Now that we are into winter, and it is almost Christmas 2011, I am planning next year's garden.  There will be berries added as well as a little more space for veggies.  I plan to plant 4-6 red raspberry plants,  3-4 high bush blueberries, and 30-50 strawberries.  The hard part about this will be waiting for an entire year to begin reaping reward from the berry plants.  "sigh" 

This year I managed to get 12 quarts of green beans plus a couple of pints, there are also 6 quarts of tomato juice and a few quarts and pints of canned tomatoes.  Last week I ate the last of my potatoes.  Hopefully next year will have a better tomato crop.  I also made something like 9 pints of green tomato relish, some of it with jalapenos in it "grin".

Oh and then there is the squash,  I have eaten and made pies from 6 butternut squashes, eaten all but one buttercup that is still in the cupboard where i keep the squashes.  There is still 11 butternuts and one buttercup in there.  Happy happy


I am thoroughly thrilled about all the fresh food I ate on an almost daily basis for over 2 months last summer.  I hope I can extend that to 3 or more months next year by planting a succession of cooking greens. 

I am pleased with the way this year's garden grew and am looking forward to an even better one next year, weather permitting.

The one main thing I will do differently is to feed my tomatoes differently, I think they got too much nitrogen fertilizer,  I will buy specially formulated tomato fertilizer next year.  There will be 3X the amount of pole beans and I will get to plant an entire row of the bantu beans and the italina fagiolina beans (I think they are peas, they have a flower similar to sweet peas, they are really yummy). 

Italian fagiolina beans

These were called beans when I purchased the seeds.  Well over the summer I have discovered they are more like peas than beans.  Their blossoms are like peas, their flavor is more like peas than beans.   This little bit in the bowl is some of the few I allowed myself to taste test to see if I wanted to grow them again next year.  I do.  They can be used the same way as bean or pea pods, or can be used as soup beans or peas.

They produce over an extended period so they will be good for fresh eating throughout the growing season and if they are left on the plant to mature into seed, the plant will begin producing more as soon as the mature pods are picked.  As of today there are still all three stages of growth on these plants, blossoms, immature edible pods, and older pods with mature seed in them. 

They are climbers like peas, they don't get very tall like peas.  So I think they are a member of the pea family.

Zucchini, Butternut, and Buttercup squash

Here is the first zucchini from the new plant that is replacing the one I had to destroy earlier in the summer.  I like to pick them small, around 4-6 inches.  I only use them for frying.  

 The zucchini plant is about half the size the first one was but it has just begun producing so it should be able to grow much larger, weather permitting.

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Yesterday I cut some butternut and buttercup squash from the vines.  The two butternuts  were on a dead vine and are not quite ripe but I think they will be ok to eat in a few months.  There are 3 or 4 more butternuts still ripening, maybe more, I have forgotten how many are out there now.  The vines keep growing despite my best efforts to prevent it lol.  I have stopped trying and they are overrunning everything around them :)  This is ok though, they aren't hurting anything, only making it a bit tricky to pick tomatoes and beans near them.

Two of the buttercups have been on the vine a lot longer than the rest of them and they feel much lighter than they should be, are they sun dried?  lol, we will see :)

second crop and intercropping

8/3/2011

The last couple of days I have spent ripping out the spent bush bean plants to make way for a late crop of spinach, beets, and hopefully collards, the time left for them to grow is short but if heavy frost holds off long enough there will be time for me to enjoy fresh greens, yummmmm

The bean and potato plants were mowed and caught in the bag then placed in the composter :)

I have also harvested about 2/3 of my potato crop for early ones.  I got about 8 pounds of them, many still very small, bite size.

As you can see in the foreground of the above image, the yard and part of the garden has been overrun with crab grass.  The real grass isn't growing, it has been too hot and dry so it's dormant.  The last couple of days we have had a little bit of rain but not enough.

Pole beans are about finished

Have not had any ripe cherry tomatoes and I have picked only a few partially ripe rutgers to ripen on the kitchen counter.  There are loads of nice green ones of all types out there though.  I planted 5 different types of tomatoes.

