Overcrowding in the garden

I knew when I made it that my planting map was a bit optimistic in terms of how closely space my plants were. Part of it was just that I wanted to plant a lot of different things and in order to get enough of each type to make it worthwhile, I really had to cram things in. I also figured that some crops might fail completely, giving other crops more room. Early on in the season the spacing seemed pretty reasonable, and in a couple places I even tried to fit a few more things in because it seemed like there was extra room. Now that we are in the middle of the growing season and many of the plants are getting pretty good-sized, things are getting awfully crowded. Many of the paths are disappearing under foliage, and plants are growing over and around other plants. I knew that the Spaghetti Squash plant was going to want to expand beyond its 5’ X 5’ allocated area, but I didn’t realized the size that many of the other plants would achieve. I figured the Zucchini (which is an heirloom bush-type), might stay within a 4’ x 4’ area. While its not really growing vines, it is turning into a gigantic bush that is managing to take over some of the surrounding areas.

I initially figured 18” for Broccoli spacing, and that might have been ok, but when I transplanted seedlings I had a few extra that I tried to cram in, and now that the biggest plant is over 20” wide, things are getting a bit tight in that area. The row of bush-beans is now almost 3 feet wide. The pea plants got pretty big and the more southern of the two rows is blocking most of the light to the northern row because they were too close. Obviously the potatoes got bigger than expected, too.

I think I’m going to encourage the Spaghetti Squash to take over the Melon area. The Melons were small, slow-growing, and behind schedule when I transplanted them at the end of May. After they were killed by some evil critter, I planted seeds in early June, but the plants are only to the 4-leaf stage and we’re hitting July now. The other viney plants have been flowering for a while and are now starting to set fruit. I think the Melons may be a lost cause, but the Squash would be happy to use that area. I’ve also decided to let the Zucchini take over the Swiss Chard area since Jaime and I don’t really like the Chard. Actually, I’m not sure what I could do to stop it even if I wanted to.

I’ll probably add a column in my planting dates spreadsheet for size of the mature plants. It started off just as a way to keep track of when I planted stuff, then I started putting comments on it about how well stuff was growing, then I added on a column for weight of vegetables harvested, and now I’ll add a column for size of plants. The spreadsheet will be very useful for next year.

Taste

The first time that I thinned out my baby Rainbow Chard seedlings this spring, I rinsed off the micro-greens and sprinkled them on my salad along with sprouts from the Arugula and Pak Choi patches. After a couple bites, I started wondering why my salad tasted like beets. My parents used to force me eat beets from their garden when I was growing up, and I never liked them. I’ve only rarely had them since, but the flavor is quite distinct (I’ve even been nervous about eating radishes because they kind of look like beets). I quickly figured out that the flavor in my salad was coming from the Chard. I’d never tasted Chard before and didn’t know much about it other than people saying that it is delicious and I should plant it in my garden. I don’t think I knew at that time that it was related. Sometime after that salad, I looked up Swiss Chard on Wiki to see if it is in the same family as beets. It turns out that not only is Chard related to common Beets, it is the same species! Not just the same species, but even the same subspecies! It is just bred for vigorous leaf growth rather than for a big root.

Fast-forward to this past weekend when Jaime and I were talking to a couple friends about vegetables and Chard came up. I mentioned something about tasting like beets, and I was shocked to find out that our friends didn’t think that it tasted like beets(though one of their grandmothers thought it did). I just assumed everybody thought it tasted like beets. The next day, Jaime and I had my parents over to the house for a dinner. Since Jaime has discovered that she doesn’t like Chard, and I’m not sure that I do either, we decided to cook a bunch of the chard so we could get rid of it. It also happens to be prime Chard season. I felt certain that my parents would really like the Chard since they like beets. I just sautéed it with some butter and salt. Somehow, they didn’t think it tasted like beets at all! My Mom thought it tasted like Spinach. Spinach?!?

