The Waiting Game

This is the time of year when there seems to be a load of work to be done but you have to wait to do it.  Is it spring yet or not?  Will we get a foot of snow?  Is it going to be mild and we will regret not planting lettuce early?  Isn't there something that I should be doing?

Last Sunday I planted the first set of peas.  With peas, timing isn't as critical as say tomato plants.  If the soil isn't the right temperature, or the weather isn't optimal they just hang out waiting to sprout until they know it's time.  They can even be snowed on a little.  Peas are very self-sufficient.  Now I have to get the pea fence out of storage which is the biggest chore of planting peas.  The more peas I plant, the bigger chore it is!

This is where my gardening year begins - the basement workbench

This is my first time for starting broccoli and cauliflower seeds and it is going well.  The reason I am going to try them this year is that I evicted the strawberries from the caged bed and I knew it would be the perfect place for cole crops because the hardware cloth will keep the butterflies out of it and if that doesn't work I can easily pin a floating row cover over it.  Worm free broccoli!  Sign me up!  I have tried both broccoli and cauliflower in the past with marginal results.  This year I am making a concentrated effort to grow some really nice ones.  In addition to the strawberry bed, which will only hold about a dozen plants, I plan to put 4-6 plants under hoops in the main garden.

Broccoli and Cauliflower starts that will
be ready to begin hardening off next weekend

In addition to the broccoli, cauliflower and a 6 pack off eggplants, I have just seeded tomatoes a couple of days ago.  They are under a dome and on a heat mat with their own light set up waiting.

We've already gone through and done our late winter cleanup.  We've removed the oak leaves that built up over winter, turned the compost pile, loosened the mulch in the landscape beds, added mulch around the daffodils and peonies and just generally gone around and picked up sticks and raked. 

This clematis vine had overwhelmed it's small store bought trellis.
We stapled this extra cattle panel up behind it.  Rather than cut the panel,
we left it whole so we haven't wasted a whole panel if we get another idea

Now is the time to make sure we completed winter-downtime projects like organizing the garden shed and contemplate which of the spring projects we are going to tackle first.  While we enjoy doing things ourselves, some of our projects are really tough to figure out, plan and source.  It would be nice if we could just picture it in our head and wave a wand over it.  Even better would be computer functions like Undo, Redo, Delete and Revert to Saved.

Happy Valentines Day

I thought I'd do a winter update with vintage Valentines.  

It's been COLD!  I hope this is killing all the bad bugs.
We've been happily hibernating.

We're still enjoying apple pies from our over-achieving little tree.
Every apple it produced went int a pie and the pies went into the freezer.
All we have to do is take one out and pop it into the oven.

We've been making our own Korv (Swedish sausage).
We've gotten so good at grinding meat that instead of paying higher prices for ground beef,
we buy roasts on sale and grind our own.

I'm working on my seed orders.
I'm making silly decisions and planning to grow things I've sworn I wouldn't plant again.
I'm going to plant sweet corn and pumpkins and winter squash.
And Broccoli.  Silly me.

I will probably end up with loads of surplus veggies

Peas.  I've ordered way too many peas.  Several new varieties.
I just love peas!  We will run out of peas before we run out of anything else
so it makes sense to plant as many as possible

So that's what we've been up to.  Since I am planting eggplants and bell peppers this year, my seeding will start in a few weeks.  I'm also going to seed my own broccoli and several varieties of cauliflower.  I've never tried that before and have rarely grown either one so that will be a learning process.  They are cool weather crops so need to go in early.  I'll start them in a couple of weeks.

Ready for Spring

We are ready for spring.  40 tons (and that's no joke) of rocks 

are staged and ready for mud management.

Two loads of boulders and two loads of washed oversize.

The plan is to do away with a portion of  (very, very soggy, muddy, swampy) lawn, create an area for a greenhouse, a fire pit, an herb garden and a dry creek bed to drain it all.

