Another wet spring

Well, apparently Iowa wasn't the only one with lots of moisture this year. I'm reading reports of Late Blight in the NE part of the country. Apparently there was a huge lot of tomato starts that went out to chain stores infected with Late Blight.
So, for all you tomato and potato growers out there, even if you aren't close to the NE part of this country, check your plants for Late Blight signs and properly dispose of any diseased plants. This disease was responsible for the Potato Famine in Ireland.




More info:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/3102.html
http://www.uvm.edu/extension/?Page=News&storyID=14464

Things are growing great in my gardens. The West bed of the downtown plots has lots of flowers on my green beans. I seeded a row of carrots in between two rows last week, that's the 2nd planting of carrots for this season, I want to try and do one more in a week or two so I can have a late fall harvest. Hmm, oh the 2nd planting of green beans that I tossed in that plot are sprouting. Hopefully they will set beans after the first plantings have slowed down.
The East bed of the downtown plot has flowers on the potatoes. According to my little book, that means that the potatoes are forming under ground. I did get them hilled, but I think I'm going to need to do it again this week. My hills of cucumbers, squash and zucchini are all getting big. Lots of flowers, I'll probably harvest zucchinis this week. I also transplanted in a dozen or so strawberry starts. They are June bearing, and I got them free from one of my mom's work friends who was trying to tame her strawberry patch. Hopefully the rain we got this weekend will help them settle in to their new home.
The Franklin plot is about to need an onion harvest. They are looking soo big and healthy. I'll probably harvest the first few this weekend, but most of them need a couple more weeks to really bulk up. I still don't have any sign of scapes from my garlic. The plants are big and healthy, with lots of leaves, so surely garlic is forming under the ground, they're just not interested in putting on scapes I guess. The first carrots are starting to form. Still very small and at least a month away from harvest, but looking very healthy. The kohlrabi are doing fabulous. I'll harvest the first of those this week and have at least a couple a week for the rest of the summer. Tomatoes are growing well, as usual with the wetness, the Green Zebra is the healthiest, it's already got flowers and the others are just starting to think about it.
My containers are doing well too. Dave and I ate the first eggplant from my container-grown eggplant on Friday. I made a pasta sauce with it, it was pretty tasty. The great thing is I have 4 more eggplant fruits set on the bush, with another half-dozen flowers. I am definitely going to grow my eggplant in a container every year. It's huge, happy and productive, plus the flowers are pretty, and it's right on my back porch. Couldn't be happier with this experiment. The pepper plant has a pepper set, the tomato is happily growing, the herbs are all tasty. I'll have radishes to harvest soon, maybe a week or two.

All is going great. I love eating out of my gardens, it's so much more personal, eating food that I've grown.

Potato Mission Deux

Happy Summer Solstice everyone. Enjoy these days, they are only getting shorter from here on out. This light cycle is what triggers bulbing in onions. Southern states who enjoy less variation in day length get to grow onions that don't need that cycle to bulb. Did ya know that? :-) Now you do. Speaking of onions, mine are doing just what they are supposed to. I can see the tops of onions forming.

Well I got the potatoes hilled this morning. Baby and I went out first thing, and glad we did too, it's supposed to top 100 in the heat index today. I could see little buds where flowers are forming. My gardening book says that's a sign that potatoes are starting to form under the soil. I'll need to keep up on their water while they are flowering. Luckily the rain showers are doing my work for me right now.

Green beans are putting on flowers too. I need to get a succession planting done soon. :-)

Hope this first day of summer finds you well. More exciting garden blogging soon.

Herb harvest

I harvested the first round of herbs from my container garden yesterday. I filled the dehydrator, that's not bad for mid-June. Dehydrated some strawberries too. Mmmm the kitchen smelled nice.
Test your herb knowledge, in the picture see if you can find the following herbs.
-Green Basil
-Red Rubin basil
-Green Sage
-Chives
-Oregano
-Rosemary
-Thyme
:-)

I harvested a large bowl full of lettuce from the Franklin Plot. They were random volunteer lettuces, but still tasty. :-) I let a couple lettuce heads go to seed in that bed last fall, just to see if I'd get any this year, I guess that little experiment was a success. Not hugely so, only three heads, but still cool.

So, my garlic experiment is starting to worry me, the bulbs aren't sending up scapes. Last year I had scapes by this point in June, and this year, not even a sign of them. They are at the farmers market, so other Iowa garlic is producing them, just not mine. *sigh* I guess I'll wait and see, maybe they are just a few weeks late.

It's been so wet here I haven't gotten my potatoes hilled yet. Did you know that green potatoes really are poisonous? That's why you have to hill, because otherwise the little potatoes get sunlight and they turn green and poisonous.

Anyway, things are growing nicely, I've got blooms on my eggplant and on my pepper plant, the onions are bulbing, the kholrabi and carrots are growing bigger, and the green beans and squashes are putting on leaves like there's no tomorrow.

Potato Mission

First off, shout outs to my Daddy, who planned an awesome family trip for us! My whole little family went and joined him, and a fair chunk of his side of the family, canoeing in MO. Waaay too much fun. Baby had a blast, and thanks to grandma's and great grandma's babysitting, Dave and I even got to go canoeing at the same time on Sunday morning. We managed to navigate 2.5 hours of Jack's Fork River without tumping over or divorcing. :-)

Anyway, I checked on my Downtown Plots this morning. The West bed is full of green beans, all merrily growing and up to a few inches tall already. 2 long rows of a purple bush variety and 2 long rows of a green bush variety. I have left enough room in between the rows to grow fall crops of swiss chard or spinach or beets. (We'll see if that actually happens.)

