The Modern Victory Garden

One of the many slang euphemisms for money is “Lettuce” - a reference to the green color of American paper currency.   If lettuce actually were money, I would be a wealthy person right now.                                          

I have always been able to grow decent lettuce crops on this property.   The combination of well-amended soil, and a climate that wants to be on the cool and damp side a large majority of the year - certainly makes crops like lettuce, spinach, celery, cabbages, and peas easier to grow.   This year however, has been even wetter and cooler for longer than is normal and the resulting abundance of lettuce has been a bit hard to keep up with.   I have been harvesting regularly from the main lettuce patch and from the container planting of Merlot lettuces for about six weeks now.   Our menu has been dominated by large lettuce salads for quite some time as a result.   However, after six weeks of steady cut and come again harvests, the patch was starting to show some indications it was getting ready to bolt to seed.   Rather than let the patch just wind down, I decided to do a hard harvest of the entire bed to ensure I got the maximum harvest from it possible while the crop was still in peak condition.   I had to work late last night, but I got home around 8 pm and was able to go ahead and harvest the bed thanks to the longer daylight hours of mid June.   The patch is now emptied of lettuces and will be amended and then planted up this coming weekend with another planting of carrots for the winter harvest.            

From this planting area, I harvested over 5 lbs of lettuces.                         

The lettuce was rinsed carefully, trimmed of any less than perfect leaves and then spun dry in my lettuce spinner. I then placed the clean and dry produce in a large gallon zip lock bag with a paper towel inside to help further reduce moisture.   I was quite aggressive about trimming away less than perfect leaves (which went on the compost pile) and yet still managed to get four very full bags of lettuce that went into the refrigerator.                                 

We will be eating on this lettuce for many days, but have no fear that once gone this is the last of the lettuces for us this summer.   I still have a large container of Merlot lettuces on the deck going strong, and I have another bed of lettuces that I direct seeded not long ago that is now ready to be harvested. 

While it actually may not be money, I feel rather rich with the large stash of cool “lettuce” residing in the kitchen vault (otherwise known as the fridge!).  

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener

Many items in my summer garden line up are slowed down considerably due to the lack of any real warmth and our sun that insists on hiding behind heavy clouds more often than not.   The temperatures have moderated somewhat over the past few days though, and I am noticing that the garden is responding with more vigorous growth.   The cucumbers, mesclun mix, and the most recently planted lettuces have particularly grown a lot in the last several days.   The cucumbers are not quite tall enough yet to lie over onto the support structure, but it won’t be long before they will be.

The blueberries in pots and growing in front of the shop are really loaded with berries this year.   I hope I can manage to keep the birds at bay so we can harvest most of them when ripe.                                     

We have errands and other activities planned for most of the weekend, so my time in the garden will be limited.   However, I did manage to get the container plants watered today and I gave the broccoli and cabbage plants a spray of Bt solution this morning.   A few of the broccoli plants are now forming central heads (at last!) and so I want to make sure that I keep up the regular bi-weekly Bt applications to avoid having a harvest of worm infested broccoli crowns.   Broccoli is one of my favorite vegetables and I can hardly wait to start harvesting.

I am still swimming in lettuces at the moment.   We are eating lettuce salads daily (dinner and often lunch too) and I am still not keeping up with it.   However, the current big lettuce patch is looking like it wants to bolt soon, and when it does I will pull them up and replant that section of garden with another bed of carrots.   Tonight’s dinner harvest still included more greens (swiss chard) but it also included zucchini, green onions (green and red), and sugar snap peas. These were turned into a stir-fry made with lean pork strips, the garden vegetables, and cooked and drained chinese egg noodles tossed with a sweet and spicy Shanghai Orange sauce.                   

It’s nice to have sugar snap peas and zucchini back on the menu to break up the recent steady diet of lettuces.   I have more coming right along behind this first zucchini and I am looking forward to a bounty of zucchini soon.               

While it is great having lettuce available daily, I must confess that I am overjoyed to have other crops starting to become mature enough for harvest.   If only the raspberries and strawberries would start to ripen up soon too - I would be in harvest heaven!                                   

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener

I have a quite a few good sized garden beds available to me for planting up my garden, but I invariably use a lot of container plantings to augment the traditional garden crops.   Containers allow me to plant extra plants I have that would otherwise end up on the compost pile, they allow me to use some small areas in the garden that get good sun but are not good candidates for a regular raised bed to be installed, and containers can be kept in the greenhouse until the weather really gets warm before moving outside and can be again brought inside in the fall to extend the crop’s harvest.   Lots of reasons to use containers for planting vegetables and berries even if you have a large garden area available to you.                                   

