Our Garden

We love the garden this time of year. It looks healthy and we are getting a lot of my favorite vegetable--Kale! The cabbage harvest has been very nice also. Daniel is the gardener of the family. I simply do a little harvesting here and there whenever I need something for the kitchen. He actually does most of the harvesting as well.

I'm proud to say that everything you see in the these pictures was started from seed (except some onions were started from sets). The indoor grow light station (go here for a post that we wrote last year on our indoor seed starting) that Daniel created was a big success for all the tomatoes, cabbage, kale, collards, chard, eggplant, peppers, and flowers.

lacinato kale (garlic in the bed to left of kale)

We are using the pvc pipe drip irrigation system again this year. Go to this post to read more about how we made and installed it. This is hopefully allowing for deep watering and saves us lots of time and water. There are shut off valves at the top of all the rows. Daniel has even recruited the girls help in turning them on and off during the week while he is at work. (We water 2 rows at a time.)

potatoes

tomatoes

mix of onion, flowers, chard, kale, collards

Daniel getting the stakes ready for the tomatoes

Spring Seed Starting Week by Week

On January 23 we started 3 trays of seeds --36 collards, 36 kale, 24 cabbage, 24 spinach, 24 brussels sprouts, 18 lettuce mix, 18 broccoli, 18 onions, 18 chard. 

We are using a new indoor lighting set up that will make starting seeds a lot easier. This powerful light stays on for 18 hours a day which has been enough to keep the seedlings healthy and strong so far. (We put paper bags on top of the trays in the beginning to help keep the seeds moist while germinating.)

The new tray allows for easy watering. Daniel fills it once a week with water, fish emulsion, and compost tea. He uses 5 gallon buckets to fill and drain.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3 

Started another tray of 6 broccoli, 18 cabbage, 18 red Russian kale, 12 red lettuce, 18 buttercrunch lettuce

Week 4

Week 5

We plan to put these out and get summer seeds started within the next few weeks.

Greens and daisies

It's that time of year again. We are bringing in tons of greens. For example, today I went out at about 11:00 am and picked a handful of lettuce, baby bok choi, sweet peas, radishes, and green onions and mixed it all together for a salad.

We ordered a scale to keep track of the amount of veggies we bring in. We are keeping record of it all on a clip board for now but I plan on charting it as we get in more food. For the first week we brought in 11.5 oz of spinach, 26 oz of sweet peas, 9 radishes, 22 oz lettuce, 15 oz baby bok choi, 1.5 lbs of bigger bak choi, 1 lb young turnip greens. And our spinach is huge.

We loved looking at it so much we just had to take a picture! Is it because of the compost tea?

This is the bak choi bed. This is an asian green that we use just like the other greens--in stir fries, steamed or chopped really thin in salads. We like it because it is a more heat tolerant than salad greens and more tender than traditional southern greens.

Here's the lettuce bed.

So I also had a birthday last weekend--yes I am 32 years old now. Thanks to all my friends and family who contributed to a wonderful weekend. I took a road trip to Nashville to meet up with my best friends from Indy. We all have soar jaws from talking and laughing so much! I got home in perfect time to receive hugs and kisses from my wonderful family, lots of birthday cards and a package with a new zoom lens! I tested it out on the daisies that are blooming in the back garden. What do you think? The pictures really don't do justice to the beautiful flowers. I really do love having flowers all over the yard.

Transplanting seedlings--Successes and Failures

Last weekend (the one before Easter) we finally got the seedlings that we started back in January (here the link to that post)in the ground.

A lot of those seeds that we started were a great success and we were very pleased with the health of the kale, collards, lettuce and spinach seedlings.

BUT almost a whole tray of summer seedlings that I started turned out to be a disaster. Hardly any of the seeds even germinated. I don't really know what happened but some reasons for the germination failure could be that the soil was not warm enough, not wet enough or maybe too wet since we noticed that the soil mix we created was a little to dense. Here's a picture of the sad tray.

I've got one tomato out of 30 that I started, no peppers, and about half of the basil and eggplants! We've learned that it's all about experimenting and trying things over and over again. So, I've started new trays of these kinds of plants and hopefully I'll correct whatever went wrong.

