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.

Harvest Celebration Confusion

Three bales of straw
Last Saturday night (Dec 4th) hubby took the kids and I driving to look at Christmas lights and we passed a pile of Halloween decorations--pumpkins, squash, 3 big bales of straw-- on a neighbors curb, waiting for trash pickup. Of course, I could not let this treasure go to the dump so poor hubby--all dressed up from the Christmas party we just left, hoisted the goodies into the back of my van.

I will use the straw bales as mulch for my summer garden in 2011. The golden color of the straw will help to reflect heat away from the soil, keeping the plants roots cooler (a definite concern in a Texas summer), the straw will help to keep moisture in the soil from evaporating, and it will also shade the soil and prevent the weed seeds from germinating--saving me time at my weeding. Free and pretty mulch, and all packaged in three tidy bundles. Until it is needed in the garden, the bales will act as a backyard climbing and jumping platform for my kids.


squash with straw mulch


I did not pick up the pumpkins from the curbside pile, but I thought about it. We already have about a dozen pumpkins in our backyard now from our own decorations as well as the free 'after holiday cast offs' from a friend's fundraising event selling pumpkins at her church.


Kids helping me to sort pumpkin seeds for roasting

The smaller pumpkins can be peeled, cubed, and cooked for pies, or the cubes can be roasted in the oven with salt and olive oil, the seeds can be salted and roasted for a crunchy snack. I still have 1 bag of pumpkin puree in the freezer from last years pumpkins. Pumpkin muffins were a real hit with my kids (and high in beta carotene). Even if you don't want to eat pumpkins, they are great food for the chickens. At the very least they are compost pile fodder. Nope, instead they were tossed to the curb to head to the local dump.


pumpkin squash muffins, ready to bake

How funny that the image we have of the bounty of "Harvest Time" and richness of fall with piles of rich golden pumpkins and squash, shocks of dried corn, and bales of golden straw--which used to mean a winters worth of food for the family and livestock-- are now seen as a disposable decorators item. Thanksgiving used to mean the end of the growing and harvest season, a time when families would gather to share in the rewards from a years worth of hard work in the fields.

This is not the first year I have collected hay bales from peoples trash, and it won't be the last (if you want to see a funny sight, picture tiny me, dressed in a skirt and heels for work, attempting to hoist a wet 60 pound bale of straw into the back of my minivan without getting dirty). For some reason this year it made me sad to see the wastefulness and the backward way of looking at things in our society.


So what are we really thankful for today (a bit late, buy HAY)? Thankful for good jobs that allow us to earn plenty of money to maintain a lifestyle? Thankful for stores full of goods, even those that are only used to be visually pleasing for a time? Thankful for a beautiful home to decorate for the various holidays? Thankful that we don't have to hack open a pumpkin each time we want to enjoy a pie?

I don't mean this to condemn anyone, I really am thankful that we live in such a rich and blessed society that allows us the choice to spend our money how we choose... and I'm even more thankful that the life my hubby and I share allow us the ability to see a treasure like this on the curbside. I'm thankful for the knowledge I have on how to use this bounty. I'm thankful that no other 'dumpster divers' got to this gem before me!

Fresh Fruit + 1 day = Fruit Flies...

With 35 pounds of peaches in the kitchen, we ended up with a cloud of fruit flies that would erupt from the sink every time we walked by. Yuck.


Here is my Aggie-solution-- a recycled fruit fly trap!



I cut the top off of a water bottle and inverted it into the body of the bottle. I put some compost (strawberry caps) at the bottom of the bottle as bait. The trap works like any fish or lobster type trap. The fruit flies can easily go into the opening of the bottle, but are confused when they fly up the sides and cannot get out.

Between this and extreme cleaning for a few days, the fruit fly problem is done. Phew.


One neat item of note is that we have moved so far away from pre-packaged commerical products that it was actually difficult for me to find an empty plastic bottle. I ended up scouting one from the trash-heap that is the back seat of hubby commuter car. The last time I bought a case of water was well over 6 months ago.

Twelve Days of Christmas--Yard Work Style

If I write this properly, it could possibly be sung to the tune of "Twelve Days of Christmas"



On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
1 load of pea gravel,
a 55 gallon barrel of manure,
a years worth of compost,
four bales of hay,
5 pickup truck-loads of mulch,

12 nasty gruuuubbbs

okay, so I got bored with this somewhere in the middle of my song.



Very nice December weather has been upon us (after our hard freezes in the first week of December) and we have made the most of it. On Dec 19-20th we were able to get 5 truckloads of mulch from a friend who had a landscapers dump truck pour a full load of mulch in their driveway. The mulch is great, mostly palm sized or smaller pieces with lots of leaves (live oak and cedar) and only a few large branch sections.



Load 1 went to the new buddliea bed in the back yard as well as along the front edge of the garden. Load 2 went to the new flower beds in the front yard, load 3 went to the garden, loads 4 and 5 mostly went to the crepe myrtle bed--which is really just an annoying section of mostly bare dirt next to our driveway. My hope is to reclaim the mulch from there to build my path in the garden after it is tilled. I am very excited to get so much free mulch. Generally, a truck load of mulch seems like a boon to me but now I have 5 loads to play with, wonderful!

I also cleaned out the fall garden. All but the artichoke and collard greens has frozen to the ground and was ripped out. We emptied a 55 gallon drum of horse and chicken manure (hauled in from my in-laws farm) across the garden. We also dumped the compost bin.

The compost did great this year. The bottom 1/2 of the bin was dark, rich, beautiful compost. The top half still had some clearly identifiable food stuff in it. I made an effort to turn the compost this year, at least for the first part of the year, and I think that made a big difference. One big mistake I made was to put whole eggs in the compost without breaking them first. I hit one with my shovel when spreading the manure and I had to leave the garden for a few minutes. Generally, I'm a pretty tough person smell-wise. I can handle dog, cat, child, poop or vomit without batting an eye (gee, the things moms brag about!) but this rotten egg was horrible. Next time I'll know better. I also found that my hubby's habit of stacking cracked egg shells into one another keeps them from breaking down. Really, egg shells were pretty much the only identifiable portion of the finished compost. Quite a success.

The load of pea gravel is for a surprise Christmas gift for the kids. But, we only needed 1/3 of a cubic yard, but the rock yard wanted me to pay for a full yard... so I told them to just load it all up, if they were going to make me pay for it. So the pea gravel is also going to line our utility area behind the garage. This is where the bees live, and also a real junk collecting place for all of the random outdoor bits that don't belong in the garage.

So there we go, the 12 days of Christmas, garden style (my favorite). On the 12th day of Christmas, my true love is going to be tilling the garden... he just does not know it yet!