Signs of Spring

Bulb bed by the back door, just beginning to color up

 
Some beautiful signs of spring are popping up all over the yard.

New garden bed on the southeast side of the house

The new garden bed is shaping up.  The bulbs I planted last spring are starting to pop up, R and I put in a row of pavers we found behind the shed, and I've been spreading coffee grounds when I can get them.  The soil test for this area came back clean, with low lead levels and a nice pH level - 6.0.  I'll be planting my potatoes here this year, and probably some sweet potatoes, too, if I can grow some slips.

 

 

 

 

Raspberry buds sprouting

Self-sown lettuce in the cold frame bed

My self-sowing lettuce struck again.  This little patch popped up last spring, along with a few others that I buried in compost to refresh the bed.  I took these 6 plants and separated them this week; if they survive I will leave them in place and let them flower again to make new lettuce last year.  I also saved some seeds from a plant last year and recently had 7 out of 9 germinate, so they will be my backup.

Lenten rose in bloom

Garlic sprouts

 Last spring a Japanese man from the community garden gave me some garlic plants and I saved four of them for planting in my backyard, but they didn't survive the transplant...or so I thought.  Then last fall all these little babies started popping up.  I'm not sure if I should now transplant them out the community garden where they'll get more sun, or thin them to a reasonable spacing and hope for the best.  Maybe I'll do both.

Flowering branch bud

While taking the boys for a walk the other day I encountered a pile of trimmings from someone's tree that just looked like they were desperate to bloom.  So I brought some home and put them in water, where they have proceeded to break out of their shells and color up.  Hopefully I'll have some blossoms to show sometime this week.  Even if I don't, though, it's been fun watching them progress.

January Garden

The sleepy January garden

It has been a long time since my last post, but not because the garden is done for the year.  I've actually written dozens of posts in my mind since last November (I've even taken pictures to go in these imaginary posts!) but none of them have actually been written.  In the meantime, we've continued to harvest from the garden. 

Lettuce and carrots picked just after Christmas

I'd planned to have carrots, lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage grown to near full-size by fall's end so that I could harvest through the winter (a la Elliot Coleman) but I found the timing for this to be really tricky.  Many of my cabbage seedlings didn't survive the late-summer heat; so far we've harvested one head, with two others left in the garden that haven't really headed up yet.  My four summer plantings of carrots have paid off - I have lots of carrots still in the garden - but I've only just finished pulling the carrots I planted last May.  Four of my July-planted broccoli made it, and produced heads and sideshoots galore throughout the fall.  (I really like the Pacman hybrid variety!)  Despite some pretty major cabbage worm action, we picked enough to make four plants worthwhile.  The second round that I planted has been quite happy under my makeshift crinoline / row cover (see Salvage in the Garden) and is just starting to flower.  Only three plants from the third planting round managed to get established under the onslaught of cabbage worms in the late fall, and they will not flower before spring.  The lettuces have done marvelously, though they've suffered some frost damage and I've pulled most of what's going to be edible before spring.  Clearly this fall garden thing is more challenging than I thought.

Store-bought (left) and home-grown (right) seed garlic

I tried my first experiment with re-planting my own garlic this year, and I have to say I'm pretty glad I didn't bet the farm on it.  The half of my garlic space that I planted from store-bought bulbs looks about right for this time of year.  The other half has only a handful of shoots.  I'm not sure if the saved garlic was just past its prime, or if it was damaged when I cooked it to prevent spreading nematodes (see Slowing Down in the Fall Garden).  I was very careful to follow the directions I found online, monitoring my candy thermometer closely the entire time the garlic was soaking.  I noticed yesterday a few more leaves poking through than I've seen in past visits, but I'm wondering if maybe I should just re-plant the whole space with something else in the spring.

