Fall Update

The garden has performed amazingly well this year, considering how little time I have been able to dedicate to it. Over a dozen quarts of potatoes are safely put up in mason canning jars, as well as peas, butter beans, tomatoes, salsa  and pickled peppers. September has settled in and I have been harvesting and freezing fresh peas and okra for several weeks now. 

This year one of my main goals was to try several varieties of cow peas to see which one performed the best, and I am very pleased with the results. My fingers hurt from so much shelling, but I have put up many quarts and cooked several meals from the bounty already. Of the several heirloom varieties I tried, three came out the clear winners, and I have collected enough seeds to grow them as main crop rows next year. 

The winning varieties were: Red Zipper, Turkey Craw and the Colossus. 

While these three stood out for different reasons, the choice was based on the following criteria- yield, taste, insect resistance and lastly, ease of shelling and how well mannered the plants were in the garden. Some of the varieties were vine-like, sprawling all over the place making cultivation and garden maintenance difficult. The Holstein produced beautiful and good tasting peas, but precious few of them. The Red Zipper produced lots of long, easy to shell pods over an extended period. The Turkey Craw produced a smaller yield and smaller pea, but with exceptional taste. The Colossus was just a super fat pod that shelled with the greatest of ease and good flavor.

And then there is the okra... 
I have eaten so much fried okra this summer that I feel like I have been in heaven. And I have frozen more quart bags than I can count, all from about 20 plants, which are still producing madly now at over six feet tall.

The peanuts are doing very well and I am excited to see the total yield when I harvest them. Last weekend I planted Mustard Greens, Spinach, Kale, lettuce  and Collards for the fall crop and they are up and growing. Peppers are so abundant that I am giving away about a half bushel per week. 



  

A quick update from the farm- 

May has been an extremely busy month for the band, and that has limited my work time on the farm. The garden is planted and doing fairly well, in spite of a late frost that damaged some of my crops. Last Sunday I was able to replant the green beans and some peas which had been wiped out, but there are still some bald patches in the rows that survived. I imagine I will have to replant the corn too, not because of frost damage but it looks like there were issues with my planter. A couple of the rows are thick but most of them are very sporadic. I think the planter just got jammed up and didn't distribute the seeds properly. Everything else I had planted by hand and the density was fine. 

 I was pleased with the result of my efforts at keeping the potato bugs bugs at bay, they are bushy, green and healthy with minimal infestation. In fact, they are blooming and producing little spuds already. I have already harvested potatoes from the tubs I have back in the city and they are quite good. 

I still have to plant the scarlet runner beans and some pole butter beans, but for the most part planting is done. I also planted two long rows of peanuts and hopefully they will come up and produce. I have another plot about 20x70 feet set aside for corn which hopefully I will be able plant sometime in June.

April 23rd

It's April 23rd the weather has turned cool and breezy. Two weeks ago it felt like spring was in full force, and that gave us an opportunity to get some work done at the farm. I planted the bounty of fruit trees purchased a few weeks ago, two more blueberry bushes and a fig tree.

I also finished planting the main garden- peas, beans, corn, okra and potatoes. I set out two dozen tomato plants and about that many pepper plants that I potted up from seedlings. Chris gave me some Peaches and Cream corn and I planted 10 sixty-five foot rows of it. This year I planted the potatoes in blocks instead of rows, thinking that I may have to build a barrier against the potato beetles.

On Sunday, I turned and worked two more patches alongside the main garden. The larger one, about half the rows of the main garden, will be for peanuts. I've never grown peanuts so I don't know what kind of experience this will be. The motivation for trying is my unconditional love of roasted peanuts. Boiled peanuts too, for that matter.

The second plot is for some wheat and my cowpea trials. I have about 20 varieties of heirloom cowpeas that I am going to run and see which one is the best in flavor and vigor.

