Time to Order!

It’s time to start thinking about ordering onions, shallots, garlic, potatoes, sweet potato slips, and asparagus crowns. My favorite place to get these items is from Filaree Farms in Washington State. They are an organic operation, and family owned. Everything I’ve gotten from them has been first-rate.

For garlic, my favorite variety is a softneck called ‘Inchelium Red.’ I’ve grown it for the past five years and we love it. It has a strong flavor and a beautiful purple cast to it, and it dries and braids well. It’s also a fairly good keeper, even in our warm dry climate.

I do not grow onions, but I do grow shallots, and like both ‘Dutch Red‘ and ‘French Grey.’ We have had allium aphids quite badly with ‘Dutch Red,’ so I’m going to try ‘French Grey’ again this year and see if we have better odds.

Potatoes come in three different ‘time’ categories, if you will - early season, mid season, and late season. Early season include varieties such as ‘Yukon Gold’ (my favorite). Mid Season include varieties such as ‘Red Chieftain.’ Late varieties include all the fingerlings, and russets. It’s fun to plant 1-2 of each kind, so you have potatoes all the way through summer. Home-grown potatoes really do taste different than store-bought, so it’s worth giving it a try.

Asparagus is a vegetable that takes some patience, as well as a permanent place in your garden. You’ll plant the crowns, which look like little octopi, and then you’ll wait three long years, watching the shoots grow and flower and leaf, before you can start to harvest them. But once they establish, they’ll be in your garden for 15-20 years, which is a very good return on your investment.

Ordering now is recommended, as most growers run out of supply quite early. You might be able to find a local supply, but why not do it now, while you’re thinking about it?

Clearing Out the Pollinator Gardens

My finals are DONE! My semester is FINISHED! I am now free as a bird until the middle of January. It feels so so so good to not sit and study. I was actually getting a particular hip pain because I was sitting so much. That’s never happened before. I would sit at the kitchen table, hip aching, table full of charts and papers and books, and then I’d look outside and see everything that needed doing, and sigh. Well, no more table! Outside time only! Bit by bit, I’m tidying up the garden and planting for spring. Now, when my body hurts, it’s because it’s getting some work done!

The pollinator gardens in our garden are the spaces people comment on the most. Oh, they like the vegetables and the fruit trees, the bees and the chickens, but it’s the flowers that really make people excited. I’ve written extensively about them before, because in order to get this abundance of flowers, it takes a little doing (it’s not hard, though). Three times a year I go out there and scatter wildflower seeds, the kind of seed depending on the season. That’s the easy part. The hard part, or not hard exactly but time consuming and a pretty big chore, is removing all the dead biomass before scattering the seed. If you don’t remove all the dead stuff, the seeds can’t get the light and moisture they need to germinate. And then, for about a month after removing everything, the garden is bare, bare, bare. Which isn’t all that attractive.

Today

I do have some perennials in there to hold down the space, but a lot of those, like dahlias or hollyhocks, are dormant in the winter, or else, like salvias and sages, need to be pruned hard in the winter. So it tends to look rather forlorn, with only borage (a workhorse all year round) and early narcissus blooming. The very first forget-me-nots are starting to bloom too, so that’s good. But on the whole, it’s very sad looking. You’ve got to hang in there, though, because within a few weeks, there will be a haze of green over this entire space, and then not long after that, the poppies will be up. By February things should be in good bloom. This time of year, I sow both California and opium poppies, Chinese Houses, Clarkias of all kinds, Nemophila, Gilia, Phacelia, Tidy tips - mostly natives. They’ll bloom until May when I will go through this whole process again and seed in the late summer flowers. Sometime between February and May, I’ll get a sowing in of early summer flowers, wherever I can find space.

The amount of biomass that accumulates from just one of the pollinator gardens is tremendous. I put as much as I can in the compost, but once the pile reaches above my head, I start to put the rest in the green bin for pickup. This year I made more space for the compost pile to go long, along the fence behind the chicken coop. I want to keep as much material as I can, especially with 10 chickens now to work it over. I’m making compost faster than ever before.

Taking out all the dead plants takes many days for all my pollinator gardens, two days for the south pollinator garden alone (pictured above). I’m actually still not done; I need to prune the passionflower vine hard and build it a new trellis. This will be a two person job and probably won’t get done until Tom’s holiday break. I’ve still got many gardens to go, though. Lots of wildflower seeds yet to get in! What a joy, though, to get out and use my muscles, instead of sitting!

