Raised Bed Bullet Biting

Last year I finally came to the conclusion that for me, raised beds will be a necessity :(  Too many moles/voles in my yard, and nothing I've done so far has kept them out or trapped them.  Too much tunneling through the garden and damaging the roots of just-planted transplants, and I got tired of every single allium being dragged down into underground tunnels, leaving nothing but a tiny hole above ground.   My solution:  a raised bed with 1/4" hardware cloth stapled to the bottom!

I used 8'x12"x1 pine boards, so that I would have enough depth for root crops.  Other types of wood might last longer, but then I wouldn't have been able to afford to do this at all.  As it is, I can only put in one new raised bed a year.  I will eventually have to put them on the double-dug in-ground beds as well, otherwise I won't be able to rotate crops effectively.  So far it seems to be working really well!

This is the best lettuce I've ever grown, and the Swiss chard has actually gotten past 8" high!  I still have a bunch of room - I'm going to see how carrots and onions do.  I know it's late to be planting onions, but I don't need them to be storage onions - I can eat them at whatever size they are when the season ends.  Lucky for me, Comstock, Ferre in Wethersfield was purchased by Baker Creek last year, so I now have a great source of heirloom seeds not ten minutes away!  No shipping charges!  So just because I could, and because this is CT, I bought seeds for Wethersfield Red onions, and Southport Globe onions.  I figure if they were named after towns in CT they should grow well here!

In other good garden news, I had much better luck with my soil-block-started seedlings than I have in the past.  I added more soil and vermiculite to the mix, and I didn't try and start as many seeds at once this year.  I have half as many tomato plants, but they are all much healthier.  I also think it doesn't hurt that I acquired a population of Red Wigglers that were living in the bag of topsoil I added last year, and they've been happily living in my dirt bin all winter.  Not true vermicomposting, but every once in a while I add some scraps to the bin.  I don't have a stinky mass of dead worms, so they must be doing OK :)

I also discovered that some tiny potatoes I had bought last year at the farmer's market and forgotten about had started putting out roots - so on a whim I planted a few of them.  First time growing potatoes - we'll see how they do.  Some of them are purple!

What was originally my Herb Bed is now starting to become the Perennial Herb Bed.  The oregano and thyme are getting really big, the chocolate mint I got last year is spreading, and some of my spearmint is still alive (what kind of soil kills mint?!).  The lavender I got last year will also get bigger as it gets older, so I think I'm going to mostly keep this bed for the perennials, and start planting my annual herbs in with the other plants in the raised beds. 

Of the ten raspberry canes my SIL gave me last summer, five managed to survive the winter and are putting up new canes.  I only had one new cane last summer (all the others were fruiting canes), so I didn't expect to get many berries this year.  Next year should be much better!

Even better, a lone strawberry plant hitch-hiked in with the raspberry canes, and is now sending out runners!  In another year or so I may have strawberries!  I would have had some this year, but something ate through the stem holding all the blossoms :( 

Saving the best for last, I finally got a blueberry bush this year!  I will need more, considering the rate at which my daughter will eat blueberries, but this is a start!  I'm planning on building some sort of PVC frame to drape netting over, to keep birds and bugs out after the berries have formed.

Every year things get a little better, and I get a little more actual food out of my garden.  I just need to plant rhubarb and start an asparagus patch, and I should be set for perennials.  Now if it will just stop with this raining-all-week and sunny-on-the-weekends so I can get some garden work done while my daughter is at school!

What's going on in the garden

 

Some of the raspberries are finally starting to come ripe - although I'll be lucky if I get to them before the critters do!

I have a guest on my sage

Some of my broccoli is ready to eat.  Unfortunately one plant doesn't give enough for a whole meal.  I guess I'll just have to eat this all by myself.  Darn!

And finally, I am starting to see tomatoes!

Yay for farmer's markets!

