July 1 Garden in Pictures

The north half of the garden. Our corn is doing well. We're still harvesting strawberries,
swiss chard, and cabbages. The onions are getting visibly larger and may be harvested this month.

We added the trellis system for vining plants. The cucumbers, watermelon, cantaloupe and zucchini
are just now starting to take off.

The south half of the garden. These boxes were newly constructed this year. Potatoes on the left,
peppers and tomatoes on the right.

We're growing Peredovik black oil sunflowers in this empty space. Next year we'll add more
garden boxes and I'll have to find a new spot for our sunflowers. I have grand plans for them... 

Just opening

Full bloom

Our Homestead in Pictures, Mid-April Edition

The scent of this Korean Lilac bush is the best thing I have ever smelled 

A neighbor gave a tiny potted lilac bush to me after the tragic death of my sister in a car accident. I planted it the following spring and it has grown to be enormous. Its heavenly scent reminds me that I will indeed see my sister again in Heaven someday. 

Baby cherries

Since I am attempting to nurse the cherry tree to back to health, I did some of the holistic sprays of spring during its bloom. The oils in the spray prevent blossoms from setting so any cherries we get will be especially appreciated. I thought the loss of the cherries was a small price to saving the entire tree. 

"Chester" blackberry blossom

Our "Chester" blackberries are blooming and the "Triple Crown"s are full of buds. I really hope we don't get a frost that will truly nip our blackberry harvest in the bud.

These are the berries that developed from these blossoms

The strawberries are developing quickly. I can't wait to taste that first berry. It is crazy just how much better homegrown strawberries taste than their counterparts from the store.

The strawberry plants we planted last month all appear to have survived. You can see them in the photo below (right side of the pic). They are all growing and some have even tried to put out flowers. We pinch them off since the baby plants need to focus on growth.

A shot of the north half of the garden

Compare this photo to the one taken  of the same view just two weeks earlier. Massive growth.

"GoldRush" apple tree in foreground, "Enterprise" in rear. The orange flag marks
the spot for our row of blueberries.

All of the apple trees are leafing out. I guess that sunny and windy day we planted them on didn't harm them too much. You can see that we put down some mulch around the trees. We used a particular kind of mulch and did it in a specific way. I know that sounds cryptic and I'll hopefully be able to post about it soon. I have to get my blueberries planted first, though.

Fishing line and bird scare tape will hopefully deter hawks

Our chicks are now five weeks old and are full-fledged little chickens. It is time to start giving them excursions into the great outdoors. First, however, we needed to do something to deter birds of prey. I often see hawks flying above our homestead and I do not want my chickens to become casualties. The chicken moat is supposed to be narrow enough that hawks won't want to risk snagging a chicken there. The main run, on the other hand, is a different story. Hubby Dear and I strung 50 lb. test fishing line back and forth over the run. Then I attached strips of bird scare tape to flap and flash in the sunlight.

This Salmon Faverolle is curious but cautious

The chickens themselves are a bit suspicious of this whole outside business. I suppose that's only natural since they have always been confined in one way or another. If we want them to go outside, it involves catching all the chickens and chucking them out the door. You don't even want to imagine what it takes to get them all back IN the coop after their outing. 

Chicken taming is a work in progress, that's for sure.  

March 2012 in Review, Part III: A Whole Lot of Gardening

With the late Spring/early Summer-type weather we've been having, everything is about a month ahead of schedule. Our daffodils and forsythia have come and gone. The grass is lush and green and we've been working outside everyday. Here's what's going on in the garden. 

March Orchard Improvements

Our pitiful little cherry tree is finally getting some TLC

One of my goals this year is to make major strides towards establishing a survival orchard. I thought I should probably try and do something for this cherry tree I got for free four years ago before I start spending money on new trees! I pulled all the grass and weeds from around it in a 2' diameter. Then I bought some organic fruit tree fertilizer and gave it a generous serving. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I have ever fertilized this tree. Gee, I wonder why it is still 3 feet tall? ;) 
I learned from my orchard bible, The Holistic Orchard: Tree Fruits and Berries the Biological Way,that putting mulch right up against a fruit tree is a bad idea. It holds too much moisture against the trunk and is prime habitat for rodents that munch on bark. It is also a bad idea to lay down a circle of weed cloth underneath wood mulch or stone. Weed cloth creates an environment that favors bacteria at the expense of the fungi that are key to tree health. So, yes, I did that wrong when I planted my pecan trees last fall! It is better to put a thick layer of pea stone down and then mulch in a wider circle around that. Much more about mulch this month. (Hehe)

Spritzing and Spraying
I've spent a significant amount of my prepping budget over the last couple of  months on equipment and spray ingredients recommended in The Holistic Orchard for our fruit trees and berry bushes. The sprays aren't toxic pesticides or chemical fertilizers but are aimed at improving the overall health of the plants. It's all about helping the plant's own immune system fight off potential pathogens and insect pressure. Does this sound a bit New Age-y or otherwise weird? It's not, I promise! Read this for a bit more explanation.  

