Carrots Harvested

So earlier in the year I had the idea of leaving the carrots in the boxes over the winter, covered with bags of leaves so that they wouldn’t freeze and then harvest them whenever I needed some.  The problem I ran into was that there was a layer of air between the carrots and the leaves as well as air below the boxes.  

 

 What happened was is that the air would allow the dirt to freeze and made it very difficult to dig the carrots up, because the top inch of ground was frozen.  What I ended up doing was waiting for a warm enough day and then dug everything out of the ground and stored it in dirt in the basement.  If the carrots had been planted in the ground instead of boxes the idea would have worked.

Pea Box

Took advantage of the nice weather we have been having this week and emptied out the pea box.  All of the dirt was placed in the top bed to raise it a little more.  The box was placed there in the summer to cover up the sinkhole in the yard as well as a place to test out growing asparagus peas.  The peas grew pretty well and lasted well into November until we had a couple really heavy frosts.  There really isn’t that much left that I can do out in the garden, so now just going to be cleaning stuff up.  The sink hole is going to be filled with sand from last winter as well as ashes all winter long and in the spring if it still isn’t filled, we will have to collapse it completely and fill it in.

Pea Cleanup

I tore out all of the peas from the middle bed this afternoon and then worked up that soil.  I was going to leave them there but the trellis started to collapse a little bit so I decided to just tear it out.  I also emptied out the pepper box so it can go inside for storage this winter.  Because of the varathane and pain on it I want to keep it as nice as possible which means the less the elements hit it the better.

 

More Leaves

I headed back into the cottage for a couple of hours this afternoon to get more leaves.  Between my father and me we ended up gathering 3 barrels and 14 full bags of leaves.  So far all the leaves have come from the front lawn, there is still part of the front lawn left and all of the back  which I would estimate to be 30 bags.

Paths Mulched

All the leaves I picked up the other day were spread on the paths in the asparagus bed as well as the bottom bed.  In the middle bed I don’t have the paths defined yet and wont until the spring.  Some of the leaves that I am saving until next year will be used as mulch for that path.   I also spread a 6 inch layer of leaves over top of the rhubarb.  They worked well last year but I didn’t have any leaves to follow up after the initial ones decomposed, something that I am hoping to fix this year.

Cottage

It was another great day outside so headed back into the cottage to pick up a few more barrels of leaves to spread on the remaining paths as well as the rhubarb at home.  None of these leaves were chopped and some of them were maple leaves so they should last longer than the ones I used last year.

Blacksmith Shop

Not garden related but we have started to clean out the blacksmith shop.  The last time any sort of cleanup of this magnitude took place was before the garage shut down and that was 17 years ago.

Barnyard Garlic Mulched

Using the 3 barrels that I filled up last night I mulched the garlic at the barnyard garden.  It took me about 45 minutes to get the leaves out of the truck and spread evenly over everything.  I used a full barrel on each half of the garlic and the third one on the path.  I will bring more leaves for the path next year as they start to break down.

Raking Leaves

Spend some time at the cottage filling up barrels with chopped leaves.  These are the first ones that I’ve gotten this year but defiantly won’t be the last.  I like using the barrels for leaves that I am just going to reuse right away because I can compact them pretty tight in the barrel and when they come out of the barrel they don’t blow away as easily.

Mulched

I have been waiting for some cold weather before I mulched the garlic and the asparagus to reduce the chances of mice or other rodents making a home in it.  Last week was all in the negatives and it feels like winter is going to start coming, so I decided this was a good opportunity to put down the mulch.  I have a few barrels as well as a couple bushels of straw I collected in the summer.  The garlic received approximately 4-6” of straw loosely spread over top of it.    When mulching the bottom garlic bed I noticed that the red Russian and Gaia’s joy had both started to sprout.  It is kind of surprising but then again it does get full sun and it has been wet and warm since they were planted.

 

Using the remaining straw I mulched the top asparagus bed lightly.  Because most of it is new crowns, I'm going to spread some leaves on top later for a little extra protection.

 

After mulching I raked up the neighbors leaves from her maple tree to use on my pathways.  I ended up filling 4 bags of leaves and the remaining leaves were spread in the corner garlic bed.  I wanted to use these leaves as opposed to some I might get from the cottage or pick up on the side of the road because I know that they are clean, and don’t have any garbage or pesticides mixed in.  The ones I bagged I'm setting aside to use next summer as the existing leaves as compressed and deteriorate.

