What Happens When You Rush Things

Gardening is an inexact science.  You win some and you lose some, and you definitely learn along the way.  For planting the spring garden, I use the average last frost date for our zip code.  Our average last frost date is March 22nd.  If you plant on March 22nd, you have only a 10% chance of getting a frost and injuring or killing your plants.  You can also use the Early last frost date.  That date is March 3rd.  If you plant on that date, you have a 30% chance of injuring/killing your plants.

Sometimes, I subscribe to the "you gotta risk it to get the biscuit" mentality.  I could gamble and plant early, right?  What could happen, really?  So, I pushed things this year, planting the snap beans, cucumbers, squash and cucumbers around March 10th.  Well...  Just so happens, it got down to 34 degrees.  I thought, incorrectly, that things would be okay.  We have lots of trees, the plants were mulched, they would make it.  I was busy doing other things and I didn't even go out and cover them.

All the plants were damaged!  Let's take a look.  Here are the snap beans.  The leaves are burned from the frost.  Fortunately, fresh new growth is being put on.  They'll be stunted, but most of the beans are going to make it.

But look at the cucumbers!  I have 3 varieties planted on a cattle panel trellis.  The cucumbers are hit a lot harder than the snap beans.  Honestly, I think I'll have to replant ALL of these except one on the very end.  I don't know how it avoided the damage.  I will wait for 3 more days to see if any new growth appears.  Then if nothing happens, I'll pull the trigger and replant.

This third photo shows the severely damaged squash, including hills of zucchini, straightneck yellow squash and crookneck yellow squash.  This right here was my main reason for rushing things.  I figured if I got a really early start, I could avoid the squash vine borers.  This pest usually kills all of my squash.  I theorized that by getting a jump on things, I could make a big harvest of squash before the onslaught of the SVBs.  The squash was absolutely beautiful, with big, healthy green leaves.  They would have been blooming in a week.  Then the temperatures dropped and all of the big leaves turned brown and died.

But I'm hopeful.  I see fresh new green growth.  There's an old adage that says, "That which does not kill you, makes you stronger."  If there's any truth to that, perhaps we'll have a strong squash crop.  We'll wait and see.

Finally, in the garden in the side yard, here are my butternut squash and spaghetti squash.  Burned by the frost? Sure.  But these plants will live to fight another day!

There are significant benefits to getting things planted early.  You get plants that produce prior to fighting the high heat and bug and pest pressure.  But there is significant downside risk that may cause you to have to replant everything.  Fortunately, I don't think that is possible.  However, I'm pretty sure I'll be replanting all the cucumbers.  I will try to rush things and plant early again, I'm quite sure, but next time, I'll cover all of the plants.

A Month Later...

Exactly a month ago we planted all of our tomatoes, eggplant, and pepper seeds.  We kept them inside until they germinated and got their first leaves.  Then we moved them out in the sun as long as the temps were well above freezing.  On a baker's rack, we made a small green house by wrapping it in plastic and fastening it down.  When the sun shines, even on cold days, the sides of the plastic fogs up.  It warms up pretty good with the solar heating and the plants have grown.  It'll be in the 30's tonight, so we moved the mini greenhouse back indoors.

The tomatoes have grown pretty good.  They're getting a little 'leggy' so I might repot them.  According to the Farmer's Almanac, the last Spring frost for our zip code is March 1st, so I won't put them in the ground much before then.  We have a ways to go until we get there.  

For our eggplant, every single seed germinated.  The peppers weren't as good.  The ones that are up look healthy, so I'll not complain.

While sitting in front of the fire tonight, I got out the Louisiana Vegetable planting guide and brushed up on planting dates.  I'm getting excited to plant.  If that sounds like cabin fever has set in, you're exactly right.  It has been raining all week long.  The ground is absolutely saturated.  We won't be planting anything until after the soil dries up.  Beginning tomorrow we'll have four days with nice sunshine.

Spring Garden in Late April (Part III)

Okay, I promise this is the last update on the garden in entirety.  I had forgotten to add a couple items.  First, let's look at some things I missed.  To the right, you'll see some birdhouse gourd vines that came up volunteer from last year's seeds.  Immediately to the left are a couple of butternut squash.  We LOVE to roast these bad boys and make a delicious soup.  So good!  To the far left (and all these vines mix together), are several spaghetti squash.  They'll vine all over the compost pile.  It will be a real hunt to find the ripened squash as those big leaves and vines will be all over the place.

