Square Foot Gazette

Starting 2011

2011-04-17T16:09:00.006-04:00

Okay, so we actually started several months ago when Linda did a ton of winter sowing...but a couple of weekends ago we actually got out into the yard and did some serious labor.

For starters, we finally did some lasagna gardening along this side of our house, where we planted 38 of 50 strawberry starts that we'd bought.

But before that'd we'd done some serious trimming of the blackberries (pictured above in the middle of the strip) and moved the grape plant across the yard.

The grape had been doing fairly well where it was, but the lattice work we had in place wasn't holding up to the task. So, we decided to trim it completely down, dig it up, and transplant it. Hopefully it survived the move.

For those who may be wondering about the two leafy green plants in the front of the first picture, those are rhubarb plants.

They make for a delicious crisp...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a slice. ;-)

Disappointing

2010-02-24T18:37:00.002-05:00

Sadly, our cold bed seems to have met an untimely demise, due to the record snowfalls we've been getting this winter (4.5 feet to date since Xmas, more forecasted tonight).

As a result, we've had a cave-in:

Thankfully, we did get some harvest from the bed before the damage - a few carrots, beet greens, turnips, turnip greens, and lettuce.

Stuff inside might be okay, but we won't know until all the snow is gone. Likely, not...

On the bright side, Linda got some winter sowing done - flowers, tomatos, broccoli, leeks, and onions, to name a few. ;-)

More to come later (winter sowing and posts)...after all the snow melts, that is.

Cold Bed

2009-10-18T23:02:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I took a little time to build a cold bed around one of our square foot gardens. The bed is planted with lettuce, collards, kale, turnip, kholarabi, and carrots. With any luck, we’ll be able to harvest the bed throughout the winter.

We had bought about twenty bales of straw from a local farmer at a great price. It took ten of them to surround the perimeter of the garden, and the plexiglass windows we used for the ceiling we got for free via Freecycle. The wood sticks and rocks we had laying around the garage.

Putting the bed together was a little bit tricky. Not only was the straw heavy and soaked from hours of the rain I worked in, but the bed has five lengths of iron rebar sticking out of the ground around the perimeter of the bed (we use the iron to support trellises during the warmer seasons).

The rebar made for setting the roof to be a little tricky. Hence the fact that some of the window panes are sitting kitty corner on top.

Almost immediately after I laid the roof down, the windows started to fog up from the underside (it was a very cold and windy day). With the first frost advisory of the season tonight, it’s good that we didn’t wait any longer to set it up.

We’ve already bought a wireless outdoor thermometer so we can watch the temperature inside. We’ll post more as the bed progresses.

Look at the Curve on this Blackberry!

2009-07-29T22:29:00.001-04:00

Hehe. If you don’t get my little joke you can just crawl back under your rock :)

Anyways on to the blackberries. We planted two roots (one last year and one the year before) and they have since decided to take over the yard! Needless to say we have tons of berries this year. Thank goodness they are the thorn less variety.

I picked a couple of pounds over the course of 5 days as they ripened and decided to turn them into jam. In the hopes of making it a little bit less seedy I put 1/2 the berries through my food mill to catch some of the seeds. It didn’t work too well unfortunately. But not to worry, the finished product is delicious.

Here are the pictures of the finished jam. Yielded 8 half pints

The jam didn’t set up as thick as I would have liked but still a good consistency. Perfect drizzled over ice-cream or warm biscuits.

We ate like Gods

2009-07-26T13:21:00.001-04:00

Here’s the virginal sacrifice.

Weighing in at exactly 1 pound. It’s our first beefsteak tomato of the season. The variety is called Mortgage Lifter. If you’re interested in how it got its name here’s a quote from here. There is more to the story at the link.

Sometime during the early 1940's, Radiator Charlie decided that he wanted to develop a very large tomato, so he set about trying to locate the largest tomatoes that he could find. He soon located four varieties of very large tomatoes: German Johnson Pink, Red Beefsteak, an unknown Italian variety and an unknown English variety. From these, he grew ten plants which he cultivated in a very unorthodox, very unique fashion. He planted nine of the plants in a circle and then planted a German Johnson Pink in the center of the circle. Byles then cross pollinated the German Johnson's flowers with pollen from each of the nine plants in the circle and saved seed from the resulting tomatoes. The next year, he planted the seeds and selected the best seedlings. The very best of these again went to the center of a circle, while the remaining were planted in a circle around them. Again, the plants in the middle were hand pollinated with pollen from those in the circle. Byles repeated this process for the next six years until he had created a stable variety that met his needs. After that, he never had another type of tomato on his place. The resulting variety became known as the Radiator Charlie's Tomato and soon established themselves as being very desirable. Every spring, gardeners from as far away as 200 miles came to buy their tomato seedlings from Radiator Charlie, which he sold for one dollar each, which was a substantial amount of money for a tomato plant back then. Mr. Byles sold so many tomato plants of his new variety over the next five or six years that the profits of his tomato enterprise paid off the $6000 mortgage on his home!

I wouldn’t take this story as gospel as I’ve seen it vary and some times outright disputed at other sites. But it sure sounds good, doesn’t it?

For the sacrifice this will be our alter. Toasted Jewish rye covered in peanut butter and bacon. Does any one else find it ironic to have bacon on Jewish rye? I guess I never claimed that this was a kosher event.

Yes, you read that correctly. There is peanut butter in this sandwich. No lettuce. If we wanted a BLT we’d make one but this sandwich is a Peanut Butter-Tomato-(Bacon) Sandwich. I should point out that bacon isn’t required to make this sandwich. It’s delish with or without the porky goodness. Don’t forget to sprinkle salt and pepper on it to bring out the tomato flavours. Hmm-Hmm good.

Here is the end result. If you feel a little queasy at the idea of combining tomato and peanut butter look at Indonesian food. Some dishes combine peanuts and tomatoes and are quite delicious. If that doesn’t persuade you to give this a go, how about a double dog dare? Post feedback if you’re brave enough to try this sandwich out.

First Tomatoes of 2009

2009-07-24T09:19:00.001-04:00

We’ve picked our first tomatoes of 2009 – woot! They are called Sungold and Black Cherry cherry tomatoes. The former is a hybrid and the later is an open pollinated variety. I think we managed to get tomatoes about a week ahead of last year which is pretty darn good considering how late we got them planted.

Here’s a snap of them.

I could have probably left the blacks to ripen a bit more but the Sungolds were nice and sweet. Both varieties were quite tasty – probably the tastiest cherry tomatoes we’ve grown. I sliced them up and sprinkled salt and pepper on them last night for dinner.

This doesn’t have anything to do with tomatoes but thought I’d toss it in here. Yesterday I noticed a huge zucchini when I was picking cucumbers to make relish so I nabbed it and turned it into zucchini bread. Been ages since I’ve had zucchini bread. I hope to turn the next two zucchini’s into a mock apple pie. Suppose to be quite delicious. I’ll post results of that if I can get it made.

Relish, It’s a beautiful thing

2009-07-23T22:18:00.001-04:00

And delicious too.

Today I made some with vegetables from the garden – cucumbers, peppers and onions.

I followed the Sweet Relish recipe in this book. Very simple. Chop veggies with a food processor, soak in salted water, drain and then cook with vinegar and spices. I did run into a problem where I was 1 cup short on cucumber and 1/2 cup short on onion – I just put in an extra 1 1/2 cup of peppers. I’ve done that in the past and had good or at least unnoticeable results.

Here are some pictures of the process. The cast:

All chopped up. If you lean in close enough to the monitor you can smell how yummy it is.

Cooking with the yummy sugary spicy goodness.

The finished product. Yum. It yielded 4 pints. I plan to make one or two batches more. I’m not sure if I’ll try different recipes or stick with this one. We’ll see.

We’ve actually forgone buying relish since we ran out of our homemade stuff a few months ago. We’re such snobs that we’d rather wait for homemade before buying the other stuff :P

Morsbags: Sociable.Guerilla.Bagging.

2009-07-17T10:18:00.001-04:00

I know I made a passing reference to Morsbags in the recent post about the sewing machine we found at Goodwill. So I thought I would dedicate a post to them.

What is a Morsbag? Well a Morsbag is a shopping bag made out of fabric. It is meant to replace the plastic bags so common in stores today. Morsbags are made out of any durable fabrics (preferably reclaimed so that they don’t end up in landfills or going to waste) by people donating their time and sewing machines. The bags are then given out to other people. The preferred method is at large social events where hundreds and sometimes thousands of handmade cloth bags are given out. For FREE. No money is ever charged for a Morsbag.

I’ve made close to 100 so far and I think I started making them just over a year ago. Once you get the hang of the pattern they can be made in about 15 minutes. And once complete they can hold 20+ pounds – so they’re plenty strong for grocery shopping.

Here are some pics of the ones of made. I made quite a few just before baby bub was born to give out as Christmas gifts. I believe most were well received and are being use. Yeah!

My first

In action

Some more I’ve made

Ones I made for this Christmas just passed

States are starting to or already have ban(ned) plastic shopping bags. Stores are starting to charge for plastic. Some offer a token incentive/credit for bringing your own bags. It wont be long before everyone is using some type of reusable bags. So why not make your own? Instructions are found here.

Don’t have a sewing machine? Here are other bags you can make:

http://www.marthaste...ing-t-shirt-bag (instructions toward the end of the clip)

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=-6yDxK68OZc

I’d also like to give a shout out to LoveForEarth. She makes beautiful reusable produce bags for a great price. We just bought a dozen and they’re great.

Singer 15-90

2009-07-15T09:24:00.001-04:00

Eric and I found this little gem at Goodwill last weekend. Our intention was to get fabric to make Morsbags, which we did, but we couldn’t resist this. It cost a whopping $10. :)

After much Googling and talking with Singer it has been determined that my machine is a Model 15, manufactured April 1st ,1948 in Elizabeth, NJ! Through more Googling, I then deduced that it was a Model 15-90 (Singer didn’t have detailed enough historical records to tell me). It looks like someone, possibly the people at Goodwill removed the motor from it. It was also missing some parts and all the accessories and case.

I’m now in communication with a Singer service center in NJ to try get it up and running. I’ve decided that I’ll convert it into a hand crank and forgo trying to find another motor and light. After a cursory glance it is also missing the bobbin case and spool pin and needs a new bobbin winder tire. I’m sure as I’m restoring it I’ll come across more pieces that need to be replaced too.

