April 2013

This has been a warm and dry April as compared to most. I'm not complaining though! I have gotten seeds planted very early in the season for the first time ever, as well as getting all of my spring plantings of yellow onions and red shallots into the ground.

I also planted some new things like Salsify, Rutabaga, Parsnip, and Beets.

Seeds Started

Bridge work has commenced in front of my house so this season will be challenging. Last week the workers moved my beloved greenhouse from out front to out back! The 24 foot tomato table garden was also dismantled and moved next to the greenhouse.

The good news is that they purposely kept the greenhouse pointed in the same direction which maximizes sunlight and I can use it as it is temporarily resting on blocks.

The workers were also nice enough to pull the huge remaining willow tree (that fell during tropical storm Irene in 2011) away from its precarious perch dangling over the brook. They even cut it up into logs that I will work on once the weather warms up.

Speaking of firewood, the tree guys were nice enough to let me keep these logs that were cut along the areas of the two bridges being rebuilt. It's a few years worth easily!

All of the tomato seeds are started. These are some of my 2010 saved seeds from a few of my favorite varieties: Better Boy, Campari, Dad's Compost, Delicious, Orange Roma and Taxi. I ordered new hybrids from Totally Tomatoes strictly based on their extreme disease resistance: Bella Rosa, Celebrity, Charger, Goliath and multi-color Cherry (free gift with my order).

Over here, I have my hot peppers and herbs planted. The herbs are: Agrimony, Chinese Jujube, Lemon Basil, Lime Basil, and Rosemary. I also got some rare seeds (10) of Jiaogulan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum) which I hope to grow for tea. The peppers are: Ancho Grande and Beaver Dam - both ordered on Amazon from Seeds Direct. I ordered peppers from Totally Tomatoes: Biggie Chile and Cayenne Purple (free gift).

I decided to use 3 inch cells to start my onions this season. I simply added seeds by sprinkling them haphazardly about 20 seeds per cell and sprayed them with water and barely covered them with soil. My attempt at growing onions in 2012 failed - mainly because I was going about it very wrong from the beginning. Last year I grew them under the fluorescent lights along with the tomatoes and peppers - BIG MISTAKE! Onions (especially northern varieties) are all about sunlight and day length. My poor onions of 2012 must have been very confused... 2013's onions will be exposed only to sunlight.

March is winding down and soon all of this snow will be history. The sun is notably stronger, more intense now and it's only going to get better in April.
:)

Garlic and Shallots

February is the right time to order new varieties of garlic. As of 2013, I have the following:

California Early

Chopaka Mountain

German Extra Hearty

German Red

Inchelium Red

Japanese Porcelain

Musik

Red Grain

Romanian Red

Siberian

Silver Rose

I'm up to 11 different garlic varieties as of this season and will expand to 21 in 2014. Growing garlic takes a bit of optimism; you have to envision the future. The garlic I order in February, 2013 won't be delivered until early October, 2013 for the fall planting. These new varieties will sprout in early April, 2014.

My favorite place to order garlic is Filaree Garlic Farm located in Okanogan, Washington. This year I have 10 more varieties ordered:

Ajo Rojo

Asian Tempest

Bogatyr

Chinese Purple

Creole Red

Korean Mountain

Lithuanian Purple

Oregon Blue

Skuri

Xian

-------------------------------------------

February is also a great time to order shallots. I decided to go with Gurney's Seed & Nursery this season and ordered 2 pints (approximately 140). Each individual shallot that I plant will yield 3 to 6 more in late summer; so if I get a conservative average yield of 4 x 140 = 560! 

I also ordered Gurney's Whopper Strawberry plants (50) and will dedicate one of the mesa gardens to be exclusively for these berries. It should prove to be an interesting experiment.

For some strange reason, my Amaryllis loves to bloom in late February - and this year, it has a triple flower stalk which should be full of many blooms into the first couple of weeks in March.

:)

Indoors Stuff

January finds me indoors as much as possible. I read all of the seed catalogs and begin my first orders in mid-January. So far, I've ordered from two websites: Totally Tomatoes & Richter's. I was pleasantly surprised at how fast both seed companies filled my orders. I received both orders in the last week of January, 2013.

This year, I've decided to buy tomato varieties that a highly disease resistant because I'm sick of watching my heirloom plants get clobbered by splotches, rots, and blights just when they peak in late July and August.

I'm also going to focus more on herbs this season. The mesa gardens seem to be the optimum location for working with herbs. Of course, this is all hypothetical - I'll see how it goes this time around.

The kitties sleep blissfully on the couch in front of the TV, basking in the wonderful warmth set forth from the wood stove that cheerfully burns the hardwoods throughout the bone-chilling January freezing nights.

