The Ides of March

The Ides of March or March 15th is a day with ominous undertones.  Things bad happen on this day.  Julius Caesar, for crying out loud, was assassinated on this day.  But on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, March 15th was just another day.  Nothing bad happened.  In fact, it was a productive day in the garden.  Let's take a look.

This little baker's rack is our greenhouse.  It works for us.  Two shower curtains are wrapped around it tightly and held by binder clips.  When it gets cold, we bring the whole thing inside.  On January 1st we plant a lot of seedlings (tomato, pepper and eggplant) and continue throughout the next couple of months (cucumbers, squash of many varieties, cantaloupe and watermelon).  We keep them watered and once they get their first true leaves, we begin using diluted fish emulsion to spray the leaves for foliar feeding and the soil.  Fish emulsion ferments in the water bottle, turns green, and stinks to high heaven.  Don't get it on you, but get it on your plants.  They love it.

These are about eight or nine varieties of heirloom indeterminate tomatoes and they are ready to be transplanted into the ground.  They are calling out for some more powerful fertilizer as they have a slight yellow tinge in their color.

Here is a tray of Boston pickling cukes, one of three varieties we plant.  We'll transplant these today beneath the trellis.

When I transplant the tomatoes into the garden soil, I use a garden knife to dig a pretty deep hole.  Then I grab a handful of composted chicken litter and toss it at the bottom.  I cover the bottom of the hole with composted wood chips that have turned into a rich topsoil.  The tomato is planted deep - buried up to the lowest leaves, then covered with the excess garden soil and watered in.  In just 3 days you can see the transformation that's taken place.  The yellow tinged leaves have been replaced by dark green healthy leaves.  The roots have reached the fertile soil and are ready to jump up out of the ground.

Believe it or not, after transplanting almost everything in the greenhouse, we also planted sunflower seeds, two rows of okra, two rows of sweet corn and two rows of snap beans.  The garden is about 80 percent planted.  We have warming weather on the horizon and we're optimistic that what's in the ground is healthy and will survive.

Happy Green Thumbs, friends!

It's Never Too Late (Or Early) To Save Seeds

It's in the low 30's now and cool weather always means, "It's Gumbo Season!"  We had a delicious seafood gumbo at Mom & Dad's house the other day that was loaded with shrimp and crab meat.  Tricia made a shrimp and okra gumbo just a few days later.  You can't get tired of gumbo.  While I was eating it, I remembered!  I hadn't saved any okra seed yet!

Well, it's not too late.  The okra in the garden generally lasts up until the first frost.  We usually plant Clemson Spineless as those are the perfect size for pickled okra.  I can finish off a whole jar in one sitting.  We also plant Beck's Big Okra and Burgundy Okra.  However, you get the biggest bang for your buck planting Louisiana Long Pod Okra.  The okra stays edible up until it reaches about 10 inches long.  Clemson spineless would be "woody" and inedible long before that.  I had a long pod of okra that was drying on the plant so that I could save the seeds.  Before it shattered and I lost the seed, I went out and got it.

This is a non-hybrid old heirloom variety that has been passed down for a long, long time.   You can save the seeds and store them and keep passing them down.

From just one pod, would you look at all the seeds I was able to save.  They are plump and dry and in good condition.  I'm sure this spring, I'll soak these, plant them and get good germination.

Just for grins I decided I would count the seeds as I put them in the supplement container that I store seeds in.  I re-labeled the container and put the number of seeds.  119 seeds from that one pod!  That's a lot of okra plants.  I think I'll only plant 25 or so this spring.  The rest I'll save for future planting.

We generally freeze quart bags of cut up, cooked okra for making gumbos in the winter, AKA "Gumbo Season."  I hope we have enough to get us through...

God Saw That it Was Good

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.  And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 

Genesis 1:11-12

In our Sunday School class, we're going through the Book of Genesis.  It is such an interesting study.  Eleven verses into the book, God caused the earth to sprout vegetation.  Remarkable!  In addition to creating plants and making them grow, He created a system in which plants would create its seed so that it would produce more of the same type of vegetation year after year.  He later enlisted the birds of the sky to help spread the seed and honeybees to pollinate.  So intricate.  The interdependencies and synergy.  I often wonder what the Garden of Eden looked like.  Prior to the introduction of sin and the curse that fell on the land, it must have been a sight to behold.

