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Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day, August 2011
August 15, 2011 | 
Author 
There are three pots of basil on the handrail of my deck. I put far too many seeds in the pots, and the poor plants grew up stunted. Still, the flowers are delicate and beautiful.
My small kitchen garden, like so many gardens in the US, has struggled through the season. Happily, things are finally moving along, though I’m afraid there is a fungus trying to kill my tomato plants.
But today isn’t about the problems, it’s about the bling! The 15th of every month is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. You can learn more about it over at May Dreams Gardens. I failed to capture decent shots of the flowering mint and cilantro. Also, I neglected to photograph corn silk. Still, there were a lot of blossoms today. Please enjoy the photos of what’s abloom in my kitchen garden.
There are two windowsill planters of cucumber plants under the handrail on my deck. This flower snuggles beneath the handrail, and it is one of dozens that have popped in the last week or so.
A bell pepper flower appears healthy and robust. Oddly, my bell pepper plants are thriving while my jalapeno, banana, and poblano pepper plants are struggling.
Despite the appearance of something blighty on some of my tomato plants, they continue produce flowers. I don’t suspect late blight because all the lesions are on lower stems and some lower leaves. I’ve seen no signs of sporulation, so it doesn’t seem likely to move from plant-to-plant. Still, I fear for my tomato crop: it may be quite limited this season.
How’s this? I understand it’s the male flower on a corn plant. My sweet corn is growing ears, and the silk on those is, technically, the female flower. This corn tassel is red and the corn lower down on the plant is also supposed to be red. I’ve never tried red sweet corn, but I suspect it will taste a lot like yellow sweet corn.
That’s a cosmos trying to hide behind a corn leaf. I planted cosmos with my corn because I heard from an online acquaintance that this would keep away corn ear worms. The first ears are nearly ready to harvest. I don’t see evidence of worms, but they can be pretty sneaky, so I won’t know for sure if the cosmos helped until I start shucking.
As long as I’m confessing about planting flowers, here’s an even bigger sin: My wife ceded an ornamental bed to me so I could grow more climbing beans. I set about ten beans across the back of the bed, and then planted five or six types of flower seeds through the rest of the bed. From the looks of things, only two types of flower plants survived, and the first to bloom is a zinnia. The leaves way back against the wall of the house on the left are Kentucky Wonder bean leaves.
On the subject of beans, here’s a flower on one of my bush wax bean plants. The plants suffered heavy chewing by insects until I treated them with insecticidal soap. With new leaves, the plants show more vigor toward reproduction. I’ve harvested a serving of wax beans and anticipate being able to preserve about a gallon of them before the season is over.
Weed. There’s quite a bit of it near my small kitchen garden, and just a few stems actually in the garden. The flowers are pretty so it’s hard to go all anti-weed on them.
I had to finish with a winter squash blossom because it’s all that! This is the biggest squash blossom in my small kitchen garden. It belongs to a neck pumpkin plant and was one of about a dozen gorgeous blossoms peaking out from rain-soaked leaves this morning. Oddly, my blue Hubbard plants have produced about 8 female flowers and only one male flower. I’ve pollinated the blue Hubbards using male flowers from the neck pumpkin plants. So far, they seem to accept this hybrid pollination, but I can’t predict whether the seeds will be viable next year (and if they are, what the squashes might be like). Perhaps I’ll find out next summer?
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | 
Tags: basil, beans, bloom day, blossoms, corn, cucumbers, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, peppers, squash, tomatoes | 
7 Comments »
Plastic Mesh Fencing? NOT For Kitchen Gardens!
Looking through the plastic mesh fencing at my garden annex, you can see bush bean and chili pepper plants scattered throughout a robust weedscape. Squint, and you might make out the fencing that stretches along all sides of the planting bed.
I recently reported how I repaired the fence that protects my small kitchen garden. This year, I used plastic mesh fencing that I bought in the garden department of a large discount store. The material came in a 50 foot roll clearly marked as fencing for vegetable gardens.
I repaired, perhaps, three fence panels with plastic mesh, using no more than nine feet from the roll. I stretched the remaining 41 feet of plastic around my garden annex—a small planting bed I added last year where my kids’ sandbox used to be.
