May Happenings

The greenhouse is bursting with tomatoes! As much as I am eager to set them out, I'm still not sure yet. The forcast calls for temps to dip into the mid-30s into Monday morning, June 1, 2009. But, I've readied the big garden for the first row of tomatoes to go in today. This garden is somewhat sheltered, so a light frost would not effect any plants in that area.

I built the shelves in the greenhouse back on May 3rd and moved in many plants that same day. There was one heavy frost back on May 19, 2009 when I had to use a space heater for one night and every tomato survived. The temp got as low as 29.4 F @ 5:30 AM. I lost a few of the small cauliflower plants because they were too close to the glass.

Next was the problem of marking my annuals with some sort of permenant markers. The solution was to use painted fur strips (left overs from when I screened in the front porch) and use a permanent marker for the plant names. The tricky part was creating the 30 degree angles with both the saw and the drill press, but I am happy with the results.

I also enjoyed building this handy rock sifter. I had this idea in mind for a while and it was great to bring it into this world. I designed it so that it would be just the right height to dump the rocks into my trailer to haul them away with ease.

I made about 3 nice piles of rock-free dirt and hauled it over to the greenhouse to have outside when needed. The sifter box is quite handy and should proove useful for many more years.

Here is my Super Secret Recipe for sucessful tomatoes. I will mix all of this up and use about 3 tablespoons in each hole when planting tomatoes out in the garden:

One 3 lb. bag of Miracle Gro® Organic Choice Bone Meal 6-9-0 One 2.5 lb. bag of Vigoro® Blood Meal 12-0-0 One 4 lb. bag of Espoma® Tomato-Tone Organic Plant Food Three Cups of crushed brown egg shells (saved-up over winter) Six Quarts of wood stove ashes Makes 11 Quarts.

Use 3 Tablespoons in each planting hole.

I like to save these bulk cat food containers for many uses. I can fill 2 1/2 containers with this recipe to have ready on planting day. If you're wondering about the egg shells, they help prevent blossom-end-rot, a common problem in my area. I begin saving egg shells in January. Yet another example of always something to do all year round when planning and growing tomatoes.

:)

The Busy Month of April

April is such a busy month that I don't have much time to be at the computer. The photos below were actually taken as early as two weeks ago.
First notable fact: Don't be tempted to plant tomatoes too early. The earliest this year were started on March 30th & 31st. As I type this, these two flats of tomatoes need to be transplanted today as their roots are growing out of the bottoms of the trays like crazy!
Pushing up the seed starting date to the 2nd week of April seems to be a better idea.

Many days have passed since these photos were taken and a lot of the tomatoes have already doubled in size!
The lights are turned on at 7AM and turned off at 8 PM each day.

It may not look like it, but there are over 900 seeds being started here! Each flat holds 72 seeds and as of today, there are 13 full flats plus a few others.

I was able to get the big gardens tilled last weekend. I noticed a Robin was scouting the area for many hours, looking for worms and insects that were exposed during tilling - smart bird!

I'm glad that the hardest work is done for this season. All that's left is to add compost and re-till.
The first seeds of the season were planted outside on Saturday, April 18th. I planted German Giant radishes and Oregon Snow Peas. I will do a 2nd planting of each of these on May 2nd.

Much more to follow.
:)

Spring Finally Arrives

I'm so glad to see that spring is finally here. March tends to be the longest stretch of winter. So much anticipation and planning of the next planting season goes on, I just realized that I haven't yet made an entry for March!

Reading back to my last post, I am humbled by how much energy has gone into the green house project. It was only yesterday that I started putting up the walls over the insulation - and I'm only half-done!


I used 2' x 4' ceiling tiles, which are all bright white and very easy to cut. This will ensure that the inside will be nice and bright as well as better insulated. I'm hoping to have all 20 ceiling tiles cut and in place by next weekend.


The snow is retreating to the woods ever so slowly. Most of the gardens have been exposed, but nothing other than the tiny chamomile plants next to the garlic has sprouted yet.


