A Tale of Two Kales

Actually, I told part of the story in the previous post. My curly kale made it though our drop to Very Cold Temperatures undamaged, but the Red Russian ended up with some bleaching on the older leaves. There is more to know, though, about these two crops.

The purple-stemmed Red Russian, according to my seed catalogs (which I finally have had a chance to look through!), should grow to be fairly large, 18-30 inches in height, but I haven't seen it get bigger than the lower end of that range so far. However, we may be eating it faster than it can grow! Most of the catalogs seem to indicate that this kale is more cold-hardy than it turned out to be in my North Georgia garden.

The other kale that I grew this year is the Vates dwarf blue curled. If I had realized how truly dwarf it would be, I would have spaced the plants closer together. I'm ordering seeds for a larger curled kale to grow next, because I want bigger leaves.

Both of these kale varieties taste good to me, but they are definitely different. Leaves of the Red Russian are MUCH more tender and taste sweeter to me. The Vates dwarf curled has tougher leaves; for salad, I chop them very small and let them stand in the dressing for a couple of hours before attempting to eat the them.

Even though they are dwarf, the curliness means that there is more actual leaf for their size than for the Red Russian, so it takes fewer leaves to fill my salad bowl. Mixing the two kinds of kale in one salad, though, makes it lovely to behold and even better to eat.

For both, even though many gardeners say that kale tastes the same when grown right through the summer, the catalogs agree that kale tastes better when grown in cold weather. The cold prompts the plant to store more sugars in the leaves as protection against freezing (sugar-water freezes at a lower temperature than plain water).

I talked with a friend today, though, who really doesn't like kale, even when it is winter-grown. Since she is an outgoing person who hangs out with gardeners and since kale is so very popular right now, she is faced with many-a bowl full of kale, prepared one way or another.

She is a good sport and eats the kale even when she'd rather not, but for other gardeners, the ease of growing such a nutritious, mild-flavored vegetable that stands in the garden through the winter makes it easy to include some in the winter garden. The only question for those gardeners will be which one, or several, to grow.

After the Big Freeze...

It's been well over a week since the Big Freeze (when the temperature dropped to around 12 degrees F), but I only just today worked up the nerve to look under the covers in my garden, to check on the broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. The results of my efforts to protect my crops were mixed.

In the good news category, the unharvested broccoli under the heaviest cover looks amazingly good. I am hoping that growth will continue and I'll be able to harvest heads that are larger than 2 inches diameter (the size they are now). The cabbages under the thinner cover also look good, but under both weights of covers all the cauliflower -- the least hardy of the group -- have died. The few remaining broccoli under the thinner cover didn't completely die, but the flowering heads that I had been hoping to eat were damaged beyond saving.

For the plants left uncovered by anything but hope, outcomes also were mixed. Some outer leaves of the collards and red kale were bleached by the cold, but those bleached leaves are not wilted, and the newer, inner leaves look fine. The curly kale and the carrots appear to be completely undamaged. The spinach looks fine, the parsley and cilantro have some limp-looking leaves among the healthier ones, but all the leaves on all the radishes and beets have turned mushy.

I pulled up the dead plants, but beyond that I haven't done any real work in the garden today, because we have taken this three-day weekend to rearrange the garage.  All of my physical work has been given over to shifting shelves, boxes, tools, the rabbits and their enclosures, bins of toys and household stuff, and more, to make a working space for Joe to build a boat.

We have been in this house for a long time, and the garage had been full of the accumulated stuff of life in the suburbs while raising two boys, so thinning out and rearranging has been a big job. Finishing the job will take more than one long weekend, really, but while Joe is working out which of his final two choices of boat to build, we are busy making room for the project.

Otherwise, my big task for the weekend has been to order some seed potatoes. Last year I was unable to find any Irish Cobbler potatoes for planting, so this year I made sure to order them early.

