December, 25, 2014

Good morning, Merry Christmas everyone. We almost had a whiteish Christmas. I was hoping to do my weekly harvest Wednesday, but that just didn't happen. I hope to get it done today some how and have veggies for market on Saturday. There will not be any Friday deliveries this week. Next week's long range weather forecast is looking a bit sketchy at this time but that is a whole week away. Any way Merry Christmas and I hope to see everyone at market Saturday, If not in the New Year.

It is a nice feeling to have most of my open beds ready for spring planting. With all of the fall rains the beds have remained moist and easy to turn. If I were to use a rototiller, this garden task would not take as long.

There are many reasons why I don't use mechanized tillers in the garden. This is not to say I do not use lawn mowers and weed eaters. I have used a reel push mower with little success and there really is not enough room for a swing blade to knock down grass and weeds. Thus is why I resort to these two power tools.

I turn in compost after each crop is finished. There is a movement towards no till. I believe the reason behind it is that by turning the soil it oxygenates the soil and causes it to become over active and deplete the soil of its organic mater. Yes I do stimulate the soil but I also feed it after each crop too.

Using a shovel is not even as “intrusive” as a mechanized tiller because I make one turn of the soil. Unlike a rototiller which would be more like an egg beater in a bowl. Because I use a shovel to turn the soil in order to be able to plant the next crop, I find pockets of compost that were not fully incorporated into the soil. I think that this method could be called minimum till.

With no till any compost would be only incorporated in the very surface when planting seeds or seedlings and soil organisms along with precipitation would move these goodies into the soil horizon. A much slower process. Especially since we do not get abundant year round rains.

So I prefer to use my shovel and minimally turn the soil. Yes this is a lot of work but there are a lot of benefits that I can reap from this exercise besides getting exercise.

There is nothing like the quite of a no stroke engine!

I can be aware of all that is going on around me. Like the quiet that over comes the barnyard when a hawk flies over head. Or when some hen is taking wayyyy to long to egg and there are hens stacked up like cord wood to use THAT!! nest box.

I can inspect the soil as I go, Something that is very difficult with a tiller. I can remove root knot nematode galls. Since this is where the eggs are, this may help reduce their populations. Something else that is difficult to do with a tiller. This allows me to get an idea how big of a wire worm population I have. As I have noted in an earlier email they were almost non existent this year. Again this would be difficult with a tiller.

When I use a shovel I can begin to till a lot sooner after a rain than what I could with a tiller. I do get some soil sticking to the shovel but a spatula resolves this. And of course there are times when it is too wet for a shovel.

My garden is home to a lot of spade foot toads (at least 10 to 15 in most beds). They burrow down 3 to 6 inches. A tiller would hit virtually every one of them. With a shovel I still hit a few but not very many. I like to think of them as another piece of my biological control.

For many years I was a landscaper up in Oregon and by necessity I had to use internal combustion engines daily. It really is nice not having to any more.

When I first moved to Alpine I had a rototiller and used it all the time. It also was the early years of the garden that I had a “real” job working for the Texas Forest Service. We would easily drive 1500 miles a week and some weeks more than that. Because we were doing brush surveys on ranch land, the roads , shall we say were not pristine supper highways. I started to use a shovel at this time. It did wonders for me to get that exercise to loosen up my back. I worked for the Forest Service for 4 years and really got to like that kind of solitude one can have with a shovel and a whole garden of soil to turn.

December 18, 2014

Good morning, I love talking about gardening! A recent conversation with a fellow gardener and the subject of companion planting was brought up. I must say the first thing that came into my mind was the inter-planting of plants to help thwart pests. It reminded me of the book “Carrots Love Tomatoes”.A book about companion planting to fight garden pests. This is not what my friend had in mind.

My friend like myself grows plants on a mature plant size grid pattern. An example would be tomatoes. I grow determinate tomatoes and the mature spacing of 18 inches(indeterminate s are a 36 inch spacing). As one can see when you set the plants out, say a 12 inch tall tomato that is buried so that only the top 3 or 4 leaves are above ground, there is a lot of open space to grow weeds.

