Early Garden 2012

The first weekend in March I took a gamble and put in a few rows of my spring/summer garden. Planting this year was less effort and more effort than in years past because hubby has decided that tilling is not good for the soil--I'm not exactly sure why it is not good, but I'm willing to give it a try this year. The garden has had a rough time the last two years, we got some produce, just not very much, so a change is probably in order.



Not tilling meant less effort up front because I never had to wrestle with the tiller, but also more effort because I had to use a hoe to loosen the top layer of soil (I'm not exactly sure if that is okay per hubby's 'new idea', but shhh, I know no other way of getting seeds planted without lovely loose soil). Luckily, over the last 7 years we have worked so much compost and organic matter into the soil, we have a really good base, so I don't think we'll be missing out by not tilling in the amendments I have poured on over the winter (4 bales of straw, a load or two of mulch, a truck load full of composted cow manure, 2 huge boxes of horse manure) All of that is mostly broken down into the soil, the larger chunks I just raked into the path areas.

To make room for the new season, all the 2011 garden hold outs were pulled--mostly just turnips and mint (argh my weedy mint is taking over the back quarter of the garden). There is one row of peas and one row of Kale which will remain along the back of the garden.



We have harvested and eaten turnips all winter and there was still enough left over to fill a child's wheelbarrow.

Garden layout wise we went back to planting in standard rectangular rows instead of the more visually pleasing V shaped planting beds. This was a decision based solely on ease of watering. From the looks of things, we will have another dry year and my #1 concern is making it easy for me to water my garden.

With lovely 70 degree weather I put in a 2 x 20 foot row of green beans (tri-color mixed, Jade, and Contender), a 3x20 foot row of summer squash (round, patty pan, caserta, cocozelle, umm.... 5 varieties in all) and 9 tomato plants. In all honesty, it is probably too early for tomatoes. But it is so hard to resist the flats of lovely plants at the nursery.



March 8 and 9th are cold and rainy, 42 degrees, but with a lovely slow drenching rain. I could do without the cold, but the rain is just perfect to kick off the growing season.

The oregano and parsley are doing great



The aquaponics set up is just so so, there is some nice lettuce and a few swiss chards, as well as the lavender I'm starting from cuttings (the main lavender plant is blooming now)




The hens are loving the longer days and have started laying again with gusto. They also love the 'chicken fort' that Andrew built for them from a cardboard box. He loves that they lay their eggs in their fort.



I did not think I was ready (I'm still bummed we 'missed' our winter) but bring on spring 2012.

Spring Signs 2012

It has been a strange and mild winter and early spring here in North Texas. We never got our winter, no snow, no ice, only a few freezing days. In general it has been mild and dry. The weed grass has green up quickly and we've already had to mow twice in February.

My spring bulbs--paper whites and narcissus-- bloomed in mid February. No sign of the giant Amaryllis flowers just yet.

Our big male cottonwood tree has bloomed it's nasty pollen 'pony tails'/ pollen tassels the week of March 1st (not sure what to call the 3 inch long structure that holds the pollen, in our tree, they bloom out bright pink and yellow, then fade to just yellow). As soon as the pollen pods open, the tree is swarmed by birds looking to eat the tiny green caterpillars that are often inside the pods. This means one messy week in our yard. Between the yellow pollen dust, the bird poop and the dropping pods and pony tails, I know to accept a filthy car and to not hang out any laundry on the clothes line. As of March 5th, the pony tails are starting to drop which signals the end of this mess. In the next few days we'll start to see the first green leaves budding out.

So far it is a light year for dandelions, probably because it is so dry. The bees love the dandelions, so I'm hoping we'll see more over the next few weeks--yes, I'm hoping for weeds in my yard. Ha ha.

The Forest Pansy Redbud in the front yard bloomed on March 4th.

The bees have been able to fly for most of the winter. Our local beekeeping friend said that his hive inspection this weekend revealed that his hives were full of honey and he had to add a super. Typically Feb and March are rough times for bees since they have had to live off of their summer and fall honey stores all year. For them to be full of honey means that they were able to fly and collect nectar over the winter and did not have to rely on stored honey as much. This could be a good sign that this will a strong year for the bees.


We are still a full 3 weeks before the average last frost date for our area, but things are looking very spring like out there. So much so, that I've already planted a good portion of the garden on March 4th.

October 2011 Garden Upate

The fall garden is coming along nicely, after a dry September (and a high water bill--9000 gallons of water... our typical use is 3-5 thousand gallons per month) October came in with a decent rain storm often enough that I was able to use just rain barrel water on the gardens.

Squash, the plants are pretty small, but starting to produce... small squash



Cucumber


I thought I had planted at least half a dozen cucumber plants, but only one came up (and squash came up in most of the places I expected cucumbers... hmm, maybe letting a 4 year old plants the seeds was not the best idea). So far, the cucumber is doing great, and has a few baby cucumbers starting.

