End of the Growing Season

After the light frost at the beginning of October, the heartier plants kept producing into early November, when we were hit by several hard frosts. I'm not sure of the dates on these photos, but they're from early November, just before the hard frosts that happened around the 6th-8th. The tomatoes that were close to the soil and protected by foliage from the October frosts continued to ripen as the plants no longer were putting energy into the leaves. Some of the green tomatoes I picked also ripened on the counter and as of December 20th, I have one left!

One of my last acts in the garden was to cover the herb bed in a thick layer of straw and cardboard. I'm hoping that this will protect the iffy perennials from temperature extremes and root damage, so that I might find my oregano, thyme, sage, and marjoram greening in the spring. So far we've gotten a lot of snow, so there's a good chance they'll be insulated enough to survive.

Behold the carnage! After the october frosts, all the tender crops looked like this.


I simply can't imagine how many cucumbers I would have had if I'd started earlier in the year. As it was, I struggled to use them all!

The green beans weren't as thoroughly decimated as the squash or cucumbers. I was able to keep harvesting small amounts for a few weeks.

The obstinate wax beans surprised me with their cold tolerance and I wound up harvesting more in October than earlier in the year.


This is what harvesting tomatoes was like: searching for ripened survivors under the protective layers of dead foliage.


One of my final harvests of tomatoes and beans. The hearty onions were usable well into November, and I may even find some of them still alive in the spring.


These were harvested after the hard frosts of early November and were just fine, if a bit spicy. I'd like to find a milder variety for next year.


Of course my brassicas were going like gangbusters after the frosts, happy that the evil caterpillars were finally dead. This cabbage became delicious sauerkraut.

The hardiness champion was the Brussels sprouts, naturally. I harvested many right out of the snow!

These were the very last thing harvested from the garden, for the occasion of Kristine's visit. They were fantastic! (The visit was a great time too!)

First Frost! October 3rd

This blog has been desperately in need of an update! I think I got overwhelmed with processing photos and vegetables and kept putting it off. Basically, at the end of September I harvested a ton of veggies for a mini-CSA for mom and Joe, and then a week later (October 3rd) we had our first frost in Zumbrota.

In town it supposedly only got to 34, but I think it must have been colder here on the farmstead. All of the cucurbitaceae died, and most of the upper leaves of my beans wilted. My tomatoes got all wilted at the top, but I think the ground kept the lower branches warm and I'm finally harvesting some ripe tomatoes from them a week later. It warmed up immediately after the frost, and rained a couple of times, so the rest of the garden is doing great. The brassicaceae and cruciferae are just thrilled about the cool, wet weather, and are thriving. Another frost isn't expected for a while, so I can continue harvesting most of the vegetables. I'm still not sure if the beans are continuing to grow or not, since they just look so unhappy.

The amazing thing is that if it had just stayed a couple of degrees warmer I would still bee harvesting everything. As it is, though I got a week more growth than the median last frost-free date (9/28), so I'm not complaining.

Here are some photos from the end of September (I don't have exact dates):

This isn't even the final harvest of turnips. I got at least 30 large-sized turnips from a 3'x3' area! PS: this was the advanced guard of what was to be legions of Asian Beetles.

Not content to simply grow the vegetables, I have also been crocheting them.

The cauliflower I produced was amazingly tender and flavorful. I'm still shocked I was able to grow this finicky vegetable so well, and it was likely because of my late planting date.


I definitely need to plant more carrots next year. These were one of the tastiest and most useful of all my garden plants. They are also very fun to pull out of the ground.

Well I didn't make it to the Sierras this year, but I was able to pretend I was among the Sequoias when I was picking celery.

My cayenne didn't yield much this year but they were still tasty and cute.


These luscious greens don't know what's going to hit them in a few nights! Everything but the basil and zucchini kept producing for at least a month, though.

Update and Cauliflowers Finally Doing Something

I'm out of batteries from my camera, but my garden looks about the same as last time, but more scraggly in some places and with plenty of insane tomato plants. My tomatoes are still green, but I harvested a few large ones to encourage the plants to ripen the remaining fruit. The sun returned after a long absence and after just a couple days of warm weather some of the tomatoes are starting to yellow.

A couple of days ago I went in the garden to get rid of the gigantic cauliflower plants that, until that point, hadn't done anything but crowd my cabbages. Fortunately I peeked into the center of all the leaves and there I found some tiny white florets! I guess the plants finally got big enough to bear florets and were probably helped along by the cool weather. I may just get a harvest from them, since they're frost-tolerant.

In other cole crop news, I harvested a 4-lb cabbage today. It's absolutely beautiful and I just love it to bits.

