Tag: Ozark gardening

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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.

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First Frost

This Ozark fall has been flirting with frost for a few weeks. The frost date isn’t until the end of October. Weather doesn’t read calendars so the first frost hit with twenty-five degrees.

There was warning in the weather forecast. Balmy days seemed to laugh at it.

Feeling Foolish

One by one I stripped and pulled the pepper plants. All tomatoes of any size came off the vines. Pumpkins and squash moved in on my pantry floor.

The weather was warm. Skies were blue. The only thought keeping me going was: Can I afford to be wrong?

If our first frost didn’t come, my summer garden would still be gone. If it did arrive, my last produce would be safely in the house. Frost would ruin this produce. I couldn’t afford to be wrong.

After first frost surprise
Reptiles disappear all winter. This young northern fence lizard hasn’t gotten the message yet. It’s basking on the old blanket I’m presently using to cover the raised bed.

Watch the Wind

All weekend the wind stayed from the southeast. This means warm or relatively warm temperatures.

Tuesday morning the weather vane began to move to the east. The wind picked up. That cold front was moving in.

Afterwards

Two mornings were in the mid twenties. All leftover squash and tomato vines hung limp, frozen.

There are some cold tender plants still growing because I took out the blankets and covered them. I keep a big stash of old blankets in the barn along with old towels and sweatshirts to use in the garden and on the goats.

Chinese celery won’t take a frost. Using old towels and blankets I’ve kept the plants growing slowly up into January.

Each morning I finish milking and go out into the garden to remove the coverings. It’s nice to see the Napa cabbage, bok choi and Chinese celery looking green and fresh.

banishing first frost cold
Nubian doe High Reaches Pamela is basking in the sun just now lighting up the barn lot after a night of freezing temperatures. Her black fur gets hot. Even the brown and gray fur on various goats gets really warm.

Goats and First Frost

I arrived to start milking and found an empty barn. Nubians love warmth. The herd had moved out in front of the barn to bask in the sun. Their warm fur helps warm up cold hands.

Now the forecast calls for some warmer temperatures. The goats, fall garden and I will be glad to enjoy them.

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Planning Ahead

So much is said about living in the now, appreciating what you see, feel, smell around you in the moment. That’s great up to a point. However, if you raise livestock or crops, planning ahead is essential.

goat coats keeping kids warm
If I want March kids, the does get to visit with Augustus in October. Part of planning ahead is to have the kids born when the weather is better. It doesn’t always work well as the goat coats on these kids of my Nubian doe High Reaches Drucilla say this March was a bit cold. Part of planning ahead is having the goat coats clean and ready just in case.

Livestock Planning

For a few years I ran a commercial rabbitry. There were around 120 does in my barn. These were roughly divided into eight sections. Why?

Gestation for a rabbit is four weeks. Weaning of baby rabbits is four weeks. The only income for a commercial rabbitry is from the sale of those baby rabbits, you guessed it, four weeks later.

Every week I bred some does, put nest boxes in for as many others, weaned babies for that many. If I didn’t keep a schedule, my rabbits went hungry.

It’s the same for other livestock. My goats have a gestation of five months. If I don’t breed in October, I have no kids to sell in the spring for money to put hay in the barn.

Planning ahead for Chinese cabbage
Napa cabbage is surprisingly cold hardy. However, cabbage worms love it. I was a bit late, but mine is wrapped with voile. The garden tubs work well for greens like this one, bok choi, peppers, eggplant and green onions among others. These seeds went in during August, so the cabbage will be ready to eat in November.

Raising Crops

Although I am only a homesteader, the same rules apply for farmers. The summer may be winding down and the summer crops with it, but spring will come again. The garden must be ready to plant then.

As a homesteader, I plant spring, summer and fall crops. January is the month to start cabbage and leeks. The end of February is time for peppers and tomatoes. August is time to plant turnips, spinach and greens along with broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

Without planning ahead for these deadlines, my garden won’t put food on my table and in my freezer. The full freezer is sure comforting in the fall.

a section of my Ozark creek
One of the joys of living out on this property is going walking up on the hills, into the ravines or along the creek. The same walks are never boring as the places change as the weather and seasons change.

