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Sweet Potato Weather Alert!

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This message came to my email this morning:

Issued by The National Weather Service
Atlanta, GA
5:42 am EDT, Fri., Oct. 16, 2009

… FREEZING TEMPERATURES AND FROST POSSIBLE IN NORTH GEORGIA SUNDAY AND MONDAY MORNING…

A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN THE WEATHER PATTERN WILL TAKE PLACE ACROSS THE EASTERN U.S. DURING THE NEXT FEW DAYS AS A DEEP UPPER TROUGH DEVELOPS IN THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION. THIS WILL RESULT IN MUCH COLDER AIR SPREADING SOUTHWARD INTO THE SOUTHEAST U.S. TONIGHT AND SATURDAY. MUCH BELOW NORMAL TEMPERATURES WILL REMAIN IN PLACE THROUGH EARLY NEXT WEEK.

TEMPERATURES WILL DROP TO THEIR LOWEST LEVELS SINCE EARLY APRIL DURING THE WEEKEND. CLOUD COVER AND WIND WILL LIKELY KEEP TEMPERATURES ABOVE FREEZING SATURDAY NIGHT… BUT BY MONDAY MORNING CANADIAN HIGH PRESSURE WILL SETTLE OVER THE AREA ALLOWING SKIES TO CLEAR AND WINDS TO DIMINISH TO NEAR CALM. LOW TEMPERATURES NEAR 30 DEGREES ARE EXPECTED IN MOUNTAIN VALLEYS AND IN MANY RURAL AREAS OF NORTH GEORGIA EARLY MONDAY. WIDESPREAD FROST CAN ALSO BE EXPECTED… ESPECIALLY WITH WELL ABOVE NORMAL SOIL MOISTURE CONDITIONS CURRENTLY IN PLACE.

I know, I hate the all-caps presentation, too, but in this case the alarm might be justified. Sweet potatoes need to stay at well-above freezing temperatures, and what is coming this weekend misses that ideal by a huge margin.

Anyone whose sweet potatoes are poking above the ground, the way they do as harvest time approaches, should either dig those sweet potatoes up today or tomorrow, or mulch them heavily to protect them until a warmer day comes again. The picture below illustrates what I mean:

Around here, Fall temperatures can swing pretty wildly, so I don’t expect the cold weather to last until April. Warmer days will be here in a week or so, but I am not going to wait, even though the ground is still very wet. Cold is even worse than wet, where sweet potatoes are concerned.

I had been hoping for great weather for harvesting the sweets, especially since this year I am growing two kinds. I wanted a bit of leisure so it would be easier to compare. However, this weather is what I have.

In the picture below, the differences in the leaves of the two kinds of sweet potatoes are easy to see. The heart shaped leaves are on the Beauregard plants and the deeply lobed leaves are on the Puerto Rican plants that were given to me by a friend.

When I have all the sweet potatoes safely out of the ground and in the house, I will spread them out in a single layer on newspapers to dry, with a small space-heater aimed at them to keep them warm. They need to dry and cure in a warm place for at least a week before being gathered back up for longer term storage.

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When a Gardener Can’t Manage the Veggies

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Someone asked me today about growing blueberries. She plants a veggie garden every Spring, enjoys it for a while, and then leaves for a summer vacation. By the time she gets back, the garden is a mass of weeds and dead veggies. Her new plan is to skip the veggies and just grow some fruit. This is a great idea for her situation.

The good news is that the garden sections of places like Lowe’s and Home Depot have pots of blueberries for sale right now, and this is a good time to plant (after the ground is less soggy, of course). UGA recommends that home gardeners choose the rabbiteye types of blueberries, and several varieties are listed, along with planting and other growing information, in the UGA publication Home Garden Blueberries.

Blueberries are among the lowest maintenance fruits available for the home gardener in this area, so anyone who can’t manage a vegetable garden but still wants food from the yard should consider growing them. They have few pests, and of those birds are the worst. Most people aren’t squeamish about birds the way they might be about some insects, so this problem isn’t too horrible. People who don’t want birds to eat the berries can use netting to cover the plants.

Another low-maintenance, high-reward fruit for this area is figs. UGA’s publication Home Garden Figs includes recommended varieties along with planting and growing information.

Figs are supposed to be much easier to propagate than blueberries, and I am hoping to make new plants from my brown turkey fig this year. Cuttings are supposed to be made after the leaves have dropped in early Fall. My fig bush still has all of its leaves, so the time is not yet right. I have noticed though, around town, that trees are beginning to turn yellow and red, so fig leaf drop should be soon, maybe just a couple of weeks away.

