Seed Catalogs Come

Jung Seed Catalog came Tuesday, 12/28

Territorial Seed Catalog came Wednesday, 12/29

Record Snow

We've had record amounts of snow this year, the most since 1969.

33.4 inches in December alone. Normal is 10 inches.

More Snow

Last weekend we got 17" of snow. They're predicting another 5-6" of snow today.

Blizzard

So far, 14.6 inches of snow today and we're expecting -30F windchills tonight.

Snow

I am hoping that the eight inches of snow we got this weekend will create a thick, warm blanket for my garlic and my artichoke.

Mississippi River

The river is frozen now. It must have happened last week because there's snow on the ice and it hasn't snowed since 11/25.

Fall Clings On

The berries on these trees by my house turned from red to orange after the frost.

Today it is raining, a steady soaking rain. Patches of snow hang on, remaining only where the snow was piled in heaps. Tonight the rain will turn to freezing rain, then snow, and winter will have its way again.

Some, but not all of the radishes in the greenhouse froze. I picked the frozen ones. They are surprisingly sweet.

The artichokes, I fear, are dead. But I don't know. The one outside is buried under a small pile of hay. The one inside is in the greenhouse where the soil hasn't frozen yet. The leaves look a little worse for the wear, but I can't tell if it's dead or not. I think I'd better mulch them both some more. But I don't know where to get mulch this time of year. The hardware stores have transitioned to rock salt and Christmas wreathes.

Fall has become Winter

On Thursday, I ate my lunch outside, comfortable without a coat. On Saturday, it snowed nine inches and highs are in the 30s. I'm glad I got that garlic in the ground!

Frost

Our first frost was October 29th. It was the latest first frost in 47 years.

4:15pm today.

We turned the clocks back yesterday and the days have become short. But today I was out in the garden in a long sleeved shirt and cotton pants and was plenty comfortable.

Kale

Garlic In

I finally got the garlic planted. It's in the dark (watered) area above.

-I planted all of the cloves ~3" deep.

-I tried to line up all of the cloves in the same direction. The concave side points south.

-There are three rows (oriented the long way, north to south).

-Each row has eleven cloves in it, one of each variety:

From our garden this year:

1. Polish softneck

2. Italian late

3. Unknown hardneck

4. Inchelium red

5. Music

6. Big Unknown

From Territorial Seed Co:

7. Music - huge cloves

8. Polish softneck

9. Chinese pink

From Jung Seed Co:

10. Siberian

11. Inchelium red - moldy smell

I put some of the leftover garlic in the plot kitty-corner to mine. In that plot, the garlic is on the western side of the garden. There are seven rows (oriented north to south), each with ten cloves (one of each variety, except "big unknown"). I had only two "big unknown" cloves so I planted them at the south end of the plot. The concave side of the cloves is oriented east.

Beautiful November

The garden is remarkably green due to warm fall temps and a week of rain. Not bad for November!

Looking south.

The frost has not killed the artichokes. This onion is a survivor. This is the second time this year that it has sprouted. And it was a volunteer from last year.

Fall crocuses in full bloom.

Ornamental kale.

Dan and I worked the soil a little last weekend. We added organic blood meal and topsoil. We weren't really sure what amendments we needed to make, but figured that, after a couple of years of tomatoes, it probably needed at least some nitrogen.

Before.

After.

So Long Summer

We have had beautiful, unusual weather this fall. October has been very warm, with daily highs in the 70s, and very dry. That is supposed to end this week with rain for the next three days, then frost on Thursday 10/28. We'll see if the forecast is right. I suppose we do need frost some time!

Supper

Last night for supper I had:

Mashed celeriac and potatoes with mascarpone (an almost butter-like cheese) and a dash of salt.

Stir fried kohlrabi with lots of onion, a little garlic, MSG, salt, and pepper.

No Frost Yet

No frost yet. The average first frost is 10/5 and it's already 10/16 with no frost in sight!

October

Fall crocuses. I thought they wouldn't come up. Then, all of a sudden, there they were!

Snapdragons and California poppies bloomed all summer and all fall.

Radish seedlings.

Freshly dug dirt. Beginning the preparation for winter.

I've never been good at growing carrots. This might be the biggest I've ever grown.

Pepper harvest. They'd stopped growing and were just hanging on the plants waiting for frost.

Fall Begins

We haven't had frost yet. But it's threatening to come soon. We pulled the tomatoes yesterday. They still had some red tomatoes, but the green tomatoes have pretty much stopped turning red. So up they came. Now there's a lot more room in the garden. Man, those cherry tomatoes are monsters!

I've never seen onions at the end of their second year in the ground so I don't really know what to expect. But I was suprised to see our onions beginning to sprout again. This spring, they sprouted, put up seed heads, then all of the green parts turned brown and crispy. And, now, little green shoots are reemerging.