After thinking about it, I was starting to doubt myself just a little bit. Perhaps my palette is just not refined enough. Yesterday I had some of the leftover Chard for lunch. Totally beets! This is not a subtle thing. It was like somebody smacked me across the mouth with a Beet. Absolutely no mistaking it. The only explanation I can come up with is that there is a specific chemical in beet plants (and therefore Chard also) that I can detect while some other people can’t. I’m not the only one, either. A quick internet search seems to show that some people think Chard tastes like beets, and some people think it tastes like a regular leafy green like Spinach. There also seems to be a pretty polarized community online about liking or hating Beets.

There is another “edible” plant that produces even more polarizing opinions amongst foodies. Cilantro has been in the news a lot lately because of its growing popularity, and with it an increasingly vocal anti-Cilantro crowd. Jaime and I fall into the group of people who feel that Cilantro tastes bitter and a kind of like dirty socks or soap (or plastic covered in dish soap in my case). Sure, I get a bit of the citrusy-herby flavor that people rave about, but its overwhelmed by the bitter soapy flavor. A small amount of it easily infects large quantities of otherwise tasty foods. There have been several articles recently suggesting that there is a genetic component to the Cilantro taste debate. The only real experiment I’ve read about relating to this was a pretty flimsy sounding twin-study, but the theoretical idea behind it seems entirely reasonable. In fact, there has been some hard science showing that there are some chemicals that some people can taste while other people cannot. This is also related to the idea of supertasters. I really wonder if Jaime and I are just able to taste a compound in the Chard that some people can't.

I’d be very interested to see a study that asks people who don’t like Cilantro whether they like Beets or Chard. I suspect a large percentage of those who don’t like Cilantro or Beets won’t like the other two. Isn’t there some federal stimulus money laying around that hasn’t been used yet? I may have to start an informal survey of my own.

Are Potatoes supposed to do this?

Aren't potatoes supposed to be upright plants? Mine don't seem to think so. They prefer to fall over, lay along the ground and grow longer and longer . The potatoes are now starting to take over the garden. I was not expecting this.

Note the lighter colored leaves in between the potato plants near the bottom of the picture. That used to be a lettuce patch. I'm not too concerned about the lettuce since I have it planted in other areas as well, but the potatoes are now crossing a main pathway and are threatening Swiss Chard in the upper right of the picture and the broccoli/kohlrabi bed that you can see the edge of at the bottom of the picture.

Not really sure what to do about this. The plants don't send down any roots where they touch the ground, so theoretically they are movable, but the stems and branches are somewhat delicate/brittle and if I tried to point the plants in other directions I'd probably do significant damage to them. The potato plants are just starting to flower, so maybe they will stop growing and start trying to make seeds/potatoes?

On Fertilization

I went into this whole gardening thing hoping that I wouldn't have to fertilize the garden. I mean, I started out with good, nutritious soil, added a nitrogen-fixing cover crop that got tilled into the soil in the spring, and the little bit of compost that we had made over the winter also got tilled into the soil in spring. That seems like a good amount of food, and the compost and cover crop should slowly break down. That was the theory anyway. After watching weeds that I've killed and just left on top of the dirt, I've realized that vegetation actually breaks down really quickly and all the stuff that got tilled in during the spring is probably long since decomposed. On top of that, the sheer volume of plant material that my garden has produced so far makes me think that most of the easily accessible nutrients must have been mostly used up (at least in the Potato, Pea, Pak Choi, and Arugula beds). So its time to think about getting some fertilizer.

If this were a standard garden, I could go pick up some industrial NPK chemical fertilizer, but we try not to do that sort of thing here on the homestead. If we had some sort of a regenerative, beyond organic farming system with chickens wandering through the garden picking bugs and turning them into their own version of fertilizer and the overflow from a fish pond drip-watering the garden, I probably wouldn't have to worry about fertilizer. Sadly, that is not the case. So what sort of nutritious, easily available, relatively cheap organic fertilizer is available to homesteads like this one? I've been thinking about it, and this is the list I've come up with:

- My own vegetable compost: Its not ready, and there isn't much of it. We put more stuff in there several times a week and it keeps rotting down to almost nothing. I may just build up a year's worth and till it into the soil next spring.