I use some containers for more permanent plantings – such as my pots of herbs.   This is some chives that I recently replanted, French thyme, and my cat’s personal pot of catnip (yes he is spoiled!).                                   

I also have several large containers on our side deck that are planted in blueberries.   These plants have really gotten big this year and are loaded with blooms and small berries.   I need to get some netting over them soon if I want to keep some of the future harvest from the birds.                             

The deck is a great spot to grow things on my property as it gets good sun exposure and would represents a colossal waste of space if it did not serve more than the one purpose of providing us a place to sit and commune with nature every once in a great while.   Right next to the blueberries is my rectangular pot of Merlot lettuces.   They don’t look very photogenic at the moment because we have been continuing to harvest from them for many weeks and I cut a bunch of it as recently as yesterday.                        

Just a bit further along where the deck wraps around to the back of the house, I have four containers of Sweet Italian peppers growing in medium/large pots.   It has not been a good year for peppers and basil because of the constant wet and cool conditions, but these container planted peppers are holding their own despite that.                                            

Tucked into a sunny corner of the garden are four containers of super early started Siletz tomatoes.   They were in the greenhouse for a very long time before I finally moved them out of doors.                                    

Inside the greenhouse I have five more containers of tomatoes growing – all of them Celebrity.   Celebrity is a robust semi determinate tomato that reliably produces a nice mid to late season tomato but needs the extra season extension of the greenhouse to ensure fruit maturity in our climate.   They always grow a huge main stem that is reminiscent of a tree trunk.              

Not exactly crops in pots, but the chinese cabbages, broccoli, swiss chard, and kale that I started about a week and a half ago are all up and growing well.   I moved them out of the greenhouse today to let them soak up some sunshine (briefly while it was here!).                                                      

Growing crops in pots is a great way to add greater variety to your harvest options and allows you to maximize available growing areas that would otherwise be underutilized.   Do you grow vegetables or fruits in pots?

While I appreciate a beautiful flower garden as much as anyone,   I honestly cannot bring myself to spend more than a passing amount of time and resources on flower gardens anymore.     There was a time where I devoted much more energy to them, but those days appear to be behind me.    My heart belongs to the food production garden because it has both beauty AND good taste!     So many vegetable and fruit plants put on such a nice flower show and then go on to produce food for our table.                       

Who needs a flower garden when we have our food production gardens that nourishes both body and soul?    

Today was largely spent attending my daughter’s high school graduation ceremony and enjoying a late lunch celebration with visiting family members afterwards at our home.   Lindsay has been in the running start program for the past two years, and graduated today not only with a high school diploma, but also with an AA degree from Olympic College.   She graduated with honors and will soon be leaving us to attend Lehigh University.   Here she is with her Grandma and Grandpa...        

…and with my husband and myself.                     

After a tasty lunch and lots of visiting, we moved out to the garden for a stroll and lots more visiting!   I always enjoy sharing my garden with others and there were lots of things to look at and talk about.   Such as tomatoes that are getting quite sizeable and some of which are already setting fruit.                   

The peas are forming nice pods – both the sugar snaps and the shelling peas.   In fact, I ate the first Cascadia sugar snap pea this afternoon while standing and visiting in the garden. (Yum!)                           

The celery is now big enough that I am making small harvests from it.             

The greens are definitely the star attraction in the garden at the moment though.   The Savoy Ace cabbages are beautiful and the lettuce patch continues to be lush and abundant.                                                     

Earlier this week I hand pollinated a female zucchini bloom and it is progressing on in growth.

We ended the garden walk by giving a brief tour of the chicken coop and introducing our little flock of hens to everyone.   Like the garden, they are certainly growing as well.                                       

A fun day of celebrating, eating good food, visiting, and strolling in the garden I love.   Good things.                                                   

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener

The celery and some lettuces have been in need of transplanting for more than a week now.   I really had to get this taken care today as the celery plants were getting rather root bound.   They have been completely hardened off and were sitting outside unprotected (morning and night) for more than a week now.          

The bed area to be planted was given a broadcasting of all-purpose organic fertilizer, which was then lightly raked in.   I used my six-inch planting jig to establish the plant spacing.                          

I then planted 12 Utah 52-70 Improved celery, 4 Red celery (seeds given to me by Dan), and 24 Super Gourmet Blend lettuces.                        

