I wish I had more time to keep this blog up. It was a middling year for the garden, but a better one in the greenhouse. Unfortunately zealous young helpers broke a couple of panes about the time the weather was turning cold and we were not able to replace them before it froze. Too bad, we hand lots of tomatos and peppers that would have ripened into late October.

Spent most of the summer working on the house however, and the garden was a second place project. Really I need to rework the whole thing. Many of my raised beds are in the wrong place and the pathways between the boxes are too narrow at 24". There is not sufficient room between them for things like wheelbarrows and I am constantly dragging hoses across the plants in the corners of the beds.

If I can possibly make time in the spring I will raise each bed by another 2x6 lift and I will add 2x2 trellis supports at the ends of each bed. These will act to guide the hoses as well as support the beds a bit better, and allow me to rotate climbing crops throughout the garden.

One disturbing development is that I had a sudden eruption of Canad Thistle in several of the beds. I was not paying attention and didn't notice until several had gone to seed. This means a big job next year and I am tempted to solarize the beds where they turned up and write those beds off for next year.

The soil in the greenhouse is getting depleted after five years and I really need to move it to a new site and let the old site lie fallow or under a crop of green manure. My original plan was to build two identical, adjacent greenhouse sites and to mount skids underneath the structure itself so that I could move it back and forth every second year or so. I still think this is a good idea but the need to park a car in the new greenhouse space is a bit of a hindrance.

We have lost three of the four apple trees I planted a few years ago. Only a single dwarf Fuji survives and I am seriously thinking of putting on an addition to the house where it is planted. Fruit trees just don't do well here and while I still think I could make them go, it is going to require much more time and effort than I can expend right now.

However, I am mostly happy with our gardening efforts. We have succeeded in putting up a winter's worth of preserved vegetables each fall and have demonstrated that we could indeed survive off the garden if we had too. Although I would get tired of potato soup...

Each year we get a bit better at some things and we add a few more as practice makes us more efficient and gives us more time. We have become very good at growing beans, peas, carrots, potatoes, herbs, onions, tomatoes and peppers. We would still like to grow apples and grapes.

We have had very good corn, but it requires tremendous amounts of water and it depletes the soil very rapidly, more rapidly than we can make compost. Ironically, about the time we decided to stop growing corn because of the usual availability of VERY fresh sweet corn, the production of corn switched from the edible sweet corn to starchy ethanol stock. Really though, since the town put everyone on a water meter, I have been reluctant to use the quantity of water that corn requires anyway.

Bees and chickens still remain projects in the future. The bees I think I can handle, but the chickens will need daily care and I am not willing to do them unless the rest of the family decides they are going to take on some of the responsibility.

For now, my interests have returned to building furniture.

More tomorrow my foot!

The last post here ended with the remark "more tomorrow". And then I laid off for a year. Hard to tell whether keeping a blog makes any sense for me. I like my hand written notebooks with their coffee stained pages, dirt, plant pressings and other items that make them real. Blogging is just not all that exciting to me.

2010 was not exactly a banner garden year. One thing and another kept me from getting out there and getting the work done and I ended up with only a bed of potatoes, another of bush beans, and the greenhouse beds of lettuce, peas, carrots, squash and zucchini outside and cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, along with a small bed of late lettuce and basil inside.

Tomatoes and peppers are bearing nicely. The cukes are nearly finished because I haven't had time to get out and pick them. Cukes stop bearing if the fruit is allowed to fully ripen.

The demands of the beginning and the end of the school year really play havoc with the garden schedule. Once school is out, it is too late for lots of the work, and then much of the garden matures after the school year starts again. Beans need to be picked now, but there just isn't time.

Grasshoppers...

...invading the greenhouse.

Grasshoppers lay their eggs in "pods" that contain between 20 and 120 eggs. A mature female hopper lays between 8 and 25 of these pods. Cold winters have no effect on the eggs which will hatch when warm dry weather arrives. The nymphs are substantially similar to the adults when born, though much smaller in size and lacking wings.They mature in 40 to 60 days, so it is critical to address them now.

Grasshoppers are susceptible to a protozoa, Nosema locustae which is available commercially under the brand name Semaspore. They also do not like cold, humid conditions. I have been moderately successful controling them by leaving areas of the greenhouse (a block of bolted spinach) unwatered. The grasshoppers congregate on the leaves of the spinach and can be removed with the vacuum.

The greenhouse is pretty well completely planted save for places I have seedlings sitting out in pots. There are four tomato plants, two bunches of cilantro, two of basil, two four foot rows of carrots, all planted around april 1. A short row of Romaine planted from nursery starts around March 14

Next year, plant starts for lettuce and Spinach in January.

Tired. More tomorrow.

Movable Greenhouse

I have been reading Elliot Coleman's new book The Winter Harvest Handbook and am very intersted in trying his technique of using a movable greenhouse so that the soil in the greenhouse has an opportunity to weather and be exposed to the elements over the winter.

