The Cycle of Things

I used my last garden onion a couple of days ago, which is kind of interesting because my new onion seedlings just came up.

I guess that's part of why I love gardening.  There's such a beautiful cycle to everything.  We can miss it if we're not looking.

Garden Tour

It's been such a mild winter here in western New York (and all of New England and the Mid Atlantic as well), and I've been hearing crazy stories about how how spring bulbs are starting to spring up already, and garlic is a foot tall in gardens.  I got pretty curious about what's going on in my garden, so I took a stroll around the yard with my camera (and a good pair of boots, because it's muddy!).

And what do you know!  The daffodil bulbs really are sending up shoots.

They're pretty small yet though, as you can see by their size compared to those leaves.  And it's not all the bulbs; only the ones that are more out in the sun are popping up.  The ones more in the shade are still sleeping.

Actually, I left some bulbs in the garage too long because I didn't know where to plant them, and I noticed they had started to sprout.  So not wanting to waste something awesome, I stuck them in some vases.

So far, only one has bloomed, but it's such a fun thing to walk into the kitchen and see a beautiful blooming hyacinth.  Plus, it smells awesome.

And you know what?  My garlic is coming up, too!

But it's certainly not a foot tall.  It usually gets about that big before it gets covered by snow anyway, so I'm not worried about it.  It is, afterall, called German Extra Hardy and can withstand some pretty frigid cold snaps.

One thing I worried about with this warm weather was that my apples would break dormancy too soon and their buds would die.  However, it looks like they're nice and sleepy still and should make it through to spring.

So while I was out there, I took a picture of my newest toy, too.

I got it all together on the Sunday after Christmas.  It was quite a project, but not as bad as the reviews made it out to be.  The box came with two pieces that weren't supposed to be there, and two pieces that I needed weren't there.  Thankfully, they're not pieces that are structurally necessary, so I just put it together and contacted the company about it. 

It's a really cool little planter!  The planting space is about 6 inches deep, and the space underneath is good for storage.  The clear plastic is pretty sturdy, but the black plastic, which covers the base part and is the tray for the soil to sit in, is flimsier.  However, the frame is very sturdy and well designed, so if the plastic breaks, I figure I can replace it with wood or some other material and just keep reusing the frame.  I like it a lot! 

It's currently sitting in the cleared out raspberry spot.  It's less windy there, and there's no threat of falling ice, but in the spring, we'll move it over to it's permanent home on the south side of the house.

There, between the raspberries and the concrete slab.  And if I like it, who knows?  Maybe I'll get another one and put it where the raspberries are.  I don't know what variety those raspberries are, but I don't like them very much.  The canes and the berries are really waxy, and my fingers are so sticky from wax after picking them.  Plus the berries have a crumbly berry disease, and I'm not at all sure how to help the poor plants.  But I suppose that's far enough down the road that I don't need to think about it right now.

So there's what's going on in the ole garden.  It may look asleep, but things are still growing!

Wall-o-Awesome

Over the long, dark days of winter, I found myself reading an unusual blog.  Somehow, through one of those long link clicking trails, I'd stumbled upon a blog called Ask Jackie on the Backwoods Home website.  She's such a cool lady!  She answers all kinds of canning questions, plus she blogs a lot about her life as a homesteader in zone 3 Minnesota.  I think I spent about three weeks reading through her entire blog, and ended up with strong desires to start canning and longing for my own farm and chickens.

One thing that caught my attention while reading through several years of her blog was how she uses a product called wall-o-waters to get her tomatoes out soon enough to get a decent harvest.  Living in Minnesota and having a pretty short season, I assume this is just about the only way she can get a good harvest.  I assumed, having been gardening and homesteading for several decades, that she wouldn't be using them unless they really worked, so I decided I'd check them out myself. 

I'd actually heard of wall-o-waters before, but I guess I figured they weren't worth the effort of expense.  I mean, so they give you a little head start, so what?  But when I read up on them, I found out that you can actually start your plants 6-8 weeks early!  And then I started thinking about how that would effect my harvest.  In our part of NY, I can put tomatoes in around the end of May, and don't get any ripe tomatoes until, at the earliest, the beginning of August.  Our last frost date is around the middle of October, but I usually tear the tomatoes down about a week before then just so I can get everything to bed before bad weather comes.  To make things easy, we'll call that two months of harvest.  I got about 30 pounds of tomatoes last year.  If the wall-o-waters give me another month of harvest, that means I could conceivably see a 50% increase in my tomato yields.  Holy cow! 

