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  The yellow tinged leaves have been replaced by dark green healthy leaves.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!

Transplanting Tomatoes Into The Garden

Here it is March 24th already.  This weekend was jam-packed with things that needed to get done.  As The Steve Miller Band sang, "Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future..."  Since the first week of January, I've been nurturing some tomato starts that I planted from seed when 2019 was brand, spanking new. 

The tomato seedlings are tall, leggy, and in need of some fertilizer.  You can tell because they have a yellowish tint to them.  Once I get them into the rich garden soil, they'll be fine.  I'll also hit them with a dose of fish emulsion in a foliar application.  They'll be happier than a pig in mud.  I separated them into different groupings of varieties.  I always plant more than I need as "insurance" in the event the germination isn't good or I have an early crop failure.  I'll have plenty for us as well as to give some away.

As I explained in a post in early January, we planted eleven varieties of tomatoes, including: Creole, Roma, Pink Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Amish Paste, Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Black Vernissage, Thessaloniki, Big Rainbow, and a variety I call "Mrs. Linda" tomatoes.  Additionally, I have 6 tomatoes that I rescued from the garden in the fall and brought them through the winter.  They are very tall and, believe it or not, one of them already has a bloom on it!:

So let's take a look at where I am planting.  I experimented with "metal mulch" this year.  It's just tin left over from a barn expansion project that I laid out on top of the garden soil in the winter.  For the most part it blocked out 98% of all the winter grass.  Furthermore, the soil underneath was rich, moist, easy to work.  It was teeming with earthworms, too!

In contrast, just a few feet south in the garden, here's what the soil would have looked like had I not laid tin out.  I'll have to work harder to get this area worked up to plant corn and beans!:

  
Using a no till technique, I used a post hole digger to dig holes about eight inches deep.  I plant the tomatoes in the hole, adding a tablespoon of organic tomato food before filling with composted leaves and garden soil.  Later this week, once I have all the tomatoes planted, I'll lay out hay (with a little goat poop and cow poop mixed in) between all tomato plants.  This will serve as a mat to crowd out any weed growth and maintain soil hydration.  A thick mat of hay mulch really aids in keeping the soil moist and cool in the hot summer months that are coming.

After working Sunday afternoon from 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm, I got three rows of tomatoes planted.  I planted them 18 inches apart on the row with rows separated by a 34" walkway.  I estimate I am about halfway done with tomato planting.  I should finish hopefully Tuesday afternoon if the Good Lord's willing.  Here is a shot looking east.  You can see the post hole digger and bag of organic fertilizer.

Here is a shot looking west.  As I pick up rows of metal mulch, I simply move them to the south.  When I am ready to plant my next crops, like peppers, corn, beans, squash, okra, etc., perhaps some of the winter grass will be dead or dying underneath the tin.

Hopefully traffic will ease up tomorrow and allow me to get home at a reasonable time so that I can get our tomato seedlings transplanted.

I Need To Get Busy This Weekend

Our Spring crop of tomatoes and peppers that I planted in early January are still under the grow lights in the utility room.  This weekend I will have to stop putting off transplanting them into larger containers.  As you can see, they are growing tall and are touching the fluorescent bulbs. 

There are two seedlings in each container that will have to be separated and placed in their own pot.  It is going to be a little tricky to separate them as their roots have grown together.  I usually use a plastic fork to help untangle as much as I can.  Some roots will be broken, but the plant will be okay as long as most of the roots are fine. 

The other thing I need to do is to begin watering them with a diluted solution of fish emulsion to give them some "get up and go."  Some of the tomato leaves are turning an unhealthy color and that means that they need some nutrients.  Fish emulsion, which is simply ground up fish that is dried and pulverized into a powder is just the ticket.  It doesn't smell good, but once that fish powder is mixed with water and poured on the young plants, they really like it!  They turn a healthy green and by the time they are ready to go into the garden, they are strong and vigorous.

I have a number of different tomato and pepper heirloom varieties planted.  Peppers take longer to germinate, so they are smaller than the tomatoes, but I'll put them in individual pots so they don't get root bound.

We still have several weeks (maybe a month) until we reach our average last frost date, so we still have a ways to go before the plants will be transplanted into the garden.  They'll need to be hardened off on the back patio to acclimate them to the cold and wind.  But, I'm wondering if we'll ever dry up enough to plant this spring.  Tricia remarked as she slogged through the mud out to the barn that it is the wettest, nastiest, muddiest that it has ever been.  Hopefully, we can keep these guys growing indoors healthy until the weather gets right outside.

These are farther along than they were last year.  However, my eggplant seed did not germinate, so we'll be buying eggplant from the nursery this year versus growing them from seed.  It is supposed to rain for the next several days, but I can get gardening done on the back patio where the rain won't bother me or the plants.  This weekend will be a busy weekend transplanting a bunch of seedlings into individual containers.  Then they'll go back under the grow light until conditions are right outside.

Let's Start This Thing Over

He gave also their crops to the grasshopper And the product of their labor to the locust.  Psalm 78:46

Ever since the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, things have been tough in the garden.  Man was going to have to toil by the sweat of his brow to have the soil yield food to eat.  There would be briers and thorns and weeds and inclement weather and pests of all sort.  Our garden cannot even be remotely compared to the Garden of Eden.  Most of the time, it is more aptly named, The Garden of Weedin'.  Today's post is about insects, though, and how sometimes things just don't work and you have to start again from scratch.

This year I was scanning the Internet for different ideas for the Fall/Winter Garden and I stumbled upon a website specifically for Louisiana that had a monthly planting guide.  I've traditionally planted all the seeds for my fall crops directly in the ground in early - mid September.  This publication suggested planting the seeds in seed pots in late July - early August and then you'd transplant the young plants into the garden.  The idea is that you'd get a jump on the Fall/Winter crop growing season.

It sounded like a great idea.  We would be eating broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and Brussels Sprouts earlier.  I planted my seeds, watered them and they grew.  They got a little 'leggy' seeking the sun, because I kept them on the patio out of the blistering heat.  But that's okay.  I would simply move them into the garden and watch them continue to grow and we'd be eating fresh homegrown vegetables a little earlier this year!

Fall Seedlings ready to be transplanted

Or so I thought.  The very next day I brought my hoe out to the garden and walked around back to the patio to begin carrying the trays of seedlings.  I was surprised to see that some sort of insect discovered my plants  and at almost every leaf off of them!  Argghhh!!  Oh well.  I tried a new idea and it just didn't work.





Next year, if I try this again, I'll be ready with some sort of organic pest control spray like Neem Oil or soapy water to try to combat the bugs.  It is just doggone hard to try to grow anything in the hot summer months of July and August.  To be safer, I may just stick with my old tried and true plan of planting seeds directly into the garden soil in September.

Planting early to 'get a jump' on the Fall crops seemed to only succeed in giving the insects an opportunity to 'jump' on my Fall Crops.  Planting the seeds a few weeks later allows the heat and the insect pressure to subside.  But that is what gardening (and much of life) is all about - trying new things, sticking with what works and learning from mistakes.  In the next couple of days, I'll show you how we started again from scratch.