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!

Wild Gourd Farm

You may have noticed some changes to the blog here. Well, it’s official, our operation finally has a name- Wild Gourd Farm.

No, we’re not changing our game plan and only growing gourds. We’ll still be tending our various garden patches with various plants throughout the St. Louis area (and have plans for two more gardens in the works). So where’s the name come from?

Eric recently found a wild gourd vine growing off the banks of the Meramec River, with several dried gourds still attached. Was it cultivated by Native Americans in the area? Did it germinate from seeds swept down the river? This find was mysterious, rare, and beautiful.

We’re determined to grow this wild gourd variety and keep its heritage alive. We’ve split one of the gourds open and are working on germinating some of the seeds, which is proving to be a challenge.

In the end, these artifacts symbolize our approach to life and gardening- a return to self-reliance in the wilderness (urban though ours may be), following the natural flow of the seasons, always ready for a challenge.

We’re looking forward to a new gardening season with our new name. St. Louis friends, look for our produce around town, especially at the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market, starting this Friday, May 3rd!

Babying the Tomato Plants

It’s cold and rainy again, calling for lows tonight in the mid 30s and gusts of wind as strong as 20 mph! So we’re doing our best to protect our tomato plants, both in ground and in pots.

This morning I went out to Sunset Hills to protect our newly-planted tomatoes. It gets colder out there in the county than it does in the city. Thankfully, Eric’s mom was willing to help me in the rain! We wrapped plastic sheeting around all of the tomato cages and secured it with staples, clothespins, and wire.

I don’t think we’ll get any frost but we wanted to be extra safe. Along with the straw, the plastic should be a good wind break and provide more insulation. We’ll just have to remove the plastic on Thursday before it gets too warm!

Here at home, Eric helped me build a windbreak for the potted tomato plants. Most of our plants are safe and sound inside our half hoop house but many are outside hardening off. This tarp attached to wooden stakes driven deep in the ground should protect these babies from strong gusts of wind. 

On a side note, we’re now selling our tomato plants! All organic, many heirloom varieties including Arkansas Traveler, Costuloto Genovese (our favorite), a bush Beefsteak variety, all colors of cherry tomatoes, and several others. In 3″ or 4″ pots, $3 each. Let us know if you’d like any!

Edit: We only sell locally in the St. Louis area. We are not able to ship plants at this time. Thanks for understanding!

How We Spent Earth Day Weekend

This weekend was dedicated to the gardens.

It all started Friday night, when the forecast called for a chance of frost overnight. A few days earlier a surprise frost nipped a few of our tomato and pepper plants, so we didn’t want to take any chances. Thus began the great plant shuffle of 2013- all of the pepper plants and the tomato plants that hadn’t hardened off yet (they were in the half-hoop house) were brought inside. As you can see above, we had hundreds of plants inside, covering literally every available surface in our apartment. The plants we’d had outside hardening off were put in the hoop house. Then, about 12 hours later on Saturday morning we put them all back where they started.

Most of the rest of Saturday was spent at our Sunset Hills garden working on our tomato patch.

We’re using a similar method as last year, utilizing burlap in between the rows and all plants to keep weeds down and moisture levels high. It’s been a cool, rainy spring here in St. Louis so we only planted about 1/3 of our tomatoes for the year, the rest to be planted later.  Most of Saturday was spent building trellises.

Last year we staked each tomato plant separately and tied them as they grew, which was a royal pain. The plants sprawled in all directions and we lost a lot of tomatoes that ended up growing on the ground. So this year we constructed individual 5′ tall wire mesh cages for each plant (about 50).

Though we didn’t plant all the tomatoes, we plotted out the rows and fertilized the spaces for each plant. We interplanted some borage, basil, marigold, and calendula seeds today and finished off with straw on top.

After a full day’s work at Sunset Hills we shot over to Iowa Avenue while we still had daylight.

Our bamboo teepee trellis stands 8′ tall and will support our favorite flat Italian pole beans. We’re going to tie string horizontally around the bamboo but leave an opening in front so we can walk into the middle to harvest the beans.