Next entry will have photos of seeds started in the flats upstairs. Planting begins soon after I post this on Sunday, March 29, 2009.

Happy Gardening!
:)

Green House Phase II

Phase II was begun today after Dad & I went to Home Depot and bought more lumber & insulation.

I got a lot more done today than I thought I would.

Now that February is half over, The sun is higher in the afternoon sky and is at its peak around 2 PM. The photo above of the indoor/outdoor thermometer photo will attest to that.
By 4:30 PM the sun no longer shines on the greenhouse, so the temp plummets from thereon..

I added a 2nd sub floor layer and actually had to take my jacket off while installing it because it was so warm!

The green exterior carpet is a nice touch and should help warm the place. I only tacked it down on 3 sides because I want it to heat and cool for a week to work out any potential bumps before I do the final cut to fit.

Next weekend, I will put up the R 13 insulation in the ceiling & walls and then begin the final phase III of creating the interior shelves along the windows (3 levels).

:)

January 2009

Bye, bye January!

Although winter is in full swing, I’m happy to see January nearly over. February goes quickly, which makes way for March. Wow, March is seed starting month!

As for this January, I’ve noticed that EBay is a new frontier for finding “rare” heirloom seeds. I use the term “rare” loosely here because I’ve seen it used more for a sales pitch than if these seeds are truly “rare.”

Fact is, the more super-tomato websites you find, the more likely you will easily bump into the same variety of “rare” seeds!

TomatoFest.com is a fine example. They offer hundreds of Heirloom tomatoes, is easy to navigate and the man behind it all seems down to earth & honest. He even sends a free packet of seeds with your order. This year, he sent me a gift of Brandywine, Yellow tomatoes - cool!

Which leads me to another problem with the folks pedling “rare” seeds on EBay; seed count.

I’ve seen offers for as little as 5 seeds per order! How do these sellers sleep at night? I’ll bet you they chuckle in their sleep for sure!

That’s not to say that I haven’t considered selling my seeds on EBay myself. In fact, I like the idea of building a virtual seed store. But you won’t see any 5 & 10 count seed offerings from me. I will do 25 to 30 counts per offer.

Photo below shows my saved Debarao seeds. Believe it or not, there are 50 seeds next to that penny. I’ve decided to plant 36 of each variety this year from my own saved seeds. 50 is a good amount to set aside for myself and I'll attempt to sell what’s left over.

Here is a photo of the seeds purchased online from EBay & TomatoFest.com. As it stands now, I am growing 12 of my own saved tomato varieties from 2008. The only variety that was a failure in 2008 was the Great White tomato. It struggled in 2007 and failed in 2008, so no need to keep trying that variety here.


Moving onto other January happenings, the weather sure was winter-like. No January thaw this year. We got it all, snow, rain, ice – oh ya, lots of ice. My weather station recorded a 4 year low of -11.6 F on January 17th and note that the lows were -7.3 F, -9.5 F, and -11.6 F on the 15th through the 17th.

Greenhouse note, in the last week of January, the sun shines over the mountain and hits from 11:40 AM through 1:40 PM. More light begins to hit the west side of the greenhouse around 4 PM to 5 PM as the sun sets.

We had a significant snowstorm on January 28th with about 7” of new snow, but then it got ugly. Sleet followed into the evening then turned into all rain. The result was an 1/8” of ice coating on everything. Check out these ice photos of the greenhouse and a view through the east window looking through to the west window.

I have plans to grow about 35 varieties of tomatoes this year. That’s a huge jump, I know! But I’ve come to the conclusion that certain varieties are eye-catching & interesting such as Orange & red Strawberry-shaped tomatoes, the whole color spectrum of Zebras & Brandywines, and so on.

I believe that getting good seeds from these as well as great photos will make for a good business in January, 2010.

I guess January won’t be so bad in future years to come!

