June Update

June is usually a good month in the garden: everything is usually planted by now and the weather has settled into summer, so all there is to do is weed, water, and watch things grow. We did have a very cool early summer this year, so I wasn't able to direct seed or transplant out any hot weather veggies until early or mid this month.

The main garden is mostly planted by the end of June. Peppers are under the plastic tunnel, as it's still not warm yet.

We had a wet spring and a cool early summer, so I had to wait until the ground dried out enough to put in the new garden space for this year. This is the area I plowed last fall and had a cover crop in over the winter. I got my first transplants in the ground in late May, so all hot weather summer crops in this garden.

My new tool for weed rustling this year is a Valley Oak wheel hoe.


The last few years I was spending way too much time weeding by hand and with my scuffle hoe, and now with twice the garden space I am going to have a lot of weeding to do. I did a little research and found a wheel hoe to be the tool for weeding in the rows between my raised beds. Wheel hoes have been around for decades. Before tractors, check that, before horses were readily available and cost efficient for small farmers, all work was done by manpower. Planet Jr. made many models for hand use or for drawing behind horses. There are 4 or 5 different companies making wheel hoes today, and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Except for Glaser ($350-$399!!), Valley Oak has been around the longest and offers a modern version of the classic tool with all the same accessories available as other manufacturers. I go through the rows once a week - takes about 30 minutes to do all the rows in both gardens - before that would have taken an entire day. The point is to keep weeds from getting established, so it must be done regularly.


I am also using a new tool for weeding around the plants in my raised beds. Eliot Coleman is a big proponent of colinear hoes, so I thought I would try one out. I found one at the feed store being sold as an "onion hoe". Not sure what that means, but once I took the angle grinder to it and sharpened up the leading edge, it was ready to go. The blade on this hoe is at nearly a right-angle to the long handle, and is used standing straight up, with a grip and motion like raking leaves. Like with the wheel hoe, once a week all the beds are gone through. The blade is slid along just under the soil surface, slicing off small weeds before they are big enough to be able to regrow, and keeping the soil surface broken up and dry to help prevent further weed germination. No need to clean up the beds afterwards and no more hand weeding! Hooray!

Seedlings and transplants

I've started more transplants from seed this year than ever before. This will be my biggest garden and I plan on filling it up completely, so I have had transplants all over the place!

5/1: Brassicas and lots of tomatoes hardening off outside and in my little cold frame. The brassicas were transplanted a week later.

5/15: Tomatoes were transplanted after about 2 weeks outside. I had to wait until the ground was ready for rototilling. These are by far the best looking transplants I've grown! This year I wanted to grow my early tomatoes and peppers/eggplant under low tunnels. I bought a "Quick Hoops" tube bender (from Johnny's) to make heavy duty 1/2" EMT hoops to cover with greenhouse plastic.

On a cloudy day where we don't even get to 60 degrees (we've had a lot of those lately) it will be a balmy 85 in the tunnel. On sunny days, I lift up one entire side of the plastic for ventilation and it stays around 90 inside. So far the tomatoes are loving it.

5/25: Pepper seedlings will go under a low tunnel as well. I'll cover the soil with black plastic before transplanting in order to trap even more heat. In our mild summers, keeping the soil warm is the most important controllable condition in order to keep hot weather peppers and eggplant growing well.

Eggplant, above, and melons and cukes. This is my first try with melons. Really, they won't grow well up here without a lot of special attention. They'll need black plastic mulch and a low tunnel, plus a good summer, in order to produce much. However, I've heard from many sources that a freshly picked, homegrown melon is just about the sweetest, best tasting this that can come out of the garden, so I have to give it a shot. These will be ready to transplant out (weather permitting) in a week or two.

Still here.

I've been busy lately and haven't been up for much posting, plus my camera died! But I've replaced it and I have a few back-posts to get up, which can be found below...

Making COF

The last few years I've had success using a combination of store-bought compost and manure and various mixtures of organic fertilizers. Generally speaking, organic fertilizers are not as potent or as fast acting as synthetic chemical fertilizers, so one must use a greater volume, more often. With twice the garden space as last year (up to almost 3000 sq ft now!), I'll need so much that I decided to mix my own complete organic* fertilizer (COF). The famous Steve Solomon developed a mix tailored to our slightly acid and heavier northwest soils that I used as my guide. I followed the recipe given here, on the third page of an excellent article about homemade fertilizers written by Steve.

