Eating From My Backyard

The garden at the end of the year

2011-11-20T19:29:00.010-05:00

Not much is left in the garden. Quite a few leeks, a few scallions, next year's garlic, and some lettuce.
I tried something new this year with lettuce, which was to scatter lettuce seed inside the frame, which I did on October 12th. When the nights started approaching freezing I added the glass cover.
Today is November 20th and there are a few tiny seedlings inside the cold frame (see the photo below) and it will be interesting to see if they will survive the winter, be eaten by slugs (I don't think so this year), or die because they just aren't big enough to make it.

In past years I have started seedlings in the cold frame, generally with success. Those in the upper photo were transplanted earlier in the year and I have harvested some of the leaves since then. Once the snow falls they will just sit there waiting for spring weather when they will start growing again.

There are two other vegetables still in the garden - kale and beets. The kale was seriously eaten by cabbage white butterfly caterpillars (cabbage worms) but after I picked the worms off (about 30 of them) the kale has started to revive and may begin producing again in the spring. The kale is not protected from cold in any way but kale seems pretty hardy.

The beets aren't large enough to harvest and I don't know if they will start growing again in the spring. We will see.

I planted garlic on October 15th and have been surprised that I have seen no growth. I did plant somewhat deeply and I have had garlic not emerge until spring so I assume all is fine. I have now covered the garlic bed with straw.

Index

2011-11-06T19:03:00.002-05:00

It is hard to find topics that I know I have written something about. So here is an index to some of the topics in the past posts.

Brassicas and Cabbage Worms - 7-19-2011
Cold Frames - 4-42010, 3-10-2010, and 1-14-2010
Cover Crops - 4-6-2010 and 1-6-2009
Deer Fencing - 5-28-2010
Dinosaur Kale - 6-13-2011
Kale chips - 6-13-2011
Grapes - 8-27-2011
Lettuce - cold frame - 10-17-2010
Lettuce indoors - 2-1-2011 and 12-16-2010
Overwintered Crops - 4-4-2010
Pole bean trellis - 6-13-2011
Potatoes - 8-7-2011
Squash vine borers - 8-7-2011
Toads - 6-9-2010

Grape Progress, or, not the Grapes of Wrath

2011-08-27T22:44:00.008-04:00

We planted two Concord grape vines two years ago. I have been bumbling along not sure how to take care of them - when to prune, what to prune, how much to prune, when to let the bunches grow, how many to let grow. This spring I built an arbor for them to grow on but the top of the arbor was a little higher than the wire on which they had been growing, so none of the bunches of grapes are hanging down from the arbor. They are, instead, hanging from last year's vines that were attached to the wires. I pulled the wire up closer to the top of the arbor and the new growth is mostly up there.

The vines produced lots of little bunches of grapes and I was pretty sure that there were far more than the two plants could sustain. I had read that I should let a small number of bunches grow this third year. I removed those that looked particularly sparse but I let most of them keep growing. They did, although only about half of the grapes in many bunches actually filled out. They started turning purple a while ago and when I walked under the trellis several days ago, I could smell grapes.

Since I have been making jam this week - peach, pear (more about that in a later post) and blackberry - I decided to see if I could collect enough grapes to make grape jam. The recipe calls for 5 pounds of grapes (including stems). I began picking those individual grapes that looked ripe (nice dark purple color - none in this photo have reached that color) instead of picking them by the bunch. That would have sacrificed a lot of unripe grapes. I had a little over two pounds when I weighed the first picking. So I picked some more and then some more, eventually picking all of those I saw that looked ripe and ended up with 4.91 pounds. This turned out to be a little more than I needed so I will amend the recipe to call for 4+ pounds of actual grapes instead of 5 pounds of grapes including stems.

When the jam was finished there was a small amount that didn't fit into the seven 12 ounce jars. When it cooled a taste test showed that it actually was grape jam. So, despite my misgivings and with a lot of room for improvement, we had a successful grape harvest. I think that next year's fruiting canes are mostly up on top of the arbor. I hope that by limiting the number of bunches they will fill out better and look like the Concord grape bunches at the Regional Market. That would also mean bigger grapes. But I am happy with the result this year. And there are still grapes to be picked.

Potato Harvest and Squash Vine Borer Damage

2011-08-07T15:34:00.011-04:00

There are good things and bad things happening in the garden. I harvested my crop of potatoes two days ago and stored most of them in a dark room in the cellar in layers in bushel baskets. I think I could have waited a few more weeks to harvest them. The leaves were beginning to yellow quite a bit but they were not close to being completely dried out. But I was looking for space in the garden to start some more pole beans since the ones planted earlier seem to be in decline. Whether this is from the hot weather and lack of rain or from a groundhog that might have been chewing on their stems I don't know. [The soy beans right next to them are pretty much gone - apparently a groundhog favorite. ] After I finished the harvest I read that one way to harvest potatoes is to cut off the plants and leave the tubers in the soil for a couple of weeks before harvesting them.

I have been looking for evidence of squash vine borers for several weeks. For the past several years the only evidence has been suddenly dying plants with the stems nearly chewed apart. I had never seen the squash vine borer. I noticed two days ago that one of my squash plants clearly had been infected and was finished. I pulled out the plant and then dissected the stem where it was clear something had gotten into it. I saw the first borer, followed, as the dissection proceeded, by eight others. In the photo there are three visible - one trying to crawl out of the picture, another just a little above my finger nail, and the third farther back. Today I checked my two other older squash plants. Both had holes in their stems and borers inside. I did my best to scrape the borers out - I only actually saw one in each stem - and the put the stems back together and covered them with soil. I expect one will not survive because I cut out a fairly large section of that part of the stem and that leaves only a small passageway for water to get to the leaves. The other one may survive, although I don't know how many borers I left inside.
One thing I did note is that the borers entered above the cheesecloth that I had wrapped around the stems when the plants were small. One obvious effort to make next year (and the rest of this year) is to keep wrapping cheese cloth around the stems as they grow. I know that one suggestion often made is to grow the plants under row cover material so that the insect that lays the eggs that become the borers can't reach the plant. But then the material has to be removed when the plant begins to flower and it seems to me that the borers come after that. Fortunately I have three other squash plants started, one of which is already producing. We won't lack for squash. This year we have either had a lot of squash at once, or none. Next year I would like to try starting squash plants at three week intervals to even out the harvest and, hopefully, limit the damage from borers.

Dry, Hot Weather

2011-07-26T20:14:00.003-04:00

We had a wet April but recently we have been in an extended dry spell, and, more recently, very hot weather. In the past seven days we had four days in a row over 90 degrees, one of which reached 101 degrees. With that heat and no rain (and little moisture in the soil) plants suffer. In my garden the cucumbers and summer squash most dramatically show the effect. By early afternoon on those very hot, dry days they looked like they were dying. Their leaves - both cucumbers and squash have lots of leaves and only root in one place - get seriously wilted. Once the sun goes down they perk up again if I have watered in the past day or two. But fruit growth appears to stop. We recently picked large amounts of squash (nearly 10 pounds one day) and cucumbers (more than 10 pounds one day). But now there are no squash or cucumbers to pick. I assume one plant mechanism when it is hot and there is little moisture available is to stop making the fruit that uses so much water.

If I am correct, when we get rain (if we get rain) and cooler weather the little cucumbers and squash will again form and grow.

I had thought that one of the summer squash plants that had really wilted and tipped over had succumbed to the squash vine borer. But I can't find any evidence of damage to the stem of the plant. No frass. No holes that I can find. So maybe the cheese cloth I wrapped around their young stems did work. Time will tell. I hope that the time for the insects that lay the vine borer has passed because I just planted some more squash and cucumber seeds.

My Poor Brassicas and Cabbage Worms

2011-07-19T13:23:00.007-04:00

I start many of my vegetables indoors even during the summer. But it seemed wasteful to keep the recent planting under lights in the cellar and so I put them outside in the shade during the day and on the open back porch each night. I began to notice that there was some leaf damage and a few days ago they were looking pretty chewed up as shown in the photo to the right. When I looked at them there was brown "dust" on some of them. Each day the damage was worse. Finally I looked more carefully and noticed the following:

This close the villain becomes clear. See the two parallel cabbage worms on the right most leaf. I found two more worms later that day. The next day I found another four worms.

The source of the cabbage worms is the little cabbage white butterflies that are so common in my garden. I suppose damage to the other brassicas in my garden is from the same source but plants in the garden grow so quickly that the damage is insignificant. And perhaps there are predators (toads and birds) that pick some of them off. The ones on my little seedlings were able to chew away unmolested.

Undeterred I planted all of these miserable looking seedlings in the garden during yesterday's rain. What was in the tray were collards, zen (an Asian green), komatsuna (another Asian green) and dinosaur kale. The komatsuna was the least damaged and the zen the most damaged. I don't know whether that had to do with the chemistry of the plants or simply their proximity to where the eggs were laid.

Next year I will be more observant. The brown "dust" that I observed was the frass (droppings) of the caterpillars (worms). The way I located most of them was by seeing where the frass was and looking carefully in that area.

Full Garden

2011-06-13T08:21:00.006-04:00

With the warm weather having arrived the garden is pretty full. Crops like tomatoes and beans are already beginning to take off. Here are pole beans at the base of their trellises. Some are starting to wind around the trellis and begin their climb up.

Tomatoes have begun to shoot up. I tied them for the first time yesterday, while dodging raindrops. For any indeterminate tomatoes (those that continue to grow seemingly forever) I remove any suckers and tie the plants to stakes, similar to the green stake in this bean photo. For my one determinate tomato I use a wire tomato cage and leave the side shoots.

Everything looks good so far with the exception of spinach. Last year I had a huge crop. By this time I had harvested 13 pounds of spinach to freeze as part of the 55 pounds of produce. This year my total is only 46 pounds and less than a pound is spinach. After I planted it rained heavily for several days and I think some of the soil and seeds were washed away.

One of my favorite crops is kale. I grow both Red Russian kale and a dinosaur kale - pictured here. Our new method of preparing the kale is to make "kale chips". I remove the large veins of the leaves and then cut them in half. My wife mixes these with olive oil and grated parmesan cheese and bakes them at 375 degrees until they are crispy. For the two of us it takes about a pound of kale, but that is pretty much the whole meal. I prefer the dinosaur kale because the leaves are more compact and make better chips.

Some parts of the garden are beginning to turn over. The crops that were in cold frames are mostly gone. These included mache, claytonia, kale and lettuce. All of them bolted or are beginning to bolt and about all that is left is a little of the lettuce and that will be gone very soon, probably to the compost pile since I have newer lettuce that needs to be used.

The potatoes look healthy and are beginning to flower. Garlic scapes have appeared and need to be harvested. It is also the season for weeds to grow prolifically.

The New Season Begins

2011-04-25T19:39:00.004-04:00

Because I had surgery on April 11th I planted as much of the garden as I could before April 9th. Right after that we had two fairly sunny days followed by days of rainy weather. Some of the transplants were scorched but they seem to be slowly getting established.

In the past week we have begun using some of the plants that made it through the winter. We harvested about six pounds of leeks that were left over from last year. The leeks were not protected from the snow in any way. (Similarly there are scallions in the garden that wintered over.) Today I picked some of the lettuce, mache (corn salad) and claytonia for our lunch time salad. We could pick some kale but we still have frozen greens to use up first.

I haven't yet gotten back to gardening, other than transplanting some of the lettuce that we grew in the cellar and harvested during the winter (see the earlier post about Indoor Lettuce). Tomorrow it is supposed to be quite warm (close to eighty degrees) and I would like to plant potatoes.

Yes! Winter is Over

2011-03-18T16:35:00.002-04:00

I returned from North Carolina two days ago. There was no snow of note anywhere on the drive back except in our backyard. But now that is gone. As a clear sign of Spring I put up the outdoor clothes line. Even better, the soil temperature was around 60 degrees and the soil was at that desired state of being able to "be worked". I got out my shovel and dug several areas of winter rye. Admittedly it had not grown all that well and so it was very easy to dig it under.

The new season awaits.

Indoor Lettuce

2011-02-01T22:22:00.003-05:00

I'm harvesting lettuce from what has been growing in the cellar. I have four trays - three that I started at the same time and one that I started later. So far I have harvested lettuce seven times, usually right around 3 ounces each time. While that isn't a lot we make the greater part of one meal from the 3 ounces. Sometimes we add carrots, cheese, olives or hard-boiled eggs to make a salad but more often we add a tin or two of sardines to the lettuce.

For the first harvest I picked some of the outside leaves from all three trays - a slow, tedious process. After that I harvested one tray at a time. As shown, I put the fingers of one hand around the lettuce and hold it while I cut it about an inch above the soil surface. I have now cut each tray twice (in addition to the first time when I picked off the outside leaves). I will be interested to see how many times I can cut the plants back and have them regrow. I suspect not more than once more. In the next day or two I will harvest the fourth tray for the first time. I started those seeds on December 1 which means two months from sowing the seeds to the first harvest. For the earlier lettuce I started them October 29 and the first harvest of very small leaves was December 8 and I didn't harvest again until December 31. Two months from planting seed to first harvest is what I have in my outdoor plan - start lettuce seeds March 1, transplant out April 1, begin harvesting May 1.

I planned earlier to harvest some of the kale and mache from the cold frames outside but that hasn't happened. I only cleared the snow off during the one warm spell (it got into the 40s) but they are all covered again and we are expecting another 12 to 18 inches of ice and snow early tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the first day when we have ten hours of sunlight and I was planning to keep the cold frames clear from that date on but will wait for a warmer day to go out and remove the snow.

This is a Different Year

2011-01-18T17:01:00.004-05:00

This has been a winter of snow - over 100 inches so far in this area. It also seems colder than usual, the January "thaw" having been two days of temperatures in the high 30s, low 40s right around New Year's Day.

I looked back at last year's posts to see what was happening at this time last year. I had just put the first of the new cold frames in the garden and there was certainly snow there then - looks like it had packed down to about 8-10 inches. But I wrote about sunny days when the temperature inside the new frame was in the 60s. I recall that there were days when the air temperature got into the 80s. That's not this year.