I planted more melons at the north end of the potato patch.  Below, I have more butternut squash, some Hale's Best Cantaloupes, some Mini Cantaloupes, some Tahitian Melon Squash and Charleston Grey Watermelons.  These, if we're fortunate, will vine out into the yard.  (Less grass to mow.)

Here is the potato patch.  It is about 40 feet of Lasoda potatoes planted three across.  I planted about 8 pounds of potatoes.  They were looking beautiful a couple weeks ago, but they have an unhealthy yellowish color right now.  I'll get back to the potatoes in the minute.

Right in the middle of the potato patch, there is another (non-edible) crop that comes up year after year as they seed themselves.  I just let them grow.  They are zinnias.  They are multicolors.   Some pink:

Some orange, yellow and white.  I leave them growing as they add some beauty to the landscape of the garden.  You'll notice the potato patch is mulched deeply with oak leaves.  I'll turn these under to enrich the soil after the potato harvest.

Back to the potatoes.  This year I planted potatoes several weeks earlier than I normally do.  So I found the reason why the potato plants look like they are dying.  It is because the potatoes are almost ripe and the plants are about done!  I pulled back the mulch and exposed a mature red potato.  We'll be harvesting these in a couple of weeks.  Looking forward to it!

And one last thing.  I have one more late thing I'll be planting in the garden.  These are some tomatillos I planted very late.  It is my first time planting these so we'll see how it goes.  I like trying new things.  Some things we try we find we experience success.  Others, quite often, we fall on our face.  But that's okay.  We learn and we try again.

May your thumbs be green!

Spring Garden in Late April (Part II)

Back again.  Here is the second half of the garden update.  After the four rows of onions, we have two rows of tomatoes.  I had a catastrophe this year with all my planted tomato seeds.  I lost almost all of them.  I supplemented with (mostly) heirloom varieties that we purchased at a local nursery.

It won't be that much longer before we have red ripe tomatoes!

I have another row of corn.  This one is a shoepeg corn called "Country Gentleman."  I like that name.  The corn is a whitish color and it is sweet.  The weird thing about it is that the kernels aren't in uniform rows like most other corn.  the kernels are randomly spread.  I'll explain better with a photo once we harvest.

I have four varieties of okra planted this year: Clemson Spineless, Beck's Big Okra, Burgundy Okra, and Jing Orange Okra.  We ran completely out of okra this year before "gumbo season" was over.  Shame!  That won't happen again.

Here is a little plot of rainbow chard.  You can see how it gets its name.  The one with bright yellow veins and stems is hidden behind the other leaves.  The greens and stalks are sweet and very healthy.

From left to right in the photo below:

Amaranth!  Now, I've never grown or eaten this before, so this is a new thing.  It is supposed to be very healthy and a high source of protein.  I'm learning something new here.

Bull's Blood beets: We're harvesting beets almost every day now and eating them with every meal.  

Black Turtle Beans:  These will be over-running the beets soon.  We dry these and then make refried black beans.  We really like them with fresh-made tortillas!

And that about wraps up the garden, except for the potato patch and the melon patch.  Maybe I'll show you that next week?

Big Gardening Weekend Ahead

 

The photo above is of our garden taken on March 1st.  In the foreground you can see a couple of broccoli that we're still picking florets off of.  We've eaten a bunch of broccoli this year.  Then you can see some dinosaur kale and some green kale.  Tricia has been juicing a lot of that.  Next are four rows of onions then a jungle of cilantro that is about to go to seed.  Then green onions, parsley, another row of broccoli, a few Cosmic red carrots, spinach, radishes and lettuce that is about to go to seed.  In a separate bed, I have some Irish Potatoes planted, but they've not sprouted yet.

This weekend we have a lot of work to do.  I will be incorporating some of the biochar we made into the soil.  We'll be picking a lot of the items I listed above and doing some planting.  Definitely corn, snap beans of several variety, a variety of cucumbers,  and several different types of squash.  If we have time, I'll figure out some additional items to plant.  Finally, we'll add more mulch to the garden (4 inches deep) to crowd out weed growth and conserve soil moisture.  It has been an unusually dry year so far.

Spring is upon us!  The weather is great.  Lows this weekend is 59 degrees and high of 82 degrees and it will be good to get outside and get our hands dirty.

72 Days

Or 10 weeks and 2 days.  Or 2 months and 13 days.  We planted all of our tomatoes (and peppers and eggplant) from seed on January 1st.  72 days later we put them in the ground.  The plants were healthy and green, tall and vigorous, yearning to leave the confines of the seed pots and stretch out their root system in good soil.