Southern Vegetables

There's a reason Bob Wills' song "That's What I Like About the South" includes turnip greens, black eyed peas, candied yams, buttered beans, and corn bread. The basis for each of those foods grows reliably and well here. The cool-weather vegetable in that list, turnip greens, is almost a fool-proof crop. However, there are plenty of crops that are less reliable producers in Southern gardens.

In years like this one, when my broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbages all are slow to head up, I remind myself that such Northern vegetables can't be expected to do consistently well in the South. Some years the garden produces big, full heads of all of those by Thanksgiving. This year, the heads on most of those plants aren't even close to what I consider a good size. If we get a hard freeze any time soon, I probably will be bringing in a lot of ridiculously small vegetables.

Many of the carrots aren't full sized yet, either, but those will continue to grow slowly underground through all kinds of weather.  It may be March before I pull the last one, but eventually those all will be brought into the kitchen.

Luckily, this year I planted plenty of kale and collard greens and a few bok choy. Greens don't seem to be delayed the way the heading vegetables are by an early hard freeze that's followed by weeks of warmer weather.

Even better, we haven't had a hard enough freeze to turn the winter radishes to mush yet, either, so we still are enjoying those, thinly sliced then salted.

To celebrate the South and its vegetables here on the last day of the year:

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!

What Can I Plant Now?

Gardeners have been calling the Extension office, from the beginning of January, wanting to know what they can plant NOW. Even when the ground was frozen and the forecast was for a drop down around 10 degrees F, the lengthening days, like a siren song that they couldn't tune out, made them pick up the phone, call, and ask. Luckily, they ended up speaking with me, another gardener gone deaf to nearly all except the need to begin the new year of planting.

For those who can't wait, I've assembled a couple of timetables. The first one is pulled from UGA's Vegetable Planting Chart. The dates on the original chart are for "middle Georgia" (somewhere around Macon); I've shifted the dates by a couple of weeks to reflect our later warming here in Cobb County.

Crop	UGA planting dates
Asparagus	Feb 1- April 1
Beets	Mar 1 – Apr 15
Broccoli	Mar 1 – Apr 1
Cabbage	Mar 1 – Apr 1
Carrot	Feb 1 – Apr 5
Cauliflower	Mar 15 - Apr 15
Collards	Feb 15 – Apr 1
Kale	Feb 15 – Mar 25
Lettuce	Feb 1 – Mar 15
Onions, green	Jan 15 – Apr 1
Onions, dry bulb	Jan 15 – Apr 1
Peas, garden	Feb 1 – Mar 1
Peas, edible pod	Feb 1 – Mar 1
Potatoes, Irish	Feb 1 – Mar 15
Radish	Feb 1 – Apr 15
Spinach	Feb 1- April 1
Turnip	Feb 1 – Apr 15

The second timetable, though not actually in table form, is from John Jeavons' book "How to Grow MoreVegetables ..."

6-8 weeks before last frost ( Feb 15 - March 1), start in flats:

broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, parsley, tomatoes

5 weeks before last frost (Mar 1- 15), start in flats:

carrot, beets

bump up the lettuce seedlings to larger containers

4 weeks before last frost (5-20 March):

sprout/chit potatoes

bump up the parsley

3 weeks before last frost (15-30 March), start in flats:

peas, spinach

bump up seedlings for broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower

2 weeks before last frost (25 Mar – 1 Apr), start in flats:

dill, eggplants, peppers

transplant to garden:

broccoli, Brussels sprouts, peas, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, beets, lettuce, spinach

plant garlic, onions, radishes

A careful reader might notice that the two timetables don't exactly match. This means that a gardener will need to experiment a little and choose for him or herself the best planting times.

One of the helpful features of the Jeavons' timetable is that it includes times for bumping up and transplanting seedlings, very useful information for those of us who DIY our garden transplants. One of the hilarious features is the inclusion of carrots as a crop to transplant. I've tried it --- it's possible -- but the carrots come out all bent and mangled.

