Vegetable husbandry, succession gardening, and prayers for rain

The late corn that Bud and LJ and I planted is coming along, though getting a bit choked by it's overzealous bean sisters. It's raining a little today (HALLELUJAH!!!) and I'm hoping the rain will give the corn the boost it needs to outgrow the beans a little.

Since it's such a small patch of corn, we'll have to hand-pollinate at some point soon. I'm excited for our first adventure in vegetable husbandry/wifery, which is far less daunting than the livestock equivalent.

Meanwhile, we harvested a bunch of carrots and beets over the weekend (see below), some of which we enjoyed shredded last night in a delightful salad with white beans, wild rice, sunflower seeds, parsley, celery, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (plus salt and pepper for those of you who want to try this at home).



The rest of the beet and carrot harvest is either fermenting in one of the various crocks crowding our kitchen counters, or in cold storage (aka the fridge) to last, we hope, until the next round of roots are ready.

We're direct seeding carrots, beets, radishes, and mustards now for the fall--the photo below is C. mulching a carrot/radish bed we sowed on Saturday with heirloom French Breakfast Radish and Scarlet Nantes Carrot seeds.



The idea is that we'll keep sowing beets, carrots, and radishes every few weeks until the weather gets too cold--succession planting so that in theory we should have root crops to eat and share for a good while to come.

In the meantime, I am holding out hope for an long, steady downpour today (it's just a drizzle at this point) for our garden and all of the plants and animals, including we human animals, that are so desperate for rain after so many months of drought.

Let's have some RAIN!!!

Garlic harvest

Last night we started digging up the garlic, and as luck would have it, Melissa was here to school us in a far better method than we used last year for hanging it up to dry.

While I was cooking up chard, kale, mustards, and herbs to toss with pasta for dinner, Christopher and Melissa tied up all of the Inchelium Red and Polish Hardneck. Bud kept us entertained with a running stream of conspiracy theory and Mr. T videos.

Inchelium Red

This morning Christopher pulled the next variety of garlic, Transylvanian Artichoke, which turned out to be whoppingly huge.

Frankie looked on, stoned on catnip, from an adjoining garlic bed.


Frankie tripping

While C. pulled Transylvanian, I planted the last of the zephyr squash starts with Black Oil Seed sunflowers and Cherokee black beans in the bed where the Inchelium and Polish garlic had come out last eve. We used this same succession planting last year--the timing works well and the legumes seem to build the soil after the garlic is done.
Transylvanian Artichoke