August 2013

I thought I would write at least one post this year to show all the amazing produce and flowers we've gotten from the yard this season and to take a look at some of the new plantings that are going to provide us with some food in the next few years. The amazing Lady of the Yard (Bev) and her sidekick weed warrior (Elena) with lots of help from garden Grannie have kept the weeds at bay, grown some beautiful flowers and produced a harvest unlike any we've had on this land yet. Congrats on the hard work and special thanks to Forrest for building our (soon to be finished) cedar fence for the garden area and helping with the wood shed area.

2012 season begins !

Things at 42 are starting to come up ! Our seedlings were looking a little small (maybe not anymore after a few weeks under the Allens grow lamp), so we bought lettuce, kale,  beefsteak and cherry tomatoes, sweet and jalapeno peppers and all have been planted in the new raised beds. Spinach, cucumber and zucchini seeds are also planted, and the cukes are already coming up after 5 short days. Soon we'll plant our brocolli and cauliflower and see what other of our seedlings can go in. We also planted our strawberry bed - can't wait for the harvest.

Harvest update

Here's the latest from the evening trip to the garden:

• Tomatoes are coming on strong. I'm going to do a big pick tomorrow to make sauce to freeze. Thinking freezing versus canning to avoid hot stove and hot water and since we all have an extra freezer. Also, we can do a batch of sauce and freeze as we go instead of feeling like we need to do a huge batch for canning in one big effort.
  
• Picked the last three pumpkins as the squash bugs were on them pretty heavy. They can store in the basement until we want to use them. (come get a couple)
• Picked a couple ears of corn to see what they looked like. There are a bunch others that we should probably pick soon too.
• Picked a bunch of summer squash as well before they got too big.
• Picked a spaghetti squash. I understand these can be stored as well.
• There are a bunch of butternut squash on the vines too. Some are getting quite large!
• The kale we planted from seed is coming up nicely.
• The kidney beans should probably be uprooted and brought inside to dry sometime soon as we did with the Jacob's Cattle beans last week.
• Carrots should be brought inside to store as well. I'm thinking of bringing in some dirt from the garden to store them in. Or sand. I hear sand is good and might be more sterile...not sure why we need sterile, this might be old thinking.
• Harvested yet more broccoli. There is another nice head out there that should be harvested soon.
• Brussel sprouts are looking good, but should get bigger still.
• Tomatillos aren't filling their husks yet, not sure when/if this will happen. We can always harvest whenever, but my thinking was that we should wait until they're bigger.
  

The weeds are pretty tall right now. Thinking a good weed wacking is in order. We could just lay cardboard over our weeds and do the sheet mulching over these areas.

Next year we should certainly minimize pathways and put material over paths to block weeds. Also try to keep garden to a "waterable" area: one that one sprinkler can reach.

Also, we should have some organic sources of fertilizer on hand so we can side dress plants during the growing cycle. Plants will grow better when they get nutrition at key times in their development. We didn't do this for this tester season, but I bet if we did our harvests would be even stronger.

Tomatoes are coming soon

Hey folks,
We are going to have a ton of roma tomatoes very, very soon. I say we think about how we want to preserve them because believe you me, we won't be able to eat them all!

Same for the tomatillos. We should think about making some salsa verde and preserving that.

I say we look into getting some quart jars and pint jars so we're ready when the tomatoes are.

The black cherry tomatoes are ripening too. Keep an eye on them as they'll all start ripening at once.

I planted some kale seeds the other day and they're already starting to pop up. So we should have a nice fall harvest of kale.

There's still some broccoli near the snow pea trellises to be harvested.

And I think we can harvest our sunshine potatoes. I'm not sure if they got the blight, but the foliage is all dead and I saw one potato that was mushy when I dug one plant up. Shall we have a potato digging party soon?

Pa-tatahs

That's potatoes, if you didn't get it.

I dug up 4 hills (of 11-12 hills) of the early red potatoes today. I stopped because I wanted to make sure you guys had a chance to take part in the potato treasure hunt as well. It's fun! I have the diggins in a 5-gallon pail in the house. I figure we can just add the rest of them to that pail, then we can measure what came of the red potato harvest (take a photo) and split the winnings.

I imagine the other potatoes will be ready in another few weeks. You're supposed to tell they're ready when the plant dies back. It looks like those other plants are on their way.

Here's what the first hill yielded:

This is the glamour shot of the potatoes.
This is that they looked like after I dug them up and piled them in the hole.

I just used my hands to dig them up, it was pretty satisfying that way. I can see using a pitch fork if you're in a hurry, but you'd want to make sure to fork well under the hill and lift up so you didn't spear any of these precious nuggets.

The soil was mostly loose and nice in the hills, but I can see forking the bottom of the trenches a bit more to see if we can coax any more potatoes to root further down.

Beware the Wild Garden

So after contracting poison ivy perhaps in our garden, I decided I needed to venture out and see if I could find the culprit today. I wore long pants, wellies and a long shirt in addition to disposable rubber gloves. I didn't find any poison ivy, so maybe we're lucky and it's actually at Sandy and Jack's house.

I did find the garden in a pretty wild state though. Weeds are hip high, but our plants are doing mostly well. I saw some pumpkins turning orange, tomatillos like little lanterns plumping up, lettuce struggling against the heat and tomatoes aplenty. I thinned the carrots a bit - pulling carrots so there's about an inch of space between them so that they can get big. I did maybe 3' and got a couple sizeable bunches of small carrots. I also found a huge critter eating our tomatoes:This is a tomato hornworm and it's a sizable pest. I found three of them in a short period of time. My garden bible says the best way to get rid of them is by hand picking them off. I have to say, I was pretty squirmy trying to get one off the vine, but I think we should do a hornworm picking party soon to get these bad boys. They look to be capable of doing some serious damage to our tomato crops if we don't intervene soon. You should see the droppings they leave! Holy crap!

So, fun things that should be done in the garden this week:

• Dig up the red potatoes. Check the pattern of the brown on the leaves to make sure it's not blight.
• Finish thinning carrots. I started on the uppermost section and got about 3' in.
• Strip lower leaves from brussel sprout plants to encourage sprout growth.
• Pluck tomato hornworms
• Keep harvesting summer squash!

Maybe we can try to arrange a couple of folks to meet out in the garden at a time to work for a bit each night?

I'm thinking we don't need to tackle the weeds as they seem to have overtaken quite a bit, but we can stomp them down and care for what we are growing.

Potato harvest?

So it might be time to harvest the early red potatoes. I saw a few online videos today that make it seem like we might be close. When the plants start to die back, which is what I think we're seeing, then you can dig up a plant to see what you have.

Should we do this on Saturday sometime perhaps? Maybe we can have potatoes as part of our dinner? Yum!