Preparing for Green Beans

Well, the broccoli has now all gone to seed and the temperatures are moving upward.  I pulled out all the broccoli plants, yesterday.  I'll be putting bush green beans into their place.  I'll need to get some chicken wire in order to create a protective barrier that will keep the squirrels out of the bean bed as the beans begin to break ground.  The little critters find the freshly sprouted bean seeds quite tasty.  I'm not interested in sharing.

Heirloom Tomatoes

I'm excited about my tomatoes this year.  Instead of buying the standard hybrids available at the local garden center attached to Lowes or Home Depot, I decided to go to my local neighborhood grower, Enchanted Forest. They debuted their heirlooms this past Saturday.  Here is what I got

Cherokee Purple - medium large dusky rose fruits with full flavor
Black Plum - oval 2" fruits, from deep mahogany to black-brown, nice rich color makes great sauce
Eva Purple Ball - smooth round 4 - 5 oz fruit, blemish free, very good flavor, does well in humid areas

I like the names of these as much as the descriptions - I am especially interested in the Eva Purple ball because it does well in humid areas.

Several weeks earlier I found a second heirloom tomato, that I was told would do well in the heat and humidity of SE Texas.  The farmer lives north of me by 2 hours and he grew the Costoluto Gero last year up until August, then he cut it back and it grew back when temperatures got cooler in the fall.   I have no clue what it will taste like or what it will look like but I'm excited to try it and find out.  I'll keep you posted as the season progresses.

Broccoli is AMAZING!!!

Back in the fall of 2010 I planted broccoli for the first time.  I was curious to see how it would grow.  One of the first things I noticed was that because the weather was too cool for insects to thrive, I had no problem with cabbage moths or cabbage worms.  That was a plus.  We began harvesting 7 - 8 inch wide heads through the month of January.  I didn't pull my plants up after this initial harvest, as I had read that if left alone broccoli would put out shoots which would grow into additional smaller heads.

Here is what my broccoli looks like now!  I have lots of new heads forming.   This picture was taken AFTER I picked quite a number heads for supper tonight.

My cabbage looks to be ready to pick.  It too has been left alone by the cabbage moth and cabbage worm.

I must report that the broccoli and cabbage plants were placed in the garden bed that I experimented with last spring.  Instead of trying to plant in the gumbo that was in this grow box I decided to follow the principles outlined in the book Lasagna Gardening  by Patricia Lanza.  I placed a 3 - 5 sheet layer of newspapers down first (I didn't even bother weeding or double digging the bed), then a layer of cut grass, then a layer of peat moss, then a layer of leaves, layer of peat moss.  I repeated the layering twice  cause by then the squash vines from the other bed were spreading over this bed. The contents of this grow box is friable, loose, nutrient rich (as you can see by the color of the plants), crumbly and holds moisture well.  I'm impressed.  Lazy gardener that I am this method is quite successful.

More Things Discovered

Who Knew Peppers Would Survive the Blazing Summer Sun?

I had a most pleasant surprise when I cleared the morning glory vines off the spring garden in September. There, still struggling to put out fruit, were the two green pepper plants I had put in April. I found three peppers that were beginning to turn red (and now you know why red peppers cost so much in the grocery stores - they are actually green peppers that have been left on the vine to ripen - it takes longer), which I picked. Now that they no longer have to compete for sun and water they are continuing to produce, there are at least 5 - 6 peppers at various stages of growth. Some look like they are even ready to pick.

Gifts from Hurricane Ike -          The next two pictures were brought to me thanks to hurricane Ike.

 These sunflowers now grow in profusion in the cracks in the concrete between the garage and the neighbors fence.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This WAS a Chinese Elm tree. They produce an inordinate amount of seeds every fall and can really be described as a weed tree.  There are baby Chinese Elm trees in a great many places they do not need to be around our property.
 

