Little Green Beans

These are the beginnings of the bean crop this year.  I call it a crop but really it's a whole 10 or so plants with a few beans each.  Enough to make a side dish from once they are big enough but that's about it.

We will have enough though to save some of the seeds for next year's garden.  Seed saving is the only way to get crops year after year, whether you do it yourself or buy from seed companies that only do seed saving.

Doing it yourself though has one distinct advantage over buying it year after year from a seed company.  You know how the plant is going to react where you live and there will always be small variations to a plant.  What grew is the best plant from the seeds you planted.  The beans, in this case, that grew are a snapshot of those plants.  Anything that made those specific plants grow that maybe made them a fraction better than the plants you thinned out or that didn't grow so well is preserved and passed on to next year's crop.  If you do this for long enough you will start to have a hybrid and something that, although it resembles the original plants, is not the plants you started with.  They will, hopefully,  be better.  They also might get cross pollinated from a nearby garden and come up with a whole different plant.  This happens a lot with commercial crops.  One plant will cross with another and the result isn't always what a farmer wanted.  Thus saving seeds can be a tricky matter.

Several of the seeds we have planted are from produce from the store.  This also can be fairly random since some produce is pollinated by a more fertile plant even though the fruit from that plant may not be as desirable.  Apples for instance are often cross pollinated with crabapples because they put off more pollen and help other apple trees produce better.  The fruit from the desired trees is good but the seeds may well be a cross between say a honeycrisp and crabapple.

Some things you don't want to cross.  Dill and fennel for instance will produce a plant that doesn't taste like either and doesn't smell all that good.

Planting for Spring

Spring has sprung even if the plant store is a little more wary. We've already got plants in the ground and seeds from last year are already popping up and saying hi.

Among the returnnig plants are the dill, which has come up in a carpet in the area it was in last year and is already attracting the black swallow tail butterflies, and the cilantro or chinese parsley, which again doesn't want to grow in the planting beds but likes to stretch out and grow in the rocks.  I think this is partly due to the birds eating most of the seed they can see on the dirt and when they're in the rocks it's harder for the birds to get to them and swallow them up.

From the plants that come back from the root we have the purple cone flower, hollyhock, a wide variety of iris, daylily, ferns, a basil plant that just didn't want to die, lemongrass, fennel, and onion.

The survivors who stayed green and happy all winter were oregano, thyme, lavender, green onion, rosemary, the monster beet, and of course the live oak.

We've planted seeds, starting from north to south, for corn, bush beans, beets, carrots, onion, and radishes.

Plants we've put in as plants are tomato, thyme, and rue (near our rose bush out front).  So far everything seems to be acclimating well.  the tomatoes, which usually droop a little at first, never even tipped a leaf.  We actually planted two thyme plants, a lemon thyme next to the one that's finally acclimating well and a yellow leaf thyme out near the fennel.

Black Swallowtail Butterflies Are Back

We went through one round of the pesky caterpillars eating the dill but it doesn't seem like the dill and cucumbers will be ready at the same time anyway so we're letting the dill go mostly to the caterpillars only keeping them off of the front two.  It's a simple matter to just pick the piece they're currently eating and putting it on one of the back plants.
Maybe this time we will be able to get them before they get too big and put them in a tank to change into butterflies. The netting is still available from last time we thought about it.  I still don't remember seeing the butterflies in the first place but I'm pretty sure that's what they are.

Plant Roundup

Before the heat of summer comes it's nice to know what was there before it's just a dry patch of land with nothing growing.  Fortunately most of these plants should make it for quite a while save the hyacinth and snow pea plants.

The weeds last year are what really made the garden survive last year and i plan to let even more grow this year in hopes of keeping the heat at bay and saving precious ground water.  The rain barrels are full and ready for whatever heat comes our way.  Already people are complaining about the heat, 82 degrees.  I don't know what they plan to do when it actually gets hot.

Steady Rain

We planted some new plants early this week and just in time it seems for a nice steady rain to help them take root.
Among the new arrivals are four lavender plants so we can hopefully get a bigger crop this summer and fall of flowers to make spindles and other lavender crafts from.  We also got some parsley, basil, two kinds of thyme, dill and sage.
We purchased some flowers and a climbing jasmine that aren't in the ground yet but they'll get there.  In the mean time they're all out enjoying the showers.