Merry Christmas

Just thought I'd bob in here and wish you all a wonderful Christmas and holiday season. I've been home enjoying some time with my sweetheart the last couple of days and now the boys are home from their gramma's house and nestled "snug in their beds" so all is well with the world.

I did finally manage to finish their presents thought it required a final push worthy of the records book. I'll post more on things soon, but suffice it to say that I had a pretty SHARP idea for this year, one that's cool because it knows how to hold it's TEMPER. Any guesses?

Merry Christmas all
Best wishes.
P~

Oh so cold and snowy.

We've had more than a few inches of snow in the last couple of weeks. In fact, after I finally got my garlic in the ground just before thanksgiving, it snowed. Then the next week got bone chilling cold and snowed, and I do mean bone chilling. When I checked the weather underground website it showed our local weather station reading in the tens (not teens, tens) and the lowest I remember seeing one morning was 3.7 degrees F. Yeah, freaking cold!

On the upside, the chickens did fine with a little help from a heat lamp and timer set-up and a weather stopping clear plastic covering that cuts the wind but still let's them get natural light and fresh air. The greenhouse, well that's a little different story.

I finally got an artificial heating set up in place and it helped for sure. However, I still want to be conscious of how much power I consume to keep everything alive so I have it also on a timer that alternates the heater off and on for an hour at a time through out the night. During the days it will heat up just fine in there, it's the middle of the night that gets me.

Also, thanks to everyone who gave me the great passive heating ideas. I have implemented a couple of them like moving a barrel with compost into the greenhouse to try to generate a little heat and I have water bottles around my actual planters that hold some of the heat from the day in there over-night. The compost hasn't really gotten kicking yet but I'm still working on it. I also just acquired 10 or so 5 gallon barrels that I'm going to fill with water and place in the greenhouse to gather heat during the day. Right now the tomatoes that are still alive, did I mention that I had a devastating freeze kill at the beginning of the big chill? I did... it probably halved the number of plants that I had in there.

All in all, I'd say things are going pretty well though. As always I take the lessons with the triumphs and press on ever forward thankful that (for now) my living is not dependant on this. So then, how are things in your necks of the woods? Cold, maybe hot for my southern Friends? Everyone about ready for the holidays? We're pretty much ready for it here, but I personally am waaaaay behind. Every year I make a handmade present for my boys. This year it took me a long time to even think of something to make and I am just starting this week.

Crunch time!!

All the best!
P~

Planting fall garlic.

Garlic is one of those things that I've never really put any effort into growing. I've planted them in the spring before and got from them a few heads that were smallish and not too impressive . However, I literally only planted some 8 or 10 cloves and it was in my first year of growing so I'm not too worried that I'm garlic growing impaired or anything. Finally this fall I've put a little effort into it and I'm hopeful for next summers harvest. At the $8.49-lb that it cost to buy the other day I sure hope so!

I decided that for this first serious attempt at garlic growing on my little urban farm I'm going to try to use a part of my potato patch that last year was the least producing and at the same time hopefully I'll be able to deter some nuisance pests at the same time. The potato garden at the front of the house is essentially one large raised bed. The area at the outside edge of that bed was not easy to mound up to help the potatoes produce to their best capacity and also made it harder to irrigate. That's where I'm planting the garlic. It doesn't need to be mounded and will make a nice "stinky" border around the bed too.

I'd already "amended" this bed by turning in all the grass clippings that I had used to mound the potatoes with as well as some straw to help break the soil up. I've had good results with this in the past. To further amend the beds now, before planting, I also turned in a good helping of coffee grounds gotten from our local Starbucks "Grounds for the garden" program. They are high in nitrogen and slow to release into the soil so they should really help out next year. Here's what it looked like before turning-in and planting.After turning in the clippings and grounds, I laid out the spacing (around 5" apart) of the cloves. These were specially purchased certified seed cloves, not just garlic purchased at the grocery. Those will grow too, but may not be disease free and if they're hybridized varieties you may not know exactly what you'll get from them.If you've never planted garlic here's the quick and dirty of it. When you buy them you get a full head just like you do in the store more often than not. Just like you would break off a single clove from the head to cook with, you break the head into individual cloves to plant as well. When planting them, the pointed end points up, and the flat part (from where the cloves were all connected) goes down. The cloves get pushed in far enough that the pointed tip is about 2" under the soil.After planting, whether in spring or fall, a good 3-4 inch cover of mulch, you can see here that I used straw, is needed. This will insulate the bulbs over the winter, and will help maintain even soil moisture through the early growth and summer.

