While I Was Out

I'm back from my trip to Oklahoma, and, while I was away, a lot of growing took place out in the garden.

There is plenty of lettuce for salads now:

The onions are looking surprisingly like onions, even though it isn't even close to June:

Squash plants have grown large enough that flower buds should be visible soon:

There are enough peas for snacking, but not for a meal. If these flowers perform as expected, though, we'll have peas with supper in a couple of weeks:

The corn has come up, but the "outdoor" (wild) bunnies have been snacking on the little plants. In this picture, one plant is left, but, looking out the window, I can see that that plant is already gone. Since I now have indoor bunnies and know how much they can eat, I should have expected this to happen. I will need to replant, and protect, some of the corn:

The tomato plants look a lot sturdier than when I left town. I've been putting cages around the plants, in case they grow so quickly that they suddenly need the support (it happens!):

The bush beans are starting to get bushier. I expect to see flowers within the week. These plants, which I planted as seeds in the garden WAY too early, are showing a little frost damage. It's my own fault, so I can't really complain:

The berries are blooming and making little green berries. I am looking forward to eating the ripe, sweet berries, but we are going to need some rain to move that process along:

The ground outside is very dry, and rain isn't in the near-forecast. I will be spending some time in the next day or two watering the garden. I also have a little more space to plant. My youngest son (age 21) would like to try some parching corn, so I am glad that the last bit of garden hasn't yet been planted. I can rework the plan, dropping the wax beans, and add another small patch of corn. First, though, I'll have to order some seeds. That's on the list for tonight.

Inside, my baby bunnies also grew while I was away. I can't believe I waited until I was in my 50s before having bunnies in the house! They are just wonderful:

We don't normally do the "baby animal" thing at our house. Our dogs and cats are typically adopted as adults (2-4 years old) from animal shelters. However, napping bunnies are extra-cute, but they are great when they are awake, too - a lot like big, fuzzy popcorn. Since the "popcorn" pictures keep coming out blurry, here's another "resting" picture:

Old Time Insect Control

My father told me a story this week about the Victory Garden his family had tended during WWII. The garden was in the vacant lot - with permission from the landowner - across the street from their home. They grew potatoes, pole beans, and "some other stuff." His recollection is that most of the garden was taken up by the potatoes, but there was a problem in the form of potato beetles, which were both abundant and voracious.

My father and his older brother, who were a little younger than 10 years of age at the time, had a job each day. They went across the street with two small blocks of wood each, and they used those blocks of wood to smash potato beetles. Each boy was required to clear a whole row of potatoes each day.

Apparently, I need to add some small blocks of wood to my tool bucket, for use at the garden/farm where my little family has spent some time smashing potato beetles. We have been flipping the beetles off the leaves onto a nearby hard surface, then smashing them with rocks, but bringing the hard surface to the beetles, in the form of a block of wood, makes a lot of sense.

Keeping Track of the Harvest: March

I weighed most of the produce that was brought into the kitchen from the yard in March, and these are the weights in kilograms (what my kitchen scale does best - obviously the instrument wasn't made in the USA!).

Radish, winter 1.55kg
Carrots 0.2
Collard greens 0.75
Chicory 1.1
Kale 0.75
Onions, green 0.1
Swiss chard 0.25
Dill
cilantro
mint

There aren't weights for the herbs because they were harvested in small enough amounts that they didn't register an exact-enough weight. Also, a lot of the cilantro and mint went to the momma bunny. Moonpie loves cilantro!

The March total harvested was 4.7 kg, which converts to 10 pounds, 5 ounces. The running total for 2012, Jan. + Feb. + Mar., is 25 pounds, 10 ounces.

There actually were even more winter radishes, but some had begun to bolt in the freakishly warm weather, and the roots were getting tough, so those went straight out the back door to the compost heap (well... a few little pieces went to Moonpie).

I am not expecting much for April. So far, we are bringing in herbs and little bits of spinach and lettuce - for sandwiches - that haven't been weighed, and we're rooting around in the freezer and cupboards for the last of last year's preserved foods. I would hate to get to July, when the summer garden produce is pouring into the house, and run across a leftover bag of something in the bottom of the freezer!

In the planning department:

I have saved a few sweet potatoes from last year's harvest, and those are sprouting nicely. I'll be snapping those sprouts off and putting them in damp potting mix later today so they can begin rooting. It won't take long! At this rate, the outdoor garden soil will be toasty by early May, and I can get those into the ground. They will be almost my last summer crop to go in. I also am starting a few tomatoes to plant at the end of June, to keep the harvest coming.

The garden seems to have survived the past couple of colder nights. The thermometer on the front porch was showing 35 degrees F yesterday morning, but we are back to a forecast for warmer days and nights.