I bought ~50 lb bags of each ingredient, all of which I was able to source at local feed stores (I had to go to two to get everything).


The components in the mix can vary, based on what's available locally (and cost!). In my mix I am using (CCW from upper right) 4 parts cottonseed meal , 1 part kelp meal, 1 part rock phosphate, 1/2 part limestone flour (calcium carbonate), and 1/2 part dolomite lime.

The finished product.

Total initial ingredient cost was about $130. The kelp meal is about $75 of this, and I could have used blood or bone meal instead and saved money, but you can read in the article I linked to and see why I chose kelp meal. This made about 25 gallons of fertilizer, enough to cover all my ~3000 sq ft @ 4-6 qts/100 sq ft. I will probably go through half of another bag of seed meal this year to have enough for side dressing the heavier feeding vegetables, but the other ingredients should be enough for the next 2 or 3 years. That boils down to ~$60 a year over the next 3 years for all the fertilizer I need, and my compost is free.

This system (compost, COF, and cover crops) is far better than simply using water soluble synthetic fertilizers; it provides all the major and minor plant nutrients, improves the soil tilth with the addition of decomposed organic matter, feeds soil biota and increases soil biological activity, controls soil erosion and nutrient leaching, and builds a solid foundation of soil health that will help the garden produce for years. $60 a year seems like a pretty good deal to me.

*the cottonseed meal in this batch is not organic and probably GM, but the kelp meal is organic. I have since found that I get organic linseed meal locally, which is what I will use in the future. The mined substances, rock phosphate (OMRI listed) and limes, are minerals so they're pretty much organic...

Cover crop cutting

Clover. Lots of clover.

The crimson clover cover crop sown late in the fall is doing great in some beds, and not so good on others (the far beds in the photo). Our winter came very late this year, and I held off on clearing out the beds and getting the cover crop sown for as long as possible so I could keep picking off my tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and beans. Turns out I waited too long. I got half of the garden beds planted early enough, but I was too late in getting the other half the cover crop in, so it was frozen out after a few months. Not a huge deal, but I didn't like the beds sitting bare while winter and spring rains pounded down on them with no protection from erosion, compaction, and leaching away of nutrients. Learned my lesson.

I started cutting it by hand (slowly) with my little Japanese hand-held scythe, but soon enough brought out the weed-whacker, which made shorter work of it. Raked it all up and put it on the compost pile. Hopefully the roots remaining in the soil will break down over the next couple weeks as the bed starts to dry out, and I'll be able to turn over the top 6" of each bed, add compost and fertilizer and plant!

It didn't create as much organic matter as I thought it would; mixed with horse manure this will break down and probably only provide enough compost for maybe an inch over two 25' beds. So next year I need to get it planted earlier in all the beds, or possibly sow a large area of crimson clover in a section of the pasture just for composting material...I think chickens will eat it too, so it can be turned into eggs!

March madness

Seed starting that is. The last few weeks I've been starting lots of plants for the garden this year. So to get up to speed:

I've started all my first round of brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower), lettuce, some leeks and onions, 9 varieties of tomato, 3 kinds of pepper, tomatillos, and eggplant. Outside, I sowed some spinach and arugula in my cold frame. The soil is getting closer every week to being workable, so in a few weeks I should be able to officially break ground and start planting seriously outside. I can't wait!


I built a new light rack for my seedlings this year. Really simple, just a 1x2 frame holding two 2-tube T-8 fixtures. I made it to so there was room for four standard size nursery flats under it, and so it fit on the laundry room counter.

In other news, I finally found some good manure! Craigslist ad lead to a very large pile of horse poo - a one time $5 loading fee and I was told I could come back as many times as I wanted. The manure is very good; no wood chips, just a little hay bedding mixed in, and it has been sitting since last summer, so it is fairly well composted. I took the oppurtunity to break down my compost pile and rebuild the unfinished portion with the addition of manure. Last year my pile did not heat up as well as I hoped, so this should help.


I'm getting another pickup load this week, which, if it's as broken down as the last load, I'll spread on the pasture garden to be plowed in a few weeks from now.