There will be french drains, shade trees, fruit trees shrubs and grasses.

It will be waiting for us when the snow melts away in spring.

And it looks like a lot of work.

The Big Apple

I did it.  I grew a one pound apple.

The Gardening is over let the Weeding begin

Strawberry Blonde Marigolds.
Prettier now than they were all summer

We're starting to look forward to cooler weather and less work.  It was time to start pulling things out.  After all, we could be only two weeks away from a blizzard. 

It happens!

Everything was either dead or overgrown

The downside to pulling out tomato plants and cucumber vines is that you are left with a pile of crumbly, blighted leaves and a lot of weeds you have previously ignored.

A quick once over with the leaf blower gets rid of those nasty old leaves.

And a few minutes with a weeder and a rake and things are as good as new.

But this is weeding season.  It's tough to cultivate your soil when it's in use.  So for the next month I will keep a close eye on the weed situation.  This bed is developing a bit of a creeping oxalis problem.  So it will be the last one planted in the spring giving me time to manage the weed problem.

But not everything is gone.  Besides plenty of lettuce and a big pile of ripening tomatoes, there are still carrots.  These are in the oven now for honey roasted carrots and roasted carrot soup.

The Results of a Plan

My one good producing apple tree is ready to harvest.  I am using them as they fall.  We've made three pies so far.  Each pie takes 2 to 3 of these large apples.  I bagged each apple to keep the worms out of them and the tree has maintained about two dozen apples.

Each apple, 12-14 ounces, fills a sandwich bag to bursting

And they are clean and blemish free with none of those nasty acid rain spots.  I've heard it said that there is no such thing as a blemish free organic apple in New York.  But if you bag them you can pull it off.

Blue Lake 47 going to seed

The garden is finally winding down.  Lettuce is in full swing, those two original cucumber vines are still producing, and we have some green beans and tomatoes.  I am letting one row of beans go for seed.  The beans were so big and beautiful it makes sense to keep them over for next year

Once the pods go yellow I set them in the sun to dry out

This is the first of three lettuce plantings that we are picking now

Anywhere I can protect them from frost, I have lettuce

I just seeded these planters to bring into the cold frame for the latest lettuce

These are the first two cucumber vines from seedlings started early May and they just won't quit!

A pretty respectable fruit for eight steady weeks of production

The tomato vines are ugly but there are a lot of green tomatoes ripening.  I may try making green tomato relish (Chow Chow) because there are a LOT of them

My Monarch

I have one lone swamp milkweed that occasionally comes up as a weed in my front perennial bed.  It has never flowered, but I protect it for the possibilities of new Monarchs.  A couple of weeks ago I was tidying up the day lilies next to the milkweed and I came across a Monarch cocoon on the ground.  I probably knocked it off. :(  So I picked it up and used a needle and thread to attach it to the inside of a mesh dish cover and set it in the garden shed.  I checked it each day and one afternoon when I came home the butterfly was waiting to be let out.  I saw it frequently for a couple of days especially around the zinnia bed and now it is gone.

Here Comes the Rain Again

So what does a gardener do when faced with a lousy weather forecast? We prepare.  I do not want to pick anything while holding an umbrella.  It is a bad idea to handle your plants when they are wet because any damage to leaves or stems ais that much more likely to have germs get into the plant.

Everything will bloat in the rain and the tomatoes will split.

So yesterday I spent all morning in the drizzly garden preparing to abandon it for a couple of days.  I picked all of the beans, cucumbers and tomatoes that were ready or almost ready.  I picked a gallon of new lettuce and some radicchio.  I washed and stored all of the lettuce.  I bagged up the beans for use "fresh" from the fridge this week.  I cut up all of the cantaloupes lurking in the fridge and then I took a load of stems, peels and rinds out to the compost pile because I don't like doing that in the rain either.

And then I stayed indoors all day cooking and listening to the peaceful steady rain.