The Garden in Early Spring

Here in South Louisiana spring doesn't last for too long.  We get out and enjoy it, because before long, it will be 80 degrees by 8 AM, and I'm not exaggerating.  Right now the weather is perfect, absolutely gorgeous.  If I had one complaint it's that it is a little dry.  I hardly ever water the garden, but that's what I've been doing when I can is keeping the soil moist so that the crops will germinate and continue growing.  

I don't have a fancy irrigation system.  I use the old thumb over the end of the water hose trick, and it allows me to get a number of different sprays depending on how I depress my thumb.  This is some modern, high-tech stuff right here.  Of the three rows under irrigation you see here, (right to left) is Italian Roma Snap Beans, Contender Green Beans, and Henderson's Bush Lima Beans.

Just 10 feet north you can see that the cilantro has bolted and is flowering to "beat the band."  That is an idiom that my maternal grandmother used to say.  It means "to the greatest possible degree."  It probably developed by someone commenting that they were making so much noise, they drowned out the band.  I don't hear many people saying that anymore.

It is past time to pull these up and plant something else on the real estate they're occupying.  I don't do that for two reasons.  First, they attract a multitude of pollinators.  That's a good thing.

Secondly, the cilantro plants will soon make seeds (called coriander) which will fall and next winter, I'll have a gazillion cilantro plants popping up in this place.  It saves me from having to plant cilantro.

Now, here are our four rows of onions.  They are really looking good and are starting to bulb.  I pulled back the soil around them, and give them a good spraying of water every afternoon to encourage good, strong bulbing.

One of the really healthy plants still hanging on from the fall crop is the Rainbow Chard.  We had some chard cooked down and served over cornbread tonight.  It is essentially a beet that doesn't bulb.  You eat the greens.  Delicious.  Not only to they taste great, but the color they add to the garden - and you plate, is simply beautiful.  See why they call them rainbow chard?

Here is yet another fall crop staple that is hanging on and producing with reckless abandon - Dinosaur Kale.  It goes by several different names like lacinato kale, nero di toscana kale, or black kale.  Whatever you call it, it produces well and tastes good.

It's dark green/bluish leaves are strange in texture.  We eat them in soups, greens and in stir fried rice.

I've some more to show you, but we'll wait until later!  Have a great day

I Walked Through the Garden Alone

 I walked through the garden alone,

    While the dew is still on the roses broccoli.

It's a beautiful old hymn that I took the liberty of changing to match what I actually saw.  I don't have roses in our garden, although Tricia has some pretty ones by the back patio.  On the weekends, I walk out to the hen house to open the nesting boxes.  I like to do that early otherwise the hens will lay their eggs in the strangest of places.  My walk to the hen house leads me through the garden.  The sun is still rising over the horizon and the scenery in the garden is always nice.  

Here's a quick tour:  (Dewdrops bedazzling a big, healthy broccoli leaf)

Turnips!  I planted them overly thick.  We eat the turnip greens and slice the turnip roots to give to the cows.  They love them.

French Breakfast Radishes in the foreground with brussels sprouts and garlic chives further back.  We have a great Radish Dip recipe that we always have around in a bowl this time of year.

Berlicum carrots marking the rows.  These were the slowest growing this year, but they've willed themselves to sprout up through the mulch and are in a growth spurt now.  As you can tell, the oxalis is also coming up in the carrot row despite the thick mulch.  We'll have to weed those out.

The lettuce patch.  We have several varieties growing, including Black-Seeded Simpson, Oak Leaf, Lollo Rossa, Rocky Top Mix, and Red Romaine.  We're pinching off the fresh new growth for salads every night.

 

Galilee Spinach.  This variety comes from Israel.  We like to make homemade Cream of Spinach Soup with this on cold, gloomy, drizzly nights.  It'll put the warmth back in your bones.

Bull's Blood Beets between two more rows of carrots.  As both the beets and carrots grow, the variation in color will light up this section of the garden.  I made it a point this year to widen the paths between the rows.  The mulch really helps to keep down weed growth in the walkways.  (More on this later)

Sugar Snap Peas.  The first pods are ready for picking with blooms starting to fill the trellis.

