Moonlight Gardening: The Exceedingly Long May Update Edition

So I started doing this thing where I go out in the dark with my headlight on and work in the garden. The trouble is I can't get any good pics in the dark even with the flash on my Mom's awesome, but super cheap, camera.  So, I stayed up past my bedtime the other day and took a bunch of shots of the current state of the garden.  Let's start with the flowers:

Cayuga Viburnum.

The Cayuga viburnum is beautiful this year.  It smells good, too.  But not as good as the Korean Spice I didn't get a pic of before a storm tore up the blossoms.

Forgotten daffodil variety.

Sometimes my second favorite daffodils make double flowers on one stem.  This one is particularly nice.  I planted about a dozen of these 6 or 7 years ago.  I'm always surprised when they come up again.

WOW!  They're even pretty when they're blurry!

This is the stunning flower basket my Step-Mom got me at Mother's Day.  She is probably definitely the nicest person I ever met.

Fern leaf peonies.

Gramma Vi's fern leaf peonies on the verge flowering once again.  These are my favorites because of the single flowers.

Dwarf lilac and sumac contrast.

We planted this 'dwarf' lilac in the spring of 2009.  It's taller than I am now.  The bright chartreuse in the background is the Tigereye sumac that wasn't supposed to get very big.  Yeah.

Clematis.

My favorite clematis.  It's called 'Blue Bird' and it flowers mid to late spring before the other clematis even think about it.  We have many clematis in our tiny place.  One day maybe I'll do a blog post on them.  So pretty and so easy to grow.

Lily of the Valley

My Lily of the Valley is almost in flower.  It's hard to believe that this plant started from a small gift from my Dad a few years ago.  He has a bunch in his garden and offered to let me take some home to mine.  I love it.  It is spreading most obligingly in the place under the other viburnum that I don't know the name of because it came to us mislabeled.  Anyway, the flowers love the morning sun and afternoon shade under my shrub.

OMG Hostas are so pretty!

The hostas are practically luminous in their shady spot.  I love the variety of plants available.  Who knew there were so many colors of green?

Next we move on to the fruit trees.  I haven't gotten many pics of them flowering this year.  We have had some wind storms that knocked the petals off.  Also, I work nights, so there is that...

Red Rome apple flowers.

The Red Rome apple tree flowered nicely this year.  It always looks so spindly to me and never seems to have many leaves.  I don't know what it wants or needs but I should find out.  It seems healthy otherwise.  My Candy Crisp apple tree had nary a blossom that I could see.  It has yet to produce a single apple in the 4 years since I planted it out there.  I'm not giving up.  It's healthy and growing nicely.  Even if it never gives an apple, it's still a nice tree.

.Tiny plums!

Little, tiny, itty, bitty plum!  Lots of them actually.  Both trees flowered pretty well at more or less the same time.  This one is a Metheley plum that I planted from bare root two years ago.  You'd never know it was just a 4 foot long stick at the time.  The other is also a Japanese plum.  I think it's a Shiro but I'm not sure.  I'll know if the plums actually get to ripeness.  The year that I planted this tree, I planted so many plum trees that I've forgotten which is which.  I have a Santa Rosa, an Ozark Beauty, and a Morris at the other property.  I really should write this stuff down, huh?

This year, I'm giving in to the urge to try growing something tasty in the front garden.  So rather than get the neighbors riled up right away with a big patch of tomatoes, I opted for some more understated peppers and eggplants mixed in with some flowers in some nice containers.  If all goes well, next year, I'm putting in raised beds.

A row of nice, new pots on the decked walkway.

Peppers with white geraniums.

Kale with red geraniums.

Eggplants with purple petunias and some pretty little white flowers that remind me of Mexican heather.

 
The final installment for today comes from the vegetable garden.  The best for last?  Probably not.  I can't really say.  I'm pretty biased all the way around.

 The brassicas with a few tomatoes under those milk jugs.

I have Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and kohlrabi in this bed along with a few tomatoes, a couple shallots, and a bunch of onion sets.  I took the jugs off the tomatoes today.  The plants looked amazing!  I hope the storm doesn't hurt them.

Celery plants.

I'm growing celery again this year.  Mostly because of the guy at Home Grown Veg on YouTube.  On a whim, I grew some last year and dried it for soups.  Home grown celery has so much more flavor than the bland stuff at the store.

