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By Elk Herder, on February 19th, 2010
The landscaper guy from Cascadian Edible Landscapes has gone home. He left me with a ton of books, some catalogs, and a plan for how to water the garden beds. It’s a brilliant freaking plan, in large part because it’s flexible. Also, I am an idiot for being so blocked on this thing.
Of course, he also left me with a brain full of rain barrel cisterns, chicken raising ideas and some fantastic ideas for vines to put in the chain link for edible content and beauty. Now I must find a way to fulfill my huge desire to hire someone to put all the pipe in the ground and figure out how to get the water pressure high enough to make the whole thing work. Having 28PSI water pressure is killing us.
By Elk Herder, on February 17th, 2010
Progress has been made! I’m going to try growing peppers this year, despite our terribly short and cool season. In poking around on the Seed Savers Exchange, I was able to find some varieties listed for short seasons. And with the shipping charges the way they are, it made sense to load up a few varieties to test them out. I fully expect that at least one of the peppers will fail spectacularly. I’ll probably also supplement with a small hot pepper as those seem to do well despite cool, short growing seasons.
I’ve also decided not to worry about getting the starts going – I’m just going to concentrate on the tomatoes. So the transplants will arrive in mid-May ready for dropping in the ground. Now I just have to hope that we don’t have a late cool snap.
By Elk Herder, on January 31st, 2010
Getting seeds late last year meant that I wasn’t able to find all the items I’d hoped for and was forced to settle for some unexpected items. This was particularly true with the squash selection. I wasn’t able to find some of my first picks – butternut and acorn squash were all gone by the time I hit the racks. So I ended up with a rather motley selection: zucchini, which I’d wanted, yellow crooknecks, which were an ok substitute, and hubbard, which just sounded fun. Huge blue-ish squash just can’t be beat, especially when it’s native to this area and could handle the long cool autumns.
I only planted 2 of each plant, making sure they had plenty of room to grow by putting them at the edge of the garden plot. I figured they could sprawl into the lawn and it wouldn’t hurt anything. The plants did remarkably well there even taking into account the tiny amount of water they got and the terribly late start from seed. All but one of the seeds sprouted leaving us with more squash than we could handle. The zucchini were easy enough until they got too big, then they just ended up in tons of loaves of zucchini bread (and bags of frozen shreds ready to make yet more bread). The crooknecks were harder to deal with – they didn’t steam or saute as well as the zucchini and had tough rinds. The tiny ones were ok but anything beyond about 6 inches was a loss. Lots of those went into compost, with a few going over the fence to feed the rabbit that taunts the cats.
The hubbards, however, are a whole different story. They’re huge. We only ended up with 2, thank goodness, at right about 7 pounds each. Seven pounds of squash at one go is more than we can handle so I’ll be hacking those up and sharing the bounty, assuming of course that I can get the cleaver through them. I’m hoping that they’ll turn into decent soups, or taste good enough plain that we can just bake them. I love baked squash with butter – it’s easy and tastes fantastic. Of course, if anyone knows of any hubbard-specific recipes, Id be glad to get those as well.
This year I’m going to be a bit more on the ball and get the seeds I want, instead of settling. Butternuts and acorns, picked at the right time, are a good size for one meal and easy to store in our new cool room. It’s worth the bit of planning to be able to get stuff we like and can cope with easily.
By Elk Herder, on December 3rd, 2009
We had very mixed success with the leafy greens this year. I think part of that was not knowing the light of the new garden plot very well and part of it was the spectacular fail of watering on my part. But for the greens that actually came up, it was an interesting lot.
The arugula came up spectacularly. All 20 row feet produced plants and they are still alive even now. We managed to harvest it in a way that meant the same plants kept producing new leaves all summer long. Giant arugula salads were regular, as was sauteed arugula. We’ll definitely keep this much next year, and may even expand it a little bit.
We managed to get a few plants of the Swiss and Rainbow chard to come up. Not many, maybe half a dozen or so, but quite enough to keep us in greens all summer. With the way they produce and our culling techniques, 20 row feet next year would be overkill, assuming the watering gets sorted. We’ll also definitely need more recipes for eating it as sauteed chard gets old after a while.