After several brainstorming sessions, we figured that purchasing nylon netting was the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to trellis our new bean section this year. We planted a row of mystery beans (unidentified, collected last year), black beans, bolita beans, and burgundy bush beans, with carrots and salad greens along each row. The paths in between were lined with burlap and straw to keep the weeds down (the evil grass was already starting to regrow- UGH!).

On the other side of the beans we planted popcorn in rows. We haven’t grown corn before, we’re hoping we planted them closely enough to allow for good pollination. We plan to interplant seeds from a wild gourd that Eric found along the Meramec River.

We have a lot to do still, but the forecast predicts lows in the 30s again this week, so we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. We’ll probably go and wrap plastic around the bottoms of the tomato cages in Sunset Hills to help protect the plants over the cold nights. As soon as the weather breaks, we’ll be planting another big wave of tomatoes, all our peppers, and the rest of our veggies. Can’t wait!

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.

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!

Meanwhile, In Sunset Hills

We’ve been busy at our Iowa Street Garden lately, but we haven’t neglected our new plot out in Sunset Hills. The deer fence is still standing guard, and our 50 tomato plants and 10 pepper plants are catching up, since they were planted a little later than we would’ve liked.

We wanted to set up soaker hoses, but we found that the water seeped out more toward the beginning of the hose and never made it to the back of the garden. Instead, we’ve been watering by hand with a regular hose.

When watering, we try to water the ground around each tomato plant and avoid watering the foliage. Watering from above is not only wasteful, as much of the water evaporates, it can also spread disease and limit pollination by locking down the pollen. Deep watering directly to the roots promotes root growth. and mulching around each plant helps retain moisture.

With any luck, this will be our Year of the Tomato!

Iowa Street: An Epic Battle

We built our Iowa Street garden in a formerly-vacant lot in the city. To prevent erosion, the city seeds its vacant lots with some crazy, evil, invasive grass, which we’ve been battling since the beginning.

We’ve mulched around our raised beds to keep the grass down. Not only does the grass try to grow up in the beds, it also sends runners horizontally from the outside.

As you can see, the horizontal roots look like zosia on steroids. We’ve pulled out roots easily over a foot long.

The grass invaded our sweet potato bed before we had a chance to plant our sweet potato slips

Grass dug out, sweet potatoes planted!

We built our keyhole garden in the beginning of March and had planted some melon and squash seeds, but they couldn’t compete with the invading grass- despite the double layer of cardboard we had underneath.

With some help, we dug out all the grass so we could start over. The only remaining plants were Jerusalem artichokes. Today Eric transplanted squash and melon plants, which will hopefully be well established before the grass tries to return.

This grassy area was getting out of control, so we laid down a plastic tarp and burlap sacks, added a container garden with tomato and basil plants, and finished with wood chips. 

New! Sunset Hills Garden

We’ve acquired another garden! A friend of ours saw a post on Craigslist advertising free garden space in a backyard in Sunset Hills, Missouri. We contacted the poster, who owns a house with a large yard that he didn’t want to have to mow anymore. It’s a win-win situation for all involved.

We weren’t the first to reply, so we’re sharing the space with another gardener, who has a small tractor with a tiller. He claimed about 1,000 square feet of prime full-sun space. We’re reclaiming what used to be a vegetable garden, and expanding it. The other gardener was nice enough to till our area, about 55o square feet, in trade for some tomato and pepper plants.

We’re hoping to plant about 50 tomato plants and 10 pepper plants. We’re in the process of building trellises for every row, as well as a deer fence around the perimeter.

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Anyone have any deer deterrent secrets? Let us know!

________________ Gardens

This summer we’ve got big plans for our produce. We’re still planning to have our produce stand outside of Labeebee’s on Saturdays, and we’re also hoping to sell some of our excess to Local Harvest Grocery, in addition to a couple weekly standing orders for neighbors and friends.

In light of this, we figured it’s time to officially name our operation. We’ve thrown some ideas around and would love your input!

Please note, if you choose “Other,” you will need to share your suggestion in the comments, as it won’t post on the poll results.

If we choose “Happy Chicken Gardens,” we already have a mascot:

In spite of scrubbing and soaking, the face on this egg cannot be removed! Is it a sign?