Garlic for Pest Control- It’s not just for vampires!

  Garlic is an amazing vegetable. Can you imagine cooking without garlic? Would anything be worth eating? Garlic’s unique flavor is a must in countless dishes throughout the culinary spectrum (Except in cakes. That would be nasty).

 Garlic’s myriad of health benefits also make it a popular dietary supplement. But did you know it can also be used in the garden?

Garlic is a mild, but effective, pest deterrent (it’s a people deterrent too, if you eat it raw) and also has fungicidal properties. A garlic spray can be bought made easily at home.

 The problem with garlic spray is, while being natural and organic, it isn’t as powerful as the likes of rotenone or pyrethrum. Both of which are used more widely used in large scale organic agriculture.

 This really isn’t much of a problem, though, as rotenone and pyrethrum are non-selective and can be very damaging to beneficial insects. Garlic is also non-selective, but it’s lack of strength won’t totally obliterate your garden life. Nor, however, will it faze an infestation of most major garden pests.

 Which brings us to the use for which garlic really shines- as a preventative spray. Spraying garlic every ten days or so on crops that you have historically had pest problems with can be very helpful as a part of your IPM (integrated pest management- more on that another day) program. Then, if all else fails, you can bring in the big guns like rotenone.

 The same goes for plants that you have had fungus problems with in the past. I have problems with wilt in young pepper plants, for instance. Spraying the leaves and soaking the soil with garlic spray before the problem shows up can be helpful.

 Don’t go crazy and spray your whole garden. Focus on crops that you have trouble with or think you may have trouble with. If you never have any pests attack your cucumbers, for instance, then don’t use a preventative spray on them. Frequent garlic spraying of your entire garden can have bad ecological effects. As with all pest control solutions, organic or not, use with caution.

A few tips-

• As with all foliar applications, don’t spray right before rain or during the heat of the day. Or else your hard work will evaporate or wash away.
• Don’t spray garlic right before harvest! This should be obvious, but give your plants at least a couple of weeks before harvest with no spraying. Unless you like garlic flavored lettuce.
• Don’t spray on plants that are already diseased or dying. That’s akin to shooting a rhino with a BB gun.
• You may want to think twice about showing visitors around your garden immediately after spraying…

•   MOST IMPORTANT- As with all pest control measures, keep a careful eye on your garden after spraying. If you notice ladybugs and bees are disappearing, or anything else unusual is going on- STOP!

Grow a Piece of Ancient History- Plant a Ginkgo Tree!

 As you may have noticed, I get excited easily over edible plants and trees. To date, however, no member of the plant kingdom gets me quite as thrilled as the beautiful, unique, and yes, edible Ginkgo Biloba, or Maidenhair tree.

   Ginkgo is an old tree.  Do a Google search for “Ginkgo biloba living fossil” and you get a boat-load of results. It’s widely believed to have been around for well over 200 million years! In fact, it is the only species in it’s genus that is still around today.

   Ginkgo was used widely in ancient times in Asia for it’s seed, which is called a ginkgo nut, despite the fact that it isn’t a nut at all. The nut is sweet and flavorful and still highly valued in Chinese cuisine. Although when eaten in large quantities it can be toxic.

  You’ve probably seen ginkgo capsules at health food or drug stores. The powdered leaves used in these supplements have gained popularity for a wide variety of claims, ranging from easing tinnitus to improving blood flow to it’s most popular use- improving short term memory.

 The scientific community has apparently taken some interest in the plant and several studies have been published supporting and contradicting these claims. However, several studies did come to the conclusion that in some instances taking ginkgo supplements can dramatically improve attention in healthy people. How can you know for sure? Start taking it. If it works for you- great! Some people swear by it, others think it’s a sham.

 Growing Ginkgo

  Ginkgo is one tough tree. Taking a peek at this link should quell all doubts on that front. If an atomic bomb blast won’t kill it, I rather doubt I could kill it either. You can grow it in your yard fairly easily. It requires very little care aside from average water requirements. It’s also pretty cold hardy, taking temperatures down to -30 degrees F.

  You won’t have to worry about replacing it in the years to come either, some individual trees are believed to be 1,500 years old! People will be enjoying your beautiful ginkgo tree for generations.

 Ginkgo is also unique in the fact that it’s trees are either male or female. If you get seedlings, you won’t know which gender you have until they start producing in 10 years or so. If you’re growing it for the leaf it doesn’t matter, but if you want the collect and eat the seed you will need one of each gender. For this, you will have to buy named grafted trees that are identifiably male or female. Grafted trees produce much quicker- under five years.