My Vulnerable Small Kitchen Garden
The plastic mesh “fence” was three feet tall, and it sat flush with the ground around the entire planting bed. Everything inside looked secure. The photos tell the rest of the story, the unavoidable conclusions of which are:
The day after my son mowed the lawn, I discovered a hole in the plastic mesh that surrounded my garden annex. I guessed my son had run the mower against the fence, and I covered the hole by leaning a board against the mesh. Later, I found two more holes in the mesh… one of them against the rhubarb patch. Clearly my son hadn’t mowed through the rhubarb patch to reach the garden fence; there must have been some other force at work here.
1. If you want to keep critters out of your garden, don’t use plastic mesh fencing as your garden fence.
2. Though metal fencing (such as chicken wire) may be three times the cost of plastic mesh, you will spend more money on the plastic stuff. Some of my chicken wire fences have survived 15 years, while the plastic gave out in a matter of weeks.
3. The manufacturer of plastic mesh fencing and the retailers who sell it as fencing should be ashamed. The stuff is useless as fencing; it can’t protect against exactly the things you’d expect a fence to keep out of your small kitchen garden.
When I examined the damaged fence closely, I noticed a tuft of hair and some flattened grass. Probing with a stick revealed a hole in the garden soil lined with rabbit hair and weeds; a rabbit had eaten through my fence in several places and built a little nursery in my garden annex! Fortunately, I’d intervened before rabbit puppies appeared; my activity in the garden annex discouraged the rabbit from returning.
I don’t know whether it’s the fence-damaging culprit, but this rabbit hangs around my yard quite a bit. When I muse about what a rabbit needs to do, I realize that it has plenty of time to sit next to a plastic mesh fence and systematically chew large holes through it. Plastic mesh fencing is a really bad idea.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: fencing, garden fence, rabbit | 4 Comments »
Mending my Small Kitchen Garden Fence
The wooden frames I made for my garden fence are of pressure-treated lumber. The corners are lap joints, meaning I removed half the material from each piece of wood so when I bolted them together they would be no thicker at the corners than at any other part of the frames. I removed the rusted, broken chicken wire from this frame in preparation for putting on new material.
When my small kitchen garden finally dried out at the end of May, of course I started planting. But setting seedlings in the soil motivates me to take on basic maintenance that feels nothing like gardening: evaluating the garden fence and mending any damage.
I have a rather ugly garden fence. This is because I built a fence first for my 14 foot by 14 foot planting bed and I made the fence three feet tall. Later, I doubled the size of the bed and built additional fence, but by then I’d realized a two-foot fence would be enough to discourage the rodents in my neighborhood. I saved money by using less chicken wire and wood for the new fence.
The mixture of high and low fence sections looks messy, but it’s mine.
Fence Mending with Plastic
I added a planting bed last year, and had no fence to protect it, so when I went shopping for materials to mend the old fence, I wanted to buy enough to create a fence as well around the garden annex. And then I found plastic fencing mesh.
These photos show detail of a bolted-together lap joint. There are two lag bolts on each corner, pulled very snugly into the wood by nuts on the opposite side. Note that I used washers behind the nuts. The metal has rusted, and algae has grown on the wood, but the frames are in decent shape even after 16 years of use. I love the well-aged look that these photos captured.
This stuff looks nice, it’s light weight, and it figured to be easy to handle. The chicken wire on some of my three-foot tall fence panels had rusted and broken, so I bought a fifty foot long roll of three foot wide plastic fencing. This would wrap around the annex planting bed and leave enough material to repair the old fence.
The photos show a fence panel and the steps I took to repair it. Here’s what I’ve learned: If you’re serious about fencing critters out of your garden, don’t use plastic fencing. Whoever decided to package and sell this stuff as though we should use it to protect our gardens is an idiot. Sorry, no apologies. The plastic fencing material looks nice, and it’s pretty convincing once you install it. But it won’t stop a rodent that has teeth and a little time on its hands.
Doesn’t this look like legitimate garden fencing material? The packaging claimed it’s garden fencing material. If gnawing rodents run free in your neighborhood, this type of plastic “fencing” is a waste of money.
I figured when I bought it that the plastic would be chew-vulnerable, but I also figured a rabbit or woodchuck would likely just walk away. After all, the stores sell this stuff as garden fence. And figuring on motivation of a small rodent: Why, I reasoned, bother chewing on plastic when there are so many fine things to eat underfoot?
Rodents that chew are a story for another day. The photos in this article show how I mended the old garden fence. Originally I built wooden frames to support chicken wire, and I stand those frames side-by-side around the garden’s perimeter. This is the first panel I repaired using plastic instead of wire, and I probably did the same with two other panels. Those are the last. Next time I repair fence, I’m using something made of metal.
