Spring is here in the Ozarks. It could still frost, but days are warm. It’s time to start those garden tub greens.
Although I do grow some taller snow peas in the ground with a trellis, I have much better luck with these shorter purple pod snow peas in the raised bed. Raised beds are a big version of a garden tub.
Which Greens?
There are several to choose from. The big question is whether or not frost will still visit. That takes bok choi off the list for a couple more weeks.
Thumbing through my line of seed packets, I take out Napa cabbage, beets, kohlrabi, green onions, red and green lettuces, tatsoi, red and green mizuna and carrots. These should take a light frost.
Savoy cabbage gets too big for a tub container, but is fine in this long raised bed. The mesh is some voile I found on sale. It isn’t real sturdy, but works well to keep cabbage moths off and is light enough to rest over the plants.
Why Garden Tub Greens?
My garden soil is still cold. The tubs sit out in the sun and warm up. All of the greens I’ve chosen may like cooler weather, but they don’t like it cold and damp.
The one disadvantage is the size of the tubs. Some of these do get big, so I can’t plant very many. My other option is pulling some like beets early for just the greens.
Another consideration is how long these take to mature. Ozark springs can be long and cool. More often they are short and become summer almost overnight.
Planting the Tubs
My garden tubs have mulch on them. Most of this mulch needs to stay or the weeds will have a party.
So I clear a ring around the tub a few inches inside. Seeds are planted in this ring.
The weeds will still have a party. At least, they will try. But it will be a small party.
Succession
About the time these greens are ready to harvest, summer will be moving in. I can still grow greens in some of the tubs, but ones that can take some heat.
Most of the tubs will have peppers, eggplant and other summer crops to fill them until fall cools things down again.
I have written about using tubs in the garden before, but it bears repeating. Since I am filling garden tubs again this year, it’s a good topic as I’ve learned more about them.
The tubs I am writing about are the empty plastic tubs from cattle licks. There are lots of cattlemen around me and these tubs are popular ways to add nutrition for their cows. My feed store buys back the empties and sells them to people like me so they are not left to get trashed out in the fields.
My garden tubs began as cattle lick tubs and are a nice size. The first step is to drill drainage holes. Then the tubs are set where they will stay as moving full tubs is very difficult and back breaking. I like the tubs because they come in a variety of styles and colors. These pepper tubs are blue and white.
Preparing the Tubs
Drainage holes are the first step. Originally I drilled several half inch holes in the bottom of the tubs necessitating use of blocks under them.
There are several difficulties with this approach. One is finding enough blocks, bricks or rocks to set under the tubs. Another is trying to pull the weeds that inevitably start growing under them.
I now drill these holes in the sides about two inches from the bottom. The tub can be set on the ground. The base provides a water reservoir for dry weather as tubs dry out fast.
Because I live near a creek that floods regularly leaving big gravel bars behind, I have a selection of gravel to choose from. As I drill four holes in a tub, I start with four larger flat rocks to cover the holes. Then I go to fist size rocks to fill up to a bit above the holes. It’s interesting to go gravel hunting as I never know what I will spot. Some rocks glitter with crystals. On rare occasions one will have an ammonite fossil in it.
Filling Garden Tubs
First and foremost is setting the tub where it will stay. Second is a layer of large gravel. I like some large, flat ones for over the drainage holes. The rest is fist sized or larger to a depth just above the drainage holes.
Then comes the dirt. It takes a lot of dirt to fill one of these tubs. My preference is a mix of dirt and compost. In reality, I use compost (sometimes pure in a pinch), dirt, sand and red dirt (clay). This last must be very well mixed in.
I have a mix of clay dirt, potting soil and compost in these garden tubs. They aren’t quite full, but close.
Using the Tubs
Most vegetables have shallow roots, so the tubs work well. One tub is sufficient for one tomato plant, three or four pepper plants or a ring of greens. I do put mulch on top to help hold moisture in.
The tubs do heat up when in the sun. I felt the dirt one sunny summer day and it was warm enough, if it was water, to take a bath. Vegetables don’t appreciate this.
