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Archive for the ‘In the Garden’ Category
Make Your Own Dibbler – It’s a Dandy in the Garden
What the heck is a dibble?
I’m usually not much of a perfectionist because it tends to create a whole lot of extra work. I leave those little idiosyncrasies to people like my sister, who actually measures the position of her place settings when giving a dinner party. I do however; tend to be a bit more fastidious when it comes to gardening. I lean more towards formally laid out gardens with their clean lines and appealing symmetry. And, at times I find a gardening approach, or tool, that gives me the formality I like while decreasing my workload. Fabulous!
Case in point…The Dibble…a centuries old tool that creates holes in the soil for planting bulbs or seeds, like the one below.
Most dibbles however, make only one hole. I wanted something that would speed up the planting process and get me off my knees. I pondered and stared, stared and pondered, before coming up with a brilliant idea – a dibble that could plant many perfectly spaced seeds at one time (did I say I wasn’t a perfectionist?).
I fantasized about how beautiful my vegetable beds would be, so formal, so linear, so precise that the gardeners of Versailles would weep. And the best part of all…I’d save money on seeds because with the right spacing I wouldn’t need to thin!
So, I set out to create the ultimate dibble for my vegetable beds. Anytime I act on one of my “fantasies” the first thing I do is scour the garage and barn to see what I have on-hand that can be salvaged. The vision in my head called for a dibble that would fit in my raised beds (4’x8’), be easy to handle and allow me to plant my seeds successively for an ongoing crop.
The vision…a board with evenly spaced pegs.
I found a nice piece of ½-inch plywood, but wanted to keep it for another project. I found 2×6’s. No. 2×4’s. No. Smaller pieces of plywood. No, no, no. Then, buried beneath a pile of scrap 1×6’s I found what I was looking for, a 1×6 that was 24 inches long, half the width of my raised beds. Perfect! I brushed it off and sanded down the edges a bit till all was smooth and clean. Then I started marking a grid pattern along the ends and sides. Since most seed spacing is 2 inches my grid spacing would be 2 inches.
Some may think it may have been better to make a dibble that would cover a larger area, but such a contraption would be large, heavy and unwieldy. Nope this was the perfect size for my needs mainly because I often make successive plantings of certain crops and other times I plant many different varieties of the same crop in one bed. With a smaller dibble I would have more options on how to use it.
The process of making my dibble was fairly simple. After cleaning off my piece of wood I drew out the grid with intersecting points at 2 inch intervals. Read the rest of the story »
9 Garden Items You Can Make Yourself or Scavenge For Free
Mankind has been growing their own food for thousands of years without all the fancy, expensive gadgets that we see on the market today. Why waste your money when you can make your own garden supplies with materials you probably already have on hand or can scavenge locally.
Our 9 homemade garden goodies will get you growing without dwindling your pocketbook. Read the rest of the story »
Garden Plan 2011
From early spring till fall’s first frost, vegetable gardens can yield not only delicious crops but exercise and life skills as well. But, to get to the point of picking fresh produce you grew yourself you must first start – with a garden plan. Winter is the perfect time to sit and dream and plan out what your garden will look like long after the cold weather disappears.
To begin with, decide what types of vegetables you want to plant and make a list. Then measure all the areas you have available that can be planted. Think about flowerbeds or parkways that could help you expand your available planting area. Not all vegetables need to grow in a set aside garden area. In fact, I normally grow some vine crops like melons, squash and pumpkins in flowerbeds, and every fence is a potential trellis for peas and beans and other vine crops, saving the “garden” for root crops, tomatoes and salad greens.
Once you have measurements for the areas that can be planted, plot them out on graph paper and get ready to “lay out” your garden. Using the growing space requirements for each crop, measure and build your graph paper garden. This will help you see if modifications need to be made because of space challenges.
My garden will be smaller this year because Brianne wanted a larger exercise area for her lambs (a sacrifice I was willing to make since this is her last year to show). What won’t change though is the geometry I use to maximize production. The 17’ x 14’ main garden area will have a center pathway of two feet. Each row of vegetables will be 2-feet wide with a one foot wide path between them for easy weeding, hoeing and harvesting. To help control the weeds and retain moisture, each row will be mulched with a layer of chipped wood, given away for free from our local library.
