So much news...

Summary:
Tomatoes are ripe!  Baby goats were born (3 babies)! Onions and garlic are harvested. Peas are over and done with.  Green beans are ready. 



Wow, it's been busy lately.  Since last I wrote, PJ had her kids, 2 girls and a boy, all healthy.  The sugar snap peas came and went, beautifully, and the aliums have all been harvested. It's early for garlic to be done, but it was ready and is curing nicely in the shed.  Curing?  To get garlic ready to store, it must cure.  This means hanging it up in a dry, warm place with good air circulation for several weeks/months to let the skins form over the cloves.  The onions need this time to dry as well.


The sugar snap peas were a real success.  I harvested about 3.5 lbs of peas from the 6 ft of row, so that's a decent yield of a tasty treat.  They were only producing for about a week, and were in the ground for 3 months, but they sure were good!

The carrots have been coming out too.  I only have a small plot of carrots left in the ground, and with the thermometer hitting 97 degrees today, they are going to need to come out soon.  Summer is here already.  :^/
I think I'll have harvested a total of about 30 or 40 lbs of carrots from the various plantings this winter/spring.  The main lesson I've learned is to give them space and time, and grow a longer variety next year.

Wow, I can't believe it, but I harvested my first ripe tomato on APRIL 30.  Yeah.... an APRIL tomato!

I planted them a few days after Valentine's day, and with our unseasonably warm winter, they did just fine.  The Early Girl is the best producer, followed by Celebrity.  Better Boy is crummy, not a single green fruit.  All of the vines, however, are infected with early blight.  There are a few hybrid varieties resistant to early blight, which I may try out next spring.  I bought all indeterminate varieties this year with the hope that they would continue producing through the summer and into the fall, but with the disease pressure, I don't think this will be the case.

My experiments in the garden include an okra-long bean poly-culture.  While working on a local farm several years ago, I noticed that the best cucumbers were the volunteers growing up in the okra beds, where they had some shade and a good trellis.  I am hoping that the long beans, which are basically black eyed pea, will vine up the okra like the cukes did.  Black eyed pea can take a little shade, so maybe it will thrive amidst the okra plants.  I'll keep you informed.

Other new plantings are sweet potatoes, melons, watermelons and amaranth greens.  So, we're definately moving into the hot time of year.  Which in Austin, lasts most of the year!  Yay!  Swimming, melons and peppers!


My yellow frying peppers, which were supposed to be sweet peppers, are extremely hot.  I mean mouth on fore hot.  This is a real problem because I didn't WANT hot peppers, but I'm not so keen to replace them now that they are cranking out peppers.  I started some pickled peppers today, if that works I guess I'll keep them and make a bunch of pickled peppers.  I did rip out two pepper plants and replace them with eggplants from Home Depot, at $6 per eggplant....  But, these are in 5" pots so I am hoping that, even though it's technically too late to plant eggplants, they will be far enough along and have a large enough root system not to die and to thrive and produce.  We'll see, I'm not too optimistic about Home Depot plants.

ok that's all for now.

too dang hot

This summer is proving itself to be a real challenge in the garden. The unprecedented heat and lack of rain are an amazing contrast to last year, when we had relatively mild temperatures and ample precipitation. Even with a good deal of supplemental watering, the plants do not thrive. There just isn't any substitute for cloud juice!

I've recently added a drip irrigation system to the garden in hopes of conserving water and helping my plants out a bit. Drip irrigation allows water to be very slowly applied to the root zone, which means less waste from run off or over-watering. It also means I don't have to drag a hose from plant to plant, so it's a real time saver for me. In this picture you can see the black plastic drip lines running along the tomato bed. The burlap cloth is to provide some shade for the tender transplants while they get established. That's right folks, we have to shade our tomatoes here.


I've also installed an improved greywater system. Well, it's an improvement over what I had before, which was a flexible rubber hose, the kind used to flush out pool filters, running directly from the laundry into the yard. Now the laundry flows into a large plastic barrel, which has a garden hose on the bottom. This allows me to move the hose around as the water comes out, control the flow with a valve, and store water for a few hours before using it on the plants. I can also split it up between plants rather than all the water rushing out onto one plant, all at once. So far, so good. It holds an entire load without spilling or backing up and the hose can reach anywhere in the yard. I can even add additional hoses to reach the front yard if I want to water the shade trees. I've used another one of those old burlap coffee bags to make the barrel a little more attractive, or less unattractive anyways.


The other big change to the garden is that I significantly reduced the area taken up by the animal pen. My reason for doing this is that the animals were not using the whole area and the bedding was getting quite thin in the part closest to the house. For some reason the bedding tends to migrate and pile up towards the back of the pen. The back is also the shady area. By moving the fence towards the back, I reduced the pen to only the area that is pretty much always in the shade, which is where the animals spent all their time anyways. I redesigned the fence somewhat, using juniper posts instead of metal posts, and made it shorter but with an electrified ware along the top and bottom to keep the goats in. I want



There's hope on the horizon, though. I've recently planted a bunch of zinnias in the shade of the now dying naive sunflowers that came up along the fence. With some periodic watering, they have emerged and are beginning to grow. They're not much to look at yet, but I am hopeful for a beautiful fall blooming!

