first pepper 5-20-2011

first eggplant 5-20-11

Does anyone watch the show Victory Garden? The 30-minute gardening show has aired on PBS for 33 years and I can honestly say I have no idea how. I’ve been DVRing this show for 6-months and have learned one thing. Just one. This is quite upsetting because it’s hosted by the hottt Australian, Jamie Durie, but even he isn’t enough to keep me watching.

The tip was in regards to saving seeds from heirloom vegetables. I had been taking a few seeds from tomatoes and brushing them on a paper towel to dry. I figured I would just cut up the paper towel and plant it. I wouldn’t have gotten very far because the gel that surrounds the seeds prohibits them from germinating. To remove, you just soak the seeds and gel in water for a few days until the gel separates, then strain off the seeds and let dry. And toss any floaters - they won’t germinate.

garden 5-20-11



carrots 5-15-11

I must write a blog post, I must write a blog post, I must write a blog post.

Only a week after my last post, the garden absolutely exploded. It was wild. Once the weather turned hot, it was on. The tomato plants have grown to five feet tall, the beans are producing, and the cukes have taken over the trellis. And there’s squash….lots and lots and LOTS of squash. If any of you out there have squash recipes to share, speak up.

I love squash, but there's sooo much of it. I’ve been giving heaps of it away and still have enough for dinner every night of the week. The quickest and healthiest way I've found to eat squash and preserve the shape and texture of the plant is to grill it. Cut the squash lengthwise down the center, sprinkle with s/p or Cavender Greek Seasoning and toss on the grill face up. Let the outside crisp for a bit, then flip face down and allow the moisture drain out. Very tasty. If I’m feeling fancy or cooking for friends, I’ll make a squash casserole. This squash casserole comes from the one and only Laurie Kohut. Those who know her know this casserole recipe is the biz.

• Cut 3-4 mediumish squash into large chunks and boil until tender. Drain in a colander and gently fork apart once cool.
• Combine 1c sour cream, 1 can cream of chicken soup, small jar of pimentos, shredded carrot, medium onion chopped.  Mix in squash.
• PAM the bottom of the casserole dish. Melt a tablespoon or so of butter and mix with a few cups of Pepperidge Farm cornbread stuffing. Enough to make a crust on the bottom of the pan.
• Pour in the casserole mixture. Top with another cup (or so) of cornbread stuffing mix with a bit of butter so it browns in the oven.
• Bake for 30-35 minutes. Take out, top with ½ cup of shredded cheddar cheese and bake for 5 more minutes.

The best thing about this recipe is you can make a low fat version and it’s just as delish.

The garden has provided a couple of interesting “learn-as-you-go” surprises. Surprise #1 – it’s not that easy to grow normal looking carrots. The weather has turned very warm and according to all my books carrots reach maturity in about 2 months. I’m going on about 2 ½ months and my carrots are downright laughable. They taste pretty good (I use them in the squash casserole), but let’s just say I won’t be hocking them at the local farmers market anytime soon. One friend described them as looking like mangled human fingers in a horror movie. See pic. I’m not really sure where I went wrong, but next year I might try a shorter variety.

Surprise #2 has been my potatoes. I didn’t have much hope or stock put into the potatoes, but growing them has been dare I say fun. You spend several weeks watching the plant grow. After a month or so it flowers and then begins to wilt and die. That’s how you know when to harvest the plant. And when you do harvest it’s like a treasure hunt – you have no idea what you are going to find! Even though I planted all the potatoes at one time, they haven’t all wilted at the same time, which has been good for attenuating the release of produce into the kitchen. I’ve been able to harvest a plant or two a week which has added a just the right amount of potato to the plate.

I have lots more to write and will keep the recipes and foibles coming.

The garden is looking awesome. Yeah – I said it. The beetles did a number on the bean leaves, but the plants are still alive and producing.  Since I can’t use insecticide I hand-pick and squish other critters that I find, but so far nothing else has done serious damage. All of my tomato plants have little starter maters, the potatoes are flowering and the corn is even coming up.  That’s right – corn. A stretch of my gardening wings, I know, but I have the space and after reading the back of the seed packet, corn is planted seed to ground. It doesn’t transplant well. So I dropped in a couple rows and we’ll see what happens. According to my mid-western coworker I’m aiming for knee-high by the Fourth of July.

