When life gives you lemons...

Well, maybe it's because you have a new Meyer lemon tree??

Alright, I admit it, I'm cheesy. But I did get a new Improved Meyer Lemon Tree last weekend.

I've been wanting one of these for a couple of years now. Then, last year when I got some of my mom's lemons I was sold. They are soooo good! So Saturday afternoon, my gift for my (gulp) thirty ninth birthday, was a lemon tree.
And here she is. My little limoncello machine! right there in her current home in the greenhouse. We've been having some really off again on again cold spells punctuated by hot days so I think I;'ll keep her in there for another couple of weeks to be safe. Later she'll be in a nice pot that I inherited from my uncle and will be kept outdoors for the summer.

And there's lots going on in that thar greenhouse too. As you can see below. I can hardly move around in there any more.There's lots of tomatoes, a lemon tree, peppers, cantaloupes cucumbers, tomatillos, marigolds, herbs...
Even some pumpkin starts that are doing really well.
And I found this on one of the little heartland tomato clones that I was able to hold over the winter. Guess there's no better testament to a healthy plant than that huh?

But Wait! There's more... There's life outside too!
Our onions are coming along well, and just about ready for a good mulching with some straw. I would love to do it earlier in the season, but our winds here just undo all my hard work.
It may be hard to see, but this bed has one of our first carrot plantings of the year growing up in it. There's five rows with a couple of extra wide spaces in the middle section. On either side of the bamboo stakes that are laying there will be planted beans for this year. The carrots will grow right along with them in the shaded area.
Here's a closer look.

And some peas. These are not doing too well. Late winter storms beat them up. Not the cold mind you but the winds. They broke a lot of them off right at ground level.

The first Kohlrabi plantings had trouble too. notice the front (windward) side of both beds were hit the hardest?
This bed has my bok Choi Chinese cabbage and is surrounded by carrots. Later in the season I'll fill the bed in with pumpkins and squash.

Not much to say... more peas!
And last but not least, the potato garden. Lots of green popping up here too!

So there you go, all caught up right? well, kind of... still have a couple more posts that I'll try to get up soon. Too much to do, not enough time!

hope all's growing well with you all
P~

High Density Pea Planting

I had quite a bit of interest in my high density PEA planting last year so I thought this year I'd go into a little more depth about it.

Peas are one of the true harbingers of spring. They're cold tolerant to the point of pushing through snow in some cases and later, when they plump and fill their pods with the sweet little green bites of goodness, you can be assured that the growing season is here. Like many beginning gardeners one of the first crops I was interested in growing years ago was peas and, also like many new gardeners, I failed miserably for the first few years.

As I mentioned, peas are cold tolerant. This isn't just a convenient truth, it's a cold fact (pun not intended) that we have to take into consideration. The truth of the matter is, peas aren't even so much "cold tolerant" as they are "cool mandating". What I mean by this is that they actually need that cool weather to do well. The first year I planted peas I did it when I felt the gardening season began...late May. I planted, watered, watched with excitement as they sprouted and started to grow and then stood back scratching my head as they abruptly wilted and died in the heat of late June's heat. I did a little research and learned that they like cool weather. The next time I planted them it was early April and they did much better. My few little rows of peas grew proudly and filled nicely and in the end we had peas for dinner... one time! While I had planted them correctly, I didn't plant nearly enough. Following the directions on the package, I spaced them as instructed and got a harvest of about one full bowl.

The last few years I've managed to work out a way that has yielded us very good results, has given us enough yield to can peas that we can eat through during the winter months and manages to get the peas in, grown and out of the garden to make space for the next crop rotation in good time.

Everything starts for us with pre-germination. This isn't something that's generally instructed to do, but I think of it as mandatory. I'll go into why in a few minutes. What I do is to put the peas that I figure I will need, plus a few percent more just in case, into a large container and completely fill the tub with luke warm water. This I leave to sit overnight. The next day, I strain out all the peas and return them to the container, which now has a paper towel liner in it, and cover with plastic wrap with a few breathing holes in it.
After a few days I check the peas and if they look dry I will mist them just a bit and re-cover. After less than a week you should be looking at something that looks like all the peas have stuck out their tongues and are daring you to plant them. Take them up on that! Wait too long and they'll start to rot.