:)
Keith

Winter Sets In

Winter is truly here to stay. It's not even January and the seed catalogs are starting to roll in. It's a good time to spend indoors reading and leafing through seed catalogs anyway.
The good news is that from here on in, the days will slowly get longer. I'm keeping a watch on the new greenhouse for the first date that the sun will be high enough to flood the windows with light. My guess is somewhere around the first week of February.
I'm beginning to start planning the gardens of 2009 on paper. Never too early to start. Which leads me to close with the possible theme of 2009 - I'm guessing the year of the "Bean". 2007 was "squash" and 2008 was "Tomato."
:)

New Greenhouse

The new greenhouse is almost finished, but the hardest work is done. It was way more work than I had thought. The most unusual aspect of this project was that it was conceived on a pocket calculator and a dry-erase board in my garage. All measurements were based around some free windows that were given to me by a friend.

Ironically, the windows were the last piece of the puzzle, and I held my breath at the last few moments wondering if the windows would all fit into their place along that wall.



All went well, and this "unusual" greenhouse is unique for a very good reason; with the exception of a future tornado, this thing ain't going nowhere! It's sturdy, built on pressure treated stilts (with re bar spikes) sunk in concrete. I have never forgotten my previous attempt with a traditional greenhouse - only to have it blow away in a fantastic October windstorm. My neck of the woods has more weather extremes, so I have to overbuild.



I'm glad that this project is almost finished, as it really kept me from doing other things, such as keeping this blog updated. By the way, it has been on full year since I started this blog.

Here we go again!
:)

Garlic Planted

October is here and that means time to plant the garlic!
I figure I go through a bulb of garlic about every two weeks or so throughout the year. Thant means a year's supply is roughly 30 bulbs.

I ordered 5 bulbs from seed savers and also bought 5 from my grocery store to plant. In all, I got 60 cloves planted in hopes of getting at least 30 (hopefully more) healthy bulbs by next July.



In the process, I came up with a handy use for all of my un-used plastic lids from my cottage cheese & yougurt container (which I used to ferment my tomatoes). I cut two, 2 inch slits on the top & bottom of each lid, write info on the inside with a permanent marker and slide them over a 4 foot bamboo tomato stake to use as winter markers.



This entry is short but to the point. I'm just glad that the Garlic is in the ground and the bed is covered with straw!
:)

Ground Hog

A quick Google search turns up this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog
where you can find out all you'd ever want to know about this creature.

I've been spotting this Ground Hog all season around my yard. I always think of the movie "Caddy Shack" whenever I see him!

I finally got close enough to take photographs without scaring him away. He absolutely loves broccoli and bean plants (he's pictured here eating old broccoli from my garden out front).

I offer these photos both as a frustrated gardener, yet a happy photographer...

:)

September is almost gone...

September is almost gone...

It starts out looking like July, then goes right into fall mode. The gardens are spent. All tomatoes have been harvested as of last week. I’ve managed to save thousands of seeds from many varieties. That's the good news.

Now for the bad…
We had more severe weather move through the area back on Wednesday, September 3rd.

I was confused driving home that evening about 7pm because the visibility was poor due to heavy fog. Then I began to notice many leaves on the road – not branches from heavy winds, but thousands of green leaves.
When I pulled in to my drive, I got the answer as to why… HAIL!!

I was amazed to see my lawn covered with hail – mostly pea sized but even more amazed to see golfball-sized hail mixed in! This would explain the foggy conditions as the frozen hailstones melted into the humid summer air.

Some hail pictured here has bizarre shapes with frozen satellite peastones frozen around a quarter-sized stone. I never saw hail any bigger than pea-sized in all my years of living in New England. That makes for 3 total storms with hail this year.

Then I learned the horrible damage that hail does to the garden – good news here was that I already harvested the bulk of the tomatoes, so no damage to that crop. But I couldn’t believe the damage to my sunflowers…

The leaves looked like they were shot-up with machine guns!

One side of my porch looks like it got sandblasted for a new paint job!

Then we got hit with the remnants of “Hanna” back on Saturday, September 6th into Sunday.

