My poor leggy seedlings. They all collapsed. So, I’m having a do-over, as we used to say, and replacing all those not hardy enough to make it with fresh seed. The weather this week is supposed to be gorgeous (and today certainly was), so this will be a prime time to get the seeds redone and out in the sun where they belong to get a start. No doubt we’ll have a couple of freezes here and there before the typical last frost around here, but hopefully they’ll have popped up and soaked up some rays before they have to come in for the night to go to sleep. Life in the garden.
Category Archives: Gardening
Test veg
There are some things you really can’t tell a thing about until you pull one out of the ground. A parsnip, for instance.
Coming along nicely. Another month-ish, and this batch should be ready to pull completely. I have some seed soaking for the next round, to be planted tomorrow. Along with the potatoes and peanuts. Not all together, of course, no matter how alliteratively that would work.Tonight, flat five: more tomatoes to replace the seedlings that are much too leggy, and more peppers.
About a week and a half ago – just before the frigied cold snap – I had planted more sugar snap peas (shelling peas) and some bush snap beans. I’d been waiting to water them, figuring that we’d pass through the freezes and then start convincing them to pop out of the ground.
As it happens, they had other plans.
These peas are more cold hardy than I figured. I’ll let these go, and start another round in a couple of weeks.
And now, a random puppy picture: resting after an arduous ball chasing session.
Sprouting
You would think it was spring around here – except for the temps that are supposed to drop into the teens. I think I’ve had enough of winter already. This is Florida, after all.
I’m a little concerned about some of the babies in the flats, since they’re a little leggy. The benefit of starting early, though, is that there’s time to start more flats before things really get rolling.
What’s for dinner? The heart of some animal.
Kidding! No organ meats for me, as I think they are supremely disgusting. Cranberry sauce, made at Thanksgiving in a huge batch and frozen in smaller batches, for those nights when it’s chilly – or downright cold – and you have a hankering for a nice warming dinner.
Some roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and stuffing. Just the thing to fuel someone up before heading out to turn on the various taps so the pipes don’t freeze and burst (or heave up, although that’s unlikely since the trenches we dug are two feet down).
Certifiable
That would be me. Why? Because I started yet another flat the other day, mostly of tomatoes and peppers. The more I see fat food ads – no, that is not a typo – the more I want to ensure that we, here, and our family as a whole, have as much good food as is possible. I love a Whopper and some onion rings here and there, but some of the ads are positively nauseating. Does anyone really need to eat a one pound calzone in a single sitting? Bleh.
Now that we have the propane cooker rescued from my brother’s place, I’m hoping we will be able to actually regulate the temperature better for the pressure canner than is possible on the stovetop.Canning means massive quantities of roasted red pepers, available any time for soup. Pickled pepperoncinis for sandwiches (and my uncle, who used to eat them right out of the jar, as did I before my mouth became a mess). Tabascos, for making – what else? – tabasco sauce (or the equivalent since that may be trademarked and I’m too lazy to get up and check the jar in the pantry, so please don’t sue me, thanks). Canned green beans. Pickled onions. Hell, pickles, both sweet gherkins and kosher dills. And bread and butters. And whatever else we can stock up on so when it comes around to dinner time, we can taste the summer even in the dead of winter.
Reading the colors
The forecast was for 30-ish. We’d already had the peas and broccoli under cover for the past couple of nights, but tonight and tomorrow will see a true hard freeze for us here, so the smaller trees, not yet hardy enough to withstand that cold, had to be covered. Fortunately, with a number of five foot trellises previously used to brace al sorts of vegetables in the summer, we had plenty to useas suppotrs for the plastic we used to cover the trees to get them through the cold snap. I’m not a huge fan of cold weather. I am, however, a huge fan of being able to see large swaths of the sky as the colors change when we move from day to night (or night to day).
Winter has arrived…finally
Our winter has finally arrived, starting tomorrow night: an entire week of freezing temperatures. I’m not terribly thrilled about it, since I don’t tolerate the cold very well, but it is good practice for the garden area and a time for experimenting. Leaving a few herbs uncovered, for instance – the sage is supposed to be incredibly cold hardy, so how will it react to temps in the 20s? The garlic should be able to survive, although we will be putting some straw down around it. The peas I know will not take hard freezes, so they will get teepees of plastic to carry them through each night. We’re building a cover for the wellhead and bladder, to keep them from freezing and knocking out the water when we get up in the mornings. And, we’re rigging a heat lamp in the coop to keep the sole chicken from freezing her tailfeathers off during the overnights.
I’m just happy I don’t live someplace like this:
Waiting for rain
We live in some weird Bermuda triangle-like area here: if the forecast says 30% chance of rain, ours is more toward zero. If it says 50%, likewise. Over that, and it starts looking better, but just barely.
Natural rainfall has a lot of benefits over watering from the well – plus, it saves on running the pump until we can get a solar bypass rigged on it, particularly to use during the summer months. Today, we had a brief downpour while I was at the NOC dealing with a recalcitrant server. Just now, we had a five minute or so massive rainfall, and just like that, it’s gone. This is the herald of a few evenings of freezing weather, so tomorrow will be hoop day in the garden to protect the little watermelon volunteers that made it through, and I’m going to try some peanuts under cover. They say they need four months of frost free weather, but with some plastic, I should be able to make them think it’s still rather balmy out.
