Topic: Gardening

[Norfolk Slim]

All sounds pretty good John.

Our efforts have met with mixed results

Potatoes caught blight, though most of them were salvaged early enough and very tasty.  Some of our outdoor tomatoes are succumbing too, although the greenhouse ones are doing really well and providing a good ongoing harvest at the moment.

A badger (believe it or not) appears to have dug up most of my carrots, eating some and leaving others to rot!  Slugs attacked my courgettes and artichokes, though I now have the courgettes in tubs and should get a decent crop by the end of August.  If I can nurse the artichokes through, surrounded by slug pub traps, hopefully they will make it through winter and offer us something next year.

Garlic and onions doing very well- harvest fairly soon.

Lots of rhubarb, late season turnips look hopeful, and a bumper crop of grapes looking good so long as we get autumn sun to ripen them.  Biggest success has probably been the two cucumber plants I grew from seed in the greenhouse.  They've been fruiting prolifically for a couple of months now and show no sign of slowing down.  We've been giving the things away.

[Stefan Wirz]

... regretfully I gave up gardening some years ago when both kids hadn't the nerve to go there any more ...

[Stuart]

Congratulations on another successful garden, John. It sounds like you have quite a variety coming in. By any chance, was the inclusion of fava beans inspired by our man Bo Carter's mention in his song?

For those of you living where the growing season is short--or just want to get an early start, the following link may be of interest. Friends in Montana use have used their clear woven poly product for their greenhouse for a couple of decades with good results.

http://www.northerngreenhouse.com/

[Rivers]

Huge drought in central Texas right now so Slack I'm totally in awe of your success in W.Tx, you must have a good irrigation system, right? I'm happy when I can get cuttings to sprout roots before wilting, and that's with native plants.

I'm kinda into flowers (big hummingbird fan) more than veges these days, after the cutworms wiped out our magnificent squashes the first year. Grrrr! What to do?! Great soil, just too dry. I think I answered my own question, irrigation planning is the key.

[Johnm]

Hi all,
It's kind of late in Summer for a first gardening report on the year, but that's how it goes sometimes.  We had nice potato, turnip, fennel, pea and lettuce crops early--also boysenberries, raspberries and rhubarb.  Later plantings are coming up well with carrots, a couple of kinds of squash, and many, many beans, mostly shelling beans for drying.  Not real good yields from fruit trees this year.  I've made a discovery, too--walking into cobwebs, face-first, two or three times a day is not my favorite thing to do.  I know they are our friends, keep pest populations down, blah, blah, blah, but they're really pissing me off!
All best,
Johnm

[Stuart]

...I've made a discovery, too--walking into cobwebs, face-first, two or three times a day is not my favorite thing to do.  I know they are our friends, keep pest populations down, blah, blah, blah, but they're really pissing me off!

Self-cleaning flypaper, John, self-cleaning flypaper. Watch where you're walking as a lot of work goes into those webs! 

[Norfolk Slim]

Potatoes were good, and the sweetcorn is doing us well at the moment.  Leeks are growing fast.

Broccoli bolted and is no good, but the Sprouts are going to be good for Christmas.

We've had a very good year for apples, a stack of which have been ready early.  I spent much of last Saturday crushing and pressing, and have a couple of gallons of cider fermenting nicely in the kitchen!

Big Blackcurrant crop too- a good six months worth of jam in the fridge.  Chilis doing well.

Pretty good year all told- though my artichokes were once again a resounding failure.

[Zoharbareket]

great thread!

Here in Israel water is not in abundance and cost quite a bit, so home gardening is not really a viable economic choice. As for a nice way to pass the time, with a set of twin boys now in their fourth year, I really need to insist on having an hour a day to practice my guitar playing, no chance to have a second for gardening work! I am lucky to have the time to check out the wise words you guys are spreading! But man would I love to grow a mahogany tree and send it to Tod Cambio for a little tweaking. once I do that i'll try tomatoes.

be well,

Zohar

[Rivers]

Great to see so many weenies are into gardening. If all goes according to plan we're moving to a farm in the northeast US come April. Building a hoop house for off-season veggies is on the agenda for year 1, along with a lot of other research projects designed to give us enough information & experience to be able to make enough $$ to keep our ag exemption in year 2.

