More Garden-talk with Grandpa Bill

Grandpa Bill kept the peppers coming through central Oklahoma's blistering-hot summer by erecting a little shade directly over each plant.

He had put a "cage" around each plant, just like he does each year, for support of the heavy branches. As the temperatures climbed and then stayed high, he put an upside-down saucer, the kind that go underneath potted plants, on top of each cage. Since his pepper plants continued to produce, the strategy seems to have been a good one. (If anyone is curious, he mostly grew Big Bertha bell peppers.)

As the weather gets weirder and weirder, it's good to have ideas already in mind, and I thought that one was worth sharing.

He also said that this was the first year he's grown cantaloupes in a long time. The weather should have been great for melons - all that heat and drought should have made them extra-sweet. He said, though, that the melons didn't taste like anything at all. We've had that problem before with melons at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, and I am beginning to see that bland melons are a more widespread problem than just here in the Southeast. Luckily, we found Schoon's Hardshell, which has worked out well for us.

As the seed catalogues began to arrive, he also pointed out that, back in the old days, you just went to the store and bought whatever seeds were there, and they always worked out just fine. Now that there are so many varieties to choose from, gardeners are more likely to end up with at least some seeds that aren't ideally suited to their yards.

As the catalogues pour in - mostly from the Northeastern U.S. and the Northwestern U.S. - it's easy to see how lack-of-garden-success could become a problem for new gardeners. For instance, I am guessing that the "bland melon" problem and prevalence of far-away seed sources that contain many tantalizingly-described varieties are somehow related.

Thanksgiving conversations

My Mom and Step-dad (aka Grammy & Grandpa Bill) are visiting from Oklahoma for the holiday. We've had some gardening conversations along with all the great food, and it turns out that gardening in Oklahoma was pretty tough last summer.

Their area had 60+ days over 100 degrees F, which meant that they didn't ever get a tomato crop. They did get some tomatoes early on, from flowers that were pollinated before the high temperatures set in, but that was it. The peppers did OK, but tomatoes usually are abundant in the summer garden, and they were missed.

They also said that Christmas trees are a big crop in Oklahoma (and in Texas). Between the drought and the heat, a lot of those just are not going to make it to market this year.

Bill says that the fall is too short and the temperatures too extreme for a good fall garden where they are, but Mom started looking at my old seed catalogues for some of the varieties that I've had good luck with in the early spring. She plans to buy some Capitan lettuce seeds (variety that has been on our turkey sandwiches) and seeds for other leafy greens for the early spring.

Amazingly, the first seed catalogues for 2012 arrived today: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. I guess the next gardening year really is right around the corner!

Autumn Productivity

Over the long summer and early fall, the kitchens of gardeners all across the Southeast are covered up in tomatoes, peppers, okra, and all kinds of beans. Those plants just keep on producing small mountains of food, week after week. There really isn't an equivalent crop, in terms of productivity, for the cooler seasons.

Part of that is just the nature of plants in cool weather; growth slows way down. But part of that is due to what we harvest. Mostly, in the cooler weather crops, we aren't after the fruits. We are after the leaves, the roots, the entire flowering stem.

The closest crops in terms of constant productivity that I can think of, really, are some of the greens. Collards, mustards, and kale, for example, keep on coming, but it takes a lot of greens to fill a pot for supper. From my garden, I can harvest enough greens each week for maybe one meal, right now, but as the temperature drops even more and the growth rate slows, the harvests will slow, too.

Most of us prefer to plant more cool-weather crops than just greens, though. For example, I planted six broccoli plants. If all goes as planned, I will harvest six big heads of broccoli and then some smaller side-shoots, but that will make, at best, enough of the vegetable for eight or nine meals.

The same goes for cauliflower, except that I don't expect any bonus side shoots after harvesting the heads. To be honest, I've never even grown cauliflower before, so I am pleased way-out-of-proportion to what I'm going to get from the six-pack of plants that I bought and planted back in August.

For radishes, one seed makes one small root. Of course, these are delicious, and you can cram quite a lot of them into a fairly small space. The red ones pictured here are "regular" radishes, with a listed 35-days-to-maturity. The white one is a Muncheiner Beer radish, a winter-radish type with a much longer time-to-maturity. The winter radishes can stay in the ground through some very cold weather, so I don't have to worry about bringing them inside as the winter progresses.

Unprotected lettuces keep making new leaves until the first very hard freeze. Around here, that might be as late as mid-December. By mid-January, though, most lettuces left uncovered will have dissolved into a mushy puddle in the garden. This is one of the big, loose heads of Capitan lettuce that I have growing right now:

I have a little cold-frame to fit over the place where the lettuces are planted, but some of these are planted a little too close to the edge of the bed. As colder weather moves in, I'll cut those to the ground to make enough room to fit the cold frame over the lettuces that are more in the middle of the bed.

