Common Ground

First off, sorry to my faithful readers for missing one of my twice-weekly posts this week. It was a busy week, not totally due to gardening though. Being Canada’s birthday we put on an obligatory party on the weekend and attended Canada Day festivities in Ottawa on Tuesday.

The not so great picture above is of my first market day which was today, Thursday. I brought with me 12 bunches of head lettuce (1-3 heads wrapped together), a whole bunch of green onions, garlic scapes and a selection of about 6 different herbs. The herbs were mostly to give the illusion of variety as most were from perennial herbs in our herb garden. But suprisingly, I sold about 7 bunches of mint, 2 bunches of parsley and a bunch of lovage. The market is quite a small one, just starting out but nonetheless I sold all of my lettuce in the first hour. I seems like it will work for me this year and hopefully the crowds will grow as the amount I have to sell grows.

If you live around Stittsville or know someone who does, tell them the market is on from 4pm to 6:60pm every Thursday and it is located in the parking lot just south of Abbott St. on Main St.

The garden is growing very quickly now. It seems like there are many things *almost* ready to pick. We’ve had a handful of cucumbers and zuchinni this week and I pulled up a thumb sized carrot. I think there might be some new potatoes any day now. Beans, both pole and bush are beginning to flower and the first of the beets are sizing up nicely. I check the tomatoes in the greenhouse daily now for the first sign of red… it should be soon!

For what’s up in the CSA boxes, see the link at the right or click here.

Above is a picture of the garden as of today. Things are really taking off now with several vegetables just about to start production (notably cucumbers, zucchini and potatoes). As requested I am going to start predicting what will be in the weekly shares and letting people know a few days before. This week there will likely be peas, lettuce, green onions, garlic scapes, parsley and possibly a few other things. I am going to put a section on the permanent (i.e. non post) pages that are linked at the right so that you can quickly see what is up for the coming week. I’ll get that working soon.  Ok, here it is.

What I really wanted to talk about in this post is the tomato staking method I’ve been using. It’s called the “florida weave” and it’s the best thing I’ve come across so far to deal with very large indeterminate tomato plants. These plants absolutely need to be staked and often pruned in order to get decent tomatoes from them. I could grow more determinant (or “bush” type) tomatoes but I find the best and most interesting varieties are usually the larger staking kind. The florida weave involves putting posts or large stakes every two plants and stringing twine between the posts so that the plants are “sandwiched” between the twine. You can see some of my plants here (click to enlarge):

I almost abandoned this method this year when I looked into the cost of the T-posts I’ve been using. They are $9 each! With about 170 plants and less than half the necessary posts it was going to be a bit too costly. Luckily I found some used posts for $3 each and ended up only buying 20 posts new. Still expensive, but I didn’t come up with a better alternative. I briefly considered using wood posts, but pressure treated is not allowed in organic agriculture and cedar posts were going to be almost $5 each. Given that they would rot after several years I stuck with the metal T-posts.

Stringing the twine between posts is a bunch of work, especially early in the summer, but it pays off later when the tomatoes come in and they are easy to pick and well off the ground. Here you can see the tomatoes I planted in the orchard with a nice layer of leaf mulch just applied. I collected the leaves last fall from peoples houses when they put them at the road for pickup. In the distance is the new egg-mobile in action. I still have to do a final post of the egg-mobile in its finished form. That will be soon.

This week’s share still looks pretty green (they probably will for a few more weeks I guess). Included in the box are: several heads of lettuce (mix of ‘optima’ buttercrunch, ‘red sails’ leaf and ‘paris island’ romaine), bunch of preemie beets and greens, bunch of green onions and green garlic, bunch of mint, a sprig of lovage, a sprig of tarragon and a decent size bag of sugar snap peas. Lovage is an herb that smells and tastes like celery and can be used to flavour things where you’re looking to mimic that taste. Tarragon has a slightly sweet, mild fennel-like flavour and is amazing when chopped and mixed into butter, then spread on bread. The boxes are standard 38 liter storage boxes I picked up to hold shares in from now on. We’ll see how they work out. As you can see there is plenty of room for the shares to get larger as the season goes on.

