Frost

Early this week, we had our first frosts, and last night we had our first hard frost.  We're totally into fall now, and I'm doing a lot of stuff to gear up for it. I sure does feel like late October snuck up on me however. 

This afternoon, I'm going to plant garlic. In fact, it's soaking right now in preparation.  Most everything is out of the garden.  I still have turnips to pull up, and waiting for the broccoli to do its thing.  There are loads of black, mushy, and curled leaves that got whacked by frost out there, too. This wasn't a great year for many crops compared to last year.  Some of that was due to weather, and some of it was due to my own experimentation.  Potatoes, for instance, weren't great, but I didn't put enough effort into mulching them like I did last year.  I also planned a lot of crops for a later harvest, thinking that harvesting them in cooler weather would improve their storage life.  The tradeoff there is that lots of those same crops seemed to grow much much better earlier in the season, as I had done in the past.  Next season, I will try really really hard to plan better and spread things out in succession. 

I've got some more strategies to deal with critters in the coming year, as well.  My deer netting bed seemed to work out for the most part, minus the mice, shrews, voles or whatever they are that sneak underneath.  I will also try to grow far less of the tender, ephemeral crops that critters love.  Instead I'm going to try hard to focus on growing those types in succession. 

Last Saturday was the opening of rabbit season.  I've been waiting for that since about March.  I put my first one in the freezer before 8:00 AM.  I've also been seeing two woodchucks in the garden, but every time it happens by surprise, so I haven't addressed that yet.  It's easier to remove them now than in the spring when they'll have babies.  I will speak to my deer hunting experiences in the last month in another post.

Finally, tomorrow is THE CHOP day for some chickens.  5 of them will be going away to freezer camp, including one that will be our Thanksgiving bird.  This will be the first time that we're going to do more than one at a time, and I'm a little unsure about how that will go.  I guess we'll find out tomorrow. 

Harvest Night

Last night, October 7, 2013, was Harvest Night!  Harvest Night is our annual harvest celebration.  It features a meal prepared only from foods we've produced ourselves, minus a few things like oil and salt.  Naomi and I took a nice stroll though the garden, ate the most delicious ripe red raspberries (in October!), ate our first butternut squash of the year, amongst other things.  We also collected a whopping 13 eggs from the coops. 

It was a very blustery fall day, except that it was really humid, and grossly warm.  This morning, however, the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees from yesterday.  That was a pleasant surprise.  I'm hoping that it'll stay this way now.  We made this year's Harvest Night a small celebration, as I had to get back to work for 7:00.  I'll upload pictures from Harvest Night sometime soon, because it's too late for now.

August Update in Pictures

This has been the summer of rodents, fishing, too many chickens, and relaxing.  I'm hoping that it will turn into the fall of nuts, deer, and less chickens.  On the first Saturday in August, Naomi, Maria and I went to Paradise Lot, the home of some permaculture self-described plant geeks that boasts a 1/10th-acre edible food forest in Holyoke, MA.  While their goals are somewhat different from ours, it was incredible to get to see what they're doing and how.  Below are some pictures from our visit, followed by our usual update photos.  The book, Paradise Lot, is a fun and funny read about their experiences.  On to the pictures!

The pond at Paradise Lot.  

Maria and Naomi listening intently.

a view of the back

Aquaculture setup in their bioshelter.  It was really cool, and had carp, catfish, guppies, and golfish

Blueberry, Juneberry, and whoops something else. 

This was in their bathroom.

And back to our stuff:

The pepper plants are really struggling this year. 

Taters!

I sowed this bed with turnips and beets for fall.

Some Boston Pickling cucumbers hanging through their trellis.

My brother helped me built this cinder block raised bed to grow greens away from rabbits, but mice came in and chewed the growing tip out of the seedlings. 

Escape hole.

Jerusalem Artichokes

some nice Scarlet Runner beans

They'll keep on going if you let them

The tomato weave is working out really well this year.  I learned to keep on top of it.

