Photos of Joseph Lofthouse's Garden

Here's a photo of what one of my fields looked like a couple days ago. It is the field that I planted the early spring crops into. Today I ate lunch in this field by foraging for: peas, lettuce, cabbage, bock choi, mallow, lambsquarters, Nanking cherries, yellow bing cherries, cilantro, fennel, spinach, garbanzos, favas, onions, garlic, and other things I've forgotten to list. It is irrigated with sprinkler irrigation.

Another of my fields. This one is planted mostly into beans and corn. There are also patches of raspberries and garlic, and some seed crops: turnips, beets, parsnips, and kohlrabi. Also irrigated via sprinkler with 40 foot long 4" diameter irrigation pipes.

The squash field. I pretty much only grow squash in this field because of heavy predation by animals. The squash bee population is very high! Only two furrows are irrigated. It is a joy to keep weeded, since the weed seeds rarely get enough rain to germinate well.

This is a collaborator's field, but I work there about every week, so might as well include it here.. It is flood irrigated.

Hi Joseph
Nice pics wonderful views
where do you get your water from ? and what animals are doing the nibbling ?

David

Nice photos, Joseph. Seeing the sprinklers again brings back memories of riding bicycle from "the Avenues" in north SLC up to the Uni for work.....and hitting every sprinkler along the way just to cool off.

A question: Even as flood irrigation may be more efficient at water use than sprinkler irrigation, do you think there is an advantage to wetting the foliage by sprinkler even as the conventional wisdom is that the roots are the business end of water and nutrient uptake?

My fields are in different watersheds. Some of the water is stored in a reservoir during the spring, and used during the summer. Some of the water is stream-flow only. All of my water is gravity fed through canals. Some through open ditches. Some through pipe from a few hundred feet up the hill. A couple of the sprinkler systems have pressure-assist pumps on them.

My squash field has deer, squirrels, turkeys, pheasants, woodchucks, skunks, and raccoons eating it. Perhaps after dark there are other unseen critters like chupacabras.

Here's what the storage reservoir for my main field looks like in the spring.



And then later in the fall, after 12,000 acre feet of water have been used.



This is one of the canals that feeds my fields:



There is a lot of dust in this area... It is blown in from the desert and settles on the plants. I believe that the dust reduces the plants ability to photosynthesize. I like sprinkle irrigation because it cleans the dust off the plants.

I have a tremendous flee beetle problem in my fields until I start sprinkle irrigation. I figure that the irrigation water drowns many of the flea beetles. I suspect that it also helps to control aphids.

Sprinkle irrigation during the day reduces the air temperature by about ten degrees. I figure that leads to more efficient photosynthesis, cause the high-temperature cut-off is not triggered so readily. On a community scale, I believe that the reduced temperatures lead to lower energy consumption for air-conditioning.

The irrigation water is full of weed seeds, so people grumble about that. I could put filters on the lines, but then I'd have to clean the filters 7 times per week.

I much prefer sprinkling over drip for most crops, because it seems like water is distributed more evenly, thus the plant roots can expand into more of the soil, and pick up more water and nutrients. Sprinkling is utterly reliable. My family is still using equipment that we bought 40 years ago. I watch the neighbors treat drip-systems as an annual expense.

I aim for 1 inch of water per week with the sprinklers. The flooded field might take 4 inches, so that's not very efficient. The squash field, watered in furrows, seems to me to use water very effectively, because I only run the water for about a half hour per week, instead of the 12 hours I would run it if sprinkling. (I don't know the rate of consumption between the two modes.)

Thanks for additional photos, Joseph. Water relations are pretty interesting when it comes to irrigation, different climates and different soil types. The discussion of the manure teas and how they might rather rapidly re-organize the rhizosphere (and maybe even the phyllosphere) to somehow make better use of water really piqued my curiosity. Irrespective of that, it seems interesting as well that (from recollection) much if not most of the russet potato production in the intermountain west is under pivot (sprinkler) irrigation (maybe not remembering this right?), in a region that might be able to use flood/furrow irrigation with all of the canals built to move water around. And in all of this, I keep thinking about how rainfall and dew, both necessarily impacting above-ground parts of the plants, might influence plant health more than typically imagined. As you indicated, with your dust it may just help to wash off the residue and let in more light. And while excessive water on leaves under certain conditions will certainly be conducive to foliar disease, it would seem as well to be an important plant source of water, even if sometimes not reaching the roots.

