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.

Winter Harvest Before the Ice Comes

Forecasts show lows of 23 degrees overnight into the morning and tomorrow lows down to 19 degrees overnight and into the morning.  This has sparked a flurry (pardon the pun) of activity in getting things taken care of and ready.  Yesterday, I wrapped all the pipes in the attic, the faucets attached to the house, and then all the water pipes and spigots in the garden and out in the pasture.  It took quite a while but we got prepared as best as we can.  Hopefully we can make it through the cold weather without any broken pipes.

Late this afternoon after church, we bundled up and got all the tarps out, covering everything that's out in the garden, trying to save what's there.  I'm not really worried about the root crops, so I'm leaving the beets and carrots and turnips alone.  The cabbage are said to fare very well through a freeze, too.  I did check on the cauliflower.  We have a LOT of cauliflower that's ready.  I learned that if your cauliflower freezes, it gets mushy and is ruined.  Not gonna take any chances with the cauliflower.  Gotta pick 'em!

Most of the cauliflower are very nice, bigger than the size of your hand.  I pick the head of the cauliflower off and feed all the leaves to the cows.  How they love that!  Cauliflower is one and done.  By that, I mean once you harvest the head, no more will grow.  Broccoli is a different story.  Once you pick the main broccoli head, little broccoli florets pop up all over the place, so you can continue harvesting as long as you have patience to get out there and pick.  Pound for pound, you probably get more broccoli from the little florets cumulatively than you do from the main head.

In pulling all the cauliflower off so they're not ruined in the freeze, we got a huge haul.  I don't really have anything for perspective, but that's a big basket in the photo below.  We'll be busy eating cauliflower and blanching and freezing it.

I like to also pull some beets (bull's blood and chioggia varieties) and carrots (Danvers and Cosmic Purple varieties).

As a kid, I often turned my nose up at vegetables, but no more!  We eat lots of them.  One of our favorite things to do is roast cauliflower, broccoli, beets, and carrots in the oven with some olive oil, butter, salt and minced garlic.  I cannot stress how delicious this is.

Fresh spinach is coming in too, right now in the garden, so Tricia made a beautiful spinach, ham, pecan and cheese quiche.  That paired nicely with lettuce from the garden and the roasted vegetables.  It made for an enjoyable lunch.

After two days, we'll take the tarps off the garden and see where we stand.  Will everything we covered survive?  Tune in and we'll report toward the end of the week.  Stay warm!

Poor Little Tree

Charlie Brown's Christmas tree was a sad little tree.  All bent and scrunched over.  Sad looking and pathetic...

It kind of reminded me of our satsuma tree.  In its defense, the satsuma tree is a very young tree, but today when I went out and picked the four satsumas off of it, I thought of Charlie Brown's tree as they sort of look similar.

In years past, we had a navel orange, a satsuma, a lemon, and four tangerine trees.  But unusually cold winters with temps down in the single digits demolished, obliterated, and decimated all of our citrus except for the navel orange and the new satsuma tree.  

I was thinking back to the times where we would pull all the fruit off the trees and make marmalade and freeze gallons of fresh-squeezed tangerine juice and eat delicious oranges.  Unfortunately, those days are gone...  for a while at least while we get some new citrus trees in the ground to make up for those we lost.  Almost as sad looking as the little satsuma tree is, is the sum total of the harvest off that tree:

Slim pickin's indeed!  I did purchase a Blood orange tree, a Meyer lemon tree and another satsuma tree that I'll be putting in the ground this spring.  Maybe next year our citrus harvest will be larger than four satsumas!

Running Out of Time

Our fall tomato crop has been better than normal this year.  Every single day, we've been going out and picking the nice red ones that were ripening on the vine.  Without the heat and bug pressure, the tomatoes have thrived.  We've been cooking a lot of them, making homemade cream of Tomato soup and also freezing a bunch of them for later use.  And Tricia, each day, would tell me, "You ought to see how many tomatoes are STILL out there on the vines!

It was with that hopeful thought in mind that we received the news of temperatures plunging to 28 degrees Monday morning.  Oh no!  We have to pull all those tomatoes off before the freeze, but Sunday afternoon was a busy afternoon for us.  Starting at 2:30, we were Christmas caroling with our church at the Veterans Administration Home, Jeff Davis Living Center and Camelot Brookside Nursing Home followed by a fellowship at the church.  Tick Tock!

