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.

First Frost 2025

Sometimes the weather forecast is right on the money.  And then other times, they totally miss it.  I can understand.  Weather has a lot of variables and conditions that affect it.  In planting crops, I like to have a pretty good idea of when to plant things in advance of a rain, so that the crop will be watered in.  It hasn't rained in several weeks now, so I'm a little concerned about the crimson clover that I planted.  The ground is as hard as a basketball court.  I don't know how the crimson clover will germinate and grown on that!

I also like to know when high winds are coming and, of course, when a freeze or frost is coming.  We have lots of tomatoes on the vine that I'd pull if a freeze was coming.

But frosts...  What about those?  Frost won't damage most of the stuff still growing in the garden from the spring, like tomatoes and peppers.  I looked up the Farmer's Almanac for the first frost date for our location.  I put in our zip code and it said: "The average first frost date is November 9"  November 9th came and went with no frost, but...

We woke up on the morning of November 11th to this:

It was a good first frost.  Not enough to damage anything in the garden, but enough to slow down any new grass growth in the pasture.

The cows, goats, and chickens will continue to clean up the last remaining grass and then it will be time to start supplementing with hay.  Last year we rolled out the first round bale on January 1st.  I'm thinking this year will be sooner to hay the cows.  At the bee club meeting, some of the beekeepers were saying that the bees were completely stopping up all the holes in their bee boxes with propolis, and they are reading that as a prediction that a cold winter is on the way.  Who knows?  Weather forecasters, Farmer's Almanacs, and beekeepers can all be wrong.  We'll have to wait to find out.

Freeze Warning on March 19th

In a really unusual happening, we have a freeze warning tonight.  As I type this, temps are predicted to get down to 31 degrees tonight and stay that way for several hours.  That would put a severe hurting on our garden.  We have every single thing planted in the garden with the exception of blackeye peas, purple hull peas and Ozark razorback peas.  We did our best to protect them, but we won't know where we stand until tomorrow afternoon.

We have saved a big inventory of landscape pots, 5 gallon buckets and tarps.  This afternoon, with temps in the 50's I got to work.  The number one task was tomatoes.  I have about 50 tomato plants that range in height from 6-12" tall.  I covered them up with buckets/pots and did the same with the peppers.  Then I stretched a large tarp over the snap beans and then over most of the tomatoes that were covered with buckets, hoping the extra layer of insulation would help.  Some of the tomatoes have blooms on them!  I covered the cucumbers as well.  They're located on the bottom left under the trellis.  Some items, like carrots can withstand a freeze so they needed no protection.

On the backside of the garden, I covered all of the squash, okra, eggplant, tomatillos, basil and butterbeans.  The onions should be fine without any covering.  I was a little concerned that the wind would blow the pots off of the plants, so on some of them I placed sticks or dirt clods on top to weigh them down.  As it turns out, as soon as the sun set, the winds diminished, so the weights weren't necessary.

I moved to the bed in the side yard and covered all 112 potato plants as well as the butternut squash, cantaloupes and watermelon plants.  Planting this early was somewhat of a gamble, but the Farmer's Almanac showed the average last spring frost date for our zip code was March 1st.  A freeze this late is an outlier indeed.

Rushing to plant everything this early is a risk; however, sometimes it pays off as you begin harvesting prior to the onslaught of pest pressure.  After we finished covering everything, I told Tricia that we did what we could.  If we lose everything, we'll just replant.  We'll see how it goes.

Fall is Here!

Last night it got down to 33 degrees!  Tonight it is supposed to be the same.  In anticipation of the very early cold snap, I rolled out a round bale of hay for the cows and goats to eat on.  It's last year's hay, but it's been covered up out of the weather.  We use a tarp that is made from an old billboard.  The sign advertised the Isle of Capri Casino in Lake Charles.  It was damaged substantially during a hurricane and lay in ruins for a while.  It got the nickname of Pile of Debris Casino.  The tarp has kept the hay in good shape.

Rosie and LuLu immediately started eating on it.  They get all excited for new hay.  You can see that they eat the very center of the hay first.  We always joke and say that it's like the center of a cinnamon roll.  You can also see the bull hanging out by the hay in the background.  I forgot to mention to you that we found out the bull's name.  It's Nick.  We call him Slick Nick.  No one is in heat yet, so Slick Nick hasn't done any romanticizing up to this point.  He's pretty quiet and calm.