Looking at the picture below you'll see that by high density planting I don't mean only that they're planted close in the row, which they are (about 4.5 to 5 inches), but that the rows of plantings are just as close. it's like planting on the corners of a 4.5 inch square.

Here's where that pre-germination comes in handy. Because I will be planting my peas in a high density way, I need to know that most, like 95+% of them, are going to come up. When the seed has germinated successfully you know fairly surely that that is a viable seed. Some will rot or die in the soil, but most will emerge successfully.

The other reason for pre-germinating seed is for situation like I had this year. I had a good bit of seed that I needed to use because it was from 2007 and was getting old. By pre-germinating I was able to identify whether the seed was still good or not. Because I wanted to make sure I still had enough time to get new seed if I had to I did the whole process a few weeks earlier than usual. Luckily the weather's cooperated and I had this handy cold frame that I built last fall that I could insulate them from any extreme nights with.

The peas have now come up and are out from under cover. If all goes well I'll be able to start my harvesting of these a couple of weeks earlier than last year even.

Peas are a great crop. They're sweet right off the vine, easy to work with and with a little planning can really yield a good harvest. I hope this sheds a little more light on how I like to do them on my little backyard farm. What's your favorite way?

Paul~

A loss tonight

Just a quick note. More for the record than for anything else.

Tonight one of our hens needed to be put down. I don't use the more technical work "cull" because while I don't keep them as pets,don't name them and even though I know that they're a part of our "farm" as an integral working animal, because of our size and the personal nature of their keeping requirements they're more than just livestock.

This particular hen was the smallest of the flock but seemed to get along just fine on her own. Last month, a little after Christmas, I found her sitting in a corner alone looking not well at all. She was brought inside our garage where the temperature is more moderate and where I could keep a better eye on and take special care of her. I gave her warm mash, fresh water with cider vinegar and kept her warm with a lamp but she stayed unhealthy. It finally got to the point where she couldn't roost, and had a hard time standing.

Tonight I put her down to end her suffering. As I said, I don't really see my hens as pets, but as their steward I feel a responsibility to do everything in my power to give them a chance to recoup. I'm sure there are some more efforts that could have been taken, but I feel that I took reasonable steps.
Best to you all.

As an aside... tomorrow is the second and final night of the beekeeping class. I look forward to it and thought I may be able to take advantage of the experts there on all of our behalf's. If any of you have any particular questions that I can pass along for you, leave a comment tonight or tomorrow and I'll do my best to get an answer.

Peace~
P~

Potting Time (34 Days)

So then, tired of these cloning posts yet? Well, the final phase of the actual cloning process has finished for the most part so you may be in for a break from them.

The roots that had begun to poke out at the time of the last update have come out in force now. The stems of tomato plants that I left in water to root are now well rooted but are beginning to show the signs of nutrient deficiency. The lime green color and yellow and purple hues in the leaves in particular.
Now is the time to get these babies into some soil. I mixed up a basic mix of well screened homemade compost, some leftover peat and some vermiculite and added a bit of slow releasing organic fertilizer to give a nutrient boost to the plants.

You can see this cutting has rooted really well. I've removed it and need to prep it for planting.
All I did to prop the cuttings was to trim off the lower and longer leaves that would just be sucking energy from the plant. I want to make sure the cutting is focusing it's energy on setting roots and growing taller. This kind of excess growth will just delay that.

Here it is ready to be put into the potting mix in one of the pots that I've made sure are clean and ready for planting.

Because of the length of the roots and the stem that has roots growing from it, I decided to use my larger size pot.

I put a small approx .5 inch layer of soil into the bottom of the pot and then held the cutting in the center of the pot while I loosely filled in the soil around it. Using my fingers and by shaking the pot, I was able to get the soil to fill in between the net of roots.

And voila, One down. Now, trim, plant and repeat 40 or so more times and you'll have this...

Actually this is only a portion of the cuttings. There's enough to fill a large table. At least one of each will hopefully make it through the winter.

And that brings me to my next project... heat! I need to find a way to get some kind of heat into the greenhouse. And I need to do it pretty quickly I think. The weather here is turning cold fast!