 A quick warning about the seed- If left on the ground they will rot and stink. And I mean stink bad. The last thing you want is a smelly garden, and while it might be a good way to get back at your neighbors for that noisy dog, you’d have to put up with it as well. So if you grow it for the seed, be sure to collect and use all of them (they can be frozen), or dispose of the excess some other way (they produce over 30lbs on a mature tree).

 Ginkgo is a great ornamental tree. The unique fan shaped leaves are very interesting, especially in the fall when they blaze into bright yellow in a breathtaking display. It grows to a height from 30’ to some trees measuring over 120’! So it’s a big guy.

 Ginkgo is starting to become more popular in garden centers, but you may want to shop online for the grafted varieties you want. Onegreenworld.com has a good male selection and a few great nut-producing females. If the nuts aren’t important to you, seedlings are readily available. One Green World also has a great little booklet about growing and using this awesome tree.

Grow Blackberries in Your Garden!

  Blackberries are yummy. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t like blackberries? Probably not. I certainly haven’t met any and wouldn’t trust them if I did.

  Blackberries are very easy to grow and can be grown almost anywhere. Add this to the fact that they taste as scrumptious as they do, and they makes for an impressive addition to the home garden.

 Blackberries can be hard to find in grocery stores. Due their very short shelf life they have defied attempts at large scale commercial cultivation. The berries that do end up at the store are usually lacking in flavor and appearance. For a taste that money truly cannot buy, you have to grow these jewls yourself. If you pick wild berries, you’ll quickly grow to love the large size and great flavor of the cultivated strains.

If you live in the South, fall is the perfect time to plant blackberries. For everyone else, you can start getting your soil ready for spring planting now.

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Calcium- The Forgotten Plant Nutrient

  In the arena of gardening, I have little doubt that the nutrient Calcium feels a tad underappreciated. Besides being the fifth most abundant constituent in the earth’s crust, plants use (by weight) more calcium than any other nutrient in the ground. It’s critical for cell division. Plants are big into cell division, especially fast growing species like tomatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, and many other vegetables. Despite all this, calcium is rather ignored in the NPK world that we live in.

  Every plant needs calcium, however, and lots of it.

  To quote Agronomist Dr. Arden Anderson,:

    “It [calcium] is the foundation of all biological systems and is the component that gives the living cell its capacitor characteristic via it’s place in the cell membrane. Without the proper capacitor characteristic, the cell’s communication system functions poorly, resulting in cell degeneration, disease, and eventual death.”

  Ok, so that was a little over the top for me, but any paragraph that ends with the words ‘eventual death’ deserves careful consideration.

Garden Problems Associated with Calcium

 Lack of calcium in the soil shows up in many ways. Blossom-end rot in tomatoes is calcium related. As are bitter pit in apples and cavity spots in carrots. Many sorts of fruit deformation can usually be tracked back to calcium deficiency. Some other things to look out for are Necrosis of young leaves, short brown roots, increase in fungus problems, weak stems and just general stunted growth. Basically general garden suckage.

  All this stuff is really bad, but most often the result of limited available calcium is just lack of full potential. Most soils have the calcium required to avoid the terrible problems mentioned above, but obtaining that optimum level can really help your garden out.

 Calcium and pH

  pH does not indicate level of calcium availability. Read that again. This is probably one of the biggest gardening and farming myths in the universe.

 While it is true that most acid soils have lower available calcium than most alkaline soils, pH is about the hydrogen ion concentration. The idea that it’s an indicator of calcium availability is just, well, not true. In fact, as ph rises, calcium becomes less soluble. Added calcium (in some forms) can certainly move the ph scale higher, but so can a boat load of other cations like magnesium and potassium. Excesses of these nutrients can actually reduce calcium uptake in plants while still raising the ph.  So just forget about pH for the moment, k?  Seriously.

Adding Calcium to Your Soil

 So how does one figure out whether one needs calcium in their soil or not? A soil test of course! Try to get a fleshed out soil test with % Base Saturation values. While no ideal range exists for all soils and all situations, I’d wager that if your %Ca is less than 40%, than you want to add some. If you don’t get CEC and Base Saturation stuff on your soil test, have a talk with your county agent or local farmer to see if calcium is generally lacking in your area’s soil as total soil calcium is not a good measure of much of anything without the Base Saturation values. If you have no idea what CEC and all that junk is, talk to your county agent for a lot longer then you planned or wait for a post on the subject right here at Growing Groceries.