This morning when I went outside, there was a frost on the ground.  It didn't get down to freezing but there was frost.  Since I didn't cover the vegetables in the garden, I was concerned about the warm-weather crops we have growing like green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes.  Fortunately, the sun warmed things up quickly and the crops don't appear to be hurt by the cold snap.

The photo below shows some of the cole crops.  We have two rows with two different varieties of cabbage, two rows with two different varieties of broccoli, and one row of cauliflower.  It seems that every seed has germinated, so they are too thick.  I've been thinning them out.  I transplanted some and gave to Russ and my Mom & Dad.  I'll also give some to my brother-in-law and his Dad.  In the background, you can see the experiment underway of fall potatoes growing in pots.

The seedlings are all looking real healthy.  These are Brunswick Cabbage plants.  

I've moved a bunch of these seedlings to the bed in the side yard.  Most have made it, but a couple are in poor health due to the shock of digging up their roots.  I think they'll make it.  As we looked out in the pasture, the animals are enjoying the cool weather.  They're frisky and are jumping and running around with all kinds of energy!  Fall is indeed a great time of year.  Maybe we'll light a fire in the fire pit this weekend.

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Eggplant - 3 Weeks Later

On December 29th I planted tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant into seed pots.  I always plant those crops from seed at this time of year and raise indoors until the chance of frost is minimal.  This year I also planted some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage seeds since the hard freeze back in November killed those seedlings in the garden.  So, to plant, I put two seeds per pot, labeled each container, watered and waited for germination.  After the seeds all germinated, I moved them inside and placed beneath a grow light.  (Really it is just a shop light with two fluorescent bulbs in it.)

Let's check in on the plants now that we are three weeks down the road from plant date.  Here are the tomato seedlings:

Probably this weekend, I will thin these out, breaking the two seedlings apart and planting each in its own larger pot so that they don't get root-bound before it is time to plant in the garden.  Now that they have their 'true' leaves, I've begun to water with fish emulsion diluted to half of its recommended application dose as I don't want to burn them.  I want to give them some nutrients to feed on.

You can see my amateur grow light apparatus below.  Nothing fancy.  The light is positioned just a few inches from the seedlings so they don't get too "leggy."  We keep the soil moist throughout the day.  Each day we turn the lights off for 10 hours.

The Cole Crops are below: Several varieties of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage.  Since this photo was taken, I've separated the cole crop seedlings to allow for only 1 seedling per seed pot.

The peppers and eggplant always germinate slower than the tomatoes.  In the bottom left below, you can see some jalapeno peppers growing.  In the bottom right, there are some eggplant just sprouting.

We will continue to baby these seedlings until it is time to carefully transplant them into the garden soil after hardening.  Speaking of hard, it is hard to imagine that spring is not far away.  The Farmer's Almanac tells me that the last Spring frost is March 2nd.

Growing Lettuce in the Winter

Lettuce.  Crisp, healthy, beautiful lettuce.  I plant 6 different varieties of lettuce in our garden:

• lollo rossa
• black seeded simpson
• oak leaf
• red romaine
• rocky top mix
• red wing lettuce mix

While there is nothing wrong with iceberg lettuce, I've never tried to grow it.  I've always had good success with growing 'leaf' type lettuce.  We always enjoy a nice salad, especially with homemade salad dressing.  We like to experiment with pureeing different herbs and olive oil and vinegar - adding lemon juice, satsuma juice to give the dressing a little 'zing.'  I generally plant lettuce in the fall as I found that lettuce just doesn't hold up well in the heat that is so prevalent in our southern climate. 

This year I mixed things up a little bit and planted a patch of lettuce alongside the radish patch in our raised bed that is in the side yard.  I planted the rocky top mix and the red wing lettuce mix in the raised bed and the other varieties in the big garden.  I wanted to experiment with the looser soils that are in the raised bed.  I have found that I don't always get good germination in the heavier soils in the big garden.  As it turns out, the experiment played out well and I almost achieved 100% germination in the raised bed.  I probably got about 25% germination in the big garden.

We have eaten a bunch of salad already and we'll have plenty of salad to give away to family and friends.  If you just pick the leaves, the plant will keep producing and you'll have an almost infinite amount to eat and give away.

There is only one problem.  Planting in the fall protects you from heat-related stress on the plants, but puts you at severe risk of losing the plants to freeze.  Lettuce does best when temps are between 45 and 65.  Romaine and butter lettuce is the most frost resistant, and I have lots of that planted.  You can see the red romaine below.  However, as I look at the extended forecast, I see that beginning this Sunday, temps will dip to 31, followed by 24 on Monday, 22 on Tuesday and 19 on Wednesday!

