Shannon's Tasteful Garden - Southeast

New Developments

2010-06-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

I went out this evening to check on things and there were a number of photo-worthy developments. For one thing I was able to get a good shot of one of the many ladybugs I have in the garden this year.

Like last year, I have a lot of peppers setting up already. My experience is that it'll be awhile before these start to turn red.

I have several watermelon that are rapidly approaching the size of my fist!

The nasturtium I planted from seed are blooming.

I have a veritable sea of potatoes. In another week or so I can start pulling some new potatoes from the bed of red caribe. Thier flowers have already come and gone. They are early potatoes indeed.

Amaranth! There is a ton of it. They popped up like weeds. And they look like weeds.

Summer squash, with a lovely curving swan's neck.

One of the eggplants is blooming. Thier leaves look like lace they've been so ravaged by bugs. But they're hanging in there.

Scarlett runner bean blossoms!

And last but not least, winter squash!

We have veggies coming in from the garden...

2010-06-04T04:25:00.000-07:00

We definitely have food coming in from the garden now. Last night a heavy thunderstorm pounded the hell out of everything out there, and when it had passed I went outside to see what kind of damage it had done. I had a lot of plants on thier sides: tomatoes, corn, beans, and the potatoes - let me tell you - these storms we're having can really beat down a potato plant. I did what I could to try to prop things back up where it seemed necessary, but mostly tried not to worry about it, since it's a natural phenomenon. I assume most everything will bounce back once that sun starts pounding on them again.

While I was out there yesterday evening I realized that I have managed to grow a cauliflower! It looks like I might only end up with one out of the four that I planted, but still, I'm going to count this as a success. Out of my four this is the only one that really seemed to self-blanch. I tried to tie up another one by hand but it is just infested with bugs and little slimy green eggs. Another that I did not tie up has started producing a head, but the florets are far apart instead of tight together as they're supposed to be. The fourth just doesn't seem to be producing a head (yet) at all. So I guess the verdict is still out on whether or not that one will feed us. The broccoli has been coming in nicely though so we're having broccoli and cauliflower for dinner tonight for sure.

While out on inspection last night I also discovered a vine borer hole in one of my summer squash...sigh. I really need to get on the ball about covering these things when I set them out. Like everything else that's new to me that very thought of it intimidates me. Silly, I know.

We've had ample salad greens/lettuce and plenty of salads, so I've been real happy with that. I've pulled up a beet every now and then but they're small and growing very slowly. I've had a few peppers already - two banana peppers and two tiny - and I'm talking tiny - jalepenos. My three jalepeno plants are small and yellow. I'm disappointed; and not sure what to do about it. The plant I had last year was huge and robust and all around stunninly georgeous. I bought it big from a big box store, and I'm going to go hunting for another one, maybe this weekend. Last weekend's hunt resulted in finding out that my local private garden store only had three jalepeno plants for sale and they were smaller and yellower than mine. So maybe it's the weather...I did buy a nice big kung pao pepper plant there though. That should be interesting.

I've been meaning to say that I have an unusual amount of ladybugs in the garden this year. I mean, just a ton. Last year where I was seeing California Potato Beetles on my potato plants, this year they're just crawling with ladybugs. Can a high ladybug population decrease the Potato Beetle population? It certainly seems that way, though I have nothing to offer in the way of scientific evidence....

The blueberry bushes just don't seem to be taking off. The blackberry bushes, on the other hand, are growing like weeds and have already set fruit. I think next spring I'll put in more blackberries and maybe some rasberries. I would love to have blueberries, but honestly I don't want to have to fuss with anything too much. I favor plants that will be hardy and do decently around here on their own. Lazy, you say? Maybe. But I'm trying to be practical.

I pulled all my miniature onions up last night. I don't want them to rot out there like they did last year. I need to get on the ball using them while I have the chance.

I suppose it's too early to call the Brussels sprouts a failure, I mean I can see sprouts - but they sure do take forever and it just doesn't seem like they're every going to get big enough to harvest and eat...We'll see.

On the subject of problem veggies, my peas are done for the year. I barely got a few good handfuls. Did I do something wrong? Did they die off early, or just languish in the summer heat? Too much water? I have no idea. I pulled them up last night. That's year two of English pea failure. Moving on....

Cucumbers, cucumbers, cucumbers!!! I am loving these little white pickling cucumbers. I did them from seed inside and transplanted them, and they're just doing great. They are popping up everywhere, fast. This week I've come in with a handful every day. We've eaten every one on salads, except for a few that I just had to use to try the Nourishing Traditions lacto-fermented pickle recipe. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Just call me Mrs. MacGregor....

2010-05-28T04:03:00.000-07:00

Another rabbit sighting, 9 May

I was outside in my pajamas, hacking down my rye with a shovel, and getting pretty doggone good at it, thank you very much, and was almost finished, near the fence, when I did my step-hack sequence and was startled by the tell-tale scream of a rabbit. At least I was pretty sure it was a rabbit. I couldn't see the source of the noise. But I had a rabbit many eons ago when I was a kid, and I remember the time he got loose in the back yard and we had to catch him, that scream he let out when we finally made a successful grab. And then there was the time at band camp when my best friend started marking time at the Drum Major's signal, and found that unbeknownst to her she was standing on a rabbit's nest. You can imagine the screams - the rabbits and the teenagers - and the ensuing hysteria.

So even though it flitted across my mind that I might have unwittingly dismembered a field mouse - sadly this has happened, quite by accident, before - it was no surprise to me when the baby rabbit, considerably larger than it was the last time that I saw it, presented itself, apparently unharmed.

I think I just scared the crap out of it. I know that bunny scream scared the crap out of me.

It made sense out of that half-eaten strawberry I found a few days ago, still clinging to its vine.

What to do?

Of course, it couldn't stay. Absolutely no rabbits allowed to make their home in the garden. Interesting things about the babies, they're quite able to squeeze themselves through even the closest-spaced wires of the rabbit guard. Rabbit guard indeed.

So I ushered him out, gently, with the shovel, where he proceeded to crouch in the tall weeds along the garden fence and to generally try to make himself invisible. Thankfully my dogs were all tied up at the time and did not notice the quick arc the bunny made across some open grass before settling into its hiding place. It occurred to me that I could solve the problem very quickly by letting them loose, but that - while sure to be effective - just seemed too cruel, especially with my daughter watching everything with rapt attention.

So I headed over to the carport where I came up with a plastic pitcher and an old Frisbee, and I managed to get the little thing inside the pitcher without too much trouble. I carried him to the fence line at the back of the yard.

Toss him over? Nope. Way too high. That would be sure to cause cruel and unusual damage. And that's when it came to me.

The day before, on one my patrols around the yard, I happened to notice a hole that had been dug all the way through under my fence. Groundhog? Rabbit? A small neighborhood dog? I have no idea. I do know that it was nowhere near big enough for one of my dogs to get through it. Still, I had hauled a cinder block out from behind one of the sheds and plopped it on top and there you go, problem solved. No one coming in. No one getting out.

This hole was plenty big enough, though, to be a safe passageway for a baby rabbit.

So I took my captured charge back there, moved the cinder block with my foot, and let the rabbit go to scamper through into the yard of the neighbors behind me. Then I put the cinder block back and another rabbit problem is solved.

Were the neighbors likely to mind? Honestly, I didn't think that they were likely to notice. Their yard is not fenced, and the neighborhood is full of these wild brown hares. And besides, I know for a fact from my frequent walks around the neighborhood that these neighbors do not have a garden.

A few days later...

The next time I was out and about and happened by that same spot in the fence, I saw that the hole had simply been extended the length of the concrete block. The rabbit must have burrowed right back in.

Since then I've seen him out grazing in the grass. My daughter has spotted him in the garden. I've learned where his front door is, and that he is indeed living in relative safety under our shed, which is fenced away from the dogs, who are always likely to go tunneling in there after him or whatever else they see or smell. One day I went back there for a peice of fencing that I'd left against the shed wall, and I caught him right out there in the small patch of grass between two sheds, and he darted back under the shed in the same place where I had set him a few weeks ago. (Right past the still visible other rabbit babies which, unfortunately, died there).

So I'm pretty doggone sure this is one of the babies I found in April.

This morning

So today I let my dogs out at 6:30, and there is an immediate ruckus. I look outside and my two young male dogs are running around the garden, barking at the fence line, and I know that we've interrupted our rabbit's breakfast.

Arghgh.

So I walk out there and can see him darting around, looking for a way out. I guess rabbit guard is best negotiated in a non-stressful environment. So I called off my dogs and came back inside, so he can get himself on back home - until tomorrow morning - when I'm sure he'll be back in there again, helping himself to something.

How much can one rabbit eat? I guess through the course of this growing season, I'm going to find out!

The peas are coming in!

2010-05-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

So far they're only trickling in...but we're starting to harvest peas!

A walk through the garden

2010-05-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

Things are going along pretty well. My squash plants all survived the transplant and are getting big.

The dill seeds I planted are coming up.

The peas are starting to plump up. Soon I'll have to start picking them.

My onions are blooming, which is bad, but quite beautiful, nonetheless.

I learned that garlic actually grows up kind of at a right angle. I think some of the really heavy winds we've had made this come up out of the ground. I'm not sure it's quite ready for harvest though...

Winter squash is also getting big. That little squash to the left is an acorn squash seed coming up, from one I had for dinner a year or two ago. I wasn't sure if it was still viable, but apparently it is!

I have little cucumbers!

And the calendula seeds I planted have come up beautiful plants and are finally about ready to bloom.

I did end up getting some broccoli, but overall the spring broccoli has been disappointing. One of them bolted before it ever had a head, we had so much high heat in April. I'll do broccoli again in the fall, when it does much better.

Beans are coming up everywhere. Bush beans and pole beans.

The potatoes are also all huge, and already have buds on them. I don't remember being this far along this early last year with potatoes, but maybe I was. I have 11 sweet potato slips in so far, and a few potatoes inside in the window still sending up slips like crazy, so I'll probably keep planting them for another 3 or 4 weeks.

Things coming up...and things coming down

2010-05-05T13:54:00.001-07:00

Things are coming along pretty well. I've been making a few trips out to the garden every day with a big watering can, and giving a drink to anything that looks like it needs it. It looks like one of my Red Acre Cabbages is starting to show signs of heading up. My other one, that I thought I was going to lose, actually looks great - only much smaller.

My English peas are beginning to bloom...

As are some of the curcurbits...

The beans are up...

And the rye is coming down...

And tonight I'm having a turnip and a kale salad with my dinner. Yum!!!

A Quick Garden Tour

2010-05-02T03:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, has it really been almost a month since I've posted anything here? I've got a lot of catching up to do. I haven't been writing about the garden, but I sure have been working it. I'm trying to get a jump this year on weeds, so I've already hauled in a fair amount of straw for mulch, and a few of my beds are "weedless" beds, although they still have a few weeds in them, as Lee Reich predicted that they would, in his book Weedless Gardening. You'll see in some of my shots that I have a few areas that are just weed nightmares, mostly around tiny plants that are planted close together. Other areas are not in too bad of shape.

On Friday, 30 April, I planted all the seedlings that I grew this winter (above and towards the back), along with three jalepeno plants I picked up a few weeks ago from a big box store, and my tomatos and peppers from The Tasteful Garden. I had been intending to wait until the first of May, but it was so hot and georgous on Friday, and I had the day off, and it wasn't supposed to get below 60 Friday night (it got down to 54 here) and I figured with that being the case, what difference would another day make? So in they went.

I have two large areas for tomatos this year, with space for a few nasturtiums in between, which are not there yet. The tomatoes below are Italian Sweet Beefsteak, Brandywine, Beauty, Rose de Berne, Box Car Willie and Arkansas Traveller, all heirloom varieties, and I am not familiar with any of them. I look forward to seeing how they turn out!

Most of the tomatoes I did myself from seed are on the other side, and I still have space for three more, which I will pick up this weekend from a local garden store. They are either Long Keeper, or Roma, or some combination of the two; I had the two different seeds in the same little pot so I'm not one hundred percent sure what came up. That's rye growing tall in the background. More on that later.

I have 10 pepper plants this year. Below are Orange Mandarin, Italian Yellow Bell, Sweet Banana, Anaheim and Chili de Arbol.

Below are Carmen, the three Jalepenos, and one mystery pepper to be named later. Reason - I bought a mix of hot pepper seeds and managed to get one to grow into a nice looking little plant - I have no idea what kind of pepper it is. But we love peppers around here, and we had such wonderful luck with our jalepeno last year, and we loved the Carmen, Anaheim and Serrano from The Tasteful Garden, so we decided to up our pepper production this year. And this year I won't kill them off early by trying to transplant them into pots and bring them inside.

The next two shots, respectively, are four watermelon plants and five muskmelon plants that I did from seed.

Below is one of my four potato beds (in one of the "weedless beds" I made). This particular one, I think is the Yukon Gold. My potatos went in on 7 April, and are coming up quite nicely. I also have a similar bed of Red Caribe and Banana Fingerling. I want to be keeping my own potatos around this winter!

I have a little patch of red-speckled romaine coming up.

In the foreground are my brassicas - broccoli, cauliflower and brussel sprouts on the right; turnips and kale, a few heads of Red Acre cabbage and some spinach on the left. Nothing in the middle but a coming onslaught of weeds, that I'll have to do something with. This is the area where I did the sheet mulching last fall. In the foreground is one of the areas I have set up for composting. In the back of the picture is where we're heading next. Those bamboo pyramids are going to be my trellises this year for climbing plants. More on that later.

Here's one of the turnips, coming along nicely. I can't wait to have turnips again!!!

Below are my English Peas, which are doing well so far. I would like to have one nice big Ziploc bag full of them in the freezer - I have no idea if I have enough planted for that. my daughter and I like to have a handful from time to time and my husband won't eat them, so the one bag should do us for quite some time.

Here's the cucumbers. I'm going to trellis them this year. The bamboo actually has some holes drill in it, so I can run wire around it to provide support and something to cimb. Same with the peas above, though I have only put in the first level of wire, closest to the ground. Last year I had three cucumber plants; there's more going on this year, though I suspect that due to a labelling mishap that one of the plants below is actually a squash...

Here's one onion bed, doing great, and way better than the other bed where I have onions planted. I think it might get more sun. Last year I let my onions go too long and didn't get as many as I should have. I won't make that mistake this year.

Here is the garlic I planted last fall, no further rabbit damage to report. It is HUGE! I didn't know how it would do - planted upside down (duh) and left under about five total feet of snow this winter - but it's doing just fine!

Here's my summer squash, two varieties, whose names escape me at the moment, but they're not yellow crookneck...For the moment I'm not trying the zucchini this year. We've lost it the past two years to vine borers....

Below, to the right are four eggplant plants of two varieties, I think Listada de Gandia and Black Beauty in some combination. To the left are some herbs - rosemary, thyme, basil and oregano.

Here's some various little things nestled amoung the weeds; beets, carrots, baby lettuce mix, the other onion patch, one radiccio plant which is a mystery to me. It doesn't look like I expected it to. I'm not sure what to do with it. Have I researched this? Um...no.

Here's my strawberry patch in the foreground. We've already had three strawberries this year. I want to put a few more plants in. In the back, under the trellises, are two different kinds of winter squash, Delicata and Winter Squash. Never done these before. Hope it goes well.

And finally, I'm trying to get a little more exotic and whimsical with my flower planting this year. I have a few pretty things going on. I still have a lot more to put in, now that all the veggies are in.