The machine does seem to be in decent enough repair but it needs some TLC and a good deep cleaning. You can’t get near it without feeling sticky from 61 years of grease and built up old oils. It actually feels and looks like someone rubbed black strap molasses all over it.

I plan on doing the repairs and cleaning myself. I’ve been doing plenty of research and I still haven’t decided for sure what products I’m going to use to tackle the job but I do have a few ideas. What works for cleaning one vintage Singer sewing machine wont necessarily work for another (even the same model & year) because their was no consistency in the paint/enamel/decals. One of the biggest problems is finding something strong enough to remove oil that has oxidized to varnish without striping or silvering the gold decals.

Here are a few pictures. I’ll post more updates as they come up. I’ll be sure to snap pictures of each section as I open it up. It’s mighty disgusting inside. I actually found a mummified spider in one section :)

I know, I know

2009-07-14T15:03:00.001-04:00

It’s been a [long] while since we’ve updated about the garden or anything actually. We just got sidetracked with life and our ability to find time to post updates disappeared.

This posting will just recap stuff that we’ve done over the past two months. And then hopefully here on out we’ll have a few minutes every week or two to post garden pictures and news.

Through June our garden chugged along quite well. We had rain almost every day or two plus cool weather so we were quite worried that our plants would end up diseased. I don’t think we got through it unscathed since our tomatoes are showing early blight already. I’m almost certain that we didn’t have signs of it until later in the year last year. Anyways it of course started on our store bought Mortgage Lifter *sigh*.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Late Blight fiasco in the north eastern portion of the US. So far we have no signs of Late Blight thank goodness! Touch wood.

We seem to be having trouble with the tomatoes in one Earthbox getting blossom end rot. If it was just limited to one plant I wouldn’t think much of it but it’s both plants in the box so I think I’ll add more calcium to it and see if we can’t get this problem resolved. The plants afflicted are Early Girl and Delicious (which will hopefully be our contender for a Largest tomato contest).

Beans were/are great. We harvested a bunch 2 weeks ago and put 10 lbs in the freezer and 4 lbs went to the compost unfortunately. We were so harried and under a time crunch that we didn’t use the pressure canner for the first time but went with the blanching and freezing method we knew. As of last weekend the bush bean and haricot vert plants have been sent to bean plant heaven – but don’t worry, I’ve also planted the fall crop which is just starting to sprout. The pole beans are just starting to ramp up their production. I might plant a fall crop of them this week.

Here is a pic of all the beans we picked:

Japanese beetles have been spotted in the garden for 3 weeks or so but thankfully not in great hordes like previous years. They seem to be causing the most damage on our grapes and sunflowers.

Regarding sunflowers – we are participating in the Great Sunflower Project. They send out sunflower seeds, we plant and observe bees coming to the flowers and then report back our observations. The program is trying to assess what is happening to the wild bee populations since most of the data to date is from bee farms. We just got these seeds 2 weeks ago and I went to plant them only to discover all but 5 were crushed. So I added some of our own sunflower seeds to the mix and sowed them. So far no germination of any of them.

We had this visitor a couple of times over the past few weeks. I think I prefer the opossum better, LOL.

Speaking of out door critters, our stray we care for is injured. I tried contacting our rescue group for help but they haven’t gotten back to me. One of his back legs is wounded. At first I thought it was broken since it was so swollen and he was limping badly. Now the swelling is gone but there appears to be a wound on each side of leg (whether self induced or not we’ll never know) just below his knee. He still limps but is putting more weight on it and he seems to get around fine. We’ve also been feeding him more in case he can’t hunt.

Birds, particularly the robins have been eating our strawberries and today I caught them at our blackberries. We’ll be going to the garden coop on the weekend to get bird netting. %^&# birds :)

Other news, hmm… Oh yes! We went strawberry picking up at Linvilla Orchards in mid June. They are really close to us and we love going there. We picked I think 14 lbs of strawberries and we turned them into two batches of jam (one plain strawberry and the other cranberry strawberry) and dried about 7 lbs of them. Then we had a big bowl left over that we ate over the course of a few days. Yum!

Pics from the jam making:

In other more minor news, our Electric Black and Decker WeedHog gave up the ghost a few weeks ago so we replaced it with a Lehr Propane powered trimmer. Very nice. Lots of power. And an environmentally better alternative to gas powered trimmers.

I think that is it for today’s installment. Hopefully I’ll have more stuff to post soon.

Garden Update

2009-05-24T17:04:00.001-04:00

Well it’s been a while since I’ve had some time to write an update. Kids and other stuff have been keeping us quite busy. The garden is tootin’ along great. This morning I planted our new Earthbox with the last two tomato plants and put two eggplants in the garden. At this point the garden is 100% planted except for successive planting stuff like soybeans and scallions.

I went around 2 days ago and sprayed all the cole crops heavily with BT and soap. When we applied our floating row cover to the broccoli it wasn’t soon enough and we ended up with Imported Cabbage worms under the cover – Oy Vey! Talk about a headache. I’m hoping my BT application and the judicious use of my pinching fingers that we now have them under control.

We’ve been harvesting a LOT of lettuce but not so much that we can’t keep up with it. We’ve also harvested broccoli twice and strawberries. I also thinned some rutabagas the other night and they made a great addition to our salad. From May 1st (the start of our harvesting) to yesterday we have harvested a total of 4 pounds from the garden! We forgot to weigh some of the stuff we brought in and we’re bad for eating stuff outside straight from the garden. LOL

Now on to the pictures…

Can you spot the cat? The tall plant is actually 3 parsnips that I’m letting go to seed. They are 5 feet tall and just starting to open their flowers. We also have 2 volunteer (All Blue) potato plants that came up in this bed.

Our pole beans are starting to climb. I went out the other night and put up some twine for them. In the front of this bed we have garlic chives and regular chives. The covered area is 13 broccoli plants. We also have spinach.

This picture has some of our bush beans. Also kale, turnip, chard, lettuce, kohlrabis and some cukes.

This picture has our onions, haricot verts, leeks, scallions and sugarsnap and oregon giant snow peas. Oh and one square of soy so far.

A backward glance at our garden. I really wish I had budgeted some space for flowers this year. I think when the lettuce and spinach finish in a couple of weeks that I’ll stick some flowers in for colour.

One of our Earthboxes. You’ll notice the fill tube in the corner is getting ready for an automatic watering system we just need to finish the hook up. The tomato on the right is a Mortgage Lifter that we picked up at the local seed & feed store. We have a total of 10 tomato plants in the Earthboxes. I noticed this morning that in one bed we have a volunteer tomato plant coming up. I think I’ll leave it because the other thing in the square will be done in a few weeks.

These are our blackberries. They are going crazy. I still haven’t found time to go trim them back. They are sending shoot up all over the place – ugh :) Buried under it to the right is our grape which finally has blossoms on it this year. Yeah!

Our Rhubarb is doing great. Some of the leaves turned yellow and died but they seem to be perking up and getting lush. It also looks like I need to add more straw for mulch since the dandelions are coming up around them.

Picture of our strawberry plants. We did manage to get the fertilizer strip refreshed in it. Took some fancy footwork but with Ev’s help we got it done. We’ve been nibbling on ripe berries for about a week now.

Our harvest of berries from yesterday.

Here is a snap of our front flower beds. The area up close to the house still needs to fill out because we only just hacked off our hydrangeas and planted starts so it’s kind of bare at the moment. This is a mix of poppies that I seeded late last summer and they over wintered.

First May update

2009-05-11T08:14:00.001-04:00

The garden has been sprouting nicely the past couple of weeks, urged on by a great deal of rain. Unfortunately, there’s been a rather lackluster germination rate, but it’s nothing that a little re-seeding hasn’t been able to help with.

Here’s some photos we took last weekend.

Lettuce starts that we bought at Alexander’s Lawn & Garden have already yielded a good number of salads already, it’s nice to have fresh greens at last. So far, we’ve had almost 2 lbs of lettuce and a lot of salads over the past week.

In particular, our peas are growing well. We’re growing three varieties, Oregon Giant Snow Peas, Sugarsnap Snap Peas, and Sugar Ann Snap Peas. The Sugarsnap have been doing rather well, shooting right up to grab the trellis we planted them by.

By contrast, the Sugar Ann peas didn’t have a great germination rate, though the ones that are sprouting are growing fairly well.

Our brambles out in the side yard are doing remarkably well. The one blackberry is getting very large, as you can see, and the grape is looking very healthy.

Since these photos were taken,there’s been a lot more growth and amazing stuff. For right now, however, we’re about to go out and fix up our tomatoes in the same Earthboxes we used last year.

I’ll post again later this weekend with more updates on how our various plants are doing.

Verdict on Seed Mats

2009-04-28T12:21:00.001-04:00

Well I’ve come to the conclusion that seed mats are the way to go for small seeds – which I deem anything smaller than a bean or pea.

Everything that we sowed using them germinated. The 1 ply paper towel broke down quickly so it didn’t cause problems for the roots (and the weeds grew through it too :P ).

Changes for next year:

I think I’ll just use standard newsprint instead of paper towel for the mat. It is a bit thicker so it will be easier to work with and I know it breaks down quite quickly once wet. This year I was paranoid about the mat breaking down quickly enough so I separated the layers of paper towel which was tedious. I could have left them together.
Skip the homemade glue made out of flour. I’ll just get a couple of non toxic glue sticks.
Skip making mats for the bean seeds. It did go faster planting them using the mats but the seeds being so large had a hard time staying adhered to the paper towel.

Here are some repeat pictures and a recap – I used Bounty paper towels that I pulled apart so that they were 1 ply. I used them because that’s what I had on hand and the dimensions were almost 12 inches square. For the ones pictured, I used a non toxic glue stick and dabbed it at the recommended spacing for each type of veggie; dropped my seeds on; labeled with a pen and then set it out to dry. After drying I folded them up and placed them in a zip top bag.

A Sauer Meal

2009-04-24T13:53:00.001-04:00

Our sauerkraut is now 3 weeks old. We finally pulled out enough to actually have a portion with a meal, instead of just sampling it. It’s still not as sour as we would like, but the taste is really good. Time will help with that. The texture is nice and crunchy which isn’t like anything we’ve had from store bought kraut.

Also as a surprising bonus, the saltiness that I was complaining about a week or so ago is gone. I mean it’s still salty but really good.

I’ve also noticed that the bubbling has slowed down. I assume this is normal. It could also be because the house has been cool the past few weeks.