A Long Winters Nap

December was mild at first and pretty much snow-free up until the last week. About an inch of snow fell on Christmas Eve and this is what the garlic garden looked like on Christmas Day.

It appears as if the garlic is all snuggled in beds of straw, covered in a blanket of snow and resting blissfully for a long winters nap. Additional snow will only further help as extra insulation from temperature fluctuations in the soil.

The bountiful herb garden is in dormancy right now. And although I made late season strides to harvest the mints and oregano, I'm already running out! I should have started harvesting the oregano in July once every two weeks because it's the first herb that I tend to run out of in December due to my spaghetti sauce addiction. Damn.

Speaking of dormant, the greenhouse solemnly sits quietly under its own blanket of snow. No sunshine will grace the front windows until late January due to the surrounding mountains. It too sleeps.

The mesa gardens are covered with almost a foot of snow as of December 29th. Good news about the snow is that I can start feeding the birds without worrying about Mrs. Bear and Mr. Raccoon raiding and destroying the feeders. So while the garlic, greenhouse and mesas are asleep, the birds are awake and giving life to an otherwise lifeless landscape.

All Garlic Has Been Planted!

All of the bunches of German Extra Hearty garlic (10 stalks each) 

that have been hanging in the rafters

since early August were taken down on November 3, 2012.

The hardest part about raising garlic is just before the new planting goes in.

Each stalk needs to be cut with pruning sheers about an inch above the bulb.

Then the roots need to be cut with scissors, all the while 

removing the outer dried dirt and outer skins. 

The result is a drastic improvement in appearance and 

it now resembles what you would buy at the supermarket.

There were 16 bundles kept separate for planting in November,

for a total of 160 bulbs pictured in the box above.

Believe it or not, this all that I would have to plant to get the same 

160 bulbs that you saw hanging in the rafters in August.

Since each bulb has 4 cloves, I only need 40 bulbs 

out of the 160 to match last year's total harvest!

However, not all of the 160 bulbs are worthy of going into the garden.

These are the smallest of the lot which are for my kitchen!

On November 4, 2012, I did final rotor-tilling(s) for the season.

 I spent about an hour braking-up all of the garlic 

bulbs into cloves for today's planting.

I almost ran out of room... I had 408 cloves to plant and it 

took up a lot of space!

I outlined my impromptu, L-shaped row in the photo. 

The row is 50 feet long with 5 cloves in width.

Not quite the 500 I was hoping to plant, but with over 200 

more of the 10 other varieties, I'm looking at a very busy season in 2013!

October Comes and Goes

I began planting the new varieties of garlic back on October 21, 2012. 

I've added 7 more this year and grew out 3 new one's from the 2011 planting

The 10 new varieties are listed below:

California Early

Chopaka Mountain

German Red

Inchelium Red

Japanese Porcelain

Musik

Red Grain

Romanian Red

Siberian

Silver Rose

I've never planted garlic in this section of garden before. 

I planted sweet clover as a spring cover crop and tilled it in late October.

I start out small with only about 3 bulbs per variety. 

The first year will only allow me to plant 1 to 2 dozen cloves depending on the variety.

What fascinates me is the process of "growing out" each type of garlic. 

The yields increase exponentially over  the years:

Year 1 = 12

Year 2 = 48

Year 3 = 192

Year 4 = 768

Year 5 = 3,072

I am in year 4 with my German Extra Hearty.

It's still hanging from the rafters over the firewood.

I plan to select 500 of the largest cloves for planting this year.

11 varieties of garlic and adding more each season!

September comes & goes...

The summer was dry. The new fall season seems to be normal as far as rain in concerned.

I began the month of September during the full blue moon of August by selecting the best peppermint, spearmint and oregano from my herb garden. I let these dry for 2 weeks and then bottled them in recycled spaghetti sauce jars for the long winter.

Here's how they looked on September 9, 2012 after drying for a week and a half.

On September 16, 2012 I heard noises in the woods through my open windows. Turns out, turkeys are noisey creatures as they make their way through the woods! I photographed these guys from my 2nd story window. They were pecking away at the grasses as they moved down my lawn.

As the Old Farmer's Almanac has told me in earlier years, Mare's Tails seen in September means that the first snow flakes will fall within 4 to 6 weeks time... This was taken on September 19, 2012.

:)
EBG.

Mesa Gardening in August

The summer of 2012 is continuing to be very dry with only a few days of showers. This is not a typical New England summer. If it were a normal year, rainy days would string together at 2 to 4 days of constant clouds with light drizzle and occasional showers. Not in 2012! I have to be ever vigilant with nightly watering of the table gardens.