The garlic that was planted a couple of weeks ago, to grow through the winter and spring, has come up. I love having a crop that overlaps the seasons - when February comes and most of the fall veggies are gone, that promise of good food to come is heartening.

Charrette

On Wednesday, at the new garden site for the Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, there was a charrette for the whole property. Essentially, a charrette is a big-group brainstorming session for design, and we were putting together potential designs for the whole property at Fountain Gate, which will be the host for our garden plus a community garden plus demonstration garden for Kennesaw State University.

The landscape designer, Sean Murphy, did a great job of walking us all through "what to do," and people from the city of Kennesaw showed up to tell us about the future road-widening that will affect the plans.

The whole group was divided into three smaller groups for the brainstorming. We all had big maps of the property, tracing paper to lay over the maps to write on, and a few colors of Sharpies for drawing. In the end, it was great to see the variety of plans that the three groups came up with. We were all trying to place the KSU garden, the PAR garden, the community garden plots, a meditation/contemplation area, picnic/play areas, paths and access routes and other features on the ~3 acre site.

One group did an especially nice job of keeping artistry in mind. My group was thinking much more in terms of function.

The good news is that Sean Murphy is very good at what he does, and however he sets up the site will be fine. (He is in a design competition right now for an urban farm in Atlanta, and there is a good chance he will win. He brought a copy of the plan to our meeting, and what I saw was pretty impressive.)

I did meet a retired friend over at the property this morning for some advice. This guy is a long-time farmer and retired developer-of-subdivisions, and he had some useful comments with regard to drainage on the site. He pointed out where the water was going to run across the property and where the slope was going to be too steep for an in-ground garden. First, he recommended that the drainage corridor be left as lawn.

Then he pointed out that if the PAR space ends up on ground that is too sloped, we will need to put in raised beds. I would probably have figured that out eventually, but it's helpful to be prepared.

He also said that the best garden site was right behind the Grambling House (historic house on the property). None of the designs put the PAR garden there, and I'm a little chagrined that I didn't see it as a possibility.

New Garden Site!

The Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry (PAR) project for which I am a volunteer seems to have found a new home. The Fountain Gate counseling center in Kennesaw is planning a big community garden on its property on Cherokee Street, and there is enough room for us, too.

The official website for the new garden is still pretty spare, but it gets the idea across. A garden is going in!

Anyone who wants to be able to voice an opinion about the layout and other aspects of the plan can sign up for the newsletter online (through the website, linked above) or send an email to the listed address and get signed up for the design meetings. The first design "charrette" (discussion/planning) meeting is scheduled for next week, on Wed., Nov. 9, at 2 p.m. at the "brown house" - which is actually beige - that is also on the property.

My understanding is that people who show up for the meeting - and everyone who is interested in the garden at any level is invited - will separate into small groups to talk about what would be great in terms of garden design. The property is three or more acres, so this is large-scale design - where garden beds should be located, how big they might be, where paths and sheds might go, where greenspace and benches might be nice, where our PAR garden might be situated, and more.

I expect to be there.

Me and My Bok Choy

One of the bok choy plants finally did make it into the kitchen.



I don't know what it is about bok choy, but I always cut the whole plant to bring in, whereas for most other greens I tend to just bring in the leaves that I will need for the meal I have in mind. It could be the thickness/succulence of the petioles that causes me to reach right past them, to the base of the plant.

There are still three bok choy plants out in the yard, and I may experiment with one of them, cutting off just the leaves I need, to see how that goes. Does anyone else harvest bok choy one leaf at a time?

Definitely the End of Summer

For the next several days, the weather forecast is for lows in the 30s. Any warm-season crops left in the garden are going to be looking pretty miserable by the end of the week, unless they've been protected. In my garden, there are a few more tomato plants and peppers still in place, but those will be heading toward the compost heap sometime tomorrow.

I hope, especially, that everyone's sweet potatoes are inside. This year, I was lucky enough to be able to harvest sweet potatoes in three different gardens: my own, the Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, and at Mr. Kastner's garden. Out at Mr. Kastner's place, there was a lot of help, which was a good thing because he had a whole lot of potatoes to dig up. The big harvest day was a couple of weeks ago, so these pictures are a little late going up. In this first picture, Mr. Kastner is the guy in the pink shirt, and his partner-in-gardening, Mr. Hankerson, is on the right in blue:



The potatoes were not all that easy to get out of the ground, and there was some discussion about the best way to pry them out without damaging them. The good news is that these were all grown on long, wide hills, so the digging wasn't so much "down" as it was "from the side."



