For the Love of Spinach

The pattern has endured throughout garden history…

The boys come along,

They meet up with the girls,

Love is in the air,



Male Spinach seeds releasing pollen

And seeds are formed.

Spinach Seeds being formed near the stalk.

For further questions, go ask your Mom and Dad.

It came as a surprise to me that spinach plants grow up to be either male or female, and do not have both the male and female flowers on the same plant. The term for this is dioecious, meaning two houses. One way you can imagine this is having all the boys in one house (plant), with all the girls in another house (plant). As long as they are in the same area, seed will be formed.

Seed to Seed recommends having a minimum of 4 female plants and 2 male plants to continue the vegetable variety without any detrimental inbreeding. I laughed at this, because you cannot determine which is male or female until the stalks grow. So the basic rule of thumb is the more the better. As spinach requires a large isolation distance to retain varietal purity, small-scale gardeners may find it easiest to save seed from one variety per season.

 

Seed to Seed

One of the things I enjoy about gardening is the vast amount of knowledge needed to grow just one vegetable. It is truly miraculous that, despite all of our blunders as gardeners, a plant will sprout, grow and - at times - flourish. The last book I read by Carol Deppe about Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties sited the book Seed to Seed as having information that I really wanted to know about growing melons. Seed to Seed turned out to have all of that information and so much more!

 The book Seed to Seed is written by Suzanne Ashworth in collaboration with the Seed Saver’s Exchange. The first part of the book is a wonderful read that overviews the importance of seed saving, explains how botanical classification works, elaborates on pollination and flower structure, gives ideas on maintaining varietal purity as well as proper techniques for cleaning and storing seeds.

The second (larger) section of the book goes over all the major vegetable families and gives information about many common and rare vegetable varieties. Each plant section contains an introduction to the plant, its botanical classification, a section on pollination crossing and isolation, a section on seed production harvest and processing, and seed statistics. The individual plant sections also contain recommendations from master gardeners in each region of the United States. These gardeners suggest appropriate planting dates and often elaborate on how to care for the plant in the specific area.

So, here is a little of what I learned from reading this book:

A perfect flower contains both the male and female parts of the plant in one place and is able to pollinate itself. An example of a perfect flower is a tomato flower.



Ozark Pink Tomato Blossoms mutate in Tucson's late-summer heat



A monoecious plant is one that has two separate flowers for male and female on the same plant. Two examples of monecious plants are melons and cucumbers.



Cucumbers and melons exhibit monecious flowers



A dioecious plant is one where each plant has either male or female flowers and both are needed to pollinate. An example of this is spinach.

 

Dioecious  female spinach requires a male spinach plant



 A self-incompatible flower is one in which requires bees or people to pollinate it, as the flower is perfect but will not form seeds if pollinated by itself. An example of a self-incompatible flower is broccoli or cauliflower.

 

Brocolli flowers are self-incompatible



Additional fun things I learned included the word “rouge”, which means to remove off-type plants and guidelines for using hot water to kill pathogen on seeds. Reading about the vegetable varieties made me eager to try out some new vegetable varieties such as the Jelly Melon.



Seed saving is a valuable skill worth developing!


Saving seeds from your garden can allow you to become more self-sufficient. Perhaps your local nursery won’t be as happy about you producing your own seed, but your finances will, and along the way you can develop skills that will enable you to be prepared for things to come. As I harvest my own seed my hope is that, if I had to, I could support my family from the food I grow.

The Carosello Bianco Leccese



Carosello Bianco Leccese Starting out.

After experiencing so much luck with Armenian cucumbers but wanting something tastier I asked around my gardening club (TOG) and found out that there was another kind of Armenian cucumber. From that point on I have been finding out as much as I can about melon cucumbers. Apparently the C. melo species that we think of as muskmelon and honeydew here in North America is often grown for cucumbers in other parts of the world including Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe. These melons have some great attributes such as often being burpless, free of bitterness, thin edible skin, fruit very quickly and taking heat better than many regular cucumber varieties.  However, they often have problems of their own, such as powdery mildew and little tolerance for the cold. One variant of these cucumbers is called the Carosello. This cucumber-melon takes many forms in a region of Italy known as Puglia.


Growing Bigger!