Beans



I love green beans, these guys are coming along nicely and it should be a bumper crop with all of the blooms I see. The plants seem a bit spindly, but seem to be blooming like champs.


Hyacinth Bean (not edible, just pretty)



SO pretty this year, even if it refused to grow over the arbor and instead took over a 5 foot section of fence on each side of the arbor instead.



The bean pods are numerous this year and since I can't (or won't) eat them, I've started using them in floral arrangements (and by 'floral arrangements' I mean the 1 bunch of measly stems and herbs I gave to an elderly friend of mine).

Basil



"MOMMY! My seeds are growing! My seeds are growing!" Boy is thrilled, I have more basil plants to harvest from, we are all happy and eating our weight in pesto on a weekly basis.

Swiss Chard


Still my #1 favorite garden green. I tried a new way to cook Swiss Chard last week and we all love it: Swiss Chard "chips". I'm still working on the method, but so far, my best attempt involves washing the leaves, rubbing them with olive oil (with my hands) and then sprinkling them with garlic salt and baking at 400F for about 5 minutes until they turn crisp, but not burn--a very fine line. The result is a crisp, crumbly, salty snack that is somewhat like the Nori sheets that come wrapped around sushi rolls. I have seen a similar method for cooking Kale, but never tried it. A few things I need to work out, so far, only about half the leaf turns crisp, the rest stay kind of floppy (tastes just like sauteed, not bad, just not what I'm going for). I crumbled one of the chard chips over my baked potato the other day and it was delicious. I have not figured out how to make this in quantity either, the leaves are so huge, that I can only fit about 3 on a normal sized cookie sheet. It is a work in progress.

Herbs



The herbs all looked scraggly at the end of the long hot summer so in September I cut them down to the ground. They have grown back up with a flourish and are doing great. I knew the Oregano would do well with this treatment, but the flat leaf parsley came back nicely as well.


The weather is holding nicely. On an almost weekly basis we have had cold front that drops our temperatures into the 40s with rain, then within two days we are back up into the 70s again. I love Texas in the fall.

Growing, Harvesting and Using Sweet Basil

Growing: This is the first year that sweet basil ( Ocimum basilicum ) has really taken off in my garden. It is located in the border outside the main garden. This spot gets sun most of the day, with a bit of shade in the late afternoon from the arbor just to the NW of the plants. The soil is heavy clay, with some compost added each year. The plants survived the drought conditions here in Texas very well with only minimal watering. Toward the end of the summer, the leaves were small, about the size of my thumb, but still tasted great. In September, we began to water this patch heavily and the plants quickly responded by putting on a new flush of large (almost palm sized) leaves.



Harvesting: The leaf is the edible part of the basil plant. To harvest for meals (usually pesto cream sauce, mmmm) we simply plucked leaves from the plant as needed.

Near the end of the summer, the plants bolted and began to flower and set seed. Since this has become a favorite cooking herb of my family, I decided to harvest and save some of the seeds for next years basil crop (if it does not self seed for next year, which I hope it will).





After it flowered, I allowed the blooms to dry on the plant (this was more of a happy accident and the result of garden neglect more than any actual planning or foresight on my part). We collected the dried flowers put them in a colander, which was then placed over another bowl.



Using pre-school labor, we crushed the dried flowers and seed pods to release the tiny black seeds. Shaking the colander gently to allow the seeds to fall through to the bowl below.



Once most of the seed heads had been crushed, we gently blew the chaff away from the seeds, leaving about 1/4 cup of dark black basil seeds.



Uses: Our favorite use is to make Pesto and Pesto Cream sauce (recipe to follow). I also add leaves to spaghetti sauce, stir fry and salad dressings.

Another fun Basil use is to prepare seed packets for friends. In this case, I wanted to share seeds with the attendees of my bread baking class (we made pesto with dinner) so we prepared several seed packets.

I used tiny zipper top bags (like the kind that come with the extra button when you buy a new shirt) and portioned off about 1/2 tsp of seeds per bag. We cut a sheet of plain white paper into small rectangles, folded them in half, and then stapled them onto the bag. My son drew a picture of a basil leaf and I labeled each packet Sweet Basil.

Summer Garden Update 2011

It was hot, it was dry (record from 1980 for number of 100+ degree days was broken this year), and the garden suffered.



One good thing about everything dying is that I felt no remorse about ripping out the spring garden in early September to start over for fall.



Plus, it made for lots of new digging and playing areas for the kids and chickens.





As of September 3rd all but 1 section of the garden was ripped out. The sweet potatoes were limping along and so they were allowed to live on.