We planted seeds in the greenhouse and outside. In the greenhouse, I planted radishes, lettuce, and, optimistically, turnips and kohlrabi. Outside, we planted radishes and lettuce. It's probably too late for the outdoor seedlings to survive, but it's always worth a try!

Garlics on the Way

We got our garlics from Jung today and an e-mail from Frontier saying theirs were in the mail.

Yesterday in the Garden

Dill on a clear blue sky.

Strawberries creeping in from the neighbor's garden (and a lot of young dill).

My artichoke.

I had this kohlrabi for supper last night. I found a recipe for stir-fried kohlrabi with fish sauce and eggs. I thought the kohlrabi would be tough and bitter, but it was sweet and crisp.

Morning glories on trellis. Ornamental petunias, Thai basil, and kale.

Pepper in bloom.

Garden Thief

I got this e-mail today:

"The 5th street garden has lost a number of plants this year and some have showed up in the Augsburg garden. I noticed when I walked past your plot last week that you have a grouping of flowers that are the same one's that 5th street had planted and then they disappeared this year. The flowers are some perennials and some annuals. They are dianthus-pink and magenta and white, caradoon(sage colored pointy edged leaves), snapdragons and California poppies. I was wondering how you came by these plants? If by chance someone gave them to you, maybe they could be returned to 5th street. I would be happy to dig them up and transplant them"

I kindly directed the author of the e-mail to review the pertinent entries in my blog regarding each plant. But who would have ever thought that I would ever have to enter my garden blog as evidence! It does tarnish my garden joy a little.

Buying Garlic

It's a rainy day so we're sitting at the kitchen table with a laptop, a Garlic Bible, seed catalogs, last year's map of the garlic varieties we planted, and a semi-destructed bulb of garlic. Who would have known that many of the garlic varieties are sold out at the beginning of September?

Cool Weather

After weeks of 80-90F weather with 70-80% humidity, today's 70F, 40% humidity felt like fall. We have begun to plant for fall. This weekend we put in some kale.

My seedlings are growing slowly in their present low-light conditions. Time to start hardening them off. We should also order our garlic and shallots for fall planting.

This afternoon, when I went out to the garden to harvest onions for the gumbo, these three little girls were playing in the water barrel. They were wearing swimsuits, spashing, jumping and giggling with contagious joy.

Tending the Neglected

I have reached the stage of garden neglect. I think I must do this every summer: go on vacation and come back to a sad looking garden. It has happened again.

One tomato is trying to rule the world and is beginning by knocking over its cage and growing half way across the garden. The weeds have multiplied. One plant looks like it's been a victim of either underwatering or a pest of some sort. The dill is growing, going to seed, and simultaneous sprouting seedlings. The onions are going to seed. Many of the onions are just bulbs now, their green tops having dried and turned brown. The greenhouse has cooked, well, everything. And so it goes.

So today I:

-harvested the ripe tomatoes

-composted the over ripe tomatoes (and cooked tomatoes from the greenhouse)

-staked up and pruned the monster tomato

-weeded a little

-brought in some of the green-less onions

-collected onion seeds

-watered the greenhouse

-composted the cabbages which were rotting and infested with earwigs and slugs (gross!)

I might have just been procrastinating. But the weather was beautiful (70s with a breeze) and the garden neglected.

The coolest thing about the greenhouse is the tomatoes re-growth. A little while back, someone decided to use the very hot greenhouse as a sauna, in a very traditional (read: nude) sort of way. So the doors were locked and as the temperature rose to the 90s outside of the greenhouse, the plants cooked. My tomatoes literally looked as if they had been baked. The lettuce and onions just plain died. The pepper and carrots are on their last legs. Even the ginger looked brown and wilty. Only the okra looked happy.

But as the tomatoes adapted, they have been interesting to watch. They have preferentially grown on the north side, which is also closer to the wall of the greenhouse. The new growth has consisted of much smaller leaves, much closer together. It looks much different than before.

Slugs Like Beer, Not Coffee

After picking 18 slugs off of the cabbages, we looked up slug control. We learned that slugs like beer, not coffee. Who knew! http://eartheasy.com/grow_nat_slug_cntrl.htm

Aphids and Summer Gardening

One of my artichokes is unhappy. This is the artichoke that I vernalized and I want it to live so I can compare it to the other one which was not vernalized. Unfortunately, I think the ants are nursing aphids on it. That would explain why it's not growing as well as the other one.

My next project, apparently, is trying to find a good, organic, solution to aphids.

Ants and Aphids on Artichoke.

Ants on Artichoke.