Smoked sausage, broccoli, potato wedges and sauerkraut.

Happy Earth Day!

2009-04-22T13:46:00.001-04:00

Everyone should do something nice for the earth today (and really everyday) whether its something like planting a tree or recycling or just turning off an unused light.

I thought this cartoon was funny.

Pictures!

2009-04-21T11:46:00.001-04:00

It rained all day yesterday. But today is clear so far, so I ran out and snapped a few pictures. I had the baby in my arms so the pictures might not be framed quite right.

Wintersowing starts. The gap in the one tub is due to me planting out some broccoli and brussel sprout seedlings the other day. I also replanted 7 varieties of tomatoes. I don’t know why they failed. I hope the replants fair well.

In the above picture you’ll notice that the peat pots are a lot smaller than the other ones. This will be the last year I use these little tiny ones. They just dry out way too fast (like in 2 hours on a moderately breezy day) and I lost at least 6 plants the other day. So in the future I’ll opt for larger vessels to winter sow in. Might take a bit more potting mix but I won’t have to worry about them drying out.

Strawberry plants. Starting to bloom like crazy. We still need to put a new fertilizer strip in and at this point we’ll have to get creative on how we’ll do that without removing the cover.

A picture of our 5x5 bed. We originally made it to hold potatoes and long carrots. It’s 12 inches deep. This year it’s holding parsnips, carrots, beets and skirret. The big bushy green thing in the back is 2 parsnips left over from last year. I’m going to let them go to seed and collect the seed to sow next year.

Baby beet plants

Picture of the main garden

Broccoli and lettuce starts we bought from our garden center a few weeks ago. The broccoli is doing quite well in spite of the slugs. We plan on harvesting salad in a few days.

Broccoli transplants I put in the other day.

Peas.

Brussel Sprouts

There were suppose to be pictures

2009-04-19T22:25:00.001-04:00

Well the title says it all. We had a beautiful weekend. Temperatures in the 70’s, sunshine, light breezes, birds singing, yadda yadda yadda – but we all came down with some horrible illness. Snot, coughing, sore throats. The kids are getting the worst of it; baby bub has even been vomiting today :( Ev will most likely miss school tomorrow until her nose isn’t quite so leaky.

Saturday:

In spite of the illness, Eric mowed the lawn yesterday. It was quite a bit overdue but we weren’t alone. I think all our adjacent neighbours mowed their lawns within 24 hours of our mowing which I think is a first in the last 6 years that we’ve lived here. I also managed to get out in the afternoon and quickly planted 18 squares of beans. The planting only took about 10 minutes and was sped up by using my seed mats that I had prepared months ago. I planted: Beer Friend Soy, Masai Haricot Verts, Maxibel Haricot Verts, Provider and Golden Butterwax. Never had time to snap pictures.

Sunday:

First it is Eric’s birthday today– so make sure you wish him a Happy Birthday if you get a chance. Today started off with me preparing him pancakes with eggs and bacon. As a side note we had the pancakes with Birch Syrup which was delish – thanks Steve ;). Then Ev and I made Eric a cake and wrapped his gift. Followed by his unwrapping of it. We had lunch and tried to relax a bit. We finally found a bit of time to get outside. I planted more beans (Golden Rocky, Gold of Bacau and Mixed pole bean) and transplanted 7 broccoli and 2 brussel sprout seedlings for a total of 23 more squares!). Then I fixed Eric his birthday dinner. All this was done with whiney, sick kids, one of whom was vomiting and not eating. Still no time for pictures of the garden.

In other gardening news: grapes that we feared were dead are leafing now. One of the rhubarbs is sending up a seed stalk already. I’ll lop it off in a day or two when I can get a minute. For some reason wintersowing starts are NOT fairing well at all this year. I don’t know what went wrong. I think it might have had to do with all the rain we’ve had plus slugs. I need to restart my tomato seedling tomorrow – the ones that have survived look great though.

It’s late and I’m rambling. If it’s not too rainy tomorrow I’ll try to snap pictures of everything. As soon as my cold subsides a bit I’ll taste the kraut and report results too.

Starting to taste sour

2009-04-09T15:12:00.001-04:00

It’s been a few days now since I started the kraut. I tasted it last night and it’s finally starting to get sour but is still really sweet IMO. I’m surprised it’s taking so long to get sour. I imagine at this rate it will be a few more days before we can move it to the basement where it is cooler. Our kitchen smells like Octoberfest :)

I managed to spend about an hour outside today working on the garden. I fixed 3 trellises. I planted 8 squares of Stuttgarter onion sets. I watered everything. And I installed some mini fencing to keep the bush beans contained.

Since our last frost date is in a few days I think I’ll go ahead and plant beans next time I can get outside. I’ll probably wait until towards the end of April to plant squash and cucumbers.

Almost everything that I sowed a few weeks ago has germinated. Still waiting on skirret, parsnips and carrots which can take a month to germinate. Also the leeks haven’t germinated yet but should soon.

First Taste @ 48 hours

2009-04-05T08:52:00.001-04:00

Last night Eric and I had a late dinner so I gave us each a small ramekin of sauerkraut on our plates. I tasted mine first. It definitely had the initial hint of being kraut but at the same time had a crunchy fresh taste too. When I told Eric that it still tasted like fresh cabbage he bypassed his taste test, LOL. Anyways we’ll try to taste it every day so that we can monitor its progress and halt or slow it when we deem it good eats.

One other thing about the taste test… It was too salty. Like tongue-hurty saltiness. Eric can attest to my love of salt and everything salty so when I say too salty, it’s too salty. I was surprised and disappointed at this. I think next taste test I’ll rinse it a bit in fresh water and see if that helps. If we weren’t approaching warmer months, I’d say next batch would have less salt but warmer weather kind of dictates more salt. We’ll see though.

Also yesterday we noted the start of bubbling. If we press on the weight a ton of bubbles come rushing to the surface.

I noticed off and on yesterday and this morning when I came down stairs that the kitchen definitely smells like kraut. It’s not a smell that really bothers me but I notice it.

Here is a picture from last night after I removed our bit of cabbage for sampling. You can’t really tell from the picture but I made a make shift ‘plate’ to help hold down the floaty bits of cabbage. I use a GladWare lid that I cut down to a manageable (and removable) size. You’ll also notice how high the brine is. We did add 1 cup (8oz) of brine the previous night after Eric pressed it again but it looks like we didn’t need it.

Garden Update

2009-04-04T13:13:00.001-04:00

After my last post about the garden my back was a mess and the weather was rainy. So not much was accomplished over the past week. Well my back is now better but the weather is still wet. In spite of that, I managed to nip out for some pictures today.

Note: Excuse the blurriness, it seems I had a problem with the camera focus and didn’t realize it.

Here are the broccoli, romaine and mixed lettuce starts we bought. They are all doing well and thriving.

We have germination of some of our seed mats. I think this square is either turnip or chard. I did see lettuce and kohlrabi sprouts too.

Some of Eric’s direct sown peas are coming up too – Sugar snap and Oregon Giant. The one variety: Sugar Ann doesn’t look like it’s germinating. Those seeds are old and I remember having germination problems with them last year. I’ll take a sample of them tomorrow and do a germination test. If any are viable I’ll replant the area out in the garden.

Here are our rhubarb plants. I was worried when I planted them because when I pulled them out of their pots all the soil fell off the roots so they were planted in 100% compost. So far they look good.

Here is a few pictures of our winter sown starts. I’m disappointed in their germination this year. I think it was because we had such wonky weather this winter/spring. The past 2 years there was a higher germination rate by now, plus the seedlings were bigger. I’m not giving up hope though, stuff is still germinating every day so it’s not a loss yet.

Kraut Update

2009-04-03T22:07:00.001-04:00

Right before bed last night, I had Eric press the cabbage. With him being taller he had more leverage and was able to pack it a bit more firmly.

So this is what it looked like 12 hours later. The liquid is just shy of the top of the cabbage level. Note how much it’s gone down over night. You’ll notice too that I’ve replaced the widemouth pint jar with a regular pint filled with coins. Provides more weight and easier removal through the mouth of the gallon jar.

This is what it looks like 24 hours later. The liquid is about 1cm above the surface – though there are a few pieces still above the liquid surface. Before bed tonight I’ll get Eric to press it again. If we can’t get everything pressed below the liquid, I’ll whip up a cup of brine and pour it in.

Wild Fermentation

2009-04-02T22:35:00.001-04:00

Our fermenting experience is really limited. I’ve personally done wine before. Eric and I have done beers together. We hope to try cheeses this summer when we have more time.

I came across this book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz and it has really sparked my interest in fermented foods. They are actually very healthy and safe for people. They act as a digestive aid containing the same bacteria as yogurt. A lot of people are afraid to try their hand at fermenting foods because of the risk of botulism. If you do the reading/research you’ll find that it is a non issue with fermenting for many reasons – namely botulism doesn’t like salt and acid.

Tonight we are starting our first batch of Sauerkraut aka fermented cabbage. We plan to post updates and reviews of the process from start to finish.

The recipe is simple: 5 lbs of fresh cabbage and about 3 tablespoons of pickling salt.

I coarsely chopped the cabbage and removed most of the cores. As I put each layer of cabbage in the bowl I sprinkled some salt on.

Then I packed it as hard as I could in to a 1 gallon jar. After trimming the cabbage I ended up with 4 1/2 lbs and it was all I could do to cram it into the jar.

I placed a pint jar full of water into the mouth of the gallon jar to act as a weight. Over the next day or two the sauerkraut will need to be pressed down when ever we can manage it. This will ensure that the moisture is released from the cabbage and that it will be submerged under the liquid to prevent spoilage. Then we wait for Lactobacilli to do their thing. Once the volume goes down a bit in the jar I’ll find something else to use as a weight.

As a final step, I tied an old (clean) tea towel around the top to keep dust and bugs out. If you open this photo up bigger you can see the moisture is already starting to accumulate in the bottom of the jar and it’s only been about 10 minutes.