An upcoming blog post, I believe, will convince you my decision is a good one.
There are no tricks to attaching plastic “fencing” to a wooden frame. Actually, the procedure works as well with metal fencing (chicken wire, for example), though you’ll need wire cutters instead of scissors when it comes to trimming chicken wire off the roll. My recommendation: use chicken wire.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: fencing, garden fence, repair | 4 Comments »
Small Kitchen Garden Bloom Day, July 2011
This onion barely qualifies as “in bloom” on this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. A few petals remain, and I assume the white bud-looking things are future onion seeds. If these grow anything like wild onions, I expect to see sprouts emerge all over this ball within a month or so… assuming I can continue to work around it—at this point, it’s kind of in the way in my small kitchen garden.
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and my Small Kitchen Garden actually has something to offer! My vegetables are a few weeks behind compared to past years, but things are finally shaping up. (Understand that I had virtually no spring crops this season because my planting bed was underwater until the end of MAY.) Tomatoes have formed (seedlings went into the garden in early June) and I’m projecting the first will ripen in mid August… which is just a bit later than usual.
Peppers are the hold outs this year. While my bell pepper plants are lush and growing, my jalapeno, banana pepper, and poblano plants have stood for weeks with no apparent growth. Now that the soil is seasonably dry, I hope these struggling plants finally get it in gear.
For long-time readers of Your Small Kitchen Garden, the cilantro and dill pairing should seem familiar; it has starred in many a Bloom Day post. The dill (right) is poised to blossom, while the cilantro (left) is about to produce coriander—seeds from the cilantro plant are, in and of themselves, a popular seasoning.
My herb bed helped me through the wet spring; it was never as wet at the main planting bed so I was able to start annuals alongside the perennials I’d set in in the fall. The purple flowers—clearly in bloom—are on a volunteer that I recognized when it first sprouted; it had snuck in from my wife’s ornamental plantings. The modest blossoms stand out against the lush greens of sage, cilantro, dill, and basil.
Mint blossoms! I don’t know what type of mint it is… it started growing two years ago in a planter containing tarragon plants. I’m OK with it as long as it stays in the container. But if it escapes, I will almost certainly eradicate it; mint is aggressive about colonizing planting beds.
The broccoli was a joke this year. Because of rain, I left seedlings in their starting pots about a month too long. When I finally set them in the garden, the soil was too wet—and then it rained. When the plants finally sent up florets, each would have filled about a tablespoon. The side shoots have been even less impressive. I’ve pulled all but three of the plants, and a rabbit recently pruned two of them. Climbing beans are now emerging from the decimated broccoli area. Pretty yellow flowers will not save the last broccoli plants from a move to the compost heap.
Happiness is a tomato blossom presaging the coming harvest. (I said “presaging” because it has “sage” in it.) I’m growing 10 varieties of tomatoes this year if you don’t count the Cherokee Purples that have sprung up in the compost heap.
There seems always to be at least one interloper at my Bloom Day photo shoots. Here, a fly-looking thingy tries to steal the spotlight from a bell pepper flower. I so hope my peppers have enough growing season remaining to turn red; I’d like to make a batch of red pepper relish using only peppers from my garden.
Yep: weed. At least that’s what my wife says. I think it looks like a morning glory, but my wife assures me it’s not. Still… it really wants to be a morning glory. I suppose I should believe my wife given that these things grow as abundantly as purslane wherever we work the soil.
That’s a cosmos about to burst into song in my vegetable garden. It irks me just a little to have been planting flowers, but I planted corn this year (which I haven’t done since I was a kid). I mentioned one week during #gardenchat (a weekly gathering on Twitter of anyone wishing to discuss gardening) that I was going to plant corn, and someone assured me that if I plant cosmos with it corn ear worms will not visit my crop. I hope this wasn’t just a mean trick to get me to plant flowers… We shall see.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: bloom day, blossoms, cilantro, corn, dill, flowers, garden bloggers bloom day, herbs, onions, peppers, tomatoes | 6 Comments »
Black Raspberries or Blackberries? The Kitchen Gardener Explains
Apparently, if you live in a warm climate, you may not find these berries growing in your neighborhood–or you might have trouble getting them to produce.
Though my small kitchen garden has had a very slow start this year, the woods and meadows around it have grown apace. So, black raspberry season has ended, and blackberry season is just getting started.