I also planted yellow wax beans, jade bush beans, asparagus beans, scarlett runner beans and white runner bush beans. But there's no picture because right now there's nothing to see but dirt.

I'll be addressing sweet potatoes in another post. I'm still working all that out.

And the rye, you ask? What's up with that? Pretty, isn't it?

We originally put it in as a cover crop with the intention of harvesting the grain. Then I learned about some possible dangers of that, and decided to till it under this spring. Obviously we didn't get around to that, and now my husband is making noises about keeping it around to harvest later this year to make a small batch of biodeisel to run our lawn mowers on. In the meantime, it's my daughter's playground.

So here we are, at the top of May, and waiting to things to grow in and get lush, and a heck of a lot further along than we were this time last year.

Um.....I was right about the rabbits...

2010-04-06T12:53:00.001-07:00

I started moving some straw around in the garden today and I unearthed a rabbit's nest - IN THE GARDEN! That's not good. There were 4 babies. No sign of Mom. I suspect that Mom may not have been around for a few days, since I plugged up the hole in the fence. I took another walk around the perimeter of the rabbit guard and I don't see any obvious entrance point, and nothing else has been eaten.

I took these out of the garden and put them on a bed of straw at the edge of the shed where we have rabbits every year. Maybe they'll reconnect with Mom. Or maybe not. But it's the best I can do for them. I SURE don't want them in my garden.

Unwelcome Nighttime Visitors

2010-04-01T14:46:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I went out to check on the state of things in the garden, and I was dismayed to find that something had not only been chomping on the leaves of my strawberry plants...

But had also gone fussing through my garlic....

And not only apparently ATE several garlic plants that had been in that muddy, track-marked spot above, but had also started to burrow there...

My guess is rabbit, especially as I know I have them in the yard. I poked around the fence some and I think I found the spot where they must have come in, some rabbit guard with about a two-inch gap between the bottom of the wire and the ground. I plugged it up and have gone around to inspect the fence perimeter. It all seems okay. There was no further damage the next night, so hopefully the buffet is now closed.

Of this I am exceedingly proud...

2010-03-31T05:02:00.000-07:00

Here is my first set of seedlings, having already spent a few nights outside. They are Black Beauty Eggplant, a pepper of indeterminate variety, Red Acre Cabbage, cucumbers and 5 little tomato plants.

Inside under the Aerogarden lights I have a TON of curcurbits doing fantastic. Watermelon, muskmelon, summer and winter squashes. I will have plenty to put out on 1 May.

A definite goal for the next winter - to expand my seed-starting station to do more at one time...

What's going on in the garden this week....

2010-03-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

A lot, actually! The weather has been just beautiful. My first plants from The Tasteful Garden arrived this week. The "test" peas that I put in the ground a week or more ago began to sprout, so I went ahead and put them all in. I'm going to try growing them up a bamboo pyramid. I can see evidence of kale and turnips sprouting - and I realized this week that one thing that has changed dramatically from last year is that this year I recognize when a seed that I have planted is sprouting, as opposed to just being a weed!

No evidence yet of the beets or turnips. Though I may be seeing my leeks sprouting. I put pansies around in various places, because they're the first flower available to go out in the spring, and because I absolutely have to have something blooming out there to soothe my soul.

The cauliflower I put in became a buffet for slugs immediately - no lie - OVERNIGHT.

After a day or two of this I went on a hunt for the little buggers and found and killed two. I also sprinkled a little salt on the ground around each plant. I may replace them. I'm going to see if they start to perk up any.

I started making the weedless gardening beds that I mentioned in my last post. And I've decided to really go for it laying down the stone paths. One thing I learned last year, when gardening with young children you just cannot do enough to make it obvious where little feet should be stepping and where they shouldn't.

Onions are still...onioning. I got a little concerned because they seemed to be getting yellowish around the outside, but the inner shoots still seem green and strong so I guess they're doing okay.

Ah, and here's the best part of the week. The Wall-E garden my daughter planted.

And finally, last but not least - brussels sprouts doing fine. They're planted in the same place as the cauliflower, but I guess the slugs don't like them. I didn't get any brussels sprouts this fall, so I'm trying again. Hopefully we can get some this summer.

To Till or Not To Till....That is the Question

2010-03-10T14:37:00.000-08:00

My husband and I have been going a few rounds around here about whether to till up the new garden space that is currently grass. I got it fenced off this past week and he promised to till it by Sunday. He's a till and straight row kind of guy; while I find myself feeling increasingly wild and whimsical on the subject of gardening.

The truth is, I don't want it tilled. I've been doing some reading about all the benefits of NOT tilling or digging, and quite frankly neither one of us have any desire to be running off to the chiropractor, so no-till sounds like a good option to me.

I was doing some nosing around on the web this weekend and I came upon a blog called In Lee's Garden Now which was really interesting to me. And I kept thinking, Lee Reich, Lee Reich, why is that name so familiar to me?

Because I already own one of his books, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.

Duh.

Check out his website. His garden is GEORGEOUS.

So much so, in fact, that I bought his book, Weedless Gardening, and it arrived promptly today, autographed, no less, which was really nice.

I went straight to the chapter called, In the Beginning: Readying the Ground for a First Time Planting, where I found this comment - "On the other hand, a sorry patch of lawn will quickly expire beneath less than four layers of newspaper".

Boy is this the book for me.

Encouraged and armed with a book saying that this is the way to go, I headed outside this afternoon and broached the subject with my husband again, and this time he expressed his reservations, but agreed to let me go the "weedless gardening" route this spring.

Turns out the answer is "not to till", so I am psyched.

In preparation this afternoon, I gathered up a bunch of scrap lumber that had been laying around and started kind of marking out where I want to have paths and where I want to have beds for the large area of grass that will be potatoes, melons, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, corn and lots and lots of flowers later this summer. I'm going to start bringing home materials tomorrow and working on one bed at a time, starting with the potatoes, which will have to go in about mid April. Gives me about a month to kill of the grass....

Still getting organized...

2010-03-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

Got a few more things done yesterday afternoon. I started putting down some paving stones to make a clear path through part of the garden. Mostly these stones were salvaged from around other parts of our property where they were being used for other things that are no longer needed. It's crooked - but rustic. I think it'll be fine when things are growing in and around it. Now that I have these spaces defined I can really see how much room I will have for some beautiful flowers. There's going to be marigolds, nasturtium and petunias throughout.

By the way, that pile of straw to the left of the birdbath is mulching the garlic I planted in October, which came through just FINE under almost 5 total feet of snow this winter!!!!!

I also poked a few seeds in the ground. I have some planting date information indicating that some things should start going in the ground - carrots, beets, spinach. Because it might be a little premature, I just poked in a few seeds and I'll see what happens. If they sprout I'll poke in a few more. I want to do some succession planting anyway. Starting Wednesday night we're supposed to have some days of rain....

I picked up a few pretty things to put into pots on the deck. This is for my psyche.

Finally...Some Georgous Weather!!!!!

2010-03-07T14:56:00.001-08:00

It was a spectacular weekend. It got up into the SIXTIES!!!

I was able to get tons done outside, getting the garden ready. For one thing, I took down much of the old fencing. I also repaired some of the fence. And I put up 100 feet of new rabbit guard around the area of new garden that my husband has promised to till up for me this week. You can see that it's going to be quite a big area this year. The bottom of the picture, where the newly fenced area is is where the tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn and melons will be. Total somewhere around 2400 square feet. About 500 square feet won't be planted till fall, when the fall brassicas will go in. At the moment it is planted with rye grass which will get tilled under this week. It's in the middle left of the fenced in garden space below.

This part of the garden is shaping up to be my favorite. I got beds ready with peat moss and manure compost for beets and carrots that will probably go in as seed beginning next weekend. The area inside the small white picket fence will be a strawberry bed, and we'll also be growing spinach in there.

I got some of the bamboo poles set up this weekend for trellising beans and peas and cucumbers. There are still some more trellises to go in.

You'll see I still have quite a bit of straw down. The area near the top of the photo is from this past fall's sheet mulching project. I'm not sure if it didn't work, or if it takes more than 6 months for all that to break down. There's still cardboard there. That's where the spring brassicas are going to go.

I picked up a few blooming things to put in pots on the deck, but I didn't get to that today. This week I still have some fence work to do, put up the rest of the bamboo poles, prepare the bed where I'll be planting onions and leeks - from seed - and hoping that they come up. :0)

Much happiness. Much exercise. Much sun. Much excitement!!!!

Seedling Update and Baby Figs

2010-03-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

I don't think I posted here that we bought a fig tree back in October and have been keeping it inside. It started out as a stick, then got buds, then leaves, and it looks like now it's starting to make a few little figs!!! How cool!

On the seedling front, I got another batch started today. Longkeeper Winter Storage tomatoes; San Marzano tomatoes, a roma-size variety of tomatoes for canning and sauce; A hot pepper mix that I picked up in the grocery store - it'll be interesting to see what we get! Celeriac, a new crop for me this year. Listada De Gandia eggplant and Black Beauty eggplant; Hybrid pickling cucumber which I grew last year and which did great, as well as Ellen's Family White pickling cucumber. The seeds all came from SESE. I will be ordering another set of heirloom tomatoes from The Tasteful Garden soon too. I LOVED those last year.

Still not sure how I'm going to get the light to go around for all that.

It's chilly with a wintry mix of precipitation today and tomorrow, but after that we'll be sunny and clear and in the fifties from Friday until Tuesday. This is my weekend to get out in the garden, hoe up the weeds, shore up the fence, and start breaking some new ground. I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!

Seedlings

2010-02-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

I am so happy that it's almost March!!! It's getting about time to get outside and get the garden ready. I ordered my seed potatoes today, three varieties - Red Caribe, Russian Banana Fingerlings, and Yukon Gold. The Red are supposed to be really early potatoes, I expect to be eating the fingerlings through the summer, and the Yukon Gold, which are supposed to be good storage potatoes, will hopefully take us through the winter. Last year the fingerling potatoes were SO GOOD, I've hated buying potatoes this winter, and have often been disappointed.

Indoors, I have a sweet potato vine growing inside, sprouted from one of our Beauregard's this winter. It looks fantastic. I think I will leave it in this pot all Spring and see if I can't harvest some potatoes out of it. If I can, then I will see about keeping some sweet potatoes going inside all the time.

I have my first true leaves on my broccoli sprouts now. They're doing pretty well. I've been misting them every day. Some of them are looking slightly yellow to me, but I mixed up a little fish emulsion and sprayed them with that today. Hopefully they'll perk back up.

Here's my little seedling set up. I have 13 broccoli plants, one lone cauliflower seedling, one lone brussels sprout seedling, about half a dozen red acre cabbage seedlings and probably 8 or so early jersey wakefield cabbage seedlings.

It's getting about time to start some tomatoes and peppers, eggplants, cucs and squash, but I'm concerned about having the space for them under the grow light. I'm going to think about that...

Broccoli Babies

2010-02-15T04:51:00.001-08:00

So far so good. I've thinned a little already as some were growing right on top of each other. At the moment I have 14. No sign of the cauliflower or brussels sprouts coming up.

I'll be starting some cabbage and celeriac soon...hopefully this week.

After that, it's tomatoes, peppers and eggplants...

Broccoli seedlings are up!

2010-02-09T04:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the good news - the broccoli sprouts are already up!

Bad news is that some of them are moldy....they got too wet. I'll watch and see what happens. Maybe they'll be all right....

Winter Wonderland...

2010-02-07T07:32:00.001-08:00

What better time to be thinking about planting then when I can't even see my garden because of the snow? You can barely make out the very tip of the fence. This is the biggest snow we've had this year so far.

Based on the garden plan and my estimated planting dates, the first seeds that I need to start are the broccoli. They'll go in the ground around mid-April, and I'd like to be setting out good, strong, big, healthy plants. I'm shooting for twelve.

It would appear that in one of my fall cleaning frenzies I threw away all of the little black seedling pots I had accumulated last Spring and Summer, so my first order of business was to figure out what I was going to start these little seedlings in. I came up with this.

Last week I dumped what was left of a bag of garden soil on the deck (frozen solid with clump of ice included) into my canning pot and added some cold perlite. It's been sitting inside ever since to warm up.

My husband brought the seedling starter mat in for me that had ended up back out in the shed, and I moved a table into the dining room so I had somewhere to put all of this apparatus. I cut the bottles down, cleaned them thoroughly, and punched a few holes in the bottoms for drainage. I mixed up my soil and perlite, which was nice and warmish and moist, and filled the pots.

We put the seeds in liberally. Since I want a dozen plants I'm shooting to end up with two good plants in each pot, four in the large pot.

I put thier Ziploc bag tents over them, placed them on the plugged-in seed mat, and walked away. I'll check them daily until I start to see seeds coming up. Hopefully by next weekend I'll be moving these new little babies under the aerogarden light, misting them every morning, and starting something else on the mat - cauliflower and cabbage, I think.

Garden Dreaming and Planning

2010-01-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

We’ve been resting up around here a little after the fall garden, and making big plans for the coming year. We’ll be tilling up more yard this year to accommodate everything, and we’ll be placing a special emphasis on preservation and storage. We’re planning lots of companion planting and will experiment with row covers to protect against cabbage moths and vine borers.

Here’s the space. It doesn’t look like much right now – sad, unkempt, wet. We want to focus a little bit more on aesthetics this year as well as productivity, so we’ve been talking about putting a real fence around it, possibly a white picket fence, which may still need to have rabbit guard stapled inside. We’ll see.

Right now the garden (in my mind anyway) is divided into three separate plots:

Plot 1: was freshly tilled up this past July and this is where my fall garden was planted in '09. It was mostly brassicas, and about a 1/3 of it was not planted with much of anything at all.

Plot 2: This was the '09 summer garden. It was planted primarily with potatoes on one end and tomatoes on the other, with peppers and a few root veggies mixed in. Turnips were the only brassicas in this section, and there weren't very many of them. I’ll do all my brassicas in this plot this year; what you see listed in the spring, and then probably exactly the same in the space below it for the fall.

Plot 3: This is the grassy area in the foreground of the picture above that has not been tilled up yet. Here’s where most of our heavy feeders this year – tomatoes and potatoes and some corn, as well as a few other things will go in. We’re planning a LOT of tomatoes and potatoes.

All three plots are approximately 20 feet x 40 feet.

This picture shows all three plots laid out side by side as they will actually exist.

Here are the larger views of each individual plot, in hopes that you can read what will go where. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about crop rotation and companion planting. Things may seem a little weird, especially in garden plot 1, but I’m trying to make sure that I’m planting the right thing after what was in there this past fall. I’ll be writing a little about each crop we plan to grow as we finalize our plans.

In plot 1, where you see the squares with Xs inside, I'm contemplating getting some garden obelisks for the peas, beans, cucumbers and possibly some squash. I'm still up in the air on that we'll see.

We’re still eating primarily our own vegetables from the freezer (green beans, yellow squash, and all kinds of greens) as well as our sweet potatoes. We’re also eating our own green tomato relish, which is just great. We ran out of canned tomato products well over a month ago, and I very much miss them. I also miss having our own potatoes. Hence the heavy emphasis on preservation and storage for this year.

That's it for now. I'll be checking back in when we decide what varieties of everything we'll be growing, what we'll be starting from seed and when, and what we'll get as transplants.

Outdoor gardening comes to an end...