 One thing you must realize is that calcium and magnesium especially have a very close relationship. When one goes up it reduces the availability of the other. Plants need both of these so it’s more important that they are at the ideal ratio rather then having the ideal volume of one at the expensive of the other. if you have a Calcium/magnesium ratio of over 5:1 (five parts calcium to one magnesium) then likely you’ll experience magnesium deficiency, so don’t overdo it.

 If you’re like me, you view soil testing as a bother and don’t want to have to number crunch calcium/magnesium ratios and such. In this case the best way to add calcium to your garden is compost. Most compost is relatively rich in calcium and you can make sure of that by adding lime or eggshells to your pile. Since compost is relatively balanced, you don’t have to worry about over applying calcium and screwing things up.  Another no-worries approach to adding calcium is to find an Organic calcium foliar spray that you can spray directly on the plants. This is also a good way to test your calcium availability math-free. Spray a few plants throughout the season and leave a few others alone and see if you can spot a difference.

 If you want to add a calcium source directly to your soil, here’s a list of some of the more common Organic sources

• Limestone- Calcium Carbonate (CaCO3). This is the most common form of calcium found in garden centers. Unless you have very low magnesium levels, do NOT use dolomitic lime, as it contains around 6% magnesium. Calcitic Lime is best. However, Calcium Carbonate will raise pH. So if you already have a high ph, stay away from lime.

• Gypsum- Calcium Sulfate. Gypsum, for reasons I don’t really understand but hear repeated all the time, will not raise soil pH like lime will. This is a great source of calium for those with high pH and low calcium availability.

• Bonemeal- Bonemeal is a great, if a tad expensive, organic fertilizer that contains nitrogen and phosphorus as well as 18% calcium with a negligible pH effect.

• Soft Rock Phosphate- Great stuff. 35% calcium as well as an amazing phosphorus source that’s highly soluble (unlike bonemeal)

• Aragonite- Calcium Carbonate. Seashells. ‘Nuff said.

• Wood Ashes- Have a wood stove? Wood ashes make a great fertilizer for acid soils. Use like lime, but double the amount. Wood Ashes are about 45% calcium carbonate. It also contains a nice little bit of potassium

  Always remember to follow the directions on the bag when applying any fertilizer, organic or not.

Save Money And The Environment With A Compost Pile!

Today we have a guest post from Mandy at GardenMandy.com

Introduction To Composting

  Composting is the decomposition of organic matter, such as vegetables, manure or once living things.   Decomposition is performed mostly by bacteria.  There is home composting and industrial composting.  Though the process is basically the same between the two, the techniques will differ.  Composting itself is a fantastic additive to houseplants and offers extra nutrition to gardens.  It is an excellent natural way to recycle kitchen waste and to reduce the amount of garbage sent to public landfills. 

 Composting is not a new innovation, recently conceived in a laboratory somewhere.  As you walk through any forest, you will see the natural process of composting taking place every day.  The process starts when leaves and twigs fall to the ground, build layers on top of each other and begin decaying.  The roots of trees and other plant life then feeds off the decaying layers, as it is returned into the soil.  Composting itself is extremely easy and natural.  Early human races made piles of food wastes, as a way to rid themselves of their garbage.  What they discovered was these piles became habitats for seeds that were unintentionally and then intentionally planted there. 

 Composting today can start the same way, on the most basic level.  Simply make a pile of unwanted biological material, somewhere in your backyard.  You can also build a composting bin by using unwanted wood, such as wood pallets or recycled wood.  There are also commercial composting bins you can purchase.  But why go to the trouble of shopping for a bin, when keeping it simple is the most fun and least costly?

How Compost Helps The Earth

 Composting is a fantastic way of reducing the amount of waste sent to public landfills.  Landfills have been known to produce high amounts of greenhouse gases. These gases do not remain contained in landfills, but escape into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are no longer equated with the common sources of  planes, cars, and manufacturing plants. 

 So how does it differ, if biological waste decomposes at a landfill or is used at your home, as a source of a compost pile? When biodegradable materials decay at landfills, a mixture of greenhouse gases are produced and over half of the gases produced are methane based.  At home, the source of the compost decays with oxygen.  When the compost decays, carbon dioxide is produced rather than the more potent methane.  When you compost at home, rather than send these materials to a public landfill, greenhouse gases are then reduced. 

