Tag: gardening

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Wonderful Seeds

Like most people, I don’t bother looking at those wonderful seeds when I order or plant them. I look at the goal: the produce they will become.

Perhaps we should take a closer look at these amazing things. And it is amazing that something only a sixteenth of an inch in diameter can become a four pound cabbage.

Wonderful seeds like Savoy cabbage
As a gardener, I start with seeds like these for Savoy cabbage as they give me more varieties than commercial transplants.

Wonderful Seeds

When I wrote “The Pumpkin Project”, I did several investigations about seeds. Different varieties of pumpkins can have very different sizes of seeds.

Different vegetables and flowers have very different seeds too. Some, like portulaca (moss rose) have seeds almost too tiny to see. Cabbages and their kin have tiny round seeds. Lettuces are flat.

Each of these seeds has the potential to become a plant many times the size of the seed. Squashed inside that seed is an embryo plant and endosperm or food for that plant.

wonderful seeds become seedlings
My seed starting preference is potting soil in Styrofoam cups, two seeds to a pot. These Savoy cabbage seedlings are just big enough to be separated into one per pot.

Seeds for Food

We eat lots of seeds. Perhaps you think of nuts. However, flour is ground up wheat seeds. Corn meal is ground up corn seeds. Beans and peas are seeds.

Wildlife eat seeds too. Turkeys and deer eat acorns. Squirrels eat those and other nuts. Birds feast on grass and other seeds.

Each of those consumed seeds could have become a plant. In a way we are lucky they don’t all have a chance to grow.

Cabbage transplants
My Savoy cabbage is started in January so I can transplant it to the garden in March, before my frost date. Cabbage takes a lot of cold. The mulch helps keep the soil from freezing and later from getting too warm for the plants.

Prolific Plants

What if a single dandelion invaded a lawn one spring. By the end of that spring, if all of the seeds it produced grew in that lawn, there would be no lawn. That expanse would be a field of dandelions.

Don’t believe me? Get a dandelion seed head and count all the seeds in it. How many of these does a single plant produce in one spring?

Resulting Savoy cabbage head
I grow Savoy cabbage because I love the crinkly leaves. This variety has smaller heads, just right for only two people.

In the Garden

I might have a fairly large garden. It produces, I hope, enough produce for us to eat for the entire year, fresh or stored. If everything goes well, there will be extra to sell to cover my seed costs.

Even so, I rarely use all the seeds in a packet. Each of those wonderful seeds wants to grow and I feel bad about not giving them a chance. Some of them will get lucky when they get shared with other gardeners.

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Getting Garden Seeds

My favorite wish books are arriving: the seed catalogs. The pictures are gorgeous. The varieties are tempting. In a month I will be getting garden seeds.

After drooling over the seed catalogs, it’s time to settle down into some serious garden planning. Getting garden seeds shouldn’t mean a pile of unopened packets sitting in the seed box for years.

Getting Seeds catalogs
Although Pinetree and Baker’s Creek are the main two companies I order from now, I have ordered from Shumway, Gurney’s, Jung’s and Johnny’s among others.

Serious Garden Planning

I do have a fair sized garden. However, it is finite. Mature plants take up space and don’t do well crammed in making both growing and harvesting difficult.

Every year I start with a garden diagram and a list of must grows. These are penciled into various beds. Leftover spots can be filled in with other plants.

My garden diagram needed before getting seeds
The main garden is roughly 50 feet square with the front section 16 feet square. This is not really accurate or entirely to scale. This does not matter as the only purpose is to let me decide what will be planted where.

Before going wild with the order form, there is another consideration: What will be done with the crop? Why purchase and grow a crop no one will eat?

My garden is in the Ozarks. Growing conditions aren’t the same as other places. Plants get hit with heat, humidity, flood and drought. Lots of vegetables don’t do well under these conditions.

Wild consumers are another consideration for me. Although we love eating sweet corn, I never grow it. The raccoons move in and demolish the crop and I refuse to camp out in the patch with a gun every night until it is picked.

Maturation time is important too. Tomatoes taking over three months to mature a crop are not on my list. Cabbage and other cole crops must mature before the weather gets too hot in summer or too cold in late fall.

