Almost May and the Fall Crop is Still Coming In

Today was the 27th of April and the outside temperature was 86 degrees already!  Things are heating up.  I have most of the spring garden in the ground and it is growing quickly.  However, there are still some holdouts from the fall garden that are still producing.

First, we have some beets.  We grow three varieties: Bull's Blood, Detroit Red, and Chioggia.  We've been roasting a lot of these and have given a bunch away.  One lady we gave them to told us that she's making baby food for her infant using the beets.  You can't "beet" that.  Here's a crate of fresh picked beets.

Even though we've picked quite a few beets, we still have a bunch left to harvest.  I like to harvest them when they are about the size of a tennis ball.  We've found if you let them get bigger, they can get tough and "woody."  Can I speak freely here?  We're old friends, aren't we?  When you eat a lot of beets, something happens that people don't mention in polite conversation: It can appear that you are 'passing blood' and can be quite frightening.  It's not blood, though.  Don't worry.  It's beets in your diet.

Next on the clock from the fall garden that will be ending soon are sugar snap peas.  These grow on a trellis and they'll soon be replaced by a second planting of cucumbers.  But for now, they are still blooming beautiful flowers:

And they're continuing to make sweet, tender pods.  We love to eat them raw, but my favorite way to eat them are stir fried in butter or cook them in fried rice.  I like to pick them on the young side before the peas in the pod get too big.

I picked a nice colander full of sugar snap peas and Tricia gave them all away to our oldest son, Russ!

Not to worry, there's more on the way that I'll pick tomorrow.

Mid-October Garden

In one word: DRY.  Of course, that's no surprise.  October is normally the driest of months.  By today's tally, it's been a month and six days since the last rainfall.  There's really no chance to speak of in the 10 day forecast.  I'm all out of the rain water that I sequester in buckets and barrels beneath the drip line behind the house.  All except for one barrel that the honeybees use to drink from.  So I've been running the sprinkler every day.  This is a sprinkler that Mom & Dad got me and we have really put some mileage on it.  We move it from one location to the other in the garden to get moisture in the soil.  This is a photo from a few weeks ago.  Even despite the lack of rainfall, the plants have grown nicely since then.

Amazingly, even as hot as it's been, the bug pressure hasn't been bad at all on the bok choy.  We've clipped all of this and eaten it since I took the photo.  It grows back quickly.  We usually cook these down like you would with any greens, but Tricia adds some ginger, lime juice and grated parmesan to the top of them.  They are really good.  This isn't something I grew up eating, for sure.  In fact, I would have turned my nose up at it, but now, I like it.

We like to plant a big variety of lettuce in the fall.  Even if we get a freeze, if we cover it, we've been successful in saving most of it.  I want to show you a new variety of lettuce we're trying out from Baker Creek (rareseeds.com).  This is called "Flashy Butter Gem" lettuce.  First time we've tried it and we achieved a phenomenal germination rate on it.  We won't know how it tastes for a week or two, though.

The leaves are a nice green color with what appears to be bloodstains on them.  I guess I'll overlook that trait.  Sure is lovely looking, though, with the morning dew beading up on the leaves before the sun evaporates it.  Just a beautiful lettuce.

But you need more than lettuce for a salad.  How about some cucumbers?  We've got some coming!  These cucumber plants looked atrocious the other day as some worms were feasting on the leaves and actually killed two plants.  That's when I dosed them up with some Neem Oil.  I'm impressed with that product.  It killed the pests and the cucumber plants quickly put on fresh new growth.

Lots of blooms coming, too!  I'm excited about some fall cucumbers for the salad.  I've got a few other garden reports coming in the next few days.  Stay tuned (and get out and enjoy this nice weather - it was 52 degrees here last night!)

The Garden of Eatin'

Strolling through the garden as the fall crops are slowly getting picked to make room for the spring crops that will soon be planted.  Some of the crops have flowered and I'm waiting for them to go to seed to save seed for next year's crop.  Here you'll see a few bok choy plants than are all bloomed out.

The honeybees have located the plants and are doing their best to visit.  If you look closely at the bee's legs, you can see that they are full of yellow pollen that she's getting ready to bring back to the hive.

The Russian Red Kale towers over the Green Kale and there's some carrots in the background that REALLY need to be harvested.  Perhaps tomorrow?