This was my next plan to have a critter-free greens bed.  Oak posts, deer netting, and scrap wood stapled to the bottom of the netting.  We'll see if it works. 

Garlic Party

I admittedly haven't been keeping up with this blog nearly as I would like to.  The main reason is RABBITS.  Rabbits are making it REALLY hard for me to grow many things this summer.  Every season, I try to focus on a new crop, either to learn more about growing it, or to produce a substantial amount of it.  This year, I planned to grow a quantity of shell beans that would at least put a dent in the amount that we eat throughout the year.  As of now, we don't have even half of the bean plants we had last year.  As soon as they came up, rabbits ate the growing tip right off.  I replanted, and replanted, but it didn't stop them.  There are more rabbits than I can possibly keep up with. 

On the good side, I grew a LOAD of garlic! The photo to the left is just some of it, as Naomi was hanging it to be cured.  It tipped the scales around 75 lbs, which is about ten more than last year.  The bulbs seem to be of higher quality, too. 

Something else I've been meaning to do is to have a garlic taste test to put all the varieties we grow head to head.  That way we could make some more decisions about which varieties to grow. 

I've got high hopes for tomatoes, potatoes, and fall greens (which will be protected from marauding rodents).  I'm also hoping for a good harvest of rutabagas, turnips, and beets.  I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Mid-July Happenings

Last week, I pulled out almost 200 onions.  All of these are in their second year.  Last year was the first time I had any success growing onions.  I started them in the last week of December, and didn't plant them out until May I think.  In the summer of 2012, we harvested a good many small (golf-ball sized) bulbs, and put most of them in the root cellar, not to be considered until very late winter.  I had decided to replant them as sets.  Meanwhile, many of the smaller bulbs were overlooked in the garden and overwintered on their own. 

Miraculously, or at least it seemed so to me, both the sets and the overwintered little guys sprouted like mad in the spring!  Many of them grew to a decent size; at least larger than last year.  The next onion issue is this:  I didn't put nearly as much care into THIS year's onion seedlings, and I'll have to start the cycle all over again next year.  On the good side, everything is usually easier with experience. 

The garlic is ready to come out now as well.  I just need enough time to process it all.  I hope that I can get to it this week.  We didn't keep it very well weeded this year, and a lot of the necks look soft.  I guess I got too confident, or perhaps lazy. 

I've got a few other garden woes at the moment, too.  Every year there are tons of crops that I spend good money on seed for, plant out, tend to, and then lose control of for various reasons.  Some things that I just can't get the knack of for some reason or another include carrots, broccoli, salsify, and spinach to varying degrees.  I can't ever seem to tell salsify from crabgrass at a critical stage of weeding in order to give the salsify a leg-up.  Carrots only get so big before their tops get chewed clean off by roving critters.  Broccoli (and various other brassica friends) always get their growing tip chomped out before it matters, and I just can't seem to get the timing of spinach right.  I'm thinking that I ought to just let them well enough alone for a while.  There are a thousand other pursuits that I'd like to spend some of my hard-won free time doing- shooting my bow, playing guitar or tinkering with equipment, working on and driving the bug, hiking, fishing, visiting friends, any and all band-related activities, and making progress on finding a new and forever home. 

I'm not sure the direction I'll take on all of this next year, and that's an awfully long way away to worry about it too much now. 

PIcture updates

Sometimes it's nice to just look at pictures, too. 

Rabbits

The Great Lake 2013

Some nice daisies

Good thing I have my beds built up for just this reason.

A not-at-all rare occurrence

Some sage flowering nicely

Potatoes and some other stuff

Last year's leeks going crazy

another all-too-common occurrence.  In 3 years, I've yet to grow a broccoli or cabbage.

peas!

 

waiting for the mulberries.  sorry it's blurry

waiting on these raspberries too

They're everywhere.