I will do my best to cover the lettuce with a tarp and I may even try to run a heat lamp out there to protect it, but I fear our beautiful lettuce crop may come to an end.  While they can survive a light frost, extended freezing conditions are not friendly to lettuce.  For insurance, on Saturday, I may try to pick a bunch of it and put it in our fridge, wrapped in wet paper towels so that we can enjoy salads during the abnormal (for us) frigid conditions.  Bundle up everyone!

Our First "Real" Freeze

We have had an unbelievably mild winter so far.  In fact, I was telling my wife just the other day that the grass is still green in the pasture.  Although we're in the deep south, by late January the grass is usually dead and brown.  We've had a few frosts that has burned the grass a little bit, but you can see in the pictures below that there is still a lot of green grass in the pasture.

Saturday morning we had our first real freeze in which there was a thin coating of ice on the top of mud puddles.  It wasn't a heavy freeze and the water in puddles underneath the live oak trees didn't freeze, but it was a freeze nonetheless.  After milking the cows Saturday morning, I walked out to feed the pullets in the chicken tractor and heard, "crunch, crunch, crunch" underneath my feet.  The morning sun was shining and had melted the frost on the grass that had escaped the shadows of the oak trees.

Frost in the shadows

The remaining green on the grass will be turning brown now from the coating of frost that covers the pasture grass.  We have been supplementing the little remaining pasture grass with hay.  The cows are eating a round bale of hay every 6 days and we feed them 1 square bale each day of the "good stuff": Alicia 'horse' hay.

Old Jack Frost

The five gallon bucket that sits atop the chicken tractor where the pullets live had an interesting collection of ice formations in it.  It's almost as if the Almighty was giving a lesson on the different types of triangles as I can see an equilateral triangle, an isosceles triangle, a scalene triangle, and a right-angled triangle in the bucket pictured below.  (I had to look those up. I never was much good at geometry.)

Fortunately, the tubing that carries the water from the reservoir bucket to the waterer that hangs in the chicken tractor below, is located on the very bottom and it didn't freeze.  Folks in northern climes have to put heaters in their water troughs during the winter so their animals can stay hydrated.  Not down here - especially not this year.

A perfect "Home School" lesson

As you can see, the water in the water trough in the chicken tractor is very much liquid.  The heat that 30 pullets put off keep the area warm and toasty as opposed to the frosty landscape that you can see right outside the tractor.

Body heat

Although it is cold, I think the frost is beautiful with the crystals sparkling in the morning sun that stretches across the landscape.  We've still got some cold weather left - that's for sure, but the days are getting longer and springtime is on its way.  In fact, as I look at the weather forecast, I see that it will be in the 70's on Saturday and Sunday of this week, January 30th & 31st.  It looks like our inventory of firewood will hold out for this year.

In just a couple of weeks at the latest, I'll plant onions and potatoes.  The ground has to do a little drying up before then, but it is almost time to get things started!

First Day of Frost - November 23, 2015

Last night was a good night.  We had a potluck supper at church to celebrate Thanksgiving a little early.  We always enjoy fellowship meals at our little country church!  The church provided the meat, which in this case was pork tenderloin stuffed with smoked sausage and the traditional fried turkey. Everyone brings their favorite side dish, cabbage roll casserole, corn maque choux, dirty rice, along with a full range of pies, cakes, etc. that are sweet enough to put you into a diabetic coma.

Our preacher pulled out a well-worn Bible and read to us from the Book of Philippians about living the Christian life and being thankful for what we have, especially our great salvation!  We lined up and fixed our plates with delicious food and then sat down to fellowship with our brothers & sisters. We enjoyed the food and each others' company and finally proceeded home with full bellies.  We did not go to bed hungry, that much is true.

We woke up to the sound of roosters crowing, ushering in a new day at a little after 5 a.m., and we walked out to the barn to milk Daisy and Rosie.  We walked in silence and heard the soft mooing of Daisy as she woke up from her slumber and followed us to the barn, eager to be milked to relieve the tightness of her udder.  I looked up at a beautiful sky, illuminated by millions of bright stars.  It didn't take long to feed the chickens, mix up the feed for the cows, wash the cows' bags and milk them. Then it was on to feed the dogs and then feed the chicks in the chicken tractor.  They are growing quickly.  I'll post a picture in the next few days to show you.