Also, I usually bump up my tomatoes - and start my peppers - much earlier than indicated in his timetable. (He bumps up tomatoes - from the flat to pots - on the last frost date, which I count as about April 12-15.)

For my yard, parts of the UGA timetable seem a little early, but my yard is in a hole and stays cooler longer than much of the rest of the county. Other parts of the UGA schedule seem late. For example,  I can't imagine planting collard greens as late as April 1!

For peas, I use an indicator plant; I plant peas when the trout lilies are blooming in my yard. The leaves of those native wildflowers aren't even poking up above the soil yet, so this year the peas may get planted a little later than normal. Irish potatoes usually get planted in my yard in mid-March, and my onions and garlic get planted in late October or early November.

Based on both timetables, and all the possible timetables gleaned from other, local gardeners, there is plenty to start working with in terms of spring planting, beginning now. I hope the information is helpful!

 

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!

Garden Plans and Events

After my very eventful December, it has taken some time for the pattern of my days to seem familiar again. I realized this afternoon, though, while hoeing out a few weeds and spreading more mulch in the onion/shallot/garlic bed, that everything feels just about normal. Parts of the garden even LOOK normal, in spite of the drop to 5 degrees Fahrenheit a week or so back.

The onions, garlic, and shallots mostly are vibrantly green, firm and growing. Nearly every other crop above ground has gone to mush  - even the chickweed that I feed to my bunnies! Underground crops, the carrots and winter radishes, seem to have survived the unusual cold pretty well. Only some individual plants that poked up out of the ground were affected.

At the little farm where we volunteer, the winter greens all look very damaged, except for the spinach. That bit of information is probably worth remembering, for future winter gardens.

Tomorrow I'll be working more in the yard. My compost pile is stacked pretty high with nearly-finished compost that I plan to move onto one of my garden beds, rather than risk letting the nutrients wash out across the back yard. I'd rather have them soaking into my garden! I hope to spend some time planning what to grow where, too.

My last, most favorite seed catalog finally arrived, which means I can place a seed order for my garden whenever I've completed the plan. I'll also be ordering seeds for a Seed Starting class that I'll be giving in February. Those seeds will all be UGA-recommended varieties, some of which are heirloom. I'm planning to order from a source that sells untreated seeds, so that organic gardeners won't have to worry about accidentally introducing unknown fungicides or systemic pesticides into their gardens.

The first class I am planning for this year, though, is a Planning for Seed Saving class. It's scheduled for the 28th at the Extension office, and I'll have some seeds to share at that class, too, in honor of National Seed Swap Day, which falls each year on the last Saturday in January (this year it's on the 25th).

I always enjoy meeting more gardeners, so I am really looking forward to both of these classes!

What Gardeners Think About in Winter

Just to start, two more seed catalogs arrived at my house this week: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. This means that the planning part of the gardening year is here. I will hazard a guess that I am not the only gardener who already has begun thinking forward to the next round of planting.

This means thinking about which varieties to grow for each vegetable, about how much space to give to each crop, about the best-yet-cheapest ways to add organic matter to the soil, about the crop rotation sequence, about planning for seed saving, about seed starting and whether the fluorescent fixture needs a new bulb. Really, there is just no end to the garden thinking that goes on in winter.

There also, here in the South, are vegetables still in the yard to harvest and eat. In my yard, I have carrots, winter radishes, broccoli, and cabbage that are at a good stage for eating, and there are vegetables that didn't make it to maturity before the cold set in for me to watch and keep weeded, so they can return to growing as the soil begins to warm again in March. This all takes some thinking, too.

And if, like me, you have a parallel life as a spouse, a parent and a person who has a full-time job, all that thinking has to fit in the spaces between the rest of it. In my own life, the "spaces between" have shrunk down to just cracks for the moment -- next week, my youngest son graduates from college, and in three weeks my oldest son is getting married (THREE WEEKS!!!)--- but that doesn't seem to stop my brain from turning toward the garden.