This is one of the garden tubs in my garden proper with red Benigorro mizuna growing in it. The Jerusalem artichokes are in the background. Garden tubs need regular watering.
I hang sun screens on tubs in the sun. Others I place so they get afternoon shade.
Filling garden tubs is work and they do wear out in five to ten years, but they let me grow many things I couldn’t otherwise – like carrots – and my peppers prefer growing in tubs.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is a snowy week in the Ozarks. We left this behind us in the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) over thirty years ago. It has come to visit.
Snow is pretty to look at. Those flakes drift down dampening sound, making a silent world. When the sun shines again, the snow sparkles and errant bits in the air shine like diamonds.
My garden tubs have snow mounds on top. There was some wind so they each have a hollow around them. The moisture from the snow will get the tubs ready for spring planting.
Reality
The Ozarks is not prepared for a snowy week. They are so rare, the road department has no real snow removal equipment. Drivers don’t know how to cope with snow and ice on the roads.
My barn was never built for the cold. Now over a hundred years old, it is drafty and too tinder dry to put any kind of heat lamp in.
Slogging through eight or so inches of heavy snow is hard work. Unlike city people, I can’t sit it out looking out the windows. Chickens and goats need attention.
Wildlife suffers too. The squirrels curl up in their nests and sleep. Birds must find food to keep themselves warm.
The birds are lining up on the feeder at first light. They mob the place all day. Other food is under the snow and they need food to keep warm.
Double Edged Sword
We feed the birds and have ever since we moved here. This morning a flock of cardinals was waiting for breakfast to arrive. They were trying to move into the tray even as it was being set out. These birds depend on the feeder’s bounty.
If the feeder were to suddenly disappear, these birds would be in trouble. There are many more living around us than the place can actually support. They would have to fly off for miles to find another good food source which is hard to do in the snow.
Snowy Week with Cold
Often the snow disappears in a day or two in the Ozarks. This time the cold is staying for over a week so the snow will too.
It isn’t all a problem. The garlic and winter onions have a snowy blanket. They will be warmer for this snowy week.
From time to time I find a copy of some homesteading magazine. You know, the ones with the beautiful pictures of neat, clean homesteads and well dressed people. Reality hits when I look at my never ending repair list.
My chicken nests are old. I built them over thirty years ago from scrap lumber. This one finally wore out possibly due to the last time I tossed it out the door containing a black snake. The chickens insist it needs to move to the top of the to do list as it is one of their favorite nests.
Do It Right the First Time
How many times have I heard this? There is some fantasy out there trying to make me believe that, if I build something right the first time, I won’t have to do it again.
I replaced a narrow gate with a wider one so the former brace no longer reached across. The PVC pipes are over T-posts so I could hang additional wire to thwart a deer. However, the outer post leans and causes the fence to lean.
The Ozarks makes a mockery of this saying. Rain, heat, cold, humidity attack as soon or even sooner than a project is done.
My PVC gates are a good case. The pipes are holding up well. The wire is rusting. It leaves rust tracings on the pipes.
The hinges sag. I’m not sure why they sag, but they do. That leaves the gates scraping on the frozen dirt or catching on walnuts the chickens kick into their path.
Shoring up the garden fences is on the never ending repair list. Perhaps I can get to some of it this summer.
The plywood may be old, but most of it is still usable. I replaced the bottom and nailed the sides back together. This hen approves my work.
Barn Cleaning
There was a time when I scraped down to the cement when I cleaned the barn. Not now. After all, I will be tossing new bedding down and the goats will be making new deposits almost before the old bedding is out the door.
Chickens make a big mess. They toss feed out of the feeder. Their new roost pole decided to sag and refuses to stiffen up. A nest box needs rebuilding.
One thing a homesteader needs to learn is to have a pile of usable stuff. I used the old brace, bent, and a piece of PVC pipe left when the septic tank was replaced and had a brace to straighten the gate post. The metal brace was from an old lawn mower that stopped working.
New Homesteaders
Now and then I meet some people, cheery people, people who are so happy to own a place in the country. They have such big plans and dreams.
