The 2011 Growing Season Has Begun!

Faithful blog followers have been begging for a post, so here it is! Before I get to 2011, a quick update on 2010. About 60% of the garden is done for the year, so I turned that portion over (with a shovel) and planted it with cover crops. I spread a mixture of oats and hairy vetch. The oats are supposed to grow quickly in the fall and die over the winter while the Vetch will grow slowly over the fall, survive the winter, and grow again in the spring. The Vetch is a legume and should add some nitrogen to the soil. The Oats grow quickly and should add a bunch of organic matter, and may help the Vetch survive the winter. Its definately later in the year than these cover crops should be planted, and the vetch might not survive the winter, but it can't hurt to plant them. Here is what it looks like after I had done about 40% of the garden.

As you can see in the picture, there are still some things growing. In the picture you can see green onions and broccoli. There are also still some cherry tomatoes, pepper plants, pak choi, lettuce, and brussells sprouts. Recently there was a forcast of widespread frost everywhere in the area except right by the lake, so I harvested most of the remaining peppers and tomatoes (most of which were green). It didn't end up frosting, so I'm glad I left some of the stuff on the plants. Below you can see that harvest.

In the bottom of the picture, you can see some garlic lined up. That brings us to the 2011 part I mentioned. I planted a dozen cloves of garlic. It should theoretically overwinter and be ready for harvest in the late spring or early summer. Those cloves came from a few heads of garlic that we got from the CSA this summer. Hopefully that means that they should grow well around here. Here is what the garlic patch currently looks like.

Sauce 'n Squash

My last post showed a large harvest from one of the tomato plants. Here is how the tomatoes look now.

It amazes me that around 13lbs of tomatoes, plus 2 onions and 3 peppers somehow turn into just over 3 quarts of sauce. I was hoping to get 6-8 quarts. I guess we'll just have to savor it that much more.

All the Spaghetti Squash vines are completely dead and brown now, so cut the squash off the vines and put them in the sun to try to get them to ripen up a bit more. Some of the vines died off before the squash on them had a chance to ripen. The color looks pretty washed out in the picture below, but about half of the squash are more green than they are yellow.

The stuff in the planters behind the squash is herbs. More Sage, Rosemary, Parsley, Chives, and Catnip than we can use.

Tomato Harvest

As I mentioned in one of the earlier posts, one of the tomato plants in the garden is an indeterminate variety and keeps slowly producing tomatoes. The other one apparently is determinate because it started growing all its tomatoes at the same time and didn't make any more flowers after that. Jaime has been wanting to make tomato sauce once the tomatoes from that plant ripen. A few had begun to trickle in over the past week, but it looked like the majority needed another week or so to fully ripen. Unfortunately, late blight has caught up to the tomatoes on that plant and have started to blight a few of the actual tomatoes and not just the foliage. In order to save what I could, I harvested all the tomatoes off that plant.

They might look like they are a ways from being ripe, but this variety is supposed to be marbled orange and red when fully ripe, so most of them are pretty close. That is about 11lbs of tomatoes. The smaller ones on top are a few cherry tomatoes from the other plant. We still have a few pounds from tomatoes that we had picked earlier, so we've got more than enough to make sauce with.

Potatoes

When I first dug up potatoes in mid-july, I found quite a lot of them. Since I knew we wouldn't be able to use them all quickly, I decided to leave most in the ground, hoping that they would keep well there. They are a thin-skinned red kind and not meant for long-term storage. We've gotten several shares of potatoes from the CSA between then and now, so we had no need for more potatoes. We finally burned through the CSA potatoes, so I dug up a couple plants from the garden yesterday. Here is what the potatoes looked like.

Not too shabby. A couple of them are rather calloused, but nothing to complain about. They are certainly in a lot better shape than most things would be after being buried in dirt for two months! I'm sure that you avid Miller Homestead followers recall that I was considering whether to thin out my potato plants or just let them grow. I thinned one row to 2-3 stems per tuber, while leaving all the 4-6 stems per tuber in the other row. I harvested one plant from each row yesterday, and though its a small sample size, you can see the difference. The bottom pile is from the thinned row and produce fewer, larger potatoes, while the non-thinned row produced more, smaller potatoes. That matches up with what the internet told me to expect. There is slightly more weight in the non-thinned potatoes, but not by a lot. Its hard to tell from the pic, but those two larger ones weigh a lot. Next year, I'll probably try to plant with somewhat fewer eyes (each eye sprouts one or more stems) per chunk of potato, but I won't thin them at all.