Late Winter Garden

We've had the warmest winter in a long time. Northwest Washington broke all kinds of records his year - highest average temperature in Jan for about the last 100 yrs, we're 2.5" short on rainfall for the last 3 months, and the number of days above 50 degrees for this time of year has never been greater - basically the weather has been awesome! Plants and trees around here have responded accordingly - spring bulbs are blooming a month early and fruit trees are weeks ahead of schedule. The vegetable garden has woken up as well.

Overwintered lettuce in the cold frame has starting growing again after going dormant during the coldest months. On sunny days, I have to remember to slide off the glass top to keep the lettuce from cooking, only to cover it at night to protect from near freezing temperatures.

Overwintered purple sprouting Broccoli has begun to push small heads - we'll be eating fresh broccoli soon! In the background a couple rows to the left, October planted garlic is already 8 inches tall.

The crimson clover cover crop has started to take off as well. In about 2 weeks I'll be cutting it down and turning it under to decompose for a few weeks before transplants start to go in.

The only thing I have to be careful of is getting ahead of myself. When it's 60 degrees out in February, it's really tempting to start planting seeds and turning over the soil, but the thing to remember about Washington weather is that a clear sunny day can easily turn into a few inches of snow overnight...

Winter studying

The cold winter months (or, on our case, the long, dark, rainy months), when there is not a whole lot to do in the garden, are a great time to tackle a few books. I read every night before I go to bed, and I've been working on two books this year.

I learned a lot about year-round vegetable growing from Eliot Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" when I read it last year, so this year I picked up another of his books, "The New Organic Grower".

Like his other title, this book is geared towards the more serious home gardener, market gardener, or small farm, and covers all the intricacies of a complete farm system, down the minuscule, but important, details. The most useful part of this book to me (so far) has been his recommendations for an 8-year crop rotation including green manure rotation. He lays out a time-tested system for vegetable rotation and cover crop sequence that will keep the ground covered for 95% of the year, either producing food or improving the soil and building fertility. I will be using this system starting this year.

The other book I have been working on is Gene Logsdon's "Small Scale Grain Raising".

Over past year I've become interested in trying to grow certain grains. I am a homebrewer, so barley is an obvious one to try, but oats, certain wheat varieties, sorghum, and rye (and others I am sure I will discover as I keep reading) can all be grown in our climate. A year's supply or more of any of these grains can be grown on as little as 1/16th of an acre each (that's roughly four 50' rows)! This year I will be trying sorghum in the summer, and probably will plant wheat and barley in the fall for overwintering.

I also finished up my garden review spreadsheet for last year's season, and am using it to plan this year's quantities to grow. Still some decisions to make on varieties and final layout, but soon I'll be starting seed again!

Big Brown

You can only haul so much lumber, sand, building block, and cement in a hatchback Subaru until you start ripping upholstery, scratching up the dash (oops), and upsetting the missus...Thankfully, an old, well-loved Ford truck was recently offered to us. It is perfect for us; beat-up enough for liability-only insurance and no worries about the paint or chucking logs into the bed, but in good enough shape (after $300 in tune-up parts and a few weekends of work) to have plenty of life left.

It's an '89 F250 extended cab 4x4.

The 4-wheel drive works, proven here as I attempted to drive it into the water-logged field, and then required it to get back out.

We live in the county, so delivery fees for gravel or dirt can be $60 (that's right, $60 of dirt costs me $120). So now, sheets of plywood, dimensional lumber longer than 8', towing, and "fitting in" in the county are all go. Plus, we got a multi-car price reduction for insurance, so it's not costing us much for how rarely we'll be driving it (we're still a one-car household for commuting). Just wish it got better than 10 miles per gallon...can't have it all I guess.

A few cold frames

I was able to finish up a couple cold frames last week. I've been working on them bit by bit, as I get a chance and whenever I can stop by the lumberyard or hardware store.

These are pretty standard cold frames - based on Eliot Coleman's "dutch light" design from his very useful book, "Four Season Harvest". I salvaged 2 large double-paned pieces of glass from a set of french doors, then split the panes apart to get 4 glass pieces. I cut a 1/4" groove in 2x2 fir, mitred the corners and framed in the glass. The sides are 2x12 in the back and 2x8 in the front, with a 2x2 runner around the bottom touching the ground. This way, in a couple years, the 2x2 will rot out and can be replaced, instead of the sides degrading.

The frames end up about 28" x 68", and fit over my ~30" beds perfectly. I made two frames this size, and will use my two other glass tops together on one larger cold frame. The green oak leaf lettuce above is already benefiting from the protection - it's in the mid-20's outside.