I can still remember asking my DH to remove that little tree in the corner of the garden before it got too big.  Well, it was about 10 - 12 inches across when Ike came blowing through and he broke off a number of branches, it being a soft wood.  A friend offered to cut it down for us and we took him up on the offer.  Since Ike, the stump has been busily trying to send out tiny, thin branches all around its edge, that is until I tried something.  A friend of mine shared with me a technique she uses to remove old stumps from her property.  She piles a mound of lit charcoal briquettes onto the offending stump and just keeps lit coals on the stump until eventually the stump is just burned away.  I'm quite good at putting the lit charcoal on the stump but I am not so good at remembering to keep adding new charcoal.  The first time I did this to the stump however, I did manage to kill it and now it has stopped sending out thin little branches.  I've even noticed that the bark has fallen off.  I think I'll try burning the stump one more time and then if I haven't cleared it completely, I'll let the termites finish the job.

 

The Fall Garden 2010

The weather here in South East Texas is beautiful. My tomatoes have been planted for a few weeks now but is wasn't until last week that I started to grow them vertically. My vertical support system took a beating this summer with the weight of the morning glory vines so I had to do some hunting around to find fittings and poles that were still straight and undamaged to create somthing for this fall. I love the nylon netting they have a Home Depot, the squares a wide enough apart that I can weave the tomato vines in and out of them without difficulty and without using twisty ties. This is what is looks like.

In front of the tomatoes are 9 broccoli plants and 18 butter crunch lettuce plants. The white strips are old window blind strips. They say if you don't have a square foot garden marked in square foot blocks it's not a square foot garden. The fall garden is in my second grow box, behind it is the spring grow box.

Gardening - Spring 2010

This year I tried something a little different.

I started "Lasagna" composting, i.e. linear composting is what it's been called for a long time. Every time I had plant matter that could be added to the garden, be it grass clippings, rabbit litter, or kitchen vegetable waste, I added it. Sometime in March I noticed some type of squash growing in a great clump a one end of the grown bed I was actively adding material to. In fact, I had two different types of vines pop up out of the grown box. I weeded most of the huge clump out and left probably 3 - 4 plants to continue growing. It was fascinating to watch and I was excited to know what I had tossed in that had volunteered.

Since one end of the bed was actively growing something vine-like I decided to plant the opposite end of the box with tomatoes, green pepper, Japanese eggplant and bush cucumbers. This was at the beginning of April. Note to self: If you want tomatoes before it gets too hot, they must be either short season varieties or they must go in no later than the beginning of March. I tried growing several 'heirloom' varieties but my most successful was one from Mexico called Tlacolula - It's shaped somewhat like a plum tomato but it had deep ridges all the way around it. It was a very mild tomato in flavor, it didn't have the sharp, acidic taste of so many tomatoes you get these days. I really enjoyed and have (I hope successfully)saved some seeds.

I wish now that I had taken a picture of my thriving garden. I haven't grown so successful a garden since I lived in New Jersey, more than 15 years ago. I think it had a lot to do with the composed organic material.

I discovered I had volunteer spaghetti squash and volunteer acorn squash coming up at one end of the garden bed. Every day when I came out to check the garden it seemed like the vines had grown another foot or more. I had 12 spaghetti squashes of various sizes hanging from the nylon netting I had stretched across my galvanized tubing frames and 1 acorn squash. I was excited. Then it happened...

The squash vine borer moth found my garden and my lovely vines. In two weeks my vines were history. I tried to cut the grubs out of the vines in an attempt to save the plants and for a short time that worked but quickly the moth laid more eggs, and as they say, the rest is history. The first to go was the acorn squash vines (I harvested 1 acorn squash), the next was zucchini (it was almost like it was here today - gone tomorrow) (I harvested just one zucchini squash), then the spaghetti squash vines were attacked(I had to pick my immature squash and hope that they'd ripen on the counter.) It was very sad. I'm still seeking an organic way to deal with them next year. The Master Gardeners at the AgriExtension office have all said "Good Luck with that, there isn't anything." The moth has a fat red body with black wings.

I fought the birds and won most of my Tlacolula tomatoes. Bird netting helped with that. Near the end of the tomatoes productive season the leaf footed stink bugs arrived with their nymphs. Now I know what the white dots on tomatoes and peppers are - they are the damaged done by the stink bugs. I discovered that a dust buster is an excellent way to deal with them, since they prefer to crawl rather than fly. I'll be using a dust buster more frequently in the garden next spring.

Currently, the only thing growing happily in the garden is morning glory. I pulled out everyone I saw before it got too hot to work in the garden. The minute I turned my back it spread like wild fire.

