Busy Busy Busy

It’s funny how drastically different this spring season is compared to last year’s. We enjoyed such a mild winter and early spring last year, we were able to get a lot done. The only reason we waited until May 2 to plant our tomatoes last year was because we hadn’t yet acquired the land for them. This year has been so cold and wet that a lot of things have been delayed.

We finished planting our tomatoes in Sunset Hills on April 28. However, this may still have been too early; we’ve also since planted some at Iowa Ave. and they seem to be faring better.

Along with tomatoes in the back section of our Iowa Ave. garden we also transplanted some pepper plants last week. Because of the invasive grass, we planted the peppers in holes we cut through burlap coffee bags and lined all the paths between plants with burlap and straw.

Here’s the whole back section, complete with burlap and straw. Between the peppers and tomatoes we planted parsley, nasturtium, thyme, and other herbs.

We also started a new tomato container garden in the section by the west fence where we were growing nothing but tall grass and weeds. To keep the grass out, we laid out a tarp and plastic sheeting before placing the pots and topping with wood chips. This method worked well for us in a different section last year.

Besides dealing with the terrible grass, we’ve also found evidence of pest damage to some of our newly-sprouted bean plants (above is an Italian pole bean seedling). It happens every year, the beans and peppers are the first to be eaten. We’ve used Dawn dish soap in the past but  this year I got some Dr. Bronner’s castile soap- more natural. Mixed with water, I’ve been spraying the tops and bottoms of the leaves and stems of all of our bean plants, and the damage has been limited.

Some of the popcorn we planted sprouted, but not all of it. We want to make sure it grows close together enough for sufficient pollination, so we reseeded some of the areas where germination was low.

We have two new raised beds at Iowa Ave.  (as seen in our garden outline) this year.  I planted horseradish, mustard, and kale in one, and Eric planted ginger (pictured above) in the other. We grew ginger last year in our side yard after sprouting it in shallow pots first. This year we direct seeded- the smaller pieces are our ginger from last year, the bigger pieces are organic ginger from Local Harvest.

The other thing keeping us busy this spring is setting up a new garden space at Eric’s sister’s new house. She found a house in the city with a 1/4 acre lot, and she’s letting us farm it (thanks Amy!). We tilled up this section of her yard literally the same day she closed on the house, May 1.

We called on our Sunset Hills gardening buddy, Tom, to till the area. It was just too much space for our little walk-behind tiller.

After several hours, Tom had mowed the overgrown grass and tilled up these two big sections for us. Unfortunately we were losing daylight, so he was only able to pass over each area once with the tiller.

To really remove all the grass, we needed it tilled again. Of course it rained for the next four days straight, so it took a week before Tom was able to come out to finish the job. As he tilled we worked to pull out grass clumps, and we returned yesterday to continue pulling them out.

Here’s a view from the other side of the yard. In this big section we’ll grow sweet potatoes, squash (summer and winter), pumpkins, melons, and whatever else we can fit.

Today I applied some fertilizer and crushed gypsum to the longer, thinner section where we’ll plant tomatoes, then covered with a layer of free compost. Eric is planning to return tomorrow with our little tiller to work the compost in and space out our mounded rows, then plant tomatoes and peppers! We’re also hoping to install a drip irrigation system to help with watering.

The weather has really forced us to be super productive in the short periods of time between rain. The forecast for this coming week looks pretty clear, thankfully. Lots of work ahead of us!

Slow Time of Year for a Garden Blog…

We haven’t posted in a while… it’s winter here so there isn’t much growing, but there’s still a lot going on.  We’ve gotten a lot done since our last post on November 1. Here are some of the highlights: Eric spotted some wild oyster mushrooms living on an oak tree in early December. We harvested about 4 pounds of them, leaving some behind. We used the Missouri Department of Conservation’s book Missouri’s Wild Mushrooms to make sure we identified the mushrooms correctly. Just for fun we also made a spore print by placing a mushroom gills-down on a piece of paper (we did one black and one white sheet of paper) and letting it sit overnight. The spores are naturally released and create a colored print on the paper below; matching the color of the spores lets you positively identify your mushroom. The oyster’s spores were a milky lavender hue. We ate our fill of mushrooms, shared them with friends and family, and still had about 2 pounds extra, which we sold. They were some of the best mushrooms I’ve ever eaten, so much meatier and nuttier than cultivated oysters, and absolutely delicious raw. Meanwhile, our inoculated mushroom logs are showing signs of mycelium growth- the logs are being colonized. We’ll have our own mushrooms this spring! We harvested a late crop of dried beans from our Iowa Ave. garden in early November. This was our first year growing varieties of  beans that are meant to be dried, and we didn’t devote too much space to it. We were pleased to have enough of these black beans to save some for seed and we cooked the ones pictured above for burritos. This fall we also dug up the ginger we had planted. Another great experiment! We used some for cooking but are saving some to replant next year.

