Sunday Growing
Posted: November 21, 2010 Filed under: Farming, gardening | Tags: farming, gardening 25 CommentsI’m hoping that a regular post about gardening and farming, but mostly gardening, will be useful on the blog. I’ve picked Sundays to run the post, perhaps every other Sunday at first depending upon interest, because it’s often a slow news day.
I hope to convince a few of the commenters and writers here to write about what is happening in the garden(s) in their neck of the woods. So feel free to dive in, everyone!
Up here in the PacNW it’s been rainy. No surprise there, eh? It’s also cold; we are having a cold snap with cold winds barrelling down out of the Fraser River Valley from Canada. This often means snow, but I think it’s a bit too warm for snow as we are hovering just above freezing, but the skies are clear. The fire has been burning in the wood stove all day. Outside the goats are all puffed up, like little fur puff balls on 4 stick like legs. They are out in the pasture looking for something to eat. The pasture is green (this is Washington after all) but the grass has little nutrition. So they come in to eat hay every few hours. The cats are similarly puffed up, lounging in the warm spots in the garage. The dog is in her heaven, being a northern spitz type dog. She’s only 9 months old. I can’t wait until she first encounters snow.
Frost on the Pasture
The plants in the herb garden are curled up against the cold. But there is still viable rosemary, thyme and some oregano. The last of the chives gave up the ghost a month or so ago. Green onions are still hanging on, hoping I won’t pick them before they can flower in the spring. In the greenhouses that I got from The Tree Center and set up last season, the last of the tomatoes have ripened and need to be picked. Their mother plants are completely brown and dead. Peppers hang here and there amidst the brown leaves of their plants. I need to get those picked and processed. We chop peppers, sweet and hot, and bag them into zip-locks. We freeze them and use them in cooking all the rest of the year. Instead of canning tomatoes I chop them, skins, seeds and all, in the cuisinart and freeze them. They too are used in cooking for the rest of the year.
Out in the fields the garlic we planted in October is showing the first of its growth. Yum! If it were to get really cold we’d have to cover it with straw, but I’d rather not. That way there’s no convenient hiding place for our garden nemesis, the slug. We also have lettuce, mesclun, carrots, broccoli, kale, swiss chard, cabbage, rutabaga, beets, turnips and more growing in the fields. Some of the plants are under cover to protect them from super cold weather. Others are left to grow as they will. I expect the beets and the swiss chard will finish shortly. I should grab some and chop it and freeze it for eating later before it turns into a brown frozen mush!
I expect we’ll have our first snow, if not over Thanksgiving where it can most effectively screw up travel plans and therefore is the chosen time of the weather gods, by early December. Before then, I hope to have the paths in the herb garden weeded, and we really need to get the plowing done.
I’d like to refer everyone to a gardening blog from our own Grayslady, Gardening in the Mud. Please visit there for information about Mid-West and North-East gardening and plants. She knows her stuff! If anyone else has a garden blog they’d like linked, let us know!
So, what’s happening in the garden in your area? Go outside and then let us know!
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I’m hoping to turn my little plot on the Mississippi into an example of edible landscaping! I have a green house that’s been there since I bought the place and some very active plantain trees. I’m working on adding some more fruit trees and I’m experimenting with using recycled cement blocks for growing herbs and lettuces. People kid me when I say I’m going to get a goat and a couple of chickens, but just watch!!!
Cement blocks are good to grow things in, especially if you have an over rainy climate. They provide good drainage. You do have to keep up on the feeding though. Remember to keep the lettuce in the shade if you have a hot sun. But you’ll be able to grow really great lettuce during the cooler months. The concrete blocks will keep the soil warm.
How big is the greenhouse? We don’t heat ours, so in the winter they only grow lettuce and the like. We’ve a glass house and another one we built ourselves from plastic and pvc tubes.
Goats are great for a garden. Their poo is already balanced, so it doesn’t need composting before addition to the soil. We generally add it a month or two before we plant and let it break down in situ. We use the straw bedding from the goat pens as a super mulch. It also really helps fluff up clay soil.
I actually grow a lot of spinach and lettuce this time of year until about the end of the year. I’ve found that when I harvest the stuff in the blocks that when I add some of the compost in before I put more seeds in, it seems to keep doing fine. I have a small compost in the corner on the side of my nasty neighbors. Funny thing is that some times I’ll get pumpkins, yams or potatoes that will start over there and the next thing I know, I’ve got an additional grow space!!! I have a very small yard but I try to use every bit of it!
