Fall 2011 Update (Part 1)

After a rather extended period of dormancy, The Golden Rule Garden Blog is once again in production. Our Garden Manager, Ellen, has written an update of this year's activities in the garden, which will be presented in two parts. The first is a brief overview of our work, philosophy and challenges in the garden. The second part details a few specific crop production statistics.

This time of year at Golden Rule Garden is very beautiful and busy. As a matter of fact, we are almost as busy as the spring and summer planting time. It is an ending to one growing season and a preparation for the new year. For the gardener, it might represent a chance to maybe take a little time off or start the new garden plan for the next growing season. At Golden Rule Garden this year, we have been facing the same challenges as most agriculturalists everywhere. We have had to adapt to the changing climate and plant many of our vegetable and summer grain crops later, after an extra 4 weeks of cool wet June weather and then adapt to a cooler summer. With those challenges, we have still managed to produce abundant food for our community here at Golden Rule as well as for the local senior center, food banks and soup kitchens thanks to the help of Golden Rule Garden’s new field coordinator, Randy Fish, and our interns Binod, Fernanda, Rachid and Lucas.

We have tried to adapt the varieties we grow to the possible permanent climate changes in our area. With some of the experimentation we have been doing, we are able to offer the varietal seeds we have grown to our local seed company, Bountiful Gardens. Growing tomatoes, for instance, can be challenging with the type of weather we have been dealing with in the last few years, so we have found tomatoes used to cooler nights. We are still experimenting with them and hope to have data on their successes or failures in the future.

It is often fun to grow seeds and preserve them in your own garden. It is truly sustainable to grow out seeds that work well in your garden and are available to you and others. This is a very important aspect to our garden and should be something that we all think about. The world is losing the amazing diversity of heirloom vegetable and grain seeds. At our garden, we are trying very hard to preserve the quality of open-pollinated heirloom seeds for both the vegetables and grains that we grow.

As the growing season ends and we’re preparing for the winter, we are busy composting, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, seed saving, cover-cropping and weeding. Many of these activities continue into the winter...when we start pruning our 84 fruit trees and rebuilding flats. A farmer’s life is full of diversity. However, we are still excited about planning for the growing season next year and what the weather will be. Whatever it is, we will adapt.

First Frost!

No soft about it: the weather has shifted, and last night it went right down to 28° F. That means the end of our beautiful solanaceae element. Peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, they all have a sad look about them. And any amaranth still in the beds took a very ugly turn when they thawed out. Similarly the buckwheat.
Luckily we saw it coming, and got the sorghum out last week. Our favorite variety is Dale, which produces both seed and syrup. The seed can go through any freeze, but the sap goes through a chemical shift after frosts and becomes much less palatable. So we always want to make sure we harvest the sorghum and run it through the press with time to spare.
The millet seems to have passed through alright this once, and the corn is as happy and dying as ever it is this time of year. Our little baby rye and wheat plants love this kind of thing, so if they make it past the birds and rodents they will get big and strong despite the winter.
And the heater turned on in the house last night... Looks like Fall!

Happy Fall Equinox!

Well, here we are on the other side of the main growing season... I took the photos two weeks ago, when the amaranth and beautiful colors were still present. The amaranth has been harvested now, and some of the green is starting to fade into yellow. Nothing like the yellow of the hills around us, which are parched from the typical summer of no rain, but the yellow of things that aren't going to grow any more no matter how much water they get. Corn, for instance.