Thousands of years have passed, but if you're in the garden, you can still catch glimpses of God and His ordered plan.  I want to show you an example today.  This morning it was early.  The sun was not positioned high enough in the sky yet to begin to shine at an angle to touch the garden with direct light.  I was out on one of the garden rows looking at the broccoli and the tiny pearls of dew that covered the leaves.  At intervals, a breeze would blow pushing one dewdrop into a few others and the resulting weight of the dewdrop would roll down the leaf and onto the ground beneath the broccoli.  In a few short hours, the dew would all be burned off.

This row of broccoli has already been harvested one time.  By that, I mean that the big head of broccoli has been picked quite a while ago.  What you see below are the little florets of broccoli that come out all over the plant.

These florets must be picked every other day, especially as it warms up.  They grow so quickly!  What you are witnessing is God's plan enacted in Genesis 1:11 where he directed vegetation to make seed after its kind.  The broccoli, since the main head has been harvested, is working overtime to ensure that seed is dispersed to give the next generation of broccoli a chance to grow.

Those little florets will turn very quickly into a gazillion yellow flowers.  The honeybees will visit the flowers and do their thing.  Those flowers will eventually produce seeds in little pods.  Once the pods are dried, you can winnow them and save the seeds for next year, since these are non-hybrid seeds.  They produce SO many little black seeds.  I have lots of broccoli seeds saved and some purchased in envelopes, so we'll not save any this year.

Instead, we'll continue to pick florets every other day.  We eat a bunch fresh, but with these in this basket, we blanched them, quickly chilled them and put them in ziploc bags in the freezer.  This basket made two quart-sized bags full of blanched broccoli.  We'll enjoy that later.

If you look at about the "3 o'clock position" in the basket below, you can see a floret or two with flowers JUST ABOUT to open.  These were picked at the last possible moment!

God's handiwork in action in the garden.  Just like in that first garden so many years ago.  As I was thinking about propagation in the plant family, I was thinking about God's directive to Man to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it..."  I read that in 2021 the average woman in the U.S. gave birth for the first time at 27.3 years of age.  The average family in the U.S. has 1.94 kids.  As a society, we aren't exactly being fruitful and multiplying anymore.  We had 3 kids and Tricia and I often think about it wish that we would have had more children.  Obviously we are happy with the kids God blessed us with.

Behold, children are a gift of the LORD; The fruit of the womb is a reward.  Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one's youth.  Psalm 127: 3-4

 When God looked at His creation, God saw that it was good.  In Genesis 1:31 He saw all that He had made and behold, it was VERY good.

Are You Thinking About the Spring Garden Yet?

In South Louisiana we really don't have a fantastic show of fall colors.  The Chinese Tallow trees, Bradford pears and, like the photo below shows, the Japanese Maple.  We planted several of these in our landscaping many years ago.  Their leaves are gorgeous to look at this time of year, especially when the sunshine filters through their leaves, highlighting the yellow, brown and red colors.

We don't really get a real taste of all four seasons down here.  In fact, today it was 72 degrees!  I was in a short-sleeved shirt splitting firewood with an ax and completely wet my shirt with sweat.  But we've got to prepare.  Cold weather is on the way next week with temperatures as low as 17 degrees on Tuesday.  I want to make sure we have plenty of wood to burn in the fireplace.  I've got more to cut and split, but I think we'll be covered for this year at least.

But we're already thinking ahead for the spring.  On January 1st, as is our custom, we planted our tomato, pepper, and eggplant seeds.  We planted many different varieties.  Most seeds were seeds that we purchased, although some were seeds we saved.  My wife made a homemade greenhouse with a baker's rack fitted with a shower curtain fastened down with binder clips.  The little greenhouse, put in the sun, keeps the soil temperatures up and the soil moist to promote germination.  Of course, when the temperatures will be lower than 55, we bring the rack indoors.