The New Zealand spinach was a complete dud. It was supposed to be a variety of plant that would give us spinach without bolting in the late summer, but our summers are hardly long enough for it to grow at all. Of the 2 plants, we took no leaves for food. The plants themselves looked like weeds to start and ended looking just like deadly nightshade. I pulled them with rubber gloves, and they went into the trash. I don’t need any nightshade in my compost, thanks.
And last, the herbs. We ended up with 2 basil plants, sprouting in September. There were about 5 leaves between them. It was definitely a watering problem, but the location will be good for next year. Full sun seems to be good for productivity.
I can’t wait to start pulling lists of things for next year. There’s so much extra room in the garden it’s not even funny.
By Elk Herder, on November 11th, 2009
When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way.
My main criteria when looking for plants was that they not require any extra hardware. We didn’t have the budget for it, and bush plants were easy enough to come by. Little did I know that there was a good reason for that. I grabbed the Venture beans because they were a bush type that should work well in our climate and the Xupars because they looked interesting. Yes, that was science and planning.
Both sets came up pretty strong and produced beans all summer from a single planting. They also kept producing well into October, which was great as our CSA box stopped giving us beans about August. We love those little guys steamed and in stir fries, we’re huge fans of the young crisp bean.
Late September was when I figured out that we won’t be planting the Ventures again. While they’re prolific and great young, it’s a shelling bean. If they go too long, they’re hard and flavorless when used in our preferred methods of cooking. They really need to just be left alone at that point until you’re ready to shell and dry them. And while my husband loves cooking chili, there’s no way I could stand shelling that many beans. One of us would die if that ever happened.
So next year, I’ll be looking for another bush bean, something that stays small and tender like the Xupars did. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
Oh, and if you want to try a Xupar, go to a good Chinese food restaurant and order the beans in black bean sauce. And save me some.
By Elk Herder, on November 10th, 2009
Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth.
The first big one was fencing the yard. While an big expense, we planned for it and managed to get everything done in one long weekend by someone else. I cannot stress enough how much the someone else part of it was integral to getting this done. The compost structure we put in place 2 summers ago is still in progress because we ran out of steam after getting the 8 holes dug and the posts placed. Living on the side of a mountain means that the number and size of rocks in the dirt is prohibitive to post holing successfully.
This newly fenced area has also had a huge impact on the cats. They’re more fit since they’re going outside and they have larger running spaces. Of course, this means with these two that I must also be running, but racing a cat is hilarious so I indulge them (it also makes my husband laugh). This extra space has also reduced the amount that they fight over turf, with more interesting things to do, and the need to clean their cat boxes. Of course, the latter means we find odd deposits out in the yard, but that’s a small price to pay.
It’s even giving us someplace to put the ladybugs that plague the house and have them do something useful instead of just little the light fixtures with their corpses. I get to throw them out into the garden or drop them on the seedlings in the house. It’s fun carrying them around as long as they don’t freak out and leave something behind.
And oh, the canning and preserving. But that’s a post all its own, the complexity there and the brain cycles behind it are really something.
By Elk Herder, on November 9th, 2009
The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable failure, but still cheaper than buying them at the store.
For next year, I will be trying the following:
- Use grow lights for the seedlings. The sun here in the early months of spring just doesn’t cut it.
- Harden the tomatoes in the unattached garage. I skipped this step, or shortened it too much. The plants were frost-burned in their first week, but recovered.
- Buy cages. Even the bush tomatoes need cages. They fell all over the ground, leaving the fruit in easy reach of the slugs.
- Water with an automated system. The ad-hoc watering I did meant that the fruit cracked. Not pretty, but still edible.
- Be around for the end of the season. This year, we went on vacation. But then, I expected the fruit to ripen before we were scheduled to go. I was only a month off. Ha!
- Force the fruit to ripen. If I do this one plant at a time, I should be able to handle the amount of fruit. Then again, it takes 3 pounds of fruit to start a sauce, so all at once would be fine. Better than expecting the fruit to ripen on its own.
- Be prepared for green tomatoes with recipes. Try some recipes out before the last minute so they can be ready to go.
I must remember to consult this list in the spring so that I get it right next year. Fresh tomatoes are too spectacular to let them go to waste.