Back to the Catalogs

Once the planning is done, it’s time for getting garden seeds picked out and ordered. My orders go in the first week of January as those leek and cabbage seeds need to be started by February.

My spring garden is a going concern already with garlic and onions. The cabbage (Savoy preferably) and leeks go into the garden in March. I have almost three months to get ready.

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Changing Colors

Nothing stays the same one day to the next. They may be similar, but never exactly the same. It shows a lot with changing colors.

Winter

Hills are gray all winter. Bare branches are gray. The sky is often gray.

On clear days the sky is a deep blue. The pastures are a rusty tan. Occasional pines are dark green with the red cedars a gray green. Mosses and lichens glow green on the trees and ground.

One day the air seems lighter, warmer. The sun rises higher and stays a little longer each day. Then the changing colors start.

Spring

At first the green is only on the forest floor and in the pastures. Then the spring ephemerals start emerging. Blues, pinks, whites erupt under the still bare gray trees.

From my barn door I watch the hillside beyond the pastures. One day it is still gray. The next there is a delicate hint of green.

As the spring ephemerals finish blooming and set seed, the hillsides turn spring green with new leaves. Other plants grow up hiding the fading ephemerals and add color to the forest floor.

Summer

Changing colors in the sky reflect the change in the seasons. The sky is now a lighter shade of blue. The clouds have white tops and puffy shapes.

On the hillsides the green has deepened to a mature green. Even there the greens vary from one kind of tree to another ranging from Kelly green to dark green.

Flowers are changing colors too. They now tend more to the white and yellow flowers on taller plants.

Sugar Maple changing colors
Although sugar maples are native trees, this one was planted in the front yard before we moved here. Bald Faced Hornets built a nest in it one year as I found out the hard way. Orchard orioles nested in it another year. This year it was late changing into fall colors.

Fall

It is fall now in the Ozarks. The hillside I watch is turning orange slowly as frost is late this year. Flowers are again mostly the blues, but darker than in the spring.

Many people love the changing colors of fall. They are pretty, but I know they are fleeting. Soon the hillside will again be gray under gray skies leaving me counting the days to spring.

See how colors change through the Ozark year in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“

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GKP Writing News

Planting Garlic

I needed another writing project. Not really. But I seem to have one. So many posts I write are about my garden that I now have an essay on planting garlic.

Ozark Gardening

Most gardening books are about northern states. What works in those places might work in the Ozarks, but probably won’t quite. The Ozarks is unique for gardening.

This area is far enough north to have seasons with occasional really cold winters. The cold usually doesn’t last for more than a week or two so the ground doesn’t freeze and stay frozen. Snow melts sometimes as it falls or within a few days.

The area is far enough south to get hot, humid weather. Along with this is intense sun that can burn up vegetable plants. Few vegetables can withstand full sun in the Ozarks.

garlic is the new garden beginning
I did use a trench in the mulch when I used hay flakes. Now I use loose hay bedding and make little wells for each clove. Either method works as long as the mulch is open above the clove so the plant can grow up quickly.

Climate Change

We had a severe drought back in 2012. The hay burned up before it could be cut. Creeks, ponds and wells went dry.

After that year, the weather has become more and more erratic. Gardening methods of many years suddenly failed.

Rain patterns changed. Now there are months of lots of rain, then months of drought. Rain often comes as downpours triggering flash floods.

Even so, Ozark gardeners rise to the challenge. And I am one of them.

Planting Garlic

Some crops are staples in my garden. There are the usual summer ones of tomatoes and peppers. I add okra and squash, both winter and summer.

Another annual crop is garlic. For thirty years I have defied gardening advice by planting garlic in the same bed. I plant it under heavy mulch without waiting for freezing temperatures.

There are now two garlic beds in my garden. The cloves go into the beds in late September. I’ve planted it already and am now watching for those garlic blades to poke up above the mulch.

By frost I hope to have two beds with rows of garlic plants. This is another reason besides having my own garlic in the kitchen: planting garlic is a success story in my garden.

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End of Summer

The end of summer arrived with a thud this year. Temperatures dropped. And the garlic chives began blooming.

