When the Garden Gets Slammed By a Very Hard Freeze

I have a friend who says that gamblers should skip going to Vegas and just plant a garden, instead --  letting those weather dice roll and taking odds on what will yield well, what will do poorly, and what will be a total fail.

In the past bunch of winters, broccoli, cabbages, and nearly all the cool-season greens have produced right through until spring. Gardeners in North Georgia are accustomed to the success of those crops, so, back in October, we all would have said the likelihood of those crops surviving the winter was fairly high. This year, the usual winter crops pretty much ended a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped down near 5 degrees F.

It seemed like it might be useful to have a list of the hardiest crops, for future reference when planning the fall/winter garden, so what follows is such a list:

multiplying onions
shallots
garlic
carrots
winter radishes
green onions
cilantro
spinach
Brussels Sprouts (report from another local gardener)

I'm guessing that parsnips would be ok, too, but I didn't plant any this year.

The perennial herbs also seem to be struggling with the cold. Most years in winter I can find enough fresh oregano down under the browned stems to use for cooking, but today I could find only a few, tiny leaves. The sage has some good leaves, and I found some usable thyme under the tangle of old stems of that plant, but the rosemary looks pretty rough.

Also, since so many of the weeds that I depend upon for bunny food were bitten back by the hard freeze, I've been growing wheat greens indoors to feed to my pet bunnies. Without these greens, my bunny-food bill would be much higher!

We've been growing sprouts in the kitchen for ourselves, too, to add some fresh, home-grown greens to our meals. With the loss of many of the outdoor crops, we are lucky to have options for continued "gardening" indoors.

If other gardeners can let me know of additional crops that have done well in the cold, we can add them to the list, to help in planning next winter's garden. Hope you all are keeping warm!

A Walk Around the Yard

Right now, the garden says that we have not yet had a hard frost, but that it's been too cool for most of the warm-weather plants. A few Zinnias and my friend Electa's Heirloom Pink Salvia are still blooming. The salvia re-seed all over the place, which mostly is fine because they attract lots of little pollinators.

This year's carrot and radish bed.

The carrots and winter radishes (to the right of the carrots) won't be too fussed about cold weather when it finally gets here, but both crops (and the rogue bok choy that somehow ended up in the same bed) have flourished in the warmth we've had so far.

I had hoped that last year's carrot success wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it looks as though the hope was not in vain. The carrot tops all look good, and the one carrot I pulled a few days ago (just to check on how things were going underground) was big enough that I think homegrown carrots will be part of our Thanksgiving dinner.

Winter radishes are getting big, a few at a time, and we have already been enjoying them as before-dinner snacks, sliced thin and lightly salted. They are our "healthy alternative" to the kinds of fried salty chips that come in bags at the store.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons

Broccoli patch

The broccoli is coming along, too. If I look straight down the center of each plant, I can see tiny heads beginning to form. At this point, it's too soon to guess when they will be ready to bring in for dinner, but it may be before the end of the month.

Ichi ki ke jiro persimmons will start coming in soon, too. In theory, they are edible while still as hard as apples (like now), but we learned last year that the flavor improves if they have more time on the tree to get a little bit soft.

Marigolds

Marigolds are still in bloom, and I've been bringing in some of the old, dried flowers to save the seed. This is one of the French marigolds that is supposed to be good for reducing nematode populations in the soil, when planted in a solid block to grow for several weeks (at least). I never grow them that way because the nematode problem hasn't been severe enough to warrant giving up a planting bed for so long in summer, but I like to be ready, just in case.

Still some peppers, in November

When we had our big "freeze forecast" scare more than a week ago, I harvested all of the larger peppers. There were still some smaller peppers out on the plants, and the tinies are beginning to get bigger. If we have another week or so of sunny afternoons in the high 60s-to-low-70s (degrees Fahrenheit), I may be able to fill the dehydrator one last time.

The garden is saying, essentially, that all is as it should be.

Mostly Ready for Fall/Winter

Most of the garden is ready for fall and winter (finally!). You'd think that by now I would know exactly what it's going to take to get that all done, but I'm still a little surprised that there is so much work in clearing away the summer and making the start on fall and winter.