Planting Seedlings

2009-03-26T11:41:00.001-04:00

On Monday, Eric and I ran to the local seed co-op and bought some stuff for the gardening season: labels, lime, fertilizer and they had a decent price for seedlings. So we bought a 9 pack of romaine, 6 pack of salad lettuce mix and a 6 pack of some broccoli variety. We also bought 2 rhubarb crowns – Victoria and Crimson Red varieties. We were planning on getting the rhubarb this year but not the seedlings. Oh well, impulse purchases are helping the economy :)

I peeked at the forecast for the next 10 days on Tuesday morning – nothing below freezing, so I planted everything that afternoon. Of course, right before sunset I checked the weather forecast again and it said 30 overnight. Gosh darn it! So Evelyn and I ran outside with Styrofoam coffee cups and stuck one on each of them. I left the rhubarb to fend for itself. Just incase anyone is wondering, the cups provided no protection, LOL. Everything was crispy and covered in ice crystals. But I think everything might survive except the salad lettuce mix. The romaine and broccoli looked good when I watered them in the afternoon.

Thankfully it’s raining today because I put my back out and it was horrible trying to tend and water the plants yesterday. I’m not sure how I did it, but it probably had to do with digging holes in clay for the rhubarb after sitting in the van for 4 hours. I hope I’m better by tomorrow because I can’t even lift the baby today which makes caring for him difficult. Cross your fingers that my back is better soon.

We Wordled!

2009-03-25T21:33:00.001-04:00

I thought this was really cool. Takes all your words on your blog and displays them by size according to how often they appear. Just like on CNN, LOL.

Visit www.wordle.net.

Fillmore Container

2009-03-24T17:42:00.001-04:00

Last year for my birthday, Eric got me a 16 qt pressure canner and I’m itching to try it out. So this year we are planning to put up as much garden fare as possible. In order to do this we needed to acquire a large stash of canning jars.

I stumbled across this great company a few months ago when I was Googling for a cheap source of canning jars. This company is located just a hop, skip and jump from us in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Since Fillmore Container had better prices and selection than Wal-Mart, we decided to place an order and drive up to pick it up:

10 cases of wide mouth quart jars
10 cases of wide mouth pint jars
7 cases of 1/2 pint jars
5 cases of 1/4 pint jars
1 case wide mouth lids
1 case of regular mouth lids
1 case of wide mouth gallon jars
12 wide mouth lids for gallon jars
1 case of 17 oz bale jars

The gallon jars will be for fermenting vegetables and the bale jars will be for dried vegetables and herbs.

The drive was pleasant and the people at Fillmore were great. We highly recommend them. Keith Reinhart of Fillmore containers was telling us that he’s seen a large increase in people buying canning jars.

Here’s are some pictures of our haul (about 2.5 feet high, 4 feet deep):

Edible Estates

2009-03-23T08:01:00.001-04:00

Edible estates is a concept that has been around for awhile but is now gaining in popularity. It basically involves using vegetables to decorate the front lawn instead of shrubs and flowers or at least in conjunction with. I think next growing season we’ll try some of this. We might even enlarge our front flower bed again.

There is a neat website that I came across called www.fritzhaeg.com. They help design and implement edible landscapes all across the country. They have a list of current and past initiatives including pictures.

Here are a couple of photos. If you visit their site you can view many more including before and after shots.

Garden Update

2009-03-22T18:18:00.001-04:00

Well we managed to get the garden beds ready for planting. Woo Hoo! I took a few days over the past week to putter around with them on my own. Having a wee babe sure makes gardening (the kind where you get mucky and smelly) hard. I weeded, amended with compost, mixed that in, put out the irrigation and tied on grids. Then with Eric’s help I installed the trellises this morning. And then we planted.

We planted peas, chard, parsnips, carrots, lettuces, spinach, collards, skirret, beets, kohlrabi, raab, kale, turnips, leeks and scallions. I think that’s everything that was planted. In total we did 71 square feet! About 1/3rd of our total square footage. In 3 weeks after our last frost date, we’ll plant our cukes, melons and squash and probably some of our winter starts. All in all not too bad.

According to the almanac we are 3 weeks behind in planting most of the stuff listed above but oh well – it should grow fast since it’s getting warmer daily. Looking back at our journal from last year, we didn’t get stuff planted until April 12th! So we are 3 weeks ahead of that date.

Our stray cat, Morris has taken to sleeping on the garden beds during the day. I thought that was strange because it’s been blustery cold. Why would he be laying out there in the open? Well that question was answered when I started planting today – holy smokes the beds are nice and toasty. Definitely warmer than the air. Smart kitty.

Planting the seed mats that I made was kind of tricky initially. It was breezy today which didn’t help matters. But once I got into the groove of using them, I was able to plant a square foot in about 30 seconds. I’ll post more reports as seeds begin to germinate.

Now on to our pictures…

Probably not evident in the pictures but our trellises are in horrible shape. Before anything gets big enough I’ll have to repair them.

Our blackberry brambles and grape vine.

Hopefully in 10 days or so I’ll be able to post some pictures of sprouts.

NatureMill – Compost Made Easy

2009-03-21T09:02:00.001-04:00

Eric and I currently have large composting bins in our side yard. The bins are so big that they can hold a year worth of compostables. The space is divided into 5 compartments – 2 for composting household and garden waste and 2 for composting the same things plus cat waste. The 5th bin is a spare in case we have overflow.

My father-in-law sent a link pointing us to NatureMill. If I had some spare money I would try one out in a heart beat. I have to admit that it looks like a neat little appliance. According to their instructions you can compost fruit and veggie stuff, meat and dairy along with small bones like fish bones. You can also compost animal feces and pet bedding. I don’t know if it would work for us since everything has to be chopped or broken into pieces 4 inches or smaller and admittedly we’re lazy. You also cannot compost paper, newspaper or cardboard which would seriously limit us.

I also noticed that they warn that you shouldn’t put the fresh compost too close to plants unless it’s aged 6 months outdoors. I think the reason for this is because the compost produced from this machine is way too high in nitrogen. The standard ratio is 10:1 (carbon:nitrogen) of compostables. I don’t think you’d get that by adding a couple of scoops of wood pellets they recommend with each deposit. As long as a person is aware of this and knows how to correct the imbalance or ages the compost then this would be great.

Despite the potential high nitrogen and having to buy wood pellets, baking soda and a filter for it, I would still give this a go. I really like how they don’t shy away from composting meats and dairy which actually account for quite a bit of compostable waste amazingly enough.

White House to have a Garden!

2009-03-20T19:17:00.001-04:00

Yeah! I’m so happy about this news. I hope this encourages others to grow a garden. I also love how Michelle is involving school kids in the gardening process.

Here is a link to Kitchen Gardeners International and their post about the garden. Their post has a picture of the planned layout for the vegetables and fruits in the garden. I haven’t seen this image in any other online news source (though I admit I didn’t look too hard, just at some of the major ones).

I love this video put out by Kitchen Gardeners International to encourage the current President to grow a garden. I guess it worked. :)

Boston Baked Beans

2009-03-20T09:28:00.001-04:00

Last year we grew a bunch of pole beans (a mixed variety that included green, yellow and purple podded). Well life happened and we never got a chance to harvest many while green. So we decide to try drying beans. We let them dry naturally on the vines. Afterwards we harvested the dried pods and I shelled them after letting them sit for a week or two indoors to make sure they were 100% dry.

Anyways, 7 square feet of bean plants, netted us almost 2 pounds of dried beans. Not too shabby IMO. We could use these beans to plant a new bean crop but we decided to use them for cooking.

And, today I’m finally doing that. It should be noted that generally baked beans are made with navy or great northern beans, which are small and white. Also the varieties we grew are more for fresh or frozen eating, not dried. But I want to see how they do.

I measured out 1 lb or approximately 2 cups of dried beans. Washed them, and then put them on to boil for 2 or so minutes. After boiling I turned them off and let them sit in the hot water for an hour. In reality, it was a few hours because I wasn’t quite ready to start cooking with them.

This is the recipe I use to make my baked beans.

2 cups navy beans
1/2 pound bacon
1 onion, finely diced
3 tablespoons molasses
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).
Arrange the beans in a 2 quart bean pot or casserole dish by placing a portion of the beans in the bottom of dish, and layering them with bacon and onion.
In a saucepan, combine molasses, salt, pepper, dry mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil and pour over beans. Pour in just enough of the reserved bean water to cover the beans. Cover the dish with a lid or aluminum foil.
Bake for 3 to 4 hours in the preheated oven, until beans are tender. Remove the lid about halfway through cooking, and add more liquid if necessary to prevent the beans from getting too dry.

It’s not the best I’ve ever had but it’s pretty darn good. I do have another recipe somewhere that is amazing but I have sadly misplaced it and until I find it, this recipe will do.

Today, since we’re out of bacon, I’m using 2 pork hocks as my meat. I also multiply the sauce recipe by one and a half or 2 since I like my beans saucy. Today it was just one and a half since I was short on molasses and ketchup. To make up for the ketchup shortage I added 1/4 cup of chili sauce. God, I sound like one of the reviews on allrecipes.com, LOL.

Here’s a picture of the beans right before boiling. I’ve covered them with a generous amount of water.

Here they are after a few hours of sitting. Rinsed and ready for the other ingredients.

Ready to go into the oven.

Stirring at the half way point, and removing the lid.

An hour or so after removing the lid. After this picture, I removed the hocks and pulled the meat off and added it back into the beans.

The hocks seemed extra meaty.

The finished product after 5 hours of cooking.

The beans softened but not enough. I’m not sure what went wrong. From my understanding there are three things that can cause beans not to soften: hard water, too old or putting something acidic in the recipe. Well, I know my water isn’t hard; we’ve cooked many beans, lentils and peas and never had a problem. I also know the beans aren’t too old, having grown them myself. That leaves acidic. I did make a change this time the I’ve never done before and that was substituting chili sauce for ketchup which I’m sure is more acidic. When I reheat the leftovers, I’ll add a bit of baking soda and see if I can get them to soften a bit more.

In the end though, the beans were soft enough to eat and enjoy. They turned out really tasty; best I’ve made in awhile. I’d give them an 8 or 8.5 out of 10. I still have some of our own home grown dried beans in the pantry so I can play with the recipe next time to see if I can get them softer.

Victorian Kitchen Garden

2009-03-19T11:14:00.001-04:00

I came across this great BBC documentary a few weeks ago. It’s called ‘The Victorian Kitchen Garden’. It dates back to 1987, but it really is timeless. It stars Harry Dodson and Peter Thoday. It’s the first documentary in a series of documentaries about Victorian gardening. Apparently it’s shown quite regularly on satellite and in the UK. I’ve never seen the whole series, only what I can find on YouTube. I wish I could buy it on DVD.

Here are a few clips from this show that I’ve found on YouTube:

Victorian Kitchen Garden: Introduction

Victorian Kitchen Garden: January

Victorian Kitchen Garden: February

I’ll just post those three. If you’re interested in the other 10 months, just do a search on YouTube and you’ll find them.