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Garlic and Fall-Planted Onions

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I plan to get my garlic and multiplier onions into the ground in the next week or so, but other people may want to plant sooner. That would be fine. Here in my yard, I would feel comfortable planting garlic and multiplier onions anytime from early October to mid-November.

A UGA publication called “Garlic Production for the Gardener” points out that garlic prefers, like every other garden plant, a soil that is “well-drained … with organic matter worked into it.” Of course, we all know how close my yard’s soil comes to that well-drained ideal….not even close!

Luckily I have been adding organic matter to the garden for years, but even with those additions, before planting the little cloves, I will add more organic matter in the form of compost from the pile out back and a purchased bag of soil conditioner (the brand I picked up at the local Home Depot is called Nature’s Helper). I will also add a little fertilizer, but more will be put on in Spring when the plants really begin to grow.

To get started with the planting, I will need to pull apart some heads of garlic. The cloves get planted individually, still in their papery wrappers, three to four inches apart. They go in the ground pointy end up, the tip about one inch below the surface. Only the fat cloves from the outer layers get planted, since they seem to result in the biggest bulbs. The littler ones go into a dish on the kitchen counter, to be used in cooking.

The soil requirements of multiplier onions are basically the same as those for garlic, so getting the garden ready for them is essentially the same task. This saves the gardener a load of trouble.

The multiplier onions are much easier to separate than the garlic, so pulling the clumps apart doesn’t seem like such a chore. The individual onions get planted just below the soil surface and ten to twelve inches apart, because they will make big (if all goes well) clumps of onions as they grow.

I also bought, at a grocery store, a couple of organically grown shallots to plant. I chose “organic” so I could be sure that they hadn’t been treated with any anti-sprouting chemicals. Their requirements are similar to those for garlic and multiplier onions, so they should be fine in the same bed. Since they make clumps the way multiplier onions do, they get planted the same way.

In addition, I saved seed from some red onions this summer. The only UGA publication specifically on growing onions that I found is one called “Organic Vidalia Onion Production.” Even though my seeds are not for Vidalia onions, the growing requirements should be the same. The publication mentions that seed for Vidalia onions should be planted in September. The Vidalia area is enough south of here that I know I am very late with my onion seeds, but I am going to put some of these into the ground with the other onion-family plants, anyway. I am hopeful that I will get, at least, some little onions. If I am lucky and we have a warmish Fall, the plants might get far enough along that I get some medium sized onions. That would be great!

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Louisiana Short?

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I chose to grow the okra variety Louisiana Short because I thought the plants would stay relatively short in my yard, somewhat like the variety Cajun Jewel. What I have, though, is regular sized plants and short, fat, okra pods!

I have never seen such fat okra pods before. Happily, they are tasty and easy to turn on the skillet when we cook them (we don’t deep-fry).

Another unexpected and not unwelcome feature of these plants is that the stems and some of the leaves have some red on them. The flowers are smaller than flowers of Cajun Jewel, but the red streaks and spots make up for the less showy flowers. One plant is almost all red and even makes red pods!

If, before choosing this year’s okra, I had read the 2008 Okra Report from the Kerr Center in Oklahoma, I would have known that Louisiana Short is not, actually, short. A helpful table, describing many varieties of okra, included in the Kerr Report includes categories for height, color, pod type (standard vs. fat!), ease of harvest, first harvest date, and attractiveness.

Surprisingly, the table doesn’t have a check for Louisiana Short under the column “Attractive Landscape Plant,” which is defined in the report as plants that have red parts. The Kerr Center got their seed from the same place I did, Sand Hill Preservation, so I don’t know why theirs isn’t listed as showing any red.

The helpful table does show that Cajun Jewel gets just 25 inches tall, which matches my experience with that variety. Louisiana Short is supposed to get just 44 inches tall, but I notice that 44 inches is also the listed height for the variety Clemson Spineless, which at the Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden where I volunteer gets well over seven feet high (some plants, we are pretty sure, get to nine feet). It will be interesting to measure my okra’s height at the end of the season!

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Tomato Disease: Bacterial Speck

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Yesterday, I went to look at a friend’s tomato plants, which were doing poorly. A quick inspection showed that, whatever the plants were suffering from, it wasn’t one of the fungal “wilt” diseases, and it wasn’t Early Blight (I recognize those on sight), so we wrapped a leaf in a damp paper towel for me to bring home for research.

I used Cornell’s Vegetable MD Online pages for tomato diseases to figure out the problem, which seems to be Bacterial Speck. The black dots were small, numerous, and ringed with yellow. In addition, one characteristic of this disease is that it thrives in cool, wet weather, which is exactly what we had for most of the early part of this year’s growing season, in April, May, and the first week of June.