These big clusters of sweets were pretty typical of what came out of the ground at each place where a slip had been planted back in early summer:



In all, there were three double-wide rows, each about 150 feet feet long, that had been planted. In each row, the slips had been planted about 9 or 10 inches apart. Mr. Kastner figured that he had planted close to 900 slips. Removing the vines and then digging up the sweet potatoes from that many plants was a big job!



Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner had built some storage bins out of old wood pallets for storing the sweet potatoes while they cured in a metal "shed" (it looks like an old version of what 18-wheelers pull around out on the highways). When the bins were all placed inside the shed, a little heater and a fan went in there, too, along with a temperature & humidity gauge to help make sure the sweet potatoes stayed appropriately warm and the air moist.



They are going to be able to feed a lot of people with this many sweet potatoes.

A Lot Like Fall

We've had low temperatures in the upper 30s, and days in which the highs are in the 60s. Indoors, we've had a fire in the woodstove a couple of nights. It is definitely feeling a lot like fall.

Outside, even though the remaining summer crops are looking pretty ragged, the cool-weather crops are starting to shine. The broccoli is beginning to head up:



This bed of greens (and weeds) has already given us a couple of salads, some greens for cooking, and radishes. When the rest of the radishes come out, it will be easier to see the greens - the little bulbs are planted between the rows of greens, and their leaves are sticking up all over.



Right near where I stood to take that picture is a little patch of cilantro that didn't make it into the field-of-view. At the far end of the bed is a short row of bok choy. This does really well for us every year:



Isn't that beautiful? I think a stir-fry-supper is in my near-future.

Wrong season, but a cool trick

My Louisiana sister sent another useful video. This is at least as cool as peeling a whole head of garlic in less than ten seconds (in a previous post), and it doesn't require matching large bowls.



Let's hope I remember this when the fresh corn comes back around in June!

Field Trip to Farmer D Organics!

Even though I live within an hour of Farmer D Organics, I had never been there until this week. I had an extra-long day at work on Monday (15 hours!), so on Tuesday I left work early. I was a little cranky from sleep-deprivation, but I figured that the thing that would improve my mood the most was a garden-oriented field-trip. Of course, a nap would probably have been a more logical choice.

My excuse for the field-trip was that I wanted to check out the garlic, since it is just about time to put that in the ground. It didn't hurt that the Farmer D store is only about 20-25 minutes from the office.

The good news is that there was plenty of garlic to choose from, and the cloves were HUGE. I bought two heads of California Early softneck and three cloves (loose) of Elephant garlic to try.

I have bought different varieties of garlic through the mail before, and they've done well, but the heads were not even close to the size of the garlic at Farmer D's, and this is one of those situations in which size matters. Big cloves usually end up making big heads of garlic in the garden.

The garlic that I've had the best luck with so far, in terms of consistently producing big heads of garlic in the garden, is the Rabun County garlic that my friend Cheryl brought back from one of her visits there a few years ago. We are still working on growing out enough of it to be able to actually eat very much of it, but it does make nice, big heads of garlic, and it has good flavor, too.

Photo below is of the two California early heads (left), the three cloves of Elephant garlic (center), and one of my Rabun County. Notice how the Rabun County is dwarfed by the garlic from Farmer D's:



I usually grow some grocery-store garlic along with the specialty garlics, but unless I see some heads with whopper-sized cloves, I'm going to stick with what I have now - the new garlic from Farmer D and the Rabun County that I've saved to replant. If all goes well, I'll have the garlic planted by Halloween.

Farmer D Organics had fruit trees and bushes for fall planting, and the strawberry plants are in. Onion sets will be in stock closer to Thanksgiving. The store seems to specialize in the small-scale food-growing that works so well in urban areas, and the people there were friendly. By the time I left, I was definitely in a good mood. It was a great field trip.

My Louisiana sister and I have been talking some about our fall gardens and planting the garlic and onions. Her planting date is later than mine, since she is more zone 9/10 than 7/8, but planning ahead is almost always good. To go with the garlic theme of our last couple of conversations, she sent a link to the amazing video below about using garlic in the kitchen.

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

Are you as astonished as I was? My sister and I are now both hunting for pairs of same-sized, large metal bowls.

Tenacity of the Summer Garden

The tomatoes just won't quit:



I pulled out the last two of the April-planted tomatoes, though, because when the first frost comes, I want to be more ready than I am. That first frost could come pretty much anytime now, though I don't actually expect it until about Halloween.