It may not be too late to plant where your located. My research tells me that after a first hard freeze but before permafrost sets in is the best time to plant the fall bulbs. I got these in just before Thanksgiving.

Wish me luck! All the best.
P~

Thankful!

We are thankful for so many things in our lives. My wife an I have each other, our kids and our families. We have passion for each other and passion for life. I've been blessed to have the opportunity to work for a great company for the last nine years and have recently added A~ to that "work family" as well.

Tuesday of last week we were given another reason to be be thankful...





We were all in the car, and we are all alright for the most part though the boys are very adamant about us "slowing down" regardless of how we're driving and their hearts skip each time we have to stop quickly at all.

I have to say we're really lucky that the damage done was all that there was. As we were going through an intersection in the evening, a 19 yr old kid cut short the corner from the turn lane and tried to make it onto an on ramp before we got there. He didn't make it. Almost, but no. I was able to swerve enough to only catch the back tire of his jacked up jeep but it was hard enough to set off both of our air bags and whack us around a bit. A~ was on the side that caught the brunt of it and smacked her head on the ceiling hard enough to break a few CD's that were in our visor cd-holder. Fortunately, the guys jeep had so much lift and big tires it avoided a lot of contact points, it could have been a much worse accident.

So, now three of us are on ibuprofen and my hip and lower back are killing me and A~ has on / off headaches but hey, we're all here. And we're thankful.

I hope your Thanksgiving was great and that you were able to get together with family and friends, enjoy some great food (hopefully some of your home grown goodies) and relax.

All the best to you.
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~

Keeping things clean (21 Days)

One of the most important and probably opt overlooked things one can do to help themselves be successful in thier propagating is to keep things clean.
There are a number of plant diseases that could easily prey on young, newly propagated plants if given the chance. Many of these can lay dormant in the very pots that we use to plant them in. Like many gardeners, I try my best to stretch my dollars and to consume less resources by re-using many of the pots that come through my garden. Taking the necessary care to make sure those pots are clean is a pretty simple tasks that can help to avoid a lot of problems.

I started with a regular bucket filled with water. This is just a preliminary wash to get off most of the dirt and grime off the pots before I sanitize them.While I rinsed them off I used an old rag to wipe down the pots quickly to remove as much dirt as possible.

After wiping down and generally cleaning out the pots I put them in a sinkful of warm bleach water. Using the bleach water is for basically the same reason as you would use a sanitizer when washing dishes. It kills bacteria and keeps disease from being able to spread easily.

After cleaning I stacked all the pots that I cleaned so that they could air out and dry completely. Bleach is not a good thing for plant roots so you do want to make sure that they are dried completely.

So now that I've gotten these all cleaned and sanitized, it's time to get those plants into the dirt.

I did plant one variety of tomato into a few of these pots, some of the romas that I am working to clone. I didn't want to jump in and plant too many of them for fear of they having a problem accepting the transplants. Best to stick a toe in the water first you know?

In the last few days we've had a dusting of snow and a serious cold front. I'll get out to plant some more this weekend comeing up. Watch for more and some photos then.

Anyone else trying to clone cuttings this fall?
P~

Propagating plants (10 day update)

Took a peek under the plastic wrap today and found a little surprise.Do you see them? Those little white spikey things poking out from the stems? Those are roots. So far so good!Here's a little closer look at them. This particular plant was one with the heaviest concentration of new roots, but most all of them are showing at least some rooting activity.

Take a look at the picture below, it's from a little different angle.Remember in my last post about the propagation how I said that the stem/leaf crotch was the place where most rooting would happen? Well, here you can see just that. That's one of the leaf ends that's poking out of the main stem and it's right in the middle of the heaviest concentration of new roots.

Like Hannibal from the A-Team used to say...

"I love it when a plan comes together!"

More to come as they progress.

P~