2009-12-12T07:02:00.000-08:00

It was inevitable that the day would come; still, it seems unreal that I no longer have a viable garden to tend to, and that I won't, again, for months. This morning I brought in the last of the broccoli (frozen) and one frozen kohlrabi.

The row covers I put over the kale and the Swiss chard were no match for 18 degree nights.

The brussels sprouts were not planted early enough, I think, to fully mature; or else I just had them so doggone crowded because I didn't realize that there were more than one plant in each pot when I bought the set of six. I did not get one brussels sprout.

You can see that my broccoli has been blooming - a sure sign that I had more than I could contend with. Again, as they got bigger it became obvious to me that I had way more than a dozen plants. I won't be making that mistake again.

Here's a good shot of the general state of things...

I'll be honest though; for the time being, I'm ready for a break. I'll be checking back in here periodically with winter growing projects and I'll be posting as I start to sprout seedlings.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

This afternoon's harvest

2009-12-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

It went down to 29 degrees last night! The row covers that I put over the kale and the swiss chard worked perfectly. This basket represents (I think) the last of the carrots. The verdict is still out on whether or not I'll be getting any more turnips...

The Indoor Winter Project

2009-12-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

Well, we managed to well and truly kill off all of our pepper plants, but we have had a few surprises. Of all things that we might be able to grow inside the house over the winter, tomato would not have even made my list of possibilities, and yet tomatoes are exactly what ARE doing well. Go figure.

These were our two volunteers that we found in the garden when we were doing our cleanup at the end of the summer. No doubt they came from some rotten or bug-eaten tomatoes that I tossed across the garden at some point. a couple of those seeds sprouted, and voila! There were two tiny tomato plants coming up, in September. So we brought them in and potted them up, and I'll be darned if they're not getting bigger, and looking fabulously healthy to boot. I'm curious as to whether or not they'll actually bloom...

My spinach outside finally did come up, but not much of it, and it's not exactly burgeoning. So as an experiement I dug up a little of it and potted it and put it in the vestibule under an agri-bulb. It still gets cool in there, but there's lots of light. It's too soon to tell how that's going to work.

I also planted a shallow pan with mixed baby lettuce seeds and put it in there under the bulb. And it looks like I'll those seeds are coming up! Awesome! This is going to be my Christmas salad! I'm really interested to figure out what we can successfully grow inside over the winter to keep us in fresh veggies, and so far the lettuce is looking promising! Pics to come.

Still harvesting...

2009-11-28T05:49:00.000-08:00

Look at the size of this Daikon radish! It's almost as big as my kid. Remember how excited I was when I pulled up my first Daikon this past spring? Well, I'm over it. I don't like them that much and I don't really know what to do with them, and I don't think that I'll be growing them any more.

I'm still getting nice baskets of food. I just love the colors. And you know, I don't really miss summer any more, fall has so much of its own beauty to offer.

We're thinking ahead towards a really big garden for 2010. For the nitty gritty details, click here.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Sun Is Out!!!!

2009-11-15T05:19:00.000-08:00

I managed to get out with the camera yesterday. Here's a summary of the general state of things.

The broccoli plants are just gigantic. I can barely make my way through them. I'm still harvesting heads, and every plant is putting off numerous side shoots.

The collards aren't looking too good.

I'm still battling cabbage worms. YUCK. It looks like of the 6 cabbages that I planted, I'll end up with two good ones. Better than last year, when I got 0 of 6....

Turns out I can grow a carrot!!!! And a weed, but let that pass....

Brussels sprouts are forming!!!

Here's yesterday's bountiful harvest.

What's going on here with the technicolor collard green leaf?

Oh, and here's something interesting. Those broccoli plants that some creature ate? They're growing back!!!!

Checking in...

2009-11-14T05:38:00.000-08:00

Well, it has rained almost constantly since I posted last Friday, and I've been out to the garden once, last night, to pull out a small head of romaine for dinner (in the rain). Finally, today, there's nothing coming down out of the sky, so I plan to get outside and check things out.

On the indoor front - all my pepper plants are dormant, and/or have developed aphids - they are so not going to make it through the winter. My eggplant is finally dying too, and no, I never did get to eat an eggplant this year. Sigh. After all of that. Oh well. There's always next year. I'm not sure if I will grow the Hansel again. They were much smaller than I thought they would be, or maybe they shouldn't have been so small, and I could never tell when they were ripe. I'll be working on my plan for next year soon. I've been collecting my thoughts on this.

The fig tree we bought a month or so ago and have indoors is still doing fine. We have a few herbs and an aloe inside the vestibule with a grow light. I'm thinking of trying spinach in there in a shallow pot. We'll see. I've been eating kohlrabi, and rutabega, and lots and lots of broccoli. I know I need to get out there and harvest broccoli today....

Ah...November!

2009-11-06T14:09:00.000-08:00

This is what I woke up to on Tuesday...lovely foggy morning. This is not sarcasm...I really love the fog we get down here.

I've had some good harvests this week. Carrots, spinach, collards, chard, kohrabi, rutabega, and still getting bell peppers.

I'm sorry to say that our great pepper project has failed miserably. None of the pepper plants survived indoors - that is, they're not dead, just going dormant - which means, we're not getting peppers from them anymore. Today I actually BOUGHT some jalepenos for the chili I'm making this weekend. It REALLY bummed me out to have to do that, because if we hadn't messed so much with all of our big, healthy, and heavily producing pepper plants we'd still have tons of them because we haven't had a frost yet. I wish I'd preserved some peppers this summer. I will DEFINITELY do that next year. Looks like I'll end up with three or four heads of cabbage - my first time!

The garlic is coming up!

This colander is the makings for the roasted root veggies I had a few nights ago for dinner, all from the garden! Every single one! Whoo hoo!!!!

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T04:11:00.001-07:00

I am pleased to say that I have nothing scary to report - unless you think that miracles are scary! These slender red shoots below are what rye looks like coming up...

And this beautiful green grass is what it looks like when it IS up!

Success! Yeah! I have no idea what the heck I'm going to do when it's time to harvest it, how to do it, etc..... but that's for another day. For today, the rye is up!!!

I'm still harvesting, though I'm not getting out there every day or anywhere near every day.

I haven't lost any more broccoli plants, and it continues to come in nicely, though I'm not sure I'm going to have enough to freeze.

I believe this dude is one of the good guys....though a little far from home...hanging out around our soon to be new construction, and not in the garden doing what he gets paid for...Do you see how he's posing for the camera? I tell you, this little guy looked straight at me when I pointed that camera at him. I'm willing to concede that he wasn't actually posing for the camera, but I'm telling you, he knew that I was there.

And last but not least, a lovely spring color - a bulb on the new fig tree. I did tell you I ordered a fig tree, right? It's inside.

Next time, a pepper update. Not sure what to say about them today, the verdict is still out on whether or not they're going to make it inside. Though the serrano is still putting out peppers. I also have a new eggplant. Maybe I'll actually get to eat this one!

Cold, Rainy October Garden Update

2009-10-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Turns out I spoke too soon about the fungus gnats. They came back in force. I think I need to repot this in some new, dry soil, and maybe add an inch or so of sand on top. Right now it's just sitting on the back porch in the dampness (which I know isn't helping anything) but I don't want all those bugs in my kitchen, and quite honestly I've been in something of a funk this past week, so I haven't done anything about it

And since I seem to have a habit of leading off with bad news...

Today was my first day out into the garden in almost a week. It has been cold cold cold and wet wet wet. Today it was still wet, but at least there wasn't anything drizzling down out of the sky. So we ventured out, and got a good big basket full of greens, and a beet, and a turnip, and a rutabega, and I'm pretty sure I have one nice big purple kohlrabi that's about ready to come inside to be sampled, and all of that is good news of course, so wait a minute...what the heck?

Now as anyone who has been reading this blog for 6 months knows, I have done some battle with bugs. This is NOT the work of a bug. As you can see from the bottom front of the picture these two plants are right by the rabbit-guard fence, and this has the look of some animal that reached over the fence and just started a-munching. I would say deer, but that just seems awful far-fetched. I know that the rabbit guard wouldn't do doodly against a hungry deer, but you see I have a six foot high privacy fence around my whole back yard. I suppose a REALLY determined deer might, possibly, jump it, but I've had the fence for about 5 years now and have never seen a deer inside of it.

My second guess would be groundhog. We have a nice plump one living under one of our sheds, inside the castle grounds, so to speak. Is it possible that he's tired of eating grass and has only just discovered the buffet? We'll have to keep an eye on that. Up till now I've been pretty live and let live with the groundhog (giving him a running start before I let the dogs out, and all that). But I have my limits.

Below you'll see a smattering of turnip seedlings. (The big ones are the turnip seedlings; the little ones are weeds.) This is from my newly planted crop which I'm hoping to have for storage. I actually thinned them out a lot and then replanted about a dozen of the seedlings in new holes. I don't know if that'll take, but they seem pretty doggone hardly, so I don't see why not.

This little beauty is a volunteer hierloom tomato of as-yet-undetermined variety. It'd be nice if he lived.

You'll see my hansel eggplant is STILL blooming and still forming little eggplants, though I have yet to eat one.

And this...ah. This. This would be my nicely planted rye seeds after 5 days of rain have pounded the heck out of them. All right, so I wasn't THAT careful about planting them, but I did kind of hoe up rows and I did make sure they were covered with the requisite 1 - 2 inches of dirt, and then FIVE DAYS of relentlessly pounding drizzle. However, there is a bright side. Two bright sides actually. The first is that the birds haven't eaten all the seed. The second is that upon closer inspection, these seeds seem to have sprouted little white tails, so it would appear that all is not (yet) lost.

Among the good news is that my jalepeno plant, indoors for a week now, is still growing lustily, and we're still picking peppers. Hang in there, big fella. I can make it worth your while.

And we DID have broccoli for dinner a few days ago. Broccoli and collards, in fact, in a lovely fall pasta dish, with shrimp from the freezer, garlic I wish I'd grown, and plenty of hot red pepper flakes. Yum!

All's Well Again...

2009-10-16T06:06:00.001-07:00

Less than 24 hours and there was no more sign of fungus gnats. How crazy!

Fungus gnats?

2009-10-14T07:56:00.001-07:00

I think that's what they are. I woke this morning to find that my habenaro pepper plant in the kitchen was just crawling with tiny white insects, and covered with pink specks that must be eggs. A close look at the soil reveals that it was alive with little black gnats. What a mess! I tried to get a picture, but it was all just too small. My husband has been on something of a watering spree the past few days, and I think that he really pushed that habenero over the edge and the fungus gnat population exploded - literally overnight. I wiped off everything that I could, and have been making a trip by the plant every half hour or so and wiping the little white bugs up as they reappear along the rim of the black planter. I think things are getting back under control. But we definitely need to let that soil dry out. I'll be chatting with hubby about that later!!!!

Things Are Coming Along....

2009-10-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

We've been very busy with fall clean up projects around here; among other things, trimming low branches off of long-neglected trees. In the front of this picture you can see our big, lovely jalepeno plant on its way indoors for the winter...

Here's a recent harvest basket.

And the Daikon that's probably going to eat Southern Maryland...

Broccoli - that seems to be doing well despite the cabbage moth carnage going on earlier this month. I haven't seen any more larvae out there.

Last but not least, this lovely flower is in bloom again. I bought and potted this back in April and have pretty much ignored it ever since. From time to time it blooms. It's always a pleasant surprise to me.

Sheet Mulching

2009-10-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

I learned a new vocabulary word this weekend – permaculture.

A friend invited me to join her in doing some sheet mulching and I eagerly accepted, not even sure, at first, what that meant, except that it has to do with preparing a patch of nutrient-enriched soil, free of weeds, that will be easy for plant roots to penetrate, and which will not require tilling or digging come time to plant in the spring. It turns out this is a lot like the lasagna gardening that Teresa wrote about this spring.

I wasn’t sure where to do this in my yard; I had a spot picked out that I thought would get sun all day but as it turns out, it won’t, so I ended up doing it right in the middle of the spent summer garden. One advantage to this is that the area is already fenced (to keep the dogs away) and also it will kill off a bunch of the insidious weeds that have quite taken that area back over since everything was harvested. I’m thinking right now that I might finish off that side of the garden with sheet mulching, and then plant cereal rye in the other half as a winter cover crop, with the plans of harvesting the grain mid summer next year. That way, we’re using all the space that we have for something useful, without over-using and exhausting the soil. I ordered some cereal rye seed this morning. As far as the sheet mulched side of the summer garden space, I’m thinking right now that I might be able to plant some things there in the spring after all, as long as I’m not planting the same things that were there before. More on this later.

Anyway, my friend arrived with bales of straw (half for her and half for me), which we unloaded out of a borrowed pickup truck into my back yard. Then we set out on our collection adventure. The first stop was to bag up dead leaves from a donor’s yard. We collected 4 big bags; two for me and two for her. Then we headed out to get the manure. We went to a local horse farm that was happy to have us fill up the back of the pickup truck and haul it away. It had actually been sitting out in a pile for some time. It was pretty much already composted, which was nice – no smell.

When we got back to my place we did the following:

1. Put down a thick layer of cardboard and newspaper as a weed barrier.
2. Wet it down.
3. Put a layer of manure on top of this a couple inches thick.
4. Put a layer of dead leaves a couple inches thick.
5. Covered the whole thing with a thick layer of straw.

And that’s it! Apparently now I just wait, and let nature do its work. Come spring I’ll have a nice spot of rich, workable fertile soil for planting. I’m going to finish up that half of the garden in this fashion and we’ll see what happens!

Stay tuned for the sowing of my first cover crop…

Peppers in Pots

2009-10-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

It's been getting a lot cooler at night, though you wouldn't know it today. It's the 3rd of October and it's 82 degrees outside!

I wanted to show you my Serrano pepper, the larger of the two plants to the left. It survived the transplant pretty well and has been steadily putting out peppers ever since. And guess what that is there beside it? My habanero plant! Remember the peaked-looking yellow freebie that I got back at the end of July? Well, it recovered. It bushed out, and greened up, and is covered with little white blossoms and with little green peppers!

Surprisingly enough, the anaheim and carmen are both still alive. The anaheim is still putting out peppers at a decent rate, though they're about half the size they were when it was in the garden. Boy, I really blew it digging those up when I did.. That was really dumb. The carmen plant I swear has been dead but today I noticed it seems to have some new growth on it. So I brought them both inside too, along with the eggplant, which seems to be setting up another fruit. I'm going to see if I can't rig myself up a tiny greenhouse for these things in the vestibule on the south side of the house, where there's a lot of light. Eventually I might have to put a little heater in it, as it doesn't get enough light to keep it that warm. We'll see. I'm hoping that by the time that's too much of a probem that we'll have more house!

Cross-striped cabbage moth larvae

2009-09-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Does this look familiar?

I identified (at least one of) my pests!!!!! Read up on this guy here.

As usual, my control tactic is hand-picking. I guess I'd better troop out to the garden this evening and make sure there aren't more crawling around.

Even cooler, those yellow eggs that I showed you a post or two ago are cabbage moth eggs, so they are two parts of the same problem! I really feel like I've just learned and accomplished something!!!

What's Eating My Broccoli?

2009-09-28T13:20:00.001-07:00

If you're asking yourself if you've heard this before - you have. Here's today's culprit. Actually, I probably killed 20 or 30 of them today, of varying sizes. What the heck is this? I've looked through web sites about broccoli pests; I've read descriptions and scanned pictures but can't seem to ID this guy.

