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A Year in Our Garden - 2014 - Page 3
December 15, 2014

September

When I was teaching, our gardening season pretty well came to a close in late August or early September. There simply weren't enough hours in the day to do a good job of starting a new school year and garden at the same time. Since retiring in 2008, I've been able to extend our gardening season through September into October, with one notable year when we picked fresh lettuce a few days before Thanksgiving!

While our harvests become less in September, the flowers along the edges of our raised beds were in full bloom all month long.

Our fall lettuce and spinach didn't get transplanted and direct seeded until September 1. Oops!

Outdoor work in our garden plots got slowed with 4.6 inches of rain from overnight thunderstorms September 1-2. But that allowed me to take the time to get our potatoes bagged and stored in our basement plant room. Since there's a bit more light in the room than I'd like for storage, our potatoes go into brown gunny sacks to filter the light a bit. Our onions get hung from the ceiling in mesh bags, as the light doesn't seem to affect them as much as it does the potatoes.

I have to check and sort out bad onions and potatoes at least once a month. The onions are much more prone to sprout and/or rot early, as some had bad spots not detected when they were bagged. And some just go bad early on. If an onion truly rots, you can count on one or two adjacent onions being damaged as well, so frequent sorting is a must.

To sort, I just dump the onions out in a plant flat. I return them to their mesh bags one at a time, feeling for any soft or moist spots. I follow the same procedure with potatoes, although bad potatoes usually look bad as well, making the process a bit easier.

While down in the basement sorting, I turned my camera to our new collection of gloxinias. After having lost all of our existing plants to the INSV virus a year or so ago, we had to start over, mostly with seed we'd saved ourselves.

Most of the gloxinias shown here were seeded in February.

As the month progressed, I worked at cleaning up our various garden plots. While I'd cleared our melon vines from the East Garden in August, I'd left some tomato, pepper, and pea plants, hoping for a little more harvest. They all got cleared out on September 10.

While our East Garden proper was done for the season, just outside of it, our butternut squash were still producing and our pumpkins were trying to ripen a few fruit before Halloween.

And obviously, our working compost pile got lots of garden trash. I often build it up to around five feet tall with vines, spent plants, and rotten fruit. Within just a few days, the pile compresses back down several feet before I feed it again.

Throughout the month, I picked several kinds of paprika peppers. We saved seed from the Paprika Supreme plants that were isolated from other pepper plants. All the various paprika pepper varieties where dehydrated and made into ground paprika.

On September 14, I turned my attention to getting some bell peppers frozen. Freezing sweet bell peppers is really one of the easier food preservations we do. The peppers need to be thoroughly washed, as spiders hide in their crevices and lay their eggs there and by the stem. Surrounded by large pans and our compost bucket, I cored, halved, and seeded peppers while watching football on TV.

Once seeded, the peppers get washed again and set out to dry in a warm location. When dry, the peppers are cut into strips, placed on cookie sheets, and frozen. It takes about six hours in our freezer for the peppers to become firm enough to go into zip lock bags for long term storage in our big freezer.

The two gallons of frozen pepper strips put up today are about twice what we'll use over the winter. One of our daughters loves to cook with peppers, so we'll send some home with her the next time she visits.

Even in September, I continue to add grass clipping mulch around our existing crops. The clippings break down and have to be replenished about every four to six weeks to prevent weed breakthroughs.

As we prepared for fall (note the bales of peat moss along the raised bed above), there's lots still going on in our raised garden beds. Our fall broccoli begins putting on heads. A good fall crop of broccoli (and cauliflower) is a real treat since we already froze enough in the spring and early summer for winter use. We nibbled fresh broccoli at will, added it to all sorts of dishes, and of course, enjoyed it steamed with cheese sauce.

Our row of kale started on July 18 was ready for its first picking on September 16. That led to our first batch of Portuguese Kale Soup getting canned late that evening. Since we were able to harvest a few kidney beans this year, all of the garden ingredients for the delicious soup came from our garden.

