Tag: Ozark gardening

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Putting the Garden to Bed

Fall is a difficult time for a gardener like me. The summer garden is shutting down, but is still producing a little. Frost is imminent along with the death of summer crops. Do I leave the crops a few more days or pull them? Putting the garden to bed for the winter is next on my list.

Unhappy Peppers

Peppers like night temperatures above sixty followed by warmer days. Night temperatures in the forties are disliked intensely.

Many of my pepper plants are now looking like they are wilting. The soil is moist. They are starting to die. Peppers still hang on their branches trying to ripen.

Tomatoes may like the same night temperatures, but many of those plants are growing happily. Their tomatoes may not be as flavorful as summer ones, but they are much better than anything from the store.

The long beans too are shutting down. There are still some beans growing on them. It is time to pull the vines.

Ajvar Pepper, Macedonian sweet pepper
Ajvar peppers are from Macedonia. They are thick walled and sweet. This one is hard to beat on the grill. I halve, clean and roast them at 350 degrees until they wilt. Seeds are available from Bakers Creek.

Goat Treats

My goats are another factor in this decision to close up the summer garden. There are plants they like to munch on like long beans, peppers, sweet potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes. Tomatoes are not on their list.

I will pull the bean vines and the pepper plants soon while they are still green. The sweet potatoes get dug just before the forecast calls for frost. Once the goats are finished munching on them, I will add them to the compost pile.

The Jerusalem artichokes are a problem. They are over twelve feet tall with thick stems. Perhaps I will cut tops off first, then the main stem.

Putting the Garden to Bed

This may sound like the end of the garden. It isn’t. It is the beginning of next year’s garden.

Now is when I add compost and top with mulch. This adds nutrients to the garden and discourages weeds. Spring is not that far away.

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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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Doing Cold Canning

Late summer has arrived in the Ozarks along with sacks of tomatoes and peppers. That leaves me doing cold canning.

Then the library obtained a book called “Cold Canning” by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough which I checked out as soon as it was put out on the shelf. It isn’t exactly what I wanted, but I’m glad to read it for new ideas.

What Is Cold Canning?

Regular canning is hot work. It requires a big canner which is a pressure cooker, special jars with lids and rings and lots of time and hot work.

The result is a pantry filled with jars of various vegetables, sauces and more. My problem is how long those jars sit on the shelves as two old people don’t eat that much.

So, I gave up my canner and changed to freezing my vegetables. In other words, I’m doing cold canning.

Speckled Roman tomatoes for cold canning
There are lots of paste tomato varieties. Some are determinate like Roma which ripens all its tomatoes at the same time. Speckled Roman is indeterminate so it produces tomatoes the whole season. It is prolific and has a good taste.

Doing Tomatoes a New Way

My favorite tomatoes for freezing are Speckled Romans. These red and yellow striped paste tomatoes are indeterminate so the crop comes in a bag or two at a time.

Forget peeling the tomatoes. There’s nutrition in those peels most people throw away. Instead, I dice the tomatoes into a big stainless steel pot and cook them down into a thick soup.

This is strained using a colander. The juice is frozen in quart freezer bags. Then the pulp is pureed and frozen in quart freezer bags. Only two or three cups go into a bag, enough for a meal.

Those Pretty Jars

In “Cold Canning” sauces, condiments, jams and more are frozen in glass jars. The pictures look so pretty. I suppose I could use jars.

However, using bags lets me freeze them flat. This makes lining them up in the freezer easy and saves a lot of space.

The recipes are the attraction in “Cold Canning”. This year I want to try making some salsa and doing cold canning is my preferred method.

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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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Really Big Garden Weeds

I’ve mentioned my weedy garden a few times lately. Perhaps you are picturing those pesky little seedling weeds needing only a bit of cultivating to end their careers. Picture instead some really big garden weeds.

Ozark Spring Plant Paradise

Usually the Ozarks enjoys spring for, at most, a week. Then temperatures and humidity soar into summer. That didn’t happen this spring.

