Way back in 2005 the Organic Trade Association put together a little video talking about the need for a rebellion against the empirical food crop addiction to chemicals and the frankenfood they produce. This battle of good vs evil led to one of the best videos I’ve seen all week. The video is 5 years old now so many of you might have seen it already, as I had, but I had forgotten about it and love both the message and the delivery. So without further delay I give you, Cuke Skywalker and Obiwan Canolli in Grocery Store Wars.
This post is dedicated to my Number One Blog Fan, MrsDoItAll. Happy Birthday Mom!!
It was a gorgeous weekend in Seattle and we took full advantage of it. My beautiful wife and I spent Friday night out on the deck, cleaning off the winter dust and dirt and getting it ready for summer. I fired up the grill and we got the deck beer fridge stocked and ready to go. After that some neighbors invited us over for some cards and wine. How I do love summer and it’s not even here yet!
We hung this little red birdhouse this weekend as well. It was one of the small little projects that I had finished earlier and just hadn’t put out in the garden yet. My wife did an awesome job painting it, including the sweet “A+M” in a heart on the side.
In garden related news, things are finally starting to really grow now. My peas are all blooming out. I planted some Canoe peas that I had left over from last year, and I planted a lot of them. Supposedly they grow fairly large with nice big pods.. last year they got about 2 feet tall and stopped, each (healthy looking) vine only producing a pod or two of 4-6 peas each.
Looks like this year won’t be any different with this variety. Aw well, we aren’t much into peas anyway. I’ll try a different variety next year or maybe in the fall and see how it goes.
My forest of garlic is going very well. The Music on the right are very thick stemmed and lush. The ‘Chet’s Italian’ on the left are supposed to be a much smaller, but tastier garlic that was discovered growing wild here in the Pacific Northwest. It was propagated from a single head found in an abandoned lot.
My cabbages are growing well also. Here are my green and red cabbages.
These are the first radishes I have ever grown. I’m mostly growing these just to be growing something right now, and to give away.. I don’t really like radishes that much, although I plan to eat a few (these included).
The lettuce and spinach bed from the coldframes are still going strong. Beautiful tight heads of butter lettuce with my two winter varieties of spinach. We had a spinach salad for lunch today fresh from the garden. A few more months until the cucumbers and tomatoes come from the garden.. not soon enough!
My 5 varieties of tomatoes all got moved to the coldframe this weekend. We are supposed to have a nice long warm period with lows in the low 50s here and overcast and rainy so it’s a great time to move these little guys outside. Here we have (in no particular order): Binto Cherry, Zebra Cherry, Super Marzano, San Marzano Gigante 3, and Chianti Rose.
I also did a little clean-up work on the garden itself this weekend. I broke out my lawn edger and put a nice edge on the garden space. It really cleans up the look of the garden and helps it feel more like a feature of the overall yard, rather than just something stuck in the yard.
It’s been a while since I posted last. Life is unusually busy, mostly due to the new job. I’ve left the ranks of the Galactic Empires Stormtroopers to become a freelance mercenary. At least, that is how it feels being a consultant. Swoop in, fix some problems, swoop out. My latest swoop took me to Paris, France for a week. It was quite the adventure.
It was nice to come home to my own garden, not to mention my wife and home. Things are growing nicely.
This was one of my dinners in Paris, dining on the Seine river.
Just another commute to work with the Eiffel Tower in the skyline.
The Westin hotel we stayed in had a beautiful courtyard cafe and being Paris they allowed you to smoke. They also sold about 12 different cuban cigars. I definitely did not partake of a gorgeous Montecristo #4.
What better to drink with said stogie than a beautiful armagnac from the family vineyards of local french family.
Too bad I didn’t buy this until days later.. but I will be recreating this scene properly on any given Saturday evening on my deck in the warmer months to come.
Now, to the garden pictures. This is one of the heads of lettuce I started in the cold frame back in late January. It’s one of the few that still remain.. we’ve eaten most of them already!
This patch of greens has kept us supplied most of this spring. We don’t eat a lot of salads and greens in the spring.. not nearly as much as in the hotter summer weather at least, so this patch is big enough for now. It’s certainly providing a lot for this time of the year.
This is one of my baby radishes. I’ve eaten a few of the thinnings, little radishes the size of a pea. They are thinned enough to grow now so in a couple of weeks I hope to harvest my first ever self grown radish.
This is one of my many pea patches. Growing along nicely.
The sign says lettuce, but it sure looks like spinach to me. I guess I’ll have to let it grow up and see what it turns out to be. Generally the reason for having labels is so you don’t have to guess..
The cauliflower and broccoli are plugging along too.
The cabbages don’t want to be left behind.
