GROW YOUR OWN (food)

It Begins ...

2012-02-09T14:14:00.000-05:00

The trout lilies are saying that it's almost time to plant peas. I don't think I've ever seen them up and so near bloom this early in February. Even though I "jumped the gun" a bit when I planted a first batch of peas (was it almost two weeks ago?) way ahead of when the trout lilies normally bloom, my very-early planting of peas is looking a little less crazy! Out in the garden, those early peas are coming up. How well they will do remains to be seen.

We also planted peas last weekend at The Garden on Dallas Hwy. where my little family puts in some volunteer time. The head gardeners, Mr. Kastner and Mr. Hankerson, had been up to Ladd's Farm Supply in Euharlee to get the seeds. They said that the seed potatoes and onion sets are in, and that even though most seeds hadn't been put out, they were told that the shipments were in.

We used an Earthway Seeder to do the planting, and I have to say that getting the seeds in the ground was a lot easier with the seeder than the "by hand" method I use in my much smaller garden. I can see that this is going to be the next tool on my "wish list."

The forecast is for some colder weather in the next few days, with lows in the low 20s. The soil is still warm, though, and I'm probably going to put out seeds for lettuces and spinach in the next week or so. It's almost time to start some seeds indoors, too, for peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, and some herbs.

Out in the berry patches, some of the leaf-buds have started to break open. It is, of course, a little early for that to happen, but I have been busy pruning the newer canes and making sure I've removed the second-year canes. It's turned out to be a bigger job than I first thought, because some plants have "escaped" from their original locations, and I had decided to let them take over a larger space. This means I'll have more berries, but it also means I have more work to do.

Other fruiting plants are also further along than they usually would be at this point in the winter, and I am a little concerned to see the flowering buds breaking open on the blueberries and the plums. I hope they don't run into a hard freeze after opening more fully!

I plan to take advantage of the upcoming colder weather to prune my grapevine. If it warms up substantially very soon after the freeze, the sap is going to be running, and pruning will stress the plant more than I would prefer.

There is a lot to do, but also a lot to look forward to!

Why Garden?

2012-02-02T11:04:00.000-05:00

When I was at the county Extension Office earlier this week, putting in some volunteer hours answering questions on the “horticulture hotline,” I spoke with a staff member about the number of veggie questions that come to the office.

She has been at the Extension Office for six years, and she said that, when she first started, the vegetable gardening questions were the main focus of about 5 percent of the total calls. Now, they constitute closer to 50 percent of the calls. That’s a huge increase, but it matches my own impression of the increased interest in home vegetable gardening.

This is the part I hadn’t thought about: Most of the callers who were new to veggie gardening cited safety concerns as their main reason for wanting to grow some of their own food. “Safety” encompasses a fairly wide range of more specific concerns, from e. coli outbreaks, to GM foods, to the widespread use of systemic pesticides that can’t be washed off.

The second most-frequently cited reason to take up veggie gardening has been saving money, and a distant third has been related to lowering the carbon footprint of the household.

Saving money through growing your own food is totally possible, but it takes more advance planning than when the gardener is more concerned with safety than with costs. The same strategies a gardener might use to save money would probably also help lower the carbon footprint of the resulting food.

For some people, though, I would guess that the real reasons for taking up food-gardening are more complex than a single, simple word or phrase can encompass. The short answer probably is just easier than the long explanation (like when someone asks, "How are you doing today?" and we all answer "Fine, and you?" - regardless of reality).

A couple of Saturdays back, after our usual volunteer work on a nearby garden-farm, my family went to our local museum’s “Trains, trains, trains!” event. We stood out because we were the only family there without small children. Our earlier morning activities came up in a conversation with the woman at the Railroad Crossing Safety table, and she told us about her garden.

She had grown up on what she called a self-sustaining farm. All of her family’s food was raised on site, from the dairy and meat cows, to pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, rabbits, pheasants, corn and other grains, beans, fruits, and veggies. She had helped with the chores related to raising all of this food throughout her childhood. A year or so back, she had been feeling a little nostalgic about the farm and its abundant good food when she overheard a young man at another event mention that he would love to have access to a big yard where he could plant a vegetable garden.

The two started talking, and it turned out that she had a big sunny yard and that he had grown up helping his parents in their big vegetable garden, and they decided to put in and tend a garden together in her backyard.

She had thought that they would start small, with a few different kinds of plants, but when they went to the garden center to select seeds and plants, the young man wanted to try everything! In the end, enthusiasm triumphed over prudence (and isn’t that a common story for gardeners!), and they ended up with enough plants for quite a large garden.

Unfortunately, neither of the two remembered all that they really needed to know, including how much work would be involved. It turned out that the woman with the yard ended up renting and running the roto-tiller and doing a much larger portion of the work than she had imagined, including most of the weeding. And when the plants began to mature, she learned the hard way that a lot of the pepper plants were habaneros - an exceptionally hot variety.

She had thought they were miniature bell peppers, and she cut one up for a salad one day after work. The first bite was a big surprise! She said that the taste didn’t go away for at least a week.

The main motivation for this pair didn’t seem to be about food safety, about saving money, or about lowering anyone’s carbon footprint. I think it might have been more about connecting with the past, about building community, about getting access to some really good food, and about being outside. I could be wrong, of course, but the two are already making plans for this year’s garden - this time with fewer habaneros.

Daffodil Craziness

2012-01-31T08:26:00.000-05:00

The daffodils in my yard are telling me all about the warm winter we've had. Not only are they up - they are in bloom. I took this picture last week and am only getting around to posting it today, but even if these daffodils were just now blooming, it would be early.

This particular variety, which has been in my yard for at least a couple of decades, usually blooms sometime in February, often nearer the middle of the month.

In 2010, my Feb. 1 blog post titled "Daffodils don't lie" included a photo of daffodils emerging from the soil, but the plants were still short and the buds tightly furled. That year, the daffodils were telling about a winter that was somewhat cooler than this 2011-12 winter.

The garlic is looking especially healthy, too. I don't think I've ever seen it looking this robust in my yard at the end of January.

I have been following the cycle of bloom for flowers in my yard over the past year more closely than in previous years, partly to determine its usefulness as a tool to tell me about the timing of planting. Using the cycle of bloom as a planting or chore calendar is a common old-timey method of scheduling such chores (example: prune roses when the forsythia bloom).

My longtime planting rule that follows the blooming of a particular flower in my yard is that I plant my English peas when the trout lilies bloom in my yard, and that has ended up being in or near the last week in February.

Those flowers seem to have a firmer internal calendar than the daffodils; their leaves are not yet up, but the leaves of the toothwort are. Although I am sure that they are not paying attention to the crazy daffodils, the toothwort may be responding to soil temperature in a similar way.

Last week, I decided to indulge in a little daffodil-craziness of my own by planting a patch of peas almost a full month sooner than normal. If we have a hard freeze and I lose my little crop, I have plenty of time to replant, but I want to know if I can rely on what else the daffodils are saying - that spring is just around the corner.

I suppose I could have waited a few days to find out what the groundhogs have to say about the coming of spring, or waited for the trout lilies as I have done for years, but, like many gardeners, I'm a little impatient. And - if I get peas earlier than usual, the hour spent outside in the garden planting those peas will have paid off even more than as just the hour of exercise that I'm currently counting it as.

USDA is Catching Up

2012-01-26T06:12:00.000-05:00

The USDA has finally published an updated hardiness zone map. The new 2012 USDA Hardiness Zone Map is based on coldest temperatures from the years 1976 to 2005. The new map wasn't made available soon enough to keep the old map, from 1990, from appearing in some of this year's seed catalogs.

This is what the USDA website has to say about how the new map was created:

The zones in this edition were calculated based on 1976-2005 temperature data. Each zone represents the average annual extreme minimum temperature for an area, reflecting the temperatures recorded for each of the years 1976-2005. This does not represent the coldest it has ever been or ever will be in an area, but it reflects the average lowest winter temperature for a given geographic area for this time period. This average value became the standard for zones in the 1960s. The previous edition of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which was revised and published in 1990, was drawn from weather data from 1974 to 1986.

In the Eastern US (my part of the country), the weather data used in constructing the map are from weather stations of the National Weather Service.

The new map places most of Atlanta in zone 8a. My town, Kennesaw, which is not labeled on the map but is a little northwest of Marietta (identified in the Georgia map - "Click" on a state to see it in more detail), is placed in zone 7b, which has lowest temperatures of 5 to 10 degrees F.

However, the 2006 Arbor Day Foundation Hardiness Zone Map places Kennesaw in zone 8. The Arbor Day map is based on low temperatures from the 15 most recent years' worth of data that were available at the time, using data from National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations.

Although both maps show that climate zones are shifting - with winter lows getting less low nearly everywhere on the continental US - there still seem to be areas of disagreement. Since I'm not a climate scientist or a weatherman, I don't know why the two data sets produced such different results, but the disparity means that gardeners who are looking for plants that will do well may need to be especially aware of the micro-climate of their own yards in making the final determination of what to plant.

Is my yard in zone 7b or zone 8? For most annual vegetables, the difference isn't big enough to be too worried about, but I have been using zone 8 as my benchmark when making choices about plants that require a certain minimum of "chilling hours" to set fruit.

Just an Update

2012-01-15T22:44:00.000-05:00

The seed catalogue that I was waiting for - from Sand Hill Preservation - finally arrived, so I am ready to make a little more progress on garden planning for 2012. The pages already are marked with big red circles around varieties that I think I "need."

With the fall/winter garden still mostly in place, those crops are on my mind, so the cool weather veggies have had the most scrutiny so far. However, I'll be getting the seed boxes out of the fridge on Wednesday (my day off), and decisions about the summer crops will be made. I know I need more seed for the Wuhib tomatoes, but there is bound to be more to put on the order form.

I've also had a pretty lively email conversation with the guy who is coordinating the move of the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden, for which I am a volunteer, to the new site in Kennesaw. We are moving to a site in town that will also host a community garden, with raised beds for use by individuals and families, and a demonstration garden tended by the local university. The site is being put together by a counseling center, and its focus is on all kinds of outdoor spaces that can boost health - mental, emotional, and physical. The whole site will be a few years in development, I am pretty sure, but we will be able to start in our space by mid-spring.

A tentative plan has been drawn up, and we have been allotted about 5,000 sq. ft. On the map of the site, it looks like a big rectangle, and it's in a good location. We will have plenty of sunshine and very little trouble with water, either standing on the site making it soggy or running through it too quickly.

I'm hoping that some of the raised beds for the community garden go in then, too, so we will be part of a whole community of gardeners right away. In the meantime, the little group of PAR gardeners will also be getting together to decide how to lay out our space and what we want to grow. I hope they are as happy to get busy as I am! It's only been a couple of months since we harvested the sweet potatoes and pulled all of our equipment from the old site, but I miss hanging out with my gardening friends.

In the meantime, I am almost healed from the wreck that totaled my car in mid-December, and I will be (finally) removing the sad, wilted cauliflower plants out of the garden this week. I bet my neighbors will be glad to see that space cleaned up!

Gardening in Uncertain Weather

2012-01-10T14:53:00.000-05:00

I know that the weather has never been 100% predictable, but, most years, winter is pretty reliably cold, even here in Georgia. In general, it's cold with little excursions up into warmer temperatures. This year has been an exception. Lows have been in the (high) 30s and 40s, and highs in the 50s and 60s, throughout a large percentage of what should have been some much colder weeks.

We had a brief flash of actual cold, though, last week. One morning we woke up to an 18 degree morning. The good news is that a lot of what is still out in the garden didn't seem especially bothered by the sudden dip in temperatures.

The little side-shoots on the broccoli look good:

The cilantro seems healthy:

And all the uncovered greens made it, too:

I had covered the lettuces, just in case, and they "weathered" the sudden cold under their tent with no signs of damage.

The cauliflower, however, did not fare so well:

The couple of heads that were still out in the garden (I brought one inside the day before the hard freeze) are both wilted and browned. It is totally possible that cauliflower just doesn't appreciate such decisively freezing weather. However, it's also possible that, had the weather been more consistently cold, it would have done better. Either way, we are not going to be enjoying those heads of cauliflower in the kitchen.

This is what is known as "learning the hard way," something all gardeners are familiar with! In spite of all the books and online research, stuff goes wrong that could have been prevented. I could have put a tent over the cauliflower, or I could have just harvested all of it. Next year, if the circumstances are at all similar (a big "if"!), I will manage the cauliflower differently.

Later this week, we are expected to have a couple of colder nights. It's too late for the cauliflower, but I plan to put the tent back over the lettuces.

Year's Ending, and Beginning

2011-12-31T18:22:00.000-05:00

Here at the end of the year, and the end of a warm December, the garden still has plenty to offer. I've brought in this cauliflower to go with the dip for tonight's celebration. We usually go in for more healthful meals, but we are making that Velveeta Cheese and Rotel Tomato dip to go with a lot of fresh veggies (I have carrots and broccoli, too). Of course, I also bought a bag of chips...

Overall, this year's garden seems to have been successful. We certainly still have plenty of dehydrated tomatoes, even though we've been using them every week, ten or so jars of jam, half a basket of sweet potatoes, squash and green beans in the freezer, and more.

However, some of the squash and a lot of the green beans are actually from a local farm where we go to help out on the weekends. This is the first year of our working there, but we have been getting "paid" in produce. Tonight's carrots, for example, are from my friend's farm. That extra produce has made it harder to judge the relative success of my own garden.

To help keep better track of how much food I am able to bring to the kitchen from the yard, I really am going to weigh most of it (at least, I hope I remember to weigh most of it). Tonight's cauliflower, which won't actually count since this is still 2011, weighs 510 kg, which is 1.12 pounds. Seeing it on the scale made my gardener's heart happy. I will be happier still to see it being eaten!

The scale is going to stay on the kitchen counter as a reminder. Right now, out in the yard, there is a little more broccoli (side shoots), another big cauliflower and one little one, some winter radishes, a few carrots, an assortment of greens, several parsnips, several beets, a few lettuces, and herbs. The onions and garlic that will be harvested in 2012 are already out there, too, but most of what gets harvested in the coming year will be planted in that year.

The scale isn't sensitive enough for lighter harvests, so when we bring in little bits of food, like a few lettuce leaves for sandwiches or a sprig of rosemary for the roasted root veggies (for example), those won't be weighed to add to the year's total, but I think that's not going to make a big difference in what my Mom would call "the grand scheme of things."

I know that a lot of gardeners already have been tracking their total harvests for several years, and I have always admired their persistence in getting the task done. Let's hope I can manage it!

Nonconforming Freely

2011-12-30T18:27:00.000-05:00

A casual perusal of my blog will show pretty clearly that my garden is right out in the front yard. The backyard is dark with trees, so I didn't have many options for garden location when I set out to grow my own veggies. There are a lot of neighborhoods, though, where this choice would be a major problem.

One of my friends gave me a great little book over the holidays that, on one page in particular, illuminates the reason behind so many neighborhoods' lawn-care rules. The book is "Weeds," by Richard Mabey, and this is the relevant passage about lawns in the United States:

The pressure to conform to orthodox standards of lawn perfection are huge. There are no hedges to hide behind. Your tolerance of a tuft of plantain is not just a sign of your own slovenliness, but a public insult to your neighbors. Your lawn is a visible extension of the whole community's proudly maintained estate. If you default on its maintenance, you have opted out of the social contract. (page 175)

A big, nonconforming square of corn out in the front yard is probably a much larger blight on a "proudly maintained estate" than a few tufts of narrow-leaf plantain! Luckily for me, the social contract in my neighborhood isn't a formal document that lays out rules concerning appearance beyond keeping that lawn below ten inches high and not using the lawn as a parking lot.

Early winter in my Southern garden

2011-12-13T11:43:00.000-05:00

With all the summer crops gone and the fall crops just scattered here and there, things are looking pretty bare in the garden, but there are a few spots of color. The tall chrysanthemums, that have flopped over onto the sage and oregano, are still in bloom. It will take temperatures lower than 29 F to stop those flowers!

The broccoli is doing what it's supposed to: keeping on making little side shoots after the main head of florets has been harvested.

The garlic has settled in nicely, sending up the shoots that will remain all winter, continuing to grow on days when the weather warms. Way in the background of the photo is the first patch of onions, planted from little dry bulbs. In another part of the garden I planted some slender green "sets" that a friend gave me. He had ordered 2,000 from a place in south Georgia, and we had a few left over after planting two big beds out at his place.

We've been using the cilantro on "taco night," so there isn't as much here as if I had just left it alone, but we grow it to use it. If last year's success repeats, by spring this patch will be amazingly tall and lush.

The Camellia japonica has been in bloom since about Thanksgiving. When the temperatures drop to more wintry levels, the flowers will turn all brown and mushy, but here in the early winter, we get to enjoy the pink. I have one of these flowers in a little vase in the kitchen window, to enjoy while I work. I like this plant even though it isn't edible. (If I grew the tea Camellia, I could use the leaves in the kitchen, but my Camellia japonica came with the house. It's more than 25 years old.)

Things have slowed way down in the garden, but there is still plenty going on. We've been eating the winter radishes, using the lettuces and spinach for salads, stir-frying the bok choy, adding the collards and kale to soups and watching the chicory as it begins to form heads. A gardener's life is never dull, and when all goes as planned, there are healthful veggies to add to meals every day. As the name of a particular seasonal movie proclaims - It's a wonderful life!

Gardening for the harried

2011-12-07T13:04:00.001-05:00

In the summertime, the traditional Southern garden staples - tomatoes, peppers, squash, green beans, cucumbers, and okra - all need to be picked and processed (either eaten, frozen, canned, fermented, dehydrated, or given away) on a schedule that is all their own (constantly!); the plants need to be kept watered, which in a drought can be a huge chore, and the plants need to be checked for pests and diseases fairly frequently. Sometimes, those pests and diseases require some kind of immediate action on the part of a gardener.

If that gardener has about a million other responsibilities at the same time, he or she can go nuts trying to keep up.

As a gardener with a job, family, friends, and volunteer work (and the blog!) all needing to be fitted into my daily life, I can understand when some people just give up on the garden, which can be seen as that “last straw” for a person who already is struggling to get everything done.

I am lucky in having family and friends who are happy to help when my schedule gets overwhelming, but not every gardener has that backup. For even the most harried of gardeners, though, there are food-plants that can be grown with a bare minimum of work on the part of the gardener.

For the truly stressed-out gardener living here in the South, I would choose the sweet potato as the easiest-to-grow garden crop. In my area, there is a big window of opportunity for planting, stretching from around May 10 to June 10 or even later. For a gardener who has trouble finding time to plant, this is a great gift. It is likely that somewhere in that four or five weeks, a planting day can be found.

Sweet potatoes will be plenty productive with just one side dressing of fertilizer that can be applied anytime within four to seven weeks after planting. The big window of time, again, is great for busy gardeners who can’t always manage to get the gardening done in a tighter time frame.

The plants don’t have to be watered two or three times each week; one really good drenching once every ten days to two weeks is enough for astonishingly good production.

The crop is relatively disease and pest free, and after the vines have spread across the garden, very few weeds survive the dense shade created by the leaves. Not having to weed is another great gift to the busy gardener.

The harvest window for sweet potatoes is as big as the planting window. As long as the plants have been in the ground for around 110 days, they just need to be dug up before the first frost. If I get my sweet potato slips into the ground in late May, I can dig them up anytime from the last week in September to the last week in October. If one week is too busy, I can wait for the next one.

I keep my harvested sweet potatoes in a wicker laundry basket in the kitchen. There is no canning, dehydrating, fermenting, or freezing necessary to preserve the harvest. The spuds are handy to use whenever I want them, and they keep for months without any extra effort on my part.

The harried gardener who has planted sweet potatoes will have plenty to smile about all winter long: a harvest of healthful food from his or her own garden, and it required hardly any work at all!

Other root crops are also easy-on-the-gardener, but not quite as easy as sweet potatoes. Potatoes, onions, and garlic all are time-savers in terms of their being harvested all at once and not requiring elaborate processing in order to “keep” for several months, but those crops need a little more tending.

“White” potatoes need more watering than sweet potatoes, and they will also need to be hilled-up and given a fertilizer boost at least once in their growing season. When white potatoes are harvested, they just go into a basket over which I will drape some towels to exclude the light. However, they are more prone to pests and diseases, which means they need to be checked fairly frequently while they are growing. If the gardener has to leave town for a week or two, this crop will need a minder, unlike sweet potatoes that will be fine on their own.

I have onions and garlic growing now, and there will be some weeding to do (some chickweed has started coming up between the plants), and they will need a fertilizer boost at some point, but otherwise the most they will need in terms of my attention is for me to remember to go out and harvest them in spring (onions) and early summer (garlic).

The harvest window is a little tighter than for potatoes, but onions and garlic left in the ground a week or two after the tops have fallen over and begun to dry will be fine, as long as the ground isn’t wet.

The onions I don’t eat right away will keep for quite a while if I’ve remembered to leave them spread out in the shade to dry for a couple of days before bringing them inside. Garlic is easier to peel if it’s been left to dry for several weeks, but that isn’t much of a drawback.

For gardeners who are not quite so harried, cool weather crops are a good choice (leaving summer to the sweet potatoes). In fall and spring, less time needs to be spent watering since there is usually more rain. Right now, for example, my yard is squishy with rain.

Cooler weather means that crops are growing more slowly, but weeds are growing more slowly, too, reducing time that needs to be spent weeding.

Even more helpful - a lot of cooler weather crops can be left in the ground and harvested when needed. The parsnips, carrots, beets, and winter radishes that I have growing now are good examples, and so are leafy greens like collards and kale. Most of the winter, I can go out and harvest what I need, when I need it.

