Spring at Palmetto Acres Garden

Baby lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, and carrots growing happily in the cold frame.

Jumbo-sized brown eggs from our layers.

Spring was all the buzz this weekend!  We had gorgeous weather to garden in South Carolina.  There's not much in season, just some early mixed greens, lemons, and farm-fresh eggs (sounds to me like a recipe for lemon bars and spring salad; oh, we added a couple early radishes on that salad, too).  Plans are being put into action for this summer's food garden, and already some vegetable seeds are sprouting under fluorescent lights indoors.  It's our fourth year on this property, and fruit trees look like they are going to put on a heavy crop - 10 bush cherries are lit up with hundreds of thousands of white blossoms; if there are no late freezes, we will need braces for peach and apple trees.

Meyer lemons ripening indoors.

Last spring we introduced laying chickens to our hobby farm; there has been no more fun and rewarding endeavor.  Our jumbo-sized eggs do not fit well in standard egg containers.  We're adding meat chickens this year of the Cornish Rock variety, which top out at 6-8 pounds by eight weeks of age.  It's the same breed chicken in any grocery store; ours will be raised on an organic diet and free-ranged over grass, as natural a life as possible, which should yield highly superior meat at less cost per pound than market free-range organic chickens.

Laying hens in their movable chicken run.

Cornish Rock chick

Cornish Rock chicks get their first meal in the brooder.  As cute as they are, these are livestock, not pets.

August 20, 2012

'New England Pie' pumpkins curing in the barn.

Grass mow is thick, mornings are dawning cooler, and evidence of the changing season is seen in fruits of harvest.  Look closely, and there is even some early leaf color in the dogwoods.  Our apple trees have let us know that their fruit is ripe and ready to be tasted.  One of those late-evening walks out to the back of our property, so busy with dragonflies and jumping locust, came to a stop when we noticed several red apples had fallen to the ground.  Their fragrance was spicy-sweet, and a bite confirmed the fruit was dead-ripe.  We sprayed these trees until the end of June with a home orchard insecticide/fungicide and then left them alone to get washed in July rain.  Insects have not bothered them in the last half of the season.

A perfect 'Winesap' apple paired with ripe figs all from our orchard.

We are seeing more fruits than vegetables as summer winds down slowly but inevitably to the autumn, our favorite season of year.  We did harvest a bushel basket of tomatoes, imperfect, but tasty enough paired with peppers and onions for salsa.  A fall crop of red raspberries is producing heavily, reminding us of a seemingly long-gone June berry season.  We picked the last of our melons and mowed the patch to the ground.

Thursday morning dawned at 58 degrees F at our elevation.  Refreshing!  Sunflowers and pumpkins are a cheery pair as we begin to think about the impending garden clean-up.  If you did not have enough milk jug covers last spring, start saving them now to cover tender transplants that will be set in the garden in early September.  We need to begin thinking of cutting down our yellowing corn patch to make room for the fall and winter garden.

A cheery sunflower bows out as summer 2012 comes to a close.

February 6, 2012

Warm weather is encouraging honey bees out already.

We acquired nursery-grown potted trees in May 2010.  Now two seasons later they are nicely branched and are set to fruit.  Tree pruning sounds like a complicated process, but it is easy with a few directions.  The goal of all tree pruning is to design a strong branch system that admits plenty of light.

Apple tree trained to central leader shape.

Trees fall into either a central leader system (one main trunk), or an open center system (bowl shaped).  A tree with a central leader has a whorl of 3 to 4 side branches every 18 inches or so up the trunk; side branches bear the fruit; in order to sustain the weight without cracking, these branches must maintain a wide angle from the main trunk; we have trained our apple trees to this system. 

The open center shape is ideal for peaches; we cut out the centers of our peach trees after their first season of growth to encourage side branches to spread outward, forming a bowl shape. 

Peach tree trained to the open center system (bowl shaped)

Shaping a tree during its summer growing cycle is the better way to mold a tree, pinching off sprouts where they are not needed, and directing sprouts into good growing positions.  Small weights such as clothes pins hung on the end of desirable branches will help pull them down when young; later, tree spacers may be needed to hold branches in position.  A tree spacer can be made from a 1x1: pound a small nail into both ends, snip off the nail head, and insert the spacer in between a branch and the main trunk.  Later, fruit will help to pull these branches down naturally, but they should never be allowed to hang lower than horizontal or fruiting will cease.  Summer pruning can also remove water sprouts (weak branches that grow straight up near the main trunk) before they steal a lot of tree energy.

Tree spacers

Winter pruning is the time to fix any tree problems; last July, as you can read, we were so busy with vegetable preservation that our trees were all but forgotten, and late-season rains encouraged some water sprouts.  There were also a few branches crowding out light, so we removed them.  Fruiting branches were headed off, by removing 1/3 of their total length, to strengthen them and to encourage new branching at the tip.  The result is nicely shaped trees, strong fruiting branches, with an open system admitting light.