Peek in the little greenhouse with me.  You can see the first tomato seedlings sprout.  The first variety to sprout this year was Cherokee Purple.

Ya'll have a great weekend!

Time to Start Thinking about Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save it for a Rainy Day

Do you remember a few short years ago when toilet paper was in short supply because everyone was hoarding it due to a respiratory virus?  Then there was a chip shortage and people couldn't buy or repair their cars.  I work for an insurance company and body shops are still having difficulty finding some parts.  Broken vehicles sit unrepaired and status shows "NO ETA."  My wife was in the grocery store last week and they were having a brown-out due to limited electricity.

As I think about these things, if toilet paper is in short supply, there are other (albeit uncomfortable) alternatives.  If we can't get computer chips or car parts, well, there are worse things.  With lack of power, yes, things get uncomfortable.  But what happens if the grocery store shelves are empty?  With the "just-in-time" inventory method in place, stores don't have a big inventory sitting in the back room.  What would you do?  Have you thought about it?

I have.  You might say, "We'll plant a big garden!"  Stellar idea.  But what happens if you can't get seeds!  THIS ARTICLE tells us that during the pandemic, the Michigan governor banned seed sales.  What if there was a run on seeds and there was none to buy?  "Don't eat your seed corn" is a valuable life principle.  Every seed that you have can either be eaten OR saved to plant for next year's crop.  Make sure you always save seed for next year.  

We do that.  First, you must ensure that you are buying non-hybrid seed.  We buy our seeds from www.rareseeds.com and save seeds from our crops every year.  It's just a wise thing to do.  We've just completed saving a few items.  Here are some blackeyed peas:

These are some black turtle beans:

These are some Ozark Razorback peas (I see I have some blackeyed peas that jumped into this bowl):

These are my new favorites - Blackeyed Butterbeans:

Here are some purple hull peas:

And finally, some purple teepee beans:

Here they are.  I'll store these away and date them.  I did an experiment and planted some Ozark Razorback peas that were 11 years old.  The germination was down, but I anticipated this and planted them super close.  They grew and produced!

It's always good to be prepared and save seeds in the event you can't get them.  You can save some money by doing this, too!  Then, if you have too many, you can always eat the remainder that you don't need for next year's seeds.  The fun thing about it is that you can always trade your seeds for other people's seeds that you don't have.  I like to try new things in the garden.  Time to check your seed inventory for the fall crop.  Save those seeds!  

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.

Beginnings and Endings in the Garden

The new year brings with it new things to do in the garden.  A tradition I have is to get my tomato, pepper, and eggplant seeds started on January 1st each year.  I like to grow a lot of different varieties.  My favorite is probably Black Krim.  In past years I would plant a six pack for each variety with two seeds per seed pot.  If all germinate, which most of them do, that means you have 12 plants.  That's really too much for the space I have allocated for tomatoes, so we ended up giving a lot of plants away.  This year I decided to plant just one seed per pot.

Varieties this year include: Big Rainbow, Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Mortgage Lifter, Black Krim, Roma, Creole, Chadwick Cherry and Tomatillo.

In past years, I would purchase a special seed starting mix.  If you look on the ingredient list, it contains items like: sphagnum peat moss, vermiculite, coconut coir, perlite, and rice hulls.  Nothing wrong with any of that, but I would rather not pay money for something we can produce on our own - and we can.

I theorized that our wood chips that have composted in the back of the garden for three years could work.  It looks like rich, dark, moist topsoil.  I fill each seed pot 3/4 of the way full.  There are some lumps and even some small chips that haven't composted down yet.  For the top 1/4 of the seed pot, I take the same wood chip compost and scrape it through hardware cloth (think wire like on the bottom of a rabbit hutch).  This screens out the bigger chunks and makes the compost that falls through the screen have a fluffy, light, fine texture - perfect for starting seeds in.

I also planted the peppers and eggplant.  I'm planting Black Beauty Eggplant and the pepper varieties I'm planting include: Sweet Banana, Anaheim, Craig's Grande Jalapeno, Hot Jalapeno, Chocolate Bell, Emerald Giant Green Bell, Lilac Bell, Horizon Bell, and Criollo Sella.  