Along the road the yellow ironweed is blooming. The first asters are blooming. Grass pollen is tickling the nose.

Garlic Chive flowers
When my garlic chive patch, all eight feet by ten feet of it, blooms, it looks like a field of snow. Once the sun warms it up, the insects move in and the hum can be heard all over the garden.

My Garlic Chive Patch

Many years ago my father gave me a pot of garlic chives. It was only a ten inch pot. It fit easily into a square foot of garden space.

This year my patch is close to eighty square feet. New patches keep showing up around the garden, in the lawn, along the edges of the lawn, wherever the birds dropped seeds. Their white flower umbels are easy to spot, not just for the color, but also for the hum surrounding the plants.

Bee Fly on Garlic Chive flowers
Although this insect looks a bit like a bee and might even sound like one, it is a fly. One way to tell is that it has only one set of flight wings. Bees have two. Sweet nectar attracts these insects as well as bees.

What Do You Do With Them?

All spring and summer I get this question. There must be some reason I allow this much good garden space to be covered with these plants.

I really don’t need this big of a patch. Sure, garlic chives are great in scrambled eggs, stir fries, mixed into soft cheese and relished by the goats. Still, half this patch would be more than enough.

Buckeye Butterflies on Garlic Chive flowers
Buckeye butterflies are easy to spot with the many eyes on their wings. These are enjoying nectar from my garlic chive patch.

End of Summer Beauty

Late August is the highlight of the garlic chive year. Snowy white flowers open and send out the message they are open for business. The pollinators arrive.

Small and large bumblebees, honeybees, several kinds of wasps, beetles, a variety of butterflies, bee flies, native bees move in creating a hum easy to hear all over the garden. They are so busy with the flowers I can walk through the edges and be totally ignored.

Along with the pollinators come the spiders. Webs appear. Flower spiders lurk.

Winter and lean times are coming for these creatures. This is a good chance for them to finish raising their over wintering queens or store up honey.

I really don’t need all of these garlic chives. However, this end of summer chives makes it worthwhile to have my patch.

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Growing Potatoes

Potatoes are cheap in the market. So, growing potatoes seems silly unless it is some unusual variety.

This isn’t silly to me. I like growing Yukon gold potatoes. Every year I put in a row, less than a dozen seed potatoes, just to have the pleasure of doing it.

Weather Problems

Potatoes like cool weather, but not frost. They like moist dirt, but not wet. It’s getting hard to have these conditions every spring.

This year started out too cold and the seed potatoes hunkered down to wait. Later the temperatures were cool enough. However, it was very wet, making a couple seed potatoes rot.

Last year frost kept nipping off the potato vines. Other years it stays too cold or too wet or too dry or too hot. I almost gave up growing potatoes and have given up growing more than a few.

Hilling vs. Mulch

Weeds love it when I try to hill potatoes. The last time I tried hilling, the giant ragweed got so big I had to use a saw to cut it down. Needless to add, the potatoes didn’t do well.

Now I use mulch. A standard flake gives the right distance between plants. Two flakes wide is a good width for my single row. Otherwise, a flake is a good distance between rows.

Not all purchased potato varieties do well growing under mulch. Purchased Yukon Gold do well. A way to get around this is to keep your own seed potatoes, choosing those from the plants that grow the best.

growing potatoes is fun
Yukon Gold potatoes do well growing under mulch. Ozark spring weather can make growing potatoes difficult, so I grow only a few.

Harvesting

Just because the potatoes were grown under mulch, doesn’t mean I can just rake the mulch off and pick up the potatoes. All the mulch does is keep the weeds from taking over and replacing hilling.

When I harvest the potatoes, I push the mulch away from the base of the now brown plant and pull. Then I know where to start exploring in the dirt for the potatoes. They can be anywhere in a foot across circle and up to six inches down.

For me, seeing the row of bushy potato vines and later bringing up those lovely potatoes is all the reason I need to grow a few every year.

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Why Garden?

Why garden? I don’t know why other people garden. Sometimes I’m not sure why I garden. It’s a lot or work for produce cheaply available in the market.

