Today I was scrambling. I’m not talking about eggs either – although I did scramble up some eggs and fried some turkey bacon for breakfast this morning. The scrambling I’m referring to is the dashing-frantically-around-to-get-something-done sort of scrambling.
It rarely gets cold-cold here in Tennessee before December. If we get snow at all it’s in February. On the rare occasion we’ll get a snowfall around Christmas, but that’s very rare. On that basis I was not in a big hurry to get my garden boxes covered in plastic for protection from winter weather, since winter weather was months away yet. Except it’s not.
The weather guessers have been saying that we can expect overnight low temperatures around 29 degrees over the next couple of days. That’s cold enough to do some serious damage to my squash. Rain is expected as well – although it’s not clear if the rain will be first then cold or the other way around. They’re not talking about snow, so I suspect it will be cold overnight and rain during the day after it warms. If that’s the case, my lettuce and Brussels sprouts should be OK, they just need protection from the cold winds.
A couple of weeks ago I bought my annual roll of 6 mil semi-transparent plastic which I use to cover the boxes. It’s been sitting here, ready to go to work ever since. That 29-degree forecast is for tonight/tomorrow morning, so today is the last day I have to get this done.
My garden is done all in raised beds, because we live on the side of a mountain and this is the only way I can garden that doesn’t just wash away every time it rains. I have fence boxes made from PVC pipe and poultry mesh to keep the rabbits out of my crops. In the winter I can add the plastic sheeting to provide better protection from the elements. How much protection is needed depends on what is inside.
I’ve spent the past few days working at pulling out the summer crop and setting up my garden boxes for the winter crop – or for laying fallow for the winter. While working with these boxes, I’ve come across a few surprises.
One was a fair number of tiny garlic plants. Some were just poking their heads up through the dirt; some were still curled up underground. All had small, onion-like bulbs and a few inches of green leaf making its way sunward. I’ve tossed these into the salad making supplies in the fridge. I have a plentiful supply of garlic cloves on hand already so I feel no need to try to nurture these to maturity.
Another surprise was a fair number of small potatoes. Some were not too much of a shock: I had potatoes in those boxes earlier in the year and must have missed a few very small potatoes when I harvested the box. These had now grown to 1½-by-3-inch spuds. BONUS! A few had rotted – blech!
The shocker was when I pulled out a box of pole beans. I raked the dead leaves and vine debris off the top of the dirt for composting and as I scratched the surface of the soft soil I rolled up a couple of small spuds. These were an inch or so long and were sitting just under the surface, buried by dead leaves. I grabbed my cultivator and began carefully pulling up the rich, dark humus and turning it over.
Working carefully I discovered another dozen or so taterlets, each between ¾ inches and 1½ inches in diameter. What was amazing to me about this is that there have not been potatoes planted in this box since LAST summer!
Over the weekend I pulled out my tomato plants. The big ones; the cherry tomatoes are still producing and are in a bed that will lie fallow for the winter, so I’ll let those go a while longer.
The tomato plants I pulled yielded a quarter-basket of golf-ball sized green tomatoes; too small to batter and fry (I do like fried green tomatoes!) but too many to just toss in the compost. I decided to make some green tomato relish. I also have an abundance of sweet peppers right now; I could put those in there as well. And of course some onion… and maybe some jalapeno to give it some zing.
To save time, I ran the whole lot of them through a food processor with a grater blade installed. I get better results – more consistent pieces – if I cut it all by hand, but that is very time consuming and I have other things that must get accomplished today. I still had to pick out some large chunks and dice them by hand, but not too many. Continue reading “Green Tomato Relish”
Marie has been promising Blondie that we’d buy her a nice snuggle-bed like Cochise’s as soon as Wal-Mart got one that wasn’t some outlandish color. It has been months, but yesterday Marie got out of the truck and was carrying a lovely new snuggle bed. Blondie wagged her tail so hard she was beating herself on the hips with it. As soon as we laid the new bed down in the house, Cochise hopped into it and said, “Mine.”
Blondie was not amused, “Just because he’s the alpha dog, he gets the new bed? MY bed!”
After a bit she settled in though; thinking, “An old bed is better than no bed. And I have gotten used to sleeping in this one even though it was supposed to be his. I guess it’s OK.”
She’s SUCH a good girl!
Speaking of beds, I’ve been working on getting my raised beds in the garden ready for the fall/winter season. Nearly all of the summer crops have run their course and I’ve been pulling out the old, dead plants, composting some and burning any that were diseased or nightshades – or both.
Disease hit us hard his year. This was partly due to the extremely wet summer and partly due to the fact that I was using a modified square-foot garden method. In every case, when I looked up causes for the leaf blights that hit us, overcrowding; which prevents leaves from drying properly and creates an environment conducive to mold and blight, was listed as a major cause.