All flesh is grass

It turns out that gardening is not a competitive sport, like how I've been treating it. The only competition seems to be internal, inside the gardener: how much they are willing to let nature be nature. Some gardeners, for instance, remove all foreign and domestic life that was not purposefully planted there for the sole immediate gratification of the gardener. I like to think that I am at least some-what more laissez-faire about the whole process. Our little piece of land attempts to work with nature and not against it. The majority of what we do is set up the structure for nature to do the work. Beans want to grow here? Let's give them something to climb on. Corn seedlings are getting choked out by knotweed? Get em out of here!

There is competition, to be sure. The weeds want the sunlight and the water; the creatures want the supple seed leaves just poking out of the ground. But, I want to consume most of the garden for my own personal gain, too. I can't blame them for wanting to eat what I want to eat. It's delicious. If I wait long enough, someone or something will come and claim the creature or plant that I consider a nuisance. Nothing lives forever.

Our garden has so many amazing predatory insects- and I don't even know about half of them. We started having these shiny green beetles that eat our nuisance insects. I am grateful for them being around. Instead of spraying chemicals on our nuisance bugs, we just wait- and something comes along. Nothing lives forever.

Our strawberries are really kicking it off this year. We have a few varieties, and this is the season for them to go crazy, and they are happy to oblige the calendar. I am grateful to be able to pluck a juicy red thing off a little shrub and have the squish of the fruit and the crunch of the seeds to remind me how lucky I am to have teeth and taste buds. A rabbit must have thought this too, because she decided to have her litter in the strawberry patch. I've decided to take that as a compliment. Thank you, rabbit. However, that meant no strawberries, or anything else in the general vicinity, either. She even sampled the seed leaves off of my cotton, but after two or three decided that cotton-tailed rabbits don't need to be made of cotton and moved onto the bean plants.

We really are lucky. Cottontail rabbits (both Eastern and New England varieties) are losing habitat very quickly, as we let forests mature and manicure our lawns, but don't allow the in-between habitat thrive. (Read more about Cottontails in CT here). The property we live on has great cottontail habitat, and they let us know it. The kits in our strawberry patch were already the second or third litter this year. We basically have to trip over rabbits on our way to the garden everyday. There are enough for disease, hawks, humans and coyotes to get without seriously injuring the population.

Most wild animals don't make it out of infancy (especially animals that have large litters), and the strawberry patch litter were no exception. A torrential downpour happened overnight and they didn't make it. I had a moment of sadness while Will took their little bodies away. The next day I had a great explosion of strawberries to pick, and Will & I spent the evening chasing adolescent rabbits out of the admiral pea bed. The next litter was already nesting under Rooster's porch.

Always Trying to Catch Up

Every evening, I think about posting an update, but after going to my job, then working in the garden when I get home, I rarely have the energy.  Perhaps I should just focus more on short, but frequent updates.  I always have great ideas or progress to report, but I don't.  I'm going to try to change that now!


Our sweet potato plants arrived today.  I thought they were coming later, but it turned out alright.  I got them in the ground and tried to fence them in because we have more rabbits than I've ever seen at one place in my life.  I want to try to live trap some of them, and let them loose across the river so they can flourish over there. 

We've picked most of the garlic scapes this week.  We also noticed the first tiny pea pods on the peas today.  Corn is about a foot tall.  Beans aren't doing so well in that the rabbits are making a mess of them.  Tomatoes aren't doing very well either.  A few of them died after transplanting.  The strawberries are coming on so strong!  Potatoes just started flowering here and there.  Squash is up.  That's all I can remember right now.

Different, not conflicting

I suppose that working together on any project, especially over years, involves having a certain level of splitsville. Since you are different people, you are bound to have different ideals. Well, that goes, even when you marry your best friend and have the same overarching values in life. The good thing is, the goals don't have to conflict, and can, in the end,  be complimentary.