Oh yeah, and today it started snowing, so good timing!

2009 season

We finally had our first frost, which, to me, signals the end of the growing season. It came a month late, so I had plenty of time to prepare for it.

Only hardy crops left now. With a proper greenhouse or cold frame, I could protect more tender vegetables through winter. I have some lettuce, spinach, and arugula still going, so I hope to finish up a few cold frames to keep them alive.

Purple sprouting broccoli leaf showing off some frost (and some slug damage).

We had an amazing spring and summer this year. By far the hottest and driest since I've lived in Whatcom county. Up here, rain can be just as much an enemy as an ally. In a wet year, we fight mildews, molds, and early blights, and plant twice as many tomatoes and peppers as we think we need to make up for pitiful harvests. In a dry year, we don't complain - just water a bit more and enjoy the sun!

Frost free from March 10 - November 14; that's 249 days, or 8 months and 4 days, an extra long season for us. You can see that we have a pretty reliable wind, primarily a breeze from the SW in the summer. Note the change in wind direction from late summer into fall. We get our fall and winter "Nor'easters" (cold and powerful NE windstorms from the Fraser Valley in Canada) pretty regularly that time of year. In October and November, it's pretty clear that the spikes in average wind speed fall on the days of NE winds. Also of note is the rarity of rainfall this year - only 3 or 4 days of measurable (and it was barely that) precipitation from mid-May through mid-September.

For me, keeping track of the weather each year is crucial. I plan when to start my seeds in late-winter based on when our last spring frost will occur. I calculate at what date in summer I must plant fall crops in order to mature them before cold weather sets in based on our first frost date. The length of the growing season helps me determine which varieties of certain crops to grow, based on whether or not our season is long and hot enough. For a real farmer (one who depends on farming for their livelihood) favorable weather can mean keeping the farm and poor weather can mean bankruptcy. Yikes!

Squeakers.

Two weeks ago we had some friends over. We were showing them around the house and property and they wanted to see the pigeons. I opened up the door so they could look in the coop and out of NOWHERE, Buk (our dog) darted his head in and grabbed a pigeon! I grabbed Buk and he dropped it right away, and it flew up on the house. I caught it a day later. The strange part was that it was sitting in the front corner of the coop, where there is no perch, so I couldn't even see it there when I opened the door. Fast forward to a few days ago, when I was feeding them in the morning, I stuck my head inside and was surprised to see two yellow fluff-balls in a feather-nest in the corner! The bird was in the corner sitting on eggs!

These are about 4 or 5 days old, with eyes still shut. I thought the back one was not alive, but I watched and it rolled over. Unfortunately, it didn't make it for too long, and was still the next day. It was probably the second egg to hatch, and I read that the second, weaker pigeon of the two will sometimes not make it. So we will have one baby pigeon this winter.

The doting parent. I have nest boxes, but I didn't want to put any in until the spring, when warmer weather would make it easier on the chicks, but the birds were resourceful and made their own. I also read that I shouldn't put in a nest now, or move the baby into a nest, or the parents may reject it. So I'll just let them be. Exciting though!

Cover crops

The cover crops/green manures are up in both the main garden and the field plot. They need to get established before it gets too cold, but they won't do a lot of growing through winter.

Crimson clover is in all the beds in the main garden. It's mainly a nitrogen fixer, but will make tons of growth in early spring and add plenty of organic matter when it's turned under before planting. You can see the winter crops that are left (not as much as I'd hoped with no cold frames).

The field plot cover crop mix is slower to establish, and won't put on much growth at all over winter. In spring it will start early, and grow into a thick, waist-high stand before being cut and turned under in late spring before planting summer crops. This mix contains Austrian field peas (nitrogen-fixer, organic matter), hairy vetch (nitrogen-fixer), cereal rye (deep, penetrating root system and tall stalks for legumes to climb), and canola/rape seed (organic matter). All four will decompose quickly (~2 weeks) after turning under in spring. During the winter, they'll help control erosion and runoff, and keep nutrients from leaching out.

Fall weather finally arrives

It's not cold yet, but the rain is here. Tonight it is pouring, we are supposed to get half an inch. It's also very windy, with sustained 10 mph winds and gusts of 35 that are expected to reach 50 or 60 mph later tonight. This is normal fall weather for up here.