In November I made detailed plans and lists for a hypothetical second garden plot, but in the end I decided against getting one.  It would require me to ask one of my neighbors to go to the community center and register with the park service, then purchase the plot.  I'm sure I could compensate them with veggies, but it is unethical (no matter how many other people do it) and I have to accept that it would be really hard to take proper care of two plots without making my children miserable.  So, I suppose the new (small) bed at home (see My New Cover Crop) will have to do for this year.

Happy New Year, everyone!

How's the Garden?

The community garden plot

June is a precarious time in the garden.  There's a lot of empty space around plants that aren't yet fully established - prime weed-growing real estate.  There's also (in my area) not a whole lot of rain falling, so many of the newly planted summer crops need water.  Add that to the relatively little harvesting and planting to be done and the human tendency to steer clear of heat and burning-bright sunshine and you have a real recipe for disaster.  This is when we lose a lot of the new gardeners at the community garden.

Luckily, I am behind schedule this year, so I have plenty of reasons to crawl out of bed and go take care of things.  Here's a rundown of the crops currently in the community garden plot:

• Potatoes - seem to have some sort of fungus or disease causing the outside edges of the leaves to blacken, but I think it won't seriously harm the yield.  At any rate there will certainly be plenty of potatoes this year.
• Tomatoes - Both rows are setting fruit, but the ones in the back row are larger.  Both rows also seem to have the fungal problem I was worried about in the spring, which I think is gray mold.  The back row really needs to be tied and pruned - I'll have to get to that this week.
• Garlic - some if not all of the garlic is probably ready to be picked.  The plants are browning and seem to be shrinking before my eyes as the energy from the plant slowly goes into storage in the bulb.
• Carrots - there are three rounds in the ground right now, with the oldest ones ready to pick and the smallest ones barely out of the ground.  I really should have put more compost into the carrot bed before I planted it - the carrots I'm harvesting are pretty stubby and crooked and split from the hard clay soil.
• The back peas aren't really producing much anymore, thanks to the heat, I just haven't gotten around to pulling them out yet.  I'll plant some beans there soon.
• The onions are so exciting right now.  It's my first year growing bulbing onions, so I'm trying not to get too excited, but it's really hard when they are clearly making onions!  I don't know when they'll be done, but I'm thinking at least another month.
• The asparagus seem to be loving life.  They could use some light weeding, and maybe some fertilizer soon, but mostly they seem to take care of themselves.
• The back pepper plants are starting to produce lots of peppers (bell and chili), while the front ones are still getting over being trasplanted.  Also I think the front ones are a little chlorotic.  I think the wood chips I added were not sufficiently rotted and now I'm worried there's not enough nitrogen in those two beds.  I watered them with some fish emulsion, and threw some more coffee grounds over the soil, so hopefully they will start to look better soon.
• The celeriac is bushy and I think I can see the tops of the thick roots widening below the soil.  I'm continuing to weed the bed, but other than that I leave them alone.
• There are little cucumber starts tucked between some of my pepper plants that look like they're starting to take off.  It's good because I'm almost out of pickles!
• The eggplants are all growing, although they're still getting torn up pretty badly by flea beetles.  The ones I started at home, which were horribly ragged when I planted them, are starting to close the gap with the nursery-bought transplant.
• The bed that used to have the broccoli in it is full of new little things whose outcome is far from certain.  There are two watermelon starts, a butternut squash start, a spare bell pepper plant and marigold that look pretty happy, and lots of little carrot and basil sprouts.
• The front bed is newly planted with summer squash: zucchini, yellow squash, and tromboncino (seeds).  There's also an extra 6-8 feet of space in there that I think I may use for beans.   I definitely don't want to plant extra summer squash!
• I haven't seen much action where I planted the parsley seeds.  I wonder if those seeds are no good any more.  I'll give them a little more time and then try some other seeds.

Whew!   The little bit of extra planning I've done this year has made a tremendous difference in how efficiently I'm using the garden space.  Can you tell I'm really proud of the garden?  Cause I am.

Garlic Scapes

After my last Harvest Notes post Susan asked about garlic scapes, so I thought I would write a post about what they are and what I do with them.

