01/25/12 Indoors and mulch

01/25/12 Indoors

The young lettuce plants I started indoors look good. Today I will move them to an outdoors cold frame.

 
Mulch
I am a big fan of mulch to spread under bushes, around trees, flower beds and, mainly in my garden paths.
Benefits of mulching the paths:
--Keeps weeds down.
--Keeps things clean. I can walk in the garden right after a rain and not track in any mud.

--Breaks down over time into beautifully rich black dirt. I don't even need to move it to the planted beds; growing veggies send their roots under the bedsides and into the good stuff. It just means that I have to, over time, keep adding layers of fresh mulch.

The mulch I use is the cheapest one available: wood chips produced by arborists and tree-trimming companies. My favorite is pine chips. Just got a load two days ago and the whole place has that pleasant pine fragrance that air fresheners keep trying to imitate.  

Too bad I have not figured out how to do a "scratch and sniff" for my blog yet. This one would be perfect! I could then upgrade to the "lick and taste" for the tomato season.

Unpaid Product placement: I am very thankful to

Leaf & Limb Tree Service (919) 787-9551

for supplying me with free wood chips and to Craig Brown of Brown's Tree Service (919) 845-6222 for having done so many times in the past.

 

Nice to see some blue sky after days of depressing gray clouds producing only small amounts of rain: ¾ inch in four days.

01/20/12 Anemones

01/20/12 Anemones

My first anemones have started blooming, a sure sign of spring even though, this year, it has been hard to talk about spring harbingers when we're still waiting for winter to happen and some spring blooming bushes have been doing their thing for weeks now..

A couple of days ago, a few Red Breasted Robins showed up in the front garden. They usually stop here, en masse, on their way North and scavenge all the worms they can find before moving on. That's when my garden gets covered in little craters left by those digging birds with no other visible impact on the garden.

Anemones, though, like many other spring blooms strictly follow length of daylight rather than temperatures. Those of us who are out early or late have noticed longer daylight already.

Indoors: I decided to start some of my heading lettuce a little earlier than normal hoping to take advantage of a cool rather than cold winter and get to eat my first lettuce a little earlier than normal. (No, it's not a sign of impatience, just experimentation, the spice of life!)

Postscript: one of my faithful followers remarked that I made a mistake on my last post by trying to make compost sexier that it really is and, perhaps, turning off some new gardeners finding this challenge too great. I did mention that my compost pile was very unsexy. Here is what it looks like:

It works great and does not need any additional sophistication.

01/16/12 Compost

01/16/12 Composting

Disclaimer: none of the pictures on this page are mine. My compost pile suffers from an image problem; she feels unglamorous and hates to have her picture taken. Since I believe in mutual repect...I am using instead pix of piles that have no trouble showing their stuff on line. 

 

Compost is the fuel that keeps your garden producing by supplying nutrients to your plants. While many garden centers will sell you all kinds of potting soils (some better than others) and tons of artificial fertilizers, your home-made compost is to artificial fertilizer what grandma's cooking is to Mc Donald.

Why make compost? The smart Alick answer is: because we can. The better answer is : because it is nature's way. Out in the woods and fields, living matters end up rotting and turning back to dirt. Even we are promised such fate. But will we feed tomatoes???

How? Chemistry 101, we need to combine carbon (dry leaves, hay, straw, shredded newspapers) nitrogen( weeds, grass clippings, kitchen refuse), oxygen (air) and water in the right proportions to help that mixture “cook” properly. The heating process allows rapid bacteria multiplication. There the ones doing all the “digesting”.

Proportions: the ideal carbon to nitrogen ratio is supposed to be 30/1 but, in my experience, somewhere around 60% brown (carbon) to 30/40% green (nitrogen) works. You'll never see mother nature out there with a scale checking ratios, you do not need to be too strict either. Do not build your pile higher than four feet to avoid compaction and air exclusion. The fluffier the better!

Where? Depending on your neighborhood covenants, proximity to neighbors and what kind of neighbors, you might have to deal with some restrictions but, if you do it properly, it will not smell and can look just like another pile of leaves.

Bins/Aesthetics: you can go on line and find many ways to build those bins. My favorites have chicken wire on three sides to hold composting matters in place while providing good aeration. The fourth side stay open for you to access. Having two or three of those next to one another allows you to either turn your piles from one to the other or have three piles at a differntly advanced level from new to finished. You will see that some are pretty fancy but, being a minimalist, I just have some construction wire in the back to avoid my stuff spilling into the bamboo growing behind it and that's it.

 

Practicalities: you do not want it too far from your garden, in a discreet place (no need to make it the center of attention) in the shade and not far from a hose so that you can wet it during dry spell. Dryness kills bacteria, your little invisible workers. 