A photo of what the cold frames look like now would show some humps in the snow. I did clear them off back when it was warmer in early January but they are covered again.

One of the things I am doing now is planning this year's garden. I have a lot of old cedar fence slats that are rotting behind the shed. I removed some that had been near the wall under the eaves of the shed and were still in pretty good shape and have those in the garage, but when spring comes I need to sort out the rest. Maybe I have enough to make 4' by 3' or 5' by 3' frames to put into the garden to help in planning. That would divide the garden up into smaller areas that might be easier to plan and easier to keep the plans from year to year. It is helpful to know where the tomatoes and peppers and potatoes have been grown in past year to try and maintain a rotation but I haven't kept such records.

I did a presentation at Edible Gardening CNY about planning a garden and it has encouraged me to do a better job of that in our own garden. I've accumulated the facts about spacing, time to plant, time to expect harvesting to begin (and end), and which plants don't grow well together and will use that to plan each bed.

New Year's Day

2011-01-01T16:57:00.005-05:00

I cleaned the snow off the cold frames yesterday (New Year's Eve) because we are having a warm spell (around 50 degrees). I took the covers off today so that the rain could reach the plants and then covered them at sunset (which is currently 4:36). There hasn't been any noticeable growth, which is not surprising considering that the glass has been covered with snow for at least three weeks. I was a little surprised that the mache plants hadn't grown at all because they are supposed to grow through the winter - but apparently that requires more light than passes through several feet of snow.

Yesterday was a sunny day. The soil temperature was around 45 degrees in each of the cold frames that I tested.

It will get cold again tomorrow, although the day time highs will be around freezing for the next few days. I plan to put the foam covers on the two frames that have them and will remove the covers if it is to be a sunny day. If it snows I will probably let the other two frames be covered with snow. The fifth frame, where I have always planted lettuce, remains covered with snow since I know that the lettuce isn't going to grow until March and it is not large enough to pick. I am hoping to pick a little kale from the frames sometime this winter. The kale plants look good.

The only plants that look like they haven't survived are some small arugula transplants. I don't think they were large enough, but who knows if they are just sitting there waiting for better conditions.

Indoors, we had our second picking of lettuce from the plants in the cellar. This time I only harvested leaves from one of the original three trays and got just a little over three ounces, about the same as I picked from all three trays earlier.

The End and the Beginning

2010-12-16T11:13:00.007-05:00

We have reached two boundaries. One is the end of outdoor produce and beginning to grow a little of something indoors. The other is beginning to draw down what is in storage.

One example of using what is in storage is the potato-pepper-onion meal. The potatoes and peppers are from the garden. I stored the potatoes in the cellar, but noticed that they are beginning to sprout. That means that they will begin turning soft fairly soon. The peppers were blanched and frozen when we had more than we could eat. The onions would have been scallions from the garden, but with some 40 inches of snow they weren't available.

As for trying to grow something, one experiment this year is to grow some lettuce under lights in the cellar. I currently have four trays under two fluorescent fixtures. I harvested a grand total of slightly less than three ounces of little leaves last week. I expected the lettuces would grow larger (and perhaps they will) but since they have a fairly deep root and are in little pots I now think this experiment fail to produce enough to justify the time and electricity (about one kWh per day). I did later add some potting soil to the bottom of the tray so that the roots that have grown out of the bottom of the pots have a place to expand. But I think the real answer would be to plant the lettuce in much deeper containers and that means more potting soil and fewer plants in the same space.

The other source of produce from the garden in the winter is what is in the cold frames outside (kale, mache, claytonia and lettuce). I haven't seen what is happening out there for over two weeks because of the snow. But that provides an opportunity to see what happens when the cold frames remain covered with snow for a long time.

Stuff That Didn't Do So Well

2010-12-08T20:13:00.006-05:00

I wrote about some of the vegetables that grew much better in 2010 than in 2009. A few things did not do as well.

I harvested a lot less garlic but that was intentional because we couldn't use the 18 pounds from 2009. This year's 6 1/2 pounds is more than enough. We picked no asparagus because the new bed was just planted last year. I harvested 29 pounds of potatoes compared with 41 in 2009 but they were bigger and I only planted half as many seed potatoes. I got no fava beans. I think they were shaded out by cucumbers growing all over and through them.

Sadly, we picked only 11 pounds of blueberries compared with 23 pounds in 2009. One reason is that the birds finally discovered that they like blueberries but the major reason was that the plants just didn't produce as much. It also looks like they have very little new growth which means next year will be worse. We have alkaline soil and blueberries like acidic soil. I add sulfur a couple of times a year and mulch the plants with oak leaves and pine needles, but I obviously need to buy a kit to test the pH of the soil. How to amend the soil around blueberries is a good winter research project.

The Tally for the Year

2010-12-07T13:28:00.003-05:00

It started to snow a couple of days ago and we have a lot of snow - probably 18 inches so far. Harvesting had been sparse with just some kale every four or five days. But now the regular harvesting season is over.

Last year we weighed about 360 lbs of produce and this year I had the figure up to 710 until I discovered that one day I entered 1300 ounces of kale instead of 13. The final tally for 2010 is a little over 650 lbs. Where did the 80% increase come from?

The major increase was summer squash. Last year I confidently relied on row cover material to keep squash vine borers off my two young patty pan plants (photo at left) but once I removed the row cover material so that the flowers could be pollinated the borers moved in and I hadn't started any back-ups. The total harvest was about 20 pounds. This year I started five plants and had two back-ups and I wrapped strips of cheese cloth around the stems of the young plants (photo below). This didn't totally work because they were eventually infected and I harvested my last squash in early October. But in the meantime we had 109 pounds of squash. I gave some away but we frequently had sauteed squash for supper.

Cucumbers were another success. Both years I grew lemon cucumbers, but in 2009 the few plants I started produced nothing edible. This year I started them indoors and planted them all in one place. They took over that area and produced 47 pounds before they succumbed in mid-September to cucumber beetles(?). I am still eating pickles from the cucumbers.

Pole beans were another big improvement. Last year groundhogs and a deer fed on the beans at various times and heights. This year I saw one groundhog, called a trapper, and never saw a groundhog for the rest of the summer. I successfully fenced the deer out by adding three feet of deer fencing to the existing five foot fence. I also started a lot more beans and we ended up with 79 pounds of beans compared with 30 pounds.

Tomatoes rebounded this year because we were not troubled by late blight. I planted four of my six plants in containers, using soil that hadn't been used for vegetables before. We collected 55 pounds compared with 21. Containers, I discovered, do have to be watered at least daily and sometimes two or three times in the very hot weather. One plant had blossom end rot which continued all summer.

We concentrated on growing more greens and harvested about 137 pounds of various greens (not including lettuce). Last year the total was 101 pounds.

A few words about what we grew less of in the next post.

A Lovely Day in the Garden

2010-10-17T19:54:00.006-04:00

It is October 26th and we haven't had a frost yet and the forecast in the newspaper doesn't show one for the next week either but production in the garden has slowed way down. [Our typical date for the first frost is October 10th.] There now is not much left in the garden other than greens. The beans have been pulled up, along with the ground cherries, all but one tomato plant (I just didn't get to that yet), and I finished the peppers yesterday.

I've begun working on the next season - winter. I've had what I call the "lettuce frame" for four or five years. It is a somewhat rickety frame from old fence slats with a large piece of glass on top. I plant lettuce in it in the fall and it remains covered with snow during the winter until about March when the snow melts off and the lettuce starts growing again. This past winter I built three new cold frames, two of which were insulated and the other made again of old cedar fence slats. Yesterday I cut more fence slats and made my biggest frame. At 80 inches long it was a little difficult to get out of the cellar. We placed it over the kale that was planted earlier. Here it is. It was seventy degrees today so I haven't brought out the two pieces of glass that will cover the top.

Last year the kale survived without being covered but I am told that might not happen every year. I think it was protected by the heavy snow. In the other cold frames I have lettuce, mache - some that was started indoors and some that was sowed in the soil in the frame, claytonia, and some more kale. In whatever space is left I will plant a few arugula seedlings, seed a few rows of spinach and more mache (also known as corn salad). Mache is the one thing that is supposed to keep growing during the winter. This will be our first winter to see how the cold frames work.

This was a good year. Few pests, lots of fruits and vegetables. In terms of produce we have brought in more than 620 lbs this year. What I counted last year was 370 lbs. Later I'll report on the weight for various vegetables (and fruits). The big increase this year was from squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and beans. We will pick kale and other greens as long as we can and then it will be time to start using the fruit and vegetables that we froze, or dried, or made into jam. We do still get a few raspberries each day but they get popped into mouths before they can be weighed.

Busy, busy summer. What now?

2010-09-05T14:47:00.004-04:00

In the last entry I was commenting on the changes in the garden from spring to summer. Now the changes to fall are already beginning. There has been a lot of activity in the meantime, most of which was not in the garden itself.

We have been freezing what we can't eat (beans, spinach, kale, squash, and tomato soup) and have already begun making jam (strawberry and currant (jelly) in June and peach and grape more recently. Except for the currants none it was from our garden.) We have also been dehydrating melons and apples.

A large portion of our meals comes from the garden. That involves quite a bit of washing produce and cooking. Eating always takes less time than the preparation.

Parts of the garden are becoming available. The potatoes, garlic, soybeans, and most of the lettuce have been harvested. I pulled out the broccoli because it was producing too little for the space required. A couple of the summer squash were done in by squash vine borers (but I know what I need to do next year). The early cucumbers have dried up and been removed and I have to admit I don't know what causes that. But they were incredibly productive for many weeks.

A couple of weeks ago I sowed some spinach, lettuce and kale in the empty spaces, along with transplanting some Chinese cabbages, Brussels sprouts and collards. But the very warm weather of this summer continued and the lettuce and spinach pretty much died out. Yesterday I transplanted a bunch of kale and some Chinese cabbages and expect the cooler weather will be good for them.

When truly empty spaces begin to appear it is time to start a cover crop. I have also seen the suggestion that cover crops can be started around existing plants like tomatoes and peppers and the cover crop will be started when those crops are done.

I will be planting mostly winter rye and perhaps a little bit of clover. Clover should be planted at least four weeks before the first frost but winter rye can be planted up to the time of the first frost. Where I am adding compost I need to dig that in before scattering the cover crop seed. For areas that only become empty after a frost I will just cover them with a layer of compost (or straw) and leave that until spring.

Since I now have four cold frames I need to identify soon where those will go and begin starting the plants that will go in them. This will be my first year to try and have some greens that I can go out and harvest during the winter. Since those plants will stop growing (except mache) when it gets really cold inside the frames I will want to have them started soon enough to reach full growth by early December. So there is still a lot of work to be done.

Transition From Cool to Hot Weather

2010-07-05T21:36:00.006-04:00

Each year brings a different set of creatures wanting to share in the harvest of the garden. Last year our major pests were a deer, several groundhogs, and innumerable snails and slugs. This year both the deer and the groundhog made one appearance, did no damage, and neither has been seen since. The snails and slugs will always be here but they limit themselves to certain vegetables - mostly Asian greens - and while they can destroy large sections of leaves they can't keep up with the growth of the plants. I do try to limit their efforts and one method is to spread crushed egg shells around the plants. A recent planting of Chinese cabbage and pak choi looked like this. I don't yet have sufficient observations to say whether the egg shells work. The plants when transplanted didn't look so great because something was chewing on them while they were outside hardening off.

This year the birds - especially catbirds and robins - have taken a clear liking to our blueberries. They simply fly in, eat or peck a few, and fly away. We really like our blueberries and believe we offer enough other food for the birds - service berries (pretty much gone now), bayberries, and Pagoda dogwood berries (not quite ripe yet) - that they should leave the blueberries for us. Since telling them that seemed unlikely to be effective I built a frame of 7 foot PCV pipes set over 2 foot rebar and tied deer netting to it. It isn't elegant and there are some gaps in it but it has been fairly effective. Two young robins - or one young robin twice - have had to be released but they seem to have learned to not wander in. Same with one cardinal. The catbird just walked under the bottom edge of the netting and took what he wanted and then walked back out again. I pushed the piping down into the soil a few inches and added some more tent pegs to hold down the bottom and that may have worked.

The garden has gotten to the point where the excess of greens - spinach, zen and lettuce - is under control. What that really means is that they started to bolt and are in the process of being replaced. The spinach was finished about ten days ago but we now have some New Zealand spinach available. But we ended up with a fair amount of frozen spinach. Lots of zen has been also been frozen for eating during the winter. The Chinese cabbages have been used or frozen and replaced with the new bed in the top photo. I planted quite a bit of lettuce and am now pulling that out as I pick it for lunch and have started more. We had our first patty pan squash yesterday and more are on the way. The pole beans are just beginning to flower so it will still be a while before we can eat beans. I do have them planted in five different areas, so we will have enough to freeze - I hope. I didn't grow bush beans, but I will next year. The tomatoes, which are a little behind, do have small tomatoes on them but they won't be ready for another three weeks. The ground cherries are forming but they all will be frozen and then used to make our favorite jam when we have enough.

Between the abundant lettuce and the kale and other greens we have enough to have a salad for lunch and cooked greens for supper. I am still waiting for broccoli to form heads as a partial replacement for lettuce at lunchtime. But most of all I wait for tomatoes for my daily in-season tomato sandwich.

Hopefully I can keep up with the very hot days we are having and keep the plants watered. Whoever told me earlier that container plants have to be watered two or three times a day in this heat was right.

The Garden is Shaping Up Nicely

2010-06-16T21:15:00.009-04:00

The garden is going quite well. Almost everything that has been taken from the garden so far consists of lettuce and greens - the spring crops. [We did have a few scallions left over from last year, some rhubarb, and a few early garlic scapes.]