This year, which was a very cold and wet summer for us, we grew our best pumpkins on the compost heap! Had a volunteer Cinderella pumpkin which put on about 7 pumpkins over there. In the field, with irrigation and fertilizer and reemay cloth covering them, the plants maybe put on 2 pumpkins each.
I love the reward of digging in the soil and pulling out an unexpected potato or two. It’s almost as good as shucking that first ear of corn and running to the house to cook it.
The Green house is in the middle of the backyard, It’s like 10X10.
I’ve been growing most of my stuff in pots because we rent our land and the soil here is somewhat clay like. However, the strawberries and dill this year decided they didn’t like being confined. I now have strawberry and dill growing outside containers.
Like Dak, I tend to lean toward edible landscaping rather than ornamental. I have some blueberry bushes and have tried raspberry plants with little luck. We have wild blackberries growing. I have chives, thyme, oregano, mint, and for now (it seems to die every winter) rosemary.
I’d love some help with my plantings.
I haven’t had any luck with
The Rosemary dying may be because of harsh winters. They can stand cold, but they like a maritime climate with the cold. Too much wet without a wind and they rot. It’s like they want the moisture to be in the air, not the soil (like they were growing on the sea shore 🙂 ). Mine grow well in raised beds, but every spring there’s some die back before they get going really strong.
We made the raised beds from fencing lumber (1 by 6 by 8 ft planks) and small pieces of iron rebar. The rebar goes into the ground at the corners and the planks are attached with pipe collars (I’m not sure that’s the word: the little pieces of metal, screw hole in either side, rounded with flat bits where the screw holes are to attach pipes to things). The system is really easy to take apart. The beds are filled with compost or other soil. The plants can root deeper if they want, and some do, but the upper 6 inches is well drained and can grow all those Mediterranean maritime herbs we love.
I love herb gardens! I always have a patch right outside my kitchen door!!!
There are wild blackberries growing all over the levees down by the river. I have a chef friend that goes with me to collect as many as we can. The marine base has a ton of them if we could only get to them! I think that a lot are from the old houses that they tore down for the canal and the marine base. You can see patches of flowers and berries that look like they once adorned some long gone little house.
oops luck with fruit trees. They survive but even with the large buckets(used to feed horses) with drainage holes in them they won’t fruit. I’m not anxious to put them in the ground because of the roots of trees causing pipe issues down the line.
Do they make flowers, or flower buds? And are they varieties for bucket growing?
There some good apple varieties, usually called ‘columnar’ with various type names, that grow really well in buckets.
I got buds the first year on a dwarf peach I attempted but the fruit never made it. I’ve only found semi dwarf apples and those two have had a flower or two but no fruit(it was a grafted breed)? One House seems to have an apple tree not grown in a bucket that seems small enough to attempt a container but the person who owns it doesn’t know the variety of tree.
I grew up in FL and loved picking tangerines from our tangerine tree. My hubby used to go over to granny’s house and pick plums. I wanted to give the kids the same type of experience(as well as a love and respect for the plants), however, I can’t seem to find a dwarf that might work. My research hasn’t turned up a whole lot either.
If flowers, and they open, but no fruit (not even little baby fruit that then falls off) they aren’t getting pollinated. Could be the varieties need cross pollination by a different variety.
If they set little baby fruits and those then fall off, it’s something more like temperature or moisture problems.
A lot of fruit trees need to be in a place a few years before they start really fruiting and producing. Don’t know if it’s that though.
The tangerines sound great! I have grown citrus in my greenhouse a few times. I love doing it. I can’t grow anything really sweet, but I can grow some great limes and lemons. Citrus will not survive outside in the winter here, even though we are zone 8. We get sudden cold snaps which do them in.
I’ve got an avocado tree but it’s not yielding fruit yet. I grew it from a seed. Also, I love limes so I had to get a lime tree. I really want to try to grow grapes next. I’ve been reading up on what it takes to make wine!!!
Back when I was a kid in California, my Mom grew an avocado from seed. That thing grew, and grew, and grew. I think she planted it in the backyard and got fruit off it. It was a neat tree.
Grapes are fun. Where I’m at is about the northern limit of wine grapes, but you should be able to do fine with them. Grapes do take some tending though, which is what always makes me fail. I forgot to prune them at the right time.
We’re having a very weird November up here in Upstate New York – very cold nights but very warm days, in the 50s (which is very warm for here), so I still have kale and chard in the garden still going strong. I actually have one little head of broccoli which has stuck it out in the garden. I’m trying to keep the kale going through the winter, but at the rate we are eating it, I won’t have any leaves left to get under the snow.
Hi Toby!!! Good to read you here !!!
HI!