Summer Time and the Garden is changing

It's been an interesting Spring. We harvested scores of tomatoes, at least all the ones we could nab before the birds punctured holes in them. I found that if I picked them just as they began to color- we got them, if I waited for them to turn a little more red - the birds got them.

We've probably picked 12 cucumbers off the bush cucumbers I started from seed. I've had to learn to wait until they plumped up a little before picking them, otherwise they tasted a little too green.

The swiss chard is doing well, as is the Malabar spinach - which is actually a vine with edible leaves. It's in it's second year, I bought it last year at the farmer's market and planted it in the half wine barrel with the ailing tomatoes. Just as promised, it reseeded itself and is going to town.

I planted string beans but for some reason only four out of the 9 plants came up. I don't know whether the birds got them or I planted them too deeply or what. It's been wild to watch them grow, they are in their second or third blossom cycle. 4 plants only produce enough green beans to snack on.

I've got a volunteer basil plant growing in the garden near the cucumbers. The birds must have planted it cause I certainly didn't. The parsley is struggling along, I really need to soak the soil, they aren't getting enough water. The stems are rather hard - it is definitely rabbit parsley.

I tried an experiment this year and made my own upside down tomato planter out of a plastic, 5 gallon bucket you can get for free at any bakery. There seems to be natural, circular indentations in the bottom and lid of these buckets - so I drilled those out, sat the bucket on two chairs, put my baby tomato plant upside down through the hole and filled the bucket with potting soil. I put a coffee filter over the hole in the lid, secured the lid and flipped the whole thing over. I left the tomato grow upright for a week or so, then I hung the whole contraption upside down on a securely mounted hook on my patio roof. The plant was determined not to grow upside-down and for awhile it looked like it was heading for the top of the roof. Eventually, as the fruit began to grow, it forced the stem to come down and now reluctantly it's growing down towards the ground. This one seems to be a little trickier for the birds to pick the fruit - I think they must have to dive bomb it, as there is no place to sit and peck daintily at the ripening fruit.

I made a second bucket and placed a basil plant in it. The basil has had not qualms at all about growing upside down. It immediately just turned it's leaves over and has had no quarrel with the pull of gravity. I discovered at the beginning of the project that it was definitely advantageous to use a potting soil mix and not a dirt type mix. Potting soil is lighter, a bag of garden dirt from the garden store is way too heavy. Also, when asking for the buckets be sure to say you want to keep the handles. I had to put rope handles on my buckets but would have much preferred the metal handles that came with the buckets originally. Also, I learned that when purchasing potting soil, smaller is better. It takes less then you think to fill a 5 gallon bucket.

This summer, I've covered the garden bed with several layers of newspapers in an effort to control the weeds. So far it's working. I've planted a few cantaloupes and hope that they trail all over the garden to fill in the empty space. I'm hopeful we can keep the tomatoes alive during the long summer months. I know some people pull them up and start fresh in the fall but if we can keep them going we'll have earlier fall tomatoes. We grow the best fall tomatoes here in South East Texas.

Linear Composting

Thirteen years ago, we constructed three 4 x 16 grow boxes. Two of those boxes are still unused, but this spring, just before the open house reception we pulled up the big weeds and covered them both in a thick layer of hay. Some very determined but easy to pull out grass has poked through and morning glory vines have grown up around the edges but the thick layer of hay compost has successfully stifled anything else from coming up.

I decided I wanted to add more organic matter to at least one of these beds; so I've been using my Vita-mix to chop up every bit of vegetable matter into a mash and pouring it under the hay to rot. Well I thought this seemed to be working quite well until one day, as I pulled up some hay near where only a few days before I'd added the last batch of mash - I discovered that I had created conditions perfect for the production of meal worms. You know the kind, the big fat meal worms they feed to lizards and birds at the pet store and that fishermen use as bait. There squirming in the mash was a large mound of meal worms. Uck!!! Now what!

It took several phone calls to the folks at the cooperative extension service before I was able to find someone who could give me some advice. The recommendation was open the bed up to the air so the birds can get fat and happy and probably don't make mash of the vegetable matter. The only problem was when I pulled the hay back I didn't know where my squirming mass of meal worms had moved on to. Oh well. Maybe the 7 toads I know are living in those garden beds will find them worms or the resulting beetles and have a fine meal and they can get fat and happy.