Harvest Monday, 13 April 2015

Whoohoo! The first harvest of the year. Though it wasn't from an in ground plant. It came from my window boxes just before I planted them in the ground.

Lunch

It really wasn't much of a harvest at 2 ounces, but it was something. I could have made a single salad, but instead I used to to garnish quite a handful of meals.

Dinner

I'm not sure if I'll get a harvest this coming week. The plants probably need to get their roots spread out since they are newly planted. But the weather is very nice so I might be proven wrong.

I'm still eating from my stores too. They are starting to get low, but not gone yet.

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Planting Peas

Today I got out to plant my peas. Usually I do them as a double row along the long back of the bed. But I don't need as many peas as I can't eat them. I'm just going to eat the pea shoots. So I'm planting them in two separate patches along the short end of the bed. The first patch was three short rows. I'm not sure if doing three rows 6" apart is a mistake or not. I won't know until they grow if I can get in to pick them well enough.

I put some nitrogen fixing microbes in with them as I do every year - well every year that I remember. But also this year I wanted to try out some mycorrhizal fungi. But to test I only put it on the northwest side of the bed. If the north side grows a lot better I'll have to keep doing it.

I did the same test with some lettuce. Today I planted the two bottom rows and the bottom most one (again the northwest side so I wouldn't forget) has the mychorrhizae on their roots. The other one doesn't. I have a feeling that right now the soil is too cold for the fungi to really grow, but it will be warming up in no time.

The last thing to get planted was the Asian greens. The pretty celery and parsley on the right side of the flat sadly must wait a bit longer for the ground to thaw out more. Hopefully it will be soon. But the Asian greens joined the earlier planted ones in the bed. The endomycorrhiza does not grow on any of the brassica family, so I couldn't expand my experiment.

I've got some more Asian greens and other brassicas hardening off on my back steps. So the next round is soon to join this round. Usually plantings don't come this quickly together, but the seedlings needed to stay indoors longer than normal. I tend to like brassica seedlings to grow no more than 2.5 to 3 weeks before being hardened off. But Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate with me.

A Beautiful Weekend

Except for the 20 mph wind, today was such a gorgeous day. Tomorrow will be even nicer as the temperatures will rise by 10F and the wind will die down. So of course I was outside getting things done.

My fruit trees showed up on Friday right on time. I figured they would all be bareroot but they weren't. Only the Pink Lady apple was. So I unwrapped it and put it in a bucket of water to soak over night. The Ichy persimmon and the 2-in-1 plum (Redheart and Shiro) were both in pots which I watered. The plum was a decent size, but the persimmon was tiny. It was only a foot tall. I hope that doesn't mean it is a really slow grower.

This morning I was out to dig out the last stump and plant the trees. Then I fixed the trellis for the apple tree. I've got the wires spaced 18" apart with four going across. I cut the top of the whip to the bottom wire. Hopefully I can get enough branches going in the right spaces. Last time I did this one of my trees had to be cut again to encourage the right branches to grow. I've never been very good at getting apple trees to grow branches where I want them.

The persimmon and plum won't be espaliered. I'm going to grow them semi naturally. They are against a fence and by the driveway so I'm going to try to shape them more linearly. But I think that will be easier than trying to trellis them as stone fruit just don't do that well espaliered. Natural growth is so much easier with them (they don't send out spurs like apples and pears, but put out buds on newer growth). I seem to do better shaping these kinds of trees than apples, so I should be OK. Either that or I'm deluding myself. We will see if I have to rip these out in five years.

Dark spots used to have alyssum

Next up was cleaning up the alyssum from the paths. I probably shouldn't let it stay over the winter. It really gets in the cracks. I've got little alyssums coming up everywhere the plants were draping in the cracks of the path. I don't put this in the compost. There are way too many seeds. I put it in the yard waste and I let the town compost it. They get much hotter than mine. Mine doesn't kill seeds.