I'm trying to figure out how to extend the foundation of my greenhouse so that I can move it back and forth between two locations. The greenhouse is currently set up on a rectangular frame of 4x4 redwood sleepers laid on top of trench filled with gravel. I'm going to add a second frame adjacent to the existing foundation, directly to the east.

Spring Snow

I was up and about at 6:30 this morning to check the greenhouse. Discovered that the timer on the circulation fan had stalled at some point, so that the fan was on in the middle of the night rather than in the heat of the day. Corrected that. Outside, the temperature felt about 30.

Soil and air temperature in the greenhouse in the mid 50's. Lettuce is growing well. Plenty to cut for dinner tonight.

The tomatoes are not looking exactly lush, they are putting on some new growth, but not bright glowing green. There appears to be a bit of chlorosis. I note that the water walls keep the soil moister than is the case in the rest of the greenhouse. I wonder if the roots are a bit waterlogged. I am going to cut back on the watering a bit.

The spinach is not growing the way I would like. It's growing long and spindly and not putting on a lot of leaves, and some of the plants are bolting. I'm thinking of hacking it back. These are nursery starts, var. "vancouver". Not sure I will do those again. Note for next year to start "bloomsdale" myself.

Carrots are still no-shows at this point. There are about 5 plants, but it looks like I need to replant.

I ran the lawnmower yesterday and picked up about 20 bushels (catcher holds 2bu) of dead leaves, old thatch and other debris. I dumped out the kitchen scraps and covered them with the lawn debris. Took me about 35 minutes to do the back part of the lawn. Would have done the front too, but dinner was ready and I need to move the trampoline and get the kid's toys out of the way first. I planned to do that this morning, but around 7:00 it started snowing hard.

It's actually snowing very hard. Not much wind, but BIG flakes and already about half an inch accumulated as of 8:00. Gray, cold, snowy day.

Inside, seedlings are doing well. I have 3 varieties of peppers and 5 of tomatoes growing well. I also have herbs going. Mint, Oregano, Marjoram, Savory, Coriander. I planted rosemary as well, but it's not coming up.

I worked in the garage most of the day yesterday, and planned to work in the garden most of today. Guess I should have done it the other way. Looks like it will snow all day.

I'm finishing up a seed starting bench to hold the grow lights today. It will support a bank of 6 flourescent tubes in three fixtures over a 2x4 area. This is a large enough space to hold 4 flats. I will be able to independently adjust the height of the lights so that I can start a couple of seed flats and also grow a box of lettuce or some tomatoes.

Not much else to report today. Time to go do something.

One goal achieved

Today I achieved an important milestone in the development of our garden and my skills in managing it. I picked the first lettuce and spinach harvests of the year. The importance of this is that we still have storage onions and frozen beans and peas from last season. This means that we have succeeded in having vegetables from our garden available for our table for the entire year, and that if I am as successful with row covers and cold frames as I was last year, I should be able to extend my fresh food season to 7 months of the year.

I realize that in many parts of the country this is not that big of a deal, but I live in a high mountain valley where the normal growing season is less than 100 days. We are still 2 months away from our last frost (June 17 last year), so to have anything fresh from the garden is an accomplishment.

Keeping the greenhouse warm

My improvised efforts to keep the greenhouse warm appear to be working out. In a week where the outside temperature dropped to 4F, the temperature in the greenhouse has not dropped below 45, and the soil temperature has stayed between 55 and 70. Heat for the greenhouse has consumed 167 kWh since March 20 for an average cost of around a dollar a day.

There is now enough spinach and romaine for daily salads. Tomatoes have recovered from transplant shock and are now growing visibly each day. Only about half of the radishes have emerged, probably because I used last year's seed. I replanted in the empty spaces between the radishes that have already emerged and I planted a short triple row on the other side of the greehouse this morning.

There has been no evidence of carrots sprouting, but I had noticed a large population of ants when I lifted the cover boards. I had been thinking that the ants hauled off all the carrot seeds. But this morning when I checked again, I noticed a number of small, neatly spaced plants coming up. These look like carrots. Carrots should emerge in 14-21 days. Today is the 16th day, so I am going to wait until next Friday before I replant those.

Cold outside. There was about 1/2" of snow overnight, but it is mostly gone now (11:30 A.M) I need to work over the outside beds where some of the grass and a number of weeds have begun to appear. I will do this later in the week after I pick up a roll of plastic film. I need to dig up the beds and then solarize them for a few weeks to kill off the weeds. If I get this done by next weekend, I will be in good shape.

I am putting a lot off until next weekend, but it is a four day weekend, so if the weather allows, I should be fine.

My seed starting is going well. 24 of 30 tomato plants that have out grown the Jiffy flat. 17 of 18 peppers are doing well. All of the herbs are up except the rosemary, which may take up to 21 days to sprout.

I started 72 more herbs at school on Tuesday, March 31, Dill, Oregano, Mint, Savory, Cilantro, and Rosemary. Some of them had sprouted by Friday.