The Flax Plot

Thursday was spent in the garden. The pound of "Lisette" flax seeds I bought from Landis Valley Farm went into the approx 150 square foot plot.

Since it is hard to weed flax once it gets more than a few inches tall I wanted to reduce the weed seed load as much as possible in this area. Over the last two weeks I hoed it four times in hopes that a large number of weed seeds would germinate and then be butchered. This is my first planting of flax and it will be interesting to see how this progresses.

Happy Father's Day!

This is the first Father's Day I have ever picked tomatoes!

Last year I thought I was lucky to pick tomatoes in mid July. These little Bumble Bee tomatoes are delicious and apparently very early. I started them from seed in February and they were flowering when I planted them. The ones we had last year from Rodale were a little bigger, but we shall see as the season progresses. And the snow peas are just beginning as well.

My hubby is having fun with his Father's Day present, a pressure washer, and washing our camping trailer with the youngest.

It looks soooo much better after just a rinse.

Finally, Back in the Garden

This past week was the first week of some real garden work. First things first; I bought a nice weed mat for the large paths and put that down. I always battle with the weeds in the paths; and last year was the first year where I actually came out slightly ahead after putting down a high grade landscape fabric. Now I found a really heavy duty mat that should work even better.
Then I transplanted most of my onion seedlings,

planted some snap peas,

and transplanted and mulched a lot of cauliflower and broccoli plants.

The rhubarb and garlic are looking very nice this year.

I now have seven rhubarb plants. Maybe this year I will have enough to do everything I want with rhubarb.

Spring is Coming!

Mid February can be a dreary time, but then you get to start seeds. Today was all about seeds. I got all the seeds organized into what needs to be planted/started when. I also made up the seed starting mix from Eliot Coleman's Market Gardener book.  Nothing like working with peat moss and vermiculite and water to feel like spring.

I planted two large flats of onion seeds and a pack of leek seeds. I think alliums are my favorite veggie to grow for transplanting.  I also started some broccoli and cauliflower and a couple of tomato seeds. Last year I spent too much money on two grafted Cherokee Purple tomato plants that were supposed to be blight resistant. The only reason they were better was that they were bigger/older. The grafted tomatoes gave us tomatoes a good couple of weeks before the regular plants but I think it was only because they had a big head start. Once the blight hit they were worse than the regular tomato plants. I planted a few seeds of German Stripe and Pink Bumblebee to grow out into big pots to see if I can get some earlier tomatoes. Years ago I grew Siberian tomatoes and they gave us tomatoes about two weeks sooner but I wasn't thrilled with the taste. My daughter grew the Bumblebee varieties at Rodale last year and they were very tasty. And as a cherry type tomato I am thinking I can get them to fruit earlier. Between lambs coming in a week and a half and seeds being planted spring really is right around the corner! (Even if the ground is still covered in snow.)

Brrrr.....

Finally, winter temps are here. Today didn't get out of the 20s. So, a great day for harvesting. I spent about an hour all bundled up digging parsnips, carrots and beets.

The chickens appreciated all the tops. I also pulled up some swiss chard and some weeds for the chickens. They had a pretty good day. 

November Gardening

The weather has been amazing for mid November. The hoses are still out for getting water to the animals which is the latest we've ever had the hoses out. Today I planted strawberry runners given to me by a friend.

The garlic is up and I also mulched it today.

The second oat cover crop I took a gamble on planting is coming up (foreground)

In October the long range forecast looked pretty good for a second planting of oats and I am glad I gave it a chance. The garden in late fall is much greener than it ever was in the past now that I am doing more with cover crops.

The greenhouse also got some attention. I have been adding composted sheep manure by the wheel barrow load and the soil is much improved. Today I planted spinach, and three different varieties of lettuce. There are also some volunteers coming up of Red Russian Kale, spinach, and red mustard.

I don't expect much from the seeding over the winter but I will get salad greens super early in the spring, way earlier than I would ever think to plant seeds.

