So, I’m left with a bit of a Catch-22: Raze the beds of the winter crop that has yet to fruit, or delay the spring planting and forfeit my opportunity to get my edibles established before the pests come out in force.  Perhaps this is a false dilemma.

Either way, this overlap can easily be avoided next year with more competent successive plantings.  My error this past winter was in seeing the multiple plantings as something to be crammed into the season, one after the other.  I waited until the first harvest had completely dried up before replanting.  Rather, effective successive planting should be more integrated, with tighter intervals.

One method involves combining started transplants with direct seeding of the same type.  Another uses periodic direct seeding to accomplish the same goal of a staggered, extended harvest.  The frequency of seeding depends on what is grown, with a vegetable like spinach being planted as often as once a week, lettuce and other greens every other week, and squash once a month.  You can also look to variation in growth rate in the different varieties of the same type of crop, like an Early Yellow Crookneck squash (52 days) versus a Burgess Buttercup (100 days).

Such strategery would have helped us to avoid the light harvest we had in February.  Being more attentive to maturation rates could also have let us plant our winter crop with an exit strategy in mind to avoid the quagmire we find ourselves in during this winter-spring transition.

However, in a month or so when the Waltham Broccoli, Bull’s Blood Beets (which have been so good), and two varieties of carrot I’ve never tried before (Purple Haze and Dragon) come in, I’m sure I won’t be complaining about space.  In the end, much of my spring preparation involves developing new areas of our property to devote to edibles — and removing another section of lawn that does nothing but consume dwindling water resources and need mowing.

So, with our eyes on the last of the winter crop, we look forward to spring.

Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and 300 Carantan Leeks.

I could have grown 1,200 Autumn King Carrots.

Or maybe not.  Even taking into consideration pests, disease, thinning, and successive plantings on some of those crops, I just don’t have the space.  Most people don’t.  And what if I did get 1,200 carrots?  I like carrots, but come on.  That’s carrots every day for a year even if I give away two thirds of that yield to — who?  The couple hundred people I know who trust me enough to eat something from my yard?  (For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking I don’t have to worry much about that kind of return, but I’m getting better — and some of these crops are easy.)

These enormous, space-consuming yields come from one, $1.89 packet of seeds for each crop.  That’s just the way seeds come.  For me and my space, that leaves a lot left over after I’ve planted my fill.  Typically I save them just in case of a crop disaster, but often by the time whatever ails my plants fells them, it’s too late in the season to start again from scratch.  Besides, that’s some pretty pessimistic seed hording going on.

Instead, we should plant with optimism and give away our remaining seeds as soon as the ones we’ve used hit the ground.  I tried this in the spring, a bit, and have done better with the practice this cool season.  In the spring I shared ground nuts and watermelon with friends and fellow amateur growers Paul and Amy Reams (who operate a fabulous wedding and portrait photography business out of San Diego).  Between us, I pulled six peanuts out of the ground and we all ate store-bought watermelon this summer.  But there was camaraderie in our lack of success.  I gave my parents tomato and pepper plants I’d started indoors, and while mine got eaten by pests, theirs made it to fruit.  This fall I shared all the cool crops mentioned above with my sister, Anna, and just this week she, her husband, and our grandpa ate salads fixed from her bursting raised bed (pictured above).

My sister never gardened before this season, and she’s doing great.  And in the coming seasons we’ll grow more edibles we’ve never grown before with Paul, Amy, and Anna, experimenting in good company.  And my folks will grow stuff, too.

Typically when people have a hand in producing some of their own food, when they see that it’s possible to step into their yard, pick something, and eat it — something they had no choice but to go to a supermarket for in the past, that they’ve only seen piled in a produce section — they tend to plant and grow something every season after that, even if they’re not gardeners by nature.  Because it’s so possible.  And so good.

Sometimes all someone needs is a handful of seeds and an encouraging word.  Every homegrown tomato is one that hasn’t been chemically raised and shipped and preserved and irradiated, that hasn’t been part of an industrial food system that devastates the environment and results in massive waste.

Yeah, you can save your seeds for coming seasons.  Some seeds last longer than others.  It all depends on how you store them.  But how frugal do you need to be?  Hundreds of seeds for $1.89, or so.

Didn’t your mother teach you to share?

R.I.P. Waltham Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash.

Powdery Mildew infects a variety of plants, but the cucurbits — the family of edibles that includes squash — are particularly susceptible.  The infection reduces yields, deforms fruit that does manage to ripen, affects flavor, and predisposes the host plant to other diseases.  Powdery Mildew is caused by any number of fungi in the order Erysiphales, but the most common for the cucurbits are S. fuliginea and E. cichoracearum.