What they are

A garlic scape is a flower stalk that grows out of the top of hardneck garlics**.  That little knob there contains tiny little garlic cloves.  Most of the ones I've picked are curlier than this one, sometimes making loops and sometimes making a figure-eight.  The longer they're on the plant, the woodier they get; most people like to pick them while they're young and tender.  This one was missed when I picked the rest, so it's pretty tough.

What I do with them

I've heard that you can use garlic scapes just like scallions, but since I don't really like scallions I don't have many recipes that call for them.  I turn my scapes into garlic scape pesto.  Garlic scape pesto has become a bit passe in the blogosphere - one blogger referred to it as "obligatory", as in "Ho hum, I make the obligatory garlic scape pesto the other day.  Yawn."  Whatever.  I made it for the first time last year, and it was so, so yummy!  I liked it better than basil pesto.  Unfortunately I didn't record the recipe I used, but I'm not too worried about it.  This year I used the recipe proportions from The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen, and I had so many scapes that I ended up with more than 2 pints.  If anyone wants to try some, let me know - N is not crazy about pesto of any kind, and I sure can't eat all this by myself.  Probably.




** Garlics are generally classified as either hardneck, softneck, or elephant.  The stuff you find at the supermarket is softneck: it keeps well, it has two or three rings of smallish cloves around the central stalk, and it has annoyingly clingy white papers around each clove.  Hardneck garlic is more tolerant of cool growing conditions, but doesn't store as well, and it usually only has one ring of larger cloves with looser paper coverings.  I grow some hardneck and some softneck.  Elephant garlic is huge (roughly baseball-sized) and more mildly flavored. 

Bullet Point Update

Here I go again with the bullet points:

• I got the rain barrel back out, still need to hook it up
• I bought a grapevine to put in the asparagus bed
• I got the potatoes planted, but had to buy some more because there just weren't enough - now I have too many
• some of the peas are planted, but there's more to go
• another gardner from the community garden gave us some garlic and I planted a few in the home garden
• possible freezing on Tuesday night
• momotaro tomatoes are dropping their bottom leaves - Territorial rep suggested they may be too wet, but she's going to send new seeds in case these have a disease; they're quarantined in the low tunnel for now
• I came up with a new trellis for the raspberries - the old one wasn't large enough anymore

gift garlic

new raspberry trellis

Changing of the Gaurd (Fall Cleanup)



Inside my compost bin

A bunch of fall cleanup work is slowly getting done around the house.  I screened the last of the 2011 compost and started next year's pile with some of the earliest leaves.  (Since this photo was taken the bin has been filled to above the 2/3 line.)  Our three maples and neighbor E's big tree will fill this several times over.  Extras get stored in contractor bags until the compost starts to shrink down.

Garlic shoot in my home garden

I brought in the basil plant I potted up earlier in the month, and my new ginger plant.  Now the only things in the home garden are the last of the hot peppers (soooo many of them), some lettuce seedlings that were probably planted too late, and these cute garlic shoots. 

 I also painted the adirondack chair, and N and I watersealed the new picnic table.  N cleaned out the rain gutters, though they may need another look sometime in December.  Finally, I emptied the new water barrel, which the Aquabarrel people say is not for use during winter.  The representative actually said I needed to find it an indoor spot for the winter, but our shed is too full (what on earth do people do with 10 of these things?) so I settled for a nice sheltered spot next to the back fence and the shed.  I'll put a couple bricks on top later to make sure it doesn't blow away.

On a more fun note, remember the volunteer potatoes that were sprouting in the container near the back fence (see Apparently I'm Incorrigible)?  I cut down a bunch of weeds/trees that were shading them and they look really happy.  Maybe I'll have another round of new potatoes next month? 

State of the Garden

Community Garden Plot

 I haven't been spending enough time at the community garden the last few weeks.  There's been plenty of work to do at home, and, er....I've been sewing.  Fortunately the weather has slowed down the weeds and the bugs and the harvest enough that I'm sort of getting away with it.