I always wonder if I will see them again in a year. Will they still be so cheerful? Or will they have met the never ending repair list, you know, the one that laughs at those fancy homesteading magazines.
Last year had lots of problems and the garden suffered. The result is that now I am growing weeds.
Doing a little weeding isn’t a problem. It can be relaxing sitting there in the garden in the sun letting the mind wander. A few weeds are to be expected.
The weeds are attacked with the potato fork to break up the soil, the soil knife to pull them and the cardboard to stop them.
Weed Overload
What is in my garden right now is a weed overload. There are lots of weeds that start growing in the fall and do their best to take over by spring.
Other weeds are perennials. These are harder to find as they spend the winter as roots hidden in the soil waiting for warm weather before exploding up.
The weeds are solid in the Jerusalem artichoke patch. The scalloped leaves are dead nettle and not edible. The smooth edged leaves are chickweed, an edible green. It has some frost damage on it.
Tackling the Overload
It’s really easy to be overwhelmed by the growing weeds. This is part of their strategy for success. There are so many, the gardener gives up and they can take over.
Unfortunately for the weeds, I am too stubborn to yield my garden to them. So, I have to have a strategy to avoid the overwhelm.
This is a moth mullein rosette. Although it is one of the weeds, it is also a lovely wild flower. I leave a few rosette here and there to enjoy the flowers next summer.
Since my garden is divided into beds and pathways, I target a section at a time. When I get too stressed, I focus on places with only a few weeds. Or I do a strip across a bed just a foot wide.
The objective of any weeding strategy is to make enough progress against the weeds each time to feel successful. Then it’s easier to come back the next day.
The pathways have cardboard on them. The vegetable bed has thick mulch. It’s ready for spring when tomatoes or peppers will move in for the season.
Growing Weeds for Food
Chickweed is one of the overwintering weeds. It has colonized the Jerusalem artichoke bed along with much of the garden.
This is one of the wild greens filled with nutrition. It has a mild taste and is good in salads, stir fries and other ways. And it is always nice to have some fresh garden greens in the middle of winter.
However, chickweed is a miniature kudzu. Left alone it smothers everything around it and produces thousands of seeds.
Spring will be vegetable growing time. Growing weeds is not part of this. So, some of the chickweed will end up on the dinner table. Most will end up in the compost pile.
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.
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.
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.
As stated in “For Love of Goats” “Fabulous fences are a fallacy fervently foisted on foolish farmers.” The same is true for garden fences and gates.
Goats are notorious for escaping fences. This is one of the tongue twisting topics in this book of tongue twisters, homonyms, alliteration, short fiction and memoir about goats.
My garden fence started as a way to keep chickens and wildlife out of the garden. This does work for chickens, as long as I remember to close the gates. Wildlife finds this as a minor barrier quickly circumvented or climbed.
PVC Gate Update
I wrote many years ago about constructing garden gates out of PVC pipe. The wood gates disintegrated in a couple of years with the moist Ozark weather. PVC pipe lasts a long time.
At the time, I had never worked with PVC pipe and this did affect the outcome. The other factor was putting the gates together out under the trees on somewhat level land.
Today the gates are still operational. They don’t hang straight because the gate posts lean (Another problem to tackle another day.) However they do not need replacing and do keep the chickens out of the garden.
There is one gate that needs repair. The garden gates have a mid pipe to strengthen them. The top and bottom are about two feet from it.
The chick yard gate is much taller and I put in only the one brace. When I snugged it up tight, the brace broke loose and needs regluing. When I replace this gate, I will use two braces as well as straightening he gate post.
Wooden gates need replacing every other year. PVC gates are harder to construct and put wire on, but they last for years. Mine have some dirt on them and the green blush of algae here and there, but they still work well.
Garden Fences
Most of my garden fence is two by four welded wire. This works for chickens, but not for rabbits. I saw a rabbit hop through the fence. Chicken wire is getting added to the bottom of the garden fences and gates now.
This fix might work for rabbits. Woodchucks, raccoons and opossums just climb over. I suppose it is possible to fence these animals out too. My garden fences and gates will keep me using livetraps when necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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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