There is some weeding to do, and the plants will need a fertilizer boost or two, but there isn’t as much “tending” as in the hot summer months, and the plants won’t go to seed until warmer weather returns in the early spring. That leaves a pretty big harvesting window, and if the plants are left for a week or two or three without any attention at all, they’ll probably be fine.

Broccoli plants will begin to flower if left unattended too long, and so will cabbages and cauliflower, so those cool weather crops probably are not great choices for gardeners whose other commitments make finding time for gardening more difficult.

Gardening does take some time, and for the most busy among us that can be a big problem, but for me it is worth the effort on a lot of levels. I like having produced some food for my family that I know is healthful; it helps that the food is cheap to grow; when I work in the yard, I’m getting exercise that I know I need; being outside is good for my vitamin D levels, and I like that the time spent outside has also been productive; sometimes, when I am having trouble thinking of what to make for supper, the garden supplies the inspiration – and ingredients – that I need; and my family eats a lot more vegetables than if we didn’t have the garden, because there is no way I’m going to waste the effort of having grown the food by letting it rot away unused. There are more reasons, but that’s probably enough for now.

In addition to enjoying the relatively easier-to-come-by fruits of the fall gardening season, this is a good time to do a little planning for the 2012 garden. The seed catalogs are starting to arrive and the yard-work is at a minimum (assuming the fallen leaves have already been moved to the compost). Thinking now about how much time will be available to work in the garden could help prevent some major stress and loss of crops in next year's garden.

More Garden-talk with Grandpa Bill

2011-11-27T18:38:00.001-05:00

Grandpa Bill kept the peppers coming through central Oklahoma's blistering-hot summer by erecting a little shade directly over each plant.

He had put a "cage" around each plant, just like he does each year, for support of the heavy branches. As the temperatures climbed and then stayed high, he put an upside-down saucer, the kind that go underneath potted plants, on top of each cage. Since his pepper plants continued to produce, the strategy seems to have been a good one. (If anyone is curious, he mostly grew Big Bertha bell peppers.)

As the weather gets weirder and weirder, it's good to have ideas already in mind, and I thought that one was worth sharing.

He also said that this was the first year he's grown cantaloupes in a long time. The weather should have been great for melons - all that heat and drought should have made them extra-sweet. He said, though, that the melons didn't taste like anything at all. We've had that problem before with melons at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, and I am beginning to see that bland melons are a more widespread problem than just here in the Southeast. Luckily, we found Schoon's Hardshell, which has worked out well for us.

As the seed catalogues began to arrive, he also pointed out that, back in the old days, you just went to the store and bought whatever seeds were there, and they always worked out just fine. Now that there are so many varieties to choose from, gardeners are more likely to end up with at least some seeds that aren't ideally suited to their yards.

As the catalogues pour in - mostly from the Northeastern U.S. and the Northwestern U.S. - it's easy to see how lack-of-garden-success could become a problem for new gardeners. For instance, I am guessing that the "bland melon" problem and prevalence of far-away seed sources that contain many tantalizingly-described varieties are somehow related.

Thanksgiving conversations

2011-11-25T19:56:00.001-05:00

My Mom and Step-dad (aka Grammy & Grandpa Bill) are visiting from Oklahoma for the holiday. We've had some gardening conversations along with all the great food, and it turns out that gardening in Oklahoma was pretty tough last summer.

Their area had 60+ days over 100 degrees F, which meant that they didn't ever get a tomato crop. They did get some tomatoes early on, from flowers that were pollinated before the high temperatures set in, but that was it. The peppers did OK, but tomatoes usually are abundant in the summer garden, and they were missed.

They also said that Christmas trees are a big crop in Oklahoma (and in Texas). Between the drought and the heat, a lot of those just are not going to make it to market this year.

Bill says that the fall is too short and the temperatures too extreme for a good fall garden where they are, but Mom started looking at my old seed catalogues for some of the varieties that I've had good luck with in the early spring. She plans to buy some Capitan lettuce seeds (variety that has been on our turkey sandwiches) and seeds for other leafy greens for the early spring.

Amazingly, the first seed catalogues for 2012 arrived today: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. I guess the next gardening year really is right around the corner!

Autumn Productivity

2011-11-16T20:00:00.001-05:00

Over the long summer and early fall, the kitchens of gardeners all across the Southeast are covered up in tomatoes, peppers, okra, and all kinds of beans. Those plants just keep on producing small mountains of food, week after week. There really isn't an equivalent crop, in terms of productivity, for the cooler seasons.

Part of that is just the nature of plants in cool weather; growth slows way down. But part of that is due to what we harvest. Mostly, in the cooler weather crops, we aren't after the fruits. We are after the leaves, the roots, the entire flowering stem.

The closest crops in terms of constant productivity that I can think of, really, are some of the greens. Collards, mustards, and kale, for example, keep on coming, but it takes a lot of greens to fill a pot for supper. From my garden, I can harvest enough greens each week for maybe one meal, right now, but as the temperature drops even more and the growth rate slows, the harvests will slow, too.

Most of us prefer to plant more cool-weather crops than just greens, though. For example, I planted six broccoli plants. If all goes as planned, I will harvest six big heads of broccoli and then some smaller side-shoots, but that will make, at best, enough of the vegetable for eight or nine meals.

The same goes for cauliflower, except that I don't expect any bonus side shoots after harvesting the heads. To be honest, I've never even grown cauliflower before, so I am pleased way-out-of-proportion to what I'm going to get from the six-pack of plants that I bought and planted back in August.

For radishes, one seed makes one small root. Of course, these are delicious, and you can cram quite a lot of them into a fairly small space. The red ones pictured here are "regular" radishes, with a listed 35-days-to-maturity. The white one is a Muncheiner Beer radish, a winter-radish type with a much longer time-to-maturity. The winter radishes can stay in the ground through some very cold weather, so I don't have to worry about bringing them inside as the winter progresses.

Unprotected lettuces keep making new leaves until the first very hard freeze. Around here, that might be as late as mid-December. By mid-January, though, most lettuces left uncovered will have dissolved into a mushy puddle in the garden. This is one of the big, loose heads of Capitan lettuce that I have growing right now:

I have a little cold-frame to fit over the place where the lettuces are planted, but some of these are planted a little too close to the edge of the bed. As colder weather moves in, I'll cut those to the ground to make enough room to fit the cold frame over the lettuces that are more in the middle of the bed.

The garlic that was planted a couple of weeks ago, to grow through the winter and spring, has come up. I love having a crop that overlaps the seasons - when February comes and most of the fall veggies are gone, that promise of good food to come is heartening.

Charrette

2011-11-11T12:33:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday, at the new garden site for the Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, there was a charrette for the whole property. Essentially, a charrette is a big-group brainstorming session for design, and we were putting together potential designs for the whole property at Fountain Gate, which will be the host for our garden plus a community garden plus demonstration garden for Kennesaw State University.

The landscape designer, Sean Murphy, did a great job of walking us all through "what to do," and people from the city of Kennesaw showed up to tell us about the future road-widening that will affect the plans.

The whole group was divided into three smaller groups for the brainstorming. We all had big maps of the property, tracing paper to lay over the maps to write on, and a few colors of Sharpies for drawing. In the end, it was great to see the variety of plans that the three groups came up with. We were all trying to place the KSU garden, the PAR garden, the community garden plots, a meditation/contemplation area, picnic/play areas, paths and access routes and other features on the ~3 acre site.

One group did an especially nice job of keeping artistry in mind. My group was thinking much more in terms of function.

The good news is that Sean Murphy is very good at what he does, and however he sets up the site will be fine. (He is in a design competition right now for an urban farm in Atlanta, and there is a good chance he will win. He brought a copy of the plan to our meeting, and what I saw was pretty impressive.)

I did meet a retired friend over at the property this morning for some advice. This guy is a long-time farmer and retired developer-of-subdivisions, and he had some useful comments with regard to drainage on the site. He pointed out where the water was going to run across the property and where the slope was going to be too steep for an in-ground garden. First, he recommended that the drainage corridor be left as lawn.

Then he pointed out that if the PAR space ends up on ground that is too sloped, we will need to put in raised beds. I would probably have figured that out eventually, but it's helpful to be prepared.

He also said that the best garden site was right behind the Grambling House (historic house on the property). None of the designs put the PAR garden there, and I'm a little chagrined that I didn't see it as a possibility.

New Garden Site!

2011-11-01T20:55:00.004-04:00

The Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry (PAR) project for which I am a volunteer seems to have found a new home. The Fountain Gate counseling center in Kennesaw is planning a big community garden on its property on Cherokee Street, and there is enough room for us, too.

The official website for the new garden is still pretty spare, but it gets the idea across. A garden is going in!

Anyone who wants to be able to voice an opinion about the layout and other aspects of the plan can sign up for the newsletter online (through the website, linked above) or send an email to the listed address and get signed up for the design meetings. The first design "charrette" (discussion/planning) meeting is scheduled for next week, on Wed., Nov. 9, at 2 p.m. at the "brown house" - which is actually beige - that is also on the property.

My understanding is that people who show up for the meeting - and everyone who is interested in the garden at any level is invited - will separate into small groups to talk about what would be great in terms of garden design. The property is three or more acres, so this is large-scale design - where garden beds should be located, how big they might be, where paths and sheds might go, where greenspace and benches might be nice, where our PAR garden might be situated, and more.

I expect to be there.

Me and My Bok Choy

2011-11-01T20:45:00.003-04:00

One of the bok choy plants finally did make it into the kitchen.

I don't know what it is about bok choy, but I always cut the whole plant to bring in, whereas for most other greens I tend to just bring in the leaves that I will need for the meal I have in mind. It could be the thickness/succulence of the petioles that causes me to reach right past them, to the base of the plant.

There are still three bok choy plants out in the yard, and I may experiment with one of them, cutting off just the leaves I need, to see how that goes. Does anyone else harvest bok choy one leaf at a time?

Definitely the End of Summer

2011-10-29T21:29:00.007-04:00

For the next several days, the weather forecast is for lows in the 30s. Any warm-season crops left in the garden are going to be looking pretty miserable by the end of the week, unless they've been protected. In my garden, there are a few more tomato plants and peppers still in place, but those will be heading toward the compost heap sometime tomorrow.

I hope, especially, that everyone's sweet potatoes are inside. This year, I was lucky enough to be able to harvest sweet potatoes in three different gardens: my own, the Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, and at Mr. Kastner's garden. Out at Mr. Kastner's place, there was a lot of help, which was a good thing because he had a whole lot of potatoes to dig up. The big harvest day was a couple of weeks ago, so these pictures are a little late going up. In this first picture, Mr. Kastner is the guy in the pink shirt, and his partner-in-gardening, Mr. Hankerson, is on the right in blue:

The potatoes were not all that easy to get out of the ground, and there was some discussion about the best way to pry them out without damaging them. The good news is that these were all grown on long, wide hills, so the digging wasn't so much "down" as it was "from the side."

These big clusters of sweets were pretty typical of what came out of the ground at each place where a slip had been planted back in early summer:

In all, there were three double-wide rows, each about 150 feet feet long, that had been planted. In each row, the slips had been planted about 9 or 10 inches apart. Mr. Kastner figured that he had planted close to 900 slips. Removing the vines and then digging up the sweet potatoes from that many plants was a big job!

Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner had built some storage bins out of old wood pallets for storing the sweet potatoes while they cured in a metal "shed" (it looks like an old version of what 18-wheelers pull around out on the highways). When the bins were all placed inside the shed, a little heater and a fan went in there, too, along with a temperature & humidity gauge to help make sure the sweet potatoes stayed appropriately warm and the air moist.

They are going to be able to feed a lot of people with this many sweet potatoes.

A Lot Like Fall

2011-10-23T19:09:00.003-04:00

We've had low temperatures in the upper 30s, and days in which the highs are in the 60s. Indoors, we've had a fire in the woodstove a couple of nights. It is definitely feeling a lot like fall.

Outside, even though the remaining summer crops are looking pretty ragged, the cool-weather crops are starting to shine. The broccoli is beginning to head up:

This bed of greens (and weeds) has already given us a couple of salads, some greens for cooking, and radishes. When the rest of the radishes come out, it will be easier to see the greens - the little bulbs are planted between the rows of greens, and their leaves are sticking up all over.

Right near where I stood to take that picture is a little patch of cilantro that didn't make it into the field-of-view. At the far end of the bed is a short row of bok choy. This does really well for us every year:

Isn't that beautiful? I think a stir-fry-supper is in my near-future.

Wrong season, but a cool trick

2011-10-19T15:32:00.002-04:00

My Louisiana sister sent another useful video. This is at least as cool as peeling a whole head of garlic in less than ten seconds (in a previous post), and it doesn't require matching large bowls.

Let's hope I remember this when the fresh corn comes back around in June!

Field Trip to Farmer D Organics!

2011-10-16T11:22:00.003-04:00

Even though I live within an hour of Farmer D Organics, I had never been there until this week. I had an extra-long day at work on Monday (15 hours!), so on Tuesday I left work early. I was a little cranky from sleep-deprivation, but I figured that the thing that would improve my mood the most was a garden-oriented field-trip. Of course, a nap would probably have been a more logical choice.

My excuse for the field-trip was that I wanted to check out the garlic, since it is just about time to put that in the ground. It didn't hurt that the Farmer D store is only about 20-25 minutes from the office.

The good news is that there was plenty of garlic to choose from, and the cloves were HUGE. I bought two heads of California Early softneck and three cloves (loose) of Elephant garlic to try.

I have bought different varieties of garlic through the mail before, and they've done well, but the heads were not even close to the size of the garlic at Farmer D's, and this is one of those situations in which size matters. Big cloves usually end up making big heads of garlic in the garden.

The garlic that I've had the best luck with so far, in terms of consistently producing big heads of garlic in the garden, is the Rabun County garlic that my friend Cheryl brought back from one of her visits there a few years ago. We are still working on growing out enough of it to be able to actually eat very much of it, but it does make nice, big heads of garlic, and it has good flavor, too.

Photo below is of the two California early heads (left), the three cloves of Elephant garlic (center), and one of my Rabun County. Notice how the Rabun County is dwarfed by the garlic from Farmer D's:

I usually grow some grocery-store garlic along with the specialty garlics, but unless I see some heads with whopper-sized cloves, I'm going to stick with what I have now - the new garlic from Farmer D and the Rabun County that I've saved to replant. If all goes well, I'll have the garlic planted by Halloween.

Farmer D Organics had fruit trees and bushes for fall planting, and the strawberry plants are in. Onion sets will be in stock closer to Thanksgiving. The store seems to specialize in the small-scale food-growing that works so well in urban areas, and the people there were friendly. By the time I left, I was definitely in a good mood. It was a great field trip.

My Louisiana sister and I have been talking some about our fall gardens and planting the garlic and onions. Her planting date is later than mine, since she is more zone 9/10 than 7/8, but planning ahead is almost always good. To go with the garlic theme of our last couple of conversations, she sent a link to the amazing video below about using garlic in the kitchen.

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

Are you as astonished as I was? My sister and I are now both hunting for pairs of same-sized, large metal bowls.

Tenacity of the Summer Garden

2011-10-09T21:00:00.003-04:00

The tomatoes just won't quit:

I pulled out the last two of the April-planted tomatoes, though, because when the first frost comes, I want to be more ready than I am. That first frost could come pretty much anytime now, though I don't actually expect it until about Halloween.

I ended up with another big pile of green tomatoes. A lot of these are far enough along that they will ripen within the next week or two, but some are too immature to ripen well, and I plan to use them in a green tomato salsa recipe that I found online.

I've already made one batch of this, and there was enough to use on one supper's enchiladas and then to mostly fill an ice-cube tray. The frozen cubes may seem weird to some people, but we don't always need the same amount each time we want to use some "salsa verde." Having the salsa frozen in cubes - then stashed in a freezer bag - means I can pull out just the right amount for the purpose at hand.

Eggplants and peppers are still coming into the kitchen, too. Some years the garden does better than in other years, and it is usually a mystery to me what makes the yearly differences so large. Of course, sometimes a less-productive year is totally my fault - the result of not paying attention to water or soil/nutrient needs, for example. This year, the weather has been so weird that a low-harvest year would not have been a big surprise, but the garden has, instead, blown me away with its productivity.

A delivery-guy I was talking with last week suggested that the shade in my yard (that I usually complain about) might have saved my garden from roasting in this overly-hot summer. Maybe he's right.

Regardless of the reason, the sweet potatoes seem to have done pretty well. I ended up with about 35 pounds from the 3x5-foot space they were planted in.

I always manage to resist brushing off the dirt and giving the sweets a good scrub, since those activities can damage the thin skins and result in sweets that rot rather than stay good into the winter, but the box of sleek, brownish, tapered shapes with "tails" makes me think I'm looking into a box of dead rats. The good news is that, when I get these into a basket on the kitchen floor after they've had a chance to cure, some of that dirt will have fallen off on its own and the resemblance will be less striking (I hope).

Later this week, I will get some mulch onto the bed that I dug those sweets from, and onto some other spaces, too. One whole bed, the one the melons were in, has been planted with a cover crop, hairy vetch. I've planted vetch for the winter before, and it is a pain to dig it back into the soil in spring, but I still had some seeds that I didn't want to waste.

That melon bed had been created as a "lasagna" bed, with compost from my yard and manure and bedding from a stable. When I checked that part of the garden after pulling out the melons, the top few inches were great, but below that was still solid clay. I'm hoping the roots of the vetch will help make little tunnels into that lower clay, giving the earthworms a little help in mixing the layers.

Gardens are always ending - and always beginning

2011-10-02T20:43:00.005-04:00

Last Wednesday, the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden group met for the last time at the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, where it's been for the past six years. We harvested the last of the summer crops that were still in place - peppers and sweet potatoes - and we hauled the debris to the compost heap.

The final total of donated veggies for our 2011 garden year was 2710 pounds. Some of us still have at home some of the Seminole pumpkin squash that were too green to give away when we pulled up those vines, but those will all have finished ripening soon, and they will go to the Center for Family Resources - the pantry where we take our harvest - in another week or so. (Their weight hasn't been added to our total, yet.)

We had a great turnout for our last day at Smith Gilbert! This particular group of gardeners is just wonderful to work with. I feel very fortunate to know such great people every time I'm with them.

I'm in the plaid shirt, in front. Notice how I'm so short that I don't have to crouch down for the people behind me to be seen.

Some members of the group (but mostly just Fred) who have had a little free time have been looking into places to move the garden to, and we will have a few spots from which to choose. I am very happy that the group is ready to begin again! We will be meeting in about a week and a half to make a final choice, and to celebrate what we've accomplished this year.

When we have made that decision, it will be time to start getting the soil ready for next year. The fun will start all over again!

At home, the summer garden is thinking about ending, especially since we are getting some nighttime lows in the 40s. In spite of the onset of actual fall weather, we still have plenty of tomatoes. This is why I make that second planting in late June.

My fall veggies are mostly planted, but it isn't too late for one last crop of one of the faster-maturing radishes, and in a couple of weeks it will be time to plant garlic and multiplier onions that will mature in June, as part of next summer's garden.

This overlap of beginning and ending is one of the best parts of gardening. There's always something to look forward to. Even though it will be a little sad to bring in the last of the tomatoes in a few weeks, it also will be great to harvest the first bok choy, lettuce, spinach, beets, and other fall veggies. Some of these cooler weather crops will start to come to the kitchen before those last tomatoes are brought in.

When one season is coming to a close, another is opening up. When the soil temperatures drop and plant-growth slows to the point that it seems there's no growth at all, there is less work to do in the yard and more time to plan next year's garden -- what to plant and where, and how to improve the soil. And some of that work on improving the soil can begin in the less-rushed season of planning.

It's also a time to think about how the work of "putting food by" has panned out in terms of meals. That's part of gardening, too. If my little family's plan of making most our pasta sauce (and other foods that usually include a can of diced tomatoes) from our dehydrated tomatoes is successful, we will be very pleased.

Now and Later

2011-09-25T21:59:00.004-04:00

The greens are planted in an area that gets less sun than they were planted in last year, so they are not quite as far along as I would hope, but the little plants are definitely recognizable.

This is one of the Capitan lettuce:

These are two of the bok choy:

And this is one of the Red Russian kale:

If the weather continues to be beautifully sunny with some interspersed days of good, soaking rains, the little plants will be nicely grown by the first frost.

I see that there are a few little weeds in the pictures, too, but I'll remove those in a couple of days, when I get another chance to work in the yard.

For the last several days, my yard work has focused on moving wood chips, left by a tree-removal company, from the middle of my front yard. The good news for me is that Joe takes care of most of the hardest work, but I still managed to make a whole bunch of my own muscles sore.

We had asked for one load of chips a couple of weeks ago, because they are great to use on the paths that run through the wooded back yard. When the tree-guys stopped by a week later with another load, asking whether we could use more mulch, I (crazily) said, "yes!"

The tree-guys were very happy that they weren't going to have to drive that truck-full of chips 40-or-so miles to where-ever they usually dump loads of chipped wood, so I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing until they actually dumped the chips. The pile was twice as big as the first pile, and it took some serious work to get it all moved.

Some of those chips are spread as mulch in places where the first load had to be laid a little thin, but a lot of it is now in three big piles that are not in the middle of the yard.

By the time next spring's garden is far enough along to need some mulch, those chips should have aged enough to be just about right for the purpose. If I am very lucky, some might be decomposed enough to dig in as soil amendment.

The Only Constant is Change

2011-09-18T19:06:00.002-04:00

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where I am both volunteer and co-chair, we are in for some big change. The place where we have been growing veggies is going to be remade into a children's interactive garden. For the past few weeks, we have been looking at other properties that would work for our project.

It won't be the first move for this garden project; before moving to the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, the project was on County Farm Road, on Cobb County property, in Marietta.