Weekend pickoff results: I picked the Ravens (won), Eagles (won), Panthers (lost), and Steelers (won). Not bad, but a little weird that only one of the home teams managed to pull out a win in the playoffs.
Browsing
There is a wide range of formats for the seed catalogs that come in. One thing that is the same, however, is the promise of what you could grow in your very own yard were so inclined to do so and doesn’t that plant look interesting and wouldn’t it be great to be able to show off this unique tomato and I wonder if this tender item would survive the brutal summers here and…well, you get the idea. Great fun to look through.
The things you find
We had a cool front blow through very quickly yesterday, dropping five minutes of heavy rain and leaving behind a lot of wind. Perfect time to get out and plant a long line of peas and snap beans – 30 feet of each – and start getting the frames in shape for the coming transplants. That means leveling out the dirst, pulling miscellaneous weeds and crap out of the frames, but also finding a few surprises here and there.
Like an unwelcome slumbering pest.
This would have been a hornworm had it survived the cleanup. It didn’t.
Nor did this visitor.
That one went to the chicken as a snack.
On the plus side, I also found a stray peanut in one of the frames, happily sprouting in the temperate weather we’ve had. I put that back in the frame, and we’ll have others joining it. I also found these volunteers, which should give a fairly good idea of just how warm it’s been.
Yes, those are watermelon seedlings. They probably all died from the surprise freeze last night, but it was nice to see them out there, going about the only business they know.
Begun, the tomato trials have
Why thank you, Yoda: you are absolutely correct.
Yesterday, I started a couple of flats almost entirely of tomatoes.
Varieties:
- Ibsen’s gold
- Toas
- Koralik
- Porter’s pride
- Ildi
- Peacevine cherry
- Gold currant
- Isis candy
- Amish paste
- Arkansas traveler
- stakebreaker
- Gardener’s delight
- Imperial
- Brandywine OTV
- Italian tree
- Mrs. Maxwell’s italian
- Anahu
- Sungold
I had a few cells left, so I also started some jalapeno, cayenne, and datil pepper seed as well.
These are sitting on some black plastic on the table to keep the heat levels up. This means, of course, that they also need more than regular monitoring to make sure they don’t dry out.
I’m hoping we’ll see the first seedlings pop up by the weekend. The trick will be babying them through the next month or so and then getting them transplanted successfully.
Last year, we had some frames that remained empty as we never got anything in them due to the bugs, the wacky weather, and general busy-ness with other things. This year, I intend to fill it all. And by “all” I mean…
The hoop supports were where the doomed tomato and peppers resided before being evicted to the compost pile. I’m hoping to try something under cover over the next month and a half before spring arrives and turns rapidly into summer.
What’s growing right now? Lots.
Parsnips, rounds one and two, to be followed in the next few days by another round. Parsnips take awhile, and are better in cooler weather, so the third will probably be the last until late summer unless I can rig a way to keep them cooler than 100+ degrees in summer without using any electricity or excessive watering.
The corn frames, relocated to the front. The first frame has hard red winter wheat, which should be able to be pulled by the time I want to start the corn in March. The second has alfalfa, for sprouts.
Carrots, four varieties. We should be able to begin pulling these in a couple of weeks. I’ll be starting another round of the little finger variety in the smaller frames.
That spot there where the water head is and the perfect circle of no carrots is where a cat got into the frame before the fences went up. The bunnies also munched around the edges of the frames, taking the tops of some of the carrots down, but after I got the fence in place, everything bounced right back. Good thing, too, or there would be pictures of rabbit stew on this blog.
Peas: sugar snaps and oregon sugar pod.
We’ve had some of these already – remember, picking makes for productive plants! – and according to those who have eaten them, they’re mighty tasty. Peas can stand a light frost, and these were not covered even during the hard freeze we had a couple weeks ago, so they appear to be winners all around.
Here we have a couple of cabbages, a round of spinach and lettuce, and onions at the far side. The frames to the left and at the end are empty except for the weeds that need to be pulled.
The smaller frames up front have some things in production. This is the only row with anything, and four of these are taken up by four different varieties of garlic. We loves our garlic.
We don’t love the weeds, but they’ve invaded that first frame and need to be removed. Just another job on the farm.
One batch of the garlic I almost deemed a dud, as it did not spring up very quickly. Once it started, though, it turned out to be just as healthy as the other batches.
Healthy, icky brussels sprouts. Three varieties. There are some leeks in the front, and the ones that didn’t totally die off when the bunnies ate down the greens have come back strong.
I will note for the record that the bunnies did not touch the brussels, at all. Can’t blame them for that.
Finally, broccoli and another variety of peas – shelling peas, piccolo (small) from an Italian seed.
The broccoli is coming along nicely.
When I was keping track last year of the harvest – between 5 Jun and 7 Aug – even with all the issues we had, we harvested 132 pounds of food from the frames we had in place. This year, I’m going to keep better track and we’ll see how much we can produce on our own here.