Hybrid Vegetable Seeds – Where Do They Come From?

I don’t usually double post blog articles, but this one is an exception and it also appears on the Pikes Peak Area Gardening Help blog that I contribute to.

A friend asked me a question last summer that kind of blew my mind. “If we can’t expect seeds from hybrid tomatoes to ‘come true,’ then where do they get hybrid seeds from year after year?”

Now, I definitely knew (or thought I did) what a hybrid was, and I had a canned answer for anyone who asked how hybrid varieties were made (well, breeders cross two varieties to come up with a new one). But I realized I hadn’t really ever understood the nitty gritty of hybrid seed production. I intended to hunker down and do some research, but it kept falling way down on the to do list until I started perusing this year’s seed catalogs, considering the varieties I wanted to try. When I order Sungold seeds each year, the seed company doesn’t have to continually grow the parent plants and cross them to get new seeds, right? That would be terribly labor intensive and it seems the seeds would be ridiculously expensive! Well, as it turns out, that is exactly what they do. If you’re curious to learn more, read on!

 

First House Finch Song – 2012!

This year, if not for a cold that kept me in the house, I might have heard my earliest house finch full mating song ever! (My fellow birding friend Sandra heard one two days earlier. I was so jealous.) As soon as I was well enough, I got out for a good long walk, keeping my ears open. I was a little disappointed when I was almost back home because I hadn’t heard any house finches at all. And then, I rounded the corner near my house, and I heard one. There, sitting in the crabapple tree in my front yard, was a lovely male house finch, singing his little heart out!

And this year, the winning date is exactly the same as last year (!)

Jan 3!

As with last year, we’ve had pretty warm weather for this time of winter, and I wonder if that is what spurs these guys to start wooing the girls so early.

Here are my results from the past few years:

2011: Jan 3

2010: Jan 19

2009: Jan 12

2008: Jan 8

2007: Jan 15

2006: Jan 15

2005: Jan 23

 

A Great Colorado Springs Parks Book

Colorado Springs has a wealth of terrific and unique parks. I’m always amazed when I remember that Garden of the Gods is a city park! (As well as Cheyenne Canon, and Palmer Park, and Ute Valley Park, and Monument Valley Park!) A beautiful book has just been released about these and our other parks, The Parks of Colorado Springs: Building Community, Preserving a Legacy by Nancy Lewis with Debby Odell. Nancy Lewis spent nearly thirty years in the Colorado Springs Parks and Recreation Department, retiring as the director in 1994.

I was so excited about this book that I couldn’t even wait to let my husband give it to me as a perfect Christmas gift. I went right over to the Garden of the Gods Visitors’ Center and bought it for myself. It truly is a great gift for anyone who is interested in local history or in our parks (which are in a precarious position right now, but if you read the book, you’ll learn this isn’t the first time). The book is well worth the $18.95 cover price for the wonderful photos alone. Proceeds go to improve Garden of the Gods.

 

Counting Birds in Monument Valley Park – 2011 Christmas Bird Count

This year’s Audobon Christmas Bird Count is underway, and this past Saturday, I joined a fellow birding friend at Monument Valley Park to count all of the birds we could find. Monument Valley Park is pretty darn big, but we covered all of it over the course of about three hours. It was sunny and 35 degrees out when we started and over 50 degrees when we finished. This was much more pleasant than the last time I participated, and it only got to 18 degrees. I had no idea that my feet could ever get that cold!

As a large urban park with several different environments, Monument Valley Park offers interesting birding. The more developed area offers a large flock of rock doves (a.k.a. pigeons), the small duck pond hosts over 150 Canada geese, and the creek that runs through the entire length of the park often has many mallards and American wigeons dabbling in it and sleeping on the sand bars. The less developed northern portion of the park often treats birders to hawks, tree sparrows, and a variety of other (sometimes shier) birds.

 

Another (Snicker!) BIG Potato Harvest

Last year, I tried growing potatoes for the first time in a long while. I don’t have much in-the-ground veggie growing space due to big shade trees around my lot. But I bought a couple of potato grow bags from a catalog, happy to have the chance to extend my vegetable garden beyond my two 4′ x 8′ plots. The reviews for the bags were glowing, so I was optimistic. I bought Russian banana fingerling seed potatoes as well. One problem I’ve had with vegetable containers like Earthboxes, grow bags, etc is that I get queasy when I realize how much potting soil I’ll need to buy to fill them. So, I cheated and mixed half garden soil with potting soil in the bags and proceeded from there. I could tell the plants weren’t terribly happy throughout the growing season and they never did get a flower on them. This was disappointing since Russian banana fingerling plants were supposed to have lovely purple flowers. I harvested in late September by dumping the bags out onto a tarp and digging through the soil. And the results can be seen in the photo at the top of this post. Cute, weren’t they?