Something almost totally ignored in our main raised bed have been our two caged grape tomato plants. Both our Red Pearl (open pollinated, but a PVP variety) and Honey Bunch Red Grape (F-1 hybrid) tomato plants provided us with all the grape tomatoes we could eat. With our tomato loving granddaughter having moved on to preferring whole, standard tomatoes, we haven't put the plants to very good use (other than my munching on them as I pass by them in the garden).

Our double row of fall carrots continued to thrive, racing to beat the first killing frost. I seeded the rows on August 1, cutting it pretty close, as our average first frost date is around October 10-15. The five varieties I seeded (Mokum, Nelson, Laguna, Scarlet Nantes, and Bolero) have a range of days-to-maturity of 54-75 days. With fall crops taking a week to ten days longer to mature due to the shorter fall day length, getting a full fall crop was dependent upon when that first frost really arrived. Last year, it was on October 22! Over the time I've written the Senior Gardening blog (2008-present), our first frosts have ranged from October 8 to October 30.

Another late crop doing well was our planting of parsley, transplanted on August 7. Fortunately, parsley can often withstand a light frost.

On September 20, I brought in two good pumpkins and a bunch of paprika peppers and hybrid tomatoes. The hill of pumpkins tried to mature a bunch more before our first frost, but they didn't make it.

It was really nice to be getting good tomatoes late in the season. Other gardeners who also experienced a less than wonderful tomato harvest have reported that their plants are done producing for the year. That makes the few ripe tomatoes we were still bringing in taste that much better.

After struggling with some mechanical problems in mounting our dandy, pull-type rototiller on our lawn tractor, I got our East Garden tilled on September 25. There were still portions of the plot untilled, though. I didn't turn over any of our alfalfa cover crop on the rotated out section. I may hate myself for that one next spring when I have to turn down some heavy turf that has grown around the alfalfa.

I also didn't have the heart to take out our geranium row markers or our long row of nasturtiums.

October

With the constant possibility of a killing frost, I always consider anything we get out of our garden plots during October a bonus. As it turned out, we had a very light frost October 23, but didn't have a heavy frost until November 1!

Drying Parsley

I made our first picking of parsley on October 6 from just two of our five parsley plants. Having dried parsley before, I knew to cut only a couple of gallons of fresh leaves, as that's about what our dehydrator will hold at one time. The leaves had been rained on overnight, but I went ahead and rinsed them off when I brought them inside. Trimming out as much stem as I could, I laid the leaves out on our dehydrator trays.

A number of web sites have instructions for drying parsley with a dehydrator, in the oven or microwave, and even air drying. Since we have a nice dehydrator, that's been the way we've done it in the past. While we've had parsley dry down in the dehydrator in just 8-10 hours in the past, the leaves I started this time took the full 24 hours recommended by our dehydrator manual to get the leaves crispy so they'd easily crunch and shatter before going into our parsley jar.

When the first batch of parsley leaves dried, I made another picking the next day, but ended up picking too many. The extra parsley leaves that wouldn't fit in the dehydrator got dried on a cookie sheet in the oven at 175° F for a couple of hours. I'd dried other herbs this way in the past, but never parsley. It worked out pretty well.

Interestingly, the second load of parsley in the dehydrator was dry after just 8 hours of drying! I'm really not sure what makes the difference in some loads drying significantly faster than others. Possibly the first load was still damp from being rinsed.

One can make the job of drying parsley a bit easier on warm, sunny days by simply getting out early and hosing off parsley plants in the garden and letting them dry in the morning sun before picking/cutting. That can eliminate rinsing the leaves after picking. I've also read that parsley (and other herbs such as basil) should be picked in the morning before the sun gets really hot. It has something to do with essential oils in the leaves being most potent and flavorful then.

Butternuts and More

I worked in a light mist to drizzle on October 9 bringing in a variety of garden crops. I first cut butternut squash, using a set of lopping shears to cut the tough stems. Butternuts store better with a few inches of stem left on the squash.

Butternuts are great when split and baked with butter and brown sugar, but also make an incredible mock yam dish for our Thanksgiving table. We skin the butternuts, remove the seeds, and cut the flesh into large chunks. We bake them with butter, brown sugar, marshmallows, and a bit of nutmeg.