The space where we've been for the past six years is about 4,500 square feet. In our best years, we've donated about 2,500 pounds of food to the Center for Family Resources in Marietta. This year, our final total is going to be higher. We're already above 2,300 pounds, and the sweet potatoes are still in the ground!

These days, it seems especially important to keep the project going. More and more people are food-insecure (don't know for sure whether they will have food for every meal, every day), and most of those people are kids or older individuals who can't, really, provide for themselves. The Center for Family Resources does great work in helping to feed those people, and in helping the working-age and working-able people around them to get and keep jobs and housing.

With luck, we'll have identified a new space and started working on preparing the soil within the next couple of months.

Fall Garden's All In

2011-09-13T20:27:00.006-04:00

Shifting from the summer garden to the fall garden involves a lot more work than I usually remember when I set out to make the change. Pulling out the old crops, amending the soil, tending the trays of transplants, getting everything into the ground in a timely manner - that all takes some pretty serious effort. The good news is that the work is usually spread out over several weeks, so no single week is too painful.

It's kept me busy, but the fall crops (except for another round or two of quick-growing radishes) are in the garden now. I started planting them in a particular sequence: slow-growing root crops like carrots, winter radishes, and beets that are all planted as seed went in first, then broccoli and cauliflower transplants, then the leafy crops as both transplants and seeds.

The beets and winter radishes are growing very well; the carrots are still tiny, but that is no surprise; and the broccoli and cauliflower are looking good.

It doesn't hurt that we finally had both some rain and some wonderfully cool weather. We still have plenty of summer veggies coming in, though. I pulled out some of the older tomato plants to make room for transplants of leafy greens, and I was left with a lot of tomatoes. The smaller green ones are going to be made into some green-tomato salsa, for use on winter enchiladas.

Two of the older tomato plants were left in the ground - the Wuhib paste tomatoes - because they are still producing incredibly well. There was just no way I could pull out plants with so many tomatoes on them when there is still so much time before the first frost.

The last summer veggie, the sweet potato crop, is at the "volcano" stage. That's when the magma-colored tuberous roots erupt from the soil.

Digging sweet potatoes too soon, or eating them before they have a chance to cure after digging, causes them to be a lot less sweet than they could be, so I haven't been in a big hurry to get those out of the ground. These should be just about ready, though.

The Latest "Goings On"

2011-09-04T10:24:00.004-04:00

Between finishing up some of the summer garden tasks and getting started on the fall ones, things here have been pretty busy.

Over the past few weeks, The Great Melon Experiment has progressed quite a bit. My melons, grown from seeds collected from hybrid plants, have been ripening, and I've been making decisions about what seeds to save for next year for my de-hybridizing project.

There has been some argument with the local chipmunks over whose melons these are, but we've worked out an arrangement. They get most of them; I ended up with enough to work with (the five pictured here, plus a couple more), but even a couple of those were pretty hotly contested -- note the scarring and other damage from little chipmunk teeth.

At first, I (naively) thought I'd probably save seeds from the earliest and biggest, but tasting the melons changed my mind about that pretty quickly. The earliest and biggest melon was plenty sweet, but other than the high sugar content it didn't have much in the way of flavor, and the texture was a little gritty -- not like sand, but not smooth, either.

After tasting the first few, I was wondering why I thought this multi-year breeding project was such a great idea, but then I tasted the little three-pounder. Oh my. It was sweet but also flavorful, almost buttery, and the texture was creamy-smooth. Deciding which seeds to plant next year suddenly became a "no brainer," and my original enthusiasm for the project returned in full force. The packets of seeds saved from each melon are marked with date of harvest, size at harvest, and flavor notes, and they are dried and tucked away for next year's garden.

Also completed is this year's popcorn harvest. Corn is probably not the smartest choice for a gardener working with a small space, but this really is a beautiful harvest:

Not only have I already cleared the old stalks away (chopped up and layered into the compost pile), but I've also been able to get the kernels off the cobs. These are pint-and-a-half jars, which means my little harvest has provided a quart and a half of popcorn.

The tomatoes and okra are still coming in at a fairly steady pace, along with an occasional eggplant, and the peppers are still rollicking along as though they were in their prime. I suppose they could actually be!

For fall crops, I have quite a lot of greens in flats, and root crops have been seeded directly into the ground -- if you don't count that the carrot seeds were first "sown" onto some paper towels to make wide-row seed tapes. Beets and winter radishes seem to be doing pretty well, in spite of the heat.

I've also planted broccoli and cauliflower transplants that I bought at a local store. It's been hot for their first week in the ground, but rain and cooler weather will be here, beginning at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, when the first rain-bearing bands of tropical storm Lee are expected to arrive. Already it is cloudy, and we are looking forward to the break in the drought and the heat. We are hoping, though, to avoid flooding!

Pickled Green Tomato Relish

2011-08-24T08:04:00.003-04:00

Even though the first frost is a couple of months away, near the end of October, and summer gardens are still producing pretty well, plenty of gardeners are looking ahead, toward the end of the summer growing season.

One of my gardening friends has begun to pass around his favorite recipe for Pickled Green Tomato Relish. It's a recipe that makes full use of all the small green tomatoes that make gardeners hesitate to pull out those old tomato plants. We all hate to waste any of our good, fresh food!

This is his favorite relish recipe, and he says it's good "on everything!" The instructions assume that the gardener is already pretty familiar with canning.

Ingredients:
10 pounds small, hard, green tomatoes
4 red peppers
4 green peppers (can use all green, if red aren't available)
2 pounds onions
1/2 cup canning salt
1 qt. water
4 cups sugar
1 qt. vinegar (5%)
1/3 cup prepared mustard
2 Tablespoons cornstarch

Directions:
Sterilize canning jars. Wash and coarsely grate or finely chop the tomatoes, peppers, and onions. Dissolve salt in water and pour over the veggies in a large saucepot.

Heat to boiling and simmer 5 minutes. Drain veggies and return to saucepot. Add sugar, vinegar, mustard, and cornstarch. Stir to mix. Heat to boiling and simmer 5 minutes.

Fill hot pint jars with hot relish, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rims and adjust lids. Process 5 minutes in a boiling water bath.

The book this recipe came from was probably printed before the newer canning books came out (I only saw a copy of the page, not the actual book); I don't think I've ever processed any canned foods for as few as 5 minutes! For safety, I expect to process the jars for at least 10 minutes. Other gardeners, those more prudent than myself, may want to put the jars into a pressure-canner rather than just the boiling water bath.

Like the Energizer Bunny

2011-08-20T16:35:00.003-04:00

The summer garden keeps going ...

In general, the harvests have become more manageable (the tomato avalanche has subsided), but we have been processing peppers pretty steadily. Right now, there is an assortment of red peppers, both sweet and hot, in the dehydrator that I plan to grind up for "paprika," and I am contemplating another round of pickled pepper rings from the Golden Greek peppers (that are not at all golden) below:

These Feherezon peppers have been producing well all summer:

This year, I remembered to fertilize the peppers again after the first flush of fruits had reached full size, and that may have helped the pepper harvest. If they are treated well and manage to avoid diseases, peppers will produce until frost.

Another summer veggie that will come to the kitchen soon is the Pigott Family Heirloom Cowpeas. This little crop had been planted in the spot from which we harvested potatoes earlier in the summer, and it seems to like that spot just fine. One of the great things about all the summer peas is that they are so easy to harvest - it's almost as though the plants are holding the peas out for you to pick!

The variety of foods coming into the kitchen isn't tremendous, but the flavor is, and we have earlier crops in the freezer (zucchini, collard greens, green beans) if we get tired of tomatoes, peppers, okra, and eggplants.

There is still chard in the garden, but it is struggling a bit in the heat, and I am thinking about cutting the tops off for compost and letting the tops regrow in what will hopefully be cooler weather in the coming weeks. There is also Malabar spinach, which I like well enough to snack on when I'm out in the yard (like purslane) but not well enough for a big serving as part of a meal.

The first melons are in the fridge (photo to come in a day or two), and the Heritage red raspberries have been ripening their late-summer crop that appears on the first-year canes.

Overall, I've had a surprisingly successful summer garden this year.

Fall Garden Time

2011-08-13T19:02:00.002-04:00

Last Wednesday evening, I gave a talk at the Mountainview Library (in Marietta) on starting the fall garden. I handed out a planting schedule, and I am pretty sure that many attendees were not all that happy to see that the time to start the fall garden is . . . now.

It doesn't help that this has been an unusually hot summer, but I when I see those "Christmas in July" fliers from the local crafts shops, I know it's time to get busy with the planning and soil preparation. To be honest, I am running a little behind.

Last weekend I started some seeds in the ground (Detroit Dark Red and Detroit Golden beets; winter radishes -- an assortment), and I also started a flat of seedlings to transplant to the garden when more spaces open up and the temperature outside has moderated a bit. I took the flat to the talk with me as a "visual aid."

I planted the seeds on Sunday afternoon, and then I set the flat on a shelf in the dining room. In summer, when it is SO VERY HOT outside, I get better germination if the flat starts out indoors. However, I left it inside one day too long. On Tuesday evening when I got home from work, I could see that some seedlings had emerged and were already taller than they should be!

I hustled the flat right out of the house and into the garden, where it now resides under some tulle - to protect it from insects. The above photo is from Wednesday, and the too-tall seedlings are pretty obvious. Since then, those have fleshed out enough that they don't look so strange, and a lot of other seedlings have come up.

This is what I put in the flat: Bloomsdale spinach, Detroit Dark Red beets (as back-ups for the ones started outside), Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce, Capitan lettuce, Bronze Arrow lettuce, Georgia collards, Red Russian kale, China Choy bok choy, Pan du Zucchero chicory, and Perpetual Spinach chard.

Today, I prepared the bed that the carrots will go in. I was going to plant them, but it looks like we will be getting some serious rain in the next 24 hours, and I don't want the little seeds to wash away.

I'll start more lettuces and spinach in a couple of weeks, when I plant the first "regular" radishes (probably French Breakfast).

Meanwhile, the summer veggies are still coming in. I pulled out the cucumber plants today, because they looked absolutely terrible, so this is the last of the cucumbers. They've been coming to the table for a month now, though, so I can't complain. They've been great!

Most of those tomatoes and a couple of the peppers went into a pizza sauce. The rest went into the dehydrator. The okra were promptly fried and eaten. I only planted six okra plants this year, and they are producing just enough to be a real treat. Of course, they will produce through most of October, so there is a chance that we will get tired of them at some point - but that's hard to imagine right now.

Unwelcome Guest

2011-08-06T15:11:00.006-04:00

Plenty of people have mentioned to me this year that their gardens had been host to one or more tomato hornworms, but my garden had managed to miss those quite large pests until, apparently, the last day or two. I didn't notice it until today, but here one is:

What's really funny is that I didn't even see the four-inch caterpillar at first. You'd think a critter this large would be totally obvious, but the way it's lined up with the stem, and exactly the same color as the stem, helps keep it hidden.

Instead, what I noticed first was the big black balls of frass on some leaves. Then, knowing there had to be a caterpillar around somewhere, I looked more closely at the plant and figured out that a whole lot of leaves had gone missing. It took another minute or two of searching to spot the big, squishy culprit.

So far, I think there's only this one tomato hornworm, so I am going to leave it alone for the rest of the day and wait to see what happens. If all goes well, a brachonid wasp will find it and lay eggs on it, and I won't have to do anything. When the baby wasps hatch out, they'll eat the caterpillar and that will be the end of that. If no wasp shows up soon, though, I'll remove the caterpillar to prevent the total demolition of my pepper-patch.

Elsewhere in the garden, things are chugging along just fine. The husks on some of the ears of popcorn have dried, which means those ears are pretty much done, so I've picked those. Other ears of corn are still very green, but in a couple of weeks they'll be ready to bring in, too. Last year, I waited to harvest the popcorn until almost all the ears were covered in brown husks (dry), but a few ears had begun to mold. I don't want that to happen - it's a very small crop - which is why I'm bringing the ears in as they seem ready.

This year's popcorn is supposed to be red, but not all of the ears are. Some are dark red, some are kind of orange, and one that I brought in is sunflower-yellow. It's a beautiful mix!

I'm beginning to work on the fall garden today, but I realized that it actually was begun a couple of months ago, when I planted the parsnips. It's hard to find room for these when all the summer crops are going into the garden, but in January, when I want to add variety to the roasted root veggies, I'll be glad that I did.

Beginning Before the Ending

2011-08-03T16:57:00.006-04:00

Even though the summer crops are still coming in (in a big way!), it's time to get moving on the fall crops. I'm hoping to get a flat of seedlings started on Friday; meanwhile, we are still in the "avalanche time" as far as tomatoes are concerned.

And when the first five plants quit pelting us with fruit, the next set of plants should begin. Little green tomatoes are beginning to form on the plants that I set out in early July.

In the side yard, the Great Melon Experiment is coming along pretty well. These plants were grown from seeds saved from fruits that grew last year on hybrid plants. The plan is to save seeds from the best resulting melons this year, and next year, and so on, until I have a great little canary melon for my yard that breeds true.

In all that vegetation, it's hard to see the melons, but they are in there. Interestingly, not all the vines produced fruit. A thorough poking-about has turned up only about eight melons. Some of these look exactly like their parent-melons, but some seem to be ripening a little differently. Flavor is the real test, though, so I won't know which seeds to save for next year until I crack open the ripe fruits. These got a late start, but the first melon should be ready within a couple of weeks.

This little patch of my favorite crowder peas was put in after the potatoes came out. These will be making peas for us into the early fall, so this part of the garden won't get any fall veggies for a while.

I have left a few bare spots in the garden, for example, when the first cucumbers came out. These will be directly seeded with fall veggies (probably beets and carrots).

The other cucumbers will be done soon, and the melons have only another two or three weeks. The early tomatoes may give out in that time-frame, and the husks on the popcorn are beginning to dry, so those spaces may be cleared soon, too. All those areas are fair game for fall crops. Having seeds started in trays or those little jiffy pellets (if I have any left from spring) to transplant into those spaces will help me get the most out of the garden. That's the plan, anyway.

'Fast' Food

2011-07-30T17:10:00.003-04:00

Usually when I bring food in from the garden, I take a little time to arrange the veggies in a wooden bowl or more attractive basket for a photo. Yesterday, however, we needed some of these in the kitchen Right Away for supper, so this picture is just the jumble of veggies as they came in from the yard:

The okra was sliced, tossed into a cornmeal coating mixture, and fried. A cucumber, pepper, and a couple of tomatoes went into a salad with some parsley, red onion, cooked barley, vinegar, olive oil, black pepper, and salt. At the last minute, we grated a little Parmesan cheese into that salad. The rest of supper was mashed potatoes and some purple-hull peas that had been cooked with one of our smoked peppers. It was a great garden-themed supper!

Busy Times

2011-07-26T20:27:00.004-04:00

The green beans are from a friend's giant garden/small farm, but the canning was all Joe's doing. He's not teaching this summer, so he's had time to work on preserving most of the produce. I canned the "black & blue" berry jam that's mostly hidden (you can just see the tops of five small jars . . .), and I canned those peppers, which in this photo are still whole but later made four full quarts of pickled pepper rings.

Tomorrow is a volunteering/gardening day, but I hope to have the energy afterward to work on getting more produce into the cupboards. Joe has filled the dehydrator with tomato slices, but I think we have enough tomatoes left here to fill some jars, which means we have some more canning ahead.

I also bought quite a lot of Georgia peaches over the weekend. They were like little tart rocks when I got them, but they are ready for eating now. I'm thinking that a batch of peach preserves would be a nice thing, and if there are enough to put a bag or two of slices in the freezer for future smoothies, that would also be good.

We had rain yesterday, which means I don't have to get up extra-early tomorrow to water. What a gift that is! Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well.

When 'Organic' Gardening Goes Horribly Wrong

2011-07-24T10:45:00.003-04:00

I have a friend who's had some trouble with his tomatoes and peppers this year. I never seem to have a camera handy when I'm out at his garden/farm, but I can say that the leaves on most of the tomato and pepper plants in most parts of his garden are narrow and twisty with weird pointy parts.

At first, I thought the problem might be a virus (it definitely wasn't a fungal or bacterial infection), but it seemed that the problem might also be caused by herbicide residues in the soil. My friend uses horse manure, but he was a little doubtful when I said that I thought herbicide residues might be causing the problem. He ages that manure in huge piles for a full year, and he's never had this problem before (in more than 20 years of using manure as his main source of organic matter in the soil).

To find out for sure, I did the experiment described in various places online. I took some of his soil home with me, mixed it half & half with potting soil, then divided that into three pots. I did the same thing with soil from my own garden so I'd have a control to compare the results to.

Then I went to one of those big box stores and bought a four-pack of Big Boy tomatoes. I planted two in his pots, two in mine, and planted bean seeds (five each) in the other two pots.

In the bean pots, four germinated in my pot and only one in his, but they seemed to be mostly ok after coming up.

After three weeks, this is what the leaves on my tomato plants look like:

And these are the leaves on his tomato plants:

I'm pretty sure this means that herbicide residue is the problem, and it turns out that the problem showing up most often at the County Extension office this year is this exact problem -- damage from herbicide residues. In most instances, the damage is worse because people have used grass clippings from lawns sprayed within the last month or so right on their gardens as mulch. At least my friend's source of herbicides has sat around for a full year, giving it more time to break down and disappear.

The real frustration here is that people are trying to do the right thing -- using local amendments to improve their soil (my friend) or local mulches (others) to reduce evaporation from the soil, saving water, and to reduce the need for weeding. These uses also keep organic matter out of the landfill.

I brought my experiment to an organic gardening class I was co-teaching with the leader of the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, and it turned out that one person who showed up had already had the damage-from-grass-clipping problem.

Another had bought some hay to use as mulch in her garden that has always been managed using organic-approved practices and never had any big disease problems. She and her husband had brought leaves (thankfully in plastic bags, so spores weren't getting loose all over the place) from plants in her yard to show several disease problems that seemed to have arrived with the hay.

They had been told that the hayfield had never been sprayed, and I had a huge moment of doubt about that, but after more thought this seems totally possible. If the field hadn't been sprayed, it probably had a lot of weeds in it. Some of those weeds were probably in the same families as the now-infected garden plants (including the tomatoes). Weeds could easily be carriers of diseases that her garden had never before been exposed to.

This is all one big cautionary tale. I am now thinking about ways to get more organic matter into my garden without actually bringing it in from the outside, because the outside is looking pretty untrustworthy. I've grown winter cover-crops before. The vetch that I grew wasn't especially attractive, or all that easy to dig back into the soil in spring, but I am thinking about trying that again.

I've also read in Dick Raymond's "The Joy of Gardening" that in plots where he had experimented with growing two crops of edible legumes (beans, peas, not vetch) in the succession with other crops, the soil was great. He had dug in all the crop residues from the two legume crops. His method calls for growing a lot of peas.

Real Tomatoes. Finally.

2011-07-21T20:49:00.002-04:00

The veggies above are from yesterday. There were more today, and Joe made a great pasta sauce for part of tonight's supper that was almost all from the yard. It included our own tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, onions, garlic, oregano, and thyme.

All the main crop of tomatoes are finally beginning to come in. We have Cherokee Purple, Rutgers, and Wuhib (paste-type) ripening in a big wave.

We're still getting plenty of cucumbers, but I expect that to end soon. The peppers, though, are going to be providing for us for a while.

Overgrown

2011-07-15T09:44:00.004-04:00

My front yard is hilariously overgrown right now. The first cucumbers will be coming out soon because they're looking a little mildewed, and some of the herbs that are going to seed will be trimmed back and look a little less unruly, but the corn will be there for a while; it's popcorn that needs to stay on the stalk to dry for several weeks after maturing.

Right now, the sweet potatoes, just left/front of the corn in the photo below, are looking very healthy, and in another week or two, they are going to really sprawl all over the place. Their area will look less and less tidy as the summer progresses (but it will be glorious!).

My harvests are still heavily skewed toward cucumbers.

As a result, we've been eating a lot of a modified version of "Israeli salad," something I learned to make a long time ago, from a friend of a friend's grandmother.

The version I learned is approximately equal parts finely chopped cucumber and tomato, about a half part finely diced onion, the same for parsley, a little salt, then lemon juice and olive oil as dressing. This should sit for a few hours in the fridge before being served. I never wrote down exact proportions for all the ingredients because I watched it being made and figured out how to just "eyeball it."

However, for anyone interested in giving this a try, there is a more precise version of the recipe at MyJewishLearning.com.

The salads we've been making over the last few weeks have zero tomatoes because we've had so many cucumbers and so few (or zero!) tomatoes. I've been using lots of parsley, too, because the swallowtail butterflies haven't found my parsley yet. When they do, and their little caterpillars start to grow, it will be all over for my parsley.

Lately, I've been going light on the onion, partly because I've been taking it in my lunchbox to work, and partly because I'm running low on onions grown in my own yard. I find myself balking at the thought of actually buying onions before August.

Soon we'll have more tomato to add to the salad. My first-crop tomato plants are loaded with green fruits, and each plant has a few tomatoes that are beginning to show the pink blush that signals the beginning of ripening. It's been a long wait, but we are almost there . . .

Squash Vine Borer Unveiled

2011-07-15T09:19:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite neighbors stopped by the other day to let me know that he was going to find the borers in the squash stems in his Mom's garden. I walked back to his yard with him to see the damage.

His Mom was there, too, so I got out my pocket knife and handed it to my friend (after asking his Mom if he was old enough, at 9, to use one). The stem was still tough, so getting to the borers wasn't easy, but it turned out that the stem was pretty full of the little guys.

The larval borer, on first glance, resembles a grub more than a caterpiller, but the lifecycle of this particular insect is well-documented. We know what it is.