Our other big experiment this year was growing peanuts. We finally dug up our crop and ended up with a nice harvest. Definitely something to try on a larger scale someday.

Also not pictured is our sweet potato harvest from Iowa Ave and our newer garden space. Both harvests went well, and we’ve got a big box of ‘em stashed away in our basement for use this winter. In preparation for cold weather, we also re-covered our half hoop house in the side yard, with the same plastic sheeting we used last year. It hasn’t gotten terribly cold yet, but it’ll be useful this spring to house our tomato seedlings. In Sunset Hills, we mulched our new garlic bed in mid-November, before it got too cold. We’ve also been keeping busy (and paying the bills) with some landscaping projects. We custom-designed this for a neighbor who loved our original herb spiral, and included a large paver patio, whimsical reclaimed brick pathway, and free city mulch. This spring we’ll plant the herb spiral and landscape the surrounding area with native perennials and whatever else she might want. In our free time we’ve also been doing a lot of crafting, including these wooden gnome doors. Before the holidays we exhibited at some local craft fairs, and we started our own Etsy shop. When we’re stuck inside over the winter we like having a creative outlet, and the extra income doesn’t hurt.

I’ve also made a bunch of miniature morel mushrooms to accessorize our gnome doors, as well as jewelry and wallets made out of discarded bike tubes.

Suffice it to say, we’ve been staying busy! And now seed catalogs are pouring in… can’t wait to get back into the soil in 2013!

Frugal Friday: Re-Growing Celery

We’ve tried growing celery from seed with mediocre results. Then I read that you can re-grow it from the base of store-bought celery. Seriously, all you have to do is plant the stump, ideally from organic celery, and keep it well watered! Some people suggest you root it in a dish of water inside first (directions and photos here), though I skipped that step and planted mine directly in the soil outside and it did just fine. You can also plant it in a container, though it seems they grow faster in the ground. Having it in a pot would allow you to bring it inside, which would be great for the winter. This one’s been in the ground for about two months and is just starting to produce stalks worth harvesting. The outside of the stump dried up fairly quickly, but with steady watering the center soon sprouted and produced new stalks.

There are a number of benefits to growing your own celery. The best thing, in my opinion, is that you can just cut what you need and leave the rest to keep growing, instead of having a whole bunch of celery taking up room in your fridge all at once (like we used to do).  Also fresh celery leaves are great for cooking and can be used as a substitute for celery seed or flakes. Plus the celery will continue to grow new stalks after harvesting.

We will probably transplant this celery and keep it inside for the winter ( in milder climates it can overwinter in the ground). Celery is a biennial, so it’ll produce seed in its second year. We may never have to buy celery again!

What’s Growing On? Iowa Avenue Garden, Fall 2012

This year, with our expansion into Sunset Hills where the majority of our tomato crop was grown, we unfortunately ended up putting the Iowa Avenue (not Street, as we’ve been calling it!) garden on the back-burner. We built the Iowa Ave. garden two years ago, and it turned into our experimental and seed garden, whereas Sunset Hills became more of a market garden.  With the changing seasons and the tomatoes slowing down, we’ve been spending more time on Iowa Ave. First on the agenda- fighting the evil, invasive grass. Second, building fences around all our raised beds to keep out chickens and dogs. Third, planting cool-season seeds and transplants!

We seeded two different varieties of spinach on September 25. We took this photo today, a month later.

On the other half of the spinach bed we sowed a mix of spicy Asian greens from seeds we’d saved previously.

We love radishes, especially because they grow so quickly! This fall we’re growing icicle and French breakfast radishes. These are just babies, but they’ll be plump and ready to harvest in no time!

If you look closely you can see part of a row of carrot seedlings we sowed from seeds we’d saved. We’ll have to thin out some of the carrots, since they were planted close together due to the small size of the seed. Note: these were planted at the same time as the radishes.

This cilantro self-seeded from plants we grew in the spring. Cilantro is quick to bolt in the summer, so when it flowers and goes to seed we harvest some of the dried seeds for coriander seasoning, save some to plant later, and leave some on the plants to self-seed.

