Garden Lessons, 2017

2017 was a year of many lessons, not all of them good. I don't know that my experiences will help others, but here's what happened.

Weather:

With a challenging summer, first hot and wet, then hot and arid, it was good that we had 1200 gallons of stored rain water. One tropical system moved west, only giving us perhaps half an inch of rain when we could have used two.  We tapped the 500 gallon cistern once, pulling about 200 gallons out after we'd been through another 300 in our smaller rain barrels.  We'll see about adding another 250 gallon tank next year, so we can water young trees as well as the garden.

Our harvest, save for white potatoes, was still very good. Frost arrived a month after the average date, so I was harvesting tomatoes and peppers later than ever. I save a window-ripened green tomato in the fridge now, in time for Thanksgiving.

Hot Peppers: 

Let's start with the bad news. Despite beds that grew into thickets of hot-pepper bushes, it's likely my last season growing them in bulk for a local restaurant. At the prices I can get per pound, we are better off giving up some of the garden for increasing our flock of laying hens. We just cannot meet demand, and if we even sold two more dozen per week, we'd make as much money as we do with the peppers.

The hours of work starting seeds in the greenhouse, transplanting to larger pots, then harvesting the peppers simply do not add up to economic sense. I've yet to tell our customer, but he may want a different source in any case: despite cross-pollinating our Thai Dragons with super-hot peppers, the heavy rain early on and the later-than-normal harvest may have made their heat content too low.  I watered deeply once per week when the dry weather came and stayed. That should not have been excessive, but the peppers lacked the bite we want.

I've learned an adage that my friend Dominic, at Dellicarpini Farms, told me: focus on crops that provide more pounds of harvest. Thai Peppers are small and difficult to harvest. I'll still grow a few for myself and to continue my cross-pollination ideas.

We also lost a verbal contract for a crop of super-hot Ghosts and Scorpions. The would-be buyer had told me he'd buy "every pepper I grew" the year before, then turned about to say he'd not need any at all. I sold a few pounds, but about 20 pounds froze on the plants and are now compost.

So next year several raised beds dedicated to peppers will go to other plants, as we rotate our garden and let the soil rest.  Two beds will be given up entirely, as we expand the chicken run to add a coop for a laying flock and our first rooster.

One good thing that came from the pepper crop was a method I learned for curbing weed growth. We rolled out 4 oz weed-block fabric from A.M. Leonard, and then we cut slits in the fabric for transplanting. It's labor-intensive at first, but in the long run we saved hours and hours weeding. The fabric gets rolled back in winter, so our chickens can scratch up the raised beds.

Tomatoes:

Okay, I gotta cage the beasts; next year it will be welded wire cages. We had good luck with Mortgage-Lifters, Long Keeper, Yellow Pear, and Sungold Cherry varieties. I saved seeds from the best plants; some of the Yellow Pears had wilt and others did not. So I chose wisely when saving seed for 2018.

Cucumbers:

We experimented with using Doctor Bronner's Eucalyptus soap (1 part to 9 parts water) on the plants weekly. We did not pickle this year, but we had slicers until the vines died in the heat of early July. Squash bugs were rare this year. I'm going to try the same treatment next year on our cukes and our squash; we did not put in any this year.

Our Lima Bean harvest was sufficient for the two of us, and there too I sprayed the Dr. Bronners a couple of times. It's cheap enough on the scale we grow.

Garlic:

While our multiplier onions only produced enough bulbs to replant this fall, we hope that next year we'll expand our crop enough to actually eat some!  I need to side-dress the onions a bit, as the bulbs were small.

Garlic, however, proved a real bonanza for us. I credit Ira Wallace's workshop from the 2016 Heritage Harvest Festival. She plants late, up to mid-November in prepared beds. We more than replaced our seed garlic this year, both hard-neck and soft-neck varieties.

I froze a lot of last year's crop, in March, that we stored in our root cellar. I put the peeled cloves in olive oil and froze that, in small tubs. We used that all summer for a weekly pesto dinner.

Greens:

These have been another ongoing success. We ate lettuce (Slow Bolt) into June, and I replanted with seeds (that variety plus Tennis Ball and Spotted Aleppo) in September. We are eating lettuce now that we put under a row cover.

Chard survived the summer, looking horrid and blasted, to feed us again in Fall. The freeze nipped it, but we keep cutting and cooking good leaves. Our mustard and collards, however, are thriving after the freeze and are very sweet. We put them in in the bed that had the garlic and onions until harvest.

Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes:

I stupidly planted the white potatoes in not enough soil, over a layer of weed block. We got four small tubers and ate them in one meal.

The Becca's Purple sweet potatoes, however, were amazing. In a raised bed I got nearly 60 pounds that will carry us through the winter. They are great weed-blockers, only needing attention when the drought got really bad or when Japanese Beetles really got after them. We handed picked the plants daily, and the crop shrugged off the pests.


Berries:

Our first year of jam! We had a nice early crop, and we'd have had more had I weeded more later. That is the plan next year. The plants draw critters, and I shot one groundhog in the patch, despite good fencing: the whistle-pig found a gap at the gate.