I ended up with another big pile of green tomatoes. A lot of these are far enough along that they will ripen within the next week or two, but some are too immature to ripen well, and I plan to use them in a green tomato salsa recipe that I found online.



I've already made one batch of this, and there was enough to use on one supper's enchiladas and then to mostly fill an ice-cube tray. The frozen cubes may seem weird to some people, but we don't always need the same amount each time we want to use some "salsa verde." Having the salsa frozen in cubes - then stashed in a freezer bag - means I can pull out just the right amount for the purpose at hand.

Eggplants and peppers are still coming into the kitchen, too. Some years the garden does better than in other years, and it is usually a mystery to me what makes the yearly differences so large. Of course, sometimes a less-productive year is totally my fault - the result of not paying attention to water or soil/nutrient needs, for example. This year, the weather has been so weird that a low-harvest year would not have been a big surprise, but the garden has, instead, blown me away with its productivity.

A delivery-guy I was talking with last week suggested that the shade in my yard (that I usually complain about) might have saved my garden from roasting in this overly-hot summer. Maybe he's right.

Regardless of the reason, the sweet potatoes seem to have done pretty well. I ended up with about 35 pounds from the 3x5-foot space they were planted in.



I always manage to resist brushing off the dirt and giving the sweets a good scrub, since those activities can damage the thin skins and result in sweets that rot rather than stay good into the winter, but the box of sleek, brownish, tapered shapes with "tails" makes me think I'm looking into a box of dead rats. The good news is that, when I get these into a basket on the kitchen floor after they've had a chance to cure, some of that dirt will have fallen off on its own and the resemblance will be less striking (I hope).

Later this week, I will get some mulch onto the bed that I dug those sweets from, and onto some other spaces, too. One whole bed, the one the melons were in, has been planted with a cover crop, hairy vetch. I've planted vetch for the winter before, and it is a pain to dig it back into the soil in spring, but I still had some seeds that I didn't want to waste.

That melon bed had been created as a "lasagna" bed, with compost from my yard and manure and bedding from a stable. When I checked that part of the garden after pulling out the melons, the top few inches were great, but below that was still solid clay. I'm hoping the roots of the vetch will help make little tunnels into that lower clay, giving the earthworms a little help in mixing the layers.

Gardens are always ending - and always beginning

Last Wednesday, the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden group met for the last time at the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, where it's been for the past six years. We harvested the last of the summer crops that were still in place - peppers and sweet potatoes - and we hauled the debris to the compost heap.

The final total of donated veggies for our 2011 garden year was 2710 pounds. Some of us still have at home some of the Seminole pumpkin squash that were too green to give away when we pulled up those vines, but those will all have finished ripening soon, and they will go to the Center for Family Resources - the pantry where we take our harvest - in another week or so. (Their weight hasn't been added to our total, yet.)

We had a great turnout for our last day at Smith Gilbert! This particular group of gardeners is just wonderful to work with. I feel very fortunate to know such great people every time I'm with them.



I'm in the plaid shirt, in front. Notice how I'm so short that I don't have to crouch down for the people behind me to be seen.

Some members of the group (but mostly just Fred) who have had a little free time have been looking into places to move the garden to, and we will have a few spots from which to choose. I am very happy that the group is ready to begin again! We will be meeting in about a week and a half to make a final choice, and to celebrate what we've accomplished this year.

When we have made that decision, it will be time to start getting the soil ready for next year. The fun will start all over again!

At home, the summer garden is thinking about ending, especially since we are getting some nighttime lows in the 40s. In spite of the onset of actual fall weather, we still have plenty of tomatoes. This is why I make that second planting in late June.



My fall veggies are mostly planted, but it isn't too late for one last crop of one of the faster-maturing radishes, and in a couple of weeks it will be time to plant garlic and multiplier onions that will mature in June, as part of next summer's garden.

This overlap of beginning and ending is one of the best parts of gardening. There's always something to look forward to. Even though it will be a little sad to bring in the last of the tomatoes in a few weeks, it also will be great to harvest the first bok choy, lettuce, spinach, beets, and other fall veggies. Some of these cooler weather crops will start to come to the kitchen before those last tomatoes are brought in.

When one season is coming to a close, another is opening up. When the soil temperatures drop and plant-growth slows to the point that it seems there's no growth at all, there is less work to do in the yard and more time to plan next year's garden -- what to plant and where, and how to improve the soil. And some of that work on improving the soil can begin in the less-rushed season of planning.

It's also a time to think about how the work of "putting food by" has panned out in terms of meals. That's part of gardening, too. If my little family's plan of making most our pasta sauce (and other foods that usually include a can of diced tomatoes) from our dehydrated tomatoes is successful, we will be very pleased.