This is, of course, just speculation, but the thought of all those tomatoes was just so tempting.  I had originally planned on only getting one 3-pack of the walls, but Chad convinced me to get enough to protect all 8 of my plants.  (I accidentally ordered four packs instead of three, so now I have four extra to experiment with.)  Only time will tell if I'll actually get another month of harvest.

I actually ended up buying a knock-off brand by Gardeneer called Season Starters because, at the time I bought them, they were only $11 for a package of three (whereas the wall-o-waters were $17 for a similar pack of 3). 

I can tell you already, after a week and a half, that these things are awesome.  The weekend before last, so April 19th, we were having some great weather; it was in the 60s and 70s, and the soil was very warm.  I saw in the forecast a week and a half of very cold weather.  I knew that I could plant the tomatoes that day, five weeks before our last frost date (I had originally planned on putting them out four weeks before the last frost date), or I would have to wait two more weeks because the soil would be too cold.  So I decided to put these walls through the ultimate test.

The tomatoes before I planted them.

I got the tomatoes in the raised beds, and then proceeded to fill up the walls with water.  That's not too hard as long as you have a bucket to put the walls around while you fill them, and a decent hose (and patience).  I was worried for a bit that they would be too big to fit in my square foot garden, but I was eventually able to convince an 18 inch circle to fit into a 12 inch square just fine.  I then tied up the tops with some nylon twine and waited for the cold weather to hit.  And boy did it.

You have to understand that even in western NY, a snow storm in late April is pretty crazy.  

The temps went down into the 40s on Tuesday that week, then into the 30s on Wednesday and Thursday, with at least three nights into the 20s with bitterly cold winds.

I went out and checked the walls daily.  The tomatoes, despite my desperate fears, were fine.  The air inside the walls was frigid and damp, but there was no frost damage to the plants.  On the first cold night, Chad and I went out at 9PM with hot water bottles to put into the walls next to the plants; no luck.  There was no room at all to put the bottles inside, and in fact, I ended up nearly crushing the one plant while trying.  So instead, we laid the bottles between walls.  By that time, the water was starting to freeze pretty good, and we had just enough time to get the bottles out there and run back inside before frost bite started setting in.  I got very little sleep that night, worrying about my plants and what I'd do if they died.  I kept telling myself that I could just buy starts from the nursery, but that didn't ease my worry at all; after all, most of my plants were heirlooms and hard to find varieties.

The next  morning, I went out with several gallon jugs full of hot water to place around the walls, hoping to help thaw the frozen water and keep the plants safe.  They were fine!  The water wasn't even frozen any longer, and the tomatoes had survived with no problems.  I was shocked!  Dumbfounded!  Amazed  by the power of water, and the determination of my tomatoes to survive.  For the next few days, I hunkered down inside and decided not to worry about the tomatoes.  I left the extra water out there as insurance, but didn't refill the bottles with hot water after that first night.

Then this week, the weather started thinking happier thoughts and turned warm again.  I opened the walls up to let some fresh air in, and to get a good peek at how everyone was doing.  Despite spending a frigid week inside tiny green cells, it looks like everyone is fine; and not only that, bet I'm positive they've all grown by at least an inch or possibly more!  Can you believe that?

My side garden tomatoes with the added insurance bottles.

A peek in at one of the beef tomatoes.

The main garden.  I added two extra walls to start early squash in.

Look at how happy this cherry tomato looks!

I still have yet to see where this will lead, as far as harvest goes.  But if they're doing this well at 3-1/2 weeks before the last frost, I can only imagine what they're going to look like by the end of May, when I would normally plant out my tiny tomatoes.  Will I get tomatoes by the fourth of July?  Wouldn't that be cool!

As a bonus of accidentally buying too many walls, I'm going to start some summer squash early to see how they do.  I set up the walls yesterday to help warm up the soil, and plan on planting the seeds this weekend sometime. 

Garden Review

It's April, and in western NY, that means it's time to get outside and get digging.  It's pretty muddy out, though, so every time I go out to the yard, I have to wear these:

And I'm out every day, because I'm just so excited about the return of spring.  The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the earth is greening.  The hill sides are even turning from brown to red as the tree buds swell and ready for opening. 

I suppose I should back up a bit and mention last year's garden, before I jump ahead into this year.  We had a nasty winter in 2013-2014.  It was not only incredibly cold (many weeks of -10 degree weather with up to -40 degree wind chills), but it was what they call an open winter; there was hardly any snow on the ground.  Combining those two things wrecks a lot of havoc on nature.  Many plants died; I lost my dwarf  blueberries, my Russian red kale, my raspberries died down to the ground, and our chock cherry even died back a bunch.  On top of that mess, we had a very cold and rainy summer.  It seemed like it rained every other day.  I didn't have to water but once a week, whereas in a normal summer, I have to water every day. 

