Spring Gardening "Crunch Time" Approaches

First, let me say that, if this page looks unfamiliar, it's because I have been goofing around with the blog templates. For those who aren't currently using blogger, it might help to know that a whole lot of new options have been added sort-of-recently, and I am finally getting around to looking at them. Right now, this page looks too plain to me, but in a few days I will probably have made more changes.

Back to the blog ...

In my own yard, I have begun to work my way through the usual springtime planting; it's just all been moved up a few weeks. A patch of bush beans (Provider) is in, as is a patch of zucchini (Raven). I've also planted a few nasturtium seeds and the salad cucumbers (Straight Nine) but everything else is still in the queue.

The spring crops are coming along fairly well, but I am a little anxious about the warm weather. Will I have any lettuce worth eating? We'll see. Right now, the earliest lettuces and spinach are a few inches high, the peas are developing flower-buds, the winter-planted onions are far enough along that I've pulled a few to use as green onions, the actual green onions that I planted a few weeks back for use later in the summer are seedling-threads that don't look sturdy enough to stand on their own (and yet, they do!), and the dwarf runner beans that I plant a few of for their pretty red flowers, rather than their food value -- they don't set many beans in the Georgia heat -- have poked their first couple of leaves out of the ground.

So far, so good.

Out at the garden/farm where I volunteer on Saturdays, my little family has planted a bed of beans (white mountain half runners) and a bed of squash (yellow straight neck). This represents a very small amount of the planting that needs to get done there, though, and the pace of planting is about to accelerate. The two main gardeners there are planning a big three-to-four day planting bonanza just before Easter. They've been checking the forecast for temperature and rain, and have decided to just get everything into the ground then, pretty much all at once. It is likely that my family will plant another bed or two in advance of the planting bonanza, but the big fields that represent most of the planting space will be planted using bigger equipment (assorted tractors) than will work in the raised beds.

Out at the space where the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) project is moving to, things are moving more slowly:

The field isn't really in black and white, that's just the way the camera was set and I couldn't figure out how to change it back to color, but the space is still a grassy field.

To be honest, even though in some ways it would be nice to get started now on this garden, too, I'm a little bit glad that it is running behind. Working on the other two gardens - my own plus the one out on Dallas Highway - is getting my gardening muscles back in shape for all the work that will need to be done at the PAR garden!

The people who are planning the site (there is more to it than just our own little garden) are making a great deal of progress on sorting out the order-of-events and how it's all going to be funded, so I am not especially concerned that the site isn't ready for us yet.

Our group of PAR gardeners has made progress, too, on pulling together the things that we'll need. I've ordered our sweet potato slips (200!) from a guy in Alabama, and we have the seeds and bean inoculant that we'll need, and I've bought the cottonseed meal and Sul-Po-Mag that we'll use as our organic fertilizer.

A couple of people have been working on finding a whole lot of compost, and they've identified a source of mushroom compost that's not too expensive.

In addition, the Junior Master Gardener group at a local elementary school is helping to start our tomatoes and peppers! Their leader is a member of our PAR group, and she grows those transplants for us each year. When we finally are able to start delivering food to the pantry, it will truly have been a community-wide effort.

When we do get started, we will have a lot to do in a very short time. As one of our gardeners put it, it will be "crunch time!"

We expect to measure out the beds (we plan to use wide rows), dump compost on each bed, spread the fertilizer for each bed, and mix that all together with a tiller in one day, which is why I'm hoping my gardening muscles are in good shape by then.

We meet just once each week, so the next week will involve a lot of planting, and we'll also need to get mulch onto the paths pretty quickly. After everything is in, there will be less hard, physical work each week, but the first few weeks will be doozies.

Uneasy Spring

Dogwoods, azaleas, all sorts of little ephemeral spring things that grow on the forest floor - it's all in bloom, or even past bloom. The ground is warm enough that morels have been popping up, and at my friend's garden/farm out on Dallas Highway, the Colorado potato beetles are already out. Last year, the potato beetles didn't make their appearance until late April.

All of the unusually early activity is enough to make any gardener or farmer uneasy. If this is the end of winter, what will summer look like? And of course, there is the problem that a reversion to normal weather, with the chance of temperatures back into the mid- to low 20s, could damage the fruit that's beginning to form on trees and bushes in yards and orchards all around. Losing the early crop of figs wouldn't be too horrible - our fig tree sets another crop later in the spring - but most of the other fruits in my yard bloom and set one crop of fruit each year (Heritage raspberries, an exception, make an additional small crop in late summer). I'd rather not lose the blueberries, blackberries, black raspberries, and plums.