Tricia and I got home and changed, bundling up as the north winds were blowing and the wind chill was already below freezing.  It took about an hour, but we got all the green tomatoes off the vines before we lost them.  It did get down to 28 degrees and then last night it got down to 30 degrees, but now, the two week forecast shows highs in the 70's and lows in the 50's.  We just ran out of time.

These are some Chadwick Cherries:

And more...

Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Creole, etc.

Here are some Black Vernissage tomatoes...

Had we just had another couple of weeks, many of these would've ripened perfectly.

We have them in boxes and will see if they will ripen on their own.  If not, we'll make Fried Green Tomatoes, chutney or relish, or salsa verde.  I would rather that they would be red, ripe tomatoes, but when Plan A is off the board, we switch to Plan B or Plan C.  

Success & Failure After the Deep Freeze

Prior to the deep freeze that rolled through our area, bringing 10 inches of snow and temperatures in the single digits, we listened to a gentleman at our bee club meeting tell us about a technique he used to save all of his citrus trees from temperatures in the low 20's from the year before.  We've always piled mulch real deep around the base of the trunk.  That didn't work out so well.  We didn't lose the trees, but it hurt them so badly, the next year we had no blooms, thus, no citrus.  We had to prune back all the dead branches.

I was interested in this man's tactics as his trees were loaded with satsumas and oranges where our poor trees were barren.  This guy purchased tarps at tractor supply and covered the entire tree.  Then, he ran extension cords to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  That's it!  So we endeavored to do likewise.  Note to self:  Purchase tarps in advance of the freeze.  Don't wait until the last minute because the shelves will be bare.  

Let's look at each of our three citrus trees.  We had more, but had lost them in previous freezes.  Here below is a small satsuma tree.  It's only about 3 1/2 feet tall, so what I did was turn a heavy plastic trash can over it and put a heat lamp underneath.  Look at the results.  The heavy trash can did a pretty good job of keeping the heat inside.  The uppermost limbs and leaves are dead, but there is green growth toward the bottom where the heat lamp was positioned.

Looking more closely at the bottom of the satsuma tree, you can see fresh, new, green growth along with LOTS of blossoms.  We WILL have satsumas this fall!

Here is our navel orange tree.  As I told you, it is big.  Too big, in fact, to get the tarp over it and fastened tightly at the bottom.  We did the best we could.  I wonder if it would be beneficial to prune the tree back to ensure the ability for the tarp to completely go over and seal good with bungee cords at the bottom.  We were able to put the heat lamp underneath, but from a distance, the navel orange tree looks bleak.  We may have to chop it down.

Not so fast, my friend.  As you look closer, there is green growth coming out of the central trunk!  That's great news.

Looking closer, you can make out orange blossoms.  What a nice fragrance!  We'll have oranges this winter.

Well, things are looking pretty good.  Let's check in on the tangerine tree.  It had been hurt badly by the previous freeze, so it was smaller.  We wrapped it completely with a tarp and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  Uh Oh!  There's no growth.  This thing is toast.

We'll have no tangerines this fall.  These were so tart and tasty.  Their color was what I describe as "electric orange."  We'll have to buy another to replace this one.  I'll chop this one down.  Things were looking pretty good with our new freeze protection protocol.  However, I try to be a glass half full kind of guy.  And like ol' Meatloaf sang, "Two outta three ain't bad."

I Just Don't Know...

Prior to the Arctic Blast that sent temperatures dipping to 6 degrees, we picked all the navel oranges off of our tree.  We've been enjoying them chilled, sprinkling a little Tajin seasoning (Chili, lime & sea salt) on them.  So good!  As we get down to the bottom of the basket, I worry about our citrus trees.  We did the best we could to protect them.  We threw the ubiquitous blue tarp over them, staking them down and then running a heat lamp under the tarp, hoping the heat would somehow offset the cold.

Once the freezing weather left, I pulled the tarps off and removed the heat lamps.  Here is the navel orange tree.  The leaves are curled and burned from the cold, but they haven't fallen off, and they're still green.  We'll give it a little time.  As bad as it looks, I'm hopeful.

Here is the tangerine tree.  Same thing - we tarped it and ran a heat lamp.  Once I pulled the tarp off and surveyed the damage, I think this one looks worse than the navel orange.  We had two other tangerines besides this one and lost them in the last deep freeze.  We miss the fruit.  It was so tart and tangy and had a fluorescent orange color.