My local farmer's market opened for the season last week, and I finally got there today.  I know a lot of the vendors have seedlings, so I wait for the farmer's market to buy anything I haven't succeeded in propagating myself.  Here's today's haul of plants:

Three different types of basil, rosemary, chocolate mint (!), thyme to replace one of my plants that didn't survive the winter, and this year my favorite vendor, Chaplin Farms, has stevia plants!  The two stevia plants I started from seed last year were amongst the beetle casualties, and never made it past six leaves.

I also got beets, asparagus, rhubarb (crumble for dessert!), eggs, and milk and chevre from Sweet Pea.  Now I need to decide what else is for dinner tonight!  Maybe grilled chicken breast?

Greater Hartford Area Vegetable Gardens and Backyard Homesteading

This is my new Big Project.  I got tired of not having any Real Life people to talk to about gardening stuff.  Not that I have no one, but everyone I know who is really interested lives too far away to get together on a regular basis.  As in, usually, several states away.  I started looking for local gardening groups to join, but they all seemed more interested in flowers and landscaping.  Flowers are pretty, but I want to grow FOOD!  I decided to try and start my own.

It's a lot harder than you'd think.  Granted, I'm really only into my second day of trying to get the word out, but so far it's been terribly disheartening.  Stores don't let you put up signs in their windows like they used to.  A few have "community bulletin boards," but those are usually a) tucked away in a corner where no one notices them, and b) so crowded with other announcements that you'll be lucky if yours is noticed amongst all the visual noise.  the exceptions were Whole Foods, where they date-stamp all announcements and rotate them out when they get old; Starbucks, where they only allow non-profits to post, and it's right in the front of the store; and the public library, which has theirs in a glass case so they can decide whether the posting is appropriate.  Thankfully mine passed muster!

Here's what I'm aiming for:
I'd like to be able to get together with real people, in real life, on a semi-regular basis to discuss food gardening and related topics.  While I want the focus to remain on food production, I don't want things too narrow either.  There are a lot of subjects (sustainability, Peak Oil,reduced energy usage, Big Ag, conventional vs. organic, etc) that tend to lie on the fringes of backyard food production, and I expect anyone interested in this group will have opinions on one or more of these issues.  I'd like it to be a place we can discuss these ideas as well. 

I'm hoping to establish a community of gardeners who are willing to help each other out, not only with advice, but with the occasional "work party" for someone breaking ground on a new garden.  I'd also like to establish enough trust and goodwill within the group to feel comfortable sharing tools with people just starting out.  For example, I doubt I'd feel comfortable loaning my pressure canner to someone who posted an ad on Craigslist, but I'd be happy to lend it to a member of a group I was part of.  Someone might have a rototiller they only use once a year, or a Weed Whacker they don't need on a particular weekend.  Sharing material resources like this will help us all.


Finally, I would like to give something back to the community.  There are many low-income families where the adults have jobs, and finding the time to install a garden and learn how to tend it may be out of their reach.  I see this as the classic "Teach a man to fish" opportunity.  These families may not have time to install a garden on their own, but they would probably have time to tend one if they had help setting it up.  This would provide almost-free healthy food to the people who need it most.  Also, there are many disabled people who think that their disability prevents them from growing their own food.  I'd like us to eventually be able to help plan and install appropriate gardens (e.g. wheelchair-height raised beds) for people who thought they couldn't have one, and to help with regular maintenance (weeding, watering, etc) to those who have gardens already, but whose health conditions now prevent them from maintaining them.

I've never done something like this before, so I really hope someone who knows more than I do about establishing a non-profit will join and help out!  In the meantime I'm just trying to get exposure.  I've set up a Facebook page and a YahooGroup, and even though my primary goal is to make local Real Life connections, I also recognize the value of long-distance online participation, discussion, and advice, so I hope people will join the online groups just to talk gardening and local food production!  I'll have links to both groups in the sidebar of the blog.  Any help I can get in making this an active community, both online and IRL will be greatly appreciated!

Garden update (finally!)

I feel like I've gotten surprisingly little accomplished in the last few weeks.  This is partly because I had my annual booth at the Westville Artwalk this past Saturday (which I will talk about in my other blog), and spent the two weeks prior eating, sleeping & breathing jewelry.  No time for much garden stuff (for me) at the end of April.