That is warm for that area this time of year. We are a bit colder than normal, in the mid to low 30’s. Usually we are in the high 40s or low 50s.
I’ve kale still growing, but it’s only inching a long. Maybe I’ll sacrifice some tonight and make zuppe toscana. We have a bunch of broccoli that have made great plants, but probably won’t head up (flower) until early spring. So we have to nurse it along all that time. It’s under a blanket of reemay right now.
Do you have any good recipes for kale Toby?
Oh, Sima, I love this. I didn’t get to put in our garden this year, but my son had a good one and just didn’t realize how much “fruit” each plant can put out. I think he learned a lot this year as did his 6 and 4 year olds.
But I do have some great ornamental plants, I’d actually like to replace my forsythia with a red bud in the corner of my back yard. I’m guessing the best time to plant the tree would be spring?
I have a great trumpet vine that grows over the arch to the pool that needs to be trimmed – can I do that now or should I wait til next year?
If it’s a campis radicans (trumpet vine) I think you can trim it just about any time, from what I’ve learned. If you trim it while it’s flowering, it’ll just put on more flowers. If you cut it all the way down, it’ll put on tons of sprouts and shoots, which might not be what you want. They go nuts after being cut back hard, apparently. I’d try trimming out the older branches and pruning to shape. Then, in the summer, I’d keep trimming it to get it to continue flowering. This should keep it in shape from then on.
If it’s another kind of trumpet vine, like brugmansia (usually called angel’s trumpet, and poisonous!), it’ll need slightly different care, I believe.
Thanks so much. It’s a beautiful plant and we get wonderful orange “trumpet” flowers most of the summer.
Late to this post, but it’s a great idea, Sima and DK.
I have espaliered apple trees which grow in about 1/2′ X 6′ of space each. 2nd year for them since planting, and they produced about 15 – 20 delicious, fragrant apples each. One ripens mid-season, the other late; one Spartan and one Akane; they x-fertilize each other. I bought them as extra-dwarf apple trees and trained them into espaliers. I picked out ones that were already lop-sided, since they only need branches left and right!
Sima’s right about slugs and salad greens here in the Northwest (I’m in Seattle). I still have some lettuce and mixed greens. Not sure if I get more or the slugs and snails do. Today we had a few tiny snow flurries so it’s quite cold for us. Usually we go along in the 40s – 50s with rain for months during autumn and winter and part of spring.
I have a number of dwarf blueberry bushes, including some Sunshine Blue variety which is usually evergreen here in our zone. Raspberries grow well here but they take up a lot of space and look rather ugly except in when they’re dangling with luscious fruit.
Joanelle, I know nothing about trumpet vines, but I think you need to check if it flowers on growth put out the same year or on growth from the year before. If same season, you can prune it now. If it flowers on last year’s growth and you prune it now, it won’t flower next year.
Was it hard to do the espaliering? I really want to try that. I have some of the columnar apple trees planted in the ground in my herb garden. They have made great little apple trees, and can put on several baskets of fruit each.
Some time I’ll tell how I eradicated slugs from the fields one year. I hates them things. I try not to, and I’ll leave them alone if they aren’t in a place that I care about, but… gahhh. Ever stepped on one barefoot? It’s like a PacNW rite of passage.
I’m originally from Vancouver, BC…so I know slugs. I stepped on one barefoot ONCE. Then I bought these platform flip-flops I called my “slugsteppers” for moving around the yard. Regular flips would have put me at risk of feeling the thing underfoot.
Snails are the prob here in Ontario. I came up with a great way to deter them from destroying my hosta…I place the rose bush prunings around the base of them, and voila! I have untouched hosta. And it’s free!
Really looking forward to your future posts!
What a great post! I miss my herb garden – I planted on in a bookcase that was open on each side. Someone was putting it out for trash and I immediately thought “perfect herb garden!” I turned it so that the open sides were facing the earth and sky; I stapled some porous kitchen shelf liner to the sides to keep the soil in and then proceeded to fill it with good soil and compost. I dug in the herbs and had a glorious herb garden for several years – it was my therapy when I was the primary care giver for my elderly parents until their deaths.
I’m in NJ and am new to gardening here. I did garden mostly in pots when I lived in Contra Costa county in California where EVERYTHING grew! I was surprised when several plants that are considered annual here actually acted like perennials – pineapple sage and one year, my rosemary overwintered. I was a happy girl when I saw it!
My new apartment has lots of sun in the back and I will be putting in a garden in the spring. The other side is a shady side and have no idea what to put there. All suggestions welcome!
I’m looking forward to all of your posts, Sima – thank you!