Another hint at how wet it has been is the number of mushrooms that pop up continually, all over the place. These little Fairy Parasol mushrooms (what I’ve always called them – I have no idea what their real name is) are all over. But out in the yard we’ve had toad stools that got huge; when their caps opened up and flattened out they were 10 to 12 inches across! And brain mushrooms that were the size of half a basketball. Too bad none of them are edible or we’d have had an incredible harvest.
The Patti pan squash that was in here is gone, but the various peppers and green onions are still going strong, although the peppers don’t like the way the nights are getting chilly. Since this box will lie fallow for the winter, I’ll let these grow until they decide to quit on their own. The onions will probably continue to grow through the winter – I’ll just lay the straw in around them to exclude weeds.
This bed is planted in a variety of leaf lettuce – which grows well in the winter. It will slow or stop growing in the real cold parts, but will remain alive even when buried under a snowfall. The snow melts and out pops the green of the lettuce. Other boxes contain beets, carrots, turnips, and onions (all grown primarily for their greens) and spinach. Root crops grow well in the winter, but we don’t usually get much from the root. But by trimming the greens judiciously, we can supply ourselves with fresh veggies all winter long.
I’ll have several boxes planted in Brussels Sprouts. If I can exclude the looper moths this fall, the sprouts will grow nicely during the winter – benefiting from a frost – and produce great tasting sprouts until spring. Keeping the moths out means covering the fence boxes with plastic or at least a fine mesh.
I also have several boxes planted as Butternut and Acorn squash. Although these are called winter squash, their fruit probably won’t be harvestable until spring. But, that will give us something once the summer squash in the freezer is gone and while waiting for the new summer crop to start producing.
Our sweet potatoes are doing well and will be harvested once the vines die back.
I also have a row of sugar peas planted against at trellis. Peas like the cool weather of early spring and fall, so these will also grow well in the coming months. We harvest these as tender young pods and use them in our cooking.
And of course I have the herb bed. The basil does not like the cool nights. It’s time to seed out a pot or two to keep in my office for winter cutting and setting out next spring. The Sage did poorly again this year. I have terrible luck with sage. Rosemary, carrot, mint, dill, thyme, oregano, chives, green onions and parsley all did fine. Although the oregano is looking a bit thin this fall.
Radishes were a disaster this year. Too bad – I really like radishes.
It’s time to prune back the blueberries and grapes and clean out the strawberry bed for the winter. And that will about take care of my seasonal garden change-over.
What are you doing to get ready for winter? Am I missing anything? Please share!
This is my post strawberry season post. Almost. Actually because I have ever-bearing strawberry plants I will get another crop in another month or two. If these were June berries then the season would be over and it would be time do the final clean-up and put them to bed. The process is similar in both cases; it’s mostly a matter of timing.
A newly planted bed
When I planted this bed I bought plants from a nursery and set them in the spring. The Square Foot Gardening book says to plant them 4 plants per square foot, I modified that according to the number of plants in the flat (about 25). That resulted in a much wider spacing, but that’s OK.
This is the bed’s second season and I now have around 10 plants per square foot: way too crowded! This is because I was lax about this maintenance business last year.
Today I’m going in to clean up. It’s been very wet this year. Too wet. And the leaves of my strawberries are showing signs of a leaf disease which I suspect is attributed to the really wet conditions and overcrowding.
Christine Engelbrecht, of the Department of Plant Pathology at Iowa State University says: “Strawberries in this region are commonly affected by three fungal leaf diseases–leaf spot, leaf scorch, and leaf blight. These diseases typically do not cause serious damage, but when they are particularly severe, they may reduce yield and make the plants more susceptible to devastating root diseases.
Leaf spot is the most common disease on strawberry. Symptoms at first appear as small, round purple spots on the upper surface of leaves. As the spots enlarge, the centers turn pale tan to white, with a purple or rust-colored border.
Leaf scorch appears as small, irregular purple spots or blotches on the upper surface of leaves. The spots enlarge and coalesce, often covering a large portion of the leaf. As they grow, the centers of the spots turn brown.
Leaf blight begins as small, purple spots. These spots enlarge into large, triangular-shaped lesions bounded by leaf veins. The centers of the lesions turn pale brown, with dark brown margins.
Management of all three of these diseases is similar. Some varieties are resistant to leaf spot and leaf scorch. Resistant varieties include the junebearing varieties Allstar, Canoga, Cardinal, Delite, Earliglow, Honeoye, Jewell, Lester, Midway, and Redchief, and the ever bearing varieties, Tribute and Tristar. Maintaining adequate spacing between plants, and managing weeds, helps to increase aeration and reduce leaf wetness. Infected leaves should be removed after harvest to reduce inoculum levels. Fungicide sprays may also be used to prevent infection by leaf diseases.”[1]
Based on her description, I’m thinking this is leaf scorch. Her treatment recommendation is to do pretty much what I planned to do anyway – I love it when that happens.