At the far end of each row, a variety of tomatoes will be planted for fresh, slicing, canning and sauce. Larger vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage will be interplanted with smaller, faster growing root vegetables and greens that become harvestable long before the larger vegetables grow big enough to shade them out. On the pathway end of each row I’ll plant marigolds and herbs to help ward off insects. Non-traditional garden areas will be amended with composted rabbit, chicken and sheep manure to improve the soil quality and give the transplants a good start. Once planted, these garden areas will also be mulched to keep down the weeds.
While I spend my evenings “fine tuning” my garden plan, daylight hours are for starting seeds. Vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers and tomatoes like to be started indoors weeks before they are ready to “plant out” in the garden. I use a homemade seed soil mix of well-rotted compost, good soil, peat moss and sand. Pony packs, 4-inch pots, clay pots and other containers are collected year-round from family and friends. They have to be sterilized though to help prevent the potential spread of disease. I do this by mixing one teaspoon of bleach to every one gallon of water in a five gallon bucket, then rinsing each container well with clean water.
Spring is still weeks away, but so far this season we’re off to a good start. Our mild weather and decent rain has made life easy for early season cool weather vegetables. And, if things keep up we’ll have a garden bursting with vegetables full of color and flavor by the beginning of summer.
So, folks, how are your garden plans coming???
photo credit: Garden and Beyond
Fabulous Fungi
Here’s a riddle for you: What flourishes without light, doesn’t use flowers or seeds to grow and is so diverse it can even be grown in your hall closet?
Its mushrooms of course!
Mushrooms are unique because they are not plants at all – they are fungi. They reproduce with spores not seeds and they don’t contain any chlorophyll or go through photosynthesis like regular plants. That’s why they can grow in cool, damp, dark places instead of warm, sunny ones.
The nutrients mushrooms need to grow come from a growing medium called substrate—usually a rotting log or a “brick” of straw, rice bran or sawdust in bags. A mushroom is really the fruit of the fungus; the actual “plant” if you will, is a network of root-like threads, called the mycelium. Mushrooms reach harvestable size in several weeks and can be picked for about 15 weeks.
To begin growing your own, first decide what type of mushroom you’d like to grow, as each variety likes a certain type of growing medium. It may be a good idea to start with an easy growing variety that can be found in a kit, like the shiitake or oyster, for first-timers. Kits will come complete with the right kind of substrate for the mushroom variety, mushroom spores and growing instructions.
If you decide to grow mushrooms without the aid of a kit you’ll need to do a bit more research. First, find the right kind of growing medium for the variety you want to grow-each mushroom variety has its own preferred growing conditions. While most favor logs, straw or sawdust, some will grow on used coffee grounds and even on corncobs. The medium will then need to be sterilized with heat, tightly compacted in a bag or on a tray and then inoculated with the spawn. A word of caution here: resist the temptation to use free spawn from wild mushrooms; purchase good healthy spawn from a reliable supplier.
Be sure to check out the growing habits of the variety you decide to grow so you know how and where to place your growing container. Some mushrooms grow vertically, as they would on a rotting log, and hanging them would be an ideal solution. Others grow horizontally in little clusters as they would on the floor of a dark, clammy forest. These can be grown in a tray placed in a dark closet.
Once your mini mushroom farm is set up all you have to do is water it, set it in a dark place and keep an eye on the conditions. In about a week you’ll see the beginnings of tiny little mushrooms. Depending on the variety you should have “ready to harvest” mushrooms in another 4 to 8 weeks.
How simple is that?
Before you know it you’ll have your very own ethereal fairy-garden of perky little mushrooms.
To learn more about growing mushrooms, check out www.fungi.com and www.gmushrooms.com. The Mushroom Company at www.mushroomcompany.com is a commercial grower site, but has lots of useful information.
To read more about growing mushrooms, check out “Growing Gourmet & Medicinal Mushrooms”, by Paul Stamets.
If growing mushrooms isn’t your thing, you can still enjoy them with these simple recipes. Read the rest of the story »
Finding Organic Seeds
Thanksgiving may be over and Christmas just around the corner, but like any avid gardener my mind is focused on spring – spring harvest of early peas and salad greens, spring turning of soil laden with organic matter and left to rest, spring planting of seeds started in the kitchen over a cold winter. Yep – spring is a busy time for we gardeners. But, the work of a garden starts long before our first chance to poke seeds deep into warm compost rich soil. It starts with a plan, a drawn out plotted map of vegetable placements, and segways to the best job of all in my opinion – ordering seeds. I love pouring over websites and catalogs almost as much as I love being down on my hands and knees digging in the dirt.