Sept 5th planted squash, cucumbers, turnips, carrots, spinach in east garden bed.

On September 8th, I got 1 load of Texas Native mulch from SBS and 1 load of 'Dairy Top Dressing'. These were mixed and then tilled in to the existing soil. Put 2 wheelbarrows on top of east side bed as a top dressing--did not till it in.

The dairy top dressing is aged/composted cow manure and looked like some really nice soil. It did have a strong smell, but that dissipated after a while (sorry neighbors).

Sept 8th planted green beans in North side bed and scattered old pinto bean seeds on South side bed.


Sept 21st, Cucumbers and squash up



and turnips



and beans



September 5th it was 61 degrees. Hooray for the first official break in the summer heat!

Still no rain until October 9th. Yikes.

June Garden Update

2011 has been a lackluster year in the garden. Things are growing, but only doing okay, not great.

First the good (of course).



The green beans have made a good showing. We have had more than enough for dinner and to share, and I have also put up about a quart into the freezer. As of June 14th, the plants are looking wilted and tired and I think the harvest is tapering off.



My potatoes did well, but I did not buy enough seed potatoes. I planted 2.5 pounds and harvested 12.5 pounds. It is a decent yield for me ~6x and right on par with my best potato harvest ever (planted 7 pounds, harvested 35 pounds in 2009). I had zero bug problems in my main potato patch this year, not so much as a bug nibbled potato in the whole harvest. This is great news, and much better than a friend of mine who reported that his potatoes got blight and he does not expect any harvest at all this year. I think one big factor was that I rotated the location of my plantings this year. One volunteer potato plant came up in the 'old' location and that plant suffered from pests and some sort of wilting disease so I pulled it early.



Sweet Potatoes. Well, I can't count this as a harvest yet, but I am so happy that this year I was able to plant over 35 sweet potato slips grown from sweet potatoes that we had bought to eat. Each time I found an eye on a sweet potato I was about to cook, I would cut off a small section of the potato containing the eye and stick it in a pan with water. After about 6 weeks of this, I had a huge crop of sweet potato slips in my kitchen window. I planted 9 plants prior to June and then planted the remaining 25 slips after I harvested the white potatoes. There are about 10 more slips that are still forming roots in the window. This was a great learning experience and very successful way to get lots of sweet potato plants (even before the harvest).

Also doing well (without photos) are: Swiss Chard, mint, oregano, basil, also pumpkins and winter squash (all very healthy and producing volunteers).

I had okay luck this year with my spinach, garden peas, summer squash. These are producing okay, but just not thriving.

And now the bads... my poor tomatoes look awful, the plants are small and anemic, there is very low fruit set (no fruit at all on most of the plants), and there is some sort of disease or pest causing a yellowing of the leaves. The "Little Porter" tomato is the only one that seems to be thriving. Brandywine has a strong plant, but no fruit. All the others look awful. Considering that Hubby judges the success of my garden by the weight of tomatoes produced... this is a dismal year.

Eggplant, cucumbers: both fell victim to the hail and never recovered.

Corn. I guess since this is the first year I have planted corn, and it got the shady side of the garden, I can't call this a true failure. I have about a dozen corn plants, waist high, and they are starting to flower (tassel?, ear?, fruit?, produce?). I am not sure what they are doing, but they are starting to form something that I hope will turn into corn. Since I have such a small patch, I am counting on having to pollinate these things by hand (with a brush) since corn is wind pollinated and you need a strong stand of corn to get good pollination.

Peppers: the seeds I planted did not germinate, so on June 10th I bought two pepper plants from the store.

Mulberries: these are not in my garden (or even in my yard) but the trees down the street had a very light harvest this year. I kept watching and waiting for the fruit fall to really kick in (last year, it stained the sidewalk and street purple from all the fruit), but this year... not much. We did not even walk down to try to harvest any, I figured with such a light harvest the birds needed them more than I did. Hubby points this out to me as proof that we should take advantage of the good years when they happen (for example, we are still eating last year mulberry jam with about 8 pints left to go). Good lesson.

Peaches: similar story to the mulberries, not my tree, but my friend's and he has reported a very small harvest this year. We do NOT have any peaches left over, so I will have to buy them to can this year.


Other milestones in the garden this year: compost! Hubby has taken over the compost area and expanded it to 4x what I had. He is diligent about turning it and even brings home other people's veggie scraps and coffee grounds from work to add to his compost bins. We have already gotten a 55 gallon drum full of finished compost which we added to the garden when we planted the sweet potatoes. It is some very pretty stuff.
Rain water: the water totes are hooked up and working great... now if we can just get some rain.
Bees: the girls are working hard and as of May we had more supers on the bee boxes than we had at harvest time last year. Hooray bees.