Any ideas? Anyone have any passive heating ideas? I'm thinking solar gain into some kind of heat sink. Well, at any rate, the experiment is going well so far.
More to come.
P~

Gitt'n buggy with it!

OK, I admit it, that was a really cheesy title. Gotta keep things interesting though right? Besides, what else was I supposed to title a post with a picture like this is it? Did I mention that I have a TON of Lady beetles in my yard? Yeah, I'm probably supplying the whole neighborhood with all the lady beetles that I have! That picture above is the remains of a Giant sunflower stalk that I removed the head from some time back. The pupa of the lady beetles are all over it. In that picture a rough guess of the number would put me close to 60-70 beetles and pupa. And that's just the top of one plant! They are all over.And they're really big and healthy too! This one is about the size of my pinky nail.
And when you get to watch this many beetles in your backyard eco-system, you get to see a lot of interesting things that you might not normally. Ever seen a lady beetle hatching?It's interesting, they come out and you can noticably tell that their wing covers (Elytra) were still soft and completely devoid of any spots.

Here's another closer look.

In this one you can see the wings out and drying. She's "hanging" around with a few sisters. I'm hoping to get out in the yard soon with a large mason jar stuffed with some straw and begin collecting the beetles into it. An interesting thing about the life cycle of the lady beetle - by the way, I'm pretty sure that these are Harmonia axyridis (Multicolored Asian lady beetle) just in case you were curious - anyway the interesting thing I learned about their life-cycle is that they hibernate over the winter by living off stored fats, just like a bear. Cool huh? My master plan is to have the ladies help me to naturally control next year, what became a very nasty aphid problem this year.

I worked this plan out sometime around mid-summer kind of by accident; let me lay it on you. When I came to grips with the fact that this years aphid outbreak was going to be a big one, I also noticed that because of the very healthy food source, my lady beetle population was also exploding. I figured that if I could encourage a really healthy lady beetle population this year, accepting of course the fact that I would have some crop damage from the aphids that they were feeding on, then next year I could use some organic methods like horticultural oil and kaolin clay early on to limit the number of aphids that hatch on my property. Between a hopefully burgeoning population of beetles and a reduced population of aphids I hope to be able to really be successful at keeping them under control for the foreseeable future, or at least for a year. Anyone have any experience they want to share in that area?

Now, totally unrelated but still pretty cool, I thought I'd show you these pictures of the mushrooms popping up through my mulch on the north side of my shed.

I took these pictures Monday and they weren't a great deal bigger today, but they are growing slowly.I don't know what they are, but it's good to know that the fungi are healthy in the yard too. They play a very important part in the natural decomposition of organic matter in the garden. I'm letting these finish their life-cyle at least to see what they become.

I love watching as the season winds down. Things change, cycles move to their next phases.
Hope the season finds you well.
P~

Put'n it up!

A big part, and to be honest it's a really big part, of the idea of a sub-urban farm or urban homestead or whatever you'd like to call it, is deciding what to do with all the stuff you've grown after you've grown it.

With the economy as it is, we'e been happy to be able to help out friends and neighbors with some extra produce from time to time and we've eaten a ton of really good fresh meals, but at some point, you just have to either put up or shut up. By put up I of course mean putting up food for later. We've done a good bit of that this year. We've dried, frozen, pickled, jellied, juiced and canned much more this year that in any year past. It is by no means enough to feed us all winter, but it helps me to justify to myself the effort, time and let's be honest here, money, that we put into our garden. I wish I'd had a chance to get good pictures of everthing we did, but alas the technical difficulties raised they're stupid heads more than once for me.
Here's some pickles, potatoes, plum jam and salsa that we put up one weekend. It was a busy one for sure.

I also tried my hand at making sour brined pickles this year. I can't take credit, as much as I'd like to, for the beautiful pickle cukes. I can't grow them to save my life! But I did find a local grower that had a great deal on these and they worked great.
After seasoning and brineing them and letting them ferment for three weeks they developed a great kosher dill sour pickle taste. I really really like them. This will be a definite do again project.
This year we also tried our hand at dried tomatoes. Believe me, we have much more than this. After they're dried we can re-hydrate them in a little basamic vinager and then store in the fridge in some olive oil. Very very good!
And of course we canned tomatoes. These are some of our chopped tom's. We also have done whole romas, tomato sauce and even tried ketchup.

