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A Year in Our Garden - 2014 - Page 2
December 15, 2014

May

While April is a very busy month in the garden, May seems even busier. It's a race to get everything planted or transplanted and mulched for the season in an often rainy month. The heavy workload doesn't seem so bad, though, as we enjoy asparagus, lettuce, and baby spinach out of the garden.

Work in our garden plots started slow in May, as heavy rain left even our raised beds quite wet. I'd had to use walking boards in the East Garden in April to plant a row of brassicas there. After a bit more rain, when I went to our East Garden plot to recover the walking boards, I had to step off one board to reach one well into the garden plot. My tennis shoe immediately disappeared in the deep mud of the East Garden!

I made good use of the days, mowing and raking our yard and the field the East Garden sits in. I also was able to mulch our rather sad planting of garlic. It was in an older, narrow raised bed, so it could be worked from outside the bed. I hadn't mulched the garlic for the winter and our dogs dug up part of the bed, but even the garlic that came up didn't seem very healthy.

In a section where the dogs had totally destroyed the garlic, I transplanted a few celery plants. I hadn't grown celery successfully in years, and things turned out about the same this year as in the past. But at least the bare spot in the bed was filled in with something growing.

Before I mulched the bed with grass clippings. I clawed in some 12-12-12 commercial fertilizer around the existing garlic plants. In mulching, I had to be careful to put "cool mulch" beside the garlic leaves, leaving the "hot mulch" for open spaces. I raked the grass clipping mulch a couple of days earlier, and some of it was quite hot as it was beginning to decompose. Hot mulch is great for holding back weeds in open spaces and heating up a compost pile, but not so good for tender plants.

Planting Melons

One of the reasons we maintain a large, traditional garden plot in addition to our raised beds is to have space to grow crops such as melons and sweet corn. They both take a lot of space to grow in any quantity. About seven years ago, the farmer who rents the farm ground around us generously offered to let us use part of a small field next to our property that he'd decided was too small to be worth planting. Over the years, we've had several good crops of melons and corn, and also have made good use of the area for isolating open pollinated tomatoes, peppers, and peas grown for seed. In return, we've kept the field mowed for the farmer (part of his rent agreement with the landowner).

Getting our melons and corn planted in a timely fashion is always a challenge. I got our melons transplanted this year on May 5 and 6, a bit earlier than usual. We transplant our melons into "deluxe holes" due to the poor soil quality of the East Garden. We also mulch them in at planting with grass clippings, eventually covering the whole melon patch with clippings for moisture retention and weed control.

I describe how we do our melons in a couple of feature stories:

• Transplanting Melons into Heavy Clay Soil (May 8, 2014)
• Growing Great Melons on Heavy Clay Soil (August 25, 2014)

As it turned out this year, we didn't grow all that many great melons, at least not as many as we usually do. An early, undetected infestation of cucumber beetles killed some of our transplants and brought in plant diseases to some of the survivors.

A couple of yellow squash plants, one hybrid and one open pollinated, also went in at the ends of the melon rows. By the time the bugs got to them (mostly squash bugs), I was more vigilant. We had a great year of summer squash.

Our sweet potato slips arrived and went into the ground in a row beside our potatoes on May 8. I also seeded a row of dark red kidney beans into the plot. Neither of these crops did well this year, although we got just enough kidney beans to include in two big batches of our Portuguese Kale Soup.

By this time, our hanging baskets of petunias were in full bloom. Other hanging baskets of impatiens and wax begonias weren't far behind.

Also by this time of year, black flies (buffalo gnats) make working in our East Garden unpleasant. Just east of the field is a nature preserve and a low area where water stands from overflow from a creek that runs just a bit further east. An Off! Clip On Mosquito Repellent dispenser I bought on a whim several years ago turned out to be somewhat effective in combatting the black flies. Fortunately, the black flies aren't as thick when one moves west to our main garden. They're still there, but not in the volume they are around our East Garden.