 

What Is It? 2011′s Mystery Squash

Every once in awhile, instead of digging up something in my garden, the squirrels actually plant something! One year it was a pumpkin, which yielded a nice, big pumpkin that was orange in time for Halloween (thanks, squirrels!). Another year, it was a squash I didn’t recognize and had to bring to others to ID. Turns out it was a spaghetti squash. Not a big fan of spaghetti squash (uh, thanks squirrels), I gave it to another appreciative gardener/cook. Since I don’t ever plant spaghetti squash, I can only guess the squirrels raided someone else’s compost pile or garden.

So here is this year’s challenge. This is one cool looking squash. I noticed some gourds that looked similar at the farmers’ market, but I really don’t think this is a gourd. It feels more summer-squashy (eww) to me.

So, any thoughts on what the squirrels planted for me this year?

 

Test Driving a CSA – Final Week

This is the final post on our fun opportunity to test drive a CSA (Javernick Farms of Canon City, Colorado). For background info on how we came to have this opportunity, feel free to read Part 1. And then if you’re all caught up in the drama, you can go on to read Part 2.

Week 3 (produce picked up on Sep 21)

When I went to the pickup the third time, I finally got to meet the woman who lived at the house where the pickups happen. She was kindly giving suggestions to another CSAer on how to use her eggplant in a way that it wouldn’t obviously be eggplant(!). They settled on baba ghanoush. I’ll have to try making that sometime.

What We Got

For the final batch, we got another dozen or so roma tomatoes, another yellow spicy banana-type pepper, 2 bell peppers, 1 white onion, 1 eggplant, 1 delicata squash (this must’ve been a great year for delicata squash!), 1 serrano pepper, and a bunch of rainbow swiss chard. (Oh….swiss chard. Another vegetable nemesis from my childhood.) From the previous two weeks we still had a summer squash, potatoes, a cucumber, and two delicata squash.

 

Test Driving a CSA – Week Two

Here is part two of our adventures in test driving a CSA (Javernick Farms of Canon City, Colorado). For background info on how we came to have this opportunity, feel free to read Part 1.

Week 2 (produce picked up on Sep 14)

You may or may not remember that Sep 14 was our BIG RAIN day here in Colorado Springs. We got 3″ at our house, but the airport got 4.5″! Record setting stuff!

What We Got

But, I valiantly made my way through the flooded streets to the pickup location and took home the following: about two dozen roma tomatoes, 2 red onions, 1 delicata squash, 1 butternut squash, 2 bell peppers (two green and one purple), 1 serrano pepper, 3 beets, another cucumber, and a yellow summer squash. (From the previous pickup, I still had turnips, potatoes, a delicata squash, a serrano pepper, and the okra.)

 

Test Driving a CSA – Week One

I have a small vegetable garden, two four-by-eight foot beds plus some containers, that usually gives mixed results – somewhat due to living in a wonderful but heavily tree-covered area in an old part of Colorado Springs. (In fact, the trees are part of what makes it wonderful ….just not so wonderful for veggie gardens.) Why, just last week, I excitedly harvested five green beans and three tomatoes. No, not five pounds of beans and three pounds of tomatoes – five individual beans and three tomatoes. My husband joked we could have three bean salad (with two beans left over!).

So I’ve toyed with the idea of signing up for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share to supplement what our garden provides us. I’ve never taken the leap though. I diligently researched the different options this past spring. (My friend Kate does a terrific food blog called Local Dish – localdish.net – and she did a nice post summarizing the local CSA options last spring – see her “Are You CSAing This Year?” post.) And then, I didn’t sign up. So, lucky us! Our friends who DID sign up for a CSA with Javernick Farms had a trip to Ireland planned for much of September and invited us to take their CSA produce for those three weeks. (Thanks Kate! Yup, the same Kate of Local Dish.)

 

Blooming in Monument Valley Park – End of the Season 2011

Well this strange growing season is coming to an end. Soon the leaves will be falling off of the trees in the park and it will enter into its winter mode. So here is one more wrap-up of what is blooming.

My last post covered the terrific weed growth in the park this year (see the weed post). Since that time, bloom has been somewhat winding down with the same plants in bloom for the past six weeks.

So if you visit the park now, here is what you’ll see blooming in many areas in the loops around the north part of the park.