Invasion of the Poppy Hatchers

A sea of red in the parking strip.

We've been invaded! Not by the typical bugs or weeds but by poppies and not the typical California kind. Red and purple poppies have sprung up all over the front yard, seemingly out of nowhere. The red ones have flowers that look like a type of Oriental Poppy (Papaver orientale) and the purple ones are of the medicinal type (Papaver somniferum). Granted we had purple poppies in one tiny corner of our lavender beds last year (that also magically materialized). They really haven't been too proliferous this year but the red ones are everywhere! We can hardly see our blueberry bushes in the parking strip and these interlopers have shaded out the rhubarb.

What's interesting is that they have not invaded anyone else's yard around us. Maybe some prankster committed a guerilla gardening act for kicks and giggles. We have a lot of admirers in the area that like to walk by to see what's up in the yard. In fact, I was snipping and giving away poppy heads to anyone interested that came by.

Purple Papaver somniferum

I like poppies, so I see this invasion as a plus even though they can look messy over time. The red ones are flopping over. The purple flowers of the medicinal variety don't last too long, but they are lovely. Seductively so.

I'll be out there judiciously cutting off seed heads so they don't go nuts again next year. I want to control next year's crop. Poppy seeds, anyone?

Yet Another Use for 2 Liter Bottles

Some bottles drained fast, others are still full after several hours

Now that the weather's warmer, I took the bottle cloches off the tomatoes. The tomato plants outgrew them anyway, becoming rather contorted in the confines of their biospheres.

Instead of storing away the bottles though, I've discovered a new use for them. I flipped them upside down and with some pressure, snugged the bottle tops into the soil enough to hold them in (like the wine bottles). I also stuck a stake through each one just to help keep them upright. Each tomato plant got a bottle planted next to it.

Now, instead of watering the whole bed, I simply fill each bottle up with water and let it slowly soak in. That does two things: it provides a steady amount of water over a longer period of time and it prevents the problems that overhead watering causes with tomatoes, i.e. fungal diseases. I know the water is going directly into the root system too. I can add some fertilizer or Epson salts to the bottle when need be. Yet another use for those plastic bottles until they are ready to be recycled or stored.

Out of the Cold Frame, But Still Out of the Cold

Roland recently - OK, recently for him - built a cold frame over half of one of our raised beds. He used old windows he salvaged off a job, built a simple frame, cat-proofed it (of course) and put knobs on the doors. Both sides swing all the way open, or I prop them open with one of the rare sticks lying around. I did a happy dance, kicked the cats out (they found a way in anyway), and put in Red Zebra tomato starts that I've raised since the seed I collected from last year's crop. Being sealed off from the weather, the trick of all this is to regularly water the contents. Several times I didn't get to that part fast enough and the tomatoes went limp, looking like a rag-tag man crawling across the desert reaching out to nowhere crying, "water." Fortunately, I did water them in time to re-inflate them back to somewhat of an upright position. I've just been testing how tough they are, ya know.

Now that it's May, I rescued them from the abuses of my cold frame care and stuck them out in the chosen bed for the season. Because the raised bed is in the parking strip, I wasn't keen on putting up a hoop house. They can look rather tacky. It's a hot, sunny location and I feel the tomatoes only need protection until they get well established. So, I did the next best thing and put bell cloches over each plant. Now, I'm not one to go out and buy glass cloches at $35 plus a pop. Instead, I re-purposed the copious amounts of 2 ltr. water bottles I've stashed after swallowing the contents.

Re-purposed water bottles over tomato starts.

I simply cut the bottom off using the conveniently placed embossed line around the circumference as a guide. Then, I just pushed them into the soil deep enough to hold them in place and, voila! free cloches and no need to worry about watering until after July 4th. Lost the lids? No problem. Use wine corks instead. I'll vent them during the day by keeping the cork off so they don't get all that tomato fungus and then to keep the heat in, I'll cork them up at night. Not too difficult to remember, right? Yeah, right.

Of course, the cat proofing had to be modified to accommodate the new configuration. That detail provides me with two more wood cat proofing grids to use as trellises for perhaps, cucumbers or some such viney veg.

