The freeze has mostly halted things but I am still processing seeds and making seed packets out of squares of paper. I think I’ll make a donation to the Springfield Greene County Library’s heirloom seed lending library. I have Small Jadu’i Watermelon, Grandpa McKay’s Cream Pea African Pea, and Palestinian Kousa to share if anybody asks or wants any.
The tomato harvest was nice. The kousa (zucchini) had a lot of problems with blossom end rot and with vining all over and repeatedly thwarting my plans to stake it vertically. I’ll see what it does with a net on the fence, sprawling space is scarce but that’s probably what it would do best with.
The watermelon did well with mostly small fruits and one over 10 lbs. They’re famous for winter storage so I’m keen to test that. I got lots of photos to reference when making my vine pattern. The cowpeas of course were productive although this year I was pleased to see how well they’d vine up a giant 12 foot tall sunflower without any prompting.
The Battiri Bitinjan eggplant had a hard time here this year. I had some blossoms but no fruit, and I had high leaf loss to flea beetles so they climbed really tall. The height is presently awkward now that I have dug them up and brought them inside, once the transplant seems stabilized I would like to trim them shorter if possible, propagate the cutting if possible. I eventually figured out seed germination but seedling transplant remained a challenge.
Great Grandma’s rose vine seems to have done well this first year transplanted to Springfield and is so far undaunted by the freeze. I may well decide to layer some for propagation next year.