Cool weather now in the seventies with frequent quarter to half inch rains are only now edging toward those summer temperatures. In the meantime the cool crops like turnips, cabbage and snow peas are looking luxuriant. Weeds love this too.

meet some really big weeds
Although lambs quarters and evening primrose are allowed to grow in my garden, they do tend to become a nuisance. These have invaded my asparagus patch and will end up as goat treats or compost. They did get really out of control this year.

Classes of Weeds

There are those pesky little seedling weeds. Then there is the chickweed beloved by baby chicks and others about ankle tall. Lambs quarters, daisy fleabane and oats are some of the really big garden weeds.

Another way of dividing weeds is into those that stay and those that definitely go. Many weeds have lovely flowers. I leave a few – note the word few – of these to bloom. All others leave as soon as I can get to them.

Weather Considerations

I will work out in the garden in a misty rain. It is annoying, but not enough of one to make me quit and head for cover

Serious sprinkles and downpours mean garden time is over. Lately I’ve taken several showers as I head for the house.

Moth Mullein is not one of the really big weeds
Moth mullein is one of the wildflowers I let grow in my garden. Others are: chicory, evening primrose, yellow wood sorrel, lambs quarters, blue and purple morning glories and chickweed. Although I enjoy having them there, they do tend to become a problem as they produce lots of seeds. That means many of the plants are pulled out as weeds with only selected plants allowed to grow and bloom.

Where Do Really Big Garden Weeds Go?

Since the grasses are busy making seeds, the compost pile is not a good option. Grasses and small weeds end up on a brush pile.

The really big garden weeds get pulled, trimmed, piled and carted off each afternoon. I pile them up in the goat hay trough shortly before letting the herd in for the night.

Goats are sloppy eaters so many stems end up on the floor. These will end up in the compost pile. The rest is savored by the herd.

There will be a lot of unhappy goats when the really big garden weeds are all pulled.

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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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Gardens Need Seeds

As I try to finish putting my garden to bed for the winter, the seed catalogs lure me with their gorgeous pictures. After all, gardens need seeds to grow all those crops next season.

The Fun Part

Seed catalogs are the fun part of gardening. Each kind and variety looks so enticing. Each page is pored over, drooled over and finally flipped over to expose the next list of possible plants.

As I look through the catalogs, I start a list of seeds I would like to order. The list gets longer and longer. Window shopping is fun.

gardens need seeds and transplants like Broccoli
This fall I planted broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts transplants. With the arrival of cold weather, the two beds were put under plastic ‘tents’ to keep them warmer overnight and during the day. Cauliflower is much more cold sensitive and was cheerfully consumed by my Nubian buck. The broccoli is making florets. The sprouts have sprouts on them. Big tomato cages provide supports under the plastic draped over wires strung around posts. Rain does pool in the plastic in places, but these temporary shelters do work.

Reality Sets In

There are vegetables we don’t like to eat. There are vegetables I can’t grow for one reason or another.

Corn is one of these. We love sweet corn. Raccoons do too. Unless I want to spend my nights out in the garden, gun in hand, the raccoons eat all of the corn.

My garden is finite. The wish list is not. Unfortunately, the garden wins, mostly.

Time is also finite. The Ozarks does have a long growing season, but I don’t want to wait until September for those first tomatoes. Since I can’t set tomatoes and peppers out until mid to late May, those plants with long growing times won’t produce in time.

gardens need seeds and transplants like Brussels sprouts
Buying Brussels sprouts is much more convenient than growing them. The plants take up a lot of room yielding not that many sprouts. However, the leaves are good to eat too. They can be shredded for stir fry or dropped into soups and stews. Of course, my Nubian goats (especially Augustus) think I grow these just for them, a welcome winter treat.

Gardens Need Seeds

Once the wish list is done and reality sets in, the seed list gets trimmed. What will get planted where? How many plants can I fit into the space allotted? Can I use succession planting? If I grow it, will we et it? If we can’t eat it all, can I sell it?

By mid January, the seed lists need to become seed orders. Gardening season begins in late January for my garden. That’s when the leek and Savoy cabbage seeds are started. The transplants move to the garden in March.

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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.