Re-purposing the Re-purposed for the Peas

My quickie pea trellis tent.

Roland usually gets creative when constructing trellises for vining veg such as peas. He has dived head first into his lumber scrap stash to retrieve lengths of mahogany and white oak to create monumental structures to hold all sorts of legumes or row cover frames to keep the bugs out. A lot of thought goes into his creations.

So far this year he hasn't had time to do any garden stuff, not to mention that the weather hasn't exactly cooperated, so I devised a trellis myself re-purposing one of the already re-purposed wooden structures. I had Roland construct a cold frame over half of one of the beds, so the cat proofing was no longer needed in that area. Instead of letting it just take up space stored somewhere, I concocted an ad hoc tent for a pea trellis. I simply placed the ends of the frames onto the beds between other cat proofing and angled them over into each other. Voila! Instant pea trellis without having to lift a nail gun. To hold the top together I used the next best fix-it thing on earth to duct tape, zip-ties. I only used 3 ties, one on each end and one in the middle. Done.

In the space below, I can plant veg that can handle shadier conditions. I have some lettuce there now, but I could plant Swiss chard, spinach or radishes. With the cold weather still around, at this point, I'll be happy if the peas germinate soon. Now that I can cross this chore off the honey-do list, Roland only has to finish the tool shed roof, finish the cold frames, replace the front porch, get rid of the dead cars, paint the house, clean out the garage........You get my drift.

It's Baaaaack!

Those darling little purple florets have just appeared.

On the way to the woodpile I passed by the raised beds and was astonished to see Purple Sprouting Broccoli florets! It's barely April and my PSB is putting forth vast amounts of edible purple yumminess. What's really surprising is the fact that it's producing those florets on close to 3 year old stalks.

Granted, this is a variety that takes around 8 months to start producing in the first place. However, I planted the seeds in late April of 2010 and the first summer I got nothing but a thicket of 6 foot tall stalks with 2 foot long leaves that took over the entire 8 ft. by 4 ft. bed. As it turns out, this is an heirloom variety that one should plant in the fall so 8 months later you can theoretically harvest something in late summer. After discovering my oops, I overwintered the bunch but only 3 stalks made to spring. PSB is supposed to be very frost hardy, but these 3 plants survived that early big freeze we had in the fall of 2010. The next spring, those plants exploded and I had so much PSB that a lot of it flowered and ended up in the compost pile because I couldn't keep up with it. I assumed that the mass production were the plants death throws to reproduce before they droop dead. How wrong I was! The plants overwintered a second time and this year, they're producing earlier than ever only this time, I'm determined to nip this in the bud before it all gets out of control. I'll probably freeze a lot of it.

This is a great time of spring for the PSB to be putting out because it's too cold for those pesky cabbage moths and the leaves are pristine. The florets and younger leaves are also very sweet. Maybe several years of the freeze/thaw cycle has increased the sweetness. Sugars are a plant's anti-freeze and there's nothing like a frost to bring out sweetness in Brassicas. I'm chopping up and steaming the smaller leaves and the florets together.

Purple Sprouting Broccoli's culinary origins happen to go way back to the Romans who first cultivated it. Marcus Gavius Apicius, a celebrity chef of the Roman Empire, created one of the earliest known recipe books that called for broccoli to be mixed with cumin, coriander seeds, chopped onions, oil and wine. Hmmm, I wonder where I can get a copy.
 
Although the Brits have been growing PSB for at least the last 2 centuries, it's just starting to become more common in this country. In the UK, PSB's season is January to May. Here, it appears to be late March to when you're sick of it and let it go to seed. It's definitely a space hog and you can't expect an abundance of large big-box style florets. Visualize the shrunken heads on grown bodies in the movie Beettlejuice and you'll get an idea of the proportions of the florets to the overall plant.

I'm contemplating contacting Guiness World Records when it hits year 10 to enter it as the longest living single crop of Purple Sprouting Broccoli. I'll have to see what the current record is. I could see myself getting as obsessed as those giant pumpkin growers get, sitting up all night to keep the varmints from snacking on my charges and monitoring the plants with an IV.