I cut down the buckwheat cover crop that has been growing in the top half of the beet and spinach bed to let it wilt down before turning it under, and I've planted a mixed cover crop of winter rye and Austrian winter peas in a couple of beds. Before those cover crops could go in, there was a general clearing-away of summer crops, then I brought compost out from the backyard compost pile, spread that on the beds, mixed it into the top few inches of soil, leveled the beds, then broadcast the seeds and "pounced" them in with a rake. The bed where the garlic and shallots will go in a couple of weeks has also been made ready.

Over the past ten-or-so days, I also replanted seeds for some of the lettuces, carrots, beets, spinach, and radishes, because the sweet potato bed isn't the only one that has been chipmunked. The rascally rodents have been having way too much fun in my garden this year; somehow, they've gotten the impression that it's their own little party place.

My neighbor across the creek has two outdoor cats, and I had thought that, between them, Lily and Johnny would have put a big dent in the chipmunk population, but they don't seem to have been keeping up with the rate of reproduction. We don't have as many hawks as usual, and that may be part of the problem. I think the crows (another nuisance) have been chasing them away. Next year, I may have to work at thinning some vegetation (daylilies, azaleas, and more) that has served as protective cover for the little, striped "party animals."

Things have been busy at work. Last week, on Thursday, I was the guest on the Master Gardener Hour on America's Web Radio. The show is scheduled to be posted on the 19th of October. On Friday, I talked about "Moving Toward Organics in the Vegetable Garden" for the Master Gardener Lunch & Learn series. Have I mentioned lately that I love my job?

Hope all the other gardens out there are just about ready for fall and winter!

Garden Update

September peppers.

There haven't been many photos in the blog lately, because I've had camera "issues." At this point, those issues are mostly resolved, so I finally went outside in daylight to take some pictures for a simple garden update.

The summer crop that is still coming in strong is the peppers. All varieties across the whole bed are doing well. The tomatoes, even the ones planted latest, are mostly limping along. I'm bringing in a few tomatoes each week, but not great piles of them like I would normally be harvesting in September.

Buckwheat cover crop, ready to be mowed down.

The buckwheat that was planted across the top of the spinach-beet bed is doing great. Soon, I will be mowing that down (or Joe will, with the weed-whacker), then turning it under to get the space ready for a winter cover crop.

Some animal(s) out in the yard have been treating the rows of spinach and beet seedlings like a personal snack bar, and I may, as a result, end up reseeding all those rows. This is an annoying turn of events, but not a total surprise. A creek borders our yard on one side, which means we have plenty of drop-in "guests" of the four-legged, furry persuasion. The creek is like a natural highway that connects parks and fields in the area. My yard is just a scenic-turnout that happens to also include a couple of fast-food establishments.

Cabbage-family snacks for rabbits.

 The cabbage and broccoli plants have established nicely and have begun to really grow, but the little green stick front-and-center of the photo to the left is the remains of another animal snack -- kind of like a broccoli-sicle stick instead of a popsicle stick.

However, I have another nine-pack of broccoli to plant, and it is enough to replace all of the most severely munched plants, with some left to plant further down the bed.

Healthy horseradish.

The horseradish, that we don't even really like to eat, is looking pretty amazing. The friend who gave me the chunk of root with which to start my plant said that the flowers would be lovely, but I haven't seen any flowers yet. I've had the plant for at least three years, so I'm thinking that I might not get to see flowers.

The plant is getting too big for its pot, and I'm expecting to re-pot it this coming spring, dividing the root to share and to make some horseradish sauce. Maybe I'll find a recipe for sauce that we like!

This year, most of my plants were in the ground, but I have seen horseradish so healthy that it threatened to take over whole yards. Mine is going to stay in a pot.

Over in the side yard, the sweet potato vines seem to be contemplating some kind of take-over. They have flowed into the next bed and across the newly-laid centipede-&-nutsedge sod that the water department put down after replacing the neighborhood water mains.

This year's sweet-potato glacier, slowly creeping across the yard.

In the picture to the right, a few okra plants can be seen along the left of the photo; they are holding their own among the vines and producing just enough okra for us to include some in a meal every few days.

