End of Season wrap up

Well, we find ourselves at the end of the growing season... and what a lousy growing season it was! The rainiest June in history, i think it rained something like 40 days straight - i couldn't get my seedlings out until well into the summer. As a resule, a lot of my crops started quite late. Others suffered a great deal at the hand of Spotty, the woodchuck/gopher/tiny demon that lives in my garden. He has a hole about 1 foot from my furthest bed, and spent the summer eating my lettuce, spinach, peas (just the leaves), beets, cucumbers, kohlrabi, and even sunflower and tomato leaves (I think he got sick on the latter - they are loaded with toxins - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#In_Britain). Several plants survived him and went on to fruit. I picked several dozen french breakfast radishes,which got less spicy the longer they grew - most were a little small, but they came up fast. About 2 dozen tomatoes were harvestable - i guess i didn't plant any of the cherry tomato seedlings i started, or they didn't make it, but the Sweet Tangerine yellow slicing tomatoes came up very nicely - though i think they needed more sun to ripen faster - i picked them all green and ripened inside. We had them in a salad yesterday and they were delicious!

I grew a lot of mesclun lettuce. i guess it's too bitter for Spotty, because he didn't touch it. it makes a really nice light salad, but it's a pain to wash and harvest - a lot of work for not a lot of lettuce. maybe i need a salad spinner? well, there is still some left - maybe as much as a pound? if anyone's interested, let me know - it's organic and healthy, and i can only eat so much bitter salad.

The sunflowers were BEAUTIFUL!!! i will not bother wit the small ones in the garden, but i might grow them in long boxes on the porch - they were pretty, but not sturdy - i could stake them to the railings. The taller ones grew to bout 6 feet, with heads as big as saucers. the petals dropped off kinda fast, and i wish i grew a lot more. maybe next summer i'll put in another row of raised beds so i can have one just for sunflowers.

I got a couple of random peppers - 2 banana peppers, one habenero, 2 little red ones - maybe they were a thai red pepper? and a few that didn't make it off the vine - a poblano and abell i think. more peppers next year, in their own bed.

Oh, and i think i managed to drive spotty off rather naturally! I tried filling his hole in, but he dug it out, including rocks as big as him. I tried all natural smelly rodent deterent made from garlic and fish oil. Nothing worked. My friend Dorothy said that when her dog started eliminating in the garden, her woodchuck stopped coming around. so, for a week, i dropped the cat's poop into his hole, and before i knew it, he was gone - the hole slowly filled with leaves from disuse, and my plants seemed to be less damaged each morning. So, poop works! just make sure it's downhill from your plants - you don't want that running off into your veggies! and beware that it might attract other things - that may have brought the fisher cat down from the hills to my deck, for all i know.

I also got rid of my slugs naturally. The rains brought them in droves (they started the day i brought home my supplies, including a bale of hay they infested within hours), so i found 2 natural, organic cures. This lady explains it better than i can: http://www.janesdeliciousgarden.com/snails_and_slugs. I did the beer trap (which you can also bait with yeast and water. I tried to come up with a good way to use copper, but didn't think of the "barbed wire" she posts. There is a brief explanation here as to why snails and copper don't mix: http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7427.html - basically, because the metal causes a current to run through their mucus and disrupt their nervous system.

So, what i learned this summer was:

-I need more space - things were crowded and i wanted more of some crops.

-some things will have to be fenced in to protect them from the woodchuck.

-i need to start earlier next year

-some things are really easy to grow - grow lots of those!

Oh, there are still some carrots and a few other things in the ground - i guess they can go pretty late, but they are still very small. thank god they're just baby carrots! ;)

this blog will probably go dormant for a while - unless i start blogging about the indoor herb garden over the winter. thanks for reading!

Tomatoes!!

Look what i grew!

It was a rough year for tomatoes this year. not much sun, lots of cold weather, and setting out my seedlings late all amounted in a sad crop. I had a lot of fruits, but i waited and waited, and they just stayed green. I spent a little time online looking for green tomato recipes and methods to ripen tomatoes indoors when it started getting chilly, but we had an early frost (complete with snow!), and i had to get them inside, green or not.

I harvested about 2 dozen small to medium tomatoes. The variety i planted was Burpee Sweet Tangerine Hybrid, which is supposed to be a yellow-orange slicing tomato. well, by the time it got cold, not too many were big enough for slicing, and NONE of them had even STARTED to turn yellow. But i put them in a paper bag with a ripe banana, and it worked! The gasses given off by the ripe banana helped the tomatoes to ripen to a lovely yellow, and then, as you can see in the pictures, a nice light red color. there's still a dozen green ones in the bag waiting to ripen, but we sliced one up tonight and had it with a little miracle whip mixed with Dr. Gonzo's Garlicmash. It was delicious! this variety of tomato is sweet and low in acid, but it didn't seem to have a ton of flavor... maybe it got too ripe?

at any rate, i think i've proven that i can grow tomatoes. I need to start them earlier, and i need to stake them so the fruits don't hang down to the ground (or overshadow the pepper plants, which were hidden under the tomato leaves all summer and didn't really grow), but i found them to be mostly vermin-resistant (no bugs, and whatever came and ate the leaves off the first one never came back - tomato leaves smell great, but they contain toxins), and fairly easy to grow without a lot of maintenance. AND i was able to grow them totally organically - no pesticides or chemical fertilizers - just yard dirt and Miracle Gro organic gardening soil!

