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.

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.

April Garden Update 2011

It is hard to be excited about the garden after it was smashed by hail on April 14th, but ~2 weeks later, it is nice to see how well it has recovered.



The purple heart is blooming, but the leaves are all beaten up. This used to fill the garden near the Cottonwood tree, but the chickens love to scratch in this area so most of the purple heart has been killed off. It still hangs on in the area right around the tree and I know it will refill the garden over the course of the season.



My 'Paprika Yarrow" is growing and blooming nicely. It has spread some, and I hope it will fill the whole area of the flower bed.



My Swiss Chard survived!

It is battered and beaten, but it lives on... phew. Of all of the plants, this one seemed to take the worst beating from the hail.


I planted four varieties of chard this year. The red is "Rhubarb Chard", it is the most scraggly of the bunch and has the poorest performance.

The large yellow is... umm the strongest variety... bu I will need to check my garden journal for the actual name.



The pale white stems were Fordhook Giant. It has the second best performance and seemed to withstand the hail better than the others (could be location too, it is near the mint and may have gotten some protection from that).



The small yellow stems at the front are Fantasia Chard. It is doing fairly well, probably ranks third out of four varieties.

Scattered through the gardens are German Camomile

(the ferny light green plants near the hose). I bought this as a single 4" pot from Northhaven Gardens and there were hundreds of seedlings in the pot. I was able to carefully break the cluster of seedlings apart and planted them all over the place. They seem to be doing great this year. Camomile is a medicinal herb and the flowers are harvested for a calming tea, it can also be used to lighten hair color.



This awful picture is the red amaranth I planted. Amaranth is a grain and ornamental and will grow to five feet tall according to the seed packet. I planted to varieties, but only the red seems to have germinated (no sign of the Golden Amaranth)

The amaranth is over seeded in my asparagus bed. The poor asparagus just limps along.

I saw a few spears, less than 10 and definitely did not harvest any. This is New Jersey Giant (?) planted last year from ugly dried out roots. I need to get a real start of asparagus from my mom. Her patch of asparagus is about 15 years old, and completely untended it has produced more asparagus than she could eat this spring.



The snow peas are starting to produce, it has been too hot for them to really do well. These peas are from my spring planting. The winter peas I planted all froze out in one of our ice storms this winter.



My spinach did not freeze this winter and it has been a great producer. This short little three foot row has kept us in spinach since about February. Unfortunately, due to the heat it has started to bolt. I keep pinching off the tops, but it keeps sending up new ones.



My poor tomatoes. Most of the main plants were damaged by the hail, but most have grown back from the roots.



The squash looks great. Strongest by far is the zucchini (black beauty)



Weird angle on this photo, but the first hill of squash along the fence is zucchini, then yellow crookneck squash (poorest performance), then a hill of the mixed squash (same mix I grew the last two years with excellent results).
The squash mix has already bloomed.

Last is the dead out hill of cucumbers. The four plants I had were completely obliterated by the hail and did not grow back.



Brussel sprouts... I have no idea. Is this what they are supposed to look like? When do they produce sprouts? I suspect that they already made the sprouts and they are now just getting leggy. A few weeks ago, I noticed very loose leaf clusters forming along the main stem of the plant, but they never resembled brussel sprouts to me. It may just be too hot to grow these here. Too bad.




My lovely Red Lasoda potatoes are growing great and I spotted the first few blooms a few days ago.



I only bought 2.5lbs of seed potatoes this year, I wish I had bought more to fill the whole section of garden. I waiver between wanting to try lots of varieties and also wanting to grow huge quantities of what I know will do well.



The beans are blooming. I planted three varities: Jade Bush, Black Valentine, and Blue Lake. It seems that my three bean mix from previous years did better, but it could also just be the weird weather this year that is causing them to grow so slowly.



Jerusalem Artichokes are coming up everywhere. I have replanted from this patch, taken a 5 gallon bucket full of plants to my MIL, and still they keep sprouting. Silly me for moving these spreading weeds to three different areas of my veggie garden over the years. Oh well, if I have to deal with an noxious spreading plant, I'm at least happy this is an edible noxious spreading plant... and it blooms very prettily in the fall, like little sunflowers. I kind of have a love hate relationship with this veggie, mostly I love it, but boy can it be a pain.



Speaking of noxious spreading plants, yikes my mint is going nuts. This little 4" pot purchased in 2009 now covers a huge swath of my garden. I find little mint plants popping up 10 feet away from the parent plant... all connected by a pencil thick root system. I'm happy to weed it, it smells pretty and I have been replanting it in tricky areas of the yard where nothing else seems to grow. The kids like to pick handfuls of leaves to sniff.



New to me this year is corn. I have never planted corn before, claiming I did not have the space, but hubby got me a huge variety pack of heirloom seeds this year and I did want to try something new.



Plus pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins... we had about 10 pumpkins to decorate this Halloween and after the holiday, they were carried around the yard by the kids, dog and squirrels. This spring, pumpkin seeds are popping up everywhere. In the garden,

on the path

by the garage door (where we walk all the time)



in the lawn... I'm going to try and let most of them grown (apart from where they will get mowed or stomped) in the wild areas of the garden. It would be fun to have lots of pumpkins, but I'm not counting on them to do great. Last year, I allowed a volunteer pumpkin to take over a huge area of my garden and it only produced one small pumpkin.

Overall, the spring garden is doing well, despite the cold to hot to cold weather and hail. My tendency this year was to plant lots of varieties of plants, but not huge quantities of any one kind (except tomatoes, I have a full section: 9 plants of tomatoes). I will see how it works out for me. Right now, I'm wishing I had planted more potatoes and less winter stuff (beets, broccoli, radishes, carrots--all doing poorly and taking up room). It is hard not to be distracted by all the pretty seed packet descriptions. It is all a learning experience. Like every year, late April and May are the glory days of the garden. Plenty of rain, not too hot, not too cold, everything growing great, it is hard not to be excited.