The foreign beans are doing very well, they have full pods and I have been picking and shelling the most mature/dry pods.  The image shows Bantu beans from Uganda.  They are in several colors, pink which turns purple when they dry, gray, and tan.  Next year I will be able to sample these beans, but for this year's crop, I am saving them for seed.  I started out with 15 seeds this spring.   This year's crop should plant 20-30 feet next year.  That's still not a lot for soup beans but it should give me a few small pots of beans :)

The Italian Fagiolina beans are very small.  They won't make much when they are all shelled.  I'm not sure I want to bother with them next year, my space is limited and they don't produce enough for what space they use.   But I will wait till next year to make that decision.  If I can, I would like to keep them as part of the garden.

7-22-2011 progress

I have canned 5 quarts of green beans and have another batch awaiting me to break and can, happy happy.

The first picture is of both the African and Italian beans.  You can see that the Africans, on the left, are filling out nicely.

The Italians are a bit surprising,.  They have a really pretty flower somewhat like a pea.  I will try to remember to get a pic of one if there are any more of them.  What is most surprising is the growth habit of the bean pods, (the second picture) I have never seen anything like it.  They stick almost straight up in the air and are long and very thin at this point.  It is truly different from what I am accustomed to seeing.  The only info I have is these beans are quite small for a dried bean, but that they can be eaten as young pods like green beans or can be used as soup beans once the seeds are developed and dried.  Oh, and that they ripen over a long period of time so if you want to use them as snap beans, you would have to be picking them every day, but....don't we do that anyhow with our usual varieties?  I plan to let them fill out the pods so that I can have more seed for next year. 

Here is the new zucchini plant.  Hope it will give me at least a few more zuchs before the plant succombs to frost.

These are the two Indian (Africa) that I have allowed to mature.  It looks like I should have let more of them grow.  I didn't know the mature size of them so decided not to let too many grow in case they were huge.  At this point they look like they won't be very large at all.

Here are two of my 6 or more ( I forget how many there are lol) buttercup squashes that are all at this size now.  Beautiful.

Butternut squash, at last count I found 5 like this one and a few smaller ones, I am culling the new ones that try to grow so that the remaining ones will mature to a nice size.

When I planted the squashes I  thought I would be happy with around 12 nice sized mature ones at the end of the season.  It looks like I will get very close to that number, probably a few more.  That would average 2+ nice fruits for each plant.  Yes, squash is technically a fruit.


The rest of the garden is doing very well, I have gotten over 5 pounds of potatoes by just reaching under the straw and picking them when I need a few for supper.  :) 

The tomatoes are growing rapidly now.  I bought two 50 foot soaker hoses and this is keeping everything green and growing in this too hot and humid weather we are having.  There are no red ones yet.

I found this nasty worm on a tomato plant.  It is a tomato horn worm that has been parasitized by a species of wasp.  This is a very good thing to find.  Poor worm :(  It means that these little cocoons will develop into more parasitic wasps and kill more horn worms.  This is the balance of nature at work.  I have not seen any horn worm damage on the tomato plants so either I am not looking under enough leaves lol or there isn't much to speak of.  By the way, the "horn" on these worms does not sting, they are quite docile, happy to have a tomato plant to munch on.

Zucchini and squash borers

7-10-11
I'm sorry for the poor quality of this image, it was taken at dusk.  At least you can see the way the leaves are drooping and turning yellow.  I have never had this problem before so had to do some online research.  The best thing for me to do, based on the info I found, is destroy the plant, seek and destroy all the grubs in the plant and in the soil around it and replant.  It's not too late to get another one grown and producing since the bug that laid the eggs has ended it's life cycle by now.  So far there is no evidence of the pest being on any of my other squash plants.

 7-14-11
Update, I destroyed the plant, found a couple of grubs in the plant, none in the soil so replanted more zucchini seeds.

Here is the squash growing on the trellis (and the place where the zucchini was) as of 7-14-11.  The trellis is almost invisible beneath all those plants :)  I am still concerned about the weight of the fruit as it grows.....

