Dandelion Greens. 4.12.17

Good time for dandelion greens.  High in calcium, iron, minerals, and multiple vitamins.  I save the biggest plants for my salad raised bed.  Excellent, hardy, very early perennial vegetable.  Dandelions have been culinary and herbal stables for centuries in many countries.  It's too bad they are not better accepted here.  We like them in Spring salads.  The chickens love eating them any time.

This plant was in the yard.  It was so lush, I intend to dig it up and transplant to my perennial vegetable bed.

Starting Pepper and Other Seeds, Indoors. 5/12/17

 Today I started peppers indoors.  It is a little late, but I hope we still get a crop.  Our Spring is so chilly and wet, early plants just sulk anyway.  Maybe they'll get a better start than last year, when I started them much earlier.

I also started some greens seeds.

I added another batch of tomatillo seeds.  According to the catalog, this is a Polish variety better adapted to cooler shorter summers, compared to the Mexican types.Tomatillo Amarylla.  60 days.

Starting Seeds. 4/11/17

 Started seeds today.  This is later than I usually do.  I'm not sure there is an advantage to the really early start, especially for semi-tropicals like tomatoes.  They sit in the cold ground, sulk, and sometimes never have the vigor that later starts have.  This year I was not as enthusiastic in March, so here we are.  A lot of the packets are old.  I don't know about those 10-year old Celebrity tomato seeds.  That was my mom's favorite type.  No loss if they don't grow.

I usually try some reliable well established varieties that I know will do well, and some experiments.  The experiments are tomatoes, San Marzano (Roma type), Beaver Lodge and Glacier (early Northwest types), Longkeeper (one to keep for ripening past the normal potato season), Black Vermisssage, and Atomic. 

I also bought some Tomatillo Amaryllo, which might not be suitable for our cool and fairly short summer, but you never know.

My favorite tomato is Better Boy.  My favorite cherry tomato is SuperSweet 100. 


I had 2 types of collar green seeds, so I'll grow both and see how they do.    The collards from last year survived the winter, and the spring leaves are excellent to add to salads.  No holes from cabbage moths, they are crisp and mild.

Next to find the pepper seeds. 

Baby Chickens

Training Ginkgo Trees as Large Bonsai. 4.9.17

Ginkgo Tree in Chengdu, China.  10/2013

Ginkgo Trees in Chengdu, China.  10/2013

In 2013, we went to China and visited historic places including some palaces and monasteries.  These Ginkgo biloba specimens were trained like bonsai trees, but in-ground and larger.  Probably quite old.

We wanted to reproduce a similar idea in our garden, using ginkgo trees that I grew from seeds.  They are about 10 years old, planted in a mixed shrub and perennial bed.  Today, I began training them as the start of making our own bonsai-type trees.  I selected branches at level of the tree.  I  pruned then long stems from each branch leaving 1-3 buds per spur.  Then I tied the branches to poles - mainly prunings from buddleia and plum - and lowered the pole-tied branches to a horizontal position, tying them to bricks.  Some, I turned to a chosen lateral orientation, as well as lowering them vertically, so they would be somewhat distributed around the trunk.

It turned out, this relatively young ginkgo wood is rather pliable, more so than willow, I think.  It bends a bit like lead.  None of them broke, despite some severe bending at very different angles from what they started with.

Ginkgo Tree Before Training.  4.9.17

First Stage of Training Ginkgo Tree.  4.9.17

I think this was a good time to start, with buds beginning to swell for Spring growth, but no actual growth yet.  The sap is running, which may have made the branches more pliable.  Even branches as thick as my thumb bent readily, although I was careful and bent them slowly.

The plan is to allow growth along each branch, maybe to 3 or 4 nodes, then pinch the apex of each spur so that they branch more tightly. 

I don't expect to make trees as majestic looking as the ones we saw in China.  That might take decades, which I don't expect to have.  But we might have something interesting in a couple of years.

Near the tops of the trees, I did leave young growth to extend longer with plan to bend to horizontal positions next year.  The maximum planned height is about 7 or 8 feet tall.