I’ve talked much with my friends about my wild black raspberry harvest: I’ve picked at least 32 quarts of berries—eight gallons—and these I’ve cooked into jelly and syrup which I’ve canned to give as gifts and to use in all kinds of cooking projects: ice cream, ice cream topping, marinade, salad dressing, drink flavor (as in sangria), and pancake and waffle topping.
Apparent Confusion among Kitchen Gardeners
Sharing with friends about black raspberries has raised some questions. Most surprisingly is that southern acquaintances report black raspberries don’t grow well or aren’t common in their areas. But the USDA reports that black raspberries range into southern Georgia. So, while black raspberries are weeds in Pennsylvania, they might not be so robust in the south.
The second question about black raspberries is why so many people refer to them as blackberries. Apparently, blackberries grow very well in southern states. So, maybe some southerners assume that a reference to black raspberries is a reference to the familiar blackberry. But an equal number of northerners seem to confuse black raspberries and blackberries. Below, I’ve written a short primer on these two, similar berries.
On the left, black raspberries or black caps. On the right, blackberries.
Black Raspberries Versus Blackberries
Black raspberries also go by the name black caps. The name suggests the berry’s shape: it’s like one of those scull-hugging stocking caps—like a bowl made out of little round balls that sits like a cap on a hard core. When you pick a black raspberry, it easily pulls away from the core.
A blackberry looks a lot like a black raspberry, though the balls that comprise it are usually bigger than the ones that make up a black raspberry. More importantly, when you pick a blackberry, the hard core comes with it; a blackberry has a central core of stem-like material.
The black raspberry on the left is hollow; it looks like a tiny cap you could put on a tiny person. The blackberry on the right contains a solid core. While both types of berries taste great, I prefer black raspberries. Unfortunately, black raspberry seeds crunch and stick between my teeth. The core of a blackberry makes it even less pleasant. Crunchiness is why I juice the berries and use the juice to make jam and syrup.
While black raspberry and blackberry plants are very similar, black raspberries ripen in very early summer and usually finish when blackberries come on. I track a season’s progress by the berries: Strawberries set things off and fade as black raspberries take over. Black raspberries fade into blackberries which, in turn, give way to elderberries. Mulberries ignore the progression. They ripen in strawberry season and might hang around well into black raspberry season. (In case you don’t know mulberries, they grow in trees and they resemble blackberries far more than they resemble black raspberries.)
PHEW!
Really: the differences between black raspberries and blackberries are obvious when you see the plants and berries. Please have a look at the photos and schedule your trip to visit me near the end of June; we’ll pick some black raspberries and make jelly.
Stems of black raspberry and blackberry plants are similar: they both have nasty thorns. However, black raspberry stems (left) are round and smooth and often have a tinge of purple. Blackberry stems may have grooves and are usually a shade of green.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: black cap, black raspberry, blackberry, fruit, plant fruit | 3 Comments »
Sour Cherry Jam from a Kitchen Gardener
When you can reach a cluster of sour cherries like this in the tree, you can wrap your fingers around the whole bunch and pull them all off the branch at once. Even in the second (and final) day of pick-your-own cherries, there were thousands of such bunches you could reach from the higher rungs of a stepladder.
It’s sour cherry season! Perhaps you’ve heard of sour cherries, but you’ve never seen them? In early summer, dark purple sweet cherries show up in grocery stores everywhere and they’re available for months. Sour cherries, however, ripen about the end of spring and are done two or three weeks later. You never see them in grocery stores.
Sour cherries are bright red and very tart. They’re also very juicy and I suspect most of them end up at manufacturing facilities that bake them into pies, tarts, frozen dinners, and just about any other processed food that lists “cherries” as an ingredient. You may find sour cherries at rural farm stands and farmers’ markets, but arrive early and grab what you’ll use because there are rarely enough sour cherries to supply enthusiasts.
Sour Cherries at Your Small Kitchen Garden
I planted a sour cherry tree a few years ago, but it probably won’t produce for another year or two. So, when sour cherry season arrives, I either buy cherries at the farmers’ market, or my family travels to a u-pick orchard to get out annual fix. We picked on Saturday.
A quart of already-picked sour cherries may cost $4 or more. The you-pick price at Dries Orchard in Paxinos, Pennsylvania this year was $1.20 per pound (about a quart). For an extra 25 cents a pound, Dries put our cherries through a mechanical device that removed nearly all the seeds. And, a Dries employee checked the mechanical pitter’s work, picking out most of the seeds the machine missed.
