First Harvest!!!

Before I get to the first harvest, I wanted to follow up on my last blog entry. The post was about the unusually warm weather. I think it was three nights after that entry, we supposedly had a frost. I didn't leave the house till after 9 that morning, but the forecast had called for widespread frost throughout the greater Rochester area, so I assume it happened. My plants look fine. In fact, my Arugula and Pak Choi look ready for their first thinning.

Thats the arugula in the foreground and the pak choi further back, with some of the bulbing onions (from sets) in the background. Some of the arugula has 2 actual leaves (as opposed to the baby leaves), while some of the pak choi has reached 4 actual leaves. Regardless of the number of leaves, they are starting to compete for resources, so I thinned both to one plant every 1-2", leaving the bigger, stronger looking ones behind. Now of course I wasn't going to let those perfect micro-greens go to waste! Here they are sitting on some turkey burgers.

Mmm.....Its actually pretty impressive how much flavor these tiny little greens have. The arugula was particularly delicious.

March showers bring April flowers

While the Miller Homestead does focus on vegetable farming, we do have a few aesthetic plants in the garden. We have two lilacs and what I believe to be an ornamental crabapple.

As you may be able to see, the crabapple is flowering pretty well and one of the lilacs has just begun flowering. The other lilac (not pictured) will probably start flowering next week. That is certainly quite a bit earlier in the year than normal. We've had a very warm and dry March and April so far. I've actually had to water my garden 3 times already!

In Rochester, the Lilac Festival is kind of a big deal. It turns out that we have the largest collection of Lilacs in the world, and its only a 5-10 minute walk from my house. Anyway, the festival is scheduled to run May 14th-23rd, which is normally about the peak flowering time for the Lilacs. This year, I'm pretty sure that most of the Lilacs will be done flowering by that time.

I also recently saw a special bulletin from the national weather service saying that they were starting frost warnings 3 weeks earlier than usual because crops like fruit trees and grapevines were well ahead of schedule.

In case people didn't realize plants were way ahead of schedule, the local paper had a front page article a couple weeks ago telling people to restrain themselves and not plant vegetables or flowers too early. So far people who did plant early have probably been doing pretty well. There has not been a frost yet in the month of April at my house. I'm itching to plant more stuff and start transplanting things early, but I'm going to stick to my planting schedule. Historically, there is still a greater than 50% chance that there will be at least one frost after April 20th in Rochester.

Slowly but surely

The indoor sprouts are slowly growing. The first plantings of broccoli and tomatoes have reached the 4 leaf stage. The peppers have barely grown at all. I suspect they want it to be warmer. Out in the garden, all of the previously planted seeds have sprouted. That includes the peas, rainbow chard, pak choi, green onions, and bulbing onion sets. Yesterday I planted the rest of the onion sets, and I planted the potatoes.

For the potatoes, I dug trenches about 5" down, leaving about another 6" of top-soil above the hard clay layer. I planted the potatoes so that there is about 3-4" of room below them and they are covered by an inch or so of dirt. As the plants grow up, I'll periodically put some of the dirt back into the trenches, covering some of the stem. Supposedly new potatoes grow off of the stem, and this will stimulate production of extra potatoes.

I also did some weeding for the first time. There were a few places where grass or vetch had been brought back to the surface by the tilling and had re-established. I pulled all those out. Also, there were areas of the garden where bijillions of tiny baby weeds had sprouted up. Not sure where they came from. There were literally hundreds of these things per square yard. So I brought out the hoe (AKA the implement of death), and proceeded to kill hundreds if not thousands of baby weeds. I think that should send a pretty serious message to any weeds that might try to grow in the garden in the future.

Two posts in one day?

Crazy, right? When I came home from work today I noticed that it wasn't just the Pak Choi that had sprouted, the Arugula had sprouted, too! If that wasn't enough good news, I had some time to plant a bunch of stuff indoors today.

I planted a pot of Melons, a pot of Spaghetti Squash, a pot of Zuchinni, and a pot of Cucumbers. Those were put into the 4" peat pots because like the peppers and tomatoes, they will be indoors till mid-late May. I wanted to make sure they have enough space. For all 4 of those, I did two pairs of two seeds in each. Hopefully I'll be able to thin them to two plants in each pot before they are put into the ground. The tomatoes and peppers will be thinned to one plant each before being put in the ground. The 4" pots definately give them some growing room, but they sure do take up a lot of space. Not only are they wide, but they are tall enough that they just barely fit under the clear plastic domed lid in my big sprouting tray. As soon as the Broccoli sprouted I had to take the lid off to give them space. I'll be curious to see how big the plants are and if there are any roots poking through by planting time. The smaller peat pots (1.5-2") and plastic trays seem like they might be better options in the future, though.

