Fall Radishes - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

These pictures are from a few weeks ago while I was in California.  It was my first chance to harvest the Cherry Belle radishes since first planting them about 35 days ago.  I knew that was about 10 days past their normal days to maturity, but I was hoping that cooler temperatures and shorter daylights of late fall would work in my favor and not negatively affect the radishes too much.

Well, I can always hope, right?

While a bit on the small side, here are The Good.

Then we have The Bad.

And we have The Ugly.

I have read that uneven watering and being left in the ground for too long can cause radish cracking.  I've also read that under- or non-development of roots may be caused by overcrowding, temperatures being too hot or soil deficiencies.  But I'm still puzzled because all these radishes were grown in the same part of the garden sufficiently/evenly spaced away from each other.  Whatever water/light/soil nutrition these radishes might have been lacking, they all got exactly the same treatment, yet some fared much better than the others. 

Oh well, I guess it's just another proof that vegetable gardening is anything but predictable.

I am happy to report that whatever problems the radish roots were having didn't affect the green tops at all.  They all grew beautifully and were rather delicious tossed into some soup.  It was my first time eating full grown radish greens, but I'm sure it won't be the last time.

Fall Vegetable Gardening in Southern California

With Halloween just around the corner, there's no denying that the holidays are not too far away.  I've been busy this week trying to finalize several different travel plans involving multiple trips "all over the country" (five states in three different time zones count, right?) while attempting to coordinate with many different family members' holiday plans as much as possible.  But that's almost all done now, so back to blogging!
 
Since there isn't much going on in the Indiana garden right now, I'll provide an update on my California garden.  Yes, I call it my garden now, instead of my mom's garden.

Last time I was in CA, I weeded the whole side garden and added some more soil/compost.  I also put down some 12 inch paver stones so that I could walk across them and reach the back part of the garden, because it was almost impossible to reach the part of the garden against the wall without breaking my back while kneeling/squatting on the concrete side path.

This is what the finished garden looked like.  After my aggressive weeding, the only thing left in the garden was the cut-and-come-again lettuce mix.

Side profile of the new and improved garden

This side garden is approximately 4 feet wide by 24 feet long.  After I finished preparing the garden, I planted it with all kinds of seeds for cool-weather crops: radishes, sugar snap peas, cilantro, parsley, carrots, parsnip, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, mustard, swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, etc.  According to my CA peeps, the garden has fully germinated and is now full of lots of healthy two-week-old seedlings. 

Cherry Belle radish seedlings

Daikon radish seedling

The seedling pictures - taken with an iPhone camera - are courtesy of my sister, whom I've been bugging to email me some picture updates of my garden babies. 

 Sugar snap pea seedlings

I'll be visiting CA again in a few weeks and will provide more updates then.  It's really exciting to have a "new" fall garden to look forward to, while my Indiana garden (a bust this fall anyway due to all kinds of evil garden pests) is hunkering down for the winter.  We're expecting our first frost tonight in Indiana.  In contrast, I think the average daytime highs in my California garden will remain around 60 - 70 F degrees for most of the winter, with the nighttime lows around 40 - 50 F degrees.  As a new vegetable gardener, I totally have a newfound appreciation for the mild climate in Southern California!

Waiting for Fall Lettuce to Grow

Ruby Lettuce

Red Romaine Lettuce

Little Gem Lettuce

Here we have lots of little volunteer lettuce seedlings (among some others) coming up from seeds that fell off the seed heads when I saved lettuce seeds, or they just self-seeded themselves.  They are mostly loose-leaf blend and mesclun lettuce mix.

Cutworm Damage to Sugar Snap Pea Seedlings

As I work out of state during the week, I sometimes text Keith to get current status reports on our garden vegetables.

"Hey, how are the peas doing?"

"Um... Oh, did I tell you that we have peppers growing in the grow box now?"

"Oh No.  What's wrong with the peas?"

"We have lots of new baby peppers!  They look really good!"

"TELL ME ABOUT THE PEAS"

"They don't look so good."

I must have bad pea karma, because I just can't seem to grow them in my Indiana garden.  Due to my first-year gardening inexperience, sugar snap peas were planted too late this spring (mid-May), and what few seedlings that tried to survive either got munched on by wild rabbits or got fried crispy brown by the hot weather.  On the other hand, the same peas that I planted in my mom's garden just thrived in the cool coastal California weather this summer and gave my mom pound after pound of fresh and sweet sugar snap peas.

As we slowly transitioned from summer to fall, I was determined to try my hand at pea-growing once again.  I direct sowed them in a shadier part of the herb garden in early August.  All the peas germinated within a week.  I even called them my butt peas.  Everything seemed to be going really well.

 My precious Butt Pea seedlings towards the end of August

Then a few weeks ago, I discovered that more than half of the seedlings had fallen over, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and went snip snip around the base of the seedlings.  There were also a few seedlings that were cut off at the bottom, but looked like they were still up because their tendrils were holding hands with other seedlings. These were literally floating in mid-air, like ghost peas!

Even though I haven't personally seen any cutworms yet, I knew from my pest research that they were the culprit here.  Those darn cutworms!  I tried to find them by digging around the fallen seedlings, but I couldn't find any.  I protected the remaining seedlings by pulling cardboard cylinders - empty paper towel rolls and toilet paper rolls cut about 2-3 inches tall - over them.  I have no pictures from this day, because I was too mad to play photographer.

I really hoped that the remaining pea seedlings would survive, but a few more of them just dried up brown from the bottom without any apparent physical damage to the stems. Not sure what caused that.