We picked too many cherries. I’ve canned sour cherry jam and fruit punch jam that includes sour cherries. I’ve also made two sour cherry pies. This morning my wife canned two batches of sour cherry jelly. Thankfully, there are only about 17 quarts of sour cherries left in the fridge.
I tweeted a lot about sour cherry jam while I was making it. I also clicked a bunch of snapshots of the proceedings. If you’re so inclined, follow the instructions in the photo captions and you should be able to make your own sour cherry jam; it’s really easy to do.
Before you start, you’ll need a box of powdered fruit pectin or some bulk pectin such as Dutch Jell. You’ll also need the cherries, of course, a whole bunch of sugar, canning jars, canning lids, and canning bands. The photos reveal what kitchen gear you’ll need to complete a batch.
In my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press, I explain jam- and jelly-making in greater detail. I also explain a lot of other ways to preserve fruit and vegetables. I hope you’ll make some cherry jam and pick up a copy of my book to keep you busy through the rest of the produce season.
You’ll preserve your cherry jam by sealing it hermetically in jars. For this, use jars manufactured specifically for canning; don’t reuse jars that came filled with pickles or jelly from a grocery store. Also, you need canning lids and bands to fit the jars. I encourage you to wash the jars and put them in a deep pot of water to boil before you start cooking your jam. The water should be deep enough that you could stand a canning jar in it and the top of the jar will be at least an inch under water. Also, put the bands and lids in a pot of water and keep the temperature there just below boiling.
Chop the sour cherries, catching the juice along with the chopped pieces. Notice that while chopping, I found a pit. The mechanical pit-remover and the back-up human inspector had missed about one pit per quart of cherries. I use a honking big chef’s knife to chop cherries for jam.
We’re making traditional cooked jam… there are other methods for making low-sugar jams, no-cook jams, and freezer jams. We’re making traditional cooked jam. (Is there an echo in here?) For nearly every brand of powdered fruit pectin, you use four cups of chopped sour cherries per batch of jam. Doubling a batch can result in runny jam or jam that sets up like a rock, so it’s best to make one batch at a time. Measure four level cups of fruit and juice into a medium-sized cookpot (see next photo).
Measure five cups of sugar into a bowl (left) and set it near your stove so you can reach it while stirring a pot. If you’re using bulk pectin (Dutch Gel, for example), measure a heaping 1/3 cup (center), and add it to the fruit (right). If you have pectin in a box, empty the box of pectin onto the chopped cherries. Notice that in my 1.5 gallon sauce pot, the chopped cherries and fruit fill barely a quarter of the pot.
Put the heat on high and stir! Keep stirring! Are you still stirring? Don’t stop. Stir until the mixture boils. Yes: that may take 8 to ten minutes. Pause in your stirring, if you must, to add all the sugar at once to the hot cherries. Stir. Keep stirring. Feel for large lumps of sugar and smear them against the side of the pot to help break them apart so they’ll dissolve. Are you still stirring? At the moment the mixture boils, time one minute and immediately remove the pot from the heat. BEWARE! While cooking jam boils, it can rapidly foam up and overflow even a very deep pot. Stirring helps prevent this, but you may have to lift the pot off the burner and/or turn the heat down a bit to keep the jam from boiling over. When the jam stops boiling, use a spoon to coral foam to one side of the pot and then scrape the foam off. I always put it in a bowl to eat later.
One-by-one, fill jars with jam. Fish a hot jar out of the boiling water, empty the jar, and set it on a plate. I use a canning funnel to help control the jam which you should add until it’s about ¼ of an inch from the top of the jar. Make sure the rim and threads of the jar are clean (wipe them with a damp cloth if they’re not), then set a lid on the jar and add a band.
Tighten the band. I hold the jar in a potholder or a kitchen towel and I twist the band on firmly (it’s hot, but not too hot). It should be at least “finger tight” but don’t work so hard that you tear a muscle. Return the jar to the boiling water and set it up upright in the pot. Keep filling jars until you’ve used up all the jam. When the last jar goes into the boiling water, wait ten minutes, then remove the jars (upright) and place them on a cooling rack or a towel on the counter.
Contrary to what most canning guides tell you, I say do this: After the jars seal (you should hear a “ping” and be able to see that the center of the lid bows down into the jar), invert them and let them cool in this position about 45 minutes until they are very warm, then once again set them upright. If you don’t partially cool them upside down, the cherry bits will float to the top and half the jar will contain jam while the other half contains jelly. You can store sealed jars at room temperature for a year or longer, but I think you should open them and eat the jam instead.
