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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>year around?
Ok, say I have garlic planted 6 inches apart.  When the leaf color
changes, and it is time to plant anew, you plant new cloves in between
the existing plants



Yes, year round.  Garlic either grows or holds in the garden year round.  
Cold nor heat much touches it.  But, no, I don't plant between existing 
plants, although I can't see any reason it wouldn't work.  Two things about 
that, 
I'm not going much for the mature garlic bulbs.  Most of the garlic is 
harvested as garlic scallions which we eat in profusion in the summer and 
fall, 
bulbs, leaves, scapes, and all.  A very great lot of it is chopped up and 
dehydrated ... again the whole plant.  A few are left to mature into bulbs, 
especially the music garlic which is very large.  So the garlic cloves for 
this purpose are planted 3" or closer in both directions and the bed is 
harvested clean.  If the garlic isn't being used all at once, rather than 
plant 
between the plants, I will pull every other plant to give the remaining ones 
some extra room.  But in the end the bed will be harvested clean and 
something 
else planted there.

Second, and this will address other of your questions, there is no actual 
garlic bed in the garden.  Rather there are maybe 20 of them four feet wide 
and two or three feet long scattered all over the garden.  Same with most 
crops, shell beans being somewhat of an exception and of course there needs 
to 
be enough sweet corn in one plot for pollination.  But most everything else 
is in very small beds all over the place.



>>  I
> didn't because I did not think we had enough cool weather left to make
> good peas.  I'm not confident enough to know when it is too late to plant.
> 
> 

Cold is best and no mistake. In warm and hot weather the odds are not as 
good.  But our perception of peas that the they need very cool weather is 
exagerated.  The key to peas is to realize that it's the blossom that is 
critical, the rest of the growing stages are not.  View them like peach 
trees, the 
critical time is when they are in blossom.  Just before the blossoms and 
just after it can get as cold or hot as you like and you will still get 
peaches, but the blossoms are delicate.  Same with peas.  The critical thing 
is the 
blossoms.  If it is too cold or the open blossoms take a hard freeze, that 
flush of peas is toast.  But if it gets above about 95 degrees or so the 
blossoms will damage.  If it doesn't get below 75 or so at night, the 
blossoms 
won't set.  Otherwise you can grow peas any time you like.

> 
> >BTW, James, what is your opinion of the Mr. Stripey OP tomato that is
> being sold commercially?  

Those were all the rage here in the past few years.  The tomato is OK, 
nothing to write home about.  Although the pictures all show a perfectly 
round 
tomato, it is a "German" type, "potato leaved" some call it, which means it 
is somewhat scolloped on the sides and has a core.  I don't grow them any 
more.  I love orange tomatoes and also deep red ones, but this novelty always 
seemed like a half-baked compromise between them.  BUT it's a weak bias and 
I'd not hesitate to grow them again.

> 
> >In my experience(and this applies to tomatoes somewhat as well) if you
> pick them regularly, they will continue to produce.  If that is so, why
> do you need to continue to plant new transplants?  Why not just have 2
> or 3 plants?  What am I missing here?

That strategy works best on the long vining type cukes, a few of which I 
grow on trellises.  If you observe the plant carefully, you will find that it 
is continually abandoning the parts of the vine that have fruited and adding 
more vine with the new cukes.  Because I want to keep the vines politely 
withing the beds (all my beds are 4' wide), I favor the bush varieties  Bush 
Pickle, Bush Champion, Bush Master, and a few others.  The vines are 
protracted, the first 3' or so is like a regular cuke with additional growth 
being 
shorter and shorter and the cukes being poorer and poorer.

So although a regular Straight 8 or Ashley cuke will produce for a longer 
time, it takes up a lot of bed space with much of that space being spent 
parts of the vine that are no longer productive.   Square foot for square 
foot, 
I get a lot more cukes by digging in one bed of senile vines while another 
bed is on its way.

> 
> >That was my point with tomatoes and cucumbers...what variety of cuke are
> you growing that doesn't continue to produce, or it it that you just
> want those 'new cukes' from a fresh vine?


That too.  If you start a new vine while the old one is still producing, 
take a bit out of each cuke and see if you can't tell a great deal of 
difference.




>> So I should plant more spinach in my existing spinach patch, or radishes
> in the radish patch...etc.  My radish leaves are mature, but the
> radishes are still small. I probably already should have planted more.