The east bed has all the hills of squashes and cucs putting on real leaves. It also has the potatoes and they have reached 6 inches. Now, my little gardening book tells me that at 6 inches I should "hill the potatoes." So, my mission today during Rowen's nap time is to figure out exactly one should "hill the potatoes." Is it a simple matter of hoeing more dirt up? Do the hills have to be a certain shape? Is compost cool to hill with or should I use plain dirt? Can I hill too much?

Now, the more observant of you will probably be wanting to know how my potatoes got in the ground instead of my fabulously planned Vertical Potato Trial 2009. Well, the frame got built, but when it came time to put the potatoes in there, I realized I wouldn't be able to easily move it. And with plans to move houses in the next month, I was loath to put the potatoes in the frame and risk losing the whole crop. So, executive decisions were made, and the potatoes got planted in the east bed at the Downtown Plots and the frame got safely moved, and is patiently waiting for a permanent home for Vertical Potato Trial 2010. :-) Potatoes are an experiment crop for me anyway, planting them in the time honored fashion will not be a wasted experience.

I'll report back when I have some answers.

A Snapshot

"Jennie, you need to get up, break time is over."

"No, I need to nap, you promised me I could nap."

"What?"

"You promised me I could nap today."

"I didn't say that."

"Yes you did, this morning, it was the only reason I got out of bed."

"I don't think I said that, if I did say it maybe I meant next week. You can nap next week."




A conversation between Dave and I Monday evening. We are in the middle of a move. Moving was easier before baby. Oh well, back to it. More exciting blogging next week perhaps.

The end of the cold frame.

So, my cold frame has yielded another tidbit of information. I planted 3 different types of spinach last fall. Monnopa seems to be the winning variety from the trial. While the other two were equally tasty, and equally hardy, the Gigantic and Bloomsdale are bolting and the Monnopa is still putting out leaves. That is good to know. You can see the 3 rows in the picture, Monnopa is the one on the left.

Sadly, the cold frame must be dismantled in the next week and moved to our new house. The lettuce I planted will not have time to mature. I might try and transplant some of the larger sprouts into containers, but I can't imagine it will be very successful. *sigh* Sad, I do love my lettuce. But, I guess I'll just have to try for a crop this fall.

All in all, it was an interesting trial. I got a bunch of spinach out of it, and some good information.



The rest of the container garden is planted and ready to move to the new house. Hopefully there's room for them all. :-D
I ended up with lots of herbs, a pepper plant, an eggplant, a tomato, a broccoli, a pot of peas and a pot with radishes and leaf lettuce.

How my garden grows

So, a quick rundown on my garden spaces this year so y'all out there in cyberspace can keep current, plus, it'll help me organize my thoughts.

I no longer have my massive farm house garden. What I'm working with this year is more of a disjointed affair. I have 3 plots, 8'x16'each, at the community gardens in Des Moines. Two of those are in the Downtown community garden, and one is in the Franklin st community garden. The rest of my gardening will be in the container garden I built up last fall. Total, I'm working with 450 sq feet of ground space and a dozen or so decent sized containers.

The 2 plots at the Downtown garden will be the farthest away from my house. So, those two plots will be vines and beans. One plot will be nothing but squash hills, and cucumber hills. My reasoning is I can't possibly container garden those, and they don't require a lot of daily maintenance. The second plot will be bush beans. Bush beans because they don't require trellising, and they tend to put on beans in waves, which means I won't have to be out there every day picking beans. The other influencing factor is those plots aren't done yet. The city is behind on construction. So, I can't put in anything that needs to be planted early.

The plot at the Franklin Garden will be more diverse, but since it will be closer to our house, I should be able to keep up with it. I have garlic and onions planted in it already. I also seeded carrots and kohlrabi over the weekend; about 6 square feet of each. I have room for a few broccolis and a couple tomatoes and that's it.

Lettuces and herbs are in containers. Peas have been planted in a container, and I have a trellis ready for them to climb. I'm trying my hand at vertical potato planting with a container I built myself. I have a strawberry pot with strawberry starts in it. I want to try an eggplant in a container, and maybe a determinate tomato plant. If I have a pot left I might try a cabbage or a bell pepper.


Aaand, just to make it all really confusing, I'm also dealing with veggies for the CSA with Becky up in Boone. This undertaking is an hour away from my house in Des Moines. But, basically we are trying to start up a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)farm. The CSA is called Open Source Organics and we tilled our first 2 beds this spring. The beds are 3'x 100'. CSA means that people buy "shares" of the harvest before the season starts and then the farmer distributes the vegetable harvest weekly over the course of the growing season. This year we are not a true CSA as we are offloading all our veggies through a middleman company.

So, that's what I'm working with this year. As always, there are a few experiments and some standard garden fare and the chaos known as life thrown in just to make things interesting. I'll post the interesting stuff here. I'm thinking I won't keep track of my harvests by weight this year. With a new baby I just figure the chances of keeping up on the weigh ins is practically zero. :-) What weights I did get recorded would be only partial representations of actual harvest and pretty much worthless. So, no boring posts full of numbers this summer. :-) I'll probably do weigh ins again in the future, they are just too useful not to, but it will be a couple of years I think.

Hmm... did I ever add up all my total harvest weights and come up with a total for the year?