Despite all that, my garden did remarkably well!  I got the best tomato crop I've ever gotten, even though everyone else in the area was having a terrible tomato year.

That's a 1.3 pound ox heart tomato.

Not all of  my plants did as well as my tomatoes, but it was a successful year, all around.  Because I'm a huge nerd and I love numbers and spread sheets, I kept track of how much produce I harvested and multiplied it by how much we'd pay for it if we'd bought it in the store.  By year's end, I'd harvested $356.77 worth of fresh produce.  I call that a success. 

The winter we had in 2014-2015 was just as cold as the year before (actually, it was colder; we had the coldest February on record, seriously), but the difference is that we had a ton of snow.  I think at its deepest, the snow was probably three feet high; of course, that's not counting the snow drifts or the places Chad piled up the snow as he shoveled it (probably 5 feet high at the tallest).  The snow was a huge pain when we had to shovel it, but it did a lot of good for the garden.  It provided a lot of protection to plants and kept the ground from freezing so deeply (or at all, in some places).  Plus, I hear old timers call snow white fertilizer because of the tasty things it leaves behind as it melts.  I'm not entirely sure what it leaves behind, but I tend to believe old timers.

I've been super anxious for spring to get here.  I have lots of lovely plants in the basement going, gearing up to get planted in the next month or two:

Lettuce, coleus, petunias, and catnip.

Tomatoes, kale, onions, peppers, and unsprouted cabbage.

A close up of my tomatoes.

And a close up of my peppers!

I'm experimenting with wall-o-water type things this year.  They're a water filled ring that you put around your tomatoes (or other plants) so that you can set them out early.  The water collects and holds solar heat through the day, and then that heat keeps the plants from freezing to death at night.  I'm planning on setting the tomatoes out four weeks early, which I hope should give me a much bigger harvest!  And I figure if I kill off my tomatoes by accident, well, that's ok.  It was a fun experiment, and I can always go buy starts at a nursery. 

I bought two new blueberry bushes to put in pots last fall.  I waited until the local nursery was having a half off sale.  They were out of the bushes I had originally wanted, but by dumb luck, they had forgotten that they had a bunch of Pink Lemonade blueberry bushes in the back!  Pink Lemonade blueberries are, well, pink blueberries, and I've been wanting some of those bushes for years now.  And now I have two!  I stuck them in the old blueberry barrels with some coffee grounds and hoped for the best.  We ended up pulling them into the garage midway through winter, because we were sure they wouldn't make it with -16 degree nights.  And, as far as I can tell, they have made it.  The buds are swelling and greening up nicely! 

I bought a couple blueberries at Home Depot last week, too, to act as pollinators.  The PL blueberries are mostly self pollinating, but the tag says they do better with some friends.  So I bought one Polaris, and one Chandler.  I ended up putting them in the front of my main garden.  It's hard to see them, but they're behind the green fencing on the right in this picture.

The main garden, all ready for planting.

And here's a close up of one of the new blueberry's buds, ready to open:

I had the best batch of compost last year that I've ever had, and I got a lot, too, so the gardens got a great boost last fall.  I only had a couple of soil tests left from last year, so I only got to test a couple of my squares this spring.  But from what I can see, that compost must have been pretty awesome stuff, because it looks like I have plenty of N, P, and K to last me through a good part of the season.  Woo!

Gee, there's lots of updates, actually.  I haven't even gotten to the apple trees.

Can you see them?  They're those sticks in the green fencing.

Last year I bought two dwarf apple trees; one Goldrush, and one Liberty.  They did surprisingly well last year; I even got one little apple forming, but Chad made me pick it off.  Sigh.  But he was right.  Apparently, if you let these dwarf apples fruit too soon, they'll stop growing any taller.  Their full size is 6-8 feet, and they're currently about 5 feet, but last year they were only about 3 feet.  I think I'll probably let them fruit a little this year.  I'm excited to try my own apples! 





The exciting thing about these apples is that I'm going to try growing them completely organic, which I hear is quite a challenge.  Obviously whoever said that didn't have access to Google!  I found tons of info on the best ways to grow apples organically, and I've already started getting to work on it.  I gave them a good spray of Neem oil as a dormant oil, to kill off any overwintering bugs, and once they fruit, I'm going to bag the baby apples so worms can't get access to them.  Take that, nature!  Plus, I have an amazing micro ecosystem in my yard.  Because I use no pesticides and no artificial fertilizers, I have a lot of natural predators that keep the pest population in check. 

