Sprouts Are Coming Up Everywhere!

Its been a couple weeks since I planted seeds in the expansion area and things are starting to sprout in most of the beds.  This first seeds to go in were my Montezuma Red Bush Beans.  I only had one small packet of seeds for this so I was only able to plants two rows - one on each side of the bed. These beans will be my version of kidney beans and I hope to be able to feed some to the chickens eventully.  Depending on how much of a crop I get out of them this year, I will be saving most of the seeds for planting next year.

 

Here is one from the first row to really start coming up.

 

 

The next bed that was planted was the winter squash patch.  There is an aray of small seedlings pushing up through the soil. 

 

Butternut Squash

Delicata squash

Pie Pumpkin

 

 So many of the squash have come up that I am already starting to worry about where I am going to store them for the winter.  I don't think I have ever heard of anyone planting this many squash on purpose.  I just hope that my chickens like squash as much as they like everything else in my garden.



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Some of the corn has started sprouting.  The first corn to come up was the sweet corn I planted.  The dent corn has just started to come up a couple days later and it takes a longer time to mature so I have less cross pollination to worry about with these two varieties.

 

Even the peas have just started to put out flowers.

I think I might be adding fresh pea pods to my salads in just a few short weeks.

 

Soon I won't have much time to plant anything else because I will be too busy harvesting! 

 

Additions to the Herb Collection

I wanted to fill out the herb patch a little so I bought a few things to add to it.  One thing I love to cook with is rosemary.  I use it in most of my chicken dishes.  Another great addition to the herb bed is basil.  I had to buy some purple basil this year because I only had seeds for green basil and I like the variety.

 

I also bought some other herbs to fill out my collection.

 

This cilantro is just getting over it's shock and starting to put out new leaves.

 

This is some of the basil that I started from seed a couple months ago.  I also planted some chamomile in this bed.

 

 I decided to use some of my annual herbs to fill out the pest repellent flower bed that boarders two sides of one of the additions.  I have marigolds, natursiums, and dahlburg daises which are all supposed to repel harmful insects.  I have also planted one or two purple coneflower plants, though I am not sure if they will make it or not yet.

 

The rest of my perennial herbs will stay in the herb patch except maybe the rosemary.  Rosemary won't make it through the winter here and this year I am going to try to dig it up and bring it inside in a pot to overwinter.  I tend to kill rosemary when I grow it indoors, but that won't stop me from trying again this fall.

 

 

Corn is 100% In the Ground

This week I finally got around to planting the rest of my corn beds.  I planted half a bed with sweet corn and four and a half beds with dent corn.  The variety of dent corn is called Pungo Creek Butcher.  I find this Variety fascinating because last year the stalks grew to 10 or 11 feet tall and made beautiful ears of multi colored corn that my chickens went totally nuts over.  I am growing this corn mostly for the chickens, but also because I want to try a little for making cornbread. 

 

I couldn't believe all the different colors it came in.  It was a literal rainbow of corn. 

Last year I interplanted the corn with squash and beans using the three sisters concept.  Unfortunately it didn't work out well for the squash which didn't get enough sun or the beans which were difficult to harvest once everything had filled out.  It did however work very well for the corn which grew very tall and made nicely filled out ears.  I saved the seed from the biggest and fullest looking ears to plant this year.  I know that there is a possibilty that some of the seed was crossed with the dent corn that the farmer plants across the street, but if it grows into anything like I had last year I will be happy (and so will the chickens). 

I am hoping to grow enough this year to seriously supplement what I buy from the store to feed my chickens.  I feel better knowing that what I am feeding my chickens (and subsequently myself) is as locally grown and enviromentally friendly as I can make it.  Not to mention the cost I could save by growing it myself from saved seed.  All it really cost me this year is time and some effort on my part.  Pretty good trade if you ask me.

Replanting

I have noticed that there are quite a fews spots in my pole bean bed where the seedlings just never came up.  Maybe I am being impatient but I decided that since so many have sprouted already that now would be a good time to fill in the empty spots with new seeds.  I really want my bean Tipis to look filled out and that won't happen if the beans grow sparsely around each pole.  I hope the second round comes up quickly so they don't get too far beind the first sprouts.

This bed was weeded about a week ago, so most of the green things you seed should be bean sprouts.

 

This is the base of one the central poles.  Three out of four ain't bad I guess but I will still plant another seed in the empty space to try to fill it out completely.

 

I may have to do the same thing in the cucumber bed, but those seedlings have just started emerging within the past couple days, so I will give them a little more time to come up before reseeding the bed.