Then it was on to the spinach seeding. I had two beds of spinach left to do. First I fertilized and aerated the soil. Or tried to. The last two feet of each bed was still frozen about 5" down. Some years I'd do the bed in two batches doing the unfrozen end first then coming back. But I decided not to this year. Our forecast is for mostly sunny weather in the 60Fs for a whole week. The ice won't last long. Certainly not long enough to rot a spinach seed as they are very hardy in these conditions. As you can see above I measured out long rows to seed in and used my measuring stick to make a small trench.

I dropped in the seed and covered them up and watered them in. One of the beds got Space which has always been my goto spinach. The other got pot luck from the store. It was Bloomsdale Long Standing. We will see if it really is longer standing than Space. Not that it will have a long time to stay in the bed. I have corn and squash that needs the bed come June.

I put on their row cover. This keeps the leaf miners from damaging the leaves. I don't need to do this yet as they don't come out until May some time. Usually mid May but it varies. But I didn't even think of leaving it off when I was doing it. I just automatically put it on. I probably should wait at least a couple weeks as then weeding would be easier.

I have some more seedlings that need planting, but today was way too windy to put them in. Tomorrow ought to be milder so hopefully I'll get a chance to get out and do that. I'll be waiting a bit longer on the celery, parsley, and celeriac that needs to go in. I want the soil to warm up just a bit before I do. I'll be able to do it later this week for sure though.

Digging and Seeding

Stark sent me an email saying that my trees (plum, apple, and persimmon) were being shipped. They are supposed to arrive today. I wanted to get their planting area ready and Wednesday the rain was on and off. I picked an off time to go out. The first order of business was to take down the figs. Then remove the trellis. I left the eye screws in the fence as they might be useful in training the trees. The metal bar at the bottom however was sunk into the soil. It took some serious work to get out. Yesterday my fitbit told me that I didn't get my exercise. It lies. All told I got an hour and a half of work. And some of it heavy work. But the figs and trellis are now gone.

I also started to remove the old European plum. I got partway there. It is cut down to a stump, but today I'll have to go out and remove the stump. The trellis for this one is staying. I'm going to espalier an apple tree here. I will have to figure out how far apart I want the wires though. Currently they are 6" which is too close for an apple tree. I'm thinking four cordons 18" apart.

Thursday was yet another cold rainy day. So I decided I needed to get my indoor planting done. First up was the rooted slips of Garnet sweet potato. I had let the roots get a tad long, but I'm not going to be planting the whole plant. Come May I'll take cuttings from the plant and root those in water again.

I put them in 4" pots and put them under the lights. I'll move them to the sun later. If we ever see the sun again. I hate dreary days.

I was behind in seeding some of my plants. My schedule said April 3rd. It was almost a week late. But I got in another round of baby Asian greens, some Brussels sprouts, basil, and a mix of Zinnias. I also made some blocks for later in little tiny containers. I'm going to be sowing six lettuce plants every three weeks. I'll see if I can keep it up all summer long or not. It helps to have premade blocks to make it faster.

One of three trays

The seedlings that were sowed on March 25th are growing well except the choy sum on the right. Some didn't even germinate from the new seed this year. The older seed did better. But I'll plant what did come up. Choy sum is such a pain to grow, but I keep trying because when it works, it is so good. It is one of my favorites of the Asian greens.

I'll be hardening these plants off starting today once it warms up a bit. Our forecast is good with temperatures in the low 50Fs and into the high 60Fs for the coming week (which would bee teens for the Celsius fans).

The Second Planting

Asian greens planted

Sadly my second day of planting wasn't nearly as nice as my first. The temps were only in the low 40Fs. Brr. Plus it drizzled most of the day. But I was tired of those window boxes. I would drag them in and out. And have to water them. In the ground I can watch them grow, but they don't require much effort. Plus I need the space in front of the sliding glass door for hardening off my next set of Asian greens and lettuce.

The baby Asian greens have Bed 2E. That was one of the first ones to thaw out. So I prepped the bed and planted them in. The ones in pots were easy to plant, but the window box was harder as it was so big and heavy. After planting I put up a netting row cover. I'm not sure when the root maggots come out - maybe mid April. But I didn't want to risk it.

