Southern Hemisphere.
Leanne grabbed her camera this weekend, and took us on a guided tour of her garden. She’s doing some interesting interpanting. Remember last time she told us about her sunflowers used as tomato stakes? This time, she’s revealed her intermixing of hollyhocks and blackberries to shade the chickens, where both are lined with grass to pick for the animals.
Leanne’s tomatoes are doing well. Being summer in NZ, she’s picking zucchini daily of course. She also has a bumper crop of honey dew - they look amazing. You can see the corn (above) - she’s hoping she didn’t plant too late...
Tracy has rescued some great shelves to use as growing racks. So great - I’m jealous that she found them, and that she has room for them! While she is currently reaping the benefits of her summer bounty, she has been planning her winter garden.
What a beautiful orchard Tracy has (right). Full of an astonishingly diverse group of fruit trees. Yum.
The Tin House
During the first week of the Growing Challenge, Lisa had planted her borlotti beans. After 15mm of rain, suddenly, they appeared (below left)! And then, a little over a week later, the little ones are surviving and thriving very well despite the rains (below right).
Lisa also started mint plants from cuttings, and those are doing well. She suggests it might not be possible to kill mint... that may be true, but I’ve had a heck of a time trying to get it to grow here!
She hasn’t yet planted the Chinese Cabbage, but instead took us on a tour of her garden before running inside to tend to jam and scones cooking in the kitchen. Beautiful tomatoes, leeks, and, yes - zucchini. She has a few tricks for hiding some of that zucchini into the kids’ meals...
To the left, you’ll see Belinda’s zucchini trying to take over the world... Last week was a week for sowing leaf and flowering plants, according to the Moon Planting Calendar, so Belinda was busy indeed. She sowed silverbeet, brussels sprouts, spinach, chicory, broccoli, mustard and cabbage. She planted out starts of leek, kale, spinach, silverbeet, parsley, dill, cumin, and savory. And she harvested squash and beans, with a few cherry tomatoes.
Interestingly, where I have tended to have more success in growing seeds directly in the ground (in situ), Belinda has found she’s had much more success starting in trays.
During a week of non-planting according to the Moon calendar, Belinda also spent some time creating a solid plan for her winter garden. An important task as she battles to find space for her winter veggies while she still has a thriving summer garden. She’s ruthlessly “culled” the weak, sick plants for the sake of space.
It has been pouring and pouring over at Our Patch. The petrified dogs have sought shelter indoors, and the hens/chooks are thinking about swimming. Rain gauge said 100ml in a day, with more on the way. Needless to say that while the rainwater tanks are filling, the corn and peas are not being planted out. Hang in there, Ali!
Rebecca has been busy! Having never successfully grown parsnips or carrots, she has declared both part of her Growing Challenge repertoire. Also mustard seed. Rebecca is including vegetable garden purchases in her grocery budget, so she can keep track of how much she has left over as they eat more and more from the garden... great idea!
Last week Rebecca began her post thusly: “To reach my goal of growing peanuts or wheat or something similar I am going to have to grow as a person and learn to compromise a little more.” She and her family just made a temporary move to stay with family while they save up to buy a home of their own. So they’re gardening on someone else’s land, with someone else’s system. Having left an organic no dig garden full of diverse soil life, they have moved to a much more conventional high-till system. But, she’s still determined to grow great veggies!
I’m quite interested in the carrot germination process she learned from her father - placing a board over it? Anyone know anything about this? It sounds intriguing, as her carrots came up in 6 days - it takes me a lot longer to germinate carrots!
Northern Hemisphere.
Lots of seed arrivals at the ‘Hennery! Laura has been quite busy planning her new garden - she’ll be ready to go as soon as she moves into her new place - wow.
In her beds full of new stuff, Laura is going to try artichokes in the northwest. I’m totally surprised that they’ll grow up there - that’s awesome. Does anyone know if they still grow as perennials in the northwest, or do they become annuals in the cold/wet?