Our second earliest sweet corn, Brocade, has only remained in the bed this long for one reason: the supposedly "bush" style beans have climbed up it and show no sign of slacking. As you see in the photo the crispy corn stalks are peppered with the lush green of beans. Though loathe to cut a productive plant off, we'll have to do it in the next month to get in our cover crops.
This is the turning point of the annual cycle, when the garden begins to take on a different look. Step by step, week by week, as each main season crop is harvested the observer can see farther and farther. Six weeks from now, where once stood many visually impenetrable layers of plant matter, there will be nothing but 1" to 8" tall cover crops, and one will be able to make eye contact with a fellow agrarian across the garden. It's pretty exciting. And most of that plant matter will be stored away against the rain for compost material next spring.
Like the straw from the grains we harvested in June and July. Last week apprentices Ed and Natasha finished threshing the last of it, which is another happy moment. Once the rains start everything takes on moisture whether they are covered or not, and moisture makes threshing much more difficult. We have all started working on threshing main season stuff like amaranth, quinoa, and teff.
Speaking a little earlier of compost, we have noticed that clearing beds of immature stuff from weeds to "catch crops" (which I'll talk about in a future post) brings with it a dire need to build more piles. Margo has been diligent at this, starting the second pile in as many weeks. Pictured here is the first, resplendent in its amaranth and bean layers. Usually spring is the most intense composting season, and piles are built and added to gradually until winter comes.
Late summer brought with it the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show and the California Wool and Fiber Festival, which are all held together in late September. We participated in it through attendance as well as submissions, the process and results of which are intriguing enough to be documented in their own post. Suffice it to say, we had a good time. Here I am participating in the "Quality" portion of the spinning contest, a drop spindle knee-deep in a circle of spinning wheels.
Makaiah's sunflower circle, referred to in the summer solstice post, is past its prime, but still present in full force. Planted a little closer together than optimally, they did not reach the towering height that other beds did. Still, they were over his head, and that was good.
One would think that the fall would bring milder, autumnal temperatures. This has not been the case, as we suddenly find ourselves needing to cope with 103°+ F days, which are supposed to continue through the week. Next week it is to revert back to the predictable mid to high 80' s.
With waning daylight and hopefully lowering temperatures, we are also faced with the last three weeks of the summer course, when the interns we have worked with and gotten to know so well head off into their next stages. Fall is a good time for contemplating change...

Knee High by the 4th of July?

Maybe if you are that Chinese basketball player. Our garden is growing like all-get-out at this time of year, and the hot weather we got last week pushed some of our heat-loving crops to do great things. On the right is a photo of our Hopi Blue flour corn. Half of this 240 sq ft bed is planted with seed I saved from last year using hand pollination as recommended in Seed to Seed, a book published by Seed Savers Exchange (an organization advocating the use of open-pollinated seed, as opposed to the artificial processes of hybrid and genetic modification). In the next month or two it will get up to eight or nine feet and tassel, and I will fine-tune my hand-pollinating skills.

Amaranth is another of the main-season crops we tout so highly. Hailing from central America, amaranth was the staple food of the Aztecs and the backbone of their culture and worship. Recognizing this, the Spanish Conquistadores banned it and actively destroyed it wherever it was encountered. It has been theorized that, had that not happened, amaranth would be to our culture what corn is now (maybe aside from all the recently discovered derivatives). It produces a brilliant plume of flowers that Victorians might have called beautiful, others might call gaudy. The seed is tiny but plentiful, and can be boiled, ground, and, yes, popped. The young greens are also tasty.
Quinoa was first cultivated high in the Andes of South America, so you might wonder why we'd attempt it way down here. Happily, it can grow anywhere from 12,000 feet down to sea level, depending on the variety. Its claim to fame among health food fans is that it is a whole protein, containing all of the amino acids that humans need. Plus it cooks in about 20 minutes and take on flavors easily (so don't eat it alone expecting to be impressed). The seeds grow naturally coated with saponin (a soapy substance) that is so bitter that birds don't bother it. The good news is that when you buy it in the health food store it has already been washed free of the bitterness. The bad news is that the store won't make house calls to wash the quinoa you grow yourself. We're still working here on the most efficient way to process it.
Rye stands out in this post as an over-wintered crop instead of a main-season one. It is one of my favorites of all we have here, between its beauty, its height, and its usefulness. The tallest cereal crop we grow, its ready tendency to host microorganisms (like the poisonous fungus ergot) makes its grain the prime ingredient for sourdough starter (a yeast kept alive through a mixture of rye flour and water). And we thrive on sourdough bread in this house. Like all the other crops I mention in this post, one of rye's biggest chores within the garden is as a compost material. The mature stalks can be easily saved for months or years after threshing to provide mature material when you are ready to build a pile. Rye also has an incredible root system, which means good things for soil quality in the garden.
Finally, Jerusalem Artichoke, a.k.a Sunchoke. While it produces an incredibly tall stalk, the flowers are all pretty small. The edible part of the plant is the tuber, which has, depending on what you read and whom you ask, a nutty flavor, a starchy flavor, or a flavor like to that of an artichoke. Which leads to the name. There is much speculation as to the origin of the name "Jerusalem", for instance that it may be a corruption of the Italian "girasole", following the sun. But I have discovered that whenever one puts "Jerusalem" in front a common garden noun it generally means "kind of like but not actually a". For instance, Jerusalem Sage and Jerusalem Cricket.
All of these crops, besides the rye, are in for the main-season long-haul, and will be harvested sometime in September or October. Having shown them as juveniles, you can expect some full-grown images from us later on...