With all the big pots, I'm running out of space in my seeding tray. Luckily, my mother-in-law was kind enough to give us a small seed starting tray and a topsy-turvy. In the small plastic tray I started some additional cherry tomatoes to go in the topsy-turvy, a first planting of Kohlrabi, and a second planting of Broccoli. There is still enough room for a third planting of Broccoli and a second planting of Kohlrabi.

Keeping up with the Millers

Not to be outdone by the Portland Miller farm, the Pak Choi planted in the garden last week has sprouted, and the peppers planted indoors have finally sprouted. I'm sure harvest is right around the corner. Not a great picture, but if you look close you can see a bunch of cute baby chois in between the two stakes.

Garden Progress

This weekend has seen some real progress on the garden. Here's what it looked like on the morning of 4/2.

Recall that the area on the left side of the picture had much less snow on it than the area on the right side. Over on the right side, sporadic hairy vetch plants survived the winter, but their spring progress has been less than enthusiastic. More towards the left side, not only did the vetch survive, but the "annual" grass and weeds survived. There were two main expected benefits to the vetch, one is that the "vigorous" growth in the spring would out-compete the weeds. Unfortunately, this vetch didn't seem to get that memo because both the grass and the weeds are growing faster than the vetch. The other benefit was nitrogen fixation. To check on that, I pulled up a vetch plant to look at the roots.

Those little round nodules are where the symbiotic bacteria live and do their fixation. Since there seem to be a good number of those, it seems likely that they are doing their job.

However, they won't be doing their job for much longer.....

Yes, I finally gave in and decided to till. The thing that really changed my mind is that the no-till works best when you have permanent beds that won't be compacted by walking on them. Because of the space constraints in my backyard, I don't really have enough room for permanent beds. I will have to rotate the location of the plants from year to year, so I won't really be able to have permanent beds. The other thing is that the vetch wasn't really doing its job of suppressing weeds and the longer I let the weeds/grass get established, the harder it will be to get rid of.

Thanks to Dave and Amy for letting me borrow their tiller, and thanks to my lovely wife for taking some of these pictures. Personally I think she should have been the one doing the modeling in these photos.

Before tilling I did spread out the modest amount of compost I had. I had started the compost in the fall and put a good amount of stuff in then, but I hadn't put much in over the winter. I did turn it over with a shovel a few times, but I wasn't really expecting it to be ready this spring. It actually looks like pretty good stuff, but after spreading it out, there sure wasn't much of it.

After tilling, I watered the soil and then planted all the snow peas, about 1/3 of the Pak Choi, Rainbow Chard, Arugula, and Green Onions areas. Also, the Onion sets were scheduled to go in next weekend, but since the weather report is looking so warm, I decided to plant half the bulbing onion area.

Not having much experience with many of these veggies, (or at least their seeds) I was surprised at what some of the seeds looked like. For instance the tomatoes. When you see tomato seeds in an actual tomato they are little round disks that look like they have a gellatinous envelope around them. The tomato seeds I planted last week were tiny irregularly shaped disks with fuzz on them. The Pak Choi was little tiny hard spheres. The onion seeds looked like very fine, rough gravel. The weirdest was the rainbow chard. It looked like popcorn-sized kernels with sharp spiky protrusions on them.

I was debating whether or not to still put down newspaper to suppress weeds. You're supposed to put something down on top of it to help keep it moist and keep it from blowing away, but mulch turns out to be kind of expensive, and the two places I went to didn't have any straw. I started to put down newspaper anyway, but it turned out to not be a very enjoyable task. I ended up just putting it down in three small areas of the garden that I thought might be the most likely to have weed problems. Then I sprayed it with water to weigh it down and help it stick to the dirt. I expect that if there is any significant wind in the next week or so all the paper will end up in the corner of the yard.

Oh, and one other thing. The seeds I planted last week are starting to sprout. Two of the three broccoli seeds sprouted. Somehow 7 out of the 6 tomato seeds I planted have sprouted. Yes, I realize that doesn't make any sense. An extra one must have snuck in there somehow. It looks like several of the pepper seeds have germinated and have sent out roots(they were planted very close to the surface per the instructions). So far, so good.