Seeds companies have come a long way over the last 20 years or so. With the rise in organic farming and home gardening seed companies have stepped up to meet the demand. One major advantage in this increase is that we can use our purchasing power to move agriculture in a more organic direction. Another benefit is that we are supporting companies that use non-toxic, sustainable methods to produce seeds.
Certified organic growers are required to use certified organic seed if it’s available. By choosing organic seeds we help ensure the continued supply of seeds that have not been genetically modified or treated with synthetic chemicals, which benefits not only home gardeners, but also organic farms as well. Read the rest of the story »
Suburban Root Cellar
Long before the first icebox was put into use or the first refrigerator was invented families used root cellars to keep their harvest fresh through the cold and bleak winter months. Cellars kept apples, carrots, turnips, potatoes and squash, even salt pork and smoked meats, milk, cream, butter and cheese were kept in the root cellar to stay cool and fresh, ready to sustain the family until spring crops could be harvested.
Root cellars are low-tech natural choices for keeping your harvest fresh for months without depending on ozone-depleting refrigeration, or electricity. Canned fruits and vegetables can also be stored at the optimum temperature in root cellars.
Unfortunately, most root cellars are large walk-in structures dug into the ground or the side of a hill, built with stone and beams and wooden roofs, piled high with dirt. Above ground cellars are covered with thick layers of sod to keep them cool inside. These are hardly conducive to a homestead on a suburban lot.
So, how can the suburban homesteader benefit from centuries of free refrigeration?
Using lidded plastic storage bins is one way (like the picture above). Storage bins come in several sizes measuring two feet to three or four feet in length and most are barely two feet deep, making them easier to reach the bottom than the more commonly used 55-gallon drum. They can be dug into the ground or into a small sloped area. Bins can even be placed in the ground at an angle half way with the excavated dirt used under the front of the bin to bury them up to their lids. Sloping the bins means that water will drain away better. These bins have a curled lip around the edge, allowing for small holes to be drilled all around for a bit of air circulation without letting in any water or mice.
To store root vegetables, first put down a layer of straw in the bottom of the bin, then a layer of vegetable, then more straw and another layer of vegetable, and so on until the bin is full. Ripe, unblemished fruit can be individually wrapped and placed in a padded cardboard box before placing into the bin. When each bin is full, autumn leaves or more straw can be piled on top a foot or so for added insulation. Normal winter conditions in different areas will determine how deep the bins need to be placed and how much they need to be covered. When it’s time to use your stores simply push aside the snow and leaves and lift the lid to get what you need. Be sure to check for softening or spoilage. If this occurs remove the affected fruits or vegetables and use quickly. Remember the old saying – “One bad apple can spoil the whole bushel”.
That’s all there is to it. What could be a simpler, more secure food supply? Even if the electricity goes off, your buried treasure will be safe, able to feed your family, which is more than you can say about gold.
APPROXIMATE STORAGE TIMES:
1 to 2 Weeks: Broccoli, Eggplant
2 to 4 Weeks: Cauliflower
3 to 5 Weeks: Brussel Sprouts
1 to 2 Months: Jerusalem Artichokes, Tomatoes, Chinese Cabbage, Parsnips
2 to 3 Months: Radishes, Rutabagas
3 to 4 Months: Cabbage, Squash
4 to 6 Months: Beets, Carrots, Potatoes, Turnips
5 to 6 Months: Pumpkins
A Pumpkin’s Story
If you’ve read this blog for long you know of my love – nay – lust for fall. The weather, the colors, the food; smoke curling up from chimneys; apples begging to be picked and made into cider or pies or cakes. And, my appreciation for the old fashioned fall holidays – Halloween and Thanksgiving. I love it all.
But one thing you may not know is my (I’m almost embarrassed to say) dismal success at growing pumpkins. Maybe I should say lack of growing pumpkins. Oh, it’s not for lack of trying though. Each spring I carefully plant my seeds in peat pots. Baby Boo, Field, Sugar, Big Max, you name it and we have planted it. I water them faithfully and within a few weeks to a month I gingerly plant them out in the garden where everything seems to, invariably, go wrong.