In other news...I went out to the garden today and the person who had started gardening in the plot that I'm plot-sitting for had pulled up their stakes and left.

My cabbages are beginning to split. So I harvested one. Now to find cabbage recipes for yummy, sweet cabbage.

The greenhouse was HOT today. I mean sauna hot. The door on one end was closed. I think my ripe tomatoes were actually cooked and ready for sauce.

Bachelor Button.

I now have all the makings of something good:

Basil.

Somewhat Ugly, but Hopefully Yummy Tomato.

Thai Dragon Peppers.

Garlic Harvest

Sharing

The plot kitty-corner to mine was full of weeds because its gardener is out of town this summer. I knew that one of the other gardeners (not the plot tenant) was kind of gardening there. He hadn't really spoken to anyone, but had put a couple of unused tomato plants in the untended plot. He did so because they were extra plants and he had nowhere else to put them. That way, he figured, if/when the gardener returned to her garden, she would have some tomatoes waiting for her.

But, since I remembered the garden's owner mentioning that she might be out of town this summer, I asked her if I could tend her garden while she was gone. She graciously offered to let me care for it in her stead. So, over the last couple of weeks, we have weeded, tilled, fertilized, and added compost to the garden. And, inside, so the bunnies don't harvest them too early, I have seedlings growing for my fall crops.

Yesterday we went out to the garden plot and someone had planted a row of seeds, in the carefully worked, fertilized and now composted soil. The row is about a third of the way into the plot from one end to the other, so it truly takes up a third of the garden. And I think it's a third gardener!

I'm kind of bummed out about it. I know it's not really my plot and it is a community garden after all. But we are the ones who cared for the soil. And the third gardener let us do all of this work and only then started to plant in it. I had also hoped to add more compost. I only had time to put one wheelbarrow of compost in and I think the soil could use the organic matter.

So, I just left a little note (on duct tape) in the plot asking who the co-gardener is so that we can discuss our plans for the garden, mutually.

Soil Amendments and Tomatoes

It was grey and in the 70s today. I took advantage of the nice weather by making some soil amendments.

I added a pound of blood meal and a wheelbarrow of compost to the plot where I hope to grow my fall garden. It could still use some more compost.

Garden bucket.

The best thing I could do for the soil is to break up the hard-packed gravel that is six inches down. There are water drainage issues in my garden plot for this reason. The water sits on the surface for a few minutes or runs off right away without being absorbed.

In past years, I have broken up some of the gravel below, but it takes hours to break up even a small area. If only I had the right tools. But not many apartment dwellers have pick axes or jack hammers so I'm stuck with shovels.

My second project of the day was taming the tomatoes. Last year my tomatoes were a good size for the tomato cages that I have. Not this year. This year, they are monsters. Very large monsters that are trying to take over my garden. They have escaped their cages, spreading in every direction, knocking their cages over, and covering every neighboring plant they could find.

Last week I staked up my tomato cages (their legs were too weak to support the plants and they just bent over). Today I pruned the tomatoes back. I will have more than enough tomatoes to eat either way. And, this way, I can walk into my garden without a machete and my other plants will not be completely covered and shaded by my tomatoes.

Summer Tasks

One of my neighbors is out of town this summer and she has given us permission to tend her garden while she's gone. So, this weekend, we weeded the garden and turned the soil over. We weeded and mulched the paths. And, in the corner by the entrance to the garden, we planted Ultra Burgundy petunias and Thai basil which has burgundy stems. A fellow gardener had already contributed some tomato plants to the plot, so the south side of the plot has tomatoes in it, most of the plot is bare soil, and the flowers are in the northeast corner.

I'm hoping to put my fall garden in the now bare spot. I planted some seeds for my fall garden today. I was hoping that the garden center would have seedlings for fall, but they didn't. I decided to start the seeds inside, which seems crazy when the weather is so beautiful. But we've experienced challenges with germination outdoors, probably due to the small, furry garden helpers. And it's a little easier to keep seedlings moist indoors.

So I planted white and purple kohlrabi, cauliflower, turnips, Earliana cabbage, and Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage in 2" cow manure pots. I would still love to plant some ornamental kale. We also need to look at which alliums we want to plant this fall. Dan is looking into garlic varieties. I want some onions and shallots.

This evening, I pulled out the peas. They had taken a significant downturn in production and were beginning to turn brown. It was time to go. The best part was that, as I walked up to my garden, I saw a mouse running across the path trying to carry an entire pea pod. He was forced to drop it in favor of running for cover. But you could see how reluctant he was to give it up. I left the pea there so he could come back to it later. I didn't have the heart to take it away from him.

Allium in Bloom

Onion

Onion

Garlic scape

Garlic scape

Purple leek

Purple and white leeks

Pink leek

Pink leek