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With summer finally in full effect the garden is finally going strong. I’m still hoping that my tomatoes get ripe in time. Regardless, I am making progress year over year, and that is really my only goal. This is the first year that my own tomato starts have really grown massively huge.

You can see they are starting to grow over the tops of my cages. Most of them have fairly large fruit on them and we have at least another month of good temps.. so there is hope they will ripen. I have stakes in the ground to put my hoop frames back over them if it calls for that later in the season.

The zucchini squash I got from a neighbor is doing really well. I harvested my first zuc this weekend. You can see it in the top middle of the photo.

The potatoes are still growing like mad. The cabbages are finally starting to develop nice big heads. The winter squash on the left is going well. All of the open spaces are actually filled with sprouts already, for my winter veggies. Mostly Kale, Chard, Broccoli and Cauliflower.

So what happens when you don’t go to your community garden plot for three weeks? Godzilla squash. Yes, this is a One Ball squash, and as you can see by the 8″ chef’s knife beside it.. it is massive. It still tastes fairly sweet, so I’m going to try to make a soup out of it and see what happens. I hope it works, because I have 5 of these things.

It has been a long while since I posted any updates on the garden thanks mostly to a really busy work schedule for the last few months followed by a much needed week of vacation away from all things technical (except for taking videos on my iphone) in Alaska. I’ve tried to stay up on my garden, but it isn’t growing all that well this year. At least, it hasn’t until the last week or so. Hopefully the warm weather and sunshine isn’t too little too late for me.

I’m also using some new blogging software. I was using Windows Live Writer but for some reason the new version won’t let me upload images anymore. I fiddled with it for some time with no real success and since it doesn’t give me any error messages I can work with (or that even show up on searches) I’m changing software. My posts will take a slightly different format, but that’s about all that should change.

I’m doing a few experiments this year. This plot is where one of my raised beds was at last  year. It is too close to the fence to really get all that much sun, but last year I didn’t use that much fertilizer either. Since I created my own this year I’m trying a few things in what is left of this bed just to see if it will make much difference. So far, not very much.

My garlic is getting ready to harvest before too long. This shot is from July 7th and shows everything getting nice and lush and some of them just starting to turn brown.

Here is the same garlic patch on July 11th.. just a few days later. As you can see a lot of the smaller Chet’s Italian garlic has gone mostly brown and started to fall over. I’m not sure if that is an official sign of being ready to harvest but I pulled a few and checked and they all look right to me. After harvesting most of the Chet’s Italian a few of them had started to split, so I think my timing is right on.

I harvested 43 heads of Chet’s Italian.

I have probably 50 more heads still growing, including all of my Music garlic, none of which is ready yet.

My green and red cabbages have started to form heads.That’s fun. Not sure I’ll grow cabbages again next year. They take up sooo much room.

The potatoes are continuing to grow like mad. I’ve hilled them up to their max amount I think. A couple of them are starting to bloom, which means they are producing taters down in the soil.. according to my reading anyway.

This photo shows my two primary tomato beds. The foreground shows my trials with red mulch. The bed above was started under the hoop house until the early part of July. They are both starting to do well. Growing pretty rapidly. The cherries have all bloomed and hopefully I have fruit soon.

Ahh.. sunshine. We hope to see more of you!

Lots of new things popping up this week.

	These little guys are my Easter Egg Radishes, a gift from my friend Cyberegg. They are going to be all shades of pinks and purples. Hopefully.
	This… this is my weed patch. This is the flower bed I made last year, but never got around to planting. I put a batch of peas in the ground several weeks ago, mainly just to see if they’d grow by themselves in un-amended soil. As you can (maybe) see, they are growing. Hopefully I will get some flowers into this bed this year.
	My thyme has started to show its lovely green and white face. I am somewhat surprised that my perennial herbs have all returned. Sage, thyme and oregano are all growing.
	This is the oregano i just mentioned.
	Release the mini Kraken! Just kidding, this is one of my hostas, the first to return from the deep.
	This shrub was with the house when we bought it. I’m sure its a common plant, but I’m not all that into flowers and shrubs so I have no idea what it is, other than pretty.