I have managed to plant out everything I had started under lights, including the tomatoes, which I put out a couple of weeks earlier than I did last year.  They're still very small, but for the most part they look green and healthy.  I can't wait til they get a little bigger - the squirrels keep burying them!  Eventually I will fence in the open side of the garden.  It won't keep out any truly determined squirrels, but it will deter the ones that are just casually wandering into the garden in search of goodies.

My broccoli is doing beautifully!  I expect to have a lot more of it this year.  It's the one garden vegetable that I can count on everyone enjoying, so I'm trying to plant more of it.  I may even try for a fall crop this year.

The mizuna and lettuces i've planted alre coming along nicely, but I really need to start some more.  I sowed some carrots a week or so ago, but no sign of them so far.  I have terrible luck with carrots, but I keep trying!  I'll get it eventually.

The long spate of rainy weather we had really slowed down my efforts to dig up new beds.  So far I've only finished two of the six new beds I've got planned.  Now that the craft show is over I should be able to devote more of my dry weather time to digging up sod.  That said, I'm devoting a lot of my child-free time to another major project lately, but that's going to be another post.

The herb bed is still looking a little sparse.  The mint has popped up in at least three different places, and I'm going to have to decide which one I'm going to keep.  The thyme is coming along slowly, but the oregano is going great guns!

 Last year I planted four shiso plants.  I didn't bother to start any this spring because I was told they reseed easily.  Apparently this is correct.  All these little seedlings with heart-shaped leaves are shiso!  I'm going to have to thin them aggressively - I only had four plants last year, and that was more than I needed!

Tripling the size of my garden

This will be the fourth year for my vegetable garden.  Every year I learn something new about what works and what doesn't.  I'm getting a better feel for what vegetables it's worth my while to plant and which ones aren't.  For example, even though everyone in the house likes peas, it takes up more space than it's worth to me to plant more than one or two meals worth.

One of my goals with this garden has been to grow and preserve my own tomatoes.  It's been slow work trying to figure out how many plants I need to get the harvest I want.  It didn't help that the first year I had tomatoes in the garden was the year of the Awful Tomato Blight, making it difficult to separate my mistakes from other problems.  Last year I came to the conclusion that I just needed a bigger garden.  Yesterday we had a rare combination of warm weather, and my son having a half-day while my daughter did not, so I had extra help rearranging the garden fence!  The new fence arrangement will give me about three times the garden space!

 The bottom right corner with all the dead leaves is the old garden space.  You can see the fence near the house - this is all now new garden space!  I'm going to spend most of this afternoon measuring out and removing sod from the new plots.

One of my beds has morphed into a perennial herb plot.  I cleared last years leaves away, and look what I found!

Oregano

Thyme

Sage

I didn't harvest any of these last year because the plants weren't that well-established.  It looks like at the very least I'll be able to start using my oregano soon!

I have green growing things!

OK they're very tiny green growing things - but that's fine!  I finally got my broccoli started last week!  Thanks to Erin at garden now - think later! who sent me a ton of seeds, I will have three types of broccoli this year!  I now have Waltham and Purple Sprouting, in addition to the Calabrese Green Sprouting I already had.

I'm trying my soil-blocker again.  The seedlings I planted in soil blocks last year didn't do so well.  They sprouted and stayed green, but didn't ever grow to a useful size.  My best guess is that I compacted the blocks too firmly in my efforts to get them to hold together.  I think the perlite I used in the soil-blocker-mix was a little too coarse (it was the only grade they had!), and also in my attempt to downscale the "recipe" (I did not need 40 bushels of mix!) I may not have added enough dirt.  This year I added another bag of potting soil to my soil-blocker mix.

