Tag: Ozark gardening

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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.

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Container Gardening

The Ozarks has good soil well mixed with gravel. As my place is in a creek bottom, the gravel is a fifty fifty mix. That makes container gardening attractive.

Regular Garden

There are lots of things I grow that won’t work well in containers. Okra is one of them. One year I had an okra plant thirteen feet tall!

Pumpkins, summer and monster squash work better in the regular garden beds too. As do the tomatoes as there are so many of them.

Container gardening requires containers
Cattle lick tubs make great containers for gardening. They are heavy plastic, sturdy. The one thing to remember is that, once they are filled with gravel and soil, they are very heavy.

Easy Containers

My local feed store sells cattle lick tubs. These are sturdy plastic affairs that usually withstand cattle attacks.

The feed store buys back the empty tubs giving the ranchers someplace to go with them. Gardeners and others can buy the empties. And I have.

A few half inch holes in the bottom work for drainage. However, I am now putting the holes on the sides about an inch and a half up so I can set the tubs on the ground.

Challenges

Next year my container gardening will be easy, easier anyway. This year I have twenty-five empty containers to fill.

First, I put in a layer of larger gravel. This goes up an inch or so over the holes. This is a lot of gravel.

For the moment I am cleaning up the yard, chicken yard and barn lot. This did need doing, but was so easy to let slide. Now I need the gravel.

Second comes the dirt. These are big tubs needing close to a cubic yard of dirt. This is in short supply unless I order a load of unknown top soil with unknown ingredients in it.

I do have some dirt in tractor tires once used as raised beds, but now filled with weeds. A fifty fifty mix with compost will fill most, if not all of the containers. It just takes time and effort.

Tomato seedlings
One tomato plant can be grown in a cattle lick container. However, four pepper plants do well.

Container Gardening Dreams

What will I plant in these containers once they are ready? Perhaps carrots, lettuce, leeks, green onions and peppers will fill most of them. Onion sets are in some set up in previous years. They do well in them.

One thing is for sure. It will be interesting to see how well my container gardening experiment works out.

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Spring Promises

It’s still February. Officially, spring is a month away at the vernal equinox. So, what is it with spring promises wrapped up in warm temperatures and singing birds?

Garden Fever

My cabbage and leek seedlings don’t mind as they get to spend the day outside in the sunshine. Grow lights may work, but sunlight is so much better.

Snow pea seeds are planted. I’ll have to cover them, if frost threatens. The plants can take some frost, but the seeds don’t germinate well when they get too cold.

Tomato and pepper seeds need to be in pots to be ready for the garden in six weeks. Mine normally take eight as they must share the one grow light. Spring frost dates here are in mid April and may is a wise choice for tomatoes, peppers and squash.

chickens deliver on spring promises
Fancy, an Old Arcana rooster, is dressed in his spring finery and showing off for the hens.

Sure Sign of Spring

Spring promises are easy to find in the hen house lately. The chickens have started laying.

Chickens are long day birds. They generally stop laying in the fall when days get shorter. About six weeks after the winter solstice, the feathered ones start making deposits in the nests again.

I do try to use lights in the winter to keep at least a few eggs arriving every day. This didn’t work out well this past winter. Now, eggs are on the menu again.

Standard cochin hen
Feathers is the last standard cochin hen in the flock. She is over five years old, but still lays an egg now and then.

Winter Promises

February is too early for winter to leave. The spring promises may become nightmares in another week when winter moves back in, laughing at those who fell for those lovely warm days thinking winter cold had gone on extended holiday already.

Impatience

The Ozark weather is famous for its changeability. I’ve lived here long enough to know this.

In spite of the spring promises, I will start seedlings at the usual time, set up the garden at the usual time, tell my impatience to settle down. Spring will get here when it gets here, when winter finally does go on holiday.

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Spring Gardening

It’s amazing how uplifting sun and temperatures above freezing can be after days of near and below zero. The goats and chickens tumble out their doors to bask in the sun. Thoughts turn to kids and spring gardening.