I also found this nice little nest of sticky yellow eggs. Lovely. Gone...

Here's my spinach, coming along.

And one of the 4 or 5 kale plants that came up from seed, long after I stopped looking for them...

In other news, I pulled up a turnip, a rutabega, a daikon, and two long lost sweet potatoes that were about the size of my daughter at birth (or something that seems very like that....). I have tons and tons of greens to freeze. Things are really moing along now. I got my garlic yesterday and got that planted out. I ended up planting about 20 different cloves. We'll see how that all goes. I got a tarragon plant and set that out there in some of my empty space, and I also did another sowing of turnip seeds. What the heck. I have the space, I have the seeds, and I'm pretty doggone sure I have the time for them to mature, so I figured I might as well.

Weeding with a Hoe at Dusk

2009-09-26T04:59:00.000-07:00

Ahhh...nothing like a few stolen minutes alone in the garden at dusk. The little one fell asleep last night at 6:30 and I was able to sneak out to pick some greens and check out the goings on out there. I have some huge Daikon, and it looks like I'll have some turnips in another week or two. It's no longer difficult for me to tell that this is the kohlrabi.

I came inside with a nice basket full of greens - collards, a little lettuce, some mini red bells (they're under the greens) and a generous handful of jalepenos.

Funny, I think I dreamed about peppers last night...I had a big bag full of jalepenos and serranos and I was handing them out to my father-in-law and brothers-in-law.....My serrano that I potted and that has been on the deck doesn't look fantastic, but it's putting out peppers lilke crazy, and has peppers all over it, and it's getting ready to bloom again. It's getting crisp around here in the evenings, so I brought it inside last night and put it in front of the window, where I'm hoping it'll live through the winter...

My cabbages look like they want to start heading up. I did find two little green worms on one head last night...

And this!!!! Yuck! This cabbage is FULL of eggs.

I checked out out all the others and this seemed to be the only one that was infested. So I trooped inside for a spoon and a big pitcher of water and I dug out and smushed the eggs as much as I could, and then doused the whole thing really hard with the water to wash the rest of the eggs away. I don't know if that was the best thing to do, but I had to do something. I figured that even if some of the eggs lived, hopefully without hatching on thier food source they wouldn't make it...

I did find some kind of clear slug-looking thing on a broccoli leaf too. Some of my broccoli and brussels sprouts are getting a little eaten, but not too bad. I haven't seen any more harlequin bugs. I hoping to get a chance this weekend to pick up some manure compost and give the broccoli and brussels sprouts a side dress of it. I could also use more straw (and some newspaper). I did weed quite a bit last night with a hoe, which went pretty well as the weeds are all small.

One additional note: I'm having so much fun doing this blog, that I've decided to start an additional blog chronicling various non garden-specific self-sufficiency issues. If you're interested in you can check that out here.

White Spot?

2009-09-21T04:16:00.001-07:00

I think I'm getting some white spot on a few kale (below left) and collard (below right) leaves. I don't know for sure that's what it is, but my research indicates that white spot is the most likely name for what's going on. I pulled off the affected leaves, and it doesn't seem to be spreading much at all. Not sure at this time what to do about it or if I'll need to do anything about it at all. But it's a situation to keep an eye on.

I've been harvesting a few greens and radishes here and there, but yesterday, with great satisfaction, I brought in my first fall basket full of goodies: kale, collards, lettuce, easter egg radishes, mini red bells, and jalepenos.

Yes, I'm still getting a nice supply of peppers. I'm embarassed to say that I nearly killed my anaheim and did kill off my carmen plant trying to transplant them into pots. BAD MOVE. Though the serrano made it no problem, these other two were much bigger and I guess I disturbed the roots too much. It's really too bad, because I lost what would have been a bumper crop of both of them. I'll know better next time.

An update on my eggplant - it's still hanging in there, but I have yet to eat a single eggplant, since my daughter, in her great enthusiasm, kept picking my babies! I asked her to please not do that again unless I said it was okay. So the very next time we were on the deck, she was playing over near the pots and asked me if it was okay. A little distracted, I said, "Sure, it's okay", not realizing what I was agreeing to. The next thing I know, she'd popped off another baby eggplant. I have not one time fussed at her about this, because I'm happy that she thinks they're as beautiful as I do. But my hopes for eggplant this year have turned into a science experiment about whether or not eggplants picked prematurely will ripen in a window like tomatoes and peppers (they won't). And it looks like all I may get out of my eggplant experiments this year is experience.

But hey, that's okay. Next year I'll have so many eggplants I'm going to turn into an eggplant...

Industrious, and Overcoming Ignorance

2009-09-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I am pleased and proud to announce that I do, in fact, have SPINACH!

I have 8 beautiful little plants which, now that I see them, I can clearly recognize as being spinach, as opposed to all of those ubiquitous little weeds that I was hoping were spinach. So I pulled all of those weeds out yesterday. One thing that I have learned over the past few months is how to recognize my most frequently appearing weeds. It's an interesting and useful bit of knowledge that quite frankly I didn't see coming.

On the subject of recognizing things, I think this is the kohlrabi. I do have a map of what I planted where, but things have gotten so mixed up from floating around in the rain that I am kind of confused still about the rutabaga and kohlrabi, and will probably remain so until they start to form thier bulbuous roots and the difference becomes obvious to me.

This is cabbage. Lovely. Although one of the plants looks like something is seriously eating it. I haven't been able to catch anyone at it though.

And here's a big beautiful collard plant. I took a few leaves off of one of these this morning and had them with jalepeno and onion in an omelette. It was delicious! I have also been harvesting lettuce.

Here's one of the easter egg radishes...it looks like someone's already had a bite...

And I do have carrots popping up in various places. Nowhere near as many as I planted.

But things continue to pop up. With almost two weeks of lovely moderate weather and intermittant rain, a lot of the seeds I put out seem to be germinating now. Interesting. Every time I walk out there there's more going on. Still no more sign of the Harlequin bugs. And no indication that anyone is eating the broccoli any more. That's it? 4 little bugs were doing all that damage? Must have been some hungry bugs.

The Official End of Summer

2009-09-08T04:15:00.000-07:00

Well, this weekend I pulled out what was left of the tomato plants, and harvested what I think are the last of the sweet potatoes. It's possible that there may still be some sweet potatoes in the ground. I won't know for sure until I really start pulling out the vines.

This weekend I managed to get two bales of hay into the garden. I'm doing a much thicker mulch than last year. As my root veggies get a little bigger so that I can do it without squashing them I'll be mulching around them too.

Here's some sweet potatoes I prepared this weekend. I wanted to show you this because there are a couple of the potato ends that broke off during harvesting and I wanted to show you how they kind of scab over (the white part). I think it's called "corking". I was surprised at how incredibly easy it is to scrape and nick the sweet potatoes when getting them out of the ground. They really are thin-skinned. I've been "curing" them (I put that in quotes because I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I guess time will tell by how long they last me) in the vestibule in cardboard boxes in front of the window because it's been both warm and humid in there. This weekend my Root Cellaring, Natural Cold Storage For Fruits and Vegetables book by Mike and Nancy Bubel arrived. It seems to be awesome and unbelievably comprehensive. After reading about sweet potatoes I decided to leave this weekend's batch curing where they were, but added a damp towel to drape them with for extra humidity. I have to redampen this towel every morning. But so far so good.

The verdict is still out about whether or not these green sprouts are spinach or weeds. If they're weeds, then not a single spinach seed sprouted. It seems reasonable to hope that it might be spinach, as I covered this area with spinach seeds. We'll see.

Here's a few tiny heads of red-speckled romaine lettuce coming up from seed.

Ah...and this is the piece de la resistance, my GRAND IDEA. I want to actually start composting, and I'm going to do it in this.

When I say "composting" I mean as opposed to what's going on above in the left of the picture. This is a dog kennel I bought last February that the dogs refused to be kenneled in. We've been using it as a double fence along one of our fence lines to keep our dogs and the neighbor's dogs from scratching and digging at the fence line and getting into a barking frenzy, and it's actually worked great, but it's in the way of the addition we're putting on the house right now and so needed to be moved. Since I needed a space big enough to build an actual compost pile this fall, and I also needed to keep the dogs OUT of it, this will work great. It's 10x10, big enough to build a 4 x6ish pile on one side, and have room to turn it to the other side. It's full of grass clippings right now. My next step will be to get out there and get all of the grass clippings heaved up in a pile in one corner, probably the front left one, so that I can start piling up other kitchen scraps in the back. I have found a "recipe" for building a compost pile in Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts, Growing Food In Hard Times so when I get around to actually doing that I will be sure to fill you in. That'll be great because it involves me getting a new toy.....a pitchfork!!!!!

Just to reiterate....

2009-09-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

In case anyone needs a visual of why I'm leaving empty space in my fall garden this year, here's a few shots of my partner hard at work!

And the Harlequin bugs?

2009-09-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

I forgot to say, that after discovering the Harlequin's on the broccoli, that I went out with an envelope and picked off three, dropped them in the envelope and gave them a smush. I've been out looking since but haven't seen any others.

Still Growing....

2009-09-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice shot that shows that all the transplants are still alive and well and getting bigger. I'm still having seedlings popping up, but they're not filling in that long bed to the right nicely like I had hoped. We had SO MUCH hard rain after I planted them, that they kind of ran off all over the place, and I think a lot of them didn't germinate because of the heat.

These are rutabega I think. There are two big ones (below) and then some other coming behind them, probably from the second sowing.

This picture is pretty hard to make out, but because of all the rain I was talking about I seem to have a few big kohlrabi plants coming up in my chard bed. The rain must have washed thier seeds there.

Yesterday I picked up a bale of straw and did a thick mulch on the broccoli and brussels sprouts bed. I'll get another bale today (I can only fit one bale in my car at a time) and mulch the chard, collard, lettuce and cabbage. Possibly I'll have enough to also mulch the kale. But my daughter wants to "build a straw house" a la The Three Little Pigs, so I have ended up with mulch on the one bed in the garden that I never did plant, and I expect there'll be more mulch there later today. That's okay. Maybe it'll keep it from filling back up with grass. I had intended to plant that too, but things are less stressful for everyone if she has somewhere specific in the garden that she can play, so I think I'll just leave that one empty this go-around. Pictures of the mulched garden to come. My intention is to continue throwing in more mulch during the next few months so that I don't get those weeds!

What's Eating My Broccoli?

2009-08-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

It's harder to see in this picture than I had hoped, but this little bugger (ha ha) is a Harlequin Bug, and he's feasting on my broccoli! You can check out the link below for more info. No pesticides recommended - not that I would use them anyway. Looks like I'm going to have to pick them off and crush them like I did with the potato beetles. Yuck.

And the good news?

I do believe that these two little sprouts are some spinach coming up....

Learn a little about Harlequin Bugs (besides how pretty they are) here:

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/GARDEN/VEGES/PESTS/harlequinbug.html

A look at how fall is progressing...

2009-08-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Everyday I go out and look, and the tranplants are getting bigger and the little upstart seedlings are getting bigger, and if I look closely I can see that seeds continue to sprout. Suddenly we're having a LOT of rain, so the seeds are coming up all over the place, not necessarily where I put them. I think I may have spotted a few spinach seedlings today....

Here's the lettuce transplants.

Here's some Easter Egg Radish sprouts...

Daikon...

The red chard transplants getting big. I also have a TON of Swiss Chard seedlings coming up. Just a TON. I'm going to be eating and freezing a lot of Chard, which is fine with me.

The broccoli tranplants look nice and healthy and strong. I did notice that one of them had some bites of the leaves yesterday, and I picked a little black catapillar off of it.

I like this shot, because it looks so neat, and orderly, and you can't see all the un-decomposed grass. I want my husband to till next spring's patch now, so that all that grass can have plenty of time to decompose. As it is thought I think I'll have less trouble with weeds this fall than I did this summer...

Now these are either rutabega or Kohlrabi. Only 1 or 2 of each sprouted. I need to sow more seeds. Again, they may have all run off away in the rain...

Here's the biggest turnip plant. It's from the first sowing of seeds. I have a lot of turnip seedlings coming up from the second sowing. I think that all around I put the first sowing of seeds in too early.

Oh, and I had to show you this. Check it out. I am finally getting beautiful, unblemished, orange bell peppers!

A summer harvest basket. I'm still bringing in tomatoes and peppers. Soon I'll have nothing left out there in the summer garden but the sweet potatoes that are still in the ground.

I hope you’re comfortable, because I’m going to be long winded…

2009-08-22T13:29:00.001-07:00

I’m in the mood to take stock.

Our summer is largely over. There are still sweet potatoes in the ground, and we’re still harvesting peppers, and it looks like we may get a few more tomatoes off the two remaining (half-dead) plants, but that’s it. I pulled up the yellow squash plants today, and we’re having the last squash tonight for dinner. The yellow squash did get vine borers, so there goes my theory about sparing it by setting it out in the garden late. The beans have had it, the nasturtium is gone, and even a few of the marigolds seem to be heaving their last breath; victims, I suspect, of a combination of weeds, sweet potato vines, and a few very heavy rains of late pounding the heck out of them.

This is OK with me, as I have other things to occupy me. But before I start blogging too much about the fall garden I do want to take a moment to reflect on Spring – largely to help me shape my goals for fall.

So, did I meet my goals this spring?

Pretty much.

Goal number one was to produce more food than I did last year; ideally so much that I am forced to freeze, can or dehydrate food to preserve it. Gosh knows I have done that. I should have made goal number one to have a blast, because I sure did do that.

I bought and learned how to use a hot water bath canner. I’ve made BBQ sauce:

Spaghetti sauce:

I've stewed tomatoes:

I've made salsa:

I've made pickles:

And relish - which I don't seem to have a finished picture of.

All of that, and I completely stopped ordering from my local organic produce source because I had all the produce we could eat and them some.

So I’m going to call number 1 an unqualified and resounding success.

My second goal was to not make the same mistakes I made last spring. My main mistake last spring was to crowd my plants in a small garden plot, and I definitely didn’t do that. And yet I still did have some plants crowded out this year. Remember how my once-robust zucchini shouldered this poor Ichiban eggplant right out of existance?

I also did things that I hadn’t even considered when I wrote those goals. I started some plants from seed, and got over my seed-sprouting apprehension.

I tried crops I’ve never tried before and they turned out great.

I met a few enemies....

And a made a few friends!

I’m ashamed to say that my biggest failure is the same as last year - WEEDS - and I can't even bring myself to show you a picture of that. :0)

My biggest lesson has been that a plant’s got to eat! By which I mean that they need certain nutrients in the right proportions, and if they’re not getting them from my garden soil, then as their host, it falls on me to oblige.

So here’s my arsenal – for fall, and for everything that is currently in containers. Left to right it's tomato tone, an organic liquid fertilizer, fish emulsion (most of what I'm growing in fall is greens), sulphur (don't even ask me what to do with that because I don't know, but I found it laying around in the shed), and bone meal. Up top, L to R, is the water meter, a couple of misters, and in the tray are a spoon and gardening gloves for myself and my daughter.

You’ll see I’m getting organized. I’ve had this little “lawn buddy” for years. I’ve just been moving it around out of my way, and lately my daughter has been playing with it. I didn’t even mean to buy it – I thought I was buying one that was much bigger, and when Lowe’s delivered it to me along with 25 evergreen trees a few years ago (yeah, you’ve seen shots of my yard. You surmise correctly. The trees all died.) I thought, what the heck is that? I thought I was buying a wheelbarrow. (In case you missed it, that was my “dumb blond” punch line.) Anyway, I bought fish emulsion the other day, and I assembled the various useful things I have around, and I’m ready! Bring it on!

