Startup 2012

I love having all of my garden stuff over here at a separate blog. Classify stuff? Yes, that's me.

Anyway, we got a little later start on the garden than last year, and after seeing the late frosts that we've gotten, I'd say it's a good thing. We thought we had lost some tomatoes and eggplants to a frost a couple of weeks ago. But when we went to plant more tomatoes yesterday, we discovered that though the plants had lost a few leaves, apparently the roots were okay, because they were putting out new growth. We only lost one plant, so New Daddy went back to Home Depot to return four tomato plants.

Here are the current totals in the garden:
Tomatoes
4 Better Boy
4 Mountain Pride
2 Roma
2 Cherokee Purple (heirloom)
1 Mortgage Lifter (heirloom)
1 yellow cherry

Peppers
2 yellow
2 red

Eggplant
2 Ichiban- thin, Asian variety


Because we have chickens and a dog who like to get into things, we have fenced the whole garden off with wire fencing and chicken wire. And it's the perfect structure for our Rattlesnake beans and pickling cucumbers to grow on. So those will be all around the edge of the garden- and hopefully very accessible. We'll be planting those seeds on Thursday and Friday, the next two good planting days this week.

Before we put down cardboard and straw for the same weed/moisture control as last year, New Daddy made a trip to Back to the Garden to buy beautiful, black, organic compost. The trailer-load cost $100, which, given the quality of the compost, was a good price. In March, I heard a talk on composting and learned that the reason our eggshells and plant matter weren't compost was because our tumbler didn't have enough water in it. I've started adding more water, so maybe we'll have better success. There have been lots more flies in the compost lately, so that should start some good worm-action. This year, our composter did not provide enough compost to sufficiently amend our 18 x 40-foot plot of mostly red clay. Maybe I can get things more active this year, and we'll have several usable batches by next year. For this year, Back to the Garden was a huge help.

Before another tilling, we also added lime to the soil where the tomatoes were going to be planted. I think New Daddy tilled the garden a total of three times this year! Good thing he got a self-propelled tiller a couple of years ago. It went pretty quickly.

I'll try to get a camera outside and edit this post with a picture. I really like how the fencing and straw make the garden look neat. We can actually mow around it and keep the edges confined this year!

To-plant list for Thursday and Friday:
rattlesnake pole beans
okra
squashes- with diatomaceous earth in the planting hole to prevent boring worms?

A little finality

We've been having some frosty nights from the storm system that dumped an October snow on the Northeast. Before the frosts came, we picked half a bushel of tomatoes. At least, I know that it filled our half-bushel peach basket. The tomatoes ripened quickly in the warm kitchen, and tonight, I made a huge batch of marinara sauce in the 8-quart stockpot. Delicious- even better than home-canned marinara, is the fresh sauce made from freshly-ripe tomatoes.

Looking back at the varieties of tomatoes that we planted, I have to say that I would love to see more heirloom "Mountain Pride" in our garden next year. We got beautiful fruit from that vine, when most of the "Better Boys" gave us split skins and rotten spots. Granted, we should have supplemented the soil with more lime, but the "Mountain Pride" didn't seem to mind the deficiency at all. This discovery alone justifies this blog- to look back on what we did, to figure out what works for next time!

We realized that all of the cherry tomato plants were "too much of a good thing." We were overrun with them all summer. Even after our fall gathering-spree, the vines are still full of fruit. Two vines, maximum, will provide all of the fruit this family can reasonably consume.

I'm still pondering the squash borer conundrum. We lost our squash and zucchini plants early in the season, which left a hole between our tomato rows. This gave Rosie ample opportunity to do what Great Pyrenees do well: dig holes. Since then, the chickens have spent a good bit of time in the garden, scratching up cardboard and eating pests. Did they get the borers? At least we know better than to plant the squash in that spot next year.

And watermelons. We won't be wasting our time on those for the third year in a row. We are not watermelon-growing people. Watermelon-eating, yes. But not -growing. End of that discussion.

Garden + puppy

We had some significant rain last night, and the morning has been drizzly and cool. I took the gorgeous weather as a sign that I should pick beans that were desperately needing harvesting.


The thing that made this all so fun, though, besides the mystic cloudiness, was that I had our new pup bounding along with me, chewing on cardboard, pepper stems (she even picked a bell pepper for me!), and the discarded beans that I should have picked weeks ago. Having my canine companion along made this morning's garden work that much more enjoyable.

And I came in with a very full, 2-gallon bowl of beans.

Pictures of the garden on my Picasa

The 100-Tomato Kitchen

The countertop is telling me that it's time to make marinara sauce... not to mention the windowsill...

Bringing it in

After last night's much-needed rains, my lazy-gardener self finally went out and picked kale. And while I was out there, I found our first zucchini! The tomatoes have tons of whiteflies, and I'm putting out a trap soon. I hope it works.

Another recent garden event is that New Daddy has installed drip-irrigation on a timer for the hanging strawberries, herbs, and elderberry bushes. All of these plants are much happier, now! We put the spinach container under the strawberries, since the strawberries tend to drip a good bit when they get watered. There... no waste!

A sink-full, plus!

The lone zucchini. There will be more!

We bought all of our plants last weekend. Thankfully, we didn't have enough time to put them in the ground just before a huge storm and a frost warning. Instead, they spent the night snuggled up against our house, away from the hail and the frost. Today, we're going to get them in the ground. Here's what's going in today.

2 elderberry bushes
8 Better Boy tomatoes
2 heirloom tomatoes ("Mountain Pride" and "Yellow Pear")
3 cherry tomatoes
4 bell peppers
spinach
leeks
rattlesnake pole beans: three 18-foot rows. (we like green beans)
kale
straight neck squash
spaghetti squash
French breakfast radishes
watermelon "Congo"
cucumber
beets "bull's blood"
okra- not Clemson Spineless. Instead, a lighter-colored variety that doesn't get tough as it gets larger. I have no idea what the name is.
burgundy okra, because it makes pink water when you pickle it!
herbs- cilantro, rosemary, basil, borage

New Daddy also wanted to grow strawberries in a topsy-turvy container, so one of those is hanging from the kids swing set. Berries are already coming out on it!

Time to rev 'er up

Can you believe that I still have one tomato from our garden still ripening on my kitchen counter? We had a bumper crop of green tomatoes before our late freeze last year, and I'm just now finishing them up. We still have a decent supply of okra and kale in the chest freezer, and I still have two jars of homemade marinara sauce in the pantry.

There's nothing more wonderful than an early Spring in the South. Two weeks ago, New Daddy tilled our 18' x 40' plot. The following week, we started implementing our new weed control plan, based on Debi Pearl's garden instructions in this video. We made two trips to Walmart to get cardboard boxes and another trip to the feed store for hay to hold the boxes down. We had a pretty wild thunderstorm this week, and the boxes stayed put. Yessss!

I think this year's weed control system will be far more effective than the nasty weed "fabric" that we laid down in gapped rows last year. The weeds took over the gaps, and I lost the battle.

In other news, Precious has asked for her own garden plot. Also, I'm looking forward to growing an heirloom variety of okra that doesn't toughen as it grows. Not Clemson spineless, I tell you!

Thus the cycle restarts...