So... success! :)

So, this is the SECOND snow of the year, on Oct 18th. and it's a Nor Easter. looks like there's going to be a lot of it! thought you might like to see it - snow on green trees and plants!

some photos of the garden in progress

Bed 1: peas, squash, carrots, lettuce, mesclun, spinach!

I built these garden beds from untreated 2x6 lumber. I sawed an 8' length in half for each side (each bed requires 4 8' 2x6s, and will be just under a foot high), then screwed the two pieces together at the ends, THEN screwed two of these together to make a square - this is one layer.

All 8 layers were painted with Rustoleum on the outside to prevent rotting - untreated lumber was used to minimize chemicals leaking into the food.

To set them in place, first lay down one layer, get it as close to level as you can, and hammer stakes into the ground up against each side to anchor it for all eternity (stakes should be about 2ft long). Screw the bottom layer of the planter to the stakes, then place the top layer and screw it to the stakes as well.

Each one is filled with a mixture of screened dirt from the excavation (native soil), and Miracle Gro Organic Garden Soil (which, surprisingly, contained a LOT of shredded plastic - i need to have some words with the peeps at Miracle Gro) - about 2 bags full per container.

If you are planting on a hillside, like i was, be sure so shore up the soil inder the front edge of your beds - an early flash flood before the soil is settled can result in a deadly washout.

Closeup of one of my kohlrabi, starting to look like it's bearing fruit.

closeup of some of my tomatoes and peppers, doing really well in the sun!

tomatoes and peppers of all kinds.

more tomatoes and peppers.

Sunflowers, beets, radishes, squash.

Peas and squash.

squash and mesclun mix.

more squash.

a perennial geranium, a gift from my friend Beth :)

a healthy little radish begging to be picked!

First Harvest! French Breakfast Radishes

Yesterday i harvested the first of my fully grown French Breakfast Radishes - 3 of them!
I've scanned the web for some history, and it sees there is no record of the French actually eating these for breakfast.
Unlike the traditional radish you see in grocery stores, these are narrower and more elongate than a standard radish - they range in size from that of a man's stocky, muscular thumb to a petite index finger. The greens are said to be edible, but with the slugs i have seen ravaging my garden after the rains earlier this year, i think i'll pass!
Radishes are a very rewarding crop to grow - they mature in about a month, and can be started directly in the soil you plan to grow them in - no need to start seedlings indoors early. The rapid growth cycle probably means these would grow nicely indoors, if you had a lot of light, and kept them moist (rain and fog supposedly keep them tasting tender and mild... just like jesus in that song...oh... that was bad.) Though the entire crop isn't mature yet, i suspect these will all be harvested by the middle of august. They don't take up a ton of room, and are great to plant around other plants, because you can pull them up early in the season, giving those other plants room to grow. According to several sites, it's a good companion plant, helping to organically combat disease and pests when planted near other veggies (from http://www.humeseeds.com/comp1.htm):

Radishes--This is one vegetable that has a lot of friends, they are excellent companion plants with beets, carrots, spinach and parsnips. Radishes grow well with cucumbers and beans. It's said that summer planting near leaf lettuce makes the radishes more tender. Avoid planting radishes near cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, kohlrabi or turnips.

As a bit of history, I haven't done any gardening since i was about 12. Since then, i have killed a LOT of houseplants, including an aloe plant. I spent 8 years in college learning biology, but never took a botany course. so, if i can grow delicious radishes in my front yard, anyone can! :)
Recipe searches for this variety of radish hasn't turned up much - most say to dip them in butter and salt and just eat them, or to slice them and eat them on buttered bread. I'm looking for something a little more involved. here are a few recipes i've found:
Radish Salad
Poached Radish Vinaigrette
I only have 2 left to eat right now, and i think they may go into a green salad. i should wait another few days before i pick any more. any suggestions on what i should do with them when they're ready?

Welcome to Marginally Insane

Welcome to my new blog, Marginally Insane, which chronicles the adventures of two first-time homeowners in Central MA.

We purchased our 1924 Crafstman Cottage last May, from a woman whose job relocated her 3 months after buying (and starting to refinish) the house. She painted it, stripped the floors, tore up the carpet, and did a variety of other partial "flips" before she was called away. Most were in various states of completion, but few in the final state. This is where i hope to record stories of what we do to the house and the property. We have already done most of the interior work, though i would like to go back and jot down some details of what we already did for posterity. I hope to post weekly about the work i get done on the yard and garden this summer, and use this blog to link to the photos i'll be taking of the progress.

I was inspired to start this blog after reading the Making of a Craftsman Home: http://goingcraftsman.blogspot.com/ I was searching for info on crushed brick, when i spotted all of their lovely landscaping, and i got hooked when i saw the house was the same age and size as our house. Hopefully, my blog will be interesting to someone else down the road looking to remodel a Craftsman home. Cheers!