It’s also time, if you live in California, to cut down the asparagus stalks/ferns and dress the bed with compost and mulch. This chore makes me anticipate late winter/early spring, when the spears will be appearing. Yum!

The new chickens (well, not so new anymore I guess) are figuring out the lay of the land. What makes me happy is that they do not run from me quite so quickly anymore - they are starting to realize I come bearing good things, like leftover yogurt or fresh greens. So now they just eye me warily and stay poised to dash. It’s an improvement. One not-so-happy development is that I think one of them might be a rooster. No crowing, just a very suspicious tail.

Just Chores, but So Much Fun!!!!

Gosh, it's been a fun weekend. The highlight was spending an afternoon with a very good friend, and we had a lively exchange of garden ideas, garden gifts, and love. On top of that we had an impromptu invitation for dinner at a neighbor's house last night - more exchanges of gardening tips and delicious produce! I tasted my first prickly pear fruit (delicious, but lots of seeds!) grown in their garden, and ate some amazing grilled fresh catfish they had caught in Oregon the week before. We brought an heirloom tomato salad with Tom's good Farmer Cheese and basil from the garden on top. Plus some of Tom's garlic dill pickles. Kate made cookies to share, the kids all made a huge bonfire, it was just a great time! A perfect official end to summer vacation, as we get back into the school and work routine this week.

I also had a lot of time to spend in the garden and kitchen, and I got a lot done (I'm headed out again after this post, in fact - potatoes to harvest for dinner!). Mainly just chores, but still, it's such a pleasure to spend time outdoors, then come in for a glass of hibiscus iced tea and make something interesting in the kitchen, then back outdoors for more sunshine and sweat.

Here's the roundup:

Bees and other bugs:
Tom and I opened the hive and there continues to be NO EVIDENCE of wax moths - looks like we caught them just in time. Hallelujah! The ants are also staying away, and the bees are making a LOT of honey. We saw very little pollen, a small amount of brood (consistent with the fact that winter is coming), and a ton of nectar and capped honey. The bees are definitely preparing for cold weather stores. I see them all over my flowers, and I am patting myself on the back that there is plenty of forage for them right now, my early planning is paying off.

In the spirit of continuing that trend, I just scattered many more packets of seed everywhere, mixed in with good compost - more sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and lots of herbs - oregano, thyme, sage, marjoram. I hope to continue blossoms all the way through October.

I watched a tiger swallowtail butterfly feeding on some salvia, two cabbage white butterflies (nuisances, but cute ones) chasing each other through the watermelon patch, and scads of monarchs and Gulf Fritillaries feeding on the tithonia. The bees are over everything, especially a very interesting salvia I planted last spring. I can't remember what it's called, darn it.

cosmos

cosmos

guara

Agastache sunset

No idea what this is but I like it!

a bee working in salvia

an old-fashioned rose, left over from the previous owners. I don't keep many roses as the deer just eat them, but this one seems to stay safe, somehow

bees working in the chive blossoms

California fuchsia next to a tiny zinnia

nasturtium

an interesting seed pod, I can't remember what this is

another interesting seed pod, this is from Nigella (Love in a Mist)

another cosmos, the varieties are endless

more beautiful cosmos

some sort of native milkweed, I think, from our watershed

native California columbine

California asters

bees working in the native CA gum plant. The buds are very interesting, too

This is that salvia that the bees are going crazy for

Something about to bloom! Don't remember what it is, but I'm still excited!

Chickens:
We're continuing to get five beautiful eggs every day, and the chooks are in good health. Now that I've fed them the last of the collards and romaine from the garden, I'm trying hard to find other sources of greens for them. Sometimes I'll pick the pole bean leaves for them, they love those. Lately I've been chopping down huge swathes of borage and taking it in to them, and they fiddle with that all day. I just planted some special grass in pots that both cats and birds can eat; as soon as it grows, I'll put a pot in there for them to enjoy, and then switch it out as it gets mowed down. I also give them any tomato that has blossom end rot, cucumbers that have gotten too big and bitter for us, and assorted nasturtium leaves, along with scratch, sunflower seeds, and stale yogurt or milk from the fridge.

