Forward Movement

I've been an organic gardener - doing the research and putting what I've learned into practice in my own yard - for a long time. Locating amendments and special "inputs" like seeds for cover crops on a garden-scale has been getting easier over the years, but there have always been items that had to be mail-ordered.

When the things you need suddenly are available in appropriately-sized packages in main-stream stores, that's a clue that a lot more people have become interested in the same things.

These cost way more than I would usually pay, but I couldn't resist. This is so great!:

I found these at the Home Depot in Kennesaw, when I was just checking the seed rack to see what was there. The cool season mix contains seeds for hairy vetch and ryegrass; the warm season mix has seeds for Austrian winter peas and ryegrass. (I like how they couldn't decide which was actually good for our area, so we get both!)  The packets each contain enough seed for 200 square feet of garden. With the easy-availability of these seeds, maybe more people will experiment with cover crops and find that they are a great help in the garden.

In other news - yesterday I attended a Small Scale Intensive Farming workshop, sponsored by Georgia Organics, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and the USDA Risk Management Agency. Andy Pressman, of NCAT and a farmer who uses multiple small urban plots as his farmland, was the featured speaker.

The morning was filled with discussion of the business considerations of small-farming, and the afternoon was filled with technical considerations, including what tools are best for what purposes in very-small-scale farming enterprises like his. 

Pressman's planting beds are 2 x 25 feet, and most of his "paths" are just 12 inches wide. With this tight spacing, tools need to be small and maneuverable. The biggest piece of equipment he uses is a walk-behind tractor by BCS (a European company). Everything else he showed us was hand-powered.

The seeder he demonstrated is the Earthway model that I have - I used it to plant my carrots this spring. He also brought along a whole assortment of hoes and demonstrated their correct use while talking about the benefits of each one.

While there, I met lots of great people who are all working on farming. Some are brand-new farmers, some are still in the planning stages, and some are fairly experienced. All in all, it was a great day!

Here at home, the cabbages I planted last week are doing well. I'm pretty sure they're bigger than they were when I saw them on Friday - I feel a little like one of those old ladies who exclaims to a child - "My how you've grown!"

And these are the carrots, seeded a couple of weeks ago with the seeder that my family gave me for my birthday this year:

I hope everyone else's gardens and gardening-knowledge are making as much forward progress!

Four Little Squashes

When I went out to check on the garden after work today, I realized that the little butternut squashes had changed. They had become both more tan and less shiny - indicators that the squashes might actually be mature, even though it is still fairly early in the season.

They've been growing for long enough, though, so I went ahead and cut them off the vine.

The NCSU extension publication Storing Winter Squash and Pumpkins explains that, normally, winter squashes will do better in storage if they first have a curing time of one to two weeks at fairly high (>80 degrees F) temperature and similarly high humidity.

I have found that butternut squashes, like sweet potatoes, get a little sweeter after curing, too. The good news is that my garage has just about perfect conditions for curing the squashes in, so after I am done admiring them for a day or two they will be parked in the garage for a couple of weeks, before being brought back into an air-conditioned space.

They won't sit around for long, though. When I have time, I will probably go ahead and roast them and then mash them to freeze for something like pie.

Elsewhere in the garden, plants are still producing. My house is still pretty much in chaos, and I couldn't find a pretty container/basket/bowl for posing my veggies in, so the photo shows them in the bag I had carried through the yard for harvesting.

It's not a huge pile of food, but it will still make a nice addition to our meals, to the pile of frozen veggies (bagged) in the freezer, and to the dehydrated veggies in jars on the storage shelves.

The tomatoes and peppers are assorted varieties. Underneath those are some Pigott Family cowpeas. We've already harvested a full quart of those (shelled-out and fully dried) Southern peas, but there are plenty more out in the garden.

As the cool-weather crops, the lettuces, other greens, carrots and more are making their slow beginning, it's nice to have the anchor of the summer crops still producing.

It Only Looks Like Bare Ground

This is the space where the buckwheat was turned under to make room for the carrots:

The photo is from before the carrots and winter radishes were actually planted (I'm not always good about getting up-to-date-photos for the blog). The good news is that I can see seedlings! We've had some fairly moderate temperatures - considering that it's August - and several small rains, which have helped.

What I was afraid might not help at all were the big footprints all across the bed that I discovered on Monday, the day after the seeds were planted. Newly-planted seeds are more likely to germinate if they are kept moist, and I was going out to see whether they needed to be watered. Instead, since the ground was still sufficiently damp, I set out a lot of that foldable, temporary fencing to let people know that there is something in the garden - it isn't just an empty space.

