Monkey Lobster

garden days

The garden is growing better than ever this year. We've had lots of sun and rain and with a fence and two guard cats, we have very few furry critters.

For the first time feel like my garden is the right size, nothing has been left off the list and the plants have plenty of room to grow. I covered a lot my crops with row cover in the spring and it seems to have helped them get off to a good start. Today I will harvest the garlic and plant some fall starts in its place (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower) and cover them up with row covers to prevent cabbage moths from laying their eggs on the plants.

I have lost my tomato corps to late bight for the past two seasons so this year I have been applying copper to them, it is only a preventative, but as you may already know there is no organic solution once your tomatoes have late blight. All you can do then is just watch them die, so this year I plan to prevent.

garden days

The hard frost came last week, later in the season than I've ever know. And once again I gained more garden knowledge than I thought I could in just one season.

Every year something is prolific and brilliant and every year something just never works no matter what I do. This year brought just a few cucumbers and an unbelievable display of flowers. Inside and out.

I didn't know that they were going to bring me such joy and pride. When I lost my father a few year back many people sent flowers, the house was full of giant bouquets of flowers and I found myself getting lost in them and really appreciating them for the first time. Now that my vegetable garden is well established, I feel the overwhelming urge to surround myself with flowers. This fall I planted 250 spring bulbs (the 50 I planted last year was pleasant but I'm hoping for something spectacular), and I have prepared many a perennial garden bed, cover cropped garden beds earmarked for flowers and saved many annual seeds in preparation for the upcoming season. Can't wait!

the not so pretty side

Well, here it is. Blight, cabbage worm, slugs, and beetles. And that's not even going into the whole ground hog battle. Next year I will use more row covers, I've found it to be the most effective way to control most of my problems. Maybe I can even hide under it.

a good cover

Planting a cover crop is a wonderful way to maintain and improve the soil. With an empty bed, the wind, rain, and melting snow will erode as much as 20% of the soil I've worked so hard to build. A cover crop will not only hold the soil in place, but will provide a rich "green manure" to work into the soil in the spring. I like winter rye, because it will winter over and re-grow in the spring, and when worked into the soil will decompose and give back nutrients and improve the soils ability to maintain moisture all summer long.  

Here is my Three Minute Method: 

    Planting Winter Rye

1. Pull out all plant material from garden bed
2. Throw hand-fulls of rye seed onto bed
3. Rake in seeds
4. Tamp seeds down with rake
5. Wait for rain or moisture in the soil to sprout seeds

No need to loosen, dig, even rake soil before putting down seeds. Try it and you'll thank me come spring.

 

Garden Days

September is my favorite eating month. Tomatoes are plenty and sauces stew on the stove. Berries by the handful and turned into jam. Peaches and apples fresh and in pies. Pesto in the freezer, and the fall crops right around the corner. The days are warm, sunny and dry, and the evening just right for a fire and a blanket. And yes, good weather for soccer too.

The photos are of the pretty side of my garden. There is the ugly side too. Maybe I'll share with you what blight and beetles and worms and mold had done next time. Or maybe I'll just let you think everything looks nice this year.

Garden Days

It's been hot. And muggy, and buggy. But things are growing pretty well.

We had our big garlic harvest this week, and the beds have already been filled with crops for fall. This year I grew enough to eat all winter and extra to plant in October for next year.

I've been fighting a ground hog. I hate him and will surely kill him if I can catch him. He has destroyed many of my crops, just eaten them down to their stems. I have planted and replanted and covered and re-covered. Wire hoops and bird netting seem to be saving them until the fence is complete. He crawled under the row-cover but missed a few, I may get a few cucumbers after all.

The berries have been coming in non-stop since June. Two springs ago I planted another row of raspberries, just so that I could walk between the rows, a romantic idea I had. My fantasy seems to be proving hopeful. 