Cleaning Gardening Gloves

2009-03-17T18:17:00.001-04:00

Until recently I didn’t realize this was possible. We have quite the variety of gardening gloves: cotton, suede, kid, and canvas. From a quick Google search I learned that some people keep them clean by washing them with hand soap after each use, including the suede variety. They do this by wearing them while washing their hands. However ours had a few years of built up crud on them so I didn’t think hand soap would cut it.

Having a sense of adventure (and a garden center less than a mile away incase I ruined them), I decided I would toss them in the washing machine and hope for the best. I rounded up 6 pairs and toss the lot of them in the machine, added a generous scoop of Tide and a good glug of white vinegar (to soften and help neutralize bacteria and smellies living in the gloves). I set the wash to cold. We after 40 minutes in the wash and a day to dry, they went from this:

To this:

Looking at the pictures it doesn’t look like much has changed. But trust me, they feel, look and smell a whole lot better. They are a touch stiff but they aren’t crunchy like before. After wearing them for a few minutes they were soft again. They also smell like new again.

From here on out, we’ll wash them with hand soap after doing something mucky in them and then a few times a season toss them in the washing machine.

Seed Mats

2009-03-14T13:07:00.001-04:00

I've been busy the past week working on my seed mats. Because I don’t have time to spare I decided to forgo the homemade glue made with flour and water. So I grabbed a non-toxic Almer’s glue stick sitting in Ev’s craft caddy. Worked great and allowed me to do the mats while watching t.v. after the kids went to bed.

Here’s a couple snaps of Skirret and Parsnip seeds glued to 1 ply paper towel.

So far I’ve done, parsnips, skirret, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, collards, chard, kale, raab, scallions and leeks. I did some bush beans weeks ago. Left to do are lettuces and spinach, which hopefully will be tonight. Then soon as I get a free minute all of them are going to be planted out in the garden along with peas. Most of these things could have been planted 2 weeks ago but due to weather and kids that didn’t happen.

I’ll of course be reporting back regarding the success or failure of these mats. I do hope they work because they give me something productive to do indoors and it will speed up planting/thinning outside. Another plus is not having to drag all my envelopes of seeds outside on windy days.

Telling temperature using insects

2009-03-11T15:29:00.001-04:00

I was reading this book today and it had a neat little chart for telling the temperature using insects. Most people I’m sure have heard about using crickets but apparently you can use katydids and cicadas too. Here is what the book had to say (temperatures are in Fahrenheit):

105	All insects are quiet
102	Bees are idle
83	Cicadas sing
78	Katydid says KATY-DID-IT
72	Katydid says KATY-DID
65	Katydid says KAY-TEE
58	Katydid says KATE
46	Grasshoppers cannot fly
40	All insects mute
32	All insects dormant

Now, I don’t know how accurate these things are. I tried to find verification online but the only mention I could see of using katydids is on this site, and their formula was different:

…calling rates among katydids varies with the temperature, so you can always get an accurate weather report by solving the equation T=(C+161)/3, with T being the Temperature and C the number of calls per minute.

I know from personal experience that Cicadas don’t start singing until the late morning when the heat of the day is starting to peak in the summer.

And I know that the cricket thing is a good estimation. Here is the Old Farmer’s Almanac instructions:

To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get temperature.

Example: 30 chirps + 40 = 70° F

To convert cricket chirps to degrees Celsius, count number of chirps in 25 seconds, divide by 3, then add 4 to get temperature.

Example: 48 chirps /(divided by) 3 + 4 = 20° C

Vintage Victory Garden Movie

2009-03-10T19:45:00.005-04:00

I stumbled across this video on the www.archive.org website. Thought it was an interesting piece of vintage propaganda. According to the site it was the inspiration for the PBS series 'Victory Garden'

Finally some updated pictures

2009-03-08T14:29:00.002-04:00

I ran out this morning and snapped some photos around the garden. First up is a picture of my wintersowing containers and sprouts. In the bottom picture you can see poppies. There are also some broccoli and brussel sprouts coming up too in this container.

Next is Morris our stray cat. We keep him around to keep rodents and rabbits out of the garden. He does a great job. We actually just trapped him last week and took him into the rescue group to get his vaccinations updated.

Here are pictures of the garden beds. They look a bit disheveled because of the compost. The compost was nice and decomposed but the straw walls we built around the compost bin didn’t break down as much and I was too lazy to put forth much effort to separate the two. Most of the straw is nicely rotted and will probably disappear pretty quickly in the garden. Once we get some planting done we’re going to mulch heavily with straw this year to decrease the amount of water we use and eliminate weeds.

Close up of the bed I worked the compost in to. I don’t think it looks as bad in person as the picture makes it look.

I made a compost deposit 9 days ago. It consisted of 6 - 5 gallon pails of household compostables, 6-10 pizza/takeout boxes, a couple cardboard boxes and 60 lbs of dirty cat litter and waste. We use compostable cat litter for a couple of our cats and put it into a separate compost bin that will only get used on the front ornamental beds. I checked the temperature 3 days later and noted it was 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Then mid last week noted it was 135 the day after our big snowfall, and today it is 130.

It’s amazing how hot it gets and how long it ‘cooks’. Most backyard composters never get thermalitic composting because of insufficient mass. We achieve that by accumulating our compostables in 5 gallon pails for a week or two and then make a big deposit. With how hot it gets and how long it stays hot any parasite that might be in the kitty poo will get killed (plus the cats are indoor only and thoroughly dewormed). If you’re interested in the nitty gritty details of composting and how our philosophy came about read this book. It’s available for free online, just scroll down. Don’t let the title turn you off. It’s a great resource for composting information backed with scientific studies and facts.

Here’s a snap of the possibly not dead strawberry plants. I’ll cut them back, fertilize and water them and see what they do.

We experienced a lot of heaving this winter for some reason. All the garden bed frames lifted, garden trim popped right out of the ground in some spots and our patio frame came up. We’ll have a lot of little repairs like that to fix over the next few weeks.

The compost is ready

2009-03-07T23:24:00.001-05:00

It’s amazing what 5 days can mean to the weather. Last Sunday and Monday it snowed so much that we got 10.7 inches of snow in about 15 hours. Schools, businesses and most government offices were closed. Now all but a few patches of snow exist in the area. The weather was beautiful today – high of 70 degrees! Eric and I and the two tots ran errands this morning. After getting home and eating I was itching to get out in the garden.

So around 3 I gave the baby to Eric and went out and didn’t come back in until just before 6 pm. I did a lot of weeding. Most of the weeds consisted of flowers that I’d planted last year that self sowed. It’s amazing how something once wanted is now a weed *sigh*.

After weeding I opened two compost bins – one dating from fall 2006 to spring 07 and the other from spring 07 to spring 08. Both were beautifully decomposed. The only stuff recognizable were things like branches that were too big and egg shells. I did find a few bones but meh, who cares. And for those people who are scratching their heads about my finding bones in the compost – we compost everything: vegetable matter, dairy, fats, meat, bones, pizza boxes, tissues, dixie cups, etc. We spare nothing. We also don’t turn our piles. We’re taboo composters LOL.

I proceeded to fill 10 wheelbarrow full of compost and dumped them in the garden beds. I spread it around but didn’t get it mixed in except for one bed. The soil and compost are still a bit too damp so the work was heavy. I’ll wait a few days and do the mixing later. During that, Ev, Eric and Marshall came out to watch and chat with me. Which was nice since it made the work less monotonous.

After I finished with that, I tackled the uncovering of the Earthboxes. In the fall we had drained the water as best we could and stacked them to the side of the garden and covered them with a tarp. Well I removed the tarp and then proceeded to pull the old tomato plants out and the fertilizer strips. The boxes look like they survived the winter really well. The one that contained the strawberry plants looks like the plants might actually have survived the winter. Only time will tell.

So tomorrow or whenever I can get out there again I need to do the following:

put the irrigation in (a sunny day would be beneficial for this to soften the hoses)
mark the grids on the gardens (undecided whether to use compostable twine or nylon)
clean up the 5x5 bed which still contains parsnips
PLANT :)

There are other things that need to be done like installing the trellises and setting up the earthboxes but that can wait a month or more. I also need to finish my seed strips/mats mentioned in an older post.

I’ll snap pictures tomorrow before it rains to show the progress on the garden.

Pax

The New Victory Garden

2009-02-03T23:44:00.002-05:00

I’ve been interested in the history of Victory Gardening for quite awhile. Honestly it was part of what encouraged us to start gardening ourselves – the thought of a little bit of self sufficiency was appealing. Stories from WWI and particularly WWII eras astound me. I know it is often quoted that civilians during WWII were able to grow 40% of all vegetables consumed. I find that figure amazing. People turned their lawns into gardens to support the effort, heck even Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn to encourage the movement.

I was reading today that Gerald Ford tried to revive Victory Gardens when he took office. His name for them was WIN (Whip Inflation Now) Gardens but unfortunately the idea never caught on.

More recently Victory Gardening is gaining in popularity, though it goes by different names - freedom gardening, peace gardens, liberty gardens, and edible landscapes. People are concerned with food safety and cost along with availability. What better way to ensure food than to grow it yourself. The resurgence of interest in this form of gardening is being driven by online blogs, websites and even seed companies. Last year even Prince Charles was encouraging people to grow their own foods.

With worsening economic times in the near future for everyone I can only hope that the movement will gain even more momentum. I hate to imagine how dire the situation might get for some. With the news about the bad droughts in California causing farmers to slash plantings and go out of business, it sure seems bleak. All we need now is a few bad hurricanes to destroy the other prime veggie growing areas like Florida and a whole lot of foods will skyrocket in price or become unavailable. I hope for everybody’s sake that something like that doesn’t happen, but if it does I hope that they start gardening to help.

Ready, Set, Garden!

2009-02-02T15:42:00.007-05:00

Hard to believe garden season is here again. Working on the garden plan and starting transplants sure goes a long way to alleviating cabin fever in January and February.

The month of January was spent combing through seed catalogs and doing research online. I selected many new types and varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers to grow. I like to peruse a variety of catalogs but I always end up ordering all our stuff from Fedco. They have a great selection, awesome prices and free shipping. Plus their catalog is a hoot to read. They abhor GMO seeds and boycott makers/resellers of them so if you're hankering for the latest franken-mater look somewhere else.