That one on the top right is bigger than normal. ouch.

Cooking:
I tried two new experiments in the kitchen this weekend. The first was a roasted tomato sauce for the freezer. I mixed together about four cups of chopped tomatoes (all kinds), five chopped shallots, five cloves of chopped garlic, a few tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper, and a handful of chopped basil. I put it all on a cookie sheet, and put it in the oven for two hours at 300 degrees, stirring it once after an hour. It made the most delicious smell in the house, and all of that reduced down to about a pint for the freezer. Not a huge yield, but what's nice about this is I can make a pint or so every weekend with what's available, and soon we'll have a nice hoard of roasted tomato sauce in the freezer.

both paste and slicers

basil, garlic, and shallot from the garden

I also decided to try to make fermented whole pickles, like the kind you get at real deli counters. This is also a recipe I can make with whatever is on hand, and add more cucumbers as I harvest them. It works best for smaller fresh pickles, apparently, and if I wait until I have a ton of cucumbers, half of them are too big and bitter, so this recipe appeals to me. I made a brine of 6 tablespoons kosher (or pickling) salt to one quart of water and heated it till the salt dissolved. Meanwhile I added, to a large mason jar, one grape leaf from our neighbor's grapevines, two bay leaves, two smashed garlic cloves, a 1/4 teaspoon of pickle crisp, 2 heaping teaspoons of dill, and 2 teaspoons of other pickling spices (allspice, coriander, mustard seed, etc). If I had any fresh dill left in the garden, I would have added that too. Then I washed the cucumbers and cut a thin slice off the blossom end (apparently you don't want the blossom part in the brine, it makes it taste funky). I put the pickles in with the spices and poured the hot brine over them. I weighted it down with another half-pint mason jar, then put the lid on. You are supposed to let it sit out for two weeks, at least, at room temperature (between 70-80 degrees). The brine will get cloudy. You can add an airlock, like with beer or sauerkraut, or you can 'burp' the pickles about once a week until they are the way you want 'em. You can let them sit up to six weeks on your counter if you want maximum fermentation, or you can put them in your fridge after two. I guess tasting will tell us when they are just right. They'll then keep in the fridge for six months. I'll add more cucumbers, maybe two more, as they ripen.

I also mixed up a new batch of Thieves Vinegar. I do this every two weeks. I pick lavender or mint from the garden, stuff it into a mason jar, and cover the whole thing with apple cider vinegar. I let it sit out in the sun, lidded, for two weeks. Then I decant into another clean jar and use it in the laundry room as a natural fabric softener. We love the spicy smell, and we like that it doesn't have any chemicals.

Produce from the garden:
We're harvesting tomatoes (all kinds), both sweet and hot peppers, green beans, delicata squash, watermelons, cucumbers, basil, and potatoes. We're a hairsbreadth away from butternut squash and cantaloupe. We're a little further out from pumpkins and sweet potatoes. The buckwheat cover crop is doing well, and we've had some new growth (surprisingly!) in many areas - the asparagus patch (a spring crop, for heaven's sake), the alpine strawberry patch, and the apple tree seems to be putting out another crop for us! That summer pruning must have made the apple tree feel extremely refreshed. We aren't complaining!

watermelon blossom

Bloody Butcher tomatoes

Alpine strawberry blossom

pumpkin blossom

Jimmy Nardello sweet peppers

Panache fig

buckwheat cover crop

asparagus patch

apple blossom

second crop of apples

Jobs looming on the horizon:
As crops put out their last fruits, I'll pull them, and put in a quick cover crop of buckwheat. After a month of the cover crop, I'll turn it in and let it rot, then cover each bed with a layer of compost from the chicken coop (heavy mulch made up of hay, sawdust, lots and lots of manure, and whatever vegetable or fruit bits didn't get eaten). Around the first of November, I'll start moving aside that mulch and plant our winter crops in. We'll need to make hoop tunnels for the North Garden and make sure the ones in the South Garden are secure, and order new floating row cover. I'll need to order garlic and shallot starts soon, as well as winter seed (kale, spinach, chard, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, turnips, more romaine, braising greens, possibly even red winter wheat). We'll need to watch the beehive vigilantly as varroa mite season is coming up, and we don't want a repeat of last year. There's still a lot of preserving in our near future as we continue to can and freeze the harvest - we've got the two hottest months of summer coming up in September and October, here! I need to sheet mulch the little bit of grass we have left and decide what the heck to do with that area - a huge herb garden, with paths winding around so you brush against the plants and smell them? Or a native California meadow, with summer-dormant grasses and lots of spring bulbs? What do you think? I'd like to sheet mulch it in the next month, and plant it once there is a hope of winter rain.