So, with all of that said, I want to lay down some new goals for fall:

1. Acquaint myself with how to nurture everything that I have planted (nutrients, etc.). This is a MUST.

2. Keep out the WEEDS!!!!!! Another MUST.

3. Continue to fill my freezer – greens of all kinds, broccoli, Brussels sprouts – YUM!

4. Figure out how to “root cellar” vegetables, with or without a root cellar. (This goal being largely precipitated by all the beets and the few radishes that I didn’t eat fast enough and that perished in plastic bags in the bottom of my fridge before I figured out that I shouldn’t have washed them for long term storage, or stored them in my fridge that long at all.

5. Possibly get a pressure canner and learn to use it. We’ll see about that one.

Thanks for hanging with me through this spring and summer! I really did have a super time, and I am SO grateful to Cindy and to The Tasteful Garden not only for feeding us this summer but for the opportunity to grow more, and more quickly, both as a gardener and as a person, than I otherwise would have thought was possible. Moving on to fall! NO FEAR!!!!!

Deck Check

2009-08-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

The eggplant is still cranking. I have five or six fruits coming along nicely. I have my eye on that one in front. I'm just WAITING for it to get big enough to eat!

I owe a lot to this eggplant. Not only am I extremely proud of it (I started it from seed!!!!). But it also taught me that all-important lesson (DUH) that I have to feed plants in containers; and hey, maybe if that's the case in containers the ones in the garden would do a little better if I fed them too....

Go figure. More on that tomorrow!

And here's the serrano pepper plant I pulled out of the garden seeming no worse for wear. White spots are going away, peppers are turning red, there are blooms all over it....I hit this with the tomato tone when I brought it up on deck too. Plus, with them both so close by it's really easy to peep out at them every day and give them a drink if they need it, which they frequently do. They've had an almost daily mid-afternoon droop, which has been easily corrected with the aqua.

And as for the fall garden...

2009-08-20T14:38:00.001-07:00

Well, I am getting some seedling action, though not as much as I had hoped. It has been SO HOT. I think that this is either turnip or daikon (of course). My first project for the upcoming weekend will be to take my map out there and take stock of what is coming up and what isn't and resow.

Here's my new babies set out. The kale is all the way in the back corner. The yellowish green stuff to the right is lettuce, and the darker green stuff in the same rows near it is cabbage. The little ones with red stalks are chard. And the ones in front are collard greens. I don't seem to have a picture of the broccoli and brussels sprouts handy.

I beleive that this little guy - one of two making an appearance this week in the same bed, is chard. If I'm right, this same seed came up fine last year. But it doesn't look like much is coming up (yet) so I may poke a few more seeds in this weekend.

You know what I really want, and which doesn't seem to have come up at all, is spinach. I love spinach. I want a LOT of it. I want to fill my freezer with it. I may try to resow that, or may wait another week and try again.

Try again!

Pepper Update

2009-08-20T14:19:00.001-07:00

The tomatoes may be waning, but the peppers are still going gangbusters. I had so many anaheim and carmen peppers ripening at the same time that I felt sure that they were going to be a one shot deal, and that I would get one bumper crop all ripe at the same time and then that would be it.

But, we've been establishing since April all the ways in which I don't know everything, so it'll come as no surprise to you that these beautiful and healthy plants are putting out new peppers as we speak, and they show every sign of keeping on coming.

So my baskets these days are mostly peppers and green tomatoes, or tomatoes that have barely started to ripen that I am picking to let finish ripening inside.

I made a batch of green tomato relish this past weekend, and you know what? It was SCRUMPTIOUS. Google the recipe on Cooks.com (I think). I didn't have any celery seed or mustard seed left (all those pickles I made....) so I actually put a tsp of thyme and a 1/2 tsp of turmeric in instead. The only thing I will change for the next batch is that I will include more hot peppers, as many serranos and jalepenos as I have on hand. I hope to make more this weekend. I have eaten one 1/2 pint jar (I canned them all in little jelly jars) as a relish with sausage, and honestly I could just eat that relish out of the jar with a spoon. It is GOOD.

I decided to stay local with my plants this fall, unless I can't find any local cauliflower. I may order that from the Tasteful Garden if they still have it, specifically because it's self-blanching which is one less thing I will have to figure out this fall. I suspect the cauliflower I planted last year, bought locally, died because I didn't blanch it, since I had no idea what that was or that I was supposed to do it. If you don't know either, I believe this means that you have to tie the leaves together around the new head and let it develop inside this little cocoon. My guess is that the cauliflower that TG sells will kind of naturally wrap its leaves itself, and I'm real interested to see that. So I may do that at the last minute.

All of which is to say that while I'll be looking for plants locally this coming spring too, and hopefully doing a better job of starting seeds inside myself for as much as I can, I think I'm going to get heirloom tomatoes and peppers from TG again because they've really just been wonderful.

My Sous Chef

2009-08-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

My daughter is a regular helper in the kitchen now. For awhile she's been getting good at scooping and measuring and counting. She put the spices in the pickles, and in the relish we made as week or so ago, and she sets up the coffee pot every night. But when she asked me this weekend if she could help me to trim the green beans, I was skeptical. Would her three-year-old hands be steady? Would her toddler knife do the trick?

She did a GREAT job! Together we got this pot ready to steam blanch and freeze.

I'm still picking beans, but I can't imagine it's going to go on for much longer. I am about wrapping up my tomatoes. The plants are on thier way out. Much as I know it's too soon, and as guilty as I feel, I have to also admit to a little bit of relief. Whew! A breather!

For now...I expect to be doing a lot of freezing this fall, and I MAY spring for a pressure canner too....

Water, Water Everywhere...

2009-08-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

You know what I really hate? I hate it when my husband gives me advice and I ignore it, and he repeats the advice and I ignore it, and then he reminds me good-naturedly and I still ignore it…and then he turns out to be right.

I really hate that.

All of which is to say, at least one of my tomato plants is dead dead dead and I suspect that it’s my fault.

Sigh.

The advice I refer to is the perfectly serviceable water meter that he gave me, so that I could check and make sure that the plants in the garden were getting enough water. And did I use it? Um…well…not really. And come to think of it, it hasn’t been raining here much. And it’s not like I don’t have a hose. And a sprinkler. And a soaker hose. And buckets and pitchers and bottles and coffee cups…I mean, if I had known the poor thing was drying out so badly I could have gotten water out there some way. I could have done something about it and now it’s too late. But no, I was too busy canning tomatoes like they were just going to keep on coming.

Shame on me.

So yesterday morning I went out with the hose and the bag of tomato tone and I gave the still living (but possibly also on their way out) plants a few spoonfuls and a good, luxurious soak. We’ll see.

But that’s only part of our ongoing water saga.

I mentioned that I had started some broccoli, Brussels sprouts and kale seedlings in the house a few months ago, and after popping up quickly and looking initially quite happy, they all shriveled up and died. I didn’t understand this, because I had them under the grow light, and I used a really good, clean seed-starting medium, and I made sure the soil stayed moist, and they still seemed to be drying up.

Well, check out what I learned yesterday.

I also said a post or so back that I was looking for a local source for my fall transplants, and the perfect place finally came to me. There’s a nursery not too far from me where my husband and I used to buy saltwater fish back when we kept tanks. I never really bought plants from them, but I remember from our trips there to get fish that they were a pretty knowledgeable and committed group of people there, so I thought I’d check them out. And I found BEAUTIFUL transplants. I got broccoli, Brussels sprouts, red chard, kale, collard greens, cabbage and lettuce. I got a whole flat in fact, 48 individual plants, for twenty bucks. You can’t beat that. And that’s not even the best part.

I was commenting to the man who helped me that they were really beautiful little plants, and he said thanks, that he had raised them himself. I told him about my seedlings that didn’t make it, and then he imparted his secret. “You have to mist them,” he said.

Aha!

This makes sense to me, since, as I said, I kept watering them, and the leaves still shriveled up and dried out.

So now I know. Mist them. I’ll do better when I try again to start them for next spring. So yesterday when I was at Lowes for manure compost I bought a mister.

Who says I can’t be taught?

Welcome to your new home...

2009-08-14T04:34:00.000-07:00

I mentioned on Wednesday that I'm hoping to find a local source for my fall transplants. I stopped in at a small garden center in Alexandria VA yesterday on my way home from work and as I was wandering around looking at the plants, I found the vegetable table that was covered not with the broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts that I was looking for, but with 30 or 40 peaked looking pepper plants that I guess never sold this spring. The owner (?) walked by, saw me looking, and said, "If you want any of those they're free", so I brought a couple home and repotted them. They looked like they would have been healthy and fine if they weren't so unbelievably root-bound. I actually had to cut the pots off, leaving some of the black plastic on the very bottom so as not to damage any of the roots that had grown out of it. It's two tabasco plants on the left, and one habenaro on the right. Maybe we'll get a few peppers out of them. I may go back on Monday and grab a few more!!!! She did say she was expecting to have the fall transplants next week....

With fall in mind, I moved my serrano pepper up out of the garden, where it was getting buried in weeds, and up into a pot. I am hoping I might be able to keep this alive for awhile in the house once the weather turns. It has developed some white spots on the leaves (before I moved it). Not powdery...It looks like sunburn, like my un-hardened off zucchini and cucumbers did earlier this year. I've been doing some web surfing trying to see what's up. It might be sunburn...we had a few really hot days here (101 degrees) much hotter than we usually get, so maybe that's it. I'll keep an eye on it.

And here's the eggplant this morning, getting really big! compare this picture to less than 48 hours ago in my last post. They grow so fast!!!!

Checking in.....

2009-08-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

The eggplants are getting big - I swear once these things get going they seem to grow 1/2 inch or more a day. You can almost see them growing!

I made and processed 5 pints of salsa last night with tomatoes and peppers from the garden. This weekend I hope to try a recipe for green tomato pepper relish that I've been hanging onto. All my peppers will be ripe red and perfect at the same time - at least a dozen, maybe more, so I'm going to have to do something with them quick as I doubt we can eat them fast enough.

I planted some seed this week - red and gold beets, daikon, turnips, rutabaga, kohlrabi, carrots, spinach, kale, chard, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. I suspect I'm getting a late start. It's also been topping at about 101 degrees in the afternoons here lately, probably not ideal germination temperature for most of these things. I have been trying to keep the soil a little moist so they don't all fry out there. I'll see what's up a week or so from now and try again if I have to. I am also going to look into some transplants. I would like to find some at local small garden stores if possible, if not I'll order some. Particularly broccoli, brussels sprouts and cauliflower. I'm pretty sure that I can get everything else to come up from seed, as I have done almost all of this stuff from seed before. Last fall the chard came up from seed just fine. I want to concentrate mostly on compost and straw, in hopes that my fall garden won't turn into the jungle that my spring/summer garden is now. It ain't pretty, but what the heck. It feeds me.

To the left here is a shot of today's garden beauty!

Did I say my cucumbers were dead?

2009-08-09T10:53:00.001-07:00

Silly me. Obviously I was mistaken. I should have taken a picture of the part of this plant that isn't climbing up the fence and you'd know what I mean. That thing looks DEAD.

This is what I mean about things seeming really weird right now. Everything looks like it's dying, but it's all still pumping out a crop. (Please ignore the overgrown jungle of weeds that this thing has become.....)

I did get out some to start working those fall beds. I worked the manure compost and peat moss into the one long bed down the left of the plot. That's where I'm going to plant all of my root veggies. The large beds to the right will hold broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, chard, kale, lettuce and spinach. That might alter a little based on availability of transplants....

I pulled up some sweet potatoes this afternoon. Lovely!

And here's a few shots of the beautiful pepper-laden plants with all the peppers turning red!

Last but not least, something pretty I saw in the garden today.

I have EGGPLANT!!!!!

2009-08-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! Look at the beautiful little babies!!!!!

Things are kind of a strange combination of slowing down/dying back and big production. It feels like things are slowing down, and yet this week I think I brought in my biggest basket ever, probably because the melons take up so doggone much space. I have manure and hummus compost in my car trunk, and some peat moss. I've been working in the fall garden spot and I really want to get some stuff planted this weekend, mostly the root veggies. I want to mix in a little peat moss where I'm going to put these, especially where I'm going to put the carrots. I'm trying to work up the energy to get out there and do this today. I also have beans and squash I need to blanch and freeze...

I got a new book this week from the Mother Earth News catalog: "The Beginner's Guide to Preserving Food at Home". You're probably thinking that I should have had this book at the beginning of the summer and not at the end, and you would be right! But I'll be able to make more improvements for fall. For one thing, this book talks about root cellaring and I'd really like to be able to do that effectively this winter.

I'm feeling a little weary...

2009-08-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's the summer heat. Or maybe it's because all of the garden work from this year is catching up with me. Or maybe it's because the life cycle for a number of my veggies is over. My cucumbers are dead. They really put out a huge amount of fruit for a few months there.

I harvested the last of my banana fingerling potatoes this weekend. They're not really suited for long term storage, so we'll be eating our way through these in the next month or so I would imagine. Next year I'm going to plant these again, and also some suited specifically for storage.

I have been canning tomatoes like a mad-woman. We moved this operation out to the grill on the deck, since running an electric eye full of boiling water on the stove for 85+ minutes just makes the house unbearably hot. I think that the pressure of keeping up with processing all these tomatoes has worn on me a little over the last few weeks. I'm not complaining...just taking a pause.

I've pulled up a few more sweet potatoes here and there, but I don't want to pull up more than we'll eat until I have to. I think I can leave them in the ground for awhile. The bush beans took a hiaitus, and then started producing pretty well again. My yellow wax beans are getting about ready to pick. My carmen and anaheim peppers are finally getting ripe on the plants. Each one has about a dozen beautiful peppers at least. And you're not going to believe this, but I actually got a yellow bell pepper to ripen on the plant! It didn't happen until the other 6 or so on there rotted and dropped off. Sigh.

My tomato plants, while still putting out tomatoes, seem to have slowed a bit too. My orange russian has developed a bit of blossom end rot. This time I treated with bone meal. It seems to be okay today. There's tomatoes on there that aren't affected. The yellow taxi is gasping its last breath. Not sure what happened to it, but it sure put out a HUGE amount of fruit, all within about a month, and then kind of shrunk up and petered out.

I am picking up several canteloupe a day now. I finally had to start pulling them when they were slip ripe (will pop off the vine with a little pressure) rather than just picking them up when they've already fallen off the vine, because they were getting TOO ripe.

And finally, let me introduce you to the new love of my life, my beautiful, big, healthy, multiple-blooming hansel eggplant! It is really thriving in a pot on the deck. About a week or so ago I fed it some tomato tone, and shortly afterwards it began to bloom. I'll do that about once a month I think. It just looks so lovely and healthy, and when it rains its beautiful large leaves cup up to hold the water....I'll have eggplant yet if it's the last thing I do this summer!

The fall garden spot is all tilled up and ready to receive. The next thing I need to do is get the manure compost. Most of what I'm planting will go in as seed. My broccoli, kale and brussel sprouts seedlings all petered out. Just another thing around here that's feeling TIRED. Other than harvesting, I'm kind of just resting up until I get my second wind to do my fall planting this weekend or next, at the latest.

OH MY GOSH....I grew a sweet potato!