This weekend we hosted a “season kick-off” potluck. It was a lot of fun and the pool finally saw some serious use:

Kids way outnumbered adults which made the afternoon fun and just a little bit crazy! The kids were also quite interested in the chickens. Since being outside, the new chicks have really flourished. I guess they should now be called small chickens. Here is one small chicken being inspected by a flock of kids:

This is something my daughter did for me for father’s day (you may need to click on it to be able to read it). I think her teacher wrote down what she said. I guess the farm has been a big deal for her too this spring. That’s me in the red pants and her on the right in the blue dress. Note: I am older than 8.

This week has been very rainy. We’ve had about 3 inches of rain here. The wet ground has kept me out of the garden for the most part. I have been busy integrating the chickens together (3 older hens with 35 8-week old chicks). That has gone well so far. I’ve also been busy planting in the basement again:

I am planting all the brassica crops (brussel sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) in the basement along with swiss chard, cucumbers, herbs and succession plantings of lettuce. I like starting the seedlings out in the basement, even though they could be planted outside for several reasons. First is that the temperature is nice and even and the watering can be done precisely. This leads to very even germination. Second, the seedlings will be transplanted when they are at least 2 weeks old, meaning that they will be that much further ahead of all the weeds growing in the ground. I think that this will minimizing the weeding in the long run. Weeding around the plants that must be direct seeded (like carrots and parsnips) is a serious pain. Also, a lot of these plants are planted few and far between (for example, cabbage is planted at least 2 feet apart in rows 3 feet apart). It would be a bit silly to directly seed cabbage and then have to thin it out severely to get that spacing, not to mention a waste of seed. On the other hand, some of the crops I’ve been transplanting are on the edge of making it worth it. The work transplanting times the number of plants is getting fairly high for things like swiss chard and maybe even lettuce. In the future I might start buying a lot more seed and seeding them directly. In the future I hope to have a much more weed free garden too! I’m sure everyone says that.

Well, it is a big day here at the farm. The very first pick-up of vegetables was today (photo credit goes to Don and his blackberry). In the picture you see mint, leaf lettuce, beet greens, green garlic, green onions, spinach, head lettuce and radishes. I guess the only ‘weird’ thing in the list are the beet greens and green garlic. We use beet greens as you would swiss chard or spinach. They’re quite tasty at this early stage. The green garlic has a tough stalk, but it’s got a powerful garlic flavour and you can probably use the bulb and first 4-5 inches of stalk as you would normally use garlic. Use it fresh if you really love garlic, or sauté / cook it into something if you prefer more mellow garlic flavour.

The rest of this post is a guest post by Amanda (my wife; who the domain is borrowed from) :

Hi there – I’m here with a slightly different perspective than my dear husband has on gardening. Although I love the amazing harvest he provides, I myself don’t get so caught up on the ‘excitement’ of getting new seed catalogues or the fact that the seedlings just grew another 1/8” today.

In fact, a few years ago when he started growing food for us, it was a bit of an adjustment for me to make in terms of preparing vegetables. Before, my weekly trip to the grocery store involved the usual purchase of tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, and pre-washed salad, without any regard to the time of year. Once Chris was motivated to provide food for us all year round, the diversity of vegetables we used grew – and changed over the season as well.

For me it was a pretty big learning curve to understand how to use and appreciate the array of flavours and textures that these new vegetables offered. So I figured giving you folks a heads up as to what to roughly expect over the season may give you a chance to plan a little more than I did that first year. Now that I know what’s coming, it’s exciting to anticipate the change in vegetable selection and really savour the flavours, knowing that it won’t be there forever! This list just shows you what’s new for each month; some things you will get all through the season once it shows up, like tomatoes, herbs, potatoes, etc…Other (cool weather vegetables) might have a spring and fall harvest, like spinach and broccoli.