New Pest: Kudzu Bug

A new, tiny brown bug - the Kudzu Bug - showed up in my yard last week, but other yards in the Atlanta area have been host to this insect for a couple of years now. A large number of calls to the local county extension office over the past year have been about this particular pest.

It shares that unfortunate habit of ladybugs of overwintering inside the walls of buildings, leading to occasional outbreaks of "what the heck?" when great masses of them emerge inside the building instead of outside, where they belong.

The really bad news is that this is not a "good bug" like the ladybug, devouring aphids and other small garden pests. The kudzu bug is itself a pest, not only on kudzu, but on all plants in the bean & pea family. It eats their leaves.

UGA's Dr. John Ruberson has published a short Pest Report (click the link to read it) about this new pest in the newsletter of Georgia Organics.

For farmers, the bug is a big problem partly because effective controls haven't yet been established, even though the bug is causing some serious damage. I am hoping that, for gardeners, the insect (which is a true bug - a Hemipteran) is not as much of a pest as the Mexican Bean Beetle, but I may have to resign myself to battling yet another beetle that eats my bean plants.

So far, my bean-beetle battle strategy includes early planting of bush beans, which works because the Mexican Bean Beetles become much more abundant as summer progresses. Sometimes, I don't see them until July, and by then I can already have harvested quite a lot of beans from bush-type plants.

According to the short article by Dr. Ruberson, the Kudzu Bug is showing up much earlier in the gardening year, and the bug in my garden suggests that he is right. That means my strategy of planting early bush beans isn't going to help much in the effort to avoid damage caused by Kudzu Bugs.

My other main strategy is to knock adult beetles into soapy water to drown them. Smashing the adults has also worked for Mexican Bean Beetles, even though it is pretty messy, but I have heard that the Kudzu Bugs have stinky guts, which makes smashing a less attractive strategy.

I also smash Mexican Bean Beetle larvae and eggs, and this would probably also work for Kudzu Bugs, but the smashing strategy isn't nearly as effective as avoidance by earlier planting of early-maturing bush beans has been. Smashing and drowning the pests just delays by a week or two the time when the crop is a complete loss.

It looks as though this will be a very interesting gardening year. Wish me luck!

EDIT: I usually get my basic information right, but in this post I originally had called the kudzu bug a beetle, and it isn't. The kudzu bug is in the order Hemiptera; it's a true bug. The information should be all correct now!

19 April 2013 EDIT: Anyone who is interested enough in Kudzu Bugs to have read this far should probably read the Kudzu Bug Update from 8 April 2013.

Spring Madness

For quite a long time, I have thought it would be nice to have a pet bunny. I even bought a book about rabbit care at a Goodwill book sale several years ago. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to adopt a bunny from a family that was a little overwhelmed by the work involved in taking care of two bunnies. They kept the black and white one, and I took the one that is white with pink eyes. Meet Moonpie:

Not only is she totally adorable and incredibly soft, but she is a great compost assistant. Ever since I starting adding the contents of her hay-box to the compost pile, the compost has really been cooking!

A couple of times a day I walk around the yard gathering bunny-salad for Moonpie to eat. She is very fond of cilantro, but she also likes a lot of the edible weeds that grow in the yard - chickweed, dandelions, violets.

In other news, of the hilarious "watch out what you ask for" variety, Moonpie had babies last week. All five of the surviving babies (a very tiny one didn't last beyond the first day) are in the picture, but one is only represented by its pink and white nose sticking out from under the pile.

The babies were born sometime between when we went to bed on last Monday evening and when we got up on Tuesday morning. We didn't know Moonpie was pregnant - she can't weigh more than four pounds - so the babies were a surprise! The book says that the babies will open their eyes after ten days, which means their eyes could open today.

We are hoping to find homes for four of them, but we plan to keep the grey one that matches our grey cat, Louisiana. My son has already named it Louie-too. With the waste generated by two bunnies, the compost pile is going to be smokin'!

Out in the garden, I've been planting almost nonstop. Normally, the planting madness wouldn't even have begun this early in the month, but the garden is nearly all planted. I have just two beds left. Of course, there will be more planting when the cool-weather crops are finished.

So far, the Kagran Sommer lettuce has not emerged (I'm about to give up on it), but the first lettuce (Capitan) is doing well:

There is spinach that is definitely harvestable (not an actual word, according to blogger):

The peas are flowering:

And the potatoes are looking healthy. I need to pull more dirt around these plants:

Some of the seeds that were planted in the last couple of weeks, for warm-weather crops, are already coming up. Four of the seven zucchini seeds have germinated, and those little plants are each making their first leaf. The salad cucumbers have germinated, too.

The bush beans have been patchy in their emergence, and when I poked around to see what was going on, I found that something has been nibbling on the germinating beans, so I replanted a lot more bean seeds. The rows will probably have to be thinned when they all come up, but I'd rather thin a too-thick patch than not have enough beans.

Hope everyone else's planting is going well!

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!