 Some remaining pea seedlings died this slow browning death

We still have a few pea seedlings that survived this ordeal and are trying to set flowers, but the pea patch is much more sparse than I had planned and I just don't have a lot of hope left for the remaining few pea vines.  The level-headed side of me thinks, oh well, I'll just have to try again next year.

But what I really want to say is: WAHHHH, I WANT MY PEAS THIS YEAR!

Fall Garden Woes

Someone has been eating my fall garden crops, and it's not me!

Daikon Radish Seedling

Pak Choi  or Tatsoi seeding

Pak Choi or Tatsoi Seedling

The frustrating thing is, I haven't seen any bugs around these seedlings, so I don't even know what's doing the damage.  With the cucumber beetles this summer, at least I could see them all the time on my plants so I could kill or curse them (often both at the same time).  But these fall seedlings are getting eaten up by some mystery pest and I don't know what to do, or whom to curse and blame (not productive for the garden, I know, but it can be therapeutic for myself)

Is there anyone else battling mystery seedling damage in their fall garden? 

Fall Planting 2010

I hemmed and hawed about what vegetables to plant for my fall crops.  I ended up deciding against most common brassicas like head cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower, because I was worried that they might take up too much room in my square foot gardening boxes.  Maybe I'll try them next year, when we expand our garden with more raised beds in the ground.

Below is a list of fall vegetable seeds sown so far in our garden and their planting dates.  I'm trying out successive planting with some of them.  I would have sown them earlier, but it's just been so hot all of July and August, and I didn't think that these seeds would germinate all that well when day time highs have been consistently in the low to mid 90s.  Our Indianapolis garden is in USDA zone 5b with the average first frost date of around October 20.  I'm curious to see if this year's first frost would be later than this average date, considering how hot it's been so far.

• Crimson Giant Radish – 7/31/10 (probably sowed too early, as they are not growing very well)
• Ruby Queen Beets – 7/31/10 (same as radish, not growing well past initial germination)
• Sugar snap peas (aka butt peas) – 8/1/10
• Carrots (I still have dreams of growing girthy carrots in Indiana) – 8/8/10
• China Choi (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener) – 8/16/10, 8/28/10
• Pak Choi Cabbage – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Tatsoi Cabbage (rosette bok choy) – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Ruby Red Chard – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Fordhook Giant Chard – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Red Russian Kale – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Little Gem Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Ruby Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Red Romaine Lettuce – 8/22/10, 8/28/10
• Daikon Radish – 8/22/10

All of these, except for sugar snap peas and carrots, are new vegetables in the garden for me, so I'm really looking forward to watching the plants grow and hopefully eating them.  I know you’re supposed to grow vegetables that you like to eat, but I confess that neither Keith nor I have much prior experience eating a lot of these new vegetables.  Well, Keith already knows that he doesn’t really like radishes and hates beets, and I’m somewhat neutral to both of them, but I’m growing them anyway.

If any of these fall vegetables grow well for us, then I’m going to have to find new recipes to work them into meals.  I figure lettuce is lettuce regardless of the variety, and I can use them in salads.  But what to do with all these new hardy greens like chard, kale, and various chinese cabbages?  This fall is going to be an interesting time for us both in the garden and in the kitchen!

Below are some pictures of germinated seedlings.  I noticed that all of the seeds sprouted more than one seedling.  With very small seeds like Pak Choi, it's possible that I sowed more than one seed in the middle of the square, but with bigger seeds like chards, I know I only sowed one seed in each spot.  Are some of these seeds supposed to germinate more than one seedling from a single seed?  Should I thin these out so there's only one seeding growing in each spot, or should I just  leave them alone?  Can I try to separate out the seedlings and transplant them farther apart without damaging the roots?  Hmm, questions and more questions...

Fordhook Giant Chard

Ruby Red Chard

Red Russian Kale

Pak Choi Cabbage

This post is linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

Butt Peas

Are you all familiar with T9, the predictive text technology for mobile phones?  Because I still don't have an iPhone, blackberry, Droid or one of those other smartphones (I know, I know, how prehistoric of me), I have my simple phone set on T9 mode for texting.  It works fine for the most part, but I do have to watch out for some common words that have the same number combination.

For example, when I press 6-3 to type me, sometimes the phone automatically types of.  Other common confusing word pairs are: them-then; sun-run; go-in.  OK, you get the idea.

Anyway, I looked up the weather for Indianapolis this morning and saw that they were forecasting HOT (aka 90+ F degrees) for the rest of the week.  This made me really worry about the fall peas that I just sowed two weekends ago.  As I learned earlier this summer, peas do not fare well in the heat!  So I texted Keith to ask about the peas, but apparently my text went through like this:

"rear doing okay?"

Fortunately, Keith is familiar with my texts often containing random T9-generated words, so he knew right away that I was in fact asking about the well-being of the peas, and not his butt.  Because that would be weird.  And because we are a couple of adults in our early thirties who still appreciate junior high humor, the remainder of the text conversation quickly degenerated into something about playing with peas in the rear.  Awesome.

In case you're wondering, the peas have germinated and are reportedly putting on some height even in this heat.  I asked Keith to take a close-up of the rear.  I mean, the peas.

Sugar Snap Peas on 8/11/10 (Day 11)

From here on out, I shall call these peas, BUTT PEAS!  That sounds better than Rear Peas, don't you think?


Related Post:

• Sugar Snap Peas in California vs. Indiana