Happy Summer Solstice!

A bit belated, it's true, but for good reasons. Not only is it the longest day of the year, it is also a choice time for weddings, and we attended two great ones.

The asparagus has gone to seed, now looking reminiscent of fennel. The comfrey is ready to be harvested for the second time this season, to go into compost piles as immature material.

But the greatest difference between this and the last State-of the Garden report (at Equinox) is that we are long bereft of compost/cover crops, and most of the main-season crops have been in their beds for more than a month. This is the list that starts with amaranth, beans, and corn, and ends with tomatoes, watermelon, and zucchini. Some notables that fall between the alphabetical extremes are quinoa, leeks, flax, teff, rice, sunflowers, ...

While these and the potatoes are growing enthusiastically, it is harvest time for some of my favorite crops: garlic and winter grains! First came the garlic, always threatened by our over-eager gopher population. This year it looks as if the crop was mostly untouched. I will plan to put a post in on them soon, after data has been done. We did a test spacing them on 4", 5" and 6" centers (the distance from one plant to the next). This photo shows one of 13 braids we made from this year's harvest.

As for the winter grains, their time has come as well. We have already harvested Cologna Lunga, Hard Red Winter and SS791 wheats, Kynon oats, Musky triticale, and Karan 16 barley. The Cereal rye (on left) and Jet barley, with a host of others, are calling my name in the middle of the night, reminding me that they are almost there, too. You know that spring and winter grains are ready when 1) a kernel of grain, removed from the head, is mostly or entirely hard, 2) the grains are falling from the head on their own, or 3) the birds are eating them. Whether or not they are ready for harvest, when the birds are eating them you don't have much choice. To harvest we cut them slightly above ground level, bundle the stalks with heads together, and hang them upside down in a safe place to dry. Ah, grains... The spring wheat and barley will take an additional few weeks in the ground before they are ready.

As the long-season crops come out, they leave bed space to fill. While we have plans to put fava beans or compost/cover crops in for the winter, they will not get planted till October. In the mean time we'll plant what we call "catch crops", which fill the bed during the intervening time but will probably not come to full maturity. They will, however, grow quickly and cover the bed, keep the soil microbes happy, and look pretty. We are currently putting in Hegari sorghum, Pearl millet, buckwheat, and dry beans for catch crops. Here Margo is interrupted in her millet transplanting by an urgent matter.

Thankfully the fruit set did not get frosted off this spring, so we have promise of Asian pears, numerous apples, and lots of other great stuff.

Finally, an inspiration of Makaiah's is coming into its own: the Sunflower Circle. He wanted a place to be able to lounge in the shade near his parents' garden beds, so they cultivated and planted this area. It promises to be dramatic, but the Fall Equinox post will have to show its maturity.

Past Accomplishments

Margo has instructed me to write about planting potatoes, and I will, but later this week. I think an accounting of how the past couple of weeks went is in order first.

We have had visits from prospective members of the Golden Rule Garden gang, a visit from my brother, a trip to Hidden Villa Ranch to present to the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA) orientation of new stewards, and a trip to go surfin' and campin' down around Santa Cruz (I'm the one in front of the blue board). Plus a whole lot of gardening, weeding, and things I'll tell you about momentarily.

Since last post, Spring Equinox, where I declared the trees were budding and asparagus sprouting prematurely, we have had at least five, maybe more like seven nights below freezing. Most of those well into hard-frost territory. The Asian pear and Plum trees go right on, as if they didn't notice. That means we'll be getting out the spun polyester soon to protect them.