May 10 turned out to be another spray day. After the systemic insecticide we used to use was taken off the market, I found that Thuricide (BT) was pretty effective in keeping bag worms off our Blue Spruce trees. Timing of the spray seems pretty important, with a recommended date of May 1. I obviously was a bit late, but also repeated the spray a couple more times during the summer.

With the Thuricide out, I went ahead and sprayed our brassicas in both our main and East Garden. In rainy weather like we had in May, it's important to make sure the undersides of the leaves get some spray, as that on the tops of leaves will wash off in the rain.

I later set aside the sprayer we use for biologicals only and grabbed our insecticide sprayer. Wearing long sleeves, a hat, gloves, glasses, and a paper face mask, I sprayed our apple trees with Fruit Tree Spray, a mixture of the fungicide Captan and the insecticides Malathion and Carbaryl, with a little sticker spreader thrown in. I've tried going with just dormant oil spray and insecticidal soap in the past with poor results.

By May 12, the 40' x 80' section of the East Garden I'd seeded to alfalfa was beginning to germinate. We rarely get a solid stand of alfalfa in the East Garden, as the soil there is poor and grass weeds compete with the alfalfa. But what does emerge and survive sinks deep roots into the soil, helping break up soil compaction.

Our direct seeded butternut squash had also emerged. Once the squash are up, drought and powdery mildew are the main things that can spoil a crop. Surprisingly, squash bugs don't seem to like butternut squash vines as well as they like summer squash and pumpkins. Of course, if there's nothing else they like, they will dine on the butternut leaves and vines.

Red Pontiac potatoes	40' row of brassicas	Melon plants

Walking around our East Garden, I was pleased to see how well our potatoes, brassicas, and melons were doing. I didn't mulch our potato plants this year, having unsuccessfully tried that method last year. Our brassicas and melons were fully mulched by this time of year.

Since grass clippings are an organic material, they do break down in time. That adds organic material to the soil, actually forming a tiny, very thin layer of new topsoil where the mulch has decayed. But as the mulch decays, weeds begin to emerge once they have the daylight they need to germinate. Repeated mulching is required several times each season to keep our plots fairly free of weeds.

As I rather lazily walked around our garden plots, I noticed our two beautiful rows of radishes...that were supposed to be rows of carrots, I knew I had to start thinning out the maturing radishes right away. We co-plant radishes in the carrot rows to help break up any crusting of the soil that might occur and prevent the carrots from emerging. The idea is that the radishes come out before they crowd out the tiny and later germinating carrot plants.

Once the radishes were out, our carrot rows looked pretty thin. The sad part of this exercise is that neither my wife nor I like radishes very much!

Continuing to walk our garden plots, I saw that our green beans seeded on April 28 were up and looking good. Since I had mulch lying beside the raised bed, I mulched the area between the bean rows.

Grass clipping mulch is a mixed blessing in green beans. It does its job of holding back weeds and conserving moisture quite well. But at picking time, blades of grass often stick to the beans, making cleaning them before snapping and canning a more difficult chore.

Since this planting of beans was in our main raised bed that got mulched from end to end, the beans got mulched. In other areas where I grow beans, I've been able to just hoe and/or scuffle hoe for weed control. Of course, then instead of grass clippings on picked beans, one sometimes gets muddy beans that grow close to or on the ground.

Our patch of lettuce, shown in the foreground of the photo below, was doing well. We were already picking some and filling the bare spots with more seedling lettuce transplants. Sadly, most of the new plants didn't get to mature before temperatures rose and caused the lettuce to turn bitter and bolt.

By May 18, I knew we were in trouble with some of our melons. We've been growing melons in the same general area for seven years, rotating them onto new ground each year, but still in the same general vicinity. Up until this year, we'd grown our melons without having to do much spraying with insecticides, but insect pressures seemed to increase each year.

I discovered that striped cucumber beetles had attacked many of our hills of melons, most seriously damaging our cantaloupes and honeydews. Some hills were already beyond saving and were replaced with what few transplants I had left on hand. When I ran out of transplants, I direct seeded the hills, not necessarily with the variety that had started there before.