What my friend was talking about was planting companion plants that would be harvested as the primary crop matures and fills in the open spaces. I was more familiar with the term inter-cropping. This is a very good way to boost crop production and use already prepared bed space along with holding weeds down.

I have done this on a very small scale in a very hit or miss way. Usually only because I remember to think about it. This has potential to increase production with a minimum of extra effort. Just needs a little bit of extra planning.

The kinds of crops that would work best would be greens such as lettuce, boc choy, spinach and not to forget radishes. These fast maturing crops would be harvested as the tomatoes fill in the space. What I have done is usually plant blocks of these various plants in their own designated beds. With additional planning I could get this companion planting to work for me. This could open designated bed space to other crops.

When I was only hose end watering, I would water the whole bed and could inter-crop all of the open space. Since converting to a drip system, there would be 1 foot wide strips of bed that would get regular water. In the case of the tomatoes there would be two strips of tomatoes per bed. This still is a lot of open watered bed space growing weeds until the toms fill in.

But this kind of planting does not need to only be a main crop and a sub crop that is harvested and the main crop fills in. There is the long noted planting that the Native Americans have done. It is referred to as the Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash. The corn would provide the trellis for the beans to grow and the squash would cover the ground.

Expanding on this would be planting two main crops that would also last all season but would grow in different soil depths. This could be okra and cucumbers or any other like combo of plants like this.

Since I am spending less time watering, I am going to see if I can plan out my garden successions and do some compatible inter-plantings. Thank you Kevin for putting the be in my bonnet.

It is really amazing what a year can make. I have my temporary greenhouses in place but have not had to use them but once. Last year I found that 60's was the warmest I wanted the temperature to be. That translates into the upper 80's under the film. We will have to see what the middle of January brings.

I am cringing a bit since I planted some seed potatoes and noticed some are emerging (last year they emerged the 1^st of March). This could be a catastrophic failure or a bumper crop. The Agribon 70 is at stand by. Also noticed that my globe artichoke is peaking its head up too. This is the middle of December??? Started my first tom seeds for February out planting. Who knows if the season continues I may have a fully planted garden in February?? How strange is this weather, but it has been a very pleasant fall and winter starts this Sunday. I think I will jump on board and see where this ride goes, it should be interesting.                   

 

December 11, 2014

Good morning, very interesting observations in the garden this year, there seems to be an increase of beneficial insects over last year. It was real comforting to know that there were lady bugs through out the growing season. This is a first since the hard drought of 2011.

I was really afraid with the use of Cold pressed neem oil that beneficial insects just might be collateral damage, and become scarce in the garden. I think I may have done a total of 5 or 6 garden wide spraying s this year. There was a pretty good flush of squash bugs along with cucumber beetles, but the grasshopper hatch was a bit over the top. Most of the above mentioned sprayings were to control the hoppers. A total of 3 spraying s every seven days were used to control them. After the second spraying you could pluck most of the hoppers off the leaves easily at mid day. The third spraying cleaned them up. Very few if any got to be adults, so I am hoping the hopper egg density will be non existent for next year. The spraying of neem oil was only done of an evening when most of the beneficial insects are less active.

Very interesting thing happened one harvest day when I found a large horn worm underneath the bell peppers. Silly me, I went into auto pilot and squashed him. It was cool to see it had been totally infected with parasites. Sad that they did not get to mature. I did find 5 or 6 horn worms under the tomatillos that were like empty sacks. So maybe I did not inadvertently kill all of this valuable asset. Such was not the case with the horn worms found in the sweet potatoes. No parasites in them, maybe next year.

It was interesting to note that I encountered very few wire worms this year while harvesting the sweet potatoes. Here again I was finding a lot of grubs and feeding them to my chickens, who went yummm. Sloooowly I began to take notice of these two observations and found a connection. Ground beetles of which most of the larvae were from these beetles, eat wire worms. Needless to say I have some unhappy chickens.

This year I cannot remember there ever being so many spiders to spin webs across paths only for me to walk through them in the morning. There were ground beetles, toads, praying mantis', garter snakes and the list goes on. I hope this is a sign of a happy little ecosystem that has become my garden.