In my yard, I sprayed the zucchini with Bt (bacterial product that is toxic to caterpillars) once each week through June, but the plants haven't been sprayed since I got back from Texas. The spraying did seem to delay the borers in my yard, but my squash plants are just about done-in, too. Luckily, I have some young squash plants growing under netting right now. They have begun to flower, so the netting will come off soon.

The netting prevents the adult borer moth from laying eggs on my plants, but it also will keep bees and other pollinators away from the flowers.

Right now, the flowers are all male. When I see the first female flowers getting ready to open, I might pull off that netting. I might, though, hand-pollinate those plants until they are just too big to fit under the netting. That strategy would probably give me the most squash.

Wild Harvest

2011-07-12T08:55:00.003-04:00

It seems awfully early for cauliflower mushrooms to be up, but here they are:

They joined a small pile of yellow chanterelle mushrooms in the kitchen, and were just wonderful to eat.

I am pretty sure that cauliflower mushrooms are my favorite of the wild mushrooms that we eat. Chanterelles are pretty good too, which is a lucky thing because there are so many more of them. In the last few days, Joe and I have also found a few black trumpets and some teeny, tiny cinnabar red chanterelles.

The cauliflower mushrooms we just sauteed in butter and ate, but the chanterelles have been added to a wide assortment of other foods, including spaghetti sauce, sauteed yellow squash, eggplant & zuchini fritters, and scrambled eggs. There are more of those yellow mushrooms in a basket on the kitchen counter, so I am assuming that they will add to yet another meal this evening. Not sure yet what that will be, though.

While I Was Out

2011-07-07T16:18:00.006-04:00

The boy did a great job of looking after the garden while his parents (Joe and I) were traveling. We returned to find an abundance of cucumbers and zucchini, and the beginnings of the eggplant and tomato harvests:

What's especially great is that he ate quite a bit of food from the garden, and there is still so much! One evening he called and asked how to cook green beans, and when we got back I noticed that several onions are no longer around -- I'm assuming those also were used in meal-preparation. And, he mentioned having eaten cucumbers and zucchini and blueberries. I am pretty pleased with the outcomes all around.

Meanwhile, "pepper alley" has really poured on the steam in terms of production. The bell peppers are getting big:

As are the grilling peppers:

The Czech Black jalapeno plant is pretty well covered in little hot peppers:

And the Feherezon peppers are also producing well.

The melon plants are beginning to make little tiny melons, and I am looking forward to watching those mature. The popcorn is tall and just starting to tassle, but the okra haven't opened any flowers yet. Soon, though, that too will begin.

I am very feeling very fortunate in having had some good-enough gardening weather here, and a son who is both willing and able to take care of the garden (and house and dogs and cat) while I'm gone.

Road Trip

2011-07-04T11:33:00.003-04:00

Joe and I left the boy (age 20) and his friend in charge of the house, the garden, the pets, and have driven west to visit relatives. Everyone else is having a lot more trouble with drought than we are in the Atlanta area, so I have been counting my blessings as we go.

The garden of my sister in Louisiana is doing pretty well, but she has had to spend some serious time watering out there to make that happen. Joe enjoyed walking through with his harmonica. I'm pretty sure he was playing "O Suzanna" when I took this picture.

Her Silver Queen corn has done especially well this year, but it was almost done by the time we got there.

The Purple Martins are an essential part of her pest-management plan. This house stands right in the center of her garden.

In the Texas Hill Country, Joe's sister and brother-in-law's garden has more problems than just drought, but this year all the gardens in the area are suffering from extreme drought. Apparently, they've had one inch of rain since October.

The high fence is necessary because these wander freely through the neighborhood:

We've really enjoyed visiting with the relatives (Joe's sisters, brother, and Mother all live in the Austin area and most of my family is gathered outside of Houston for the Fourth), but the drought is severe enough that fireworks have been banned. The men have a plan that involves Mentos and diet soda pop that I am pretty sure involves some loud noise (the two can be combined to make rockets and fountains and the sound of exploding). I'm sure we will all be entertained.

Death of a Tomato Plant

2011-06-26T21:27:00.005-04:00

The plant on the right is a Cherokee Purple. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the leaves are all droopy. We've had a lot of rain recently, and that's allowed Verticillium Wilt to really take off inside this plant.

I've pulled out the wilty plant, and so far, the other Cherokee Purple (I planted two) is still fine, but one of the Olivette Jaune may be toast. Interestingly, this is only the second year that this garden bed has been in existence, and last year it held melons and other non-tomato-family crops. The wilt is just pervasive in the soil here, and in the right conditions it can do some serious damage.

The good news is that Rutgers and Wuhib have both always made it through "wilt season" just fine, so I will still have tomatoes, even if some plants have to be pulled from the garden.

And, while the rain "taketh away," the rain also gives. The local blackberries have really picked up the pace!

We are still harvesting green beans, cucumbers, and zucchini from the yard, and the blueberries are adding to the blackberries.

The little pepper plants are loaded with little peppers, so pretty soon we will have a lot of those to also add to our meals.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

The Crops Are Saved!

2011-06-20T21:37:00.005-04:00

Along with "Trouble in the neighborhood!" (when he sees a police car), "The crops are saved!" is one of Joe's favorite catch-phrases. I hear that phrase most when it's finally raining after a long dry spell, so I've heard it some recently. In the last week, we've had almost four inches of rain.

We had a little hail with the first storm, but the damage in my yard was limited to holes in leaves and some leaves knocked off their plants. The storm wasn't too bad in my yard, but the hail that did fall ranged in size from the diameter of nickels to the diameter of quarters:

Plants in other yards had more damage. None of us like to go out and find our plant babies broken in two, but one friend walked out after the storm and found exactly that. It was pretty sad.

The same crops as last week (zucchini, green beans, and cucumbers) are being harvested in my yard. I did, though, dig up the potatoes. I got nearly 18 pounds out of the 4-by-4 foot patch. For Georgia, that's not too terrible. Some of these were roasted tonight to go with supper after being rolled in olive oil and sprinkled with fresh, chopped rosemary and some salt. We had zucchini (sauteed) and blackberry cobbler, too. Have I said yet how much I enjoy eating food that we grew and/or harvested ourselves?

The Provider bush beans have been interesting to harvest. They seem to have a very different production strategy than the Burpee Tenderpod bush beans that I usually grow. Provide puts out a huge burst of beans and then seems to taper off, while the Tenderpod have a slower, steadier pace of production over a long time. I've had Tenderpod plants produce most of the summer, but I don't think the Providers are going to keep going after this big flush of beans is gone.

The good news here is that the pole beans will be sending food to the table soon, so if the Provider plants really do quit, we will still have beans in the yard.

A Varied Diet

2011-06-15T16:15:00.007-04:00

On Monday, I brought in a cucumber and some green beans.

On Tuesday, there were a couple of zucchini to go with the green beans and cucumbers. The little white cuke is the first of the North Carolina picklers. There weren't any more of those to bring in today, but the plants have a lot of little baby cukes that will be ready in a few days.

This morning, there were more green beans, cucumbers, and another zucchini.

Tomorrow, there will be more of the same. (Amazingly, all the green beans so far are from a patch that is just two feet deep and four and a half feet long.)

Usually, when people engage me in conversation about what our garden does for us, I don't talk about it in terms of providing all our food, or even all our vegetables. There are quite a few garden beds out in my front yard, but the actual growing space for veggies that these provide is less than 500 square feet. It would take a lot more than that to feed my family for the year!

Instead, I think of the garden as a source of vitamins, minerals, and variety in our diets. These last several days don't look especially varied, but the garden also provides herbs that can make two meals composed of nearly the same basic ingredients taste different.

The odd times when only one or two veggies are coming into the kitchen don't tend to last very long, and I don't think I've ever had too much zucchini; too many pests here in the South love it too, and the plants usually die before I get too much squash. If there ever is too much of one crop, it can be frozen/dehydrated/canned for later, to become an out-of-season treat.

Also, there is the chard. The small planting means it doesn't come to the kitchen every day, just every now and then. The plant on the right is yet-to-be-harvested; the one in the middle, that is just nubs, went mostly into a pot of lentil soup on Sunday while part of it went into a stir-fry last night. The last few leaves will go into a fried potatoes-and-veggies meal with cheese melted on top tonight. The one on the far left was harvested a week or so ago, and it is regrowing.

If all goes as planned, we can harvest a bundle of chard nearly every week all summer long from the four plants. I had planted five, but something (I suspect a dog) smashed one plant early on, and I never replaced it. Since we are down to just four plants, I might have a week without chard after that fourth plant is harvested, waiting for the first one to complete its regrowth.

We'll have peppers soon, too. Most of the 15 plants on "pepper alley" are sporting little peppers.

We've also had raspberries, but those get eaten before I can even think about bringing out the camera, and a few blueberries have begun to turn blue each day. In less than a week, if the birds are willing to share, we should have enough blueberries to not buy any fruit at the store for awhile. Joe and I have been out picking wild blackberries to put on ice cream and our morning granola (even though, when I made it, I added almost the last of last year's dehydrated blueberries).

The tomato plants finally all have green tomatoes on them, but I don't expect to eat the first ripe tomato until the second week in July. My plants got a late start this year.

For those who are keeping track, the large heads of Slobolt lettuce have turned bitter. We wanted some lettuce for sandwiches over the weekend, and I went out to check the leaves. I brought one back to Joe who popped it into his mouth and nearly immediately made what looked a lot like the "Mr. Yuck" face that goes on bottles of dangerous chemicals! He was raised Catholic, but his family has always celebrated Passover, and he said that the lettuce reminded him of whatever it was that his Mom found to use as the bitter herb at the Seder meal.

The smallest Slobolt, which has only about five leaves, all smaller than six inches high, is still not bitter, but I don't know how long that situation will last. I might just put it on a sandwich later this week, and call it the end of the lettuce season.

I hope all the other gardens out there are growing well!

Beans and Zucchini

2011-06-10T15:31:00.006-04:00

I know I am not alone in having pretty much these exact veggies ready for harvest:

Even though they are what everyone else has, too, I am SOOOO happy to have them coming into my kitchen.

One of the zucchini went into what we call "smashed sandwiches." We saute veggies in olive oil (sliced onion, squash, and sugar snap peas in this particular version), pile them into French bread that's been sliced open longways, add some cheese (Provolone is a family favorite for this) and slivers of marinated artichoke from a jar, then cook the finished (closed) sandwiches in one of those George Foreman grills.

This version included sugar snap peas because I brought the last of those in before cutting down the plants.

The sugar snap peas shared a trellis with the cucumbers, and I wanted to make some more space for the cukes. Good air circulation can be helpful in slowing down the assorted mildews that attack the leaves of those vines. The vines are getting long and bushy, so they definitely will benefit from the extra "breathing room."

Also, it has been very hot every day for a while now, and the production of those sugar snap peas has slowed way down. Obviously, though, it hadn't come to a complete standstill before I removed the plants.

Something else that seems to have cropped up in the garden, something unwanted, is the adult of the squash vine borer. I am hoping that the Bt that I have been spraying will slow the damage from the babies of those day-flying moths.

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden where I volunteer, we started our yellow straightneck squash early enough that the garden is pretty much pelting us with squash.

One of the gardeners took the 90 pounds of produce we harvested on Wednesday (65 pounds of which was summer squash) to the pantry in Marietta. We were very happy to have been able to provide some good veggies to the pantry!

Summer Harvest Begins

2011-06-06T17:36:00.006-04:00

I'll start with the crops that are kind of on the shoulder of the season. The first is the "perpetual spinach" chard. The one on the left, that's been chopped down to about an inch and a half high, featured in last night's supper.

Most chard varieties produce good food right through the summer. In the very worst of the heat, the plants look pretty sad and aren't quite as tasty, but they perk up again in the fall.

The harvested chard went inside a batch of stuffed shells (greens sauteed in olive oil with onions, garlic, and Italian herbs; mixed with ricotta cheese and a little grated Parmesan; stuffed into mostly-cooked shells; covered with pasta-sauce; cooked until bubbly; grated mozzarella strewn on top). The onions that were in the skillet with the wilting greens and garlic were also from the yard.

It wasn't my greatest onion year. I didn't plant a very big patch (concentrating more on garlic), and the bulbs didn't get as big as usual, but they are still onions!

The "potato onions," or multipliers, are still out in the garden, so there will be a few more to add to the onion pile in another week or so.

This morning, while walking around the yard with my cup of tea, I stopped to check the little patch of bush beans and saw some that were finally big enough for harvest. These came inside with me when I got home from work.

A zucchini also looked just about "eatin' size."

Joe watered the garden while I was gone (when the afternoon temperature gets over 90 degrees F, watering is important!), and he said he thought it had grown since I left.

When I went to look at it, I had to agree, so the zucchini came in, and it will join the handful of green beans, an onion, and some sugar snap peas (nearly the last...) in a stir-fry.

When the green beans and zucchini start producing for the kitchen, that's when I know it's really summer!

Odd Squash Problem: Split Stems

2011-06-02T20:24:00.006-04:00

A the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, we noticed, a few weeks back, something odd about our summer squash plants. The stems had split. In the lower right part of this first picture, the split shows as a wide place:

Here, in this close-up, the split is easier to see:

If this were caused by squash vine borers, the split areas would look a lot more "chewed" and frass (caterpillar poop) would be all over the place. The Squash Vine Borer Damage page from the University of Nebraska's entomology department shows the damage from squash vine borer activity very clearly (sorry I don't have a photo of my own to post. Maybe later this summer...).

Also, when we first noticed the damage, it was VERY early in the season for squash vine borers. In another week or two, I won't be surprised to hear that evidence of the borers has been seen (except that we are spraying the plants with Bt this year, to head that off some), but early May is just too soon.

When I went online to sort out the problem, I didn't find any university or research related sites that discussed the split stems in any context other than as damage from squash vine borers, but I found some discussion sites, populated by gardeners and farmers, that did.

Several mentioned that split stems can be a result of mechanical damage, and is common when young plants with long stems twist and turn in the wind. Others mentioned that such damage is often seen when the plants experience temperature extremes.

The squash at the PAR garden were set out as transplants with fairly elongated stems, so the first category of damage is a possibility. However, this spring and early summer, the daily high temperatures have been all up and down the thermometer, so the second category is another possibility.

Since my zucchini plants at home all experienced the same temperature extremes without also having split stems, I am thinking that the wind-action on spindly stems was a larger factor.

The good news is that the plants seem to be producing well in spite of the weirdness. The plants are blooming abundantly and don't seem to be at all stressed by the heat. Yesterday when we met for our usual workday, the first harvest from those plants totaled 38 pounds!

Spring's End?

2011-05-29T19:37:00.002-04:00

I brought in the last of the Bronze Arrow lettuce yesterday.

There is still the Slobolt lettuce, but I'm not sure that counts as a spring crop. I've brought in the beets, and the Sugar Snap peas seem to be slowing down in the heat, so I'd say that the spring crops are just about done.

Considering that the daytime high temperatures have gone back into the lower nineties, the persistence of my spring crops has been a little surprising.

Until the traditional summer crops kick in, I am left with chard as a green vegetable from the yard to go with that Slobolt. The good news is that the beans and cucumbers are making good time. In a week or so, they will be ready to add to our meals.

In addition, the onion tops have mostly keeled over, so those have been pulled and left to dry for a day or two on the front porch. The potatoes will be ready to dig soon, too. The domino-like progress of food from the yard into the kitchen, the same almost every year as the seasons progress, is always great to see!

In order to make space in the freezer for any superabundance (I can always hope . . .) we cleaned out the little chest freezer. I usually keep extra flour and cornmeal in there to avoid bug-problems (I tend to buy a LOT when it's on sale), but we moved that into a bucket with one of those "gamma seal" lids (supposed to be bug-proof -- we'll find out!). It turns out that there is a Survival Store surprisingly nearby that sells the lids. If this really works, I might get another one for the rice (usually purchased in 10-20 pound bags, so I don't have to remember to buy more as often).

While working our way to the bottom of the freezer, we did get one pretty big surprise. We still had two gallons of blueberries in there! I had forgotten how productive those bushes were last year. To move those berries along -- one step closer to our stomachs -- I turned most of them into "fruit roll-ups." We already had the dehydrator moved back into the kitchen for the summer, to dry the dill, and making the puree was a snap. We now have 48 pretty large blueberry roll-ups (a.k.a. fruit leather) individually wrapped in wax paper and ready for lunch boxes. I think I'm officially ready for summer!

Since Memorial Day is tomorrow, I'd say my timing isn't too bad.

My Mom (in Oklahoma) usually spends one day during this weekend taking flowers to the graves of family members. I'm betting she's not the only one. Hope it's a beautiful day for everyone, and not too sad.

Beans of Tomorrow

2011-05-26T17:14:00.005-04:00

My bush beans (this year's variety is Provider) are making flower buds. Of course, just like when I look at those pictures of clean-cut, smiling kids captioned "Tomorrow's leaders," I know better than to expect every last one of the buds to make a bean, especially if the high temperatures of the last week continue. The flower buds are, however, a hopeful sign of beans-to-come.

A label of "Tomorrow's beets" would be mostly right, because I'm expecting my little family to eat golden beets from the garden this weekend.

We might eat a little dill, but mostly we have been running it through the dehydrator (at the lowest setting) to save for when the pickling cukes are ready to harvest. Since they aren't yet opening any flowers, it could be awhile.

Joe is having trouble waiting for the garden to provide his cukes, so he has bought some picklers at the store and started a batch of brined pickles, using our fresh dill.

The Sugar Snap peas have been cranking out the peas for a while now. Most of these are going into a stir-fry tonight. They've been great in salads and as snacks-while-walking-around-the-yard.

We still have a couple of heads of Bronze Arrow lettuce out in the garden, but I will be bringing these in to the house tomorrow morning. So far, they have held up very well in the heat, but I don't want to push my luck. Also, I need that space for the sweet potatoes.

Maybe this weekend I will get the rest of the summer planting done. We are about to have some rain (after several dry weeks), which will be welcome.

The weather has been crazy this year, and we have been lucky that our family members in Oklahoma and Missouri have been missed by the worst of the storms (even the niece in Joplin). I hope everyone else out there in electron-land is safe and well!

The Vagaries of Spring

2011-05-19T21:51:00.005-04:00

We have had some pretty hilarious weather here. Already there has been a week in which the high temperature most days was around 90 degrees F, and that was followed by a week in which the high temperature most days was around 60 degrees F. We should be heading back into more usual territory this weekend, but the extremes have been hard on some plants.

I would blame the weather for my tiny pepper plants, but their size is my own fault. If I had started them sooner, they would be more visible in this arc of garden near the front steps. Can you see them? There are fifteen, representing several varieties, though not all are visible in this particular photo.

The big plant to the right, on the outside of the curve, is a red-flowered bee balm that seems fairly resistant to the mildew that attacks most of these plants. I think the variety is Jacob Kline.

In my own yard, the weird weather has mostly served just to slow things down. In the garden of a friend, though, the weather has been a little harder on the plants. The leaves of his earliest-planted tomato plants have a purplish cast. We finally figured out that this is probably due to the reduced uptake of phosphorus that resulted from having been planted in cold soil. In addition, his peppers are looking a little pale, and we think that is cold-related, too.

However, all the plants of my friend who gardens in containers look great! Her tomato plants have little green fruits on them, and all is proceeding as it should.

Elsewhere around my yard, blueberries are looking abundant (though still green), the other berries are flowering and making little green fruits, and my persimmon trees, both the Ichi Ki Ke Jiro and the unknown variety that a friend grafted for me are also making little fruits.

The neighborhood kids (aka "Little Rascals") have figured out where the fruit is, so I expect to have some competition for the berries from these canes. The good news is that there seem to be more canes and more flowers than last year, and if we are lucky there will be plenty to share.

This is the first year of fruiting for the grafted persimmon tree, and I do not know whether any of those fruits will mature (or, if they do, if I can beat the squirrels to them). I'm looking forward to finding out!

What's for Lunch?

2011-05-13T12:53:00.004-04:00

These are the salad days at our house.

We brought in all the Capitan and Tiny Tim lettuces, and most of the Marvel of Four Seasons (packed into bags in the fridge). The first two don't hold up well in the heat, and I am hoping to find out how well Marvel holds up. I'll be nibbling on the remaining Marvel plant on and off to find out when it turns bitter. Still in the yard are the oak-leaf lettuces (this year those are all Bronze Arrow), which should be fine for a couple more weeks, and the SloBolt, which should be fine into June.

We still have some radishes left in the garden, and the peas, both English and Sugar Snap, have just recently begun making additions to our meals.

Also making regular appearances are the many herbs, both the ones we planted on purpose and the ones that have re-seeded into the yard. There's a lot of dill that I will be thinning soon, and bringing the thinnings in to dry for later use. Last year's parsley is starting to make flowers, but the leaves are still just fine to use. We even still have a little cilantro! All the plants in the sunnier spots went to seed a while back, but the plants in shadier locations still have plenty of usable leaves.

For someone who cooks, herbs are a great choice of plants to grow, because getting them at the store in those little plastic packets costs a small fortune. Today, our lunchtime salad is a pesto-potato salad (on a bed of lettuce) (it has peas in it), for which buying basil leaves would have made me pretty unhappy. I will admit that making the pesto last summer wasn't exactly my favorite activity, but we have been using the frozen cubes of pesto all winter long, and we still have a few more cubes in the freezer.

The Hanover Salad Kale has bolted, along with most of the other earlier greens. That hasn't stopped me from taking more leaves off the spinach plants; they are just a bit tougher than earlier in the spring. Those plants are all coming out soon, though.

In another week or two, the newest Perpetual Spinach Chard will be big enough to add to meals, too. The carrots will be ready at about that same time, and so will the beets.

It is great to have food from the garden on my plate!

