Be it ever so humble

Hey, I should post a picture of this garden I keep going on about -- like a picture of the whole thing.

I can't lie -- that idea came from my friend Martha. She just posted a shot of her garden on her blog yesterday ...

I seem to have misplaced Charles' phone number, so I can't borrow the helicopter for my shoot. We'll have to make do with an unwieldy photo panorama ...




(Be sure to click the image to get the whole huge thing, with labels even.)

And it's a good thing I took those photos when I did. Here's what's going on back there right now -- another hailstorm -- hopefully there'll be something left tomorrow.

Costoluto Genovese

I hate to commit the sin of pride, but I think the tomatoes are doing really well this year.

Blossoms have been generally prolific all around, and fruit is setting left and right. But none seem to be doing as well as the Costoluto Genovese. This variety doesn't get very good reviews as a slicing tomato, but there's always drying and saucing.

It starts ...

We got our first summer harvest last night -- these three Sunburst squash. They got sliced, soaked in orange juice and soy sauce, and seared on the grill. Tasty.

Well aren't we just King and Queen Locavore of Hippie Hollow!

I just got back from a walk across the neighborhood where I met a very nice family with a flock of 6 chickens in their backyard.

My wife -- who likes to be called "Fayrene" when she's on the Internet -- had emailed Linda after seeing her mention on our neighborhood email list that she has chickens and gives away eggs on a regular rotation. Fayrene said "yes please, and can we give you some produce?" and since Fayrene is in class tonight, it was left to me to do the walking.

Long story short, I came home with these ...



... and left them a bundle of green onions. I think we definitely got the better end of the deal, but it's kind of an in-between time of the season. By next round, we'll have squash and maybe tomatoes to make it up to them.

(By the way, only language nerds should click here)

update, 5/5/2008

The eggs got eaten yesterday morning. We poached them and served them on English muffins with bacon and avocado, with cheddar cheese sauce on top. As is true of many of my attempts at writing about food, we forgot to take a picture as we were too busy stuffing our faces.

Death from above

We had a classic Central Texas Spring thunderstorm Sunday morning -- about 20 minutes of heavy rain and thunder and enough hail to paint bare ground white.

The damage wasn't too bad. The Sungold and one of the Principe Borghese  both got their main stalks broke, but they should be alright. So should the squash, but it looks like someone took a machine gun to them.

Harvest

Leeks and an artichoke. April 27.

Proof!

I really do have a hard time believing that my plants are actually growing, probably because I see them several times a day. Now I have photographic proof to ease my mind.

March 31

April 26

Head for the hills

My wife and I are making a much-needed retreat to the hill country this weekend. Of course the best part for me is having two days without obsessively checking on the garden 5 times a day. When we get back, everything will look friggin' huge!

Too many mother uckers uckin' with my squa!

I got home from work today and went to visit the garden, where the squash (3 Sunburst, 1 Peter Pan) are in heavy blossom mode ...

Only to find this ...

Actually, about 70 or 80 of those, which you may recognize as the eggs of one Melittia cucurbitae, a.k.a. the Squash Vine Borer moth, a.k.a "Those goddamn motherfuckers" (pardon the blue language).

I can't tell you I was surprised -- growing squash around these parts is largely an exercise in futility due to the Squash Vine Borer. But, as fast and prolific as squash are, it's worth it to keep trying for the few weeks of production we usually manage to get before they succumb.

And the end is not pretty. Once any one of those eggs hatch, the tiny larva burrows into the hollow squash stem and begins burrowing downward until it hits the solid, meaty base, where it starts eating, growing and pooping. Usually you'll see a little sawdusty poop (frass) pile at the base of the stem as the caterpillar eats its way through. More and more of the plant's leaves get wilty (a condition referred to as "tha itis" in our house) until they're all dead. Then the fat borer crawls out of the stem, belches loudly and drops into the soil where it digs in and cocoons up for the winter.

Actually, I found a few of them when I was preparing the beds in February. These were summarily executed.