For the last couple of years, and even so far this year, the babies (seedlings) have taken over my office for the early part of the growing season. I have run out of room in my office and after buying a new grow light with no place for it, it was time to build the nursery. Using some scrap 2x4s I had laying around I put together a little seed starter rack that sits out in the garage. The garage is actually a better place for it since it gets cooler at night and will help the seedlings grow harder and adjust to the outside easier.

	This is it. I have 2 – 2 bulb lamps right now, with room to add one more row below. After that if I still need more room I will switch out the 2 bulb lamps with 6 bulb lamps, and be able to grow at least 432 seedlings at a given time. I think that should be enough.. for now!!
	This is the second harvest of the year. Some more spinach and green onions and some sage. This all went into a lovely omelet my lovely wife made for me.

Last year was the year of trying the Intensive Gardening method. Double dug raised beds.. brought in quality soil to fill them.. heavy (organic) fertilizer and very intensive irrigation. It worked.. somewhat. It was good for hobby gardening. There was definitely no money made by the end of the year.

This year I’m going back to the ‘old school’ methods. Spreading out and using the land that I have. I have just under half an acre, so there really is no reason for me to do intensive gardening.

	Here is what my garden looked like last year. Well.. this was a few days ago, nothing growing but the garlic, but it shows the raised beds I used last year.
	And this is the beginnings of my new garden! This awesome guy on craigslist that rents out his tractor by the day. I asked him if he just did work himself for small projects like mine, and sure enough he agreed. He came over one morning and in about half an hour had sod transformed into the beginnings of a new garden bed. Some of the best money I’ve ever spent, that’s for sure!
	Here is the final product after I’ve made a few paths for myself to get around in. I blocked it off into roughly 6′x4′ blocks.
	Same thing from another angle. The plot in the foreground will be my landing/staging area. It will be either mulched or graveled. Maybe I’ll put a nice little garden chair there or something. A gardener needs to just sit and relax every now and then!
	Here is some of our locally produced waste seed meal. Since this is Seattle, that would be Coffee grounds. I stopped by my local Starbucks and picked up a bag one day, and another bag a few days later.
	You can see there is some espresso grounds in the mix as well. I’m going to have some highly caffeinated worms!
	My blueberry bush was right in the middle of where the new garden went in, so I trimmed it back and moved it to a different spot on the other side of the house. This isn’t the right time of year to make cuttings to propagate (as root grow takes place in fall and winter) but I decided to give it a shot.. why not. If it fails I’ve lost nothing, and if it works, I have 6-8 free blueberry bushes!

This year I decided to add to my garden, not only by putting in a much bigger garden at home (posts on that to come) but also to take part in my local community garden. It is located in Marymoor Park in Redmond, and gets sun all day long. Since this is our first year, we are only allowed 1 plot, which isn’t a problem for us at all. We even decided to go halfers on the plot with our good friend (more family really) cbro. No, his mother did not give him that name, but if I called him by his real name none of my family would know who I was talking about. Each community plot is 10′x40′, giving us 400 sq ft. We are dividing it in half, so my wife and I have 200 sq ft in addition to the 500 sq ft we have at home.

We got to the plot around noon on a cool and rainy Saturday. This was fine by me as it meant it wasn’t going to be crowded.. in fact we were the only ones in the place for the first two hours. Our plot did not look like it had been used in a while. Later we discovered that both ours and the plot beside it likely belonged to the same person last year or the year before. Maybe we won’t have neighbors on one side this year and we can expand a little.

	The community garden looks pretty rough right now, being technically still winter. I took this picture from the main entrance to see how it changes over the seasons.
	This is what we have to work with. Random wire, and lots of grass, weeds, and old vegetative material. Looks tasty!
	But, you take 3 strong backs and a few hours of work and you end up with something a lot more pleasant. We will go back next week and make our beds and add our compost and organic fertilizers. We might even plant some peas.

