Photolog 10/15/2009

With this post I come armed with a new camera, a Nikon D-40. The pictures are coming out much better than my hundred-dollar point-and-shoot Olympus POS, and I hope to get back to blogging more often now that the weather is cooperating with my gardening efforts. Look forward to next week's post, as we going climbing this weekend with the new camera (and the dog).

Last week I planted some pretty stressed out broccoli transplants (they were the only ones left at the garden center). I also, in anticipation of rain, planted spinach seeds last Friday. Amazingly, it rained that night and off and on for the next two days! Now I've got little spinach sprouts :).

The fall tomatoes are a disappointment once again, partly because I did not prune them. They are nine feet tall and have basically no fruit. Note to self: next fall do black-eyed peas instead of tomatoes.

The basil is out of this world though, and is enough to supply four families with year-round pesto. (Anyone interested?) I bought it in a container with four separate sprouts and just planted them as they were without spacing - a technique I will have to try again next spring. The bees love it, and I have to keep pulling off the flowers to prevent a permanent basil infestation. I'd bet the honey made from basil flowers is delicious!

Spinach sprouts! Barely bigger than an acorn.

Elephant Garlic

Broccoli transplant.

Fall tomatoes

Bailey by the Basil.

Elephant Garlic

Photolog 4/28/2009: 3 Sisters Update

The last post was quite lengthy, and I imagine that most people (myself included) simply scrolled down the blog while looking at the pictures. If you read the whole thing (God bless you) then you have too much free time. So here is what we all want to see, mostly pictures! Abbey and I have been doing lot's of landscaping in the backyard, so things may look a little different...

With all the rain everything is very green and growing like crazy! My Three Sisters garden is booming. This companion-planting technique was used by the Native Americans to grow all kinds of plants (mostly corn, beans, and squash). To plant a Three Sisters garden you need to plant a "square" of corn. When the corn is about 8 inches tall, plant pole-beans between each corn stalk. When the first of the pole-beans sprout plant squash around the outside or wherever there's a sunny spot. The corn will continue to grow and will support the pole-beans, the pole beans will grow nitrogen-trapping bacteria along their roots, which is like a living fertilizer, and the squash will creep around low looking for light and will crowd out any weeds. It works! You can also bury some fish real deep in the garden before planting if you want to really feel like a Native American (this acts as a source of fertilizer).

The Three Sisters Corn, Beans (the triangular-flat leaves) and Squash (lower middle-right)

Carrots (left) and Onions (right)

Tomatoes

Eggplant

Cucumbers with a squash in between

Garlic sacpes. These will taste great when I sauté them in butter!

Bailey by the Three Sisters garden. She has also been growing exponentially! Can you tell which end of the garden I buried the fish at? I didn't think it would make that big a difference...

Winter, and All We Need

Here's a little mid-winter update on what has (mostly hasn't) been happening in the garden, what I want to plant for the Spring, and a simple fact of life itself...

I pulled up the cauliflower not because I harvested and ate it all, but because it began to flower and stank my fridge up. A couple of pounds of cauliflower in a big gallon Ziploc went pretty much entirely to waste, and the rest never even made it out of the garden. I will have to remember to grow desirable vegetables from now on. Not all was completely wasted as the plants and un-eaten heads found their way to the bottom of the leaf bin - which brings me to the next topic.

The compost I have been preparing since July is looking really nice, and I stopped adding new things to it (diverting new compost into the leaf bin) on the 1st of the year to allow it to be more thoroughly composted for this spring's garden. I look forward to adding the compost to my gardens here in a few weeks before I plant. I will be sure to post some pictures of that.

As far as what I will be growing... I know I want to grow a lot of corn, squash, peas, and cucumbers this spring, and I think I might plant a few tomatoes, but not as much as I did this past fall. I also want to plant okra because it's easy and it's the only thing that will keep growing after the summer heat sets. I am going to try something called "Three Sisters" which is a method of companion-planting successfully used by the Native Americans. I will post a detailed narrative of the experiment.

Abbey and I went to Ganado to visit her grandparents during the holidays and I saw how her Pa Pa was growing an entire patch of garlic (I planted mine mid-September and nothing had sprouted at that point). He said that every single clove sprouted as I looked down the rows and rows of it. Apparently all I needed to do was water it really good once a week - plants like water - go figure. The cloves I planted in September finally came up around Christmas after laying dormant for three months in the dirt! After all the fertilizer and mulch and waiting, all it wanted was some water. Good thing garlic likes the cool weather, as mine is having quite a delayed growing season. All it needed was water to sprout...

The chemical reactions and miracle for life lay waiting, only needing some H2O.

I guess all we need sometimes is all we need. truly truly...

fall garden is underway

Fall tomatoes! Now which is which?

Side garden

This pic is an update on the poor guy in the last post... looking better!

The 4X12 raised beds

Corn hasn't sprouted yet

The okra is loving the heat

Gideon helped with the Saturday morning honey-do's

I decided to give the blog a face-lift to celebrate my newly planted fall garden. I am growing three different kinds of Tomatoes: Better Boy, Cherry, and a grape-tomato variety called Juliet. I planted two of each, and then forgot which was which so we won't know until they start to set fruit (how fun!). I have a variety of Okra called Cajun Delight which is busily sending out new leaves every couple of days. It looks like they have been planted too close (okra gets really tall and wide) but Abbey's grandpa (from henceforth known as Pa Pa) showed me a way to do this by cutting off a stem every time you harvest an okra (you know when to stop when you can't reach the tops of the plants anymore). I also devoted half of the other raised bed to a super-sweet corn variety called Gotta Have It, and after tasting some of what Pa Pa grew I must agree. I think I will have around 50 or so ears of corn in about seventy days, so we will have to have a corn-roast party at our house and celebrate before the raccoons do. Party details will be closer to harvest-time. In my side-garden I have a black-eyed pea variety called Early Contender which has done well despite the abuse I have put them though last week (see the previous post). Also in the side garden I have planted some Cucumbers called Sweetest Yet, and they should be hanging all over my energy meters and time warner cable boxes soon. 

In a month or so I have been thinking about planting Snow Peas and Spinach in the second half of the raised bed with the corn. I have also been thinking to interplant some elephant garlic cloves that Pa Pa gave me. Garlic is a pest and disease-free plant, and it can help keep bugs out of the garden if you juice it up and spray it (I hear it also keeps away vampires). Garlic is different from most veggies in that it grows during the winter. You plant it in the fall, and harvest in the spring.

I also must recommend a blog that I ran across by accident. Skippy's Vegetable Garden can be found in the continuously updating column on the right. She puts up new posts almost daily and takes really great pictures. I tried copying her picture-posting style for this post, we will see if it works.

Stay tuned!