The Garden is Coming to Life

It has barely been a month since the official beginning of Spring, but the signs of life returning to the world are everywhere.  The trees are leafing out, the flowers are blooming, the grass is growing lush and green.  In the garden things are starting to emerge too.

The onion sets that I planted a few weeks ago have made their way through the mulch with their tender green spears.  I am always amazed by how quickly onions grow.  In only a few short months I will again have fresh onions for my kitchen.  I still have a few onions left from last year's harvest and if they can keep for a few more months I will have been able to grow enough onions to last me a year in only sixty square feet of growing space.

The potatoes are pushing their way up through the leaves and straw that covered their bed, forming little mounds before finally pushing through.  They will hopefully fill in this bed in short order and I will be well on my way to having fresh potatoes to eat soon.  This year one of my goals is to dehydrate more potatoes for easy dried backpacking meals for my camping adventures.

The peas and radishes have made an appearance in their bed where the wind stripped off the straw mulch that I had put down.  Once things get tall enough to hold the straw in place I will go back and re-mulch this bed.  The carrots that I planted in the row with the radishes should take a bit longer to germinate, but they will be able to fill in the gaps left by the radishes when I harvest them.

In the next bed I have a few turnip or rutabaga seedlings finding their way to the sunlight through the thin layer of straw covering them.  I expect that the lettuce and spinach I also planted there will find their way to the sun in the next few days.  I have been finding an abundance of lettuce volunteers scattered throughout the beds.  They are growing nicely with little help from me.  Because of these volunteers I will be able to have a good harvest of lettuce with literally no work on my part aside from cutting the leaves when they are big enough.

The garlic are growing taller each day.  It might be another month or so before they send up scapes, but by the looks of things, I am expecting a pretty nice harvest.  It looks as though most of the garlic are quite happy and I expect to have some good sized heads by June.

In a few more weeks the weather should be warm enough to start planting my warm weather crops.  It won't long until my garden becomes a regular contributor to my pantry again.  I am looking forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor in the months to come.

Transplanting Broccoli and Cabbage

The last frost is still a few weeks away, but my cold hardy broccoli and cabbage were more than ready to stretch their legs in something bigger than a three inch pot.  They were starting to gain in size and the roots had begun to grow out of the bottom of the pots, so I knew they were ready to go out into the real world.  They have been hardened off over the past several weeks.  At first it was only for a few hours on nice days at the end of March, but as they grew stronger I started leaving them out for the whole day. The overnight temps have also begun to creep up over the past couple of weeks, so I started to leave them outside through the night, even if the temps might dip near freezing.  Brassicas can tolerate some fairly cool temps, in fact they seem to thrive in cooler weather.

This past week I had time to clean up the garden bed that would become home for these plants and I set up the drip irrigation lines for the bed as well.  I laid out the seedlings on the bed to find the right spacing, then dug them in with my little trowel.  I felt like the middle of the bed still had some usable garden space, so I planted a row of parsnips down the middle of the rows of broccoli and cabbage.  This year I am growing six broccoli, three green cabbages and three red cabbages.  The red cabbages were still fairly small seedlings when they were transplanted outside.  They were off to a late start because the first round of red cabbage seeds that I planted never germinated.  Hopefully they will catch up to the bigger seedlings before too long.

Other Things That Grow Here

I have a deep love for all living things and one of my fondest loves is plants.  I find them fascinating.  The variety of ways that they grow is astonishing.  In addition to all of the edible plants that I grow in the garden, I host a number of plants in my living space.  Most of them have a story and some of them were gifts.  A few are experiments that turned out well and at least one was a rescue from a discount grocery store shelf.

My indoor plant collection began with a lovely little creature named Clyde the Cactus, a name bestowed upon him by my mother.  Clyde was a single "finger" of a cactus wearing a top hat and glued on googly eyes that I bought from a grocery store when I was 15.  I never figured out what kind of cactus Clyde was, but over the years he has grown many extra "fingers".  Clyde has never once flowered, and seems to do well no matter where in the country I am living (Clyde has multiple cross country moves under his belt).  I call him the friendly cactus because his "thorns" curve back on themselves and don't poke like most cacti.

I have several Christmas Cactus as well.  One of them in particular is very sentimental to me.  It belonged to my grandmother and I am certain it is much older than I am.  It still flowers every year, sometimes multiple times a year and is a lovely explosion of color in my house during the dreary winter months.

Another very old plant that I have is this Jerusalem Rope.  It belonged to the mother of a friend and was something of a family heirloom.  I asked for just a cutting, but she decided to give me the whole plant.  It's vining growth habit is very long and heavy and I didn't want to break it's branches so it currently lives with it's long vines wound around it's pot on the shelf.

I have a  Rosemary plant that I rescued from a gift basket that was being neglected where I worked.  This lovely creature has grown nicely over the years and is my most successful attempt at keeping rosemary alive. (I may have accidentally killed a couple of these over the years)

One of my experiments that is turning out well is my Pineapple plant.  I saw online that you can grow a pineapple from a pineapple top, so I followed the instructions and lo and behold it works.  I think I will need a fairly large pot for this plant eventually, but for right now it is slowly growing in a sunny window in my kitchen.

An experiment I am continuing is growing sweet potatoes.  I had an extra sweet potato left over from my thanksgiving meal prep a few years ago and it sat around so long that it started to grow new vines.  Last year I found an extra space in the garden and planted it for the summer.  It only ended up producing a couple of edible potatoes, but I decided to keep the experiment going and let one of those potatoes grow again for planting this year.  If I can get enough slips to make a decent crop, I may start devoting one of my garden beds to sweet potatoes.