The toughest part of gardening right now is practicing patience. I can see everything growing and it all looks incredible, but it’s just too soon. Last week I was at the garden and eager to enjoy the vegetables of my labor, I started pulling off beans to eat with dinner. The grand harvest resulted in 4 beans apiece for Mike and me. Not exactly bringing home the veggie-bacon...

garden 4-10-11

I've got worms...and beetles

What a bummer. Despite all my efforts to maintain weeds and check for bugs, some little varmits got a hold of my beans (pics below). About half the plants have holes in the leaves and three plants have just fallen over. This of course led to a frantic Google search of all things bug.  Turns out 95% of garden bugs are good bugs – they break down organic matter, pollinate, and eat other bugs, but the other 5% suck. Actually, half of them suck and the other half chew.

The best website I uncovered during my search was www.gardeners.com 

I found a picture of some bean leaf beetle damage and it looked exactly like my little chewn up leaves. The culprit for the fallen over plants is most likely cutworm. A little gem who likes to chew the stems of young plants right at ground level and then, as far as I can tell, just lets the plant die. I find these little jerks to be very counterproductive. I plan to get some natural insecticide for the entire garden. There are lots of recipes online for how to make your own, but rather than concoct something gross enough to repel slugs in my own kitchen, I think I’ll just purchase it.

Victory note – Ate a salad tonight with some home grown lettuce. Absolutely delicious!

Public Enemy #1

funny little sign outside Tallahassee Nurseries

You Say Potato

The garden bounced back beautifully from the mid-March frost. The tomato plants have grown 4-5 inches and have small yellow flowers. The lettuce is becoming leafy and the cucumbers have even started sprouting new leaves. All this activity encouraged me to round out the garden with two rows of squash, cantaloupe and honeydew melons.

When I’m out at the garden, I usually work my way around each bed, pull weeds, try to avoid fire ants and zone out. It’s a great physical release and cheap mental therapy. I was extra-zoned the other day and started yanking up some rather tough weeds. I snapped out of it and realized the entire bed was filled with similar looking leafy weeds…. all lined up in a nice row. I had weeded my way around to the bed where I planted pieces of potato about a month ago. Potatoes should come up within about 10 days, so by this point, I had given up hope.

 I followed some YouTube directions on how to plant potatoes, but as with the rest of this gardening experiment, I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing. I cut the seed potatoes into chunks with at least two eyes per chunk and let them dry or “cure” for a few days to avoid the risk of rot once put into the ground. Then I planted the potato chunks about 3-4 inches down in acidic soil with a good amount of compost or manure. Once the plant comes up and begins to grow, the potatoes can push up out of the soil which is no good. Sun-burned potatoes turn green and are inedible. Hilling is the act of adding 2-3 inches of soil to the row to protect the potatoes from the sun.

Another handy tip – potatoes should be harvested 2-3 weeks after the actual plant dies. Which is good to know, because otherwise how are you supposed to know what’s going on down there…

hay for stabilization, weed control and moisture

heirloom tomato riesentraube variety

feeder lines across a raised bed of potatoes

drip irrigation trunk line connected to smaller feeder lines

hose bib connected to a water timer and drip irrigation line

my little helper...sometimes

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Alright fine, Mother Nature. You win.

I learned a tough lesson the hard way. Despite that fact that I’ve been sweating my tush off at the garden for the entire month of February, Mother Nature decided to send one more little cold front through. How fun.

The frost-free date for Tallahassee is March 15, but the weather had been so sunny and beautiful, I didn’t think there was any chance we would get a freeze. Well, the joke was on me. Temps dropped the night of March 11^th and as luck would have it, I was out of town. I returned to some pretty peaked plants.

