Garden update

The garden has been a fun adventure so far, so full of lessons! The piece of hardened horse pasture we wet to work on in the spring has turned into a patch of half wild, tumultuous greenery. Our absence in May and June did not end in disaster for the garden (thanks mom for the watering), though it did produce some interesting quirks (see "Weeds" post!).

Beets
I can't say I love the taste of beets, but I have come to appreciate their value as a crop. They grow fast, don't need a lot of watering or care (maybe weeding/mulching), and provide both edible greens and roots. They did well intercropped with our perennial kales: by the time the kales had grown to occupy the whole bed, we got a harvest of beets! Oh, also, beets can be started either indoors or direct seeded! They aren't fussy!

Perennial Kale
Talking about the perennial kale ("Chou Daubenton" in French, Brassica oleracea var. ramosa), that has also been a hit. We haven't been eating it as much as we could be, but each plant has become huge bush. It also seems to be somewhat drought tolerant, though it would probably do better if it had more water. It hasn't been attacked by any insects, and seems generally like a hassle-free plant. We're very fond of it! So is one of the horses, who puts her head over the fence to chomp on the tops!

Three Sisters
The 2 three sisters patches have both been doing great. Planting maize and squashes together seems like a no brainer: one grows horizontally, the other vertically. Can't really go wrong, right? The carpet of squashes has now become very thick, and seems to be doing its job of keeping the ground cool and the weeds down.

The one tricky thing has been the beans. They do grow quite a bit faster than the maize at the beginning of the summer, and they seem to find it hard to hold on to the thick stems. In our windy area they get shaken to the ground and have to start all over again (we usually help them, also so that they don't waste their time twirling around squash leaves). So I'd say the one subtlety about a three sisters patch is when to plant the beans in relation to the maize, and that probably depends on the climate and varieties used.

I can't compare the productivity of such a patch to that of separate patches, but I'd say that those people who used this system for survival probably had very large patches. If you think how much a maize plant or a bean plant produce, and imagine 4 plants of each every 1.5 metres, it surely takes a large area to get enough for conservation.

Other Things
In the rest of the garden the tomatoes are becoming ripe and delicious (we got one that weighed almost half a kilo!), the red cabbages are making heads, still requiring virtually no attention from us, the kales are slowly on their way to reaching their goal of 2 metres, the sunflowers planted by the rats are flowering, the garden huckleberries are steadily ripening (though that doesn't mean they taste any better; more on them later), the Peruvian groundcherries are flowering, the pepinos are starting to think they should do the same, the peppers are swinging into action, with some jalapenos coming right up, the tomatillos have given us enough for our first green salsa, and, and, and...