Eric has been working hard on developing a piece of software to help track, organize and plan a SFG/raised bed garden. So far it's looking really good. I'll let him post about it since he knows the ins and outs of it.

I received most of my seeds 2 weeks ago and gave up waiting for the rest before starting wintersowing - if I wait too long I wont have any winter left for wintersowing. So this past weekend I went ahead and got started. If you're not familiar with this technique - it's a great energy efficient way to start transplants in the spring without cluttering up the basement or closet with grow lights and still ending up with leggy plants. This technique was developed by a wonderful woman named Trudi. She runs Wintersown.org and has tons of info about the process and she also gives out free seeds for a SASE!

I managed with the help of Evelyn, to get 3 medium Sterilite containers potted up this weekend. They are now out on the deck enjoying 55 degree weather?! Where the heck did winter go? Thankfully the weather forecast shows snow for tonight and tomorrow. I do have another 2 Sterilite containers to do up, just waiting for another shipment of seeds. This is what I've sown so far:

Because Blogger is annoying the snot out of me when it comes to adding images I'll just add these last 3 images and make another post in a day or two with real pictures. These images are of the proposed garden layout this year. It's not set in stone yet but I think we'll go with it. We don't have much trellis space so we are limited in where we can put things like melons, squash, pole beans and peas. We have 193 sf of gardening space plus our 5 Earthboxes. Then out in front of our house we put in a large flower bed which we'll be enlarging even more once we get time. So we have a lot of space to play with.

In addition to finishing up winter sowing, once we get the rest of our seeds we're also going to make our own seed tape. Well not actual tape, but more like 1 sf planting mats out of sheets of paper towel or newspaper. Here's a link to how to make your own homemade seed tape. I figure this will make a great craft for Evelyn. Seed mats will speed up planting a lot for us. Having a new baby sure puts a crimp in our time so anyway to shave some time off planting piddly little seeds is a win.

In a few weeks towards the end of the month I'll order a couple cubic yards of compost, 6 - 8 bales of straw and some more peat and vermiculite for delivery from our local Seed & Feed store. Then, weather permitting, the first week of March or so we'll start amending the beds and put out our drip irrigation, and hopefully get some seed mats and wintersowing starts planted.

And we're off to a great start for the 2009 growing season - wish us luck.

Winding down for the year

2008-10-03T20:11:00.005-04:00

The past month has seen the garden starting to tail off as the season dwindles. It was not without its share of bounty, however.

While our tomatoes were not as plentiful as they were last year, we nonetheless had a fair yield of cherries and other various reds.

The picture above shows the final haul we took about a weeks ago, the biggest in over a month. For the prior four or six weeks, I'd been picking about a cereal bowl's worth of cherries, with the occasional red.

Additionally, the strawberries produced plants in our Earthbox had given about a dozen strawberries each week until two weeks ago. It was a lovely treat to have as the summer came to an end. :-)

Now, we're firmly in autumn's territory. We planted twenty-nine square feet of beans (9 plants per square with an average of 90% germination/survival rate). Today we picked and just finished freezing our first yield:

What's more amazing is what's coming. The plants are covered with yet more beans, and far more blossoms. We should have a nicely packed freezer of fresh beans for the winter. :-)

Our peas will probably be producing soon, they're covered with blossoms. We now need to put the trellises to support them. That, among a thousand other things, will be the agenda this weekend.

Switching to Autumn crops

2008-08-31T18:51:00.000-04:00

Over the last few weeks, we've been slowly changing from the summer time crops to those of the autumn season. We've planted bush beans, peas, lettuce, swiss chard, carrots, radishes, and mesclun mix.

Here's what the garden looks like right now:

The new plants along the right side of the isles are the bush beans, we planted them about two weeks ago. The rest of the new crops were planted just a few days ago. We're still waiting for them to germinate.

We've pulled up a lot of the summer crops by now. The pole beans, scarlet runners, cucumbers, and watermelons are all gone. We've still got tomatoes and strawberries, and our pepper plants are still prolific producers. Here's a few pictures of our garden from about two weeks ago.

Overall, this year's summer crop was pretty good. We pulled out far more cucumbers than we could have possibly eaten, so we gave as many as we could some of our friends. We also put some cucumbers and tomatoes out for our neighbors to take (which they did - we received quite a few thanks and compliments on how nice the tomatoes tasted).

The pole beans were left on the vine to dry. Between the infestation of Japanese beetles that beset the poor plants and how hot this summer was, it seemed the easier option. In all we picked and shelled over a pound of dried beans, as seen here:

Our corn was almost a success. We harvested a number of small ears from the stalks. However, it was rather bland and tasteless. In hindsight, we probably left the fruit on the plant for too long, as we were expecting the ears to grow larger than they did.

We'll just try again next year.

Our strawberries are still producing, amazingly enough. They survived quite the assault by the Japanese beetles, but now that the scourge has passed, they're yielding at least a dozen fruits a week, usually more.

Our tomatoes have been fairly productive, though with far smaller yields than last year. But then, we only put down eight plants this year, as opposed to the sixteen we did last year.

In all, the garden's been good this year so far, if not quite as productive as last year. More updates to come as the autumn weeks roll by. We're looking forward to our peas and some fresh lettuce again.

Overdue update

2008-07-10T07:12:00.000-04:00

The following post was written by my wife about a week ago:

Been a long time since I posted an update here. Eric was taking over the job on blogger but he doesn't have much time to post often.

Garden is doing well. We are besieged by Japenese beetles :evil: It seems we've provided them with quite the smorgasboard this year. They love the beans and zinnias of course. They've been nibbling on my basil and grape vines and corn, oh and blackberries. But the best thing they love is the strawberries. UGH.

We pulled out the peas a week or two ago. We got a pretty good harvest this year. The now open spots will be filled with bush beans in a few weeks.

We were also plagued with harlequin bugs. Those bugs creep me out. They took over any sort of cole crop. Most of the that has been pulled up now except the swiss chard and cabbage.

Garlic is almost ready to harvest. The hardneck stuff fell over :? Don't know why. After the rain passes and the ground dries a bit I'll harvest them and set them about to cure. I clipped most of the scapes off the soft neck garlic so the bulbs should be bigger.

The corn is about 4 feet tall. Most have tassles and some even have silks.

Found this bug while watering my earth boxes. It was clinging to the side of the box. Eric identified it as a grape vine beetle. Aparently the damage they can inflict is minimal so I released it. I was suprised at how big they are.

Blackberries are getting big and red looking. The ants are all over them. I guess there is some sort of sticky/sweet stuff on them that they like. It doesn't look like they are harming them.

First carnation opened today. It is a white-ish color. It smells divine - like cinnamon with a spicy note. Very nice.

Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes. Our tomato plants are going crazy. We have 8 plants this year (half what we had last year). We bought 1inchx1inch 6 foot stakes to stake them. All the plants seem to have tomatoes on them but one. For some reason it seems to keep losing its blooms. It is a mystery heirloom variety that I planted so I don't know what the deal is.
This kind is called Chico III - very strange shape

Going crazy tomato plants

Cherry tomato going nuts. It's covered in blossoms, hence the yellow hue to the picture. It is so big we had to dedicate 2 large stakes to it.

Another mystery tomato plant with a tomato ripening

You can't really tell in this picture but this is our roma tomato plant. It is loaded with tomatoes.

Bed with herbs and patty pans

Picture of the patty pans I harvested today. I harvested 3 the other night. Most in the picture came from one plant

Bed with flowers and onions. The onions are almost ready to harvest I think. They are getting quite large.

Pole bean and flower bed. It also has a dead zucchini and a egg plant with a baby egg plant on it.

The zuke was alive yesterday but died late in the afternoon. I think it is suffering from vine borers. I can't think of what else would cause such a quick death. We did get a few zukes from it. One big enough for me to make bread from.

Cucumber/watermelon and flower bed. We have 3 baby watermelons and a bunch of blossoms on the cukes.

Beets and swiss chard. The beets have gotten too big to eat. The swiss chard is acting as a trap crop for the harlequin bugs. We'll be clearing this bed sometime this week.

What's left of the cole crop bed. There are about 5 cabbages left. Some are close to harvesting. The spinach is finished and the cauliflower was harvested. There are still carrots and parsnips but I'm not holding my breath since we've suffered from root maggots this year. Oh and some rogue potatoes came up this year. They look healthy. We decided to leave them and see what becomes of them.

Next year I think instead of starting a large cool weather crop we'll keep it slim and focus on flowers and warm weather stuff and then mid summer plant the cool weather stuff for fall. I think it warm up way too quickly in the spring for a good healthy spring crop.

Oh, SNAP! (peas)

2008-06-16T20:45:00.000-04:00

Even as the broccoli produced its last, the snap peas were coming into their full glory. In the past two weeks, we must have picked about 2 or 3 pounds of peas.

Just to give an overall impression, here they are in all their splendor:

The outer row along the path on the two beds are all peas, on both sides of the corner. The closer bed has the snap peas, while the farther bed has English peas.

As I write this, however, the snap peas are on the decline. They've about given their all, and we'll probably only get a few more smaller harvests.

The English peas are doing fairly well, and are still increasing their production. Like their sweeter cousins, however, they'll probably be done in another two weeks or so.

Such is the fate of cool-weather crops.

Ah well, all is not lost. We have beans on the grow, as can be seen here. The pole beans and runner beans have about reached the top, and have been flowering for many days now.

We expect to get beans soon enough, which will be just in time as the peas breathe their last.

Still, to paraphrase the old general, "they shall return". Being a cold-weather crop, the peas will do JUST fine in September and October.

I can't wait. As memory serves from last year, they were even more tasty and plentiful in the autumn. :D

Broccoli wrapup

2008-06-12T20:10:00.000-04:00

So one of the big hits from our garden this year was Boccoli. We had three plants of it, and they were very productive and yielded great flowerettes.

We managed to get a pretty good portion of food out of it, if memory serves we picked about four times from the plants before they were done.

Here's a picture of the first harvest we made.

This year I made a discovery about fresh broccoli, straight from the garden.

It is delicious raw.

I've never been a fan of the green flower. It always seemed bitter to me, whether "fresh" from the supermarket (ha!) or just disgusting from the frozen section.

Getting it straight from one's own garden makes a world of difference, however. It's crisp and crunchy, with almost a sweetness to it. No bitterness or foul tasting, whatsoever. This year's crop has sold me on broccoli in an SFG.