Lettuce, radish, and turnip bed

Next up was the west bed of the Circle Garden. I planted the really early lettuce here and under the netting cover I seeded some radishes and turnips. I'm growing a new radish this year. German Giant. I'll see if they can indeed get giant. I only seeded up half of their allotted space. The other half is for a later sowing. But I can't sow them too late as this bed needs to be empty by June 1st for my melons. Though last year I planted the melons a week late and they still produced in a timely manner, so I could probably push it if I wanted to.

Tuesday through Thursday were pretty miserable weather days here. Rain, drizzle, low 40Fs weather. But late tomorrow that trend ought to reverse. We are supposed to get some really nice 60F (15C) weather. Maybe even above average weather for a change. That would be so nice. I have plants showing up on my doorstep today and tomorrow. I need to get them in the ground. Everything is easier when the weather is nice.

The First Planting

On Monday the soil was finally unfrozen in some of the beds. I couldn't get the peas in as that one was still frozen, but a few of the beds were ready.

Carrot bed

Bed 2W was the first one. It is the spring carrot bed. So I did a light fertilization. My soil test said I didn't need anything except nitrogen, and carrots don't need much of that. I don't turn over my soil, but I do aerate it. The aeration process mixes in the fertilizer a bit. I don't have a fancy broadfork, I just use a traditional garden fork. A quick raking gets it smooth. Then I measure out shallow furrows 4" apart across the bed. I try to put the seed about 2" apart in the furrows, but I'm not very good at doing it perfectly. I'll have a lot of thinning to do once they are up.

Carrots have issues germinating if they dry out at all. Plus they can take up to three weeks in the early spring because it is so cold. So I cover them with a double layer of Agribon. This keeps the soil moist. It also keeps the soil in place when we get heavy rains, so the seed doesn't wash away. I'll be watering this once a day on days that we don't get rain.

Next up was the spinach, which I do in rows 6" apart. In previous years I'd sow the seed about 2" apart and thin to about 6". Germination can be a bit erratic, but I usually get a decent stand. I bought seed for two beds - the spring planted bed and the over wintered bed. But I wanted to expand that to four beds with three spring planted beds. I was a bit worried about having enough seed. So I spaced them farther apart. Then I went and bought another packet.

The carrot bed had this little guy in it and a couple friends. I was surprised the soil was warm enough for any to come to the surface. But there weren't any in the spinach bed. In fact when I first started to aerate the soil I thought the soil was very compact at the bottom. I didn't think it was frozen since ice is hard as a rock, but it turns out that it was almost unfrozen. It still had ice crystals in it. I planted it up anyway. I've found that spinach will germinate in really cold soil. And the top inch where the seed sits can get reasonably warm during sunny days.

It was so nice to get my hands dirty for the first time. And Monday was a beautiful day. It was about 50F (10C) and sunny. A perfect spring day for my first planting.

Taking Stock

I went out yesterday and it really did feel like spring. Even the daffodils have started to push out of the soil. Which means it was time to start planting as long as the ground was unfrozen. I'll get to that last part tomorrow, but for now I'll go through the state of the perennials and overwintered crops.

First up is the spinach. It had survived well. Many of the older leaves were dead, but the new ones were starting. They looked better than I expected after being buried in 6' of snow (I shovel the path onto their bed and the snow from the solar panels on the roof comes down on top of them, so they get a lot of heavy heavy snow on top of them).

The dwarf curly kale always seems to do well. And they all survived. I don't eat those old leaves, but new ones will start to grow soon. Sadly the mache looks pretty ragged. If it doesn't grow new leaves before it bolts, I won't be eating it.

The Winterbor kale looks pretty sad. It isn't totally dead. Only time will tell if I get anything edible out of it this year.

The garlic has started to come up. The grid looks perfect, so most if not all of the plants survived. Those are the only overwintered plants in the garden. I do have a lot of perennials - mainly herbs in the garden.

