June 10, 2013

Chickens free-range around the deck.

This wet, wet week has given us a chance to catch up with a long overdue post!  We're enjoying peas and garlic (not together, necessarily), raspberries, cherries, ever-bearing strawberries and garden salads, while blueberries, green beans, and summer's first dill pickles not far away.  Chicken manure is composting with straw bedding to give a nitrogen bolt to future plantings, and it's not smelly at all - actually Confederate jasmine and the creamy fragrance of gardenia are perfuming the yard.  Hope you enjoy this photo tour!

Ozark Beauty strawberries continue producing all summer.

Sour cherry jam, care for a sample?  We made two batches
and canned enough fruit for several pies.

Weeding after 6.5 inches of rain in one week.

Sweet corn reaching sky-ward.

Blueberries hanging in clusters like grapes - ripening soon!

Garlic curing in the barn.

"Look out below!"

Last post for 2012

Parsley in front, and a row of garlic behind, with brassicas in the top left; half of the garden is
tucked in for winter underneath a layer of cardboard and fallen leaves.

First frost was also a killing frost for us, on Thursday morning November 1st.  Any tender vegetation that was not freeze tolerant turned black in the morning sun.  Nearly half of the vegetable garden is tucked in for winter, underneath a layer of cardboard and fallen leaves.  Parsley is still growing, bright green, to add to our late fall soups; one-third of our cabbage heads have been harvested.  Brussels sprouts increase in size, while our future corn patch is really turning green with clover.

One-third of our cabbage is harvested.

The change back to standard time has returned us to long nights.  Another growing season has come and gone; we're looking forward to enjoying our preserved harvests through the coming holidays.  The garden will remain essentially as it is now until February, when we prepare for planting early spinach. Thank you for enjoying the season with us!

The garden in November.

October 22, 2012

Crepe Myrtle tree brightens up in our front yard.

Garlic row.

Our third crop of broccoli at the new place is finally approaching the quality that we achieved in the old garden, where we would routinely see broccoli heads a foot across and larger.  The head shown below was still growing when we photographed it, and it did reach 12 inches.  It has taken 2.5 years to amend our subdivision soil with compost, leaf mulch, and a cover crop of red clover in order to boost fertility to the point where it really pays to grow organically.  There are nine heads this size ready to harvest now, and what we cannot eat fresh will be blanched and frozen for later.

A cabbage head or two could be harvested also; they weight about five pounds each and are still growing.  Garlic is shooting up.  Red clover is beginning to turn our future corn patch from brown to vibrant green.

Not much else is green, however, and our attention is turned upward to trees of many types that have caught the hint that it's autumn!  Morning temperatures have consistently been in the mid 30's F on our hill top, and sunny warm days to follow are excellent for creating anthocyanin in leaves, the pigment that gives them their flaming red-orange colors.  If this weather pattern continues, we are in for a very colorful show by early November.

Broccoli head, 10 inches across.

October 15, 2012

'Packman' hybrid broccoli is very close to full maturity.

Our crop of fall vegetables is racing to maturity, just six weeks after transplanting.  But everything else is winding down; our garden is pretty much the way it will stay for the next four months through the winter period, while we take a welcome rest.  Red clover seed has sprouted across our future corn patch, and it will continue to green up until heavy frosts come with regularity.  Garlic has sprouted thin green spikes up to six inches tall.

Cabbage heads still need a few weeks of growth.

It is looking like we will be enjoying a broccoli harvest this week; the large heads a hand-span across are still firm and thriving in these cooler days of October with no noticeable damage from worms of the cabbage moth.  We've left them uncovered to receive maximum sunlight in these waning days as they mature; it's so nice enjoying fresh produce knowing there were no pesticides used - only our homemade compost.  Broccoli cheese soup sounds like a perfect complement to these cooler fall days!

Roses have returned for one last show - a rare thing of beauty before November drains all the color away.

Roses last until frost.

May 21, 2012

Standard garlic, the size of elephant garlic.

Garlic curing in the sun.

Garlic, our eighth harvest of the season (brussels sprouts, spinach, lemons, greens, radishes, cherries, broccoli), is curing in the sun until it is dry and odorless; cured garlic lasts up to one year in a dark dry pantry. 

Our landscape is changing:  spinach is gone and has been replaced with 7 wells for pumpkins and winter squash. 

The pumpkin patch (peas to the left), mulched with straw.
A few volunteer sunflowers are upward of 5 ft. tall.

Last year, one of our Jack-Be-Little pumpkins (the kind that fit in the palm of a hand) developed a hard, gourd-like shell; it took a mallet to smash (we were half expecting it to be the fake plastic kind that decorate wreaths); we saved its seeds to plant this year hoping we will get more like it.  That kind of shell outlasts the fleshy varieties (though it's not edible like fleshy varieties) and can be dried and decorated.  We're trying Prizewinner and New England Pie pumpkin varieties again this year with a new variety, Superfreak:  medium to large pumpkins that are warted all over, but fully edible.  Hope this is a better year for pumpkins, and we might just set a record-breaker!  The entire pumpkin patch is mulched with wheat straw saved from last autumn's bales.

Blueberry bushes covered in bird netting.

Blueberries and raspberries are ripening; we covered them in bird nets.  Peas will be our next harvest if everything goes as planned; pods are already swollen.  Little green tomatoes have set, corn is four inches high, and the only part of the garden yet to plant is a second set of sweet corn the first weekend of June (late for us, but it helps to extend the harvest).

We organically fertilized everything as part of general maintenence this weekend.  We feel like we have a better control on weeds this year, and we're ready if the summer turns droughty - a network of soaker hoses reaches about everything growing, and is set on an automatic timer, saving us time to enjoy the good stuff.

The last time we showed our strawberry bed, these plants were barely poking up out of the dirt.
Bush cherries in the background.