Enjoying the Now?

Standing in the barn door as my goats eat their grain, I look out over the pasture to the far hill. A breeze ruffles my hair. Birds flit by or stop on a branch to scold the cat.

Even though I spend a lot of time planning ahead, enjoying the now is important. It’s what makes homesteading special.

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Eating Jerusalem Artichokes

The yellow orange flowers of Jerusalem artichokes are along the roads now. My garden patch is just beginning to bloom. This winter’s menu plan includes eating Jerusalem artichokes.

Wild and garden chokes are not the same even though they are the same species. There are several big differences.

Jerusalem artichoke flowers
Like all the flowers in the Aster family, these flowers are really a ring of ray flowers forming the petals and small disk flowers producing the seeds. These are wild Jerusalem artichoke flowers as I can’t get up high enough for the garden ones, although they are the same as I’ve seen other years.

Wild Plants

All the plants along my road are five or six feet tall. They have an array of flowers at the tips of their stalks. The leaves look like spear heads as the petioles have wings and the leaves are triangular with a long taper.

According to Samuel Thayer’s book “Nature’s Harvest” the wild tubers are long, fat tubers. I’ve never dug any up, so I don’t know.

blooms precede eating Jerusalem artichokes
The top of the cattle panel is just below this picture. One of the twines broke and I had to replace it pushing the Jerusalem artichoke stalks up as I went. They are heavy! About frost I will cut the stalks off half way as the goats love the leaves. They don’t take killing frost, only light ones. Over the winter each plant can be dug for the sackful of tubers extending several inches below the surface. It’s impossible to find all of them so next year’s crop will grow here.

Garden Plants

Growing Jerusalem artichokes in the garden is challenging because of is their height. Thick two inch diameter stalks tower over my head. I haven’t measured them, but they are close to ten feet tall. Their roots aren’t deep enough to support this height.

My patch is lined on each side by cattle panels. A rope surrounds the patch with twine running between the panels to help support these huge plants. It’s a nuisance to have them fall over.

These plants bloom about two weeks later than their wild cousins. Each has fewer flowers on the ends of their stalks.

Eating Jerusalem artichokes from the garden is challenging too. These tubers are knobby with tight creases. Dirt clings to them and fills every crevice.

When I dig the tubers after frost, I have a bucket of water with me. First I shake and rub off all the dirt I can. Then I dunk them in the water and shake off more mud. Once in the kitchen I resort to an old toothbrush and often snap the knobs off the main tuber.

Eating Jerusalem Artichokes

Maybe someday I will sample the wild tubers. The description of them makes them sound a lot like the garden ones I grow, but smaller.

I find my tubers can be used like water chestnuts in stir fry or added to stews. Cooked they turn soft and taste a bit sweet. One plant produces lots of tubers, so my garden has a big supply.

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October Is Pumpkin Month

Yes, this is September. However, now is the time to get ready for Pumpkin Month. One way to do that is to check out “The Pumpkin Project”.

It is too late to grow pumpkins as frost kills the vines. Fall is when pumpkins arrive in the stores and get ripe in the garden.

pumpkin month honoree
Sugar pie pumpkins are the best eating pumpkins. Larger pumpkins can be eaten, but are coarser and not as sweet. Giant pumpkins are not eaten.

Pumpkins Aren’t Just Decorations

Pumpkin displays start appearing at houses around town in late September. I like to keep track of these as most people putting these up throw the pumpkins away after Halloween. Unless the weather has been very cold, I like to take these pumpkins home.

At my house the smaller pie pumpkins become pumpkin puree for cookies or soups. Some are chunks in stews.

Bigger pumpkins are treats for my goats. I cut them into bite sized pieces and take them out each evening. A few pieces go on each plate of grain.

Different goats eat the pieces differently. Agate pushes hers around as she eats all the grain. Then she eats the pumpkin pieces. Drucilla and Spring attack the dish before it is even set down in front of them as they grab the pieces, then eat their grain.

cover of "The Pumpkin Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
The focus of this book may be pumpkins, but it explores many aspects of botany and plants.

“The Pumpkin Project”

This science activity book has lots of pumpkin puzzles and investigations in it. Many of them start with the seeds and growing pumpkin vines.