The morning dew was all beaded up on the leaves of the kale.  Beautiful!

As we continue with the cole crops, here is a nice cauliflower.  We've been picking a bunch of them.

And here is a Jersey Wakefield cabbage.  This variety of cabbage makes a football-shaped head rather than a round one.  Coleslaw for lunch today.  

From the 'alien vegetables' department, here is a purple kohlrabi.  This has turned out to be one of Tricia's favorite vegetables.

Here's a gourmet French heirloom variety of spinach we grow called Monstrueux de viroflay.  As soon as it warms the bugs start getting to the leaves, so we pick them fast.

This is a second variety of spinach we grow.  Galilee Spinach from Israel.  We like them both.  We'll be letting these go to seed to save seeds once more.

A basket of cauliflower, broccoli and spinach.

This time of year, we oven roast fresh picked vegetables on a stoneware tray in olive oil and minced garlic.

We finished this entire casserole dish off between the two of us.

Sautéed spinach with grated parmesan.  A dish to make Popeye drool.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Fall At Last

September 23 marked the first day of Fall, but as that day came and went, it sure didn't feel like Fall.  It didn't feel like Fall two weeks after that date.  But on October 7th, we woke up to a north breeze blowing.  You can see the little garden flag by the live oak tree whipping in the wind. This morning, we had a low temperature of 58 and as far out as I can see in the forecast, I see no more 90 degree weather.  Hallelujah!

The heat was stifling this summer, but more than that, the drought really took its toll on us and the animals as well.  This drought decimated the grass in the yard.  It is starting to come back now after the 1 1/4 inch rainfall we were beneficiaries of last week.  I fear, though, that we lost two azaleas, two magnolia trees, and most of the monkey grass in the landscaping.  The lack of rainfall also meant that there's no grass in the pasture.  We've had to resort to feeding hay WAYYYY earlier than we normally do.  The condition of the cows and goats is poor going into the winter compared to other years. 

But Fall is here.  We can rejoice in that.  The live oak trees have produced a bumper crop of acorns and they are falling all over the ground.

This afternoon I watched two fox squirrels jump from tree to tree, with their bushy tails flashing in the wind.  They're no-doubt fat on this diet of acorns.  Squirrel season opened Oct 7th and runs through Feb 29th.  There's a daily bag limit of 8.  I think I could sit in the front yard with my 12 gauge and thin out the population.  I'll put some in the freezer for sure.

Because the grass is non-existent in the pasture, I've been stringing up the temporary electric fencing powered by the solar charger and rotating the cows through the yard again.  The crazy thing is, I only mowed the yard (by machine) two times this year!  That's good on the gas bill, but I'll need to crank it and run it.  Pretty soon the pecan trees will drop their leaves and it will be time to pick up pecans.

Now that it has rained, I've been working hard to get the Fall garden planted.  I'll show the progress in a future posting.  October 1 marks the date that you can plant garlic in our zone.  I ordered some and it came in the mail.

I opened the bag.  We're hoping to have a good crop.  I had given up on garlic as the past several times we planted it, we had large harvests, but it was hot and humid and the garlic wouldn't cure.  It all got soft and rotted - even though we had it on racks drying by a fan.  This year I decided we'd give it another shot.

I broke the cloves up into individual pieces.

In the garden, I pulled back the wood chip mulch away, exposing the soil and then gently worked the soil with a garden hoe.  It worked up nicely.  I used a planting knife to dig 2" holes and planted the garlic (root side down) in the hole.  I spaced them 4-6 inches apart and watered them in.  When they sprout, I'll mulch around them.

Fall is nice time of year.  The mosquitoes are still pretty bad, but the mosquito plane was flying tonight.  Hopefully, that will diminish the population.  Looking forward to cooler temps!

Time to Start Thinking about Fall

Tomorrow is August.  The sultry heat saps your energy.  The lack of rainfall is concerning as the grass withers and is 'crispy' when you walk on it.  We wonder out loud, "when will we get respite from the heat?"  We patiently wait.  But, we prepare, too, for cooler days ahead.

With a change of season and, hopefully, rainfall, we anticipate putting in the fall garden.  We begin looking at our inventory of purchased and saved seeds.  We start looking at planting dates for different crops.  We've always saved seeds to plant from our best produce.  This year, for the first time in forever, we saved our snap bean seeds.