Then again, much of what I grow is not in the market, cheap or expensive. Perhaps that is an answer to Why garden? There are so many available varieties.

Exercise?

Tillers, hoeing, weeding, planting, picking all provide exercise. These can strin the back, ruin the fingernails, wear out jean knees and more. They do burn off a lot of calories.

Some of these methods are long since discarded in my garden. Tillers are verboten. Hoes are used sparingly. I prefer potato forks, weeders and mulch.

More to the point, gardening gives a way to destress. Mad at someone? Pull some weeds and pound them to loosen the dirt in their roots. Feeling blue? Enjoy creating color and food.

Prize Peppers an answer to why garden?
Growing your own vegetable varieties lets you grow heirlooms like my Prize Peppers. This is one you will not find in any catalogue. It’s a Macedonian sweet pepper that won blue ribbons at the Indiana State Fair. The seeds were a gift from a friend. As all such heirlooms, it’s continuation depends on those seeds being shared with other gardeners unless some seed company like Bakers Creek wants to add it to their collection. This is one of two Macedonian sweet peppers I grow every year as they are the best peppers I’ve found.

Health?

More and more I hear this answer to Why garden. Market produce is sprayed with pesticides and herbicides. Seeds can be treated as well.

All these chemicals do provide those perfect, or close to perfect vegetables we get in the market. They cut down on any actual work such as weeding, cultivating and mulching not really feasible on huge scales.

So, is home grown produce really better? It can have fewer chemicals dumped on it. But, is any place really chemical free?

Probably not. Manmade chemicals are in the rain, the air. Watering hoses shed them. They are found in the remotest places on Earth.

The only advantage is having fewer chemicals in my organic garden. Since the insets take their toll on my produce, the chemical load must be less.

Why Garden?

Thinking about it, I garden for many reasons. One is having many different tastes and vegetables. Another is the exercise and mental reflection time. It’s nice to have fewer chemicals on my food.

Most of all, I garden because I love cooking up a dinner of produce I just picked out in my garden.

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Desperate Seedlings

May is here with warm, wet (very wet) weather in the Ozarks. Trays of desperate seedlings get carried out to the porch in the morning and back into the house every night.

They aren’t taken in every night because of frost. Moths come out at night. Cut worms and other caterpillars make meals out of the seedlings. These are really hard to find as they dig down into the dirt during the day.

desperate seedlings
The cups are roomier than the usual ones for seedlings. Still, my tomato seedlings are more than ready to move out into the garden. The pepper seedlings and other plants are just as desperate. This weekend is their escape, if I can work fast enough.

Frost Date Is Past

The average frost date was a week ago. These desperate seedlings are begging to get transplanted into the garden.

Experience tells me to wait. Setting out tomatoes and peppers before Mother’s Day is usually a mistake. The weather is watching for anyone foolish enough to try it.

Late frosts are a surprise. The evening is warm enough to leave the gardener confident. In the morning those precious seedlings are black.

Not Ready Yet

Waiting is easier for me this year. My garden is not ready for all the summer planting. I am still setting things up.

Several new containers need holes drilled, gravel and dirt. The small raised bed is getting rebuilt, sort of. My impatience and sloppy masonry skills are obvious.

Last winter had cold, wet weather so some things didn’t get done. I know: excuses. It doesn’t help as I pull weeds. At least most of the garden did get done, although the weeds are moving in as fast as they can.

What Garden Plan?

There is a garden plan. All the beds, containers and extra spots are labeled. Future occupants are listed for each one.

It seems I now have a sage and a French tarragon to take over two containers. The carrots have to move to? The parsley doesn’t seem to be on the list. Oops.

Then there are the extra Black Krim tomato and two globe artichokes. I won’t mention the four kinds of basil, four kinds of marigolds, all needing to be separated from each other.

Those desperate seedlings will make it into the garden. I’m aiming for Mother’s Day, depending on the weather. The blankets will be at the ready.

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Thoughts About Gardening

The wish books have arrived filled with gorgeous pictures of produce. Even a bit of snow can’t stop the thoughts about gardening.

Looking Back

Considering the heat, sun and drought this last summer, my garden did very well. My freezers are full. The fall garden is producing. It was a successful gardening year.