Organic prescriptions for SVB include covering your plants with row cover and pollinating by hand, picking off eggs and spraying or injecting the stems with Bt, and shopping for squash at Whole Foods.

I opted to pick off as many as I could and hope for the best.

Update

Look who I found skulking about in the pea seedlings ...

ps. The squash plants aren't actually that green. Something in the camera>iPhoto>PicasaWeb chain was messing with the levels, a problem I've since remedied.

Why?

What kind of garden blog would this be without a link to the latest Michael Pollan article in the Times?

Alongside a sporting run at the eternal question "What can one person do?" the article hits pretty close to the reason I think I'm into gardening, although I've never really articulated it. It's anti-consumerism. I have a purposely-overinflated paranoia about corporate marketing cabals scheming to get my money. I've worked hard to build up an immunity to most of the single-purpose kitchen appliances, wearable advertising and overly-convenient food products they generally throw at me (us all).

But it's a less (imaginary) nefarious process that Pollan talks about.

Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food.

By having a garden, I break some portion of the lifeline to Dole, Kraft or ADM that we all still rely on for much of our food, and my family and friends get better-tasting, healthier produce to boot.

Plus, when the shit goes down, we won't have to eat cat food.

Ladybug lifecycle

In early March, our big artichoke was swarmed with aphids. Within a couple of weeks, it was swarming with these little black creepy-crawlies ...




Which one by one holed up in these little spotted cocoons ...





Which were soon vacated by little yellow ladybugs ...







No more aphids!

Feeding tomatoes

Dang this site needs more pictures, y'all.

The tomatoes are getting visibly bigger every day and most of them have tiny blossoms. I'm taking that as a sign to stop the weekly dousings with fish emulsion to let them burn through all that nitrogen so it doesn't distract them from blossoming and fruit setting.

Today I paid some mind to the neglected East-side bed. That's the one that's in-ground, and along the fence, so it doesn't get morning sun. That hasn't kept it from producing a healthy crop of tomatoes the past 2 years though. However, I didn't do anything at all to the soil this year, just stuck 6 plants in among the onions and leeks. So, after work today I scratched in two handfuls of cottonseed/kelp/bone meal around each plant, laid down the soaker hose, which takes 3 loops to fit in the bed, and covered it all with a wheelbarrow full of grass clippings and leaf mold from the pile in the West-side bed.

Everything but the well-mulched raised beds was looking a bit dry, so I put a little water down on the cantaloupe, squash, artichokes and the corner-bed tomatoes. I also soaked the cream peas I planted on Saturday. Then I plugged in the soaker hose and let it run for 20 minutes on the East bed.

Basil's smelling good -- I can just taste the tomatoes ...

Peppers

I haven't had great luck with peppers. The first year they got devoured by pill bugs. Last year, they grew lovely leaves, but not a lot of peppers. Jalapenos have done OK, but that's about it. This year, I have 4 great looking seedlings from seed and just transplanted them into more-or-less-native soil near the compost bin. They can't do much worse than they have.

April 8
Peppers: (from left to right, facing compost) Cayenne, Serrano, Yellow Wonder, California Wonder Orange. Holes dug past pecan roots in plain soil, each hole amended with a tiny bit of compost, and a handful of cottonseed, bone, and kelp meal.

Dates

I think just about everything is in the ground. I'm waiting for my pepper seedlings to get a little bigger before planting, and there's a stretch of dirt on the North fence where I grew tromboncino squash last year that could take something. But that's about it. Now I just need to remember what I did for next year ...

March 15
Tomatoes: Various home-grown seedlings. 8 in the raised beds mulched with dead grass, 6 in the in-ground bed on the East fence, and 3 around the compost bin in Japanese tomato ring style.

March 26
Cantaloupe: 2, bought from Natural Gardener, planted in the new, unfilled raised bed in two hills of native soil and compost, mulched with dead grass

March 29
Tomatoes: Mail-order seedlings from mom for my birthday. 2 in new spots on the North and East fences in the compost corner, 1 in my homemade "earthtainer".

