Growth Updates for June 2011
Oh it’s been busy here the last few weeks, so I must apologize for the inherent silence this has caused.
A bit of travelling was in order, then catching up after travelling, and now that I’m all caught up I finally have a moment to do a post here.
The image you see to your right is the tomato ‘Fryerfrinsborghese’. This tomato, about a month back while I was originally transplanting everything, was snapped in half by my over excited dog when she took a flying leap over it while it was still waiting for transplant. Of course, I only had one of these transplants due to extremely low germination (I have a feeling these seeds must have been the original given to Plant Gene Resources Canada in 1984). Shocked and horrified I grabbed my rooting hormone and plunged it into the ground.
About two weeks on it looked practically dead, but still showing a bit of green I couldn’t force myself to actually rip it up. Then, when I left for holiday I noticed a little tiny bit of new growth. Hallelujah!
By the time I got back a week later, there was about two new inches of growth on it.
The plant is now doing spectacularly, growing very well, and I even see the formation of flower buds, promising me I’ll actually be able to save some seeds from this sucker for the bank. If this is any indication of how strong this plant is, I am absolutely thrilled to have requested these seeds from PGRC (which I did only because I liked the name!).
Unfortunately I do have a few deaths to relate: ‘Platillo’, another variety from Plant Gene Resources Canada didn’t survive the initial transplant. It was a poor start to begin with, but even my extreme babying couldn’t help it. ‘Calabacito Rojo’ also met its untimely death after a bad meeting with a weed whacker. ‘Americke Pyramidni’ died about a week after transplant, due to its very weak state, but the tomato that came out of those seeds that is still yet unidentified, ‘AP2’ is doing extremely well and growing like crazy. All three will be on the growing list again next year.
‘Irish Conners’ the bean I’m determined to bring back from the brink of extinction is doing much, much better for me here in Victoria than it did in Nelson. In Nelson I had hard clay soil, and temps reaching 35C, and this variety suffered in those conditions. Out of five initial beans last year I got two plants, and from those two plants, only managed to save 13 beans. Thankfully I got that many, and decided to plant them all this year. Well, they are doing spectacularly well here on the coast with it’s warm sun, but slight breeze to keep it cool. The soil I think is playing quite the roll too, as the natural sandy loam here seems to be much better for these plants to grow in. Looks like I’ll have nice strong plants, which means lots of beans to send out to anybody wanting them.
Thanks for coming by to read about the updates – I promise more in short order!