A Pepper Ranching friend in Ironwood, MI (https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=41&q=i ... 01&PC=HCTS) raised some Carolina Reapers a coupla years ago; couldn't give 'em away.

The Gotch

Svalli...Thanks for all your beautiful pics of your very fine garden. I feel we all got to know you better through your garden !

I am just wowed by the cherries... what kind are they @svalli .
There are a few "bush cherry" varieties on this side of the pond (Juliet, Romeo, etc) which I've been trying to get here... I would just be so satisfied to grow and harvest cherries! So far I am really scoring on Black Currants only.

I haven't forgotten your wild chili pepper seeds.
Been working on it.

bower wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:46 pm I am just wowed by the cherries... what kind are they @svalli .

These are tart cherries and the plants were sold as bush type. Tallest ones are now 3 meters, so these are not any small bushes. We had not pruned the plants at all, but now we have to, since these are getting way too large. I read that best time to do it would be now in August.

I can’t believe all the preserving work you did. Very impressive!

Absolutely gorgeous stuff! I need to expand into berries.

Every evening I have been cleaning the garlic to bring it indoors, so I almost forgot to harvest beans from our city garden. Bush beans are now producing well and pole beans are just starting grow pods. Bean seeds have amazing longevity, the purple bush bean seeds which were purchased 2007 in Wisconsin and to my surprise quite many of the old seeds germinated. I planted yellow and purple bush beans, because the beans are easier to find in my thick planting than green ones. Buenos Aires Roja pole bean vines grew taller than my poles, so I have guided the vines growing horizontal above peas and bush beans.

This week we had first ripe Greenbush Italian and it was absolutely delicious sliced on a sour dough toast with ham and cheese. Thank you @Cornelius_Gotchberg for the seeds of that Wisconsin heirloom and also for the beautiful post card, which arrived yesterday!

Sari

@svalli; that Greenbush Italian appears absolutely flawless! Just yesterday, gave one to my 88 year-old neighbor, along with a Sheboygan Heirloom, an Amish Paste, and a Wautoma Heirloom Cuke; together they completed a WESconsin Cultivar Quadfecta!

The Gotch

Gardening season will end soon here. I removed tomato and cucumber plants from the greenhouse on Sunday and this evening I collected all remaining tomatoes from outdoor plants and cut the vines down. We have not got killing freeze yet, but rainy weather has caused botrytis to spread also on the outdoor plants. In the end it was good season. This year I did not try to squeeze so too many plants into the self watering tubs and had only one plant in each large round container. Total production seemed to be almost as much as I have gotten from many more plants with the crowded planting. We have eaten a lot of tomatoes and I have canned over 20 quarts of salsa and 10 quarts of tomato sauce.

This is what I picked couple of weeks ago and now I have about same amount of ripe ones and some green ones, which I took indoors to ripen.

I usually collect seeds from all non hybrid varieties, but this time I have one, which I will not grow again. I was really interested and excited about growing it because of the unique looks, but taste was real disappointment. Varity is named Loaghtan Woolies and even it looks cool with the fuzzy leaves and striped fuzzy fruit, it tastes like the tomatoes grown in commercial greenhouses during winter.

I got a surprise cross from my own saved seeds. This supposed to be New Big Dwarf, but the tomatoes in it are small and brighter red. Taste is almost like NBD, with real tomato taste and right amount of acidity and sweetness. I liked it so much that I am saving seeds and will test what the next generation will be. I would like to have a small fruited dwarf, which is bigger than the micros and also tastes better.

Carrots and leeks still need to be harvested and garlic planted to finish this season.

Just curious as to how Momotaro does in your climate ???

Excited to hear about your NBD cross. Hope you have a lot of fun in the next generation!!

Yak54 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 02, 2023 2:25 pm Just curious as to how Momotaro does in your climate ???

I grow it in the greenhouse and there it is growing well. The kind I got is named Home Momotaro, so I do not know if it differs from other ones. https://www.utane.co.jp/lineup/1143/
It is indeterminate, but does not grow too tall, so it fits well in the greenhouse.