Paths

So I have fully bought into the idea of multiple rows side by side and wide defined paths throughout the garden.  As with the asparagus bed I mentioned above, I am going to put defined paths in the bottom bed and edge them with poplar trees.  Poplar grows fairly straight and doesn’t burn well, so I'm free to get whatever I need from my uncles bush.  While it might not look the best, I'm not sure how long this lower garden will be there and the wood is free.  I spent part of yesterday cutting down 7 x15’ trees with a diameter of about 3-5 inches.  The plan is to put it on the outside of the raspberries and along all of the paths.  It’s not going to go on the outside of the garlic, just because it won’t look that great and I might either shrink it or expand it next year; so no point putting something there that I will just have to move. I managed to get a couple trunks in place and hope to get the rest of them in place Wednesday and Thursday night when the weather is better.

The paths are going to be covered in leaves with some cattails on top to keep the leaves from blowing away.  I found that last year the leaves did a good job retaining moisture and decompose pretty quickly adding more organic matter to the soil.  It is also something that needs to be cleaned up anyways, so if I'm going to go to the trouble of raking it I'm going to use it.

 

Asparagus Transplanted

 This afternoon I took advantage of the good weather today to transplant the asparagus crowns into the top bed.  I spent some time Friday weeding it so that everything would be ready to go.  I still had some kale and bok choy in the bed and instead of just cutting it all, I transplanted the kale to the bottom bed so that I can continue to use it fresh. It was looking a little wilted after I moved it, but the soil is pretty wet and it is supposed to rain later.

For the asparagus, I dug up the top area and made a path down the center of the bed, separating the asparagus I already planted there and the new stuff I'm going to be planting.  The path is to create the raised bed I want, and to have a defined area to walk, as opposed to walking in amongst the asparagus.  The asparagus was planted in 2 rows about 2 feet between the rows and a foot or so between plants.  I also planted a few plants among the existing plants to fill in a few bare spots, as well as the extra area I added last year that had the garlic. 

Barnyard Garlic

After work today I planted the rest of my garlic at the barnyard.  Initially I was going to plant just 5 varieties and then have a row of random garlic, from the leftover cloves I still had.  But I decided that I might as well plant the red Russian I got in the summer from friends so I ended up with 6 varieties and then a row of random garlic.  Because I had already previously dug up the area all I had to do was put the path in down the center, rake the planting area level and then run the garlic wheels down them.  I was moving quicker than usual and didn’t take notes as well as I should have, because I was trying to finish up to head to the clinic for a sore throat.  But I managed to piece everything together after the fact.

Pumpkins Picked

I headed to the field this afternoon to pick the pumpkins.  It has been raining for the last few days and although it looks like it’s going to rain today, I figured this was my best opportunity to get them.  Because the field is so wet, I took the wheel barrow so the truck didn’t have to go in the field.  The frosts completely killed the vines, so all I had to do was snip off the dead vines and load them in the wheel barrow.  I managed to get 6 big pumpkins and 8 medium sized ones. 

I left a couple big one in the compost pile because they weren’t ripe yet and hoping they will mature up in the field.  A couple of the orange pumpkins that were in with the horse did have some bite marks on them but it was defiantly not the horses, looked like it could have been the rabbit or mice.

 

Garlic Planting!

It has been a very busy morning.  When I woke up to go to hockey there was a very heavy frost that had me slightly worried.  I didn’t end up starting until 10am on the garden.  The weather started off looking great but then you could see the clouds starting to darken as the day went on.

The first things that I did were test out and finish the spacing on my garlic planting wheels. I used 2 bike tires from a kid’s bike and mounted them on a small frame made out of 2x4’s.  Originally I figured I would need 5-6 spikes per wheel to achieve the 6 inch spacing I wanted.  However when testing it out I found that I needed to measure from the tip of each spike to figure out the hole placement as opposed to the base of the spike.  I ended up playing around with it for about an hour or two getting it all figured out.  The spikes were attached with electrical tape in order to test the spacing out quickly.  They are going to be screwed on permanently but the tape worked great for today.  The spikes are made out of 1x1 inch spruce stakes that I cut out of scrap wood.  I cut tips on them using the chop saw to get that 45 degree angle and then cut them into 3 inch lengths.  I then just put them in a bench vice and used the draw knife to round them up a little. I do have old wheel barrow handles to use on this but due to the impending rain I just screwed a couple scrap pieces of wood on to make use for today.