2009-07-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

So, I was outside, sweating profusely, covering the garden with plastic because it's bug spray day... and I happened to notice that there are furrows developing in one of my sweet potato mounds.

On closer examination I realized that I could see a sweet potato!

There were 2 showing. One of them is below. I don't think that the neck is supposed to curve like that, but heck, I'm guessing a probably have a million sweet potatoes out there...I went back to my garden planning notebook and realized that I planted the slips on 17 April, which means that they have been in the ground about 100 days or so...WOW.

Tomorrow I will have to inspect all my sweet potato mounds and pull out any that are showing above ground. My research indicates that I will then leave them in a basket to dry or "cure" for about 10 days, and I should be able to store them.

And a few recipes...

2009-07-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

Cindy asked about recipes for the veggies I showed a few posts back. They're super simple.

Tomato and Cucumber Salad

Chop tomatoes and cucumbers. Mix with one or two cloves of crushed garlic, thinly sliced onions to taste, and freshly chopped basil. Add light dressing of olive oil and vinegar (balsamic or apple cider). Salt. Mix it all together and let rest (in fridge, or out if you're going to eat it in the next hour or so). Sometimes I also thinly slice mini red bells or jalepenos if I have them.

Green Beans and Yellow Squash

I steam the green beans and cut yellow squash until it's al dente. Spread them on a broiler pan (I use the little broiler pan in the toaster oven). Drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, ground red pepper and shredded parmesian cheese. Bake until the parmesian is just beginning to get golden. Then enjoy!

And finally...FALL

2009-07-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry for all the catch-up posts at one time.

As I've mentioned, I'm thinking about fall. We borrowed a tiller, and this past week my husband set to work tilling us up a new plot for fall, the same size as the one we're currently using for spring. Eventually I want to rotate them, using one for spring, one for fall, and leaving one fallow or planting a cover crop on it. He got the whole thing tilled up, and the grass is actually dying in the heat, which means his tiller did a better job than my months of shovel work. (Go figure). He's going to till all that dead grass under again so he can get deeper. This coming weekend I'll fence it all in and bring home bags of compost manure and then he'll till that in. At that point, I'll be gearing up to plant. Mostly root veggies, as well as chard, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, kale, cauliflower. I want to concentrate on really producing some carrots this time, which I have not gotten to grow successfully yet. I'm still tweaking my garden plan...

Various other things

2009-07-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

We harvested our onions - too late, apparently, as I lost about half of the beautiful perfect things to rot. My bad.

Sigh.

They had started to fall over, but the green tops hadn't died off, and for some reason (wrong, apparently) I was thinking I had to leave them in till September or so. My husband brought in the first batch. I nearly had a coniption fit when I saw him walking back up to the house with his arms full of onions.

"What are you doing! They're not ready! They don't have thier paper skins!"

"Some of them are rotting. These were all sitting above ground. I think they're done."

"Then you're not supposed to bring them in. I think you're supposed to pull them up and leave them out there to dry up or something..."

I wasn't really upset with him, of course, but at myself for being so unprepared to deal with them. I went back out the next day and there were two more decent ones, which I pulled up and left to lay there in the hot dirt for the day. They actually dried up on the outside and did get papery, and now they're in the vestibule in front of an open window getting a few more days of hot air.

So the good news is that this is my onion! (Sung to the tune of "This is my country" it's kind of catchy....) The bad news is that I only got half the crop that I should have. The other good news is that I am well-prepared for great improvement next spring, in onions, as in so many other things.....

The yellow wax beans I planted for a second crop of beans are flowering, as are the second crop of bush beans. Good thing too, as the bush beans are only producing about 20% of what they were previously. I was talking to someone at my daughter's dance class who was saying that they don't produce all summer, so maybe it's not just me....

I FINALLY started to get some color action on these Anaheim peppers. Only two, and too late, as they had both already started getting eaten by bugs or succoming to come kind of rot. I am really not having luck with my big peppers. I didn't last year either. I think that IS just me. Jalepenos and Serranos are still kicking.

My cucumbers are dying back. Like the bush beans they've slowed production almost to a halt. Although I truly can't complain. We ate dozens raw, and ended up overall with about 24 or more pints of pickles. Not bad for 3 plants I sprouted from seed!

Here's my basket from yesterday. As I said, no complaints!

Holy Tomatoes!

2009-07-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

Well, the heirloom tomatoes are really popping now, and starting to earn thier keep! So we've gone into preservation mode around here, learning as we go, and exercising that hot water canner!

A local area food program that I participate in here in Southern Maryland is selling heirloom tomatoes for $4 a pound. My kitchen window has pretty much looked like this - rotating tomatoes through to finish ripening before being turned into some product (BBQ sauce, canned tomatoes or spaghetti sauce) - for over a week now. And we've eaten plenty raw in salads, and have given some away. I'd say the $25 investment for the 6 transplants was WELL worth the money. And boy are they tasty. Thank you Tasteful Garden!!!!

A batch of fresh, ripe yellow tomatoes ready to be processed....

Here they are in the pot, smothered in spices, ready to go. Full disclosure - I was actually following a recipe I got online for ketchup, but it was so spicy and tangy, it definitely tasted more like BBQ sauce, and that's what we've been using it for. One night I also poured it over meatloaf at the last minute and put it in the toaster oven. That was delicious.

This is my second batch, done yesterday, with almost exclusively dark tomatoes. It was great. I didn't process the cans, just filled them up hot and let them cool, and they sealed. But I'm keeping them in the fridge. I'm sure we'll use it up in the next few months.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

2009-07-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Gosh, I have a LOT to report.

I have to say that overall I am definitely doing better this year than last year. No doubt. And though I've had plenty of disappointments, everything seems to have a silver lining. Case in point, I have been lamenting the July demise of my zucchinni plants, two years running now. All evidence points to squash vine borers. I have done limited research on these little critters, but what I have done seems to suggest that at some point in early spring these moths lay thier eggs on or in the plants, and that after the eggs hatch and begin to eat the plant, the plant usually dies around mid July. This certainly seems to be the case with my zucs. But here's the thing. My yellow crookneck squash are doing beautifully, and they are virtually identical to the zucs only thier fruit looks different, so I would have to assume that they are also succeptible to the borers. I didn't put them in the garden until after I had harvested the last of the turnips and radishes and beets, 13 June, as opposed to the zucchini which were set out in May. So what I'm thinking is that maybe next year I can put out a squash and a zuc in May, and follow up with more plants in mid June, so that if (make that WHEN) the first round dies in July, I will keep getting both veggies from the new plants, my theory being that I may have missed the egg-laying stage with the crookneck squash and so they didn't end up with borers. I figure it's worth a shot. I've made a note for next spring.

I harvested some potatoes this week. This plant seemed to be falling over, and I was out of potatoes, and anyway I was just dying to know what the heck is going on in there, so I pulled it up.

This is what potatoes look like when they're growing.

The good news is that they were delicious. The bad news is that there weren't as many as I had hoped. The silver lining is that I think I can do better next year. I think that the potato "cages" were probably a good idea, but that I still did not manage to keep these potato plants hilled up enough to encourage maximum production from them. I'm thinking that next year I will not plant them in mounds to start, and that I may set them aside in their own garden plot and make it a raised bed so that I can keep adding soil to it. I think that I had way too much foliage showing. Next year I will also plant horseradish with the potatoes, as that's supposed to help deter the potato beetles. My potato beetles did not turn out to be a major problem, and next year I will be vigilant about looking for those eggs before I have to start crushing beetles.

My main project this week was to do a major pickle canning project. I bought a hot water bath canner and some mason jars, and set to it.

The good news is that the tweaking I did to the recipe after tasting my refridgerator pickles was perfect, it corrected the flavor in exactly the way that I wanted. The other good news is that although it seems like a lot is going on at one time, which can be kind of flustering, I'm not afraid of canning anymore as a concept. All my jars sealed - we listened to the "ping" of the jars sealing all evening, which was pretty cool.

The bad news is that I put one of these jars in the fridge for a couple of days and then opened it to taste. As I said, it tasted great, but the pickles turned out to be rather limp, which didn't happen with the refridgerator pickles. I think this is because I let the jars sit in the canner while the water was warming and coming to a boil, so they spent WAY too much time in hot water, rather than just being put in for the 10 minutes of boiling time. I want to try again. I'm also thinking I should see if I can do some research to ID the problem so I don't have it again, but to be honest with you I'm a little reluctant to Google "limp pickle". Heaven only knows what I might end up with.

I guess that more or less wraps up the week. I had my first sweet potato bloom this week. How surprising and lovely. I didn't know they would bloom. (Duh).

I am going to have a melon before this coming week is up, I just know it.

Here's one of the harvests I brought in one day this week. That yellow taxi is still alive and pumping out ripe tomatoes.

And here's some veggies we had for dinner! Yum!

This time with photos

2009-07-12T15:07:00.001-07:00

Well, I had to pull this up today. It DOES have borers. The stem is turning to mush.

The bush baby zucchini though does not seem to have that problem. The part dying off is closest to the stem, and it seems to be vining out through the garden. All the new, dark green leaves are at the end, and it's still putting out fruit. We'll see what happens.

Here's my first yellow crookneck. I'm having this for dinner tonight.

Yesterday I made my first ever pickles! Refridgerator version. I'm definitely going to make more. We tried them tonight and they were quite tasty. I've also been picking the cuckes much smaller in anticipation of making more pickles. I specifically got pickling cucumbers. I need to get some jars so I can make some to can for longer storage.

Here's a basket from a few days ago...

The melon patch is going nuts. I'm still waiting for that first ripe canteloupe. I have canteloupe (muskmelon) and "Old Melon" which has white flesh. I can't wait!

And the final bit of news....I'm getting geared up for fall. At the moment I'm planning to do everything from seed. Here are my first babies - broccoli (on either side) and red kale (in the flat of 6 in the middle). Though I was reading today that I could just direct sow the kale...I bought transplants last year so I figured that's what I'd do. I got serious with the potting medium this time, 9 parts peat moss and 1 part perlite - more or less. The packets say 10 - 20 days till the seedlings emerge but it took about 24 - 36 hours. Unbelievable. And since I used a clean potting medium this time and not dirt from my back yard I'm pretty sure it's actually the seeds that I planted coming up, and not just weeds (ha ha)!

Things went well enough this spring that I have high hopes for them....

Feeling a little discouraged this evening...

2009-07-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Well, that yellow tomato plant I showed you a picture of yesterday today has an entire dead limb on it. Yesterday, it was only the suckers (?) the small limbs that had no flowers or fruit on them that were dying and dropping off. I pulled a bunch of ripening tomatoes off of there today.

I'm also worried about my zucchinis. I took some photos but my husband has made off with the camera this evening so I can't post them. They're yellowing wilting - the EXACT same thing that happened to me last year at the exact same time of year. Much web research this evening suggests that zucs affected by vine borers tend to die in mid July. But I don't see any evidence that that's the problem. The stems seem sturdy, intact, and fine. I still have a lot of green leaves, and a lot of new growth leaves that are a rich dark green. Also, the bush baby zucchini seems to be making it's way across the garden, and it's the older leaves that are yellowing and falling off as the part producing fruit has moved up the new plant...Promise photos later. Tomorrow I hope.

Tonight I fed the carmen, anaheim and yellow bell plants with the tomato tone. They're just bursting with huge green peppers, all of them, that just don't seem to get ripe. The bigger the peppers are the more likely they are to get ripe so slowly that the walls start getting thin on them. I haven't had good luck with the bigger peppers, though the serranos and jalepenos are growing like gangbusters...

On the bright side, I made my first batch of refridgerator pickles today. I'm excited. I need to get myself some canning jars and lids and take the plunge with the canning. This week! I should have plenty of ripe tomatoes by the end of this week. My melons are coming along nicely. I'm still picking beans. I'm also still hoping for a big potato and sweet potato harvest.....

I'm planning for fall. I've sprouted some broccoli seeds and kale seeds over the past few days and I have them under the grow light, hoping for a dozen or so robust transplants for Sept. I think I'll do the cauliflower next...

A few things...

2009-07-08T04:22:00.000-07:00

Well, my container garden plans really haven't worked out so well. Neither zucchini, nor squash, nor cucumber seem suited to containers and I've had to pull them all up and throw them out. My one Bush Tomato is looking pretty peaked too; the same variety in the Topsy Turvey isn't making it either. I do have three carrots coming up in a pot. And my two transplanted eggplants are doing nicely, though they're still little. Maybe I can bring them inside in the fall and have eggplant for Christmas.

Most of my tomato plants are lush and huge, but not with huge amounts of fruit.

This little bugger, on the other hand, is FULL of fruit, and looks low and stunted. I haven't done anything to it (no sucker pinching, etc.) but it certainly is putting all its efforts into developing fruit and not into developing foliage. I guess that's good?

Here's what I collected Monday...

And here's Tuesday. The greenish looking tomato on the left is one of those big pear-shaped ones. It's actually quite large, and the bottom of this one is yellow, though you can't see it in the picture. Stealing shamefully from someone else's blog I decided to line these up on a window-sill in the kitchen to ripen, as it looked so cheerful.

The marigold's are my daughter's contribution to the harvest. She loves to pick them, and as we have TONS I don't mind. She's discovered all sorts of neat insects and her fear of bees has become a fascination. We like to watch them together, and talk about what they're doing. One of her favorite movies is Bees. It's cute, and a good learning tool for talking about what goes on in the garden. I bring the marigolds in and float them in a crystal bowl of water for a centerpiece. It looks nice, and they last for a week or so...

New Potatoes, Melons, and More on the Evils of Pesticides....

2009-07-03T16:01:00.001-07:00

I wanted to try some “new potatoes” this week, so I dug out a few. At one of the potato plants I ended up being up to my wrists in ants – not good! Anyway, I just took a few of these banana fingerling potatoes, and roasted them in olive oil, and let me tell you, I have never tasted a potato with such a delicate, round, sweetish flavor, they were UNBELIEVABLE. It makes me realize that I’ve probably never had a fresh potato. WOW. Can’t wait till I can harvest more. I hope I have a lot of them!

Here’s Thursday’s harvest. I’m picking at least a half colander of green beans daily. We’re eating them, and I’ve already frozen quite a bit.

I have melons!

As far as our bug spray saga goes…

I called the County extension office and the woman that answered the phone told me to call the Maryland Dept of Agriculture and gave me that number. So I did, and the man I talked to said the product is called "Biomist" (something else is mixed with the permethrin) and that it stays aloft for about an hour, after which point it either "evaporates" (his word) or settles on a surface. My research indicates that it'll stay in the soil up to 30 days, is detectable in foliage for up to 10, that it is not absorbable by human skin, and that it is fairly easy to wash off, as it degrades quickly in water and sunlight. The man at the MDA told me "it won't hurt my garden", not to "eat anything fresh and unwashed out of the garden", but that if I wash everything it'll be fine. This seems like common sense to me and not really the answer I'm looking for, as I don't want it to be on the produce at all, but that was the response I got when I was asking about whether or not covering the garden would keep it from getting on the garden. All of my research thus far suggests to me that covering the garden should keep it off the plants and out of the soil where the plants roots are for the most part. So we’ll be diligently covering again this Monday. I will also need to cover a new plot with black plastic in the not too distant future to keep the permethrin out of the soil where I’m going to dig up the fall garden. I figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone, keep the pesticide off and kill the grass all in one go.