It will be time to dig up those sweet potatoes very soon. I'm planning to manage that sometime in the first week of October. The slips were planted back in May, which means the plants have had PLENTY of time to make sweets for me by now.

Carrots to the left, winter radishes to the right.

The carrot and winter radish bed looks pretty good. There are still some places in the rows where carrots didn't come up, and it isn't too late to drop in a few seeds in those gaps. We are getting rain today, so it will have to be on another day, but I am thinking that there is still time for a few very late carrots.

The last seeds in won't yield mature carrots until sometime in the spring, but that's okay. I will have harvested plenty of other carrots by then, from the earlier-planted seeds.

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

I Planted Carrots

This was a busy weekend of tidying up, amending, and planting. The bed that got "tidied" (everything pulled out) was the one that had held the zucchini and most of the cucumbers. After pulling up the old plants, I spread a wheelbarrow load of compost over the bed and then used my grub hoe to "till" the bed. If the bed hadn't been for carrots, I probably wouldn't have worked it so deeply, but I wanted the roots to have no trouble growing long and straight.

After raking the bed smooth, I added a little of my own mix of organic amendments, then sifted those into the top few inches of soil before planting.

One of the great things about planting the carrots is that I get to use my seeder. Most of my crops aren't planted directly into the garden as seeds so solidly in the beds, but carrots are. It's always fun to roll that seeder down the row, and great to know that the seeds are planted with pretty good spacing at the depth that I want, covered up and tamped down, all in one pass!

Grub hoe and seeder help make short work of planting the carrots. PHOTO/atlantaveggies@blogspot.com

I planted five rows of carrots and then one row of winter radishes.

The day wasn't super hot -- only in the 80s -- but it was humid and still, so in the mid-afteroon -- rather than working out in the blazing hot sun -- I worked on the shady front porch on transplants for the beds that aren't far enough along to clear for fall planting.  I started a tray of fall greens and bumped up my cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower seedlings into larger pots.

Meanwhile, the summer crops are coming in at a good pace. I'm especially happy about the success of the peppers. We've been putting a couple of pounds of them, chopped, into the dehydrator each week for awhile now, and they will make our winter meals very tasty.

A day's August harvest in a rainy garden year.  PHOTO/atlantaveggies.blogspot.com

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Carrots, Catalogues, and a Mixed Up Plant

What a great time of year it is for gardeners! It isn't meltingly hot outside, but there is still food in the yard to harvest for supper.  The carrots are only just now getting big enough, but it's looking like I can quit buying carrots for a month or so.

The carrots in the yard are extra-sweet, too. These look like they are probably a Danvers-type, but when I planted carrots I had a little bit each of several kinds. I'm not sure when I'll run across a Chanteney or a Nantes, but that will happen eventually, if any of them germinated (some seeds were fairly old).

Other good news is that the seed catalogues have begun to arrive. Seeds Of Change hit the mailbox before Thanksgiving, and Fedco came today. The Fedco catalogue is especially wonderful this year because it contains poems and quotes by Wendell Berry (bio here and a great poem here), one of my favorite writers.

Neither of these first two catalogues is my main source of seeds (that would be Sand Hill Preservation), but they are great for the beginning of planning next year's garden.

Yet more good - or at least interesting - news, is that my key lime tree, a.k.a. "Old Spikey," is in bloom.  The plant is a month or two ahead of its usual flowering schedule, but the year has been weird. How can I be surprised?

Plenty of beautiful, warm weather is forecast for the upcoming week, so we've rolled Old Spikey out of the dining room - its winter home - and out onto the back deck. For the next week, anyway, we will be able to maneuver around the dining room without the risk of being raked by two-inch spines.

Outside this afternoon, Old Spikey was host to some honeybees that must have been grateful, in their own little honeybee way, for some fresh pollen and nectar. The whole plant was haloed with scent and sound - a honeybee oasis!

I hope that everyone else's gardens are lively and productive, too!

State of the Garden Report

It's been a great year for peppers in my yard, but the season is just about at its close.

We'll be pulling up the pepper plants (see pathetic plants in photo below) this weekend, because the cool nights have taken their toll on the heat-loving plants. It won't help that the forecast includes a dip down into the mid-thirties within the next few days.

Other plants due for removal this weekend include the last of the eggplants.