As the weather continues to be strange, I find myself making contingency plans for a "bad" gardening year. Grandpa Bill, gardening last year in Oklahoma's 60-plus days of above-100-degree weather, didn't really get a tomato crop. He got peppers, but he had rigged a shade over each plant to help protect the fruits from sun-scald. I am going to keep that strategy in mind - I have some tulle that I use over plants as a barrier to insect pests, but the same fabric could be used as a shade-cloth to lessen the sun's intensity over sensitive plants.

I usually start a few tomato plants in early April to plant out at the end of June, and I will definitely do that again this year, as insurance against a horrible July and August, and if we get a freeze that damages our main fruits, I'll make a big space in the garden for ground cherries, a tomato-relative that I usually grow just a few plants of. That would ease the pain of losing most of the fruit.

I'm thinking about putting in a patch of bush beans soon, too, and I wouldn't normally plant those for four more weeks. If a freeze kills the whole patch, I won't have lost much in the way of resources and time. I can just replant the 20-or-so square feet at the end of April, like usual. If we are past the last freeze, though, it will be good to have already made a start. Since the potato beetles are out and on the prowl, it's likely that other pests - and diseases - also will have made an early start. I'd like to stay ahead of them, as much as possible.

Gardeners have to be flexible - the weather is never exactly normal, but this spring is further from normal than any I've yet seen.  It will be interesting to see how this all turns out.

First Morel of the Season!

Zack found this 5-inch high morel while he was out walking the coonhound. It was near the east side of the house, by the azaleas:

It was delicious!

I am sure I am not the only one to notice that this is unusually early for morels, but, in most of the US, it's early for just about everything. When I was out walking the other dog this evening, I could smell the sweet shrub, like freshly sliced apples, already in bloom. The trilliums are up and opening their flowers; the May apples are up; it's all just very strange.

In the good news category, though, are my happy seedlings. I transferred the tomato babies into a divided tray, and they seem to be adjusting well.

Out in the garden, the lettuce babies (variety Capitan) have come up and are making their first true leaves. This section, pretty obviously, will need to be thinned soon.

I planted another section this morning, to mature a little later than these. Today's planting was of a variety that's new to me, called Kagran Sommer. It's supposed to hold up well in warm weather. I think this year might be a tough test for it!

I planted some radishes (variety Hailstone, also new to me) near the new lettuces. Other outside chores were done, including potting up some herbs for the Master Gardener plant sale in May. It was a busy day!

Planning for Salad

While I mostly think of lettuces when I think of salad, there is a salad that we eat in the summer that uses no lettuce at all. It contains either tomatoes, a lot of parsley, a little mint, bulgur wheat, lemon juice and olive oil (it's a simple version of tabouleh), or it leaves out the mint and bulgur wheat and adds in a lot of finely diced cucumber and some finely diced onion.

I grow the primary ingredients (except for the bulgur wheat) for both salads. In the seed tray right now, the tomato and parsley seedlings are up and looking great. The mint overwinters in the yard, and the onions have been growing for awhile already and will be harvested over many weeks - starting with slender green onions in April and ending with "keepers" that will last, I hope, through much of the summer salad season. I'll plant the cucumbers directly into the garden in mid-April.

Both versions of the salad rely on the lemon juice and olive oil for a lot of their flavor. I'm pretty sure that growing our own olives to press for oil would be more trouble than it's worth, especially since I'd probably have to put up a greenhouse to keep the little trees alive, but lemons are a different story.

I don't have a lemon tree, but my Louisiana sister does, and she just sent me four lemons that weigh about one pound apiece. They contained a lot of lemon juice that is in my freezer right now, setting up in ice cube trays. When the lemon cubes are completely frozen, they'll be dumped into a freezer bag, to await their use in summer salads.

Some years, I have bought organic lemons at this time of year (when they are cheapest!) to squeeze and freeze, but it is exponentially nicer to have lemons from a sister. I hope other gardeners' summer salads are coming along as nicely!

Busy Times

Even though it isn't quite spring, there has been plenty of garden-related activity in my life recently. Last Saturday, my friend Susan and I gave an "intro to veggie gardening" talk at Smith Gilbert Garden, and the Wednesday before that, my Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden group had a planning meeting. Here at home, a tray of plant babies is looking happily green under some fluorescent lights; out in the garden the peas are poking up through the soil, and the little pale green cotyledons of some lettuces and the strappy, darker cotyledons of the spinach also are visible.