- Composted cow manure: Moderately nutritious, but its available from multiple stores nearby in easily transported bags, and the cost is pretty reasonable.

- Composted chicken manure: Supposedly highly nutritious, but I haven't seen it available anywhere locally. I've found it online for not too much money per bag, but the shipping cost is rather prohibitive

- Worm compost. I've found one local producer, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to get my hands on it. Also not sure how nutritious it would be. I guess that probably depends on what they feed the worms, but I suspect it would be similar to regular vegetable compost.

- Bone Meal, Blood Meal, Fish Meal, combination organic fertilizers. I can find all this stuff online, but the shipping isn't cheap. I might be able to find some of it locally if I look hard enough. But it kinda seems like cheating to me. Its organic, but all this stuff isn't going to be made by any small local places, it will be made at some massive slaughterhouse in the midwest.

I've also been seeing a lot of stuff about "compost tea". Basically you steep worm or other types of compost in water, then water your plants with that liquid. That seems kind of silly to me. Why wouldn't you just put compost on top of the soil, and then you get compost tea every time it rains. Plus, you make sure all the organic material eventually makes its way into the dirt. Am I missing something about compost tea?

I'm thinking that I'll probably get a couple bags of composted organic cow manure for now because its cheap and easy, and I'll keep my eyes open for the local worm compost or chicken manure.

Attack of the giant Pak Choi!

I can't really complain about the greens that the garden is producing. We have more Arugula and Pak Choi than we know what to do with. Exibit A:

I don't know if the picture does it justice. That thing is huge. It probably should have been harvested a week and a half ago when I noticed it starting to bolt (go to seed). We had so many greens as it was and we had just eaten a bunch of pak choi, so I held off. It just kept getting bigger. Finally this morning when I went out to check on the garden the wind and rain from last night had knocked this guy over. It weighed in right around 2.0lbs. There was a pretty hefty flower stalk in the middle that I discarded, but I kept the flower buds (they look just like broccoli florets) and any leaves on the flower stalk. Jaime had a stir-fry recipe to try that called for 5 cups of cut-up bok choy (same thing as pak choi). After I cleaned and cut up the head, it made around 25 cups. Made a double recipe, heavy on the choi. Not too shabby.

In other garden news, I've noticed the first pea pods of the year. They should be ready to start picking by next weekend at the latest. I know that this is unusually early for that and peas around here aren't usually ready till the end of june or beginning of july. Works out well for me, though. I'm planning on putting Brussels sprouts in that area at some point in july. Next year it might be better to plant Brussels sprouts in a plot after greens to lessen the chances of overlapping times.

A couple weeks ago I planted some Asparagus roots. It will take a couple years before it is ready to harvest, so I wasn't sure I wanted to plant Asparagus. We should be around at least that long, so why not give it try. Its a bit late to be planting it, too. Better late than never? I put it in a spot that is mostly shaded at ground level by the fence. Asparagus gets pretty tall, so I'm hoping that it can grow up into the sun. I planted two purple plants, a green jersey knight and one other green kind. As of now, only one purple and one green have sprouted. I'll probably plant the last two remaining roots (the second green variety) that I have where those two didn't sprout.

I had been letting weeds grow in the heavily shaded area along the fence in the back yard. I realized that they will probably start sending out runners and seeds into my garden, so I decided I should hack them down. Turns out its kinda difficult to get rid of established weeds. Ugh. After 3 weeks of hoeing, there aren't many sprouts coming back up anymore. So then I had a nice approximately 1 foot wide nicely hoed dirt strip. I figured that since greens don't like hot weather, maybe they'd grow ok there where it is cooler and wetter. Not sure how they'll handle the full shade, but we'll see. I planted a bunch of pak choi, arugula, bibb lettuce, and swiss chard.

Morimoto

This is not really homestead related, but if anybody wants to check out our experience at Morimoto, take a look here.