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.

Varietal Comparison, Winter Harvest

I wanted to take a brief minute to compare two garden crops on the basis of variety

For many years, I was of the belief that, while the particular variety of a crop you grew mattered, it didn’t matter as much as the quality of your soil, the care taken to provide ideal conditions, the vagaries of weather and pests, etc. in terms of your final yield. Obviously, such a belief flies in the face of seed catalog promoters, university extension services, and the process of species domestication generally but, if there is any trait common to organic homesteader types, it is a willingness to discount conventional wisdom in favor of gnostic revelation as regards science. I was/am by no means immune to the siren call of cheap, and have on numerous occasions favored inexpensive seed when planting my garden.

Now, this is by no means uniformly a bad thing. Though quite stringy, the grocery store pinto beans I planted last year were quite high yielding and tasted great, while the fancy yellow fleshed stringless French beans were terrible. Likewise, the ‘Hales Best’ muskmelon seed purchased for $1.29 grew healthy vines and fruit, but said fruit were not as flavorful as the Charentais melons grown from seed that cost a staggering $2.79. Needless to say, the amount of work, time and resources invested in producing a melon far outweighs the extra buck and a half that the different seed cost, so it PAYS to grow good varieties. Shocking, I know.

These experiences and others have led me to change my outlook somewhat, but this year I did a little more scientific experimentation and have decided to grow two varieties each of chard and spinach at the same time.

Here are the results…

Chard “Bright Lights” (on the left) vs. “Fordhook Giant” (on the right)

Spinach “Oriental Giant” (on the left) vs. "Bloomsdale" (on the right)

As you can see, the chard varieties are pretty different. While the Bright Lights does have interestingly colored stalks, the Fordhook Giant leaves and plants (not shown) are so much more productive that it hardly seems worth it not to grow them instead. Just for a sense of scale, here is our friend Nicole holding some chard leaves.

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Here are some nice pictures of harvested vegetables from the past month or so. I'm quite proud of them.

Unfortunately, I don’t like these turnips very much. They aren’t very sweet. You know, that reminds me of another variety related comment. Don’t buy Shogoin turnips. Well, don’t buy them if you like turnip roots. They are passable greens, if you like such tings. I found them to be a bit fibrous as greens and kind of bitter as roots. I’ve had great experience with Hakurei turnips on some farms I’ve worked on, but the seeds are fairly expensive, and since these were also all white roots I thought it might be similar. They aren’t. Though highly productive and large, vigorous plants, the end result of growing Shogoin isn’t worth it to me.

Just if you want to know, the cabbage is “Early” (not sure if it’s early round dutch, jersey wakefield or what, the tag at the nursery just said Early). The carrots are Red Core Chantenay. The beets are Detroit Dark Red. Anyone who has spent much time looking at seeds will immediately recognize these varieties as being among the most common, cheapest seeds available. The carrots, however, I chose because of the Chantenay’s purported ability to grow in heavy soils, an advantage in the black clay I have in my garden. However, I have added so much compost, and the particular bed I grew in this year is quite sandy, that I think I would have been better off growing a longer variety, like Kuroda or Danvers, as it would likely have done well and produced more. Nevertheless, the yield and quality of these carrots is perfectly acceptable and I am happy with them for the most part.

I think the biggest determinant of yield in carrots this year has been my thinning regime. I have two carrot beds right now, a winter bed and a spring bed. The winter carrots were planted in late October, while the spring bed were planted in late January. Maybe that’s more like Fall and Winter according to the calendar, but in Austin we don’t really have seasons according to the calendar. Anyways, the winter bed (sandy soil mentioned above) was not thinned as aggressively as the spring bed. The carrots in the winter bed consequently have relatively tall tops (possibly also due to over fertilization with nitrogen), while the roots are sort of scrunched together. I thinned the spring bed furiously in reaction to the overcrowding in the winter bed, spacing each carrot about 4 apart compared to the inch and a half or so in the winter bed. The tops are much shorter and thicker, while the roots are already overtaking some of the winter carrots, despite having been in the ground for 3 months less time. This is in the heavy clay soil, too!

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And finally, the chickens in their new budget chicken tractor, and some awesome bread I made using some wheat that I malted in the fall.

The budget chicken tractor is made of old scraps of chicken wire and some bamboo stakes that I used for tomato supports last year. It allows me to put the chickens out in the garden or yard without having to worry about them getting into stuff I don't want them in. It is about 5 or 6 feet long and is fit to the width of the garden beds. This allows me to put the chickens onto a recently harvested section of the bed, where they can scratch around for the bugs and little weeds, while fertilizing the top layer of soil. They especially love to eat baby snails, which are very nutritious for them and a pest that I would like to keep somewhat under control. I like snails, and don't want to exterminate them, but some predator pressure is good. I put the chickens on the first bed for several days after I removed the spent broccoli and boc choy, before planting tomatoes. So, we'll see what happens.