Since I was already wet from rain and sweat, I went ahead and drove around to all of our garden plots. I found several ripe Moira tomatoes and Paprika Supreme peppers in one isolation plot and our first two, good Quinte tomatoes from a very late planting in an isolation plot by the barn. The isolation plot at the back of our yard produced a half dozen ripe Mountain Fresh and Mountain Merit tomatoes along with a couple of nice Kevin's Early Orange bell peppers and a single red Hungarian paprika pepper.

While not a lot of produce, I was pleased with what I got, considering that we're now well into October.

When I got to our raised beds in the back yard, I only found a single red and a couple of yellow bell peppers to pick, along with a large handful of nice broccoli sideshoots. When I checked our bed of lettuce and spinach, I found that some of our romaine lettuce had gone to seed before forming any head. A lot of the lettuce looked as if something or someone had laid on it, pointing a possible accusatory finger at the dogs! But the spinach rebounded nicely after having been picked back twice already.

Our row of kale that was heavily picked in September responded nicely to some fertilizer, compost, and nearly ideal growing conditions (cool, sunny, plenty of moisture). In a little less than a month, it had doubled the volume it had before its first picking. I'm not sure whether I better like looking at the deep green kale accented by a few flowers around it or eating it.

The kale provided one more batch of Portuguese Kale Soup at the end of the month.

Our cornucopia of harvest continued throughout the month of October.

Our cauliflower plants put on some of the largest leaves I've ever seen on that vegetable. With the weather we had, it was almost impossible to grow a bad fall crop of cauliflower this year. The heads were large, and due to some fairly cool weather earlier (and a good bit of BT), relatively free of worms.

Cooler weather slowed the ripening of tomatoes and peppers.

I cut and dried parsley again on October 18. We use a lot of dried parsley as most everyone else does in spaghetti sauce and such. But we also use it in special dishes such as our rich, delicious (and probably totally unhealthy) Asiago Cheese & Tortellini Soup.

I almost filled a four gallon bucket with cut parsley this time. When I was done cutting, there wasn't much left of the once lush parsley plants. I obviously had to use both the dehydrator and the oven to dry the large batch of parsley.

Later in the day, a granddaughter who was intrigued by the drying process, enjoyed putting the freshly dried parsley along with some basil and oregano in spaghetti sauce for dinner. I wished I'd held out a few fresh leaves for the sauce, though.

Kale Chips

With the oven fired up, we picked kale and tried making kale chips for the first time. I got a little too much olive oil and salt on them, but everyone seemed to like them. What kale wouldn't fit on the cookie sheets for drying got boiled with a bit of bacon, onion, and garlic to go along with our dinner. I really thought the boiled kale was a whole lot better than the chips, but that's just me.

Shifting Gears

With the possibility of frost growing every day, I finally shifted from harvest mode into getting the garden ready for next year mode. I cleared our grape tomato plants on October 21 and continued down the main raised garden bed in the days following. While late harvests are really gratifying, getting the garden ready for the next season became more of a priority.

After getting our remaining broccoli and cauliflower plants out of the main bed, our next task was harvesting fall carrots.

Carrot Day

On an absolutely gorgeous fall day, I finished digging our fall carrots. We'd been "sampling" them for some time, with the grandkids loving walking around Bugs Bunny style eating a carrot with the greens still on.

As always, the digging was really easier than the cleaning process. I lift our carrots in the ground with a garden fork and then gently lift them out in bunches by their tops.

A bit of tapping on the ground drops some soil clumps from the carrots. They then go into a first rinse in a bucket of water before going into our garden cart.

When I was done and the cart was nearly full of mostly 5-8" carrots, I pushed it to the house and filled it with water for another soaking of the carrots. If I get the carrots clean enough with a couple of soakings and a bit of brushing, they may not need peeling when used.

The tops of the carrots get trimmed off outside the house, as that job makes quite a mess of feathery carrot foliage. The carrots are rinsed and brushed again in the kitchen sink before being laid out to dry on kitchen towels. Once dry, they go into Debbie Meyer Green Bags. We've had good luck storing carrots all winter in the vegetable drawers of our refrigerator with the bags.