Solo 4 Gallon Backpack Sprayer

The weather has accelerated the spraying timetable so I've already sprayed two of four total spring sprays. I loaded up my nifty new backpack sprayer with a pungent concoction of water, neem oil, liquid fish, liquid kelp, effective microbes, and blackstrap molasses and slid on the 40+ lb contraption. It felt like a stubborn, smelly toddler was clinging to my back as I staggered across our homestead, spraying our cherry and pecan trees as well as the blackberry and raspberry bushes. Luckily, I'm used to stubborn, smelly toddlers so this was a breeze! 

Raspberries in the foreground, blackberries in the middle. Hopefully the holistic sprays will encourage bountiful harvests. 

Composting
We set up a compost bin primarily for chicken and rabbit waste. The majority of our food waste will be consumed by the chickens as they get older and we plan to use many of our spent garden plants as mulch in the chicken run.  

The bin is close to the coop and to the garden. 

When we were deciding where to set up the compost bin, we debated putting it somewhere that would be a bit out of the way but wouldn't be visible from the house. But then we remembered that our giant chicken run isn't exactly discreet! The compost bin is practically invisible in comparison.  
I'm looking forward to reducing the number of bags of compost we'll have to buy in the future for our garden endeavors. 

The Vegetable Garden

Hardly a day goes by when we're not planting something.

We planted onion transplants this year rather than trying to grow them from seed. 

Growing onions from transplants instead of seed seems like cheating, but maybe we'll actually get some good sized onions this year.

"Music" variety garlic

The garlic we planted last fall all sprouted and is doing great.

"Encore" lettuce mix and "Corvair" spinach

The first of many boxes of salad greens have sprouted. 

My usually June-bearing strawberries are in bloom

Last year's strawberries are blooming. In addition, we planted 75 new plants.

Peas! We outsmarted the mice this year

Hubby Dear's relentless trapping of mice in our garden has resulted in many more seeds surviving long enough to sprout. Yippee for peas!

I love our garden 

If you've been following my garden adventures, you might notice that we switched out the wooden lattice-style square foot grids for ones made of twine. We decided that the wooden grids simply take up too much room and make weeding and planting difficult. Hubby Dear installed metal screw eyes to the sides of the boxes and ran the twine through. We are much happier with the result.

Seed Starting Results

The seeds we planted in the little Jiffy Pot greenhouse took off rapidly. We're now in the process of hardening off the seedlings. 

Rosemary I overwintered indoors, the seedlings, and one of our new blueberry bushes

The sunflowers aren't enjoying the process very much and everything else is pretty leggy and windblown, but we may end up with a few successful transplants. We hedged our bets by directly sowing the same seeds in the garden and we'll keep whichever are the best looking plants in the whole lot. 
------
The beat goes on in April. More planting, hopefully we'll start harvesting! Coming soon: planting apple trees and blueberries.


Have you started your garden yet? What's growing at your house?

2012 Garden Plan

I don't know what the weather's been like where you live, but around here it hasn't felt anything like winter. It's been so spring-like that I have felt an urgent desire to get our garden up and running. Despite the balmy temps, it is still a bit too early, but it won't be long before we'll be planting our early spring garden.

We learned a lot from our garden in 2011. Some things will stay the same in 2012 but of course we're also going to make some changes. I can't help it. I'm a fiddler. Sadly, that doesn't mean that I play the violin. I just keep fiddling with things even if they are perfectly fine. It's a sickness.

The first big thing we're doing is adding yet more square foot garden beds.

Please excuse my sloppy handwriting and failure to use a ruler! 

In the oh-so-beautifully-freehand diagram above, our existing garden is to the left. Our ultimate goal is to double the size of our garden, but since constructing and filling all those beds last year nearly killed us, we're taking it in stages. We are building just three new beds this year and saving our energy for expanding our orchard and dealing with our chickens.

In some of the space that will be filled with boxes in the future, we are going to plant sunflowers for our chickens. We'll see how well they do considering the prior luck we had gardening in our poor clay soil.

The current garden plans for both halves of the garden are below. I'm sorry they came out kind of blurry - not sure why the scan is so poor.

The "Old Garden"

The New Garden

The boxes are color-coded with the approximate date of planting for Zone 5.

Although we are growing many of the same types of vegetables as last year, we are changing quite a few varieties. Many of the changes aren't because the previous variety was a failure; this year we simply decided to focus mainly on open-pollinated, heirloom varieties.

We ordered our seeds, plants, and bulbs from several sources: Johnny's Selected Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Seed Saver's Exchange, Peaceful Valley, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Stark Bro's.