My guess is that some Darwinian PSB mutation is happening with mine. Or maybe I'm not so quick to whack them down after the growing season. Much to Roland's eye-rolling, I've decided to see how long I can keep these PSB anomalies going before they finally peter out. More bang for the buck that way too. My $3 packet of seeds has gone a long way and I haven't used much fertilizer either. Who knows, this region's predictive climatic transitions to warmer and wetter might just be the ticket to the development of a new cultivar. How does Brassica oleracea 'Debra's Floret Folly' sound? I just love freakish plants, don't you?

Ceramic Pots Aren't All They're Cracked Up To Be

It seems like that at the end of every winter I have broken planting containers to deal with. I like natural materials so I like glazed clay. And using glazed clay pots presents some challenges.

It's not that my pots have gotten smucked by extreme temperature swings nor has freezing moisture done its weathering job. It's the cats! At the end of the season, I often place several small pots on the edge of the front porch (which is pretty much anywhere on the porch given that it's only 4 feet deep and there's ten tons of crap on it already) and every year several of our chubby mogs go plowing through the neat lineup on the way to knocking something else over so they can nap on the spot that they shouldn't. Of course, it's always my favorite pots that get broken. You'd think I'd learn by now not to put them where they get bulldozed off the porch or front steps, but being a creature of habit, I inevitably leave them in an area that is convenient for me. Apparently, however, it's inconvenient for the cats. They're creatures of habit too, and like their established paths uninterrupted with things such as expensive ceramic pots.

A slope with newly installed pot fragments.

As one who is resigned to a cracked pot destiny, I have decided to make the most of it by, you guessed it, re-purposing these clay fragments elsewhere in the garden. Yes folks, they get morphed into a design element. I simply bury them in the slope below the bathtubs and plant something in them. It's sort of Mesopotamian looking, after the earthquake or during an anthropological dig.

In addition to looking earthy decorative, these broken pot halves act as small terraces on a relatively unstable hillside. If the sides of the pot pieces don't adequately sweep around, place some decorative rock along where fired clay meets soil to help hold the pots in place and keep the soil from eroding down the hill. The end result makes the whole thing look like you've broken your $30 pots on purpose just for this project.

Of course, it's critical you plant something in these areas right away because chances are you will have fury supervisors watching you build them new places to poop. Cats are good at re-purposing too.

The Evil Twin Series: Bored with Your Garden? Try Squirting Cucumbers

It's so much fun to peruse the internet for unusual seed companies. In fact, I came across a great one from, where else, England called Plant World Seeds. Actually, I was entering search ques for old cottage varieties of perennials when I came across this site. I couldn't help myself; I ordered a bunch of seed packets for unusual varieties of different perennials and bulbs. One in particular definitely caught my eye: Ecballium Elaterium or Squirting-Cucumber. Not exactly something you would typically find at your local nursery. Although the fruit is not very edible, it has another endearing value for those of us that posses an evil twin (formerly known as the Jungian id).

According to Plant World Seeds:

Its name alone is a mouthful. And that is precisely what your curious friends will have when they touch the small plum-shaped fruits....Yellow flowers on radiating stems produce intriguing hanging fruits. Unwary inspection triggers the incredible seed distribution method. The swollen fruit breaks off and shoots downwards (remember Newton's Laws of Reaction) propelled by a high speed jet of seeds and water.

Yes folks, it's a cucumber that shoots itself and its seeds across the yard! In fact, according to one source, the record squirt is 45 feet! The fact that the propellant action is triggered by touch has a potential for some wicked fun. The fruits look like the size of kiwis attached to a very Cucurbit-like plant. I plan to place it in a strategic position where curious passer-byes will have a looksie, then ZAP! I just hope that I'm around to witness the fun. There's a couple of neighborhood walkers that I've caught having a peek at my zuccs before.

Of course, I'm assuming that the cats will provide much of the entertainment. The fruits will be just too irresistible looking not to be batted around. If I see a sproinging cat in that vicinity, I'll know what happened. Cheap entertainment for under 3 bucks, eh?

Leave it to the Brits to provide this one. Squirting-Cucumber: It's so Monty Python.