Things I’ve learned in the garden this summer

I need to plant a lot more sunflowers.  They grow great, need little care and make a ridiculous amount of seeds to feed to the chickens.  Simply break down the stalk, chop off the head and throw it in a bin to be shaken to release all the seeds.  By using plants that grow shorter I could plant a lot more in the plots.  Definitely do this next year.

Oats fall into this too.  They grow well and make a great addition to the chicken coop.  I threw the whole stalk in there with the oats still on them and the chickens had a grand time figuring out how to eat the oats off the stalks.

Peanuts are too much work.  You can get most of the nuts when you pull up the plant but you still have to dig them and it’s really not worth it.  But, if you wanted to grow some feed for pigs I think they would be great.  The pigs could eat the tops and then root out the nuts and the high fat content would be good for them.

It is possible to plant too many green beans.  For me, bush beans work better than pole beans.

Don’t waste space on tomatillos.  They produce heavily and grow well, but we aren’t into them that much.

 I didn’t miss tomatoes this year.  It was a bad year anyway, but all the time I saved not slaving over the plants and canning them was better spent other ways.  I’m going to just plant a few next year too so that I can use all that space and time on other things.

Don’t be afraid to pull up some squash plants.  You don’t need as many as will sprout.

Sweet potatoes yield very well.  Plant more plants in the future.  4 gallons from 2 plants is a good deal, especially when this year was cool even so I would expect they under-yielded compared to a normal summer.  They were almost no maintenance even, I just kept them halfway weeded and then dug them up.

Plant peppers earlier in the spring so they will be bigger when they get outside.  They are heavily loaded down now but don’t have time to get ripe before the frost.  (I don’t like green peppers)

Potpourri

Sorry I’ve been away for so long, I’ve got a lot to say but not a lot of time right now.

Weight
Well, most of the month of February was lost. I ended up gaining 3 pounds by the time the week in Vegas (and subsequent week long readjustment after wards) was over. That puts me as of now at 15 pounds lost. Still have 20 to go. This week might be the week though. I feel some changes in my body and with gardening starting up I’m now busy in the evenings too (even if I just want to lie down) which means even more calories burnt. I typically lose 10-15 pounds over the summer so hopefully that will continue.

Chickens
Loving them. I’ve been spreading out mostly finished compost in the garden and they are finishing the work for me. I’ll be planting or trimming something nearby and they are digging up the beds and spreading around the compost looking for things to eat. Unfortunately they got into my cold frames when I had the lids off but I think I was able to stop most of the damage. They are doing a great job though earning their keep.

Gardening
I planted lettuces, Swiss chard and spinach in the cold frames. Also transplanted some so we’ll see how that takes. First results aren’t very good. Last night I also planted onions, carrots, parsnips, beets and turnips. I’m waiting for the moon phase to turn again at the end of the month and I’ll plant peas, broccoli, cabbage and other things, although I did start their seeds to see how they take. I also started some tomato and pepper plants. I’m not planning to grow many tomato plants this year. I’ll plan to buy most of what I need to can. Squash and melons will be started when the moon phases line up too, although they’ll only have about 6 weeks in the tray by that time. Seed potatoes are sitting on the counter waiting for the right time.

I heavily mulched some spinach last winter and it seems to be coming back just fine this spring, which is really cool. I should get my first asparagus crop this year and the garlic is doing nicely, although I planted less this year. I haven’t seen the rhubarb coming up yet.

Food stores
I did a lot better stocking up last fall and managing it through the winter. We ran out of pizza sauce, but that was really all. Most of my potatoes are unusable because of shriveling and sprouts, but that was because I was sold bags of mixed potatoes instead of just long storage ones. Otherwise we’ve had plenty of jelly, tomatoes, sauces, beans, corn and other things. We ran low on meat for a while but we’re past that now. I guess heading into this summer I have a much better idea what I need to stock up on and how much to stock up on.

Volunteerism
If you live in the area and want to help I’ve got some opportunities for you!
I am planning to do my runs again this summer from a local CSA farmer to the food kitchens. This would be once or twice a week. You would need to be able to pick up about 40 pounds and have a large enough vehicle to hold 4 or 5 boxes of produce.

