Corn, Winter Squash, and Beans

  

     We start most of our plants early indoors but three notable exceptions are corn, winter squash, and beans.  These don't start well indoors and do just fine in our growing season planted outside from seed.  A few weeks ago we planted two variates of corn.  In the front of the house in the circular boulevard gardens we planted a dwarf strawberry popcorn.  In the center of our compass bed in the backyard we planted a ruby sweet-corn.  Intermingled with our summer squash we planted two variates of winter squash:  Marina Di Chioggia and Delicata.  The squash was planted just before we went out of town and has already germinated with it's first leaves visible.

     We still haven't planted our beans, we're awfully late with these!  We'll get the seeds planted this weekend.

   

The Wednesday Weigh-In : Week #21

We're Over 100 Pounds!!

     Whew, we've been really busy getting the last of the plants in the ground and catching up from being out of town.  Despite having been gone part of the week we produced a lot of food.  Our chickens laid 32 eggs weighing in at 3.9 lbs.  We harvested 4.8 lbs of lettuce, 2.8 lbs of spring onions and 4.2 lbs of spinach!  Adding those together and including a little from radishes, chard, and herbs we harvested 12.1 lbs of produce.  Thats 16 lbs for the week.  Adding it all together we're at 105.1 lbs for the year! 

Only 1894.9 lbs to go!

     The photo above is of the spinach we harvested tonight.  We're turning it into Spanakopita (spinach pie).  We'll have some for dinner freeze some for this coming winter.  Yummy!

   

Eggplants in the Ground

     

     Continuing on our planting theme we've got our eggplants in the ground now too.  We're not nearly as obsessed about eggplants as we are about tomatoes and peppers but doesn't mean we don't love them as well.  Were planting 4 variates this year, all slightly non standard.  They are:

     Casper

     Florentine Silk

     Listada de Gandia

     Pingtung Long

     Casper is an all white ghost like eggplant.  Florentine Silk has 3-4" egg shaped light purple tasty fruits that are great for grilling.  Listada de Gandia is a French heirloom with white and purple striping.  Pingung Long is our favorite eggplant and if we could only grow one its the one we would choose.  It originates from Taiwan and has foot long one inch diameter fruits.  They're just fantastic sliced on grilled pizzas or roasted and made into eggplant tomato salsa!

     

Planting Peppers

    

     After we finished planting the tomatoes we started on our pepper plants.  While we grow a lot of different crops peppers and tomatoes are among our favorites.

     Just as with our tomatoes we started all our peppers from seed this year.  We had great germination rates, but the really hot peppers took a while.  As with our tomatoes we're growing a lot of different peppers.  Here is the complete list of the 22 variates:

     Ancho Gigantea

     Bhut Jolokia

     Bulgarian Carrot

     Bull Nose Bell

     Candelight

     Cherry Large Hot

     Early Jalepeno

     Emerald Giant

     Fish

     Golden treasure

     Habanera Red

     Joe's Long Cayenne

     King Crimson

     McMahon's Bird

     Mini Red Bell

     Mini Yellow Bell

     Orange Bell

     Peter Pepper

     Purple Beauty

     Scotch Bonnet

     Tequila Sunrise

     Wisconsin Lakes

     Between fresh eating, drying and freezing we will use a lot of peppers over the course of the year.  With that in mind we've planted 94 pepper plants, with several of each variety.  We space our peppers fairly closely with just over a foot between plants.  The chopsticks mark off where each plant will go.

     For now the lettuce will remain between the peppers.  We've harvested this lettuce heavily several times but it keeps growing extremely well.  Once the peppers need the space the lettuce will be removed.  If all goes well peppers and tomatoes will end up being our two largest crops.  We're betting on over 500 lbs produced between peppers and tomatoes before the season is out.

    

The Wednesday Weigh-In : Week #20

    This week we had 28 eggs weighing in at 3.6 lbs.  We harvested 7.4 lbs of lettuce, onions, and herbs from the garden.  That puts us at a whopping 11 lbs of food grown this week.  A new record again!  Adding it all together were at 89.1 lbs of food for the year!  We did not quite make it to 100 lbs before tomato planting time but we came close.

Only 1910.9 lbs to go!

 

Tomato Planting Time!

      

     On Sunday with temperatures having warmed back up, and the extended forecast having daily highs in the 70's and lows in the 50's we decided to plant our tomatoes.   

     We started all our tomatoes from seed this year.  All in all we're growing 25 different variates.  Early on we transplanted one of each variety into one gallon containers as seen above.  Each of these tomatoes is now one to two feet tall.  Many are blooming and a couple already have small tomatoes.  We also had a couple of each variety in 16 oz containers.  These look great but are about half the size and have much thinner stems.