The reservoir photos bring back memories....The sweltering Boise and Wasatch front ranges around 5 pm in mid-summer can be so starkly contrasted by the freezing water in those canals and the rivers and reservoirs that feed them.

Wow your garden is so organized and well laid out! I try to water my Three Sister garden only an inch a week at most too. If you don't mind me asking Joseph; at what time of day to you sprinkle water?

Center pivot irrigation is the pinnacle of ease of use for large farms... I used to hand move my 40 foot long 4" diameter irrigation pipes every 12 hours. I sure buffed up when I was doing that. Watering by ditch/furrow in most cases requires collaboration with the neighbors, and a lot of labor to build the ditches and furrows, and to tend the field while irrigation is in progress. The farm doing the irrigation gets a significant portion of the canal flow during that time. Pressurized irrigation is typically done on an ad-hoc schedule. With the center pivot set-ups the whole process is automated.

Our relative humidity in the evening here can be around 5% to 10%. So within an hour of turning off the sprinklers I can walk through a field without getting muddy. Plant leaves dry very quickly.

I sure know about freezing water... My sprinklers spray about 55 feet, so inevitably that means that I get sprayed trying to turn off the valve at the start of the line. Even though I am expecting the cold, I gasp every time I get hit.

I tend to irrigate mid-day... If I irrigate at night, the sprinklers stay on for 12 hours. If I water during the day, I only water for about 6 hours. If I have a major crop like corn that is flowering like crazy, and the bees are all over it, I'll irrigate at night to avoid drowning the bees.

I irrigate the squash field in late evening. Because some nearby trees cast shade onto the garden.

I usually take a photo of the first irrigation of the year. Here is the 2011 photo:

Yup those chupacabras can be really difficult to see being invisible to most human eyes
I only normally have this critter and she is no problem as she lives by herself how ever cow invasions are more of an issue for me

David

Yesterday, I  started harvesting the seed crops: favas, shelling peas, turnips, spinach, perennial flax, annual flax. I also harvested apricots and made some must. I tossed the pea seeds in the dehydrator at 95F for about 18 hours, so that I could get them dried quickly, and into the freezer to kill the weevil larva that are inside them. The fava beans grew better for me than ever before. As soon as I harvested the seed, I planted a fall crop.


Here's what my squash field looked like a week ago.


The beets have been one of my favorite crops this year. Don't know why I have previously been reluctant to grow non-red beets!


This week I finally weeded the runner beans and built a trellis for them.


This is the 4th generation of runner beans to survive my garden, so I'm expecting a glorious harvest. They are sure doing a great job flowering!!!

Joseph, the long yellow roots look like yellow sugarbeets.....or are they mangolds....or a cylindra-type table beet?

Between table beets and swiss chard, it's great to see how much coloration has been returning to home garden accessions.  You probably know of Irwin Goldman at the University of Wisconsin who part of the open source seed initiative.  Below is a recent pub showing involvement with public access carrot germplasm. The beet photo below that is a relatively new release from his program called 'Badger Flame', but I don't think that is an open source seed.....will have to be purchased through garden seed suppliers once enough seed is available.

John: I don't keep the records necessary to answer the question about what type of beets I'm growing... People send me gifts with fancy names on them. I don't look up the variety names. I just plant them. Then when they mature, I just harvest them, again without names. When I grow seed from them, they will be promiscuously pollinated and lose their identity anyway... Eventually, I might separate them into "yellow beets", and "red beets", or get really creative and call them "big yellow beets with chard-like leaves".

The beets that I pulled were the culls that weren't very productive, so technically, perhaps they should be called "The beets that I'm NOT growing!"

I'm loving the colors in Swiss Chard these days. Here's a photo of my landrace...

This evening i took some photos of one of my fields.

This patch of squash is composed, as far as I can discern, of hybrids, of various types, between mixta squash and moschata squash: F2s, and BC1s, and reciprocals, etc. All via natural cross pollination.


Here are what the leaves of some of the plants look like. Their phenotype is mid-way between moschata and mixta. With some plants taking on more moschata traits, and some taking on more mixta traits, but all munged up and intermingled.