Goodbye babies, hello milk

Yesterday we sold the first batch of kids (Mabel's three) to some family friends. Seeing them go was a mixed bag for me. I knew they were going to a good home and that their departure meant we would finally begin getting milk from our mama goats, in which we have invested a lot of time, money and effort. On the other hand, the kids' plaintive cries when we separated them from Mabel was hard to handle. I immediately began second guessing myself, wondering if we had given them enough time, wondering if we should actually be keeping goats at all...how could we be such heartless monsters as to separate them??

Of course this is the reality of dairy: anytime you drink milk it is only because some little calf or kid or lamb is not drinking it. When the animals are in your backyard, it just feels more immediate and visceral than when you buy a gallon of milk at the store. We waited the recommended length of time before separating the kids from their moms, we gave them vaccinations, affectionate attention, and plenty of hay while they were here. I have full faith in the folks who are now in charge of their welfare. Really, this is the best it can be, I think!

This morning, I woke up full of anticipation. Mabel seemed to be in good enough spirits; she hadn't tried to escape in the night and wasn't hollering for her kids all night either. Sarah and I had been watching her udder for the last few weeks, wondering if we would get any milk. She was always empty!! This morning, however, her udder was full. Between the morning and afternoon milkings, we got ~1100 grams of milk from Mabel today. That's a little over a quart.

A quart of milk per day is actually a lot of milk. Also, that is only from one goat. When PJ's kids leave, will we be getting half a gallon? What on earth will we do with 3.5 gallons of milk per week?? Cheese! Yogurt! Milk! Ice cream! Party favors!

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In non goat garden news, the heat has been hard on the tomatoes. Some of the fruits are getting pretty sun burned, turning a pale yellow and getting mushy. Yuck. Nevertheless, we have a good number of tomatoes coming in, enough for salads & sandwiches, but not enough for the big pots of salsa I was dreaming of. Next time, I'm going to use tomato cages and grow only determinate, fast maturing hybrid varieties. The heirlooms are well and good if you don't mind harvesting just 3 or 4 edible fruits from each plant. I want to be inundated with tomatoes.

My peppers are coming along very nicely. They love the heat! Today I harvested some poblanos, time to make goat cheese stuffed chile rellenos! Maybe I can use some of the smokey salsa verde i made last fall as a sauce. Oh yeah....

Melons, tepary beans, black eyed peas, amaranth, malabar spinach, eggplants, peppers.... They are all coming along well. I'll harvest the last of the potatoes, beets and carrots soon. That will be the last root crops till next fall.... Imagine not eating a carrot from now till November! Yikes! I'll probably buy some at the store. (Heresy, I know...)

well that's a lot to mull over.
greg

More pictures of goats and garden.
See the babies, a typical harvest and what's growing.
Artichoke, sweet pea blooms, tomatoes, grape vine on the trellis, baby melon plants in the lettuce bed.

The Goats, The Garden

Here are some pictures of PJ and Mabel...
PJ is the black and white one, Mabel the brown and black.Here's PJ...



Here is a papaya tree that sprouted up in the compost. Cool!

Actually, we have had about 5 or 6 papaya plants come up, and a mango. I put the mango tree and 2 papayas in pots, I'll put a few more of the papayas in pots this fall before the freezes come. In the springtime, I'll plant them out in the yard, with the hope that by overwintering them, they will be old enough to produce some fruit next summer. Apparently, they need a little under a year of frost free weather. In Austin, we get about 20 freezes per year, between December and March. If I can put a 10 month old tree in the ground in April, then I could, theoretically, have ripe papayas in the summer. I have seen other papaya trees in Austin with green fruit on them, so I know that a single season is long enough to get a tree to the point where it is at least blooming and setting fruit, I think it is the extra time needed to get RIPE fruit that is the rub. Anyways, we'll see how it works. It's a lot of trouble to go to for a fruit that costs $0.89/lbs, but of course, that's not really the point....
Here's the Texas A&M home fruit production guide to papaya:

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/extension/homefruit/papaya/papaya.html

I also recently planted a flower mixture in the 'wild' patch. I included a number of cool season traditional cut flowers, a native wildflower mix, rapeseed, flax and poppies. The flax and poppies are from the grocery store, just exactly what you would put in a muffin or your granola. I want to create bee food by having these flowers around, and have also planted some other things around the yard to encourage bees to visit. Apparently, bees need our help and one of the best things to do is plant nectar producing flowers to bloom year round. So, that's what I am going to attempt...a year round bee garden! We'll see.





Just so that you all get a sense of what the yard looks like, here's a panorama. The goat pen is behind where I was standing to take the picture.