We had, on the west end of the garden, a large blackberry/grape vine bramble. It stretched about twenty feet along the fence and stood around eight feet tall for most of that. Let me first stress this most important of all facts: it did not produce many berries, nor did it produce any grapes whatsoever. It shaded the bed next to the fence starting around 3:00pm, which could be good or bad depending on the crop. It leaned heavily on the fence, which is a plastic deer-barrier fence and not in any way structural. And it provided an excellent habitat for a number of birds. We thought this last part was great, until the Red Fife wheat we planted nearby began to be decimated. And then the sugar snap peas, then the kale, then the mustard. You have probably noticed that the bramble has been referred to here in the past tense, and that is what this paragraph is really about. Ellen has been talking for a while about getting the backhoe in to rip the bramble out, but last year it was shading the delicate crops so nicely that we asked her to put that off a bit. This year is different, and since my brother was visiting with his excellent trail-maintenance skills we did it last week. Now it acts as a nice, but mobile, habitat. I'm guessing it will ambulate (with persuasion from a golf cart) to a better location in the next few days. Besides, it isn't like there aren't blackberry brambles ALL OVER the place here anyway. That one taking over the greenhouse, for instance...
The final point I'll reference now is the reconstruction of old flats... Flats are great for using space wisely in the garden - seeds are planted in 3" deep flats and stay there until the seedlings are of a size to transplant. That way whatever is already growing in the beds can grow some more before being pulled out for the new crop. The downside of flats, as with most other things, is that they eventually break. This is the corner of our greenhouse where we store such flats. (They don't know that the wood burning stove around which they are stacked is out of service - it keeps them honest.)
Out of this pile, so far, have arisen fifteen solid and usable flats. Eight of these were cobbled together from pieces of broken flats, and the other seven incorporated some brand new material with the old pieces. Here are three of the flats, which constitute the two most popular flat dimensions at the Golden Rule Garden. The two on the left are referred to as "half flats," because they are approximately half the width of the full flats cited in How to Grow More Vegetables. Their interior dimensions are 15.5"X 10", and they are much easier to deal with when full of wet soil. The flat on the right is a "long flat," and is 2'X 9". It is heavier, but since it is long you can keep its center of gravity closer to you.
I'll end with a digital print of my flat-concocting diagrams. The medium is graphite on 1/8" redwood board. It is the first of its series...

Happy Spring Equinox!

Golden Rule Garden, 3/20/09

This seems like a great time for a State-of-the-Garden report, to take stock of where we are now and what is imminent...

We'll start with the perennials. Someone is confused in the garden, and I think it is them. They've all been living here longer than I have, but I'm pretty sure that just because it is officially Spring, and just because it has gotten nice and warm for the past stretch of time, it is not by any means certain that no hard frost lies in our near future. But the raspberries are caning, the blueberries are forming flowers, the Asian pear is tempting fate with its buds and the asparagus is four or five inches high. We'll see. As the folks who buy their tomato starts in February say, "You never know. This year may be different!" And our perennials will be ready.

I talked to Mom today, and she pointed out how lucky we are to be moving ahead with garden preparation. They weather has been nice and warm back in Ohio, but that simply means that the ground has thawed into a thick muddy mess.

We are starting to pull up cover crops to plant potatoes, and have already put in about 250 square feet of them already. Those that haven't been pulled are shooting skyward, as are the fava beans and the seed heads of the green onions we didn't quite get harvested last fall. We have happy garlic and lettuce, and Margo just planted sugar snap peas yesterday. A little early, perhaps, but something to look forward to.

Our broccoli is flowering.

As for work, we are clearing paths from weeds (which seem to give us half of our compost material themselves) and building compost. Here is Margo with the first pile this year! We have also started sifting the compost piles from last Fall to get out the rocks and un- decomposed material out.

And flatting... We have promise of wonderful crops in flats in the greenhouse right now. Allow me to rattle off the list: arugula, basil, beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, eggplant, flax, kale, leeks, the ever-present lettuce, mustard, parsley, peas, sweet peppers, hot peppers, quinoa, salsify, spinach, stevia, tomatillos, and tomatoes.

Finally, the main-season wildlife is starting to show up again. Most notable are the western bluebirds and cliff swallows. One of these days I'm going to post our bird list on here, as inspired by Anne.

So Happy Spring, everyone! I hope you get all the water and sun you need to get your gardens going!

One of our male western bluebirds shows what he's all about

Jack Frost Nipping at our Beans

I know this post isn’t going to receive any sympathy from folks in the northern lands, but those of you on the west coast and in the south know what I’m talking about: when the mercury falls below 32°F it’s really cold! So much so that things start to freeze! Thank God it doesn’t stay that way when the sun comes up…

All subtle bragging aside, we have a mild enough climate that the occasional nighttime lows below 32 are sometimes exasperating as we consider all the things we might be able to grow if it never froze. Add to that our last frost date of May 15 and occasional frost begins to seriously affect our capacity to grow long-season crops. Sorghum and corn barely mature before frost comes again, late potatoes are often still small at harvest, and miscellaneous other marathon crops are, for the most part, out of consideration. So tease us about our lack of severe winters, but realize that your warm nighttime lows in the summer allow your plants to overtake ours handily. (See the sidebar under “temps” for clarification).