I hope, wherever you are, you are enjoying some time outside and enjoying nature!

Summer Winding Down

It's been a busy week with the kids starting back to school, and me starting back to work. The garden has taken a back seat.

Today I harvested corn and jalapeños for a roasted corn and tomato salad, but then it got too hot outside to finish the other stuff on my to-do list. I need to pull out the beans and the collapsed trellis, and pull out the corn stalks. I need to collect potatoes, as all the vines have died off, and that's a good sign that they're ready for harvest.

Unfortunately I need to pull out the sweet potatoes.  For weeks, they grew and looked amazing, and then the deer found them and ate every single leaf. They grew back, and the deer ate them again. I have no idea if any fruit was formed; I doubt it, as I never saw a single flower. It's so disappointing! The deer have eaten most of the acorn and butternut squash leaves, though I do have some fruit maturing. They have eaten a lot of tomatoes and most of the leaves off the sweet pepper plants. Their timing in the flower garden is uncanny: I see a bud and think to myself, tomorrow there will be a flower! And that night the deer come eat the buds. The hungry and thirsty deer have found my little buffet, and have no intentions of leaving it alone. I don't mind if they eat a little, but they have eaten a LOT, and every morning there is more evidence of their destruction.

I suppose I need to design some sort of deer fence. I'm unhappy about this, because I find deer fences difficult to navigate around and within. They are also ugly, at least if they are slapdash, and slapdash is all I can afford. I suppose I need to experiment more with companion planting. For instance, the deer stay entirely away from the pumpkins, because they are prickly (I'm guessing). And they've stayed away from my herb spiral, presumably because it's smelly. So interplanting could help me a lot.

Ah well, at this point in the summer, the garden is actually slowing down here, though I know in most of the country, this is prime harvest time. My stuff is nearly played out, anyway. I'm looking ahead to a winter garden and have ordered seeds both from Renee's and High Mowing. I'm planning on kale, chard, spinach, lettuce; shelling and snap peas; broccoli and kohlrabi; and beets. I also ordered two cover crops; buckwheat and crimson clover. I'm going to put the buckwheat in now, for a quick crop before the frost comes. We have two hot months ahead of us here in Northern California, in fact September and October can be our hottest and driest months, and buckwheat can withstand that. It will add nutrition to the soil, and produce small white flowers from which the bees can collect nectar. Then in the winter, I will plant the clover, hoping it will flower in the warmish days and therefore provide forage for the bees during the cooler months. The trick with cover crops, and yes I'm nervous about it, is cutting them down and tilling them in before they go to seed.

In the bee hive, the bees have started converting yet another brood comb to honey production, so the queen is definitely laying fewer eggs. I'm very happy that there are a few combs of honey; hopefully I won't have to feed the bees all winter long. A neighbor of mine has many blooming cacti in his yard and I think those are single-handedly keeping the bees fed. That along with the pumpkins in that same yard and in my yard. Most of my neighbors have reported an increase in bee activity in their flower and vegetable beds, which makes me happy, and provides more beauty and food for the humans!

Also last weekend we saw the queen for the first time!

The queen is in the center of this picture, to the right and down a little. You can see that she is darker in color than the worker bees, and longer, with a thinner bottom. You can see some capped brood around her, as well as some nectar at the top of the picture.

On my hikes, I also notice that summer is winding down, even though the heat fools us into thinking otherwise. In early August, I became aware that acorns were falling from the oaks. That's very early, and in my opinion, is likely a sign of the deep drought we are in. The acorns litter the ground wherever I hike, now.

The valley and interior oaks are also already losing a lot of leaves, another sign of the dry conditions. It looks like fall, in the hills.

The fact that those two hot and dry months are coming up makes me worry about fire.