And to avoid giving the impression that I have a perfect garden, here is one of my weed patches. Supposedly there are some onions in there, and some garbanzo beans.


This is my largest tomato patch. It contains mostly experimental varieties that I am trialling. I'm harvesting a few tomatoes from it. The corn beyond the tomatoes is a commercial hybrid. I planted it for my sister, because she has one variety that she has loved for a very long time now.


I have had such a bad sunroot weed problem in this area of the field, that it has basically been abandoned for 3 years. I haven't been able to grow anything else in this space because the sunroot weed problem was so intense. That's about 3000 square feet of lost productivity. So this year, I adopted a "scorched earth" attitude towards the sunroots. I till regularly, and also pull by hand any sunroots that come up between tilling sessions. The rhizome grasses and bindweed have gone away from this area. The annual weeds have mostly stopped germinating. Looking forward to seeing if it is usable next growing season.

Scorched Earth: Attempting to get rid of sunroots. A few lagenaria squash allowed to use the space.


The onion seed crop is doing well:

Another view of the size of the sunroot-eradication area. I love my sprinklers... Our irrigation system was started by my great-great-great-grandmother and her peers and family. My great-grandfather's generation built the storage reservoir. My grandmother's generation pressurized the system. I am still using hand lines that were purchased 40 years ago by my father. No disposable drip irrigation for our family. We build things to last for many generations of descendants.  

Two crops of corn planted side-by-side, but about a month apart, so that they will not cross-pollinate.

I started attending the farmer's market with my daddy about 50 years ago. For a while I took my son with me. He's grown now, so it's me and daddy again. This week we took: Apricots, zucchini, crookneck, broccoli, garlic, snap beans, honey, rhubarb, tomatoes, cucumbers, and grape vines. I took seeds, but didn't set them on the table. This time of year, seeds are only for people that know to ask for them...

Here's what my squash field looked like a few days ago:


And from the other end...

I found a pixie playing in the sunflowers...

I took this photo to show off how I like my corn. Tall!!! With the cobs high off the ground, and far away from skunks, deer, coons, pheasants, etc... And picking is much easier if I don't have to bend over to reach a cob.

Wow.....Cool selection!  Are those stalks just super-tall with the cobs in relatively the same place that they would be if the stalks were short?  Or has your selection actually moved the location of the cobs up the stalk a bit higher as well?  With all the variation coming out of your work, I'm beginning to think there is hope for growing pineapple in Pembina, North Dakota.....    So amazing to see the things that can come about with a little seed saving.

hau Kola, super photos of your fields. I'm going to start landracing maize next year, our little test run of "patio" corn flopped this year but I think it was because Wolf was so sick and I took care of everything else instead LOL.

I love the idea of tall, high cob corn, I just have to do that because it is so cool.

Wolf is finally healed enough that she has been putting in the fall garden. Just means I have tons of new chores so she will have more spaces to plant.
over the winter I "get" to set up an area for her to grow loofa in next spring, more squash spaces oh and she wants the terracing at least half finished by spring.

We discovered a yellow fleshed, very sweet (almost like candy) watermelon growing and I have saved all the good seeds from this anomaly to plant next year.
It's the first yellow fleshed watermelon that I actually like the flavor of so I just have to get it on the program.

Be well my friend

Redhawk

John:  I'll try to take photos to show the difference in the corn morphology next week. The plants are taller, AND the cobs are relatively higher on the stalk (I think...). One plant a few years ago had the cobs immediately below the tassel. I didn't plant the seed that I saved from it. The plant was a bit top-heavy.

The attached photo is of my neighbor's field. I sure had fun picking corn in it. Many of the cobs were 10 feet from ground level.

Is it sweet corn for table eating or flour corn ?

Miles Flansburg wrote:Is it sweet corn for table eating or flour corn ?

Sweet corn is typically eaten as corn on the cob. Flour corn is typically eaten as posole, tortillas, hominy, cornbread.

Here's what my flour corn looks like, compared to a commercial sweet corn...

The first pair of photos are to approximately the same scale... The sweet corn cobs, at about 20 inches to where I grab them at, are pretty much within reach of all the corn predators in my garden. And, I have to bend over to pick them!!! I do not like bending! I marked the grab spot on all of these photos with a red dot.