Many of my herbs are in the herb circle (chives, oregano, English thyme, garlic chives, savory, and sage). I did a quick clean up of the bed. I used the garlic chives stems to help mulch the ground as otherwise the cats will dig in it. I cut the sage way back. I think this year I need to get a circular support for it. Otherwise it drapes itself over other parts of the circle and kills the herbs there.

The big question every year for me is if my rosemary has survived or not. And I'm really not sure yet. It has faded quite a bit. I'm in zone 6b and rosemary is not hardy here. I use Arp which is a hardier rosemary, but not reliably hardy. I used to have four plants scattered around the yard. This is the only surviving one. To keep it going I really need to scatter more around. And as you can see the sage plant nearby is leaning over it. I have four sage plants scattered around the garden. At the start they would die off often, but I think I've finally gotten them in places they like. Which is good as we go through a lot of sage every year.

The French thyme has survived well here. It wasn't very happy in the herb circle so I took a cutting and put one here. It likes the location because it has winter protection. I prop the garden gate open in the winter and it goes right in front of the thyme. This keeps the wind off of it. Usually French thyme is harder to keep going than English thyme, but it seems a lot healthier than my English thyme in the herb circle. The pots above are my mints. I don't see any growth out of them yet, but I'm sure they are alive. Can you kill a mint?

My tarragon lives next to a current plant. I cleaned up the dead branches and leaves. I see small shoots coming up underneath so they are doing well. I don't use a lot of tarragon in my cooking, but enough that I need to grow it.

And last but not least, my rhubarb is coming up. I'll have to think about what I'm going to do with it this year. I've taken a lot of the sugar out of my diet and you really can't eat rhubarb without sugar. I could make some rhubarb butter for the neighbors again. That was so so good. And I can eat the leftover bits. Yum.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my first plantings. I was so excited to find soil that was unfrozen. Whoohoo! I love spring. Sadly the forecast has three days of dismal cool temps, with highs in the 40s, but the weathermen assure me that it will warm up on Friday and it will even feel like spring. I'll be able to garden in a sunhat instead of a fleece cap and coat. Time to get dirt under my fingernails.

Harvest Monday, 6 April 2015

Butternuts

I used a lot of squash up for Passover. These were all pureed and made into squash casserole. I have three squash left. Not very many. I can't believe I'll actually get through that 105 pounds of squash that I harvested last year. I did give a little of it away. And I always brought it to potluck parties (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Passover).

I'm fermenting the insides of those squash for the seeds. I didn't grow any other variety of C. moschata last year, so the seeds ought to be pure. This year I'll be growing a few kinds so won't be able to save any.

Lunch and dinners still have my homegrown orange colored vegetables in them. And the above had some of my last greens - mizuna soup. I still do have a bit of frozen Chinese cabbage left. I ought to be making cabbage soup, but just haven't felt like it. Maybe this week.

But the big thing to look forward to this week is picking a real - if very very small- harvest. I think some mizuna on my egg salad sandwiches would be really tasty.

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Garden Share Collective - April 2015

Circle garden with overwintered spinach in the foreground

We still have a bit of snow on the garden. It would be a lot worse but I was shoveling it from the beds to the paths. It melts quickly on the paths. And shoveling lowers the albedo of the garden so it gets warmer faster. My garden is a very urban garden. The neighboring houses and trees block the sun rather effectively during the winter. As the sun gets higher in the sky, more and more of the garden sees the sun. This means that the parts of the beds near to my house melt out much faster. I can stick a shovel into at at the nearest part. But the parts near the neighbor's fence are a big block of ice. They do see some early morning sun at this time of the year, but the warm afternoon sun is still blocked.