Right next to the newly planted area is the bed of spring broccoli.   They are coming along nicely.                                             

The spinach patch has gotten to the stage where I can start harvesting some baby spinach leaves next week.   I may even pick a few leaves to add to some lettuces for tonight’s dinner salad.                                           

The pea patch and onion/garlic patch have also really taken off in the past week.   The allium bed has two kinds of garlic (Elephant and Inchelium Red) and several types of onions some started from seed and others from sets (Walla Walla, Candy, Yellow Storage, and Sweet Red onions).              

The Elephant Garlic is particularly impressive this year!              

The set grown onions are racing ahead of the onions started from seed.   These are the Yellow Storage onions.                                   

The blueberries and bush pie cherry plants are loaded with buds and are about to bloom.  The asparagus patch is getting more active in sending up fat shoots.   If the weather would warm up a bit (it’s rather chilly today), everything would explode with new growth and blossoms.   Unfortunately, the weeds and grass in the walkways are also bursting with new growth and I am going to have to pull the weed whacker out of winter hibernation soon and give everything a tidy up.   

Purchased and brought home our chicks today.   Six Black Sex-Link chicks that within a 95% confidence level should all be females.    Had the brood box already set up with a heat lamp in one corner, soft wood shavings for litter, chick starter feed and feeder, and a chick water container set up on a block of wood to reduce the amount of bedding kicked into the water.   The brood box is set up in our shop, which has heaters running in it.                  

They all seem to be doing well with the transition – eating, drinking, sleeping, and busily scratching away in the shavings.   I took a short video to share them with you.  No narration, just the sound of tiny peeps!   The image is red tinged at times because the heat lamp has a red bulb.                     

                

The sun came out (finally) today and I set all the tomato plants outside to allow them to enjoy direct sunlight.   The entire bunch is getting quite large and it is time to begin a slow hardening off process with all of them.             

Short post today.    I can hardly tear myself away from watching those chicks.    Simply adorable and it is clear that they are all unique individuals.   My daughter is suggesting we name them after the female characters in “Gone with the Wind” (Scarlet, Melanie, etc.  ) and if by chance we do end up with a rooster… he can be Rhett.    What do you think we should name them?

After several days of high winds, driving rains, and substantially colder weather, it was nice that it was at least a little less stormy today.   In fact, this afternoon we had a brief hour where the sun made an appearance.   I took advantage of it and rushed the tomatoes outside to let them drink it in while they could.            

It did not last very long though.   As soon as the sun went back behind dark storm clouds, the temps started dropping fast so they were all quickly shuttled right back into the greenhouse.   Too much time and energy invested in these tomato seedlings to let a moment of inattention take them down!             

There is not a lot to do in the garden at the moment, but I did have one task to get completed this weekend – which was to start the cucurbit family seeds (cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins, and winter squash) and the sweet corn.   I was toying with the idea of direct seeding the corn this year, but changed my mind and went back to my usual practice of starting them indoors.   Our soil temperatures do not warm up very fast and corn really needs warmth to germinate properly.   Now that the tomato seedlings are all moved out to the green house, there was plenty of room under the lights for this next big round of seed starting.      

These seed trays were covered with a plastic humidity dome and placed on heat mats and under grow lights in the shop.                                    

Elsewhere in the garden, things are progressing despite the cool and wet conditions.   About a week ago I moved the container of Merlot lettuces out of the greenhouse and out onto the deck area.    It has been cold and really wet ever since but these plants seem to be thriving.   In fact, they finally turned the merlot color that they are named for.                            

The pea patch is almost fully emerged now too.   I was worried that the soggy and cold conditions would give them problems but it appears that they are unfazed.     Look how nice the spacing is on this planting!   The new planting jig worked really well.                          

The onion sets have also really come alive too.    That is the garlic patch behind the onions.                                                       

The broccoli plants I transplanted a week and half ago are really doing well with the protection of a grow tunnel cover.    Once the weather stabilizes just a bit, I will be removing this cover.                                                      

I have already harvested and used all of the first pac choi planting and the chinese cabbages too.   I am now harvesting asparagus but it is still just small amounts at any given time.   I can see some really fat spears poking up in multiple places in the bed, so I think if the weather got just a bit sunnier and warm we would be in asparagus heaven!   I still have some pac choi plants (second sowing) growing in an outside bed along with lots of kale and lettuces that should keep us going until then.   Coming along behind all of that is the spinach patch.   I am really looking forward to the first baby spinach salads of the season.   Yum!