Posted in home kitchen garden | Tags: canning, jam, preserves, preserving, sour cherries | 3 Comments »
Got Weeds? Welcome to my Small Kitchen Garden
Can you spot the vegetable plant in this photo? Do you know its Latin name? Then you’re probably a landscape architect or some other type of trained horticulturist… and that’s OK.
I’m neither a landscaper nor a landscape designer, and there’s no hardscaping in my small kitchen garden. What I do have is a diverse and resilient weedscape.
My job as a weedscaper is easy: I don’t have to learn the Latin names of any plants. I don’t even have to learn the common names of most of what grows in my weedscapes. In fact, to succeed at weedscaping, I merely plant vegetables. In a matter of weeks a robust understory of undesirable and only vaguely familiar plants establishes itself around my vegetable plants.
How to Manage a Weedscape
It is a bit more work to manage a weedscape than it is to create one. While you don’t need special tools for the job, you might consider using a hoe or at least a cultivator hand tool that has a flat blade and a forked scraping tool on its business end. Also, there’s no more useful product for managing a weedscape than mulch. Oh! Gloves can be pretty useful as well.
A healthy weedscape is a cornucopia of biodiversity. Frames in the illustration above show various plants in one of my more successful weedscapes: Purslane in the top-left is actually food as you can read in the post, Purslane: Eat Weeds from Your Small Kitchen Garden provided by my brother in August of last year. Front-and-center in the top-middle, top-right, and bottom-left are plants I can identify only as weeds. The broadleaf weed in the bottom-center is plantain about to go to seed. On the bottom-right is woodland strawberry which spreads quickly and can form a dense mat of green. The berries of this plant are edible, but they are dry and flavorless; perfect for nearly any weedscape.
Basic maintenance of a weedscape goes something like this: Wearing gloves, grasp each weed in turn and pull it roots-and-all from the soil; toss the weed in a compost heap, bin, or tumbler. In a truly healthy weedscape, hand-pulling weeds may be a formidable prospect. That’s when you might turn to a cultivator or hoe.
Hoeing in a Weedscape
Hoeing seems simple enough: scrape the flat edge of a hoe or a hand cultivator along the surface of the soil, pulling weeds or cutting them off at the soil line. This works fairly well when the soil is damp and soft. However, as the soil dries and hardens, weeds become hoe lubricant; the blade of a hoe can slip and slide on the weeds. Hoeing might bend the weeds and stress them, but it will likely leave them whole.
So, to care for your weedscape properly, you may need to chop the blade of the hoe into hardened soil. This may cut through the roots or stems of the weeds and even lift the soil, releasing entire root balls from the ground (or, it may bend the hoe).
If you can identify the vegetable plants (the ones you planted originally when you created the weedscape) in your garden, try not to remove them along with the weeds… I mean, what’s the rush? Insects, rodents, microbes, excess rain, drought, or an early frost will remove your vegetable plants in good time.
Ideally, you care for a weedscape by removing each weed plant along with its roots. Realistically, you might employ a tool to pull the weeds from the ground. In the middle photo above, you see the hoe lubricant effect of weeds growing in hard soil: even a sharpened hoe blade can slide right over well-rooted weeds doing very little damage. The photo on the right shows a properly tended patch of a weedscape. I had to pound the hoe’s blade into the soil and hack away at weed roots to break them out. In the bottom-right corner of the photo you can see that the hoe removed nearly as much soil as it did weeds.
Mulching your Weedscape
If you have a lot of mulch available, you can altogether forget pulling or hoeing in your weedscape. Rather, if you bury the lovely display four-to-six inches in mulch, it may take many weeks for new weeds to start—though some of the more tenacious original weeds will find their ways up through the mulch layer. As with pulling and hoeing in your weedscape be sure to leave your vegetable plants out of the mulching strategy: keep a clearing around the stem of each vegetable plant; if mulch touches the stems, the vegetables may rot.
A classic weedscape maintenance error: While a hoe bent this weed to the ground, stripped it of foliage, and cut away most of its stem, the weed didn’t notice. In two to three weeks, the weed will show no sign of the abuse it received. Covering it with mulch now may buy another week or two. Interestingly, were you to mildly nick the stem of a vegetable plant leaving a scratch on its skin without actually bending it or breaking through, the vegetable plant would die before tomorrow’s sunrise. Still, if you don’t plant vegetables, you aren’t really weedscaping; you’re just growing a meadow.