State of the Garden

Fall-the time to review how the garden fared, what worked and what didn't. This was the end of a full 12 months with cover crops. I definitely liked the fall sown oats and daikon radish. You could barely tell there was anything planted in the bed by the time spring rolled around.  The radishes especially left no trace of their presence after the winter freezes and snows. The crimson clover didn't do so well over the winter. And I am still sold on using buckwheat as an interim planting for ground that might be bare for a few weeks otherwise.

Not so great was the winter rye. Waiting until pollen shed to cut the rye, then waiting 2 weeks for the roots to begin deteriorating allowed too many weeds to become entrenched. I don't think I will be planting anymore rye.

I will definitely continue to have a bed used for composting garden waste. Right now I have two beds of finished compost, one bed now cooking, and one bed being built. The soil under the two finished beds of compost looks beautiful and should grow great veggies next year.

I am lucky to have access to a good amount of sheep manure and some chicken manure from my own animals. Knowing what they have been fed and how they have been treated makes me comfortable using their manure to fertilize the garden. We also have a yard vac which shreds the leaves and mixes them with grass clippings.  So I have various beds treated differently. Four beds have fall sown oats, two have daikon radishes. Some of the beds have garden compost and others have composted sheep manure. And some beds have shredded leaves/grass clippings along with manure.

Spike the cat likes to keep me company in the garden.  He is sitting in one of the old compost beds. Directly above him is a bed of oats, then the leek bed (which did really well this year), then another oat bed, then beets, parsnips, the old thai pepper bed now covered with sheep manure, then carrots.  In the background, beyond the little white fencing, is the large double bed of daikon radishes.

I read somewhere that chicken bedding used as mulch on garlic grows the best bulbs. I had the perfect chicken bedding to use so we'll see how the garlic does. I used shredded leaves last year and the garlic didn't do so well. I am not sure if that was the shredded leaves or the drought, although I did try to water that bed fairly regularly. 

Fall is my favorite time in the garden. So many possibilities for next year and the weeds are mostly dead. Having the oats with their bright green color makes the garden seem so alive and ready to grow.

Leeks

The leeks were amazing this year. I have never grown such large and beautiful leeks. So what to do with all these leeks? I've been scouring the internet for recipes. The first one we tried was a Leek gratin.

This was super easy. Just clean then slice the leek (dark green leaf parts removed) lengthwise leaving the root end attached and not cut. Put in an oven proof pan with 1.5-2 cups of cream (I used heavy cream). Bring to a boil then simmer 5 minutes, then put a lid on the pan and continue simmering for 15 min or until leeks are soft. Then sprinkle with 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese and bake in a 375 degree oven for 35 min, or until golden brown.
What could be easier than three ingredients and one pan?

Tomato Blight v Grafted Tomatoes

In the spring I planted 2 grafted Cherokee Purple tomato plants in hopes that they would be resistant to late blight as advertised. Well, they did great at first. I had ripe tomatoes earlier than ever, mid July. But I think that was purely due to the fact that they were started earlier and were growing in bigger pots, hence a larger root system.
When late blight hit, it hit the grafted tomatoes the same, and maybe a little worse, than the Amish Paste tomato plants.

The Amish Paste tomatoes have been giving me a huge harvest of tomatoes despite the blight while the grafted tomatoes have given up. This was one experiment that I think was a failure. But I might be tempted to start some tomatoes super early and keep moving them into bigger and bigger pots. I like having tomatoes in July.

Water!

Alan has been diligently working away at getting the hydrants in the barn and veggie garden hooked up. Yesterday was the day. We now have water in the barn!

And the garden!

And soon all the electric will be done too.

Then we just have to clean up the huge bomb site that is our yard.

Soil Fertility

A couple weeks ago I sent soil samples from the vegetable garden, the orchard, the lower pasture and the hilly pastures to the Penn State Agricultural Analytical Services Laboratory. The results were somewhat as I expected and a little surprising in other areas.
This is the report for the vegetable garden:

Apparently the soil is perfect in the garden. All they recommend is an application of a 10-10-10 fertilizer. I think I'll stick with compost and composted manure.