But, there are buds on the tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash (see above) and ground cherries. The blueberries are beginning to show some blue color. There are a few peas and I need to remember to pick them tomorrow. The beans are climbing up the trellises and I think I saw flowers on the cucumbers.

This is the first year spinach has really been productive. Actually too productive. One lesson I learned is to not plant all the spinach at the same time. I have always found it difficult to plant something like lettuce or spinach a little every few weeks. The result, though, is a large patch of spinach ready to harvest at the same time. I have frozen a fair amount but I did throw away a lot of the last spinach because preparing it for freezing was too time consuming. And, in the meantime, stuff like zen is getting overgrown, and that, being a large leafed green, it much easier to prepare in quantity for freezing. [Zen is the larger leafed green in the upper part of the photo below. The other is Italian dandelion.]

I was happy to clear the spinach out and next year I will probably not have it regrow after the first cutting - unless I start it earlier under a row cover or cold frame. The regrowing this relatively warm spring resulted in most of it bolting. I need the space for more scallions, beets, zen and the various Chinese cabbages that I have started indoors.

I experimented with several new greens this year. Our favorite green is still zen (a Burpee seed) which I assume is a kind of Asian green. It is very mild, grows well and cleans easily. Among the new items was tatsoi, which is very much like the zen in taste. I also grew mustard greens - not too bad - and mispoona. The latter has a rather thick central vein and so it takes more preparation for cooking that I would like. So that may be my last mispoona.

I say the following with the hope that it doesn't turn out to be a curse: pests have been at a minimum so far. We had only one sighting of a groundhog and that was probably six weeks ago. We had one sighting of a deer. With the plastic deer fencing on one side of the yard that deer left the yard by leaping over the back gate on the other side. I then attached metal 3 foot fencing to the top of the fence and gate in that area and have not seen any deer hoofprints or damage since. Slugs and snails are present but haven't devastated anything. The first Japanese beetles are showing up.

I have found row cover material to be very useful. I first used it to try to keep flea beetles off of those crops that flea beetles like - Asian greens mostly. But I have now been covering the two beds of lettuce with it. One bed is under the pear tree which is a favorite spot for the birds that visit our yard. The row cover material intercepts the bird dropping and the lettuce remains clean. In the other lettuce bed the row cover material has kept potential lettuce loving creatures from eating the lettuce and I suspect that it may slow the falling rain enough to keep the lettuce cleaner. It doesn't harm the plants and lifts off easily.

Toadly Successful

2010-06-09T20:22:00.004-04:00

The dark speck to the left of the penny is a toad.

Soon after we created our first pond in the back yard toads began to appear in the spring and inhabit the pond. The males would sing to attract females and those who were compatible would mate and lay eggs in the pond. Then they would go back to their regular jobs. It was a delight to watch the eggs become tadpoles and the tadpoles grow, develop legs, and then, one rainy day, hop off into the rest of the yard.

Then we had three years when the toads would lay eggs, the tadpoles would develop, but, before they were around long enough to grow legs they would disappear. And not out into the yard - they just couldn't be found in the pond anymore. No little bodies either. This was a mystery. The first year we did see grackles around the pond frequently. They would go down to the edge of the pond and then come back up. Was it grackles? The next year we put a hardware cloth covering over part of the pond so that grackles couldn't reach everywhere. The toads disappeared anyway. Then we thought perhaps the chlorine in the water was killing them. So we started using only water from the rain barrel. The toads still disappeared. Until this year.

So what is new this year? No frogs. A friend brought us some frogs four years ago and we had a good population of frogs for two years but it dwindled to four frogs last year (the pond seems not to be quite deep enough for them to overwinter) but there was only one frog by the end of the summer. That frog did not survive the winter. Thus our theory is that the frogs were eating the toad tadpoles and now that there are no frogs we have little toads again.

They really are as small as the one in the photograph. They began leaving the ponds (we actually have two now) during the recent rains. We also noted an influx of birds - catbirds, cowbirds and grackles - near the ponds probably just waiting to gobble them up. But some of them make it. When they jump they jump about five times their body length and when I am in the garden weeding I only see them if they jump. Otherwise they look like a small piece of mulch. I saw 10 or 12 yesterday.

It still amazes me that these creatures develop in water eating vegetation and then hop out of the pond to breathe air and eat bugs. There have to be some really small bugs for them to eat.

What does this have to do with vegetable gardening? Slug control. Toads supposedly eat slugs and snails. We have lots of those. I have one older toad who spends the day time between two boards in the garden. I have been dropping snails down next to him hoping that he will eat them. The next day the snails are gone, but I don't know whether they have crawled away or been eaten. Next time I will watch to see which it is.

Rain, please!

2010-05-28T16:48:00.004-04:00

We have had a lengthy period of insufficient rain and some record breaking heat. And this is only May, albeit late May.

But, the garden is doing fairly well. There is far less snail and slug damage than last year. We have only seen a woodchuck once - but I have seen a couple of broccoli eaten totally off in the last two days so it probably has returned. As soon as we saw the groundhog we had the trapper set out two traps, but all we caught was a skunk and two raccoons (or the same raccoon on consecutive nights). I released them, making sure I had a large plastic sheet between me and the skunk (which was very timid and calm) and that I had gloves on when releasing the raccoon(s) (which was/were aggressive). Now the traps have been empty for over a week and therefore not attracting anything. We had a deer in the yard on at least two occasions - one evidenced by hoof prints and the other by an actual sighting.

As to my efforts at deer control, we have a four to five foot fence around the back yard but this clearly does not keep deer out. The question has been where the deer (I have never seen evidence of more than one) comes in. Our neighbor has seen the deer go into their yard and jump the fence into our yard. Several weeks ago I added a three foot post to each fence post on that side and then stapled deer fencing to those posts to make a seven foot barrier. That has remained intact. When the deer was chased out of the yard it went over the gate in the back corner of the property. I have now put up two pieces of metal 3 foot fencing there. One piece was pushed over several days ago, perhaps meaning that the deer tried to enter there (or maybe meaning that it just fell since I didn't actually attach that piece to the fence. I now have.) Without rain the ground is so dry that it would be difficult to see hoof prints.

The photo is of part of this year's spinach crop. I have never been particularly successful with spinach but this year both beds did very well. This bed is a variety called Space which I believe I bought as being particularly good for growing through the winter. We have so much spinach that I have been cutting it and freezing it. I have always pulled out spinach plants before as my method of harvesting them - and creating room for warm weather plants - but I want to see how well it will regrow.

June is just a few days away and we will be taking a short trip to a conference so I am working on planting all the seedlings that I can. It would be a lot easier if the forecasts for rain were accurate for where we live. I spend a lot of time hauling water to the little seedlings. I also planted some ground cherries, tomatoes and potatoes in containers and they need watering a couple of times a day. Hopefully it rains while we are gone. We also have to figure out what to do with the toad tadpoles in the aquarium in the kitchen, but that is another topic.

The Mid-May Garden

2010-05-18T10:52:00.004-04:00

The potatoes began emerging four days ago.

Because of the slow growth of my seedlings I bought some lettuce, broccoli, basil, and pepper seedlings at the Regional Market. Lettuce because we have eaten all the winter lettuce and all the lettuce that I put out in cold frames early in the year. My later seedlings just won't be producing lettuce to eat for a while yet - they are the ones that I started in inappropriate potting soil. Basil because I started seeds late - I don't know why I scheduled them so late. Broccoli and peppers because my seedlings are not growing. I may put them (and the tomatoes) out in the garden in a covered cold frame to see if the warmth will encourage them.

A new item this year is minutina. The seeds are extremely tiny and since it is hard to dole them out I have at least 30 little plants in each little pot. Today I decided to plant some out since they are a spring green. Supposedly they should be planted eight inches apart. It will be amazing if these little things that look like small grass stems will grow big enough to be that far apart. Or, considering how they were all growing together in the little pot, if they will grow at all. They will need the tenacity of lettuce to survive. This is one of this year's experiments.

We have grown very fond of ground cherry jam and it takes a lot of ground cherries to make the jam. The ones I started from seed were also in the potting soil that didn't work well. But it is said that if you once have ground cherries you will always have ground cherries. They are coming up all over the area where they were grown last year so I transplanted some of them to containers. This is one thing we decided to try in order to be able to harvest them more easily. I also am transplanting some of them in the area where they are already growing. I will also plant some of the ones that I started from seed.

Snow peas or snow spinach?

2010-05-09T13:47:00.003-04:00

I was sure last week that the danger of a May frost was over. Sure, it wasn't May 10th yet but the warm April and the effects of global warming made it seem that we weren't going to have a late frost. And I don't think we actually did here in our yard notwithstanding the obvious snow. Here it is sitting on the spinach.

The outside temperature actually read 36 degrees while I was watching the snow fall and there was enough to require clearing off the car windows before driving.

At least I didn't plant out any warm weather crops in anticipation of continued warm temperatures. But that may be more the result of not having seedlings that are large enough (see prior posts) not that I have learned from experience.

What Have We Eaten So Far?

2010-05-08T18:44:00.003-04:00

We have been eating from the garden since April 6th when we picked some of the lettuce that was started last October along with some of the mache and claytonia that we started in the winter and put out in the first cold frame around the beginning of February.

We have also been eating crops that we had assumed would be killed by the winter cold - namely scallions and kale. We have also had some zen (an Asian green), spinach, and lettuce that we started indoors and put out into the second cold frame.

All of the scallions and kale that survived the winter have now been eaten (they were sending up flower stalks), along with the lettuce that overwintered in the "lettuce frame".

Lately we have been eating claytonia, lettuce and Chinese cabbage (including pak choi and komatsuna) all of which were transplanted into the spring garden. We did pick a small amount of rhubarb also.

My tally, which is fairly accurate although some produce comes in and forgets to weigh itself, is about 23 pounds. Timing to keep enough, but not too much, ready for eating is not yet something that I have mastered. Perhaps because of the very warm (and dry) spring some crops have already "bolted". That happened with the pak choi and so I picked it all (only eight plants) and froze it for later use.

Is it the potting soil?

2010-05-08T13:15:00.005-04:00

What am I doing differently this year such that my seedlings are not growing well? The tomatoes (left) and peppers (right) that I started on April 3rd have germinated but have not developed as they should. Admittedly I started them later than I wanted to but these little plants represent seedlings that emerged four weeks ago. The same is true of most of my other seedlings. The lettuce I transplanted this week are the smallest little lettuces I have ever planted out. That is also true of the broccoli, zen and kale that I have now transplanted.

My suspicion is that the potting soil I used after I finished up last year's bag is the cause. I know that a lot of sources on starting seedlings say to not use commercial potting soil but I have never had a problem. What I have been using the last several years is Miracle-Gro potting soil (the bag also says that it feeds plants up to six months). When that ran out this year I bought what I thought was the same - well, the color of the bag was the same - but I think it was Scotts Premium Potting Soil, which, according to their website, is intended for container gardening. I knew that it was different when I opened it because it was fairly coarse and full of little chips of mulch and woody stems.

The seedlings I grew thorough the winter to try out in the cold frames did not have any problem but they would have been grown in last year's potting soil. The most recently planted seeds also seem to be doing well and would have been planted in potting soil from a new bag of Miracle Grow. It is what I started in between - that is, using the coarse potting soil - that has not done well.

Since the soil around these seedlings, when I knock them out to plant, is very wet I suspect that this potting soil is a type created to retain moisture. On the other hand I have also changed the way I water the seedlings, using a little watering can and watering from the top as opposed to my prior method of pouring water into the bottom of the tray in which the pots are sitting and then draining it out a short time later. But I don't really think this would change the amount of moisture retained by the soil in the pots.

As a result of the slow growth, I have been planting seedlings into the garden that are much smaller than what I would normally plant. Time will tell if they will thrive. They may have been in too much water too long and can't recover in the garden soil. [The tiny lettuce plants seem to be doing okay, however.]

Also today I transplanted the tomatoes and peppers into larger containers using the newer potting soil. Hopefully they will soon be smiling back at me - and growing.

I'm Getting a Slow Start

2010-05-03T11:02:00.003-04:00

Maybe I am misled by the warm spring we have had so far, but I seem to be behind in my "regular" gardening. Working on building cold frames and trying to get some greens started early in cold frames I have been late in starting seeds for the garden. As a result I have peppers that are just beginning to form their first true leaves and tomatoes that certainly don't look like they will be big enough to set out later this month.

I am concerned about the potting soil I used. It retains a lot of moisture so that some of the seedlings that I set out were sitting in dripping potting soil. But they certainly have roots. I am mostly concerned about the growth of the seedlings. Several days ago I planted out the smallest lettuce seedlings ever. But, knowing that lettuce is pretty hardy (and that I have bunches more still in their little containers), I set out about 60 tiny seedlings. I put them in the frame that I used for the winter lettuce and, later, the early Asian greens and covered the frame with row cover material to protect them from too much sunlight. Hopefully the slugs won't find them immediately.

I have also set out celeriac - although this may be too early as I have read that they will bolt in the warm weather. Anyone with experience with celeriac, let me know. The parsley is in - now that it is large enough so that I can distinguish it from the cutting celery. [I didn't label the containers.] I have planted potatoes and set out more leeks yesterday. I planted the leeks by dropping them into holes made with a dowel. Usually I dig trenches and plant them in the bottom and then pull the extra soil over them as they grow. I'll see how this method works because it is certainly easier and allows more leeks in the same space since there isn't soil piled up along the sides.

We may now be where we are producing enough of our own greens that we don't need to buy them at the grocery store. The Asian greens (Chinese cabbages, komatsuna, and pak choi) have grown well and are ready to eat. We have been working on the lettuces that I planted out in the cold frames earlier. [The winter lettuce have been gone for some time - how long will 22 lettuce plants last?] We have been eating last year's kale and scallions and have started on this year's zen and spinach.

Now, since I am already late, I need to start some basil, more kale and squash inside, and fava beans and scallions outside. From the limited way in which scallions have germinated inside this year I suspect that the seeds have lost much of their viability.