This makes for some interesting planting times here. Last year our last frost was April 18th. I couldn't plant the peas until April 4th, and I could only plant part of the bed as the rest was still frozen. The rest of the bed didn't melt out until April 10th or so. Peas really aren't my main issue though. They have time to produce no matter how late they are. But the spinach needs to get out of the bed it is planted in by June. It needs enough time to grow. This year I'm going to try to make three beds of spring planted spinach (plus I have one of overwintered). Two of these beds are closer to the fence so might take a while to melt out. I'm just hoping they will have time. Last year was pretty late too and they got in April 10th. There weren't a lot of pickings and my harvest tally was low.

One bed however is going to be by the path which is warmer and sunnier. Hopefully that will do well and the harvests will be faster. I'm planting cucumbers and zucchini after it so they need to be out by June, but late May would be better. I always worry during late years if my successions will work. But with four beds of spinach I'm probably going to be inundated and have to start giving it away.

Brassica starts

March Completed

• Shoveled snow off the garden
• Started sweet potato slips Purple
• Starting to take slips off of Garnet to root
• Start indoors flowers, Asian greens, chard, herbs, broccoli, and cabbage
• Potted up some lettuce and baby Asian greens into window boxes for early greens
• Hardening off green onions and shallots
• Pruned fruit trees

I'm getting pretty low on my stores. Most of the vegetables that I'm eating are from the supermarket now, though there is usually something I grew too. I've decided to grow more greens this year as they were the first things to be used up. And I LOVE my frozen greens. The only thing I hate about frozen greens is washing the spinach. 5 pounds of spinach takes a long time to get clean if it is really dirty.

Tally of what is in storage from the garden last year:

Frozen

• Celery: 1 cup (5 cups)
• Chinese cabbage: 4 servings, 3 soup packet (10 servings, 4 soup packets)
• Corn: 9 cups (14 cups)
• Zucchini: 2 cups (? cups)
• Carrots: 8 cups (20 cups)
• Burritos: 5 servings (11 servings)
• Basil: frozen leaves
• Cilantro: frozen leaves
• Parsley: frozen leaves
• Kale: 0 servings(43 servings)
• Broccoli: 0 (19 servings)
• Chard: 0 (17 serving)
• Mizuna Soup: 0 servings (4 servings)
• Spinach: 0 servings (24 servings)

Canned

• Peach cobber filling: 4 half pints
• Peach preserves: 3 half pints
• Dill Relish: 5 jars

Basement

• Carrots: 5 carrots left (25 pounds)
• Parsnips: 0 (4 pounds)
• Onions: 0 (11 braids about 45 pounds)
• Garlic: 8 bulbs(3 pounds)
• Waltham Butternut: 3 avg. 3lbs each (27)
• Sweet Potatoes: 6.7 lbs (45 pounds)

Early greens window boxes

April is one of the busiest months in the year. A simple line on my todo list says "Clean up the garden". Four simple words. Hours and hours of work. Hopefully I'll get it all done.

April To Do

• Finish shoveling the garden
• Start indoors zinnias, basil, Brussels sprouts, more Asian greens, more lettuce
• Seed peas, carrots, radish, turnips, spinach
• Transplant brassicas, chard, onions, herbs, lettuce, etc
• Pull the plum and figs out (one is so sick and the others don't produce)
• Clean up the garden
• Order mulch
• Plant all ordered plants: onions, strawberries, plum, apple, persimmon, service berry, ornamental grass, and lots of flowers for the new front flower bed

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An InLinkz Link-up

Sewing

Earlier this week I decided to get some indoor garden work done. Sewing isn't usually a garden chore, but this time it was. I write in my garden plan which plants will get row covers and which kinds. Last year I found the fabric netting that I use for most of my row covers wasn't quite tall enough for the onions and storage carrots. So this year I decided to add 50% more width to it to make it the right size.

I needed three extra wide swaths of netting. A 16' one for the onions which spans more than one 8' bed. A 13' one for the carrots that take up a whole 8' bed. And a 12' one for the chard which has one foot of the bed taken up by beans that can't be covered. The chard only takes half the width of the bed, but it gets really tall.

I rolled out the bolt of netting and cut them at the appropriate lengths. The first one was 16'. I used the other half for the 13' one. For the 12' one I only cut 6' as I could use the other half for the rest. Then I sewed them together.