 

When it was finally ready to go it was around 1pm and the weather was thankfully still holding out for me.  For the first row I pulled the garlic planter down the rows.  Pulling it worked well but it was hard to keep the row straight when you can’t see where you are going.  For the next sets of rows I pushed it down and that worked much better.  Straight rows and I was able to push it without walking behind it so I didn’t compact the soil.  I have 6 rows sided by side which is the maximum I would go and would have preferred to go with 4 but just didn’t have enough space with everything else I want to go in.  The planter worked well but did have trouble in a couple spots where the soil was a little compact.  If necessary I could easily put some blocks on top to increase the weight to make sure it penetrates the ground properly.

 

When I was planting I made my mother help me.  Her task was to write down the exact number of cloves that came out of each bulb and the number that was planted in each row.  I already had everything laid out along with how many I planned to plant, but on a couple occasions snuck an extra clove or 2 into each row.  I planted the bottom bed first and then the corner bed second.  It took about 2 hours to plant everything, but that also included breaking apart the bulbs as I went.  Because I was planting 15 varieties that were already marked on each bulb, it was easier to break them apart one variety at a time and plant instead of getting out a bunch of containers to keep them separate.

About 20 minutes after I finished and was just cleaning up the tools it started to rain.  I managed to finish in the nick of time, and am now hoping that the forecast for next week changed from all rain so I can have a couple clear days to plant the rest of my garlic at the barnyard garden.

I am very happy to get all of that garlic finally in the garden.  By the time I'm done planting all of it I expect to end up with just shy of 500 full sized cloves planted from 21 different varieties.

Planting Preparation

As soon as I got home from work tonight I immediately headed out to the garden to start working on it.  I plan on planting my garlic tomorrow and it is supposed to start raining after lunch so I really only had Friday afternoon and then tomorrow morning to get everything done.  I used the ridging hoe to dig up the large bottom garden area where the garlic is going to be planted.  While I was doing that I had my sister pull down the morning glory vines and take off the pea trellis netting from the corner garden.  We then proceeded to pull the poles and the pipes that they were in.  I was going to just dig in the buckwheat that was planted there but I figured that when it was raked out all of the buckwheat would be collected off the top anyways so we just pulled it and added it to the compost heap.  After they were both dug up I laid out the rows and put stakes at the ends to mark them for planning tomorrow.

Peppers and Tomatoes are Done

After the heavy frost last night and the beautiful weather this morning, I decided it was a perfect opportunity to harvest all of the remaining peppers and tomatoes.  I started with the peppers, pulling each plant and then cutting the peppers off of it into a bushel with snips.  I found that it worked really well, cleaning out the plants and making sure I didn’t miss anything all at once.  I ended up with 2 bushels of peppers from my 36 plants. Overall from the whole year’s harvest I figure I ended up with 3+ bushels from those plants.

 

In the picture below you can see the chocolate peppers.  A few were ripe but mostly still green.

 

This is the bushed containing the Jimmy Nardello and the chocolate.  They both did very well, and had my best yields of the 6 varieties. Both had ripe peppers the earlier than the others.

 

These are the purple peppers.  I found that they didn’t start to produce until after the others, and when they did the peppers were of a medium size with thin walls.  The plants were fairly brittle so when picking them you had to be careful.

The Alma paprika did well, but also had slightly lower yield and most of them didn’t ripen up. 
 

King of the North produced great peppers, but took until almost September to give me red peppers.  They did have big green peppers, but were later than the other sweet non bell peppers.

Sweet Hungarian was another great producer, there were lots of them on the plants and they ripened up steady throughout the year.  I would have them at 3^rd on my list for productivity, possibly second.

Finally there are the golden Cal wonder.  Last year these didn’t even survive from the seeds.  This year they grew into nice big plants with my largest peppers.  I had 2 plants and both produced 4 large peppers and a couple smaller ones.  It did however take until the very end of September until I had a yellow one. This is a pepper that would defiantly be on the edge to grow again. There are defiantly better bell peppers out there.

For the tomatoes, I just filled a flat with ripe ones and filled another with any that were still green.  The ripe ones are going to be either used up in the next week or preserved in some way, and the green ones kept around until they either ripen up or go bad.  It’s hard to judge how well they did because they were so crowded but over all they did pretty well.