End of June/ Beginning of July – ‘baby greens’, mixed lettuces, very quickly followed by cucumbers, peas, spinach, radishes, and green onions.

Mid – Late July – greenhouse tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, beets, carrots, new potatoes, beans, herbs, onion, garlic

August – melon, squash, watermelon, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, leek, kohlrabi

September – sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, cauliflower, Jerusalem artichokes, rutabaga, potatoes

October – parsnips, brussel sprouts

Throughout the season we’ll be providing recipes for the vegetables that you may not be so familiar with. There are many recipes you can find on the web; however, we’ll post what we have found to be the winners so far (i.e. ones that we have used). These will be put in a recipe section that you can access from the main page (at the right under navigate, called “recipes”).

First CSA box will be next weekend, I am pretty sure. I think it will include the following: radishes (shown above), spinach, green onions, green garlic, lettuce and whatever else I can scrounge up, probably some herbs. I really hope the spinach holds out until then. Here it is:

Here is what it looks like when it bolts (goes to seed):

We still eat it at this stage, but it gets more bitter when it goes to seed. I’m going to try watering the leaves on the hot days this week to keep the rest of it from bolting. The lettuce is more of a sure thing. I have many varieties going probably at 4 different ages already. Here is a nice “red sails” leaf lettuce (please ignore the weeds):

The greenhouse is really starting to fill out. You can literally see the plants growing on a daily basis. This is also promising:

I’ve trellised the pole beans and the taller pea varieties. Shown above is my preferred pole bean trellis. It involves hanging garden twine from a wooden trellis that is about 7 feet high. Putting up the trellis is time consuming thus I’ve done it for only a small amount of the beans. Behind these are another 50 ft X 3 rows of bush beans. The bush beans are a lot more work to pick but require no trellis. I wonder if they are actually better in the end. When picking beans I MUCH prefer the pole beans.

Finally, the egg-mobile is coming along. I’ve done some of the trickier hardware installations (egg boxes with door and latches, back doors with latches, front windows. What’s left now is nailing on the sheet metal and the hardware mesh on the air vents (you can see I’ve started at the back right if you click to enlarge). It is now the top priority as the 14, 3 week old chicks in the basement don’t smell nice anymore. The 40 or so chicks in the garage smell quite bad even though I’ve added a lot of bedding. They’re not too crowded where they are now, but they’re feisty and would really benefit from some outdoor activity.

Above is the beginnings of the egg-mobile I’m working on (click to enlarge). The weather over the last half week or so has been very wet. I can’t complain about the rain, but it is so wet I’m trying to stay out of the garden beds. I still have several flats of stuff to transplant (some tomatoes, basil, lettuce, broccoli) and I’ve started seeding the next round of plants in the basement (cabbage, brussel sprouts, rutabaga).

So the egg-mobile or movable chicken coop will house all our egg laying hens. We currently have about 40 chicks that are 6 weeks old in the garage. It’s starting to smell bad and they’re getting crowded so this project is a priority right now. The idea is that the coop will be movable either by hand or with the lawn tractor and will be surrounded by electric netting (shown in this post and photo). The netting will keep the birds where I want them (out of the garden especially) and protect them from predators. I can move the pen and coop around every few days or week and the chickens will always have fresh pasture to roam on. This makes for tasty eggs and happy chickens.

You can see in the picture the coop sits on a trailer contraption. I bought this as a complete unit at Princess Auto. I was going to put something together myself, but for just over $200 this seemed like a deal. I also scored a whole whack of scrap lumber and scrap sheet metal so besides the trailer bed, I’ve only had to buy a few 10′ long 2X4’s.