Since I was too lazy to post a pic of the garden in my garden update post, here is one.

The picture doesn't show everything because its too cramped to be able to see it all without a fish-eye lens, but you get the idea. The remains of the spaghetti squash can be seen on the left side and right side (where I let it grow through the old potato patch). Zucchini in the front. Broccoli is the blueish leaves in the middle with tomatoes behind that. You can just see the Brussells Sprouts plants starting to grow in the back along the wall. Pepper plants in the back right.

Which vegetables take up the most time?

I expected the garden to take up time this summer, but some of the crops took up more of my time than others. I'd guess that I probably spent about 3-5 hours per week on average. Here is a list of crops I grew this year, ranked from least time consuming, to most time consuming.

1. Onions: Not much to it, plant them, do a little weeding, yank them out of the ground, dry them.

2. Potatoes: Plant....harvest. If they didn't have to be dug out of the ground at harvest, they would be #1.

3. Leafy Greens: Not much work here, either. Did have to do some thinning and hilling up dirt to keep them upright.

4. Peppers: Had to do a little bit of staking the plants and branches to keep them from falling/bending over under the weight of the peppers.

5. Broccoli/Kohlrabi: Had to check often for aphids and spray for them periodically.

6. Beans: Just a matter of picking them, which is not terrible, but takes 10 min every other day for a month or so during harvest time.

7. Zucchini: Occasional harvesting, occasional spraying for powdery mildew, occasional pruning.

8. Ground-planted tomatoes: Requires occasional harvesting, periodic staking up, and frequent pruning.

9. Spaghetti Squash: Frequent spraying for powdery mildew, occasional pruning and harvesting

10. Topsy-turvy tomatoes: Just a matter of (quick) daily watering and frequent fertilizing

11. Peas: Putting in supports, training them up supports, and time-consuming picking made peas the most time-consuming crop of the year. 20 minutes of searching through vines to find peas every other day during harvest season really gets annoying after the first couple weeks. That doesn't even include the time it takes to trim the stems off (they were snow peas, shelling peas would be even worse) before eating. Its a shame the peas grew so well and tasted so good, because I'm tempted to not grow them next year due to the time it took to pick them.

Late Summer Garden Update

Its been a while since the last garden update, and I was going to make a really big post with lots of pictures, but then I got lazy. You probably wouldn't have wanted to read a really long post anyway.

August is supposed to be the month with tons of produce. Here at the Miller Homestead, it seemed to be the month of disease. After a prolonged battle, the Spaghetti squash has basically succumbed to a combination of Powdery Mildew and something else (possibly gummy stem blight). The Zucchini is pretty well covered in Powdery Mildew as well, though it seems to only be slowing it down rather than killing it off. The tomatoes are having problems with late blight, but the soil planted tomatoes are doing better than the ones in the topsy-turvy. The broccoli and kohlrabi have bad infestations of cabbage aphids. I'm keeping that in check with pyrethrin spray now, and the plants seem to be doing ok.

Despite the diseases, we have been getting some produce. Cherry tomatoes and paste tomatoes have been harvested. A couple of green bell peppers have been harvested. None of the peppers have turned the orange that they are supposed to, even though one started to rot on the plant. Sporadic Zucchinis, or course. We ate a couple of moderate sized spaghetti squashes. There are another 13 squashes of varying sizes and ripeness laying all around the garden; hopefully the unripe ones will still ripen even though the plant is basically dead. We've also eaten a few Kohlrabis. Basically, they are Broccoli stems, maybe with a slightly more cabbagy flavor. In case you haven't seen on, below is a picture of one. The picture is not from my garden (I told you this was a lazy blog post).

Not so sure I'd grow kohlrabi again. I think I'd rather have cauliflower or more broccoli or something.

There is still a good amount of stuff growing in the garden. We'll probably get tomatoes, peppers (green apparently), and Zucchini for the next month or so. Some of the spring planted broccoli looks like its just now starting to think about growing heads. I think they must have gone semi-dormant over the summer. Brussells sprouts have been transplanted, and I've also recently planted fall crops of Lettuce, Pak Choi, Arugula, and Green Onions (from bulb sets). Most of the potatoes are still in the ground, too. We have more than enough potatoes, and I'm hoping they'll keep well in the dirt till fall.