March 30
Eggplant: 3 small varieties bought from The Great Outdoors, planted in one of the raised beds.
Basil: 1 sweet basil from Great Outdoors, planted with existing herbs in a raised bed.

April 1
Squash, 3 Sunburst, 1 Peter Pan: We had removed 2 Althea bushes along our East fence, leaving a couple of holes, which I filled out with compost and peat humus. I planted two squash in each hill and covered the surrounding area with cardboard and leaf mold.

Home Despot

I feel a twinge of guilt every time I buy garden supplies at Home Depot, but until I stop being so lazy or someone opens a nursery at all convenient to East Austin, I'll keep going there, especially once they open the new "green" location within biking distance.

I've noticed this year they're carrying an organic fertilizer that, the more I think about it, I might have to buy. $19 for a 40 pound mix of Corn Gluten Meal, Soybean Meal, Sunflower Meal, Yeast Culture, Dried Molasses, Dried Kelp, Alfalfa Meal, Fish Meal, Langbeinite, Limestone, Phosphate Rock and Sulfur is a lot better than I could do on my own. I actually don't think I've seen Corn Gluten Meal by itself that cheap.



They're really upselling the stuff too. Check out the prominent display in the far back corner of the garden section.

(That's it on the other side of the forklift.)

Mmmm ... Bokashi ...

After logging my fertilizer approach yesterday, I saw this post at Path to Freedom talking about how they've gone a full year without adding any organic NPK fertilizer. I take that to mean they're all homemade compost (which for them would include chicken and goat droppings) and I gather they also add rock dust.

One of my general goals is to spend as little as possible on gardening. I'm not there yet, but maybe at some point I'll set a $0 year budget for the garden and see how it goes. I don't yet have a good sense of how fertile my soil is and how much it relies on the purchased amendments. Better record keeping and the journaling I'm doing here will help me with that, I hope.

But I am rather skeptical of this EM business Path to Freedom is talking about. It sounds like compost tea to me, and you can make that yourself. Bokashi, I guess, is bran and sugar soaked in EM. How's that different from cottonseed meal getting soaked in your garden with compost tea (or rainwater seeping through compost)? It is Japanese though, so I guess that makes it pretty cool.

There are also a couple of good links there on rock dust -- I'm thinking I may need to get another bag of the Minerals Plus.

And if you're not familiar with Path to Freedom, they're some true believers -- a family with 1/10 acre yard in Pasadena who are shooting to harvest 10,000 pounds of food this year.

Fertilizer mix

The maddening thing about organic fertilizer is that it's kind of hard to get a handle on whether it really works. You aren't dumping a fast acting chemical that shows up in a day or two in the plants. You're adding material that the soil will digest and make available to the plants when it gets around to it.

It may just be yet another example of the slow pace of gardening. After only 3 years, I just haven't had enough opportunity to learn to notice the effects of different ingredients and proportions.

On the bright side, there's not much worry about overdoing it with organic fertilizers. As a result, I generally am pretty random with adding whatever I have around in whatever quantities seem right. But, I have been a little more consistent so far this year with my fertilizer mix, even though I've had to make up 2 or 3 separate batches. They've looked something like this:

4 parts cottonseed meal
1/2 part bone meal
1/2 part kelp meal
1/2 part Rabbit Hill Farm Minerals Plus

When refreshing the beds, I mixed in a handful per 3-4 square feet. Then I added another handful in each planting hole.

Here's what I know about these ingredients:

Cottonseed meal -- It's cheap and is supposed to provide a reasonably high proportion of nitrogen. It's also what they use for general purpose fertilizer at The Natural Gardener, which is a decent endorsement. Some organic gardeners avoid cottonseed meal because of the pesticides and defoliants used in cotton growing, but I'm not too concerned and have never seen any solid answer about it. It might also not be approved for certified organic use.

Bone meal -- It's a phosphorous, and I guess calcium, source. It also takes a while to break down, so getting it into the soil early gives you time before the tomatoes start blooming, which is when phosphorous supposedly comes into play. Hardcore organic folks balk at using ground up animal bones in the garden, but they just don't appreciate the irony of vegetables eating animals.