Starting right to left, we have Dinosaur Kale, three varieties of cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. I should have allowed more space for a walkway between crops, ha ha!  They've shaded out between the rows, so we don't have to worry about weeds, but it will be a challenge to harvest!  They are very healthy!  Can't wait for harvest time!  

A Quick Look At the Garden

Most of my first planting of the fall garden was wiped out in Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Delta, but as the old saying goes, "If at first (or second) you don't succeed, try, try again."  So we replanted.  The cooler temperatures and decrease in insect pressure have helped the garden catch up.  Let's walk through and take a quick look.  

First the Contender Green Beans.  They are very healthy with lots of green growth.  These weren't fertilized at all.  However, they are growing right on top of a previous crop of legumes that fix nitrogen in the soil.  This photo doesn't really show, but just beneath the leaf canopy are a whole bunch of blooms.  We may have fresh green beans for Thanksgiving after all.  

This bed is planted thickly with turnips.  I'm not a big turnip fan, but our cows are.  We'll feed most of the turnip roots to the cows this winter and we will eat the turnip greens.

These are English Breakfast Radishes.  I've just pulled the mulch closely around them to discourage weed growth.  That same mulch will eventually decompose and turn in to rich garden soil.

Carrots always start slow, but once they get a foothold, they really take off.  Eventually, I'll pull the mulch around them to crowd out weed growth.  The oxalis is already threatening.

This is our lettuce bed.  We have a number of different varieties of leaf lettuce.  We like to harvest a mixture of lettuce leaves for a nice tossed salad.  The various colors of the different types of lettuce paint a nice portrait in the garden.

Here is a row of Detroit Beets.  I also have two rows of Bull's Blood beets.  I figure in another week, I'll pull the mulch closely around them as well.  In the meantime, we walk the rows and weed, but that will end once the mulch is pulled around them.

Always one of the first items we're harvesting is kale.  This is a fast growing plant that produces new leaves in record time.  It will produce for months - right up until it gets warm in the spring.

We also have Rainbow Swiss Chard at various stages of development.  The veins of the rainbow chard light up the garden with vivid color.

Here is another type of kale - Dinosaur kale or lacinato kale is a relatively new variety for us.  

Here is a big patch of cilantro that has come up on its own volunteer after seeding from the crop last spring.  We allowed it to go to seed and the plant reproduced itself many times over this year.  The cool weather will keep it from bolting and we will enjoy it with scrambled eggs for many breakfasts to come.

The Sugar Snap peas are beginning to trellis up the cattle panels I have for them to climb on.  They are planted thickly and will soon completely cover the trellis, producing crisp, sweet pods for snacking on.

I'll show you some of the rest of the garden in Part II of the premature garden tour coming up early next week.

It Almost Felt Like Fall...

Saturday morning was an absolutely gorgeous day.  It was my first Saturday off in over a month and boy, was I ready!  Tricia and I boiled some water and made a great cup of coffee in the french press and planned our day.  I had a number of things competing for top priority, but we decided to get out in the garden first thing out of the gate.

We had a little planting to do.  The Russian Red Kale I had planted from saved seed did not germinate.  I tossed the seed and Tricia picked up a package of Siberian Kale at our local feed store.  Siberia reminds me of two things - cold weather and gulags.  We had neither of those things at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm on Saturday.  The weather was very pleasant with a hint of coolness in the air that we hadn't experienced in many long months.

About a week ago, I cut back some vines from the sweet potato plants to give me enough room to plant a couple rows.  When we harvest the sweet potatoes in a week or two, I'll have about a 15 foot by 15 foot square within which to plant carrots, lettuce, and mustard greens.  But I can get so busy thinking about all I want to do that I distracted from doing the task at hand.