As I walked across the pasture with a bucket of Chick Grower, enjoying the peace before a busy day, I noticed something glimmering in the moonlight.  I bent over and touched the grass.  Yep, a layer of frost, the first one of the season, covered the ground.  I googled the Average First Frost date for our zip code and it showed November 10th.  This year we're almost a full two weeks later.  I like to note this in order to protect sensitive plants that we have.

Image Credit

The fall frost means that any additional growth in the pasture will come to a halt and while the cows have been continuing to eat on the pasture, over the next few weeks, their nutrition will come increasingly from the hay that we have stockpiled to help them make it through the fall/winter.  The frost also means that our green bean harvest will come to an end, along with that of the basil and peppers.  I'll cover our lettuce to protect it until we're able to harvest and consume all of it.  As the nights get colder, I'll bring the sensitive houseplants into the garage.  They are still somewhat protected from the frost by a canopy of live oak limbs.

One other thing thing that the colder weather also means is that I'll need to set out some traps and try to catch predators that attack our flock of laying hens.  With the onset of fall/winter, the prey of predators must be increasingly hard to find and they resort to eating our animals.  Just yesterday I was walking around the perimeter of our pasture locating a place in our electric fence where it was grounded and saw this sad sight!:

Thou Shalt Not Kill!

One of our Barred Rock laying hens fell victim to a violent end last night.  She was intact except for her head.  This method of attack appears to be the calling card of either a possum or a raccoon.  When I find something like this, I always think to myself, "If you're going to kill the thing, don't waste it! Eat it all!"  It won't be wasted by me.  I picked up the poor old girl and buried her in the garden where she'll grow some nice vegetables for us next spring.  I sure will miss those nice eggs she laid, though.

Composting a Laying Hen

I'll pull out the cage trap that I have and bait it where I found the chicken.  The predators are creatures of habit and will return for more and in doing so, will make a fatal mistake.  I'll then compost the predator in a hole right next to the laying hen. Preparing for the change in seasons takes planning and adapting.

The First Freeze of Winter

Well, Jack Frost visited us a little early this year.  The average first frost date for our zone is November 21 - 31.  We had temperatures dipping down to 30 degrees on November 15th and again to 30 degrees on the 18th and 19th.  It gave us an opportunity to get a roaring fire burning in the fireplace and we sat in the den and enjoyed the cozy evening.  When the fireplace is roaring, I like to go outside and just smell the oak wood burning.  Smells great!

I actually like the cold weather.  It is a nice respite from the hot, muggy days of summer.  Some vegetables in the garden don't like it, though.  I walked out to survey the damage.  Our yellow squash plant's broad leaves were burnt by the cold. Those leaves acted as a broad blanket as they sheltered the younger foliage underneath it, but once the next freezes come, this plant is toast!

Frostbite

There was a number of young yellow squash that we were hoping to eat once they matured; however, we'll have to eat them as "baby squash."

Baby Squash

The Contender Green Beans didn't like the cold weather either.  The leaves and blooms on this row took a beating and are all curled and withered.

Cool Beans

There were some green beans ready for picking so I quickly snapped them off the plant.  The plants won't make it, but the beans will certainly make it into the pot for supper.

Mmmmm!

The volunteer tomato plants that grew up from seed from tomatoes that fell to the ground during Spring and Summer shrugged their shoulders and surrendered to the frost.  Never fear, I planted parsley right next to them and the parsley will overtake the area that the tomato occupied.  I snipped off a handful of parsley and cut it up to top a delicious bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo last night. Parsley really adds a nice fragrance and taste to a warm bowl of gumbo.

Tomato is gone, but here comes the parsley

On another row of beans I noticed a stark contrast between the large green bean leaves that were burnt by the freeze against the kelly green tender smaller leaves of the same plant.  I won't pull them up.  Maybe they'll produce a few more beans.  If not, their roots are still setting nitrogen in the soil. If the beans won't feed me, at least they'll feed the soil. 

I did meander down the rows and picked produce that was in danger of being lost. That's the thing about gardening - you've got to stay on top of it.  If you wait one day too late, you risk losing some of the items you grew.  We love homegrown vegetables too much to allow them to waste.  So I brought the colander out and picked a few green beans and baby yellow squash.  We won't see this again until Spring 2015, so we're going to savor every bite.

Fresh Picked Goodness from the Garden

I also picked 8 packed cups of basil leaves off the plants and turned it into pesto.  I froze it in individual family-sized servings as we've found that thawing out a container of pesto and boiling some pasta makes for a quick (and delicious) meal.