Fall Lettuce

The garden has been winding down but all of the vegetables I planted for the fall are in their prime right now.  The lettuce looks great, peas are blooming and I even managed to find a pod on the plant and the bok choy is doing well.

 

The Red Russian kale in the bottom of the middle bed is doing really well.  But the red Russian and scotch kale in the top bed by the asparagus are doing well but significantly worse than the other.  I'm not sure if it’s because it gets less sunlight or if the soil is inferior to the lower end of the bed.  It is lighter but should have just as many nutrients in it.  When I put the asparagus in there at the end of October, I will add a little more manure to make sure it’s up to par.

 

Gourds Harvested

At the field this year 4 hills of pumpkins and gourds were planted.  With the leftover seeds my cousin and I threw a few into the brush pile to see if they would grow.

Today after work I headed in and we both went to the field to pick them all.  I had been waiting to pick them until we were going to get a hard frost to let them mature as much as possible.  We are supposed to get that frost the next couple of nights, so taking advantage of the nice weather to get them out of the field.

 

The plants that were grown in the garden all did terrible and only grew about 30 small gourds between them.  They were pretty disappointing.  The plants that grew in the brush pile took over everything and just went nuts.  We ended up getting 4 bushels of ripe gourds as well as 7 large pumpkins.  To pick the gourds I took my new snips I got for the garlic to cut them all off the vine.  The pumpkins were left in there until they ripen up a little more.  They aren’t ready yet and I would like to see them turn orange on the vine if possible.  There are also 8 medium sized pumpkins in with the horses where a seed or 2 was dropped.  They have also done well; horses eat the grass and weeds and leave the pumpkins alone.

Barnyard Peppers

After picking a bunch of peppers from my garden last week I decided I better check out the barnyard garden and am really glad I did.  I ended up taking just under a half bushel.  A number of those were green peppers; now that I have some that are finally ripe I might as well have a good variety to eat.

I also picked a couple more baskets from home of ripe peppers across all varieties.

 

The Peppers Continue

Picked some more peppers today this time I'm guessing around 9 liters were picked.  It was a blend of every variety with the exception of the golden Cal wonder, they still aren’t yellow yet.  I did get a king of the north that was ripe though.  Based on the amount that I have picked so far I would say half of everything that will be taken out of there has been picked.

 

Garlic Cleaning

This morning I spent about 3 hours cleaning all of my garlic up to bag and label it.  Now I did do this while watching War Horse so that may have contributed to it taking so long.  For each of the varieties I cut all of the bulbs off of the stalks using garden pruners (scissors aren’t strong enough for hardneck garlic, they will work but so much easier with a pruner) and then cut the roots off with scissors.  At the same time I also rubbed off the outer layer off of the bulb so that they were nice and clean.  I then spread out each variety on a cardboard flat so that I could see them all and pick the ones I wanted to save for planting in the fall.  It was also so that I could see the size difference between those that I left scapes on and those that had the scapes cut off.

This is a picture of the Music that I grew in the garden.  The bulbs on the left had scapes left on them and produced bulbils, the ones on the right had the scapes removed.

The size difference really isn’t that different going through all of the varieties I grew.  I still had some large bulbs but didn’t have any that were exceptionally large.  So I would say by leaving the scape you are eliminating the possibility of getting the largest possible bulb. But any that had the scape left on were right around average with those that had the scape removed.

I weighed each variety to see what the yield was, it is as follows:

Music – 3lb 8oz

Music from Field – 2lb 8oz

Red Russian –2lb

Northern Quebec –2lb 11oz

Georgian Fire –2lb 14oz

McEwen’s Red – don't remember

Polish White – 2lb

Brown Saxon – 2lb 4oz

I didn’t record the number of heads of each that I picked, but if I was to look back to the tags I wrote out I would be able to figure it out.  There were about 25 bulbs per variety with the music and polish white having double that.

Overall I was very happy with my garlic harvest and am planning a significant increase in production next year.

 

Tidy Up

Went out and picked a bunch more peppers approximately 6lts of a couple different varieties.  They were mostly jimmy Nardello and chocolate.  There are tons of them still on the plants that I am just waiting to ripen up.