 

Mistakes to avoid:

--Too much green: you'll be able to tell by the smell. Correction: remix in additional browns.

--Too much brown: less visible; it will just cook much slower. If you're in no rush, no big deal.

--Not enough moisture: slows the process. Just add water!

--Too much moisture: smell will tell you. Mix in more dry leaves, hay, or what you have that is dry. You want your pile to be moist, not wet. If you're not sure, do the squeeze test; if water drips out of it, it's too much.

--Do not put any meat or grease into your pile. Grease does not compost and both attract unwanted visitors.

Fast compost vs slow compost: if you're in a hurry, you can turn over your pile, to add air to speed up the process. You can do that every two weeks and have a finished or semi-finished product in just a few weeks.

If you're like me and prefer the lazy method, you just let your pile sit there until you need it. Mine goes untouched from 6 months to a year. I just keep building next to it .

Uses: straight in your growing beds—you can plant into a 100% compost. As potting soil and as starting medium if you grow your own plants from seeds. For seed starting, I sift mine and mix in a little sand to keep it more friable.

Happy composting!

01/12/12 Rain and Flowers.

        1/12/12 Rain and Flowers

 

Yesterday was a gloomy day. I am not big on gloomy and winter in the same sentence but we got shy of ¾ inch of rain out of it and I like that.

Flowers now in bloom: pansies, Johnny Jump-Up (the pansies wilder and smaller ancestor) , the first buds on anemones and one of my favorite Spring harbinger: flowering quince, a small bush with beautiful flowers and some mean straight thorns to protect them.

 

 I know, this year makes it tough being a Spring harbinger when we haven't even had Winter yet.

 For those who miss a real  Winter, think Cordova, AK with 15 feet of snow. Can't see the pansies from there!

 

01-09-12 Seeds

01/09/12 Seeds

Today’s raining, not much, just a gentle drizzle. While I am a big fan of open blue sky, especially at this time of year, I know this rain is perfect for the garden, to keep those roots cool and moist.

Rain is life!

Well, after spending time with garden catalogs and choosing which ones to order, seed packs have started coming in. Each one full of promises!

First thing I do is to mark each packet clearly with the year I receive it. So now, each one is marked with a blue “12”. The main reason I do this is that I do not always use up all my seeds and I sometimes go back to using unfinished packets from years past. The date helps me pick up the freshest one with the best growing chances.

Second I organize my seeds by alphabetical order and keep them in an airtight plastic container. I do not want bugs to access them at any time.

Care: seeds keep best in a dry, cool dark place but mine spend the year in garden shed that gets pretty hot in summer and they seem to do fine. Nature does not easily give up its fertility.

                      Our next step will be sowing and planting.

Around the Triangle, we can start spring seeds in the ground the first two weeks in February (coming fast!): lettuce, spinach, onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots, radishes, etc…the cool crops.

By mid-February, you can also start, indoors with good natural light or a grow lamp and a heating pad, some of the summer crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and the like.

End of April, beginning of May, outdoors, you can transplant those summer seedlings and start corn, beans, squash, and other summer crops. Annual flowers can also be sown outdoors at this time.

By September first, it is time to start your fall/winter garden: a last crop of bush beans, onions, leeks, endives, escaroles, lettuce, cabbages, kale, collards, Brussels sprouts, etc…

December: time to get catalogs in your mailbox again and start dreaming anew about the perfect tomato, the crunchiest cucumber or the most delicious bush beans, unless you already found them and already know what to reorder.

Next week's topic: our garden's natural wonder fuel: compost.

Winter garden 01/06/12

01/06/12

I promised you I would talk about the winter garden: here is. Notice the difference between this picture and that, taken in Spring, on the first blog.

We live in the perfect place to grow vegetables the whole year long, warm weather veggies in spring/summer/fall and cold weather crops in winter. If you travel around the countryside some, you’ll notice a few rows of cabbages or collards green in people’s yard. These are the typical winter crops in the South.

 

To the collards green, I prefer kale; it has a sweeter taste and does very well around here. My second crop would be leeks, a major winter food in Belgium where I was born. I pretty much grow leeks the whole year long and will start my next batch in early February. You can’t make a good soup without adding a leek or two to it and steamed leeks also make a very nice side dish.

 

Next year I will try some Brussels sprouts. It is hard to beat the freshly picked taste of home grown B.S. I have tried them in the past but their taste can get spoiled by a hotter than normal fall, always a very strong possibility around here.

Herbs in winter: even though some might not consider them as herbs, I always make sure I have enough onion and shallot tops/ greens for additional taste. I never do without parsley and I also enjoy chervil, less commonly grown around here. Winter, so far, has spared my cilantro. Oregano, thyme and rosemary growing the whole year long, round up my available fresh herbs garden.

