First Post of 2013

Featuring our new fence.

My new garden workbench.

Wow, it's hard to believe it's June 2013 and it's sad to think that this is my first post.  I've been taking pictures of the garden and diligently working away at it, but not keeping everyone posted!!  Let's play catch-up.

The new strawberries.

We've made a few changes this year as you can see.  We added a fence all around our square foot area to keep out the newest addition to the family - a Boston Terrier named Marvin.  We added new mulch to the pathway, revamped the soil in the raised beds, and my talented husband, Jacob, created a garden workbench for me for our one year wedding anniversary - he did all the welding/building himself!  We pulled all of the strawberries out since they were not producing well last year and added new ones.

This year I was determined to maximize what I was growing in a limited space so I made out a VERY complicated plan including a minimum of 10 spreadsheets with various layouts, statistics, etc. on them, ordered lots of new heirloom seeds, prepped the beds and then.....life happened.

Here are some of my lessons learned.

1.  Simplify!  My plan was way too complicated to keep up with in real life (too many start dates, transplant dates, etc. to track).

An early shot of the peas.

2.  I didn't think practically in terms of infrastructure - having 5 rows that are each spaced 6 inches apart and consist of teeny tiny seedlings that are easily accidentally stepped on, is not too practical.  In addition, having random pea plants and other veggies that need support structures scattered throughout various rows and beds are not easy to deal with when I only have a limited number of tomato cages/stakes and makes harvesting a pain.

Our few straggly asparagus spears.

3.  The weather has been extremely odd this year - we went from extremely cold and wet where nothing would germinate and when it did, it got frost burned, to peak summer heat, so the cool weather plants that should be thriving are struggling - the peas are looking ok but some are a bit yellow already, the arugula bolted before we could eat it, along with a decent number of spinach plants, and the baby lettuces got sunburned.

The secondary garden bed featuring potatoes.

4.  Wild Animals - there is what I believe to be a squirrel who is playing a game of mental warfare with me.  Every time there are seedlings in the garden (including the highly fenced areas), some critter comes along and digs them up and leaves them to die.  I'm assuming it's a squirrel since it gets over the fence and doesn't actually eat the plants.  Any tips on how to combat this demon would be much appreciated.

Spinach babies before the heat kicked in.

The garden coming along - the greenery is mainly peas.

5.  Germination and transplant problems - I've had a lot of bugs assaulting my transplants while they are hardening off (especially potato bugs) which obviously challenges the baby plants and leads to most of them dying after they are transplanted.  I've been direct seeding lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, carrots, and leeks with very very little successful germination and again, not sure why.  I tested my soil and should be good to go but nothing happens.  The peas and potatoes are thriving (relatively speaking) along with a handful of lettuces but everything else is just having a really hard time.  We didn't get to harvest any asparagus this year either, just didn't thrive...

6.  Time....there's never enough to keep up with the weeds but I'm fighting the good fight.  I was out there before work Friday at 6am weeding the 5-10 carrots (supposed to be 200)....

Any tips/advice/recommendations with regards to any of these issues would be much appreciated.

Don't want to end on a downer note though - here are some lovely pics of the garden as it has progressed this year.  As you can see, the grapes and hops are absolutely wonderful and doing their best to give us cool shade on the arbor!  More to come!

A more recent shot of the grapes and hops.

A very early shot of the hops.

A more recent shot of the peas

Status Update

Wow, ok, wedding over so now maybe a little more focus.  We lost all our seedlings and have been heavily dependent on Oakland Nursery.  Because of this, our assortment of veggies is different than we would typically pick.  We are growing collard greens, swiss chard, malabar spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupe, and berries.  We harvested our first 2 cucumbers yesterday and our first 2 cherry tomatoes - they were all wonderful!!  We are in the midst of blackberry season which is fun.  Our grapes and hops are both growing strong and we are going to be getting grapes for the first time this year!  You can see some pics of our arbor going strong.

We're Back.....

The garden last year was crazy....so crazy in fact that we didn't get the time to work on the blog! We will try to be better about it this year. We have started the pepper and tomato seedlings in the basement already and we started the peas and spinach outside during St. Patrick's day weekend. We also had LOTS of volunteer strawberry plants that sprang up anywhere and everywhere around our established strawberry beds. We pulled them up and planted them anywhere we had space around the house and yet we still had extras!

A recap from last year - you can see some pictures we took - we grew a lot of lima beans and yellow cherry tomatoes. Our generous neighbor also let us use his garden bed where we grew MASSIVE carrots and lots of chard.

We were harvesting those well into January!! Our potatoes once again failed miserably despite our use of big containers and great diligence. We tried Malabar spinach which took control of a large section of garden and was amazingly

productive when normal spinach is not, so it was an excellent addition. We also tried leeks that did not do so well (they were more like green onions). We got to harvest our first asparagus and strawberries last year and we are looking forward to more this year. We also tried a new kind of garden pea that has blue/purple pods. It was astoundingly productive so we are going with that again this year. Also, we harvested our first batch of hops, which you can see below. They are already growing up tall again this spring!

