Pole Beans for Victory

You know you are having a good crop of pole beans when you need to get out the step ladder to harvest. I have recently fallen in love with pole beans, and I'll tell you why. Firstly, they are prolific as this picture attests; and with a tall trellis, one can get quite a yield from just a few square feet of garden space.

Secondly, they are a legume, and you should know by now that legumes are good for your soil, in that they fixate nitrogen from the atmosphere,and deposit it in the rootzone. When picked young, they are sweet and delectable. I like the classic Blue Lake strain, but there are many good ones, and I also grow a strain bred Charles Ledgerwood, known for years as "The Seed Man of Carlsbad"

Which brings us to the last point, and that is that it is very easy to save the seeds from season to season by just letting a few bean pods mature and dry out right on the vine. Once the husk has yellowed and the seeds rattle a bit, they are easy to pop out and into a jar or ziplock for the next planting season. And here in Southern California, that is nearly year round, certainly from early spring to mid summer at least.

    
     The simple trellis for these beans was made from a 4x8 piece of concrete reinforcing mesh, less that $10 at the local Home Depot, zip tied to some 2x2 poles salvaged from the landscaping of some new construction nearby.  Viola!  a tall, sturdy trellis that can be disassembled and moved at a moments notice.  We also use the concrete reinforcing wire screens for tomato cages.  This product is very useful in the garden, and lasts for years.

     So I encourage all you nascent gardeners out there to get your trellis together and get your pole beans on!  You won't be sorry.  Just be sure to harvest when they are young and tender, and remember to leave a few pods to mature to provide the seeds for next season.

I wish you all a bountiful garden and life.
Now get out there and grow something.
Peace,
Swami bruce

Garden Pods Installed and Planted

       One of the services we here at the Gardener's Footsteps provide is the installation of what we call "Garden Pods", a circular small garden bed of our own design.  These modular garden beds are inexpensive, easy to site and easy to maintain.  We have recently completed an installation for two happy gardeners here in Encinitas.  This was an array of eight pods in two different locations on their property. 

The basic design uses galvanized wire fencing wired into a circle; the bottom is lined with tape free cardboard and the sides with inexpensive reed fencing.  They are filled with alfalfa hay, straw, fertilized with blood and bone meal (or any good organic fertilizer) and topped with planting compost. Viola! Instant garden bed!  These pods were then wrapped with bamboo fencing as desired by the client for aesthetic purposes.

The wonderful thing about these pods is that they are so easy to maintain.  The raised soil bed means less bending.  They can easily be covered with bird netting when young succulent sprouts are tempting the birds. They are easy to weed, easy to water and easy to revamp at season's end and they just look pretty cool.

In general, the complete garden pod installation runs about $100/per unit.  The pods pictured here have the bamboo fencing wrap that did increase the unit cost, but they are still pretty cool looking even without the bamboo upgrade.

Here is an array of two Garden Pods from Swami bruce and Amy's home garden that were made in an oval shape and lined with used burlap coffee bags, free for the taking from local coffee roasters.  They are planted with potatoes in this picture. As you can see, they are easily shaped to fit the area, and harvesting is a breeze !!
Now get out there and grow something.
Peace,
Swami bruce

Fallowed Ground

Welcome followers of The Gardener's Footsteps.  It is time, without further ado, to speak of gardening.  Edible gardening. Beautiful, fragrant, tasty gardening.  So where to start?  How about with a fallow garden patch?  For this was the case for a few weeks this spring when about 40 square feet of our main garden was between crops, with the winter crops done and the summer crops seedlings of peppers and eggplants being started elsewhere under birdless cages.  I considered a legume cover crop (to fix some nitrogen and add organic matter to the soil), a simple handful of alfalfa and/or red or white clover would work.  But I never got around to that.  What I did do, however, is make sure the patch was mulched with straw, enough to shade the soil.  And I watered it along with the rest of the garden.  I did not want the soil to die out while the patch was fallow.  There are microbes and worms that need to be fed and watered.  The UV rays of the sun will kill off soil life as well.  The straw mulch both shades the soil, protecting the biota, conserves moisture, and as it breaks down it adds organic matter to the soil.
     So in this fallow, mulched and occasionally lightly watered patch, which had been more or less cleared in a compost sweep, grew a surprising number of things. A big beautiful comfrey plant popped up right in the middle of everything.  Comfrey is an amazing plant that we will discuss in detail in a later post. It provided big  soft leaves for a very effective and soil energizing mulch to other parts of the garden.  A chard plant popped up, and this is interesting. I couldn't tell if it was from a root left in the soil or from a seed.  I didn't think that we had let any chard go all the way to seed, but maybe a few seed heads had formed my the time we cleared the patch. Potatoes plants appeared, they had been grown there earlier in the season. Lambsquarters, a wild herb (or weed some would say) was well represented.  Lambsquarter is edible, and I have learned it the genetic parent of quinoa.  Purslane, another herb/weed, was also present.  Purslane is used in French cooking and I have learned that it is high in omega 3 fatty acids and is a good companion plant, helping to break us dense soil for other plants and, with its succulent like leaves, keeping the soil cool.  Also I found one solo specimen of plantain, yet another herb/weed.  Plantain (aka, "plantago") oddly shares it's name with a type of banana. It has a long history of herbal uses, is edible as a green, and is virtually the same plant that provides psyllium seed, used for digestive cleansing. And of course, tomato seedlings. It seem tomato seed are just about completely indestructible. But the mulch keeps any of these sprouts from becoming onerous. They are also an indicator of the health and moisture content of the soil while the starts get ready.
     Now the patch has been reworked with fresh compost, and the peppers and eggplants and pole beans and two butternut squash planted in the patch, with some fresh mulch laid down. I'm hoping for eggplants by mid August.
Thanks for visiting.
Get out there and grow something.
Talk soon,
Swami bruce