing I can figure is, it's the variety of wheat. I planted all heirloom varieties, wheat that could be considered ancient and isn't used any longer on big commercial farms; Emmer, Sonora, and Red Fife. And from my reading, it does sound as though the lodging problem has been bred out of the newer strains, along with a lot of the nutrition. Honestly, I don't WANT to grow modern wheat. I want to grow the good, heirloom stuff.

I am cheered by reading that the lodging may not hurt the seed crop, if it happens before the seed develops. But I do think stems of wheat lying down and collecting water is going to invite rot; and in fact, some of the stems have some discoloration. So, this crop may end up being fodder and straw sooner than I expected, and I'll just have to keep buying my wheat berries from the local farmer. 

Have any of you ever grown wheat? How have you dealt with lodging?