The finished pieces were labeled. And I was done.

It makes it sound so easy. But have you ever had one of those days where little things keep going wrong. I'm usually a measure twice and cut one kind of gal. Well the cutting went well. But when I sewed them together I sewed the top of the narrow piece to the side of the wide piece. How on earth could I make that mistake? I could see sewing the top of the 6' piece to the side of the the smaller piece. 6' is pretty long. But the three foot top is short. I can see the end of it. Well I got my ripper out and very very carefully ripped the stitches out. The netting is very fragile.

After shaking my head at myself I started again - triple checking this time. I started the sewing machine and my needle broke. I had somehow wrapped the thread around it the wrong way it it broke it right off. At least this one was easier to fix than the sewing up the wrong side of the cloth. I put a new needle into it and thought if something else goes wrong the universe must be telling me something. So of course my thread broke immediately. Can you guess what stupid thing I did this time?

Can you believe that when I replaced the needle I had gotten the thread caught in the mechanism. I had to unscrew the needle to get it out. But no I didn't stop. I'm stubborn. I did have a bit of minor difficulty after that. The fabric likes to grab onto parts of the foot and especially the screw that holds the needle in. I think I have a couple tiny tears in the first one I did. I learned how to hold the fabric away from the foot better as time went on. I went back and couldn't find the tears, but I'll find them when I put it up I'm sure. I keep a needle and thread out in the garden to fix row cover holes.

In other news we are having a warm spell. Last night didn't get below 50F (wow!). And today is supposed to get into the 60s. I've been shoveling more of my beds off. I just have a small corner left. The shoveling has helped a lot since before today we had some cool but sunny days. That dark soil really helped absorb the sunshine. The snow wasn't melting very fast on the beds, but it melted quickly once it was tossed on the brick path.

Digging Out

Yesterday was such a gorgeous day. I put my plants on the back step for some sunshine and noticed that the garden has been melting out pretty well.

The circle garden right outside that door was half melted out. It does still have a foot of snow on some of the spinach plants, but only because that is where I shoveled all the snow off the path to the compost. But where it is melted out I see green leaves that look pretty happy. Snow is such a great insulator. It might have been cold, but the snow kept my plants alive.

One part that wasn't melting out very quickly was where the snow was shoveled near the fence. The fence shades the ground during the heat of the afternoon, so it takes longer than the first part of the bed. So I decided to shovel it out to make the process go faster. I had shoveled a bit last week, but did the rest of it yesterday.

The after photo shows that I couldn't get it all off as the bottom was ice frozen to solid soil. But I got the worst of the top part off. It ought to melt out a lot faster now. Supposedly it is supposed to get into the 60s on Friday. I hope it does.

Ice dams have been a real problem this year, but I never thought I'd see one in the garden. The end of each path has a big ice dam. So I'm getting huge puddles in my paths. I tried to chop out some of the ice, but it is really solid. Hopefully in the next few days it will melt out a bit on its own.

You can see by the snow cover which parts get the most sun in the garden. That far corner is much more shaded than the rest of the garden. Still I wanted to get Bed 7 shoveled out a bit. I'm thinking of doing some early spinach in there. It needs to get out before the end of May so I need to get it in early enough to produce. I shoveled the paths surrounding it and the top bits that would come off. Like the other beds I shoveled, the top most layer of ice is pretty stuck on top.

The snow got shoveled out near the foundation of the house and onto the path. That part is warm and it was almost all melted by evening.

I also shoveled some back onto the driveway. There really isn't a lot of space to put the snow, but it was enough for now. I've got two of my spinach beds, the broccoli bed, and the cabbage bed shoveled out. I'll be looking at my garden plan and see if I need to shovel out any other area. I probably need to work on the onion bed and the Chinese cabbage bed. Then hope for lots of sun to warm the soil. Hmm I wonder if I have some black plastic somewhere in the basement. That would speed things up a bit.