John Weiland

Woke up this morning to a wonderful gurgling sound on the slow, meandering river that runs near the house.  As predicted, the local beavers had swung into action last night an assembled a proper, but low height, dam across it just upstream from the back deck.  After a summer of drought, the river is recovering and the beavs are going to make sure there is some depth for their winter burrow!

I'm going to give a new name to the kale shown below 'Phoenix' ..... after the cabbage butterfly larvae this summer did their best to defoliate all plants and wipe out all but one cabbage, the kale is 'rising from the ashes' to produce nice fall leaves.  The more pale-colored kale is a Portuguese variety that is recovering as well, but both will need some frost and cold nights to reduce their bitterness and bring back some sweetness to the leaves.  Otherwise, th garden is winding down, but warm days and nights are keeping us in fresh peppers and tomatoes....even some of the zucchini is still producing young fruit.  Over-ripe cukes will go into 'Senfgurken' pickles along with some of the wax pepper abundance.  The chest freezers are busting with tomatoes....may do some salsa but will need to access cilantro in town since all garden stock long since dried up.  The warmth and late rains have brought some skeeters back, but frost will come soon and knock them back.  Best time of year for sure!....

Jill Dyer wrote:.....reason being that once it's been touched and there are fingerprints, something has to be done about it, eating into spinning time.  Boo, hiss. . .

Our solution to that was to have the poorest indoor lighting in the county!   :-)

Finding these comments interesting!

I have little problem with dishes (do by hand), laundry, toilet cleaning, or cooking..... but can't STAND floor/furniture/wall&window cleaning!  With increasing age, just even worse what with chasing dust bunnies under beds and bookcases.... grrrr.

Nancy Reading wrote:..... 'Amish paste' on the right which grew rather poorly but did make a few tomatoes, and an unknown 'fleshy red plum' which had much more healthy plants. The Amish paste does seem to have more flesh than the other plum variety, but presumably I could select seed from plants that did slightly better or fruits that have more flesh in proportion, and hope to make small improvements in time too.

If the Amish Paste and the other plum were grown fairly close to each other, you may have already shared genomes between them through cross-pollination.  In this case, yes....just begin selecting each year for traits that you value with one twist:  To assist in maintaining *some* diversity over the years, we typically save seed from about 80% of the most desirable fruit that we harvest from the tomatoes with the remaining 20% being fruits of slightly different sizes and shapes.  So far, we have not lost good fruit size over 20+ years of seed saving and by default have been selecting adapted genetics for our region and garden.

Michael Qulek wrote:.....
If you want to have a guarrantied copy that's identical to the original plant, you need to pinch off branchlets and root them in water.  Only then will the tomatoes be identical to the parent.

Just adding a bit of caution with this statement although for the most practical purposes it is correct.  'Somatic mutation' occurs frequently enough in organisms but often goes unnoticed if (a) the mutation is not deleterious or (b) the cell in question harboring the mutation, and within a multicellular organismal context, does not affect the non-mutated cells around it.  But there are documented cases where genetic 'mosaicism' occurs due to mutation occuring within the meristematic cells....those cells that divide to help create an elongating shoot/root or expanding leaf.  If the progeny cells from this one mutant cell divide onward to eventually create the flower tissue....female and male parts, both of which will harbor the mutation.....then a situation can arise where the fruit derived from this flower is actually different from the fruits elsewhere on the same plant, even if it were exclusively self-pollinating.  You can see, therefore, how in rare occasions the excision of a shoot for rooting and transplanting might not guarantee clonality with the donor plant.   As small as such changes are, you can imagine ancient gatherers across time along with myriad gardeners of today all making these selection judgements in their respective time periods and regions around the world and it becomes less surprising as how we ended up with the variation and abundance that exists today.

Can you give a bit more information on when you typically get your chickens and when you start getting eggs from them?

Also, you may already be aware of the natural autumn slow-down or stop in laying, but just in case.....   -->  https://www.chickencoopcompany.com/a/blog/understanding-how-chickens-lay-eggs-in-fall?srsltid=AU7gw4UBRjmodVQwwNTvNTQ-LMwEjWIHIpi2fJT7xaxas-as5ca8KOlT

Jay Angler wrote:I am definitely noticing the cooler nights and darker mornings! Mother Nature has worked hard all summer - she deserves a rest, although I hope she'll ripen a few more tomatoes for me first!

Glad for the change-over to my favorite time of year!  Just astounded this year at how late the tomato ripening was/is.....but also how quickly things are catching up.  The official prediction for tonight is a low of 40⁰F......which is flexible enough to mean potential frost in some areas.  The tarps are at the ready.  Bring on the fall coolness and colors!...

Dan Fish wrote:Oh that looks pleasant...