Temps in the 90s

2011-05-10T08:25:00.007-04:00

As so often happens in the middle of May, afternoon temperatures are reaching into the low nineties. That means it's time for my little family to eat a lot of salad. Most lettuces left in the garden for many days at such high temperatures will turn bitter, and they will bolt to flower and seed.

For people planning to save lettuce seeds from their own plants for next year, that is kind of a mixed blessing.

The Slobolt lettuce should be good for several more weeks. One of my plans for this spring was to compare Slobolt with Jericho as the heat wore on into early summer. I started them at the same time, in exactly the same way, but the Jericho seeds didn't germinate. There is always next year . . .

Other spring crops just reaching their stride include the peas -- both kinds. I have some of the regular English peas in the pasta salad that I've packed for today's lunch, and the Sugar snap peas are just a little bit behind in maturity. These are beginning to get sweet, but as they get more plump, they will also get more sugary.

This is one of the four squash plants that came up. I had hoped for five, so I will probably plant another seed soon. One would think that by now I would have all the summer crops planted, and if all had gone as scheduled, almost all except the sweet potatoes would be in, but I always plan to have more energy and time that reality provides.

As it stands, I have planted the peppers, but not the eggplants. The okra and sunflowers are waiting for the space currently inhabited by carrots, beets, and some spring greens. The melons are waiting for me to get busy and finish preparing their bed. The winter squash and popcorn need to go in, too, along with some flowers and herbs.

Soon though, soon the summer garden will be in, and I will have the same lazy life as our little cat Louisiana (not really, but I can dream - right?). Here he is in one of his several favorite napping spots:

Tools Inventory: Grub Hoe

2011-05-08T18:29:00.003-04:00

My husband is pretty good about giving me new garden tools for all the major gift-giving days, and for my birthday I have a new grub hoe!

I've been talking about this particular tool for a while now, so it wasn't a huge surprise when I got a very long gift (I didn't stop to count the candles drawn on the box to make sure all 51 were there, but I have been assured that they are).

This is the 4" model for smaller gardens, and it works amazingly well. It isn't for chopping weeds; it's for digging. I tried it out first (notice that I'm not really dressed for gardening in the photo) in the bed that will soon hold eggplants. It turned the soil up like a charm!

When I got serious enough to put on some sturdier shoes, I was able to prepare the bed for peppers in less than half an hour. Working with a shovel or spading fork, it would probably have taken closer to two hours to get that done.

A lot of gardeners, I know, would get this all done even faster with a power tool, but some of my planting beds are small enough (and some are curved) that a power tool isn't any easier in the long-run than a hand-tool, especially when considering maintenance and fuel costs. The grub hoe, and most of my other tools, just need to be filed to keep them sharp and an occasional rub along the handles with linseed oil to keep the wood in good shape.

The funniest thing about the hoe is that it used muscles I didn't even know existed, and I use all hand tools. You'd think I'd have found all those muscles in my upper back by now!

We are having lovely, warm weather, and it has been nice to sit outside and enjoy the day, even though I've also had to do some work for my actual job. I hope everyone has had a great Mother's Day!

Groups and Gardening

2011-05-07T18:14:00.004-04:00

This afternoon, I talked with a lot of people at the Kastner-Hankerson garden as part of the 2011 Master Gardener tour of gardens in my county (an event titled “Through the garden gate”). I had signed on as a docent. The “garden” is the little farm at which my family has been helping out for the past few Saturdays in anticipation of this day (on which more than 400 people showed up to see the garden!).

One of the great things about helping out in advance is that I learned enough about the garden to be able to talk about it with people who come out to see it. Another great thing is that I have learned a lot about “gardening” on a much larger scale. A third great thing is that I have met even more people who are interested in growing good food and in sharing that food. What a great gift this has been!

This project is a perfect example of what I was hoping to find when I joined the Master Gardener program. Even though I already had been gardening for a long time and had a degree in Botany, my time in the classes was time well spent. I learned a lot, for example, about ornamental plants. Those are not my main focus –I’m about food and native plants – but plenty of people in the program are there because they have found a particular plant, or group of plants, to be beautiful, and they wanted to both know more and to share what they have learned.

For me, as for most people, the classes were only the beginning. What is learned after completing those classes, while working as a volunteer, is even more valuable.

The Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden (PAR) that is my main project (and for which I am a co-chair) tends to present a whole different set of problems than my own garden, so I learn from it as I learn from my own yard. When people come to me with garden problems, sometimes the answer comes out of my experience at PAR.

I also get to give talks on growing veggies, and being in a roomful of people who ALL are interested in growing food is almost too wonderful for words.

The other day, my friend whose veggie garden is all in containers on her driveway said that she has always wanted to join the Master Gardener program, but never thought she could. In general, the Master Gardener program is looking for people who can make it to all the classes and are available to volunteer for its various projects. She has a full time job and some health problems that she has thought would probably interfere with those goals.

Recently, though, she looked into the program again, and now she is thinking about applying for next year’s classes.

When I took the classes, they were WAY on the other side of Atlanta, and only a couple dozen people were accepted from each of the participating counties. The classes met two days each week, and sometimes it seemed as though we spent more time on the road than in class. Since then, our county has joined with a different group of counties for the classes, and they are much more nearby and have space for more participants. In addition, they are only one day each week, and most of the notes for each class are now posted online.

My friend’s job is fairly flexible in terms of scheduling, so the one-day-a-week class would not be a problem. She also figured out that volunteering includes activities like writing, giving presentations, and answering the phone (the “horticulture hotline” at the extension office). Those activities are well within the realm of her capabilities.

The Master Gardeners here in my county are a great group. We get a lot done even though many of us are "older." We all have family disasters and bad health years, and we adjust. We tend to make up for random infirmity through numbers --plenty of other gardeners taking up the slack. That is part of the beauty of working with a group!

My container-gardening friend said, in that same conversation, that when she is gardening, she never is thinking that she should be doing something else; her thoughts are all about her garden, and she is content and happy. That’s pretty much how I feel about gardening, and we are not the only two people who share that experience. A bunch of other people who feel the same way are in the Master Gardener program.

(I had hoped to post a picture or two from the Kastner-Hankerson garden, but Joe got his new Sighting Compass in the mail yesterday, and he took his new compass and the camera with him on a hike at a state park in North Georgia this morning.)

Little Bits of Progress

2011-05-02T19:13:00.005-04:00

Radishes help get a gardener through the long wait to the summer crops. They are so pretty, and a few go a long way. Of course, I have kind of a lot of these coming along in the garden still. It's a good thing Joe really likes radishes.

Around the garden, seeds are coming up -- and not just the weed seeds! The zuchinni (below) are looking very promising. The slicing cucumbers are a little further along, and the picklers a little behind. The bush beans are coming up, but the first set of pole beans have yet to poke their heads above ground. If I had planted everything at the same time, I would be worried, but I have planted little bits at a time, after work, on the weekends . . .

And pretty soon, if all goes well, we will have sugar snap peas. These are on the same trellis that the slicing cucumbers will eventually take over. Nearby, a lot of little Malabar spinach seedlings are coming up. I have been very surprised to see them. I hadn't thought that such a tropical plant would make it through the winter here, even as seeds.

In other good news, the potatoes (Red Pontiac) are beginning to flower. That usually indicates that little spuds are beginning to form underground.

I am behind on posting about the garden (I've had a cold for more than a week now), so these pictures are from last week. Today after work I planted eight tomato plants: two Olivette Jaune, two Cherokee purple, two Wuhib, and two Rutgers.

After I planted them, I put cages around them even though they are way too small to need cages. The dogs tend to run through that bed rather than around it, and I am hoping the cages will keep the plants from getting trampled. I also am hoping that, on Wednesday, I will be able to get the peppers and eggplants in the ground. Wish me luck!

Vegetable Tourism

2011-04-28T16:34:00.002-04:00

On May 7, the day before Mother's Day, I will be out at a big garden/small farm on Dallas Highway, playing docent. The Garden (of Mr. Kastner and Mr. Hankerson) is on the Master Gardeners' tour of gardens this year, and I signed on to help. I've been going, and hauling my family with me, for the last few Saturdays to help get things planted and to learn more about The Garden so I can do a good job.

I've learned quite a bit about what is being planted, why those crops were chosen, and how the soil is prepared. Since I usually work with much smaller plots of veggies, this has been a real learning experience. The good news is that I'm ready for questions!

Every year, the Master Gardeners send around a request for volunteers to help out at all the gardens on the tour. Different gardens are on the tour each year, but it's been awhile since a food garden was featured. One of the great things about this garden is that a lot of food it produces is given away to people who really need it (going to pantries and shelters, for example).

Making sure everyone has access to good food is important!

When I was visiting the Energy Bulletin website this afternoon, I saw a link to a video about a much larger project that's dedicated to providing good food to as many people as possible. The project is called Incredible Edible, and it started in a town called Todmorden in the UK. It takes watching five YouTube videos to hear the whole talk, but it's worthwhile. The whole town of 17,000 people has much better access to fresh produce than before, partly because it's growing all over the place. The group also has put effort into making sure people know how to prepare the food that's being grown. It turns out that this is a very important piece of the local, fresh food puzzle. Video five brings up the topic of Vegetable Tourism, which made me laugh, but then I remembered what I'm doing a week from Saturday . . .

I hope that The Garden gets some good vegetable tourism next weekend!

Plenty to See

2011-04-20T17:05:00.008-04:00

There's a lot of action right now, plantwise, both in the wooded backyard and in the garden. It's a great time of year to walk around and see what's going on in the plant world!

Taking up the whole right side of this photo is some cilantro that seems to be in competition with Jack's beanstalk. I don't think I've ever seen cilantro get to four feet high before! On the left are the potatoes, and in the back, starting up the trellis, are sugar snap peas.

Elsewhere, last fall's chard is bolting, and the spring lettuces and spinach are making enough progress that they will soon land in the salad bowl, along with some of the radishes that are getting close to the right size for eating.

The herbs are greening up and looking lush, especially the comfrey, which is in glorious bloom. The bees are very happy!

The backyard has smelled like apples for a couple of weeks now, because the sweetshrub (aka: Carolina allspice) is in bloom.

The woodland flowers are coming along, too. In addition to the goldenseal, which is already setting fruit, and the Solomon's seal, the trillium are putting on the best show they can.

And the Jack-in-the-pulpit have burst forth with their weird little blooms, too.

The crossvine blooms way up in the trees. I wouldn't know they were in bloom if they didn't drop their flowers all over the place. The flowers resemble somewhat the flowers of trumpet creeper, but the crossvine flowers smell like Mexican food.

I hope Spring is progressing as wonderfully for other gardeners!

Keeping Pace

2011-04-17T21:17:00.002-04:00

Tonight, after work and after supper, there was still enough daylight to putz in the garden. Actually, there was enough to get the zucchini seeds in the ground. Since I am hoping for only five plants, this wasn't a monumental endeavor.

Seeds for the dwarf runner bean with big red flowers that I've enjoyed for the past couple of years also got planted. These are technically edible, but I have planted them mostly just to admire. I put in ten big seeds.

About six days ago, I was able to plant seeds for the slicing cucumbers (the variety Straight Nine), and these have poked their seed leaves (cotyledons) out of the soil. I am very happy to see them! So far, there are five seedlings. That might be all I planted.

Later this week, I'll probably plant bush beans and pickling cucumbers. Then the pole beans and popcorn will go in. After another week or so, I'll think about getting the tomatoes into the ground. Then it will be time for melons and okra (as seeds), and eggplants and peppers (as plants).

As long as I get a few things into the ground each week, I know that it will all get done. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes wonder how I'm ever going to get the whole thing planted; I do! But every year, it gets done. My planting gets done the same way eating an elephant does: one bite at a time, and I'm guessing that my garden isn't the only one that gets planted this way.

Choices

2011-04-09T18:20:00.003-04:00

We've had a beautiful warm day today, and a warmer one is forecast for tomorrow, but there was a frost here just a few days ago, on Wednesday morning. I'm glad that my plant babies are still in their flats and pots, rather than in the ground.

I've worked some in the yard today but still have a little more to do before the beds are all ready for summer crops. Since the "last frost date" is still a few days away, this is just as well.

The map of what will be planted in each section of the gardens has been drawn, but it isn't really set until the plants are all in the ground, and I've been thinking more about what I've chosen to plant and the reasons for my choices.

I tend to plant many different kinds of crops, but just a little bit of each--except for tomatoes and peppers, which I plant enough of for a little canning/freezing/dehydrating. We eat a lot of tomatoes and peppers.

For the other crops, though, there are different reasons for the choices. Some plants, like lettuces, don't keep especially well, so I try to grow enough for us to use fresh, with a little to share, but with not too much that might "go bad" before we can use it.

Some crops I grow just a little of because we won't eat much of it (chicory and kale, for example) but we do like to have a bit.

Other crops we grow just a little of because I'm not sure yet whether I like them. This is how I started with beets, but I plant more of those now as we like them and their greens more and more.

Other gardeners make other choices. I've known some to grow just tomatoes. I would hesitate to put all my effort into that one crop, though, because some years are not so great for tomatoes. It would be sad to put a lot of effort into a garden that keeled over from, say, late blight! Diversification means that, even if one crop doesn't make it, there will still be food from the yard.

Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner, who have a big garden out on Dallas Highway, are growing more peppers this year than in the past, and I was told that choice was partly because they have a great new recipe for green tomato and pepper relish. They plan to make lots!

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, we plant crops that don't have an immediate and pressing need for refrigeration, because the food pantry that gets our harvest doesn't have a huge fridge.

My friend who grows all her veggies in containers on her driveway looks for varieties that are just a little different than standard grocery-store produce, so people who walk by won't harvest all her food before she can. It turns out that white eggplants are less likely to "walk away" than the standard purpley-black ones.

What a miracle it is that there are so many kinds of good food from which to choose, so that we all can grow gardens that work for us!

Helping the Plant Babies Grow

2011-04-05T14:30:00.005-04:00

My seedlings out in the front yard are still pretty small, and I'm thinking that they are slow partly as a direct result of cool weather but also as an indirect effect. The indirect part would be that the nitrogen from the organic fertilizers is not yet available. It needs to be "set free" through a decomposition process, and the cool soil may be slowing that down. That's my current theory, anyway.

The nitrogen in that soil right now is in the form of some cottonseed meal and a couple of bags of "humus & manure" from a store. Given some more warm weather and a bit more time, that nitrogen will become available for use by my plant babies, but I am impatient. I will probably water that bed with some fish-emulsion in a dilute solution tomorrow. That form is more readily available to plants, but when mixed according to package directions won't harm my little lettuce, chard, spinach, mustard, carrot, beet, and scallion babies.

My garden doesn't usually have this problem, but it has happened before, and the fix was liquid fertilizer, so the fishy plan is likely to work. Gardeners who rely more on bags of conventional fertilizers will not be so constrained by the weather, which is certainly something to consider when planning a garden, but I'm sticking with my stinky organic amendments.

Stormy Weather

2011-03-28T19:23:00.005-04:00

This isn't the metaphorical stormy weather of the old song; I'm not pining for a man to return, but my little seedlings here in the house are surely pining for a return to sunshine.

We had a nice long stretch of it before thunder started shaking the house and the rain started falling down like the sky is one big waterfall. The crazy weather seems to mean, though, that spring is really here. The good news is that the cold and cloudy will be over soon, and my seedlings will pine no more, but we need for the cool spring to continue if we are going to have good lettuces, spinach, and other spring veggies. If it gets warm too soon, the spring crops don't do well.

When I got home from work today, the clouds were still here, along with the cool temperatures, but the rain had let up, and I had a chance to see how things are holding up out in the yard.

The peas have made a good start:

And so have the potatoes:

On the edge of the garden, the patch of horehound (perennial) is greening up as well as any fuzzy, grayish green plant can, and the grape hyacinth are blooming right alongside.

Elsewhere in the yard, the goldenseal is beginning to bloom. This loves our yard; it has spread to make a nice big patch.

And the toad trillium are beginning to bloom.

Spring is definitely here.

Bumping up the Babies

2011-03-25T19:03:00.002-04:00

It is about time to bump my seedlings out of the tray where they were started (in seed-starting medium) and into pots with something that's more like soil. I usually fill the new pots with Miracle Grow potting soil, but a friend of mine who uses the same stuff had a problem this year.

My friend starts about a thousand plants each year. Some are for her own garden, but most are for Master Gardener projects like the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where we both volunteer, and the veggie garden at the elementary school for which she is the project chair.

This year, she transplanted all her seedlings into the potting soil as usual, but this year all her seedlings died. She called the company, because she is pretty sure there was too much nitrogen and that it burned the plant babies. The company refunded the money for her three bags, but she will have to start all those seedlings again. That is a lot of work and time lost.

The big problem for me is that I bought my bag of potting soil at the same store, and at about the same time. It is probably from the same lot, but my friend doesn't have her empty bags anymore to compare.

Yesterday, because I would hate to lose my (much smaller number of) plant babies, I bought a big bag of Farmer D's Planting Mix. If I had been thinking, I would have switched last year when I first saw it, because it is locally produced and not already laced with fertilizers (I will get to manage the nutrients myself).

This afternoon, I washed the empty six-pack-style plant containers that I plan to use for the first bumping up and filled them with planting mix. The tomatoes are all settled into their new spaces, but the rest of the babies will get moved tomorrow.

Progress of Spring

2011-03-21T19:21:00.007-04:00

My seedlings, both indoors and out, are mostly up but also still quite small.

Outdoors, where I set out a lot of seeds on homemade seed tapes right before a big rain, the last seeds to germinate have been the carrots and scallions, but when I got home from work tonight, I could see them coming up. I must have hung over that bed just grinning for about ten minutes.

The most amazing part about that planting is that the seed tapes did such a great job holding the seeds in place. There are a few that have strayed out of their lines, but the plant babies are, essentially, in their assigned spaces in spite of a couple of downpours.

The seeds I've started in a tray are almost far enough along to transplant into individual pots. The first sets of true leaves are becoming well-developed in all the tomatoes and lettuces, and they are becoming big enough to see without a hand-lens on the eggplants, peppers, beets, spinach, chard, and parsley.

The overwintered plants out in the yard are looking good (except, of course, that I pulled up the last 4.5 pounds of carrots last week when they began to grow new leaves).

The amazing patch of cilantro has been great to have all winter long, but it is beginning to bolt. Luckily, I have new cilantro coming up already in a couple of other places in the garden.

Last fall's chard has put on enough growth that we can harvest some for meals.

And elsewhere in the yard, spring is really coming along. All of the flowers pictured here today have been blooming for about a week, so they are almost done. They are all, essentially, ephemeral. Soon the blooms will drop off, any seeds that are going to be set will be set, and the leaves will begin to die back. When the hot weather of summer sets in, there won't be much left above ground to show where these live.

This is the toothwort.

This little rue anemone is among my favorites, but it is pretty obvious that I need to pull some weeds in the patch of ground it inhabits.

The bloodroot is so white it almost glows at the back of the yard. There are two patches across a little path from each other.

Unlike the others above, these bleeding hearts aren't native. They are amazing, though. There have been times when I have just sat near them on the ground and admired the pink.

Planting with PAR

2011-03-17T19:14:00.005-04:00

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden for which I am a volunteer, we continued this week with the early spring planting. Only one other person in the whole group had ever made seed tapes before, so we started our Wednesday session in the Carriage House, making seed tapes out of toilet paper, Elmer's glue, and carrot seeds. We haven't planted carrots before at PAR, so this is a double experiment for us.

Some of these gardeners work with children at other projects, and they were particularly happy to discover how easy making seed tapes is. The hardest part (especially for the people who didn't bring their reading glasses to the garden) was getting the seeds onto the glue without dropping huge numbers of them in a pile all at once.

Fred, our other gardener who has made seed tapes, gets around the "tiny seed" problem by using pelletized seeds. He drops one at a time, with tweezers, at the correct spacing onto his homemade seed tape. I am less precise in placing seeds onto my seed tapes, but I usually have to do a little thinning as a result.

There were enough of us present that it didn't take long before we had a lot of seed tape ready to go.

After we had plenty, we tidied up (put the newspaper back into the recycling bin where we found it) and moved to the garden to work. Planting the seed tapes didn't take long, either, but we had plenty of other tasks to keep us occupied. Broccoli was planted along the edges of the bed in which the carrots are now planted.

We also planted more potatoes and onions. We didn't finish getting these in the ground, because parts of their bed were still too wet from the previous day's rain. We made a lot of progress, though.

We are really fortunate that the city had someone weed-whack our cover crop (the garden is on city property), the Austrian winter peas. The greenery was becoming startlingly thick, and it was going to be heck to turn under, even with a heavy duty rototiller. The potato/onion/carrot/broccoli areas had already been tilled by Doug (thank you!). If we are lucky, he will be able to till the rest of the garden in a couple of weeks, shifting the good organic residue of the peas down into the soil, where we need it.

Making the Most of Small Gardens

2011-03-11T16:11:00.002-05:00

Over at the blog called Our Engineered Garden, EG has a post up about setting up his trellises. Growing big, climbing plants up trellises is one way to get more food from a small garden space.

His post made me think a bit about why I don't use more trellises in my own small garden, and what it mostly comes down to is height. I am not at all tall. Growing things up trellises, where I can't reach them to take care of the plants and harvest the produce, just isn't practical for me. For taller people, trellises make a lot more sense. It turns out that EG is well over six feet tall.

My strategies for maximizing production have relied more on using the gaps between plants on the ground. As I plan where in the garden to plant each crop, I consider each plant's eventual height and sprawl. Plants that will spread across the ground, like sweet potato vines, can be planted next to a crop that uses less ground space and more air space, like okra, corn, or peppers. The vines can then be aimed toward the bare ground under the other taller crop, where they act like a mulch over that ground, shading out weeds. This kind of planning lets me have sweet potatoes in a small garden.