Spring days in the garden

These photos have been taken over about a week. We spent all of last Saturday digging in the garden and getting 2 new rows ready. Daniel trimmed the lupine cover crop that had been growing all winter. We added our compost and then tilled it under and mixed it all in with shovels. Even though you don't see me in these pictures I was out there for most of the time. Daniel does way more of the work in the garden than I do but I really do enjoy being out there working along side of him.

The area that we were working in had potatoes and beans in it last year. The rows were shaped differently and we wanted them to look like the rest of the garden. The second picture is the finished product--2 more long rows.

(potatoes are planted in the 3rd row on the left. We planted those in late February)


We are excited about 2 new crops that we are trying out this year. Pictured below the top bed has jerusalem artichoke and the bottom has taro. Both of these plants are perennial and you harvest and eat the root or tuber.  They are also beautiful plants while they are growing. The jerusalem artichoke grows tall and have big yellow flowers and the taro have elephant ear stalks and leaves.

We started summer seeds (flowers, veggies, herbs) last week also.

In another part of the yard we have had this cabbage (along with  several others) growing all winter and it is big and beautiful now. We have a new found love of cabbage and I can't wait to harvest this one this weekend and enjoy it with friends.

We have lot's of sugar peas coming up on these two rows.

We have garlic and onions here with lettuce seeds scattered and beginning to sprout all over. Some other things we started as seeds in a few rows are carrots, radishes, turnips, bok choy. We will be transplanting our broccoli, kale, lettuce, and cabbage seedlings this weekend.

We ended one day last week hanging out by a fire.

Another night Daniel took E and A to see a local theater's production of The Sound of Music. We had friends that were acting in it and that musical is one of  our favorites.

Alley cats in the garden

I'm combining more Halloween photos with a garden update. I got my camera working again thanks to Do it yourself digital camera repair blog. I'm afraid it's a temporary fix so I sent Daniel and the girls out to take some pictures while it was working yesterday.

The garden is just beautiful these days. Daniel works hard out there and his work is paying off extremely well. We are still eating from these huge eggplant. (Arianna is holding one of the smaller Japanese eggplants but we have the globe variety also.) The lacinato, or dinosaur, kale that is in the front of this picture is so big. We have been harvesting from it for about a week now and loving it.

The cats are hiding behind the lettuce that are providing fresh salads every day!

They are standing in the middle of the garden and you can see the large broccoli that is forming some nice little heads. The cabbage is in front of them. The tall plants with stakes behind them are our second try at tomatoes.

Collards are in front of Arianna and lupine cover crops just starting out in front of Ellen.

Here's the whole crew dressed up and ready for trick or treating last night. We enjoyed a lovely potluck before heading out  in  our friend's neighborhood in the 78 degree temperature. Thankfully it was not raining yet, but we were all sweating by the end of the night! I love the South.

Fall Garden 2009

We are growing a lot of the same things that we did last year but we've added lots of new stuff to the soil. Over the past few weeks, Daniel has added many bales of hay, another load of free wood chips, and a load of municipal compost to the garden. All the plants in these beds we started from seed indoors a few months ago.
Here is a batch of compost tea brewing. Daniel made and applied 2 batches to the garden so far. We were inspired by this gardener in Alaska who sells tea brewing kits and grows amazingly huge veggies. Here is the youtube video about his product--we didn't buy it but made something similar of our own.



The lettuces are looking beautiful and just about ready to harvest.

This is the biggest cabbage we've had. Still has a bit of growing to do.
Here is a bed of kale that has been hit hard by slugs.


Here is a close up. Once Daniel figured out what was destroying these greens, he started going out "slugging" after dark with a flashlight (picking off the slugs). There has been a lot of caterpillars on most of the greens so he's also been on the lookout for those guys during the day. He also sprayed some BT, an organic pesticide. A few of the transplants didn't make it but most of them are starting to come back with new leaves.
Here is a bed of lacinato kale that we've already been harvesting from. In the back of the row are the huge eggplants that are still producing. Behind the eggplants are a few small brussels sprouts that you can't see.
Here's broccoli.
Collards, sweet potatoes and other left over summer veggies.


Our weather is finally cool enough so we can enjoy a fire in the evening. It was a nice way to finish our weekend.