Because I only have one light, and I can only fit two trays under it, last year I was doing my germination in a third tray with a heat mat, but no lights.  I started compacting the soil blocks more when the ones with sprouted seeds started to fall apart when I tried to move them to the lighted trays.  This year I decided to skip the third tray (for now) and put the heat mat/tray directly under the lights.  Now I don't have to move sprouted blocks when their neighbors are still "cooking."  When it comes time to move them into larger containers, we'll see how well they handle being moved!

This Thursday we're supposed to get into the 60's!  There's no rain forecast right now, so that's when I'm going to attempt to rearrange my garden fence to give me a couple of new beds.  Wish me luck!

Look Ma! No BER!

 
I may actually get tomato sauce this year!  I don't have enough plants to have big, all-at-once harvests, so these guys are being cored, seeded, and frozen as they come ripe a few at a time.  The other plus side to this method is that by the time I have enough tomatoes for a big batch of sauce, it'll probably be September, and (one would hope) much cooler!

Sadly, I may have to give up on the pickles.  It's taken three years, but I can no longer avoid the fact that trying to plant cucumbers as a succession crop in New England is doomed to failure.  Powdery mildew will hit at roughly the same time every year, no matter what I do to prevent or stop it.  If I want pickles, I really need to get my cucumbers into the ground as early as possible.  It's the only way I'll get a good crop before the cucumbers start to look like this:

I'll try again next year!

Finally getting some good garden news!

My cucumbers are doing brilliantly!  I picked two today and had them for lunch, along with some of my grape tomatoes.  I'm trying to anticipate when enough of them will be big enough for pickling.  At the moment I'm aiming for sometime between Friday and Tuesday (understanding that Weekends Don't Count.  I can't get anything done on weekends) for making the first batch of pickles!

My Roma tomatoes are finally starting to turn red - and so far the blossom-end rot is still at a manageable level!  I plan on turning these into tomato sauce, so I'm going to experiment with freezing them as they come ripe so that I'll have enough for a big batch I can put up.  I figure it's mostly the texture that suffers when you refrigerate/freeze tomatoes, and I'm going to be cooking them anyway, so it may not really make much difference in the long run.  Anyone who's tried this and has an opinion please chime in!

In other better news, the Garden Beetle season seems to mostly be over, and my herbs are trying hard to stage a valiant comeback!  Of my nine purple basil plants I think I truly lost three of them.  The other six look much like this one, so I may yet get pink, basil-scented vinegar this year!

There will be pickles!

...Eventually :)  First cucumber blossom of the season!  I admit, I started late.  My garden is pretty small, so I had to wait until the peas were done before I could plant cucumbers.  The upside is that I was able to direct-seed them instead of starting them indoors, so no transplant shock.  Last year's cucumbers were a bust - they got hit with hail and never quite recovered.  This year looks much more promising!

My grape tomatoes are finally ripening, so I have more salad fixings.  The romas are sizing up nicely, and I finally have one starting to turn red!  So far I have not had anywhere near as much trouble with blossom-end rot, but it's still early.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed - I want tomato sauce!

On the flip-side- this is all that's left of my purple basil :(  They've also gone through my tarragon and my sage.  The stevia never really had a chance, it got eaten up when it was so small.  They have gone on to my mint and my shiso now - the only plant that's still mosty OK is the oregano.  They're even eating my marigolds!

 At least I've finally figured out who's doing this - it's these little buggers here -

The Asiatic Garden Beetle.  A lot like Japanese beetles, but nocturnal, and not so picky.  Apparently they're endemic in New England.  They're controlled in much the same way, also.  Unfortunately I found out about them too late in the season for nematodes to be any use, and I understand that milky spore is not very effective in the Northeast.  At this point traps and handpicking are about the only solution.  I'm pretty much giving up the herbs for lost this year :(  I'll have to get some nematodes between now and the spring, and with luck I can get this infestation under control within the next year or two!

Bugs or Slugs?

Somebody...

is exceedingly fond...

of my basil and sage!

I have yet to catch the perps red-handed, so I'm not quite sure who I'm dealing with here.  I've had slug bait out in some areas for a while, and I'm trying the soapy water trick, but it's too soon to see if it's made a difference.  Anyone have any idea who could be doing this and what's the best way to combat it?  