 So what are good materials for composting?  It is not as simple as just saying anything with a carbon or nitrogen base.  Common elements for composting include leaves, sawdust and wood chips, paper, cardboard, manure, fruits, vegetable (yes, even if it’s just their peels), teabags, egg shells and grass cuttings.  Even if you decide not to consider the toxins spewing into the atmosphere from landfills as a reason to compost, at least consider the money you will save, by using natural compost to feed your lawn and garden rather than buying the synthetic commercial brands.

Sign the Petition at EatTheView.org for a Healthier President!

  I’m often late when it comes to finding out about stuff. I’m always the very last person to find out about  every internet craze or popular website, for instance.

   Well, I think I’ve done it again, but in case you haven’t heard about eattheview.org, then please head over and sign the petition for the next president to turn the White House lawn into a veggie garden! Wouldn’t that be so freaking awesome?

  I can just picture McCain (not so much Obama, he doesn’t have the farmer look, I’m afraid) in overalls, a plaid shirt, and a hanky hanging out of his back pocket whilst hoeing the Presidential cabbage patch and whistling along to Woody Guthrie’s ”This Land is Your Land”.

Stop Global Warming and Rock your Garden with…Charcoal?

So have you heard of Terra Preta? If not, then do yourself a favor and watch this awesome video-

  People have known about Amazonian Dark Earth for a long time, but not until recently have they pinned down what it is and where it came from. Even now there’s a lot of mystery surrounding it. Initially, it was thought to be the result of volcanic ash or sedimentation, but now it’s widely accepted that these amazingly fertile plots of ground in the Amazon basin, surrounded by very infertile tropical soils, were man made through the application of charcoal.

  Instead of slash-and-burn, the ancient Amazonian dudes practiced slash and char, which involved burning at near anaerobic conditions. The wood isn’t incinerated into ash, but is burnt to a stable charcoal form. You know. Like briquettes.

 The cool thing about charcoal is stuff sticks to it. Including soluble nitrogen, which is notorious for running away from your plant’s root zone as quickly as it possibly can.  Charcoal also absorbs moisture, keeping your soil from drying out as fast. Charcoal builds soil tilth, increases soil CEC and acts as a veeeeery slow release fertilizer. It can’t be substituted for less stable carbon sources, like compost, but it seems like it could make quite a magical addition to a soil fertility program.

  Also, being a very stable form of carbon, it reduces CO2 emissions. When plants die and decompose, they give off a lot of carbon dioxide. With Biochar, up to 50% of the carbon in the charred material permanently stays in the charcoal. So it’s green. Well…it’s actually black, but…yeah.

  So where do you get charcoal from?  Well, you can make it yourself from wood or plant material like corn stalks using a homemade biochar stove or gasifier.

Or you buy it. Lowes home improvement stores sell natural charcoal under the Cowboy Charcoal brand. With no fillers or preservatives, this should be fine to use in your soil. Biochar as a soil amendment is sold in some places, but good luck finding it and paying for it.

 The answers to all your charcoal questions can be found here - A lot of research went into this resource and it covers just about everything.  Theres also a lot of great info at http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/

 This is a very exciting topic, and I’m glad it’s gotten so much attention of late. Please be sure to share it with friends! Have fun experimenting!

Growing Cover Crops

I talked a little bit last week (or was it earlier?) about Cover Crops, specifically Cowpeas. Today I’d like to go into the general principles of cover crops and how to implement them in the home garden. My next post on cover crops will go into selecting the plants that are best for your situation.

Growing Cover Crops, or green manures, is one of the most important things you can do to make your home garden more productive. The fact that it’s easy is icing on the cake. They can be grown in any garden of any size, and usually take up growing space in the least productive months of the year.

It’s helpful to think of cover crops like compost. When you throw a banana peel in your compost bin, you’re taking nutrients that were derived from some tropical soil somewhere and recycling it into your own garden. When you grow a cover crop, you are taking nutrients that already exist in your soil and recycling them so they’ll be more available for the next crop and increase soil biology.

The banana peel example is like putting more gas in your car, and the cover crop example is like buying a hybrid. Capeesh?

Now just because you buy a hybrid (grow a cover crop), it doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep filling up your tank (adding nutrients from outside sources). Growing cover crops and adding other fertilizers need to go hand in hand for optimal garden awesomeness.

Cover Crops can help your garden with the following:

• Increasing organic matter by decaying plant material into the top few inches of the soil
• Growing the Earthworm and microbe population in your soil
• Virtually eliminating erosion by protecting the topsoil from rain
• Keeping down weeds by forming a dense colony of plants.
• Areating the soil through deeply penetrating roots that afterwards decay.