Here is our satsuma tree.  It is the youngest, by far, and the one the I was worried about the most.  Due to it's size, I simply turned a garbage can over it and ran the heat lamp underneath.  The garbage can is maybe 1/4 thick plastic.  Once the freeze passed over, I removed the trash can and turned off the heat lamp.  Let's look at what happened:

The tree is absolutely perfect!  No burned leaves.  It looks absolutely perfect.  Like a tropical plant should in the summer.  Green leaves and stalk.  Why do you figure?  I suppose the thick plastic garbage can acted as an insulator, keeping the heat inside the overturned trashcan, warming the air like a sauna.  This really worked!

Sadly, it's just not practical for our larger trees.  We'll continue to watch to see if they perk up and put on any fresh growth.  Will they make it?  I just don't know...

Prepping for the Arctic Blast

The Arctic Blast sounds like a new slush that they might offer at Sonic, but we're taking it as seriously as we know how.  They are predicting cold weather.  The last time Tricia looked at her phone, she told me that they said it would be 9 degrees in Jennings.  9 degrees.  At that temperature, I don't know if it even pays off to cover plants, but I've got some tarps.  We might as well try.

The turnips that I had planted may be a lost cause as I didn't have quite enough tarps for them.  The greens were going to be for me.  The turnip roots for the cows.  We'll see if they survive.  Under the blue tarps you see is the spinach and radishes and some mustard greens.

The cilantro and the green onions are going to be left uncovered.  I don't know if they will survive.  The broccoli and brussels sprouts are covered.

The swiss chard, kale, kohlrabi and cabbage are all covered up, too.

Here is my new experiment.  Last time it reached the low 20's I lost two tangerine trees and a satsuma.  The navel orange tree and the tangerine that survived took 2 years to recover.  While the navel orange produced again this year, the surviving tangerine did not.  I had them covered, too.

This year I tried something.  In addition to covering them, I ran heat lamps to each one.  This is the heat lamp under the tangerine tree.

The new satsuma tree was small enough for me to flip the garbage can over it with the heat lamp inside.  Who knows?  It may make it so warm under there that it cooks the little tree.

And finally, here is the heat lamp under the covered up navel orange tree.  This is the one that I had just picked all the fruit off of it.

Will they make it?  Only time will tell.  I'll uncover them in a few days and we will report if the heat lamps did the job.

While we were out walking to the barn to do the evening chores, we began to hear sirens.  One after the other.  They turned off the main road and onto ours and stopped at our next door neighbor's house.  We could see flames and then the firemen jumped out and started spraying things down with water.

We didn't want to be nosy neighbors, so we didn't walk over.  The firemen had it under control quickly.  It didn't seem to have spread to their home.  It looked like it was confined to a barn behind his house.  I'll find out for sure, but I didn't see his heat lamps on his chickens like he always has on.  If I had to guess, it could be that he moved his birds into the barn and somehow the heat lamp caught the barn on fire.

No one was injured and their home was saved.  It's a good thing to live exactly one mile away from the Hathaway Rural Volunteer Fire Department.  They were on site in three shakes of a billy goat's tail and got it put out quickly.

Pickin' The Orange Tree Bare

We have some cold weather coming next week.  Like, cold weather that we don't often get down here.  On Tuesday the high will be 29 and the low will be 19.  We're just not accustomed to that. We can't drive in it.  Our pipes aren't wrapped yet.  Our plants and animals aren't ready.  I have a lot of work to do in advance of next week.  I'm praying it won't be as cold as they say.

I realized I need to get the navel oranges off of the tree.  This tree didn't make a single orange last year because the freeze the previous year almost wiped it out.  It did kill two of our tangerine trees.  We only have this navel orange, a tangerine tree that hasn't made fruit in two years because of the freeze, and a new satsuma tree.

I clipped all of the navel oranges off the tree, dropping them in a big bucket.  I have to find a way to make room in a refrigerator so they'll keep if it starts warming up before we can eat them.  A fall-back plan is to make freshly squeezed orange juice and freeze what we can't drink.  Fresh orange juice is just that absolute best.  There's no comparing store bought and especially concentrate to fresh-squeezed.

I can remember perhaps my first experience with fresh orange juice.  We were on a family vacation in Florida and stopped at a roadside stand smack dab in the middle of a huge orange grove.  Of course they were selling oranges, but they had these plastic 'straw-like' contraption that was sharp on the end.  You'd cut into the orange with the straw and squeeze on the orange and suck on the straw and delicious orange juice would flow into your mouth.  It was delicious!

The size of the navels on our tree this year are gargantuan.  Of course I'm picking out the largest one for comparison, but look at this monster!  I have this one side by side a huge lemon that came off the neighbor's tree.  Those lemons are twice the size of those you get in the produce department.  That navel on the left is ALMOST as big as a cantaloupe.