When the sprawling crop is one that uses tendrils to climb, like in cucumbers, squashes, and melons, some extra effort is needed to keep these from climbing up the taller plants (and possibly pulling them over), but that doesn't take much time.

Another strategy is using the close, grid-like spacing described in books like Mel Bartholemew's "Square Foot Gardening" and John Jeavon's "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine." I do a lot of this. When bush beans are well-grown and spaced as in this strategy, they are a beautiful sight.

Yet another strategy I use is intercropping, which means pretty much what it looks like it means: crops "in between." One way to intercrop is to plant root crops in spaces between leafy crops. An example would be carrots interplanted with lettuces. When intercropping, the standard planting distances can be reduced in ways that allow the garden to produce a little more food from one patch of soil. The lettuces could be planted at the usual distances (6-8 inches apart) but in the open spaces, carrots could be sown.

When one crop produces mostly above ground and the other mostly below ground, competition for space is greatly reduced.

The two crops should be genetically different enough that disease and pest problems are also reduced. For example, even though chard and beets don't compete for exactly the same space (one produces a big bit of its harvest-able food below-ground, one produces all the food above-ground) they are too similar genetically for intercropping to be a good idea.

Before the recent big rains started, I planted some seeds outside, and I set them out as intercropped rows in the bed nearest the road. The rows alternate leafy veggies (lettuces, mustard, chard) with root veggies (carrots, beets, radishes).

If I am lucky, the seeds are all still there, rather than having been washed away. In another week or so, I will know. I did set them out as homemade seed tapes, which should have helped keep the seeds in place. Amazingly, I have a contingency plan in place! (Some years I am more organized than in other years.) If not all the seeds come up, I can replace some with plants I've started in a seed-tray in the house. Those, mostly, have begun to emerge.

Hanging Out with the Old Guys

2011-03-05T13:09:00.002-05:00

Insanely early on Wednesday morning, I was at the dermatology office to have a thingy removed (a hazard of a life lived largely out-of-doors). The other people waiting outside for the office to open were older guys, who all turned out to be in their early eighties. We spent time visiting while we waited.

One of my new dermatology friends had grown up in north Georgia but had lived on Lacy Street in Marietta for a little more than fifty years. All that time, he'd had a garden in the backyard. He and his wife now live in a smaller townhouse, but he still gardens. He just asks people he knows, who have sunny spaces in their yards, if he can grow a few (fill in the blank) at their homes. So far, he hasn't been turned down.

He told about a friend who had moved here from Louisiana (this was one of those "way back when" stories), who had always gardened in the black dirt there but who was skeptical about the ability of the red dirt here to support crops. My new dermatology friend went over to his yard one spring, dug out three spaces, mixed in rotted leaves, a little lime and fertilizer, and planted three tomato plants. By the end of the summer, his friend was totally surprised at how well this worked out in terms of total harvest -- "he'd never got so many tomatoes before in his life!"

This year, my dermatology friend and a grand-son-in-law, a young man who has never gardened before, are going to start a veggie garden in the young man's backyard. It sounded as though they are both really looking forward to working together on the project. The older man plans to set up raised beds using old railroad ties to contain the amended soil, because that's what he's always done. He likes for his beds to be three feet wide.

As the conversation continued, he offered some advice. He said that he waits until the end of April to plant his summer garden, claiming that plants set out earlier are slowed down by the cold soil. He thinks his late-planted garden does better than if he had planted on the last frost date, when many people plant. As another gardener who waits an extra week or so, this was very satisfying confirmation of what I've thought/experienced about planting on that last-frost date!

Later in the morning, I was at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where we planted onions and potatoes. We are going to plant more next week, when we also plan to make seed-tapes for carrots and plant those, and probably also put in some broccoli transplants. One of our gardeners, Lee, has been growing a lot of her food for a very Long Time, and she said something that I tend to forget, but that's important.

The conversation was about which pole beans to grow. We had looked for mountain half-runner beans at Ladd's Farm Supply, but they weren't in yet when we went. Lee also grows mountain half-runners, but only from the company she called Morse (now it's Ferry Morse). She's grown the same variety from other companies, but she has found that they just aren't as good.

After years and years of seed production by one grower, a variety can develop slight genetic differences that affect its growing and food qualities. Lee thinks the beans from Morse both taste and perform better. Another gardener in another place might prefer beans from a different source, but when ordering/buying seeds, keeping track of where a favorite comes from can really help the success of a garden.

Update on my own planting: onions, potatoes, and peas are in the ground. The potatoes are Red Pontiac; the peas are both Wando (a dwarf English-type pea) and Sugar Snap (an edible-pod pea).

I've also finally started seeds indoors: Tomatoes (Rutgers, Wuhib, Cherokee Purple, Olivette Jaune), peppers (Jimmy Nardello, Czeck black, Ancho, Feherezon, Spanish Spice, Golden Greek, Sweet Chocolate), eggplants (Casper White, Black King), curly parsley, spinach (Bloomsdale), chard (Perpetual Spinach), Collards (Georgia), lettuces (Marvel of Four Seasons, Capitan, Bronze Arrow), chicory (Pan di Zucchero), and some Golden Beets. Some of these are "old reliables" and some are new this year.

Based on the number of varieties, it seems like there wouldn't be enough room in my little garden for everything, but I tend to plant just a few of each kind. This is a way to hedge my bets in the gambling world of gardening. If one crop doesn't pay off, another one surely will.

UGA and Sources of Gardening Information

2011-02-27T09:32:00.003-05:00

When looking for reliable sources of information about gardening, one place to start is at the land grant college in your state. Here in Georgia, that's UGA. It offers a search function on its publications website that can be used to find all sorts of great information.

Publications span a wide range of topics and include a booklet-length text on Growing Vegetables Organically. We handed these out at yesterday's talk on raised bed gardening, but we didn't have enough for everyone. (To get an electronic copy from the linked page, choose which version you want, either html or pdf, and it will appear!) UGA offers publications on individual veggies and fruits, on composting and many other relevant topics.

The good news is that most County Extension offices will send, through the mail, paper copies of their publications if a citizen in the county requests the information. Later in the week, when I get to the Cobb County Extension office, I will be putting together a couple of envelopes full of information for people who came to the talk but missed out on the handouts.

Other sources of information include experienced gardeners, some of whom will have published information in magazines and newspapers. Yesterday, someone asked about growing vegetables in the shade. Amazingly enough, when I opened my email this morning, the most recent note from Mother Earth News included an article on growing veggies in shade.

The article, Best Vegetables to Grow in the Shade, includes a link to a handy table of veggies and their minimum sunlight requirements along with the general discussion on maximizing availability of sunlight to a shaded garden.

This Morning's Talk

2011-02-26T22:17:00.002-05:00

This morning's talk on raised bed gardening was a lot of fun. It is great to be in a room full of people who are all interested in gardening!

One thing we didn't get to, though, was listing specific varieties of veggies that do well here. I promised to put together a such a list for my own yard. For anyone interested in a more detailed list of tomato varieties I've tried, there is a post from last April with that information.

The list is not complete, but it is a start. I hope it is helpful!

Plants that do well in Amy’s yard:

Okra—any okra will do well (okra loves the summer heat and has few pest/disease problems). I grow Cajun Jewel because it is a dwarf variety. Plant okra seeds directly in the garden.

Lettuces—Red Sails, Tom Thumb, Marvel of Four Seasons, assorted Oak Leaf varieties, Capitan, and more have all done just fine in cool spring and fall weather. I have been growing Slobolt (less tender and tasty than most lettuces) as a later planting because it lasts longer into the warm weather. All of these are grown to pretty much full size. Susan, who gave the second part of the presentation, plants a salad mix every few weeks through the entire growing season to use as baby greens (cutting them as they get to about three inches tall). Lettuces get bitter as they mature in warmer weather; the “baby greens” strategy means she gets gourmet salad ingredients all summer long.

Peppers—bell peppers suffer from the good years/bad years syndrome. Some years they do really well and some years they don’t. As far as I can tell, all bell pepper varieties have the same problem. I still grow some bell-type peppers each year (one or two plants, usually California), just in case we have a good year. Banana peppers are very productive every year, as are jalepenos, Jimmy Nardello peppers, and ancho/poblano peppers. One I grew for the first time last year, Feherezon, did well, but I won’t know for sure that it is a reliable variety for a couple more years. I’ve grown a hybrid called Spanish Spice that has been productive and good for grilling, stuffed with that Mexican crumbling cheese.

Radishes—all radishes I’ve tried work well now (French Breakfast is my favorite), but they didn’t when I first started gardening here. It took a lot of work on the soil to get it in good enough shape. I also grow winter radishes (Muncheiner Beer is one) in the fall.

Spinach—Bloomsdale, Space, Tyee all have worked.

Cucumbers—Staight Eight, Straight Nine, Marketmore, Burpee’s Picklebush. A friend grows Lemon Cucumbers and loves them.

Broccoli—Packman is one I’ve grown, but we’ve tried others at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden (whatever varieties were being offered as plants at HomeDepot/Lowes/Pikes/Walmart) and they all did about the same. If growing from seed, I would choose one with a relatively short time-to-maturity (the weather goes from cool to HOT pretty fast some years).

Collards—any will do well. I usually grow one called Georgia.

Melons—this is something I’ve been working on. A whole lot of melons have been a big disappointment. Two that have been successful are Schoon’s Hardshell (cantaloupe type) and Sugar Nut (canary melon). Right now, seeds for Sugar Nut, a hybrid, are hard to find. I am in the middle of a project to de-hybridize it. When I get the line stabilized, there will be plenty of seed locally for lots of gardens.

Eggplants—any should do well. I like Casper White.

Peas—I grow dwarf types. I’ve tried a few, but so far Wando is the one that does best for me. A taller pea that is eaten in the shell, Sugar Snap, also does well. It also gives more food per foot of trellis than English peas that are eaten shelled out.

Bush Beans—my family likes Burpee Tenderpod, but it isn’t available every year. At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden we grow Blue Lake, and it is very productive for us. This year, I am trying Provider. I’ll be posting on my blog how it works out for me.

Beets—Detroit Dark Red

Carrots—I’m still having trouble with this crop. So far, Scarlet Nantes is at the head of the list.

Tomatoes—Rutgers (determinate), Arkansas Traveler, Better Boy, Park’s Whopper (bred for the South) have all done well for me as main-crop tomatoes. Some years, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter has done well, but it died in my yard for the first time a couple of years back. It had been a very wet spring. I’ve also had pretty good luck with Costoluto Genovese. For paste tomatoes, Roma and Wuhib both have been good producers. Of the two, Wuhib is my favorite. For cherry tomatoes, Sweet 100 and its variations (are they up to Sweet Million yet?) have been good. Twice now, I’ve grown a yellow pear-shaped cherry type (is that an oxymoron?) called Olivette Jaune that has been outstanding. For a “keeping” tomato (to plant at the end of June), Burpee’s Winter Red Hybrid is my favorite so far.

Swiss Chard—I grow one called Perpetual Spinach. It is more “spinach-like” than most chards. However, if you can’t find it, growing any of the others and harvesting while the leaves are still fairly small is another way to get chard leaves tender enough to eat as salad.

Squash—I usually grow Raven zucchini as my summer squash. At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden we grow straight-neck yellow squash. These both, as with all summer squashes, usually die from attacks by the squash vine borers in mid-summer. For winter squash, Seminole pumpkin squash is good, but it sprawls alarmingly. For a tidier winter squash, a bush butternut (which is resistant to the squash vine borers) is a good choice.

Sweet potatoes—for gardeners who don’t mind the sprawl, any will do well in Georgia. I grow Beauregard and Porto Rican. I hope to add a new variety this year.

When choosing seeds for each year’s garden, I make sure that I have enough “old reliables” to get through the season with good-enough production, but I also add some experimental varieties. Last year I grew ground cherries (another tomato-family plant, so they were in a container). They did just fine. Most years, I grow chicory of one sort or another for greens, but this year’s variety (Pan di Zucchero) is one that should head-up rather than forming a dandelion-like cluster of leaves. I have ordered a couple of new peppers and a new eggplant, too.

It's Time!

2011-02-24T19:00:00.003-05:00

The trout lilies are blooming! That is my cue to plant peas. It is too late this evening, of course, but I have hopes for tomorrow. Of course, on NOAA's website, the map of Georgia has a big red patch over the northern half of the state with the words "Isolated severe thunderstorms possible. Damaging winds. Large hail." I am hoping that "scattered" means my yard has a good chance of not being soggy in the morning.

It's time to begin the indoor seed-starting, too. My seed orders haven't arrived, but I plan to set up a tray with some of the seeds I already have. The cooler-weather veggies will get started first, along with peppers and eggplants. Those two summer veggies seem to need a long head-start.

The cooler weather veggies that will get started include spinach, the lettuces that are less heat tolerant, mustard greens, maybe some more chard (it's hard to have too much), beets, and carrots. Some herbs will get started, too. Maybe some of the older seed packets will finally be empty. When the new seeds get here, if some of the older packets aren't removed, there won't be enough room in my storage boxes for the new ones!

With the talk on raised bed gardens on Saturday morning and the seed starting in my own yard, I have a great garden weekend to look forward to.

Talking and Doing

2011-02-21T19:32:00.002-05:00

This is a week for both of the activities in the title of the post. This coming Saturday, the leader of the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) Garden and I will be giving a talk on raised bed gardening. The talk will be at the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, which is also the home to our PAR garden.

A couple of weeks ago we worked out a list of subtopics and divided those up for the presentation. I still need to make a handout for my part, so people who show up will have a handy little sheet to follow along and to take home as a reminder, in case I say something that is helpful to them.

Before then, some of the PAR gardeners will be making the Third Annual Pilgrimage to Ladd's Farm Supply up in Euharlee, for seed potatoes, onion sets and assorted seeds. Previous trips to the store have been both fun and educational, and I am looking forward to this one.

Over this last weekend, though, we had such beautiful weather that I spent as much time outside as I could. The hoe and I did a number on the winter weeds, and I dug in some compost to begin getting this year's potato patch ready.

I also jumped the gun a little bit on the onions: mine got planted. My big excuse for putting them in the ground so early is that the forecast is for still more warm weather ahead. I am hoping that the stretch of warm weather will help the little onions get settled in before the cold returns.

The trout lilies still aren't blooming, so the peas are still in their packet instead of in the ground. Maybe next weekend . . .

When to Begin . . .

2011-02-18T10:17:00.003-05:00

Several years ago I spent some serious time working out a veggie-garden planting calendar for my yard. I have since discovered that the Old Farmers Almanac website has a feature that will create a planting schedule using US frost dates for gardens all over the US. A gardener just has to specify a location, and a schedule will appear!

The schedule includes dates for gardeners who also like to consider phases of the moon in their planting. I have checked the Old Farmers Almanac schedule for Kennesaw, and it is not too far off from the one I created for myself for most crops.

It shows later planting dates for potatoes (old-timers around here get their potatoes into the ground in March), and it has a very small window-of-opportunity for planting radishes. Some years I start sooner and others I end later. It also is only for the spring/early summer garden. However, a new gardener could do worse than to consider the planting dates suggested in the schedule.

PAR Planning

2011-02-16T16:29:00.005-05:00

The group that volunteers at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden met today to talk about where to plant which crops in the garden this year. It was great to see everybody, both the old friends and some new friends, too. We had fun, but we also worked. There is a lot to think about in planning the garden!

The needs of the food pantry where we donate the harvested food have a huge effect on our choices of what to grow. One consideration is that the garden needs to produce a lot of good food, since the pantry works hard to feed a whole lot of people. The pantry also can't take any kind of greens because it isn't equipped (refrigerator-wise) to keep greens fresh and un-wilted. The food we grow for donation needs to "keep" pretty well without much pampering.

Once the choices are worked out, there is the step of figuring out where in the garden each crop should be planted. The garden had its first year at the current location in 2006. This means that the crop rotation is beginning to be a bit tricky.

We didn't make any final decisions (our fearless leader has that honor!), but we had copies of drawn layouts from the past several years to look at (so we would know the history of each patch of the garden) and we had blank maps to doodle on.

This drawing shows some of our thoughts:

The yellow writing represents one possible layout and the pink another. We discussed going back to the 2006 layout for this year, but we aren't growing exactly the same crops at this point. For example, back in 2006 we grew corn, but the resulting harvest didn't provide enough food to justify its inclusion in the garden. We also have more trellised area now (but still not enough!), which means the spaces are going to work out a little differently.

Part of the group discussion was about crop rotation: trying to keep plants from any one family from being planted in the same spot within three (or more) years. This is one goal that we just aren't going to be able to meet every year. Some years, the tomato/pepper/potato/eggplant group is going to be planted in a patch too soon, and so is the cucumber/squash/melon group. It's a good thing that we aren't too hung up on perfection!

Another part of the discussion centered around the desire to try some different crops, and maybe some different varieties (to "trial" them without risking a whole harvest). We may save one of the wedges to use as an experimental plot. One of the crops for that might be carrots. I promise this wasn't my idea, even though I have been dissatisfied with my current carrots. We may get together in a couple of weeks to make seed tapes for carrots, and possibly for some other crops (radishes? beets?). The suggestions for things to try were flying!

We briefly discussed the idea of succession planting, but a fuller discussion for that will have to wait for later. The main ideas were that some kind of Southern peas will probably follow the potatoes & onions, and that we might want to have two separate plantings for the tomatoes. I do at my house, and so does Fred (long-time gardener who moved here from Alabama). The later crop sometimes is what makes the tomato-year a success.

In a week or two we will make our pilgrimage to the farm supply store up in Euharlee for seed potatoes, onion sets, and seeds. I already ordered enough Schoon's Hardshell melon seed for the PAR garden, and our fearless leader has stored leftover seeds from last year. Soon, it will be time to turn under the cover crop of Austrian winter peas and to get busy in the garden. Looking forward to it!

For Love of Vegetables

2011-02-14T19:52:00.003-05:00

When Joe and I were preparing tonight's supper (a pasta dish known at our house as "oogli ogli"), I realized that we are almost out of the 2010 crop of garlic. Oogli ogli takes a lot of garlic. If the need for it hadn't sent me down to the garage to raid the basket in which the garlic is stored, I might not have noticed.

Since most of the little heads of garlic are beginning to sprout, its being nearly gone might not be a disaster, but if I want enough garlic to last an entire year, I will have to plant more than I did in October 2009.

This kind of planning isn't 100% simple. It requires careful record-keeping (how much do we really use each month?), and it requires calculations of the space required to grow enough to last until the next harvest. It might also require that the last several months of the crop be dehydrated and then ground for use as powdered or granulated garlic, since the heads tend to sprout in late winter/early spring. That all sounds as though it could be work.

Except, for people who love to grow food, the "work" isn't really a chore. It's just part of the whole process. The composting, the digging, planting, spreading mulch --it's all good.

Several years ago I wrote a poem about early spring work in the garden. Here it is:

Preparing the Way

Steam of my breath
and steam off the compost heap
mingle. The slant sun of early spring
leaves us cool but for our own internal
heat; the small controlled combustions
signifying life.

I fork black compost into the rusted
wheelbarrow, wrestle it to the front
garden, ready for planting. I work

without gloves, digging to bring
the smothered to air, breaking lumps
between fingers.

Most lumps are solid,
but some hold, as a geode, amethyst
worms that drop and then sink
back into soil. A fine, tangled wire
rolls from my hand, unknots
to a spider that staggers away
like Lazarus surprised.

Oxheart Carrots

2011-02-12T12:22:00.004-05:00

When I read the descriptions of Oxheart carrots last year, they all sounded about like what I had been looking for: short, broad shouldered, does well in clay soils. What the descriptions didn't do was translate all that into a picture. Here are a few that I pulled up today:

If I had known that the mature, ready-to-eat carrots were so short that they were nearly spherical, I would have ordered a different variety. This is one of those little lessons about doing more research before devoting time/space/$ to planting seeds. You'd think that by now I would have learned that lesson very well, but, based on this particular carrot experience, that would seem to not be the case . . .

There are, however, two bits of good news here. The first is that these little carrots are good to eat. The second is that there are lots of them, which helps make up for how little "carrot" is actually in each one.

Also, their very shortness may make these carrots a good variety for people who grow most of their veggies in containers.

Seed Decisions

2011-02-06T19:55:00.007-05:00

My friend Cheryl and I usually put in an order to Fedco together, so we can meet the minimum order size for free shipping. Separately, we never have big enough orders to qualify. One of my activities for the day was to work out my final order for that seed company. Cheryl is taking a turn filling out the form, which is a little more complicated than most seed-order forms. Thank you, Cheryl!

One of my seed packets from Fedco will be filled with seeds of Jericho lettuce. I am planning to grow Jericho next to Slobolt so I can compare the two varieties. They both do well into the warmer weather of early summer, but I want to know which will be best in my yard, and for more qualities than just the slowed down development of bolting and bitterness. Growing them together in the same bed at the same time should help me figure that out.

My other seed order is to Sand Hill Preservation. One packet from that source will be filled with Tennessee Greasy pole beans. They are supposed to be good to dry for leather britches, and that is a food preservation/preparation method that I want to try on a larger scale than in the past.

I've dried other green beans from the yard in small quantities, but I haven't been impressed with the outcome. I've also dried small amounts of overly-mature white mountain half runner beans from the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden. These were beans I've taken home because they were too far gone (turning tan, tough) to take to the food pantry. I am hoping to work with beans at a more tasty stage of development; hence the need to "grow my own."

Wanting to try this old-timey method of food preservation/preparation may seem weird, but canning, which I do a little of every year, takes some time. With all the other responsibilities in my life right now (as with so many other gardeners!), I am hoping for a few more crops that require minimal effort to keep for the winter. Right now, sweet potatoes are the champs in that regard. Although there are a lot fewer now than there were in November, the sweets that remain are keeping just fine in a basket in the kitchen.

