I got some new seeds in the mail today. They are as follows:
Purple Dark Opal Basil
Lacinato Kale (the other seeds I had didn't germinate for some unknown reason)
Lamb's Ears
Sylvetta Arugula
Lovage
Hyssop
Amado Coneflower
Prize Choy
Tatsoi
Purple Vienna Kohlrabi
Chives
Tall Russell Lupine
Mrs. Burns Lemon Basil
I'm trying to establish a perennial border to keep down on weeds, so that's why I got all the strange herbs that I don't cook with. The greens will be grown in the coming months.
Friday, July 20, 2012
A Drip Before the Deluge
So here we find ourselves in the middle of July, with more work to do that there are hours to do it, and I'm not talking about weeding. We started harvesting garlic on Tuesday, pulling out some 139 heads, equaling just under 16 pounds of garlic. Lacking a shed or barn, we were hard-pressed to find a place to cure it. We ended up stringing it up in an unused as of yet portion of the chicken run, and putting a tarp over it with a support pole in the center sort of like a mini circus tent.
After not receiving and rain for weeks, we got almost an inch on Wednesday along with some hail. Most of the corn is now lodged, the runner bean poles fell over, amongst other more minor things. We learned last year to leave the corn alone, and it may straighten itself back up using its powerful brace roots.
The Rose Gold potatoes that we planted in mid-April are ready to come up. The leaves were starting to get pretty crunchy looking about a week ago, and after the storm hit us on Wednesday, I went to survey the damage. The potato plants looked fine, it's just that the Rose Golds looked like yellow sticks coming out of the hay mulch. Hopefully tomorrow it'll be dry enough to do some digging.
Some tomatoes have blossom end rot, but I'm hoping it'll rectify itself. BER happens due to a lack of calcium. One possibility is that a large fluctuation in moisture disrupts the previous amount of uptake of calcium to the soil, temporarily causing a lack of calcium available to the fruits. This is the case with us in the last week as we went from .05 inches of rain in July to over 2 inches in a matter of hours.
Our chickens finally learned to stay inside the coop when it's raining instead of miserably standing around in it. A very large tom has been gobbling in the pasture every morning this week, and I got my first glimpse of this year's fawns.
After not receiving and rain for weeks, we got almost an inch on Wednesday along with some hail. Most of the corn is now lodged, the runner bean poles fell over, amongst other more minor things. We learned last year to leave the corn alone, and it may straighten itself back up using its powerful brace roots.
The Rose Gold potatoes that we planted in mid-April are ready to come up. The leaves were starting to get pretty crunchy looking about a week ago, and after the storm hit us on Wednesday, I went to survey the damage. The potato plants looked fine, it's just that the Rose Golds looked like yellow sticks coming out of the hay mulch. Hopefully tomorrow it'll be dry enough to do some digging.
Some tomatoes have blossom end rot, but I'm hoping it'll rectify itself. BER happens due to a lack of calcium. One possibility is that a large fluctuation in moisture disrupts the previous amount of uptake of calcium to the soil, temporarily causing a lack of calcium available to the fruits. This is the case with us in the last week as we went from .05 inches of rain in July to over 2 inches in a matter of hours.
Our chickens finally learned to stay inside the coop when it's raining instead of miserably standing around in it. A very large tom has been gobbling in the pasture every morning this week, and I got my first glimpse of this year's fawns.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Harvest Record 7/6-7/14
I'm sitting here, munching on a cucumber and listening to the rain fall. We've been needing it bad, and I'm so grateful for it! I hope our garden perks up from all this great H2O! One downfall from the rain is that one of the chickens seems to be unhappy about it. From what I gather, she's not sick or injured, just grumpy about the rain. Will and I gave her a look-over, and she seems fine, but we'll keep an eye out tomorrow when it's not raining to make sure she perks up after the rain, too.
- 7/6:
- boston pickling cucumbers: 15.1 oz (4 cukes)
- 7/7:
- bp cucumbers: 5.1 oz (1 cuke)
- chinese turnip (?): 3.4 oz
- Will's dad was given seeds from one of his Chinese co-workers, who has limited English. We grew them, and they looked like a cross between a red globe radish and a purple top turnip. It also turned out that it was rotten on the inside, so we didn't get to taste it. Bummer.
- romaine lettuce: 8.9 oz (1 head)
- Despite the heat, the lettuce is still doing fine, since it is well shaded under the cucumber plants. Some of its garden leaves are bitter, but that's to be expected. The chickens don't seem to mind these outer leaves.
- black radishes: 24 lbs.
- This group + the other already harvested black radishes got pickled and jarred up, making 9 pints of pickled radishes! Yum!
- 7/8:
- blue potato: 2.2 oz (1 potato) - test potato!