Hill of Beans

With all the rain we have had this fall, I have not been able to get out into hte garden much. Yesterday, a rare sunny day, I decided the beans probably needed picking.



Boy did they ever! My quick stroll to the garden turned into 30 minutes of bean picking. The beans overflowed the basket I had brought. It totaled 6.5 pounds of beans, hooray!



I washed the beans by filling the sink with cool water and letting them float.



I then cut the ends off and sliced into 1-2 inch sections.





I blanched the beans in a large pot of boiling water for 3 minutes, then 3 minutes in an ice water bath before bagging, labeling and freezing. I found that about six hand fulls fills a 1 quart freezer bag perfectly.



I did four batches of beans and ended up with 3.5 quarts of frozen beans.



Notes:
-Beans were tri-color bush bean mix from NorthHaven gardens
-the purple beans were very hard to see growing against the black soil
-only 4 beans were bug eaten out of the whole batch of 6.5 lbs
-the purple beans turn green when blanched.
-I found it easiest to work in batches of about 8 beans when cutting
-I had to drain the excess water out of the bags before sealing and freezing

Beans up

Despite not getting any water, the beans I planted on 8/9 are already coming up. I planted a mix of three varieties of bush bean. One is up before the others, from the color of the stem, I"m guessing it is the purple bean.

My fall tomatoes and eggplant have been a real disappointment. Despite daily light watering, the tomatoes are barely growing and look puny. The eggplant has been attacked by something and the leaves have a lacy appearance. Too bad.

The cucumber I planted is totally gone. Something snipped the stem in half, it wilted, then by the next morning the whole plant had been eaten or carried away. Too bad.

The okra and peppers are growing great. They thrive in this heat. Also the Swiss chard looks very good. I may start harvesting again soon.

2009 Spring/Summer Harvest log

Here is the 2009 spring/summer harvest log from our garden. I had been picking since early April, but did not pull out the scale until June 2nd. Oh well, 85lbs is not too bad, but I was hoping for more than my body weight. Maybe I can still reach that goal if the fall garden does well.

the formatting is a mess, I'll have to work on how to post a chart neatly in blogger.


Harvest Log
date items weight (lbs)
6/2/2009 squash, green beans 0.75
6/4/2009 green beans 0.1
6/5/2009 8ball squash, 2 big zucchini, green beans, onions 3.5
6/7/2009 very small potatoes 1.5
green beans 0.5
Kennebec White/Yukon Gold 4.5
Russet 8.25
Red lasoda 10.5
6/8/2009 sqaush, green beans 0.75
6/10/2009 caserta squash, green beans, 2 marconi peppers, bell pepper, tomatoes 1.1
6/12/2009 caserta, patty pan, 5 sweet 100 tomatoes, 1 round squash, 1 pepper 2.5
6/13/2009 1 better boy, 1 beefsteak 0.5
6/14/2009 2 roma, 1 little porter 0.1
6/15/2009 Roma, beefsteak, porter improved, chetrry, green beans 0.5
6/16/2009 zucchini, roma tomatoes 0.75
6/17/2009 patty pan, 4 roma, 1 porter improved, 2 small zucchini, 1 better boy 1.4
6/18/2009 3 roma, cherry tomatoes, 1 pepper 0.8
6/20/2009 1 black krim, 3 better boy, roma, cherry, beefsteak, 2.5
2 caserta, 1 zucchini, 1 yellow crookneck 2
2 cucumbers 0.4
potatoes, 4.1
onions, shallots 0.6
6/22/2009 tomatoes 1.5
6/23/2009 patty pan, peppers, cucumbers, better boy, black krim 3.2
6/25/2009 6 super fantastic, 1 better boy, 1 black krim, 2 roma, 2 zucchini, 2 round, 1 cocozelle, 3 cucumbers 7.5
6/26/2009 tomatoes 3
squash 7
cucumbers, peppers, okra 1
6/29/2009 black krim, beefsteak, super fantastic, 4.5
7/5/2009 tomatoes, squash, okra, beans 6
7/7/2009 rutgers tomatoes 1
7/9/2009 bitter cucumbers
7/15/2009 okra, cucumbers, rutgers tomatoes, beefsteak, roma 1.5
7/21/2009 patty pan squash, okra, peppers, tomatoes, 1 cherokee purple 2
85.8

Jacobs Cattle Bean

We planted a new type of shelling bean this year called Jacob's Cattle Bean.

Pretty beans, just like spotted cows. Purchased from Seeds of Change http://www.seedsofchange.com/garden_center/product_details.aspx?item_no=S10954

It is an heirloom variety of bush shelling bean. I put in a single row, as an afterthought along the fence line of the garden.
Jacobs Cattle Bean Row, April 24, 2009


The plants came up strong and topped out at only about 8-12 inches tall. Despite the small height, each plant had 4-8 pods on it.
May 24, 2009

When the beans were young, I picked about a dozen and cooked them up like green beans (blanched and cooled to eat), but they were too tough for my tastes. After that experiment, I just allowed the pods to dry on the plants.

Harvet on June 11th, 2009

I picked all of the plants on June 11th, just before a big rain. 90% of the plants were dead from the heat and the others were yellowed. I allowed the plants to dry in a basket for a few days and then enlisted the help of boy's small fingers to help shell the beans. Forget child labor laws, he loved the task.

It was not much of a harvest. I planted about 20 plants and harvested 1/2 cup of beans, mabye enough for a side dish. I'm not sure it was really worthwhile use of space in my small garden. Still, what a pretty bean and my first sucessful crop of shelling beans.