Our carrots were the last critical crop still growing in our main raised bed.

Renovating Our Main Raised Bed

One last summer-like day allowed me to get our main raised garden bed renovated on October 27 for the next season. We have to add material to the bed each year to keep its soil level up. Considering the bounty of produce we harvest and the quantity of green material moved from the bed to the compost pile, it's not surprising that the soil level of the bed drops a bit each season.

I really prefer to till in any major soil amendments in the fall, giving them all winter to settle and also do their work. I didn't get that job done last fall and ended up trucking in compost to raise the bed's soil level a bit this spring.

All the flowers that I'd left around the border of the bed had to go first. It seems a shame to pull flowers that are still in bloom, but we had a hard freeze in the weather forecast.

Since I added compost to the bed in the spring and the soil structure seemed a bit dense all this summer, I chose to add peat moss to the bed to raise the soil level and loosen the soil a bit. I had six 3.8 cubic foot bales of sphagnum peat moss available, although I planned on using only four of them in the main bed, with the other two reserved for our narrow raised beds. In the end, I ended up using all six bales, as it seemed the soil level had sunk a bit more than I thought over the summer.

I sprinkled lime over the bed to help neutralize the acid peat moss. Lime is best applied in the fall, giving it all winter to help raise the soil's pH. I also added a bit of 12-12-12 fertilizer, although the nitrogen in it will mostly leach out of the soil over the winter. In the area where I planned to plant garlic, I added some 0-0-60 fertilizer (see caution). And the whole bed got a heavy dose of Milky Spore to help keep moles seeking cutworms out of the bed. We have two hound dogs that have a passion for digging up and killing moles anywhere they can find them, including in our garden plots!

With the added peat moss, rototilling the plot fluffed the improved soil so that its level was nearly up to the landscape timbers that enclose the bed. The soil will settle a bit over the winter. I took the time to rake the bed smooth before quitting, as I simply like to have it that way.

Planting Garlic

The next day, I got our garlic planted. Getting garlic in the ground in October has until this time been a long, unfulfilled goal of mine. The weather cooperated perfectly, dropping an overnight rain that helped wet the peat moss I'd tilled into the bed the previous day. But the wet conditions also made using walking boards necessary to prevent compacting the fluffy, moist soil. The knee pad is an accommodation for my bad knees.

I had reserved a 36" wide section in the bed for the garlic. When I checked our purchased and saved garlic, I found that I would need to plant six rows of garlic, making the rows just 7" apart. That's about as close as one wants to get garlic plants, especially since I spaced the garlic seven to eight inches apart in the rows.

I started planting from the center rows out so that I wouldn't be compacting already planted rows with my knees while I planted. Each garlic clove went into a hole that was 5-7" deep, depending on the size of the clove. I try to keep my garlic covered with at least two if not three or four inches of soil to prevent freeze damage.

I worked a little bone meal into the bottom of each hole with the trowel or my fingers before pushing a garlic clove into it. It's important to get the root side down and the pointy side up of the garlic clove. Then I just pulled dirt into the hole and firmed it a bit.

I ended up planting two rows of elephant garlic. One row was newly purchased garlic from Territorial Seed and Sow True Seed. The cloves were huge. The other row of elephant garlic got our saved garlic cloves which were considerably smaller than the purchased stuff. Our four rows of standard garlic included Inchelium Red, German Red, German White, Softneck Silver White, Purple Glazer, and Chesnock Red. I didn't use any of our saved standard garlic cloves, as they've seemed to lose vigor over the last few years. Note that ordering ones garlic early is important. By the time we planted, every variety we'd ordered in July and August was sold out for 2014!

After planting, I covered the garlic patch with several inches of mixed grass clipping and leaf mulch. While the mulch needs to be pulled back in early spring, it helps the garlic withstand cold winters. I forgot to pull back the mulch one year and greatly reduced our harvest because of weak plants whose leaves couldn't penetrate the matted mulch.

