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.

First Season With a Greenhouse

To be honest, this post had to wait a bit because I feared disaster. Luckily, our first season with a greenhouse has been a near-complete success.

Purchase and Assembly

We purchased a kit from Farmtek. In particular, we got a 9'x12' model shown here. It was not cheap and we added a base that gets attached to the ground by long metal stakes. I highly recommend that, because greenhouses act like sails in a heavy wind. Imagine a $3000 investment blowing across the  yard in a storm, to end up a tangled mass of bent aluminum and cracked poly panels. Buy the base.

The kit requires patience, as well as a few common tools. I used some ratchet-driver wrenches and screwdrivers. Since the poly panels are held against the metal frames with spring-loaded clips, only a fool would not wear goggles when working on that part of the project. A carpenter's square is a must, too, for early work. If the frames are not straight when screwed together, the panels won't fit later, and the builder will need to loosen screws, move things, and lose time in the process.

It took me about 30 hours of work, half of that with a helper, to get the thing built. We started in late winter. Before I began I leveled the area and put several inches of rock dust, then gravel, over weed-block fabric. A few weeds have still found the site comfortable for sprouting, but they have been easy to pull out.

The panels were the most difficult part; screwing together framing is easy, if time-consuming. The panels have open cells to trap air and edges that fit into plastic channels resembling the binding for acetate report covers. The edge-channels got easily mixed up in the bags and we had to unnecessarily cut some down that should have been saved for larger panels.  They are wickedly difficult to slide on at first, but once we had the hang of it, that got easier.

The company provided several tubes of excellent silicon caulk for sealing out air; the metal clips alone for the panels do not suffice when the winter winds blow. And we often start seeds in February. The finished greenhouse had two loads of snow on the roof from late-season storms.

Overall, most things fit well until we got to the roof-vents. They were cheaply made and ill-fitting. I cut down some poplar strips and painted them white. They braced the vents and sealed them fairly well. Water will still drip in during downpours, and one stream ruined a small tray of Ghost-Pepper seedlings that I grow to heat up our Thai Dragon peppers: no small loss if you hate hot food!

I did not have time to install the automatically opening vents that respond to sunlight; when the plants are all in the ground, I will go to work.

Controlling Temperature

Seeds will not germinate when the soil is too cold or hot, too wet or too dry. I found that my Thai Dragon peppers, our cash crop, were particularly finicky. 2015 seed I saved did well, but not Thai seed  left over from last year's bulk purchase, then frozen. 2016 seed purchased as a last-ditch effort to have enough plants did wonderfully. Then some of the Thai-sourced seed from 2015 made a late emergence.

This troublesome seed may be from plants that were not open-pollinated in Thailand. My local plants were. That could affect germination rates, but I think more than anything it was our cold spring. The first sprouts came up in a freakishly warm stretch of days in February, then a really hard freeze. I used to start seeds indoors around Valentine's Day.  I mist the trays of sown seeds and cover the trays with clear tops, cracking them as soon as germination begins. It has worked for 20 years for my basil, without a hitch, and tomatoes too. When the seedlings start to get a couple inches tall, I move them to individual pots, anything from old yogurt cups to reused planing pots.

Bigger growers use heating pads under trays, and I think I will too for peppers next year.

A key element for any greenhouse is a max/min thermometer. It reads those ranges and can be reset daily. One cloudy morning I left the vents and door closed. By noon the sun was beaming down and I raced home to find seedlings wilting. I nearly lost 100+ plants since the greenhouse was at 120 degrees. I got lucky and saved them all, by opening the greenhouse wide and misting everything little and watering the rest. Still, it was a close thing.

Damp Soil But No Floods

Mold will kill your seeds fast. The rule I've heard from professional growers to to mist the soil only when it is dry. On cloudy days, the soil may not dry out completely. On sunny ones, I found myself misting the seedlings again in late afternoon, when I got home from work.

The right mix of soil is everything. I used some planting mixes for some trays. For others I put a few inches of garden soil, from a 20 ton pile we had delivered. I smoothed that layer, added the seeds, then topped it with seed-starter mix to the depth needed by a particular seed (1/4 inch for peppers).

When the seedlings get tall, I just use a common metal watering can and water the lot. I have always liked to keep my potted seedlings in trays with a half-inch or so of water in the bottom. I found this develops really good root systems, as compared to only top-watering the seedlings.

Now we are hardening off the seedlings and planting at a breakneck pace. I think I raised over 1000 plants this year. Yikes. I'm giving away the extras.

Would I do it all again? Absolutely.  I might have looked for a different vent system. When all of our plants are in the ground, I'll unbox the automatic vents I purchased from Farmtek and install them; they respond to daylight and are solar-powered.

And, I did say "Buy the Base," right? And stake it down, right? Here's what happened to Scottish greenhouse, an image I found online, in a big Scottish gust. I'd need more than a wee dram if I came outside and found that.