I'm also getting cucumbers all of the sudden and put up some fermented Kosher dills yesterday (though I need to add another half pound of cukes as they come ready. The "Amour" pickling cuke is a great variety--it produces attractive, uniform fruit, and many come ripe at the same time. They're very prickly, but I think that's OK. I'm definitely going to plant more of this variety next year, and it's clear that I don't even need to bother starting them indoors.

The green beans are continuing to produce heartily, and "Provider" is my favorite variety (as befitting its name). It was the first to produce, and the beans are tender and stringless, with great flavor and a nice shape.

I've got tons of greens that I'm not harvesting. It's just hard to get excited about them in the harvest season when there are plenty of other, tastier, things to eat. The important thing is to freeze some of the collards, which are so nice to have during the winter. The komatsuna greens have (amazingly) not bolted yet and they have a succulent, spinach-like flavor (like a cross between spinach and bok choy). I will probably grow more of them next year, starting earlier, so I can appreciate having greens early in the season. The big loser has been the "Garnet Giant" mustard greens--they have yucky flavor, bolted quickly, and dye everything blue or purple. I would be more inclined to use them as an ornamental in the future, since they look cool in the garden.

First Cabbage Harvest

My cabbages came back from the brink a couple weeks ago and are quickly becoming harvest-able. All my cole crops are happy for the cool weather we've been having, though if it continues I fear I will be harvesting only green tomatoes. Today I harvested my first savoy cabbage, picking one that isn't as large as it could get, but which will clear out some space for its neighbor to mature. I cut an X into the stem I left behind, which supposedly will encourage the plant to make 4 more tiny cabbage heads. We'll see.

I'm thinking of making this one into kimchi. It's not Chinese-style cabbage, but the head is loose enough that I may be able to get the salt in.

Not much else has progressed dramatically in the garden since my last post. I harvested my daikon radishes for kimchi, but they were a touch disappointing. I'd hoped they'd be bigger and/or I'd have more of them, so I wouldn't have to buy radishes from the store, but I think I'll have to. Next year I can plant a larger, longer-maturing variety for more kimchi, though.

That still didn't put a damper on my garden enjoyment, as you can see here:

Does my baby have my nose?

This past week I've just been harvesting delicious summer squash and thinning my green onions. My carrots are coming along and I ate one of the white ones today--it was wonderfully sweet and zingy. Next year I'll plant way more carrots, because they're just so much better when you grow them at home.

Hopefully the weather will warm up a bit to give everyone's garden plants the last little jolt they need. I've been talking to other people and most of them have tons of unripe tomatoes still too. My cabbages have set a lot of fruit but they're still too tiny to harvest--I'm hoping they'll all ripen at once for pickling.

Update and Caterpillar Nightmare!

Another obligatory cloud shot. On this one I was having fun with negative space, and I like the effect.

My garden as of August 10th. The weed pressure has been very minor since I planted so late and the weather's been dry. Even in a large-ish garden I don't have to do much control. The landlord has since mown the surrounding weeds down.

It's been ages since I last updated and things in the garden have changed. We had several weeks of dry weather and then some soaking rainstorms, which seem to have jolted the garden out of its dry slumber. My tomatoes are thriving, my beans are finally getting ready to flower, my peppers are flowering, and my turnips have shot up like crazy. Since most people around here are already harvesting the above vegetables, we'll just have to see if these catch up.

My 'Garnet Giant' mustard greens are doing well. They're tasty, but zingy enough to need cooking. I love the color.

My first acorn squash. I got this on impulse at the garden store and put it in a neglected corner of the garden, but it seems to be doing well after a couple weeks of droopiness.

Does anything smell as good as a tomato plant? Oh I hope these make it to maturity!

This shot would have been cooler if I had a manual focus. In the foreground is a cucumber I bought as a seedling, and in the background are seeds I planted. In the few days since I've taken this photo, they've developed at least 2 true leaves.

When I planted this garden I tried to remain detached, since it's my first time with a real, full-size garden, and I had no idea if I'd succeed. I couldn't help but get emotionally invested, though, and now I'm terribly upset by the possible demise of my cabbages. This is worsened, of course, by my desire to make gallons and gallons of sauerkraut.

It turns out that the pretty white butterflies that were 'gracing' my garden are known as 'Introduced Cabbage Moths'. They ugly eggs at the base of the petioles of cole crops, which hatch into velvety green caterpillars. RAVENOUS green caterpillars. They go to town on the leaves, leaving shot holes and eventually destroying or at least greatly reducing yield.

They tend to be a problem later in the year because they've had months to reproduce. It probably doesn't help that the garden was surrounded by massive weeds that the landlord hadn't mowed, where the moths could have been chilling out and reproducing on cruciferae family weeds.

These were nifty until I realized they were massacring my cole crops :'-(

This head of savoy cabbage isn't too badly affected by the evil worms, but you can see some of their naughty nibbling.