OK I think that is a different version of Momotaro from the one I've grown.
It's a bit confusing when they have 3 different versions with the same name. The version I've grown I've purchased from either Tomato Growers Supply or Kitazawa Seed Co. Anyway It has been one of my very favorite hybrid tomatoes and I've grown it many times with great success. I was just curious what your experience with it was.

We drove out to the countryside on Sunday to do last gardening chores and pick the studded tires to our cars from the storage. We have a 120 km drive out there and it was snowing in the middle of our journey. Luckily the snowing ended before arriving and the day was mostly sunny with just couple of short drizzles.

There has been a lot of rain recently and the soil where my carrots grew was almost slurry. Lifting them was easy, but the carrots needed to be rinsed to get the mud off. Getting leeks up was not easy, because there was so much mud attached to the roots. I had to leave half of them still in the ground. I did also pick two bags of kale leaves, which seemed to be clean and without maggots. Here in the city all kale was eaten by diamondback moth larvae, which does not overwinter here, but migrates with winds blowing from south.

Most important thing what I got done is planting garlic. I was already a bit concern about the weather cooling so rapidly and constant rains. Growing stuff so far a way from home limits the work to be done during weekends and vacation. Covering the ground with silage tarp proved again to be essential for making the bed for autumn planted garlic. Soil under the tarp was moist but not soggy and tilling it was easy. I had separated and counted all cloves in paper bags on Saturday and marker sticks were also ready. This year I planted only 424 cloves from 20 different varieties. We have not been able to use all of the garlic on prior years, so I am cutting down what I plant.

Gardening season 2024 is slowly starting. Peppers, everbearing strawberries, petunias and some other annual flowers were sown already in February. First of March I started tomatoes and those are now ready to be moved to bigger containers.


Outside snow cover is still thick, so there is not much to do. Last weekend I put my snowshoes on and trimmed serviceberry hedges (Amelanchier × spicata). It is easy to do while there is snow on top of the flower beds. On one side of the yard the hedge had been grown many years without trimming and the serviceberry had grown to small trees with trunks as thick as my arm. We do not want to loose the barrier between us and the neighbor so I have started to cut some of them every spring, hoping that the offshoots will grow from the stumps. It seems to be working and I again cut down some of the tallest trunks leaving still some to next year. Last year I got such battery powered small chainsaw, which makes it easier to cut between the trunks and I can do it myself without trying to guide DH about which ones and what height I want them to be sawn.

wow, you are ahead of me, and i have very little snow on the ground. i only just planted pepper seeds.
also, some old kale seeds to see if there is life in them still. uncle steve seeds from 2003 were planted
last night. if they sprout, they will be the oldest seeds ever to do so for me. i am having difficulty getting
into seed starting mode. wife wants some lettuce started. i should get some micro tomatoes going too.
clean off the plant stand. time to get going.


keith

I planted some Green Curled Ruffec Endive seeds on 2-28-24 and been growing them under lights in the garage. I've given them 3-4 hrs of partial sunlight for a few days and they are doing nicely. Getting ready to plant lettuce seeds in the garage in another week or so. I have 9 varieties this year which should produce 72 plants to put out in the garden in April. I'm looking forward to fresh lettuce !

I have some lettuce growing in my self made passive hydroponic system made from an ice-cream tub. There are holes for two rock wool cubes, but the other seeds did not germinate. We have already harvested some leaves from that to be eaten on sandwiches. I should try start some more lettuce seeds to grow in that thing.


I do also have basil, cilantro, dill and mizuna growing in my Plantui hydroponic smart gardens. Some of those are already overgrown and I should start new plants. There is still long time before getting harvest from outdoors and I try to avoid buying fresh potted herbs from the stores, because there is a risk of getting fungus gnat infestation with them, so if I want fresh herbs, I have to grow those myself.

Is the ice-cream tub system like a Kratky system?