Pretty good stuff, eh?

How to Grow a Cover Crop

Growing cover crops is easy. Here’s the steps:

1. Figure out when to plant which cover crops in your area- This is not as hard as it sounds when you consider that cover crops fall into two groups. Winter Cover crops, and Summer Cover Crops. With relatively cold hardy winter cover crops you want make sure you have a good month of not-too-terribly-cold weather. The plants will then be old enough to resist lightly freezing temperatures. This usually puts the planting date in late summer or early fall. With Summer cover crops, which are not hardy at all, you want to make sure it has enough time to mature and be cut down before it’s killed by the first frost

2. Get a good, clean, even seedbed- Cover crop seeds are usually small, and always broadcasted, not planted in rows. Having a clean seedbed that you can evenly spread the seed out on is imperative. Otherwise you’ll have holes in your crop, which weeds will try to sneak through in

3. Sow the seed and rake it in- Not to belabor the point, but be sure to spread the seed as evenly as you can. For larger areas a broadcaster is nice, but not necessary. A bag of seed and a back and forth swaying motion of your hand is all that’s needed. After the seed is spread, take a rake and lightly cover them. Most cover crops, having small seed, require very little covering, so don’t over do it. A light scratching of the surface is fine.

4. Water- Since the seed is just barely below the surface, they’ll dry out fast. Be sure it’s consistently moist until they germinate and get established. Afterward, water like you would anything else

5. Fertilize- This step is almost never mentioned by anyone, and is not wholly necessary, but cover crops benefit from fertilizer too. By using a balanced Organic foliar spray every few weeks, like many fish emulsion products, you can often dramatically increase the biomass of your cover crop. The nutrients go right back into the soil, making it worth the extra time

6. Cut it down - Cut down your cover crop right before it flowers. The reason we do this is because flowering and fruiting is the time when most plants really start freaking out when it comes to using nutrients. If you let the plant go to seed, a whole heck of a lot of nitrogen and other nutrients will go into that seed, instead of back into the ground where we want it. You can cut it down with a sickle, swing blade, weedeater, lawnmower, or variety of other sharp instruments

7. Dig it in or mulch it- After letting it dry for a day or two, (not sure why, it’s just become the standard practice. In reality it’s probably not that crucial) dig it in. Before digging in, however, it helps to chop up the cut plants with a lawnmower to make the digging process easier. Dig it in with a spade or a rototiller. Alternatively, you can just leave it on top of the soil for mulch, and plant your transplants through it. This is much easier on soil life, as spading and rototilling makes life a good deal harder for microbes and earthworms.

As a side note, you’re supposed to wait awhile for the cover crop to decompose before planting, as decomposing plant matter temporaily ties up nitrogen in your soil. As I mentioned in my article on cowpeas, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal whether or not you follow this rule if you have moderately healthy soil. Still, it’s good to play by the rules.

Oat picture courtesy of /kallu, clover courtesy of upturnedface on Flicker

Life Lessons From….Vegetables?

This morning I was sitting cross legged on the ground in front of a few rows of young pepper plants. I had a little cultivator in my hand and was unenthusiastically scratching at the ground around them that had grown rather thick with weeds. I was trying to go about it as quickly as possible, as I had already spent more time than I had intended doing things that ‘just couldn’t wait’ in the garden and had to move on to things that ‘just couldn’t wait’ in other areas of my life.

I got bit on the hand by a fire ant at this point, but that’s largely irrelevant.

There’s something intrinsically relaxing in a vegetable garden, as I’m sure many of you noticed. As I sat there sucking my newly injured hand, a fresh wave of this restorative effect washed over me. The wind was blowing nicely, the sun was just popping it’s head over the treeline and making the dew soaked leaves sparkle a little bit. Pretty cool.

As I looked at these young pepper plants in front of me it sort of struck me that a pepper plant, like everything else on this earth, has a lot to overcome and many problems to face. Bugs, weather, animals, a scary three pronged sharp cultivator in my careless hand that had already badly nicked one of their brethren- they all threaten this poor guy’s very existence.
It doesn’t seem to bother him, though. At lease, I’ve never seen a plant have a nervous breakdown. What little he can control of his own exsistence, he does. He’ll branch out towards sunlight if he’s in the shade, for instance, but what is outside of his control, he accepts.