Check out my rutabagas. I left a few to over winter to see if they’d produce any seed. I don’t really like rutabagas, so I don’t really plan to save the seed.. I just wanted to see what would happen. They are enormous.. at least 5 FEET tall.
The garlic in the foreground is doing very well.. I’m ready to start harvesting! I’ll try to be patient though.
This is one of my favorite parts of the growing season. Planting tiny little seeds that turn into tiny little plants, which hopefully turn into not-at-all-tiny plants down the road. I have a good selection of cold crops that just sprouted and are growing well under my grow light. The new grow light I mentioned in another post hasn’t been set up yet, but will be soon.
No pictures yet, but I picked up 6 strawberry starts this weekend. They are hanging out in the coldframe for week to make sure they are hardened off before getting planted this coming weekend.
These are my oldest kids, heh. Two types of onions. There are two 4″ cells in the photo, but they are in single file so you can’t see the pot behind the other one. They are Guardsman onions and Shimamoto Japanese onions.
These are Thompson’s broccoli and Cheddar Hybrid cauliflower. The cauliflower will be a fun orange color when it’s finished. Sadly, they won’t taste like cheddar.
I really have no idea what these are. These are ANS #47, as seen on the plant tag, which means they are Red Acre Cabbage. ANS stands for Aaron’s Number System. I’m planting 54 different varieties this year, most with at least 3 plantings, some less (like corn) and some a lot more (like greens). Each start or planting (cold frame or direct) has a small metal plate with a number on it which is it’s primary key in my database. Putting “47″ on a tag is a lot easier than “Red Acre Cabbage – Planting 1 – Started Indoors 03/18 – Moved to Coldframe 3/30 – Transplanted 4/05″ on a tag!
These little guys are super fun. They are red cabbage, but what I didn’t know was the red cabbages are all red even from birth. They should add a cool color to the garden for the first part of the year.
These are the newest babies. Just barely starting to sprout. These are my second round of scallions, but a different variety than the first. These, along with the red cabbage seeds were gifts from my buddy Cyberegg.
In the words of Ice-Cube: Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K., I gotta say, today was a good day. A good day indeed. It was mid 60s and sunny here today and in the sun it felt much warmer.
I hit up the community garden plot with cbro this morning around 11. We got the plot sectioned off into beds and worked in some coffee grounds and organic fertilizer so that it can all start to break down so when we do plant a few weeks from now there will be available nutrients. We did plant a few beds of peas, just to see what will happen. I bet they all do well.
Back home I worked on my garden for a while too. I was surprised that my compost pile did so well over the winter.. I got two full wheelbarrows full of the most beautiful compost that I spread over my new garden beds. I built a sifter a month or so ago when I made my potting soil, so I sifted my compost as well. I also worked in some COF (complete organic fertilizer).
Now I’m sitting on my deck smoking my pipe and writing up this blog post. And I didn’t even have to use my A.K. It was a good day.
Yeah that’s right. Be jealous. Dearest coldframes, how I love thee… er.. thees.. thous.. I love you both.
Today I did the first thinning harvest of the winter spinach and lettuce in the coldframes. We made a gorgeous salad for lunch with these.
And yes, that is a frisbee.
Here are the new beds at the community garden.
This is my weeping cherry in the front yard. It is blooming out beautifully.
The main reason for starting my gardening blog back early last year was to keep notes on what worked, what didn’t, and what I would change for 2010. Since my 2010 Territorial catalog came in this weekend I guess it’s time for me to write the summary post on all of the things I grew in 2009.
First, though, the results of a few of my experiments from this year.
The stone bed really is good for plants that do better in partial shade. My tomatoes didn’t do well there. Spinach, lettuces, kale and carrots all did well there. Onions, bok choy and surprisingly enough, Chard, didn’t do very well. I guess it will be my ‘greens’ bed from now on. This works out well since it is elevated above the bunnies that would likely chow down.
I have several experiments planed for 2010. First of which will be to propagate my blueberry bush. Second will be the new garden itself. I’m going with Steve Solomon’s recommendation and moving away from raised beds towards low mounded rows. I’ll be doing a lot wider plant spacing in hopes of better water conservation. I have the 1/2 acre, I should put it to use.. and I will. This should allow me to run my in-ground irrigation system only rarely through the driest of summer months.
Now, on to the summary:
Name
Grow Again?
How it went
What to do differently
Jalepenos
Maybe
Peppers are hard. Really hard. We had several days over 100 degrees and mine still yielded poorly. I think they were planted way too early
This year I think I’ll grow the seedlings much longer indoors. I set out fairly small plants in 2009, way too early. I think they went into shock. I’m considering growing them under cover all year too. I have some coldframes in use this winter that might make it extra warm for the peppers.