Hilling up the Potaoes

The potatoes have been growing like mad since they came up through the soil.  So far it looks like almost every single seed that I planted has come up.  I have read that if you want to increase your potato production you should hill them up a few times over the growing season.  Since our potatoes are in beds surrounded by irrigation ditches I am a little limited on space for hilling them up, so I think I will only be doing this once.  They were already mulched in with straw fairly thickly so I just left that in place and added dirt on top of it.  If they look like they need hilling further I will probably just fill it is as much as possible with more straw.  Besides, these beds could really use some extra organic matter to improve the soil and straw fits the bill to a T.  I just hope it doesn't make it too hard to dig the potatoes out of the ground once it is time to harvest.  Guess I will find out in a few months.

Here are the beds before hilling them up. 

Each plant is about 6-8 inches high and once they are hilled they will be covered by about 4-5 more inches of dirt, just leaving the tops of the leaves out of the soil so they can keep growing.  I made sure to pull any weeds from all of the beds before I added the dirt.  They would probably be nearly impossible to pull once they got buried deeper.

 

Here are the same beds after being hilled up. 

As you can see the plants look tiny again, but all that extra dirt means more stem space for growing potatoes.  This year might be our largest harvest yet.

Happy Chickens

If there is one thing our garden is really good at growing it is weeds.  It is a constant battle to keep the weeds down since I refuse to use herbicides in my garden.  We do a lot of hand weeding which leaves us with buckets and buckets of weeds.  And what do we do with all those weeds you ask?  Why feed them to the chickens of course!  Now the chickens don't actually eat everything we throw in their pen, but I'm sure they are finding plenty of bugs and other things amongst the piles.  It also acts as a nice surface for them to scratch in and play their chicken games.

 

With all the extra forage they are getting they are providing us with many eggs.

 

Right now I'd say that we get 3 to 4 dozen eggs a week from nine chickens.  Not a bad trade if you ask me.

 

 

A Collection of Herbs

 

These areas are part of the herb bed that was started last year. 

 

This section has two kinds of Oregano (Greek and Italian) and Thyme.

 

 

These are the Chives that will be here for the third year (technically) since they were moved from the original herb space in the fenced part of the garden.  They are in full bloom right now and this herb has gotten larger every year.  It is one of the more showy herbs I have in the garden.  They add a beautiful garnish to salads and other dishes.

 

There is another area that I had dill in last year.  Dill is a prolific re-seeder and I doubt I will ever have to plant it on purpose again.

 

 The Strawberry patch also takes up a large area of the herb patch.  I am hoping they spread to fill out the area around the Peach tree and any blank areas in the herb patch.  Right now keeping the weeds out of that area is an uphill battle.

Garden Caretakers

Some helpers have appeared in my garden quite to my surprise. 

 

Here is one of them watching over the garden from the corner of the broccoli bed.

 

His friends appeared in the Herb patch a couple weeks later.

 

I've never had garden gnomes before but they add a whole new dimension to my garden that I have begun to adore.  I've heard they are supposed to be good luck for a garden.  I hope to find more in the future.

 

The Garden is Growing Indeed

Just wanted to share a few picture of how things are coming along in the garden.

 

The Onions are really taking off.

 

The Garlic is filling out nicely.

 

The peas are tall enough to climb on the fence.

 

The potatoes are in need of being hilled up.

 

The celery has gotten over it's initial shock and has started to put out new growth.

 

The lettuce bed is ready for harvesting.

 

Even the tomatoes have grown a little since they've been permanently planted.

 

The radishes and carrots are starting to fill out as well.

 

Things are really coming along here.  Even some cucumber, zucchini and bean seeds have started to appear in the last week or so.  If everything stays happy enough we should be getting quite a harvest this fall.

 

 

 

 

 

Harvesting Salad Fixings

These past couple weeks have brought the start of prime salad season.  The lettuce that was started in early February is finally making leaves hearty enough to start harvesting.

Here are the seedlings that emerged at the end of February.

 

Here they are ready to be planted out three weeks later.

 

In early April they looked like this

 

Last week they were starting to really fill out

 

Looks beautiful!

 

Tastes even better!

 

We are also starting to get radishes. 

 

We had our first one last week.

Now they are filling out salads and adding a little color and kick to things.  Little by little salad season is revving up!

 

 

 

 

 

Squash Extravaganza In The Making

Last year our squash crop failed horribly.  I tried the three sisters concept and planted it amongst the corn which grew way taller than expected and shaded out everything around it.  This year the squash are getting their very own beds.  This way they can soak up as much sun as their little squash hearts desire and have room to roam as their beds are next to low growing crops with plenty of space to go around. 

 

I have also planted a large number of squash because part of the plan with them is to feed the extras to the chickens.  I have planted 4 snap jack pumpkins which grow hull-less seeds which are awesome for roasted pumpkin seeds.  I also have 4 pie pumpkins, 8 delicata squash, 8 acorn squash, and 8 butternut squash.  If they all take off I am going to inundated with squash by the end of the year.  Right now I am just trying to be patient while I am waiting for the seeds to sprout.