Last year, sadly enough, the two pumpkins we did harvest were not even planted by us. Birds had dropped seeds near the sheep pen. When they began to grow Brianne would dump water on them while cleaning out water buckets and troughs…not the tips that I read about on the internet or got from growers. When we realized the vines were pumpkins we guarded them as steadfastly as the Secret Service guards the President. As those long sought for orbs grew, we protected them with cages made of chicken wire and wood. Nothing was going to prevent us from picking those two of our favorite crops. But, even with the surprise of volunteer pumpkins, my shame still remains, folks. I love pumpkins, but I can’t grow them.
Until Now!!!
We planted three hills of Cinderella pumpkins in May. And I’m proud to report that ALL three survived and have produced little green globes that will be screaming fall in another month as they turn to a luscious burnt orange color. None of them are overly huge. And, they aren’t really the kind for making into jack-o-lanterns or pies, but they are of respectable size for tabletop decorations or front door displays. When the season is over, we will gut our beloved pumpkins and save the seeds for in hopes of having even more next year.
It’s not the truck load I had envisioned, but it’s something. Our first real homegrown pumpkin. It’s a start, right?
photo credit: beautifulcataya
Fall Garlic
I just love September on our homestead. One foot is still in summer while the other one steps towards fall. It is a time when the garden starts to slow. Even in our temperate winters only a few things can be planted. Garlic is one of them, my favorite cooking herb. It can be planted in October after most other garden chores are finished for the year. All winter long it waits in the ground for spring. Tiny new roots are sent down; some clinging to the frozen soil of colder areas. By early spring it will be poking its head through layers of mulch reaching for the sun. If you’d like to try your hand at growing garlic, now is a good time to order seed garlic.
There are over 300 varieties of garlic grown world wide, divided into two categories – soft neck and hard neck. Everyone has their preferences and lots of people enjoy growing new varieties to find new favorites.
Garlic is native to Central Asia and dates back to 4000 BC. It is part of the lily family. Ancient Egyptians worshiped garlic and would place clay models of the herb in the tombs of deceased family members. Garlic was so highly regarded in ancient times that it was even used as currency. And, lastly, garlic was well known for its aphrodisiac qualities, which have been celebrated through the ages in literature, recipes, and medical journals.
Until the 1940’s however, garlic was unacceptable in most of American society, having been dubbed the “stinking rose”. For centuries garlic has been considered an herbal wonder drug. It was used by monks of the middle ages to treat the cold and common flu.
During WWII garlic poultices were used on wounds as an inexpensive and effective replacement for antibiotics.
Garlic has many medicinal qualities too. When crushed, garlic has been shown to kill 23 types of bacteria, including salmonella and staphylococcus. It has also been shown to lower cholesterol by preventing clotting in the arteries. And, the A, B, and C vitamins in garlic help stimulate the body to fight carcinogens.
For a great “how-to” guide on growing garlic check out this article by Adam Steiner
photo credit: Fluffymuppet
Plan Your Fall Garden Now and Eat Well All Winter Long
Fall and winter vegetable gardening is an old practice, dating back to the beginning of our country. Pilgrims, settlers, and colonists all planted “cool weather crops” that could provide them with fresh produce all winter long.
Today, many growing areas are well suited for 12-month gardening. Take the western part of the country along the Pacific coast. Their mild winter climate is ideal for growing a wide range of root and leaf crops almost year-round. Southern states are equally able to grow a substantial number of vegetables to crown their winter tables. With a little protection and creative gardening methods, even northern state can adorn their table fresh vegetables throughout the winter.
The key to a successful winter garden is knowing the average date of the first killing frost in your region (for example late October in the Pacific Northwest). You then plant your winter crops early enough to let them reach their full maturity before that killing frost. Local garden authorities can give you information about the timing of first frosts and the hardiness of various crops for your area. The planting suggestions in this booklet are based on a late October first freeze. If your killing frosts come earlier or later adjust your planting schedule accordingly.
LATE MATURING CROPS - Approximate maturity 90 days. Plant by mid July for fall harvest, later for spring harvest. Read the rest of the story »
Are GMO’s the Frankenveggies of the Future?
Learn how seed companies are clamoring for patents to seed varieties and strains, and in the process trying to control not only the way food is grown, but who can grow it as well.