I’m working with the Matthew 25 hub on a couple of projects.
1) We are setting up an effort to beautify the flooded areas of the city. Right now (pending city approval) we are planning to build a sheet mulched garden bed in the public space at intersections (maybe 6-8 ft around) that will be studded with native Iowa wildflowers, sunflowers, etc. Sometime in late April we are planning a gardening blitz, so keep your options open at the end of the month. Contact me if you would like to donate some seed packets.

2.) Additionally, through Local Food Connection we have two CSA shares being delivered to Cedar Rapids to Red Cedar Farm that will need to be picked up and delivered to the Matthew 25 hub once a week for 18 weeks. This produce will then be distributed to local low income families at a time to be determined. We’ll need volunteers to pick up the produce on occasion as well as people to staff the area during distribution time. We’ll also be doing some education opportunities which might be fun and interesting to be involved with. Let me know if you are interested.

Seed starting among other things

Tonight I led a discussion at Cub Scouts with 6 kids about running a garden, starting seeds, what plants grow well here and what plants go into certain foods (pizza sauce, salsa, etc).  I also talked about how these plants start small and end up pretty big all from the energy of the sun, the soil, the fertilizer in the soil and time.

Overall it went a lot better than I expected, although I didn’t cover as much as I had hoped.  I took a lot of my early seeds there tonight and had them do my work for me (he he).  I’ll still be stuck doing maters, peppers and other late season plants.  The downside is that I ended up with A LOT of trays planted but not really any idea what went in them.  One kid dumped a whole packet of lettuce seeds on his trays.  Another planted way more kale than I could ever wish to have, but, I figured that would happen when I decided to do this.

Man, 6 kids firing rapid fire questions at you while you try to maintain some calm is tough.  Not to mention massive amounts of seed mixture and worm castings are flying around.  The boys got a huge kick out of worm poop as fertilizer in the mixture.  I think maybe more lecture before they got started with the dirt would have been better.  After the dirt came out all bets were off!

The plan is for them to come back in May to see how the seeds turned out.  We’ll also talk about garlic, potatoes and other plants that I didn’t bring at that time.  Not to mention they are very excited to see the chickens.

Choo choo. Do you hear that train a comin’?

Seeds galore

Well, possibly not this season.  Check out Sharon’s post.  Apparantly Fedco is already out of some items, and people aren’t even ordering their seeds yet.  You may want to think about ordering your seeds soon if your a gardener.

Just what we need.  As food get more expensive, and more scarce the means to grow it yourself disappears because of incredible demand.  This really could be a catastrophe.

Planning Ahead

This week I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the future.  I’ve been thinking about a whole bunch of different things, none of which I’ll bore you with right now.  But I did want to mention, I ordered a bunch of seeds this week.  I was thinking; if the economy gets a lot worse maybe people will be more interested in planting crops next spring, and if that happened there could be a potential shortage of seeds.  I know there was with Y2K, and if there was a sharp demand the seed companies wouldn’t be able to keep up.

So, I ordered up $75 worth of seeds from Seed Savers.  This is something I usually take great joy in doing in the winter in front of the corn stove.  But I’m just not so sure that they’ll be available next spring.  If you are already growing food for your family maybe you might want to think about picking up some seeds that might last you for a year or two.  At least until we have a better idea what the future holds.  You might be surprised to realize that if you started growing a serious portion of your family’s food your seed needs go up by more than you would expect, at least mine do.

I’ve got some beans still hanging on out in the garden.  I think I’ll let those dry and save those for next year too.

Perhaps my New Favorite Garden Toy

OK, most of you are probably thinking I’m going to talk about a tool, but actually I wanted to mention Jerusalem Artichokes aka Sunchokes.

I planted some of these this year for the first time ever, and I’m impressed with them.  They grew fantastic, made nice flowers on the top, provided a huge amount of food to the chickens and in the end, gave me the tubers you see below.  This bowl is full from half of the section I planted.  I created a bed on the south side of my compost pile that is between 3 and 4 ft long.  I planted the Sunchokes in double rows within that bed.  I didn’t amend the soil or anything.  I just dug a trench, put in the tubers and filled it back.