If anyone is interested, I also found out after last week's hysterical panic that permethrin is a main ingredient (37%) in the flea and tick product I have been putting on my dogs. Hmmn. Apparently you can also buy permethrin at places that sell camping equipment and people soak their clothes and camping gear in it. Yuck. I know from the Internet that many states use this stuff in their public mosquito control programs. They crop dusted the gulf coast with it after Hurricane Katrina. All of which is to say that the stuff seems to be ubiquitous; and I don't find that comforting so much as extremely disturbing. If you're interested, of all the websites I found about permethrin, this (link below) seems to be the most balanced - that is, it considers the possibility that this could be harmful (it’s an endocrine disruptor…anyone see The Colbert Report this week????) in addition to repeating all of the "this is basically safe" information that is out there.

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\Home\TEDX ? Pesticides Permethrin Citizen's Guide.htm

Much Ado About Nothing...

2009-06-30T06:31:00.001-07:00

Well, turns out the County didn't spray last night. I called the mosquito control board to find if the scheduled changed. I was told that they didn't spray last night because the "landing count was too low". We are scheduled for dusk next Monday. Lesson learned, call during the day Monday to confirm that we will be sprayed before going through all that trouble. I also spoke to a recent aquaintance this morning who I've met through a local area food program; she has taken the Maryland Master Gardeners Courses through the Department of Agriculture, and she gave me the name and number of someone there that I can call to discuss this issue further. In particular, to find out more details about permethrin such as how long it stays aloft, etc. to make sure that covering the garden is actually going to help. It's hard to see how it wouldn't, but I suspect that both my aquaintance and the woman whose number she gave me know more about these things than I do at this point, so it seems that I have some more research to do.

14 minutes till bug spray time...

2009-06-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

And this time we're ready. It took my husband and I about an hour and a half working together to turn the garden into a bubble...

Today's Work

2009-06-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's this morning's harvest. My first bush beans! Lots of cukes. In the back in the white bowl is my first bush baby zucchini that I got the other day.

I started work today on my pesticide protection program. You'll get the basic idea from the pictures below. It's just 1/2" PVC pipe, 2' rebar, and plastic sheeting. I'm still not done. I need more supplies. Doing this gives me some good ideas about how to do dimensions on my fall garden space. They won't be spraying in the fall, but I can probably extend my harvest season a little bit by covering the plants...

Today's haul - and some dire news...

2009-06-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

Here’s today’s take from the garden.

The eggplant didn’t make it.

And it doesn’t look like the plant’s going to make it either; not because of the potato beetles but because the doggone zucchini is just completely taking it over. This happened last year too, with a different plant choking out the eggplant (I can’t remember offhand what).

I think it’s time to put my eggplant seedlings in big pots on the deck and hope for the best.

Here’s my first yellow squash on the deck! I had my first zucchini for dinner last night. It was beautiful and great.

Herbs are going well.

The potato plants are getting HUGE.

And now for the dire news…

This past Monday evening – without notice – our County began its mosquito control program, which consisted of driving a pickup truck through our neighborhood spraying permethrin from a tank in the pickup bed. This noxious cloud drifts out over everything, including the garden! I was both hysterical and heartbroken. They didn’t do this last year. My husband was a little quicker-thinking. While I was inside have a breakdown, he was outside pulling plastic over the garden. He didn’t have enough to cover more than half. And because our garden is behind a privacy fence on all sides and set back some few hundred feet from the source of the spray, and protected by trees on one side, its likely that the damage was minimal, but I don’t want anything sprayed on my food!

I scrubbed the heck out of everything that I harvested today, and threw away the beet greens – what a shame. The only comfort is that if they did get hit, that there is still probably substantially less residue on them then on commercially-produced agriculture, where the pesticides are sprayed deliberately right on the plants, so we’re still better off. I have since checked out neighboring counties here, as we’re thinking of moving in the next year or so, and it seems all the counties around here do this. It makes me very angry and frustrated and helpless that someone can come through spraying pesticides that will contaminate my garden.

I called the County Mosquito Control Program Tuesday morning and had our address placed on the “objection list”, which means that they supposedly won’t spray at my address, but as I live in a neighborhood with houses not too far from me it’s hard to see how much good that’s going to do. So between now and this coming Monday evening (they will be doing this weekly through September) we are going to have to figure out how to cover this 800 square foot space, and covering the garden will have to be our regular Monday evening chore.

I’ll keep you posted on what we come up with.

The good news....

2009-06-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

My last post was about blossom end rot - this one is about everything that's going WELL....

Zucchini!

Here are the yellow wax beans I planted where some turnips were, coming up nicely. I mixed in more manure compost before planting and the beans are supposed to be good crops to alternate with the turnips...

Yellow squash, also planted in a spot where turnips used to be...I managed to eat every one of those turnips, by the way...

Tomatoes doing well...

Look at these cucumbers I discovered this morning! These really snuck up on me....

I have little beans on my bush bean plants!

Help! Blossom End Rot!

2009-06-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

I seem to be getting blossom end rot on one of my tomato plants - not sure which one, I couldn't find the little sign. I ookied this up this morning. It seems that the four possible causes are:

1) I planted them a little too early, the soil was too cold and inhibited the root growth some, this is just occurring in the first fruits and will subside (possible, I planted them at the end of April I think)

2) Too little water (very unlikely)

3) Too little calcium (possible)

4) They're planted too close to other plants and aren't getting enough nutrients because of competition ( suppose this is possible, but I think that #3 is probably the most likely candidate).

I picked off about 8 bad ones today. Right now I'm thinking about getting a food with a higher phosperous amount...Cindy, what do you think?

Rainy Saturday...

2009-06-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

So...no pictures this morning. But I did go out to check on things. The yellow wax beans I planted where the turnips and radishes used to be are coming up beautifully. I pulled up my first couple of touchstone gold beets, still small, and cooked them and the greens, along with a few red beets from last week and some cajun sausage for lunch...YUM!

Weighty and Unruly!

2009-06-18T03:59:00.000-07:00

I had to stake one of the tomato cages the other day - these plants are just so huge! There are arms sprawling all over the place!

I also had to give some support to the mini red bell pepper plant, which is getting heavy with fruit...

Potato Beetle Update

2009-06-18T03:53:00.000-07:00

I've been on potato beetle patrol since my last post on the subject. A few days ago I had a banner day - not really seeing the grown ones anymore but was seeing a LOT of the larvae of various sizes. Crushed everything I saw (yes, this is VERY gross). I found that folding over and pinching the leaf they're on works pretty well and keeps the goop to a minimum. I also found about 5 or six patches of orange eggs, on the underside of the potato plant leaves, and on my eggplant! So I got rid of all of them. The day after that I saw substantially less larvae....Sorry but I didn't have the camera on me during this exercise...

Potatoes are flowering!

2009-06-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Here they are - blooming! Does this mean that in a few weeks I'll be able to start harvesting potatoes?

There are little yellow blossoms all over the melon plants...

Cucumbers are also steadily flowering...

And the bush bean blossoms! How delicate and pretty!

This morning's action...

2009-06-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

My first Zucchini! (if you don't count the little one I accidentally broke off a few days ago...)

That eggplant seems to be growing an inch or so a day...

My first bush beans!!!!!

Yesterday's Harvest

2009-06-13T10:03:00.000-07:00

Roasted root veggies and and greens with rice and sausage for dinner last night!

Colorado Potato Beetles

2009-06-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I have a positive ID on my potato-eating critters – Colorado Potato Beetle (with the brown and yellow stripes) and their larvae (the red and black ones). Apparently this is what is also eating my eggplant. What to do about it? Well, pesticides are out, so the fact that they apparently become resistant to a pesticide very quickly is immaterial to me. I read a paper from the University of Kentucky, College of Agriculture (you can fidd it at this link) that said:(http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/entfactpdf/ef312.pdf)

“Potato plants can withstand considerable defoliation without yield loss. Plants can lose up to 30% of their foliage without yield loss. Generally, insecticides do not need to be applied unless there is more than an average of one beetle or larva per plant. Additionally, some beneficial insects such as birds, predatory stink bugs, and parasitic flies will help to reduce Colorado potato beetle numbers somewhat.”

From that, I would say that at this point my problem with the potatoes is not too bad. I have never seen more than one or two on a plant at a time, and when I walk through all my plants I usually only find one or two plants (out of 11) that have any on them at all. Whenever I see them I pick them off and crush them. I do have a lot of birds visiting the garden. I have a birdbath – maybe I should put that in the middle of where the potato plants are to encourage even more birds to visit and eat them. I also need to get a little more vigilant a couple times a day about wandering through to take a look and plucking them off. I was out a little before 6 this morning, and I found two beetles on one plant.

If anyone knows of any other organic action I can take about this problem I would love to hear it!

Catch up photos

2009-06-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

Here's the last of my three catch up posts. Note the weeds coming up through the straw. I think I must need more straw.

Sweet potatoes

I had no idea that the sweet potato was a vine...

Yellow Beets

I'll be starting to pull these up in a few weeks. I've already had some of the greens.

Potato in its cage.

Serrano Peppers

Orange Mandarin
This huge pepper was bowing the plant. I had to cage it, something I should have done before it got so big because now the cage is kind of cramping some of the plant the way I had to position it to support the pepper....

Anaheim Pepper

Spanish Onions

More Cucumbers I Grew From Seed!

Bush Beans Getting Big!

Red Beets!

Melon Patch

Believe it or not I have thinned these a number of times...

Herbs in front, Carrot in back, Yellow Squash to the sides

Tomato Status

2009-06-11T14:40:00.001-07:00

Here's some pictures of how the tomatoes are doing - huge and bushy. The close up is the yellow taxi.

You'll see I had to add a new stake to the gigantic beauty below. This is the one that the staked limb seemed to be half broken off (I think from weight) but I forgot to take a picture of the break while I was out there. It's been 2 days since I noticed it and the branch still looks healthy so maybe it'll be okay.

Here's one of my cucumbers (from seed!!!!!!) that I staked, and tomatoes behind.

Here's another new tomato - not sure which kind, as I didn't check the label while I was out there...

Battery is here and I'm back in the photo business

2009-06-11T14:30:00.001-07:00

Over the next few posts I'll be playing catch up. First, a few shots of what is munching on my potato plant leaves. I've been pulling these little striped buggers off (immediately below) for a few weeks now. Today is the first time I've seen these little red and black things (second below), who I quite obviously interrupted having lunch! Are either of these a "potato bug"? I need to research what to do about it...

Here's my first eggplant, which is doing great, and has grown REALLY fast. A few days ago this was only the size of the first segment of my thumb. Note the lacy-looking leaves. I haven't been able to catch anyone eating it yet.

And the best news - My first harvest. The first picture is of turnips just pulled last weekend. Below that is what's currently in my bottom produce drawer in the fridge - clockwise from the top, Daikon, red beets and turnips. We've got some eating to do!

Turnipaloosa!

2009-06-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

Well, actually it's a radishapoloosa around here, but turnipaloosa flows so much better!

I have harvested one mound's worth of Daikon and one mound's worth of turnips over the past few days - they are cleaned and trimmed and in dated Ziploc bags in my bottom produce drawer. There's a lot - but based on my experience last fall I have about a month to do something with them all. So I've been researching what that "something" might be. Tonight's veggie dish - rainbow chard, leeks (both locally bought organic produce) and (my) daikon casserole in a thick, yummy cheese sauce. It's in a loaf pan in the toaster oven (I'm trying not to heat up the house with the big oven, now that the summer is here). I just took a taste, and it promises to be YUMMY! I cut the daikon very thin and sprinkled about a teaspoon of salt over them and let them sit for a few hours. That pulls most of the moisture out of them. They were actually quite palatable to me raw after that. It kind of tones down the spice. I suspect that in this killer sauce I made (with parmesian and feta) I won't even know I'm eating radishes.

The elephant in the room here, of course, is that it's only the 9th of June and I have two empty mounds; when I get the rest of the turnips and radishes, not to mention all those beets in the next week or two, I will have even more empty mounds...hmmm...what to do? I did some research about this this weekend and it seems that beans and squash are good crops to alternate in the same spot as turnips and beets (from which I extrapolated radishes....we'll see). So after work today I worked in some of the new bag of compost manure that I bought on Sunday, and planted some of the yellow crookneck squash in those two mounds. Hopefully that will do well. If the zucchini, cucumbers and melons are any indication, they will.

I also staked up my cucumbers today, and used some strips of old hose for the time being to get them growing up the poles. I also had to put a new stake off to the side of one of my tomato cages, because the plant is just getting HUGE and one of the branches was both dragging the ground and seemed to be breaking off the main stalk. I'm REALLY missing the camera for this comment...

What else? What else?

I'm starting to get a lot of little tomatoes. Something is eating my Ichiban eggplant leaves (they look like lace, though the plant generally looks healthy), and something is munching on the leaves of one of my cucumbers (I'm guessing from reading the other blogs that it might be slugs), which is why I decided to stake and train them up. I covered the split zuchinni vine with dirt and also used a smaller hooked stake to kind of lift it up off the ground a little bit and support it. I started to weed around the inside perimeter of the fence, which is just getting overgrown with grass and weeds. Uncovered a big black spider that scampered back down into a hole in the dirt. Yuck!

I still have weeds coming up through my straw. I think I need more straw. I have to admit that I love straw now.

Oh, and I potted cilantro, oregano and thyme that I bought at Lowe's last night.

All of which is to say, things are really hopping, and there's something to tend to every day. And in the evenings? Start planning the fall garden, of course!

Quick update...

2009-06-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

I had second thoughts about the landscape fabric in the potato cages - I went back out there this past weekend and pulled it all out. I got another bale of hay and put hay around the inside edges and on top instead. The dirt seems to be holding up so I think they'll be okay.

Curiousity got the better of me with the potatos, and I went feeling around inside one of those mounds while I was out there. Sure enough I found a few little potatoes - TINY - like the size of a grape or smaller. Wow. I pulled my hand out and patted the dirt back down again.

I put the six crookneck yellow squash in pots on the deck. Some of them look better than others. My zucchini in the garden are huge; the one in the pot is looking pretty spindly. I don't think it's going to make it.

Basil is coming up nicely.

The one pot I planted with my last few snap pea seeds is just burgeoning. They are climbing right up the cage I made for it. Can't wait to post a picture of that. I think I need to top off the potting soil in all the pots on the deck.

I have a huge mandarin pepper, a huge anaheim, a huge carmen, and about 4 serrano peppers that all look like the right size, I think I'm just waiting for them all to turn color (orange or red) to harvest. (Cindy, is that right?) My mini red bell pepper has peppers all over it. The biggest one is showing signs of turning red.

I have a little eggplant forming about the size of the tip of my finger.

Can wait till the camera battery arrives!!!!

What's for Dinner

2009-06-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

Well, my camera battery (both of them) has officially permanently died on me and won’t hold a charge, so until the replacement arrives (about a week) I’ll be going exclusively verbal. Sorry about that.

This past week I have gotten serious about thinning the beets. Last fall they didn’t do well and it’s because I never thinned them so I never even got one that fully developed, though they all started out as nice robust plants and should have been a nice little crop. As they’ve gotten bigger it’s getting easier to see which smaller ones are growing practically on top of which bigger ones (when they’re little it’s hard to even distinguish between two plants, to me). So I’ve been out there actively thinning, and I think with the red beets at least I’ve got them all about 3 – 4 inches apart now so hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll start harvesting red beets. The gold ones will come in a few weeks after that.