The fungus is an aggressive sexual and a-sexual reproducer that is wind dispersed, hopping from leaf to leaf and plant to plant in the breeze.  Dry weather, as we have here in San Diego in abundance, helps the mildew get established.  It starts with the oldest plants first, working down from the crown leaves until the plant, stem and all, is dusted snow white with spores.  Infected leaves die, and the plant senesces prematurely.

Wetting plant leaves when watering can make them prime breeding grounds for this type of fungus — something that was nearly impossible to avoid with the raised beds I built.  Crowded plants make the transmission easier, and that is another quality of my garden: I packed the plants in and didn’t thin nearly enough for the space available, partially because I was so keyed up on producing something in the aftermath of my summer losses.  Also, raising my beds put my squash at the perfect height to catch the hot, dry winds that race off the canyon behind our property — the likely vehicle of the original spores.

Apparently the fungus can be wiped off, but this seems a dubious suggestion since the reproductive structures of this fungus are smaller than the eye can see, and my eyes don’t see that well anyway.  Most recommendations for treatment quickly turn to chemicals — at the same time that they note chemical treatment breeds resistant strains of fungus, in addition to secondary pollution of groundwater and humans.  When I originally researched Powdery Mildew, my plants had a mild infection and my reading led me to believe that established plants might not be adversely affected.  Further reading and my own experience has proven this to be … wishful thinking, at best.

My winter squash hang languidly from the planters, their leaves largely withered, browned and yellowed by a parasitic relationship with this fungus that is not mutually beneficial, as some pairings in nature tend to be.  The four butternut fruits stopped growing sometime ago, and the promising pink bananas have begun to wrinkle and wilt into themselves.

I think it’s quits for the winter squash I was so cocky about at the start of the fall planting.  This weekend I’ll cut them out and make room for the true cold season crops — the broccoli and the beets and the carrots — to get fat in roomier digs.

The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit.

But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all but stopped, the growth arrested by something, many of them shriveling and softening and slipping off the vine.  It’s not a total loss.  There are several massive Pink Banana Squash that increase in size daily.  But our plans for Butternut Soup in the winter and the clipped recipes now seem presumptuous.

Of most concern is the lack of female fruit to replace what has been lost.  In squash these females have big flowers attached to perfect miniatures of the mature fruit, basically an ovary, on a short stem.  As of now, there’s nothing but fruitless male flowers, high on their slender stalks.  They stand tall and bloom, attracting hordes of pleasantly surprised bees with their out-of-season pollen.  Damn happy bees.

The most likely culprit, as far as I can tell from my reading, is insufficient pollination — which seems an odd problem for the sausage fests that are my raised garden beds.  This would never happen on a college campus.  Insufficient pollination can result in deformed fruits or fruits that grow a bit then die off, and it can occur even if there seems to be an ample pollinator presence (the damn happy bees).  Apparently the number of pollinators present can affect the ultimate size of the mature fruit, too.

What does this mean for me?

At any time over the next several weeks you may find me out in the garden, hand-pollinating the squash.  This can be done by picking male flowers, peeling the petals back, and then rubbing the exposed pollen over the female stigma.  Another, less aggressively sexual method would be to use a small artist’s paint brush to pick up some male pollen and then dust the female.  You have to be an attentive hand-pollinator, though.  The flowers open in the morning and are receptive for only one day.

The male squash flowers just can’t get it done.  I guess it can happen to anybody.

This particular insect stretched about three inches long and towered a quarter-inch off the ground.  Scattered mulch would create obstacles for this animal.  So how is it that this caterpillar got itself into my free-standing, 3’2″-tall box of soil and plants?  The bed stands on stilts, and none of the newly-sprouted vegetables hang over the sides.  There’s nothing to see — and caterpillars don’t see well anyway.  Instead they make use of short antennae to find food.  It’s like a nearsighted man walking up to an 83-story building and thinking, “Maybe there’s a burger up there.”  And then climbing it to see.  (Maybe not just like that since caterpillars have 4,000 muscles to our 629, and are hardly ever obese — but still.)  Sure, maybe a bird snatched it, fumbled, and dropped the bug into the bed, a target that is 2′ x 3′ in the wide ranging rest of the world in which the bug could have landed.  This seems about as likely as the caterpillar just happening upon one of the bed’s stilts and then happening its way up it.  And the caterpillar looked to be in fine shape, not like it had tussled with a bird.

Perhaps this was just a particularly skilled caterpillar and therefore deserved to eat some the plants it miraculously found.  Looking at the tiny creature balled up defensively in my hand, I leaned toward it being an oddity that it had made its way into the raised bed.  So, I released the caterpillar in some leafy greens that had bolted, satisfied that I had spared this Sir Edmund Hillary of caterpillars.  However, the next morning the bed had been conquered again, either by this same bug or some other member its family (caterpillars all look alike to me).