By this point, my garden has expanded to include Tendergreen bush beans, Red Pontiac potatoes, cucumbers, five varieties of heirloom tomatoes, basil, cilantro, Cali peppers, jalapenos & eggplant. The frost caused the cucumber leaves to turn white, the bush beans to wilt and some of the tomato leaves to shrivel. I picked the dead leaves of the plants and started a new batch of cucumber seeds. Cukes germinate quickly, so if the first lot officially dies off, I’ll plant the new ones.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the tomato plants.

Hot Mess of Seeds

Alright - lesson learned. Don’t buy a gaggle of gardening books and then selectively choose the advice you WANT to follow. I flat out ignored the step in seed germination where you thin out the weaker seedlings to allow room for the healthier ones to grow and as it turns out, there’s a pretty good reason for including this step. When it came time to plant the lettuce and carrot seedlings in the ground they were a hot mess. The roots had grown together, the leaves were all tangled and it was impossible to separate a seedling without damaging the whole lot. I wondered if this was an amateur mistake or the makings of a greedy gardener. Of course I want ALL my lettuce plants to grow. What exactly will I do with 36 heads of lettuce at one time? I’m not quite sure…but I grew these little seedlings and want all of them to be successful. I also passed statistics and playing the odds is the way to go here, but how do I plant this snarl of seedlings?  

Enter Hippie Jeremy. Jeremy is one of the professional gardeners tending to the Orchard Pond Organic crops. Maybe I didn’t explain that very well in the beginning, but the majority of the community garden is used by Orchard Pond Organics to grow vegetables for their CSA members (http://www.orchardpondorganics.com/). CSA or Community Supported Agriculture and is a service that provides local fruits/vegetables to members for a set monthly fee. Jeremy suggested I separate the seedlings the best I can and prune back the clumps as they grow up. I confirmed this technique with my Garden Guru, Sarah Marie - a certified Master Gardener who has successfully planted a prolific vegetable garden for many years.  Below are a few pictures of the lettuce and carrot seeds in the ground.

carrot seedlings in the ground (a little late, but we'll see what happens)

rows of lettuce starts next to drip irrigation lines

Building the Raised Beds

I have yet to meet my established garden neighbor to the south, but I’ve checked out her methods and she has most of her veg planted in raised beds. The book How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jevons details a “double-dig” method of how to actually construct the raised beds by tilling, aerating and working compost into the soil. I started by digging a strip down about 12-inches and placing it over one the side. I then aerated the bottom of the strip and worked in a couple shovels full of horse manure (1 “scoop” for $10). Then I moved the top 12-inches from the next row on top of the manure. And so on, and so on. The aeration of the soil and addition of the manure is what actually builds the up from the earth. I’ve included a few pictures of the method and final product. It took me a full weekend to build five beds and it was utterly exhausting, but a beautiful way to spend the weekend outdoors and pretty darn rewarding once it was all done. Well, at least a third is done…

dig a strip down 12-inches

horse manure worked in 12-inches into the soil

Working the manure into the bed

Three completed beds

SEEEEDLINGS!!!!

It was only after I planted the carrot and lettuce seeds that my mom offered these words of wisdom – “the smaller the seeds, the harder they are to grow”. Super. The carrot and lettuce seeds were teensy tiny, but after a week most of them popped up. They came up in little clumps because I put a few seeds (4-5) in each little seed cup. The book says to thin out your seeds by plucking out the non-winners to allow room for the healthy seed to grow bigger, but that just seemed wasteful and a tad fascist for my garden ideals. So instead I transplanted these seedlings into a larger round tub with more space.  I carefully took the seedlings from the cup, brushed off the dirt around the roots and kinda fanned the clump out into a semi-row. Where did I get this idea? Who knows – but it sounded brilliant at the time. It proved to be much trickier than I planned. The stems on these seedlings are seriously thin – it was like replanting a strand of hair. Pretty tough.