Rabbits also had fun in there, but with a scoped small-bore rifle I rid the garden of a few of them. Our livestock guardian dog got others, to judge by the skulls at the back of her run.

That, too, is nature. Everyone has to eat.

Our wild blackberries came in heavily. This winter I need to bushhog two thickets of old canes, so we'll get young canes and new fruit. We got enough as it was to freeze several pounds for winter.

So next year I'll put these lessons to work and see where 2018 take us all. In dark and difficult times, full of so many disappointments and tragedies in our nation, it's good to at least eat food you grow yourself.

Garden Journal: Eating Seasonally

What an interesting cool season it has been. I did a salvage harvest of our last hot peepers before setting the chickens loose in the beds. Our one customer has bought 80 pounds so far. Meanwhile I fenced our greens and covered our tender ones though the short freezes we have experienced.  We are doing our best to eat seasonally from our garden and chicken coop.

December looks warmer than average, which gives me the chance to enjoy more greens. I'm thankful to Dominic Carpin of delli Carpini Farm for pointing out to me that one should harvest late in the day and on a sunny day if possible, which is now my practice, to avoid picking greens with too many nitrates in them.

So in the spirit of the holidays, here's a recipe for winter greens over pasta. I adapted it from a Martha Stewart recipe for creamed chard and I've added more of a Mediterranean twist. I suggest a top-quality egg pasta from Italy. You will not be disappointed.

Braised Autumn Greens in Cream Sauce

• 1/3 cup sweet onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 1/2 pounds (big bunch) of coarsely chopped Broccoli Rabe, Swiss Chard, or Broccoli leaves. Remove large stems from the chard before chopping. Chop any Broccoli stems finely.
• 8 oz. whole milk
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
• 1 tsp salt & 1/2 tsp black pepper

Sautee the onion and garlic in the oil and garlic and, when translucent, add the greens and stir until their volume is greatly reduced. To me that means "wilting but not dark." They should retain their color and most of their texture.

Remove greens and onion/garlic to a plate and add milk to skillet, stirring in flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Stir over low-to-medium heat until mixture begins to thicken a bit, then add back the greens mixture. Heat thoroughly, and serve over pasta. Top with grated Romano or Parmesan if you wish and a dash of red pepper.

This makes a great main or a side dish. Happy Holidays!

Abundance and The Root Shelter

It's been a year with a lot of summer rain. The rain-barrels are brim-full with water we don't need, the garden bursting with produce and more than a few harmful insects. Every time I put down diatomaceous earth to murder the squash-bugs, the rain comes down and washes my powder away. I am using a slurry of 3 tablespoons to a gallon of water, and spraying it over and under the leaves, as well as around the bases of the plants. The pumpkins are coming in early, as a result. The first two are sun-curing in the garden for a few more days before they go into long-term storage.

My canning skills are well honed by putting up about four gallons of tomato sauce annually, so it has been a busy month for putting up pickles. I've a professional pressure-canner for the low-acid foods, and we've been using a simmering or boiling water-bath canner for produce that can be safe with that sort of treatment.

We froze a lot of green peas and now are doing the same for blackberries that grow wild around here. I am going to try to recall all of this abundance when winter arrives. It's easy to forget!

One trick to keeping things going will be our new "root shelter," a dry windowless room in the basement of a building where we store equipment. It's completely below ground.

It's not a true root cellar, since it lacks an earthen floor. The 8 by 8 room, of cinder-block walls was, in fact, a fallout shelter from the 60s. It never got finished, since it has no venting to the outside, which makes it less than perfect for surviving a nuclear attack or for getting air circulating for other purposes.

After I made the old door tight but before it got a coat of paint, I knocked out the panel over the transom and lined it with a layer of hardware cloth (a stout metal screening with 1/8 or 1/4" holes) and also window screen. This keeps out rodents and black snakes, one of which chases mice around our building and occasionally leaves a skin draped over the tractor seat or rafters.

With a drill bit used to bore holes in doors for lock-sets, I bored three large holes in the bottom of the door. Those too got covered with hardware cloth and screen. Shelving is basic: with low-humidity in the room, old 2x6 pine boards and cinder blocks serve us well. A small electric fan blows air out the transom, and that encourages cool air to enter the bottom of the door.

I plan to keep early-harvest pumpkins in there, since we have a local market that will buy all I grow. My garlic harvest, only about a dozen bulbs, and some onions I pulled after curing them in our utility room will also go on the shelves. This sort of "root shelter," as I call it, will store winter squash and sweet potatoes.

A damp root cellar would be perfect for vegetables that need more humidity. With a backhoe, a hillside that faces northwest, and lots of cinder blocks I think this will be a future project for my LLC's harvest. And it will vent to the outside world. No nuclear attack needed.

Campaign-Season Row Covers

Virginia's off-year elections have passed (my guys won) but I'm perfectly bipartisan about one thing: stealing as many campaign signs as possible.