There are for sure two pumpkins on the African pumpkin vine, you can see one vine from it inching it's way towards me,  lol.  There are also a possible two more on that vine, I have pinched off the growing tip, there are enough there for this year.  The vine is huge, it got a later start than the squashes but took off once the weather was steadily warm.   I just looked it up, it is from Bangalor India.  The pumpkin is the yellow one in the picture below.  There are 3 more on the vines that have been recently pollinated.  This is going to be a surprise because I do not know how big they will be at maturity.  

In this picture I captured 4 fruits, one pumpkin and 3 buttercup squash.  The production is exceeding my expectations, at this point I am happy about it all.

Here is my largest butternut squash.  It is about 8" long  There are at least 8 more that I found over 3" long, and even more that have just been pollinated. There promises to be bounty for me to keep and share as well.  :)

These are my standard bush beans I grow for canning whenever/wherever it is that I have a garden.  If you look closely enough you can see beans here as well as more flowers, the leaves you see at the bottom of the pic is my sweet annie growing next to them.


The italian beans are doing surprisingly well given their dark place between the potatoes and the african beans.  I will probably have enough beans from them to plant a nice plot of them next year.  Sorry, no pic of it this time.

The African beans are filling out their pods, there will be a good harvest from them, I believe there will be enough to plant at least 10 feet next year, maybe even 20.  That will give me enough to eat some and save seed for the future.  

And here is my tomato jungle :))

There are no red ones yet but a boat load of green ones and even more blossoms.

June 28 pictures

 all these pics were taken on june 28.  This is being written on July 6.

In this pic the beans had not flowered yet but today they have buds all over them.  The surprise climbers are doing great and the smaller Italian ones are doing well but not as well as the others, I am afraid they will suffer in their spot between the surprise climbers and the potatoes, they won't get a lot of sun there, hopefully they will get enough to make a good batch of seeds for next year.  

Yesterday I picked a small green tomato and two 3" zucchini, fried them and oh!!! yummmm!!! What a treat.  I usually designate one tomato plant to be the one that never, or rarely gets a red one, I eat them all green as they grow, but since I have 8 plants and only 2 are cherries, I will just pick them at random from all the vines.

 Here are the pole beans, they have now reached and gone beyond the top pole which is approximately 7' high.  On the closest pole I have a morning glory vine growing.  If you click on the pic to view it larger you will see it winding it's self around the pole.  It is now up to the top pole.  Just one will be plenty I think lol

 My trellised squash are going to overtake everything close to them LOL.  I love it!  I have started pinching off the growing tips to keep them in bounds, there are enough little squash on the vines to give me a respectable crop.  I am still skeptical about whether or not the trellis will hold all the squash and pumpkins that will be hanging around it.  Time will tell :)  In the foreground you can see a couple of my herbs, sweet annie and borage, I also have sage, stevia, and horehound.

 Bad angle, sorry.  The tomatoes are doing very well,  There are flowers everywhere and lots of little green ones just started.  Lovely :)  Can't wait for the first cherry tomatoes to ripen.

My Huuuuge zucchini plant, I hope it will be more than just giant leaves, this baby is more than 4 feet wide.  There are at least half a dozen little squashes on it now and there are more than that many flowers where there will be more little squashes :)  Fantastic!  I looove zucchini, I doubt there will be much left for me to dehydrate for winter.  I hope I am wrong :)

6-13-2011 Great start

Great start

It's been a few weeks since I have blogged and the garden is growing by leaps and bounds.  The spring weather here has been either sunny, hot, and humid or rainy, a great environment for initial growth in the garden.  Everything has more than doubled in size in the past week to 10 days. 

As you can see the tomatoes have grown tall enough for me to start weaving them through the mesh of the trellis.  The Rutgers shown here have their first blossoms, joy joy :)

And then there are the various beans I have planted, 4 different varieties in all. On the trellis there are two rows, one on either side of the trellis, of  Kentucky wonder pole beans. 