I was fortunate in that I enjoyed a few really beautiful days during the past week while I was taking time off from work.   The weather dramatically shifted by the end of the week though and we have had some substantial rain and windstorms ever since.   Despite that the early season garden crops of lettuce, kale, mache, chinese cabbages, green onions, pac choi, asparagus, rhubarb and peas are all growing rapidly.   The fresh season harvests have been slowly increasing and while the total harvest poundage year-to-date through March 31st is only 16.75 lbs - the trend is on a steep curve upwards.         

I did manage to get the entire potato patch planting completed before the weather turned foul on me.                                                          

I wrapped it up last Wednesday while it was sunny and warmer and the next two days it just poured rain, which really watered it all in well for me.          

The pea patch has sprouted and is coming along well despite the fact that the bed and plants are looking a little soggy from all the rain.   They could use a return of some sunshine soon.   The tomato seedlings are all piling up in the greenhouse where they are protected from the winds and occasional hail and are keeping warm enough to keep growing.   The super early Siletz plants are still being given the red carpet treatment and are carted into the house each night to protect them from the colder night time temps.   They are thriving on the TLC.                    

Meanwhile, the other tomatoes are trying to catch up.   Last week during the warmer and more sunshine filled days, I put many of the tomatoes outside to get direct sun and begin the slow hardening off process.   They are definitely “happy campers” when they are outside in the bright sun.                            

Things are progressing along nicely in the garden and it is good to have the fresh harvests increasing again.  

The strength and length of available sun is obviously ramping up significantly.   In addition, the arc of the sun in the sky has moved higher such that the sun is now starting to clear the tall trees that surround our property occassionally.     The greenhouse and back garden beds in particular are showing real appreciation for the infusion of solar energy.   The greenhouse plantings and trays of seedlings have just taken off this week.   In fact, I need to harvest the kale plantings soon and the onion seedlings really should be planted out into the garden this coming weekend.   A sure sign that spring has really arrived - is the rhubarb is up in force. 

I found the first spear of asparagus poking through the soil this past weekend too!    It’s small and does not show up well in a photo, but like the rhubarb it makes me happy as they are the first substantial crops of the early spring garden.      

The replacement raspberry plants were supposed to arrive on Friday but did not.   With my husband’s help we forged ahead despite that to largely finish up the raspberry patch rejuvenation project on Saturday.   The big thing still on the to do list (besides planting the replacement plants) was to construct the supports for the raspberry beds.   Together we got them constructed and installed in no time at all.    

Today, the raspberry plants finally arrived and I made a point to leave work on time so I could get home before dark and plant them up.   No pictures to share because it was getting dark by the time I finished, but they are all in.   Now the only task I have left to do on this spring project is to reinstall the drip irrigation hose down the bed of raspberries.   Hopefully these newest bare root plants will all break dormancy and help fill in the missing portions of the raspberry bed.         

It’s a good thing the early spring crops are taking hold and starting to produce.   The inventory of freezer items from the garden is getting down to a low level because we have been leaning on them so hard for months now.   The canned items are less depleted overall but certain items (like dilly green beans) have long been used up.   The pickled peppers on the other hand have been hardly touched.   They taste great but honestly, we prefer diced frozen (roasted and raw) peppers and I am having a hard time finding ways to work them into our menus.   If you have any great ideas to share on this – I would love to hear them.   The late fall/winter crops are essentially done for the year with the exception that I still have some over wintered carrots to harvest, and there are parsnips still in the ground too - but they are going to seed and need to just be pulled.   I think the preserved supply level was just about right this year and we have not been wanting for much of anything as a result.   The only storage/preserved crop that is running out far too soon this year are the onions.   2009 was a rather bad production year for onions for some reason.   We used up the storage onions a while ago and have been using my freezer supply of diced onions but they too are fast running out and the green onions in the garden and greenhouse are still too small yet to harvest.   We may have to actually reduce down (possibly even stop) the onion usage for cooking for a while.   Now that is a true hardship because I use onions in just about everything I cook it seems.   Hopefully the green onions will get a kick-start from the increasing sun energy and I will not have to endure the onion drought for too long.   To avoid having this problem in 2010, I am planting significantly more onions and hedging my bets by planting not only onions started from seeds, but also sets, and my usual multiplier onion patch as well.   Keep your fingers crossed for me that 2010 is a better onion year altogether.            

Got any good ideas on how to incorporate pickled peppers into our evening meals?