I was afraid that by using a pesticide such as neem , I would throw the whole thing out of wack. This does not seem to be the case, it could be due to my reluctance to spray and only spraying when a pest population gets out of control. It is nice to know that I am a help as opposed to a hindrance to all my garden helpers.

As for my root knot nematodes, with the use of my drip system and very fertile beds, garden production did not seem to be impacted severely. It was interesting to see in two infected sweet potato beds I harvested a total of 252 pound of sweets. Not a great harvest but a good one. Now for the last bed that does not have nematodes, I have harvested well over 120 pounds out of only half the bed. I finally finished the sweet harvest. Total poundage was 531 with 279 being out of the last bed. A real awesome harvest!!

Next year because the drip system has worked so well I intend to not plant as many duplicate beds. This will allow me to solaraize more beds and get a very good handle on my root knot nematodes.

The fall / winter veggies are looking pretty good. It looks like I have some lettuce to list this week. Within the next couple of weeks I will start the Jerusalem artichoke harvest. I am going to be interested to see how well this crop did with a drip line. I may be able to harvest spinach soon also. One of my favorite greens Hon Tsai Tai pronounced Asian green is starting to put up flower stems. The leave stems and flower stems have a nice crunch to them, the leaves have a very mild mustard taste, and the flowers add a nice little touch to any tossed salad. They can be eaten raw, steamed, sauteed, added to soups or stir fries. A wonderful versatile green.

I can be reached at markdirtfarmer@gmail.com

December 4, 2014

Good morning, This fall, has taught me that being complacent is not a good place to be, that is if one intends to be a gardener. I had gotten just a tad to much so this past September with fall sowing. I will have decent stocking levels for winter veggies, even though there are a number of holes in the planting grids. Not paying attention to the extended moist and cloudy conditions kinda bit me in the rear.

Not really wanting to repeat this folly with my temporary “greenhouses” I have been monitoring them pretty close. Some things that I have noticed: following the last freezing period, the greenhouse chard did not get frozen stems like the traditional covered chard. Although on a recent warm sunny day there was no wind and the green house did heat up a bit higher than I would have liked to see. I have only the fabric as a cover to prevent the plants from scalding. With all new practices there is a learning curve and this greenhouse thingy is no different.

Instead of removing the green house film all together, it has only been pulled back underneath the fabric. The next freeze. I will replace it. I am sure that it will be very beneficial during the months of December and January. I intend to get an older model of indoor / outdoor thermometers that has the sensor on the end of a wire (I can bury the probe 4 to four inches). With this I can record the difference of soil temp and air temp inside the cover. It will be some neat information. Last year the sunny days seemed to be more windy. It is wonderful to have sunny calm days but I do need to pay attention to details.

A couple of observations from last winters use of the film /fabric combo: last fall was much cooler with few days after the 3^rd week of November getting much above the mid 60's. This year we have had temps in the high 60's to almost the low 80's. Last year was more windy and this year has been very mild in that respect. I also noticed from last year, that when outside temps were in the 70's and 80's and sunny, the temperature inside the covers was pushing the century mark. I did notice some leaf scalding this year before I pealed back the film under the fabric on one of our recent warm days. It will be interesting to see what December and January hold in regards to warmth and sunshine.

I have been using fabric for many years and with “trial and error” I have learned what kind of protection to expect with different weather events. I expect to gain this kind of knowledge about the use of these greenhouses over time too. I hope that I do not have any catastrophic events with this film like I did learning the best time to plant early toms. As I have said when pushing the seasons, if you are not willing to buy the farm only to start over, then it is best not to do it. The only way to see if it can be done is to just do it. I think the odds are better than playing the lottery!

The winter fall veggies are coming along. The kohlrabi, and cauliflower are looking pretty nice. Same goes for the parsnips and the early broccoli raab. Because of some seeding issues with the cabbage and broccoli, time will tell how these do. Peas are looking real nice. Except for a couple crops all is looking pretty good.

I can be reached at markdirtfarmer @gmail.com