I bought some rare varieties of seeds from a company in Canada.  They have people who search the world for rare and almost extinct varieties grown in small local areas.  One is a variety of shell beans that comes from Africa, called Bantu beans, they are doing very well, making fast and steady growth.  They are planted in the back 2/3 of the row in the middle. 

On the right is two rows of blue lake bush beans (you can only see the end of the rows) planted about 6-8 inches apart.Behind that are the African beans between the pvc poles, I had to make a fast support for them because I did not know they were climbers.  Oh well, this should be fun :)

To the far left, beyond the pole is the variety from Italy.  It can be used like a green bean or a shell bean. It is not doing as well as the ones from Africa, I think maybe it is the cool nights of our spring weather. (Update) I was right, they are doing much better now that the nights are a bit warmer.   

In the packets of both the African and Italian beans there were just 15 seeds so I will only be able to have a little taste of each, I want to be able to increase the yield next year.  Must remember to plant the Italian beans later than the others.  The foreign beans share their rows with blue lake bush beans because there weren't enough of then to fill a full row.

You may be able to see see I have had some bug damage to the first leaves of my bean crop.  I am not too worried about this, it seems to have slowed and I believe, from past experience, that the bugs have about lived their life cycle and that since the plants are larger and stronger with more leaves, the bugs won't do much future damage.  I have seen many birds in the garden around the beans, mainly robins and doves having breakfast, lunch, supper and many between meal snacks as well :)  I am sure they like the worms they find there after a rain as well as the easy pickings of bugs on and around the plants.

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I also have some pumpkin seeds from Africa, there were 6 seeds in the packet, I planted 3 of them and thinned to one plant.  Next year I will have more space so will be able to have several plants if I like this variety.

Oh no!  LOL, my finger is covering up the African pumpkin plant, I will get a better pic of it in here later. 

There is also a patty pan summer squash.  I never grew a patty pan squash, never ate it either, looking forward to the treat,  I did not know it is a bush and not a vine, so it is planted in with the vines on the trellis haha.   And here is the zucchini. 

 

The second picture is a couple of weeks later, after fertilizing and lots of rain and sun too.  They shot really fast.  I love it :)

You can just see the African pumpkin on the front-right of the trellis, it is a little behind the squash but I think it is the same reason the Italian beans were a little slower.   I'm sure it will recover.

That trellis scares me LOL, I don't know if it will hold up.  There are 2 buttercup plants, 4 butternut plants, and the pumpkin.  And the pattypan is in there, it will probably help prop up it's neighbor, a buttercup lol.

I am planning to dehydrate some summer squash for winter use in soups and lasagna, and maybe re-hydrating and frying, we will see.

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Interplanting:

You may be able to see the radishes growing beside the squashes and pumpkins.  They help to repel squash bugs. The radishes will be allowed to continue to grow for that purpose.

Again, the second pic is a couple of weeks later.  See the amazing growth,  I love it.   Again lol

Bush beans and potatoes are said to repel each other's pests and from experience I know this to be true.  I have placed the bush beans next to my potatoes, which by the way are gigantic :)  The tallest row was planted on Saint Patrick's Day, the others were planted about a month later.  I just planted potatoes from the grocery store that were growing in my cupboard.  All I did to plant (Thanks to my friend Mark for the donation of the straw)As they grew, I kept covering them with a light layer of straw until they started to flower.  Now they will grow potatoes in the straw, making it easy for me to harvest.  No digging for me, which is the point of starting the garden by using newspaper and flattened cardboard boxes along with mulch materials such as grass clippings, shredded pine, and straw to kill the existing grass.  As you can see, I have confined the straw with some of my rabbit fence so that the straw will stay put and the growing potatoes will not see the sun.  The straw is from a foot to a foot and half high. 

I will continue this mulching process throughout the summer and into fall to increase the size of the garden area for next year. 

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Garden Trellises

I have some concerns about the strength of my squash trellis that is made from half inch pvc.  I think my design is flawed so I have been adding more support to it.  It seems to be too wobbly and weak to support the 8 plants I have growing around it.  I hope it doesn't break and fall, I don't want to lose any of the squash crop or the African pumpkin :(  I'm already wishing I had chosen to make bamboo teepees instead. It isn't too late to do that, I just might yet.  The pumpkin will probably be a very large, long plant so I am considering training it to grow around the base of the trellis structure.