In a vegetable garden weedscape, mulch with lightweight plant material that will break down quickly (lawn clippings are amazing this way), or with mature compost. Later, these will mix into the soil easily whereas pine bark or wood chip mulches might not break down adequately in one growing season and you’ll have chunky soil for next season’s weedscape (which won’t bother the weeds even a tad).
Decrease the amount of mulch you use in your weedscape by pulling or hoeing the weeds out of your garden. Then mulch with two inches of material—though if you can spare six inches, it will take just a bit longer for your weedscape to reemerge and provide you with another weedscape management opportunity.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: cultivate, hoe, weeding, weeds, weedscape | 6 Comments »
Finally there’s Soil in my Small Kitchen Garden
When your broccoli seedlings remain in their very limited planter about a month too long, they might produce disappointing florets. This tablespoon-sized floret represents what each of my plants produced about three weeks after I finally set them in the garden. It didn’t help that I set the seedlings in soil that was nearly mud… or that several days of subsequent rain kept the roots far too wet. Perhaps as things dry out the plants will send up enough side shoots to make a decent meal.
Since planting season started some three months ago, I’ve reported again and again that there is no soil in my small kitchen garden. That’s right: where, every growing season for the past sixteen years there has been soil, this growing season nature replaced my soil with mud.
My Earliest Starts
I managed to plant cauliflower and broccoli three weeks ago while the mud was a bit dry (as mud goes). Sadly, the plants had been pot bound long enough that they were flimsy… and further rains stressed the plants once they were in the ground.
For the first time ever, I saw a rabbit chewing on one of my vegetable plants. In 17 years of kitchen gardening in Lewisburg, I’ve had rabbits nest in my garden and I’ve watched many of them feed on my weeds. This year the rabbits decided that broccoli and cauliflower taste good. I’ve since mended my garden fence.
Within ten days of getting their roots in the ground, my broccoli plants sent up center stalks bursting with florets… tiny florets any one of which would make a single forkful on a dinner plate. Had I harvested from ten plants, I’d have gotten a single serving of broccoli.
Then a rabbit decided that brassicas taste better than native plants and had a few meals in the mud.
My Small Kitchen Garden is Coming On!
There have been a few positives about this growing season:
- I planted all the lettuce seedlings in planters on my deck and, though the lettuce is a tad bitter because of early heat, we’re eating fresh salads pretty reliably.
- I started artichokes indoors. When I planted the brassicas, I also set five artichoke seedlings in the garden. Actually, I set three in a new bed near my rhubarb, one in the back of the new herb bed, and two in a two-gallon planter on the deck. One of the plants has already put out a choke.
- Cilantro I seeded in part of the new herb bed is coming on strong. I’ll do a second planting in a week or so.
- The volunteer dill seedlings I moved from my main planting bed into the herb garden are filling out nicely.
- Thyme and tarragon I started from seed last year and set in the herb garden in the fall are growing strong. I may want to add more thyme plants this season.
- The sage bushes I moved from an old half-barrel planter into the new herb bed in the fall have filled out and may soon need some serious pruning.
- The mud is gone, replaced by soil. I’ve planted 55 tomato seedlings in the main planting bed and more than 24 chili pepper seedlings of four varieties.
It’s two months later than in past years, but my small kitchen garden is finally on its way!
I’d never grown lettuce in containers, but when my raised planting bed remained mud for the first two months of the growing season, I realized I’d have no homegrown lettuce if I didn’t try something new. We’ve had several garden salads but it has been very hot. Chances are the lettuce will bolt soon; I’ll probably plant again in August and hope to have plenty of fresh salads well into November.
Not my best photographic work, but clearly a choke has formed in my small kitchen garden. I love photos I’ve seen of artichoke plants, so I decided to grow some this year. I hope I see more food on them, but I’ll be happy if the plants mature and look at least vaguely like the ones I’ve seen on other blogs.
Yes, the soil is dry and weeds abound, but the dill seedlings I rescued from my main planting bed are thriving in my new herb bed. Cilantro I direct-seeded grows at the left front of the photo, and sage grows at the rear of the photo. Out of sight at the far end of the bed, thyme and tarragon plants are growing very nicely.