Garden Days

Here's a peek at what's going on in my garden this week. This is the view out my bedroom window. It's the very first thing I do in the morning.........look at my garden.

Lots of greens, garlic scapes, fava beans, chick peas and snow peas.






The fruit is looking more hopeful than ever. I just have to cover the ripening fruit with bird netting before the critters get it.  The bee's and I are still just getting to know each other. Although I will tell you, that I did get a nervous system altering shock from an electric charge meant for a bear. I now know how to properly wire a fence, if you ever need assistance. 

What to do with a cover crop

This is winter rye that I planted last spring. It has held my soil in place over the winter and will soon be pulled up and added to the soil in the bed.

When I was first establishing my garden I has truck loads of compost delivered that I freely dumped on top of my beds. The past sevral years I've been making compost myself and can make about three yards, which is just not enough for my garden. I wanted to not be dependant on a truck to bring me compost every year and I've found that the rye adds a substantial amount of organic matter. 

A good planting of winter rye, a wheel barrow of compost and a balanced mix of rock dust keeps the hard working soil in each bed healthy and productive.

Here is how I deal with the rye:

I start by loosening the soil with a broad fork. Then I start at one end and just yank it out by the hand full, and lay it down on the bed.

Then I wait. Here it is a few days later.

Here is is a week and a half later. Sometimes I take an iron rake and give it a surface stir to break up some of the bigger clumps and mix it into the soil a little.

Here it is after 2 weeks. It's got a nice soft, crumbly texture. Ideally I will now add my rock dust and compost and wait one more week before planting. But I have been known not to wait that extra week. You can still see the little wisps of rye. They won't interfere with anything that's growing, and the rye will continue to decompose, adding nutrients and improving the texture of the soil.

Some years I wait too long, and miss my window of opportunity. If I find myself with knee high rye and tomatoes ready to go into the ground, I'll loosen the soil and pull the rye up and throw it in my wheel barrow. I'll add the rye to my cooking compost pile and add an extra load of finished compost to that bed. In the end it seems to even itself out.

Garden Days

I love this time of year. I feel confident this year.  I now have many years of experience and knowledge, I've been building my soil for a few years now, and I know the common pests and diseases in this little patch of earth I work. My expectations are high.

I'm trying fava beans and chick peas for the first time. The fruit trees and strawberries are flowering, and with 10 or so cloves of garlic left in my kitchen, the new garlic is coming up strong.

I did a little bit of proactive pest management. I covered the radishes with a row cover to keep the flea beetles off, so they don't eat those first baby leaves right down. And the lettuce and emerging peas tend to get pecked at by birds and nibble at by bunnies, so some bird netting held up by bend wire in the ground seems to be working so far (this is a second attempt at peas as the first batch did get pecked down).

I am most excited about the raspberries that are coming up so strong. I had a fantasy a few summers ago of lying between rows of raspberries with Cyrus, so last summer I added another row of Caroline raspberries. We'll be lying in their shade in no time.

Direct Seeding Water Conservation Technique

I have discovered that planting in a trench and watering deeply is a great way to conserve water and help plants develop better root systems. It also makes watering much easier because the water is directed to the seeds and young plants instead of into the paths. 

I start by making a trench (or as many as I need) and filling it with water. My intention is to saturate the sub-soil, where the moisture is not going to evaporate so quickly.

Then I drop in the seeds, fava beans and chick peas today.

I cover the seeds with the appropriate amount of soil and then tamp it down so that the seeds are in firm contact with the soil.

And then fill up the trench again with water.

Plants watered less frequently will look down for their water, instead of up. Seeds and seedling will need more frequent watering than established plants, but this deep watering technique (vs watering with a sprinkler or a hand held sprayer) will train plants to look to the sub-soil for their moisture and develop deep healthy roots. These plants will look to the sub-soil where water is available during dry periods. Plants that are watered more frequently and superficially will develop shallow roots, looking for water at the surface of the soil where is soil is dry and will require more frequent watering.