Anyway, R and A and I went out there the other day and did some pea picking and work and poking around.  I keep meaning to go ahead and set up my tomato bed for next year (more on that later...) but I am waffling now about where to put it and wether I should stick to the same bed layout as last year or narrow the paths and/or widen the beds.  I'm being seduced by the idea of planting just a little more of...everything.  Meanwhile I've been clearing away weeds and squishing bugs - cabbage worms, to be precise.  You can see the kind of damage they do in the photo on the right.  I keep hoping the damn moths will die already, but no such luck.



Two cauliflowers growing side-by-side



Cabbage patch

The broccoli and cauliflower are fighting the good fight, but the cabbage is clearly winning, just as it did in my home garden in the spring.  Is it the purple leaves?  I don't know.  The garlic is coming up, both here and at home, and the peas are producing quite a lot.  R has always been reluctant to eat sugar snap peas, but this time he spent a good hour bringing me pea pods to break open so he could eat the tiny peas inside.  After he painstakingly picked the peas out I would eat the pods (frost damaged and oh-so-great!), until finally curiosity got the best of him and he (after licking, scrunching up his face, holding it cautiously between his lips, etc) crunched through the pod whole.  And I didn't get a single speck of pea after that!

R sorting through pea pods to find the "nice, fat ones".

More Good Weather...

Okay, I am a little tired of the rain.  But otherwise...  On Saturday I went out to my community garden plot and got lots of work done. 

I pulled up my tomato plants, and replaced them with garlic.  I had one bulb each of the two kinds I planted last year, plus 4 big new bulbs of Chesnok Red hardneck garlic from SESE.  (I ended up not having quite enough room, so I brought one-and-a-smidge bulbs of Chesnok Red back to plant at home.) 

There were two tomato plants I particularly liked this year and I wanted to make a note of the variety names: Husky Red and Supersonic.  Both were very productive and seemed to resist the blight that (I assume) eventually killed my plants.  Both also had really big root systems  - about a foot and a half worth came out intact when I pulled them up.

It looks like the cabbage worms are still active out there because they got into my little seedlings.  I killed many of them and weeded the carrots and cucurbits.  I wanted to weed the peas as well, and set up a small trellis for them, but as I was chucking old cornstalks over the fence to get to the fencing (trellis) material, I came across.....a snake!!  Being from Iowa and knowing nothing about snakes I can only tell you this about him: he looked mad.  (It was awfully cold out.)  Suddenly I am looking at every weed-covered garden out there in a whole new way!   

I pulled a bunch of weeds up in unplanted areas and brought lots of things home.  The bean trellis still needs to come down, though.  Okay, more later...

Apparently I'm Incorrigible



Potatoes from home



Last spring I planted potatoes in old recycling totes in my yard. Then after I got my community garden plot I planted the leftover spuds out there. The potatoes at the community garden you've heard a lot about already, but the potatoes at home had a rough year. The spot I picked out for them was a lot less sunny this year than last, and they were so far away from the hose spicket that I'm afraid they didn't get quite as much water as they should have, either. The plants eventually fell over and died, and I let them go out of sympathy. (And, I must admit, laziness.) Then the other day, while I was playing with R in the backyard, I glanced over at the bin and noticed something green peeking over the edge. Though I knew I deserved nothing whatsoever from the home garden potatoes, I dared to stick my hand down into the soil next to it.

Young potato plants

Sure, enough, when I dug down into the bin I found a bunch of other little potatoes getting ready to sprout.  (See the photo at the top of this post.)  It wasn't a bad haul for a recycling tote, actually. The garlic I planted in the other two totes also didn't get enough water, and I wrote it off. But it is sprouting as well!