While reading Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon, Laura has decided not to build wood-bound raised beds this year. Instead, she’ll be making “double-dug beds bound by pathways.” This is essentially what Matt and I have built, and you’ve seen the results. While Laura has to contend with a fair amount more rain than we do, we’ve found ours hold up very well through weeks of rain.
While living in San Francisco, Green Bean is dreaming about the country and its beautiful green acres. And while it’s still winter, Green Bean is dreaming about a bountiful garden teeming of life: birds, berries, bushels of beans (of course), and so much more. They’re wonderful dreams... I can’t wait to see her sons picking those delicious beans...
Green Bean also writes a great post about how we as individuals can do a little more to fight agricultural monoculture, as well as consumer monoculture - by growing our own food, and by buying local gardening supplies.
The Lucky G
Last time we saw the Happy Housewife’s awesome tomato seedlings. I’m happy to report that they’re doing well. The peppers seem to be poking out as well. She’s waiting for the rain to pass so she can start the old tractor a’rumbling to get ready for potato planting.
Farmer’s Almanac in hand, Ivy is doing some garden planning with Emily’s Drag and Drop Garden Planner. With the help of her 4-year-old, she started strawberries in a great little indoor greenhouse from her mom (right).
While sitting through another winter storm, Ivy also writes a nice post about listening to nature as you garden.
Life in the Lost World
From Jayedee’s “Wordless Wednesday” post comes a beautiful bug’s eye view of her healthy tomato seedlings (left).
Like me, Jayedee is planning to try growing some spring wheat this year. (I can just see those cute little chicks hiding amongst the golden waves.) Like me, she is also getting some raised eyebrows when she mentions the idea. Pshaw - if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we’ve learned something! This week she’s planted lantana to draw hummingbirds to her garden, pruned the pear tree, nurtured the fig tree, and is seeking cherries that might survive her chilly nights.
Also, Jayedee is looking for some organic solutions to a terrible fire ant problem, if anyone can help!
The cool crop seeds arrived at Future House Farm: onion, celery, pea, cabbage, and a “big ol’ bag of mixed spinach seeds”.
Kelly and Meg also received their 500-page Seed Savers Yearbook - yikes! What an awesome - yet completely overwhelming - array of choices. 200 pages of tomatoes...!
Finally, they’re looking for a little pruning advice for their beautiful but very large apple tree...
Michelle, who is emailing me updates
If you’ll remember, Michelle and her son are growing a windowsill garden in their urban apartment. They decided on arugula, scallions, and chamomile for Michelle’s bedtime tea, and two weeks ago she ordered seeds. They arrived, and she started six of each plant.
Michelle was very excited to report that 4 of the 6 arugula plants have already sprouted. As for the scallions and chamomile... she’s still waiting with patience and hope. Fingers crossed!
The Idaho Locavore decided at the end of January that she just might have enough lettuce to make a Valentine’s Day salad for she and her sweetie.... That’s the lettuce to the right, growing in grow bags on the kitchen counter. She placed the bags in a plastic container she had lying around, filled the bottom with packing peanuts, and added water.
Well, it worked!
She’s starting to plan her vegetable garden now - and is looking at a seed company I don’t know, Heritage Harvest Seed. It looks great, and for those of you in the north, they have a “Short Season Collection.” The Locavore is thinking about some extra pole beans this year, plus parsnips and rutabagas. Worried that the parsnips will not be able to make their way through her Idaho clay, she has found a “turnip rooted parsnip” with shallow roots. So she’ll be trying that and a regular-rooted parsnip side by side, to see which works better. A great experiment! A seed saver at heart, she will probably be saving the seed of her favorite variety.
I’ve mentioned Emily’s Drag and Drop Garden Planner. (Try it out and make sure to click on “Grow!” when you’re finished, for a special treat.) She is full of great gardening tips this month, including a top ten list of easy plants for beginners. It looks similar to mine, but there are some interesting differences (due to our different gardening zones, personal experiences, soil, and so on).