It’s hot now, but my friend’s plants are in bad shape. One plant has lost nearly all of its leaves, some plants have several leaves that are completely wilted, and all the plants have spots on all of their leaves.

The several websites that I eventually read agree that the most common way a garden becomes infected with this disease is through infected seeds or transplants. I started from seed most of the tomato plants that my friend is growing, but my garden is not infected, which means that the disease is unlikely to have come from the Cherokee Purple, Arkansas Traveler, Rutgers, Yellow Marble, or Amish tomatoes that I gave her.

I did grow one variety for her that I did not keep any plants of for myself; it was the variety Black Seaman. She also brought in at least one other tomato plant from another source. Either one of these could have been the source of infection (and I plan to burn that packet of Black Seaman seeds, just in case…), but for now, the biggest question is whether any of her plants will survive.

The remedy mentioned on most websites I visited was spraying with a copper-based fungicide: either a Bordeaux mixture or a copper-maneb spray. However, research from western North Carolina suggests that some strains of the bacteria that causes speck (Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato) have developed resistance to copper sprays. I am hoping that the strain in my friend’s garden is not among them.

Ways to limit the spread of this disease were mentioned in several online sources:

1. practicing clean cultivation (removing and disposing of plant debris–continually)
2. keeping tomato leaves dry
3. using mulch to avoid spread by splashing in heavy rains
4. choosing disease-free seeds and transplants (though this, obviously, is tough)
5. making sure plants are far enough apart that they get good air circulation and that one infected plant has a lessened chance of infecting all the others through splashing

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Stinkhorns!

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Walking the dogs around the yard this morning I saw a clump of my favorite fungus, stinkhorns. I like these because they remind me of a line in that old TV show, Wings.

The line is spoken by the ditzy lady (Faye) behind the ticket counter. She is entertaining the waiting passengers with fun facts, and one is something like, “the pressure from a whale’s blowhole can shoot a baby 23 feet in the air” (I know the height number isn’t right, but the idea is). Then she says, “Isn’t mother nature a hoot?”

When I see stinkhorns, I think that line.

Sometimes the taxonomists do a good job of assigning helpful names, and the family name of the stinkhorns, Phallaceae, is an excellent example; they are all a bit phallic in appearance. Of course, the stinkhorn family contains many species, but I’m pretty sure the stinkhorns that pop up in my yard are Mutinus caninus (also called the dog stinkhorn; they aren’t as tapered as M. elegans).

My 1979 copy of Ian Ross’s book Biology of the Fungi includes a little stinkhorn-related story from a 1959 text by Wasson and Wasson, about Charles Darwin’s aunt. The story is that she “used to seek out and destroy such horrible growths from the neighboring woods, so that when the maids of the household went out for walks, their morals would not be impaired.”

The commentary that follows the story is also interesting: “One assumes, of course, that Darwin’s aunt was, as are all censors, incapable of being affected by such gross objects.”

According to Kerry’s Garden, the dog stinkhorn is edible. A comment under the post by Jim Krupnik adds that it is also considered a delicacy by the Chinese. It is possible that stinkhorns are the plant world’s version of Limberger cheese. My in-laws used to say that the trick is getting it past your nose—then, it is pretty good. Needless to say, I never got that stinky cheese past my nose. I think the stinkhorns are going to stay out of my kitchen, but it is good to know that they aren’t at all dangerous.

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Pest Control: Cucumber Pickleworms

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Planting time is a good time to think about pest control, so I looked up the UGA fact-sheet on growing cucumbers and found a warning about cucumber beetles—keep them under control (through unspecified means) because they spread disease. That could be a useful warning, but I am pretty sure I have never had a problem with cucumber beetles. My pest problem in cucumbers is cucumber pickleworms .

Last year, the cucumber pickleworms had a very good year, and my cucumbers had a correspondingly bad year. Almost all of my cucumbers had the little shot-holes that show where a larva has eaten its way into the fruit. The little pests were also worse than usual at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden where I volunteer, so I know the problem was not just in my yard.

I have a copy of The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control , and when I realized the cucumber harvest was in serious jeopardy I checked the pickleworm section for advice. One suggestion was to plant a “trap crop” of yellow squash, since the pickleworm likes those even better than it likes cucumbers. The other advice was to plant early maturing varieties of cucumbers so that a good harvest could be brought in before the pickleworms totally demolished the crop.

This advice might have been useful a couple of months earlier (at planting time!), but it didn’t help much at the time. However, spring has come around again, and I have another chance. I am not changing my cucumber varieties, though, because they already are varieties that mature fairly early, and I don’t really have the space for trap-crops, other than the zucchini that usually keels over before the onslaught of the pickleworm, so I am hoping for a different solution.