Sadly, the plants are done for this season. They had produced their last few, tiny flowers, which I pulled up this Monday. That night we ripped up the plants.

I'm definitely going to see that we plant a lot more next year. We'll have to do some staggering so that we have it for more than just a few weeks in the late spring.

Ah well, we've still got lots of peas, and a LOT of beans coming. Not to mention lots of other green goodies. :-D

This past weekend

2008-06-09T19:19:00.000-04:00

In addition to the nearly 200 square feet of SFGs, we've been planning to plant brambles in our side yard. Last year we planted a good half dozen raspberries, blackberries, and grapes. They were small starts, and almost all of them died. One blackberry and one grape survived, however.

This past weekend we went to Home Depot and bought a few things for the yard. Among those were a second blackberry plant, as well as a trellis for the grape we're already growing. We staked the trellis in by the grape and planted the second blackberry to the left of the first one, which has been doing very well this season.

The surviving blackberry is actually bearing fruit this year.

Meanwhile, the garden is looking simply lush. We picked the last of the broccoli this morning, and we're making fast work of the lettuce. The snap peas are starting to product at a prolific rate, we're getting a much better harvest than we did last year.

It's worth comparing where our garden is now with what it looked like at the start of the season.

A beautiful morning in the garden

2008-06-06T08:15:00.001-04:00

So here I sit in the midst of my garden, enjoying blissfully cool temperatures while the sun plays hide and seek behind the clouds, its furtive rays gracing me with sometimes warmth.

All about me is the lush green of my garden, the air is filled with the ageless sonnets of birds. Breezes come and go as I sip on my cup of coffee, the invisible wind rustling the leaves of all the plants about me, making the peas, lettuce, radishes, and herbs sway to and fro.

The rains we've had over the last few days and even weeks have been a blessing to our garden. I'm constantly left awestruck with how fast and easily plants burst forth, their wide leaves soaking up the sun's rays, their deep roots drinking in the savory rain.

Our sweet peas are producing more with every day, growing faster and faster. Our english peas are gearing up too, their pods will soon be full and ready for picking. The lettuce we've planted is ready to be harvested, without a doubt we'll be eating lots of salad over the next week.

The runner beans have reached the top of the lattices, as has one pole bean. The broccoli is rapidly regrowing, providing many more flowerettes for us (they're quite delicious raw ;-) while the beet greens are ready to be picked.

Our tomatoes are almost as high as the deck, we'll be putting up supports for them this weekend, without a doubt.

In all, the whole garden is bursting at the seems with life. What's even more amazing is that there's so much more to come.

We're only in the begining of June, after all...

Beans, Brocolli, and more Lettuce

2008-06-03T19:08:00.000-04:00

So as can be seen, the garden is just exploding with growth from all the rain we've been getting. (They're forecasting even more rain for tonight! ;)

The one broccoli plant that we harvested from has already grown fresh flowerettes, almost ready for picking once more. They'll probably be set after this next rain (or before it's done).

We picked some of the lettuce in the front row of that bed for dinner tonight, it should make a tasty salad. The runner beans on the back row and the pole beans on the back row are growing several inches every day, they should be up to the top of the lattice by the end of the week.

First harvest!!

2008-06-02T07:44:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, we had our first meal that had all veggies from our garden. Here's a picture of the bounty we harvested:

We ate the broccoli raw, and cooked the spinach. The lettuce we simply had as a salad, adding beef with orange sauce as a side-dish. In all, it was quite tasty. The raw broccoli was simply amazing, crisp and light on the tongue. There was no bitterness, whatsoever. The lettuce in the salad was delicious, and the spinach was great (especially with a little salt and vinegar - a topping introduced to me by my wife :)

I've missed having fresh vegetables. It's good to be back in the season again.

Here's a latest picture from this morning to show how the garden as a whole is doing. We expect to get a good harvest of peas very soon, the plants are just bursting with blossoms.

In all, it's now promising to be a very good year.

Oh, and that strawberry I posted about a few days ago...?

We're picking it tonight. :D

Cauliflower

2008-05-30T08:21:00.000-04:00

The garden is simply exploding with growth this morning, the weather we've been having has done very well by the plants.

We're continuing to see the peas covered with blossoms, and about half a dozen pea pods growing away. Likewise, the broccoli is really bursting forth with flowerettes, and the lettuce is growing so fast it will end up bolting on us if we don't harvest it soon.

One plant I haven't written about yet this year is our cauliflower. It too is doing very well, as can be seen by the picture below.

It's about time to bunch up the leaves around the head, to allow it to grow sheltered from the sun. Hopefully we'll get to that this weekend.

More updates to come!

Strawberries!!

2008-05-29T08:19:00.001-04:00

Linda and I went out to look at our garden this morning, enjoying the cool morning air and the feel of the sun's warm rays as it just crept
over the roof tops of our neighbors.

Our garden is looking fantastic, the rain from two days ago has made a huge difference. The peas are bursting forth, and just about all of our lettuce is ready for picking.

Of particular note is the strawberries. As can be seen in the picture, we have fruits that are looking very close to ready. We figure another week or two perhaps, we'll have to see.

Linda's interest in making jam, so that should be fun.

I'll post here as the strawberries ripen, it'll be neat to see how long it takes from here.

Stay tuned for more updates!

It's been a good month!

2008-05-27T19:01:00.000-04:00

So the last month has been very good to our garden, as can be seen in these photos:

So we've got a lot going on, as the box on the right of the blog shows very clearly. Thankfully, the problems we were having with germination early on tailed off in the end. We had to replant a few seeds in some squares, but now we're nearly at 100% germination.

The heads of lettuce that you can see in the picture above are about ready, we're probably going to harvest them in a few days.

Next up in terms of readiness are our peas and broccoli. The three broccoli plants we have are going to be ready soon, as can be seen here:

As for the peas, they're becoming fairly well covered in blossoms, and we already have one pod forming.

Our scarlet runner beans are taking off as well, but they're not showing any blossoms yet.

We have tomatoes too, in Earth boxes. We switched tomatoes from standard SFGs to these self-watering boxes because the intermittent rains last year caused tomatoes to split or rot on the vine. We still had a huge crop, but we easily lost as much as we harvested.

So, there's lots more updates to come, but that's all for now.

Germination nation

2008-04-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

So out of the plants we direct sowed, we're finally seeing some plants germinate. We have been concerned that the compost we got from Alexander's Lawn and Garden was unfinished composted manure. That may still be the case, as we're seeing some plants showing signs of what may be burning (the compost/manure is too hot). However, it's still too early to tell.

In any case, Linda went out this morning and found that we had some germination of our radishes, baby spinach, mesculn mix, peas, and beets. Not everything has come up from the soil, but at least we're seeing some plants. Hopefully we'll see more in the next few days.

More direct sowing

2008-04-18T18:42:00.001-04:00

Linda, Evelyn, and I planted more seeds just now. We planted Luther Hill Corn, as well as runner and pole beans. The growing time for the corn is about 80 days. So, with any luck, we may have 2 crops of corn in a season.

Also, there was no serious damage from the frost after a day. Things are looking good!

so far, so good...

2008-04-16T11:45:00.000-04:00

We went out this morning to check on the garden. While there was no visible frost anywhere we could see, the newspapers were a little wet. So, it's fairly likely we've had one. The air was certainly chilly enough.

The plants all looked like they survived without any significant damage, only a few cabbages had been touched by the chill. Linda reminded me that we need to wait and see, it may take 24hrs to see all the effects.

First frost since planting

2008-04-15T19:15:00.000-04:00

Turns out there's a frost advisory for tonight, so Linda and I ran outside and covered up our plants and flowers. We used newspapers to cover the greens in the beds, and turned our empty compost pails upside-down to cover the flowers Evelyn planted on the weekend.

We also covered up the remaining winter starts that have yet to be planted in the beds.

Hopefully everything will survive the cold tonight. We'll post more in the morning.

The Start of the Year

2008-04-13T13:32:00.000-04:00

We decided it was time to get going on the garden. We've been so busy lately with other stuff and then when we do have time it seemed to be cold or wet so it delayed the garden a lot this year.

Last weekend we finally finished our compost bin expansion project. We basically double our capacity. I also ordered a cubic yard of compost from a local co-op/garden store. We also had 6 bales of straw delivered too. So this past Thursday I spent a few hours shoveling and carting wheelbarrows full of it and adding it to the gardens. I also started adding eye screws for the grid and working on the front flower beds.

Then Friday I spent the day installing the irrigation system. Getting out the hoses. Ratcheting in the remaining 50+ eye screwing for the grid and then installed the twine grid. That night, Ev and I planted peas. We also planted some winter starts: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and some lettuces.

Saturday, while Ev and Eric were at Gymboree, I spent the morning planting the rest of the cold weather stuff. The seeds of this stuff is a bit too small for Ev to handle so I did it while she wasn't here. Then in the afternoon we decided to run to the gardening store and bought some flowers, rosemary and onion sets. And Ev being the avid gardener she is, we planted them immediately when we got home :)

So far we have the following planted:

Chives (they are permanent)
Leeks
Scallion
Broccoli
Peas
Snap Peas
Carnations
Dahlias
4 types lettuces
2 types spinaches
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Asian Cabbage
Mesclun Mix
2 types beets
2 types carrots
Parsnips
Raab
Chard
Kale
Kolhrabi
20 types Garlic (which was started last fall)
Pansies
Petunias
Marigolds
Rosemary
Onion sets

I think I calculated 104 squares are filled at this point. Once it warms just a bit more I'll sow the beans and vining stuff. The corn will be sown today I think.

Here are some pictures:

Our 5x5 bed. I know it's taboo in SFG to have a bed of such large dimension but this was originally designed to be used for potatoes. This year we are using it for the cole crops and some roots like carrots and parsnips. We have cabbages, cauliflowers, carrots, parsnips and spinach planted in this one.

This is a shot of our winter sown lettuces. There is Little Gem, Romaine mix, Black Seeded Simpson and Butterhead mix. I've also planted 2 squares of baby leaf spinach. Oh and one of Easter Egg radishes. You can see the crazy chives in this shot.

This is a picture of our broccoli starts.

Shot of our garlic. Way more garlic than we'll ever consume. I actually thought most of it didn't make it through the winter. As you can see I was mistaken :) Corn will be planted next to the garlic.

ZOMG! Tomatoes runneth amok!!