He goes through many stages. he’ll sprout, grow leaves, flower, fruit, and die. But he doesn’t seek counseling in between stages. He’s not trying to grow faster than his fellow peppers, and he doesn’t try to change and become a tomato plant. He doesn’t even notice the tomato plant.

People, unlike plants, strive and worry so much for what we want to be that we don’t focus on being what we are now. They aren’t worried about the economy, and they don’t give a dime if Obama or McCain wins the White House. Job security is not an issue to them. And you know what? Nine times out of ten they usually make out just fine. And when they don’t, I get more upset about it than they do. I’ll loose sleep over a squash bug invasion. They just wing it. Funny how that works out.

I want to be more like a pepper plant.

Three Great Watermelon Varieties To Plant Before You Die

My watermelon crop just finished up for this year. Until now, my watermelon selections have been kind of tame. I’d just pick up whatever variety was at the Feed and Seed store and stick it in the ground. Like Sugar Baby, Crimson Sweet, Jubilee. Just your average, everyday, red-fleshed, green striped watermelon.

Well no longer. There are so many flippin’ awesome watermelons out there, it seems a shame to grow the same boring varieties you could pick up at the grocery store. These three were the ones that dominated in my 2008 garden.

• Cream of Saskatchewan
• Ali Baba
• Keckley’s Sweet
• 
  

As you probably know, watermelons come in a wide range of colors. From white, to yellow, to orange, to red. This has led some people to speculate that the sun is actually a cross section of a watermelon.

Eating a white fleshed watermelon is an interesting experience. Having eaten red watermelons exclusively throughout my entire history of watermelon eating, it came as a shock that something that looked so different would taste so similar.

This particular white fleshed variety I grew was Cream of Saskatchewan. The only thing I know about Saskatchewan is that it’s way, way north of me. And that it’s probably really cold. So I wasn’t really expecting this plant to excel like it did in my hot, humid climate.

Cool little dudes, these melons. They’re nearly perfectly round, and the sharp contrast of light and dark stripes make the whole thing look like a globe of the earth. They ripen slightly earlier than most other watermelons. The packet says 80 days. It seemed a lot quicker to me, but being forgetful and stupid I forgot to write down when I planted them. How’s that for being helpful?

Either way, it’s an early melon, and great for people with shorter season. Or, as in my case, a way to prove to your gardening friends how much better you are since you’re getting your watermelons first.

The flavor was definitely unique. Maybe I’m just imagining this because of the name, but I could’ve sworn there was a hint of creaminess in the flavor. Very sweet, but with far to many seeds for very enjoyable eating. That’s great for seed spitting contests, but having matured into a reasonable adult, it getting harder and harder to find people to share this delightful past time with. That or they’re all jealous of my mad expectorating skillz.

None of them got huge. The biggest was probably a little bigger than a basketball, with most falling in the 8-10lb range. They set a lot of fruit, however, more than either of the other two varieties.

Growing ‘Ali Baba’

Ali Baba watermelons are the bomb. After great lengths of contemplation, meditation, and quiet prayer, I cameto the conclusion that Ali Baba is the best watermelon I have ever tasted. Coming in at about 20lbs, the crisp, sweet, and flavor packed red-fleshed melons were a favorite of everyone I let try it. They’re oblong-ish, looking like an over-sized, light green cucumber. Very few seeds is an added benefit. This variety is from Iraq, and is said to do great in dry climates.

Growing ‘Keckley’s Sweet’

If you’re looking to escape the whole stripey thing, Keckley’s Sweet may be the variety for you. Tall, dark, and handsome is a good physical description.

A much later variety than the other two- over 100 days for me-these guys were absolutely freakin huge. My only problem with them was it was very hard to tell when they were ripe. For whatever reason, the old standby of the dead tendril test (checking for the tendril in between the axis of vine and fruit) didn’t work reliably. I’m a terrible watermelon thumper, so the result was two huge beautiful watermelons picked prematurely. After two such failures, I determined I’d go to the river and end it all should I pick the third two soon. My presence here is indicative of the result of that resolution.

Plenty big enough, though. This one pictured with yours truly (my hands, anyway) weighed in at nearly 45lbs, and he wasn’t the biggest. See how it dwarfs my truly massive shoulders.

Anyway…. This should give you some ideas for next year’s watermelons. Two great sources for these and other watermelon seeds are www.gourmetseed.com and www.rareseeds.com

Happy Fall, everyone! I for one sure can’t wait for some cooler weather.

‘Ali Baba’ picture used with permission from http://www.gourmetseeds.com