Yep... Still Green

written by Yvonne

Honey and Olive wanted to make sure everyone knows how much they help in all of our gardening endeavors.  They did a good job of making sure these bales of straw didn't blow away.

And yes, you guessed it. We are still (happily) eating spinach and lettuce!  Baskets full!

And there is still plenty more growing!  Actually, after harvesting a good amount of the spinach pictured here, we started pulling up the plants because they've begun to bolt.

This is the other end of the lettuce/spinach bed. Tom tilled it and planted (from left to right) snap peas, Provider bush beans, Maxibell bush beans.  In the background you can see new rows of spinach coming up in bed #3.

The collards, Swiss chard and kale are just about ready to eat.  Next weekend I'll likely make something with the Swiss chard. Upon further inspection, Tom determined that the large plant in the right foreground is a couple of turnips, not collards.  Still good eatin' either way.

Only a few of the peas have come up so far (center).

This volunteer cucumber showed up out of nowhere. It's a little early for cucumbers but if it wants to come up now, fine by us.

Still plucking off the strawberry flowers and it seems to be working because the plants are really growing nicely.

We are a behind in starting summer seeds. We should have started melons, squash, peppers and tomatoes a few weeks ago, but there are only so many hours in a weekend.  Tom filled up the pots I made with dirt and tomorrow I'll get some squash, melons, and pumpkin seed started.

Tom also tilled the garden annex area. Ya know, I think we just like having this as potential so we get it ready every year and think we're going to find just the right thing to make it work. Yes, a few squashes materialized last year, but for the most part, it's been a dud. Well NO MORE! Boy do we have plans for it now!  You may recall we purchased rosemary and two kinds of mint plants in early Spring. This is where they are going to reside and we have high hopes they will 'take' since both are aggressive and hearty. We've managed to keep the plants alive through some really cold weather. Now that the bed is ready, they'll get planted tomorrow.  THEN, we're going to take chicken wire previously used for compost bins and hang it on the outside of the carport.  We'll secure it down at the bottom of this of brick wall with stakes.  Then we'll transplant some jasmine at the back of this bed and let it grow up the chicken wire.  We'll have a nice beautiful natural wall blocking off the ugly carport. It'll make for a much nicer view from the back patio.  We did the same thing several years ago on one end of the front porch and it's worked great.

Whew!  It's finally done! And what a job it was. It took two weekends, many hours, 3 broken tools, and MANY loads of brush wheeled to the front yard for pick up.  But the back fence line has now been completely cleared out. We cleared a third of it together two weekends ago then Tom finished the last 2/3 by himself.

Here's what it looked like before....

and here it is after!

Before...

after!

This is before mostly shows the overgrown compost bins. Nonetheless, here is before...

and after!  Doesn't even look like the same yard, does it? Now that it's a nice open, accessible space Tom was able to get to the trees to hang some bee boxes. (Read more about that later this week at www.tsbeeshoney.com.)  Our neighbors told us numerous times over the weekend how great it looked. Guess it was worse than we thought.

Welcome 2013!

Written by Yvonne

2012 was a very busy holiday season for us and thus, our blogging came to a screeching halt.  The garden still exists and we've been eating out of it, but we just haven't had time to blog.

Since the last post, Tom repaired the hoop houses which turned out to be essential since there have been a few weeks of nice cold weather. They really took a beating this winter. We had severe winds recently that really tore them up. As it turns out, with the Ruth Stout mulching system, we may not even need the hoop houses next year. (See more about this later in the post.)

We've been enjoying the most abundant crop of lettuce ever and pretty much handed a bag of lettuce to anyone who came to visit during the holidays.  Now, though, it's done for the season.

Because we planted spinach and collards so late, the only greens at our disposal were turnip, and we ate a fair share of those.  I'm just now starting to pull up a carrot or two.  They are small to medium sized and DELICIOUS.  The cabbage is getting big, but several were lost to the cold.  Garlic, spinach, collards, carrots, cabbage and a small plant of parsley are still in the ground and doing well.