     The specific variates of tomatoes we're growing this year are:

     Beam's Yellow PEar

     Berkeley Tie-Dye

     Black From Tula

     Black Krim

     Blondkopfchn

     Brandywine, Sudduth's

     Brandywine, Purple

     Brandywine, Yellow

     Burgundy Traveler

     Caspian Pink

     Dark Chocolate Stripes

     Gilbertie Paste

     Gold Medal

     Green Zebra

     Halladay's Mortgage Lifter

     Isis Candy Cherry

     Mexico Midget

     Moonglow

     Northern Lights

     Sara Pink Cherry

     Speckled Roman

     Striped Cavern

     Stupice

     Sweet Pea Currant

     Velvet Red 

     As the season progresses and tomatoes start ripening we'll do a profile of each tomato we're growing.

     Before planting we clipped off the bottom couple leaves of each tomato.  We then planted them about 6 inches deeper than they were planted in their containers.  By doing this they will root out form the portion of stem planted underground and form a larger root system thereby producing a better crop.  Despite the large size of the plants they look rather small right now compared to the size of the tomato pergola.  It's going to be really beautiful watching the tomato plants grow and envelop the pergola.

     

A Strawberry Ground-Cover

  

     In front and around our espaliered trees we decided to plant strawberries.  They get along well with fruit trees and won't compete too much for nutrients.  Acting as a ground-cover they look nicer than mulch, and we'll get strawberries every summer to boot!  We spaced the strawberries a little over a foot apart and left some room between rows for runners to fill in.  You can see the dormant strawberry plants spaced out on the ground in the photo above.

     All the roots were trimmed to around 4 inches before planting, and dead leaves were removed.  The roots were spread out and buried between two and three inches deep so that the crowns are half way above the soil.  You can see the crowns just peeking out of the soil in the above photo.  We panted around 90 strawberry plants in total.  The were ordered them from Jung Seed and consist of 4 different variates:

     Ogallala

     Cabot

     Cavendish

     Earlyglow

     Ogattala has the rich flavor of wild strawberries and is an ever-bearer producing a large crop in early summer, and a smaller steady crop all season.  Cabot is a late season june-bearing strawberry that produces huge flavorful berries.  Cavendish is an mid season june-bearer with tasty bright red berries.  Earlyglow is an early season june-bearer with dark red sweet fruits.  Between the 4 variates strawberry season should start in June and continue all the way through August.  This year we will pinch all the blossoms off so the plants can focus on root development and bear a much larger crop next year.  All the variates we choose are cold hardy to MN and produce runners.  This means we can refresh older plants with the new ones every couple years without having to buy more strawberries.  We'll definitely be making strawberry rhubarb pie next year!

    

Kiwis and Grapes and Hops OH MY!

  

     While we were planting our trees in the backyard we were also planting several different vining plants.  

     Next to the chicken coop along the run we planted a hops vine.  This vine dies back to the ground each fall and will re-emerge every spring. It's an aggressive growing plant that should climb the chicken run and provide a canopy along the top giving our chickens a little shade from the hot summer sun.  Additionally, we will be able to dry the hops flowers and use them in making our own beer.

     Along chain link fence across from our garage we've planted a few grape vines.  We'll train these into "T" shaped cordons along the top of the fence.  We've planted four types:  Reliance, Riesling, Cayuga, and Marechal Foch. 

     With our kiwi pergola built and ready to go we were really happy when our Kolomikta kiwi's arrived.  Due to a mixup with our order we received five kiwi plants instead of the three we ordered.  With both an extra male and extra female plant we decided to keep the extras as insurance in case some don't make it.  

     The white blotches on the leaves of this kiwi are not caused by a disease but a natural variegation that occurs in the male plants.  The female plants will also have this variegation but not until they are older.  It will be really interesting to see how much they grow this year as they are purported to be super aggressive growers.  Based on what we've read it could be up to five years before we get to start harvesting kiwis but we bet it will be worth the wait!

  

Planting Trees

  

     Whew, we finally got all our trees in the ground.  The espalier fence-line is now planted.  We've pruned each of the apple trees to encourage branching at the correct height for the belgian fence.  All the trees in the espalier fence-line are still dormant so it looks like a bunch of sticks in the ground with tags hanging off them right now.

     Over the next several weeks they should start leafing out and by the end of this year we should have the first set of branches established.  We estimate it wont be until the third season that the trees fully fill the espalier design.

     The espaliered fruit tree fence-line makes up majority of the trees we planted but we've also now planted the other trees that comprise the backyard edible landscape design.

     In total here is what we've planted in the backyard:

     16 apple trees

     2 pear trees

     3 cherry trees

     2 plum trees

     1 peach tree

     1 apricot tree

     3 mulberry trees

     With the existing mulberry tree that's a total of 29 fruiting trees in our backyard urban edible landscape. In a few years when they all start producing fruit these trees will go a long way in helping us meet the urban ton if we're not there already.  We hope that eventually almost all the fruit we could want we will be harvested from our own yard!

     

Building a Cold Frame

     

     We've moved all our tomato seedlings out into the cold frame a week ago and they completely filled it up.   We still had peppers, eggplants, and many other plants that needed hardening off before planting so we figured the best solution was to build another cold frame.

     Our first cold-frame was built with scrap wood we had laying around, but this time we had to buy wood.  We used 2x2's with a total cost was just under $10.00

     With some more used painters drop cloth we made semi-transparent walls attached with staples.