There were problems. The heat and sun kept me inside too much so the weeds got out of control.

These also made the tubs too hot for the plants growing in them. The dirt was bath water warm! Shade is an important item to plan for next year.

Rabbit Food?
My Savoy cabbages looked great until the rabbits found them. However my Nubian buck Augustus didn’t mind rabbit nibbled cabbage snacks. My garden fence needs improvements.

Looking Forward

I grew a number of new plants last summer. Some were a success. Others were not.

Chinese eggplant is a better tub plant than traditional eggplant. Carrots need more water and more shade.

Sunflowers will not be in the garden again. Better planning for succession planting will be in the garden.

My seed list is growing as I add more plants. Most are old friends like Napa cabbage, bok choi, Zephyr squash, butternut squash, long beans, tomatoes, sweet peppers, Chinese celery, potatoes, beets. Newer ones include more kinds of snow peas, leeks and Savoy cabbage.

Planning ahead for Chinese cabbage
Napa cabbage and bok choi grow well in the tubs as long as I cover to deter cabbage worms and add shade to keep the tubs from getting too hot.

Thoughts about Gardening

It occurred to me that I write about my garden a lot over the course of the year. I spend a lot of time in it doing and trying different aspects of gardening.

Although I am a serious amateur gardener and read gardening books about other gardeners, I never considered writing about gardening. My garden is not neat, rarely orderly and my methods adapt each year.

Last year I kept a monthly planner about my garden. It told me a lot about how successful my garden turned out to be. Other people find my methods interesting.

Perhaps I will write down my thoughts about gardening in more detail this year. Maybe they will become a book after that. After the six I’m presently working on get finished.

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Digging Jerusalem Artichokes

When I mention digging Jerusalem artichokes to people, most of them think about the globe artichokes sold in the markets. This is not what I am talking about at all.

Globe Artichoke or Jerusalem Artichoke?

The globe artichoke is the flower of a thistle. These are enormous flowers, but just like the ones on roadside thistles before they open. If you slice through one of these, it will look like the market variety in miniature.

The Jerusalem artichoke is a sunflower. Wild varieties bloom in August and do have small tubers. My garden variety grows much taller, has large tubers and blooms in late August.

Artichokes and Potatoes

Another comment from people is how a Jerusalem artichoke is like a potato. Other than both being tubers, this is far from the truth.

Potatoes can be grown, dug, dried and stored in the pantry in a box. Yes, Jerusalem artichokes can be grown and dug like potatoes. If you try to dry them and store the min the pantry, they will wither away into husks.

digging Jerusalem artichokes
When the Jerusalem artichokes first get turned up, they are covered with dirt. This clump doesn’t have a lot of them in it. Most of the chokes broke off and had to be dug out. I never find them all.

Digging Jerusalem Artichokes

Since Jerusalem artichokes do not store well, they get dug as they will be used. I dig my first ones after the stalks have frozen and turned brown and brittle. These are chopped off about six inches over the ground and the stalks carted away. The stubs mark where to dig for tubers.

The best tool I’ve found is a potato fork. Pick one plant to dig. Have a bucket of water handy.

Use the fork to lift out the plant. The tubers are connected to the roots and buried in the ground. I use the fork to lift the tubers buried as much as a foot deep up.

I knock a lot of the dirt off. The bucket of water is for swishing off much of the dirt still on the tubers. Not all of the dirt will come off.

cleaning Jerusalem artichokes
Digging Jerusalem artichokes is time consuming. It doesn’t take long to gather up a pile. More time is spent checking for those still buried in the dirt. Rather than taking a lot of dirt into the house, I wash them off in the garden. This is the pile of washed chokes from this batch. Once inside the house, they are cleaned using scrubs and an old toothbrush. They are then ready to become mashed, stir fry like water chestnuts, pieces in stews, broken up in salads and more.

Yield

A single established plant yielded two plastic grocery sacks of tubers. This doesn’t count the discards chewed on by millipedes and sowbugs or too small to bother with.

No matter how carefully you are digging Jerusalem artichokes, you never get all of them. The plant will sprout up again in the spring to yield next winter’s crop.