What Survived the Dip into the mid-20s

We had a couple of especially cold (for November) nights last week, and the garden showed it. The leaves of the pepper plants all wilted, the remaining summer annual flowers (marigolds, salvias, cleome) turned to mush, and even the last of the spring-type radishes fared poorly.

In the good news category, the winter radishes are still standing, as are the carrots. The cabbages and broccoli look good, even though they looked very sad on the coldest mornings. All the leaves fell off the Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmon, but the big orange fruits are still there, even a couple that have been half-eaten by my aerialist chipmunks.

The very small lettuces and assorted greens that have all struggled to get beyond the "delicious to chipmunks and wild rabbits" stage, also are still vibrantly green. In my dreams, they reach mature size before we get much colder weather.

A couple of stray potato plants had come up from tubers that were missed in the early summer harvest, and the tops of those collapsed in the cold. The good news is that we dug up another pound or so of red potatoes from underneath those wilted tops.

Essentially, last week brought an end to the remaining the summer crops that had been barely hanging on.

At the County Extension Office, we are still getting calls from people who want to know what vegetables they can plant now (gardeners rarely give up, and they aren't deterred by a little frost!). There is still time to put in some garlic and onions, but that's about it. However, this is a good time to start thinking about some winter-sown vegetables.

UGA Cooperative Extension's Vegetable Planting Chart (planting dates for middle Georgia need to be adjusted for Cobb County by 10-14 days) shows traditional planting dates for the most commonly planted garden crops. Alabama Cooperative Extension's Planting Guide for Home Gardening in Alabama offers dates that are similar to those in UGA's publication.

Other than the onion group, neither of these publications lists any crop that can be planted (with the hope of successful harvest) this late in Cobb County. Even the most cold-hardy vegetables are fairly tender when they are very young, and,  at this point, the odds are pretty small of any vegetable growing to a tougher stage before another killing frost occurs.

However, Colorado State's Extension publication Winter Gardening: Planting Vegetables in Early Winter for an Early Spring Crop tells about planting seeds in the ground in late winter, much sooner after the New Year  than many people might usually consider planting. In this publication, author Curtis Swift offers, along with some basic instructions, this list of cool season vegetables that can be winter-sown:

• lettuce
• peas
• spinach
• broccoli
• Brussel sprouts
• carrots
• radish
• cauliflower

A website called (not too surprisingly) Wintersown offers a step-by-step guide to an outdoor container-option for sowing seeds in winter.

For the many gardeners who like to keep things moving in the garden, winter-sown crops might provide a nice outlet for that pent-up planting energy.

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!

Indoor Blueberry Babies

It's taken awhile, but a couple of the blueberry seeds that I planted in November have sprouted. If all goes well, several more will come up in the next few weeks. However, if this is all I get, I can't really complain.

The seeds were from berries that had been in the freezer, from the rabbiteye blueberry bushes in the front yard. When the house was smashed by the tree this past summer, the berries probably experienced more freeze/thaw cycles than were good for the seeds' eventual ability to germinate.

The baby plants are super-tiny, with stems thinner than sewing thread and cotyledons sized to match. For the rest of the winter, these will grow fairly slowly, and I will be keeping them under flourescent lights, repotting as necessary, until the weather moderates enough that they can go outside. Then, as many as there are will go into a "nursery bed" outside until they are big enough to pot up for sharing. One of the great things about gardening is that I get to see everyday miracles like the one of  such tiny plants growing to become full-sized bushes!

To separate the seeds from the blueberry pulp, I followed instructions from University of Maine's Cooperative Extension, which has published a very useful "how to" called "Growing Blueberries from Seed." 

I started these seeds as part of my "eHow" adventure. This is the video about how to plant the seeds:

Since the winter garden is slowing down, and the weather has turned decidedly colder, I am very happy to have some new plants to tend indoors.

I hope that everyone else's winter-garden adventures are going well!

One (Almost) Tidied Garden Bed

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.