Now, being on the south side of my compost pile probably provided a fair amount of runoff fertilizer, but I’m still amazed at how bountiful they produced.  The bowl below is 7 lbs worth.  (my scale measures in whole pounds)  They don’t seem to produce on the scale of potatoes, but this is still something considering that they are basically plant it and forget it.  I just hope we don’t have trouble digesting them like some people say can happen.

Later this fall I’ll harvest the remainder and we’ll see where we end up.  I dug these up because I cut back the plants as they were all over the place and I was anxious to see how they did.  I hear that if you wait until after there is some frost they sweeten up.  We’ll see if that’s true.

Where ya at?

You may be wondering where the heck I’ve been for the past month or so.  Hard to say.  Things are just moving and I’m trying to keep up with the flood.  Been busy putting up food, even though I look at what I have and it seems completely inadequate, although at least twice what was there last year.  The freezer is a lot more full than last year, and about to be really crammed when the cow and pigs come home, so to speak.

I was afraid that this Sat would be the last farmer’s market of the year but I see they go on until late Oct this year, so I still have time to pick up a few more squash and apples.  Picked up 100 lbs of taters the other day for $50.  Felt like I should pay her at least $70 but she wouldn’t take more.  (Probably because I buy some of her really overpriced tomatoes early in the year)  I buy quite a bit of stuff from her.

Overall I was pleased with how much food we ate from the garden this summer, although the spring was a lot better than the late summer and fall.  Tomatoes were down this year with the cool weather.  I didn’t get any squash this year (didn’t plant any so that makes sense) and most of my potatoes and sweet potatoes were flooded, so I was forced to buy them, but that’s not so awful, well couldn’t buy sweet potatoes because no one has any.  Didn’t get as many beans as I would have hoped this year, but mostly because one of my packages was mislabeled and by the time I realized it the pole beans were going and making a big mess in the garden and I didn’t have much energy to wade through it and sort them out, so they weren’t picked as much as you would hope.

My harvest totals seem small, but I did the best I could to keep them up to date with all the stuff I have going on.  Perhaps I should just give up on that.  I’m never ever to keep it up.  Been delivering a mad amount of food for the food kitchens, but haven’t put the last couple up.  Maybe I can find them and get them up.  I’ve already delivered the totals to the farmer and unless I have the e-mails they will be gone.  I’ve been happy to be involved with doing that this year.  A lot of food was put to use that would otherwise be wasted and we’re going to step it up with some planning meetings this winter to do even better next year.

I’ve been so impressed working with her that I’m going to sign up for a CSA share next year with her.  I haven’t done that in the past because I’ve always felt like I wouldn’t get enough for my money, but seeing what she gives out if we get half of what is distributed she is still giving out too much.  She doesn’t charge organic prices either for most of her food items.

I’ve been following the financial markets very, very intensely.  Been spending some time managing money for ourselves and others to try to stay a step ahead of the market.  Sad to see it appears that the Senate is going to push through this bailout…er…financial rescue plan (ie a turd sandwich) even if their citizens don’t want it to happen.  And now they’ve added all kinds of other crap to the bill to bribe enough people to vote for it.

We’ve also, for some reason, been spending a fair amount of time entertaining ourselves.  Having friends over, going clubbing, going on a few trips, etc.  I’m not sure where this is coming from, except perhaps an understanding that this will probably happen less in the future so maybe we should get some of it in now.  Don’t know?  Maybe because our kids, and our friends kids, are finally older and now we can do more things as humans instead of just care giving machines.

Obviously starting up another school year and all that entails can be quite challenging.  I wonder sometimes about homeschooling the boys, but by the time I think we can do that financially it will be a few years and by then do I want to pull them away from school and their friends?  I don’t know.  I do know that I could do a much better job of teaching them, at least so that they learn a bigger variety of information, but the energy it would take and removing my salary (which isn’t large but is big enough) from the income stream is a big step.  We’ll see how it goes.