Also check out her essential garden tools. I confess to not knowing what a widger was before reading the post! But I use something similar - a tiny transplanting shovel which I love. And unlike Emily, my three-tined hand fork does get a lot of use as well.
An interesting note: like several of us, this year she will be forgoing much of her indoor seed starting.... So all you beginning gardeners, don’t worry if you don’t have the space, time, or money for indoor seed starting. You can still garden from seed in situ!
Children in the Corn
Farm Mom posted a great introduction to seed starting last week. I particularly like her shop lights suspended by chains for easy raising and lowering (left). She discusses peat issues here as well... I wonder if she’s tried coconut pellets? In my experience they are great alternatives...
I don’t know if you’ve picked this up yet, but it sure has become very apparent to me now resourceful gardeners are. Farm Mom uses popsicle and caramel sticks for plant markers!
Farm Mom is planning on starting her seeds the weekend of March 8-9th - lots of them. Rosemary, mint, oregano, thyme, peppers, tomatoes, head lettuce, romaine lettuce, eggplant, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, cutting celery, bok choi, hungarian blue poppy (for seeds) and lemon balm. Phew!
LimeSarah
LimeSarah is dreaming of gardening - literally! She harvested a few of the greens in her window garden, and the next crop of mushrooms went into some tasty meals. I love that she includes yeast for her sourdough as a part of the Growing Challenge! Though I’m sorry it hasn’t started working... it takes time, Sarah, so don’t give up! And it does take warmth - we bring our starter into the bedroom with us at night, because it’s warmest there.
I’m proud to say LimeSarah is also my newest Take 5 member.... though it looks like she’s doing pretty darn well so far!
With her last frost date in May, Tameson is cooold yet. She has thoughts of a market garden, chicken tractors, and dirt-caked knees... She has been perusing Path to Freedom’s Southern California garden - which is a bit sunnier - and there Tameson has found a new crop to grow: yacon. Through more reading, jerusalem artichokes have also caught her eye. I’m interested in both, as I have not eaten either of them. Anyone here grown them or know more about them?
She found an interesting article about the benefits of manure - something I would never have thought...
A spa garden - complete with loofah sponges, lavender, calendula, and various herbs - is now going in next to Pattie’s new vegetarian garden. Her bean sprouts are doing very well, and tasting wonderfully on her garden-grown salad. Pattie recommends a book for beginning gardeners: You Grow, Girl. I’ve heard this book is a good, quick, easy read - some of you new gardeners may want to check it out.
Pattie and the kids were at work on a Universal Access Garden earlier this month, made with repurposed materials from her garage (there’s that gardener’s resourcefulness again appearing again). They came up with some interesting added touches for the garden, including things to activate other senses besides sight for the visually impaired. She writes that the kids are now seeing “what would have been barely perceptible before”... Isn’t that what gardening does for all of us? I’ve become so much more aware of my surroundings here. I love that.
Pattie’s mother was recently in a terrible car accident - Pattie, many hopes for your mother’s speedy recovery - I’m glad she was ok!
Lori, who is emailing me updates
Sigh. Lori, her husband, and I talked about their new garden over pina coladas in the Caribbean earlier this month. It was terrible... Actually, despite our best intentions we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about gardens. There were other things on our minds. But she did go home (to sleet and snow!) and order seeds right away.
Because she is in St. Louis with a short warm season, Lori was careful to order crops from northern climates. She’ll also be germinating them indoors to get a head start on the weather - the goal is to get those fully-grown transplants into the ground as soon as danger of frost has passed. Then in the fall, she can use some frost covering and maybe cold frames to protect them as it gets cooler.
So, Lori has ordered beans, carrots, cucumbers, mixed greens, winter and summer squashes, radishes, and tomatoes. Now it’s time to figure out how everything will fit in her current beds...
Kory has been germinating herbs under is Aerogarden, and has finally moved some of them to the windowsill (right). He reports that growth is slow, but the plants are healthy. Sounds like he’ll have to do some serious hardening off when the times comes, as they are currently in an 80F office!