Putting in the Peppers

I finally had the chance to plant out some warm weather crops this week and one of them was my pepper bed.  The peppers are out at one end of the new expansion in a row on either side of the bed.  I think there are about 19 or 20 pepper plants total: 4 red peppers, 4 green peppers, 6 yellow peppers, and 5 jalenpenos.  I know it sounds like a lot of plants, but the larger peppers usually only produce 5 or 6 good peppers per plant in a good year and I like peppers in alot of dishes.  Last year we froze as much as we could, and we are just running low on them now.  I may have planted too many jalepenos, but I usually have no problem giving them away to co-workers or turning them into salsa. 

Half of this long bed is devoted entirely to peppers.  The closest 4 plants are the red peppers, the next 4 are green peppers, the 6 after that are yellow peppers, and the tiny little plants at the end are the jalepenos.

Moving on Up

The "baby" chickens have reached 1/2 chicken size and I have decided that they are big enough to have a little more room to roam.  I closed off the door between the chicken runs and let the kids out of their box.  They started acting like big chickens right away - pecking and scratching at the dirt and taking dust baths in the shade.  I think they are quite enjoying their larger area.

 

 

 

 

The younger chickens are still going to be kept separate from the adults until they are pretty close to fully grown.  They are only separated by a fence so they can still interact with each other a little bit.  I want them to get used to the idea of being a part of the same flock, but I don't want the big birds to harass the young ones too much.  Right now they seem happy to chase them along the fence when the opportunity presents itself.  Once that gate is opened between the runs I'm sure there will be a few days of turmoil while the pecking order gets reestablished, but I am confident that they will integrate into the flock nicely.  I have even noticed that the black and white chicken that I think is a rooster has been eying the older ladies.  I hope they don't hen peck him too much.

 

Cucmber Trelis

Last year I grew my cucumbers along one side of the fence and they climbed it beautifully.  This year they were planned for a bed that did not have a fence to climb, so I improvised.  I used my left over rebar stakes and pvc pipe from years past to make a trellis for this bed.

 I'm still not sure how well the cucumbers will climb on the pvc because it has such a smooth surface, but I hope they wind their way around each pole.  I am hoping for one plant per stake so it should fill out nicely if it works at all.  I left a path down the middle of the two rows of trellis so I would have a dry place to stand when I am picking cucumbers.

 

I am definitely looking forward to eating garden fresh cucumbers again this summer.  I also can't wait to start making the next round of pickles!

Irrigation in the Expansion

This is our garden expansion:

It looks huge I know.  It pretty much doubles the size of the garden we had last year (and the picture doesn't even do it justice.  I think the dimensions come out to be 35 by 60 feet. 

This is the begining of the layout for the irrigation ditches:

 

I used rebar and a long measuring tape to mark my rows and keep them straight.  Each bed is about 3 feet wide and surrounded on all sides by irrigation.  I plan on planting the edges of the ditches and leaving the center of each row for a walking path so I can pull weeds easier.

 

This is the finished product with water flowing and everything:

 

The hardest part is leveling the ditches so the water flows down every row and doesn't overflow where I don't want it to.  It took hours of shoveling and following the flow of the water around, but I think I got it to work pretty well.  I'm sure there will be adjustments along the way, but for now it is good enough.

 

 

Coming Soon to a Garden Near You

So this is the big weekend for planting in these parts and as soon as I am done working today, tomorrow and Monday, I will be out planting everything I can think of.  It's the moment I've been waiting for.  The last few days after work I have been getting my irrigation ditches in order in the latest garden expansion and hopefully everything will flow beautifully and water all my soon to be planted seeds.  The list of things to plant include: tomatoes, green peppers, corn(dent and sweet), beans, amaranth, millet, wheat, pumpkins, squash(four varieties), watermelons, honeydew melons, and maybe even some flowers around the edges if there is time.  I also need to replant my broccoli and brussel sprouts since the first round I planted was badly damaged by frost.  A few of those plants survived, but they are struggling and I want to actually get a harvest from them this year so I will be buying plants from the nursery to make up for my oops.  I will try to take pictures as I go along, but can't guarantee that I won't get carried away just playing in the dirt.  Happy gardening everyone!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

This blog will be taking a break for the next few days as I am going back home to visit family.  I'm sure there will be lots to update you on when I get back to garden land.  Take care!

Strawberry Fields Forever

I am happy to report that the strawberries are really taking off with thier flowering.  From far away it doesn't look like much is going on in that patch, but if you look closely you can see dozens of tiny white flowers throughout the bed.  Maybe even hundreds.  None of them has produced anything resembling a strawberry yet, but I think that will change in the next few weeks.  If I can keep the bugs and the birds out of the patch I hope we get a good harvest this year.  I know I will eat as many as I can fresh, but if we can't keep up with them I will be making my first attempt at strawberry jam.