The coop will be 10 feet by 6 feet with a simple slant roof. The short side will have 2 old windows installed in it and a row of 4 nest boxes. The tall side will have doors on hinges the entire length of the coop for easy clean-out. The 60 square feet should be plenty of space for upwards of 60 hens given that they’ll only be in there at night. We will have somewhere between 30 and 45 hens by the fall (when they start laying) so they should feel very roomy. I’m thinking I will keep their feeder and water-er in the coop for now. I do this right now with our 3 laying hens and I find they spend very little of their time in the coop. They dip in for a quick bite and drink and then it’s back outside for foraging.

I’ll post more pictures when the coop is finished and in action.

After a close encounter with frost Tuesday night, transplanting started seriously Wednesday. I was looking at the forecast and almost decided to risk it and plant tomatoes Tuesday. It turned out that we got a fairly widespread frost and I probably would have lost what I planted. A bit of a lucky decision. The tomatoes in the picture (click to enlarge) are in the orchard. I have a lot of space between the young trees and while they are small I thought I might as well use it for other things. There are now about 75 tomato plants in line with the trees. The orchard is probably the best site on the property with a slight southern slope and a very nice windbreak to the west.

I also started transplanting into the plastic mulch that was laid down. It turns out that the drip tape needs to go under the soil if using clear plastic mulch, so I had to re-lay it all on Monday. That being done, when transplanting care had to be taken not to cut into the drip tape when cutting holes for the plants. Here you can see a pepper plant in clear plastic mulch with row cover on:

It’s hard to tell, but there is a stream of water spraying out where I cut the tape accidentally. Luckily that is the only time it happened. The plastic mulch makes transplanting much more difficult. The hole for the transplant need to be dug through the hole in the plastic, then the plant is put in the hole and soil moved around without being able to see what you’re doing. Then water is sprayed into the hole around the plant and finally, the plastic is weighted down with a little handful of soil around the plant. Almost all the peppers and eggplant are transplanted. I put tomatillos and ground cherries out without plastic mulch. I am planning on doing all the sweet potatoes tomorrow and wondering how long the process will take me. The wind has been quite a factor this week too. I’ve put row covers and windbreaks wherever I can. It looks like harsh treatment for the transplants to have to endure 30 km/hr winds in their first couple days.

In between transplanting jobs I found some time to finally plant onion sets that I intend to use for green onions and I weeded the onion transplants. Here is a picture of them:

They look pretty good right now. Onions are notoriously hard to keep weed free. This bed is still suffering from an onslaught of couch grass. The wheel hoe is making quick work of the stuff in between the rows. I’ve used it about 4 times already this year in this bed, mainly because it’s so easy to do (takes about 5 minutes) and makes the bed look fairly clean on it’s own. This time though I did both the wheel hoe and the more strenuous between-plant hoeing. Probably took me about 45 minutes to do this bed. I might do it one more time in June but since the onions will be pretty much done in mid-July that will likely be all that is needed.

The first bed of carrots I planted have germinated fairly well from the looks of it (click to enlarge). I’m always a bit anxious about carrots coming up. They take a week or more to germinate and they’re pretty fussy about being moist and just below the soil for the whole time. A lot of people use burlap on top of the freshly planted carrots. I’m thinking of trying a large roll for the larger plantings of carrots, but for now I’m still using my old method which involves laying scrap lumber on the rows of carrot seed. it actually has been working quite well. Last year it took 3 plantings before I had a decent stand. In the end though, the carrots that did come up well did very well and we had a bumper crop last year.

Carrots make up one of the staple vegetables in our diet, mainly because I love them and like to grow them. We finished a cold room in our basement last fall and kept vegetables in there until… well, there are still a couple potatoes and a handful of onions in there right now. I’ve been trying over the past several years to grow more and more of what we eat from the garden. Last year was the best yet with basically no vegetables bought until March. The cold room selection can improve a lot from last year, but now that I know how well it works I’ll be planning and planting a lot more for it. Cabbage is another vegetable we discovered, or rather re-discovered. The garden cabbage last year was fabulous - head and shoulders above the stuff you buy in the store. We also got better at doing things with it and we now have a repertoire of cabbage dishes. My favourite is cold cabbage salads mixed with other grated root vegetables and tossed with a variety of different dressings (like walnut oil and raisins). This year I’m going to grow a greater variety of cabbages, celeriac, chinese cabbage, more beets, more rutabaga and at least as many carrots as last year just for our root cellar. There are a whole host of other things that last at least a month or two with some help from the root cellar like leek.