- red potato: 1 oz (1 potato) - test potato!
- bp cucumbers: 1 lb 4.6 oz (6 cukes)
- fava bean: .7 oz (2 pods)
- Our fava beans were kind of pathetic this year, but we asked the farm-stand lady to ask her farmer his secret to big beautiful pods, so maybe we'll have better fava beans next year!
- rhubarb swiss chard: 1.4 oz
- 7/9:
- beets: 5.4 oz (3 beets) - test beets!
- bp cucumbers: 14.3 oz (4 cukes)
- 7/10:
- bp cucumbers: 6.9 oz (3)
- 7/11:
- kale: 2.7 oz
- rhubarb swiss chard: 2.1 oz
- killarney red garlic: 3 oz (1 head) - test garlic!
- Ready to come up! Just need a dry day where we're home!)
- 7/12:
- sad cucumbers: 6.8 oz (1 lemon & 2 bp)
- These cucumbers were the victim of a 'friend' with a tiny mouth. I suppose I will never know for sure who the culprit was, but it was most likely either the juvenile woodchuck or the baby bunny. I cried in the garden when I found these unfortunate veggies.
- 7/14:
- creole red garlic: 2.9 oz (2 heads)
- The stalks on these heads were totally dead, but they made little heads anyway! I think we'll be the garlic king and queen from now on...
- romaine lettuce: 8.7 oz (1 head)
- One head of lettuce a week is perfect for our 2 person family!
- rat-tail radish pods: .1 oz (3 pods)
- The pods are the edible part of the variety of radish, not the root. They are very prolific, but we wanted to test them out to make sure we didn't die or throw up upon consuming them. We had them in spring rolls, and I'm not dead yet!
- bp cucumbers: 13 oz (4)
Rain and Rabbits
On the 4th of this month, I planted approximately 200 beans. Two days ago, there were 58 remaining seedlings as the rest had been munched. Today, there are 17. We're one less woodchuck, but still host to an ever-growing rabbit.
I planted 4 more packets of beans today, and I'm about to go out to the store for 4 more. It's getting iffy on planting these beans. Depending on the variety, they take about 45-60 days to mature. It's the 15th, and based on first frost dates I've seen, the frost will come as early as September 15th, but we might get lucky til the end of the ninth month. Only time will tell of course.
Yesterday, I spotted the first corn tassles. There are an increasing amount of green tomatoes on the vine, and the beans I planted in spring (a little late though) are producing pods that are starting to plump up. The garlic can be pulled up any day, but I want to wait a few more days.
There's rain in the forecast for today. I really hope it comes. Thursday or Friday, there was some water on the driveway when I woke up, but it burned off fast. We got less than a half an inch. Otherwise, it hasn't rained in weeks. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed.
I planted 4 more packets of beans today, and I'm about to go out to the store for 4 more. It's getting iffy on planting these beans. Depending on the variety, they take about 45-60 days to mature. It's the 15th, and based on first frost dates I've seen, the frost will come as early as September 15th, but we might get lucky til the end of the ninth month. Only time will tell of course.
Yesterday, I spotted the first corn tassles. There are an increasing amount of green tomatoes on the vine, and the beans I planted in spring (a little late though) are producing pods that are starting to plump up. The garlic can be pulled up any day, but I want to wait a few more days.
There's rain in the forecast for today. I really hope it comes. Thursday or Friday, there was some water on the driveway when I woke up, but it burned off fast. We got less than a half an inch. Otherwise, it hasn't rained in weeks. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
The Weeds Are Growing Like... Well, Weeds
It's July, and it's hot. I'm thinking about water and weeds. I've observed in previous seasons that immediately after weeding an area, the plants suffer some wilting and shock, and the soil surface dries out and looks like beach sand. I interplant various species intensively, use mulch, and sow cover crops as religiously as possible.
Weeds are just doing their jobs, as I am mine, protecting the soil's fertility and host to a multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that support life, photosynthesizing life or otherwise. Weeds are the pioneers, reclaiming disturbed land, covering it over as quickly as possible, over time leading to a progressing to edge habitat, and eventually woodlands. I don't hate the weeds. I don't want to poison them off, or torch them with a flame thrower. All plant matter that we don't intend to eat is not removed from the garden. It is pulled out of the ground, left in the sun, and later returned to the soil either on the surface, or spaded under. I want total biomass retention. by removing fertility from the garden in the form of edible vegetables, I need to replace what I've taken out. I do this with kitchen compost, manures, growing green manures like buckwheat, clover, and ryegrass, and keeping all of my weeds.
