What's going on at Pinch Manor? And Quick, quirky quibs about quality quinoa.

Weeeeeell,

This. This is what's been going on at Pinch Manor. Planting and weeding and harvesting and coddling and fighting the mini invaders, and more planting and more weeding and andandand...on to other things:

This is what quinoa looks like before it winds up at your local grocery store :D. Purdy, ain't it?

I've been trying to grow this stuff for the last 3 years, and this is the first time it's not simply laughing at me right before falling over and dying in infancy. It's actually blooming. I'm gonna have quinoa from my own garden.
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In a few years. This year I'll get just enough to save seed, but that's OK, I finally figured out how to treat these recalcitrant little buggers.

First off, seed them out RIGHT after the chance for your last frost has passed, and make sure that you have your weeds under control, they do NOT like to be smothered. And then keep them weeded. Then weed some more. They seem to do fine in the location I put them this year, a fairly even mix of clay and sand, with plenty of compost, future years will tell if they have a preference.

Once they are actually established and going, they can handle quite a bit of abuse (like absolutely no weeding for a solid 2 weeks), but don't let your S.O. rip them out, thinking that they are fat hens (a common weed that they are actually very closely related to and look a lot like and WILL cross pollinate with, at least according to every source I have been able to find).

So far I have not had to support these guys, and they are now about 5 and a half feet tall. As the seed heads mature this may change, so we'll see.


As far as harvesting goes:

So far we've brought in some garlic, a few quarts of raspberries, a small handful of blueberries (they hate their location and will be moved once they go dormant in the fall), three honeyberries (yeah, 3, you have something to say?), quite a bit of mint and chives, more loose leaf lettuce than we could eat, radishes (they have now all gone to seed, which I am not at all upset about), several meals worth of asparagus, one paltry carrot (I will not be defeated by a root vegetable), about a quart of peas that are going right back in the ground this summer for a fall harvest we can actually eat and a few handfuls of buckwheat, again enough to go right back in the ground so we can hopefully have a harvest worth making pancakes with.

I'm forgetting things, and that's OK.

Oh, yeah, some of our corn has tassels (YEAH!) and the peppers that went in the ground about a month late are setting flowers (YEAH! again).

That's all I have for now,
Happy Pinching :D