The entire melon/squash patch got treated with a strong insecticide. Had I been a bit more vigilant, I might have gotten by with using insecticidal soap or pyrethrin. And as it turned out, the cucumber beetles apparently brought in some diseases with them that continued to affect our remaining melon plants the rest of the season.

Rather than order a tanker truck full of liquid Sevin for 2015, I'm planning to cover our melon transplants next spring with floating row covers to keep the bugs off of them until the plants begin to bloom. Then the row covers will have to come off to allow pollination by bees, but I may be able to control pests then with organic measures. I'll also be keeping a closer eye on our melon patch.

After picking more asparagus than we could eat fresh, freeze, or give away for much of April and May, we began backing off on picking asparagus just after mid-May. We still picked, but only the thickest shoots, letting the slender ones get a head start on putting out their leaves and building roots that will produce our next asparagus crop. We totally stopped picking the asparagus by the end of May.

I saw that some of our tall peas were coming into bloom on May 21. And the first of our canning/slicing tomatoes got transplanted on May 23. The very next day, I noticed that deer had clipped the heads off of two of our broccoli plants in the East Garden, so it was time to put up our small collection of Nite Guard Solar Predator Control Lights. They emit a flashing red light at night that helps spook deer, and if set low to the ground, raccoons. Possibly of more effect, I also sprayed with some nasty smelling (and presumably nasty tasting) stuff to deter the deer.

Sweet Corn

On Memorial Day, the big boys began chisel plowing the field west of our house. That was all the encouragement I needed to convince myself that our East Garden was dry enough to till.

Even though we'd turned down a lush crop of buckwheat the previous year where the sweet corn would go, I broadcast a lot of 12-12-12 fertilizer over the area before tilling. I think that comes from our farming years when we were so poor that we sometimes had to grow our corn with just starter fertilizer and the hog, cattle, chicken, and turkey manure we'd spread.

I usually like to let tilled ground sit a day or two before tilling it again. But with the variable weather we had in May, I got back to working the sweet corn patch by late afternoon. I seeded five sh² varieties of sweet corn in seven forty-foot rows. Most of the corn was yellow, although I also started a seed flat of ACcentuate MRBC bicolor in fourpacks to transplant into any bare spots in the rows.

My wife, Annie, and I picked a half bushel of spinach and cut a lot of lettuce on May 27. While a half bushel sounds like a lot of spinach, if you're boiling it down, it probably isn't enough to justify getting out the pressure canner. At any rate, most of the spinach went to Annie's sister along with some Barbados and Crispino lettuce. And of course, since we were on a "garden date," I totally forgot to take the camera out with me and grab images of the spinach and lettuce.

I did remember the camera the next morning when I put in a forty-foot row of nasturtiums along the west side of our East Garden. I soaked a mixture of Whirlybird, Milkmaid, Empress of India, and Night and Day nasturtium seed for a couple hours in an old potato salad container before planting them beside our sweet corn. Before seeding, I even watered the furrow a bit to give the seed a better chance of germinating before covering the row with dry soil.

I finished up the month getting some isolation plots of tomatoes planted and putting in a long row of Eclipse and Encore peas along the east side of our East Garden. I also spent a lot of time just enjoying how some of our garden areas looked.

Pea pods filling out	Onions around bell pepper plants	Onions and carrots	Green beans

June

We always get a little produce from our garden in May, but our real harvests begin in June. Warm, dry weather pushed our broccoli and cauliflower to begin maturing heads, some a little smaller than usual. We quickly began freezing broccoli and cauliflower for winter use, as our harvest, other than later broccoli sideshoots, is pretty concentrated.

Our lettuce either flourished, yielding a variety of head and leaf lettuce, or went to seed. Since we usually get some really hot weather in early June, our spring lettuce season is pretty short.

Over the last five or six years, we've begun growing both spring and fall crops of lettuce and brassicas (and carrots, too). Doing so obviously allows us to put up more broccoli and cauliflower. In the fall with a good bit of broccoli and cauliflower already in the freezer, we tend to use a lot of the fall harvest fresh.

The fall lettuce is just an extra treat.