In the spring, I brought in a good deal of wood chips, and inoculated them with cultures of Garden Giant mushrooms. I needed to keep them in full shade and moist, so I built a really simple structure. It's essentially a low table with the tabletop made out of chicken wire. We pull weeds and pile them onto this table to dry in the sun, while also shading the mushroom patch. After the weeds are sufficiently dried (eliminating the possibility of them re-rooting themselves, they're used as mulch. It looks something like this:
Currently, some of our biggest garden invaders are Purslane, Lady's Thumb, Ragweed, and Mugwort. Of course we've got the normal crabgrass and other various grasses, too. I mostly leave the purslane alone, as I don't see it as a big threat. All Lady's Thumb and Mugwort are pulled out immediately on sight. The mugwort is never left directly on the soil surface after being pulled, because it's so tenacious at re-rooting itselt. Once it dies back, though, it's great. On the property there are some big expanses of mugwort that are left standing for the entirety of their life cycle, and the soil underneath is GREAT because of the amount of decomposing plant matter from previous years' stalks.
I like to share my successes, but it's also important to note some of my failures. For the second year, I've tried to grow a small patch of wheat, since I love to bake bread (provided it's winter!). On account of a dry spring, and a pinch of neglect on my part, I got terrible germination this year probably from lack of moisture. In no time, my precious wheat patch was overrun with grass stalks going to seed that were well over my head. I decided it was time to give up on it and mow it down. This week sometime when it's less hot, I'm going to turn the whole thing under and probably plant radishes. Better luck next year. RIP wheat patch 2012:
Weeds are just doing their jobs, as I am mine, protecting the soil's fertility and host to a multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that support life, photosynthesizing life or otherwise. Weeds are the pioneers, reclaiming disturbed land, covering it over as quickly as possible, over time leading to a progressing to edge habitat, and eventually woodlands. I don't hate the weeds. I don't want to poison them off, or torch them with a flame thrower. All plant matter that we don't intend to eat is not removed from the garden. It is pulled out of the ground, left in the sun, and later returned to the soil either on the surface, or spaded under. I want total biomass retention. by removing fertility from the garden in the form of edible vegetables, I need to replace what I've taken out. I do this with kitchen compost, manures, growing green manures like buckwheat, clover, and ryegrass, and keeping all of my weeds.
In the spring, I brought in a good deal of wood chips, and inoculated them with cultures of Garden Giant mushrooms. I needed to keep them in full shade and moist, so I built a really simple structure. It's essentially a low table with the tabletop made out of chicken wire. We pull weeds and pile them onto this table to dry in the sun, while also shading the mushroom patch. After the weeds are sufficiently dried (eliminating the possibility of them re-rooting themselves, they're used as mulch. It looks something like this:
Currently, some of our biggest garden invaders are Purslane, Lady's Thumb, Ragweed, and Mugwort. Of course we've got the normal crabgrass and other various grasses, too. I mostly leave the purslane alone, as I don't see it as a big threat. All Lady's Thumb and Mugwort are pulled out immediately on sight. The mugwort is never left directly on the soil surface after being pulled, because it's so tenacious at re-rooting itselt. Once it dies back, though, it's great. On the property there are some big expanses of mugwort that are left standing for the entirety of their life cycle, and the soil underneath is GREAT because of the amount of decomposing plant matter from previous years' stalks.
I like to share my successes, but it's also important to note some of my failures. For the second year, I've tried to grow a small patch of wheat, since I love to bake bread (provided it's winter!). On account of a dry spring, and a pinch of neglect on my part, I got terrible germination this year probably from lack of moisture. In no time, my precious wheat patch was overrun with grass stalks going to seed that were well over my head. I decided it was time to give up on it and mow it down. This week sometime when it's less hot, I'm going to turn the whole thing under and probably plant radishes. Better luck next year. RIP wheat patch 2012:
Thursday, July 5, 2012
6/26-7/5 Harvest
Hey folks,
It's that time of year where the weeds are growing like mad, and every ounce of time is spent making our garden still look like a garden. Here's the harvest of this week:
It's that time of year where the weeds are growing like mad, and every ounce of time is spent making our garden still look like a garden. Here's the harvest of this week:
- June 26
- peas: 1 lb 6.1 oz
- June 29
- romaine lettuce: handful
- June 30
- black radishes: 4 lb 10.9 oz & 2 gallons of processed greens (minus what we've been eating for dinner before I weighed it, including one night where we had 4 cups of radishes)
- July 2
- rhubarb swiss chard: 2.7 oz
- romaine lettuce: 2 oz (~one small head)
- fava beans: 1.1 oz (4 bean pods)
- peas: .8 oz
- July 5 (stuff for dinner)
- kale: 1.4 oz
- swiss chard(fordhook giant & rhubarb): 2.3 oz
- purslane: 6.6 oz (when you eat weeds, it feels less defeating)
- wheat: 6.3 oz (nuked the wheat patch...)
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