So, even though I swore I wouldn't go to great lengths to save my garden from threats, I did anyway and bought up some insecticide at the hardware store. I wanted to start with tamer stuff so I got insecticidal soap and pyrethrin dust. My attempts at control were interrupted by a trip to the City and an all-day rainstorm, so the damage got worse.

I started by picking all the caterpillars I could find off of the leaves and throwing them in a bucket to drown. Then I started spraying both sides of the leaves with the insecticidal soap, but the squirt bottle was a piece of junk and would stop working every 3-4 pumps. This drove me nuts, but I got as far as I could before it got dark (about 2/3 of the plants). After a day and a half, when it stopped raining (this morning), I gave up on the insecticidal soap and switched to pyrethrin dust. It stuck fairly well to the leaves and was much easier to use than the soap--I focused it on the stem and petioles. By this time, the eggs had swollen ominously. It's supposed to kill insects on contact, so hopefully it killed any that hatched this morning. Unfortunately it poured rain today and washed the powder off a few hours later. Pyrethrins are quickly de-activated by sunlight, so perhaps I didn't loose that much activity anyway. In the future I will apply it in the evening when there's no rain predicted.

Who knows if my efforts to save my cabbages will succeed or not. I'll probably apply the pyrethrins again, and then consider that enough. There's always the colorfully rustic local farmer's market. There's only one stand that seems to grow vegetables professionally--the others are just people who planted extra and shelled out $5 to put up a stand at the market. Oh yeah, and the old lady who sells the junk out of her house and uses the market as an opportunity to chat with everyone in town. She specializes dogeared dime-store romance novels :-P

The collards don't seem to like the heat, so I may need to seed a third time, or just give up on them. You can see an evil moth on the left, just waiting to wreak more havoc.

The 'Carson Yellow Wax' beans haven't sprouted at all, much to my disappointment. I'm not sure if it's a bad batch of seed, the heat, or if the resident critters just like to eat the seeds right out of the soil.

Other than the cabbages, things are going pretty well. There are some plants that don't like the heat, so I may do yet another planting. They're doing a little better with the mass of cool air that's hanging over MN, courtesy of Hudson Bay. Let's hope it persists (as it's predicted to)...despite the cold, wet spring the crops seem to be happy this summer and MN is expecting a record harvest (though of course that's due to a record corn PLANTING, thanks to crazy high prices).

Re-seeding and General Update

First true leaves on my daikon seedlings.

A happy garden hastily photographed due to mosquito attack.

My garden is coming along nicely, and the tomatoes and herbs especially seem to be thriving. Some seeds didn't do so well and I got low germination, so yesterday I re-seeded. The problem was worst among my green beans, where I got less than 50% germination and zero germination of the Carson Yellow Wax variety. I suspect that the seeds were predated in whole or in part and then rotted beneath the soil. My reasoning is that when I dug in the rows I found few seeds, and those that I found seemed to have holes in them and were rotted. (Though the rotting itself could have caused the holes, so who knows).

July 29th:
Re-seeded

• Toscano Kale
• Champion Collards
• Hakurei Turnips
• Scarlet Queen Turnip
• Amour Pickling Cucumber
  
• All varieties of green bean
  

Next I need to pop in a couple of more cabbage plants. I had one more red cabbage plant die on me--for whatever reason they didn't take to the transplanting. My sorrel hasn't germinated, or if it has I can't identify it. I will wait a while longer and then decide if I want to re-plant or maybe put in some Thai basil.

A red sorrel seedling from the Ohio State Website. My sorrel isn't red, but the seedlings should look something like that.

Beyond some low germination, things seem to be going well. I'm getting some leaf predation by flea beetles on my turnips and radishes (though fortunately as that's increased the nibbling on my cabbages has decreased). I might look into getting some floating row cover, but I haven't been able to find it at the couple of stores I checked at. I don't know how much aerial holes will prevent root development--I'm most interested in the roots and if nibbled leaves is the cost of keeping my cabbage un-eaten, I'll happily sacrifice my turnip greens.

My peppers are still playing head-games with me, but haven't died or anything, so that's good. Many of my tomatoes plants have unripe fruit now, byt I've learned not to 'count one's chickens before they hatch' when it comes to tomatoes, so I'm cautiously excited.

Amazingly, I have one pickling cuke! It matured so quickly because I bought it as a large greenhouse seedling. What do I do with one pickling cuke?

Weather-wise it's been a pretty typical few weeks of summer. Hot days in the low- to mid-eighties with rain or a thundershower every 3-4 days. I pulled back on watering a bit, but I'll go back to it to keep the new seedbeds moist. We're going to have some extremely hot weather this weekend, so hopefully it won't damage anything.