For now, let's plant some kale.  Kale seeds look exactly like broccoli, cauliflower, mustard, turnip and cabbage seeds.  That's because they are all cole crops.  I stretched out a string and used a rock rake to move back the wood chips that cover the soil.  The newly exposed earth was moist and dark with plenty of organic matter in it from composted leaves, hay, and decomposing wood chips.  I used my hoe to work up the soil to receive the seeds.

Earthworms squirmed in the turned earth.  I grabbed a handful of the soil and held it in my hands.  It has a certain scent to it that is appealing.  It has just the right amount of moisture in it which will be perfect for germination.

I worked in some composted chicken litter from the hen house.  Then, I made two slight trenches side by side and sprinkled the seeds in each.  Tricia worked to cover the seeds in the seed bed.

And just like that, we were done.  The sweet potato vine jungle will be home to the carrot, lettuce and mustard green rows in a week or two.

In 5 to 8 days, little kale sprouts will burst from the dark brown soil.  Planting the fall crops is always fun.  It is exciting also to know that fall is on its way.  On Tuesdays we'll have lows in the 50's and highs in the 80's!  How nice!

A Quick Garden Stroll

Yesterday we looked at the three rows of carrots in the garden and talked about the surprise of finding some tomatoes growing up from seed in 'volunteer' fashion and transplanting them.  Today we'll peek in at the other items in the garden.

First off, I must tell you that the fall garden this year is very disappointing.  The very wet months of August, September, and October meant that things that I planted succumbed, and any of the things that I did manage to plant was planted two months late.  Better late than never, I suppose.  After that gloomy introduction, let's look at something bright and cheery.  Some of our Lemon Girl sunflowers sprouted up from seed that had fallen from some of the flowers from this summer.  Their blooms confirmed the resiliency of nature and at the same time was humbling.  How is it that you work so hard to plant things... and fail due to weather, and yet, some things just come up on their own and thrive?  I stopped to admire the flowers just opening and saw that a honeybee had arrived to enjoy the sunflower along with me.

This row of Russian Red Kale is coated with a thick coating of morning dew.  Kale, the ubiquitous hipster vegetable, gained such notoriety in the last several years.  We like it and grow it each year, but I must admit, for greens, I like Swiss Chard, mustard, and bok choy a little better.

This year has been a bad year for Romaine Lettuce.  Romaine grown in mostly Yuma, Arizona, was linked to an outbreak of E. Coli that sickened many people and caused a recall of romaine from supermarkets across the country.  We'll be enjoying some homegrown Red Romaine lettuce soon, hopefully without e. coli!

Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce is always a favorite in the garden because it grows great, big, leafy heads and is beautifully green colored and tasty. 

The young lettuce patch is planted for aesthetics as well as taste.  I like to alternate the reds and greens.  Tricia did warn me that we needed to pick the lettuce earlier this year as we find that lettuce that we allow to get too big is bitter to the taste.

At this point, the cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage all pretty much looks the same.  We've been fortunate so far to not have much damage at all from pests.  We'll keep our eyes open, though, as caterpillars love feasting on their leaves almost as much as we do.

We'll begin harvesting some items from the fall garden soon.  I was reminded by a seed catalog coming in the mail on Saturday that it isn't too early to begin thinking about the spring garden.  Why, I'll be planting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant from seed in about three weeks.

Checking in on the Fall Garden

Gardening can be a risky enterprise sometimes.  In our side yard, something has been clipping my sugar snap peas and they haven't been able to grow very much.  As soon as they get any new growth, something nibbles it down to the ground.  Rabbits?  Rats?  I figured I would set one of my cage traps that I've had success eradicating all the possums in the neighborhood to catch the culprit.

Yeah...  No.  Cage traps are indiscriminate.  This cat is NOT the culprit, but boy was he mad.  I think it is the neighbor's cat.  With much hissing and discontent by the trapped feline, I was fortunately able to let him out of the trap without him scratching me to ribbons.  I hope my neighbor doesn't notice the cat's scratched up head that he got trying to escape from the cage.  Anyway, we have sugar snap peas trying to grow.

Here is my spinach.  It is young, but I have a 30 foot row of it and it appears to have all germinated.  Spinach is one of those things that is fantastic eaten fresh.  It doesn't even compare to the canned Popeye spinach.