2007-09-03T11:21:00.000-04:00

We went out into the garden this morning. My wife pulled up some plants that were past their prime, removing the cucumbers, watermelon, and musk melons. At the same time, I made some major deposits into our compost pile. While we were out, we also picked beans and tomatoes. The beans didn't yield quite as much as we've gotten from previous harvests, but there's enough there for one or two meals.

The tomatoes, by comparison, are starting to produce in what feels like an exponential fashion (though it's probably more linear ;-) We picked 22 pounds of luscious red, yellow, and green tomatoes today:

Combined with Friday's harvest (15 lbs) and Wednesday's (5 lbs), we've picked a total of 42 pounds of tomatoes in the past week alone. That's just one week.

The last batch of tomatoes we picked on Friday were made into ketchup. My wife found the recipe from this book. After removing bad parts and so forth, she loaded up the stock pot with a net of six pounds of tomatoes. Adding the other ingredients, she then cooked them down over the course of two hours:

It was amazing to see such a large volume of tomatoes cook down into such a relatively small amount of ketchup. In the end, my wife jarred 8 half-pint jars:

We haven't eaten it along with anything else yet, but we did taste it. The resulting ketchup was far less sweet than the store-bought versions, very rich and full of the taste of tomatoes. We're anxious to try it with something like cheeseburgers. It will go very nicely along with the relish that my wife has made.

Tomāto, Tomäto

2007-09-01T16:04:00.000-04:00

Over the last several days, the amount of ripe tomatoes that our garden has been yielding has increased dramatically. Just look at how much we've managed to get by going picking on Wednesday and Friday night:

We didn't weigh the first batch, but the second (which you can see in the green colander) is about fifteen pounds. We took the tomatoes from the first bunch on the left and made tomato soup out of them. It was the most rich tasting soup I or my wife have ever had. It was fairly easy to make, only requiring a few pots and a food mill.

Growing tomatoes hasn't been trouble free. We've had a few pests and pestilences, but it wasn't nearly as bad as with the pumpkins or the pole beans. Early on, we contented with blossom end-rot, which left a good number of tomatoes spoiled and needing to go into our compost piles. As the season wore on, we started to deal with tomato worms, as well as blight. The worms seem to be tapering off as the season continues. The blight, in turn, has claimed one plant, possibly as many as three, due to some excessive rains we had in a relatively short time.

Lastly, we've also had stinkbugs beset our tomatoes. These little stinkers cause the fruit to ripen prematurely, giving us yet more material for our compost piles

In spite of that, the sixteen tomato plants we have planted are promising a much more bountiful harvest in the very near future. We have plans to make many more tomato products as the harvests come in, including marinara sauce, pizza sauce, salsa, and ketchup. It will be very interesting to see how much we get before the season's over.

Pictures for our SFG 2007 Posted

2007-08-29T17:58:00.000-04:00

I've selected the best photos from the last four months and created a series on my online photo gallery.

Looking back now, it's amazing to see how the whole thing has changed over the last few months. I think what took my wife and I by surprise was how fast everything grew. Since I didn't really ever try and grow any plants before, I didn't really have an appreciation how quickly vegetables would yield a harvest.

I also can't believe we're already coming into the autumn growing season. Several weeks ago my wife planted seedlings for the fall. The peas we've planted in thirteen different squares are just the beginning. We've also got lettuce in our garden again (it's nice, I've missed having fresh salads).

More on that later, as we plant our fall crop. Keep an eye on the gallery, it'll be updated as more pictures come out over the weeks.

Beans, beans, they're good for your heart...

2007-08-26T21:10:00.000-04:00

...well, you know the rest. ;-)

The picture to the right is of today's harvest. My wife and I picked 2.5 lbs of bush beans, over a dozen tomatoes, a cucumber and a bell pepper.

This is rather typical of what we get out of our garden on a regular basis. We'll probably be able to pick about the same amount of beans in just a couple of days.

I really haven't done our garden justice on the blog in its first year. It's almost September, and I haven't done any posting since April to talk about all the great harvests we've had of lettuce, peas, tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, kale, cabbage, swiss chard, beets, green onions, broccoli, garlic, spaghetti squash, zucchini, rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, peppers, chili, jalapenos. We've also grown and harvested various herbs, including chives, parsley, cilantro, oregano, basil, rosemary, and dill.

Part of the reason for that is with how busy I've been at work, my wife has done most of the work in the garden, so I've been a bit disconnected from it.

So, in order to try and give the garden its due, I've decided to start posting about the various plants we've got going in our garden right now. Today, it's about our bush beans.

As can be seen in this picture, we've got about 24 square feet of bush beans (just over 10% of our garden). There's about half a dozen varieties of beans planted in all this space, including Golden Butterwax (a yellow bean), Provider (a green bean), and a "gourmet mix" of green, yellow, and purple beans.

The beans have been about the most trouble-free crop of our garden. To date, there have been no pests to harass them, and the praying mantises that we have in our garden love to hide in them (perhaps why we don't have pests...).

Additionally, our beans have been free of any diseases. Only a few slugs seem to cause problems for our beans, but those are extremely minor in all (a few damaged leaves here and there).

In all, the beans that we've harvested have been delicious and plentiful. They cook up without any bitterness. These beans have no strings, so that makes preperation much easier.

By comparison, our pole beans had strings and were horribly beset by Japanese beetles. I also didn't find them quite as tasty as the bush beans.

We probably won't be growing pole beans next year. Bush beans are just so much better by comparison.

It's about time for an update...

2007-07-04T17:12:00.001-04:00

It's been 3 months since I've posted anything. When I last wrote back in April, the garden was still very much a work in progress as can be seen by the earlier pictures.

Although the blog has been silent in all of that time, we've been quite busy with finishing its construction, planting, and harvesting. For all of that effort, the garden has rewarded us graciously, exploding forth with green leaves, luscious flowers, and a delicious crop.

I'm working on gathering together the photos we've taken over the past several weeks and months. Unfortunately, my website is in a state of transition, so I can't yet post the chronology I want to put together.

In the meanwhile, however, I can post a few photos of what the garden looks like now.

...and what a difference a few months make.

First cold night of the season

2007-04-06T13:57:00.000-04:00

So last night was the first cold night of this growing season for us. My wife ran out last night and covered up what she could with plastic tarp, but we didn't have enough by far. She tried to use halves of 1/2 gallon milk-jugs on the most critical plants outside of the one 4x8 bed she was able to cover. The winter-sown stuff she has on the deck was completely covered.

At this point, we don't know what the impact was. Over the past two weeks, we've been getting lots of little green sprouts throughout our garden, and are quite concerned about the effects of this cold snap we're getting.

With any luck, losses will be minimal. We'll just have to wait and see, and hope this cold weather ends soon.

Square Foot Gazette

2007-04-01T13:36:00.000-04:00

Sometime last summer, my wife stumbled across a seemingly little known way of gardening that is incredibly inexpensive and simple, while being highly effective. That way of gardening is called Square Foot Gardening, and was invented over 25 years ago by Mel Bartholomew. Throughout the last few months, my wife and I have been preparing for this year's growing season, building our gardens and getting ready to plant. (I say "we", but really 90% of the work has been done by my wife. I'm kinda just along for the ride ;-)

This blog is going to be my journal of our endeavors, challenges, and successes along the way.

About Square Foot Gardening
The basic premise of Square Foot Gardening (or SFG, as it's typically called) is that gardens can be grown cheaply and effectively in very little space. By reducing the amount of space that's used in traditional gardens, one eliminates the lion's share of the work and cost.

Traditional gardening has typically been done with the time-honored tradition of long rows over large spaces and is incredibly inefficient. It basically is an effort to apply large-scale farming principles to the much smaller requirements of individual families. This method, however, is inefficient and costly. Classical gardening / farming doesn't scale down, it only works when dealing in economies of a large scale.

Square Foot Gardening's name is a succinct description of what it is. In an SFG, one puts an entire garden in a rather limited space - say a four foot by four foot square. We plant any given crop we want to grow in a single square foot within this space. That gives us up to sixteen different crops we can plant in just a single 4' x 4' space. In any given square, we can have between one to sixteen plants, depending upon the size of the plant (for example, we'd only plant one head of cabbage but could plant sixteen rows of carrots).

With SFG, planting beds are made by raising the garden up and placing it on top of the native soil in the area. To make the raised garden, just get four lengths of lumber, preferably 6x2, cut to 4 feet long. Join them together with nails or screws (we used screws in our frames). Place the frame on the ground, and fill it to the top with Mel's Mix, which consists of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 vermiculite. Do not use the soil on your property. The nutrient rich Mel's Mix will make the garden even more efficient and effective.

After filling the square, place a grid atop of it that clearly defines the borders of each square foot within the four-by-four space. Then, plant your crops accordingly by simply drawing a grid within each square and planting as many seeds as is appropriate (see Mel's book for details).

The other thing worth mentioning about SFG is how easy weeding becomes. Since all of the plants are placed so close together, there's very little room for weeds to take hold. Even for those few that do take root, they're easy to eliminate. Simply surveying the garden a few times a week allows you to spot the new weeds. Pulling them out is then only a matter of pinching them with your fingers and a light little yank. If you spend as much as fifteen minutes a week weeding in SFG, that's considered a busy week.

Our garden
Last Autumn, my wife and I set about building our own SFGs. We're looking to grow as many of our own vegetables as we can, and buy as few as possible. We surveyed our property, decided how much crop we wanted to grow, and carved out an appropriate space in our lawn. We went down to Home Depot and bought the need lengths of lumber, assembled our boxes, and laid them down on the ground.

Due to the volume of crop we wanted to produce, we had to order quite a bit of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. Making the mixtures was a bit of hard work, simply because of the volume. From here on out, however, we've already accomplished 90% of the work for the lifetime of our gardens. Each time we harvest a square and go to replant, all we need to do is add one trowel-full of Mel's Mix. So now making the Mel's Mix is a lot easier and won't be any trouble at all.

We had attempted to plant some Autumn crops, and were moderately successful at it. To allow our crops to survive into the colder months, we simply bought four pieces of PVC piping and made a frame over which we placed a plastic tarp. This impromptu greenhouse served us quite well in through November, almost until Christmas before a hard frost killed everything.

Nevertheless, we did manage to get a few salads out of the deal, not to mention the satisfaction of seeing crops for our hard work. Now that spring is here, we've been working hard the last few weeks to get things planted and ready.

Our efforts have gone beyond just SFG, and are extending into projects like composting and growing fruits such as blueberries and strawberries.

But more on that another time.