Here's the orange in the palm of my hand for perspective.

Citrus doesn't do well in frigid temperatures.  It's tropical and will easily die.  I've lost many a citrus tree to hard freezes.  I've tried all sorts of things to try to save them.  Mulching them DEEP and HIGH around the trunk, putting tarps over and around them, putting buckets of water stacked around them.  None of that worked.  The trees are all planted on the south side of the house, so the house serves as a wind break from the north winds.  To no avail.

At one of our bee club meetings, a fellow named Jim explained how he saved ALL of his citrus trees.  He put a tarp over all of them, ran an extension cord to each tree and put a heat lamp under the tarp.  He saved every last tree.  I'm going to try out his technique.  I don't want to lose our trees!

A Nice Cold Snap!

For the last three days and continuing into tonight, overnight lows dipped near 30 degrees.  It wasn't nearly a hard freeze.  I didn't worry about winterizing the pipes.  In fact under the trees, I saw no ice in the water troughs.  I knew that the freeze would end the green beans, though.  They had a nice run.  Not only did we get fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving, but we were still picking green beans for New Year's Day.  We've never done that before.  After I picked the last of the beans, I used clippers to clip the plants off at ground level and tossed the foliage over to the cows.

The fall garden always produces some wonderful meals.  I get excited about vegetables.  What kind of a weirdo does that?  I showed you a nice cauliflower we harvested last week:

I neglected to tell you our favorite way to eat cauliflower (or broccoli).  Chop up the cauliflower into florets.  Place on a stoneware baking pan and add kosher salt and a bunch of minced garlic.  Drizzle olive oil and stir it all up.  Place in an oven and roast until they turn golden brown.  I would assume people just call this Roasted cauliflower.  We call it cauliflower candy.  It is so delicious that there are no leftovers.

The freeze wrecked the peppers and eggplant.  We picked all the remaining fruit off of them and cut down the freeze-damaged plants.  Everything is brown now in the garden, except for bright green leafy things like kale, swiss chard, mustard greens, turnips, and things like radishes shown below.  The red radishes contrasted against the radish greens in the morning sun are pretty.  I don't get that fired up about cut up radishes in a salad.  I'll enjoy them like that, but Tricia makes a radish dip that's quite addictive.  She'll take a few nice sized radishes and put them in a food processer and mince.  To that shell mix in a softened block of cream cheese and a little salt, pepper and chili powder.  

The purple kohlrabi is a relatively new addition to our garden repertoire.  Growing up, I don't imagine I ever even heard the word kohlrabi, but I got some as Free Seed from Baker Creek and it looked like a vegetable grown on an alien planet.  We cooked it up and really enjoyed it.  I'll wait until this one's a little bigger and we'll feast on it.

We're also getting ready for planting.  My onion sets came in from Dixondale Farms, so some time this week or next, I'll be planting about 200 onions.  We harvested some Irish potatoes that came up volunteer from some that I guess we didn't find when we harvested back in early summer.  To that bed I'll be adding about four inches of mulch.  We'll be planting Irish Potatoes around Valentine's Day.

Still No Freeze

As of December 29th, we've had maybe three mornings that I've walked out and seen a very light frost out on the pasture.  It has not significantly damaged anything in the garden, though.  The snap beans had a very slight 'bronzing' of the leaves as evidence of the frost, but that's it.  I always plant a fall crop of snap beans with the goal of growing a mess of fresh snap beans for Thanksgiving dinner.  We accomplished that this year, but additionally, they've kept producing.  I've harvested another two big baskets of green beans since Thanksgiving.  We had some for lunch after church this morning.

This is the longest that I've been able to keep them producing.  Usually a freeze has burnt them to the ground by now, but they are loaded up for another picking!

Not only that, but they're still blooming!  We'll see how long we can keep this going.  

We have been harvesting lettuce, kale, chard, and broccoli already, but yesterday I picked a big, fat cauliflower!  It was possibly the biggest head of cauliflower we've ever grown.

I don't know how to show you proper perspective other than tell you that it's bigger than my head.  I put my left hand by it for comparison.

We'll be cutting this one up and putting it on a baking tray and drizzling with olive oil and lots of minced garlic before roasting in the oven.  That's my favorite way to eat cauliflower.

In other garden news, I'm expecting delivery of all my onion starts next week.  On December 31st, I always plant all of our tomatoes, peppers and eggplant from seed.  Lots of exciting gardening tasks coming up soon.