May Garden Update 2011

Most importantly, we are eating from the garden again!



The spinach is tapering off, but the swiss chard, peas and beans are really starting to produce.



I gave most of my garden a thick layer of old hay mulch (the hay was my curbside treasure from this winter).



The mint is going crazy... what is that hiding behind the mint?



A full sized wheelbarrow. I love how green and pretty it is, but the mint is starting to take over the yard.



My Purple Hyacinth bean is starting its yearly climb of the trellis. These seeds are the fourth or fifth generation of saved seeds I have planted. Too bad I have not been so diligent to save edible seeds to replant each year (usually because I eat the vegetables before they can become viable seeds).



I found a nice surprise on my front porch the other day, a big trash bag full of baby plants from a local family member. Hooray. Inside the sack were about 30 small Purple Cone flower plants and some woody perennials which I am guessing are tarragon.

I am really excited about the Purple Cone flower, which is the common name for Echinecia, the herbal remedy that we buy in capsules from the store. Echinicia is used as an immunity booster and both hubby and I take it when we feel a cold coming on. Our family member has this growing like a weed in her yard and gardens and was more than happy to share. I hope it is as happy in my yard as it is in hers. I will have to do some research to see just which parts of the plant are medicine, but it is neat to be able to grow something so useful.



My tomatoes have finally reached the top of the cages. They all basically regrew from the roots up after the hail storm, so they seem a bit stunted to me this year. I see blooms on most of the plants, but have not noticed any fruit starting yet.




The squash is thick and healthy (and needs to be thinned (which I did on May 23, after this photo). I have harvested a few small yellow squash and a few zucchini, but they don't seem to be putting on as much fruit as I had hoped. Lots of blooms though.



Our trio of mulch loving hens is always trying to get into my garden to make a mess of things.



Luckily, they understand that me yelling, stomping my feet and waving my arms means 'SCRAM'.




As a new experiment this year, I am growing sweet potatoes from slips that I started in my kitchen window. There are about 9 plants in the garden now, and 2-3 more are ready each week. I have photos of how I started the plants, and I'll post more on that another time. I have had great success with my sweet potato slips, only one has died so far, and that was one that I damaged before planting it (I broke about 3/4 of the roots off--oops).



My eggplant looks awful, it is still alive, but looks about the same as it did a month ago after the hail storm.

Side note... notice how there are piles of poop all through my garden? No, we did not get a heard of miniature horses, but I did carry home four big buckets full of 'processed hay fertilizer' from my in-laws horses. My wonderful husband did not even question why there were four stinky buckets ready to be loaded into the van the last time we left their house. As long as I can keep the dog out of it, this little addition of manure seems to give the garden a bit of a boost. If the dog gets into it... yuck.



The regular potatoes are doing well, they are done flowering and now I am just waiting until the tops start to die off and we can harvest our potatoes.



My bush beans are doing great, and so far, are the star producers of the last spring garden. We are able to eat about a meals worth of beans each night with a few extra bunches to share.



This looks like an acorn squash to me, it has two small fruit on it, but I did not plant acorn squash this year... a volunteer!



The red amaranth is still growing slowly. It is supposed to get five feet tall and the new growth and seeds are edible.



Outside of the main veggie garden, I have been sneaking in edibles where ever I can. This little grouping is a strawberry, a squash plant and a bunch of chamomile. I have no idea why they are all clustered so close together.



My day lilies are all blooming and look great. This is the first year they have bloomed (I planted them in 2010). I hope they spread as the years progress, they are such a pretty and tall flower.



Here is the side garden, also called the bee garden. The tall plants in the back are Jerusalem artichokes, they are doing great this year. There is also a fig tree in there somewhere, it is just limping along. Plus some day lilies and WEEDS. Our lawn guy (our biggest luxury EVER) knows he does not have to go into this area because of hte bees, so the grass gets tall back here and makes us so thankful that the whole yard does not look like this.



Two kinds of oregano, about to bloom. The one on the right is Hilltop Oregano and it has a better smell and flavor than the one on the left (that one just said "oregano" on the tag).



One tiny little dill plant.



Parsley from seed! Hooray, parsley is hard to get to germinate, but it does so much better when grown from seed. The plants are biennial, so they will live for two years. My previous parsley plant was about 2 years old and it does not appear to be coming back this year so the timing of this is perfect. This is flat leaf parsley, before I had curled leaf parsley.



More lovely echinecia and more fertilizer.



I don't have a picture of the plant, but the blackberries have been producing as much as we can eat.


The berries are huge and delicous.



Last but not least, the paprika yarrow keeps on blooming and the color is improving as the season progresses.


Ahh May in the garden. We have had good rains about once per week (May 2nd, 12, 20, 22, I think...) but I have also had to water some to keep my plants happy.