All of those germinate a little slower than the tomatoes.  In fact, most of the tomatoes are up.

That's the Beginnings of the garden that starts on January 1.  We also have some things ending.  The broccoli has been producing, but they aren't near done.  A cauliflower produces on head and then it's done.  A broccoli says, "Not so fast, my friend."  After the big head has been picked on a broccoli, the plant produces many florets.  So many that you must pick them just about every day.

If you aren't dutiful in picking, some of the florets quickly go to flowering, which is bad for us, but good for the honeybees.  You can see a honeybee checking out the beautiful yellow flowers of a broccoli that has gone to flower.

Each day (that I remember) I bring a colander out to the 3 rows of broccoli and do some picking.  In no time at all I have pretty good mess of broccoli florets picked.  Yeah, a few flowers, too.  I'm not particular, I'll eat the flowers.  We generally pour this on a stoneware tray, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper and sprinkle minced garlic on top and then stir up.  We roast that in the oven and devour it.  We call it broccoli candy.

I don't know how to quantify it, but I would guess we harvest MORE pounds of broccoli florets like this than we do in the bigger heads of broccoli.  It's like a 'second crop' of broccoli.

The Beginnings of the Fall Garden

We had planted butternut squash and tomatoes and cucumbers from seed and transplanted the young seedlings into the garden.  With promptness, worms ate up the cucumbers.  We've since replanted the cukes and transplanted the seedlings into the garden under the trellis.  The butternut squash are mostly doing fine in the side yard garden.  We lost the spaghetti squash to the heat and dry conditions.  So it goes.  You win some and you lose some.

The very first seeds were direct seeded into the garden last week.  We have a two rows of broccoli and one row of cauliflower and two rows of cabbage.  They are all up and about an inch tall, about to put on their first true leaves.  Here's the beginning of that process.  I didn't get the finished photos.  You can see one of the roosters standing guard.

The tomatoes have been planted in the garden and the experiment with fall Irish potatoes grown in landscape tubs.  We'll see how that goes.  In the next week or two I'll plan on planting the following:

Beets                    Lettuce                Mustard greens        Turnips        Radishes
Kohlrabi               Swiss Chard        Sugar Snap Peas      Spinach       Carrots

My problem is that I am running out of space in the garden as some of my summer crop is still producing.  Crops like okra and Southern Peas take up a lot of space in the garden.  Other crops like sweet potatoes won't be ready to harvest until a couple more weeks.  Once that happens, it'll free up a lot of room for those items I need to plant.  

One thing I'm trying new this year is proper plant spacing.  I always have a hard time pruning back plants to proper spacing between plants.  The reason is that I hate to pinch off and kill a perfectly good plant.  But if you don't they crowd each other out and compete for nutrients and you don't get quality produce.  This year I vow to do something different.  As the plants grow, I'll dig up those plants that are too close to one another and plant them in the side yard garden where the Blackeyes and Ozark Razorback peas are finishing up.  It will be a win-win situation.  

As I look at the barn and the hen house to the south of it, I also plan to use more of our natural fertilizer this year that I've harvested from beneath the roosting bars in the henhouse.  I went in there with a big tub and shovel, scraped off the top layer of chicken litter and got down to the older, composted stuff.  I shoveled a big tub full of it and moved it into the garden.  I've been slowly amending the soil with it and have noticed greener leaves on the snap beans.  They are full of blooms right now.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous right now.  Perfect time for gardening!

Putting Some Stuff in the Ground in August

We march forward toward September and the gradual reduction in temperature and humidity that will be welcomed with rejoicing by yours truly.  The okra continues to produce in abundant fashion.  As I write this, Tricia is 'cooking some okra and onions down' that she'll freeze and we'll use in gumbos throughout the winter months.  Cucumbers, believe it or not, have had a rebound and are producing once again.  

Speaking of cucumbers, I've got to tip my hat to an elderly gentleman who dropped by the house this spring and gave me some cucumber seeds.  They were of the Marketmore Heirloom variety, and I've got to report that they were the stars of the show, producing steadily throughout the hottest of months when my Boston Pickling and Suyo Long varieties faltered.

