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Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. A Year in Our Garden - 2013 - Page 3
As it turned out, all of the re-seeding I had to do in June with several different varieties of sweet corn seed we had in frozen storage to get even a so-so stand of sweet corn produced an amazing harvest. We picked short season yellow corn, short and full season bicolor corn, yellow Mr. Mirai Mini ears, and lots of hefty full season corn. We froze so much sweet corn that finding space in our freezer became a bit of a problem. Sometimes, I guess you just get lucky.
Our fall carrots and kale (far left and right in the photo at right) were doing just great. And of course, our mix of vincas, geraniums, and petunias at the edges of the raised bed made me smile every time I looked at the bed.
Let me add a few words here about a tool for processing tomatoes. When my first wife and I were farming in the 1980s, we bought a brand new Squeezo Strainer How's that for embedded advertising and an enthusiastic endorsement of a product!
Update: When I listed our SSE varieties this year, I got a rude awakening. Eclipse is a patented variety owned by Seminis/Monsanto. So saving and selling seed is a definite no-no. Guess I'll make some peas soup with the seed we produced.
Even with a gorgeous, producing yellow squash plant in our East Garden, I transplanted one last Slick Pik yellow squash plant on September 7. One of my goals for this gardening season was to have an uninterrupted supply of yellow squash. Since the plants produce heavily and then die, and are subject to powdery mildew and attacks by squash bugs, frequent succession plantings are necessary to ensure a constant supply of the delicious squash. I always begin each gardening season with several private, but important goals I wish to accomplish for the gardening season. A steady supply of yellow squash was one of those goals this year. Besides our usual tried and true yellow squash variety, I tried one new-to-us, highly rated, open pollinated yellow squash variety. The open pollinated squash was a total disappointment, but we did have fresh squash for our table and to give away all summer. I think I planted six hills of yellow squash over the summer. Roofing, Windows, and Guttering
We ended up getting a new main roof, replacing our east attic windows (which had blown out in a bad storm a year ago), and adding guttering to complete a guttering job begun on parts of the house years ago. We used Angie's List to help select the contractor for the various jobs. It turned out to be cheaper and easier to let Paitson & Son Home Improvement out of Brazil, Indiana, to do the work and subcontract the guttering to Corky's Seamless Guttering Systems.
By mid-month, the U.S. Drought Monitor report had classified our west, central Indiana area as "abnormally dry," one classification above a full drought. While most of our crops seemed to do well throughout the dry spell, our melon patch pretty much succumbed to the dry weather. Deluxe planting holes and lots of grass clipping mulch proved no match for no rain through most of August and September. While we still got a few good cantaloupes and watermelon, the patch was essentially done for 2013! That proved to be a major disappointment of our gardening season, as we often have good melons throughout the month of September and even into October.
As noted earlier, we have to segregate our hill of butternuts from our other vining crops, as the butternuts tend to overgrow and crowd out surrounding crops. We have also switched to using butternuts for our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner yams. They are tastier and far easier to prepare than sweet potato brown sugared yams. Quick Recipe for "Butternut Yams" Updated
I sprinkle a little nutmeg, salt, and pepper over the squash, add a bunch of dark brown sugar, and marshmallows. I bake ours at 350°F until the squash is soft. Sometimes, I need to dump a bit of liquid off of the dish. I'm really not sure that's a healthy dish, but it is incredibly delicious. Portuguese Kale Soup I made our first batch of Portuguese Kale Soup of the year while the carpenters were finishing up our new windows and some siding repair. We make the delicious soup from a recipe start that first appeared in Crockett's Victory Garden (1977):
The timing of our soup making days is driven by when we have enough of the ingredients ready or already canned or frozen from our garden. This year we had fresh tomatoes, garlic, onion, leek, carrots, green beans, peas, potatoes, and of course, kale from our garden to use in the soup. The chicken stock we use is what we've saved from times when we buy bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts, filet and freeze the breast meat, and cook down and bone the rest. Obviously not from our garden is the smoked sausage. And we also used canned kidney beans, as the Senior Gardener is absolutely lousy at growing them! (I plan to try growing kidney beans again in 2014, Lord willing.)
We ended up with seven quarts and eight pints canned from this batch, with a later (November) batch producing another twelve quarts. I traded a couple of quarts of our kale soup in 2012 with Bo Muller-Moore for one of his cool, Eat More Kale T-shirts. Bo is fighting an uphill battle with the greedy homophobes of Chick-fil-A over his supposed trademark infringement of their "Eat mor chikin" slogan. Obviously, I don't and won't patronize Chick-fil-A. Buckwheat Our incredibly gorgeous, 40' x 80' planting of buckwheat was ready to be turned under as green manure on September 24. I had mowed the buckwheat a day or so before, a nasty job possibly better done with a weedeater than a riding mower. Last year, I let our small buckwheat planting on our failed sweet corn patch get a bit too mature, simply because the blooming buckwheat was so pretty, and I enjoyed all the bees visiting it. But this year, I caught the buckwheat at just the right stage to produce maximum turn-down value.