Growing such fall crops requires starting transplants indoors under our plant lights in late June or early July. Direct seeding into our garden plots in mid-summer is a very iffy proposition. Summer heat and dry spells, along with our well that really won't support much watering through the summer, dictate we start our fall lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower inside.

Johnny's Selected Seeds provides an excellent, downloadable spreadsheet tool that can help one know when to start and/or set out stuff for a fall garden. If you lack a spreadsheet program on your computer, the one in the free, open source OpenOffice Suite works quite well. You will need to enter your approximate first frost date and then the Fall-Harvest Planting Calculator calculates the appropriate planting or transplanting dates for a good number of fall vegetables.

By early June, it became obvious that my double trellis experiment with our early, tall peas wasn't working. Our pea vines, laden with heavy pods, pushed to the north of the double trellis instead of growing between the trellises.

I'm not quite ready to give up on the idea yet. I'm going to try spacing the trellises a good bit wider next season. While many of our tall pea vines fell over, we still got a lot of good peas. Of course with peas, it always seems like you have a lot when picking and shelling them, but the quantity of shelled peas is a bit disappointing. If fresh peas from the garden weren't so superior to frozen peas from the grocery, I wouldn't mess with them.

Our pea varieties (from left to right in the images below) are Champion of England, Mr. Big, and Maxigolt. All three varieties are open pollinated and not protected by plant patents, so one could save seed from any of them if they were isolated from each other. The varieties put on large pods, but in dry weather only fill the pods with a few peas. In wet summers, the large pods may be filled with eight or nine plump, delicious peas. As with any crop, different varieties may produce widely differing results in other regions.

A very pleasant surprise of the season was our first head of Violet of Sicily cauliflower. It is an open pollinated variety that we tried for the first time this year. While I didn't let the head get as deep a red as some photos of it I've seen online, it produced nice heads that had good flavor. Cutting the heads a bit early prevented the cauliflower from getting bitter and/or going to seed. I also noticed when I cleared our narrow raised bed of spring brassicas that one of the Violet of Sicily plants had developed clubroot, a common disease of brassicas. It didn't affect our harvest, but showed that the disease is present in our soil. Keeping soil pH levels at or a bit above 7.0 usually wards off the disease. Since none of our other broccoli and cauliflower plants developed the disease, I suspect that the Violet of Sicily variety may be a bit more susceptible to it.

A light rain on June 8 popped up our slowly emerging sweet corn. As soon as I'd been able to "row the corn" (see where the row is from emerging plants), I'd started scuffle hoeing the patch. Wet weather the past two seasons had kept me from properly tilling our sweet corn patch, and weeds just about took over both years. I was determined not to let that happen again.

The wooden stakes we initially use as row markers and to string the rows for opening a straight furrow get quickly replaced with far more attractive plants. One way I know the soil in our East Garden is improving is that it will now support geraniums, which used to die when transplanted into the plot.

I quickly used up the twenty-four sweet corn transplants I'd started in May, filling in bare spots in the rows. Since we grow all sh² varieties, I didn't have to worry about mixing the varieties. Once I ran out of transplants, I started pushing soaked seed from a short season sh² variety into the bare spots that remained.

Our sweet corn germination this year with seed from three different sources convinced me once again to stay with our long-time sweet corn seed supplier, Twilley Seeds, in the future. After some disappointing results with their seed in 2013, I'd spread my sweet corn orders a bit this year. Whatever problems Twilley had, they seem to have resolved. In our brief experience with farming, we used to grow 2-4 acres of sweet corn for roadside sales each year, using Twilley's sh² varieties. Dropping a seed at a time in a furrow these days is a far cry from filling up the seed hoppers of our four-row John Deere planter with huge bags of sweet corn seed.

I forgot to mention that when I used some celery plants to fill in a big bare spot in our narrow raised bed of garlic, I also filled in some smaller holes with some sad looking beet transplants that had been on our back porch way too long. I popped the beets into bare spots in the garlic row, watered and mulched them, and promptly forgot all about them. When I finally got around to checking them for maturity, some of the beets were the size of small mangels (sugar beets), which I used to grow on the farm for livestock feed.

