Saturday, April 04, 2009

Iffy cukes

Those cucumbers we transplanted in the greenhouse beds had mixed fates: some are starting to grow boldly up the fence, but several quickly keeled over all limp-like and died. A sample a couple years back from this greenhouse revealed pythium in the soil, a hard-to-get-rid-of fungus-like organism that destroys the roots of plants. Further tests will reveal if it's still pythium. In the meantime, we'll see if some biological controls will give us the edge, and we're rooting for the survivors to stay strong.

Elsewhere, we did lots of transplanting in the field; several beds are now growing little greens. We cut potatoes to plant next week. Applied some fish emulsion to the strawberries, which are flowering and even setting berries already. And we keep potting up in the greenhouse.

And I need to point out that the flat seeder (the wand thing with all the needles) is not all I thought it could be. It is useless when seeding eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes (nightshades), and extremely aggravating when seeding little tiny seeds (flowers). With the nightshades, it can't pick up the large seeds. With the flowers it either sucks the seeds up into the needles, picks up too many seeds, or can't pick the seeds up (depending on which needles you use). But my fingers almost always work when it comes to seeding. Lesson learned.

This morning we're heading to town to run some errands. Then we're gonna hunt some morels and cook up some pizzas from scratch in an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven for a little get together. Somewhere in the mix of activities we might plant some hops. Mmm... hops.

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