Beet - Bulls' Blood
-We selected this type of beet because of its particularly excellent greens. "Greens" is a bit of a misnomer, though, since the leaves are dark red in color. We may or may not eat the greens (I may save them for our rabbits and chickens), but we'll definitely eat the beets!


Broccoli - Waltham 29
-We planted a different variety of broccoli last fall and it didn't get very far. I really think we should be starting seeds indoors and then setting out transplants, but we thought we'd give direct sowing another shot with this variety.

Cabbage - Farao
-The Thinker planted this cabbage last year and it was ridiculously delicious. I also think the plants are absolutely gorgeous and want to plant some in some concrete planters I have by our front porch.


Cantaloupe - Kansas
-Our beloved "Minnesota Midget" melons just didn't like to grow on a trellis, so we searched for a new candidate that might like trellising better. The description of "Kansas" from Baker Creek drew us in, "The vines are vigorous and the yield is great; oval-shaped, ridged and netted fruit; the flesh is orange and has exceptional flavor; very delicious! A very dependable variety; fruit weigh around 4 lbs. One of our most endangered varieties and also one of the best."

Carrot - Danvers 126 Half Long
-We have reserved a double-depth box (12") for carrots this year. I'm hopeful they will grow larger and straighter with the extra room. It was kind of fun finding all sorts of funny shaped roots last year, though. I try to keep it family friendly on my blog or I'd post some of the more unusual specimens. ;)

Cauliflower - Snowball Self-Blanching
-We had the same problem with cauliflower last fall as we did the broccoli, though we did at least get some small heads. We shall see if "Snowball" does better.

Unrelenting heat and lack of rain really hurt our corn last year.
At least we've figured out a support system that works for
square foot gardens.  

Corn - Golden Bantam
-Corn is our Achilles heel. We never have been able to get a decent crop, which is pretty ridiculous considering we live in corn country! We're trying a dependable old variety and reducing the number of boxes we're devoting to corn this year.

Cucumber - Double Yield
-I favor pickling-type cucumbers. They are good for pickling, of course, but they are great for fresh eating as well.

The "Provider" beans in the foreground were pretty much toast but miraculously returned
to life and gave us another crop 

Green Beans - Provider 
-How could we not plant this variety? Not even last year's record heat could knock these beans down; they literally returned to life after getting fried, leading to my pet name for them - "Zombie Beans". High yielding, too.


Garlic - Music
-We planted many cloves of "Music" garlic last fall. It was heavily mulched with straw. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the field mice left it alone over the winter!

The Thinker's box early last year (Clockwise): Beets, Pod Peas,
Farao Cabbage, Winter Density Lettuce

Lettuce - Winter Density, Encore Lettuce Mix
-After a slow start, lettuce was one of our big successes last year. We're planting "Winter Density" again plus an organic version of the lettuce mix we enjoyed so much. Again, any extras will go to the chickens and/or rabbits.

Nasturtium - Empress of India 
-Mini Me wanted to grow some flowers in the kids' garden box and this was her selection. Nasturtiums are edible, but I imagine we'll mostly just enjoy their beauty.

Onion - Copra
-We're planting transplants this year rather than sowing seed or growing from sets. Hopefully they will grow larger than last year's marble-sized crop.


Pea (Shell) - Lincoln and Pea (Pod)- Sugar Sprint
-If we can keep the mice away, we should get a nice crop. Sugar Sprint doesn't need stringing - bonus!


Peppers - Ancho Gigante, Bull Nose Bell, Chocolate Beauty, Jalapeno, Orange Bell, Tolli’s Sweet Italian, King of the North, Cayenne
-Peppers did so well for us last year! New varieties to try out for 2012 plus my nemesis, cayenne. 


Potato - Yukon Gold
-Another repeat variety from last year. 

"Cherriette" radishes we harvested last spring

Radish - Purple Plum                                                                                                                                        

- Radishes are the one veggie I don't get very excited about, but they are one of Hubby Dear's favorites. He couldn't resist trying out this purple variety.

Spinach - Corvair
-We weren't able to get spinach to grow last fall, but we're bravely forging ahead in the spring. 


Strawberry - Earliglo, Tribute
-One of our boxes of strawberries mysteriously died last spring. (Dang, now that I type all our failures out, it seems like 2011 wasn't so good after all!) We are replacing that and filling in the remainder of the box that Mini Me successfully nurtured.


Sunflower - Peredovik Black Oil
-This type of sunflower is supposed to produce high quality seeds for bird feed. They will be treats for my chickies. 


Swiss Chard - Five Color Silverbeet
-Everyone says that Swiss Chard is a pretty much foolproof vegetable. I can vouch that it is not! All the chard we planted last fall failed to germinate. Well, these fools are trying again! 