An awful lot of our time in June was spent picking and shelling peas, scuffle hoeing and/or rototilling the sweet corn patch, picking lettuce, shelling more peas, cutting broccoli and cauliflower, and then lots more weeding despite the heavy mulch we use to suppress weed germination and growth.

On Father's Day, I got a great shot of our Red Pontiac potatoes in bloom.

Having seen the lovely potato blooms, I went out the next day to dig some new potatoes. There's some old gardening wisdom about being able to dig new potatoes when or shortly after ones potato plants start blooming.

Being a bit cautious about the possibility of bringing disease into our potatoes, I carefully washed some compost residue off our garden fork before getting started. As I walked to our East Garden, it began to sprinkle just a bit. As I started to dig a hill of Red Pontiac potatoes, the sprinkle turned into a shower.

Since I was only going to dig one hill of small, new potatoes, I used my sun shirt to protect my camera from the rain and proceeded with the digging. I was a little surprised when I lifted a baseball sized spud from under the plant. When I got the full plant dug up, it produced four good sized red potatoes along with just two of the expected small, new potatoes!

I planted our potatoes on April 24 this year.. I guess I waited too long to dig new potatoes.

When I got around to harvesting our potatoes in August, we dug hundreds of pounds of Red Pontiacs. Our Kennebecs produced considerably less, and our sweet potatoes, zip. We stored some Kennebecs and about fifty pounds of Red Pontiacs in the basement for winter use. The rest all went to a local mission's food bank.

On June 18, I got around to doing a job I had been putting off for a week or more. I'd planted a long row of Eclipse and Encore peas along the east edge of our East Garden. If I wanted to save seed from the short peas, I needed to put up a trellis to keep the pods off the ground to prevent rot.

I thought the job would only take a couple of hours, but I ended up spending the whole day (with the hot, high UV hours of midday off) weeding the forty foot row and getting a trellis up.

The related Eclipse and Encore pea varieties are the very best peas we grow at the Senior Garden. When Eclipse seed disappeared from seed catalogs, I made a major effort last year to produce a large seed crop of the variety. The effort worked, but I later realized that both Eclipse and Encore are patent protected varieties (PVP). Legally, I couldn't share the seed produced with anyone else, but could use it for our own garden use.

The large planting of the varieties was intended to be for dual use. I hoped to first pick peas for table use and freezing and later save the late peas for a seed crop for future plantings. Germination of the supersweet Eclipse variety was dismal, pretty well dooming that crop, but the Encores thrived. I ended up using the center of the row where Eclipse peas didn't germinate for a later planting of Mohon's Heirloom Beans.

The pea row along with our sweet corn and sweet potato plants got a a heavy layer of Bobbex repellent, as deer love all of those crops. Some years ago I was puzzled when I saw that our sweet potatoes looked like they'd been cut off about six inches high with a weedeater. There weren't any leaves on the ground, though, and a closer inspection revealed deer tracks around the sweet potato row.

The next day I was out in our sweet corn patch fertilizing and rototilling. Even though I'd broadcast a good bit of fertilizer at planting, I sidedressed the sweet corn rows with all the 12-12-12 commercial fertilizer I had left on hand. While corn requires a lot of nitrogen, the first number of the NPK three number code, most outlets around us only stock triple-12. Since phosphorus and potassium don't leach out of the soil like nitrogen does, I don't mind using the balanced fertilizer, knowing the extra PK I put down will be there for future use. And corn, any corn whether sweet corn or field corn, loves nitrogren.

While our tiller with its shields up throws a lot of dirt into the corn rows, it's still necessary to go back and hand weed grass plants and morning glories in the row that survive our attempts to bury them.

I also took time to push a bit more sweet corn seed into the ground in the bare areas that still remained in our sweet corn patch. I used the shortest season sweet corn seed we had on hand, some really, really old stuff that had been in our freezer a very long time.

A Succession Crop

After a long and wonderful pea harvest (despite the vines blowing off our double trellis), I pulled our spent tall pea vines the morning of June 22. During the hot hours of the day, I worked on our shaded back porch uppotting some parsley plants I've not gotten in the ground yet. The plants were root bound, and I was going to lose them if I didn't move them to larger pots. Later, I moved to cooler quarters inside to start our fall brassicas.

About 8:30 P.M., taking advantage of one of the longest days of the year (in hours of daylight) and slightly cooler temperatures, I began transplanting our Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers. The soil in the raised bed was incredibly dry, so I ended up using about fifteen gallons of water to transplant just eight plants along the twelve foot row between the double trellis. By transplanting late in the day, the plants had the overnight hours to begin adapting to their new conditions before enduring another hot day.

This crop of JLPs was really special. Our strain of the excellent slicing and pickling cucumber came from one lone seed that germinated from a very old packet of seed that had been in frozen storage too long without being grown out. Saving seed finally led to inbreeding depression that causes problems with seed and plant vigor and disease resistance. I finally found a vendor that offered a cucumber called Japanese Long Pickling that turned out to be the real deal (after a previous failure of an untrue-to-variety one). I grew out the new seed two years ago to see if it was true-to-variety, and it was. Last year, I transplanted plants from the new seed along with our old JLP strain, hoping they would cross-pollinate and add some genetic diversity to our strain. This crop was the result of the possibly crossed and strengthened variety.

Three days later, I could tell that the transplants were going to make it.

June had been a relatively dry month until June 24, when we received around three inches of rain in just 24 hours. We had standing water everywhere for a while. But our recently fertilized and tilled sweet corn leaped up several inches seemingly overnight. Squash bugs appeared in volume on our yellow squash, requiring a serious spraying of insecticide. I was able to transplant a hill of pumpkins on a previous compost pile site without too much watering, and our garlic, onions, and green beans moved towards maturity.

I made our first picking of some of our green beans on June 28. The relatively light picking produced green beans for supper and six quarts canned.

While grabbing shots of our green beans, I couldn't leave out our rows of onions, carrots, and bell peppers. The petunias at the ends of the rows actually began to crowd out some of the onions growing next to them!

As I mentioned earlier, the rain caused our sweet corn to leap up in growth. By the end of the month, it looked great.

July

July was a month of bountiful harvests for us in our Senior Garden, but also a month where physical issues reared their ugly head.

On the Fourth of July, granddaughter Katherine and I picked some almost overripe yellow squash and sampled our rows of carrots. I went out later and picked some green beans, this time freezing them, as I didn't pick enough to merit dragging the pressure canner and related supplies out of the basement.

While picking the beans, my right shoulder began to really hurt. There wasn't an incident where I knew of doing something to it, a point of injury, but the pain cut the harvest short. By Sunday morning, the shoulder and entire right arm were immobile due to pain.

A trip to the doctor on Monday suggested either a frozen shoulder or a rotor cuff problem. I walked away with a lot of pain killers, which helped with the pain and recovery, but didn't do much for getting any gardening done. A later visit to an orthopedic surgeon confirmed the rotor cuff problem. As we worked through the shoulder problems and lots and lots of x-rays, it turned out the shoulder was the least of my problems. My bum leg was actually a hip socket with no cartilage left in it and would have to be replaced soon.

During my downtime, my darling wife Annie kept up with any urgent chores that had to be done in the garden. But it was a full week before I could do much of anything, and two full weeks before I actually began cautiously gardening again. It was not the best time for such an injury to occur.

A heavy rain on July 12 started some of our onions toppling over. Most heavily affected were our short season Red Creole onions. Since they ripen at least twenty days ahead of all of the other onion varieties we had planted, they'd been picked over a good bit as we used fresh onions for cooking. But the small, tasty harvest gave us a hint of what was coming soon from the rest of our trials of thirteen different onion varieties.

By July 15, I was finally able to do a half day of real gardening. Since our carrot rows ran between rows of rapidly toppling over onions, they needed to come out first so that the onions would have space and sunlight to cure a bit.