Garlic sprouts

Garlic Update

Some of you may have noticed in my harvest post that I have picked some garlic!  It was from the softneck garlic that was in my home garden bed.  About a month ago we had a real serious hot spell and I noticed that all my garlic had fallen over.  I watered it and hoped for the best.  The hardneck garlic popped back up a bit, but the softneck garlic took on a distinctly dead appearance.  I finally decided to check what was under the soil, and was pleasantly surprised to find nice little garlic bulbs!  I think I may have waited too long, because several of the bulbs I pulled up were losing cohesion, their "papers" having disintegrated.  Ideally garlic should be harvested before the papers break down - it is supposed to keep longer this way.  We've given away several that didn't look like they were going to keep, and we've happily been eating the rest.  Unfortunately the leaves got cut off so I wasn't able to braid the "keepers", but I put them in the foot of a pair of pantyhose to hang and hopefully I will be able to keep a couple of the best bulbs until October, when I can plant again.  They have a nice, mild taste; I wouldn't say it tastes different from grocery store garlic, but it's more fun to eat!

Garlic Oops

 So, you know how I was just bragging about how lovely the garlic looks?  (Ignore those weeds!)  Well, N and I were looking at it the other day (I was pulling the weeds, I swear!), and the bases were just so thick and healthy looking that suddenly even I was a little uncertain about how much longer I needed to wait to pull them up.  And...there was this one, that was growing way too close to its neighbor anyway...so we pulled it up!

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To give you some sense of scale, those are 4-inch tiles.

 And they're not ready.

Growing Things at Home

Me, putting out the basil seedlings.

Keeping up with both my home garden and community garden plot has been harder than I thought.  Somehow I forgot about things that really need to be done, like mowing the lawn and weeding the flowerbeds.  So here are some sort of selective shots of my home garden, and I'll ask you not to peer too closely around the edges.  As you can see, I'm getting a little large to be squatting and bending these days.  Luckily N's interest in gardening is growing with every new thing he eats from the garden, so he's been a big help.

My cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli are all doing quite well under the sheer curtain that used to cover our living room window.  (N tells me I sound pretentious when I say "brassicas", but it is a lot faster to type!)  I took the cover off last week to make sure they weren't getting too little sun, too little water, or too much heat, but I've noticed that some largish-gnat-sized bugs have been fluttering around them a lot, so I may put the cover back on.  I should point out that all of these are foods that I didn't really eat until this pregnancy, but am slobbering all over right now.  I hope I don't lose interest before they produce!

My garlic patch looks very healthy, surprisingly better than the garlic in the containers, which is a little dry around the edges.  We'll see who has the last laugh when they start developing bulbs in their respective soils, though.  There are two varieties here; the hardneck variety in the foreground was noticeably smaller when they stopped growing for the winter (Garlic Progress), but it has definitely caught up.

Overall, the garden is finally starting to look green and not too bare.  I transplanted some peppers in over the weekend, three sweet bell peppers, a chili pepper, and a "kung pao" pepper.  I decided to buy pepper seedlings this year because they take so long to get started and some creature (World's Worst...) ate my first batch.  The great thing about buying them is that you can choose a variety of plants; the bad is that it costs almost as much as if you bought seeds for all those plants and only planted one or two of each.  Almost.

I have completely abandoned the original plan for the home garden in favor of just getting things in the garden.  For example, the basil you see me transplanting above was supposed to go in after the lettuce and spinach, but frankly it was ready to be planted and I am in a hurry now that I'm so close to my due date.  So, I guess I'll put the beans in the cold frame bed once the lettuce is finished.

Garlic Progress

Well, for anyone who's wondering, my garlic survived the winter despite my failure to acquire proper mulch last year.  If you can see it in the picture, there are actually two types there: the hardneck variety near the bottom of the picture got off to a slower start last fall than the softneck variety that takes up most of the shot, but while it's still pretty small it seems just as green and healthy.  Both varieties have definitely perked up a lot since the weather has begun to warm and the spring rains have been rolling in.  They ones I planted in containers are looking good too.  I'm a little concerned that I've planted these too close together, so I'm going to wait another week or so and give them a good application of organic fertilizer.  (The white specks all over the ground are little bits of eggshell from my homemade compost, which I applied judiciously last fall to this area before planting here.)