Kelp meal -- A Potassium and trace minerals source. It supposedly also has some sort of hormone and enzyme content that promotes microbe action.

Minerals Plus -- I bought a bag of this a few years ago out of my concern for the lack of mineral content in my soilless mix and have been adding it generously in previous years. My thinking is that it serves the same purpose as lime would -- added calcium and other trace minerals.

For future reference

The whole thing with gardening is that if you screw something up badly, you pretty much just have to live with it until next year. That's also what makes it rewarding and the reason old people are good at it. You have to wait until next season or year to apply any lesson you learned this season.

This is why people keep garden journals and the reason why every year I've wished I had kept one. Motivated by the near disaster with the tomato seedlings, I think this might be the year I start.

So ... entry one -- bed prep.

Raised Beds
First week of March this year, I double dug (OK, maybe not a textbook case of double-digging but I turned over every bit of soil in them and then some) our three existing raised beds and the soil beneath the new raised bed.

I haven't made a habit of doing this, in part because no-till gardening sounds like it kind of makes sense, and also because I'm lazy and it's hard work. However, I had a couple of thoughts that motivated me.

First, I've had it in my mind for a while that our beds, filled as they are with a soilless peat/compost/perlite mix ( a la Square Foot Gardening) are lacking in water-holding ability. Our native black clay soil knows all about water holding, and probably has a lot of good mineral content to boot. So, by digging down to the bottom of the beds and a couple of inches into the ground, I probably introduced a good 10 percent native soil to my growing mix. It's still very light and crumbly, but I can definitely feel the clay in the mix now.

Secondly, in my exploratory probing of these beds, I noticed a lot of roots that I suspect are from the neighbor's pecan trees. A friend of mine had a raised bed completely overtaken by pecan roots, so I figured it might not hurt to knock them back every few years.

Besides the digging, I did my usual routine of mixing in some fertilizer mix and sifting a wheelbarrow of compost out of the pile and topping off each bed with a layer of it, scratching it into the surface just a bit. I also pulled out my soaker hoses and reset them on top of the soil, nestled in a bit until they were level. (I'll have to devote a whole post sometime to my irrigation system)

Oh, and that new fourth bed -- I haven't really filled it, but I tilled it up pretty good at ground level, added some leftover bought compost, leaf mold, dry leaves and fertilizer mix and mixed it in.

So that's quite a bit for now. More later.

I've had a terrible time with my tomato seedlings this year.

Things started out pretty well -- I sowed about 9 seeds each for 9 different varieties. This was on January 22nd, which is maybe a week later than I've done it previously.



After the first true leaves appeared, I thinned them to 6 per variety and potted up to 2 inch cells.



On March 1, I bumped them up to 16oz plastic cups.



And there's where my troubles began. I don't think they grew much at all after that point. The lower leaves turned yellow and eventually fell off and they gradually got to looking pretty sickly.

My best theory at the moment is that I drowned them, through a combination of not punching big enough holes in the plastic cups and using too much compost in my potting mix. Tomatoes are resilient though. I planted 17 of the wimpy things and after 12 days in the ground, they're all quite green and about double in size.



It's killing me though that after weeks of coddling them indoors under lights, I'm now happy that they're just alive, and it's almost April. I think plenty of people in Austin plant about this time anyway (at least to judge by what's available in the stores), but what's the point of being obsessive compulsive about tomato growing if you can't beat your neighbors to first fruit?

What to blog about

This here Web site has been a classic case of the abandoned domain name. I've certainly gotten some use out of it as an e-mail address and I've had random photos and some half-hearted attempts at  blogging, but generally, Google hasn't had to knock itself out reindexing this page over the past 7-8 years.

Several months ago I hooked it up with some blogger tags mainly just to get the stale content out of the way. Then last week I stopped by for some reason and thought I should really do something with it.

I'm at least old and wise enough to know that probably isn't going to happen, at least not on a sustained basis, but I'll pretend for at least a few days. 

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