I have several plants that were given to me by various friends.  There is a Jade plant, a Ficus, a Philodendron, and an Aloe plant.  All of them are thriving and some of them are starting to need more space.

 

I also have a couple of Orchids that were both rescued that also seem to be thriving in their sunny spots in my windows.

There is an English Ivy that is taking over the top shelf in this sunny window and it seems as though it is telling me that I need to find another place for some of my other plants to live.

Finally, I have a Norfolk Pine that is beginning to dominate the west side of my living room.  This is my Christmas tree substitute and I decorate it every winter.  Eventually I think it will outgrow my home.  Hopefully I will be able to find it a good place to live when it gets to that point.

Little Chickens Big Outdoor Adventure

The baby chickens are just over a month old now and they were quickly outgrowing their temporary living space in the spare room.  I started to acclimate them to cooler temperatures for the past couple of weeks by turning off the heat lamp during the day, then finally leaving it off all the time.  They seemed to adjust pretty quickly.  I usually wait to put them outdoors until they are fully feathered.  The last place on their body to loose the cute chick fluff is the head.  Once their heads are feathered in, they are ready to go outside.  I try to keep an eye on the weather when I decide when to put them out for the first time.  I wait for a stretch of nice warm days and mild nights, so they can have a gentle introduction to outdoor life.

The day they went outside was a mild sunny day with temps in the upper 60's and a gentle breeze.  The rest of the week looked about the same, so it seemed like an ideal time to get the little ones out of the house.  They will spend the next couple of months in this small enclosure where they will be safe from roaming predators.  Once they start to get close to being full sized chickens I will introduce them to the rest of the flock and they will get to enjoy the freedom of the chicken yard.  Until then I will have a front row seat to watch their antics from my kitchen window.

Potato Planting

The weather is going through an indecisive phase right now and has been swinging back and forth between warm sunny days and cloudy, cold wet days with a variety of snow and rain.  The warm days were nice enough that I decided to try to get a little spring planting in starting with my potatoes.  I still had quite a few potatoes left from last fall's harvest and a bunch of them were well on their way to becoming potato plants again.  The sprouting eyes were nearly a foot long in some cases and they were just begging to be planted so that they can grow again.

I had already started turning over some of the garden beds that the chickens had "tilled" for me this winter and this year's crop of potatoes was planted where last year's cucumbers had grown.  The dirt in this bed was nice and fluffy and I dug three trenches for this collection of seed potatoes.  Each trench received a different variety.  Yukon golds went down the middle.

 The Purple Vikings went down the east side and the Red Chieftains went down the west side.

Once I had all the spuds where I wanted them, I back filled the trenches and leveled out the bed with a rake.  The next stage was setting up the drip lines for this bed and then covering the whole thing with straw.  The straw will help insulate the potatoes from wild temperature swings and helps to hold precious moisture in the soil.  I expect to see sprouts appearing on the surface in a few weeks from now and am already looking forward to this year's potato harvest.  Potatoes have become a staple in my diet just because they are so easy to grow and store very well in the right conditions.

Spinning Luxurious Yarn

A few years ago I bought a pair of braids of some very soft, shimmery black roving.  When I touched it, it felt like I was petting a cloud.  I didn't have any particular project in mind when I bought them, but I knew that what ever I made with it would be silky soft and very warm.  They were a blend of alpaca and silk.  When I got a request for a special camping nightcap, I knew what material I wanted to use.  I could make a thin cap that would still be very warm with this blend, but first I had to turn it into yarn.

I made two skeins of this shimmery, soft double ply yarn and then proceeded to tun this yarn into a hat.

From start to finish it was many hours of work, but I love the final product.  A thin, but warm, soft hat that won't fall off when the wearer is cozy in their sleeping bag on a camping trip.

Late Winter Root Crop Harvest

Seeing as it is almost time to start planting my spring crops. I decided that it was time to finish harvesting last years crops from the garden.  The two things that I overwintered outside were my carrots and my parsnips.  The carrots were tucked in the middle of my pepper bed last year, and I mostly neglected them after planting.  I was more concerned about the pepper harvest at the end of fall, and I pretty much forgot the carrots were even growing there.  The parsnips were hidden among the celery crop, which died back months ago with the first of winter's frigid temperatures.  When the weather started warming up this spring, I noticed that the tops of the carrots and parsnips had started to grow again.  Now that I could easily see where they were growing, I could just dig them out where ever I saw a touch of new green growth.  I was impressed by the size of the carrots as many of them were huge!  There were a few that had split in the winter and those immediately became chicken treats when I found them.  The rest were washed and brought inside where I could further process them at my leisure.

Overwintered carrots are super sweet and tasty because the carrots store lots of sugar which acts like antifreeze to help them survive the really cold temperatures of winter.

The parsnip harvest wasn't nearly as impressive, but there were many good sized ones that had grown nice and straight in my hard clay soils.  I like this crop because it's taproot grows very deep into the soil and helps brings nutrients closer to the surface where other crops can utilize them.  It also helps to break up any compaction in the soil which can help any future crops grow by making it easier for them to spread their roots.

I will use some of these tasty roots for fresh eating, but the rest will be sliced or cubed and then dehydrated for long term food storage or backpacking meals.  This is another example of how I can grow a good amount of food with little extra work.  These crops shared garden beds with other crops that were unaffected by (or improved because of) their presence.  They were seeded in as an after thought and pretty much ignored for the rest of the growing season.  I left them in the ground outside for winter which also saves me storage space while the roots become sweeter.  In the end I wound up with several pounds of tasty fresh food that I can harvest at a time of year when there is very little growing outside yet.  A win win all around.