This picture was taken at about 5 pm a few days ago...

and this was the same time the next day. You could say the weather fluctuates.

Final fall work

Finally was able to finish winterizing the garden this weekend. Our first frost hasn't come yet, and it looks like it won't for a few weeks, so I still had time to get the cover crop planted in the last few beds. I cleared out the beds of beans, tomatoes, and peppers, the last remaining hot weather veggies.

This year my tomato seedlings got a little lanky. When I transplanted them I plucked off all the lower leaves and planted them deep and at an angle, with all of the stem buried to the uppermost leaves. I had read that they would sprout roots all along the stem, and they did! On the far right is the original root ball, with roots that grew all along the stem. I really had to fight these stems out of the ground, so the depth and spread of the roots for each plant had to be many feet.

This is from a few weeks ago, but I picked about this many green tomatoes off the vines as I pulled them.

The eggplant did awesome this year - we had way more than we knew what to do with. I picked the last of them and we'll just slice and freeze it all and try to use it this winter.

This is Hansel hybrid eggplant. Very sweet when picked small. I probably got about 20 this size and 20 half this size, from 4 crowded plants.

The remaining peppers. I will probably not do this well again with peppers unless I grow them under plastic - this summer was just too abnormally good. I picked a grocery bag FULL when I pulled these (I got 3 more bags full over the summer). I also hung two entire chile plants in the garage to dry the peppers - we'll see how that goes.

It's said that almost any veggie that follows a bean crop will do well, and I have to believe it. The beans left the bed in amazing shape - I can only hope the beds will be this nice again in the spring. I sowed crimson clover in these two beds, and filled in all the remaining bare spots in the other beds. Ideally, I would've had compost ready to spread and mix in the top few inches, but I'll just have to do that next spring instead. In the emptied pepper bed, I got my garlic in.

I put in about 125 cloves of Chet's Italian Red garlic. We eat about a head a week (we use a lot of garlic!) and I like to plant twice as much as I think I'll need, to cover losses, to make up for the smaller bulbs, and to have plenty to give away. I bought 2 lbs of organic seed garlic cloves from a local Deming, WA farmer. This variety is a mild softneck with good keeping qualities. Planting in fall after colder weather sets in will prevent the tops from growing, but will allow roots to establish over winter. They'll start growing earlier than if planted in the spring, will grow larger heads, and should finish bulbing by July.

So that will pretty much take care of the garden for this year. I didn't get my cold frames built in time for fall, so I don't have many semi-hardy crops to carry through the winter. I do have purple sprouting broccoli, cabbage, carrots, leeks, and Brussels sprouts, none of which need protection over our mild winters. I will build the cold frames this winter and use them next year in the early spring. I have some other projects for the winter as well, including repairing and restoring a few implements for the Gibson, getting to work on a chicken coop for next year, and getting some work done on my old truck I have stored in the shop...It will be a nice change of pace from all the hard work in the vegetable garden this year.

Fruit trees in

Woke up to sunshine this morning and got the fruit trees planted. The orchard is expanding into the pasture, and I have at least one more row planned for the future...

Compost turnin'

Not my favorite activity. Every time I do it I wish I had one of those silly plastic compost tumblers (not really). Turning is the only way to know how far along the compost has come, as the outside of the pile generally looks about that same as when it was built. When rebuilding the un-composted parts go on the bottom and in the middle of the pile, and the more finished around it. Turning also serves to oxygenate the pile, allowing the soil microbe colony to continue to grow and feed on the uncomposted material as it is turned into the middle of the pile.

I have 3 piles right now. This is the core of the most recently built pile. You can see that the middle of the pile is fairly well composted, and the outside is still raw hay. This is mostly because I did not water this pile at all after I built it, so the outside dried and didn't decompose, while the middle broke down.

About half way done. Still some recognizable pieces in there, which means it isn't done yet. If you look closely you can see quite a few sowbugs in there - the pile was teeming with them, literally hundreds. That's good, cause they eat plant litter.


After rebuilding the two round piles, I wrapped them in some black plastic I had lying around in an attempt to keep them from drying out. Usually you wouldn't cover a compost pile, because it needs oxygen, but these piles are open on top and built on pallets for air flow from the bottom, so they should be fine. I'll throw the last bits of the garden on top, and let these sit until spring, when the finished compost will be spread in the garden.