Things that did not do well this Fall/Winter:

• Beets
• Winter Squash
• Sweet Potatoes

The sweet potatoes we planted really didn't mature.  The roots grew, but true tubers never formed. Our best guess is that the soil in this area is very heavy clay (as you can see). And you are correct; that's not Olive. That's our new dog Honey. (What else would a beekeeper name a dog?!)  ;)  More about her later.

I pulled up the remaining turnips...

and we made turnip chips out of them. We sliced them up in the good ol' food processor...

then fried them in oil and...

well, they didn't turn out all that great.  They never really got crisp. We tried the oven-bake method on one batch, but they still didn't crisp up.

Now it's on to 2013! Something to look forward to when it's too cold to be outside is perusing through new seed catalogs and deciding what new things we want to plant.  We placed our seed order from two places this year: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Missouri and Sow True Seeds in Asheville.

The Sow True Seeds came right away, but we're still waiting on Baker Creek.  We needed a LOT of seeds this year because we either used up what we had or the seeds were too old to mess with so we threw them out.

For Christmas, Tom gave me an out-of-print book by Ruth Stout called "Ruth Stout's No-Work Garden." We mentioned her in a previous blog post (4/25/11). She had a no-fuss method of gardening that relied heavily on mulching. After seeing her results and after reading her book, I'm sold!  We will begin using her method this Spring and of course, you'll have a front-row seat to see what that means and how it goes. One thing I gather from her book is that the first year may not produce great results, so we're setting low expectations for crops this year. But subsequent years will be less and less work each time.

I put the greenhouse cover back on so we could get seeds started ASAP.  We both agreed that we haven't really gotten a jump on Spring and Summer crops these past several years and this year we are committed to starting seeds much earlier (including tomatoes!).  Olive and Honey approve.

For anyone who doesn't know about our new dog Honey, here's her story.  She was a stray found on Christmas day by an acquaintance of mine. They have two cats and couldn't bring the dog into their home so she spend a week or so outside in the cold (it got down to 26 degrees on the coldest night) until a home could be found.  I brought her to our pack the day before New Year's Eve on a trial basis. After the first 48 hours, we were ready to give her back (knowing full well she'd be taken to the pound and put to her final resting place).  Still,  Tom couldn't help himself and named her Honey because she was the color of golden honey, and well, he's a beekeeper at. But we stuck it out, got some tips from Turk (Off Leash Dog Training) and things improved a little.  Things were rough-going between Olive and new dog for that whole first week.  Honey wasn't completely housebroken either.  Let's just say for the first week, nerves were frazzled; mine, Tom's and Olive's.  But each day we saw signs that made us think things were headed in the right direction:  she adjusted to a feeding and bathroom routine, she did better on walks, she and Olive seemed to find a better ways to play, we figured out how to feed them separately so no fights broke out, etc.

Now Honey is a full-fledged member of our pack. She's had her first lesson with Turk (with many more to come) and she and Olive are BFF's. As you can see, she's still on a leash when outside.  It will be a good while longer before she gets to run free, but that's OK. We need to be patient and do our homework to get her trained so she's safe and

Written by Tom

We have severe windstorms each spring no matter what, that much I've observed. And when I say windstorms, I'm talking about 40-65 mph winds. Tends to happen with the wild swings behind very warm spring days combined with still-winter cold nights. Last year our green house fell over, along with every seed tray, multiple times. I finally figured out a good method of securing the greenhouse: put two tent stakes into the ground on either side, and run a bungee cord from the stake to the top of the house. Works perfectly and survived the latest windstorm in which tornadoes were reported in Charlotte.