If all goes well, I'll get the garlic planted - it's time - but it's probably better if I don't absolutely count on getting that done.

At this point, most of my cool-weather crops are looking very promising. The broccoli will be big enough to harvest soon!

The extra-cold weather heading my way can only help.  There are enough of these in the garden this year to make several good meals-worth of the central heads.

If this winter is anything like last winter and we don't get any hard freezes (with temperatures down into the teens or below), we could get more meals from the little side-shoots, too.

Joe, though, is looking forward to the cabbage harvest. He LOVES sauerkraut, and last year he wasn't able to make enough from the cabbage that was available.

This year, we have a dozen of our own plants to add to any harvested from the little farm where we volunteer on the weekends.

He will have to wait a few more weeks for the cabbage, but the first heads should be ready by Thanksgiving. At our house, the best batches of sauerkraut are the ones that are made in cooler weather. I don't know if that is because the whole process procedes at a slower pace or if it's because the mix of bacteria/fungi in the air is different.

Regardless, we've figured out that he needs to make his sauerkraut in fall, rather than in spring, even though we can grow cabbages that mature in April.

We've been eating some of the lettuces and spinach (not pictured), too. I've fed some of the tiny lettuces - that were pulled to thin the bed - to my bunnies, but I'm planning for most of the lettuce to feed the humans in the house.

This year's carrot patch is looking like it could be the best I've ever planted in this yard. If I am really lucky, next year when it's time to plant the fall carrots I'll be able to decipher my notes about what I did with the soil to make this happen. It's always great to be able to replicate a success.

Weather reports are calling for some fairly stunning storms (can I use the plural form, when what's really supposed to happen is a collision/combination of two?) north and east of here. I'm hoping for the best possible outcome for everyone in the affected areas!

May your hatches be safely battened down, your larders and water-stores sufficient to meet the need, and everyone make it through un-injured.

Horehound Surprise

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 Carrots

My sister in Louisiana called a couple of weeks or so ago, laughing about her carrots. She had planted the seeds back in September when she was supposed to. Then, she had pulled a couple up in early December, and at the time the roots were still spindly and pale. After Christmas, she still couldn't see anything but green above-ground, but she pulled another one up, just to check.

It had definitely grown; in cross section, it was shaped just about like a wedge of pie. The carrot was three inches at its widest diameter and only seven inches in length. The shape is what made her laugh, but, as a bonus, the carrot was sweet, with good carrot flavor. The leaves smelled carrot-y, too, making the plant a complete carrot experience.

The other carrots she has harvested from her garden since then have all been similar.

When choosing the seeds, she bought whatever was available in bulk at a local store. The stores that carry bulk seed, for gardeners to measure out themselves, (usually a "feed & seed" store) typically carry seeds that will work well in their area, making it hard for a beginner to choose poorly.

The variety my sister's store happened to have was Danvers, which, according to Wikipedia

"has a conical shape, having well-defined shoulders and tapering to a point at the tip. They are somewhat shorter than Imperator cultivars, but more tolerant of heavy soil. Danvers cultivars are often puréed as baby food. They were developed in 1871 in Danvers, Ma."

My sister's yard definitely has heavy soil, but she built some raised beds to keep her plants up out of the worst of it.

She has been pulling the carrots "as needed" for meals, and they have all been tasty and not tough (the way root vegetables can get as they age).

She will plant them further apart next year, maybe six inches apart; she planted these about 4 inches apart which, for most carrots, would have been a fine spacing, but these carrots needed more room.

The carrots I grew in 2009, Little Finger and Jaune du Doubs, both did very well in spring, but fizzled in the fall, so I have ordered different fall carrots for 2010. If I were very smart, I would just buy a packet of Danvers, since they did so well for my sister, but I do not always do the smart thing.

Instead, I have ordered a packet of Oxheart, which should be shaped a lot like my sister's carrots and are advertised as doing well in the fall garden, and a packet of Nantes, which I have grown before with good success.

One potential problem with the Nantes variety is that some strains do better in spring and some in fall. I am not sure which category my packet belongs in, so they will be a bit of a gamble. However, I would likely lose more money gambling with actual cash in Vegas than in my yard with a packet of carrot seeds.