The 'garlic bed'

What I'm calling the 'garlic bed' this year.  There's garlic for sure.  And peas.  And Walla Walla onions.  Also eggplant, leeks, beets, and the very first spinach I ever got to grow past a couple of leaves.

Napa cabbage and red salad bowl lettuces.

Romaine, Tendergold cabbages, and Baby Choi.

I must confess that I bought most of my lettuce and cabbages in these two pics as plant starts.  None of my lettuces made it past the first true leaf this year.  I'm not sure what I did wrong.  Better luck next year.  The best part about this is I discovered a couple of varieties that I really like.  But!  The Baby Choi is all mine from seed.  The first time I ever got it to grow this well.  I hope it gets big before it gets too hot.  Either way, I'm eating choi in my stir fry this spring!

Indigo Apple tomato.

This is the much sought after and prized Indigo Apple tomato plant.  It was a struggle that took three tries to accomplish.  But, I did.  I finally got several plants to grow and I thinned it down to the three best of the bunch.  I am super happy about these tomatoes.  I hope they grow well.  The one in this picture (taken 14 May2018) is about twice as tall 5 days later.

Kohlrabi

This is my very first kohlrabi from seed.  I've grown it from purchased plant starts.  But this year, I got it to grow from seed.  I am very excited about this.  I tried to grow the purple kohlrabi but it didn't make it.  I'm going to try it this fall.

Mint, kale and parsley.

The Mojito mint plant...or maybe it's Mint Julep mint.  I have both and the labels are long gone.  I should get those little copper plated labels for my perennials, huh?  Also, some parsley in the front and two of my tiny kale plants in the back.

Here I go again...

Hope springs eternal.  I ran out of tomato room before I ran out of tomato plants.  So I'm trying them in pots again.  Really big pots this time.  These are my Rutgers and Zlatavas.  I also have a plant from some seeds I saved last year.  I got some rogue plants from a batch of 'Homestead' tomatoes that were clearly NOT Homestead.  They were, however, very nice small plum tomatoes perfect for stuffing!  I hope they grow like that again.  I have a lot of seed.

Sriracha pepper

The Sriracha pepper plant looks great this year!  Probably the best looking pepper I started from seed.

Potatoes in pots.

Some of the many pots of potatoes I have growing in the garden.  These are (I think) German Butterball on the left and Fingerling Salad on the right.  Maybe I'll go out and check for sure when the rain stops.

Potatoes in pots again.

 More potatoes in pots.  It's just about the only way I grow them anymore.

The main tomato bed.

In the main tomato bed, I'm trying to grow them single stem style a la One Yard Revolution on YouTube.  Also, this is where I planted my Candy hybrid and Red Candy onion plants. 

So many things are growing so well already.  I have about 10 blog posts in mind right now.  Stay tuned for more about tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and maybe even clematis. But, first, I need to go out an cut greens for a salad.

As another of my YouTube garden gurus, Allotment Diary, says: Sithee later!

Here it Comes

Finally. I think it might finally be spring here in the Heartland.  So many things to do suddenly.

Like mowing the lawn.  I need to find the charger for my mower and make sure the batteries still work.

The really good news is I can finally start planting the gardens for the year.  We're scaling back a bit this year in an effort to maintain sanity whilst the changes keep rolling in.  Gearing up for a move and the demolition of the old homestead this summer along with planning for festivals and farmers markets has left me with little time for anything else.  So we scale back a bit.

Next year we hit it hard, I hope.

Anyway...here's a gratuitous pic of my onions-to-be.  Every year I try to start seeds. They sprout then die.  So, I go out and buy sets because I can't find plants anywhere.  Then I find plants and buy those, too.  I'm hopeless.  But I will have tons of green onions for the farmer's market, so there is that.

The onion plants in the front are a mere fraction of the whole bunch of onions I got.  I pick out the biggest and the best for nurturing into larger bulbs.  The tiny ones go in the ground for spring salad onions.  I have Red Candy, Candy Hybrid, and Walla Walla this year.  The bulbs are the standard big box store variety.

My seedlings are getting way too big to be in the house.  I will remedy that over the next week or so:

These peppers want to flower!

The tomatoes are way too big.

Some of the plants will probably not make it outside.  For example, this basil is getting big enough to harvest fresh for a meal.  At this stage, it probably won't harden off well and will sun scald or be stunted by the transplant so I'll direct seed some more outside. I might try potting them up to a bigger container and see how long I can keep them going in the house.

 That's it from The Slice for this week!

Working the Night Shift

I have a night off from work unexpectedly.  Things change in the production world and I have to change with them.  So I'm off tonight and working Saturday night instead.  I guess it's okay.  I slept roughly 10 hours straight so I must have needed it, right?

Right!

So I'm up and at 'em and wide awake tonight.  It is just after 4:30 am.  I have managed to get caught up on most of the things I have been wanting to get done for the last week. 

• I up-potted my garden seedlings.
• I did some research on a couple of new things I want to add to my bath & body line-up.
• I made two more batches of soap.

Joyful Squid up top and Extra Stout below.

So far I've made a fresh batch of Ahimsa, Kismet, Swedeberry, Sowing the Wild, Lumberjack, Joyful Squid, Extra Stout, and a new offering--Grungy Gardener.  Grungy Gardener is an old/new soap flavor with added ground cardamom for a little bit of scrub power.  It works great to get the grime off your hands after a hard day's work in the garden.

Grungy Gardener.  Smells wonderful and gets your hands clean.

On top of everything else, it's officially spring! At least according to the calendar, anyway.  We got a dusting of snow for our first day of spring here in the Heartland.  It's okay though.  Just knowing that sunshine and warm temps are around the corner makes me pretty happy.

Okay...so this is an old picture.  The daffodils are not quite ready yet.

With the coming sunshine and warm temps comes a barrage of extra work.  Along with the soap gearing up there's the garden gearing up.

Pepper and eggplant seedlings.

Tomato seedlings.

We're moving to new digs at the end of the summer so there's that to work on.  It's a short move down the road to the next town over...just us adding to the Picofarm empire.  Along with that move comes more room for soaping and gardening and seed starting and what-have-you.  So we have plenty to do to keep us out of trouble so-to-speak.

Sheesh.  I'd better go put the camera away so Lucky will come in from the kennel.  I swear that dog is the most suspicious creature I've ever known!  He doesn't like his picture taken so he hides whenever I get the camera out and won't come back in until he's sure it's gone.  Nutty dog!  I can't even entice him back in with ham!

This is the last picture I took of Lucky that isn't blurry because he's running away. It was taken at least 5 years ago.  He is a Catahoula Cur and true to type is very suspicious of EVERYTHING.  Two seconds after I snapped this picture, he was gone.  He looks angry, doesn't he?

This is Dotti-Dog about 3 seconds after Lucky bailed for the kennel.  This dog is an English Pointer and wants to be a pony when she grows up.  She's actually posing here.  Not the slightest bit shy.

Late Spring Update

It happens every year.  I get going on the garden and everything else goes by the wayside.  Here's a little update on what's been happening here at The Slice.

Onion plants

After trying to start onion seeds and wasting three packages of seeds in the process, this is what I have.  One onion.  I hope it gets big enough to eat.  I had ordered a bunch of onion plants online,  I was sorely disappointed in what I got in the mail.  But, I planted them anyway.  A lot of them seem to be doing okay in spite of their spindliness at the beginning.  Good thing my neighbor gave me the rest of his sweet onion sets.  They're growing really well.

Watermelon radishes

Germination was iffy at best for me this spring.  Every last one that did start to grow almost immediately bolted and set seed.  I will try again in my fall garden.

Cabbages

Holy cow have they been growing like mad!  I discovered that one of the cabbages I bought is actually a cauliflower, but what the heck?  Let's see how this turns out.  The broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts are all doing very well.

Sweet potatoes

Following the disasterous results of the first attempt at growing sweet potato slips, I tried again with a new potato and got some very small slips.  They were really tiny so I just planted the whole potato in the pot.  We shall see what happens.  I also bought a couple plants at a local garden center as well as some mail order slips.  I was deeply disappointed in the slips when they arrived.  But, I planted them anyway and more than half of them have new growth.  If I actually get enough sweet potatoes, I plan to try canning them this fall.

Okra

The okra was a last minute addition to the garden plot this year.  I impulse bought a fifty cent pack of seeds at the local dollar store. I think every last one of them came up. I don't even know if I like okra.  Guess I'm going to find out.

Chamoe

Chamoe is also called Korean melon.  I totally blame Hollis for this one.  I ordered the seeds and planted them out about 10 days ago.  These are the babies. 

Infrastructure

My hubby built a new trellis.  By the time it was done, most my vining crops had been planted elsewhere.  So I plan to train whatever sweet potato vines I get if I get any at all.  I also planted a few Sweet Dumpling squashes in the farthest pot.  They will probably climb the trellis all by themselves.

Eggplant

Other than a little flea beetle damage and a healthy coating of weeds, the eggplants seem to be doing just fine.  I planted three varieties...maybe four...and they're all growing well and fixin' to flower soon.  I tried an eggplant recipe that a friend cooked for me last week and it was edible.  It is my goal in life this year is to find an eggplant recipe that I like.  We shall see if my hopes are in vain or not.

Tomatoes

My beefsteak plants have set their first greenies.  The Homestead plants were first to the mark this year and I noticed some Romas today as well.  The plants are looking fabulous.  I added some 'Jubilee' tomatoes that I impulse bought.  They're orange tomatoes and I love them.

Squashes

I have severely curtailed my squash planting habits this year.  I've planted only delitica, sweet dumpling, black beauty zucchini, and yellow crookneck.  Above is an image of my delitica seedlings which were ALREADY being menaced by the evil and dastardly squash vine borer just today!  Blasted things anyway.  My plants are small on purpose to hopefully avoid infestation.  We shall see how it goes. I'm hoping to avoid the use of the dreaded garden dust.  But, I will if I have to.  I've also found a few squash volunteers from last year's plantings.  I've decided to let them grow and see what I get.  And maybe the vine borers will menace the volunteers instead.

Melons

In addition to the chamoe melons, I have Sugar Baby watermelons and Minnesota Midget cantaloupes.  This picture is the watermelons.  The cantaloupes have only just sprouted in the last couple days.  Hoping for some juicy melons this summer.

Well, that's about it.  See you later!

Late Summer Update from Picofarm

This year I decided to try a bunch of different kinds of tomatoes and do an informal study.  There were 17 varieties all together.  Here I present my determinations:

 

Here we have the red Rutgers, the small orange Zlatava (a Russian variety) at the bottom, the big yellow on the left with the red blush is called Mr. Stripey, and the other yellow is Yellow Oxheart. After extensive study in our test kitchens, we have determined the following:

Rutgers is best used in canning. Well, duh. It was sort of developed for that purpose. It's not a bad slicing tomato, but it's not very big.  It is also fine in salads.

Although it did not perform as I expected, Zlatava makes a very nice salad tomato. Tasty and sweet but not too sweet. It's not a cherry tomato.  I would grow this one again just for salads.  Zlatava was touted as a large yellow tomato with a pink interior.  The images that accompanied the seeds showed a tomato cut in half that resembled a pink grapefruit.  Not so much.  But it's so tasty I don't really care.

Mr. Stripey really shines in a BLT. It's not as 'tomatoey' as some I've had, but it's quite tasty with the bacon.  It is reminiscent of a beefsteak but not as watery, I thought. Given my choice between Mr. Stripey and a beefsteak for my BLT, I'd choose Mr. Stripey.  For some reason, my Mr. Stripey tomatoes don't look a lot like the picture on the plant ID tag.  I'm not complaining.  They're wonderful.

The Yellow Oxheart is just good eating. It seems like it is lower acid than a run-of-the-mill red tomato, but I haven't done a side-by-side comparison or any pH testing on which to base my conclusions.

 

Some varieties not pictured are San Marzano and La Roma. Both are paste types that performed as expected when prepared for sauce.  I would not recommend them for eating on a salad as they are pretty dry.  But they are perfect for saucing.

 

Black Krim.  Never made it out of the garden.  I ate the first one on the spot and after that they were all eaten the exact same way.  Very, very tasty.

 

Black Prince.  I did not get a single ripe tomato from the plant I got.  It set a few fruit and then just stalled.  I keep waiting and hoping...

 

Pink Brandywine.  A very pretty heirloom type that the grasshoppers and birds seem to LOVE.  I've only gotten a couple of unblemished fruits.

 

Green Pineapple.  Very odd looking and because of the green color, I missed the first few fruits and they rotted on the vine.  Sweet and tomatoey with rather delicate and easily bruised flesh.  Really good on a plate with some salt. 

Of course we had some Beefsteaks.  Good old dependable beefsteak types are the best in sandwiches and eaten fresh.  These were no exception.

'Sun-Dried' tomatoes were a meaty, paste type that did not perform well.  Only a few fruits set before the heat of the summer took the plant out.

'Champion' set a lot of small tomatoes that taste okay.  Nothing special to me anyway.  Sized about like the Zlatava but nowhere near as good.  The plants are on the smaller side and might do well in limited space.

 

This year we did three varieties of 'cherry' type tomatoes.  

 

Super Sweet 100 is an annual favorite at our house.  One or two plants gives us way more tiny tomatoes than we can hope to eat.  They are sweet and juicy and surprisingly easy to store when dehydrated.  They make a nice topping for pizza or a mix in for casseroles, pasta, meatloaf, soap, etc. 

I had never grown Yellow Pear before this year.  I had tried a plant last year but it didn't make it to the fruit bearing stage before a blight took it out.  So this year I got seeds and started a couple dozen plants with the hope that one of them would give me some tomatoes.

Holy crap.

None of them died.  I have yellow pear tomatoes everywhere.  That might not be such a bad deal if I actually liked how they taste.  They are a very pretty little pear-shaped tomato with a lovely yellow/gold color and almost zero tomato taste.  I dried a few to see how they will perform in recipes and I made some pickled tomatoes with a few.  I hope to report back on those in a few weeks.  Unless they get a stellar review from one of those uses, I won't be growing those again.  Prolific?  Yes.  Edible?  Yes.  Desirable?  Not so much.  They made so many tomatoes that I live in fear of the multitudes of volunteer plants I'll have next year.  Yikes.

The last of the tiny tomatoes is a golden cherry that I have since lost the variety name.  I wish I hadn't.  These are easily the best cherry tomatoes I've ever eaten in my life.  Somewhere in that garden plot is the identification tag that came with the plant I bought.  I will find it.  In the meantime, I'm saving some seeds in the hope that at least one of them will be true to the variety.

In other news...

The squashes have started to come in.  This is a small selection of the varieties that I grew this year.  Two kinds of pumpkins, three kinds of summer squash (a traditional zucchini, some funny little yellow zucchinis, and a white patty pan), and I forget how many kinds of winter squash.  In the picture below we have turban, butternut, acorn, lakota, spaghetti, and delitica.  There are so many other types and many I had never grown before waiting to be harvested in the squash bed.  I hope to have a taste test completed soon so I can report my findings. 

I am super pleased with my squash crop this year.  Probably the best one I've ever had!  I have to confess:  I used some garden dust on the squash vines this year.  The squash vine borer is a menace in my part of the country. I rarely ever get more than a couple of edible fruits no matter how many vines I plant.  This year I used some judiciously applied chemical dust and had almost NO vine borer issues and the squash bugs are almost non-existent.  I know, I know...it's not organic.  It's really a topic for another blog, but I'll just say here that it is very unlikely I will be able to grow completely organically in my plots no matter how carefully I shun the chemicals.

In the 'just for fun' section of the garden we find me and my broom corn.  Just for scale, I am about 5'9" and the tallest of the broom corn is easily double my height.  This was so much fun to watch as it grew like crazy to form the seed heads at the top.  Last week I harvested those seed heads and I hope to make some nice fall decorations with them.  I plan to make room for some broom corn every year.  It's fun to grow and the seed heads turn brown and purple in the fall.  I'll post up some pics of whatever I figure out to make with the seed heads.

A parting shot of the squash beds and the Bitch of a Ditch.  I had hoped that the squash would grow down into the ditch eliminating the need to mow it all the dang time.  It sort of did that.  Next time I'll plant right along the edge and see what it does.  Yep, that's little ol' me standing in the ditch for scale.  I told you it's one big ditch.

That's all for now.  I gotta get back out there and pick some peppers.  There are lots of those to talk about, too.  Until next time.