With a really hard freeze predicted overnight, I ended October with a flurry of picking. Some rather scrappy looking tomatoes, paprika peppers, lettuce, and spinach were all still good in our narrow raised beds and isolation plots.

The lettuce picking included a very heavy head of Crispino lettuce and a couple of Skyphos butterhead lettuce. The Crispino seemed especially crisp and tasty, possibly because it came from a plant grown from the seed we saved earlier in the season.

About that Spinach

I only picked enough spinach for a batch of shrimp portofino for our supper. I used a couple of online copycat recipes (1, 2) of the original dish served by Romano's Macaroni Grill before they caved into criticism about unhealthy meals and trashed their menu. Note that the first recipe linked omits the delicious (and expensive) pine nuts, while the second is good for ingredients, but not so good for its method. I used portobello mushrooms instead of white ones, as shrimp portofino is supposed to be a rich dish. I also added chopped carrots and onions and chicken broth to the dish.

I had to split the sauce halfway through the preparation, as my wife, Annie, doesn't like shrimp. I substituted small scallops for the shrimp in her half. The shrimp portofino was delicious, although I'll use a lot more spinach the next time I make it. Annie liked her scallops portifino, too, although I found it disappointing in comparison to the incredible shrimp version.

November

We had our first real frost/freeze overnight on October 31-November 1, getting down to 31° F. With colder temperatures on the way, I did another heavy picking of kale and set to work making one last batch of Portuguese Kale Soup for the year. I picked two, five-gallon buckets of slightly packed kale for the soup, as the kale after being stemmed really cooks down. It nearly filled our twelve quart kettle when I made the soup.

After our family had chowed down on the kale, I canned seven quarts of it (the canner's capacity) and had another quart for the refrigerator. While not usually a problem, I had trouble keeping the canner at ten pounds of pressure for the required ninety minutes of canning time. The canner slipped down to as low as eight pounds and once got as high as thirteen pounds. I'm hoping the bacteria that need to be killed in the canning process can deal with an average pressure of ten pounds per square inch, which produces a canning temperature of 240° F.

24° F = End of Growing Season

The next morning the sun was bright. Our overnight low was predicted to get down to 28° F. That wasn't accurate, as two nearby reporting stations showed lows of 24° F! Even our usually frost hardy kale looked pretty sad after a heavy picking followed by a hard freeze. Interestingly, our bed of lettuce and spinach appeared not to have too much frost/freeze damage.

Fortunately, most of our garden plots had been put to bed for the winter already.

I published several annual blog features during November. Since each is rather lengthy, I'll just supply titles and links here:

• Seed Catalogs and Trusted Suppliers (November 14, 2014)
• Garden Seed Inventory (November 16, 2014)
• Seed Saving 2014 and Seed Savers Exchange Offerings (November 17, 2014)
• Garden Planning and Mapping (November 26, 2014)

I also put up a couple of shopping guides for gardeners and/or those hunting gifts for gardeners:

• The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners (November 28, 2014)
• Shopping Guide for Gardeners (November 29, 2014)

Our monthly sorting day for onions and potatoes came a bit earlier than expected. When cooking something, I went to the basement for an onion and found green sprouts peeking out of one of the mesh bags.

Our stored potatoes were all in good shape, but I found a half dozen sprouted and/or rotting onions. The culls went into a compost bucket that gets dumped on the compost pile...usually when it begins to smell really bad.

Our first light snow of the season arrived on November 16, followed by a bit heavier snow on November 18.

Beating the cold weather, Annie and I traveled to Baton Rouge just before Thanksgiving for the wedding of our youngest daughter, Julia. While the natives found the 60 to 70 degree temperatures there a bit chilly, we felt like we'd found summer again.

After a long drive home, we enjoyed a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, hosted by another daughter, Jen. We brought green bean casserole, sweet corn and butternut squash yams from the garden for the feast. Jen also opened one of the jars of canned green beans we'd previously given her for the meal.

Since most of the cooking in our house falls to me, as I'm now retired and my wife still works full-time, I really enjoyed not having to host and prepare a Thanksgiving dinner.