I used some baling twine to stretch from one side of the garden to the other.  Then I raked away the wood chips until I got to soil.  The twine enables me to plant the seedlings in a straight row.  It is not necessary to have straight rows, but I like order.  I planted 5 rows of tomatoes, 18 inches apart.  This allowed me to have 13 tomato plants per row, 65 tomato plants total.

I used a shovel to open a slightly deep hole and tossed a handful of biochar inoculated with composted cow manure in the bottom of the hole.  Then Russ planted the tomato, burying it up to the bottom leaves.  The 'leggy' stem will become part of the root system of the plant.  Then Tricia followed behind, pulling the wood chip mulch around the plant to preserve soil moisture and block out weed growth that might compete with the tomato for nutrients.

I planted the following varieties of heirloom, indeterminate tomatoes: 

Black Krim                Black Vernisage            Big Rainbow            Pink Brandywine

Mortgage Lifter        Roma                              Chadwick Cherry    Creole

Cherokee Purple    

Then I planted the peppers, two varieties of of each:

Anaheim        Chocolate        Lipstick        Lilac        Banana        Emerald        Horizon

Then, very far away, in the front of the garden so they don't cross pollinate, I planted six Jalapeno plants - 3 hot jalapenos and 3 Craig's Grande (a big variety for making poppers)  Finally, I planted 3 Florida Market Eggplant.

I climbed on top of the wood chip pile in the back of the garden to capture the newly planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplant and to get a look at the entire garden.

You can see the onion plants in the photo.  They are looking better at this stage than in prior years, believe it or not, after being concerned that the freeze killed them.  We have lots of beets, carrots, chard, kale, kohlrabi to harvest in order to make room for beans, corn, squash, cucumbers, etc.  We'll get to some of that maybe this next weekend.

A Peek at the Garden in Mid-January

We got the onion crop planted last week, and I've asked Tricia to be looking for seed potatoes at the local feed store.  We're about a month away from time to be planting them.  In the meantime, we have plenty of items that we're harvesting right now like mustard greens, swiss chard, and kale.  I'll show a few of the other items in a brief post.  Here are the Sugar Snap Peas, full of tender, sweet pods:

The Waltham Broccoli is making nice heads.  I like the way the dew sparkles on the leaves and head in the morning sunlight.

We pick the big heads, but the broccoli continues making smaller florets for quite a while if you are patient in harvesting them every other day.

Prior to temperatures falling below freezing the other night, we picked a basket of the last of the squash crop before the plants died.  The basket includes zucchini, spaghetti squash, cushaw squash, and Tahitian melon squash.

Here is a nice photo showing nice color.  It has many varieties of lettuce in the foreground contrasted against the bull's blood beets and carrots (and cows and chickens in the background).

And speaking of lettuce, here is one row of three rows of carrots that I have growing.  They'll be maturing in another month.

Here are some eggplant right before the freeze.  The eggplant succumbed to the freeze.

Here is a shot of Galilee Spinach in the foreground looking south toward the barn:

And a better shot of the spinach.  It is thick and healthy.

I'm preparing for the Spring garden as well.  Here is the tomatoes that have come up and are growing.  Actually, they are getting a little too "leggy" under the grow lights.  I will replant them a little later.  The peppers are all starting to germinate, but the eggplant have not sprouted yet.

As we harvest, we plant.  We look forward to what the spring garden brings.

Getting to the End of the Fall Garden

Over the last two weekends we've been able to transplant all of the tomatoes and peppers into the garden as well as plant sweet corn and several varieties of green beans.  We've made room by harvesting all of the carrots, radishes, bok choy, and cauliflower.  The broccoli, cabbage and lettuce are finishing up.  In a short time, the cucumbers and squash will be planted, but we need more room.

Dill, Sorrel, Cucumbers and Squash

We're working on it.  The spinach finished up, so we planted our sweet corn there.  Now the beets are ripening.  First the Detroit Red Beets...

And next the Bull's Blood Beets.  You can see why they are called that.  The leaves have a deep burgundy color of bull's blood.

With all the carrots we pulled, we've been cutting up the beets and having Roasted Root Vegetables for a side dish several nights a week.  We'd add turnips to this dish, but we've been feeding all of the turnips to the cows.  We really like turnip greens, but the turnip roots are another story.  The cows like 'em, though.