Washing basil leaves in the vegetable sink

Finally, I picked all the green bell peppers, chocolate bell peppers, cayenne peppers, and jalapeno peppers off the plants as those plants will be gone after the freeze. Tricia has been making stuffed bell peppers with rice and ground meat inside topped with homemade salsa and the whole family has been enjoying those things.

A peck of picked peppers

I'll show you something else we did with the remaining peppers tomorrow.  Even though some of our plants can't make it through the cold weather, we can!  Stay warm friends!

Jack Frost Nipping at your Nose

We're in South Louisiana so our winters are decidedly mild.  Sometimes they are warm and balmy.  Snow is pretty rare and some years we don't even have a hard freeze. In fact, most of my pepper plants in the garden this year are two years old as the freeze didn't kill them last year.  They kept right on producing for two seasons. We're not accustomed to the cold, so when it gets a little chilly, I always think that people snowed in in the North must laugh at us having a hard time dealing with a little blast of cold air.

The other morning I was off work on vacation and we went out to milk the cows a little later than normal. (Yes, cows don't care when I'm on vacation!  They still need to be milked.)  I noticed that we had a pretty good frost on the ground from the night-time cooling.  The sun had already melted a lot of it, but you can see in the picture below that where the long morning shadows still occupied the ground, the frost was hanging on for dear life against the rays of the rising sun that had already turned the white ground back to greenish-brown.

I'm melting, I'm melting...

Here is a little frost on top of the chicken tractor.  Chickens do remarkably well in the cold.  They can withstand the cold better than the heat.  I guess their feathers provide great insulation.  I read on a website that a person in Ohio posted that at -20 degrees Fahrenheit, their chickens are out foraging and that they don't even provide a heat lamp until it is -15 below zero.

Milk cows are a somewhat different story.  They can withstand the cold and they can withstand being wet, but both conditions together cause problems.  It is best to have a wind break for them and a place to stay dry.  They also need plenty of hay and feed to replenish the calories they are burning in trying to stay warm and produce milk.

Frost on the chicken tractor roof

I love this picture.  It is a piece of wood that broke off of a homemade chicken feeding trough I made.  It had a screw sticking out of it and I didn't want the animals (or us) stepping on it, so I threw it on top of the chicken tractor.  The ice crystals from the frost made unique designs on top of it.  It's weird the way that works!

Here's some more ice crystals on a piece of tin on top of the tractor.  It is only December.  Normally January and February are pretty cold months for us. Thankfully we've got plenty of firewood cut and ready to burn.

I only need to remember the heat and humidity of July and August to make me appreciate the chilly days of our mild winter.  I'll take our cold weather over the hot any old day.

Jack Frost Nipping at your Nose

The morning following Thanksgiving was ushered in with roosters crowing and cows mooing.  Nothing out of the ordinary there - except for the fact that it was cold.  It got down to the lower 20's last night.  You can see that the pasture has a nice coating of frost that shimmers and sparkles in the morning sun.

Maggie Mae is cold and hungry for breakfast

Chickens are scratching

After looking at the effects of the frost on the pasture, I wanted to check out the garden.  The basil did not do so well with the frost.  The leaves are burnt.  I'm glad that we made lots of pesto that we froze and dried lots of basil and froze basil leaves as well.  I wanted to make some basil infused olive oil, but it looks like I missed that opportunity.

The frost did a number on our basil

Fortunately, the cole crops (brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, bok choy, and kale laugh at the frost.  It doesn't seem to bother them at all.

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They aren't close to being ripe yet, but they've shaded out the rows, which is nice as I don't have to weed any more.

The cole crops unfazed by the frost

One of the items in the garden I was quite concerned about was the lettuce.  We made a real nice salad mixture for Thanksgiving using the various varieties of lettuce we have growing right now.  I really like the way this one looks.  It is one of several varieties in a Rocky Mountain salad mix.  It is green with maroon freckles and tastes as good as it looks.

Beautiful lettuce

The second variety in the Rocky mountain mix is shown below.  It looks like your normal leaf lettuce except it looks like it is blushing with light maroon to pink shades on the outer tips of the leaves.

We have numerous rows of Black Seeded Simpson lettuce.  This is a tasty lettuce that is superb for salads, garnishing or simply snacking on right out of the garden.

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce

And finally I have a row of Oak Leaf Lettuce.

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Why is it called Oak Leaf Lettuce, you ask?  Well, look at the leaf below.  It looks very similar to a leaf off of an oak tree.

Oak Leaf Lettuce

I enjoy eating a nice salad and after we clean up some Thanksgiving Day leftovers for a few days, we'll have salad on our menu.  Thankfully the frost didn't damage it.