I wound up our gardening month by clearing the last of our isolation plots of tomatoes and peppers on November 29. Beyond those items, there were some late butternuts and pumpkins that didn't ripen, rotting on the ground that had to be moved to our compost pile.

After picking a small bowl of nice spinach leaves, I cleared one of our narrow raised beds of the remaining, frost damaged spinach. Then I raked out both of our narrow raised beds before mulching them with a grass clipping/leaf mixture. The mulch will help keep the beds weed free and ready for planting next spring.

I also cleared another raised bed of asparagus stalks, cutting the tough stalks off at the ground with a pair of lopping shears. The asparagus stalks went into a hole I'm slowly filling instead of our compost pile. The fibrous asparagus stalks break down too slowly to include in a regular compost pile.

I've read that the reason for clearing away old asparagus stalks is to prevent insect and disease carryover. I suspect that's true, but I can't imagine trying to pick asparagus next April with all of the previous year's trash in the way. We have one other asparagus patch yet to clean up, but that will be about the last of our outdoor gardening chores for the year.

December

Even inveterate gardeners like myself need a little downtime. The month of December, when garden chores are at a minimum, provides just such a rest.

Garden seed catalogs continued to trickle in throughout the month. Our garden seed inventory indicated that we didn't need all that much new seed for 2015, but I still enjoy paging through the catalogs. I shared our listing of recommended suppliers in November, but one outfit probably deserves some special mention.

The rather unassuming looking 2015 Fedco Seed catalog contains lots of what you might expect, good seed at good prices. But it also contains a lot more important information than other seed vendors are currently willing to supply.

There's a very frank discussion about whether Fedco should be selling seed produced by Bayer and Syngenta, both makers of neonicotinoids, insecticides linked to honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD). It also includes a note that no seed from Monsanto/Seminis is included in the catalog.

Beyond that, Fedco tells in general terms where their seed comes from (i.e., from "Small seed farmers including Fedco staff" to "Multinationals who are engaged in genetic engineering").

I really like their "Your Last Chance in 2015" and "Dropped Varieties for 2015" on page 111 that includes some truly humorous explanations as to why stuff has or will disappear from their catalog. Along with "New Seed Varieties for 2015" on page 3, they also have a list of "Back in 2015."

Unlike any other seed vendor I know of, Fedco is open about their practice of selling old seed that still meets government germination standards. Going a step further, Fedco identifies old seed in catalog listings with their most recent germination rates!

When I got to the final sections of the catalog, I hit upon a real find. Fedco Seeds' Organic Growers Supply division is offering 83" x 50' packages of Agribon-AG-19 floating row covers in the 83" x 50' size for just $13 plus shipping. For comparison, Johnny's Selected Seeds, a usually good, but expensive vendor, is currently charging $25.95 for exactly the same product! Johnny's prices on larger rolls are competitive, but their price on smaller rolls is way out of line. I've ordered floating row covers in this size from Johnny's in the past, usually on sale, but feel a bit put off by an employee owned company that is constantly raising prices well beyond consumer price indexes, and especially what we retired folks receive in Social Security COLAs.

There are many more nuggets of golden gardening info in the Fedco catalog. It's one that really deserves paging through from front to back.

You can order a Fedco catalog here, or download their catalog (in pieces for the various divisions) here.

Closing

We had some incredible crops in our 2014 garden plots...and a few spectacular failures as well. That's pretty much normal, as growing conditions change from year to year. It doesn't account for gardener screw-ups, which sadly, I committed a few of this season.

I'm blessed that the Lord has granted me some years in retirement to enjoy gardening, the photography that goes hand-in-hand with publishing this site, and the many wonderful emails from readers.

Our gardening plans for next season are all proceeded by a big "if," as I'm scheduled to have total hip replacement surgery this winter. We've timed it so that I should be done with rehab in time to have our senior garden once again in 2015, hopefully with a good deal less pain involved. While a touch threatening, such surgery didn't exist for our grandparents and earlier generations. I'm thankful such options now exist to extend ones active lifestyle well into retirement.

Have a great holiday season and best wishes for a successful gardening season in 2015.

From Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening