What's In Season Now?

Onion family crops to harvest in June.  Tulip to enjoy now.

I spoke with a guy last week who was looking for farm-fresh produce for a project at a local Senior Center. He was hoping for tomatoes and corn, and it was hard to get across the idea that those crops are not currently in season.

When we finally had that notion sorted, he asked about yellow squash. Let me just say now that the conversation went on in that vein for several minutes.

Onion-Family is Planted; Cold is on the Way

On the way home from work one day last week, I stopped at a garden center and picked up a little bag of onion sets -- dry, tiny bulbs -- and I was able to get about half of them into the ground last weekend.

The bed they were destined for also was planted with garlic, shallots, and multiplier onions. By the time I had all my saved bulbs in the ground, there wasn't room for all of the little onions in the space that had been set aside. I'm thinking, though, that when I pull out the last of the zombie pepper plants that still are holding onto some darkened, ragged leaves out in the garden, I will be able to plant the remainder of the little white bulbs in the newly emptied space.

An alternative is to plant them around the edges of a bed that will be covered with mulch for the winter, so that spring planting can be done without too much trouble in trying to not disturb their roots. Regardless of which option I choose, planting the rest of those little onions will have to wait for next weekend, which is expected to be quite cold.

All the more tender plants need to be either safely under cover or, if potted, indoors, because it's supposed to be pretty cold tonight, and a very cold snap is forecast for next week. This weekend we are looking at low temperatures in the mid-20s, but at least one day next week is expected to be down around 22 degrees F. For Georgia, in any month, that's cold.

I hope all the gardeners out there are keeping warm as they tend to their plants!

Finally, a Summer Harvest!

I have been bringing in green beans for a few days now, and this is not the first pepper, and the zucchini isn't quite full-sized, but today is the first day I could bring in more than one or two kinds of veggies from the garden in the same day.

In honor of the occasion, I have arranged it all in Grammy J's cut glass bowl (Grammy J was my mother's mother's mother -- my great grandmother). That is just how happy I am with the little harvest.

First real harvest of summer crops, 2013.            PHOTO/Amy W.

I brought in the regular bulbing onions today, too, but they need to dry a few days on the front porch before I trim and weigh them.

The 2013 harvest of bulb-type onions from my yard.        PHOTO/Amy W.

We've had crows in the yard over the past couple of weeks, which means that seedlings have been pulled up and tossed about. I've replanted some of the cucumbers (and melons, and butternut squash) more than once.

To protect the most recent batch, I cut the bottoms from small plastic cups then pushed the cups down around the seedlings as they emerged. This seems to have been enough protection; the smallest cucumber plants finally all have a couple of true leaves. This may be enough that they are no longer so attractive to crows.

At home and at the garden/farm where I volunteer, I have been pruning the tomato plants. If I can't stand up tomorrow, it's because I have been hunched over pruning leaves and suckers from about 150 tomato plants in the past couple of days. Here in the South, diseases are an ever-present threat to tomatoes. It can help if the plants are pruned up a bit.

I like to get them to the point that there are no leaves within about 18 inches of the ground, and I prune away leaves that are growing in toward the center of the plant, to create a cone of air-space in the center. This takes several weeks of work as the plants grow, but the improved airflow can help keep the remaining foliage drier and less susceptible to the most common airborne fungal diseases.

Hope all the other gardens out there are growing well!

Crazy Busy Planting Weekend -- and I'm Still Not Done

No pictures yet, but I was able to get most of the rest of the garden planted in summer crops over the long weekend.

On Saturday morning, before working on our own yard, we went out to the farm on Dallas Highway where we usually volunteer, and we weeded (a lot) and planted a couple dozen tomato plants and a couple dozen pepper plants in some of the raised beds.

Then, just when we thought we were leaving for the day, our farmer friend (Charles) said, "when you come back after lunch you can plant the rest of the tomatoes down in the field." So we went back after lunch, and with the help of one other guy we planted two 150 foot rows of tomato plants. In other words, we started the planting-weekend with a bang.

I didn't really start on my own yard until the next day, because I was kind of wiped out after that, but  planting in my yard included:

Half of the sweet potatoes (Beauregard, Purple Delight), the parching corn (Supai Red), this year's round of the melon de-hybridization project (Amy's Kennesaw Sweet Canary), a few of the "dwarf" butternut squash that I planted last year, watermelon (Luscious Golden), cucumbers (Burpee's Picklebush, Straight Nine) to replace ones that didn't come up when they were planted before, one more tomato plant, and some flower seeds. I also started some flower seeds in Jiffy Pellets, because I will need a lot more flowers for our bees.