There are stories about pumpkin history and growing giant pumpkins by people in the U.S., Sweden and Australia who grew award winning giant pumpkins. These are weighed at special fairs called Weigh Offs.

For Pumpkin Month there are more things to do with pumpkins. Of course, you can carve a pumpkin, but then it’s not good for anything but display. Painting one lets you cook up the pumpkin later.

What Can You Cook Up?

There are recipes for making pumpkin puree. Then you can make not only cookies, but pumpkin bread, Caribbean pumpkin bread, cheesecake, soups, pie and more. You can even roast the seeds for snacking.

In honor of Pumpkin Month, you can get a free pdf of “The Pumpkin Project” by emailing me and asking. The book is only available in print or as a large pdf.

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Giant Sunflowers

The roadsides are lined with yellow and orange wild sunflowers of many kinds. This year giant sunflowers are growing in my garden.

Last Year

Seed catalogs have lots of pictures of many varieties of sunflowers. Most are strictly pretty flowers. A few will produce edible seeds.

Some of these are giant sunflowers growing to ten feet or more. A packet of Mongolian Giants was added to the seed order just for fun.

Wind can be a problem for tall plants. After some thought, I placed the sunflowers along a tall deer fence so I could tie them up, if necessary.

The problem was how edible sunflowers are. Deer reached through the fence. Groundhogs crawled through. Only one plant, hidden inside yet another wire ring, survived.

This plant grew tall although a few leaves disappeared. It produced a large flower head. No bird even looked at this treat as every seed was empty.

giant sunflowers
Watching these giant sunflower plants get taller and taller is fun. The flowerheads seem to start small and get bigger. It’s a good thing they are against a fence as the flowers made the plants top heavy. I’ve had a couple tall over and tied the others to increase support for them.

This Year

I had left over seeds. A different fence was selected, an interior one. And the plants grew. And grew.

Giant sunflowers are giants. Some of these must be ten feet tall and tower over me as well as the tomatoes growing on the other side of the fence and the okra trying to grow alongside of them.

Now these giants are blooming. Interestingly, the heads open only about six inches across then steadily get bigger. They start facing out toward the sun and later bend down.

Just For Fun

Although we like eating sunflower seeds, there won’t be enough to last very long. The birds will probably get many of the seeds as the flower heads are too far overhead to bag.

The packets boast how tall the plants get. I remember county fair entries of these as people vied for who could grow the tallest ones.

We won’t enter these in any fairs as our county fairs are now past. However, these giant sunflowers have been fun to grow.

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Purple Milkweed Blooming

Missouri is home to a wide variety of milkweeds that spread their blooms over the warm months. The purple milkweed blooming along the roads and in the edges of the woods is the first of the milkweed parade.

No Milkweeds Means No Monarchs

This is what the Missouri Conservation Department keeps saying. And it is true as milkweeds are the only plants their caterpillars feed on.

Those milkweeds are fewer in number every year as the places where they grow are plowed under, sprayed and mowed. They have no modern economic value, so they are destroyed with little thought for the consequences.

butterflies love purple milkweed blooming
Butterfly gardens, especially those with milkweeds are popular for monarch butterflies. Purple milkweed, Asclepias purpurescens, is a good choice for semi shade. It is a lovely plant and very popular with butterflies, wasps, bumblebees. clearwing hawkmoths and more.

Valuable Milkweeds

Although the big push to grow milkweeds is for the monarchs, there are other reasons too. An easy dozen kinds of insects visit the flowers.

Purple milkweed blooming is a magnet. Frittilary butterflies were tromping around drinking nectar. Dodging their feet were wasps, bumblebees and bees. Another visitor is the clearwing hawkmoth that hovers like an hummingbird.

Flower or crab spiders ambush prey on the flowers. Various beetles move in. The plants attract aphids and milkweed bugs.

Perennials

Because milkweeds are perennials, they are great for erosion control. Some are very showy like the popular butterfly weed. Others need lots of space like the common milkweed that spreads into a patch. Most like lots of sun.