I have two rows of carrots popping up.  There are three varieties planted: Danvers Orange, Cosmic Purple, and Atomic Red.  Our carrots always flat-out produce.  We still have bags of blanched carrots in the freezer from last year's crop.

Several varieties of lettuce are planted.  Here is a red romaine.

Here is a black seeded Simpson:

I like the fall garden because you can pretty much count on less bug pressure.  That isn't always the case.  Worms are eating my chioggia beets, bull's blood beets, and swiss chard like nobody's business!

Not to worry, though.  After we get a cool snap, the beets will put on new leaves and they'll be okay.  We need cool weather.  The bok choy is bolting.  They are wanting to flower and go to seed.  We find this makes the leaves bitter.  Cool weather would slow this down.  It appears to be cooling now, so maybe that will save the bok choy crop.  Otherwise, we'll feed all this to the milk cows.

Finally, we have some red Russian kale.  We only planted a third of a row this year as it is always so prolific.  We find that even though we eat it several times a week, we cannot possibly eat it all.  We give some away and we end up feeding a bunch to the cows.

Next week, perhaps we'll take a look at the tomatoes, okra, radishes, and cole crops. 

A Quick Look at the Fall Garden

The other day my new job in Lafayette took me a little south and west from the office and I found myself driving down roads that I haven't driven down in years and years.  On an old country road between Loreauville and New Iberia, Farmers were in the middle of sugar cane harvest and as I looked at the cane, it dwarfed the tractors and 18 wheeler tractor trailers loaded with the chopped sugar cane.  I had never seen sugar cane that tall before.  While sugar cane is grown right down the road from where we live, it is not nearly this tall.  My first thought was that perhaps this was a different variety of sugar cane.

But then I looked at the soil.  It was rich and black as onyx.  There's the answer.  It is the rich soil that makes the cane grow like Jack's beanstalk.  The soil is everything.  Unfortunately, the soil 50-something miles west where I live isn't near that good.  Not even close.  We work every year, though, to amend our soil with manure, compost, organic matter, lime and other amendments to improve it, but this takes work, time, and great patience.  Truth be told, I'd like to import some of that black soil to Jeff Davis Parish.

But despite the soil deficiencies and the weather struggles we've had this year, we're still growing fresh vegetables.  Let's take a look.  Here is some healthy looking (and healthy for you to eat) Russian Red Kale.

I love to see the dew-kissed leaves.  While the leaves are still small - about five inches long and four inches wide, it won't be too much longer before it's time to pinch a nice little bunch of these to cook down for supper.

Here is a 24 foot row of Bok Choy or Chinese Cabbage planted from seed I saved from four years ago.  The germination of this saved seed was off the charts.  They are planted really thick as insurance against poor germination, but now I know I didn't need to do this.

I'll thin them out by plucking out a 'mess' of the baby bok choy to braise as a healthy, tasty side dish for supper.  The young, tender leaves are tasty.    

If there is such thing as growing candy in the garden, this is as close as it gets. Here is a portion of a 24 foot row of Sugar Snap Peas.  The young peas are reaching skyward with their tendrils about to grab hold of the trellis.

When these sugar snap peas bloom and put on pods, many of them never make it in to the kitchen to be stir fried - they get eaten right out here in the garden.

These are late this year due to the unusually wet August that delayed planting, but our carrots are just popping up.

And here is some baby spinach.  I planted more spinach a couple weeks later than these were planted to have a staggered harvest.  Raw spinach is good.  So is creamed spinach.  That might be good on the Thanksgiving menu.

One row over is the cabbage, then cauliflower, and then broccoli.

There's other items coming and I've yet to plant my mustard and turnips, but it is a good start considering the delay.  I'll show the fall tomatoes a little later.  It is really going to to be a race to see if we get any tomatoes before the first frost.  They have their first blooms now.  Who knows?  It is November and in the 80's still.  It is an abnormal year for sure.  That's what makes gardening the adventure that it is!