Growing in my indoor greenhouse

I got this greenhouse through an online group where people post what they have to give away or what they are seeking.  Check out the yahoo group freecycle for a chapter near you.  I felt so very blessed when I messaged the guy who was giving it away and it was still available.  It has four tiers and four florescent light fixtures.

On the second tier shown here I had a failure.  I planted impatiens in the rectangular yogurt cups after poking holes in the bottoms,  I must have kept them too moist because there is some green stuff growing in most of them instead of the impatiens.  At least there should be enough of them to fill a couple of hanging planters.  Also on this tier are beefsteak tomatoes, garlic chives, geraniums, one gardenia, pansies and pennyroyal.  All are doing pretty well.  I think the pennyroyal will have to be planted in ground.  They haven't grown much in the past month and look too weak to me.  We will see.

The top tier has aster, marigold, coleus, zinnia, eggplant, sage and an open pollinated variety of black cherry tomatoes.......yummmmmmm :)  This tier has it's plants in last year's 4 packs or small peat pots I purchased at the local dollar store and they are doing much better than plants that were in yogurt cups.  I wanted to re-use the yogurt cups instead of sending them directly to recycling,  I think they need larger holes in them for better drainage.  I will try them again with the bigger holes.

Here are my awesome tomatoes on the bottom tier, I had to remove the third tier to make room for them :)  The varieties are brandywine which is a nice big juicy tomato, and sweetie which is a succulent cherry type, both open pollinated varieties so I can save the seed for next year.  Some of these are going into sawed off 2 litre soda bottles soon.    Looks like I will have to dig some deep holes come planting time.

 Here we have basil and sweet annie, (sweet wormwood).  These were started in the middle of winter in the indoor greenhouse and are doing so nicely.  They are now in a west window in the living room.  I put them back in the greenhouse a few days a week for light and moisture.  Yes, I made the plant pokes with the names of the plants on them.

The sweet annie gets around 5-6 feet tall, is a ferny looking plant.  I love it's scent (fresh and clean) and can't wait till I can start bringing them inside later this summer.  The dried plant keeps it's scent for months after harvesting.  All you have to do is touch it to release the scent.  Of course, I will keep one of these plants for inside and the other one will be planted outside.  I will also plant some seed in the ground.    

I had some old seeds from previous years and since I have not had a garden in 3 years I felt I should test sprout them to check their viability.  They were all packed for either the  07 or 08 planting seasons.  In this trial all seeds were given 5 days to sprout, the seeds that did not sprout have been put back into the baggies for a few more days to see how they will do.                                                

There were two kinds of beets in this test.  Three of one kind were tested and four of the other.  One of each kind did not sprout but since they were only given 5 days to sprout, they did very well.   It looks like both are good to go so as soon as the weather warms up from freezing I will go out and stick them in the ground :)

Looks like the peas sprouted with flying colors.  They, too, will go in the ground at the earliest opportunity.  I will also purchase more pea seeds for a fall crop.

The pic doesn't show the broccoli well at all.  There was a 50% sprout rate for these, looks like for older seeds they have done well.  I will plant them in the ground in early to mid July for maturation in the fall in our area

                                              

These brusssels sprouts sprouted great!  Every one of the 11 sprouted and they look good and strong.  I will plant them out in the ground in late July to early August for October to November harvest. 

Some wax beans along with some sweet and hot pepper seeds did not sprout~~yet~~They will be given 4 or 5 more days in the baggies. 

4/12/2011  The pepper seeds did not sprout, they simply got moldy.  Guess I will purchase new seeds.

A few weeks ago I transplanted my tomato seedlings from the square pots you see in back on the left. 

There were 4 of them in each pot, and they were transplanted singly into the yogurt cups.  Now they are growing like wildfire and need to be transplanted again.  I was not ready at all to transplant them now. 