By Elk Herder, on November 6th, 2009
Autumn is in full swing here – the winds have picked up and its pouring down cold rain every day. That means that I’m starting to work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s easy to pull the dead plants, but harder to gauge how long some of the others will last. And of course I didn’t think about this when plotting the space, so putting down the straw will be a haphazard affair. At least it will keep the weeds down over the winter and be mulch in the spring.
The good news is that we’re still getting food from the garden. The chard is producing and the broccoli and leeks that I planted as seedlings haven’t died yet. They may not survive much longer, depending on how cool it gets and how quickly it does so, but there’s hope yet. Not much, but some.
At some point, I hope to get out a summary of each plant we tried this year. Some, such as the zucchini, were amazing and easy. Others, like the herbs, failed for water. And still others totally bombed out. Can I just say that New Zealand spinach looks like nightshade? We ate none of that, or at least, I think that’s what was growing.
I’m already dreaming of seeds and sprouts for next year. We’ll definitely get the water situation sorted before it comes time to plant. I’ll even have a better system for starting seedlings, if I have my way.
By Elk Herder, on September 22nd, 2009
We’ve been picking peas and beans off the same plants in small quantities, just enough for a meal, all summer. We’ve had arugula and some chard pop up and been completely disappointed by the New Zealand spinach. It looks way too much like the nightshade we grow to risk harvesting any.
The joy of the garden this month has been zucchini. The small ones are great grilled, sauteed, roasted or any other form you can think of. Sometimes you can end up with too much of a good thing though.
I missed harvest on 2 zucchini by two days. At that point they were way to big to eat, so I just let them go until I had a weekend and the ingredients to make zucchini bread. By the time I harvested those 2 squash, they were 13″ and a whopping 19″ long.
So last Sunday I spent all day baking bread. I went through 15 pounds of sugar and 10 pounds of flour. I used nearly 3 pounds of walnuts and almost all of the appliances I’ve accumulated since I moved out on my own. If I hadn’t had a giant mixer or electric food processor, someone would have died. As it was, I had to hand shred all the zucchini (after discarding seeds) because my food processor is a pansy and doesn’t grate or slice.
But I made it. 12 hours and twenty two loaves later, I was done. And now the freezer is full of summer goodies that we’ll continue to enjoy all winter long.
By Elk Herder, on August 18th, 2009
There’s a good reason that I haven’t updated on the fish tank in a while. There hasn’t been much progress to speak of, only setbacks. We got the lighting attached to a temporary hood so that the plants wouldn’t die from lack of light. I works perfectly and my AHSupply lighting puts out a ton of light. I wasn’t quite sure hat bulbs to get, so I ended up with a mix of 6700 and 10Ks. From a color perspective, I think the 10Ks are too blue and won’t be getting them again. 6700s are designed to be more along the lines of natural lighting and the color spectrum definitely shows that.
But after this minor victory, the tank went sideways on me. It started a minor algae bloom which turned into a major bloom with hair algae. That stuff is nasty and nearly impossible to get rid of. The best advice I could find was to starve it out by feeding the plants (which require more complex nutrients than algae) and turning off the light. Also, pull it out manually.
Well, the whole point of a giant tank is that I don’t have to do this manual labor stuff. The bigger they are, the better they tolerate adverse conditions. So I started looking for little critters and other conditions that would help. I found a place that said that ghost shrimp eat hair algae, which turns out to be true. The best part is that some of them are even smart enough to avoid the goldfish and have been munching on algae like crazy and helping keep the tank clean. The other thing I found was chemistry.
Turns out that I live an an area with super-soft water. As in it’s a miracle that plants grow here because the water is so soft. It doesn’t have enough mineral content to properly buffer the tank and keep the pH or the carbon content in line. I found some suggestions for getting the pH under control, but the low hardness and buffering capacity was going to continue to cause this hair algae explosion. So I added some baking soda and poof, problem goes away. There are little strings of algae in there now, but nothing like the jungle before.
Following other aquarists advise, I bought some cuttlebone for a long term solution. That’s supposed to help with the hardness and buffering issues. I’m aslo planning to buy a CO2 system at some point, but those suckers are expesive.
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