Saturday's talk seemed to go well. A wonderfully large group of gardeners, both new and experienced, showed up, and they had great questions and comments. I know I say this a lot, but it is soooo great to be in a room full of people who are interested in growing food!

One gardener (thank you Cathy!) shared her method of keeping track of varieties that do well in her yard: In the garden, she marks the varieties with the little plastic labels that come with them at the store, and if the variety does well, she stores the label in a plastic bin that she can refer to the next spring. It turns out that she hasn't ever been able to manage the pencil and paper kind of record keeping for her garden, and this has worked for her. She also stores photos of the garden, labeled with the date on the back, in the same bin as a way of keeping track of what was planted where, to help in planning the crop rotation for following years. For other gardeners with the same pencil-and-paper problem, and whose gardens are small, this could be a useful idea.

At the PAR meeting, we talked some about design and management of our new space. Our old space at Smith Gilbert Garden had been shaped like a short, squat ice-cream cone, with a big circular dome on two straight sides that met at right angles. We let that dome/circle design guide the layout of the crops - dividing the space into wedges like a pie. Sounds weird, possibly, but the garden was beautiful. However, we occasionally ended up with some very short rows that seemed a little inefficient. Looking at the garden, the trade-off was totally worthwhile, but the new garden at the Fountain Gate Counseling Center is a different shape.

Our new space is a giant rectangle, so we are going to return to the wide rows (link downloads a 2.8 mb pdf) that were used when the PAR garden was at its first space, on county property in Marietta. The wide rows have their own limitations and benefits, but they are a good choice for the size and shape of the available space. We also are going to use companion planting (eg: marigolds with the tomatoes) and cover crops more consistently. I'm looking forward to getting started!

I'm also working on some short talks/demonstrations to give at the new community gardens that are sprouting up in Cobb County. I have one for working with transplants (handling the plant babies, depth of planting, spacing, use of a "starter" fertilizer solution) and one about succession planting for the year-round raised-bed garden, but I want to develop a whole series. If anyone has suggestions for useful topics, let me know?

Today, it is supposed to be 70 degrees and mostly sunny here in Kennesaw. I expect to do some work in the yard. Hope everyone else has beautiful weather to enjoy!

Keeping Track of the Harvest: Jan. and Feb.

I have been moderately successful in keeping track of what we've brought in from the garden so far this year. My scale is easier to read in kilograms than in pounds, so that's what I've recorded.

The weights don't include smaller harvests, like a few kale or chard leaves brought in to stir into the white bean soup or to put on pizza, and the weights of the herbs (which are also tiny) aren't recorded, but when there was enough of something that the scale read more than 0.1 kg, I wrote it down:

January
Cauliflower .50
Lettuce .20
Broccoli .35
Radish, winter .40
Swiss chard .20
Collard greens .50
cilantro
oregano
thyme
rosemary
dill
February
Swiss chard .15
Radish, winter .95
Lettuce .15
Broccoli .55
Parsnips 1.50
Onions, green .45
Chicory .50
Beet greens .30
Carrots .25
cilantro
oregano

Using a kilograms-to-pounds converter that's available online, I converted the weights to the more familiar pounds and ounces.

Jan. total 2.10 kg = 4 pounds, 10 ounces
Feb. total 4.85 kg = 10 pounds, 11 ounces
2012 running total: Jan. + Feb. = 15 pounds, 5 ounces

That's not a spectacular start to the gardening year, but it's hard to complain. The cool weather veggies require so little tending that counting their weight in the year's total feels almost like cheating. Getting to the summer harvest takes a lot more work - more weeding, more watering, more replenishing mulch.

Summer Begins in February

Even though it's been a warm winter, it hasn't been exactly summer-like, and even though I've been enjoying the vegetables of winter, I have been hankering after some fresh summertime veggies. The good and the bad news is that a lot of summertime veggies need to get their start long before summer. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, in particular, have a long time-to-maturity, which means their seeds need to be planted indoors now, or even a week or two ago.

I had thought about starting some seeds earlier, but last week I was in Oklahoma with my Mom, who was recovering from hip-replacement surgery. I didn't want to leave just-germinated seedlings for my family to tend, since they would have plenty of other things to manage while I was away, so I waited.