In addition to these little goals/experiments, I will be growing a few tomato plants from seed I saved last summer, and I will be working on my melon de-hybridization project. This will be the second generation of melons, and the first crop for which "choosing wisely" becomes important.

In other news, we adopted a special needs kitty this weekend. His name is Louisiana; he has a heart problem, he sneezes, and he has no teeth. He is about eight years old, and, as cats go, he is fairly small. My youngest son volunteers at the shelter (Good Mews) that had been housing Louisiana, and he has been nervous after every "adoption day" that Louisiana might be gone the next time he went to clean the shelter and feed cats.

In the good news/bad news department, Louisiana has enough health problems that he is designated a Halo Kitty. This means that the shelter will help with his medical expenses, covering everything related to his heart problem. When his prescriptions need to be refilled, we can pick up his meds at the shelter, for free.

Here is Louisiana:

He is such a sweet little cat when it comes to humans, that his reaction to our dogs was a bit surprising. Here he is with Zack. Just looking at the picture, you can almost hear the hiss and the doggy-toenails scrabbling on the wood floor as Belle (barely visible on the right) backs away.

Even funnier, Louisiana actually stalked Moksha and scared her enough that she climbed up onto my chair and tried to worm her way around behind me.

I had been working on my little laptop (with assorted papers all around me) and had to shift everything else off the chair in a big hurry to make room for 65 pounds of quivering dog. Right now, she is tucked behind my chair on the floor.

In a week or two, the animals will all work out a truce, but until then, and for several weeks afterward (just in case . . .) Louisiana will stay in Zack's room when the humans are all out of the house.

Planting Dates

2011-01-30T17:21:00.002-05:00

I know that plenty of gardeners time their planting with phases of the moon. Last year, when I looked that up on the online Farmers Almanac, I was happy to see that the "planting by the moon" times coincided with times I had planned to plant, anyway.

That meant I had one less thing to consider as I completed my planting calendar. I will have to look that up again for this year, but it turns out that there are even more planning methods than watching the moon or counting weeks before or after average first/last frost dates.

It shouldn't surprise me, because I plant peas each year when the trout lilies bloom in my yard, but there is a little booklet, "The Seedling Handbook," published in 1968 by the American Guild Garden Book Club, that lists planting times by what's in bloom.

I am assuming that the logic behind this is something along the lines of "plants are smarter about what's going on above and below ground than we are." I could be wrong, but I watch the trout lilies because I think they are a good indicator of soil conditions. Their bloom-time can vary by as much as two weeks from year to year. That means my pea-planting time varies, too.

The booklet was written by Elda Haring and was "prepared for the members of The American Garden Guild Garden City, N.Y." That particular town is not anywhere nearby, so it is not unexpected that some of the plants listed as being among those to watch are not represented in my neighborhood, but some are.

Here is an example:

When these are in full bloom--Chionodoxa luciliae (glory of the snow), trailing arbutus, border forsythia and weeping forsythia, Lindera benzoin (spice bush), and Scilla siberica (Siberian squill)--it is safe to plant beets, cabbage, chard, chervil, Cos, Cress, Endive, Escarole, Kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, onion (sets), parsley, parsnips, peas, spinach, radishes, salsify, turnips, and whitloof chicory.

Among the first few thoughts that sprang to my mind, on reading this list was that I'm not sure the Siberian squill and Glory of the snow bloom at the same time around here. Another was that I have a long way to go in terms of exploring all the kinds of veggies that can be grown in a garden. I haven't yet tried kohlrabi, for example, or endive, or escarole, or whitloof chicory . . .

Since I already watch for the trout lilies, it shouldn't be too hard to watch what else is blooming as I plant my garden. It will be fun to put together a similar set of planting times for my yard!

The Last Catalogue

2011-01-27T19:04:00.002-05:00

I still haven't worked out exactly what to grow this year in terms of varieties. I took a little stack of seed catalogues with me to Oklahoma to look at while staying with my Mom following her hip replacement surgery, but I didn't have a lot of time to look at them. Hospitals are busy places!

I got back home today, though, and there in the mailbox was the Last Seed Catalogue--the one I've been waiting for-- the one from Sand Hill Preservation.

This coming weekend must be the one in which I make a final plan. Of course, there are plenty of seeds left from last year, stored in the fridge. But I still haven't hit on the perfect carrot, for example, for this yard, so there are decisions to make after doing yet more research.

'Brave Sallet'

2011-01-20T12:43:00.004-05:00

Back in the late seventies, while I was in college, I walked across town a few times to visit a great uncle who lived in the same college town. He was almost completely blind from macular degeneration and had been giving away books. One day I walked home with an old two-volume dictionary set and a little Dover book called "Culinary and Salad Herbs."

The herb book was a 1972 reproduction of a 1940 British publication by Eleanor Sinclare Rohde. The book contains some information on growing herbs that isn't 100% applicable to growing herbs in Georgia, but it also offers a lot of simple recipes and a few tidbits of interesting information. These features are a couple of the great reasons to look more closely at older, "out of date" gardening books when they are available.

One page in particular caught my attention back when I first received the book, and it still kind of amazes me. This is what it says:

I think our ancestors would have had a poor opinion of the few ingredients that compose the modern salad. James II's head cook considered that there should be at least thirty-two ingredients, and a "brave sallet" contained more than that, for it was the decorative centerpiece of the table. John Evelyn gave it as his considered opinion that he "could by no means approve the extravagant Fancy of some who tell us that a Fool is as fit to be a gatherer of Sallets as a wise man," and his ideal housewife numbered among her virtues that she "could in a trice set forth an handsome sallet." She must have been a remarkable woman, for those of us with practical experience know that making an elaborate salad takes time.

I agreed with the author that the person who could set forth such a salad "in a trice" must have been remarkable. However, the little book also offers some shortcuts to achieving the "brave sallet." One is to use up bits of leftovers in the salad (little bits of meats, for example, or bean or macaroni dishes). Another is in the use of herbs. Herbs can easily overwhelm a salad, but she recommends using just a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped herbs, and having those be from a mix of leaves (one or two leaves each of whatever the garden provides).

Every year, I grow enough herbs to make the "brave sallet" possible, but I don't always use them as effectively as I think is possible. Just one more thing to think about . . .

Snow! Again!

2011-01-11T15:44:00.003-05:00

On Sunday night, snow started falling, and it continued long enough to cover our yard with about four inches of snow. At first, it was all the classically fluffy white stuff, but it changed to hard little bits of sleet toward the end. Today, we had more flurries, but not any significant addition to what was covering the ground.

Most winters, we don't get to use the sled even once. This winter, we've been able to have plenty of fast rides down the hill in front of the house over both the Christmas weekend and the last couple of days. Other people have come out to take turns on the sled, too, and the chance to visit with so many neighbors has been great.

One of the things about snow in the South that is both good and bad is that it packs to ice on the roads almost immediately. The situation is made more interesting by the lack of snow-plow trucks to clear the ice or to spread salt or sand on the roads. The icy roads make driving dangerous, so schools and businesses close, and most people stay home.

However, when Joe and I walked the mile and a half to the nearest coffee shop earlier today, the TV there was on, showing news coverage of Atlanta's roads, and it was pretty obvious that a whole lot of people who should not have been driving were actually out in their cars. Plenty of those people were stuck, either on a highway or in ditches or yards.

Roads have begun to look more passable, though, as the day has gone on, which means the return to work and school most likely will begin tomorrow.

Leather Britches Beans

2011-01-08T14:12:00.004-05:00

I finally spent a half hour looking into leather britches beans, and I found out a lot in just that little bit of time.

For people who don't already know, leather britches is really a preservation/cooking method for green beans. Mature beans are threaded onto strings to dry, and later cooked, usually with some kind of pork for seasoning (I don't eat any kind of pork, but I'm working on this one step at a time). This is a very "old-timey" way of preserving beans for use in the winter.

I had heard that any kind of green bean can be used for making these, but my experience with the beans in my yard had made me think that some varieties of beans would work better than others. Basically, Burpee's Tenderpod, which is a great green bean for fresh eating, shrivels to almost non-existence in drying, and the flavor is dramatically less than great. After reading my new book "The Resilient Gardener" by Carol Deppe, who found that some squash varieties were better than others for drying, I knew I would have to do some actual work to figure this out.

The writer over at vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com confirmed that thought:

The hulls of today's beans all become very tough as the bean matures. Some gardeners will dry a commercial string bean as a substitute for 'old time' Leather Britches beans but they risk criticism from historians, Southern chefs and anyone who has tasted the real thing.

It turns out that more than one gardener recommends "greasy beans," especially the "greasy cut shorts," for this use. Steve from Western North Carolina, posting at newsgroups.derkeiler.com, said:

There are at least 3 different greasy beans grown by seed savers in Western NC. All are pole beans and strong runners. The Greasy Cut short has only 4-6 beans to the pod, so they're just strung and broken in 1/2. The long greasy (my type) has 8-11 beans per pod and then there is the big greasy. It has 8-11 beans and a very thick, fleshy pod.

I like to let the long greasy get very full before picking. The beans have a rich, nutty flavor and are wonderful for canning. The cut shorts make the best "leather britches".

At the site community.berea.edu is this comment:

"Black greasy" beans were a popular old-fashioned variety. They could be eaten fresh out of the garden or canned. When strung and dried, they were called "leather britches" or "shucky" beans.

A poster on the gardenweb forums agreed with the above comments:

Until her demise my adoptive granny, Sarah Lou Back, made leather britches every year. Her bean of choice was Greasy Grits, and there were so many strings of them hanging from her porch you couldn't see through what superficially looked like a bamboo curtain.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest.typepd.com added some other bean varieties to the leather britches list:

By general acclaim the best heirloom bean varieties to make Leather Britches include the Barnes Mountain Cornfield Bean, Pink Tip Greasy Bean, Tobacco Worm Bean and the NT Half Runner Bean.

Other writers added white half-runners to the list of good varieties for leather britches, and it sounds as though any bean described as a "shucky bean" is also a good candidate.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest included one more piece of very useful information in his post, the name and URL for a source of heirloom beans: Bill Best's Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center Inc.'s catalogue. Since this is the season for planning, I will be looking more closely at this particular catalogue.

Starting Out Right

2011-01-05T21:09:00.003-05:00

On 1 Jan., 2011, my little family ate crowder peas from the yard, cooked with carrots and greens (turnip) from the yard. It seemed like a good way to start the New Year. I'm still not sure that people were meant to eat turnip greens, but Joe seemed to like them just fine.

I made cornbread to go with the crowder peas, using the recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, More With Less, by Doris Janzen Longacre and published by the Mennonite Central Committee. I have had this cookbook since 1980, and its history as a well-used book shows in the stains on many of its pages.

The day before, on New Year's Eve, Joe, Zack, Stephanie and I set off "Georgia" fireworks (nothing is allowed to shoot up into the air, so there were a lot of fountains and things that spin on the ground), and the teenage boys from across the street did, too. A couple of the neighborhood rascals, along with their Mom, came out to help. It was fun. I am very lucky to live in a neighborhood that is actually a neighborhood, where people know each other.

On Jan. 2, 3, and 4, I was at work. Considering that many people are starting the New Year unemployed, this also is good. If I could just settle on a garden plan, my year's beginning would be complete.

It is interesting to me that this year's garden-planning is going so slowly. Last year's goal of more seed-saving went well, and it's too late for a midlife crisis to be getting in the way. I am hoping that when the catalogue from SandHill Preservation arrives, a light-bulb will go off in my head (figuratively), and a plan will coalesce. Wish me luck!

Miracles Every Day

2010-12-29T20:33:00.005-05:00

Snow on the dogs:

Snow on the boy:

Snow on the blueberry bushes:

Snow everywhere:

In my own mind, miracles are the unexpected things that go my way. These are not to be confused with what a Cajun would call "lagniappe," the unexpected little something extra that comes along with the usual expected events/items, or a bonus. These events stand on their own.

Just lately, I've experienced the Atlanta area's first white Christmas since 1882, the last ping-pong table tomato's not being eaten until TONIGHT (almost the end of December!), and finding a live bat in my kitchen (also tonight!). The mail lately has been stacked high with seed and garden-related catalogues, and everyone at my house is well during the holiday season (usually, someone has a cold). Right now, I am feeling really blessed in this season of miracles (yes, weirdly enough, even with the bat).

If you count as miracles the flashes of insight that sometimes strike people, I've had a couple of those, too. They are both related to a book Joe gave me for Christmas, "The Resilient Gardener," by Carol Deppe, who also wrote "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties." I am using that second book as a guide in dehybridizing my favorite canary melon.

In "The Resilient Gardener," Deppe points out that she has a large garden only because she and a friend lease a two-acre property on which to grow it. Her own house's yard is too small to grow many veggies. If she can lease garden space, it is likely that I can, too, if I really want more garden space. That is definitely something to think about.

The other insight was something I've suspected but haven't wanted to totally face: if I want to find a really good list of veggies that do well here in metro-Atlanta, I can't wait for a seed company to pull that together for me. I have to make that list myself. It's going to take some work, researching seeds and sources, and it could take years of experimentation. I've been growing veggies here for a long time, but it seems I have a long way to go . . .

Deppe recommends that gardeners begin with seeds from a local, or at least regional, seed company. There isn't one for the Southeast, not really. Park Seed in South Carolina is the closest, but it sells plenty of varieties that are more trendy than region-appropriate.

The next closest seed source that might count as regional is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and it is in Virginia.

Locally, my best source so far in a lot of ways is Ladd's Farm Supply up in Euharlee. It offers some seeds, to measure out from bins, that local farmers have been growing for years. It's a good starting point, but its offerings also have a lot to do with what is commercially available. For example, the owner would like to offer some other varieties in particular that customers have asked for, but hasn't found a good source for those.

I have a lot of work ahead of me! That, too, is a miracle. How wonderful it is to have goals and plans.

Food Traditions

2010-12-24T16:47:00.002-05:00

I am pretty sure that gardeners think about food more often and in different ways than a lot of non-gardeners. Since I am the only vegetable gardener where I work, and I get to choose most of the news “briefs” that go into the little newspaper for which I work, it wouldn’t be a surprise to any of my gardening friends that the paper contains a fair amount of food related news.

However, a week or so back, a non-gardener asked why we’ve included so much news about kosher foods (it’s a Jewish publication), threats to kosher food rules around the world, new certifications, and sources of information about keeping kosher. My thinking is that food plays a very important role in tying people to their cultures and to their families. The laws of kashrut (kosher lifestyle) are an important part of Judaism, even though not all Jews follow the rules in their daily lives.

Many less observant Jews, though, do follow the kosher laws to the best of their ability during the High Holidays, the holiest days for the community. My belief is that food traditions are a strong connection to community and to the past, that following the food traditions of Judaism during these times provides a great connection to the Jewish community, and can even light a way back to the community for people who have not been actively Jewish in the rest of their lives.

Since I think that community is important for the happiness and well-being of people in general, I keep including information about kosher foods and laws.

I am not Jewish, but my family has some food traditions, too. One that is important to me is making egg-noodles for holiday meals. The dough has to be rolled out, dried for an hour or so, cut into noodles, and then dried some more, so making these noodles doesn’t exactly provide instant gratification, but taking the time to make them connects me to a kitchen-full of older female relatives --an assortment of aunts, great aunts, and grandmothers, now all dead-- who put together huge holiday meals in Claremore, Oklahoma. The noodles, cooked in broth made from chicken “parts,” also connect me to the frugal frontier cookery of my family’s past.

Of course, we have some other food traditions that are less frugal. One is Aunt Mickey’s fruit salad, which includes Jello, whipped cream, and a whole lot of fruits that are not all in season at the same time. I don’t make this one any more, but my Mom does, and so do some nieces (who learned how from Mom/Grammy) and probably a sister or two. We also eat a lot of pie during most holidays, and some of us have convinced ourselves that pumpkin pie, in particular, is a healthful breakfast food.

As a gardener in the Southern US, the foods I grow in the yard help connect me to the South. Sweet potatoes, especially, play a larger role in my winter diet than ever before, because they grow so well in my yard. I’ve been eating more greens, all kinds, and in summer I’ve had tomato sandwiches after my neighbor-across-the-street, a Southern girl, told me how much she likes them. If I had a bigger yard, we would have more corn and more crowder peas.

I would say that these are also foods that mostly grow well in Oklahoma, but when I was a kid we ate a lot of magazine-inspired meals that involved cans of cream of mushroom soup. Holiday foods were an exception (except, obviously, for Aunt Mickey's fruit salad).

As I begin to put together my garden plan for next year, one of the things on my mind is making sure that the varieties are totally appropriate for the place where I live, the Southern US. I’ve made a lot of progress in this direction over the past almost-twenty years, but I sometimes get pulled off-track by the amazing descriptions in seed catalogues. If I choose carefully, though, the foods I grow will be great ingredients for traditional Southern meals.

In this way, gardening and then eating what grows in the yard serves as a reminder of my connection to the geographical and historical place where I live and have raised my family, and to the community that is here.

A Mexican Food Miracle

2010-12-18T13:05:00.002-05:00

The unprotected cilantro survived the hard freeze! We had a low of 14 degrees F in our yard last week, and the cilantro is still there. I had fully expected it to keel over in the cold.

I can't take a picture because Joe has the camera in Austin where he is visiting his mother, but the plant is definitely looking perky and green. In other winters, the cilantro has not made it through such low temperatures.

In other news, my friend Eddie, of the persimmons, sent a correction to the previous post:

The persimmons I gave you were not American but Asian. The tree you got from me might be an American type that has seedless fruit.

He also added that the weeping persimmon's name should be Diospyrus kahki 'pendula.' (Thanks for the update, Eddie!)

Persimmons and a Friend

2010-12-12T21:21:00.005-05:00

A friend sent an email note that he had persimmons and did I want any. Of course, the answer was "Yes!" Joe and I went over to to his house, and we saw that our friend's little weeping persimmon tree was loaded with fruit. He stayed with us out in the Very Cold weather, picking persimmons. This is what we brought home:

I have some work to do! These will all need to be washed and then pushed through the ricer to separate the pulp from the skins and large seeds. The work will be worthwhile, though. The flavor of the pulp is exceptional.

My friend Eddie Rhoades grafts fruit trees, and he has grafted a piece of his weeping persimmon onto a sturdy rootstock, so he will have another one of these little trees producing fruit in a few years.

There is a persimmon in my backyard that he grafted. It should produce fruits that have few or no seeds at all. If I am lucky, it will start bearing in another year or two. It has already been out there for two full years, and the scion was from a fairly mature tree.

We have a young Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro (Asian persimmon) in the front yard that set three fruits this year, but they disappeared about midsummer. I am hoping for more next summer, and for them to stay on the tree until ripe. This particular persimmon is supposed to be non-astringent even when hard; American persimmons, like those that my friend Eddie gave us, are powerfully astringent until they become fully ripe.

Eddie is also the source of my shiitake mushroom log. His haven't produced mushrooms yet, either, but I am thinking that this spring we will both get plenty.

Seed Catalogues!

2010-12-08T16:16:00.003-05:00

The seed catalogues are arriving! Actually, I think most people around here call them catalogs, but either spelling is going to get the idea across.

The first few came last week, but the ones that arrived earliest aren't my favorites. However, yesterday the Fedco catalogue arrived, and today I got one from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. These are two of my three favorites, so I am a very happy woman.

Actually, it is hard to know whether the early arrival is a good thing. On the one hand, the results of the 2010 gardening season are still pretty fresh in my mind, which should make seed selection easier. I won't have forgotten which varieties did really well and which were a total bust. In addition, this makes my husband's seasonal shopping a lot easier. I can just circle what I want, and he can buy it for the next gift-giving occasion. It's hard to think of a better present than the promise of spring.

On the other hand, I haven't had the down-time from gardening that makes a new catalogue in January seem like such a ray of light in the cold and early-dark of winter.

Luckily for me, I can have the best of both worlds. The catalogue for Sand Hill Preservation Center, the other of my "top three" favorites, always arrives in January.

A Hard Freeze on its Way

2010-12-06T21:10:00.003-05:00

Over the weekend I saw a weather forecast for my area that included temperatures as low as 19 degrees F. That cold weather should begin tonight, with a predicted low around 23 degrees and colder nights to follow, so I spent some time on Sunday getting the garden ready.

You would think that by now there wouldn't be anything left to do, but there was plenty. The bok choy and broccoli are likely to get "freezer burn" in the low twenties (let alone the high teens), so I harvested all of the best parts of all of those plants. That means I brought in the last two bok choy and the last four heads of broccoli.

When I cut the broccoli, I noticed new ragged edges on the leaves; they were the ragged edges caused by caterpillars, and I was a little surprised to see an actual green and growing cabbage worm on a broccoli leaf. I had thought that the weather had been cold enough to stop those little guys, but I was mistaken.

I also harvested the rest of the winter radishes, the last turnip, and a big bunch of cilantro. These were all out in an unprotected bed, and I didn't want to leave them out to turn mushy. The turnip would have been fine in the cold, but it would have been out there all alone if I left it, and leaving it just seemed wrong somehow.

Also, I brought in a lot of lettuce. This would probably be fine under the plastic tent where it had been growing, but I won't want to pull the plastic back for harvesting while the weather is so cold, and I will want salad before it gets warm. I picked plenty, so we can have lettuce every night for a week or more.

In fact, the lettuce-eating started tonight, with tacos. The beans were prepared using peppers from the garden (chopped and frozen) and a tomato from the ping pong table; lettuce and cilantro from the garden were piled on top.