All C. melo cucumbers, including the Carosello, can cross with other C. melo species so require being grown in isolation if you desire to save pure seed. The cucumbers can either be grown on the ground or staked. When staking the vines you will need to let the main stem grow out to about 71 inches before pruning (this stem often produces the female fruit). The side vines containing the male flowers can be pruned back the side after the second node of leaves.



Beginning to see Fruit!

There are many different varieties of these cucumbers and some of them go by multiple names based on what the locals know them as. These pictures sent to me are from a gardening friend in Italy. These are the Carosello Bianco Leccese. From what I understand Bianco means white (though the skin is light green) and Leccese means it comes from the district of Lecce in the Southeast of Puglia. Other varieties such as the Barese come from Bari while the Manduria and the Massafra come from the Taranto district of Puglia.

Harvesting the first Bianco Leccese

The inside looks good (=

Many of these cucumbers do have some form of fuzz at the beginning stage of growing and a few keep growing fuzz as they mature. I like to call this the “fuzz factor”. My friend who sent me these pictures said that the fuzz factor on the Bianco Leccese is minimal and can be easily removed before eating. I personally don’t mind fuzz on my cucumber and think it is a neat characteristic. The fur on even the more fuzzy varieties is simply brushed off by hand.

Growing...

...and growing even more.

The fruit of the Bianco Leccese is very delicious when they reach the weight of 150-170 grams or 5-6 ounces though they remain good until about 200 grams or 7 ounces. When picked in their prime, the seeds are small and edible.



Ahh... the beauty of the Carosello.



The Bianco Leccese.

You can learn more about these cucumbers at an Italian Wikipedia site: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carosello_(gastronomia) or translated into English. I hope you have enjoyed some of these pictures of the Carosello Bianco Leccese. I am very grateful for my friend Giuseppe who provided much of the information and pictures for this post.

Update: With the help of my Italian friends I have recently been able to purchase a large amount of Carosello Bianco Leccese seeds. You can purchase them in sample seed packets at Cucumbershop.com.




Il Carosello Bianco Leccese e magnifico!

Beneficial Insects of my Garden

As a kid I was fascinated with bugs (to say the least) and I have probably, from egg to egg, raised ladybugs, Anise Swallowtail butterflies, Painted Lady Butterflies, and Praying Mantises with the last being the most difficult. Most insect pests have predators - so it can greatly help to know each kind of beneficial insect (those that eat your insect pests) that lives in your area and how you can use them to minimize your crop damage and work. I would much rather have beneficial insects do the work of eliminating pests for me.



Grey Aphids can do some damage to the top of plants



 Aphidius colemani parasitic wasps finding aphids on the leaf 

There are some insect pests whose presence in my garden must be addressed immediately, because of the extent of damage a few can cause and because they have no native predators to bring their population down to numbers that are acceptable to me. These include cucumber beetles, tomato hornworms, squash vine borers, and cutworms. Many of the rest of my pests I rely on beneficial insects to take care of. The most common pest in my garden is aphids. With wings that enable them to fly from one location to another, with ants working hard to protect them (ants harvest nectar from many kinds of aphids), and with the ability to double their population in a matter of days aphids can do a lot of damage to a garden. Their method of attack is sucking juice from the plant, which weakens the plant and can result in leaf curl of both old and new growth. Aphids have many enemies including parasitic wasps, the fuzzy Scymnus beetle larvae, lacewing nymphs, ladybug nymphs and various caterpillars and nymphs of other kinds.



Aphidius colemani parasitic wasp hatching from prey.



Hoverfly Larvae eat aphids.



Scymnus beetle larvae enjoy eating aphids too



Lacewing Egg on a leaf.





Adult Green Lacewing

My all time favorite of these is the Aphidius colemani parasitic wasp followed by the lacewing. The female A. colemani wasp flies from leaf to leaf, poking her egg laying tube into various aphids to lay eggs in them as she desires. The aphids eventually turn yellow then golden as the new wasp grows within the aphid, then eats it from the inside out. Then the wasp cuts an opening out of the aphid shell and starts the process all over again. Why I love the A. colemani wasp so much is that it can really take the Tucson heat and the ants and aphids just cannot compete with it. I really enjoy lacewings as well. They stay in Tucson throughout the year and are a real help whenever I need a bug to take care of my aphids.