As to the title, we have a variety of legume that stands out in a number of ways. Its seed production is great, its biomass production is incredible, and its hardiness means it will live through our winters. All three attributes put together make it an ideal crop for us. It will act as protection for the soil against sun, wind, and erosion, give us a great deal of mature material for compost, and make a tasty meal to boot. This wonder crop is the Banner variety of Fava Bean. It grows to around five feet high, can produce more than six stalks per plant, as many as seven pods per stalk and up to six beans per pod. We’re talking up to 252 beans per plant, and they are largish beans. And, as I said, they are hardy.

It gets down to 18F, as you can see if you scrutinize the min-max thermometer above, and while the Favas don’t like it they do cope. They get a little wilty, maybe a little covered with snow, and maybe even the tops die back. The point, though, is that they don’t die, and whatever they have saved to their roots starts going into high-gear around late March, which we’ll see soon. Here you see them relaxing onto the strings we set up to help them stay vertical.

As I mentioned earlier, any solar exposure usually melts the frost promptly around here. It seems, in general, that the sun is stronger in the west than, say, the Midwest. If you are working outside when the air temperature is, say, around 65°F you might be comfortable in the shade, but when you move out into the sun you get too warm quickly. Not that I’m complaining about that. At least, not in the winter. It means that, as long as your garden isn’t shaded all day, the ground doesn’t freeze very far down, and won’t stay frozen long. Root veggies store pretty well left in the soil. And you don’t have to worry (too much) about draining pipes and hoses. This photo was taken about 8 am. The hose is still frozen, as you can see from the frost, but the sun is on it already and it will thaw soon. Pipes are all around 12-18” down, well out of danger.

This week looks to shed its wetness tomorrow and turn the gardens into a warm, sunny, potato-planting wonderland!

Sunshiny Goodness

Willits weather is funny, because it is completely unpredictable. It can rain in the middle of the summer, though it almost never does. It can frost in June, though it almost never does. It can be in the upper 70's for a week in January, though it almost never is. But there are annual trends, strange ones, by which you can judge how relatively odd the weather is, and people will say things like "Huh, this freakishly cool weather usually comes in June, not May," or "Huh, usually this week or so of beautiful weather hits in February, not right now." Which is what our Garden Manager, Ellen, said today. People who have lived here for more than 20 years can talk that way with some amount of confidence. For the rest of us it just seems like someone up there is rolling the dice to see what the day will look like.

As a bit of trivia, we here are apparently on the border of the Alaskan and Hawaiian jet streams, so when one of them has the hankering to go north or south a titch, well, we get unseasonable weather. I have come to think of all of the weather here as unseasonable.

The unseasonably nice weather in the past 5 days and the coming 6 or 7 days has us doing whatever we can in the garden. Weeding takes a high priority at all times, as does harvesting whatever is ready to be harvested. And this time of year, not being able to count on the cold coming back to stay, we prune when it looks like it could stay warm. Which was today.

Here we have Ellen hitting the Asian Pear tree hard, because it went wild last year. In the foreground are two Persimmon trees, one of which is getting the ax this year.

Another bit of garden trivia: two years ago the whole region had an overwhelming fruit year, and some of our trees, not pruned for bounty and not quite watched closely enough, split down to the ground. We lost a couple of plum trees and a peach tree. Or two peaches and a plum. Something like that. At any rate, the remaining trees got a good pruning last year, and then some unseasonably cold weather came along late Spring and took all the blossoms. No one anywhere near us had any fruit besides berries and such. No apples, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons... We were sad. The trees weren't, though, and put all their energy into new growth.
So today in the garden Ellen pruned, Margo weeded, and I harvested willow from our basket-willow stands. And we all watered for the first time this winter.

The beautiful weather came at a difficult time for Margo and me. In the apprenticeship program with Ecology Action we each plan and teach six classes a year to EA Director (and Golden Rule Advisor) John Jeavons and EA Garden Manager Carol. Our next classes will be presented this Thursday, mine on Grains and Margo's on Seed Saving. Naturally we would have preferred cold, rainy, prohibitive weather that would keep us out of the garden definitively. But there we were, in shorts and short sleeves, getting our vitamin D.