I brought in all the beet greens to eat – a first for me. I have a photo of the bowl full – it was a lot – but I can’t get it out of my camera! I cleaned them all, and cut off the stems, and then over the course of two nights I ate them for dinner. I sautéed some raw garlic in olive oil and then threw in the chopped greens to wilt. When they did, I squeezed a wedge of lemon over them, salted them, and mixed in some white beans and cooked brown rice for a meal. DELICIOUS! On the second night I also threw in some Cajun sausage. It was really good.

I polished off my first Daikon over the course of a couple of salads, and pulled myself up another today. Again, it’s not huge, but I want to make sure I eat them, so I’m going to keep pulling them up as I use them. Anyone have a good recipe for Daikon?

I pulled up four beautiful, perfectly shaped, medium-sized turnips yesterday (again, photo stuck in camera). They are trimmed and washed and in my produce drawer. Tonight’s dinner will be roasted root veggies – turnips, rutabaga, red and gold beets, banana fingerling potatoes and sweet potato. Roast in olive oil, maybe with a dash of cayenne pepper, and when they’re crispy pull them out, squeeze with lemon and dust with freshly chopped cilantro. Tonight only the turnips will be mine, but at some point I’ll be able to make this dish entirely out of the garden (minus the rutabaga, which I didn’t plant…)

Split zucchini stem and burgeoning babies

2009-06-01T17:42:00.000-07:00

One of my zucchini stems is splitting...is this a problem?

The melons are getting big!

Here's two beautiful baby cukes!

And the piece de resistance - I harvested my first radish tonight! I had it on a salad for dinner. Delicious!

My Final Thought For May

2009-05-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

My final thought for this weekend, and for the month is this: This time last year I was thinking gosh, I wonder if it’s too late to plant a garden? And this year? A sense of great satisfaction and accomplishment...Ahhhhh!!!!

Hay Part Two and Some Beautiful Moments

2009-05-31T05:39:00.001-07:00

My eggplant has put out a beautiful purple bloom. I first discovered how beautiful a blooming eggplant is last year. I just love it.

Well, after getting half the garden covered with hay (that bale doggone near did half the garden) I thought wow, this is great. I had already worked up a sweat working that hoe on all my weeds before putting the hay down – I thought, maybe I won’t have to do that anymore.

And they hay covered half looked like – well – a working garden. I’m starting to think that all of a sudden, I’m going to have a lot of food on my hands! The marigold that I thought died didn’t – it’s just taking a break. I was going to replant that mound; now what the heck am I going to do with 6 little crookneck squash plants? I’m thinking I need more potting soil, and I need to haul more pots up onto the deck.

I fed the heirloom tomatoes, which are getting HUGE, and I fed the topsy turvey, which already has a nice tomato on it.

The melons look great. I have thinned them some. Last year I had 5 plants and as much as I could eat for a few months there, so I’m going to have cantaloupes to spare, I think. The cucumbers are thriving, as are the zucchini. I’m very glad that my ignorance and carelessness didn’t kill them off.

My radish greens are gigantic, and I expect they’re busy forming nice big roots. My red beets are doing great, and so are the yellow (pictured).

One of my nasturtium is finally blooming!!!!!

I felt so good after checking all this out, that I went back and got a second bale of hay! This time I lined the trunk with trash bags. I also ordered myself a special treat – The Backyard Homestead, a Mother Earth News Book. Because I think that in the not so distant future I’m going to have to get on with my summer project of learning to preserve food. I’m really trying to get my husband to agree to a couple of chickens……

Potato Cages and Hay Mites

2009-05-31T05:20:00.000-07:00

Potato cages first…as I mentioned a few days ago, hindsight would suggest that initially planting my potato seedlings in a mound was probably not a great idea. They need to be hilled up a few times as the foliage grows, and after the first time that I hoed dirt up around the already-existing mounds, I kind of ended up with pyramids and nowhere else for dirt to go for the second mounding. My solution was to build these “potato cages”, just some retaining walls around the potato mounds that would allow me to hill up some more dirt around the foliage. I think that this should do them. I used two kinds – cardboard boxes, because I happened to have a few from a recent shipment that were the right size. That made four, but I needed 11. So I built a few short cages out of leftover rabbit guard, and lined them with black landscape fabric so that the dirt wouldn’t fall out of the openings in the wire grid. I don’t know if it’ll work, but at the moment I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t.

As for the hay mites….after weeks of procrastinating, I finally got some hay. My reasons for procrastinating were various: the place where I knew I could get it (which wasn’t, in the end, where I got it) is not on any of my usual routes; I drive a small compact car; and perhaps most of all there was the sense of unease at doing something unfamiliar. Well, enough of all that. I finally bucked up and got serious this morning, and went in search of the hay.

I drove out to the out-of-the-way place where I’ve seen bales of hay for sale, and no one was there. It was about 9:15 in the morning – too early, apparently. So I made a huge loop back towards the house, with the idea of stopping at the couple of country road nurseries not too far from my house (I’m in a pretty rural area) to see if they sold hay. I’d been to the first nursery a number of times and never seen hay, but today as I pulled into the lot, lo and behold a guy was walking out towards the parking lot carrying a big bale of hay!

I asked him if he could get me some hay, and he looked at my car, and then back at me, doubtfully.

“In that?”

“I can put some in the trunk,” I told him. I opened the trunk and he peered inside. “Could I get two bales in there?”

“You might be able to get one in there.”

“I can put some in the front seat too,” I said. And some in the back.”

“With a child in there?”

“Well just in the front seat then. One in the front and one in the trunk.”

“In your car?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, if you want to. If you want to get mites in your car, I’ll put it in there for you. You know hay has mites it in it. You’ll get mites all over your car.”

Hmmmn. Mites???

“Well, just give me one then. Put it in the trunk.”

So he went and got the bale of hay for the dumb blond, and I picked up some slow release organic tomato food (something else I’ve been avoiding doing) and a few yellow crookneck squash plants and headed home, thinking all the time about mites.

I appreciated the information, but gosh, he could have been a little nicer about it.

Well, let me tell you something – when I got home and pulled that bale of hay out of my trunk, I was astonished at the mess. Boy am I glad I didn’t fill my car up with hay. I doubt I’ll ever get all that out of the trunk of my car. Geesh.

It didn’t do much for my sinuses either…or maybe I just have mites up my nose.

So here’s the lesson learned for anyone else that’s new to hay and contemplating the exotic – unless you have a pickup truck – have it delivered!

Zucchini abounds!

2009-05-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

Well, the verdict is in on the non-hardened and semi-hardened Zucchinis that I sprouted it the house - they choose LIFE! There's two in the garden, and one in a pot on the deck sporting a sunny yellow flower this morning, which means that the first zuke of the summer is not that far away!

Please ignore the weeds...sigh. I still haven't gone for hay. Though I did do some substantial weeding yesterday afternoon - about half the garden. Too rainy and wet to venture out there this evening.

Thinning....

2009-05-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Here's the topsy turvy tomato!

I did some thinning of both red and gold beets today. The red ones are getting pretty big. They kind of tended to clump together and grow on top of each other, sometimes 2 or 3 in one spot. The seeds must have run in the rain. So I diligently thinned them, which I hate to do, but I forced myself. It was interesting, pulling up the greens, and seeing just the tiny little red and gold tendrils...and yet even that small they all had the very distinct and recognizable smell of beets, the red ones smelling different from the gold. If I mess around the base of the turnip greens with my thumb I can see the tiny telltale purple tops and white bottoms just starting to fill out. It looks like the transplanted, non-hardened off zucchini and cucumbers in the garden are going to make it. And the couple I did half-heartedly harden off and put in big pots look great too.

I have tomatoes on my yellow taxi!

Eggplants inside still going strong....

2009-05-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

I thinned some eggplants today - truly painful. I hated to do it. I had 3 in one pot and 4 in the other, now they are 2 and 1. Compared to what I put out this past weekend, these babies have a long way to go....

Below is a shot of the garden these days - starting to look like something. Under that: turnips, happy bush beans, and beautiful beets!

A few pics of the tomatoes and peppers doing nicely....

2009-05-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Potato hilling, bush beans sprouting, and more...

2009-05-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a transformative week. I have potato foliage high enough now to start hilling it, although now that I'm at this point I regret having planted the potatoes in hills to start with, as I'm not sure that I've left myself anywhere to go....We'll see.

The big news is that as I mentioned last week I transplanted some zuchinnis and cukes outside, and the very evening I did that I thought to myself, uh-oh, I don't think I was supposed to do that. The phrase "hardening off" comes to mind. I have lost one cuke and one zucchini, the rest of the zucchini seem like they might make it after all. They have new growth leaves still coming in green and pretty, so we'll see. Where I lost one of them I planted a big, beautiful and robust looking Ichiban eggplant that I bought this week. The remaining cuke and 2 zuchhini I introduced to the out of doors slowly over the course of the week, and yesterday I put them in pots on the deck. We'll see if they do better.

Speaking of pots on the deck, I have some snap peas coming up beautifully. I put a trellis around each pot for them to climb. I don't know if it'll work or not. I also put one bush tomato in a pot, the other in a Topsy Turvey tomato planter out by the garden - no pic yet as my camera battery keeps dying on me. I'll get that up soon.

I planted bush beans in 4 mounds last week and they've come up beautifully this week. The sweet potatos are upright, and it looks like I only lost 1 or 2 (out of the 26 or so I planted). The tomatoes look beautiful, and I have peppers getting large on almost every pepper plant. The beets, radishes and turnips are still going strong. These days when you walk out to the garden, it actually looks like there's something going on out there!!!

Garden Plan

2009-05-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

I apologize the the mixed up descriptions of what's in the photos. No matter how careful I am the actual post never looks like the preview. The pictures above are (L to R) sweet potatoes, beets, radishes, melon and potato on the bottom! More pictures are forthcoming.

Wish I could figure out a way to show you this garden plan as an image, but I'll have to settle for text. Now that everything is in, here's what I've got in the grid (6 across, 13 down):

Row 1: Banana Fingerling (BF) Potato, Daikon, BF, Red Beet, BF, Marigold

Row 2: Sweet Mini Red Pepper, BF, Marigold, BF, Bush Bean, BF

Row 3: Black Beauty Zucchini, Sweet Potato (SWTP), Bush Bean, SWTP, Red Beet, SWTP

Row 4: Black Beauty Zucchini, Bush Baby Zucchini, BF, Red Beets, BF, Yellow Italian Bell pepper

Row 5: SWTP, Bush Bean, SWTP, White Spanish Onion, SWTP, Bush Bean

Row 6: Marigold, BF, Onion, BF, Daikon, BF

Row 7: Orange Mandarin Pepper, SWTP, Carmen Pepper, SWTP, Marigold, SWTP

Row 8: Red Beet, Marigold, Touchstone Gold (TG) Beets, TG Beets, Daikon, Pepper

Row 9: Marigold, Red Beet, Marigold, Anaheim Pepper, Red Beet, Cucumber

Row 10: Turnip, Marigold, Nasturtium, Turnip, Marigold, Cucumber

Row 11: Marigold, Black Krim Tom, Green Zebra Tomato, Nasturtium, Old Melon, Muskmelon

Row 12: Jalepeno, Nasturtium, Marigold, Black Plum Tomato, Muskmelon, Old Melon

Row 13: Yellow Taxi Tom, marigold, Orange Russian Tom, Pineapple Tom, Old Melon, Muskmelon

Everythings coming up...well, veggies!!!!

2009-05-10T05:50:00.001-07:00

Here are some new photos (clockwise from top left) red beets, radishes, melon, the Beuregard Sweet Potatoes standing upright now (a sign that indicates I think that most of them will probably make it!) and the Banana Fingerling Potato leaves. Every mound has something in it now, so any new planting will be in pots. I got a jalepeno pepper plant yesterday and put that in. I also put the two Black Beauty Zucchini and one Bush Baby Zucchini in, and two cucumber plants. I planted Bush Bean seeds in about 5 mounds that hadn't had anything in them. I got the tomatoes caged, and weeded, mostly with the hoe, which makes it a little easier. I still need to get the mulch. But I'm starting to feel pretty good about things!

Sweet Potatoes

2009-05-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Beauregard Sweet Potatoes arrived this week. Unfortunately, they sat in my mailbox for about 24 hours before I knew that they were here, so hopefully they'll be okay. They were pretty wilted when I pulled them out of the box - though the literature I got with them said that was normal. I was taken aback to see plants and foliage at all; I guess I thought they would be "seed potatoes" like the banana fingerlings. I followed the directions and planted them. A day later a few of them looked perked up. However, we've had almost incessant rain and overcast weather for a week and a half and I don't think we're expecting to see the sun before Monday. I'm worried about everything outside getting all this rain. But it's nature, so I guess it'll all work out....I have a few Serrano peppers coming in now too...

Everything is in the garden now except the cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant and bushbeans...

Banana Fingerling Potatoes!

2009-05-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

I went out to the garden this evening and of the 12 mounds planted with banana fingerling potatoes, I can see the potato vegetation has come up through the dirt on 9 so far...yippee!

The eggplant also rises!

2009-05-04T03:31:00.001-07:00

Looks like I've got three or four the the Hansel Eggplant showing thier beautiful little heads! (Only 2 pictured)

Also making its grand entrance this weekend are potato sprouts up out of the dirt in the garden. I've got twelve mounds planted with potatoes, and only seeing them up through the dirt on one so far. They've been in for a little over two weeks now. I must confess the only reason I know what I'm looking at is because this past weekend in the name of science I DID finally dig one of those mounds up - gently, with my hands - just to see what the heck was going on down there with the potatoes. I was surprised to see long whiteish sprouts growing out of them, that just hadn't yet made it up through the dirt. I didn't disturb anything, I just covered them carefully back up. Then a few days later, a few mounds over, I found this (look carefully in the center of the picture at the two white things that look like bean sprouts), and I'm reminded once again that patience is a virtue. But I figure so is curiosity, because if I hadn't dug up one of these mounds I wouldn't have known what I was looking at. :0)

Speaking of patience, the zucchinis are doing quite well. They no longer look wilted, one of them is fully upright, and the others are turned up towards the grow light, but kind of laying like vines. All are beautiful, perky and healthy.

Here's a few recents shots of the Daikon radishes and the red beets growing. The beets definitely seem to grow slower than the radishes.

I did poke a few seeds in pots on the deck this weekend. More on the container garden later. I'm turning my attention in the ground garden this week to tomato (and possibly pepper) cages, mulching, and locating an organic, slow-release plant food.

Everyone's alive and well....and more surprises!

2009-05-03T04:36:00.000-07:00

As you can see, the zucchini (in right of picture) seem to have made it through thier gardener-inflicted trauma! They're not as upright as they were previously (though one has righted itself), but they still seem healthy. All the little cucumber sprouts (in left of picture) are doing great too.

I mentioned in my last post that I found a Black Beauty zucchini sprouting up out of a pot that I had given up hope on a week or so ago, and that I had brought it in and put it under the grow light too. During the course of that first day, after a few hours inside under the light, this happened - another little sprout lifted its head up out of the soil, with soil still clinging to it! I was astonished. It's so big! It was like one moment it's not there and the next moment it was. Amazing. A few hours later, and I had this.... TWO Black Beauty Zucchinis coming up out of that pot. How cool! So for the time being, I'm just letting them all be!

I'm so glad that I decided to throw caution to the wind and just try a few seeds inside. I have learned so much doing it. Still no visible action on the Hansel Eggplant seeds, but I'm not giving up yet.