The orchard is almost the opposite of the vegetable garden; every value is below optimum. The pastures were not too bad. They just need lime, only 6,000 pounds! I've been reading up on liming pastures and found out you shouldn't put that much lime down at once. Usually half is spread one year then the other half the next year. That's great, I only need to spread 3,000 pounds now. That's only 150-50 pound bags. Most farmers have a truck come in and spread lime and it's not expensive. But I don't think a truck could get into my pastures with all the fences, gates and hills.  We are still figuring out the best way to do this but we need to come up with something soon since the lime should be spread before the reseeding.

The most surprising result though was the selenium. I paid extra to check selenium levels and they are more than double the top of normal for this area. I guess I don't need to worry about selenium deficiency in my sheep. The risk of selenium toxicity is something I need to think about. Chronic toxicity may take a while to show any symptoms but so far the sheep are doing fine on the pasture and have no signs of selenium toxicity. I can send a whole blood sample to the lab for selenium level for $25 or I can send a liver sample and get results for calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, and zinc for $34. Since I will be butchering a couple of rams soon I think the liver sample is the way to go. I need to know if the selenium is just in the soil or if it is being taken up by the plants and eaten by the sheep.

Harvest Time

The first of the Cherokee Purple tomatoes were ready this past week, some of the earliest I have ever had. These are the grafted tomatoes that were growing in gallon pots and were about 5 times bigger than the Amish Paste tomatoes I planted the same day.

Pickling cukes are also coming in. I started a crock of fermented half-sours from a recipe given to me by my friend Lynn. She makes the best pickles and I only hope mine turn out half as tasty as hers.

The last of the fall planted broccoli yielded a tasty broccoli salad. And I have been occasionally picking Chiogga beets and zucchini and yellow squash.

The berries are continuing to go crazy. So far I have picked 29 pounds of blueberries, most of that now residing in the freezer.  The blueberries are definitely on the downward side of picking.

The red raspberries are getting close to finishing, I hope; but the fall gold raspberries are starting to ripen for their first harvest.

Last year I preferred the flavor of the red raspberries over the gold but this year the taste of the golds is superior. Must be the weather since nothing else has changed.

June Veggie Update

Scapes, we have scapes!

The red potatoes, planted last month, are doing great. I am mulching them with shredded leaves to make them easier to harvest and improve the soil. This is the new part of the garden we made when we moved in and the soil isn't as nice as the older portion of the garden. Eight inches of composted shredded leaves should help.

 The grafted tomatoes have really taken off. One has three tomatoes. Time will tell if they help against late blight.

The Amish Paste Tomatoes are trying to catch up.

The onions are doing well too.

As are the leeks.

Parsnips from last year are going to seed. I don't really have anything to plant there so I was going to try saving seed. Then I realized I planted a hybrid variety last year so who knows what the seeds will get me. At least the pollinators should appreciate the flowers.

The broccoli has never looked better! That's because the cabbage moths haven't found it yet.

The second planting of lettuce, chard and kale are looking pretty darn good.

The Cover Crop Experiment Continues

The value in the cover cropping I've been doing should be seen in the planting results for this year. I have been a bit late planting this spring, but just about everything is now in the ground. It took me a while to figure out where to plant everything, harvesting then waiting for the cover crop to start to break down, and how to go about doing the planting in the cover crop.

Planting in the rye is definitely difficult. The time spent making and planting the rye in rows next fall will really pay off for planting in the spring. It was tough making furrows to plant seeds when the clumps of rye roots were randomly spaced around the patch. I had to rip out a few but I was able to get everything planted.

Here is the patch of parsnips planted in the rye. I am very interested to see how things go with weeds since hoeing would be very difficult, if not impossible in this patch.

The beets are a bit of an experiment. The first row on the left were planted last month: Chiogga variety. Next is another row of Chiogga, then a row of golden beets followed by another row of golden beets fully in the rye.

The last plot with rye is a large one with corn, beans and squash.  After seeing how difficult it is to dig furrows in the rye I decided to go with the old indian/colonist three sisters' planting method. I dug holes every two feet in a four by five pattern. Into each hole was planted five corn seeds, two louffa gourd seeds and two hyacinth bean seeds.