This is a project that my wife and I have been wanting to do for a while. I started it last weekend and while cutting the first one out it caught in the drill and sliced open my finger. Pretty nasty too. That will teach me to wear gloves when working with sheet metal. So a week later and well on my way to recovery, we decided to tackle it again. This time we had much better success.

	We looked all over the web, local nurseries and my inventory of seed catalogs for cute, affordable and durable plant tags. Durable, in our case, means standing up to years of being soaking wet. We found some cute ones, some affordable ones, and some durable ones.. but none with all three attributes. They were all either cheap, ugly, or expensive ($14 each for plant tags, really??). So what do we do, we design and make our own! I think they turned out really well. Here’s how we made them.
	We started off with a 24×24 sheet of fairly thin sheet metal, cutting it down to 1.5″ strips.
	Then we cut those down to individual sizes.
	Using a metal stamp kit we stamp in each of the names we’re planting this year.
	Grind off the sharp edges.
	Using a fine point sharpie we draw in the metal stamps for better definition, and then drill a hole in the center of the tag.
	12 gauge wire we bought in 10′ sections, cut down to 16″ and bent in half. These form the legs.
	And here we go, the final result. Pretty sweet!
	Here is the back of it. You can see it is just bolted together.
	Quite a few, and still a few more to go. We need about 25 for this year. We are quite pleased with these though. We estimate they cost about 50 cents each to build. Way better than the cheap ones at the nursery and a lot cheaper than the metal ones you can get online.

It is mid-February and already spring is in the air. It has been an especially warm winter for us here in Seattle this year. I got out and enjoyed the 60F and Sunny weather we had yesterday. I actually had to mow the lawn,.. during which I found the first dandelion flower already. They don’t waste any time.

Other things are growing too.

	My garlic didn’t grow at all last fall. I planted it ‘on time’, according to my resources anyway, but nothing sprouted. That is probably a good thing since all of the greens avoided the week of 15F nights we had in December. They are wasting no spring sun though, they are growing quickly. The “mulch” is the leaves dropped by Japanese maple. It was sort of a half hearted mulching effort.
	Inside my cold frames the spinach is getting off to a good head start. These were planted in late October.. which is way too late really, but they just kind of hung out over the winter and have started growing quickly with each sunny day we get.
	My daylilies have started to break ground in the flower bed as well. The blueberry bush has buds forming and the trees and shrubs are all starting to bud and leaf out too. I love it!
	I was at my local independent hardware store picking up some supplies for a gardening project (which I’ll post about if it turns out well) when I saw some primroses on sale for $1 each. My planter box on the front porch has been bare all winter so I decided to pep it up a little. Scoring the brownie points with my lovely wife didn’t hurt either!

“I hate dumb junk” is one of my favorite sayings from childhood. One of my biggest pet peeves is things that don’t do their job. If a tool was created for a single purpose and fails to do that purpose, it is worse than a failure.

My garden trowel frustrated me to no end last year. I’d really be digging in and instead of doing the job, it would just bend. Well.. no more!

I built my own. I call it The Apocalypse Trowel. It will take out weeds, or zombies.

	This is 1 inch square steel tubing as the handle, with 1/4 inch steel blade. The two are bolted together with 8mm bolts. I figured the bolts were stronger than a weld.. and since I don’t have a welder, bolts it is.
	This is a close up of the blade. I ground it down on my bench grinder.

One of the other things that I learned in 2009 was that buying your supplies, of any type (seedlings, fertilizer, or tools) from a garden supply or nursery center is amazingly expensive. I live just down the road from a well known residential nursery center and while they do carry anything I would need, they seem to want far more for it than I think is reasonable. In 2009 my garden was a hobby. Our house hold had two working adults, so money put into the garden wasn’t all that important. It certainly wasn’t an economically minded venture.

The end of 2009 brought a lot of change. First one of us was out of work, and a few months later so was the other. After 3 months of zero outside income, the amount of cash available to hobbies is now zero as well. The book “Gardening When It Counts” by Steve Solomon is my new favorite book all over again. Even though both of us are blessed with great jobs again going into the spring of 2010, the mind set as definitely changed from ‘garden hobby’ to ‘garden as low cost high quality food’.