This year, one of my goals for the garden is to make it more attractive. Right now, since we believe in repurposing and have access to all sorts of useful junk on the property, we haven't really needed to buy many things. We have wood for tripods and fencing to keep critters out, not to mention all the hay and newspaper we can shake a stick at! We are also trying our hand at no-till, which means that (especially in the beds) the weeds can get a little out of control, while we focus our efforts on more useful tasks. These things combined, however, adds up to our garden (especially in a dry April) looking like a big,  fenced-in junk pile! There are piles of 2x4s and tomato cages and weed benches and old scraggly vines hanging out all over the place! It really doesn't look like we put any effort into the thing, when in reality, it's pretty all-consuming these days.

It may be one of those things where I notice it and no one else would. Like when you go over someone's house and they apologize up and down for their mess and the whole time you're thinking that you wish you could keep your house that clean? (or does that just happen to me?)

Here's the thing, though. It doesn't matter if anyone else thinks it's a junk pile. I do. And guess where I don't want to spend my time? That's right, a junk pile. My running theory is that if I make the place more attractive (even just to me), then I will be more willing to spend my time there- and more willing to get some other serious jobs done.

My big first step in this goal was to fix the snakiary (for the snakes), so it looks less like a junky pile of rocks in the corner. There is a Zen-Buddhist quality of arranging rocks. In fact, when I was in Korea, the Buddhist temple I visited had rock sculptures all over the place. It was magical and wonderful while being normal and phallic all in one go.

Well, if anyone can my garden phallic, it's me. Here's to another year with new goals.  

The Crunch

Multiple times every year, and not always at the same time, I feel The Crunch.  It's not a time crunch, but a space crunch.  The last rows are filling up in the garden, and I have to look for the small, overlooked areas where weeds are creeping in, or I forgot it was there so I can make the best use of all my garden area.  Here are my main concerns at the moment:

- I planted too much garlic.  I planted a good amount more this year than last year, and it takes up almost an entire row, with an inefficient space left over on either end of the row.  In another month or so, scapes will be upon us, but we still have maybe 100 heads of garlic in the root cellar. If it's not 100, it sure feels like it!  I should have marked down every head of garlic we used this winter, but didn't think of it until a few weeks ago.  I will do that this coming year.  My baseline for garlic and onions each is to have one bulb for every day of the year.  I figure that this is overestimating how much we need, but it's a safe bet.  I'd rather too many than not enough. 

-I planted too large an area of peas, and I also planted them too late.  The good news here is that I will have time to replant this row with a storage crop (or a few!) in mid summer.  

-Last year, I had moderate success with growing onions from seed germinated in the last week of December.  What didn't grow to efficient eating size was saved and used as sets this year.  There are over 100 of these sets.  That room is taken up now, and can't be used for this year's first-year seedlings.  I need an extra row for this.  Same goes for leeks, but those overwintered on their own (good job guys!).

-I possibly allotted too much space for corn and squash- one row each.  My plan last year of alternating square blocks of each didn't do so hot, so I went back to a row formation.  I can effectively grow enough winter squash in maybe 1/3 of a row, however, I wanted it to run under the corn stalks.  That might be redundant because this year I'm going to sow half-running beans between the corn stalks, once the corn gets established.  Perhaps I can use some of that squash row for other things. 

-I still don't always have realistic expectations for space allotment during the planning/pre-sowing stage of the year.  Some things take up significantly more room that I had planned, which reduces space for other things.  I also didn't account for overwinterers like leeks taking up space in May, which is happening big-time. 


-I need to make sure I think very carefully about my succession plans to maximize space and yield. 
This includes starting first crops early enough so they can finish in time to plant second crops.  I should try to intercrop a little more to squeeze even more into my space. 


This is all I can remember at the moment. 

Spring Picture Dump

I got a little click-happy and took a bunch of pictures of spring happening. 

some Kales, a few weeds, and red orach popping up

seedling of a breadseed poppy

carrot seedlings

onion sets

pea shoots

a fava bean coming up

a nice bright dandelion

buds on a strawberry plant

a strawberry plant

ol' woodchuck

borage sprout

bee balm

radish

140 degrees

winter rye growing between two beds

garlic

some bushel gourds I grew last year

lupines sprouting, and possibly a sunchoke (the pointy one)

chammomile I think