I had planned to plant the carrots in the rye as well, but thankfully the rye didn't quite go that far. One row of carrots has a small area of rye so I can have a very small trial. I really like Cindy Connor's method of planting carrots in between rows of rye. That will make a huge difference next year.

The last plot of cover crop to be planted was the pole beans. These are seeds I saved from the few plants I grew last year of a Thai bean I got from a friend at work (Thanks Na!) I ate only a few of the beans so I would have enough seeds to get a good planting this year. The pole beans went into the Austrian Winter Peas. The beans don't need the nitrogen from the winter peas but the garden is a great big puzzle when it comes to planting. When you take into account crop rotation and the large area that is too close to the old walnut tree it makes it hard to figure out the best place to plant everything.

One big improvement planting into the cover crop has shown is in water run-off. Most of my vegetable garden is on a slight slope so when I water often the seed will move downhill with the water. That didn't happen with the seeds planted in the rye.  So the experiment continues!

Harvesting the Cover Crop

Sickle v scythe. The Austrian Winter Peas, approximately 12x12 feet, were harvested using a sickle I have had for years. The pea stem was pretty soft and cut well with the sickle. The main problem was the length of the sickle handle. I had to either bend way over or kneel to get a good angle on the cutting.

Then I tried a patch of winter rye, slightly larger than the patch of pea cover crop. The stems were much tougher and required a smaller "bite" with each swipe of the sickle. And I had to kneel for the entire patch.

Altogether it took me about 40 minutes to cut those two patches of cover crop using the sickle.

Then I cut the remaining patch of winter rye using the scythe. That patch was about 12x25 feet and took about seven minutes to cut down with the scythe. And I was able to stand the whole time! The definite winner is the scythe.

The sheep think the Austrian Winter Peas dried in the sun make a mighty tasty hay too.

Grafted Tomatoes

We have a great Mennonite nursery nearby that specializes in pepper and tomato plants. They have 200 varieties of hot pepper plants, some that they have developed; and over 100 varieties of tomato plants. They also grow and sell vegetables and we got the first strawberries of the season on Friday from them.
The past year or two they have sold grafted tomato plants. This year I decided to try two of the grafted Cherokee Purple, my favorite variety. Grafting is supposed to increase resistance to late blight which has really cut into my tomato harvest for the last few years.   If grafting does in fact decrease late blight I may need to learn how to graft!

The grafted plants were beautiful. Nice and bushy with strong stems. I just wonder how the size of the plant will compare to an ungrafted Cherokee Purple tomato. My plants usually grow about six feet tall. We'll find out in a few months! Has anyone ever grown grafted tomatoes?

The Kindness of Gardeners

I met a fellow gardener who lives about two miles from me. She had too much Siberian Iris and needed it thinned out. So I went and dug out a lot of iris!

I planted a few clumps in the front yard gardens but most of it went along the stream.

She also had an amazing rhubarb patch and had just dug out some plants and offered them to me.

I added four plants to the five I had before. Hopefully, this will be enough rhubarb!

April Cover Crop Update

As spring progresses I am getting a better idea how the cover crops faired over the winter and what I like and don't like about each one.

Crimson Clover:
Everything I've read says crimson clover should over winter in our area. But most of it died. The green plants at the bottom of the picture are what is left of the clover. We did have a very cold winter, with many days of record breaking low temps, but I can't count on that never happening again. So scratch crimson clover off the list.          
                               
Austrian Winter Peas:
These are my second biggest disappointment. I don't know if I planted them too late or not heavy enough but I am not happy with the sparseness of the planting. The gaps leave too much room for weeds to move in. If I try them again I will plant a little earlier and more thickly seeded.

Winter Rye:
This cover crop looks great. The plants are densely spaced, crowding out weeds. The final verdict will come in when I cut the rye, at pollen shed, and see how the roots die off.

Oats:
The oats grew nicely in the fall then died back into a nice mat that should be good for planting transplants. Definitely something to grow again.