After the corn is up and  looking good, I plan to plant peanuts in the spaces between. I still have some sweet potato slips to plant (Nancy Hall, Porto Rican Gold), and I'm expecting to harvest the onions and garlic within the next two or three weeks, which means I'll be planting the Tarahumara Popping Sorghum soon, too. When the shallots come out, I'll be planting more zucchini in their space.

Joe and I also worked on the "foundation planting" area that had been destroyed last summer when the tree smashed the house. The soil there was VERY compacted clay; breaking that up and mixing in the compost and other amendments required some seriously hard work. At the sunnier end of that bed we planted the bay tree that has been growing in a pot for the past few years, three perennial, purple-flowered Salvia, and a couple of Coronation Gold Yarrow.

The hard work will all be rewarded later in the summer, when the flowers are beautiful and we are enjoying the harvest, but right now I am a mass of sore muscles. Of course, I am also very happy to have accomplished so much.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

The Seeds of Spring are Planted in the Dining Room

In the best of all possible worlds, I would have a cute little heated greenhouse that I could start seeds in for my early spring/summer vegetable crops; instead, I have a big glass door and some fluorescent lights in the dining room. The good news is my current set-up, though somewhat limited in terms of space, works just fine.

Mid-Feb. is a little early for starting most of my seeds, but I am scheduled to give a presentation on seed starting on Feb. 19, and I want to have little plants up and growing for "show & tell."  By then, it will no longer be absurdly early, and the people who sign up and start seeds with me at the talk will be all set for some successful growing.

My seedlings that are coming up now, on the other hand, are at risk of spending too long indoors and getting too lanky as a result. I might need to go find another light or two to help brighten my plant-babies' lives and keep them stockier.

There will be some planting outdoors soon, too. I'll be planting onion sets as soon as I can find them, and even though it's a bit early still for peas, we are getting close. I usually judge the readiness of the soil by when the trout lilies bloom in my yard. I'm not seeing flowers yet, but the speckled leaves are coming up by the back fence.

Here in Cobb County, we have until about mid-March to get seed potatoes in the ground, but I have already dumped a load of compost on the spot where those will go this year. In the past, when I've had a chance to visit my Mom in Oklahoma in late winter, I've bought my seed potatoes at the little grocery store down the street from her house. They typically cost about 50-69 cents a pound, and they work just fine.

Since I haven't been able to visit recently, Mom went to get some for me and put them in the mail. She picked up some Red Pontiac, White Cobbler (my favorite), and Kennebec.When those arrive, I'll cut them into egg-sized chunks, each with a couple of eyes, and set them in a warm place to get them growing before they are planted out. The warm place will be (you guessed it!) the dining room.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

It's hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."

An "Alliums" Harvest

I harvested most of the regular onions, multiplying onions, and garlic -- plants that are all in the Allium genus -- over the weekend. The job was an aromatic one! I am lucky that the house has a shaded front porch; I can leave them all outside on trays to dry for a while.

There aren't as many onions as usual this year, because I had given more room to the garlic. They came out pretty well, though, and we will be eating these for a couple of months.



I had also planted some little bulbs from the multiplying onions (sometimes called "potato onions" though I don't know why), and these made more little onions. Every year I debate whether to replant these -- using the little onions in the kitchen is a bit of a hassle -- but every year I plant a few that I have saved from the summer's harvest. Even though they are a hassle, they are free!



The tray in the center of the photo below holds the harvest from some grocery store garlic that I had planted. Originally, this is all I had planned to plant, and it would be enough to last until about Thanksgiving. The bulbs need to dry for several weeks before use, to let the skins dry enough to easily peel away from the cloves, so it really represents about four month's worth for my family.

Then, a friend wanted to try some different garlics, but her garden space is even more limited than mine, so we agreed to split a "starter pack" of different garlics.

The tray on the left holds the variety Inchelium Red; the tray on the right holds the Polish White. I didn't have as many little cloves of the Polish White as the other kinds, so I didn't expect to have as much of a harvest from that variety, but it is interesting that the bulbs are so much smaller than for the other varieties. This is something to remember for my yard!



The bulbs that I harvested are all soft-neck varieties of garlic. There are also some hard-neck garlics out in the garden, the variety Chesnock Red and the one heirloom bulb from Rabun County, Ga. The leaves on these are still green, rather than the shades of tan and brown that the other garlics had all been turning, so I left them to mature a while longer.



The hard-neck varieties form scapes, which are the parts that usually flower and set seed. In the picture above, they are the curved bits at the top. I have read that these are edible, and I decided to find out for myself just how edible they were. I trimmed off the scapes to saute in olive oil to serve on pasta with peas and grated parmesan cheese. The scapes made the olive oil nicely garlicky, and the bulbous ends of the scapes, the part where the flowers were forming inside, were good to eat, but the long pointy ends were tough.

When you have a garden, every day is an adventure!