I like the idea of raising pasture-raised pigs, cattle and poultry, among many other opportunities. Cheryl wants to start a serious sheep cheese operation complete with cheese cave. There are enough sugar maples on the property to be able to produce a few gallons of syrup a year. Mushrooms are a lifelong interest of mine so I'll be trying to cultivate woodland varieties like shiitakes, oysters, etc

Plus I will get to bomb around on a big ass tractor with all the gears and hopefully a 4x4 ATV, assuming there's any spare money left by that stage. If there is I daresay it'll all be gone by 2015 but what the heck.

[Old Man Ned]

This sounds fantastic...and a cheese cave sounds like something out of my dreams that you have to eat your way out of to escape .  Is a hoop house what we would call, on this side of the pond, a polytunnel..ie big metal framed hoops covered in plastic that you can walk into to give crops an early start or protection from wild weather?  My own growing is far more modest, having a plot on the outskirts of Edinburgh.  Were lucky with a great summer this year though and had loads of soft fruit and the first year that the plums and apples have given us anything.  Usual staples of tatties, kale & onions did well too.  Am I the only person that can't get Bill Broonzy's 'Digging my Potatoes' out of my head while I'm lifting the tatties?

[Rivers]

Yes Ned, polytunnel = hoop house. Usually, but not always, unheated. The hoops over here tend to be PVC electrical conduit. This has the benefits of cheap material cost, easily available standard fittings like various connectors & clamps etc, tough and easy to work with.

Plus if a chicken happens to rest its eyeball up against a hoop in midwinter it won't immediately freeze and cause the chicken to pull its eye out in its struggle to get free, I understand this has actually happened with metal hoops. Kinda like the story of the ski guy who stuck his tongue out to touch the up-bar of the chairlift and had an uncomfortable centrifugal exit (cue velcro sound effect) at the top of the hill. Yikes. Why would anyone do that anyway? (rhetorical question, no answer required)

We will need two hoop houses, one for extending the veggie season and a second for overwintering chickens that will be out on the pasture the rest of the year. I'm thinking perhaps we should rotate them, so the overwintering chooks fertilize one for veggies the following year.

Intriguingly we also have two large ponds and adjoining wetlands on the property. The ponds are stocked with bluegills, largemouth bass and catfish. I won't know what the pond balance is like until we move in but the current owner has a lot of fishing rods stacked up in the workshop so that's a good sign. I've attached a picture of the upper pond below.

We continue to be very inspired by the writings of Joel Salatin and Eliot Coleman. I'm optimistic and realistic at the same time, and am talking to local farmers about this, all of whom have been extremely helpful, human and willing to share their experiences. How refreshing in this day and age, I look forward to becoming involved in the community and reciprocating. Farmers are just regular people with all the diversity that implies.

I like to think we're going into this with eyes wide open and a realistic budget. Year 1 won't be cheap but we will not be under-capitalized either, having been working, saving and investing for several years to get to this point.

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[Rivers]

Re. cheese caves and generally aging cheese, this is the most definitive study we've found so far and is well worth reading even if you're not planning to do it anytime soon but are interested nonetheless.

The link contains 56 pages of invaluable information straight from the school of hard knocks.

[Old Man Ned]

Thanks for the links Rivers, but the cheese link doesn't seem to be working.  I'll bare what you say about the poly tunnels in mind, if I ever get one.  Hadn't realised they could be such a hazard to chickens!

[Rivers]

Could be an urban legend. I'm now leaning toward metal tube.

[harvey]

Thought I might get this thread going again. Mostly becuase here in the south West UK we had an extremely wet winter and now we are having one of our better summers in memory.

As a consequence, my garden has gone crazy (including weeds). In particular french beans and tomoatoes are going to last sometime. The flowers are amazing but because the hot spell the summer flowers are already going past their best (this would normally start late August for me) 

How is everyone else getting on this year ?