This is the second to last cabbage still in the garden.  We've been making egg rolls with them, smothered cabbage, and cole slaw.  Once the last cabbage is pulled, we'll have room for the squash.

The cauliflower, as I mentioned, was all harvested.  The broccoli is another story.  The neat thing about broccoli is that after you cut the main broccoli head, little broccoli florets will continue to pop up.  We leave the broccoli and continue to pop off little florets every so often.  It is perfect for cooking up a quick vegetable side.  At some point as the weather warms, the little florets quickly turn to yellow flowers before you can pick them.  At that time, we'll remove the broccoli plant and put egg plant in its place.

It's all about making effective use of space.  We've run out of it.  That's why I planted all the potatoes in the side yard.  Maybe we'll check in on them later this week.

Spring is on its way!

The last several days we've seen temperatures in the 70's.  It has been a welcome change.  While milking the cows this morning, I heard mockingbirds in the trees singing their songs.  I hadn't heard songbirds in a while. This weekend I could hear crop dusters flying in the distance which is another telltale sign of Spring.  As discussed in another post, I worked up four rows and planted 116 seed potatoes.  I have some additional seed potatoes that I need to plant, but it'll require pulling up a couple more rows.  The days are getting longer, too, which will allow me to get more done in the afternoons. Sunset today is at 6:01 pm, but by the end of the month, it will be 6:09 pm. Longer days and warmer weather will dry out the water-logged soil and enable me to plant the Spring crop.

That got me to thinking that I needed to do a seed inventory so that I can order some seeds to replace the that I used last year.  So last night while Benjamin and I watched the Olympics, I went and got all my seeds out of the freezer and grouped them in logical groups like melons, beans, peas, corn, squash, okra, herbs, etc.  I made a list of the seeds that I have in stock on a legal pad.

Grouping seeds together and getting organized

Then I pulled out my planting guide from last Spring that shows, row by row, what I planted and when I planted it.  My planting guide shows all 35 of my 30 foot rows and what is planted where.  I compared the two lists (inventory against planting guide) to determine what I needed to order.  I like Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and I went to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at www.rareseeds.com and placed an order. They'll come in the mail in time for planting.  The other reason I look at my planting guide is to help me determine where in the garden to plant items this year as I don't want to plant the same crop in the same location.  Rotating planting locations helps give the soil a rest and allows the soil to build up nutrients pulled out of the ground by the crop.

Looking at my planting guide from Spring 2013

Some of my seeds are left over from the 2009 crop packing year, but I still experience good germination on them, so I keep using them.  You'll notice that I only inventoried my purchased seed last night.  I have a big drawer that is absolutely filled with supplement bottles full of seeds that I save.  I'll use those seeds in addition to purchased seed.  Each year I try to save as many seeds as I can.  I have another inventory list of those seeds.  I'm finding that I have to purchase fewer and fewer seeds each year.  This year my total seed purchase was $17.50 and that included shipping.

Seeds on carpet that will soon be in the dirt

Making a list of all my seeds does another thing besides providing an inventory and determining what I need to order to be prepared for Spring Planting - it helps me begin thinking about how to organize the garden.  I have so many seeds and each year I'm tempted to enlarge the size of the garden.  I've found that the size of the garden and the time it takes to maintain and properly care for it is at odds with a person (me) who has turned another year older since last Spring's Garden was put in.  A man's got to know his limitations.

So I've decided to operate on the same standard operating procedure that our Government does.  I won't reduce the size of my garden, I'll just increase the size of it at rate that is a little slower than the garden's growth rate in the past and call it a cut. (Smile!)

Making a list and checking it twice

While watching the Jamaican bobsled team go down the run, I got out my LSU AgCenter Louisiana Vegetable Planting Guide.  It can be found here.  It is a really good planning tool that I use to help me with seed spacing, depth, and planting times. After looking at it, I really got the fever to go out and play in the dirt!

Louisiana Vegetable Planting Guide from LSU AgCenter

I have notes in the margins and things highlighted to help me improve the garden each year and I look over it to refresh my memory of things I want to change.  One thing that I'm definitely finding is that I want to be planting at the very earliest dates for the Fall Garden.  To try and beat the heat and bug pressure, I want to do the same with the Spring garden as well, but it is a little dangerous to do that.

Just to be on the safe side, I researched the average last frost date for my zip code and it is February 21 - 28th.  It won't be long now until I knock the rust off of my garden hoe...