After this exercise I came to the conclusion that the new barn will have a wide but shallow overhang that I can park my implements side-by-side. The current setup is stacked in one behind the other in a narrow deep overhang, open only on one side. This means I have to spend a lot of time hooking up and moving around plows and tools to get everything out.

Spring Update

This weekend I made an excellent find- fruit trees for $4.00 each.

I know you should be skeptical about buying trees at a flea market, so let me preface by saying that I have purchased from this guy before and had good success. This year, however, he has a much bigger selection, and I was literally like a kid in a candy store with a pocket full of pennies.

So, here's the booty:
2 high bush blueberry bushes
1 Texas EverBearing fig tree
2 Winesap apple trees
1 Granny Smith apple tree (to replace the one I ran over with the tractor)
1 Golden Delicious apple tree
2 Surecrop Nectarine trees
2 Arkansas Black apple trees
1 Ozark plum tree
1 Methly plum tree
1 Moorpark Apricot tree
1 Bing Cherry tree
1 Black Tartarian Cherry tree
5 Stewart Pecan trees (there's a future story in there somewhere)
1 flowering Dogwood tree

Importantly, the Pecans will be the start of the nut trees. I have two black walnut trees over at the barn that produce a small crop already, and I am hoping to add Hazelnut and Almonds to the orchard as soon as I can find a good price on them.

I feel good that I have the basics covered and now I want to concentrate on some the specialty trees that I just want to add to the collection. And then I want to gather my immediate family- our kids and grandkids there in the orchard and have a photo taken. Those trees I have planted in that orchard could live longer than all of us, and forms the perfect backdrop- a common shared event between us and the trees.

Downstairs the greenhouse is flourishing. The seedlings I started a few weeks ago are thriving and things are right on schedule. It's spring and all is well. :o)

Februrary

It's only February but this weekend felt so much like spring that I just had to do some gardening. I have been flipping through the pages of several seed supply house catalogs all winter long awaiting a day such as today. Every year I save and collect seeds, and can hardly pass up on buying some new variety I have never grown before. Last year I grew Calypso and Christmas beans for the first time and it was dismal. I have learned that just because something will grow in my zone, that doesn't mean it will thrive and produce. Armed with this knowledge, I have decided to grow a lot of different things but in small quantity. My freezer is full and I will still grow a few rows of production proven crops like the Mississippi cowpeas and Jackson Wonder butter beans, but all of the experimental stuff will be on a very small scale, perhaps six to twelve plants each. I need to determine what performs best among the dozen varieties of tomatoes, peppers, peas and beans in my seed bank.

To that end, this weekend I started twenty or so different varieties of seeds. It's about eight weeks from the last frost date and this time of year usually finds my basement turned into a seedling greenhouse. Half a dozen Tupperware containers form mini-gardens basking in the warm glow of fluorescent grow lights until the seedlings are strong enough to pot up for later transplant. By the time the weather is warm enough outside they already have a jump start on life. That's the way we did it back in the day when we ran a commercial greenhouse and it works well.

Regarding news from the farm, last weekend I had only two chores to accomplish and yet I got neither of them finished. The first was to install the water heater, which I did, but used the wrong thickness of pipe and it exploded under the pressure. I was going to put off chore number two, which was to replace the radiator in the tractor, in order to complete something and not return home defeated, but it was raining the next morning. Since I couldn't work on the water heater I started the repairs on the tractor, as at least I would be out of the rain.

I quickly found out that 60 year old rusty bolts don't undo easy, and spent most of my morning just getting the old radiator out. But once it was free the new one went in relatively easy, and I was about halfway finished putting everything back together when we had to pack up and head for home to play a show down in Columbus. Hopefully I can finish both tasks this coming weekend. The garden has been too wet to work, but at some point soon I would like to turn under and plow three more new sections- one dedicated for corn, another for peanuts and the last for spring wheat. That will pretty much fill up the acre I have set aside for gardening. By moving the corn out of my regular garden, that will free up space for some experimentation, and I want to grow some watermelon and cantaloupe this year too.