Toward the end of the spring crop, I marked several of our best plants and marked them.  We stopped harvesting the snap beans from the marked plants and allowed them to mature and then dry on the plant.  When totally dry, I picked the pods and set them on our drying rack to continue drying.  We had just finished curing our onions on the rack, so we had space.

I cracked open the brittle bean pods to expose the snow white seeds.  This variety is Blue Lake Bush.  We also saved three other varieties.

Some of the seeds had blemishes, but some were absolutely perfect.

We packed them away in dark vitamin bottles that we save for this purpose.  We label the bottles and date them. 

We should have enough saved so that we don't need to purchase any - at least for the fall.  We really enjoy eating fresh green beans that we harvest whole and then bundle and wrap in bacon.  It is a nice side dish for Thanksgiving Dinner.  We'll see what type of germination we get on the saved beans.  In looking at my planting calendar, you can plant a fall crop of snap beans in mid to late August.  Goodness, that's only two weeks away.  If we get a good rain, you can bet your bottom dollar, these seeds will be in the dirt.

Shading Out

I want to show you something in the garden that made me think about the term "shading out" that we would use on the farm.  First, take a look at the cole crop patch below.  From left to right (two different varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, two varieties of broccoli, and then kohlrabi, kale and bok choy.

They are growing nicely and are healthy.  It is late afternoon and the sun was shining in my face.  I walked around to the west side of the garden to take the following photo.  As you can see, the rows have about grown together so that it is almost hard to differentiate one row from another.  It almost looks like one big swath of green, verdant growth.

That's what reminded me of the term "shading out."  About 45 years ago, give or take we were growing soybeans on the Cottongin Road in Oberlin.  We weren't using a drill to plant at that time.  Instead, we were row cropping.  This required getting in the field with a cultivator to turn the ground over between the rows to stay ahead of weed growth.  You had to REALLY pay close attention or you'd run over the soybeans.  This had to be done until the soybeans "shaded out."

When the young soybean plants grew tall enough that you couldn't see the dirt between the rows, you were very happy!  You didn't have to cultivate anymore because the soybean plants had grown together.  The shade prevented any sunlight from getting to any weeds under the canopy of soybeans and this prohibited any weeds to grow and compete for nutrition.

As I looked at the winter crops in the garden, it made me happy.  Although I don't use a cultivator in my garden, it brought back some nice memories.  We've almost shaded out!

If the cows just over the fence could get in the garden, they would certainly "cultivate" my crop with the quickness!

Ol Jack Frost

Tonight's forecast predicts our first freeze.  Will it happen?  I don't know.  We're around trees and cloud cover may prohibit the temps from dipping colder than 33.  Trouble is, sometimes we like to push the zone and plant things late just to see if we squeeze additional time out of the growing season.  For instance, we have been picking buckets and buckets of green beans lately.  Our peppers and eggplants are producing great quantities.  

And our tomatoes.  They look fantastic.  Fall tomatoes are always prettier and healthier than the spring tomatoes around here.  There's no bugs or worms to compete.  The issue you run into is an early freeze.  In 2017, we had a HUGE crop of beautiful tomatoes.  All were still green.  Then an early freeze came and decimated the crop.

I picked every single tomato and researched what we could do with them.  I came up with this:

Pomodori Verdi is a green tomato pasta sauce made with: Green tomatoes, onions, bay leaves, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano and lemon juice.  We canned a bunch of the stuff.  It still sits in our pantry.

The other day we were rotating the stock in our pantry and Tricia made a Cream of Tomato Soup with the pomodori verdi.  You know what?  Pretty doggone good!  (You gotta get past the green color of the soup, though.)

Speaking of Green Tomatoes.  Let's walk out and look at the crop.  The plants look great.  They are about 5 feet tall and still growing.  I have them trellised with the Florida Weave Trellising system.  They are happy plants.

The vines are loaded with blooms AND tomatoes.  Still a ways from harvest, but looking good and coming on strong.  In a few short weeks some of these bad boys would be ready.

But with the freeze coming,  I don't know if they'll make it to maturity.  I got a blue tarp out and threw it over the 13 plants we have.  Maybe it'll work.  Maybe it won't.

But at least we know if Ol Jack Frost comes, we can still make green tomato sauce.