Commercial sweet corn (left) vs local landrace flour corn (right). Same scale.


I have blown up the scale on the sweet corn to demonstrate how successful my selection program has been to get cobs higher off the ground. Not only have the plants gotten taller, but the cobs are carried relatively higher on the stalks.

Messed with scaling.

Hummingbirds are one of the reasons why I love growing runner beans!

I have finished harvesting the seed crops for early things, so I am growing a cover crop of weeds. I'm keeping the area mowed to minimize the amount of weed seeds produced.

The squash field continues to grow fine. We haven't had any rain since the squash was planted, therefore the weed seeds only germinated in the irrigated furrows, and not in general, so weeding was trivial this year.  I'm intending to grow a cover crop of winter rye and legumes this fall. To be planted the same day the squash are harvested. I realized last time I was in this field, that there are not any legumous weeds. Therefore, I'm going to introduce some from my other fields: black medic seems to be the most appropriate for this field, but while I'm at it, I'll include a number of clover family  weeds from the nearby wildlands.

I was excited when I learned that interspecies squash are possible, and not only possible in a laboratory, but in ordinary gardens of ordinary farmers... Thanks Carol Deppe! Not that my farming is ordinary, because I find diversity to be highly desirable. I go out of my way to make sure that things get creolized. The past few years, I have been inter-planting mixta and moschata squash closely together, and then watching for naturally occurring hybrids, which I plant in isolated patches to undergo further crossing... I'd love to move the precocious-yellow-fruit and maple-leaf trait into moschata, and the fig-leaved trait into mixta. It would be clever to grow trombocino mixta squash, and to shorten the days-to-maturity of the mixtas. I'd love to move the deep-orange-flesh trait of Dickinson pumpkin into mixta squash, because I think that the more carotenes a squash has, the better it tastes! And by combining the two species, and reselecting, there is no telling what kind of pest and disease resistance are going to show up. I am certainly finding some hybrid vigor. Some of the leaves are at tall as my waist!!!

Last week I splurged, and spent a five dollar bill to order a [maxima X moschata] hybrid, Tetsukabuto Winter Squash, from Pinetree Garden Seeds. I'm intending to add that to the creole squash next year. I am attempting some manual pollinations of other inter-species combinations. Can you imagine combining the great taste of a maxima squash with the vine-borer resistance of a moschata? Or how about moving the naked-seed trait of the pepos into a maxima squash so that you could get already-shelled seeds, AND a squash that was actually edible... Or how about moving the long-necked trait from moschatas to maximas... That would be some mighty tasty eating!!! And the best thing about these types of experiments, is that we can be doing them at home, in our own gardens. No degrees required...

The squash in the first photo looks like a classic moschata necked squash: Peduncle, shape, and coloration are moschata-like. It is actually an interspecies hybrid. Based on how it looks, I'd guess ([mixta X moschata] X moschata).

It's mother was the squash in the center of the second photo labeled "hybrid?".  It's grandmother looked like the squash on the left labeled "mixta".

The squash in the third photo is a sibling to the squash in the first photo, (seeds from the same mother, but different daddies). It's inside has some degree of the orange-flesh trait. Six weeks or so, and I can open it up and take a closer look. Antsy!

There is a reason that my work seems like play. This stuff fascinates me all day, all week, and all year!!!

A lady at market today asked me about the -cides I use on my garden. I replied that I don't use anything... Then she asked me about fertilizers. Again, I told her that I don't use anything. She asked, "But... how does your garden grow?", to which I replied, "Fine!" Then I spread my arms out to encompass the table, and continued, "My resume is spread out on the table before you!"

Best job I ever had!!! And the most satisfying.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
A lady at market today asked me about the -cides I use on my garden. I replied that I don't use anything... Then she asked me about fertilizers. Again, I told her that I don't use anything. She asked, "But... how does your garden grow?", to which I replied, "Fine!" Then I spread my arms out to encompass the table, and continued, "My resume is spread out on the table before you!"

Best job I ever had!!! And the most satisfying.

I love it! People also give me weird looks when I tell them I don't use cides or fertilizer.

Hi Joseph,

I just wanted to say thank you for your time and expertise, on this thread and many others! I'm always pleased when I see this thread get bumped up. All of the photos are wonderful, but that hummingbird was especially delightful.

