Nothing Doing

I've been planting seeds of a different nature and my two sprouts are now nearly two and six months old. They are a full time job. So much so that I have not yet planted anything. I have a single chinese cabbage left over from last fall that will soon be crawling with slugs.

In the mean time, I still have this blog and I can use it to advertise my townhouse, photos of which are on photobucket, which now has a slideshow feature that I am going to test here:

We'll see how that turns out. I do have some recent pictures of the garden. I will try to get them up. I might possibly get some carrot seeds in the ground or maybe a couple of tomato plants.

Still Going

I just thought I'd post to note that I have abandoned neither the garden nor the blog. I pulled in a handful of green tomatoes last week and yanked the vines. Decent tomato crop this year. I've still got one Chinese cabbage out in the east bed. No idea what to do with it. I have no plans to plant this winter. I keep telling my wife that the old sliding glass doors are there for my winter garden. One of these years she'll make me plant one or throw them out.

My oldest daughter is eighteen months and she walked around the garden on her own this weekend. I think by spring she may go out there with her watering can to help. When we go to the backyard she always wants to go to the garden ("gar-gar"). I've yanked the dead things except a few dried brown basil plants and the lone still-purple coneflower.

I have yet to improve the soil. Fatherhood has cut back my time with the garden. Composting is going well. I hope to run another batch of twigs through the chipper shredder soon. The shredded sticks and leaves have really jump-started the compost. Also, I've started putting more stuff in it besides kitchen scraps: used coffee filters (with grounds, of course), contents of the vacuum cleaner (bagless), dryer lint, and dog hair (beyond what comes out of the vacuum). I have even composted a few cloth diapers that have become too threadbare for diapering. I'm trying to find a better use for them, but the composting works.

I keep thinking I'll borrow my father-in-law's truck and get out to a stable one of these days, but more likely I'll have to order a few yards of manure. I just need to do it in the next two months.

Seed catalogs are here and I'm getting excited about all of the possibilities. I just have to remember to buy what we eat and keep the experimental stuff to a minimum. Maybe beets. We'll see.

A year gone by

Wow! Nearly a year since I last posted. I'll have to put up a new picture of the garden. Very bad year. I stopped planting green beans since we weren't eating them. All of my carrots died, only about three sprouted. I put in trellises for the vines which had mixed results. My echinacea came back from last year and looked great, but what the hell do I do with it? I suppose it brought in some pollinators. I had a nice cilantro plant, but my wife hates it and it came early (May) so I had no tomatoes ready to make salsa anyway. It went to seed (coriander) and now is shrivelled up and pretty well dead.

The trellises are electrical conduit, ten feet high and five feet wide with a nylon mesh that is supposed to last five years done up with duct tape and zip ties. It gives great support for the vining plants. The problem is all of my squash and cucurbits are bedeviled by vine borers. When the vines are along the ground, you can cover them with dirt every few feet and they re-root, so vine borers will only take out a little bit of the vine if you get them in time. With the trellises, everything from the entry point up dies. So my zook, my crooknecks, my butternuts, and my cukes all got hit hard and early. I was dusting weekly with rotenon and dipel dust, but it wasn't enough.

I planted simpsons lettuce and chinese cabbage, which did well once I dusted with dipel and surrounded with diatomaceous earth and that cleared up all of the green worms and slugs. We just weren't eating it. The lettuce has gone to seed and the leaves are all bitter. I haven't dusted the leafies in over a mont, so the chinese cabs are worm food. I've been really bad about maintenance. I'm sure I'll have a bunch of vine borer cocoons in my west bed and the center east bed.

I have very weak soil. I really need to boost it this winter. I think that's why all of the carrots died. I need a couple of yards of manure, optimally. My compost program has gone very slowly. The hay bales I picked up at a construction site (from the dump pile) have been slowly decomposing next to my beds. I've gotten some good browns for the pile from the chipper shredder, too.

I'm kind of writing off this year. Maybe I can do a winter cabbage or winter squash, but probably only in one bed. I guess if I dump a whole bag of blood meal and bone meal and some phosphate in one bed I can farm it through the winter.

Lots of basil came back, so I should have a nice pesto crop. We're having company next weekend and I'll be making a calzone. I can load it up with fresh basil.

Strategy for next year.
1. Improve the soil this winter.
2. Plant early. I need sprouts in February and plants in the ground in March.
3. Dig out vine borer cocoons.
4. Use fine mesh netting to physically keep vine borers adults off the plants.
5. Plan to hand-pollinate.

Reaping What I've Sown

The roma tomatoes were piling up. I borrowed a pressure canner, picked some basil and got to work. I started with probably 6 quarts of whole roma tomatoes from the garden and 3 or 4 cups of freshly cut whole sweet basil leaves. I blanched the tomatoes, peeled them and diced them. I chopped the basil leaves somewhat coarsely. They filled 9 half-pint jars. I put them in the canner for 20 minutes at 15 pounds. No magic to those numbers. I just made it up. I read a few web sites with various different times and pressures and decided 15 pounds for 20 minutes was good.