Anyhow, I planted a few seeds in some seed pots to get the fall garden underway.  Here are some zucchini and yellow crookneck squash:

And here are some spaghetti squash.

In a little experiment, I planted 12 Boston Pickling Cucumber seeds from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  What do you know?  All 12 sprouted.  We achieved a 100% germination rate on some seeds we saved 6 years ago.  Not too shabby.

Having that all planted, I got out my Vegetable Planting Guide to see what else I could get my hands dirty with.  Well, it told me that it is time to plant Irish Potatoes.  Right now.

Our feed store does not sell seed potatoes for fall crops.  What we must do is save seed potatoes from our spring crop.  I dug through the bin of potatoes and picked out a dozen small red potatoes (Lasoda variety).  All of the potatoes from the spring are holding up good, stored in the dark in a well-ventilated hallway.

You can see that most of them have (at least one) nice eye growing on them.  That gives me optimism that we'll have spuds this fall.  It is always a risk, right?  The choice is, I could eat these 12 potatoes and really enjoy them.  Or, I could put them in the dirt and see if I could multiply a dozen potatoes four or fivefold?

I'm taking a chance.  I won't put them in the cooking pot.  I'll put them in the planting pot.  I'm trying an experiment this year.  Instead of putting them in the ground, we will try our hand at growing them in pots.  The area where I normally plant them is already populated with purple hull peas and blackeyed peas that are about to put on pods.  No room for potatoes out there.

I filled 12 nice sized landscape pots with the rich compost made from the rotted wood chips in our mulch pile.  It's black and moist and teeming with earthworms - a good medium to grow potatoes in.  Once the potatoes are up, I'll dose 'em up with some composted chicken litter.  Another plus is that, if we get an early freeze like the one that killed my potatoes a couple years ago, I can pick up the pots and bring them in the garage and save the spuds. 

Here are the potatoes planted before I put 3 1/2 to 4 inches fresh compost on top.  I'll be watching over the next several days to see when they sprout.

We have rain for the next 5 or 6 days forecast, but once that is past, I'll look to what else I can put in the ground.  I'm thinking it's time for a couple rows of snap beans.  Happy Gardening Fall Gardeners!

Saving Seeds

I'll start off the post today by showing you some flowers in the garden.  The seeds we'll be talking about are dull and drab.  Let's look at some color first.  This flower below reminds me of Chanterelle mushrooms - exactly the same color.  However, this plant has nothing to do with a mushroom.  These are the blooms of peanut plants.  Pretty soon we'll harvest them and make some homemade peanut butter.

The pretty flower below is a mystery to me.  It is on some variety of cow pea, but the plant came up volunteer from last year's crop.  It is either a blackeyed pea or a whippoorwill pea.  The mystery will be solved shortly when it sets its pods.  Then we'll know.  Until then, we'll enjoy its colorful flowers.

This flower below, can you guess what it is?  A clue is peeking out behind it.  It is a bloom on an okra plant (Clemson Spineless, to be precise).  Can you tell that okra is in the hibiscus family?  The flowers highly resemble a hibiscus blossom.

That's all on flowers for now.  Let's move to seeds.  It is important to save seeds.  It is a good insurance policy in the event you can't get seeds next year or the variety that you prefer.  Below is a beautiful butternut squash we harvested.  

We scooped out the guts and the seeds and set them aside.

We separated the guts out and put the butternut squash seeds on the windowsill to dry.  It is important to save seeds from the healthiest of fruit.  Hopefully these seeds will produce a nice squash like their parent next year.

I was also saving some Whippoorwill peas.  We just set them on the windowsill for a week or two and let them fully dry out.

Once they are fully dried out, it is time to package them up.  I get a dark-colored bottle and label it with the variety and the date they were saved.

Same thing with these...

I store the bottles of saved seed in a jar in a dry shelf drawer in the utility room.  It's nothing fancy, but the process works.  I'll show you later this week perhaps, I planted some Boston Pickling Cucumbers from some seeds I had saved back in 2016.  We achieved a 100% germination rate.  Fantastic!  Saving seeds is rewarding and will save you money over the years and keep your heirloom and favorite varieties being passed down.