A big surprise awaited me at the very end of our double row of carrots. I'd planted just a few feet of a highly recommended new hybrid carrot variety, Sugarsnax. Fedco raved about the carrot variety in their description (What seed house describes anything they're selling as average?) with tons of superlatives about the long, thin carrots.

When I began to dig the Sugarsnax, I found that I was in for a real job. I normally just push my heavy garden fork deeply into the soil beside a carrot row and lift a bit. That usually loosens the soil enough that I can lift the carrots out of the ground by their tops without breaking the roots. With the Sugarsnax, one measuring almost fifteen inches long, I had to really dig deep to extract the carrots without snapping them off.

After rinsing and thoroughly washing the carrots for storage in our refrigerator, our haul of carrots weighed in at sixteen pounds! And when I was done, it was obvious that it was almost time to get the rest of our onions out of the ground.

With my shoulder still working the next day, I dug most of our rather sad crop of garlic. Our dogs had dug a bit in the garlic bed during the winter, so the crop was a mess, not to mention considerably lessened. But I also noticed that our saved garlic really didn't seem to have the vigor it should. For 2015, I ordered a lot of new garlic bulbs.

We only got a fair harvest of elephant and regular garlic. For cooking, though, there's nothing quite like the aroma and flavor of freshly dug garlic. I left three elephant garlic plants that had "bloomed" in the ground to later collect garlic bulbils from them.

Coming off our worst garlic harvest in years, let me add that garlic is normally one of the easiest, most productive, and trouble free crops one can grow in their garden. For areas where the ground doesn't freeze too far down, one plants it in the late fall. For folks like my sister who lives in northern Minnesota, planting has to be done in the spring.

Defying the wisdom of crop rotation, I planted our fall kale on July 18 in the same narrow raised bed our spring broccoli and cauliflower had grown in. I did do a pretty thorough bed renovation before direct seeding the kale. I pulled back the existing mulch in the bed with a rake and worked in a healthy dose of 12-12-12 fertilizer and some lime with my hoe. After raking the area smooth, I used a piece of one inch lumber to make a shallow furrow down the center of the bed and direct seeded three varieties of kale. I then scooted the old mulch up to the edge of the kale row.

Summer plantings like this one are often an iffy proposition for us. We usually have much drier weather in July than in the spring, so I have to regularly water (and sometimes even reseed bare patches).

Note that the existing flowers in the bed were just left in place.

I harvested our fabulous crop of onions on July 22. I'd pulled most of the onions several days earlier to let them cure a bit in the sun. With rain predicted, I pulled all the rest of the onions and took them to a makeshift curing table in our garage.

I quickly realized that we had more onions than curing space. The onions with their tops totally covered the 4x8' sheet of plywood I dry them on, making an ideal environment for mold and rot. While I prefer to let the tops of onions naturally dry down when I have enough space, I trimmed the onion tops to within 3-4" of the bulbs to prevent having a nasty mess of rotting onions on the curing table.

I'd been pretty careful about keeping our onions sorted by variety and labeled this year, as we were searching for some different onion varieties to grow in the future. As it eventually turned out, our favorite storage onion was discontinued for 2015, but we'd already found one, two, and possibly even three other varieties that should serve as adequate replacements.

I wrote up our onion adventure in two separate feature stories:

• Onions We Grew in 2014 (July 28, 2014)
• How We Grow Our Onions (August 6, 2014)

We ended up with enough onions for our winter use, to share with family, and more to share with a local mission.

Towards the end of July, we began to find some bell peppers ripe and even a couple of really early ears of corn for our dinner table.

With our onions and carrots out of the way in our main raised bed, I tilled up the open section and transplanted our fall brassicas on July 29. The remaining open area of the bed was later planted to fall carrots and a short row of parsley.

August

We started off August with a huge harvest of early sweet corn. I hadn't planned on picking corn on August 1, as the corn's days-to-maturity suggested it wouldn't be ready for a few more days. But when I hauled a couple of buckets of kitchen scraps to the compost pile, I noticed some very ripe looking ears of early sweet corn. Since I'd been lazy with the compost buckets and used our garden cart to move them, I went ahead picking a dozen or so ears of corn. But as I walked into the rows, it became apparent that two of our three early varieties, Summer Sweet 6800R and Early Xtra-Sweet, needed to be picked that day. So...I ended up picking nine dozen ears of early sweet corn. That's not bad for picking just two-thirds of three forty-foot rows.