You would think I would already have learned to defend the bare-looking seedbed in advance, because the space where I planted the bush beans also got some big footprints in it within a day or two of planting. You can't see the footprints in this photo, but the seeds seem to have weathered the boot-storm. They are coming up!:

In my dreams, everyone knows better than to walk across what looks like bare ground in the garden, but my dreams are unlikely to come true anytime soon. When even the obvious edges of the garden aren't enough of a clue that there is something special about the space, I can only hope that the boots quit tromping through before the seedlings are at a more vulnerable stage.

In other yard news, the gardenia at the front corner of the house was pretty seriously damaged when the tree fell on our house. The main stems were all split, so Joe went ahead and removed it. I will probably put another gardenia there, though, because I enjoyed that one so much. This is a not-great photo of the split stems:

The azalea next to the gardenia at first seemed to be only slightly damaged in the tree accident:

When we were able to get a closer look, after the gardenia was gone, it was pretty obvious that the damage was a lot more extensive. Looking down into the shrub, there were more of those split stems. When we cut that shrub down, the remaining full-grown azalea looked weird all on its own, so we cut that one down, too, and we will be starting over on the foundation planting. It's not a good time of year to be planting most bushes, but the house isn't completely repaired yet, so we have some time. Meanwhile, it will probably be a little easier for the workmen to move equipment and materials around - they won't have to worry about the shrubbery, and they might be able to stay out of the gardens.

What Comes of the Compost

Since we still are not 100% at home yet, we haven't had a good way to add to the compost piles that usually collect our kitchen trimmings, and we still seem to be generating plenty of odd little brown spots and stem ends. The good parts are going into either the crockpot (on loan from a co-worker - Thank you, Louise!) or the dehydrator.

Our compost is still collecting little bits of yard trimmings/weeds, but not nearly as much as usual, and the contents of our bunnies' litter boxes aren't going there either, because our bunnies are still with a friend. Right now, instead of having one compost pile that's growing while the other, more finished pile gets moved out to the garden, we have two dwindling piles. By the end of this weekend, there won't be any compost left in the backyard - just a little stack of wilting weeds.

We have become so accustomed to always adding to the compost piles that it seems a little weird, and very wasteful, to run veggie trimmings down the disposal at the hotel where we currently are being housed (not for much longer!).

I know, though, that there are plenty of people for whom saving organic material for the compost pile is a foreign concept. I forget sometimes that other people's lives aren't centered around gardening and all the daily behaviors that make gardening work.

However, it is great to hear about other people who not only are doing similar things but also working to educate still more people about using leftover/waste material in the garden. Not long ago at work I heard from a guy who is educating others about the usefulness of coffee grounds in gardening. He has put together an informational webpage and a little project to collect, dry, and distribute coffee grounds for use in gardens. It's a local Greenbean Project. I am hoping that his project becomes wildly successful.

A great thing about coffee grounds, especially as the season for collecting fallen leaves is almost here, is that coffee grounds are a good nitrogen source, which helps balance out the high carbon content of the dried leaves that we will all be dumping into our compost piles.

Meanwhile, the multiple seasons' worth of compost that have been added to my vegetable garden have been working their magic on the red clay, helping the soil produce good food for us, even though I haven't been out there tending to the watering and weeds every day like I would normally be doing.

The trombocino squash are beginning to produce for us:

The dwarf butternut has made several squashes, too. In a comic-twist, the squash fruits themselves are "dwarf," but the vines have sprawled ten-to-twelve feet. I was kind of expecting a reverse version of that outcome, where the vines were more dwarfed and the fruits more normal, but I am not exactly surprised by the reality. It's the kind of thing that sometimes happens with seeds and plants.

The buckwheat that had been acting as a place-holder for the last few weeks has already flowered, and I've turned that cover-crop under to get the area ready for the carrots. If all goes well, those seeds will be in the ground tomorrow.

Tomato plants are still producing, and the remaining plants look surprisingly healthy for this late in the season. These are Akers Plum tomatoes:

These are Wuhib, another plum/paste tomato:

We have a week of cooler weather coming up, and it will be a good time to plant some of the cooler weather crops. Germination will be a lot more successful than it would have been a week or so ago - the highs are forecast to be below 90 degrees F for the next few days. It won't hurt to have dug in the last of the compost.

Dehydrating the Harvest

We (mostly my husband, actually) have been keeping the dehydrator busy in the last few weeks. The jars below are packed with the dried fruits of our harvest:

Most years we do more canning and freezing of veggies, but we have been working with a hilariously inadequate kitchen. The two-burner stove seems to do well with high heat and low heat, but we haven't found "medium heat" on either of the burners so far.