Part of that is now reflected in the title of my page. No longer just a garden blog, but also a food blog. What happens to the vegetables from seed to stomach.

The biggest shift for me is thinking about my little 1,000 sq ft garden as if it were a for-profit farm. WWFD is my new gardening slogan. What Would a Farmer Do? A farmer wouldn’t pay $3 a pound for fertilizer like I did last year (Dr. Earth by the 4lb box, $12). He wouldn’t skimp out on cheap seeds with bad germination and poor genes either.

My first act of Farmer-ness is to make my own organic fertilizer. Thankfully my paperback-bound-mentor Steve Solomon gives a full chapter on soil amendments including his recipe for his ‘complete organic fertilizer’, which he calls COF for short. It is made of some interesting things I figured would be nightmarish to track down. Things like seed meals (mostly husks and byproducts from oil manufacturing, bloodmeal.. ground and dried animal parts (lovely huh), and various other things like lime, dolomite, gypsum and basalt. WWFD.. he’d go to the feed supply store. Turns out I have one right beside the nursery.

	The thing about farmers is they generally don’t just have 1,000 sq ft. They generally have a LOT of sq ft. As such, the best bang-for-buck per ingredient is the 50 pound bag. Steve’s recipe calls for 4 parts of a seed meal. Any seed meal will work (expect for coprameal, which isn’t as nutritious) DeYoung’s Farm Supply, where I got my stuff from, had two different kinds of seed meal.. Alfalfa meal and Cottonseed meal. I got 50 pounds of each. I put 2 parts of each meal into my first batch.
	This is what the alfalfa meal looks like. It has a very pleasant smell.. sort of like dried hay.. which isn’t far off.
	The cottonseedmeal comes in the same bag (both with a small tag stapled to the top describing the contents). The actual meal itself is slightly lighter in color and has roughly the same smell and texture as the alfalfa meal. A quick note about cottonseedmeal from Steve’s book says that cotton isn’t a food crop and can therefore be more heavily sprayed with pesticides not qualified for human consumption. He notes that during the processing of the cotton all of the oil residues (which include the pesticides) are extracted under extreme heat, leaving the meal entirely free of any pesticide residues. He also notes that these cottonseed oils that are extracted contain all of the pesticide residues… these oils ARE used in processed foods. Something to think about when choosing your next salad dressing.
	This is the blood meal. It looks like you’d think it would.. like dried and finely ground animal parts.. yummy. It smells pretty much like you’d think it would too, but thankfully, not nearly as strong as what I would imagine it would smell like if it were to get wet. Honestly though, once the whole batch is mixed together, it smells great. Like a fresh hay barn.
	This is the gypsum. There are 3 types of lime that are added to the COF, all of which provide calcium in one form or another. Gypsum is calcium sulfate.
	This is what the finely ground gypsum looks like. It doesn’t really have an odor.
	Another type of lime, and the one used most by volume, is your standard agricultural lime. It contains nearly 100% calcium carbonate.
	The final lime is Dolomite lime. Not to be confused with that great 70s movie, Dolemite. Dolomite contains both calcium and magnesium carbonates.
	Mixed all together you end up with your complete organic fertilizer. I bought 300 pounds of total ingredients, with taxes it came to $149. I think a farmer would be much more willing to pay 50 cents a pound versus $3 a pound for his fertilizer.

Steve does call for 1 /2 – 1 part of Kelpmeal for his COF. Kelp is super high in trace minerals, which are needed and used by vegetables Vegetables grown with available trace minerals provide a far superior nutritional content. Steve warns that kelpmeal is very expensive and you can get along without it. He wasn’t kidding. DeYoung’s had it in stock at $75 per 50 pounds. That is 50% of my total cost for all of the other ingredients, so this year I omitted the kelp. I’ll be sure and keep taking my daily multivitamin until I can afford the kelpmeal.