The Pickleworm Management page from North Carolina State University, recommends the use of Sevin (carbaryl) to manage pickleworms. People who are averse to using pesticides (even this one which is a relatively safe chemical for home gardeners to use), are going to hope for another option.

According to the fact sheet Cucumber, Squash, Melon & Other Cucurbit Insect Pests from Clemson University, pickleworms don’t survive winter freezing, and the adults fly up from Florida each year:

“In South Carolina, pickleworms starve or freeze to death during the winter. They overwinter in Florida and spread northward each spring. Severe damage usually does not occur before summer in South Carolina. Heavy populations generally do not build up before the first flower buds open; however, late crops may be destroyed before blossoming.”

It seems reasonable that when the Southeast has an early or unusually warm spring, or early, strong winds heading north out of Florida, the pickleworm damage might start earlier than usual, like it did last year.

A couple of those linked resources also mention that the parent of the pickleworm is a night-flying moth. This seems like information that could be used to thwart those pickleworms. I am thinking about covering some of my plants at night, to keep the moths from laying eggs on my plants, then uncovering the plants in the morning, so bees and other pollinators can get to the flowers.

This sounds like work, I know, and some of my cucumbers will be trellised and a serious hassle to cover up each night. So, I will leave the trellised vines uncovered and only cover the pickling cucumbers that will be sprawling on the ground this year. This way I will have both an experimental plot–covered– and a control plot–uncovered– (ignoring that they are different kinds of cucumbers), so the experiment may be able to tell me whether the nighttime covering makes a difference in pickleworm infestation.

I’ll let you know how the experiment turns out.

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Cucurbitaceae Fun Facts

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The plant family Cucurbitaceae has the same root name as the squash genus, Cucurbita, so it is often refered to as the Squash family, even though it includes cucumbers, melons, and watermelons. The melons that most of us plant—canary melons, cantaloupes, and honeydews–are the species Cucumis melo. Cucumbers are the same genus as the melons, but a different species—Cucumis sativa. Watermelons, that I don’t plant because I can’t plant just every sprawling plant that I want to due to lack of space, are in the genus Citrullus.

All of these garden plants grow as vines with coiling tendrils that help them climb, unless a variety is specially bred (and labeled) to not have long vines. These “bush” types are essentially vines with very short internodes (spaces between the leaves ). They (mostly) still have tendrils, but they sprawl in miniature.

Plants in this family also have both male and female flowers—only the female flowers produce fruit, but they need the male flowers to accomplish this task.

All the garden-plants in this family are warm weather lovers, needing full sun, warm days, and plenty of water as the fruits begin to develop, for best production. Also, they do best with a soil pH between 6 and 6.5. (Click on the plant name for more growing information from UGA: cucumbers, melons , watermelons)

It turns out that a couple of native members of the Cucurbitaceae grow in the western U. S., and they are both in the genus Marah. The common name for each includes the word Manroot. These plants are vining and have both male and female flowers, just like the garden members of this family, but these plants include an unusual “extra.” According to this website about the Native Plants of Montara Mountain in California,

“The name “Manroot” comes from the surprisingly large tubers (4 – 8 ft long!) of these plants, which can appear to be a dead body when dug up.”

According to this webpage from a website about the Natural History of Orange County that is sponsored by the University of California at Irvine, one tuber “of unknown age dug at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden stood for many years at the entrance to the Administration Building. It had been transported on a flatbed truck, was several feet in diameter, and weighed 467 pounds.”

Tubers of the Manroot have been used medicinally as a purgative, so they aren’t exactly something that you’d want to serve at the supper table. Can you imagine trying to dig giant inedible tubers out of the garden at the end of each season? I am thankful that the garden members of this family are less exuberant than the natives in their production of underground parts.

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Pea Planting Time

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I plant out peas in the first nice weather after about 20 Feb. By nice, I mean days when the lows are projected to be consistently above or just at freezing for several days in a row. Interestingly, this usually coincides with the blooming of the trout lilies out back—the first sign, for me anyway, that spring is actually approaching.

For some people, Spring’s herald is the blooming of the daffodils, crocus, snowdrops, or forsythia. My daffodils and crocus have been up for a couple of weeks (or more!) already, and since they’ve come up the temperatures have dropped crazily into the teens at least once. It’s hard to think “Spring” when the front steps creak with cold when I leave the house.

However, I’ve been watching the trout lilies, and several fat buds have been pushed up from the emerging leaves out near the compost pile. They’ve been just waiting there, for about a week, in which the low temperatures have been in the low-to-mid twenties. The forecast is for warmer weather later this coming week. I expect those buds to break open when that happens. Then, I will be out planting peas.

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