I have managed to burn more than one meal, and I've undercooked some things, so we are going to give canning a pass until we get completely moved back into the house, where the stove operates on natural gas and we have cookware that's more familiar. Our cast iron cookware - for example - is a lot more nonstick than the two pans and one skillet that came with this kitchen, and I'm not actually certain that a big water-bath or pressure canner would fit on this stove.

It's a very good thing that we were able to bring the dehydrator with us when we shifted into the extended-stay hotel! The poor Excalibur could use a break and a good cleaning, but it still has a lot of work ahead of it in the next few days.

Last year, a lot of our tomato-based sauces started out as dehydrated tomatoes and peppers. It looks as though this year's sauces will have the same beginning.

Keeping Track of the Harvest: July

July's harvest total was 49.1 kg, which converts to 108 lb and 3.9 oz. Considering how my summer has gone, getting this amount of food out of the yard is amazing.

The breakdown is in kilograms here:

July

Tomatoes, ripe 23.2
Melons 10.95
Cucumbers 1.95
Eggplants 1.6
Blueberries 1.3
Bush beans, green 0.6
Peppers 6.85
Popcorn 1.95
Apples 0.55 (Colonade-type in pots)
Southern peas 0.15

Not too surprisingly, this is the biggest harvest-month of the year to this point. I have no idea how August will turn out, especially considering how the non-gardening part of my summer has gone, but I am not the only gardener who is having to work the gardening into the rare, spare spaces in her life.

And if I want next year to have a higher harvest total than this year (the total for 2012 so far is 268 pounds, 7.9 ounces), it's time to start working toward that goal.  Fall veggies will need to be planted very soon, and the planting begins with working more organic matter into the soil.

Right now, there is some buckwheat flowering where I plan to plant carrots. It has been holding nutrients for me, keeping them from washing out (from rain) or burning out (from heat). This coming weekend, the buckwheat will be turned under to add organic matter to the space, and carrots will be planted a week or two later. The melons also are just about done, and I'll be pulling those vines out, then adding compost to their area to get the soil in shape for the cool-weather veggies that will be planted in those spaces next.

It may seem strange to be getting the cool-weather veggies planted while it is still so stunningly hot outside, but gardening often requires actions that only make sense after a lot of thought and research. Many of the fall crops will require 70-80 days (two and a half months!) to fully mature in a sunny yard. My yard is a little less than fully sunny, which means I need to add another week or two to the days-to-maturity. If the first frost comes around 31 Oct., and I want some of the fall crops to be mature a week or so before then, I need to have seeds in the ground very soon.

Gardens and Talks

This week I spent a couple of hours at a community garden in Smyrna, and it was mostly doing very well. It was great to see so many little gardens, and to meet more people who are focused on growing good food!

However, the garden was definitely having a pest problem. I have never seen so many beetles-per-square-inch before; these are kudzu bugs, and they were all over the pole beans:

So far, there is no good, established control method for these beetles, since they are new to the United States. Scuttlebutt has it that some entomologists at UGA are looking into the effectiveness of a parasitic wasp, but that's really all I've heard so far. It is likely, though, that if next year gardeners grow their beans under row covers, they will be able to avoid (or at least delay) such dramatic infestation.

The garden's tomato plants also had a problem, and I'm pretty sure it is Septoria leaf spot. The good news is that most of the garden beds already have produced a lot of tomatoes for the gardeners, so they have enjoyed a good harvest up to now.

The garden/farm where I volunteer on Saturdays has the same disease problem, and I'm guessing that it's only a matter of time before the leaf spot hits my garden, too. Disease has been a huge problem for gardens all over the area this year. Gardeners who are not all that concerned about using organic methods have been keeping the manufacturer of Daconyl (a fungicide) in business this year, and the rest of us are muddling through as best we can.

I pulled out the last of my Cherokee Purple plants yesterday, but I have several other tomato plants still producing, so I'm not totally heartbroken. Joe says that the Tomato Man's Amish tomatoes taste better, which means we still have what Joe thinks of as a "highly desirable" variety providing tomatoes for us.

Later today I'll get to visit another community garden, this one out in the north-east corner of the county, and I will be talking some about getting ready for planting fall veggies and about pest and disease problems.

On the evening of July 31, I'm scheduled to talk at the county Extension office about getting ready for the fall veggie garden. Anyone who wants to come should call the office to sign up (770-528-4070; or email uge1067@uga.edu).