Here is what I learned about pressure canners in the last couple of days. The pressure allows you to boil water at temperatures higher than 100 degrees Celsius. Normally if you boil anything, the temperature of your food can't get above 100 because the water can't get above 100. If it does, it boils off as steam. Wikipedia gives the details, but the advantages to food preservation are twofold:

1. The temperature of the food is raised above 100 degrees Celsius for an extended period of time, thus killing off bacteria that might otherwise grow inside the jar and spoil the food.
2. The heating and subsequent cooling of the jars in this environment creates a vacuum seal for the jar that means bacteria outside can't get in.

These jars should keep at room temperature pretty much indefinitely. As an added bonus, the fact the the food cooks in the jars means their nutrients don't get boiled away as they cook.

I also learned that pressure cookers can cook food much faster than open pots and can use up to 70% less energy to do so. That alone has me wanting to get a small pressure cooker for everyday vegetable cooking. Nevermind that it can also be used to sterilize items like baby bottles and breast pump parts. Add to that the ability to can foods and the pressure cooker is looking like a handy gadget to have in the kitchen.

Out in the garden, we got three inches of rain in the last two days. The lettuce is bolting. The tomatoes are petering out. The beans are drying up. Summer harvest is nearly over. I need to begin planning out my square foot garden and start my graduated planting crops, like carrots and onions.

New Plantings

August is about the time to get seeds going for the winter garden, so I've read. The first frost comes to North Florida in mid November and the last one is typically late February or early March. So I have a good 100+ days before the frost.

Winter harvest is kind a new concept for me, but I've been reading about plants that do well in the cool and cold weather. The picture above is some plantings I did today. I just want to document them.

The 10 pot flat on the right is half spaghetti squash and half butternut. The 8 pot flat is all Hopi squash, which is technically a summer squash, but I'm going to try my luck. The three round pots each have two pumpkin seeds planted and the black flat on the left has six spots with chinese cabbage. I'm going to try my hand at the graduated planting. New concept for me, yet totally obvious and sensible. Every two weeks, I plant another six of those. After I transplant them into the garden, they will mature over time instead of all at once.

Squash need to come in more or less together because they need to have blossoms at the same time to pollinate. Though, as I discovered this Spring when my volunteer pumpkins were came up right next to my yellow crooknecks, cross-pollinating squash can cause some undesirable effects.

In addition to what is planted, I've got seeds for carrots, onions, cabbage, spinach and other leafy greens. The underground and the leafy stuff do better in the cool weather apparently. Once I turn my mulched beds I can start planting them, though I'm in no hurry. We'll still have daytime temps in the 90s for another month and a half.

State of the Garden

To start my log I want to describe the state of the garden as it is. Later I can go back and add the history. I've got good photos for that.

My garden is made of six 8x4 foot beds. The photo is facing north so the west bed is on the left. It contains big boi tomatoes and sweet basil in the north bed (1W), roma tomatoes and grape tomatoes, plus more basil in the middle bed (2W) plus a few small pepper plants that didn't do well. And the south bed (3W) contains leaf lettuce, echinacea, chamomile, fennel, and dill. I've got marigolds throughout the garden as a pest deterrent. Also, I had some volunteer canteloupe vines from the compost pile that I let run wild, mainly in 2W and 1W.

The east bed is nearer the house and doesn't get quite as much sun. I've got bush beans in the north end (1E) and I'm mulching the rest of the bed with hay. I just pulled out zucchini and cucumbers. The middle bed (2E) is also mulched with hay. It had cucumbers and yellow squash. The south bed has carrots and onions, and some volunteers peppers and butternut squash that did not pan out.

Very soon I'm going to be ripping out the canteloupe and peppers. The former are done and the latter never got going. That's the general layout of the garden. I can review bed by bed in later posts.

Starting a Gardening Log

When my wife and I went house shopping last year, one of my requirements was having a yard with some open, flat space that wasn't shaded so I could start a vegetable garden. Our new house has a spot in the side yard that is perfect. So last fall I built two raised beds, four feet wide and 24 feet long and one foot high. I filled them with new soil and planted my first crops.

This year, I planted earlier and did a little better, but I'm learning more all the time. I've gotten some great books from my father-in-law, one of which is Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It has completely changed my approach to gardening or at least, it will when I plant next.

One of Mel's recommendations is keeping a gardening log of what you plant and when, how you treat the soil, what kind of pest you have, how you deal with them, what the results are, what the crop yields are, etc. The log is a tool for learning what works and having a record of it to refer to. When it came to keeping a log, I wanted to include diagrams and photographs and I thought a blog would be the perfect tool for that. So if no one ever reads this blog but me, it serves its purpose. If someone reads it and finds something of value, then that's great too.