First I’m going in around the edges of the box where runners have bumped into the sides and rooted, producing a dense wall of young plants, and rip them out. Horrible aren’t I? I will transplant these orphans to another spot in the yard where I need a ground cover, and the birds may have the berries. Or some of them anyway.
Then I’ll snip out any diseased or dead leaves/stalks and clean out the debris around the base of the plants. Last fall’s tree leaves are still in there as well as last season’s strawberry leaves. All that needs to go. The pine straw can stay for now. Strawberries need a slightly acid soil so they LOVE pine straw.
Were these June berries, I’d perform the end of season ritual now; which I will describe in a moment. But I’m looking for another crop from these plants this year so after the clean-up I’ll take a look at the over-crowding situation inside the box.
I want to snip off ALL runners this time around. This will help the plants to direct their energies into producing berries. I will have to do this again when the blossoms appear, because strawberries are stubborn lil things about wanting to produce daughter plants via those runners. But I also want to pull out some plants where I have more than 4 plants per square foot. Leave the bigger, healthier looking plants: they’ll have the best root system, and pull out the sprouts or sickly plants. More plants does not mean more berries, or if you do get more berries they will be smaller because the plants are competing for nutrients and water in the soil. Also be sure to pull out any weeds that may have snuck in.
Speaking of nutrients, after population control it’s time for a feeding. Use a balanced, all purpose nitrogen fertilizer (10,10,10). If using a regular fertilizer try not to get the stuff on the plant’s stems, this may burn them. Side dress them – which is harder to do in a box than it would be in a row. So I use a slow release, granular fertilizer. Don’t over fertilize as this can lead to root problems and inhibit berry production.
This will have the bed ready for the late summer crop of berries. When that crop is done, the winter maintenance consists of going in with grass shears and lopping the heads off the little darlins. Cut the stems about an inch above the ground level or the top of the crown, whichever is higher. Then use a rake to pull all the debris out.
Strawberry plants will normally produce for around 3 years, so if your bed is two or more years old you will want to let the plants daughter. You can leave two runners per plant to propagate, remove the others. Apply fertilizer again and cover the bed with a couple of inches of fresh pine straw. Compost the debris you raked out.
Your strawberry maintenance chores for the year are now done and you can look forward to a bumper crop of plump, delicious berries again next year.
The garden planner utility I use says that beans and potatoes are excellent companion plants. So I decided this year to let these cohabitate in their boxes. To maximize the companion planting benefits I planted them in a checkerboard fashion in each box. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
And it started off pretty well, but in one box, the potato vines took off and took over. Soon I was hard pressed to find the bean plants at all.
When I pulled the taters aside to look for beans, nearly all of the bean plants had been smothered out. The potatoes are doing GREAT, but the beans… well, this box will not be producing beans this year.
In another box I planted the beans earlier than the potatoes and they got enough of a head start that they’re holding their own. But then, these were *supposed* to be bush beans (like the other box) but turned out to be pole beans that are climbing all over the potatoes. I’ll need to install poles for them to dance on so they don’t molest the taters.
My biggest problem in logic here is that I’ve gotten stuck into a sort-of square foot garden method. In SFG, we plant each square foot of soil with a different crop. I should have put one square foot of potatoes and one square foot of beans in each of 16 different boxes – along with assorted other crops. But taters need a lot more depth than most crops, so that wasn’t going to work unless I doubled or tripled the depth on all 16 boxes to accommodate 1 potato plant. Or two plants in 8 boxes.
By bastardizing the system like I did I’d have been better off to just plant half a box in taters and half in beans, with a security fence between them! I’ll do that next year. It may not make the most of the benefits of companion planting, but it should work better than this crazy scheme. Especially if I make sure I get bush beans.
Actually, what I’ve been building is much more than just eye candy. The thick bed of wood chips over landscape fabric bordered by landscape timbers that now surrounds all the boxes in my “Lower 10” also serve some good purposes:
It keeps grass and weeds away from my garden beds.
I no longer have to weed-whack between the boxes: always a chore and it sprayed plant bits and weed seeds into my boxes.
It makes a cushy surface to kneel on while I’m working the beds.
The landscape timber borders help divert rushing rain water around my garden so it doesn’t flood the boxes or wash away the mulch.
I’m planting flowers around the perimeter timbers that will draw beneficial bugs (bugs that eat the bugs that eat my garden) and add a splash of color.
This should help maintain the moisture levels in the entire area.