Weed-wise, the redroot pigweed is finally starting to pop up significantly. The seedlings are still quite small, though, so they're easy to control. It's the dominant weed, joined also by lambsquarters, purslane, and cheese-weed, and a few grass species in the mulched areas. I think the mulch brought in the grass seed--I should make more of an effort to identify it, but I usually pull it out before it's big enough to do so conclusively.

Garden Update

So far nothing's germinated yet, but that's not surprising. I think I see some cracking in the soil over the beans, so hopefully they're doing their sprouting thing.

Half of my peppers are quite wilted now. I'm not sure what the problem is, since we got drenched in rain yesterday and it seems unlikely they'd be thirsty. From what I've read and heard, pepper plants often wilt, especially in hot weather. However, today was pleasant and in the low 80s, so I would think they'd be fine. Five out of five look happier than they did before the rain and the other five look wretched. I guess I will have to keep monitoring them. Like I said, they're in prime real estate so I can always replant. What I'm afraid of is phytophthora stem rot due to too MUCH water. Maybe I should back off with the hose.

My cabbages are looking happier now than before the rain, but I've seen some insect holes on the leaves. I was hoping not to have to get floating row cover this late in the game, but it might be necessary if they're going to make it to sauerkraut stage.

Starting Out in 2008

Our house, with a vibrant sunset tinted by Canadian forest fires.

Well, Dan and I have moved out to a lovely country house in Zumbrota! It came with a fenced paddock in the backyard, which the landlord was keeping sled dogs in. It seemed like just the perfect place for a garden as it will deter the more lethargic deer and rabbits. Although it was so late in the year, mom and I have had good luck starting late gardens. From a weed ecology perspective it's a good idea, because all of the early weeds have done their thing by the time you start. Also, you're past the danger of late frosts.

This year has been strange for weather. The spring was very long and wet--planting was delayed all across the Midwest and then we were hit by relentless rain leading to flooding. That, plus a few hailstorms, means that most gardens and all the crops have been delayed. I even picked and canned strawberries on July 4th! In most years they would be long over by then.

So far I've bought many started plants from the garden mart at the grocery store. Another benefit to late planting is that the starts are dirt cheap! Only $0.25 apiece for vegetables (but the herbs were more dear at $3 each). Getting the garden started was more costly than I'd hoped, but as I've learned in the past, you can't truly do it to save money unless you're comparing the costs to buying upscale organic produce. Also, there are more costs the first year. Here's the breakdown of the annual expenses:

$25 + 5 - having the neighbor till the garden + 2 straw bales
$30 - herbs and vegetable starts
$75 - seeds from Johnny Seeds (yikes!)
$25 - 6 40-lb. bags of composted manure

The garden, freshly tilled. It's in a handy, fenced paddock. The barrels in the background are the doghouses from the landlord's sled dogs.

I also got some wonderful gardening tools from Lehman's. My favorites so far are the ass-kicking Wilcox gardening tools. Each one is made from a solid piece of stainless steel, so there's nothing to break, and I've broken more trowels and dibbles than I can count. The craftsmanship is excellent and they're even marked to measure planting depth. The customer service lady I talked to just raved about them--she's been gardening for 40 years and she says the only tools she needs is a Wilcox trowel, a pair of snipers, and a new pair of gloves each year.

I also got the metal watering can I've always dreamed of, a large spade, a couple of pairs of gloves, and a heavy-duty rake.

The neighbor, a farmer himself, did a great job of tilling the garden. The soil seemed so compacted I was worried, but he fluffed it up really well and made it perfectly level. Then (after dodging a few nasty storms) I dug it into raised mounds. They're about 25' long and about 3' wide and about 1' above the walkways.

The mounds, mostly finished and planted with solanaceae.

I got enough manure for one 40-lb. bag per row (or maybe a little extra, depending on if I plant all the rows). I'm not sure if this is enough, so I might add synthetic fertilizers. Since it's the first year, I have no idea of the underlying fertility of the soil and this may be a good bet, especially for the tomatoes (those greedy bastards!).

So far the main limitation has been working around the shady areas. There are a lot of trees here, so I'll probably have to go with some irregularly shaped plantings to avoid the dark spots. I think that since I'm planting so late and the days are getting shorter, finding enough sunlight will be essential.

At this point I think the only other thing I need is an extension to the hose and one of those gentle shower head type attachments. I've been doing pretty well with the watering can, but once the whole garden is planted it will be really time consuming to water the whole thing. The landlord left a sprinkler here, as well.

I also want to get some garlic to plant in the fall, but it is outrageously expensive. Gardening books warn you off of using what you find at the grocery store, but when the option is spending $12-21 for only 3 bulbs from a fancy catalog, I may take my chances with the grocery garlic. Next: planting!