Tomato -  Amish Paste, Green Zebra, Brandywine, German Pink, Rosso Sicilian, Gold Medal, Italian Heirloom     
-The heat last summer really stunted our tomato production, but even so, we managed to have fresh tomatoes from our garden until January! I'm hopeful that I'll be able to can many more quarts of spaghetti sauce in 2012. 

Watermelon - Golden Midget
-This is an unusual type of watermelon. One of our problems with the "Little Baby Flower" melons we grew last year was that we couldn't tell if they were ripe or not. Since they were trellised, we didn't get the usual yellow-white spot on the ground. We checked tendril browning, thumped the heck out of them - none of the usual methods of determining ripeness worked. Golden Midget shouldn't be a problem because the melons turn yellow when they are ripe! 


Zucchini - Costata Romanesco
-Carol Deppe gave rave reviews about this zucchini in her book, The Resilient Gardener. Apparently it is great both fresh or dried. 



That's it! More than you ever wanted to read, I'm sure. What plans are you making for your spring garden? Are you growing anything new and exciting this year? 

August 2011 in Review and September Preps

I'm a bit late with my monthly summary, but here it is. To cap off a very interesting August, both of our water heaters died last weekend. It took five days for the parts to come in and for the water heaters to get fixed. No hot water when you have four young children home making messes all day in the middle of canning season? Life gets complicated and everything takes about twice as long to get done. It's going to take a few days to unearth my house from under the debris of dirty dishes, kids, and laundry.  I'm hoping September will be a better month.

August Garden:

Here's the bad news: the germination rate hasn't been great for our fall plantings.

Cauliflower hanging in there

We have a few tiny cauliflower and broccoli plants.

The Box of Death

This is the box we have christened "The Box of Death". All the strawberries we planted last spring died and now only one cabbage seedling remains. Lots of seedlings sprouted, but they mysteriously died. What gives?

Brandywine tomato plant gone wild

Our tomatoes are in a holding pattern. The insanely hot weather of July and early August caused the plants to drop flowers rather than produce fruit. Now the weather is better and flowers are setting, but we have to wait until the fruit is produced and ripe.

But there's good news.

The pumpkins are looking great. It won't be long before they're ready to pick. Our cucumbers and cantaloupe are consistently producing, too.

I'm harvesting and drying tons of cayenne peppers.

Green beans in September?

And, miracle of miracles, we have fresh green beans! Lots of them! Hubby Dear picked nearly two pounds just yesterday.

I reported last month that the green beans died, right? Well, in two of the boxes, the green beans bounced back and began producing with the mild weather we've been having.  How strange is that? It's fun to have some garden serendipity instead of garden catastrophe.


August Preps:

• In addition to the odds and ends I picked up at Cabela's, I bought some more items for our long term food storage: local honey, oil, mayonnaise, molasses and evaporated milk. I broke down and shelled out the mega bucks for a case of dry milk. We are getting so close to having a full year's supply of food. Exciting!
• I also added to our three-month supply: dry carrots, dry fruit, cornstarch, granola bars and cereal. My family is a crazy bunch of cold cereal addicts, so we have to build a big stockpile of it. Cereal is getting more and more expensive (like everything else these days) so it's a challenge to find bargains. 
• Speaking of stockpiles, my budding toiletry stockpile was getting out of control. I had been just pitching items in the cabinets in our master bathroom and it was pretty chaotic. To solve this problem, I bought five storage bins and divided the stockpile into five categories: oral care, body wash & soap, skin care, deodorant, and hair care. The bins should hold about a year's supply of these toiletries for my family and items are much easier to find now.  

The beginnings of my hair and skin care stockpile

• I added these two books to my library:  Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition and The Organic Fruit Gardener. 
• I've canned a bit of salsa, spaghetti sauce, pickled peppers, and cucumbers. I have two dynamite recipes to share with you soon. 

What's coming up this September? 

• I'm so excited! Global Sun Oven is lending me a Sun Oven to take for a test drive.  I can't wait to put it through its paces. Will it really work? Is it worth the hype? Is it better for baking cookies than my mini-van? You'll be along every step of the way.
• Of course I'll continue building our food storage. I plan to dehydrate a bunch of herbs and freeze pesto. Apple season is upon us so I'll begin canning applesauce, apple butter, and try my hand at dehydrating apples, as well. 
• The advent of cooler weather reminds me that we need to get a back-up form of heat for our house. We plan to get a wood stove at some point, but for now, a propane heater will have to do. 
•  I'm cutting back a bit on my prepping budget this month to start saving for my chicken coop. Hubby Dear and I are going to begin building the chicken moat this month. Since the two of us are ridiculously un-handy, that should be fun times indeed. Thankfully our marriage is strong enough to survive the trials and tribulations that are sure to unfold. ;) 

What did you do to prep or in the garden during the month of August? What do you have planned for September?