My berry house is also done. It encloses a blueberry bed, strawberry bed, red and purple grape vines. Bird netting over the PVC frame keeps the birds away from the berries.
The door is the curved section with all the slats between the strawberry and blue berry boxes. It’s a flap of bird netting that lifts up to allow me in and out, yet keep the avian fiends away from our berries. I stabilized the edges by trapping them between two layers of duct tape (sticky sides together) and stapled the slats on to lay across the door frame to prevent the netting flap from falling through the opening. A piece of PVC at the bottom holds the flap down and keeps it from blowing open in winds.
We just bought some marigolds to plant around the high perimeter to brighten it up a bit and help repel rabbits. They can chew right through the bird netting.
The Middle 10 was completed just days ago. This section required shoring up the lower ends of the paths between the boxes (the slope is steeper here), which meant some extra digging to level the timbers.
For the most part, this work is very simply done; no hoopla. Well, almost no hoopla.
I did angle the cuts when I made the timber pieces that went between the boxes so the ends of the timbers sit flat against the boxes despite the slope, and I could not resist showing off just a little by coping the ends of the timbers where they meet the curved face of another timber.
Otherwise, it’s all pretty much plain-Jane work: timbers, pinned to the ground with rebar, on top of landscape fabric to keep the weeds out and filled with wood chips I make myself by chipping up tree branches from the spring trimming. But it should ease my maintenance chores, make my knees happy, and it looks pretty nice too.
I lay claim to the title Professional Writer because I make an income from selling my articles and books. I am also an amateur gardener: because I do NOT make any income from it. I had once considered selling excess produce at the local Farmers Market, but that would mean getting up quite early on Saturdays and trundling a truckload of veggies over to a parking lot where I would HOPE that people would be willing to exchange cash for foodstuffs. That lost its appeal once that ‘getting up early on Saturday’ thing became a tangible reality. Still I have learned some lessons from gardening that apply well to other areas of life, even life as a writer.
I’ve been meaning to write an article about common herbal garden items that have healthful benefits beyond their vitamins and minerals. Now that spring is upon us and the garden is coming along nicely it’s time I got around to that.
Growing herbs has many advantages and takes very little space. You can grow 16 different herbs in a 4’ x 4’ raised bed garden. You may need to pot some plants: like mint, which is wildly invasive, but you can set the pot down into your bed if you want to keep them all in one place. Continue reading “Herbal Cures From Your Garden”
I spent most of the day yesterday putting in my potatoes. Well… half of my taters. I planted two boxes in Yukon Gold as my early crop. Next month I will plant another two boxes in Russets as my main crop. But before planting them I had to get the boxes ready.
To hold potatoes I need a double-depth box (2 2×8’s stacked) that I fill half-way with soil. To do this I have bottomless boxes that are used as the second level and are held in place on top of a regular box with pocket hole screws. These screws can be backed out and the second level moved from box to box as I rotate crops each year. I mixed 1½ pounds of composted chicken manure into the soil of each box to enrich the soil.
Then I used a modified Stout method of planting. The Stout method sows the potatoes on top of the soil then covers them with a thick layer of straw mulch. Regular planting puts them down about 3” then mounds dirt up around the stalks as they grow to keep the tubers covered. I plant my taters an inch or so deep, then 1½” of mulch on top — as a start. As I plant them, I mark the locations with a craft stick just behind the seed-spud – careful not to stab it!
I planted the box in a checker-board fashion with 8 cells as potato and 8 cells as bush style green beans. I put 1½” of mulch over the potato cells – leaving a dimple over the potato for the shoot to rise through. No mulch on the beans yet; there are 9 bean seeds per cell, I’ll wait for them to sprout and get a little size to them before mulching to discourage weeds and retain moisture – I don’t want to discourage my beans. As the potato plants get tall (12″ or so) , I’ll mound up more mulch around the stalks to keep the tubers that will grow from them covered. Sunlight makes the taters turn green and toxic. The mulch makes it easy to reach in and pull out young taters as they get to be golf ball sized. The deeper spuds will get large and be harvested later.
The white grid-like thing is one of two planting guides that I made from PVC pipe fittings; this one helps me plant things 1 or 9 plants to a cell, the other is made to plant 4 or 16 plants per cell (it’s made as 4 quarters, 16 get 4 plants in each quarter – I just eyeball them). These take care of all the common planting schemes in the square foot gardening method.
My late crop potatoes will be co-planted with black beans. The late crop will be allowed to grow undisturbed for larger spuds, but I’ll use the same planting method. (NOTE: this co-planting scheme did NOT work out. Here’s why.)
It rained last night, so I’m off to a good start – as long as the frosts are over with; that would hurt the bean seeds. Since it is early April now the frosts should be done (here in Tennessee) but… ya just never know these days!