The other beneficial insects I have noted appear in small numbers throughout the year, depending upon how much heat or cold they can tolerate. They complement the A colemani and lacewings but seem to only come in as backup when aphid populations get really high.





Ladybug Larvae feasting on aphids





Fast ladybugs are difficult to catch on camera





Cabbage Looper caterpillar...

 

...plus caterpillar Parasitic Wasp...

  

...equals new home for wasps!



The only other beneficial insect of note for the garden is the praying mantis, which does well in established gardens. Mantises tend to thrive in long-standing gardens with multiple stories of foliage. This is because they feed on different insects throughout their life cycle. Though they can live in many environments, they prefer eating flying insects and residing on flowering plants that attract insects half the length of their arm. Got all that? Mantises can be difficult to keep in an area, unless you have enough area to support their prey and to keep them safe from larger predators. Many kinds of mantises inhabit Arizona (including Tucson), but the most common variety I find in Tucson is the Mediterranean Mantis, or Iris oratoria.



Mediterranean Mantis on my neat desk. (=

 

So how do I attract beneficial insects? The first way I do this is to give them a healthy food source – which means I let the pests thrive. I usually try to start a population of pests and predators early in the spring so that I can enjoy the benefits of beneficial insects all summer and fall. And what if no beneficial insects thrive in my area? I could purchase some varieties from companies that could do well in my climate or I could kill bugs by hand. As for me, I prefer the method with the least work – let the beneficials do the work.

 

The Enigma of Organic Pest Control

One very effective way to eliminate a pest is to eliminate its food. If you starve any creature to death long enough it shouldn’t come back – right? That is what many people in Tucson choose to do if they receive repeated assaults from Squash Vine Borers. That does not necessarily take care of the pests though, as the pest may come back the next season you plant a crop. Another option is to grow indoors. However, the cost is too great for most gardeners to pay for the lighting and fancy equipment needed to grow crops in a controlled environment such as a greenhouse, nor do most gardeners want the possible consequences that could occur if whiteflies or some other insect pest happened to sneak into a controlled growing area. Instead, most gardeners prefer to work in rich soil and do what they can to keep bugs from taking the majority of their veggies.



A good read for Southwestern Gardeners

In order to control the bug problem in my garden I practice a form of Integrated Pest Management, or IPM for short, in order to maintain the health of my vegetable garden. In Desert Gardening for Beginners by Cromell, the author devotes an entire chapter (7 pages) to managing insects. She describes the 6 steps of Integrated Pest Management as follows:

1. Identify the pest

2. Monitor the pest’s population levels.

3. Decide how much damage is acceptable to you (for the plant’s health and/or aesthetics).

4. Consider all options, including no control at all.

5. Keep accurate records

6. Evaluate results and modify the program as needed.

Although I will not expound too much on these points, the author does, and I would highly suggest a read of this little book for those seeking to grow veggies in the Southwest. I am very good at each of these steps except for step 5. The only time I wish I had kept better records for pest control would be to determine when the beginning and end of the Squash Vine Borer season is. Integrated Pest Management works for me because, even though I tend to notice a lot, I am a very lazy gardener. I do not want to spray my crops nor deal with the effects of a chemical spray. Instead I could do some of the following:

- Choose to use some low-impact techniques, including the use of beneficial insects.

- I could spray my garden with some form of home-made concoction (such as with garlic or with hot pepper).

- I could spray with the area with BT bacteria.

- I could dust all affected plants with Dichotomous earth (which kills insects that walk on it).

- Practice some form of crop rotation to decrese the reoccurance of a yearly pest infestation.
- Kill the plants and let the ground fallow for a while.

I have tried making a homemade spray before and it works a little. However, most concoctions only work for while and do not get at the heart of the problem. I have used Dichotomous earth in the past, and I feel it works well for cutworms, but I resist using it in any place frequented by lizards or beneficial bugs. For the most part I choose to fallow one of my two gardens and use beneficial insects, both of which are free techniques. This helps me to do as little maintainence on my pests as possible. Though I do hope to grow cover crops in my fallowed garden in the future, for now my fallowed area seconds as a compost pile.



Dichotomous Earth can be bought from Hardware Stores