I don't so much want the red-and-blue reminders of our partisan divides. They go into the recycling. I do want the metal u-shaped frames from the signs. With the resulting row-crop covers, I can extend my lettuce-picking season far into the cool months.

I'm no Eliot Coleman, who picks lettuce in a New England winter from his cold frames. I have done that here, but this season of moving we did not get the cold frame up in time.

So we'll enjoy lettuce for another few weeks this  year, cabbage and collards longer still. With the groundhogs decimated or hibernating and the raccoons scarce, it's a good harvest a few times each week.

The trick to row covers is to let the sun in on warm days and replace them before dusk. The results are not lovely, but they are tasty.

We'll enjoy some greens come Thanksgiving.  Thanks, Dems and GOP! I love my bipartisan row-covers!

That Change in the Air

Every year, when the annual cicadas start up their late-July chorus, I begin to grumble that 1) school is about to start and 2) the good weather for working outdoors will be coming, just as I get busy with my day job.

But in 2013, it's been a strange season. I cannot recall a summer when it was actually fun to be painting a metal roof, as I'm now doing in this crisp weather. Soon enough, an old wreck of a building used for painting cars will be reborn as a barn-red paneled gem with a dark green roof.  Getting that building done is worth a summer of labor, but what a summer we have had.

I should have known that an odd summer was coming. It was heralded by the seventeen-year cicadas who emerged with the first really hot weather. While no swarm came closer than a quarter mile from our farm, so we heard only a strange echo of their trilling in the distance, but just five miles west it was deafening, their song that of a squadron of UFOs landing.

Those insects have burrowed down into the earth again, and I'll get to hear them, most likely, once more before I join them underground. Yet their appearance was just the start of the strangeness. For the past several summers, I can't recall letting the garden water itself from the sky or leaving the house windows open nights after, say, mid June.  And yet, in a cool wet summer, punctuated by spells of tropical humidity and heat, the rain barrels went un-tapped and the windows have been left up repeatedly.

What IS this late-September night-breeze, coming through my kitchen window in mid-August?

So we count what good fortune we have. I sold a science-fiction story, my second sale in the past three years. That was magic enough, but then our hilltop garden, a curse in a dry year, is abundant. The tomatoes in Fort Tomato are only now showing signs of excess rainfall: some are splitting, but we've probably gotten out a bushel and a half from a dozen plants.  That means more pots of sauce for winter. I usually can at least two gallons, and I'm almost there with more fruit on the vine.

If I do have to give 3 or so hours weekly to run the tractor to mow the grass in the fields around the garden and in front of the house, it's small payment for such an abundant harvest.  If next summer brings drought and disaster, I'll think back to that cool breeze and the vines  heavy with fruit from 2013.

Garden Journal: Late Planting

I used to keep a "Garden Book" of my observations on paper, and I still may record facts there, but a blog provides an excellent record-keeping device in the form of tagging and fodder in case this project morphs into a book. So here goes for what has been a brand-new garden.

We had to pony up for a cubic yard (about 1500 lbs) to good bedding soil from a local firm specializing in soil, mulch, and gravel. That began but did not end the Kitchen Garden just outside our back door. We fenced with short, green-enameled welded wire, fastened to 4' tall treated posts set in quick-setting cement. That took only a day and the seedlings are now in there.

Yesterday we also seeded the back half of the big garden, really a field, with yellow clover as a soil amendment and as forage for the honey bees. The big garden, 88' by 42', awaits fencing 10' tall and with subterranean barriers for Phil, our groundhog. I don't relish shooting Phil, but the second he gets into the garden, Phil will learn "Rule 303" as quickly as any character in the old film Breaker Morant.  Groundhogs can excavate 700 pounds of earth for a single burrow and dig down a foot, so the old chain-link sections, rolled and buried about the field's perimeter, should keep Phil at bay.

Given our recent move to this land, I did not get my basil and tomatoes germinated on our porch but instead purchased them from firms doing business at Maymont's annual Herbs Galore show. In particular, for my fellow Central Virginians, I recommend Amy's Garden for veggies and A Thyme to Plant for herbs of all sorts. I tend to raise from organic stock or seed, but in the case of tomatoes I went with old favorites among the hybrids suited for a clay soil. Heirlooms have brought tears to me and mortality to my plants, so I  chose Mortgage Lifter, Big Beef, and a Roma variety. In my experience, they have all shown good VFN resistance. The only amendment these plants will need is some calcium spray as they flower and begin to set fruit. This will prevent blossom-end rot.

Tricycle Gardens, a local urban-farming nonprofit that has revitalized empty lots all over the metro area of Richmond, sold me rhubarb.  I love the plant and recall it fondly from my grad-school years in Indiana. In a couple of years, our patch should produce enough for pies and rhubarb divisions for friends.

With a cool and generally wet Spring, I can get away with planting this late. Corn will be sprouted indoors and transplanted to deter crows from picking seeds, and cukes will grow up and over a trellis. Soon the hot weather will arrive. We are lucky for this rain and coolness, even if it delays our gardens.