On a happier note, a friend offered me the rabbit poop from her hutch. She brought over a good-sized bucket, and I decided to add it to my compost bin, even though you can put this stuff directly on your garden. I thought it might speed up the stuff in my bin, and make it ready more quickly.

I've also sent out several emails to local farms asking about the availability of aged manure. I don't know how I will transport it, but I'd love to spread a couple inches over all the veg and flower beds, as well as under the fruit trees and bushes. The asparagus also needs several inches.

Another item on my autumn to-do list: rent a jackhammer and take out our front path, which we have always hated, and replace it with pavers. Then, dig the dry creek bed in the front yard (which we sheet mulched last spring), and plant 30-50 native plants around it. Just a *little* project. I'm hoping that as the fall routine of school and work gets easier, and the weather gets cooler, we'll have more time and energy to put in to this project.

My heart and mind were nervous this week with my special-needs daughter starting middle school. And then, while cleaning in her room, I spotted this gem on her desk:

And suddenly, I wasn't nervous any more.

Happy Labor Day to everyone, and on we go to September!

Quiet

Things have been quiet at Poppy Corners, at least in the garden. The kids are super busy with end-of-school-year projects and events, in my first grade classroom we're counting down the days to the last day of school, and even Tom can breathe a sigh of relief as the college gears down for summer, when all the administrators can finally get some work done. We've had band concerts and musicals and special rite of passage projects and auditions for the opera and exciting, hectic times. The neighborhood pool opened, which means a daily swim wedged in there somewhere, and the house smells of sunscreen and chlorine.

But in the garden, it's been quiet. The days are warming up and lengthening, the trees are in full leaf, we're getting at least a few strawberries and blueberries every day now. The peaches are getting big and should be starting to ripen mid-June, I can't wait until my first peach smoothie. We're getting carrots every few days and the last of the spring peas.

The potatoes I was worried about are overflowing their cage - the shoots and leaves are strong, huge, and growing a lot every day. The asparagus has put out more spears and has 'fronded' - is that a word? - it's all big and ferny. The sweet potato slips are growing, putting up leaves. The herb spiral looks great, and I'm harvesting herbs from that frequently. I've found I really like sorrel mixed in with my daily greens in my morning frittata.

But there's lots of questionable things going on in the new raised beds, and I fear we may not have much of a crop this first year. The manure has helped. But several vegetables still look sickly and are not growing properly. I planted more corn in the bed which had the lettuces and cilantro. I figure if the lettuces finally take off (doubtful now it's getting hot), and the corn actually grows, they can hang out together for a little while. The pumpkins I planted have germinated and look pretty good, and the pole beans which were supposed to grow on corn are taking over said corn, so I'll have to figure out a trellising system for those.

The cherry and slicing tomatoes are going gangbusters, but the paste tomatoes are in the new beds look very sad, and my dreams of canning lots of tomato paste are fading.

In the flower garden, sunflowers are growing up up up. I'm hoping some summer seeds of cosmos will germinate for the bees. In fact I need to plant a bunch of summer flowers for the bees, as their forage opportunities are definitely coming to an end. We opened the hive yesterday, and everything looks good - but the rate at which they are building new comb has definitely slowed, and we didn't even add another bar. They are making lots of bee babies but not a lot of honey. I didn't expect to harvest any honey this year for our own use, but I am concerned that they won't have enough even for themselves through winter. I look at my neighborhood with a different eye - what will bloom in the months ahead? Right now the bees are collecting from my catalpa tree, and any leftover spring poppies, lupines, wisterias. In June, there are two Chinese Tallow trees nearby which always attract lots of bees. In July, the sunflowers might sustain them. But what happens in August? And the driest, most arid months in Fall? I have to plant now to have forage for them, then. And I have to plant a lot. Masses of the same few flowers. So I've been researching late summer/early fall bloomers, that are loved by honeybees, and trying to figure out how to pay for a huge quantity of them.

Some branch trimming is to be done by me today in the back garden. Our apple tree is being quite shaded out by our flannel bush (which is much larger than the apple tree), so I need to cut back the flannel bush, now it's done blooming. But it's called flannel bush for a reason - the leaves are covered with tiny fine hairs which come off when bushed against - and it itches like crazy. I have to do it right before we go jump in the pool, or I'll go crazy with itching. Guess I'll be trimming branches in my swimming suit!