That’s all for now.  Make sure to talk to your Congress people about the bailout package.  One section of it specifically details how foreign companies will be allowed to sell their bad investments to the Treasury so all us taxpayers can pay for bad decisions made by the finance people in other countries.  Good times.

Amazing what they can eat

Admit it, you thought I was going to talk about the chickens didn’t you? HA! Not this time. This time it’s kids. We eat veggie meals in our house maybe 2 or 3 times a week. Tonight we had nothing but veggies. I boiled some new potatoes (about the size of a large egg) and steamed some corn on the cob. I also served some canteloupe and tomatoes from the garden. The kids didn’t think this was enough for them so I also made them 1 slice of bread with PB&J on it.

And they ate it up. Amazing how many veggies kids can eat when they want to. My oldest had two bowlfuls of cantaloupe, 1 ear of sweet corn, his PB&J and 2 potatoes. The youngest had 2 ears of corn, a shitload of tomatoes, 2 potatoes, PB&J and 1 bowl of cantaloupe. I’d say they easily got 4 servings of veggies/fruit in just this meal.

In other news I had this conversation with my youngest when I was picking tomatoes, or trying to pick tomatoes.

Ethan: Ever wonder why there aren’t any tomatoes on the plant?

Dad: Well I figured there was a tomato monster eating them. Do you know what happened to them? (I know he’s been eating them)

Ethan: There is. I saw him. It was me. I’m a tomato monster. Grrr. (Then he grins) I sometimes eat the green ones but they don’t taste as good as the orange ones. Now I wait for them to get orange. (They’re Sungold tomatoes)

If you knew his grin you’d probably laugh about this. He looks like a Cheshire cat, only he’s got an ornery glint in his eyes.

Time to dig the taters

There was a TV commercial from the 80s which featured a Dunkin’ Donuts guy waking up early in the morning and he would cheerfully say “Time to make the donuts” as he rose from bed. My mom use to make donuts. No one she worked with was that cheerful that early in the morning. I think it’s just a TV thing.

Anyway, the potato vines died so it’s time to dig the taters. I wasn’t sure what to expect this year. Most of my potatoes washed down the river with the rest of Iowa, but I have a few stashed here at home as a backup. I planted a 4×4 square and a 2×6 with fingerlings. Also, I planted my neighbors tractor tire flower bed with potatoes. Seriously, here in Iowa a tractor tire can also double as a flower bed. Anyway, the fingerlings worked out to about 8 lbs, I think because I dug the 2×6 bed too early so none of them sized up. But the 4×4 bed did pretty good. Not as good as Red Pontiacs but I can live with it.

I thought fingerlings were supposed to be some super great tasting potato, but I like small red potatoes better, so they’re probably making their only appearance in my garden this year.

The plants in my neighbors tire didn’t produce jack shit. I think they were too shaded. The soil there was great, but by the time the trees leaved out I just don’t think there was enough sun. I got a few Yukon Golds but I gave them to her to enjoy.  The vines weren’t completely dead so maybe I dug them too early.  Or maybe they needed more nutrients.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll try it again next year.

I still have one container full which is still flowering since I’ve covered it up with more leaves to produce more spuds, hopefully. I also planed more recently to harvest later this fall, and I have a few more sprouting which I’ll put in the ground soon too.

I hate digging potatoes because it causes me to do two things I hate to do, turn over the soil and step on the garden beds.  I do what I can to avoid stepping on the bed, but I can’t do anything about turning over the beds.  I’m a firm believer in layering.  I never till or turn over the soil.  I don’t think it does anything, with the soil I have, so why do it.  So, when I need to add compost I dump it on top.  Mulch goes on top.  When I need to plant I pull back the mulch and plant, then move the mulch back over.  Everyone has their own opinion on what works, but I try to mimic the way nature builds soil.  This means I don’t till it up and I just add layer after layer after layer of organic material to the tops.  Essentially building the soil from the top down.

I hope you all had success with your potatoes.