Thanks to global warming, we’re still eating lettuce, curly endive (on its way out) and escaroles. Blanched properly, escaroles have an amazing crunch and a mix of sweet/bitter taste worth acquiring.

 

I mentioned earlier that we live in the perfect place but that only is true to a point: your winter crops get started around September first and need the cool fall to develop and ready themselves for the winter cold. Just like this year, getting those cool days in fall can be unpredictable and cause some veggies to go to seed early, before you can really enjoy them or get too fibrous or never attaining the ideal taste by turning bitter. Like in most of life, nothing is guaranteed so that a good gardener may end up trying different crops for different variations of weather, knowing full well that some won’t make it due to weather vagaries. 

I am glad my livelihood does not depend on having to pick the right crops every year.

This week in the garden 01-04-12

01/04/12

So what do gardeners do at this time of the year?

Two things: they eat from their winter garden and they plan next season(s).

 

I’ll go back to the winter garden some other day. Planning is ongoing in the garden; while we’re all good at enjoying the moment: first lettuce, first cucumber or tomato, a lot of time is spent planning weeks/months or years ahead where we’re going to plant what and how we’ll manage our crop rotations.

For the last couple of weeks now, gardening catalogs have been piling up in our mailbox, keeping the US Post Office in business, and next to my chair. The ideal is to pick a really cold day, your favorite armchair and cuddle with all these brightly colored dreams in print called catalogs and a marker to pre-select the seeds you will order. But, like with all mood enhancing elements, it is important to exercise some self control and not buy the whole shop.

For the last few years, I have been on a holy quest to find the perfect tomato. Not the cubic one that will fit perfectly in shipping crates, not the one that will keep its blandness for the next few weeks. No, the one that has the perfect taste*: a mix of real tomato flavor softened with a tad of sweetness. Every year I try several new ones and, last year, I ended up with a very fine tasting Greek tomato called Thessaloniky that had the taste of Greece and a cherry type called Cherry Roma, a miniature paste type I loved eating straight in the garden.

This year again, I’ll try a few new varieties besides the two above mentioned and I’ll let you know how they came out taste wise.

So what does a North Carolinian gardener do while Iowans wake up with the morning after hang over? He dreams of tomatoes loaded with the taste of Southern summer.

*My perfect tasting tomato story goes back many years, during my hitch hiking days. At the time, I actually was riding a train in an area of Northern Greece where donkeys far outnumbered cars and where standing by the road thumb in hand was totally useless other than to add grit to a hide that did not need any. Three of us were sitting in that little section of a third class coach heading North: an English guy I had met a couple of days earlier and a Greek grandma who , most probably, was fifteen years younger than I am now. Her face, like the local landscape, proudly displayed signs of hard living but showed a real beauty unequaled by any face cream. At a given time, she opened up the little bundle she had been carrying, pulled out a knife, some gorgeous tomatoes, a whole, freshly baked peasant bread and a big piece of Feta cheese she had wrapped in a cloth. My classic Greek and her local dialect did not quite jive but her smile and insistence we share her meal did gain us over. 

 

To this day, I have been trying to find or reproduce that tomato with its perfect taste of warm, human generosity but haven’t found it in any catalog yet.

This week in the garden 01-02-12

This week in the garden…

Disclaimer: this picture was not taken this week but last spring.

 

01/02/12 I have decided to share some of my experiences in the garden for the following reasons:

1. I love gardening
2. Not many people do practice this pastime anymore and maybe I’ll tempt a couple of you to start with a few herbs in pots and then, maybe, you might even go as far as sacrificing a few square feet of grass turf to plant a couple of tomatoes.

What’s the draw?

1. Taste, taste, taste and freshness. Warning: once you have tasted the crunch of a head of lettuce picked fifteen minutes before dinner, once you sink your teeth in a tomato still warm from the sun or a fresh fig, you’ll never be able to appreciate in the same way that stuff that travels for days before getting to your super market.
2. Peace of mind. Nothing is more regenerating after a day’s work than a few minutes spent among your fruit, veggies and flowers. Weed pulling and watering work better than any shrink (I apologize to my friends who are shrinks.) All three Abrahamic religions give gardens a huge play, be it as the lost Garden of Eden or a future heavenly resting place (Sorry to disappoint but no promised virgins in mine.)
3. Because we can. In NC, we’re blessed with a loooooong growing season, and lots of sun.

Why now? I had a few free minutes.

How? I’ll just post every few days depending on how busy things are.

The good thing: easy to skip if you’re not interested.

The other good thing: feel free to ask questions if interested.