And, just as I finish this my wife spotted a nice fat groundhog in the back yard with something nice and green in its mouth. Guess we didn't get them all last year.

Last Fall's Cover Crops

2010-04-06T17:49:00.009-04:00

Cover crops are recommended for garden beds that have finished growing vegetables for the year.
Last fall I planted three different cover crops - winter rye, oats and clover. They have different characteristics. Winter rye - shown here - survives the winter and grows quite thickly. The patch shown here was something of a disappointment because the winter rye did not germinate in most of the places where I planted it. In fact, I went out and bought more seed because I thought the seed from the previous year was not viable. Last year it had grown very well. Rye does not fix nitrogen but it obviously holds the soil in place. It needs to be dug under in the spring and allowed to break down before planting in those areas.

One of the other cover crops I tried was oats. Oats are not winter hardy as can be seen from the thin dry layer of oat remains in this photo. The soil surface is protected and the dried up oats can be lifted off and added to the compost pile, leaving a nice surface for planting this year's crops. Oats don't add organic matter or nitrogen to the soil.

The third cover crop I tried was clover. I don't recall whether it was red clover or white clover - I had only written "clover" on the bag. I had used clover during the growing season last year in among the kale to reduce weeds. I suppose that is like choosing clover as your weed and using it to block out other weeds.

I thought I had read that clover did not survive the winter but clearly that wasn't true for what I planted. Now it needs to be dug under so that what grows in this bed during this year is what I want to eat and not more clover. Time will tell if I have introduced a new weed to my garden. I assume that since the clover has not been allowed to go to seed that it will not be a problem.

Using and learning about cover crops is one of the items I had put off until I retired.

The Early Spring Garden

2010-04-04T20:53:00.009-04:00

Global warming brought us some very warm early April days. The high was 87 degrees yesterday. Today was a little cooler but very sunny and comfortable. In short, great weather to be in the garden.
Typically there wouldn't be much in the garden at this time of the year. But with the new cold frames we are nearly ready to begin eating. The lettuces in this photo are the ones that I started last October and which were in my old glass covered frame during the winter. The frame is now behind the lettuce and is covered with row cover material. The frame contains Chinese cabbage, pak choi and komatsuna (another Asian green) that I had started indoors on February 11th and that I transplanted out five or six days ago. Initially the row cover material was to protect the transplants from the sun since they were hardened off only for a couple of days. But my Asian greens have often been a food source for flea beetles and so the row cover now keeps off any flea beetles. [I don't know if they would be around this early in the year.]

In one of the new cold frames I transplanted lettuce, spinach, and zen around four weeks ago. This frame is not insulated and doesn't retain as much heat as my other two new ones. One of them is pictured below.

This frame, which is insulated (the insulation is covered with black plastic to protect it and presumably absorb more heat), contains some red lettuce in the lower corner, then a group of mache (corn salad), some spinach at the top which is mostly overgrown with zen (the larger leafed plants). If you could see closer up you would see from the holes that zen is a favorite of the slugs. So far it seems that the slugs concentrate on the zen and the Chinese cabbage and pretty much leave alone the Claytonia (which is in the one cold frame not shown here), the mache, spinach and lettuce.
The red object in this photo and the black object in the photo above it are the plastic covered pieces of board that I use to attract slugs. My wife suggests that if I got up earlier in the morning I could go out and pick the slugs off the plants before they scatter to avoid the sun. She got about a dozen this morning which is more than I typically find under the boards. Where do they all come from? Since I am more of a night person maybe I should go out at night with a flashlight and pick off the slugs before they can start eating.

Having the claytonia, mache, lettuce, spinach, and Asian greens available is a result of using the cold frames. But this year we had another surprise. In the fall I planted a lot of Red Russian kale. It had been so productive for us during the year that I started some late in the season and planted them in a number of places. Then winter came before they were big enough to provide anything for us to eat. I have read that Red Russian kale is not the best variety to try and maintain through the winter and so I assumed that they would end up as a cover crop. When the heavy snow that we had in late February/early March finally melted away there were the kale plants. And here is what they look like now. They are definitely growing and I would not be surprised, depending on the weather, if we have some to eat very soon.

The Beginning of Spring

2010-03-23T19:01:00.006-04:00

I took a quick trip to Durham, N.C., a week ago Friday and by the time I had returned nine days later Spring had come. I had been waiting impatiently for spring and it was a surprise to me to learn that in my absence the official first day of spring arrived. I spent it driving.

Today we ate this year's first produce from the garden. While Janet went to the store to buy some lettuce I went out and cut a very small amount of mache and claytonia to add to the salad she would make. It wasn't enough to bother to weigh. We were happy with the taste and texture.

I removed the glass covers from the cold frames the day I left (March 19th) and they have been off ever since. The temperature remained above freezing and some days were really pleasant. The only covering that was used was row cover material over one of the frames to keep bird droppings from the pear tree above it from reaching the plants.

Surprisingly, when the snow finally disappeared Janet found that many of the small Red Russian kale plants that I started last year looked like they survived and were beginning to grow. That would be surprising since that variety is not recommended for keeping during the winter under protection. We will see.

As soon as the rain stops I will be out in the garden to clean up, dig under the few areas of winter rye, check out the compost pile, set up the rain barrels, and get the pond going (but that has nothing to do with the vegetable garden). Inside, it is time to start seeds and prepare that last cold frame.

Extending the Season

2010-03-06T20:08:00.003-05:00

It should be obvious that one of my main projects this winter has been preparing to grow vegetables for a longer part of the year. That is the reason for the various cold frames that I have been making.
It is becoming clear to me that these frames should have been in place last fall and that the way to extend the season for greens (and carrots and whatever other vegetables we can nurse through the winter) is to have them set out and planted before the cold weather begins. I have read that mache will continue to grow through the winter. But most other vegetables would either need to be fully grown before the winter comes full force and picked as needed through the cold weather or at least established and allowed to just sit in the cold frame under the snow ready to start growing as soon as the weather warms.
One thing I did was to sow some spinach seeds in November and I believe they have germinated and are waiting to begin growing. They were in the "lettuce frame" from which I just cleared off the snow today. (There is the photo of the beginning of the process.) In a day or two I will see if they are growing or not.

There are two upcoming presentations about extending the season. On Saturday, April 24th, the Edible Gardening CNY group will hear Jennifer Cleary talk about that subject at the Liverpool Library (Liverpool, NY) at 2:00 P.M. That is free and open to the public. If you need more information contact me at john.allen1@verizon.net. Then, on April 27th the Finger Lakes Permaculture group will present their Community Food Growing Series: Season Extension from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M. at the Ithaca Children's Garden at Cass Park, Route 89, Ithaca, NY. Pre-registration is required. Contact Josh Dolan at sapsquatch7@gmail.com or call 607-272-2292. Cost $5.

If you are interested in extending the vegetable growing season I would be very pleased to hear from you.

Out In the Snow

2010-03-03T19:03:00.004-05:00

Spring is not coming fast enough. I have more seedlings in my cellar than I have places to plant them.
Right now the garden has four glass covered frames in it. The oldest is what I call the "lettuce frame" and I have used it for a number of years to overwinter lettuce seedlings so that they are ready to take off as soon as the weather warms enough to melt off any snow and then provide light for the lettuce plants to start growing again. With the recent 18-24 inches of snow that hasn't happened yet. I did brush the snow off before that downfall and found that the soil was still frozen.
Then there is the green cold frame that was the subject of an earlier post. That one is filled with mostly mache and claytonia. The plants have survived and I expect will soon start growing visibly. I have begun removing the insulation cover from 8 A.M. until 6 P.M. so that the plants get at least ten hours of light. The air temperature inside the frame yesterday afternoon was about 76 degrees and the soil temperature about 56 degrees. Today I propped the glass open a little so that it wouldn't get too hot.

The third frame, pictured here, is a clay colored cold frame that is much larger than the green one. It is currently filled with spinach, lettuce, mache and zen (a mild green). In this photo it is propped open so that it doesn't overheat on this 42 degree sunny day.

The fourth frame is my simplest one. I made it from cedar fence slats from the 20 year old fencing around the yard that was replaced several years ago. [I kept a lot of them.] Although the surface of the boards look as if they are rotting, when I cut them I found a lot of solid wood inside. Because this was made from cedar I didn't have to prime or paint. I also did not insulate this one at all and do not plan to make an insulated cover for the glass. So this will be used somewhat differently than the other two. It does have the advantage that I have two screens from the same window that the glass came from and I will be able to remove the glass and use the screens in early spring to protect seedlings from insects such as flea beetles. This frame was set down on about a foot of heavy snow two days ago. Today I took off the glass covers and removed as much snow as I could and pushed the frame down onto the garden surface. The forecast is for sun during the next five days and by the end of that time the snow will be gone and the soil warm enough for planting. Or so I hope because I have those seedlings to plant out. I think I have far more than will fit into that frame. It may be time to start the next cold frame. I do have a lot of fence slats that I have been saving for something.
This photo was taken a couple days after writing this. I am digging as much of the soil in the frame as is diggable. Around the edges the soil is still frozen and comes up in cold lumps, if at all.

First Produce of the Year

2010-02-06T11:32:00.004-05:00

It is a very small start, but yesterday we ate our first produce of the new year. It consisted of a little spinach, a few cutting celery leaves, and a little claytonia. It wasn't enough to justify weighing and none of this came from the outside garden. This is Syracuse in February.

The spinach came from seeds that I started indoors in late December to plant into the outside cold frames. The cutting celery and claytonia were started earlier in December as an experiment to see if they would grow. I had tried both of those and mache (corn salad) seeded directly to the garden last year with no success. But they germinated quite well and some were planted into the cold frame on January 22nd and are still sitting there looking a little worse than when planted.

I have finished and set out a second (and larger) cold frame. The soil inside is mostly unfrozen although around the edges it is still pretty solid. I am planning to plant some spinach, leek, and Asian greens tomorrow, if it is sunny. The temperatures are not forecast to go above freezing for the next week and it will be interesting to see how quickly the seeds germinate or if they do. I have been recording the soil and air temperatures inside the first cold frame. The soil temperature, at about three inches deep, has remained above freezing although the outside temperature has been as low as -8 degrees Fahrenheit. In the late afternoon the soil temperature has been in the 40s and the high temperature inside the frame has reached over 80 degrees on two sunny days.

I hadn't planned to extend the season at this end of the season this year but since two cold frames are done there is no point having them just sit around waiting for October. I should learn something that will help next winter.

Heating Up the Cold Frame

2010-01-22T23:59:00.006-05:00

The cold frame has been outside for about a week now and we have had two sunny days recently. I use a maximum-minimum thermometer and a soil thermometer to record the effect of the cold frame. Most interesting is that the soil inside the frame, except near the front edge where the sunshine doesn't reach, is no longer frozen.

There is no doubt that the sun warms up the air and the soil inside the cold frame. On January 21st, when the high daytime temperature (according to the newspaper) was 32 degrees, the temperature inside reached 64 degrees. It was a bright sunny day. The next day was another mostly clear sunny day and the temperature got up to 61 degrees and the soil temperature (taken in the area that the sun reached) was 46 degrees, although the outside temperature high was 36 degrees.

After I put the cold frame outside I added insulation that I bungee cord over the glass in the afternoon when the sun no longer reaches the cold frame. Two nights ago the outside temperature dropped to 14 degrees but the lowest temperature inside the cold frame was 30 degrees. Last night the outside temperature was 12 degrees but the lowest temperature inside the cold frame was 29 degrees and the soil temperature in the morning before the sun struck the cold frame glass was 36 degrees.

What these mean is that, on those two clear sunny days, the temperature inside the cold frame got up to 25 to 30 degrees higher than the outside air temperature. At night the temperature dropped below freezing but was about 16 degrees above the outside air temperature. The soil temperature remained above freezing although it dropped about 10 degrees.

We have three more warm (but not necessarily sunny) days coming up (projected highs in the mid 30s to low 40s) followed by a return to much colder weather (highs in the low twenties and lows around 10 degrees). I may move a few of the mache and claytonia seedlings that I grew as an experiment into the cold frame tomorrow to see if they can survive the colder weather. Do I leave the insulation on all day if it is going to be cloudy? Do they need sunlight or warmth more?

Keeping Busy in the Winter

2010-01-14T12:06:00.006-05:00

What is that object sitting in the midst of the snow in garden bed #4?
Today is January 14th. Snow covers the garden. After all, this is Syracuse. I can't prepare the soil, plant vegetables, fertilize plants, or harvest produce.
The seed catalogs have been here for over a month and the seed orders have already been placed and some have arrived.
The plan for this year's garden is made. What will be grown and where things will be planted has been decided.
Is it time to relax and read? Some.
But when it is impossible to work in the garden it may be time to work in the cellar. The object is my first attempt at a cold frame. I just put it out in the snow today because we are supposed to have sunny weather and temperatures above freezing for the next four or five days. My hope is that this weather will warm up the soil inside the cold frame so that soon after the beginning of February I can plant the little spinach and corn mache seedlings that are growing in the cellar. The magic date is supposed to be around February 8th when the daylight will have increased to ten hours.
Here is the cold frame up close.
Except for the screws that hold it together, the insulation hidden inside and the insulation strip that lies under the edge of the glass, it is made from materials that I (or my son, Greg) collected or that have been in the cellar for some time. When I see large storm door windows by the side of the road I grab them. This one is somewhat small, about 26" by 29". The frame is made from 3/4" pine some of which was a neighbor's shelving unit that found itself at the curb. The sides are screwed into halves of pieces of 2" by 4" at the corners. I cut up pieces of our old cedar fence about 1 1/2" wide and nailed them to the bottom of the sides so that the initial rot over time will be of the replaceable cedar pieces and not the pine sides and to hold the insulation. I cut one inch foam insulation and added it to each side covered with black plastic stapled to hold the insulation in place and absorb more sunlight. Right now the cold frame sits on a piece of black plastic that hopefully will absorb heat from the sun and melt the thin layer of snow under the cold frame and warm the soil that is below that. I was planning to remove the black plastic but I could just make slits and plant through it. Since the glass sits on 3/4" pieces of wood screwed about half an inch below the top of the cold frame I placed a metal corner brace under the glass when I put the glass in so that I have a way to lift the glass when I need to get inside to plant, water, etc. The string was added as a back-up means of lifting the glass when I forget to put the corner brace back in place.
The last step will be to cut a piece of foam insulation the size of the glass to bungee cord on top of the glass when it is supposed to get really cold. I may also add a piece of row cover over the plants inside to provide additional protection. I have to purchase a maximum-minimum thermometer to put inside in order to see what the range of temperature is.