Our transplanted Red Russian kale is doing well.

Here remains the only sign of our failed potato tower experiment- a few potatoes left in the ground have started to sprout.

We can’t wait to dig up the sweet potato bed, coming soon!

From a distance, this looks like a tangled, weedy mess of stocky tomato plants. The grass was so thick in this area of the garden, and we didn’t have the resources to get it up, so we laid out a tarp, planted tomato plants in pots, and mulched around them. As we said, we like to experiment.

Up close, you can see this patch has been pretty successful, considering they lived in pots through the extreme summer heat and drought. This variety of cherry tomato has been very prolific, hardy, thick-skinned, and a hit at the market in combination with our sweet yellow cherry tomatoes.

180 Square Feet of Garlic

We planted a new garlic bed at Sunset Hills last week. In our zone, traditional garden wisdom says to plant garlic around Columbus day. That way the roots can start growing before the ground freezes, giving the bulbs a head start in spring. Our tomato garden is still going strong, and another gardener holds claim to the larger tilled patch, so we built our new garlic bed the only other place where it will still get full sun- behind this shed on the south end of the yard. It turns out, as a neighbor later told us, this shed was used to house a horse about 40 years ago. That means the soil is well fertilized!

It’s true, the soil is great. In a perfect world, we would’ve had our chickens scratch and peck the soil to prepare the bed for us, but we had neither the time nor the chicken tractor to do so. Instead, we bought a tiller from a neighbor to dig up the bed. Eric did most of the tilling… that little engine was strong and jerky. While he tilled, Eric’s mom and I pulled out as much of the grass and roots as we could, with rakes and by hand.

This is only one of the piles of grass we removed, there were several more. In the background, you can see Eric adding some soil amendments- we added leaf compost, granite dust, ash, and bat guano.

It’s best to plant garlic that was grown locally, so you know it’s suitable for your climate. On the right is garlic we’d harvested earlier in the summer, a hardneck variety and some elephant garlic, but it wasn’t enough for our new 12′ x 15′ garlic garden. Unfortunately we missed the boat on buying local garlic, but we’re betting the store-bought cloves on the left will grow just fine. We selected the biggest, healthiest-looking cloves to plant.

Each clove was planted about 2 inches deep and about 5 inches apart. We laid the bed out in four sections, separated by narrow walkways for us to get around, then fenced it in with wildlife netting to keep the deer out. We’ll add mulch before it gets too cold, to keep the ground a little warmer.

We had a couple storms last week, and the bamboo stakes holding the fence blew or fell over, allowing some deer in. We did see some cloves dug up, but mostly it just looks like the deer walked around a little and left. They’re not supposed to like garlic, but we’ll see- these suburban deer seem to eat pretty much everything. We re-staked the fence, so hopefully that’s the extent of the damage.

Our garden in Sunset Hills is part of a backyard in a small subdivision, which used to be one large family farm. In the background of the photo is the remaining farmland that hasn’t been developed. We’ve talked with old Farmer Hank, one of the neighbors, about leasing some of the beautiful, creek-bottom land for farming. He doesn’t seem too interested, but we’ll see!

Fall Garden Overhaul

The Iowa Street garden has plenty of life left after this brutal summer. This year our main harvests from this garden were cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, cut flowers, garlic, herbs, beets, and onions. We’ve cleared out some of our beds to make room for cool season crops, and we’re looking forward to lots of fall harvests.

The amaranth and sweet potato bed held up well in the drought. The amaranth will be harvested when the heads dry out; we’ll dig up the sweet potatoes after the fall cold sweetens them up.

We found another watermelon growing outside of our keyhole garden- best surprise ever!

Also planted in the keyhole garden are a couple large stands of sunchokes, or Jerusalem artichokes, which we’ll harvest for their edible tubers.

Sunchokes are distantly related to sunflowers… so pretty.

We’ve also got a ton of tomatoes popping… ripening soon, if we’re lucky.

More tomatoes in the tomato bed.

Our two chard plants are still doing well. They’ve been cut back a bit to give us more growing space.

The rest of the garden is getting a fall makeover. We started seedlings indoors to transplant into some of our beds, other beds have been direct seeded.

Asian salad greens recently transplanted.

A whole bed of kale- most of it Red Russian- transplanted.

Tomatoes aren’t a cool season crop, but we still had some in pots that we’d started in the spring, so we figured we might as well plant them. We’re obviously not expecting much-if we get one green tomato from them, we’ll be happy. They’re sharing the bed with basil (also non-cool season), radicchio, and lettuce transplants.