Ah!  You see, I don't actually have "a" spinach patch.  Here just before 
harvesting the first one, there are already six spinach patches in the garden 
dozens of feet from each other and I'm no where near finished yet with the 
spring spinach planting.  The first bed is 4' wide and about 6' long.  When 
the spring grazing of the greens begins, I will cut the whole plant off 1" 
above the ground until the basket is full and keep doing this until the whole 
bed has been harvested.  I'll add a little compost and by this time the 
second bed will be ready for harvesting.   That bed is 4' x 4'.  But the time 
I've harvested three or four such beds, the first one will have grown back.  
It will do this maybe three times maybe two.  By late June or early July, all 
this early spinach will be bolting no matter what I do.  So in mid June I 
will have started a bed that can be overed with a shade cloth and will keep 
putting these out in cooler and cooler, more and more dappled places in the 
garden through August.  There won't be nearly so much spinach and the quality 
won't be as good, but, hey, spinach is spinach.     About mid September the 
spinach patches will expand again for fall spinach much as was done in the 
spring.

But when one small plot is cut, recovered, and cut again, it is hoed into 
the ground and something else is planted there.
> 
> 
> >Is this in a flat or in the ground?  Flat early, ground late?

The very earliest ones in flats.  But these are very few now of days.  Then 
by February in cold frames in the garden.  The rest of the time in seedling 
beds directly in the ground.

>> When I plant these(tomorrow) do you think it
> will be okay to plant them up to the first leaves(not the true leaves)?


I'd hesitate.  Burying the stems of squashes tends to rot them.  My guess 
is that the odds are better in your favor if you let them start out a little 
leggy in the garden.  


> 
> >Center of the Universe garden...now James, is this your main garden area
> or just *your* garden<g>?

This is philosphical, which never goes over well on this list.  My main 
garden is a circle of concentric beds, 4' of bed and 2' of paths with 
connecting paths in the cardinal directions.  The garden is 100' across 
giving seven 
concentric rings plus the center circle (which now hosts the pitcher pump) 
and the bed by the permiter fence.  How can I but wax affective, eh? 

Now, Bev, you are an astronomer.  If I ask the question, "Is the sun 
revolve around the earth or does the earth revolve around the sun?" would you 
not 
immediately answer the latter?  But what does "revolve around" mean?    If 
it means size is the deciding factor, then your answer is correct.  But the 
geometric truth is that if you visualize the earth as a fixed point in space, 
immoveable, then the sun is indeed revolving around the earth.  It's a 
matter of what's important to you, and for me it's the fact that Iive here 
(on 
the earth) that is paramount when I visualilze who is revolving around whom.

I have lavished treasure and sweat and poured out my life like a pitcher of 
water on this particular bit of truck.  The rest of the cosmos can spin 
about like the the sky in Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and please itself.  For 
me, 
this is the Center of the Universe.

> 
> >How large are your pea patches?

Each plot 4' wide and from 10' to 15' wide.

>> What kind of shell peas have you grown like this? 

Wando, Thomas Laxton's, and Laxton's Progress #9, the last accounting for 
the bulk of the shell peas.


> Are you talking about

> lima beans or butter beans or something like black-eyed peas? 

I have to keep in mind I'm talking to a Georgian.  What we call 'peas' here 
you call 'English peas'.   Oh, I'd love to do as well with black-eyed peas, 
silver hulls, crowder peas, and the like as I do with "English" peas, but 
the climate difference between us is critical and those latter along with 
lima beans are iffy for me.  Too bad too.  When I lived in Georgia, I was not 
much taken with the cuisine, but I did pick up a few habits such as boiled 
peanuts and I dearly love all the "southern" peas.  I'm getting better at 
second guessing them and I do get a small crop, but, alas, I mainly buy them.

One thing Georgia has it all over any other place in the world is catfish.  
The second best catfish was at the seedy red-neck place "Johnny Reb's"  but 
the best (excuse my racism) was always at a black owned catfish place, I 
don't even recall any of the names now.  It was made by dipping the catfish 
in 
this huge vat of Lousianna hot sauce then dredging it in cornmeal and thus 
fried.  There was also a version of fried chicken like that and without a 
doubt the third best fried chicken in the universe.  The second is my 
mother's.  And the first ..... well, when anyone asks me why I married 
Herself, I 
never hesitate to disclose, "It's the fried chicken."

I must have been a saint in my previous life to have been born Southern.


> 
>   >Whaddaya think?  If they don't germinate due to being old, I've only
> lost one meal, but if I get a few plants, I could at least replenish the
> seed. 

Legume seeds last a good long time.  They won't be too old.  And you have 
time to mature the seeds and replant them for the fall.


James