My weather station reported 3.78 inches of rain fell in less than 12 hours. That made for some great photos of about 10 kayakers putting in at the bridge in front of my house!

I compared last year’s rainfall and found that in September of 2007 there was only 0.87” to this year’s 6.68” Making this one of the wettest Septembers ever.

:)

Tomato Seed Saving

Tomato Photos:

I began saving tomato seeds last weekend from a few varieties that were ready. I also made sure to set up my homemade camera light box for getting closeups of each tomato variety.

Dad's Compost Tomato, originally discovered in 2007, very good yeilds throughout the seeason.

Note: These seeds are very small and some will go right through a fine strainer!

"Crazy" tomato known for early cherries with large amounts on each vine.

The two photos above are "Early Wonder" which has a wonderful rosy-red coloring.

These two are of Striped Cavern. Bright orange stripes outside with its seeds looking almost like a strawberry in the center of the tomato - very tasty!

These are suppose to be "Super Snow White" but they grew to be a golden yellow here this season... Soil conditions?

These Alaska tomatoes were very impressive this year. Mostly golfball sized.

An interesting tomato plant "Ildi" is an early cold climate type with both round and pear-shaped fruit. Many heavy clusters on each plant.

And last for this post, Black From Tula. It's an odd thing to see growing in the garden, as the fruits look like they're going bad with their brownish-red color!

Saving Tomato Seeds:

Many people shy away from saving tomato seeds for three reasons; First, the fermentation process takes time and can be made overly complicated. Second, the fermentation stinks and will attract many fruit flies to that area! And third, many folks don't enjoy having redish-orange under their fingernails for a week after processing a few hundred tomatoes!



Ah, but I enjoy the whole thing. I've learned how to simplify the whole process and take any guesswork out of it. I'll outline the steps below:

1: Work outside, preferably on a sunny day to get the tomatoes nice and warm. You'll need a table, a large soup pan, a large strainer with big 1/4 inch sized holes, some containers to ferment the seeds in (I use plastic cottage cheese and yogurt containers) and most impotantly your garden hose with a nice strong shower nozzle setting.

2: Use a paring knife to score each tomato with an "X" on the bottom and squeeze the seeds through the strainer into the soup pan. Disgard the tomato skins off to the side. I tend to do about 10 to 20 tomatoes for each variety.




3: After all tomatoes have been seeded, take the hose and try to blast a bit through the strainer to force more seeds into the pan. Remove strainer and clean throroughly with the hose.

4: Spray a bunch more water into the seed pan and really mix things up with the pressure. Fill the pan up about half full and let settle for a few minutes.

5: Important thing to note - The good seed is settled to the bottom. With that in mind, take the soup pan off to the side and slowly tilt it to let the water run out. This is kinda like panning for gold, you want the good stuff to settle on the bottom while you dump the rest of the junk out of the top of the mix.

6: Dump the rest into plastic containers and be sure to have enough water to make the container 3/4 full. Be sure to label with permanent marker and place on a warm shelf to ferment for one week.




7: A week has zipped by and look at all of those happy fruit flies flying around those stinky, mold-covered tomato seeds! Using the same large soup pan, hold your nose and dump the moldy mess of fermented tomato seeds into the pan.

8: Use your trusty hose to fill the pan half way with water then do the same "panning for gold" technique of letting the junk pour off the top while the good seed will remain on the bottom.

9: Use a small strainer to catch all of the good seed and then spread the seeds onto a screen in the sunshine. Let the seeds dry out for about 4 to 6 hours in direct sun.


10: Use a spatula to get the semi-dried seeds off of the screen and place them onto wax paper. Never use paper towels! Once a tomato seed dries on a paper towel, it's impossible to get it off without taking some of the paper towel with it!


The seeds need to dry completely indoors. I use a specially built seed dryer which is surrounded by a protective galvanized mesh to make it mouse-proof. Depending on temperature and humidity, it can take months for seeds to dry completely - usually well into the wood burning season.


Happy Seed Saving!

:)