Seed Catalog Time

2009-12-30T18:27:00.005-05:00

Since mid-December seed catalogs have been arriving. My favorite is Johnny's because of the useful information in it. However the source of most of my seeds is Fedco. As time goes on I will be switching away from hybrid varieties and so Seed Savers Exchange will become an increasing source. I would like to begin saving some seeds.

The mild green that we have liked most in the past two years - zen - seems to be only sold under that name by Burpee and Cook's Garden (which I believe is now owned by Burpee). Since it now sells for around $5 a packet I am looking for other greens that are similar. I have several on order and will grow them this year to see if they can replace zen. (Trying to locate zen greens through Google doesn't help - the "zen" part leads down a whole different path.)

Zen is the larger leafy green at the left in this photograph. The plant to its right is an Italian dandelion ("Clio"). It is a very nice upright plant that definitely has a dandelion taste. I know that deer like it. I didn't notice any deer munching of the zen but they weren't growing right next to the dandelions this year. Snails and slugs did take their share.

In any event, the arrival of the catalogs has had its usual result - I have ordered a batch of things that I have not grown in the past including tatsoi, golden purslane, minutina, komatsuna, celeriac, and Belgian endive. My garden does not lack for purslane. It is the major weed in the vegetable garden and while we could let it grow to add to salads it seems to grow best with lesser expectations. That is, when I select a few plants to grow for consumption they don't grow nearly as well as the ones that I don't want to grow.

I am told that celeriac is very easy to grow and we bought a couple and ate them. They can be stored to be available after the cold weather begins. The Belgian endive grows during the regular gardening season and then can be brought in and forced to produce again in the dark of the cellar. Both of these are part of our effort to extend the growing season. Some of the other new vegetables - tatsoi and minutina - are greens that I will try to grow in the winter cold frames, which I hope will begin to materialize soon. I have cleaned up enough the cellar area around the table saw that I can begin cutting wood for the first glassed cold frame. I plan to put this one in the garden and transplant mache and spinach into it soon after the beginning of February from seeds I started two days ago. It will be interesting to see whether the soil, under the frame, will warm up enough for planting.

Ground Cherries

2009-12-05T21:20:00.000-05:00

My daughter asked what ground cherries look like. This is what they look like when they are growing, except that this plant doesn't have very many ground cherries showing on it. The fruit grows inside a husk, and there are two clearly visible in this picture. We didn't grow them until 2008 and this was actually our only plant that year. We had ordered two plants but transplanted them a little too early and one didn't survive the frost. They should be planted on a tomato schedule, that is, near the end of May, beginning of June.

At that time we didn't know how easy it was to start ground cherries from seed. We also didn't know much space they need because the one plant in 2008 had its growth inhibited by the frost and by growing in the shadow of soybeans and cucumbers. This year I had 25 seedlings to transplant but they are so productive that I think I only need 8 to 10 next year.

Harvesting ground cherries take a little effort. The fruit grows inside a husk and they are not ready to harvest until they fall off the plant. Even then many (at least this year) were not ripe enough to use. They have to be yellow. To use the fruit the husk has to be removed, which is quite easy but also time consuming. There was quite a bit of waste this year consisting of unripe fruit and over-ripe (cracked) fruit.

Here is what the fruit looks like. After removing the ripe fruit from the husks and unusable fruit we rinse them, put them on a cookie sheet, and freeze them. Once they are frozen we put them into freezer bags and keep them until we have enough to use. Our favorite use is ground cherry jam. It has a unique and pleasant taste. Other people make ground cherry pies.

Our challenge for next year is to find ways to grow the ground cherries so that harvesting is easier and more productive. This year we had to be on our hands and knees reaching under the rather low growing plants to find the fruits on the ground. We suspect that chipmunks were also eating some of them because there were a lot of empty husks and the chipmunks were often in that area. We might try growing them in containers so they are off the ground.

Extending the Season and the Challenge of Slugs

2009-12-05T11:17:00.007-05:00

My only serious attempt to extend the growing season has been a cedar frame with a glass cover that I have used the past four years to keep lettuce in wait for growing in the early spring. Here is what it looked like two years ago. The glass cover (an old storm door window) just sits on top (see below).

The first year this worked wonderfully and in the spring we harvested quite a bit of lettuce before anything was ready from the regular garden. I think I was just lucky that year because I had no idea of when to start the seedlings and no problem with slugs. In the intervening years I didn't plant soon enough (last year) or slugs had a feast. It must be a real treat for them to have a protected, relatively warm place with delicious young seedlings to feast on.

This year I either planted early enough or the unusually warm November gave the seedlings enough time to mature. But, as a number of people have experienced, slugs and snails have had a very productive year. I originally set out 35 seedlings and a little later replaced six or seven of them to maintain the 35 seedling number. But as some of those began to disappear I discovered that slugs were the problem. I had left the black six-packs with a few remaining seedlings in the frame and discovered that slugs were spending their daylight hours under the six packs and in the grooves between the cells of the six pack. Obviously slug control was needed. I set out a piece of board with black plastic stapled to it in the middle of the seedlings and a small black plastic tray in a corner of the bed. Each day I go out, remove the glass cover and transfer whatever slugs I find into salt water. I am surprized at the number of slugs that I have removed from this relatively small area - somewhere between 40 and 50. I don't know whether they are immigating into the frame from outside, or there are eggs hatching in the soil, or there are just that many slugs there. When I go two days without finding slugs I think the battle is over but then go out the next day and find three or four more.

I have also scattered crushed egg shells around the seedlings and for the past week or ten days the number of healthy looking plants has held at 24. I don't know why I didn't do that when I planted the seedlings because I did that earlier with Chinese cabbages. What I did do initially was spread some wheat bran around the seedlings. Rumors that slugs eat the bran and die didn't work for me. The bran absorbed moisture and got crusty and needed to be removed.

As to the correct planting time for the seedlings, I just read in Eliot Coleman's "The Winter Harvest Handbook" that plants you want to harvest through the winter need to have almost reached maturity before the day length becomes shorter than ten hours. In Syracuse that would be November 8th. I started this year's lettuce on September 23rd and transplanted them into the frame around October 28th. That seems about right, although maybe starting the seeds a week earlier would be better. I recall also reading recently that September 15th is suggested.

What We Harvested This Year

2009-12-04T15:44:00.004-05:00

This was a year of keeping records and one of my primary goals was to record everything we harvested. We did get most of it although occasionally some greens were already washed and in the pot before we remembered that we hadn't weighed them and although the basil crop had a bad year I know we (well, my wife, to be accurate) did make some pesto even though I don't show any harvesting of basil in this list. But here are the results of what we did weigh:

Asparagus 8 lbs (then I dug up the bed after starting a new one)
Beans (pole) 29 3/4 lbs (not including what was lost to groundhog and deer trimming)
Blackberries 7 1/2 lbs
Blueberries 23 lbs (another great year)
Chinese cabbage 6 3/4 lbs (after removing lots of snail and slug damaged leaves)
Currants 1 lb (this is their first year to produce)
Dill 1/2 lb (plus the seeds that I harvested)
Fava beans 1+ lbs (shelled and I didn't weigh half of the crop)
Garlic 17 3/4 lbs (this was generally an excellent year for garlic)
Garlic scapes 2 lbs
Greens 42 1/2 lbs (this includes zen, Italian dandelion, collards and some kale)
Ground cherries 11 1/2 lbs (but a lot is unripe and over ripe berries)
Jerusalem artichokes 3 lbs (these came up by themselves from ones we pulled years ago)
Kale 19 lbs (and we are still picking)
Leeks 8 lbs
Lettuce 13 lbs (ground hogs got quite a bit too)
Malabar spinach 5 lbs (there was a lot more that got intertwined with the pole beans)
Pak choi 17 1/2 lbs (my first successful year)
Parsley 2 1/2 lbs (mostly made into pesto)
Patty pan squash 18 1/4 lbs (and we would have eaten lots more)
Peas 3 1/2 lbs (I will use an innoculant next year and grow some with better taste)
Peppers 13 lbs
Potatoes 41 lbs (from 5 lbs of seed potatoes)
Raspberries 24 lbs
Rhubarb 2 lbs (first year to harvest)
Scallions 1/2 lb+ (most were picked as needed and not weighed)
Spinach 5 1/2 lbs
Swiss chard 10 lbs
Tomatoes 21 lbs (before the late blight got them all)
Trombocino squash 1 1/2 lbs (we stopped picking them because the patty pans were so much tastier)

About 360 lbs of produce. At the cost of organic produce this probably equates to between $750 and $1,000. More important to us is that what we grow here at home is safe (no pesticides, no E. coli) and, we believe, more nutritious, better tasting and it travels only a few feet from where it grows to where we eat it.

This was a good base year to grow from. My emphasis next year will be on extending the harvest into the fall and winter. That's my reading topic right now. Maybe I will actually use some of those old glazed windows that I have been collecting.

The Lettuce Is Gone

2009-10-14T19:15:00.004-04:00

We picked the last lettuce today. Now about all that is left are some greens (zen, kale and collards), a few raspberries and maybe some peppers. We weighed most all of the produce we got from the garden this year and the total is about 350 pounds. That pales in comparison with the 6,000 pounds the family in California grows annually as shown in the video "Homegrown". But then we can't grow year round and don't have four people working full time in the garden. We wouldn't be able to eat anywhere near that much food.

It was an interesting year and a good base for planning next year's garden. In past years tomatoes produced a lot of produce weight but since I am now the only one who can eat tomatoes I planted far fewer and then all succumbed over time to the blight starting, surprisingly, with the ones that were planted where I had never planted vegetables before. I only picked enough to have a daily tomato sandwich and those ended yesterday with the last blight free tomato. I was away for the weekend and was reacquainted with the tomatoes that are commercially grown - tasteless and hard - and hope that next year I can grow my own throughout the whole tomato season.

Among my other disappointments were beans and broccoli. Three of my four plantings of broccoli were chewed nearly to the ground by groundhogs - three of which were removed from the garden. The fourth planting, for reasons unknown to me, produced vigorous untouched plants with no broccoli heads. So the count for this year was zero broccoli. The only beans I grow are pole beans and they were first cut down by groundhogs and then, after I replanted and surrounded them with circles of 3 foot fencing, they were trimmed weekly by deer. We did harvest beans but not the quantity we wanted nor that would be produced by the number of bean plants we grew. We ate fresh beans fairly regularly once the groundhogs were out of the picture but did not have any for freezing for the rest of the year.

The only cucumbers I planted were lemon cucumbers. I scattered them around the garden but think that was not a good idea. The rather dry summer was not favorable to good production.

So what did grow well? Peppers did extremely well but I did learn that I should carefully read the catalog descriptions. One of the three varieties (Beaver Dam) that I planted was medium hot. One bite and my lips were burning and my eyes watering. Neighbors liked them, however. Blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries were very productive. Some of them are now stored as jams, others are in the freezer. The red Russian kale that I planted early is still in the garden producing. I set out a lot more of it about two weeks ago but the rather cold rainy weather since then may keep it from getting big enough to produce a harvest before cold weather stops it altogether. Will it start again in the spring? Ground cherries were productive but there were a lot of unripe cherries that fell off the plants - which is supposed to be the sign that they are ripe - and separating the cherries from their little covers is a pretty slow process. They are also now in the form of jam, which I really like. The later pak choi and Chinese cabbage were great - the earlier ones were ravaged by snails. Patty pan squash were delicious and although I started them under row covers until they began to flower they were destroyed by borers. Next year I have to check them daily. I also grew trombocino squash and it sure does want to climb. It would have been very productive if we hadn't preferred the patty pans. By the time those were gone the trombocinos had remained unpicked for many weeks and seemed to have stopped producing. However, as I pulled the plants out of the hemlock trees at the end of the season I found that they had started producing again, maybe because I finally cut the huge squash off the plants. Potatoes were good. I got nearly 40 pounds of potatoes from 2 1/2 lbs of seed potatoes. I would like to have fewer but larger potatoes because I am the one who has to peel them.

Greens (zen, dandelions, kale, and collards, along with some spring spinach) grew well and we had greens as part of our meals almost every day. We also froze some, but not as much as we wanted. Next year I need to have a large garden of greens beginning in the spring. I think my wife wants the garden to be mostly greens and beans. I grew red Malabar spinach but since I again did not read the description didn't plan for the fact that it wants to climb. It became entangled with some of the pole beans to the detriment of both.

Now it is time to clean the garden up. I do still have to plant garlic - that also did extremely well this year - and, hopefully, some lettuce seedlings that I started about two weeks ago. But for those to succeed I need a nice Indian summer to get them large enough to survive the winter in a class covered frame. The peppers still need to be pulled up sometime. I don't think the freeze we had killed them. My compost bins are nearly full but I can find space to stuff in some of the remaining plants. I have planted cover crops in a number of beds - clover and oats, both of which will be killed by a heavy frost. I planted either annual rye or winter rye in other beds but saw no signs of germination. I might stop by Lee's Feeds tomorrow and ask if it is too late to plant winter rye.

I began emptying out my leaf barrel today. It has two years of leaves in it because last year I wasn't able to empty it because of a back injury. Soon my neighbors will be raking their leaves and putting them in large paper bags which are handy collect and empty into the circle of fencing that is my leaf barrel. I find it is best to wait until mid-leaf season because the earlier bags often have stuff besides leaves - sticks, stones, dead potted plants, and whatever accumulated junk got raked up with those early leaves.