The Garden Goes On

In spite of the current chaos in my home and some smashed parts of the yard outside, the garden is still busy making food. We had just brought in a big pile of veggies on Monday afternoon, before the disaster, and on Tuesday morning I harvested a little more:

If I aim the camera just right, it's hard to tell that a tree fell on the house just a week ago. This part of the garden looks fine. The place where the okra was leveled is hidden behind some other tall plants:

The side yard was completely spared. It definitely looks fine:

Even though we've given away quite a lot of the most recently harvested fresh veggies (we are a little too preoccupied for canning), we still have plenty to work with. Joe managed to pull the dehydrator out of the debris, and after we cleaned it up we've been able to put it to use. The half-gallon jar on the table is full of dried tomato chips:

The melons are the first harvest from this year's round of the great melon de-hybridization project. All the melons in the photo were harvested at "forced slip." For each, the tendril nearest the melon was brownish, corky lines had begun to appear on the outside, and a definite aroma of ripe melon was easy to detect.

The first two we sliced through were both good, but they are not even close to being identical. One was very pale inside, and sweet. The other was green inside and less sweet. The paler one seemed to have more flavor, and it had a smoother texture, too.

When the seeds are dried and ready to package for next year, all that information will be recorded with them. It is likely that the seeds from the greener melon will not ever be planted, but it's hard to know at this point what I will need in the next few years of the project. For now, I am saving seeds from all the melons that seem reasonably tasty.

I've also put some tomato pulp and seeds from this year's Tomato Man's Amish in a cup to ferment a little before separating out the seeds to dry and save for next year.

This all feels a lot like progress.

Hope everyone else's gardens are doing well!

Crazy Disaster

Does it look to you as though a T. Rex might have wandered by and taken a big bite out of my roof?

That would be a much more interesting story than what really happened. In actuality, on Monday evening while my family was eating supper, a big oak tree from my neighbor's backyard fell onto/into my house.

Some of the garden was smashed, too.

We were sitting in this room when it happened:

Of course, pre-tree there was a lot less stuff lying around, and we didn't have the enormous "skylight" letting so much sunshine and greenery into the house.

The good news is that my little family is fine. We are only scraped and bruised, and the animals all seem to be fine, too. One of the dogs had to be helped out by the Cobb County Firemen who responded to my 911 call, and we will be forever grateful for their help. We were worried when she yelped and then struggled to get up but couldn't. Luckily, even though she was trapped under some debris, she wasn't seriously injured. At first we couldn't find the cat, but he had taken refuge upstairs.

The worst damage was in the dining room, so it is a good thing that we were being lazy, eating in the living room and watching TV. If we had been in the dining room, the disaster would have been more tragic than crazy. The table and chairs in there were buried (and broken) under some very heavy boards, roof supports, and branches.

People keep asking about the storm that must have brought the tree down, but there was no storm. That night, we had no wind, no rain until several hours after the event. The tree was brought down by gravity and probably the damage that results from several years of drought conditions. The root mass that came up at the far end of the tree didn't seem even close to large enough to hold up a 100-foot trunk and the associated big bunch of greenery. I can only guess that roots had been dieing, year after year, until they just could no longer hold the tree.

Some parts of my garden in the front yard were obliterated. The new patch of green beans is gone, as is the entire patch of parching corn that my son had asked me to grow. This is one of those times when the flexibility of gardeners is useful - I will just plan to try that corn again next year, because it is definitely too late to replant that particular variety this summer.

Even it weren't too late, my seeds were all packed up by a cleaning company, and I don't know when I'll get them back, so it looks like I won't be starting the Brassica-family plants this weekend as I had originally planned. For the most part, I will have to rely on the garden supply stores for the fall garden. That's OK. The available varieties won't be the ones I had selected, but they will work just fine.

In other good news, I have been reminded of how many amazing friends and neighbors I have. Several of my neighbors are storing my frozen garden produce in their freezers; another neighbor brought cardboard boxes late on Monday night and helped load up the things we thought we'd need for the upcoming week; one friend is keeping one of our dogs and another has the rabbits; one brought us lunch on Tuesday as we waited on the driveway for the next crew of workmen; one is serving as "communications central," sending out email updates to a large group of gardeners; others are waiting to find out what we need next. Of course, events at the house are unfolding at the speed of the Insurance Industry, so it's all in fits and starts with odd lulls and then spurts of activity.