Waiting on Kids

My Nubian doe High Reaches Juliette was due about New Year’s. The days passed and she stayed fat and showing signs, but no kids.

When she looked like any time, the temperatures plunged. Anxiety began as wet kids stand no chance in zero degrees even with an experienced mother goat.

The cold seemed to stop all kid preparation. As this cold moves on, the wait begins anew.

Reading Gardening Books

There’s not much to do outside with cold temperatures and a dusting of snow. Reading about gardening, seed sorting and starting along with spring gardening plans pass the days.

Much of the country is having much worse weather than the Ozarks. That’s one of the reasons we moved here thirty years ago. Waist deep snow along with temperatures ten and twenty below for six months didn’t fit our preferred life style.

My current gardening book “The Country Journal Book of Vegetable Gardening” written by Nancy Bubel is set in Pennsylvania. Some of the crops, all of the timing and some of the problems don’t apply here in the Ozarks. So, why is the book helpful?

Zephyr summer squash
This is definitely on my garden list for this year. Zephyr summer squash is easy to grow, delicious to eat and somewhat tolerant of squash bugs.

Universal Gardening Ideas

Some things fit gardening no matter where the garden is. The author prefers setting out rows. I have marked out beds. But planting seeds is the same.

Pennsylvania gardens are set out later than mine. But spring gardening planning entails the same details for succession planting, mulching, cultivating, seed starting and more.

Much of this and other gardening books won’t apply to the Ozarks. Enough of it does to make reading them worthwhile.

Besides, its relaxing to read about spring gardening while waiting for the season to begin. Now is when the planned garden is beautiful and productive. Before reality sets in.

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Winter Garden

With killing frost ending the summer into fall garden, my winter garden takes over. This year finds it a bit meager thanks to the groundhogs and deer, but there are a few plants left.

Choosing Plants

Cold hardiness is a must for a winter garden. It’s hard to help more sensitive plants survive.

My choices are spinach, turnips, Napa cabbage and carrots. Some others a bit more sensitive include yellow heart cabbage and winter radishes.

Chinese celery likes cool weather, but is not frost hardy. Bok choi is hard to keep too.

Winter Tactics

I use old blankets and towels along with plastic. The main raised bed is set up for a plastic cover. The new raised bed has the beginnings of a cold frame so the blankets and plastic are jury rigged for now.

This round I got caught with some leeks and beets. Luckily the beets are in the same bed as the turnips which are frost tolerant to mid twenties. The forecast is for lower, so all of this bed is covered for a few days.

winter garden strategy
Blankets and plastic may look clumsy and ineffective as winter garden protection, but this picture was taken after a night at eighteen degrees and another at fifteen degrees. The winter radishes and spinach came through just fine. All of my other beds protected in this manner survived well also, no casualties.

The Shade House

Plastic goes over this cattle panel structure turning it into an unheated greenhouse. Although the plastic doesn’t keep the inside from freezing, old towels and blankets protect plants overnight. The plastic does heat up the inside if there is any sun. It gets quite toasty necessitating opening the door.

The plastic I use is nothing fancy. It’s clear – actually cloudy white – from the hardware store. This is not greenhouse grade, but it works for the winter.

Winter Garden Greens

Generally this will hold plants into January, occasionally into spring. The shade house need only covering attention and door opening to raise some good Chinese celery and greens.

The raised beds need a more permanent winter garden solution. I’m hoping to get cold frames over both, but will make do over this cold spell.

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New Garden Beginning

My garden isn’t moving. My new garden beginning is the start of next year’s garden. It isn’t next year yet, but my garden begins when I plant my garlic patch.

Garden Preparations

Lots of things are on the ‘To Do’ list for next year’s garden. On top is clearing out the remains of this year’s garden.

Once killing frost arrives, the cucurbits, tomatoes and peppers are gone, what is left of them. The groundhog continues to evade capture thanks to squirrels removing the bait from the traps.

New cardboard and mulch are next on the list. Weeding is not the way I like to start next year’s garden. My method doesn’t eliminate the weeds, but does get about 90% of them.

