the gang’s all here

One of the reasons I have not been blogging lately is that it’s so darn hot outside and gardening is a bit on the miserable side. Also, anything I do spend time sweating over, the deer eat. They’ve become so desperate that they knock down my fencing.

Yesterday, my brain, overloaded by cherry panna cotta, made a startling discovery: The deer are NOT EATING my HERBS! DUH!!

I woke up early this morning to find a cool breeze and a temperature in the mid 70s. Perfect for pulling out munched down squash and cantaloupe vines. I started “weeding”, slowly working my way from the left side of my garden to the right. All was well until I nearly stepped on one of the culprits of my garden’s demise. Right under my nose was Bambi’s stunt double. A tiny deer was napping between the house foundation and the plumbago.

At first I thought it was dead.

Then I noticed it was faking dead. So I walked off hoping it would run away. I returned a few moments later to find the little bugger in a new position, but same spot. So I kept working, it breathed heavily as I puttered a safe distance around it. I’m sure it’s mom had said not to move and if you see Kate she’ll want to kill you for having eaten her tomatoes. But my cold, gardener’s heart melted as I imagined what terror this poor kid felt and so after I cleaned up I willingly exposed on of my carefully protected cherry tomatoes.

I went to dress for church.

I returned to find it sill in place, napping and breathing normally. PHOTO OP!

Bambi hiding between the foundation, septic control thingy, and my plumbago.

I was so worried this precious but destructive animal was hiding in my garden to die (drought is so bad this year…I wonder how any of these animals survive – oh wait, they’ve had more tomato sauce this year than I had the whole semester I studied in Italy). I feared I would return from church to find dead Bambi. Luckily, when I got home, she/he was gone and all was well.

And so I easily continued forth with my herb garden bonanza. Already in my garden I had 11 varieties of herbs. I planted 21 more varieties (but 31 4″ pots total).

Left side of raised garden - pre planting

Left Side planted

Right side planted

While planting I almost hit a bunny with my hori hori knife as it came sprinting out of the oregano. GOOD GRIEF!! I looked around to find bees buzzing near me, a humming bird, some sort of sparrow like bird, and a huge dragonfly. I’m becoming a Disney princess! Can I use these animals for good, to clean and weed, like Cinderella did?

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Collards

Today I finally got home With enough time to peruse my garden and much to my excitement ongoing a mutated collard green! Two leaves were fused together much like a Siamese twin.

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Radish

Radishes are one vegetable that are super super easy to grow. These plants work wonders in a child’s garden because they have a quick grow period.

Seedlings show after about 5-7 days.

Harvest can be anywhere from 3-5 weeks.

These red globes do not need a lot of attention. Just sow each seed about 1/4″ deep and leave them alone. The only problem I have encountered with pests was a few doodle bugs (pill bugs) chopping around the top of the root. Also last season my soil was much more nitrogen rich and thus I had really leafy radishes with small bulbs.

Vibrant color!

Beware of the scratchy leaves. Also while radishes are fun and easy to grow they have a “spicy” aftertaste.

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Why Do We Garden?

“Gardening is all about anticipation, not completion.”

John Hoyland (As quoted in BBC’s Gardens Illustrated magazine)

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Garden Update

Drizzly mornings, sunny afternoons. Great weather for gardening! My seeds seem to be responding well…

TURNIPS – these babies were the first to sprout from the Great Seed Plant which happened one and a half weeks ago. After 6 days their cute little two leafed seedlings broke the ground.

RADISHES – The radishes I planted before the freeze are trying to make up for lost time. They are now beyond the tiny seedling form and have put off new, larger leaves (this is almost a month after planting – usually they would be close to harvest but the two weeks of unusually cold weather pushed us back).

PEAS – These broke through the soil about 7 days after planting. They look so cute! I love fresh peas!!!

CARROTS – I am finally starting to see the skinny little carrot leaves pop up. Those took a month to even sprout. The seeds I planted 1.5 weeks ago haven’t shown yet.

SPINACH – no show yet

SALAD MIX – planted a month ago, starting to get bigger…I assume I’ll have baby leaves ready to eat in about a week.

Of my transplants, everything is doing pretty well and recovering from the Great Freeze of 2011. The onions are all leaning towards the west which looks pretty cool – all lined up in rows and stretching towards the sun (like sunflowers!).  Leeks are getting stronger; I thought I was going to loose them. The artichoke seems to be doing ok.  Collards and Cabbage are a little yellow on some leaves, but doing well. Lettuce is taking off and growing strong and are the Tuscan Kale. YUM!

Sad event though – the deer got brave and one guy stuck his nose through the fence just enought to rip out a strawberry plant and run off with it… 😦 At least that’s the only damage (so far).

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Giddy

I just loaded up my garden with a flat of baby lettuce and kale transplants. I am soooooo excited that I had to quickly post about it. I am still sitting outside of The Natural Gardener, giddy as can be.

I’ve never planted kale before. I picked the ‘Toscana’ variety.

Normally I seed all my lettuce butI lost all my lettuce in the recent freezes so I am planting a few transplants to give me some immediate food choices. Seeding will also be done this weekend.

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Handmade Vegetable Plots Part Two

A week after building the cedar vegetable garden beds (and days of hauling soil), it was time to plant.