In other news, I’ve finally got to finishing some beds ready for planting warm weather crops:

I’d have had it all ready sooner, but actually the weather hasn’t really been warm enough to plant any warm weather crops outside anyway. I know a lot of people have put their tomatoes and peppers in already here, but I’ve found that it doesn’t help the plants out any to be out when the days are 18 C and the nights are still 6-8 C. The soil is really too cool for them to do any growing anyway. In the picture you see a bed ready for sweet potatoes on the left. I used greenhouse plastic and a slightly raised bed to warm the soil for the sweet potatoes. According to Ken Allen it’s the only way to dependably get sweet potatoes in my climate. This year I’m going to try it with peppers as well. The bed on the right is ready for plastic. The driptap has been laid down and the bed is shaped so that water will run into the planting holes. The bed in the middle is almost ready for tomatoes. It has a dressing of well rotted cow manure on it that just needs to be tilled in and it will be ready to go. Now I’m just waiting for a day when the winds aren’t over 30 km/hr to put some of the first tomatoes out. High winds are not nice for seedlings that have just been put outside as their stems and leaves aren’t strong enough to handle it yet.

This past weekend with the help of my brother and dad who were visiting, I got my irrigation setup and working. There are a still a few kinks to work out (literally and figuratively) but it is doing what it is supposed to. As expected, after all was set and working on Monday we got 3/4″ of rain. This is more than we’ve had in more than a month and it was needed. I guess setting up drip irrigation amounts to doing a rain dance.

What you see above is 2″ layflat hose (blue, click for larger image). It’s called layflat because it lays flat on the ground when not full of water. Simple enough. Connected to it are little plastic faucets with black “driptape”. The driptape is thin plastic (8 mil) tubing with drip emitters welded into it every 6 inches. When around 10 psi of pressure is applied to the hoses, each emitter will drip water out. Every 100 ft of drip tape drips at a rate of 0.22 gal (0.83 litres) per minute. This is a pretty slow rate and ensures that the water is placed right where it is needed at the plant roots. It is purportedly much more efficient to water this way than with overhead sprinklers. Another plus is that many plants get diseases when watered on their leaves too much (tomatoes being a prime example).

The idea is that I will place this driptape down each bed and place it next to each row of crop. Because I’m using our well for a water source, I got low flow driptape and shutoffs at each row tap so that I can select which crops to water and when. As it turns out my well puts out 11 GPM (gallons per minute), enough to do almost the whole 1/2 acre simultaneously. On the other hand, I have only connected about 300 ft of driptape so far and my well pump pressure is causing the system to leak all over the place. I have a pressure regulator, shown here with the filter and other fittings (click for larger image):

But apparently the regulator only regulates down to 15 psi once you have enough flow (around 7 GPM or half my garden). So I turned the 1.5″ faucet down so that it was almost closed to reduce the flow so that the system worked. I still have leaks here and there, but for the most part I think it’s working. As I prepare more beds and lay out more driptape it should be easier to use. Here is the driptape in action watering what will be a bed of peppers and eggplant. The bed is a total of 5 feet wide (literally 5 of my feet which I think are about a foot long, maybe a bit more; incidentally everything in the garden is measured in “Chris feet” not real feet). This is after about 1 hour of water. You can still see where the emitters are in the driptape and the ground is wet to about 2 inches down (click to enlarge):

As you can see all my pictures are from the evening with the flash on the camera. Of course they’d be better in sunlight, but who has time for picture taking during the day with so much else going on!

We have a lot of amazing sunsets at our place, just beyond the garden. Ignore the mess of stuff in the foreground and focus on the distance (click for a supersize image):