For the most part, Kory is waiting until March 19th, six weeks before his last frost date, to do much seed starting. He’s planning to follow the Grow Biointensive method pioneered by John Jeavons. (It will be interesting to watch him follow through that method, as it’s a bit more of a free-for-all here in our garden!) Right now it is “like ice cream truck in antarctica cold” up in central New York... brr.
Red wiggler worms arrived at Thane’s Neck Farm last week! The kids’ reaction? They wanted them to be pets! Gotta love that. Housed in their new homemade home, the new arrivals will create a nutritious blend of compost just in time for the summer garden.
Diana has planted lettuce from seed she saved last year - the seedlings are doing well, despite Diana’s not having germinated indoors before. Unfortunately while cleaning up the farmyard after the winter storms, Diana had a nasty fall. I hope she’s ok, as that is the last blog entry she wrote - yikes!
Wow. Wow. Wow. Jenny has mapped out her planting schedule for the season. I’m totally impressed - I want and need to have such a list, but I have not had the time or patience to do it! Well, February 15th says “Start broccoli seeds” and on February 16th, she started broccoli seeds. Ok, another one on the resourceful list: Jenny used a sesame seed jar as a mold for making newspaper pots in which to start her seed. I haven’t made newspaper pots, so I’m very anxious to see how it works - they always seemed so flimsy, but hers look pretty sturdy.
Check out Diane’s mathematics of pasta sauce - I love it. Very much like the conversations we have here.
The Forge Village Farmer is taking this whole resourceful thing to the extreme. She is building a cedar trellis box around her tetherball pole, for viognier grapes. Yum - it’s one of our favorite wine grapes. I’ve never eaten them straight, though - very interesting.
Last Saturday the ‘Farmer started seeds of tomatoes, chiles, herbs, and broccoli. Something incredible happened: one day after planting them, the broccoli sprouted.
And boy her post about New Mexican chiles made my mouth water - I can’t wait to get a few of them in the ground!
Rejin is is back and ready to grow. This week she decided that the little pile of bricks used to define the compost pile was not going to nurture the garden. So she dug out the pile, created a wire enclosure (for aeration), and layered it with leaves from her front yard (balancing the carbon to nitrogen ratio). Then she watered it, and continued to read about compost. All before the rains set in that day...
After that, she returned to the kitchen to plant some tomato seeds in egg cartons, with her son. Not bad for a day’s work!
I (Melinda) returned home to a whole host of great seeds I’d ordered just before I left. And I have a list a mile long of all the things I should have been doing in our garden while I was gone! So, I started with planting our bare root raspberries and currants. Unfortunately Matt dug a hole for our fig tree and found a crazy storm water pipe... and it has been raining ever since, so we haven’t re-dug a hole and the fig is still hanging out in a bucket.
If you haven’t checked out my top ten easiest vegetables to grow from seed, take a look. Basically I’ve decided to be very selective about what I start indoors this year. This is for a number of reasons, including that it’s faster, easier and cheaper not to start indoors. I also did quite a bit of experimenting last year and found that in situ planting in general gave me better results.
I’m slowly weeding the garden, and as soon as the rain stops (not for the next 4-5 days), I’ll be able to get out there and plant garlic and shallots, and, finally, the fig tree. Very soon I’ll start trying to germinate some greens in situ, underneath a frost cloth to see if I can get some results - we’re running low on salad greens finally!
New Beginnings.
Ok, there you have it: the last time you will see all of the updates in one week. I’ll continue to take your very helpful comments and suggestions until Sunday night, and then decide how to recap all our wonderful activities from here on.
I am so happy this is becoming a wildly successful challenge - what a great community we’re forming here! We have twelve new members since Monday, so I’ll tell you all about them in the next post (on Tuesday). Welcome to all of you.
It's not too late to join us.
You can join us at any time, though the sooner the better of course. Just send an email or leave a comment when you decide. I'll continue to update the list as more people join the challenge.
Spread the word, let’s grow our own food!
http://web.mac.com/elementsintime/creatinglandscape/Grow_Challenge.html