My garden looks nekkid!

My peas are all done for the season :(  The plants are now in the compost getting ready to provide nitrogen for next year's garden, and I have planted my pickling cukes where the peas used to be.  I know I could have had cucumbers out much earlier, but I didn't have room!  I really need a much bigger garden.

Last year my cucumbers did not grow past 8" tall.  Some of that may have had to do with the hailstorm we got in June, but it was such an off year for gardens it's hard for me to know which failures were mine and which were Mother Nature.  At any rate, I figured since cucumbers grow quickly I might as well direct-seed them this year and avoid potential transplant issues (and things like forgetting to turn the lights on or off!), and so far they seem to be doing well!

I'm hoping to get at least 6mos worth of pickles out of these - maybe a year if I'm really lucky!

Soil blocks: Not an unqualified success :(

I got a soil block maker at the beginning of seed-starting season(which is February around here), hoping to get the convenience of peat pellets without the added expense.  So far I've had mixed results.

Most of my seeds germinated just fine in the soil blocks, but shortly after gaining their first or second set of true leaves they seem to have stopped growing.  These were planted sometime in March - I'd think the plants would be a lot bigger by now!

I've heard that if you pack your soil blocker too tightly the roots have trouble penetrating.  My first few blocks were loose enough that I had trouble moving them without crumbling, so I packed the next set more firmly.  There's no way for me to know what's too tight or too loose except trial and error.  It's also possible I might not have watered them enough - or I might have watered them too much!  I hate it when diametrically opposed actions result in the exact same symptoms!  I've tried potting some of them up and attempting to loosen the soil a little, but so far it doesn't seem to have made much difference. 

So far the broccoli I started at the end of February hasn't gone much past this stage here.  I planted them out in hopes that being in the ground would encourage them - I'll let you know if it works. 

My sage, on the other hand, was planted in a peat pellet, and is going gangbusters, along with several other varieties of herbs.


I'm not all that upset, because I knew that soil blockers had a bit of a learning curve.  At the most I'm annoyed at the prospect of not having some of my longer-growing veggies (namely broccoli and eggplant) this year.  I'm probably not going to have time to try and start the eggplants again if these fail to thrive, but I can start more broccoli seedlings for a fall planting.  I think next year I'll stick to the peat pellets for these, and experiment with the soil blocks for plants that grow faster, so that I have time to try again if I don't get it right the first time.

Back again!

I know, I have been terribly remiss!  It's been ages since I updated this blog.  Nothing very interesting has been going on, and the light hasn't been good for photos.  Now, however, it's gardening time again! Yet again I have way too many seedlings and can't fit them all under my lights.

 At least a good number of them are cool weather crops, and I'm finally starting to get them into the ground, thus making room for the new seedlings.  I finally got a heating mat for my germination flat, and that's made a huge difference in my success rate with some of my warmer weather plants!  Peppers and basil especially have had much better germination rates for me this year.  I hope the growing season continues to be this successful once I get them in the ground!

I'm trying several new plants this year!  In addition to lettuce I've got Swiss chard and spinach in the ground!  My broccoli seedlings aren't quite big enough yet, so it'll be another couple of weeks before I can plant them out.

I've also got a whole bunch of herbs going this year that I didn't have last year.  I get really tired of swapping places between not having fresh herbs on hand when I need them, and buying them so I have them but not using them up quickly enough.  I really hope that I'll have planted enough basil this year, and that it does better than it did last year! 

My mint is coming up nicely, and much to my surprise and delight I discovered that two of my parsley plants survived the winter!  Yay!  I had piled all our dead leaves into the garden last fall, instead of bagging them, and I suspect that's what did it. 

My peas seem to be doing nicely as well!  This is what the first shoots looked like a few weeks ago . . .

and here is what they look like now!

I'm very much looking forward to fresh peas in a few weeks, and I'm definitely looking forward to mid-late May, when I can start planting out everything else!