And we still had four rows of full season sweet corn yet to mature.

Fall Carrots Finally Seeded

Maybe it's because we had a bumper crop of spring carrots, or possibly because I'm none to familiar with growing fall carrots, but I somehow left the task of seeding our fall carrots until a full ten days later than last year when we seeded our very first crop of fall carrots. But I got a double row of Scarlet Nantes, Mokum, Nelson, Laguna, and Bolero carrots seeded...after picking all that sweet corn!

As with our summer seeded kale, I had to repeatedly water the carrot planting to get the seed to germinate in the hot, dry weather of early August. I omitted our usual practice of overseeding the carrots with radishes that help break up any soil crusting that might block the emerging carrots. I did, however, use an old trick of simply laying our walking boards over the carrot rows to hold in moisture until the carrots began to emerge.

Jumping a bit ahead chronologically, the carrots emerged in seven days, producing one of our better garden shots of the year. Speaking of good gardening shots, I got what I thought to be our best garden shot of the year on August 7. (See Our Best Garden Photos of 2014) Since it was raining on and off, I took my backup camera with me to the narrow raised bed where our garlic had grown to get a shot of a garlic scape in bloom.

I eventually dug the elephant garlic which had produced pretty nice heads. The garlic "blooms" got dried and bagged, as I hope to try growing out garlic from the tiny bulbils the bloom produces. While said to be a great way to dramatically increase ones garlic stock, the process can take two to three years.

Main Sweet Corn Harvest

It rained a good bit of the day on August 8, but there were periods where it stopped or dropped back to just a drizzle. During one such period, I was able to pick our full season sweet corn along with some second ears of our early corn. In all, we ended up with just over thirteen dozen ears of corn, mostly Twilley's Summer Sweet 7930R.

Husking, silking, blanching, cutting, bagging, cooling, and freezing all that corn extended well into the next day. When done, I found that we'd used up almost every bit of available space in our chest type freezer in the garage.

Tomatoes

While out in our East Garden, I picked some Earlirouge tomatoes to go along with some my wife had picked the day before. Like most midwestern gardeners this year, our tomato crop was disappointing. Cooler than normal temperatures slowed ripening of the fruit. Since I'd staggered the transplanting of our Earlirouge, Moira, Quinte, Mountain Merit, and Mountain Fresh tomatoes, we had nice tomatoes all season, just not that many of them.

Melons and Potatoes

Towards the middle of August, our melons began to mature in some volume. We also started digging our two, forty-foot rows of potatoes. After a rough start with insect infestations, we began to get muskmelons in some quantity.

Our watermelon fared far worse from insects and cool weather. We picked a lot of watermelon, but the quality really wasn't what it should have been. I attribute cooler temperatures this summer to the disappointing flavor of the watermelon. I didn't get a melon with that incredible watermelon taste one wants until the last melon I picked of the season!

It wasn't until August 22 that we were able to share melons with the mission's food bank, something that normally occurs much earlier...and with more frequency. Of course, this year the food bank also got a lot of onions and potatoes from us.

I cleared our East Garden of melon vines on August 28. It was our worst melon crop since we started growing them in the East Garden in 2007. While cool weather was a factor in the poor melon crop, I attribute most of our near crop failure to my not being watchful of our melon hills early on.

I spread the potato digging over a week or so, as digging really irritates my hip and knees. It wasn't long, though, before our curing table was covered with potatoes. Spuds with small bad spots that could be cut out were quickly worked into our meal plans. We let the potatoes cure in our darkened garage with a fan blowing over them until early September.

We also harvested and saved seed from our Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers late in the month.

A Crispino lettuce plant that bolted from our spring lettuce was allowed to go to seed, producing viable seed we used for some late, fall lettuce transplants.

And we began picking and dehydrating paprika peppers that we use to make our ground paprika.

From Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening