Garden thread

[Melodychick]

Wow you both have huge gardens! I used to have a large one too, but now mine is tiny, at least until I can get this insect thing under control. It’s heartbreaking the last three years all the planning, bed prep and seed starting just to have the whole thing decimated by vine borers and squash bugs. I have a few new resources to check out for help/prevention and hope something helps. For now, seed starting has begun! The old tomato seeds are sprouting

 

[ChocolateMouse]

45 is our reduced count to account for our blight issues with greater airflow. We do in fact do a LOT of canning. We have a huge pressure canner. It does like 10 pints at a time and we have this huge stock pot we cook it in before running it through a manual food mill and canning it. It's VERY good, just straight tomatoes with a bit of citric acid. We use in in pasta sauce, pizza, curries, soups, all sorts of things. In a dream world all our tomatoes come from our garden.

The hot peppers are for D's hot sauce pet project this year. He wants to do fermented hot sauce and canned hot sauce for friends.

We eat SO many carrots so it's hard to go overboard with those for us.

The costatas are so productive it's hard to say no to them. I love letting them get big and grilling them as steaks.

 

[rosemarythyme]

Wow you both have huge gardens! I used to have a large one too, but now mine is tiny, at least until I can get this insect thing under control. It’s heartbreaking the last three years all the planning, bed prep and seed starting just to have the whole thing decimated by vine borers and squash bugs.

Mine's not *that* big... I started with two 4x8 beds and now have five 4x8s and one 4x4 and some random pots for herbs - it's a set up big enough for smaller plants but not enough for more than one or two larger plants like zucchini. But I'm not trying to be 100% self sufficient so that's fine, as I think this is about as big as I can manage.

Sucks about your bug issues. My main pests are slugs and aphids but I figured out last year that I could grow nasturtium nearby as a lure to get the aphids off the veggies at least.

It's VERY good, just straight tomatoes with a bit of citric acid. We use in in pasta sauce, pizza, curries, soups, all sorts of things. In a dream world all our tomatoes come from our garden.

The hot peppers are for D's hot sauce pet project this year. He wants to do fermented hot sauce and canned hot sauce for friends.

The costatas are so productive it's hard to say no to them. I love letting them get big and grilling them as steaks.

The tomato sauce and pepper sauces sound so delicious!

This is where I admit I actually hate zucchini (probably my least liked veggie ), but it grows easily so I eat it anyway. Good thing I have recipes to use it up while masking the zucchini-ness of it all.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

That does suck about the bug issues @Melodychick. We have disease problems in our gardens, and last year we had rats. >( So we had no garden last year. Hopefully having been fallow with grasses and native plants last year will let things grow in better this year since the diseases that like tomatoes don't exactly grow on sedge grass and plantago. Hopefully yours does the same.

And yes, my garden is VERY big. You can see how big here (minus some strawberries and a very large blackberry cane stand, if you include those it's about 500sqft of plantable ground, not counting pathways);

Square footage is clearly marked even. This is the Final Layout™ barring any surprises. (Which means it'll be rehashed like six more times as things go wrong.)There's a tiny version of the last garden we planted for the purpose of tracking plant rotation. In the program I use there's a key telling me what each letter is if I don't already know from inference. (For example, it's pretty obvious the the big red Ts are Tomatoes, cT cherry tomato, the Ms are melons, the Z zucchini, etc.)

I did have to update the seed list a little. Some things were missing or didn't have varieties selected or they were otherwise out of that variety. So the updated seed list is;
Arugula (Grazia) x4
Radish (French Breakfast) XA billion
Zucchini (Costata Romanesco) x4
Basil (Genovese and Dark Opal) x20
Green onions (Everygreen bunching onion) x6
Paste Tomatoes (Plum Regal and San Marzano. Plus a few Legend and Defiant the last two are technically slicers but I wanna see how they handle the blight.) x45
Cherry Tomatoes (Matt's Wild Cherry) x4
Habenero (Magnum) X6
Cayenne (RingOFire) X2
Anaheim (NuMex Joe) X2
Bell peppers x4 (2x sweet chocolate, 2x purple beauty)
Butternut Squash (Honey nut) x6
Butternut Squash (Brulee) x6
Storage Squash (Baby blue hubbard) x6
Kale (Red russian) x8
Potatoes (Huckleberry gold and German butterball) x2
Cantalope melon (PMR DELICIOUS 51) x4
Leek (Tadorna) x8
Sunflower (Velvet queen) X6
Jalepenos (Early Jalapeno) x10
Parsley (Extra curled dwarf) x8
Dill (Mammoth and Dukat) x4
Snap peas (Cascadia) x120
Carrots (Red cored chanteney) x72
Lettuce (Optima butterhead) x4
Celery (Tall Utah) X3
Sweet corn (Who Gets Kissed) X22
Beans (green, bush) (Tavera bush) (x24 beans)
Beans (green, pole) (KY Wonder) (x24 beans)
Radish (Daikon) X32
Sunflowers (Velvet Queen) X6
Various non-listed herbs and flowers (thyme, catnip, nasturium, johnny jump ups, dwarf sunflower, coneflower, etc) X25

I've placed the seed order for the year. We go through two companies; Seeds N Such for the hybrid tomatoes and some flowers and herbs and High Mowing for everything else.

For seed starting anything that gets started indoors gets 1.5-2Xs the number of plants listed here started. Anything extra I have I sell, trade or keep as backups in case of damage from weather and animals.

The next two steps; clean my seed starting shelves and organize my seed lists by starting dates, direct sow dates, then note transplant dates and put all of that information in my phone calendar as appointments so I can be on top of what has to happen when.

Whew!
That was a lot of work in the last 24 hours.

 

[Sequel]

If you live somewhere temperate, you can grow a tree collard plant and have limitless greens for your chickens!! I’m growing one for the first time! They keep growing for ten+ years and get enormous!!
https://www.projecttreecollard.org/

That sounds really interesting! I have grown kale since way before it was fashionable! It would be fun to have a giant relative. Have you successfully overwintered any yet?

 

[Melodychick]

Very nice @ChocolateMouse ! One (of many) problems I have now with the small garden is there’s no way to really rotate crops. I try not to plant in the exact same spot as last year, but really the plants are maybe a foot or so over from previous spot. I did have a larger garden, but when the insects apocalypse started, I moved to the small area near the coop so the chickens could help. So far they haven’t much since its mostly stink bugs and they don’t like them. In the meantime though I have left the old garden fallow and let the horses and chickens have access to the space, so hopefully I can move back over there, maybe next Year.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

My seeds shipped! My list is almost sorted by planting dates. Progress is slow.

We have 4" of snow right now.

 

[21hens-incharge]

I just got my seed catalogs!
I will have to get busy and order what I need soon.

 

[FT Chickens]

I would follow this thread. Use to have a garden but I just could not keep the weeds under control. My neighbor has a nice garden not a weed in site and he goes away on vacation for a week and it still stays clean. Unfortunately he will not share his secret, just smiles and says he does not plant weeds. LOL

 

[Melodychick]

Weeds are really bad here too. Another reason I’ve made a smaller garden. I keep up with them pretty good until it gets unbearably hot then they get away from me. Every year I vow to do better. We shall see...