I had faith in all this because I purchased a secret weapon from Gramlings Seed Store. A local place on South Monroe Street that when you pass through the open air entrance, makes you feel as though you’ve taken a Quantum Leap into 1957. The smell took me back to all those hardware/garden stores my parents brought (drug) me to as a kid.  The kinds of places where no matter where you wandered there was absolutely nothing cool to play with. But this trip to Gramlings had a purpose - I was on a mission to find worm castings! Known in the gardening world as “black gold”. The way folks talk about worm castings you would think they were Godiva Chocolates. “Oh man, those worm castings…hmm, hmm, hmm…” I didn’t really understand what worm castings were or what they did for the soil, but garden peer pressure took over and I had to have some. I purchased 3 pounds of worm castings for 25 dollars. You’d think there would be some real gold in there for that price, but sadly no. Worm castings are basically worm poops. Organic matter (leaves, kitchen scraps, paper, etc) goes into a container with some worms (Red Wigglers, usually) and then after the worms have eaten and digested everything you harvest the castings. This strikes me as very similar to horse/cow manure, but on a much more inefficient scale.

Days later the seedlings are doing great! Transplanting did not kill them. They are outside now and receiving around three hours of indirect sunlight. I’m hoping they grow to be a little sturdier before moving them to the plot.

Carrot/Lettuce Seedlings in Soil Mixture plus Worm Castings

my little spot of dirt - 01/15/2011

Flat of carrot seeds planted 1/16/11

Let’s get this garden started

The gardening books arrived and I dove right in. I couldn’t stop reading. Partially because I had to move past Chapter 1, which offered such encouraging phrases like - organic gardens typically produce low yields for the first two to three years. Big frown face, but I’m not easily deterred. Pressing on, I learned about soil amendments, compost, seed varieties, good bugs versus bad bugs - my head almost exploded. I told myself it is okay to feel totally overwhelmed as long as I keep taking small steps in the forward direction. It will all come together at some point. The next small step was to pick out my plot at Orchard Pond. I met Mary out at the site for a short tour and settled on a plot next to another one that had a small winter garden growing. Mary told me that my new garden neighbor had been gardening organically with them for many years. So much for being the greenest garden on the block….all I can hope for now are style points. The uptick to all this is that I’ve positioned myself perfectly to acquire gardening tips should we ever cross paths.

The gardening books recommend an equal part mixture of compost, garden soil and builder’s sand to germinate seeds. I got all this stuff at Home Depot and some seeds from Native Nurseries. I’m not sure if the timing is going to work out, but carrots and types of lettuce can be planted in late February / early March. So lettuce begin. I started two flats of seeds today - endive, escarole, Asian carrots & regular carrots. I hope they grow. My dad said seeds are like children – not all are winners. You try your best, but some just don’t grow up right. He was kidding of course, or maybe he was talking about my brother. J

The 5 W’s and 1 H

I’ll start this blog with the five W’s and one H: who, what, when, where, why and how.
My name is Katey Breland. For the past 6 years, I’ve called Tallahassee, Florida my home. My 2011 New Year’s Resolution is to discover a challenging hobby outside my realm of expertise and see what happens. I chose organic food gardening - although I’m not sure why. I can re-pot a daisy and mulch a flower bed with the best of them, but actually growing my own food…this is different. I’ve answered the five W’s and this blog will be about The How. How exactly does someone who has conveniently purchased produce at the local Publix for 30 years, start growing food?

The First Step: Oh god, what is the first step? Seriously, I have no idea. Do I read a manual? Go to a nursery? Take a class? I feel stuck already. I decided to take it to the internet – and here I found a decent start. I read some articles and ordered a few books. I’m anxious to get going.

Information on-line states that you need 6-hours of direct sunlight to grow fruits/vegetables. My yard receives about two, on a bright day. So where do I plant this food garden?  I found a listing on a great Tallahassee website (http://maninoveralls.blogspot.com/ ) for local community gardens. Community gardens are basically farms or open plots of land where individuals can pay a fee (typically around $20/month) and lease their own row or plot. Plot sizes vary at each garden, but usually hover around 1,500 square feet and include water for irrigation and one tillage per year. I visited Orchard Pond Organics and fell in love. It’s a beautiful piece of property located north of Tallahassee off Meridian Road.
I’m on my way.