     In under two hours we had a new cold-frame that looks pretty good and should help with the overflow of seedlings.

     We designed the size of the second cold-frame to fit into the first cold frame.  This will be really nice during summer and winter storage keeping the space they take up in the garage limited.

     While we finished the cold frame a couple days ago with all the rain we've been having we did not move the plants into it until yesterday.  It's now full of peppers, eggplants, lavender, thyme and nasturtium.  

    

The Wednesday Weigh-In : Week #19

     This week we had 30 eggs weighing in at 3.9 lbs.  We harvested 5.8 lbs of lettuce, onions, and herbs from the garden.  That puts us at a whopping 9.6 lbs of food grown this week.  A new record!  Adding it all together were at 78.1 lbs of food for the year!  

Only 1921.9 lbs to go!

  

Baby Tomatoes

     

     Whew!  It's been a busy few days.  All the trees we ordered have arrived and we've been busy busy busy planting.  We'll be posting and showing photos of the planting in the upcoming days but for now we'd like to share a few photos of the tomatoes in our bay window.

     What's really remarkable is they already have baby tomatoes growing on them:

     They started flowering a few weeks ago and without pollinators inside we lightly tapped each plant once a day so the fruit would set.  Looks like it worked!

  

Our Trees Arrived!!

    

     Wow, despite ordering from several companies almost all our trees arrived over the last couple days.  Our house is full of plants and we have a lot of work ahead of us!  

     We have pears, apples, peach, necterine, cherrys, cornealian cherrys, pawpaw's, blueberries, winterberries, plumbs, mulberries, kiwis and honeyberries to plant.  It's going to be busy around here!

    

A May Freeze...

  
Burrrrr.....

     It's been an extremely warm spring here in MN, and several times we've been tempted to get an early start to our warm season crops but we've resisted.  Holding out will prove to be a good thing since we're predicted to get an inch of snow tonight, and have a low around 33 degrees fahrenheit.  While that snow will certainly all melt quickly (soil temps are around 60) the low tomorrow night is about 30 and widespread frost is predicted.

     Our uncle was over earlier this week and mentioned his neighbor planted their tomatoes a couple weeks ago and was giving him a hard time about waiting to plant his.  We reassured him that it's better to plant tomatoes late than too early.  With the temps this weekend his neighbor will be looking to him for advice in the future!
  

Planting Blackberries

     A few days back when our raspberries arrived so did our blackberries.  As we mentioned in our post about frontyard farming we are planting the blackberries in the front-yard.

     Every year they should grow to six feet and with the vertical trellising should provide an interesting focal point in the front yard.  We'll be sure to share some photos from the street once they've grown a bit.

The Wednesday Weigh-In : Week #18

    

     This week we had 23 eggs weighing in at 2.8 lbs. Our lettuce has been growing like crazy, and we harvested 2.6 pounds over the course of the week.  We harvested another .6 lbs of food between herbs and spring onions. That puts us at 6 lbs of food grown this week, and at 68.5 lbs for the year!  

Only 1931.5 lbs to go!
  

Planting Raspberries

    

     Our raspberries have arrived and are now in the ground.  The raspberry section in each of the half circle beds is 12 feet long by two feet wide.  With that area we opted to plant 10 raspberry plants in each bed.

     We planted six different variates of raspberries with three different colored fruits:  red, yellow, and purple.  The different variates should yield colorful flavorful harvests over an extended growing season.  

The specific variates are:

     1.  Heritage  (Red - Everbearing)

     2.  Prelude  (Red - Early Summerbearing)

     3.  Taylor  (Red - Late Summerbearing)

     4.  Nova (Red - Mid Summerbearing)

     5.  Anne  (Yellow - Everbearing)

     6.  Royalty  (Purple - Summerbearing)

     We ordered the raspberries from Nourse Farms.  All except the Royalty variety are bare-root and dormant.  Royalty is a greenhouse grown tissue culture plug.  We were really impressed with the nice root system most of them had and can't wait for them to break dormancy and start growing.  We won't get any raspberries this year, but next summer we should have enough raspberries for a family of 4 in season, or plenty for the two of us year round by freezing the surplus.

    

Boulevard Gardening

  

     Continuing with the work on re-developing our front-yard from ornamentals to edibles, we built two vegetable beds on the boulevard between the sidewalk and the street.

     For the boulevard gardens we decided on two circular beds made with 100 year old Purington street pavers.  We marked off the site for the beds and used our Mantis tiller to tear up the grass and loosen the soil.

     Installing them followed the same process as the compass bed.  Each bed is two bricks thick, and ended up being about 6 inches above ground level.  We filled each bed with 500 lbs of compost mixed with the existing soil.  Each bed has a radius of 38 inches.  Combined they add another 60 square feet of raised vegetable beds.

     We really love how the circular beds look from the street.  We're debating what to plant this year but the current front runner is strawberry popping corn in both beds.  A dwarf variety that produces 2-4 small heads of red colored corn that dried is great for popcorn!