All last week I tried to come up with something tall enough I could put them into and bury most of their stems.  While I was out  the other day I was thirsty and bought a bottled water,  I hardly ever do this.  Anyhow, while taking a drink from it I realized it was the perfect size.   It must have been divine intervention that helped me decide to vary out of my norm and buy that bottled water.   :)

As I said, I hardly ever drink bottled water (I have a filter system at home), but my son's family drink a lot of it and recycle their bottles.  AHA!  A free source of the perfect size container.  I simply poke holes in the bottoms of my plastic containers with a hot darning needle so I did the same with this bottle. 

This weekend I will get some of my family's bottles and transplant my taller tomatoes. 

When it is time to plant them outside I will run a table knife around the edge to loosen them.  If they don't want to come out easily, I will cut the bottles.  Whatever I do to remove the plants, I will rinse the bottles and put them in my recycling bin. 

Transplanting every few weeks helps the tomatoes develop a hefty, strong root system.  If you want to do this, simply pinch off lower leaves and plant as much of the stem along with the existing roots as deeply as you can. 

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I planted some potatoes on Saint Patrick's day.  This week we have had some pretty frigid weather (below freezing day and night for several days now).  I hope they don't die in the ground.  We'll see in a few weeks. 

Checking seed viability

Today I decided to check my older seed stash to make sure they will grow this year. I put from 3-10 seeds on a piece of paper towel, rolled it tightly, wet it, squeezed out the excess and put it into a labeled plastic sandwich baggie.

There are sweet, hot and hotter peppers, broccoli, brussels sprouts, peas, beets, and several kinds of bush wax beans.

Now I can't wait to learn the results, especially the beets and peas because they can be planted now in my area. ~~~smiles~~~

 

 My new organic garden.

Here is a pic of my new garden space. At this time it measures 15' X 15'.  After life changing events in the past couple of years, I find myself renting a home instead of owning my own. I got lucky and ended up in a nice little home owned by a wonderful landlady. She is letting me have a vegetable garden in the extra lot beside the house.

This will be my first garden in 3 years. Since it is being started from scratch on an existing lawn I am taking the opportunity to test organically smothering the grass.

With access to the town's compost heap I went last fall to get some pine needles and ground up pine. Then I got some cardboard boxes from the local dollar store and put them down on the ground, then covered them with the mulch. I wish there had been time to finish the entire area I wanted to cover but the weather didn't permit it. So this spring I am covering it with newspaper covered with the pine mulch. I hope the grass will die in time for my planting in the end of May and early June.

Oh! I found a perfectly good bale of straw at the community compost heap. What a great find, it will be used to mulch my short little row of potato plants.  Thanks much to my sister who helped me lug it out.  It was wet and very heavy.

The area that was mulched last fall is wonderful, I pulled back the mulch to find the cardboard boxes had disappeared. Traditionally, at least in my circle, we plant potatoes on Saint Patrick's Day so I simply pulled back the mulch and plopped my potatoes in and covered them with the mulch. As they grow, they will be covered with hay or straw until they are almost ready to bloom. Then when they are ready I will only have to pick up the plants with the potatoes attached to the bottom......How Easy Is That???  In truth, there will have to be a little digging to find a few that grow deeper.  There will only be 9 of them so not very many but they will be soooo good.

Last fall just before I ran out of good weather, I raked my leaves and covered some ground with newspaper and about half of the leaves, but didn't get to finish so just left some leaves on the bare ground and covered them with plastic to keep them from blowing away. Today I raked those over the leaves that are covering newspaper. That is the area that appears higher in the picture. It is around 3 feet wide so that is where the tomato plants will be going.

4/12/2011

A couple days ago I finished laying newspaper and am going to put more mulch on the garden to make sure the grass is totally smothered.  I peeked under the paper in several places and the grass under the newest part is already turning white, the grass under the oldest part is gone but the dandelions are growing well LOL.  Maybe I will allow some to grow to use for greens.  This will depend on where they are growing.

I have decided to stop expanding the garden size (for now) because I don't want to over-do it this first year.  I can always expand it in the fall for next year.  The 15 X 23 plot is big enough to grow everything I want.  For now :)