Garden Update

Its been a while since the last garden update, so here is another. The biggest development is that I lost the Cucumber to some sort of disease. Here is a picture of what it looked like shortly before its death. Sorry about the poor picture quality.

Whatever disease it had attacked the leaves making brown spots all over them until the leaf died. Unfortunately there are tons of leaf diseases bacterial, viral, and fungal that can attack Cucumber leaves and to my untrained eye, the pictures that I found online of each of them look remarkably similar. I tried spraying it a couple times with a baking soda solution that seems to help with powdery mildew on the squash, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the Cucumbers.

My bean plants may also have some sort of leaf disease. Here is a picture of what some of the beans looked like a couple weeks ago.

The brown spots also spread and killed the leaves on these plants. There is a chance that it is just old age for the beans since this happened as the second harvest was winding up. I'm not to upset about the beans either way since I got quite a bit of production out of them.

The tomatoes are doing very well. One of the plants (Heirloom Old German) dramatically slowed its growth and has almost 2 dozen large tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing thats a determinate variety. Jaime already has plans to make sauce out of those. The other plant (Heirloom Isis Cherry) continues to grow like crazy and has fewer tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing that is an indeterminate variety. Some of those are starting to ripen. That plant grew up to the top of my 8' wooden poles, so I pinched off those shoots (had to use a stepladder). I'll let some lower shoots grow up to the top now. Here is what the tomatoes look like as of mid-august.

Note in the picture that the vegetation is much thicker up to about 4'. That is the height of the previous stakes that I was using to hold up the tomatoes, and I had been trying to prune the plants to keep them at that height until I got the taller stakes. Thats what I'll be doing now, except it will be up at 8' now. The 3' high tomato cages are under there somewhere, too.

I was at a farm this past weekend and I took note of the way they supported their tomatoes. They were growing in a hoop house covered in plastic. The frame of the house had poles running the length that were about 10' off the ground. There were strings running from the poles on top down to horizontal poles on the ground, making 10' tall taught strings next to each plant. The tomato plants were spiraled up the strings as they grew and that seemed to be enough support for them. Not a bad idea. I could probably do the same thing around my wooden stakes next year.

I also learned while I was at the farm that scallions and green onions really are different. Green onions are just young onions that haven't grown bulbs yet while scallions will never grow bulbs. That is something to keep in mind for next year. I have two types of seeds that I was using to make scallions. One that was labeled "bunching green onions" did stop growing when they were still really small and made bulbs. The other was labeled "spring onions", and some of those continue to grow (and are pretty good-sized) without making any bulbs.

I didn't really have much hope for the pepper plants in the spring because they started out so slowly and were way behind all the other plants. They have done very well in the hot summer weather, though. There are probably about 6 or so peppers growing on each of the 4 plants. They are a sweet pepper variety that should ripen orange. I was expecting them to be smaller than bell peppers, but the largest of them are now approaching bell pepper size and are still green.

The Zucchini plant continues to grow vigorously. Even after trimming it back a bit, it has grown to be a dense canopy at least 10' by 10'. It is called a bush variety, but it seems to be basically a viney variety with really stubby vines. Zucchini production has been somewhat sporadic, though. Many of the baby Zucchini have shriveled soon after flowering, possibly because they aren't getting pollinated well enough. This week has been good for Zucchini, though. I harvested three large ones and there are two more that will get picked in the next couple days.

The Spaghetti squash continues to be the winner of the "Which plant can take up the most ridiculous amount of space?" contest. I originally allotted 5' x 5' for it. I let it take over the melon patch after the melons didn't really work out. Then I let it take over my paths and some shady areas that I wasn't planning on planting. Then it started climbing my fence (with mixed results). Then I let it take over the potato patch. It has been trying to take over the Zucchini area, but the Zucchini is putting up a pretty good fight. The Zucchini being taller and very dense, shades the squash vines that try to wind through it. Had I planted the squash in the middle of the garden and let it go where it wanted, I am quite certain that it would completely cover the entire garden. Its hard to tell how much squash we will actually end up with because its such a tangled mess and the squashes are various sizes. I've probably seen a dozen or so squashes, a couple of which are probably around 15" long and must weigh around 5lbs each.

One of the vines that went through the potato patch kept right on going past the potatoes, over to a lilac bush, and has climbed vertically into the bush. That bush is about 20' away from the planting location of the squash vine. Its now about 8' high in the bush and showing no signs of stopping. I'm curious to see if it will make it out the top of the bush, which is about 15' high.