Both raised beds need frameworks for plastic put up. The lumber is waiting. The workshop is being renovated.

old garden resists new garden beginning
Sugar pie pumpkins are supposed to be smaller vines, like butternut squash. These seeds didn’t know that and promptly started taking over part of the garden including racing across the garlic patch to climb up the fence. The pumpkin vines will be gone with killing frost, but the pumpkins will be in the pantry.

Fall Planting

There are greens planted for fall harvest. I don’t count these in my new farden beginning projects as they are a continuation from this year.

The Chinese celery looks great. That’s because the groundhog doesn’t like it. The other greens get eaten the day before I want to pick them. That’s another reason to put frameworks up over the raised beds.

garlic is the new garden beginning
As my garden is surrounded by lawn and pasture, weed seeds move in by the handfuls. The mulch helps keep the weeds at bay while keeping roots cool in summer and warm in winter. The trench in the mulch has garlic cloves planted in it. Once the garlic leaves are up, the mulch will be pushed around them.

Planting Garlic

This year the sugar pie pumpkin vines overran the garlic bed. As summer wanes, the vines are dying back.

There are four varieties of garlic this year: Hard neck (name unknown), German, Romanian and soft neck (probably California white). The patch wasn’t big enough so a row of walking onions left.

Rain has been scarce for a few months. It comes in quarter and half inch showers. The patch was a bit dry even under the mulch. Rain barrels supplied water.

The cloves are planted between piles of mulch. In a few weeks garlic leaves should tower over the mulch.

That will be my new garden beginning to grow, promising a first crop for the new year.

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Ending Summer Gardening

Fall’s arrival means ending summer gardening for me. It’s bittersweet for me, especially this year.

Many Challenges

Every year brings new gardening challenges. This year brought more than enough. It started with the spring crop of weeds as I didn’t get the cardboard and mulch down over the entire garden. The pathways were ankle deep by planting time.

Many of my crops didn’t come up. There is a black walnut shedding too many leaves, twigs and nuts over almost half of the garden. A wide variety of plants refuse to grow in such contaminated soil.

A new family of groundhogs moved in. So far I’ve eliminated four. The first one leveled the greens which did eventually grow back. The last one wiped out the okra, tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers and lima beans. Number five is working on the leftovers. Other leftovers were collected by a wood rat aka pack rat.

What damage the chipmunks and turtles did was masked by the groundhogs. Turtles do little damage and are easy to remove. Chipmunks are cute, for now.

Yuxi squash ending summer gardening
This squash is edible young as a summer squash or it will shell into a nice winter squash. I get the seeds from Baker’s Creek. I prefer it as summer squash mostly because if is an awkward shape. the goats love it young or shelled.

Bright Spots

Cucurbits ignore black walnut. Groundhogs and pack rats ignore squash, monster squash and pumpkins. Leeks, onions and garlic don’t seem to be on their preferred list either.

This is the first year in a long time I’ve grown onions. It won’t be the last.

We will also feast on butternut squash all winter.

The goats will enjoy monster squash for months. These mysterious squash seem to be a cushaw/Tahitian melon cross. Some crossed with the yuxi, I think, judging by the shape. The one trait all of them share is size. They are big.

monster squash for my cucurbit year
These are small monster squash. One that fell off the vine mostly shelled is about ten pounds. There are a couple of others similar in size or bigger.

Ending Summer Gardening

The squash bugs have finally overwhelmed many of the cucurbits. The winter varieties are shelling even as the vines die back.

The tomato vines still look lush on top, but fall blight is creeping up. There are few tomatoes as they got carted off or eaten by groundhogs and wood rat. The flowers have no time to develop before killing frost.

Only one container of peppers and one plant still have peppers on them. The okra leaves were eaten along with the flower buds.

With the arrival of October, I will be officially ending summer gardening as I start clearing out the summer crops, laying down cardboard and mulching. Instead I will concentrate on the few winter crops growing in the raised beds.