Slowly but surely we're building a good food storage in the basement. It would be easier to freeze a lot of stuff, but that won't help me if the power goes out.

There's still more to go, but soon these jars will be regular guests on our dinner table.

Few things taste better than something you planted from seed, picked at the peak of ripeness with your own hands and put up for later.

It's a good life, eh?
Till next time.
P~

On the garden front

All is well.
Some things are starting to show some signs of slowing, while others are really just kicking in. Some of the tomatoes for instance, while still giving prodigious harvests, ( I'll go into that later ) are starting to show signs of stress. The long hot summers do take their toll on things by this time of the year. But hey, They take their toll on me too so I can't blame them.

on the other hand, our green pole beans are really just coming on strong now. I thought that we wouldn't get a good harvest of them this year, and it still won't be as good as last years, but after consulting that garden journal from last year (can I tell you what a blessing that thing has been!) we found that our first substantial harvest of green beans last year wasn't until mid September either. We figure we're about 2 weeks behind. That will catch up to us on the back end, but honestly I couldn't have handled more if they'd have come any earlier!

A couple of other things that have been fun this year have been our green peppers and eggplants.
I don't know if it was a product of the long cool spring that we had giving them a chance to root well, or if the new Lasagna garden that I planted them in just acted like rocket fuel to them, but we got a better crop of both of them this year than we've ever gotten. And of course this years new crop for us was Okra. I followed the instructions of a woman that I met in our Master Gardener program that had learned to grow them in the south and they've done great! To think that last year I never even managed to get them to germinate and this year I'm harvesting bunches at a time. It's all about planing the seed direct well after any chance of cool weather. They like it hot.
I mentioned that we pulled our Mid season potatoes a while back. I never did manage to get a photo of that harvest up though. It was a good one so I thought I'd share.

We got a few tomatoes, cukes, a watermelon and such then too. We've eaten a lot of potatoes, but they're mostly a fall/winter thing for us so many of these are in the cold storage waiting for Thanksgiving.

I guess while I'm on the topic of harvests I can meander off in that direction with you. We've done well this year. We set a goal of 1500 pounds during the winter while we were working up our garden plan for this year. It was ambitious to say the least, but we figured what could it hurt to shoot for the moon. Well, we lost our entire pumpkin crop as well as a few zucchini plants and our watermelons to squash bugs this year. They were TERRIBLE. That's set us back quite a bit I think but as of tonight we have a running total of 745.25 pounds (Not counting eggs of course.) so I think we're doing pretty darn good. We'll hit 1000 lbs this year I'm sure or at least come pretty darn close. Last year for the entire year we got a total of 521 pounds so if nothing else we can be glad to have well beaten our own best.

We also set a one day harvest record for ourselves a couple of weeks ago. Remember
I said I'd get back to the prodigious tomatoes? Well, thanks in no small part to a one day harvest of 140 pounds, we brought in just over 166 pounds in one day. Curious what 140 pounds of tomatoes looks like?

For perspective, they're covering the top of our full-sized chest freezer. Suffice it to say we had a lot of tomatoes!

So then what's a family to do with all this stuff? Well, besides eat it of course. We gave a good bit of it away to friends and like the old saying we're so fond of...

"Eat what you can and CAN what you can't" we put up a bunch of jars this year. more to come on that.

P~

More Springtime Gardening

Here's those finished pictures that I promised you of the potato patch. The length of the fence line down the driveway is 15 feet and it's almost 11 feet wide.

I had to buy one of the sections of fencing because I didn't have quite enough from the salvage job I did but I don't think you can really tell.

Since I finished the fencing yesterday, and hope to plant the potatoes this weekend, I wanted to take today to really get the ground busted up. I double dug most of it tonight with my pitch fork and then quickly ran over it with our small cultivator.

I also added that 8 inch plank retaining "wall" to the side of it to keep the soil in the bed. It's some old barn wood that we've had laying around the garage for years and that needed to be used up. I do still need to re-bury that drain spout but....there's time for that later when the bigger fish have already been fried (if you get me.)

There's news on the indoor garden front as well. The Broccoli, kale, cabbage, kohlrabi and lettuce seeds that I sowed a while back are doing well. There is getting to be a bit of bend to them, but I think that's mostly because of how close the lamps are to them right now.