My astonishment hints at an essential imbalance in the ecology of my garden.  The pests, including the caterpillar, find the food they want, expertly.  I, on the other hand, know little of their habits and specialties, which makes it unlikely that I will be able to get between them and their (my) food.

Returning later in the day I found that the squash had failed to secure itself; the tendrils curved slightly at the ends but caught on nothing.  The squash bumped ineffectually in the wind.  I grasped the thread-thin tendrils and hooked each to the netting.  They held, tenuously.  I noticed a Butternut vine having the same trouble with our chain-link fence, so I affixed some tendrils there, too, then left the squash to figure the rest out themselves (my work showing the plants the right way to grow finished for the time being).

I returned to the garden late in the afternoon, expecting to see that the squash had capitalized on my aid by twisting and wrapping until tightly fastened.  However, the vines continued to bob, the tendrils I’d touched blackened and shriveled.  Perhaps I’d handled them too roughly, or transferred to them some oil in my hands that the delicate wisps found caustic.

Whatever the case, by the next morning the vines had found their own way, tendrils held fast by a thousand twirls around.  Clearly the plants know how to apply their own hard-earned adaptations and need no pointers from me.

There’s no pretension in the name dropping above.  The point is to know something about what I’m growing, that it’s not just a bean, it’s a Kentucky Wonder.  Plants have proper names just like people, and not in a freaky I’ve-personified-all-my-plants-by-giving-them-people-names kind of way.  Most of the time when we eat a tomato it’s called “tomato” and that’s as far as we know it.  That kind of informality results not just in Big Farm monoculture, but the perpetuation of a single variety of tomato to the exclusion — and sometimes the extinction — of all others.  Such a lack of diversity is problematic, not just in limiting our access to a variety of flavors within a single type of food, but also in a very basic, Darwinian sort of way.  A lack of genetic diversity within a species is a precursor to extinction.  Fretting over the loss of a single squash variant may seem a bit academic.  For a better explanation, watch the TED Talk below.

Today we are losing unique edibles like we’re losing languages, and those edibles that are truly unique have a cultural significance not unlike the native tongues that first described them.  One thing we can do is support and protect genetic diversity by growing heirloom plants in our gardens.  Not a radish lover?  There are 20 varieties available at a single retailer of heirloom seeds.  Maybe there’s one you like.  Maybe the only way to get the chance to eat it is to grow it yourself.

I snatched up a few them and headed for the raised beds I’d built in the back yard, thinking that since they tower three feet off the ground it would be unlikely that any worms would find their way into them to keep the soil healthy — unless worms do things in the night that I don’t know about, crazy things.  I dropped one or two into each bed (some worms do not require other worms to make more worms) and watched as all but one found ways of tunneling into the soil.  This worm slid around from edge to edge, missing what I saw as perfectly obvious opportunities to dive under.  The soil had dried out in the desiccating winds that blow off the canyon behind our house, and the sun beat down, causing the worm to flip around violently and thrash against the surface.  I felt a strange sense of responsibility for the creature since I had abducted it.  And brought it to that box.  To work for me.

So, I unfastened the netting around the bed and reached in a finger to create a divot in front of the searching worm.  I then raised my hand and shaded the animal for nearly 10 minutes as it nosed around and into the hole and pulled the rest of its six inches in after.

As for me, I have lots of dirt and nothing else thanks to the voracious appetite of the local pests this past spring and summer.  So, having snatched a simple box-on-stilts idea from the fair and mulled it over for the past few weeks, I threw together a few boards for a trial run. The construction is simple.  Cut five pieces off a sheet of 3/8″ plywood (cheap stuff) to build the box: 10″ x 4′ (2), 10″ x 1′ 11 1/4″ (2), and 2′ x 4′ (1).  Get two 2″ x 3″ studs and cut them into 3′ 2″ lengths for the legs.  I also bought some 1″ x 1″, cut it into 10″ pieces, and fixed it into the interior corners of the box for support.  I used a staple gun to assemble the box and screws to attach the legs.  I bought cheap wood all around because it’s going to be watered regularly and sun-bleached in no time.  And I didn’t seal it or stain it — that’s just more chemicals to seep into the food.

Hopefully I have stumbled upon a $20 solution to much of the pest problem.  The height will take care of rabbits and gophers.  The netting will keep out the birds.  The test will come when the netting comes off as the squash vines mature and require more space.  Squirrels can climb.  Birds can peck.

I will remain skeptical until I bite into something successfully raised.