Hmmm... anything else?  I guess nothing major.  I guess I'll finish this post off with pictures!

Our front garden.

Crocuses!

And one little snow drop.

My side garden with the strawberry bed (on the right).

The long box in the main garden.  That's garlic coming up.

Another view of the main garden.

Baby lupines coming up!

One of the raspberry brambles.

And our chives!

Happy spring, everyone!  Make sure to get outside whenever possible!

Vacation, Pears, and Real Life

Hey guys!  I'm sorry I've been so quiet lately.  When Gwen from over at Sky n Surf asked if I was alright and said she missed me, it made me realize that I should probably stop being lazy and write something.  (Thanks, Gwen!)

Life has been kind of crazy.  Well first, for a week at the end of August, Chad and I went on vacation.  It was really nice to get away.  We rented a little cabin in the woods in PA and just relaxed.  We did some hiking, took some scenic drives, went to a few gift shops, stopped in at a winery, had a campfire every night (with s'mores!), and did a whole lot of just sitting around relaxing.  The weather didn't cooperate the whole time, but the cabin was cozy and we brought some good books with us.  It was a very nice, relaxing vacation.  And now here's some pictures.

Red Spotted Purple butterfly (can't decide why they call it that, but there you have it)

Some sort of cute tree frog.

Chad climbing up his favorite boulder.

Chad next to a little creek at the bottom of a huge hill we climbed.

Me next to the same creek!

Old nonworking fountain.

Pretty wooded trail.

Sunbeam in a part of the forest called the Forest Cathedral.

The trees in this forest are some of the oldest stands of trees in the eastern US.  They've been untouched for 400 years.

The trail was quite hilly.  We climbed up 1000+ feet and then had to come back down.

At the bottom was a pretty creek with at least a dozen bridges over it.

And here's the creek.

Here's the winery we went to.  It was very nice. 

The fires were always nice.  Relaxing, quite, warm, and it was fun to build them.

Inky cap mushrooms, so called because they start melting into black goo after a couple days.

Chipmunk!

Some sort of shelf fungus.

THE hugest millipede I've ever seen.  It was as thick as my pinky and twice as long.

As relaxing as the vacation was, though, things went crazy once we got home.  Just like an hour or two after we got home, my mom's car broke down and we had to go pick her up and help her get it taken care of.  Right before we left for vacation, I picked two pear trees (one in my neighbor's yard, and one in Chad's mom's yard), which yielded almost two bushels of pears.  If you're not familiar with how big a bushel is, imagine a 5 gallon bucket.  A bushel is just about two of those.  So I had a ton of pears (and it took several hours to pick them, but that was the easy part).  Since pears don't ripen on the tree and only ripen once picked, I like to pick them before we go on vacation so that when we get back, they're almost ripe and ready to process. 

Well, I've never had so many pears before.  It was an amazing year for pears, and this is the first year I've picked my neighbor's yard.  So for literally a whole week, I did just about nothing but work on pears.  Peeled, cored, cut up, cooked, canned.  I made canned pear halves in extra light syrup, pear sauce, pear jelly, pear preserves, pear salsa, and pear conserve.  I ended up with something like 24 quarts of canned pears, and like 10 pounds of pear trimmings in my compost pile.

Happy pear.

Two bushels of pears turned into 24 quarts of canned goods.  Also, my MIL made me that quilt!

So after the week of pear hell, I seriously haven't wanted to do anything at all.  Sleep mostly, video games, some reading, and when I'm up to it, doing the cleaning that never got done.  After a week of recuperating, I'm feeling much better. 

I've been having trouble getting back into the swing of the low carb way of life.  Chad and I didn't go overboard on our vacation.  We tended to eat very smart low carb meals, but we did splurge like every day.  There was always s'mores at night around the fire, and there was ice cream a couple of times.  It's especially going to be difficult getting back into the sugar free lifestyle because September is our month of celebration.  We've already had one birthday party (my 5 year old nephew), and my birthday is Sunday.  Then there's our anniversary, and then Chad's birthday.  And my niece is about ready to have her baby, so there will probably be another birthday in September soon.  Ugh.

So I think I caught you all up on just about everything going on in my life lately.  I hope I can get back into the swing of writing regularly.  I'd hate to lose you guys :)