So I live in clay too. Right before I bought my place they put in a 250ft long, 2-4 foot deep french drain just like the one you outlined above and it failed completely the first season. Clay and "normal" french drains are incompatible, What I did in the interim was just trench down 4-6" on top of the drain, just down to the top of the aggregate, Like has been said above, it worked well but I can see that your situation is different. I had much more slope to work with.

A good last post within this thread to provide an update.  Below is a photo from the same vantage point as my muddy photo #4 above.  But it's not really a fair comparison since we were in a drought year this summer whereas all photos in the OP were from spring melt.  But to echo Dan F's comments, we were only moderately successful at controlling or redirecting water in this heavy clay with the very shallow slopes available to us.  My best efforts (most arduous) yielded drainage only slightly better than the shallow depression used before.  That effort was a pretty solidly replicated 'burrito' of trench coated with rock at the bottom, then porous geotextile fabric onto which was laid drainpipe (6" diameter, perforated on underside). The trench/fabric/pipe then received more of a rock-sand mix after which the outer uncovered edges of fabric were laid over the top of the pipe.  More rock followed and then a bit of driveway composite (called class #5 here...used on the gravel roads in the region) to make it a bit smoother.  

The whole set up worked okay with a few storms that followed, but that drainage depression is surrounded on all sides by bare topsoil/clay (no grass, shrubs, landscaping) to hold back run-off of this sediment.  So within a few weeks and a new spring season, there was not much improvement to the saturation and mudiness of the yard.  Oddly, I'm not sure to what extent slope would necessarily help us here without a wholesale changeover to a much more porous surface of about 1-2 ft. thickness.  I suspect some of the farmyards locally that have had the equpment and budget have done this in the parking areas of their homesteads.  At any rate, that is our experience so far.  As an aside, the buidling off to the right was constructed on an elevated 4 ft compressed pile of the class #5 composite noted above.  Even with this height and composition, water *still* pools even here for about a day before finally percolating downward and providing a firm walking surface.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Looks like the following to me....

Lenticel breakdown occurs because of microcracks and abrasions on the epidermis layer of apples preharvest. These microcracks and abrasion can occur due to irregular water supply, as well as high humidity (> 95%), and low wind. Influxes of water in addition to low rates of evapotranspiration causes fluctuations in the amount of water within the apples and equate to this irregular water retention. Lenticel breakdown occurs mainly on the apple skin around the lenticels of the fruit, on the less exposed side of the fruit. They are characterized by precise circular darkened spots concentrated in multiple areas on the skin of the apple. Early symptoms are similar to small dimples, visible in angled light. During storage, as flesh firmness decreases, spots grow in depth and diameter and may combine. Flesh is not generally affected. From here.

I've had what looks like that on my apples. Mine also got very slightly past the skin into the fruit. I just cut those out. A tomato corer worked fine for me. Or the tip of a vegetable peeler has also worked.

Yes, this looks like the issue here. I had not heard of this condition in apples even as I likely have eaten many that had it.  Interestingly, it seems quite similar to a condition in potato called 'pink eye'....and again involves the lenticels on the surface of the tuber.  In potato, the surface pink discoloration is evident upon fresh harvesting, but fades somewhat quickly when exposed to air.  But a cut tuber with pink eye will have the same subsurface brown spots that do no largely affect flavor and texture of the potato if just a few spots.  

https://potatoes.decisionaid.systems/articles/potato_pink_eye_is_not_pink_rot

Doug McEvers wrote:....... I like Red Norland here, very rarely is there any hollow heart, maybe one or two per hundred (usually jumbos) in an odd weather year. The last three years here have shown quite a variation in precipitation, 2024 and 2025 adequate to above and 2026 very dry. No hollow heart of any consequence in Red Norland for those 3 growing seasons.

This is a nice overview of red potatoes; Red Pontiac was widely grown in the Red River Valley.  https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/best-red-potato-varieties/

Yes, although white chippers are pretty common as contracted for that industry, it does seem that local soils and conditions favor the reds.  Red Norland is a good one....can't recall if it was that one or a next stage variety that I planted this year.  Russets do well enough, but the western state of the US seem to do best with those for consistency and yield.  Below is some additional regional information to go with what was posted above.....many of these would be worth trying in any region just to see if they would do well for one's specific garden/storage/culinary needs.  We had a good year with spuds after several years of bad disease or flooding.  This year, drought....but was able to keep everything watered from an early stage and kept at it through the season.  Also planted deeper this year (5-6") than in the past which may have helped.

Nancy,  This link probably will give information overload, but poking through this slide presentation may offer some varieties for your area that would exhibit lower levels of hollow heart (internal heat necrosis probably not a great concern in your region).  You might try compiling a short list from this slide presentation and then consult with some local producers over which varieties they have seen to have reduced hollow heart incidence, while stlll providing good disease resistance and storability.  Good luck in the search!

https://archive.sebs.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011-Observations-Potato-Varieties-Presentation.pdf