I also stopped on the way home to clean up the barnyard plot.  I have definitely been neglecting it and it was in need of a good weeding.  Thankfully there are a couple of plots that look much worse than mine, so I haven’t felt too bad.

Stratford Garlic Festival

Last year in the fall when I was looking for some new garlic varieties I found out about the Stratford garlic festival.  I had already bought some varieties from Ego’s and didn’t want to go and possibly get more until I had grown some and decided if I liked it as a crop or not.

 

Well after this year’s successful garlic crop and the fact that I have discovered that I love growing it, I decided that a trip to the Stratford garlic festival was necessary even though it’s like a 2.5 hour drive.  I went down after hockey and the weather was exactly what they called for.  It poured rain the whole way down and then once I was there it started to clear up.  There was a 10 minutes period where I temporarily left the festival to sit in the car because of the rain.

I tried a number of different samples of garlic, garlic products, jams and even some honey.  The lack of actually lunch food kind of surprised me but there were a few places. I ended up bringing home some honey, and a lavender ginger jam.

Now for the most important part the garlic!  The first thing I did when I got there was a walk around to see who had what various kinds of garlic.  While I did check out the prices, any garlic that I was going to be able to purchase there would be much cheaper than something I would have to order from BC, not to mention I could hand pick exactly what I want and it should already be adjusted to our climate.

For purchases from August’s Harvest I bought German Red (Rocambole).  For selection they grow about 7 varieties in large quantities and the varieties they grow are all larger varieties.  The bulbs I purchased were large and price was $9/lb. 

At Hampstead Garlic I bought 4 different varieties. Red grain (purple stripe), Red Rezan (glazed), Brown Tempest (marbled) and Purple Glazer (glazed). They were all nice looking bulbs and he had about 25 different kinds available.  I paid $8/lb which was about the average to lower end at the festival.

The last place I bought garlic from was Golden Acres Farm.  I saved them for last because they had by far the largest selection there.  They grow over 127 different kinds and had 41 at the festival.  Now their garlic is all certified organic and was selling at $14/lb.  It was there that I bought 10 different kinds of garlic.  I bought Marbled Purple Stripes: Red Russian,Irkutsk,Gaia's Joy and Siberian; Rocambole's: Carpathian, Killarney Red and Pitarelli; Purple Stripes: Chesnok Red and Persian Star; as well as a Porcelain: Georgian Crystal.

 

I thought it was a good festival and am very pleased with everything I was able to get.  I ended up spending $75 just on garlic for next year’s crop but will be able to replant cloves year after year so was ok with the cost.  I am also going to have to change up the garden plans a little for next year.

Pea Clean Up

The peas are officially done and all of the vines have been pulled.  Tons of pods were picked off to save seeds and I'm going to go through them later to pick out the ones I want to keep and the ones I don’t.  The pea netting was going to be removed completely but the morning glory is still growing and I would really like to see it flower before I pull it down.  So what I did was move the netting as high as I could without effecting the plants so I could access the ground easily.

I used the ridging hoe to break it all up and then planted buckwheat and a few peas as a cover crop until I'm ready to plant the garlic in a couple months.

Saving Peas

On the way home from work today I stopped at the barnyard garden to pick a few peppers and get my share of potatoes.  Overall we only ended up getting slightly more potatoes than we planted due to the summer drought we experienced.  The way I look at it is its better than nothing.  And the peppers I picked looked great, including a couple really tiny purple ones.

After I got home I hit the garden again to continue my harvest.  I picked a bunch of peppers again, a basket of chocolate peppers and basket of jimmy’s as well as a mixed 4lt basket of tomatoes.

These are Jimmy Nardello's

Sweet Hungarian Banana

Alma Paprika

Sweet Chocolate

This is a Golden Calwonder before it has ripened

Purple Beauty

 

I finally managed to get the time to tear out all of the pea plants.  They all came out pretty easily but I'm going to need to leave the trellises in for a little longer so that I don’t kill off the flowers.  The netting is going to be raised off of the ground, to allow me to dig it up and plant buckwheat.  After ripping out all of the plants I shelled all of the peas that have been drying inside.  I ended up with around a 500ml jar full of dried peas.

These were all of the tomatoes I picked. The polish linguisa after trying it is extremely meaty and a great paste tomato.

Black Prince

Kansas Depression

Polish Linguisa

Black Cherry

 

Isis Cherry