Back as a young gardener and young father I grew a couple of pumpkins in my greenhouse to be used as jackolanterns . The night before halloween  the kids and I brought the pumpkins into the house , spread out the newspaper and started cutting them open. My wife was making dinner and I commented that the cucumbers that she was putting in the salad smelled really good. She wasn't making a salad!  That is when I realized that my pumpkins had crossed with the cucumbers up in the greenhouse. My first experience with cross breading. That pumpkin was solid inside,like a cuke, smelled like a cuke, but all else looked like a pumpkin. Not sure if that hybred would have been worth persuing but it was a neat experience.

"With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row."

Always so much exciting stuff happening in your garden life. Just what I'm hoping for in my little slice of paradise. Thanks for all the updates, tips, and enthusiasm.

It's funny how so many people just can't imagine how we can grow a garden without slathering it with toxic gick. It's like they don't use their noggins, and remember back to when there wasn't any toxic gick to put on a garden. Silly.

Miles Flansburg wrote:... That is when I realized that my pumpkins had crossed with the cucumbers up in the greenhouse. My first experience with cross breading. That pumpkin was solid inside,like a cuke, smelled like a cuke, but all else looked like a pumpkin. Not sure if that hybred would have been worth persuing but it was a neat experience.

I.m.o. it would have been a good idea to save the seeds of those cuke-kins, to grow more ...

Well, the hummingbird photo takes the cake, Joseph.  That one could grace the cover of Audubon Magazine.  What color shirt were you wearing when it approached the camera??......Or were you hiding in a blind, camouflaged with edible dahlias?  

Leading to my next question.....Just what *is* an edible dahlia??

The maize is interesting.  Just like needing to breed in more lodge-resistant stems in wheat when the yield is increased, it's probable that you are selecting for more sturdy stalks as you move those ears up higher on the plant.  I'd love to see a combine with it's header raised 5 feet off the ground trying to clip cobs from that selection.  Maybe they would have to switch to equipment like that shown below used to harvest coconuts!  

I was in the runner bean patch to take my daily photo of flowers to send to a friend. There were hummingbirds pollinating the beans. They are so unpredictable that I just started snapping photos, in hopes of at least catching a blur... I thought that it was going to land on the camera!!! The breeze from it's wings was cool! I was wearing my ordinary clothes tan shirt and blue jeans.

My archetypal edible dahlia is a dahlia that can be planted from seed in early spring, and will produce lots of huge tubers before the tops get killed by the fall frosts. It springs out of the ground and grows so vigorously that it out-competes my local weeds. It has simple open flowers and produces an abundance of promiscuously pollinated seeds so that high levels of genetic diversity can be maintained, allowing lots of opportunities for survival-of-the-fittest and farmer-directed selection. It has a mild flavor that doesn't offend my patrons. Tubers should be long, with a cylindrical shape and large diameter to make peeling easier. And they will store well.

I'm making good progress towards those goals. For example, these tubers were all seed grown last growing season. Two of these plants were culled for being pikers. The others were saved and replanted this spring.



These tubers were grown from tubers. So they produced much more food during the  growing season. I'd rather not have to figure out how to overwinter tubers, but for this much extra production, I'd probably make the sacrifice.

So, you can eat the tubers of the dahlias?  What do they taste like?

Julia: Dahlia tubers are bland and crispy. The closest approximation I can think of would be water chestnuts. They take on the flavor of whatever food they are cooked with. We typically add them in moderation to soups, stir-fries, or roasts.  They stay crunchy when cooked, so I don't like them sautéed by themselves, or as hash-browns. They don't mash well. They burn when deep-fried, so I don't like them as chips. I think that they might make an excellent fermented vegetable if grated. This year I want to try some as pickles.

And, since we are on the topic of dahlias, this is one of the more productive clones, and one of my favorite colored.

I'm loving the dahlias this summer!

I had to develop my own variety of tobacco. But it grows fabulous for me. It's easily the most ornamental and exotic looking plant that I grow.

Onions were among my biggest challenges when I decided that I was going to stop buying propagules from The Corporation. I used to plant onion sets which are trivial to grow, but were very pricey (when planting in large quantities). This onion was grown from a seed which came out of my onion breeding project. Woo Hoo! I've finally learned how to grow onions!