I found growing a buckwheat cover/smother crop so enjoyable that I did a feature story about it. Potatoes
The dry weather, or possibly a touch of late blight, didn't help our potato crop any. But on the whole, we got some nice Yukon Gold potatoes, and a good number of Sangre. Our Kennebecs, which dried out early in September, didn't produce much. Our Rio Grandes were just so-so. Please don't take any variety recommendations from my statements above, as this was a lousy potato season from start to finish. I got the potato cuttings in too late, mulched instead of hilling, and got hit with a mini-drought just as the potatoes were beginning to fill out their tubers. Our Nancy Hall sweet potatoes were just as disappointing. The ground around them had dried to cement hardness when I started to dig them. But late planting simply isn't a good thing for potatoes or sweet potatoes. Surprisingly, we probably brought in enough spuds to last Annie and I all winter! But that's certainly not a statement of good gardening, just dumb luck. Zinnias
While lots of gardens are pretty well done in September, ours obviously kept me busy picking, freezing, and canning throughout the month. I did do some garden prep for next year, most notably in our large, East Garden, but for us, September was still a full gardening month. Fall crops take a week or two more to mature than spring planted crops due to lessening hours of daylight in the fall. So I was fairly pleased to be able to dig our fall carrots on October 2, just 73 days after they were seeded. Our first fall carrot crop became necessary due to puppies digging up half of our spring carrots and later, standing water that caused much of the remaining crop to rot in the ground. I can only say at this point that there's nothing like beginners luck! We put a little over twelve pounds of good carrots in our refrigerator in Debbie Meyer Green Bags
Digging, sorting, and washing the carrots took one whole day, as we store our good carrots unpeeled. Somewhat frustratingly to me, peeling, cutting, blanching and freezing the cull carrots took almost another whole day! But it's really nice when cooking to be able to grab a handful of frozen carrots out of the freezer when you're in a hurry and don't want to mess with whole carrots (that may need to be peeled).
A final, heavy picking (cutting, actually, with loping shears again) of butternut squash went directly from the field to the mission, as we already had all the butternuts we could use stored for the winter.
Our one grape tomato plant that I'd heavily pruned in early August, began producing its delicious, small tomatoes again in quantity. We gave away the equivalent of a couple of gallons of grape tomatoes. Seemingly trying not to be outdone, our Quinte tomato plants finally began producing lots of nice tomatoes in October. They'd had a rough start, going into some of the nastiest clay soil on our property. While we'd already picked lots of bell peppers during the summer, the full variety of pepper colors came on strong this month. And since I'd neglected to freeze any peppers up to this time, I bagged a couple of quarts of cut pepper parts for winter use. The last of our paprika peppers didn't quite ripen before our first frost, but they matured nicely in a tray on our dining room table before being washed, seeded and cored, cut, and dehydrated before a quick trip through a coffee grinder to provide us with ground paprika for the winter. Our fall broccoli that had to be restarted from seed after rabbits ate our transplants began producing heads by mid-month. Sadly, our cauliflower never made it, getting caught by a hard freeze just a week or two before it matured. But getting anything from the planting was a big plus, and we cut a few main heads and broccoli sideshoots into early November. We still had great flowers in our garden on October 19. Our first frost arrived on the night of October 21-22, pretty well finishing the season for most of our bloomers. Once the first frost hits, it's definitely time to shift from harvesting crops to getting our ground ready for the next season. Our large East Garden was tilled on October 28, leaving it as ready as possible for next spring. |
Planting Garlic
Wet soil pushed our planting of garlic from a more ideal October date into November. One wants to give garlic as much time as possible to put out roots before the ground freezes for the winter. But once the soil dried out, I was able to work in a large bale of peat moss, some ground limestone, a bit of 5-24-24 fertilizer, and a heavy dose of Milky Spore The interior dimensions (3' x 15') of our narrow raised garden bed allowed me to squeeze in five long rows of garlic with six inches between each row. I allowed about seven inches in the row between garlic cloves and offset the planting in the rows to allow a bit more space between plantings. This spacing is about as tight as I've ever used. With nearly perfectly prepared soil, I was able to use a garlic dibble If you've never grown garlic, let me recommend it as one of the easiest crops one can grow in ones garden. This posting is pretty much the short and sweet version of planting garlic. Maybe I'll do an in depth feature story on it someday. But for now, Burpee has an excellent, free, video tutorial available on how to plant garlic. And below are some excellent sources on growing, harvesting, and storing garlic.
Clearing the last of our brassicas after a killing frost took out the broccoli and cauliflower made it a good time to also take out the last of our frost hardy kale and make one last batch of Portuguese Kale Soup for the year. Paperwork
Both the seed inventory and our garden planning (and recording) are now computerized. Setting up a spreadsheet for a garden inventory is a relatively easy task and doesn't require any paid software if one employs a freeware spreadsheet tool such as the one included in the open source OpenOffice suite. (Full disclosure: I still use Microsoft Excel for Mac 2008 for my spreadsheets.) As to garden mapping software, I don't have any good suggestions for folks looking to computerize this task. The commercial programs offered by many seed houses seem a bit heavy on cutesy vegetable images and a bit light on real record keeping. I still rely on AppleWorks 6 for my garden mapping, as it does what I want, is already paid for, and can be run on my various Macs and PCs with the assistance of a variety of emulators.
I'm also a total sucker for an attractive seed catalog cover, often searching such catalogs for something to order when I don't really need anything more. My favorite catalog covers for the 2014 gardening season came from Sow True Seeds and R.H. Shumway, even though Johnny's Selected Seeds and Twilley Seeds got the bulk of our seed orders this year. If you're looking for a reliable seed vendor, I do maintain a bit more objective page of Recommended Seed Suppliers based on our experiences and The Garden Watchdog ratings from Dave's Garden. A reader recently wrote to thank me for making him feel like Spring was just around the corner. It is, but it's a long block before that corner. I hope this feature story has added a bit of spring to your step and day.
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