We’re hoping to have another mild fall and winter, especially since we got a late start seeding for fall. From seed we’ve planted spinach, lettuce mix, carrots, beets, and radishes.

Frugal Friday: Preserving Peppers

We’ve been busy as ever working the gardens, harvesting and selling what we can. Last week the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market (which got an excellent write-up in the St. Louis Post Dispatch a few weeks ago) got rained out after an hour and a half, and we found ourselves with a ton of peppers (and tomatoes, but that’s a post for another day) on our hands. We’ve pickled peppers before but we just don’t use them often enough to justify all the work.

So we decided to freeze our extra peppers. It’s really the easiest way to preserve them. All you have to do is rinse, de-seed, and chop them before tossing into resealable bags. It helps to have a big enough bag that you can spread them all out in one layer, then store flat or roll the bag up to conserve freezer space.

We ended up with 3 gallon-size bags of peppers, mostly sweet banana but also some hot banana peppers. Once frozen they won’t be good raw, but we’ll throw them into stir fries, egg dishes like omelettes and quiches, and Mexican dishes throughout the winter.

We also roasted some peppers, by de-seeding and halving them before broiling them in the oven for 15 minutes, until the skins blackened. After cooling, the skins are easy to remove- more so in the meatier bell peppers than the thinner banana peppers. We have one serving in a plastic container in the fridge and one in the freezer to enjoy later.

As for our jalapeños and cayenne peppers, we’ve got big plans- dehydrate, crush into a powder, and use as seasoning… better than hot sauce when you don’t want the vinegar-y taste. We’ve already exhausted our supply of hot pepper powder from last year!

Sweet Success

 

We may have failed this year with our potato tower, but we’ve had our fair share of successes, too. I think it’s safe to say this is officially the Year of the Tomato for us- we’ve sold our heirlooms at a farmers’ market and to a restaurant (and still have had plenty for ourselves, family, and friends!).

We’re also really excited to have grown and harvested our very first watermelon!

We should’ve weighed it, but we didn’t. We were too excited to hack it open!

We weren’t entirely sure it would be ripe, but turns out our instincts were correct. There are apparently numerous ways to tell if a watermelon is ready for harvest- here’s a good list.  We picked ours when it sounded hollow and the part of the melon that rested on the ground was yellow-ish.

Hands down, the best watermelon we’ve ever had. We saved as many seeds as we could so we can continue to grow them year after year!

Frugal Saturday: Homemade Goat Cheese

Sorry, dear readers, for the lack of posts lately. Have no fear, we’re still working tirelessly in the gardens, it’s just my blogging time has been constrained since I’ve started working (outside the home) again, at a small, family-owned grocery store. I have a huge amount of respect for the owners and all of the employees there; the store’s slogan is “Know Your Food” and everyone is committed to the mission of supporting local farmers and providing organically grown, sustainably-raised products.

You probably know that I identify as a vegan, though I do sometimes use the eggs from our own chickens in cooking or baking- I know they have a happy life. My ethics haven’t changed, and I will always vehemently oppose factory farms and CAFOs, but I have started consuming dairy products, in very limited quantities. I’m not talking about straight-up buying Velveeta or Cheez-Whiz or anything- at the very least the dairy at the store is nearly all produced humanely and sustainably, though I’m still hesitant.

The thing is, given the time and energy that goes into producing the product and its packaging (plastic is made from petroleum after all, and petroleum is inevitably used in the production of glass and cardboard as well), it hurts my soul way more to see that product go to waste. In most cases, expired dairy products from the store aren’t just discarded like at most grocery chains- they’re up for grabs by employees before being donated to a local food pantry. However, this week there was a whole case of organic goat milk that expired, which the food pantry didn’t want. So what’s an ethical vegan to do?

Make goat cheese, that’s what!

The Year of the Tomato

This week we harvested enough tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeños, and herbs to participate in our first farmers’ market! We’ll be selling our produce at the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market on Fridays from 4-7 PM all summer!

The tomato plants at our Iowa Street garden survived the massive heat wave we experienced- over a week of temperatures soaring well above 100ºF. Watering was a tricky balancing act but I think we were successful- the plants are positively exploding with tomatoes. Seriously, we’ve never seen such prolific tomato production!

The tomato plants at our Sunset Hills garden are thriving, too. No ripe tomatoes here yet (besides some yellow cherries), since we got a later start than we would’ve liked.