A huge patch of purple milkweed blooming is gorgeous. The clouds of orange, brown, yellow, white, purple, black and more butterflies shifting between the upright umbels add to the beauty.

cover for "Missouri's Milkweeds, Milkvines and Pipevines" by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
A guidebook and more to the milkweeds, milkvines and pipevines known to grow in Missouri.

Growing Places

I see purple milkweed blooming in places with some shade and moisture. The common milkweed does well in road ditches, sometimes reaching six feet fall or more. Butterfly weed likes it drier and sunnier. It is rarely over two feet tall. Water gardens or the edges of ponds and lakes is favored by pink swamp milkweed.

Green, whorled and spider milkweeds are easy to grow too. They like dry and sunny places.

Butterfly gardens need milkweeds.

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Storm Reports

Lately the news has lots of storm reports. One of my latest reading books was “A Storm Too Soon” by Michael J. Tougias about a storm to rival the reports.

This excellent nonfiction thriller follows three sailors on a sailboat crossing the Atlantic. They left a month before hurricane season, but two low pressures joined forces to create a hurricane.

When the sailboat sinks, the Coast Guard rescue units attempt to find the life raft and rescue the sailors. There are photographs in the book of the monstrous eighty foot tall waves.

Local Storm Reports

Storms much tamer than the one in the book have been passing through the Ozarks lately. One caused a flash flood. Most drop an inch or less of rain, maybe have some lightning and thunder and big winds.

The frequency can be a nuisance. The grass loves the rain and warm weather. The mower doesn’t mind the warm weather, but doesn’t like the rain or resulting wet grass. Barn cleaning is no fun in wet weather either, especially rain as the goats are in the way.

I’ve written about Ozark storms in both “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and “My Ozark Home”. The ones in recent years are different as they are usually small rains or big downpours.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
Several of the nature essays in this book concern storms, rain, ice and snow, and the results of those storms.

Gardens and Rain

With summer plants and seeds going into the garden, the frequent small rains are very helpful. I put in the squash seeds, let the rain water them in and watch the seedlings appear a few days later. Tomatoes and peppers love the rain too.

One problem has come up. The flash flood filled in the creek pool I use for water during dry times with gravel.

That is another aspect of the new weather patterns. A wet time is followed by a dry one that borders on drought before the next wet cycle begins.

The gravel problem is one of many to solve. For the present I will watch the storm reports.

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Growing Savoy Cabbage

Cabbage is not a big favorite for meals at my house. Brussels sprouts, broccoli and spinach are much preferred. So the Savoy cabbage remained a pretty picture in the seed catalog.

Regular cabbage is a fairly smooth ball of ribbed, green leaves. It likes colder weather and will take frost. Hot weather makes it turn bitter. I put in a few plants in the spring, but mostly put them in for a fall crop.

Temptation

The regular cabbage came as transplants appearing the first of April or thereabouts. There were four plants in a pack.

Savoy cabbage was not available as transplants. In fact, most people in my area have never heard of it.

Every year I thumbed past the cabbage seed offers and stopped to admire the crinkled leaves in this picture. This year I ordered a packet just because.

Seed Starting Headaches

Usually I only start seeds for tomatoes and peppers and similar summer crops. These go into pots about the middle of March.

Cabbage likes cold weather. It needs to be in the ground in March. That means starting the seeds in January.

January seedlings, like all seedlings, need light. A warm sunny porch will not be available. I bought a grow light.

Two trays of cabbage and leek seedlings meant one tray under in the morning for the day. The other tray went under in the evening for the night shift.

Savoy cabbage transplant
Perhaps thick mulch isn’t great in the spring as it keeps the ground cool, but it does help when the temperatures drop to twenty. It keep the weeds at bay. Cabbage worms can hide in it. Later on it will keep the ground cool so the Savoy cabbage can survive Ozark sun a little longer.

Garden Headaches

The Savoy cabbage made it into the garden in early March. Of course winter moved right back in. The blankets came out for killing frost nights.

Now the cabbage moths have arrived. I’ve been busy doing other big projects and neglected to get these little transplants under mesh. Now I’m playing catch up once again.

At least, now that spring is officially here, winter visits are shorter and not as bad. The mesh is over the plants. Maybe I will get a few heads of Savoy cabbage from my dozen plants.