To follow up on my last posting about putting all our precious grain seed away in plastic, I got out our store of silica gel and baked it. Silica gel is useful because it absorbs water, but it is fun because it's treated with cobalt chloride, which is blue when the beads are dry and pink when wet. Now I think it would be less confusing if blue was wet and pink dry, but we don't live in a Harry Potter world and cobalt chloride doesn't work that way. All the same, it's a good time, the agricultural version of a hypercolor shirt.

So for posterity I put some crystals in a bowl of water to take a picture. Then I baked the whole bunch of them in the oven for a while at 200°F (that's how you're supposed to dry them) and put them in the bowl for another photo. I made some handy 1 cup envelopes out of paper, which breathes just fine, and am in the process of transferring seeds from plastic to paper. I will sprinkle some silica gel in the bottom of each jar, and watch it for a few weeks. If it turns pink, I'll put more in. That's how we learn, I guess...
Coming up next, by popular demand, threshing :)

You Have to Start Somewhere

And this is where it all starts for us - with our eyes on a tasty, wholesome meal. We try to reflect before breakfast, lunch, and dinner on where our food came from, and today we had one of those excellent meals that, except for a little salt, pepper, baking soda and powder and a pad of butter, came from our own garden. We had black bean soup with black beans, veggie broth, cayenne pepper, onions, green pepper (dried), garlic, leeks, cilantro, and lemon juice (from trees in the greenhouse). Our salad had lettuce, carrots, daikon radish, and flax seeds. The cornbread was made with corn (wachicha flint), barley (jet), thyme, and veggie broth for the moisture. It may seem a simple meal, but the background makes it fascinating as well as nourishing.
Our daily life here involves an intimate relationship with food as well as with weather, soil, wildlife, compost, tools, ingenuity, sweat, and every once in a while a forgotten greenhouse tomato, halfway frozen and consumed by mold.
In this blog I hope to record the goings-on of the Golden Rule Garden for family, friends, neighbors and other interested parties.
Now a little bit about the situation. The Golden Rule Garden has two goals in its scope: to meet some of the food needs of the community here, and to provide experience and a learning environment for Ecology Action interns and apprentices that help out. It has been chemical-free (not card-carrying USDA "organic") for its entire history, tinkered with Biodynamic principles for some time in the 1990's, and is now using the GROW BIOINTENSIVE® system (hereafter generally referred to as biointensive) which is researched and taught by Ecology Action. More on that in future posts.
In ~2001 the Garden Manager (whose name I will add when I get her permission) took part in Ecology Action's summer course, and it is since then that the garden and community have been host to EA interns and apprentices. They live on site and, in exchange for helping the Garden Manager grow food for the community, get a section of the garden to manage on their own, practicing the techniques they learn during the summer course. Currently there are two 3-year apprentices here - Margo and myself. The 6-month summer course begins in April, and that is when the interns will arrive.
As the side bar indicates, the garden is in almost coastal California (which means the extremes we experience are about 5 miles away from moderate). The area is approximately 11,000 square feet (about 1/4 of an acre), and is in the format of beds, between 3.5 and 5 feet wide. We get a lot of rain, but none of it comes in the main growing season.
Temperatures deserve their own paragraph.
It gets below freezing, but not far enough or long enough that we can't grow some things like Fava Beans, rye, wheat, lettuce, and the hardier greens through the winter. It can get very hot, with highs peaking at 115°F for a week or more. The fascinating thing is that nights, even during those hot times, rarely stay above 60°. For the folks in the midwest and south (I guess) this gives you cause to pity us. For those heat-loving crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, etc. processes really slow down below 60. So you may be used to coming out in the morning and seeing your plants a foot taller than when you left them the night before, but that's not what happens here. They pretty much pout until the sun comes out and warms them again. Then, when it gets hot in the middle of the day, they will shut down again. Corn, for one, does not like temperatures above 95°F, and will close itself up to preserve water. In certain weather, then, we have plants virtually shutting down twice in a 24-hour cycle in the middle of the main growing season. All our beautiful weather has its limitations, agriculturally.
That's the background, and that's where I'll leave the post for today. Many intriguing tidbits are on the way, and I have pictures to prove it. So stay tuned...