Happily, not only is Mom doing very well, but yesterday afternoon I filled most of a tray of those "Jiffy" peat-pellets with seeds. Part of the tray is yet-to-be-filled, because the seeds I've ordered aren't here yet, but most of the tomato and pepper seeds for this year are in the tray, as are the eggplant, parsley, marjoram, basil, and a pink Salvia. It feels great to have made a start on the summer garden!

I also planted (in the ground) some seed-potatoes yesterday. There is a short row of Red Pontiac and a short row of White Cobbler. At the end of the potato area I planted some spinach seeds (Tyee), and along one side of the trellis I planted a row of lettuces (Capitan). The seeds were leftovers from previous years, but I found the seed potatoes at Mom's neighborhood grocery store in Choctaw, Oklahoma. The seed potatoes, which were 59 cents a pound, were in a bin in the produce department, along with several varieties of onion sets.

The weather isn't spectacularly warm, but the high temperature yesterday, and forecast again for today, is the mid-50s. That's plenty warm for doing some serious work in the yard. I expect to spend much of this afternoon outside. Hope everyone else is having a beautiful weekend!

Thinking about Soil

On Wednesday morning I gave a little talk about building soil fertility using organic gardening methods. I was pretty surprised by the large turnout, but one feature of the talk was a demonstration of converting a recommendation for inorganic fertilizers (like 10 pounds 10-10-10 per 1000 sq ft, plus 15 pounds 15-0-15 per 1000 sq ft) from a UGA Soil Test Report to organic fertilizer ingredients. It turns out that a lot of people were interested in seeing someone put this math into action.

The Georgia Extension Service offers a handout on this conversion, so the demonstration wasn't anything I had to work especially hard to put together. The hardest part is choosing the ingredients to use in the conversion, since the list of possible sources is quite large, and some of them aren't widely available.

It turns out that the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden this year is going to need about 50 pounds of cottonseed meal per 1000 sq ft and 10.2 pounds of Sul-Po-Mag per 1000 sq ft to meet the requirements of "medium feeders," which describes most garden crops. "Heavy feeders" like tomatoes will need an extra (full) dose partway through the summer, and "light feeders" - mostly legumes - will need half as much as the other crops.

If building soil fertility were as easy as dumping in a few bags of amendments, though, we would all have perfect gardens! Unfortunately, to get really root-friendly soil, a little more is involved.

The biggest hurdle is working in enough organic matter that - in heavy clay soils - the clay particles are held apart so roots can grow and water can move freely through the soil, and that -in sandy soils - the big sand particles are held together enough that the water doesn't run right through and leave the roots in a desert after a few hours in the sun. The organic matter helps hold nutrients, helps maintain more even moisture levels, and it also contributes nutrients - especially the micronutrients that are missing in most bags of 10-10-10.

Getting more organic matter into heavy clay soils and into sandy soils is easy to manage in small gardens. A few bags of Nature's Helper (or similar organic amendment) and a couple of loads of compost from a pile in the backyard, with the addition of some mulch to keep the weeds down, is just about enough.

For larger gardens, getting enough organic matter into the dirt is more problematic. It is possible to buy soil amendments by the truckload, but that can be expensive. I, for one, would not like to be able to commiserate with the guy who wrote that "$64 tomato" book!

For people who can't really buy enough organic matter to dig into their soil, there are cover crops, also known as green manures. I grow one of these, hairy vetch, most winters in at least one of my garden beds. At the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, we have grown Austrian Winter Peas for this purpose. And the guy who wrote The Joy of Gardening, Dick Raymond, plants his dwarf peas and bush beans in blocks, then turns the plants back into the soil after they've produced, giving them a dual purpose.

One of the great things about cover crops is that they conserve nutrients by tying them up in the actual plants. It's hard to for nutrients to wash away when they are firmly rooted to the ground! If the crop is a legume, in the bean and pea family, there is the bonus of ending up with more nitrogen in the soil than was there originally.

We found, at the plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, that we weren't really able to add enough organic matter as mulch (we used leaves that had been saved from the fall) to keep the soil in good condition. Over time, productivity of the garden fell, but switching to organic fertilizers and to using a cover crop made a huge difference. In my own garden, I've used mostly organic methods all along, but I haven't made as full a use of cover crops as I could have. This year, I think that will change.

Video for the Most Intense Gardeners

I saw this at Sharon Astyk's blog that's on the Science Blogs site.

This is for those of us who spend a lot of time outside, and whose minds are often fully occupied with seed and gardening information, and for anyone who's ever asked someone else for help with a "tick check."

It Begins ...

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?

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

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.