Above is a self-portrait which will be the cover photo for my up and coming book (scheduled for release in 2013). You saw it here first! I was able to set-up the tripod and set my Fuji camera to "face recognition" mode which snaps photos automatically as I made different poses. I love technology!

Ah ha! This is why I have created my Mesa Gardens. Note the Ground Hog / Wood Chuck / Whistle Pig in the foreground. Also note how the table gardens are thriving 3 feet above this ugly creature's head - unmolested by the a fore mentioned pig.

Here's a closer look. Have you ever seen such an ugly ground chuck pig? Sorry you had to see it so up close...

The trick to a successful zucchini hunt is to approach the plant as quietly as possible. You don't want to frighten the zucchini - you want to befriend it. The big ones can get startled and run away, making your gardening efforts all for not. So go s-l-o-w and make no sudden movements whilst approaching the largest zucchini.

Yes, I'm a choosy mother, so I like JIF peanut butter, but that's not important right now... Check out this beauty! This was the trophy zucchini that I snuck-up on and bagged with not much of a struggle. It weighed - in at 1 lb. 13 oz. and was cut into round slices and wedges which were put into freezer bags for freezing.

I'm posting this page for now, but I want to edit more photos taken in the month of August and add to this later. Look forward to more stuff in the coming week!

:)
Keith

More Mesa Gardens Built!

I'm happy to report that my Mesa Garden project has been very successful thus far. The only drawback is that the constant construction has made me wait very late into July to actually set out transplants. I'll start here with the Mesa in front of the greenhouse. This was taken on July 4, 2012.

This was my first free standing Mesa and the beans are doing well.

I decided it was about time I set out some signs to let the furry bastards know that I mean business!

On July 12, 2012, my Maximilian Sunflowers were in bloom at the end of my driveway.

Now I have three Mesa Gardens at the front of the house. Each one is 8 feet by 2 feet.

I am amazed at how much can fit into a relatively small area. The best part is that there is no bending or kneeling - all transplants were a breeze to put out, all I had to do was stand and work at table height!

Watering is easy too. It only takes 10 minutes a night after the relentless sun goes down.

The following week I tackled my most ambitious Mesa structure (so far) by building a 24 foot long base in three 8 foot sections. This will be accommodating my heirloom tomato collection.

I then built three 8 foot by 16 inch soil beds out of fur strips and 2x3s.

I dread the digging part of each garden, but 14 holes later, I'm ready to level and set the legs. Note that I omitted 2 legs on the last 2 sections.

This saved wood and I was able to temporarily clamp the sections during the initial set up. I simply drilled pilot holes into the 2x3s and used nails to connect the last two sections once the legs were set & secure.

Now that I've learned that putting poultry fence around a garden is a useless defense... (good one!)
I'm recycling the fencing, using it as my base in conjunction with the black weed guard to hold the soil in place.

Each 8 foot section gets 5 cubic feet of soil. I made the legs shorter because the average tomato plant can be 5 to 6 feet tall. I will have to later install a fence because whistle pigs can and will climb!

I added a 3 foot tall wall for the tomatoes to be tied up and allowed to climb. I can make it 3 feet taller when needed. Those funny looking flowers in the front row are called Balsam Flower a.k.a. Touch Me Not.

Hey, you Ground Hogs -- Any questions?

This is what the front of the greenhouse looked like on July 15, 2012. The cucumbers are being trained to climb up the jute netting that I created earlier in the season.

Close up of a cucumber blossom.

Close up of a zucchini blossom.

Close up of Ruby lettuce.

Side view of greenhouse Mesa Garden.

On July 22, 2012 I harvested the garlic in the cool of the morning. I filled the trailer with just over 250 plants.

At this point, it's best just to shake-off the dirt (don't wash them) they need to be tied in bunches of 10 and hung in the hot, dry rafters to cure.

That's me, hanging the garlic in the rafters of the breezeway!

These can be hung until the October planting day or can be used in as little as 2 weeks.

I didn't bother hanging the smallest of the bulbs. I cut the necks to 1 inch and trimmed the roots and they can cure in this basket. I will use these in my daily cooking.

The pumpkin plant in my cedar mesa needs a bit of gentle persuasion... so I tied a small block of a 2x3 to help train it to grow down and away from the beans.

The onion sets that were planted this season had a rough year due to heavy rains in May (over 5 inches) and then no significant rain to speak of since then. The dry of July did them in with most of the tops dried to nothing, so I had to dig them up today. Most are about the size of a golf ball - still very usable!

This was the first year I ever tried to grow shallots. Apparently, you plant one and it morphs into three! These were the only ones ready today, I should have many more in a week or two.

:)