Fall Garden (Part 2)

Earlier this week we looked at the 'Salad Rows' in the garden.  Let's look in at the rest.  In this photo below, in the top right corner, you can barely make out the potatoes in bucket experiment we're working on.  The rest of the photo makes up a bunch of the cole crops along with some others.

Starting left to right:  The first two rows are cabbage (brunswick and Jersey wakefield varieties).  The next row is cauliflower (amazing and purple varieties).  The next row is Romanesco broccoli.  The next row is 'regular' broccoli.  The next row has baby bok choy, kohlrabi, and kale.

Here are some sugar snap peas that are beginning to trellis on a hog panel I have fastened to some t-posts.

Here is a big section of sweet potatoes that I haven't harvested yet.  To the right where you can see the dirt, that's where I have harvested some of the sweet potatoes to make room for planting three rows of carrots.

Below is a row of some French breakfast radishes.  These grow really fast.

Here is one row of Cosmic purple carrots I have planted that are coming up.  I have three additional rows of carrots (Atomic Red, Danvers half long, Uzbek Golden varieties).

I have a couple of rows of snap beans that are really producing, both Contender Green Beans and Italian Roma II beans which you see below.

Every couple days I pick a large bucket of beans.  We eat them with new potatoes and butter and they are delicious.  We'll begin blanching a bunch to freeze.

One thing I didn't show you is the beets and rainbow swiss chard.  We had poor germination on the Bull's Blood beets.  We had to get some Detroit Dark Red beets to fill in the holes in the row.  Probably this weekend I'll be planting turnips, spinach and mustard greens.

Quick Look at the Fall Garden (The Salad Rows)

Let's take a look at the Fall Garden.  The spring garden is tailing off with only okra and butterbeans producing still.  Well, our many varieties of peppers and eggplant are starting to really produce after a dormant summer slump.  Today, we'll look at the salad rows.  We have one full row with various types of leaf lettuce.  We've enjoyed salads deep into winter by covering these rows during freezes.  Here is the most prolific variety of leaf lettuce - the Black Seeded Simpson.

Growing up, I had never planted lettuce, so it was a new crop to learn.  In fact, when the lettuce got big, I'd pull it up by the roots.  Not smart!  My wife told me, "Why don't you cut the leaves off from the different varieties and they'll re-grow over and over?"  Why didn't I think of that?  This was the start of the "never ending salad bowl" during the fall and winter.

Here's a patch of Red Romaine.  It looks spiffy next to the Black Seeded Simpson (green leaf lettuce) that is it's neighbor to the east on the row.

Here is a mix of lettuce called Rocky Top Blend.  It must originate from Tennessee.  It has a nice mixture of different varieties and different colors.

And finally here is a variety of lettuce called Oak Leaf lettuce.  Yep, you guessed it.  The leaves mimic the appearance of an oak leaf.  The colors are different, the leaves are different, but I think that most lettuce tastes the same.  I'll admit I don't have a refined palate.  There was a salad mix I planted one time that was "spicy," you might say.  It had arugula, radicchio, and endive along with others.  It was just too strong for our tastes.  The varieties I have planted are all sweet and tasty. 

Along with every salad, you'll want to slice up some cucumbers.  This is the first time I've attempted to grow some in the fall.  If the frost holds off, we'll have at least ONE cucumber to cut up.  There's lots of blooms and lots more on the way!

Tricia likes to slice up homegrown tomatoes for the salad.  We've got lots of tomatoes coming.  I've trellised them using the Florida Weave method and they are happy, adding inches of growth each and every day.  Annie, the Nubian Goat, is coveting the tomatoes.  If she could, I promise you, she'd be in there making a mess of the garden.

We have lots of blooms and lots of tomatoes coming!  We'll see if we can get a harvest in before the first freeze hits.  The Old Farmer's Almanac shows November 26th to be the first FROST date for our area.  We can protect these from a frost, but not a hard freeze.  We'll watch and see what happens.

While I was pinching off suckers that grow in the tomato plant's 'elbows' and squeezing to death four or five late season Army worms that were feeding on the tomato plants' foliage, I saw one of our honeybees that was busy (as a bee) pollinating one of the tomato blooms.

That concludes the salad rows.  I'll show you some of the other rows a little later this week.  We still haven't planted a few fall/winter crops like mustard greens, spinach, and turnips.  Those will likely go in once the okra finishes up.