Posted in home kitchen garden, plant herbs, plant vegetables, small kitchen garden | Tags: artichoke, broccoli, cauliflower, cilantro, dill, herbs, lettuce, sage, tarragon, thyme | No Comments »
Veggie Bags Winners
I learned something about blogging in the last two weeks: Never schedule a contest or giveaway during high school graduation week when your kid is one of the graduates! I launched the Veggie Bags giveaway to end on June 5 with results to be posted on June 6. Finally, only a week late, the results are in!
The two winners of the Veggie Bags giveaway from Equinox are:
Jill at Sweet Life Garden
and…
Grow Home Organics.
I’m emailing Jill and Grow Home Organics to be sure they don’t miss the announcement.
Thanks to everyone who left a comment or comments, and who tweeted or posted about the giveaway. I hope your gardening seasons are going way better than mine!
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: giveaway, plastic bags, produce bags, veggie bags | 1 Comment »
Veggie Bags Giveaway from Your Small Kitchen Garden
How many tons of plastic bags do you figure Americans mindlessly fill with produce, put on the checkout scales, and eventually toss in the trash? I’ve seen people put already-wrapped produce into these things… and such bags are the only option when you select from open bins and refrigerator compartments in a grocery store’s produce section. If, once they reach the ocean, any plastic bags look to predators like jellyfish, these produce bags must be the worst. How many did you bring home this week?
Please be aware that this giveaway ended on June 6, 2011 as explained below.
Your Small Kitchen Garden announces a new giveaway! This one’s a bit unusual, so here’s some background:
Be Green and Re-use
Remember when I tried to grow a small kitchen garden in some reusable grocery bags? The bags were pretty disappointing as planters, but I continue to applaud them for their intended purpose: When I shop, I carry six or more reusable grocery bags, and I almost never bring home those non-biodegradable plastic bags that you find at nearly every checkout counter.
Then I met the owner of a local manufacturing company that developed and produces something they call Veggie Bags. These bags fill a green niche that I’d never thought much about: Think of those rolls of flimsy, light-weight plastic bags that have strategic locations throughout produce and meat departments at nearly every grocery store in the country. Veggie Bags make “disposable” plastic produce bags obsolete (see photos).
The translucent white drawstring bags in this photo hold onions and carrots from loose bins at the local farmers’ market. The bags are strong yet sheer enough that they have no significant impact when you weigh them along with the produce that you put in them.
Qualify to Win Veggie Bags
The manufacturer of Veggie Bags – Equinox – and Your Small Kitchen Garden have teamed up for this modest giveaway. Each of two winners will receive one set of Veggie Bags. We’ll select the winners at random from all qualified entries. Here’s how to earn qualifying entries:
1. Leave a comment in response to this blog post and reassure us that if you win a set of Veggie Bags, you’ll remember to take them shopping with you and decrease the world’s dependency on petroleum.
That’s all you need to do to enter… a comment qualifies as one entry, but multiple comments from the same email address do not qualify as additional entries. If you’d like to increase your chances of winning, the following activities will earn further entries:
2. Tweet a link to this giveaway including the hash tag #SMGbags. Each tweet having a unique calendar date qualifies as an entry (so, only one tweet per day qualifies).
3. Post a status update on Facebook linking to this giveaway and including the hash tag #SMGbags. Each Facebook update having a unique calendar date qualifies as an entry (so, only one update per day qualifies).
4. Announce this giveaway on your own blog complete with a link to this post, then email me at admin@smallkitchengarden.net with a link to your post. Each blog that announces this giveaway earns two qualified entries in the drawing.
The last day to qualify for entries in this drawing is Sunday, June 5. We’ll select the two winners using a random number generator and post results on Monday, June 6, 2011.
A set of four Veggie Bags comes packed with the three larger bags folded inside the smallest bag. It’s a tidy package that you might not recreate once you put these work horses into service.
Here, all four bags lie stacked, revealing that the bags are a fine, see-through mesh. The smallest bag might be appropriate to carry nuts or candy from bulk bins. The larger bags can handle whatever produce you wish to carry in them.
For contrast, I put five pounds of potatoes into the largest Veggie Bag in my set. The weight didn’t seem to stress the bag’s seams or the drawstring. I’m pleased to use Veggie Bags and further reduce the number of plastic bags I bring home from my shopping trips each week. Leave a comment on this blog post for a chance to win your own set of veggie bags
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: giveaway, plastic bags, produce bags, veggie bags | 18 Comments »
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