Also on Sunday I added another sheet of plastic over the top of the little tent that houses the lettuces and some vegetable babies. I thought about doing something with the carrots but decided to just wait to see how they fare.

Here is a picture of winter radishes, Moksha, and me:

Southern Seed Legacy

2010-12-02T17:44:00.007-05:00

The Fall 2010 issue of Seedlink, the newsletter of the Southern Seed Legacy project, contains some news that made me a little sad. SSL, which has been housed in the Anthropology department at UGA, is moving to the University of North Texas (in Denton). This really great project saves heirloom Southern seeds and their histories.

The move is probably good for agrobiodiversity, because it is likely that more seeds and their stories will be able to be gathered as a result of the move, but it seems like a real loss to this state.

One way that Southern seeds have been gathered is by having students hunt them out (visiting old farmers and gardeners to see what they are growing) and then record histories of how the seeds came to the family. A lot of the seeds saved through the project have been beans and southern peas (crowder peas, cowpeas, black-eye peas, etc.), probably because these are easy to save.

To keep the seeds alive, rather than having them all warehoused in a freezer somewhere (although I am sure that some are kept exactly like that), members of the project can request some seed to grow for themselves. This would make the project kind of like a "Johnny Bean Seed," except that one third of the resulting seed is supposed to be shared back with SSL and another third with another gardener. This practice keeps these heirloom Southern seeds alive and in use.

I have not actually requested and grown out any of their seed, but I have taken the idea to heart. I have shared my own favorite crowder peas, "Pigott Family Heirloom," with a few people already, and at least one couple has liked them well enough to save some for subsequent years. This has made me very happy.

My Pigott Family Heirloom peas were purchased through Sand Hill Preservation (one of my top three favorite seed sources), and their catalog, which is pretty much the last one to arrive in the mail each year, says that the variety came from Louisiana.

These are some of the Pigott Family Heirloom peas:

They don't look like much, but they are delicious! Also, they are not available in many places. That is the point of SSL, to find those seeds that are not generally commercially available, seeds that have been grown for generations by a family here in the Southern U.S. so that the seeds are adapted to this region.

I have been supporting SSL for a few years, and I have enjoyed the Seedlink newsletter. I am including an excerpt from the most recent issue here:

Fred Lunsford, an Eastern Cherokee elder and Baptist preacher, told me a story about leather britches that he and his wife preserved and prepared from a Yellow Hull Cornfield bean that he had originally acquired from his grandfather in Clay County, N.C. In 1995, Fred had a heart attack and was asked by the dietitian at the hospital to record the foods he was eating at home. Day after day, leather britches was prominently on the list. The dietitian from the North couldn't figure out why in the world Fred would be eating his leather britches. Well, she tried to investigate by asking the nurses, but Fred was onto her confusion and told them not to tell her what leather britches were. Finally, the dietitian asked the cook if she knew and she replied, "Boy, I reckon I do. I'd like to have me some right now." - Jim Veteto, Director, SSL

I am sure that not everyone in the north is clueless about leather britches, but the story is a reminder that some really good foods that grow well in the Southern U.S. could be lost without efforts like those at SSL.

Wild Food for Supper

2010-11-28T21:03:00.003-05:00

We still have plenty of leftover Thanksgiving food, so we didn't actually need for anyone in the family to go out foraging, but Joe was feeling the need to be outside today. This morning, he loaded the canoe onto the jeep, grabbed a lunch (turkey sandwich included) and a fishing pole, and headed out.

He brought back one ten-and-a-half-inch yellow perch and a big bunch of oyster mushrooms.

I took a break from work (my schedule is weird, I know) to clean and cook the mushrooms while Joe took care of the fish. We had little fried fish fillets and fried mushrooms along with our (leftover, still) mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce. It was all good.

Good Food

2010-11-26T16:21:00.004-05:00

Although Thanksgiving does necessitate some housecleaning, the food and the company make it worthwhile. Some friends came to spend a good part of the day, and we had a great time talking and eating and talking and eating and talking and eating.

As usual, I ate A Lot, but there is also enough left-over really good food in the fridge that getting meals together for the next few days won't involve much work.

The big meal did incorporate some herbs and veggies from the yard: chard, spinach, chicory, parsley, garlic chives, thyme, marjoram, sage, and beer radishes all came fresh from the yard; smoked peppers came from a jar in the cupboard; sweet potatoes came from a basket on the kitchen floor; garlic came from a basket in the garage. It was great to have some food from the yard for such a special occasion.

When I feel the urge (probably tomorrow evening) to add some variety to a meal of leftovers, I will steam some of this:

The weather is supposed to turn cold over the next day or two; a freeze (to about 29 degrees F) is predicted for tonight, but the broccoli will be fine if that's as cold as it gets. I will need to watch the forecasts, though, for any temps much lower. I may need to cover the broccoli patch.

A 'Focused Experience'

2010-11-22T17:46:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago on the New York Times website, I saw the headline In These Lean Days, Even Stores Shrink. The first line of the story read, “Some retailers are cutting the size of stores and inventory to limit costs and provide a focused shopping experience.” What a blessing this will be!

The grocery store nearest my house is big enough that it is hard to complete the shopping in less than an hour, even when I don’t need all that much in terms of regular groceries. When we first moved here, there was a smaller grocery store nearby that I liked much better. It offered fewer brands, which were arrayed on fewer aisles, so I could get through the shopping in less than thirty minutes.

The headline also reminded me of how gardening provides a nicely focused shopping experience. When I am out in the yard “shopping” for supper, I can choose only what is ready to harvest. Currently, I can choose from the bok choy, parsley, cilantro, lettuces, chicory, beer radishes and turnips that are ready for eating now.

Soon, the bok choy will be gone, but broccoli, carrots and chard will be ready. The good news is that the veggies in my yard look – and taste - a lot better than the ones in the grocery store, so the difference in kinds of produce available isn’t as large as it first seems.

I can also shop from the baskets of sweet potatoes, the basket of garlic, the ping pong table that is still loaded with tomatoes, and the jars on shelves and freezer-containers of produce put away for the winter. This kind of focused shopping really limits costs!

When I finally clicked on the link to the rest of the article, it turned out that the story was about clothing and department stores, but I can still dream that someone will apply the concept to grocery stores.

Trying Turnips

2010-11-18T18:17:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure whether I actually like turnips, so when I decided to plant them, I put only a few seeds in the ground. In my childhood, Mom would occasionally sneak some turnip bits, chopped to the identical size of the potato bits, into a soup or stew. I always figured it out Right Away, and after supper, at the bottom of my bowl, there would be a little pile of turnip cubes.

This memory is why I planted only a few seeds. It would be more reasonable, I know, to just by-pass the whole turnip-growing adventure with a background like this, but I didn't used to like beets either, and now I do. Taste buds change. It was possible that I might like turnips now. Luckily, Joe likes turnip greens, so even if the turnips turned out to be awful, the crop wouldn't be a total loss.

The good news is that turnips seem to grow pretty well in this yard. I pulled one of my (three total) turnips last night to use in supper:

The root part went into the oven with some sweet potatoes, coated with olive oil, to roast. The greens got sauteed in olive oil with onion and garlic. There were a lot of greens. From just the one turnip came a heaping three cups of cooked greens. One third of the greens went into the ricotta cheese mixture for "stuffed shells" (pasta); the rest went into two pint-size freezer bags and into the freezer.

The turnip greens turned out to have a pretty strong "bite" (I don't know how else to describe it), so the ricotta cheese mixture also included some of the much milder Malabar spinach that we had prepared and frozen over the last few weeks.

The verdict? The greens-&-cheese stuffed shells were fine, even though I noticed the "bite" under all that tomato sauce and Italian seasoning, and the turnip root wasn't awful like I remembered turnip roots to be. Turnips aren't going to replace sweet potatoes in my affections anytime soon, but I will not have any trouble eating the remaining two turnips. Next year, I might plant five.

A Good Winter Crop

2010-11-15T19:47:00.005-05:00

A lot of gardens and gardeners are winding down for the winter. In my yard, the asparagus bed is dormant and, even though I have a few patches of cool weather crops coming along, there are lots of spaces that I have covered with mulch for the winter.

One really important crop for this season, though, is one I won't be eating directly. It is the compost that I will be "feeding" the soil with in the spring. In heavy clay soils like those here in north Georgia, gardens need a pretty steady diet of organic matter to produce good crops of vegetables. If I had to buy all the organic matter I use, I would be broke in a hurry, so I scrounge as much organic matter as I can when it is available - hence, the compost.

This is a great season for making compost, for me anyway, because this is the time of year when my neighbors bag the fallen leaves in their yards and set the bags out for the trash haulers. It isn't hard to walk up the street and bring back a bag or two when I see them. My neighbor across the street saves me some work by having her boys bring her yard's leaves over for me. She can skip the bags that way.

Leaves in a big pile on their own will take longer than one winter to break down into crumbly compost. That is partly due to the lower temperatures in winter that slow decomposition, but it is largely due to the low nitrogen content of fallen leaves. Speeding up the compost-making requires layering in some nitrogen, and that can take the form of coffee grounds (from regular stops at a Starbucks), kitchen scraps, or whatever other source is handy.

University of Georgia's "Ag Publications Search" provides a link to a publication on Composting and Mulching (you'll need to choose whether to see the html or the pdf version) that explains what to do for people who've not made their own compost before, but the important thing is to start, and now is a good time.

Progress

2010-11-10T16:37:00.004-05:00

This afternoon the asparagus bed got fertilized (manure, compost) and mulched (crumbled leaves), so that part of the garden is done for the year. I also spread mulch among the garlic bulbs that have sent up green shoots. The soil they are planted in needs to be kept as loose as possible for the bulbs to achieve their best growth. Considering the tight clay structure of the original garden soil, the mulch, even though I had already added a lot of organic matter to that bed, is pretty much non-optional.

We've been eating the bok choy, and there are still three big heads of it out in the garden to enjoy in future meals. It is great to have some greens to cook this early in the fall!

By the time the bok choy is gone, we should be pretty close to having broccoli from the garden. The little heads are slowly getting larger.

We can add lettuce to our meals, too. These leaf lettuces are plenty big to donate leaves to a salad:

A lot of the tomatoes that have ripened so far out on the ping pong table in the garage have been made into salsa, using cilantro and peppers from the garden. The cilantro has been growing well enough in this cool weather that it is hard to tell that we've used as much of it as we have. We REALLY like cilantro . . .

Another herb "in season" right now is the saffron. The individual flowers are short-lived, so even though there are a lot of them in the yard, I have to pick the red stigmas when I see them, because they won't be there tomorrow!

The carrots are still small; they are mostly about an inch across the top, which seems adequate, but they are also only about an inch and a half long. Barring catastrophe, though, we will have home-grown carrots on the table in a few more weeks.

Plant Everywhere

2010-11-08T18:40:00.004-05:00

A person must plant everywhere and then concentrate on what grows. --Rav Yosef Yoizel Horowitz, The Alter of Novardok Zt'l

This is the "quote of the day" that came to my email a few days ago. I am pretty sure that it is not meant to be taken literally, but that is exactly where my brain went. It seems like pretty good advice.

There are people who do exactly that, sow food plants everywhere and tend what grows; the practice is generally referred to as guerilla gardening. I haven't taken to planting food in disused public spaces (yet), but here in my own yard, sometimes it seems as if I have planted everywhere. Then Joe points out that he still has little patches of lawn to mow, so I know I haven't quite done it.

The "concentrate on what grows" part is especially useful. So often, I try certain varieties over and over again because someone (usually in another part of the country) has raved about it, and the plants fail again and again. And usually, there are perfectly wonderful varieties that DO grow here just fine, but not always. Some whole categories of plants are never going to do well in the hot, humid Southeastern US (currants). Some will only do well with excessive pampering (celery).

There is a yearning, probably basic to the human psyche, for more/bigger/better or just plain different. Gardeners are not immune, and the people who write plant descriptions for seed catalogs know it. They know we will try almost anything, even though a lot of what we have is really great. The good news is that we can learn from what happens. This relates to the use of the word "concentrate" rather than a word like "tend." It implies thinking. After planting all kinds of plants all over the yard, we can come closer to choosing the best plants for our own yards the next year.

So, here at the close of the summer growing season, I am busy concentrating on what grew.

First Freeze Tonight!

2010-11-05T17:28:00.004-04:00

At least, that's what the current forecast is calling for. The weather sites have been waffling all week on the potential for a freeze this weekend.

The good news is that my garden is sort of ready for it. Joe harvested more Malabar spinach yesterday, and it has been cooked, bagged, and frozen. Today, when I was working in the yard, I brought in a few more things:

Joe saw the eggplant when he got home from work and said, "Looks like we're having eggplant parmesan tonight." Hah! The eggplant did get a little bigger over the last week, but it isn't big enough for a three-person meal.

The tomatoes are the very last ones from the yard (the plant is in an odd place, and I kept forgetting about it). They are from the Amish tomato plant that was grown by the Tomato Man in Kennesaw. Only one tomato from that plant has matured, and I did save seeds from it - that was one of my goals for the summer - but I had hoped that one of these would ripen outside, too. I don't know whether seeds saved from tomatoes that ripen indoors will be hardy enough to produce good plants next spring, but I will find out!

The radish is from a winter radish mix. These all have long maturation times (60-75 days) and are supposed to be grown in the fall. I don't know which variety this is, but I expect it will be good sliced thin and salted. The ones I grew last year were. They are supposed to be eaten that way as a snack, with beer.

I covered the part of the garden that has lettuce, not because the lettuce is especially tender (it isn't) but because there are some babies in that same space. I had replanted more lettuce seeds, since so many didn't make it to maturity the first time. There are also some little cilantro, regular radish, and beet babies in that space. Very young plants are less cold-hardy than more mature plants, and I'm not taking the chance of losing these.

One (Almost) Tidied Garden Bed

2010-11-01T16:19:00.005-04:00

I have been working a little at a time on getting the garden tidied up for winter, but I am about to run out of time. Our first freeze will be here in a week or two. Anything the least bit "tender" that's left in the garden when that happens is going to turn to mush. (Yesterday, that first freeze looked like it would arrive this weekend, but the forecast has changed since then.)

I worked on this bed over the weekend:

In the foreground is a patch of chard; to the right are potted herbs; to the left are some red-veined sorrel that are probably too small to see (a gift from Cheryl - thanks!); across the "near-back" are a couple of different varieties of chicories; and behind those are nasturiums (left) and thyme.

Everything except the nasturtiums - they will turn to mush - should do just fine all winter long, especially since the herbs are portable.

It may seem a bit odd that I've planted the pots of herbs (rosemary and bay), but there is a reason for this. Last year, we had an unusually long stretch of very cold weather, and some of our potted herbs didn't survive. They always had made it through the winter before, so I hadn't done anything to protect them. This summer, I had to replace the bay and the rosemary.

I could actually plant the herbs, but we like to have the bay on the back deck in summer, and planted rosemary can get very large here. The pot helps keep it in bounds. My thinking is that, this year, if a freakishly long freeze sets in, I can pop those pots out of the ground and put them in the garage for the duration. When the freeze ends, they can go back into their holes.

I know that a lot of people have good luck bringing their herbs into the house for the winter, but I am not one of those people. Indoor herbs die in this house.

Fall Garden Clean-up

2010-10-29T16:09:00.006-04:00

I finally finished clearing away the old asparagus stalks. I also worked today on clearing other parts of the garden. There were still some pepper plants in the side-yard beds, and I picked the last of the peppers before pulling up those plants.

Here they are, the last of the summer peppers:

That last Casper White eggplant is also in the box. The peppers were mostly fairly large; the Spanish Spice peppers were all seven to eight inches long. I had been hoping they would turn red, but that didn't happen. The weather has turned seasonably cool, so it was definitely time to bring those in, but I will have to chop them up to freeze as green peppers.

There were still some okra plants, some stumps of corn stalks, aging marigolds, and other flowers that were going to look very bad very soon. I filled the wheelbarrow with stuff, chopped up, for the compost pile.

One wheelbarrow load isn't going to be enough, though, for me to able to say those two beds are clear and ready for winter. There are still some flowers, the last of the basil, and all that Malabar spinach, in addition to a few cool-weather plants (winter radishes, cilantro, and a couple of turnips).

Really, clearing the garden in fall is almost as big a job as getting it all planted in spring.

This, though, is part of what motivates me:

This is the garlic that I planted just last weekend. It is already coming up! It looks like the "one big clove" that I thought I had planted here was actually one big clove with a little hitch-hiker. Two are coming up! However, even when what happens in the garden isn't quite what I had planned, seeing the food plants emerge and grow reminds me that the work is worthwhile.

Garden Distractions

2010-10-27T15:46:00.006-04:00

Today I fully intended to finish removing the old asparagus stalks from the garden for the winter. They need to be removed for two reasons: the first is that the old stalks can harbor insects and diseases, the second is that they look terrible.

When I was about halfway through, though, I called my Mom to tell her what I was doing, because she has asparagus, too. That's when I looked up and saw the Casper White eggplant.

I thought we had eaten the last eggplant for the season last week, but it seems I was mistaken! There will be little bit more. When I glanced over at the Ukraine Beauty right next to it, I saw one more tiny eggplant there, too.

I can't imaging that this will have a chance to get much larger before cold weather kills the plant, but I hadn't expected to see this little fruit at all.

Since the broccoli is in the garden bed just across from the eggplants, I turned around to check on them, too. A lot of years I have less that wonderful luck with the broccoli, but I got another surprise.

Every plant has the beginnings of a head of broccoli nestled down in the leaves! I know very well the pitfalls of "counting chickens before they hatch," especially when it comes to gardening, but this looks very promising.

After all these great discoveries, I had to make a quick tour of the garden. This is a tough time of year for gardens. In spite of the patches of green from the cool weather crops, there are lots of bare spaces and brown (or browning) leaves dripping off of scraggly old stems, so that the visual rewards aren't all immediate.

The little tour showed, though, that insects are still finding sources of nectar in the flowers that remain. This bachelor's buttons plant had a couple of visitors, in spite of the cool, damp weather.

And the nasturtiums really just hit their peak a couple of weeks ago. We've had some rain in the last couple of days (1.3 inches!), so older flowers are a bit battered, but the more newly opened blossoms look great!

When I got this far, though, a wave of much darker clouds moved in; it had been drizzling for a while, but that didn't bother me. I'm not related to the Wicked Witch of the West, so I work outside even when it is wet - I'm not going to melt - but the thunder started and that was the end of being outside.

My next chance to work on the asparagus bed, if it doesn't come later today, will be Friday. Maybe I will finish then . . .

Horehound Surprise

2010-10-23T18:21:00.002-04:00

One of the herbs in my garden is horehound. This is not a delicious culinary herb; it is a bitter, medicinal herb traditionally used as a treatment for coughs and sore throats.

When I was growing up, this is one of the bad-tasting medicines that my father brought out when I complained about a sore throat. If I had an unhappy tummy, he mixed a teaspoon of baking soda in a glass of water and told me to drink it. This tasted worse than horehound, which at least was in candy form, so there was the consolation of a little sugar. Needless to say, there were very few minor health complaints at our house. None of us wanted to risk the bad-tasting home remedies!

Weirdly enough, I have grown to like horehound (but not the baking-soda and water).

One year, I made horehound candy with my own horehound, but I didn't know that the pieces absolutely had to be individually wrapped. I've made other hard candies before (cinnamon and anise flavors) and they kept just fine in a jar. When I put my horehound candy in a jar, though, it merged into one solid mass in the jar in just a couple of weeks.

This year, I'm going to pass on the candy-making, and just use the leaves for tea. There is a lot of horehound, so I've put some leaves in the freezer, and some are set out to dry.

The job turned out to be a bigger adventure that I expected; when I was out in the garden snipping leaves off the horehound, I found carrots!

The horehound grew really well this year, flopping over the space where last spring's carrots came out. I had harvested all the carrots that I could see months ago, but the horehound seems to have sheltered some seeds that hadn't germinated with the rest of the crop. If I had been a better weeder, these probably wouldn't have made it to maturity!

Fall Veggies on the Way

2010-10-20T21:42:00.004-04:00

The summer garden is almost all done. There are still some tomatoes hanging on, but the plants look like heck. Have you ever seen so many brown, dead leaves? I've left the plants this long so that the remaining tomatoes could get a little more mature. Lots of those tomatoes will ripen just fine in the house, but some need a little more sunshine and feeding from the plant for that to happen.

The cooler weather crops are making good progress. We've eaten one head of the bok choy, and the rest (there were only seven) look good, too. This makes two years in a row that the bok choy has done well. I am not sure whether it is the result of something I've done (planting them early enough in August?) or just a fluke, but I am happy about the success, however it has been achieved.

It looks as though I might actually get carrots for Thanksgiving this year, too. This hardly ever happens. Usually, the carrots aren't big enough to eat until closer to January. One of the neighborhood rascals made the sign for the carrots (they are a vegetable he might actually eat). He wanted to write the label with a Sharpie, but I have heard from his mother that her children are not reliable with permanent markers, so I brought out crayons, which seem to have worked. His handwriting is excellent!

The lettuces are doing moderately well. I don't know whether the germination rate was very low, or the "infant mortality" rate very high, but something happened that resulted in a lot fewer lettuces in the garden than expected. August was exceptionally hot, which might have interfered with germination of the lettuce seeds, and we have hardly had rain (surprise!) for weeks and weeks, which could have resulted in a too-dry situation for baby lettuces to survive. And, it could just be that I messed something up. Hard to know.

The good news is that the lettuces that have survived thus far look great!

This weekend, I will probably finish pulling the tomato and pepper plants from the garden and hunt under the house for the cold frame so I can put it over the lettuces. When I get it in place, I plan to plant more lettuces and spinach. They won't grow very quickly, but they will grow, giving us greens in the winter.