Then there are the rain barrels to empty out, clean (if it's warm enough) and turn over for the year. And the hoses to put away.

And finally it is time to begin planning for next year.

It Has Been A Good Year

2009-09-09T19:57:00.003-04:00

The time lapse since the last post is an indication of how busy the garden has kept me. For many meals everything is from the garden. One recent example is a mixture of roasted potatoes, leeks and peppers, all growing very well this year, together with a serving of green beans. That meal might be topped off with a slice of raspberry pie. In fact, raspberries seem to be so easy to grow that my wife wonders why everyone doesn't have them. Although I cut our raspberry bed in half this year (but I planted a new half that will begin to produce next year) we have been picking very close to a quart a day.

Blueberries, peppers, potatoes, kale and garlic were particularly productive this year. Even the bean plants, although they were ravaged early in the year by groundhogs (three have been removed but there is one still sighted in the neighborhood) and trimmed the rest of the year by a deer (although I have never seen it, its tracks are quite visible about once a week), have produced a number of meals.

I tried a number of new things - arugula (neither of us eat it), red Russian kale (great and it just keeps producing), patty pan summer squash (great, but succumbed to borers almost overnight), trombocino squash (not as tasty as advertised), red malabar spinach (great promise but I didn't realize it needed to climb), and lemon cucumber (so-so).

Yesterday and today, since we are going on a camping trip for most of next week, we have been cutting and freezing most of the greens - collards, kale, and zen - but leaving the plants to grow more. I also pulled out all of the Swiss chard and pak choi and froze that. I also pulled out the arugula to add to the compost pile.

Now there are empty spaces appearing in the garden. Some space will go to garlic in October and I am growing more kale (just planted the seed a week ago) and hope that it will grow big enough before the cold weather stops it. In the meantime I am planting a variety of cover crops. Clover germinates very quickly and I am planting rye and oats in other places. The rye grew very well last year but it either germinates more slowly than I thought or last year's seed is not viable this year.

This has not been a good year for tomatoes. In addition to the virus that turns leaves brown from the bottom of the plant - which I have had for several years - the plants simply did not grow vigorously and I don't know whether my plants had the problem that has been reported fairly widely this year, but a lot of the tomato fruits developed what look like big sores. The sores have a hard crust but begin to rot underneath. Most of my plants have been pulled out. Even the ones that I planted where tomatoes (or other vegetables) have not been grown for 25 years developed the virus that turns the leaves brown.

But every year there are successes and failures and usually far more of the former than the latter.

Time to Enjoy the Fruits of our Labor

2009-07-27T15:29:00.003-04:00

A fair number of our meals in the past few days have been straight from the garden. Yesterday, for example, we picked blueberries (but they are winding down now) and they were part of the dessert for lunch today and also picked kale, Swiss chard, and pole beans (all of which made up supper yesterday). Two days ago I pried out much of the garlic and now have 25 or 30 pounds hanging in my shed to dry. The bulbs were larger than I have ever had before so this may be an especially good year for garlic. I even picked my first tomato but haven't eaten it yet. It wasn't fully ripe but I didn't want to take the chance that something would come along and take a bite out of it. We have also been harvesting a few of the potatoes.

We also "harvested" our third ground hog and our third raccoon and had them removed. (I don't have a problem with raccoons and wish they would stop going into the traps.) Squirrels, as they have for years, are knocking off or carrying away the large number of pears on our one pear tree. We hardly ever eat more than a few of them because the squirrels usually clean out everything before any are ripe enough for me. I did bring a few in to sit on the porch and ripen - if I didn't pick them too soon for that. The main purpose of the pear tree is to keep squirrels from eating other things.

The deer has returned. For the past three days we have seen deer tracks in the garden. They come up the side road from the front of the house - either choosing the mulched path through the flowers or just using the road. I could see tracks in the mulch leading to the gate to the back yard but didn't see any tracks immediately on the back yard side, but there were clearly new tracks near the potatoes and in the lettuce bed. We do have a fence around our yard (but five feet is no barrier for the deer) and a thick row of shrubs next to the fence on the road side. I haven't yet figured out where the deer jumps the fence nor have we actually seen a deer anywhere on our property this year. I don't see much damage if any at all - maybe a few pole beans nibbled higher than the ground hog would have reached - but my concern is what a deer could do. [I know what ground hogs like but what vegetables deer prefer.] The hoof print is no more than 2 inches so I assume this is not a large deer.

Snails remain abundant on our property but they are not such a problem in the vegetable garden as they were earlier. I still remove them when I see them.

We have picked about 12 1/2 pounds of blueberries so far this year - just from six bushes. Weight-wise that has been our biggest producer but squash (for sure) and tomatoes (I hope) will soon provide greater poundage (and they are a lot faster to pick).

I hope your garden is growing well.

Between Planting and Harvest

2009-07-09T08:55:00.005-04:00

This is the time of the year that is devoted to weeds (and, this year, snails). Most of the garden is planted, although I have collards, kale, pak choi and arugula seedlings in the cold frame. The big vegetables are not yet ready for harvest - tomatoes have green fruit but probably three weeks before any picking, peppers just have blossoms, pole beans are now beginning to flower (after having been repeatedly pruned by the groundhogs), the potatoes are in flower, and the garlic leaves are just beginning to dry.

We have been picking blueberries for about a week and the bushes are heavy with berries. For the first time we notice that some of the birds are interested in pecking at the berries. We continue to harvest Swiss chard and other greens. With a daily surveillance of the snails there is less loss to them.

I have planted broccoli from my seedlings and surrounded them with cut worm collars (I cut the cardboard backs of note pads into about one inch wide pieces and staple each one to form a circle). With no groundhogs these may grow. I hope so, this is the 4th planting.

One thing I have become much better about is the amount of seed I use when starting plants indoors. I became aware of this when I was growing milkweed seedlings and wanted to compare the germination rates of seeds that were cold stratified with those that weren't. To do that I planted three seeds in each cell in the six-packs. I was amazed at the germination rates (92% for those that were cold stratefied) and the result was that most cells had three seedlings in them. With the last broccoli I only had a few seeds left in the package and so I planted one to a cell. I had 17 seeds to plant and just set out 16 little seedlings from them.

In past years there have been times (admittedly rare) when I was current with weeding. Then we go away for a week - or life intervenes and I don't get to the garden for a week - and the weeds have taken over and I never catch up again. Do my vegetables grow that quickly? Of course not. I think I can weed an area one day and three days later it needs to be done again. I have been pleased with the clover that I planted among some crops. It discourages (but does not totally eliminate) weeds. The clover can best be used with larger plants - about the size of broccoli and kale - that will be taller than the clover.

This year I have grown a couple of new vegetables and I should have researched them more. I planted arugula (mostly because I wanted to see what it looked like). It grew very well but I didn't know when or how to harvest it. By the time I really noticed it, it had begun to flower. One website says once it flowers pull it out because it will be too bitter. I will be able to answer that soon because I did pull it out yesterday but saved some of the leaves in the process. Some of them will go into a salad today and then I will know if they are still worth eating. I have started more arugula but since it is a spring (cold weather) green it may not do well - unless summer continues to elude us.
Another new vegetable is red malabar spinach. Having read that it is like New Zealand spinach I treated it as such. But apparently the similarity is that it is a warm weather plant that is sort of like spinach. The New Zealand spinach plants I grew last year spread out in a bush form but I just learned that the red malabar spinach is a vine that will grow 6 to 8 feet tall. I need to create a trellis for it.

If anyone has grown arugula or red malabar spinach I would appreciate any suggestions on when to pick the leaves. I assume that I could start now with the spinach.

Although it has not been very hot yet I see that my pepper plants are beginning to grow well. So all is well right now.

Am I In Control Again?

2009-06-29T19:40:00.002-04:00

I learned this past weekend that other gardeners have the same problems that I have had. Slugs and snails seem to be having a banner year most everywhere and groundhogs are a problem for many.

In my garden the little groundhog was finally caught and removed. My pole beans are now growing. I had just surrounded most of the pole bean areas with fencing held down with tent stakes to keep out the groundhog. I have left them there just in case the family had other members living nearby. I transplanted some new little lettuce plants and maybe we will actually be able to eat some. The last lettuce we had for a salad came from the Regional Market this Saturday.

Snails (we have far more snails than slugs) still abound but I scout for them two or three times a day, dropping them into soapy water. This was the suggestion of another gardener and I prefer it to squashing them. I don't have anything under row covers right now so the snails cannot operate freely. I don't have anything to report yet on whether surrounding Chinese cabbage with bran meal and/or egg shells cuts down on the snail damage.

In general, the vegetables are beginning to show good growth. Tomatoes are forming. Greens (like Swiss chard, pak choi and zen) are providing part of our meals. I grew some snow peas that have done well but are tasteless. Back to sugar snaps next year. Summer squash have flowered and are beginning to develop. Cucumbers (I went with lemon cucumbers this year) had been nipped back by the groundhog but are now beginning to show growth and flowers. The potatoes have certainly grown quite well, at least above the ground. [Hard to know what's going on below the surface.] The fava beans my son brought back (as seeds) from Oregon are impressive and the soy beans, initially nipped off, have been replanted and are growing. Peppers and basil are not having their best year, but it is early. Garlic and leeks are doing nicely. Our blueberries are covered with berries and are beginning to ripen. My goal of weighing what we get from the garden fails with blueberries - they usually don't make it into the house. The raspberry plants are growing well. Japanese beetles have been found on the roses outside the fence but I haven't seen any on the raspberries yet. About fifteen years ago they were a major raspberry problem for several years. When I find them they will also be candidates for soapy water. We have some blackberries growing along the fence and we should get more of those than we did last year when the canes weren't supported.

Most of the planting is done. I still have collards, more kale, broccoli, pak choi, arugula, and Swiss chard starting in the cold frame. All in all the garden is doing well despite the early set-backs.

Always Room for Learning

2009-06-13T17:19:00.005-04:00

Maybe because I am retired and have more time to observe I am learning more this year than I recall in the past. Some of what I learn I would rather not know. For example, if you remove a groundhog it doesn't mean you will have no more groundhog damage. As soon as the groundhog that was wiping out the broccoli was removed neighbors told me that it wasn't the only one. And, sure enough, a day or two later my wife saw another groundhog in the garden area. This one seems clever enough to avoid traps. When we returned from a short trip to Pennsylvania the trap was empty but the third planting of broccoli was gone. Along with the Italian dandelions, virtually all of the lettuce including what was inside a hardware cloth cage - the ground hog just pushed it aside and clipped the lettuce - and some of the scallions. I haven't seen damage this week but perhaps that is because my son set up his tent in the back yard and has been sleeping there most nights. But he won't be there for the rest of the growing season.

While at the native plant conference in Millersville, PA, I attended a workshop on composting. We have been composting for years but the thrill of seeing steam rising from the compost pile ended some years ago when we stopped adding our next door neighbor's lush grass to the compost. (It was to avoid adding pesticides but these days most people mulch their grass, especially those who do not have chemical treatment for their lawn, so the supply has ended. We have virtually no lawn and so cannot supply our own grass.) I thought the lack of grass was the reason my compost no longer heated up but apparently it was really lack of moisture. Most of what has gone into the composter dries out very quickly and then sits there breaking down very, very slowly. I have never added water. So over the past two days I rebuilt the compost piles. I have a composter that consists of three 3 ft by 3 ft sections. They were all full of material. First I emptied out one section. Then I put some large stuff (pieces of branches mostly) into the bottom of the empty compost section and transferred material from the second section into that section, with the hose dripping water into it as I did. Then I put a large plastic bag that is full of straw that I gathered from the garden beds earlier on top of the compost pile to retain the moisture. Then I transferred the material from the third section into the second section after adding some large stuff at the bottom (to allow oxygen to reach the composting material). During the recent three inch rainfall I ran out and pulled the bags off the top of the two sections so that the rain would provide more moisture to the piles. I remember how quickly the piles used to sink when I was adding layers of new, lush green grass to the piles. I hope to report soon that when I turn the piles over - that is, move one pile into the empty section - steam rises.
Although I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about compost, it seems I lacked a few basic essentials.

I have also learned that solving one pest problem may create another. I have been unsuccessful with Chinese cabbage in the past because flea beetles (I think) eat the leaves so much that the little cabbages are unable to grow. This year I put the Chinese cabbage and pak choi under row covers. That prevented the flea beetles from attacking the little plants. They grew very nicely but when we began to harvest the Chinese cabbage we found that they were covered with snails. The snails were protected from any predators by the row covers. I probably picked a hundred snails (and a couple slugs) from the plants. Most of the leaves had so many holes that they were unusable (well, at least unpalatable). I have removed the row covers and spread bran meal around the area (something I read said that they eat the bran meal and die) and kept picking off whatever slugs and snails I could find. The centers of the plants are now doing pretty well. I harvested one yesterday and after removing a couple of layers of the outer leaves the rest didn't look too bad and there were relatively few snails or slugs on them. The snails and slugs seem to come off in the water when the cabbages are washed. We generally wash these things three times to eliminate the undesired protein.
Since I have started some more pak choi under a row cover I better get out there tomorrow with my bran meal to surround the plants. If this works I will have the procedure for next year - row covers with bran meal. And inspect them from time to time.

Not all is dealing with pests. Potatoes appear to be growing well. (In the previous post I was wondering where they were.) They have gotten to the point where I have no more soil to hill them up with. The tomatoes are beginning to take off (which means I need to stake them soon). The peppers are holding their own and should take off as the weather warms. Even the dead looking asparagus crowns which I thought I had buried far deeper than they could deal with have come up. I can count 22 little shoots from what I think were 25 crowns. Something has cut off a couple of them (cutworms?) but the first of those has sent up another shoot so I expect they will be okay. The peas are forming pods, the fava beans look good, dill is every where, the summer squash are growing well (I took one out from under the row cover), parsley and basil, which had started very slowly, seem to be established, the kale and Swiss chard have been good, the spinach is finished although I have also planted a New Zealand type spinach and the ground cherries look good. Both the pole beans and the soybeans are troubled by something that snips off some of the growing tips - groundhog for the pole beans I suspect because the cuts are 4 to 6 inches above the ground. Weeds are developing nicely also. But that seems to be true even in bad years.