These should grow fairly quickly from this point and I'll get them in the garden in a couple of weeks.

And speaking of the garden...guess what needs to be harvested already? The late spinach from last year, that's what! I sowed this crop late in the season for a final harvest but it grew too slowly so I left it to over winter and now it looks done to me.
Some of the leaves will be a little freeze damaged but the chickens can have those. I'm just looking forward to a quick fry with some vinegar and maybe a bit of my last purple onion from last year.

Springs really shaping up nicely around here and gardens are being prepped all over. In fact, and I can't believe I almost forgot this...., I was asked by the Master Gardener program coordinator to teach a class this weekend in a nearby town. The class is for a church group and will focus on gardening from a preparedness perspective. They also booked me for another class in the middle of April at another cities city hall to talk about organic gardening and the options available. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to take this class. I enjoy talking about gardening and food production, and wanted to be able to help get others going in doing it them selves.

Wish me luck!
till next time.
Paul~

Another loss (I'm an idiot..)

Yeah, it's what it sounds like. We lost another bird yesterday. She was another one of our brown leghorns.

It's been really frustrating me too since I just lost a bird not even a month ago. I wasn't doing anything differently that I knew of, and yet I was losing birds. As I said previously, I was going to keep a close eye on the girls to make sure that I didn't see any signs of stress or disease or anything and I did, keep an eye out that is. No signs of anything though. That is, until Monday morning. I get up and get myself ready for work in the morning and then head out to the coop before I take off for the day. I give them fresh water, check their food and toss them a half jar of scratch for the day. While I do this, I check on them for signs of problems. I repeat the checking in the afternoon after dinner when I head out to the coop to fetch the eggs.

Monday morning when I went out I noticed that one of the hens was very lethargic. She was also all puffed up and not wanting to go very enthusiastically after the scratch that I threw her. I made sure she got some water and that the food was accessible to her. That afternoon I did a little research in to possible chicken maladies and learned more about mites and the damage that they can cause to hens.

I have to add at this point that many of the chickens have been going through a sort of molting phase. Or at least that's what it looks like. Many of them have been losing feathers both on their bellies below their vents, or along their backs just in the back by the tail feathers.

I got to thinking that maybe there were mites and that that was the cause of the feather loss. I went home and cleaned the coop out, dusted the hens with Diatomaceous earth as well as the beds and the floor. They say cleanliness is the biggest culprit when dealing with mites, however, While dusting the birds I inspected them for mites and found no sign of them. When I had returned home that night, the hen in question was doing infinitely better. I hoped I had it licked. I was wrong.

The next morning, yesterday, I found the same hen acting the same way. Confused, I decided to turn the light on longer to help warm her up. That's when I found that the automatic timer that I was using had crapped out on me and I hadn't noticed. They hadn't been getting the warm lights in the morning! I separated her from the flock, placed her in a warmer area in a crate with some food, water, bedding, and gave her a dedicated light to warm up with. Sadly, it was too little too late. She had passed by the time I got home from work.

So, as I said in the title...I'm an idiot. I've lost two birds now to what I think was a simple automatic timer. My girls didn't freeze, but the cold is, I think, what got to them.

In the mean time, I have remedied the timer problem. I'll not let that be the cause for further losses. The only possible up side to the whole thing is that we had 9 birds and were only allowed 6. I've been thinking about giving them away to a family that wanted to start raising chickens as it is, this just kills that.

If your new to raising poultry, please...learn from this. Check all your equipment each morning. Be familiar with your birds and keep an eye out for odd behavior. It may just be the odd quirky bit of behavior that keys you into what the problem is/could be.

All the best to you all.

P~

EGGS - The Natural Way

A~ and I raise chickens in our backyard and, although we have had occasion to kill, process and consume a couple of our "extra" birds (Roosters that came for free with our mail order hens.), we don't raise them for that purpose. What we do raise them for, is eggs. So as we began to move into the colder winter months of the year, we had an issue confronting us and needed to make a decision. Natural or artificial?