I am getting the feeling that the pace of recovery overall is going to be annoyingly slow, but I keep thinking back to the miracle that we are all fine. The whole set of events has made me think of other miracles, like the one of Moses getting his people out of Egypt. The miracle (really a whole string of Divine Interventions) was followed by forty years of Work - plodding, annoying, and quarrel-inducing. In fact, the Work part seems to follow every miracle that I can recall.  So, I've had my miracle, and now there is some work ahead. Remind me, when I complain, that my work part of this miracle is going to be a whole lot less than forty years!

Tracking the Harvest: June

My yard isn't exactly in full sun. Most of it gets about an hour and a half in the morning, then it's in shade until a little past noon. The side yard doesn't get back into the sun until after 1 p.m. As a result, I don't really expect to bring in spectacular harvests.

In spite of the shade, though, the June harvest from the yard was surprisingly large. The weights below are kilograms:

June Bush beans, green 4.05 Zucchini 9.6 Peppers 2.5 Cucumbers 4.1 Tomatoes, green 3.25 Blueberries 10.05 Berries, misc. 0.7 Onions, bulbing 2.8 Tomatoes, ripe 0.4

June total 37.45 kg = 82 lb and 9 oz
Running total: Jan. through June =160 pounds, 4 ounces

That seems pretty amazing to me.  However, to put this into perspective,  John Jeavons, in the book How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, has put together a table that includes potential crop yields for comparison.

According to the table, average U.S. yields of bush green beans are 12.9+ pounds per 100
sq. ft. (based on U.S. Dept. of Agriculture statistics). That number represents conventional
agriculture production. Using Jeavons' biointensive methods, the yields should be 30/72/108 pounds per 100 sq. ft., for beginning gardeners, good gardeners, and excellent gardeners with good soil and climate, respectively.

My 20 square foot patch of bush green beans that just finished production was in the
shadiest part of the veggie garden, and the harvest total from that patch was 5.45 kg,
which converts to 12 pounds 0.2 oz. This scales up to about 60 pounds per 100 sq. ft,
which is not quite as high a yield as a "good" gardener should achieve. However,
considering the shade, the pest pressure, and the weirdness of the weather, I don't think I
can complain about the bean harvest.

Planning Pays Off

Notice how there aren't any green beans in the most recent batch of harvested veggies?:

That's because the patch of beans I've been harvesting from so far looks terrible. I hope nobody else has quite this much trouble with those crazy Mexican bean beetles:

I harvested the last of the beans from the damaged patch, cutting the top growth off to add to the compost and digging the remainders back into the soil. The good news is that, having seen this kind of extensive damage before (year after year...), I planted a second patch of beans that is just about to start providing us with more beans:

We'll get a few more weeks of green beans before the beetles destroy this newer patch of plants, and I'll have another patch of beans coming up to replace these, too, if all goes as planned.

To be honest, I am surprised that there already are tiny beans on those plants, considering the recent extreme heat. Who would have thought that a variety of bush beans (Contender) could set beans on days with highs in the 100s? Most beans won't make in that kind of heat.

In the less-good-planning category, the Pigott cowpeas were planted a little too soon. They are coming up behind the cucumbers (which are on the trellis) and are growing fast enough that the cucumbers are in danger of being swallowed up.

If I were at home right now (I'm in South Texas, on a family visit), I would be starting seeds for my fall garden this weekend. For plants in the cabbage family, it's time! Instead, the seeds for this year's broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower are going to have to wait another week. At least, though, I have a plan!

Last of the Zucchini, Plus Squash Beetles

When I pulled out the zucchini plants last week, after the squash vine borers had thoroughly infested the little patch, I first harvested a little pile of the dark squash. Some of it wasn't exactly full-sized, but it has all been good to eat!

The garden also has continued to provide quite a lot of cucumbers, and some tomatoes have been ready to bring in, too. The tomatoes in the basket are Yellow Marble cherry tomatoes and one Cherokee Purple. Some of the green Cherokee Purple tomatoes that I brought in from the sick plants that were pulled have also been ripening on the kitchen counter, so we are flush with tomatoes right now.

In other news - when I was visiting a community garden in Marietta, I saw squash beetles! The larvae are very similar to those of Mexican bean beetles, but the bristles are black.

The larvae also have the interesting habit of chewing a border around the area that they intend to eat. The chewed line is underneath the leaf, but over time the line of damage can be seen on the upper side of the leaf.

Needless to say, we smashed all the little beetle larvae that we could find.

I haven't seen these yet in my garden, but it would not surprise me if Another Pest of squash plants found its way to my yard.

Hope everyone had a great Independence Day!