Some Things Are Discouraging

2009-05-18T12:32:00.002-04:00

Maybe I am impatient. I planted potatoes on May 4th (two weeks ago) and don't see any sign of potato sprouts yet. The pieces of potato that I planted seemed in good condition and those several that I didn't cut into pieces should not have rotted if that is was happened to the others. I planted asparagus crowns April 29th (two and a half weeks ago) and don't see any sign of asparagus shoots. Admittedly the asparagus crowns really looked in bad shape - more like dry strings - but I know that 20+ years ago when I planted our current asparagus they didn't look like they had potential either. But I can't imagine that these asparagus crowns have the strength to send anything through six inches of soil. I looked at an article on asparagus several days ago and the advice of that article would have been to not buy asparagus crowns that looked like the ones I received.

For several weeks I have been disappointed in the growth of all the lettuce that I have planted. It just seemed to be very slow. And a few were disappearing. In fact, one group of six or eight seedlings that I planted in one spot were all gone several days later. I blamed slugs. Then, on Friday I discovered that almost all of my broccoli plants that were in three different locations had been chewed almost to the ground. My immediate thought was groundhog. But a few minutes later seven year old Julia next door called over that they had seen a deer jumping the fence from our yard into their yard that morning. So then I thought "deer". Saturday I went to the Regional Market to buy more broccoli and friends there didn't think that deer would eat broccoli. Sounded more like groundhog to them.
This morning every one of the twelve new broccoli plants was eaten to the ground. And the lettuce looks more chewed than stunted so I think those plants have been trimmed back by the groundhog also. And the parsley that I planted out recently has been cut back.
We used to have a ground hog living under our shed until I put hardware cloth around the base of the shed and down into the ground. No problem for a number of years. Last year there seemed to be one episode of severe damage to the brussels sprouts. I was also told that there was a ground hog living a couple of houses away under a shed. This year the damage seems to be daily. I am pretty sure that fencing will not work unless it is fairly high and set about a foot into the ground. The fence that I have around part of the garden to discourage rabbits certainly hasn't and won't stop a determined ground hog.
Now I am afraid to plant out the warm weather vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers) for fear that some (or all) of them will be delightful treats for the ground hog.

Some Early Mistakes

2009-05-12T18:40:00.001-04:00

The gardening year is young but I have already discovered a few things I do that need to be changed:
(1) In early March (the 14th to be exact) I seeded the area within a wooden frame that has a glass cover with various kinds of lettuce, some Swiss chard, and some other greens. While they all germinated germination and growth was very slow. I did much better with seed that I started indoors and transplanted outside later. Having this frame in one of my beds also interfered with my ability to follow my garden plan because lettuce wasn't scheduled for that space. When I did remove the frame it fell apart so that will help not repeat this mistake.
(2) I still have a habit of using more seed than I need to. For example I may put four or five tomato seeds in a little pot. Generally they all germinate and I am loath to thin them out. But I only use as many pots as I want plants, so two seeds would be enough. But I am learning to snip off extra seedlings (or, at least, some of them). Outside I also tend to overseed. This all goes back to Jim Crockett saying something to the effect that if you are stingy with your pea seeds your peas will be stingy with you. Maybe that is true for peas in the early Spring but it doesn't seem to be necessary for all vegetables.
(3) I still set out seedlings too soon. Nice weather just doesn't mean that the soil is warm enough for little seedlings to flourish. And often I have not hardened them off long enough. So I am putting seedlings that are too small and not properly prepared into the garden before the soil (and sometimes the air) is warm enough. While they try hard to please me they would do better if I waited a couple of weeks more.

So that I don't feel totally full of mistakes, I am happy to say that I have actually begun using the row cover material that I bought last year. That year I put it over an area where I had just planted pak choi and Chinese cabbages seeds. (Flea beetles seem to love these plants.) But with the row cover there I did not water the seeds and germination was poor or many of the emerging seedlings dried up, but the number of plants was very small. And, they also had flea beetles anyway. This year I started the plants indoors and put the row cover over them immediately after planting, making sure that it was pretty well secured around the edges. They seem to be doing very well and we may be eating some of them in the next few days. So that looks like one success.

May there be more.

It's Hard To Wait

2009-05-07T18:42:00.002-04:00

Okay, so the cold weather vegetables have been planted and are growing nicely - especially with yesterday's gentle rain - and we aren't yet at "the average last frost date", but I can't wait to plant the warm weather vegetables. After all the 10th of May is only a few days away and with the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the weather is warmer and the newspaper doesn't show any cold nights in the immediate future, so why not get a jump? I planted my pole beans two days ago. I thought about planting the tomato seedlings but I have been "stung" before by planting tomatoes early only to have a frost seriously set them back. Anyway they are not actually big enough and haven't been hardened off enough. Not to mention that the spinach that occupies the bed where the tomatoes are supposed to go aren't even close to picking size. I guess I can wait until the 25th or the 30th.

Not that there hasn't been enough to do in the garden recently. Taking care of the seedlings indoor takes a certain amount of time especially because I started about 250 milkweed seedlings for a local nature center's fund raising plant sale. Boy will I be happy to deliver those. They have been ready to go for about three weeks and I have visions of them drying up for lack of space in their little containers.

I had this great garden plan all mapped out. Then we decided that the flower garden that was going to become part of the vegetable garden should remain in flowers. Since I then didn't have the place to transplant the pak choi and Chinese cabbages I just put them in a different bed. But that was where the new asparagus was supposed to go. And the little seedlings in the glass covered frame really didn't grow as quickly as I expected so that space remained tied up. [The seeds started indoors later that thos ein the frame have done much better.] I decided to scatter the cucmbers around the garden instead of putting them all in one place where pests could easily find them. Today I went out to see what I had put where and where I had empty spaces. Then I sat down and rewrote the plan around what I had already done. Somehow everything still fits. Part of the reason is that I cut way back on the number of tomato plants because Janet isn't supposed to eat tomatoes.

Right now the swiss chard, lettuce, spinach, zen (a green), new asparagus, peas, broccoli, garlic (some from October, some planted in April), new raspberries (and the dry little sticks are beginning to send out shoots), fava beans, scallions, potatoes, fennel, kale and leeks are in the garden. Plus a few nasturtiums as companion plants.

We ordered a number of new fruit plants - two cherry trees, two concord grapes, two more rhubarb, a currant, and a cranberry. The directions were to plant them within 8 hours. It took a little longer than that but they were all in the ground within 24 hours.

One thing I have done this year is cover some of the empty garden beds with compost. Then I can just plant seedlings through the compost. Will this keep down the weeds? Or will they grow even better with the compost. Another thing I have done is grow red clover among some of the larger plants - broccoli and kale and around the new raspberry - as a cover crop. I did scatter a little too much seed so they might crowd each other out.

I think this year I succeeded in using a row cover over the pak choi and Chinese cabbage. I started them indoors and then transplanted them and immediately covered them with the row cover material. They seem to be growing beautifully and not being eaten by little black bugs. Maybe I will try the same with the summer squash. I also started those indoors and they should be ready soon after the 15th of the month. Will that keep the squash vine borer off of them - at least until they flower and the cover needs to be removed?

I have been much better at record keeping this year. That also takes time. My planting schedule has been very helpful in keeping me doing what needs to be done. In the past there were always some things that didn't get planted because I didn't have a written schedule of what to plant when.

Nice Weather Again

2009-04-09T15:56:00.002-04:00

We have had a string of cold or rainy days where it is too unpleasant to be in the garden. Today it was sunny and warmed up some.
It is still basically cleaning up and preparing time. I did get the cold frame out of the shed so that some of the seedlings can spend a little time beginning to harden off. They are otherwise ready to plant out. I did plant six little broccoli seedlings today and put small tables over them to keep the sun off until they get established. If they don't survive it would be no tragedy as I have more than enough to replace them. I usually use as many little pots as I want plants but put a number of seeds in each and end up with two to three times as many plants as I need.

For several years we have had the water level in the pond drop faster than it used to. We thought this was related to the amount of vegetation which has become established and which is transpiring water vapor into the air. But this year the loss of water was noticeable from the time we started the pump (March 27th) and could not have been because of the vegetation. The loss seemed to be more than last year so we began the search to find the problem. Clearly it wasn't in the pond itself because when the pump was off the water level there remained steady. The obvious first place to look was the "bog", which is a small area below the first falls where we arranged for some water to go off to the side and form a wet area, but still within the liner. Robins like that spot to gather mud for their nests. I looked around that area and didn't see any problem. I don't recall whether the pond pump was running at the time or not. But later events show that my search must not have been thorough. Next was to check where the pipe from the pump connected to the skimmer and to the bio-falls. It was easy to see that there was no problem at the skimmer end but the pipe to the bio-falls was a foot and a half below the surface so that took some digging. No problem there. Next was to uncover the entire length of the pipe. That also took some digging at the bio-falls end but not far from there the pipe was only a couple of inches below the surface. When we made the pond the pipe was laid on the surface of the ground and covered with some sod that we removed to make the pond and stream. There was no visible leak along the pipe. That left the stream that started at the bio-falls and went to the pond. I covered this with two large pieces of plastic so that the water (mostly) would run over the plastic and not the stream. My intention was to remove the lower piece of plastic later in order to see if the leak was in the upper part or the lower part. The problem was that having the water run over the plastic didn't seem to significantly reduce the loss of water. It was at about that time that Janet took a careful look at the bog and noticed that water seemed to be oozing over the liner along one edge of the bog. Turns out that was the problem. It has been three or four days since I pulled the liner higher and the water level is not dropping. Now why didn't I notice that when I looked at the bog? Would have saved a lot of work. Embarrassing.

So far what is actually in the garden are the lettuces and greens that I planted in the glass covered frame. With the exception of one row of lettuce everything there is coming along nicely. I planted spinach and peas and the spinach is coming up but no sign of the peas yet. It has been a while since I grew peas so I don't know how long it takes them to germinate. I did see one seed that was on the surface of the soil and was just beginning to germinate. I have been freezing some of last year's garlic and some of them had begun to sprout so I have planted those in the garden. They won't grow very large (the ones planted in October are growing quite nicely) and I have scattered them around the garden partly to help repel pests. I need to make a note to freeze the garlic a little earlier than April. Then today I set out the six broccoli. Most of the rest of the beds are covered with straw. I am working on sifting some compost out of my compost pile and dig in small amounts of that just before I plant.

Inside, the tomatoes are just beginning to germinate. Chinese cabbage and pak choi (both of which I have had trouble growing by starting in the garden) are up and growing under the lights. A lot of my indoor space is currently occupied with milkweed seedlings being grown for Monarch butterfly gardens.

The three rain barrels in the garden area are set up and full and with the pond not needing so much water this year I should not lack for water for the garden.

It's Too Nice To Do Nothing

2009-03-20T16:38:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was sunny. Today I am tired and sore. There is a relationship.

It is a little early to plant although I wouldn't be surprised if people have already planted spinach and peas and other early spring vegetables. My soil certainly can "be worked". I'm thinking of planting peas tomorrow and maybe spinach. I looked in the "lettuce frame" today and see that the broccoli raab is beginning to emerge along with one of the lettuces.

But, yesterday was a clean-up day. I have a three part composter (I believe the plan came from Crockett's Victory Garden) that receives garden waste and those kitchen scraps that don't go to the composting worms in the cellar. I used to make compost fairly quickly when I could layer the garden stuff with my neighbor's newly mown grass. But most people mulch their grass these days and if the grass is really growing nicely it means that chemical additives are likely creating the lushness and that is something we don't want in the vegetable garden. So I no longer experience that early spring joy of a steaming compost pile. I still get compost, it just takes a lot longer. But one job yesterday was to break up the accumulated flower and vegetable stalks from last fall and move everything to two of the three sections. That job didn't quite get finished because the material in the lower half of the soon-to-be-empty section is still frozen.

I also spread straw over most of the vegetable garden beds. My son left behind the better part of two bales of straw (from the cob oven he constructed in the back corner of the yard) last fall and I used those. I have read several sources recently that strongly suggest not leaving any part of your garden uncovered.

My son also collected more bricks than he needed for his oven. Actually he used some of the bricks that I had lining the sides of my raised beds for the oven and brought in others that he gave me to replace those. I spent some time on my hands and knees replacing the bricks that he had removed.

We are removing the yellow raspberries that we have in the garden and planting another variety. I spent some time - on my hands and knees again - digging around some of the stumps and pulling them out.

Three days ago I set up two of our rain barrels and they both filled during the rain the next day. I have three more to set out. The purpose for the rain barrels is to provide non-chlorinated water for the garden and for the two ponds. One of our ponds has a circulating pump (not yet started up for the season) with the water then running down a stream bed to the pond, the other pond has no circulation. Toads gather in our ponds at mating time and lay their eggs. One year we saw thousands of our tiny, tiny toads develop and then leave the pond to seek their fortunes. But then recently we have seen eggs, tadpoles, and then nothing. One year we believe that grackles ate the tadpoles. But we also believe that they may be sensitive to chlorine and that when we add water from our faucet to the ponds we may be killing them. This year will be a test. If we see lots of little toads hopping away from our ponds it will suggest that the chlorine was the problem.
Anyway, one of my knees is sore, my back was stiff, and one wrist felt weak. Today is a day to rest up so I can wear myself out again tomorrow.