This year, we are growing garden peas, pickling cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, spinach, Malabar spinach, lettuce, hot peppers, sweet peppers, melons, yellow squash, carrots, chard, zucchini, leeks, and I'm sure there are some others in there that I'm missing. Anyway, I'll keep you posted on developments! We've gotta get some lettuce started this weekend!

New Seedlings!

The germination station is officially active and working overtime! On Sunday 2/27 we started the leeks and ground cherries in seedling trays with a special seed starting mix. We knew we wanted at least 117 leeks based on our garden plan. Although our garden plan calls for 117 leeks, I think we will probably need fewer because we got Bulgarian Giant Leeks which could be way too big for square foot gardening general spacing (9 leeks per square). Our plan calls for two ground cherries, but I am willing to scatter a few more around the house, so I started nine. We also started the Early Jalapenos, Jimmy Nardellos, Snow White Tomatoes, and Amish Paste Tomatoes on March 1. We started a few extra of each plant, but our base numbers for what we need are 12 Amish Paste, 3 Snow White, 8 Jimmy Nardello, and 12 Early Jalapeno.

The leeks have sprouted and we are holding our breath to see the germination rates of the others.

Updated Seed List

Now I've managed to finalize a list and would love peoples' opinions if they have experiences with these varieties:

• Early Russian Cucumber
• Snow White Cherry Tomato
• Amish Paste Tomato
• Early Jalapeno
• Jimmy Nardello Pepper
• Jackson Wonder Lima Bean
• Green Arrow Garden Pea
• Blue Podded Blauwschokkers Garden Pea
• Sugar Sprint Snap Pea
• Red Malabar Spinach
• Giant Noble Spinach
• Bulgarian Giant Leek
• Caribe Potato
• Carrots (again, still have to locate the seeds)
• Goldie Ground Cherry

Planning for Spring

Whew, long time no blogging. I fear we have gotten side tracked significantly from eating local due to financial issues, but we are trying to buckle down a bit. We probably aren't going to be as extreme as before, but we definitely have decided that it makes us happier and healthier to cook from scratch and eat local! Now, I find myself perusing the seed catalogs and trying to find out what we will be growing this year. Right now, here is the line-up (if anyone has any experience with these varieties, I would love to hear how they did):

• Jimmy Nardello (Sweet Pepper)
• Early Russian Cucumber
• Early Jalapeno
• Sugar Sprint Snap Pea
• Carentan Leek
• Caribe Potatoes
• Ground Cherries
• Amish Paste Tomatoes
• We want a yellow/white cherry tomato that is quite small and I am looking at Bianca, Blondkopchen, Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry, Ildi, and Snow White.
• Red Malabar Spinach (I'm really curious about this one) and maybe some Giant Noble as well
• I'm debating on the lima beans. The Hendersons did well last year, but I am looking for something else since they got picked over a bit by bugs. Currently, I'm looking at Dixie Speckled Butterpea and Jackson Wonder.
• For garden peas, I'm still trying to decide between Green Arrow and Pioneer.

All of these varieties are heirlooms from Seeds of Change, Bakers Creek, Tomato Bob, and maybe Johnny's. We will also be growing some carrots that we bought seeds for last year. I have to dig those up (no pun intended) to figure out what variety that is. We will NOT be putting carrots or potatoes in our square foot beds - instead we will get something bigger and deeper to give them more space. We will be getting strawberries, asparagus, and onions coming up this year that we put in last year, so we will get to enjoy those finally!

If you are looking for seeds to order, be sure to talk to your friends and neighbors and read reviews. I didn't do this as much as I should have last year and made some mistakes that negatively affected my yields. I could have easily avoided a lot of stress and frustration if I had done this!

Stored Foods

I finally was able to take the time to evaluate what all has been preserved in our freezer and what we have canned.

In our freezer:
Strawberry Freezer Jam - 11 half pints
Apples - 11.5 lbs.

Berry Freezer Jam - 17 half pints
Potato Leek Soup - 5 quarts (I improvise a bit with this by making half of the water be chicken broth and we always add some cheese and diced ham)
Diced Tomatoes - 15 quarts

Applesauce - 7 quarts
Corn - 15 pints
Blueberries - 12 cups
Rhubarb - 9 cups

Zucchini - 9.5 cups

Bell Peppers - 5 quarts
Tomato Sauce - 5 quarts
Borlotti Beans - 2.5 quarts
Lima Beans - 2.5 quarts
Sugar Snap Peas - 5.25 quarts

Peas - 6 cups
Poblano Peppers - 1 quart
Jalapeno Peppers - 1 pint

Banana Peppers - 1 cup
Medium Peppers - 1 pint
Cayenne Peppers - 1 cup

Red Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
Black Hungarian Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
In our pantry:
Peaches - 11 quarts
Green Beans - 31 pints (plus 2 we have already eaten)
Salsa - 8 half pints (this turned out to be a sweet and spicy recipe, so next year, we need to cut back a bit on the sugar)
Hot Salsa - 2 pints
Peach Melba Jam - 7 half pints
Apple Butter - 2 1/2 pints (We tried a crockpot apple butter recipe that really did not go well!)