Leafy Greens
Yes
These were my greatest success, probably because it’s hard to screw em up. I did well in succession planting in my stone framed bed.
I think I’ll add bits of spinach and smaller leaf types around as borders in my flower beds and other areas this year. They do so well and look so pretty.
Pac Choi
No
The first early planting of pac choi didn’t do well at all. In fact they failed miserably. A second, much warmer planting did better but still didn’t create very large plants, and most bolted quickly.
We eat a fair amount of store-bought boc choy, but I think I’d rather grow something else in the space.
Rutabagas
No
We ended up eating more rutabaga greens than rutabagas. The roots didn’t develop very well. To top it all off.. we found we don’t really care for rutabagas.
Not growing.
Bulb Onions
Maybe
They didn’t do well. Most sprouted and just stagnated at 5 inches tall. However, towards the fall and even early winter they started to grow nicely.
Storage onions are cheap… I live in the same state that produces Walla Walla Sweets. On the other hand, if I grow over-wintering onions, it will be growing when not much else does. I’ll have to do some reading about it this year and see what the fall brings.
Carrots
Yes
I did two plantings of carrots this year and had great success with both. The carrots grew nice and fat and tasted great.
I planted too early to get any frost on the carrots. They were all ready long before the fall. This year I’ll do another planting in mid-summer.
Canoe Peas
Yes
I’m not sure about these. They did OK, but didn’t do as well or produce as much as I was expecting. I had 10 vines get about 3′ tall and produce only about 5 pods each. Not much.
I’m not sure what to do differently. I think I’ll try succession planting this year to see if I was too early into the ground. Peas grow in cool weather, so I don’t think I was all that early if any. We’ll see.
Early Tomatoes
Yes
I grew Oregon Spring and Northern Delight early tomatoes from seed indoors before transplanting out. I’m pretty sure I was still too early into the ground with these. I got only a few pounds of tomatoes from each plant. Barely enough to eat, not nearly enough to can.
Start indoors a little bit later, and then out into the coldframes instead of the ground itself. The season for tomatoes here is short, so I need to get a head start, but the nights are still cool enough to put the baby tomatoes into shock, from which most never recovered lasy year.
Main Season Tomatoes
Yes
I picked up several semi-professionally grown San Marzano and Roma tomato seedlings from a neighborhood lady on Craigslist. I planted them much later in the year.. too late I thought, in mid-May. It turned out to be just right though and they did far and away better than my Earlies did.
I will likely try to buy some seedlings from the same lady this year as back up to my own that I start indoors and in coldframes.
Tomatillos
No
My tomatillos didn’t do all that well this year. Probably due again to the fact I jumped the gun and planted too early. Their requirement to be planted in several plant groups for proper pollination adds up to me not planting them again in 2010.
Not growing.
Beans
No
I harvested a total of 3 bean pods in 2009. Epic Fail seems to apply to my bean crop. Only 2 out of 15 beans in two successive plantings germinated at all. Or, as I think is more likely, survived the birds.
We don’t really eat many beans, so I’ll use the space for something more valuable.
Green Onions
Yes
My green onions took a bit to get off the ground but eventually went on and did really well. They grew well into the fall, providing me green onions whenever I needed them and storing very well in the cool ground.
This year I plant to grow a lot more, and use them a lot more often.
Sunflower
Maybe
We tried to grow two different sunflowers this year, and both failed. The first was from a seed packet and most of the seeds were cracked. None germinated. The other attempt was for a plant from home depot. It didn’t last a week.
If I decide to try again this year, it will be with reputable seeds planted in the main garden.
One Ball Squash (summer)
Yes
These were some of the most luscious looking plants in the garden this year. They all did well and produced plenty of little single serving summer squash.
Give the plants more room this year. They all grew together really fast last year and mildew set in and killed most of them once the season started to change. I think I could have gotten another few weeks if they were spaced wider.
Spaghetti Squash (winter)
Yes
This vining squash needs a lot of room to grow, but grows fairly well vertically. It did well, and the fruits held for a long time after being harvested. At least 3 months on some of them.
I’ll create a better trellising system for them this year right from the start. They seemed to grow pretty happily in the Up direction which gives me more room on the ground for other things.
Herbs
Yes
Some of my herbs did ok, some failed spectacularly. My cilantro came up on its own this year and did just OK. I don’t think it got enough sun or heat to grow big lush leaves. My dill took a full 60 days to germinate and then came up long after I had given it up for dead. Still it didn’t do very well either. I had better luck with Basil that I planted in pots. My oregano, sage, epazote, and marjoram all did great.
I think I will keep more herbs in pots or planted under cold frames with my peppers, especially the cilantro and basil, the two I use the most.