Nice Days for a Nice Beginning; The First Frog

2009-03-15T20:48:00.006-04:00

Yesterday (Saturday, March 14th) and today were very nice days - in or close to the 50s in temperature and sunny. Yesterday I planted lettuce, zen (a very nice green), broccoli raab, and swiss chard outside in a wooden enclosure with a glass top. This had been sitting in one of the garden beds all winter in the hope that some lettuce seed that I planted in late October would begin to grow. Several previous years I started lettuce in September and had seedlings to transplant into this bed and they would grow for a while, sit there all winter, and then start growing again in the spring so that we had edible lettuce in April. But last year I was too late (back injury). The soil in that enclosure was warm and certainly ready to work yesterday and so I expect that the seeds that I just planted will germinate and grow.

Today I turned under the winter rye that I had planted in one bed last September and then I moved inside to start broccoli, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, parsley and chamomile. Back on the 5th I started leeks and scallions and they have already germinated and are under the lights in the cellar.

I am trying to do much better this year in keeping records of what I start (including the variety), when, and when the seeds germinate and when I plant them out. Hopefully at the other end I will record when harvesting begins and ends. That is where I have been really weak and so I never know when to expect the first tomato or other vegetable.

Other than one frog that slid across the ice on the pond three days ago when we pulled out the pipe that we used to allow gases to escape, we saw the first intentionally appearing frog today. So one, at least, of the 12 to 15 frogs that we had last year made it through the winter. We have also seen one that didn't. Since our frogs were not mature enough to produce tadpoles we needed the adults to make it through the winter. No adults survived the 2007-2008 winter so as far as our yard was concerned they were on the brink of extinction. So now we need only one of a sex different from the one that appeared today.

At Long Last

2009-03-03T16:15:00.003-05:00

This has been a very long winter because it started in November and any break - like a January thaw - was pretty weak and short. But on March 1st I noticed that our pussy willow was showing the end of winter. Little fuzzies were beginning to emerge from the buds. And at the Edible Gardening meeting on February 28th several people reported having seen their first red winged blackbird. When I was a kid I always looked for the first robin as a sign of spring but some robins stay around during the winter. My wife's records for 2001-2008 show sightings of robins in all months of the year, although not necessarily every year. The numbers are less in the winter than the rest of the year, but they are here. But apparently the appearance of the red winged blackbird is a sure sign.

Another hopeful sign is that the dawn is noticeably earlier and dark noticeably later as the days pass.

So it is time to prepare for outdoor gardening. I am setting up a table in the cellar with fluorescent lights above for starting more seedlings than I have in the past. I think I have washed (and rinsed with a little bleach) enough little pots and six packs for all the edibles that I want to start, along with a lot of milkweed in connection with my wife's Monarch butterfly garden activities. [I never knew that Monarch butterfly larva only eat milkweed. No milkweed, no Monarchs.]

All my seed packets have arrived now - from four different sources. By the time I get them started the snow will be gone from the garden and the soil will be workable and it will be warm enough to be out there. I hope to see lots of other people doing the same.

My 2009 Planting Schedule

2009-01-30T10:22:00.005-05:00

This is my planting schedule for this year. Obviously dates may vary depending on the condition of the soil, temperature, etc., so these are really my guidelines for the year. Some guideline is better than wondering each day what should be done in the garden. The "d" refers to days to germination. The (T) indicates that seedlings are being planted. The x" shows the distance between plants.

March 15 Indoor
Broccoli (6d )
Chamomile (need light)
Leeks (10-12d) 6” pots
Lettuce (6d)
Parsley (11d)
Parsnips(?) (17d)
Scallions (9d)

April 1 Indoor
Basil (7d)
Chinese Cabbage
Cucumbers April 15 in peat pots
Fennel, bulb
Ground cherries (14d)
Marigolds (6d)
Nasturtium
New Zea Spinach scratch and soak first
Pak choi (?)
Peppers (18d)
Tomato (7d)

April Outdoor
Broccoli (T ) 4-30 18” Tolerates shade, interplant lettuce, cutworm collars
Claytonia 4-30
Dandelion (5d) 4-8 6-8” Tolerates shade
Fava beans 4-1
Garlic 4-30 4-5”
Leeks (T) 4-30 6” Partial shade, in trench
Lettuce (+T) 4-1 8” Tolerates shade
Pak Choi (+T) 4-15 (covered) 6”
Parsley (T) 4-30
Parsnips (+T) 4-30 Tolerates shade, seed into garden in late May, in cones.
Peas 4-1 Partial shade, in 3” x 6” trench
Potato 4-15 12” Full sun, acid soil
Scallions (T) 4-15, 4-30 Full sun
Spinach 4-1 (or earlier) Tolerates shade, New seed
Swiss chard 4-30 12”
Zen 4-10, 4-30

May 15 Outdoor

Basil (T) 5-15
Chinese cabbage (T) 5-30
Cucumbers (T) 5-30 Full sun, under black plastic
Cucumbers 5-15 Prepare area
Dandelions 5-15
Edamame (6d) 5-25 Full sun
Fennel, bulb (T) 5-15 12” Full sun
Ground cherry (T) 5-15 24” Full sun
Lettuce 5-15, 5-30
New Zealand Spinach 5-30 Transplants
Pepper (T) 5-30 12” Full sun, cut worm collars
Pole beans (5d) 5-15 (if warm) Full sun
Scallions 5-20
Squash, summer 5-15 Full sun
Swiss chard 5-15 12” Tolerates shade
Tomato (T) 5-15 3’ Full sun, eggshells
Zen 5-15, 5-30

Mid-Summer
Broccoli 6-1
Chinese Cabbage 7-1 (covered) 12” Partial shade
Collards 7-15 6”=18”
Cucumbers 7-1 Direct sow
Garlic 10-1
Kale 6-20 1”=8” Cover until germination
Spinach 7-4 1”=3”=6” Tolerates shade
Summer Squash (2) 7-1
Zen 6-15, 7-1

Marigolds go with beans, potato, tomato.
Nasturtium go with broccoli, cucumber, kale, squash.

Not As Much Fun As Gardening

2009-01-08T20:10:00.002-05:00

As a joint initiative toward straightening up the cellar and preparing for this year's garden I have spent a couple hours the past three days cleaning the little pots, six-packs and trays that I use for starting plants from seed. In addition to vegetables I will also be trying to germinate a lot of milkweed for Monarch Waystation distribution. As a result I need to clean a lot of pots and six-packs. I generally use little green 2-inch pots for vegetables and will use the six-packs for the milkweed (and maybe the marigolds and nasturtiums). Each tray will hold 36 pots or 8 six-packs.

I wash out the pots and six-packs with warm soapy water, trying to dump out any potting soil left from the last use first. After they have soaked for a couple of minutes I clean them out as best I can with my fingers and transfer them to a basin with warm water and a little clorox bleach. After that I set them on trays and let them dry for a day and then stack them up ready for use. It's not exciting but my hands are pretty clean when I am done.

I have space for two trays of seedlings under fluorescent lights in the cellar. But with the milkweed (and the increase in the variety of vegetables that I plan to start indoors) I will need to set up more space for more trays. That's one of the reasons to start cleaning up way in advance of the time (around March 15) when I actually start seed germination.

Cover Crops

2009-01-06T09:54:00.004-05:00

Rarely have I used cover crops. But almost everything I read recommends them either for enriching the soil or weed control. This past year I did plant winter rye in most of one bed. It grew thickly and quickly. Other than that I have left the garden beds empty for the winter. I have never planted a cover crop in the spring.

Now I see that there are cover crops that can be planted in the spring and turned under in the summer so that a fall crop can be planted in the same bed. One recommendation for a spring cover crop is buckwheat. There are also cover crops that can be planted in the summer and turned under in the fall. One source recommended sweet clover. Annual rye can be planted in the late summer and turned under the next spring. It apparently does not survive the winter and I am not sure why it would be preferable to winter rye. The only recommendation of winter rye I have found is in Rodales All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening where it is listed for late summer or fall planting. That book also lists annual ryegrass for spring planting where other sources list is only for fall. I believe I planted annual ryegrass one year and it did not do well.

I need to make a note to dig the winter rye under in early spring - probably about the same time as the garden is ready for spinach and other early spring crops.

Winter rye and buckwheat would be "green manure" as opposed to alfalfa or clover that are legumes and add nitrogen to the soil.

Soybeans are also listed as a green manure. I assume that means that when my soy beans have been harvested I should dig the plants into the soil as opposed to adding them to my compost pile. Or do I dig the roots into the soil and put the rest of the plant in the compost pile? Another question to try to answer.

So now back to the garden plan to see what is appropriate to plant in the spaces that have been left for cover crops or that have only a spring or a fall vegetable crop.

Plan Early, Change Often

2009-01-04T09:20:00.002-05:00

Planning the garden would seem essential to making really effective use of the available space. My past practice has been to plant whatever is ready to be planted in some open space. This sometimes means that short plants later end up in the shade of taller plants. And, if there is something to companion planting, with some plants next to incompatible plants. Sometimes I don't consider what will happen as plants grow. Last year, as an example, I planted the cucumbers on one side of a four foot wide bed and soybeans (edamame) on the other side. The cucumbers used the soybeans to climb on but the soybeans didn't benefit from this. I should have anticipated that.

This year I had a plan complete in late December. But then we chose a few new crops; I read a little more about companion planting; read that the winter rye in the bed where I planned to plant potatoes in mid-April needed to be dug in for a month before planting; and then we decided to dig out the asparagus after the 2009 harvest. These changes required re-planning the garden. I also wanted to be able to just rotate the beds north one bed at a time each year. That meant making sure that I didn't plant something like tomatoes in the same location in two different beds such that tomatoes one bed didn't rotate in the next year or two to a place where tomatoes had already grown. [I have trouble with leaves wilting and plants being less productive.] So now I have my second detailed plan for this year. Since I have already ordered seeds perhaps I won't have to change the plan again.

Companion Planting

2008-12-30T20:32:00.005-05:00

I have heard references to "companion planting" occasionally but never paid much attention, other than to plant marigolds here and there throughout my vegetable garden because someone, at some time, said it discouraged some kind of garden pest. But this year I have done a little reading and have put together a compilation of various plants that may help (or hinder) others. I am going to try to use some of that information this year.
It seems that much of the evidence about the effectiveness of planting one vegetable with a "companion" is anecdotal. (Agriculture schools must not have big PhD programs or we would have some hard evidence.)

Some plants are referred to as "allies" of other plants and some are said to be "incompatible". In The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing (by Tanya Denckla) "allies" are plants that are said to repel insects "or enhance the growth or flavor of the target plant". "Incompatibles" may play a negative role in the other plants growth. Marigolds and Nasturtium appear as allies for a lot of vegetables and since they are edible I plan to distribute them throughout the garden. That way we get two for one - flowers to eat from plants that may help other plants in the garden.
I will take a closer look at those plants that are "incompatible" with what I am growing. If the information I have has any validity then I need to keep onions and garlic away from the pole beans - apparently they will both be happier - and the spinach and cucumbers away from the potatoes. [If anyone who happens across this post wants a copy of the chart I have compiled, let me know.]

Another concept that I heard nothing about until I looked at Vegetable Gardening for Dummies by Charlie Nardozzi is planting by the phases of the moon. Hard as it is to think how the moon would affect what you plant apparently ancient gardeners believed ("noticed" is the word in the book) that some vegetables do better when planted during the appropriate phase of the moon. If nothing else trying this gives a reason to go out into the garden at night (although it may be easier to look in the newspaper to see what phase the moon is in.) Supposedly the first seven days after the new moon (that is, no visible moon) is best for vegetables that produce their seeds on parts of the plant that are not eaten. Basil would be an example. The next seven days (half moon to full moon) plant vegetables in which the seeds are eaten, such as peas and tomatoes. The next seven days, plant root crops. And then when the moon is diminishing from half moon to nothing, don't plant. There are plenty of other tasks to do. By the way, I assume this doesn't mean you actually have to plant at night.
What about a carrot? It has seeds on the part of the plant not eaten (first seven days) but is a root crop (third seven days). Let's not get too serious about this.

What's Already There

2008-12-27T14:47:00.001-05:00

Even though the garden is covered with snow some of the things we grow are already there. I have to plan around them. Most have been there long enough that I know where they are. There are blueberries, raspberries, and asparagus all occupying significant space. Also we planted garlic in October so I have to work around that. I did sow lettuce seeds in a wooden frame that now has a glass cover. The past several years the seedlings had a good start before they needed to be covered - in fact I had transplanted them so they were properly spaced. They then just sat through the winter and when Spring came were ready to start growing and ready to begin harvesting in a few weeks. This year they didn't get a good start and were certainly not big enough to transplant. I tried to look today to see if any were growing but the snow had turned solid and I couldn't brush it off. Probably I don't have to plan around that lettuce this year. The only other thing that is in the garden are parsnips. But they will be harvested as soon as the soil can be dug. It will be interesting to see how they did this year. While we have good soil it is full of small bits of shale and my parsnips haven't grown into nice large single roots in the past. This year I started them indoors and then transplanted them carefully into cones made with newspaper and filled with sifted soil and set each one into a cone shaped hole in the soil. Unfortuntately they were right next to the flower garden and the flowers eventually grew tall enough to partially shade the parsnips. This is one of the experiments that I can't judge until Spring.

I'll get it right this time!

2008-12-25T18:49:00.000-05:00

The seed catalogs are arriving. I have already planned out where each vegetable, herb and fruit will go. And, this year, I hope I can keep to the plan. I have grown vegetables for more than 30 years always with as good intentions as I have this year. But in every one of those years a time has come when the garden just "got away". The weeds took over, or harvesting didn't keep up, or watering was inadequate and suddenly control was gone for the rest of the season. That didn't mean we got nothing from the garden, only that we could have done a lot better.

One reason was that I never had a clear plan. I have learned from Toastmasters that if you want to speak effectively you have to plan in detail what you are going to say. If I want to garden effectively I have to plan - on paper - what I am going to do. The vague plan in my mind doesn't hack it.

I have one big advantage this year and that is that I am retired. I can allocate time each day for gardening. I also have had time to plan and time to read more about gardening. I'll get it right this time.