So ... what's a greenhouse without a temperature check? I got this handy dandy weather station for Christmas, thanks to my in-laws the Mahoneys and Yvonne who tipped them off. I've been wanting to know the temperature at my bee hives, which get all-day sun. I just knew it was different, and warmer, than what the weatherman and thermostat reported. Boy was I right. BUT, I realized the same was true for the greenhouse and I couldn't stand not knowing how much warmer a greenhouse is. So, I put the outside sensor from the weather station in the greenhouse for a test.

On a 51-degree day, the temp in the greenhouse rose and rose ... and kept rising. I honestly couldn't believe what I saw. As you can see below, on the top left-side of the readout for Feb. 3, the greenhouse temperature at 3:13 p.m. was 96 degrees F! On that same morning, the temperature outside the greenhouse was 27 degrees F. Wow.

And here's the temperature readout from our carport. Yep, 51 degrees, while the greenhouse was a-cookin'. I can't wait to start seeds there early!!!

Gutters and Hoop Houses

written by Yvonne

This past weekend was likely the last mild weekend before the cold comes.  It was BEAUTIFUL weather to be outside and we got a lot of work done.

This isn't garden related but it was pretty ingenious so we thought we'd share it. The gutters have needed cleaning oh... since we moved in three and a half years ago. On our annual Fall drive through the country to get pumpkins and apples I happened to see a guy cleaning his gutters using a leaf blower.  He had a long tube attached to the blower and, while standing on the ground (not on a ladder), he was blowing leaves out of the gutters.  We did some YouTube research and Tom came up with a similar contraption.  He took two pieces of gutter (the part that runs down the side of the house) and slipped them over the end of the leaf blower and volia!  Gutters cleaned of leaves!

Now, onto garden news.

This is beans and okra.  I harvested the last few pods of okra and pulled the plants up.  I'll keep the beans in for a little while longer, hoping they'll recover from being eaten buy bugs.  They are putting out beans, but the leaves are decimated.  In a few weeks, we'll pull these out as well and plant rye grass.  Each year we are rotating which bed gets planted with rye grass.  Last year, it was bed 1, this year it's bed 2.  Doing this takes that particular bed out of fall/winter planting, but it adds back much needed nutrients so it will be ready for the next season.

Turnips are taking off...

but the carrots and beets are taking their time.

This looks like a mess because of the leaves, but all the green is actually garlic.

Cabbage (on the left side of the bed) is doing great.  I suspect we'll have to thin them out pretty soon because they get HUGE.

Wanna see something super cool?  The first lettuce photo below is dated 10/15.  The second is dated 10/29.  In two-weeks time the lettuce went from sprouts to a full out!

As such, we had our first salad of the season with dinner last night and had enough for lunch today.

We let bed #4 go to weeds during the last half of summer.  Now it's time to dig it all out and prepare it for planting.

I pulled out the cowpeas (much to Tom's disappointment)...

and cleared the whole thing of weeds.  Once the weeds were gone, it became evident that this bed needs more dirt so we'll have to wait another week or so to plant anything until more dirt is added.  We're WAY too late for planting more fall crops (of course) but we'll throw seed down anyway because our winters are fairly mild and we should be able to get collards, spinach and squash growing through the winter.  In the very front corner of the bed, you can see a splotch of green - this was a bit of parsley still hanging on that I dug out from the weeds.  I left it in so it can thrive.

This week the temps will be dropping into the high-to-mid 30s so it's time to get the hoop houses up so we don't loose anything.

This morning I pulled out all hoop house pieces so we could take an inventory and get anything else needed to get all three beds full coverage.

Many of the plastic C clamps broke off when I put the hoop in so when Tom goes to Lowe's tonight, he's going to investigate other clamps that may tolerate weather better.

Short and sweet

written by Yvonne

Not a whole lot to report, but our fall garden is getting a very good start.

We are gonna have a TON of lettuce. Salads for everyone!

Cabbage is coming up as well.

Garlic took off right away.

Carrots slow but coming up.

Turnips are sprouting as are the beets. However, the beets aren't moving as fast as the turnips.