What I planted:
– 1 Artichoke ‘Violetta’
– 6 Leeks ‘Lincoln’
– 6 Collard Greens ‘Georgia’
– 2 sets of Onions ’10-15′ (yellow) and ‘Bermuda’ (white)
– 2 types of Carrots ‘Baby Fingers’ and ‘Danvers’
– Radish ‘Globe’
– 2 Lettuce ‘Salad Mix’ and ‘Butter Crunch

While I am very familiar with the Square Foot Gardening system and have helped others install their gardens accordingly, I have never done it for my own garden. I usually like to play with something more ornamental and random. This time around I have decided to test the SF system for myself and see if it actually is more efficient.

Pre-plant (notice the square foot grid)

Post-plant with the deer fence set up

While my dad’s hand stacked stone raised garden bed by the house is so beautiful it is hard to set the deer fence up sine it is not laid out in straight lines. Here the box shape lends itself to the easy install (and removal) of my little deer fencing.

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Small/Local is possible

Short and sweet blog post from an American gardening in Italy.

I had the pleasure of studying abroad in Bella Italia and was amazed at their farming system. Peppered along the highways, in the small triangles of land between intersections I saw many little farm plots with adorable older men tending them. As we drove by houses we could see that many of them had gardens full of edibles.

Proponents of BIG AG like to claim that we must keep large scale industrial farms to feed America (the amount of wasted food is enough to prove that wrong). I’d like to think that they are short sighted. Italy (and much of Europe) proves that small farms do work.

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Handmade Vegetable Plots Part One

For the fall season I created a decent sized veggie garden by clearing a patch of perennials out of a raised bed up along the house foundation. This has worked very well (mainly because I invested in great soil and have never used any man made toxic chemicals to kill insects or disease) but I am eager to expand. My family and I were able to lightly supplement our food from my garden but not to any extent that really saved money. We had a few collard greens, some carrots, and about a dozen salads that were all very delicious and left us wanting more.

So on Saturday I purchased cedar lumber from a store nearby and started constructing my beds. The goal was to build two 8×4′ beds approximately 12″ tall. This included:

– 12 2″x6″x8′ cedar boards
– 1 8′ 4×4″ post
– two boxes of 3″ nails

I had the guys at the hardware store cut four of the 8′ long boards into 4′ pieces (total of 8 4′ boards for the ends) and they cut the 4×4″ post into 8 foot long pieces.

I had to construct these in my garage due to rain, but just FYI try to build them in place. These beds get heavy and it took a while to get them set. This involved my sister and I “rolling” the beds across the yard, which was really stupid because it weakened the joints.  To move the second bed each “hugged” a side to move the second one and waddled across the lawn while my mom kept yelling “look out for dog poop!” This was ridiculous because we could barely see (did I mention it was pitch black outside when we did this?) and we ended up in giggles.

Anyway, the first bed I constructed took a little over an hour as I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing. I made the mistake of constructing the whole base first, which turned out to be very inefficient.

This took way to long as I moved around the frame a lot...

Once the bottom layer was completed I set the second layer. This involved way too much movement and I wasted a lot of my time. The second bed was constructed by side – first I put together the 4′ sides one at a time, then I set up each of the 8′ sides. This would have only taken me about 45 minutes except that half way through I mistook my finger for a nail and had to break for a while.

TIP: before you start nailing boards together check to make sure the lengths match. I did not do that on my first go round and some of the top boards didn’t quite match the bottom boards. On the second bed, I spent a few minutes setting the boards next to each other to make sure they were the same length so that there were not big spaces between the joints.

Example of how the corners came together.

Another mistake involved a nail that some how got stuck in the board. I could not get it to go in, nor could I get it out of the board. I ended up having to bend it down against the board. This is disappointing from an aesthetic standpoint and also could potentially scratch someone/tear clothing.

Dysfunctional nail!

My sister and I moved the beds a few feet off of a dry stacked stone wall my father built. This is the sunniest spot in the side yard and unfortunately the most visible to the neighbors. I believe veggie gardens are the most beautiful type of garden (especially formal French potagers) but not all agree. So I planted a hedge of Rosemary which I will eventually make into some sort of topiary or box hedge to distract the view.

The final prep was moving soil into the beds. I purchased mine from Geo Growers and had them dump 2 cubic yards in our driveway. It took me almost three days but I moved it all myself with this tiny little red wagon.

I’m sore and I have a bruised nail but this experience thus far has been amazing. As stupid as it might sound I feel slightly like a pioneer woman. OK so maybe I am more of a city girl playing around with self-sustainability in a tiny way, but figuring out how to build something with my own hands has been rewarding in a way no other project or job has been. This was hard work labor wise, but simple in execution. I just can’t wait to get more carrots, lettuce, and maybe even a few flowers out of my newly constructed beds.

Almost done...

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Loca-grow

Garden update. I planted a week ago: Collards, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Buttercrunch and Romane and assorted lettuce (both seeds and transplants), Brussels’s Sprouts, Strawberries Mustard Greens, assorted carrots (seed) and assorted radishes (seed), also a bunch of herbs. The French Breakfast Radishes have sprouted. Yum!

Lettuce and Collards

To keep the deer out I planted this garden in an existing raised bed then added a short fence. So far the deer have stayed out. The only damage has been to a chamomile plant that was sampled by a desperate, sleep deprived animal. They only took a few bits of one plant.

Our short fence - also highlighted is our volunteer cherry tomato plant taking over the agave

Strawberries!

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