I did find one plant while I was out inspecting that seemed to be growing very shallowly and a couple that were growing very close together.  I think when I planted them there were a few that I doubled up because the cloves were small.  I dug the shallow one up and stuck it back in a little deeper, but I'm curious if anyone reading this knows if it's a bad idea to add a layer of compost to bury them a little deeper as they grow. 

I can just taste these already!

Garlic Sprouts

Look how big my garlic sprouts are getting! Yikes! The ones in the back there are the softneck garlic variety, Polish White (according to the package), and the shorter ones in the foreground are a hardneck garlic. I lost that package, so now I may never know what variety they are!

According to my internet research it is not unusual for garlic to sprout like this in the fall. Supposedly it will look pretty raggedy by the time spring comes around, but should bounce back one the weather warms up. I did read that it shouldn't get more than a few inches tall, though, which mine is definitely pushing. I think I will try to chop up some leaves with my weedwacker and use them to mulch around it, unless I can find some cheap straw. Or maybe I will shred some newspaper - I've been wanting to try that for a while now.

My Garlic has Arrived!

A couple days ago I came home to find this charming little package in my mail box - my planting garlic has arrived! I ordered it last month and I wasn't sure if I could expect prompt delivery but Southern Exposure Seed Exchange filled my order sooner than promised! As several websites explained to me, garlic is a tricky business because it grows underground, making it difficult to know how many orders can be filled ahead of time. I ordered the Beginners Mixed Starter Package, which contains a hardneck and a softneck variety. I am so excited to see how they do!


I was unsure about the wisdom of planting garlic this year, since it seems likely that we may have to move in the next year, but I so regretted not having any to harvest this year that I decided to buy some anyway and plant half of it in containers so I can take it with me if necessary. Viola! My garlic bin!


Our city switched from these yellow bins to rolling recycling carts last year, so this is a re-purposed recycling bin. I have a couple of others from folks who didn't have a use for them any more. Now that my order has arrived it looks like I will probably want to plant one more of these. They will sit in a very nice, totally underutilized sunny spot next to my shed.

Compost Gift

I have been meaning to post this for some time - it is a big bag of compost given to me by N's uncle T. We went to visit their homestead in PA for Father's Day, where they have a huge garden with beautiful soil. (Oh, my soil envy knows no bounds!) I watched my 5-year-old niece's feet sink into the nice, soft, soil and disappear. They used to run a CSA from this garden, so they really know what they are doing.

I am pretty certain that T makes his compost with manure from local animals. They are surrounded by farms, including many Amish households, so it is easy to get manure. Here it is not so easy to find, and I am always a bit reluctant to bring in manure to my compost pile, knowing that it will be only several yards away from my neighbor's home.

Anyway, T. said I should put it in a raised bed and plant something there that I want to just grow and grow. I think I'll put it where my tomatoes were and plant my garlic in there this fall. I sure would like to have some luck with my garlic next year!

Wild Garlic Scapes

Last year I tried to grow garlic, without much success. Around here garlic is supposed to be planted in the fall so it can get nice and large, but I didn't think to grow it until January, so I planted it in the spring. Several of the cloves sprouted and made small plants, but then a bunch of them died inexplicably. (They are not the first plant to do that in this particular location. I'm now calling it my dead spot and I'm afraid to plant anything else there.) In the end I only got four very small bulbs. I used half of them to make pickles last fall and replanted the rest in the fall.

Unfortunately they sprouted very early during a freakish warm spell, then died and never came back. I'm not sure if it was because I put them back in the dead spot or because they weren't large enough to sprout a second time. Now I can only stare sadly at the scapes on these wild garlic plants and rue the decision to replant with the small cloves instead of buying new stock. Lesson learned!