What I'm talking about is whether or not we wanted to provide our birds with artificial light in order to ensure that they continue to pump out eggs like clock work similar to, yet on a smaller scale than, the way commercial producers do or whether we wanted to let them have a bit of an off season, time to re-coop. (Pun intended.) After we talked about it and gave it some thought, we both agreed to a sort of trial period. What we're doing is not providing any artificial light, for the time being, but we may yet do it before the end of the winter. We're not trying to just be indecisive. What we are doing, is following much the same philosophy that we do with most everything that we do around here. Take it step by step, see what happens and adjust as necessary to keep the birds healthy, and maintain our egg supply.

Here's our thought process. First off, we don't raise the chickens for pets. Yes we love them and they're fun to watch and all, but primarily they are for food production, green waste disposal and manure generation; food doesn't get purchased for them for no return after all. That said, we also try to maintain a fairly natural order of things around here; organic veggies, compost, and natural pest control for instance. Because of that we thought we owed it to them to at least give them the opportunity to "slow down" for a season, while still maintaining a minimum number of egg production. I believe that there is a reason that the birds will naturally slow down with their egg production in the winter time. It is a part of their physiology, and pushing them beyond that is likely to reduce not only their lifespans but I believe their long term productivity as well.

So far, I have to say, so good. We have 9 chickens total, and although we are no where near their regular 7 or 8 eggs a day that we got during the summer months, we are still averaging about 4 a day. Our drop dead number was exactly that, 4. What I mean is, when we decided to let them have their "down time" we set 4 as our minimum daily number of eggs that we were willing to accept before introducing artificial lighting. We've had a couple of 3 a days, but not enough to worry about in my opinion, so for now, their still on staycation.

One of the things that instigated me to make this post was a post on another blog, one of my favorites, the Tiny Farm Blog. There, the Tiny Farm Blogger, posted that he wondered what would happen with his birds if the day light hours dropped below the recommended 14 hours for even a single day? So I looked into it, just how long are our day currently? Turns out, quite a bit less that that. Today for instance was set to only be a 9h-26m-21s day. That 5 hours less! Even better news was that the shortest day of the year for us is set to hit in just 18 days, Dec 21st. So we're nearly half way through the short daylight part of the season!! We may just make it.

What do you do with your chooks if you raise them? The natural way, or artificial? Ever tried it without light? Let me know, I'm curious. I'll keep you posted on my experiment as well. Oh yeah, and in case your in UT and want to see the daylight hours and such, check here. Not to ignore my non-Utahan readers, you can find your city by searching here.
Till next time.
P~

Yeah I'm a scrounge...So what?!

Alright, it's out there. I'm a scrounge. I am, I admit it. Well, I guess in all honesty anyone who's ever read this blog for very long already knew that. There were the window frames I picked up a last year, the concrete urbanite that graces so much of our yard, and most recently all of the grass clippings other organic materials that I added to my lasagna beds. So I guess it won't strike anyone as a shock that the weekend before last, while driving through Salt Lake Cities older east side and seeing all the bags of leaves left out for the city to collect for people, that I threw a bunch in the back of the truck!
I Love freebies! Especially freebies that reduce landfill waste, give me lots of ammo for the compost pile and some really good mulch for next year! I'm hoping to stock up on a bunch more leaves this fall to add to this. They're really one of the best kind of "browns" to have available . I really liked these particular ones because of their size. You can see here that they're a good medium-small sized leaf, not like Maple or Sycamore, and will break down into the beds very well. I'll be turning these into the raised beds this fall and then topping them with more for the winter. I'll be adding them to the compost pile when I rotate it for the last time in the next couple of weeks (I need to relocate it first, but that's a future blog.) and will top off my lasagna beds with some for the winter too.

So, where else could I get leaves if I can't get more from people putting them the curb? City parks, think about it, they have to pay someone to deal with them and then just toss them in the trash anyway. I will be loaning my blower/vac to a friend to help him make it easier to clean up his leaves in return for the bags of leaves when he's done. Or maybe I'll offer to help an elderly couple clean their leaves up and just "take care of the leaves" for them. The point is, even if your house is like mine with no real trees to speak of, you can still have plenty of leaves to use in the yard.

Think outside the box, and keep an eye open to the world around you. There's so many opportunities if we'll just be open to them, and maybe put a little ego on the back burner.
Good luck
P~