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.