Blight!

Oh our tomatoes!  I think the gardener's heart in me might just be breaking. 

This year we built a large, very large by our standards, bed for these babies of ours and in the late spring, I faithfully transplanted all (or most) of our volunteers to their permanent {summer} home.  Because I have never grown tomatoes from seed before, I knew that this year would be experimental for me {and that there might be some casualties) but I never dreamed of this!

Nearly all of our tomato plants are dead!  Ack!  AND to add insult to injury, the hens are pecking away at the few that are indeed ripening!  It feels like such a sad climax to what has been an only mediocre season in our garden.

The late coming of spring, the extraordinary amount of rain, the hens, and my relative inexperience have ensured a pretty poor showing from the garden this year.  I suppose I have learned a few things (note the grumbling and arms crossed) and have made some mistakes that I won't make again (keep the hens out of the beds, for one).  Most importantly, though, it is another lesson in relinquishing control (for me).  Some years will be good; others won't.

Harvesting

There is so much coming from the garden right now.  We have:

     :edamame: pulled the plants along with the beans out of the ground.  Can't wait to serve                             them with some sea salt tomorrow

     :Cubanelle peppers: think I might be the only one in the house who likes them.  More for me!

     :tomatoes: a garden visitor got to our first one before we did!

     :jalapenos: these I have to share.  Jalapeno poppers.  Yum!!!

   :cucumbers: slicing and pickling.  Now I just need to get my courage up for some canning.  Does it make you nervous too?

and so much more...  Life is good.

                        

Saving Seeds

Seeds have always been such a mystery to me--I mean, where and how do they materialize?  I remember looking inside a not yet bloomed sunflower last year for the seeds it supposedly had.  Yeah, as I suspected, no seeds.  These seed thingys, I thought, are for someone else to hold, behold, and plant.  Not for me.

But this spring, I bought some of these thingys to plant in my own garden, to plant from seed.  Our first go together indoors was not so great.  My seed trays that I faithfully brought in and out of doors each day (until I stopped remembering) didn't like my forgetful ways or the the cold spring we had this year.  Direct seeding, though, worked!  What fun it was for us to put a little pellet, or flake, or tiny ball in the ground and watch it turn into carrots, peas, spinach, and lettuce.

Seed saving is the next logical step for me on this path, but back to one of the original questions--where and how do these seeds materialize?  Lo and behold, and again with nature's unpredictable predictability, there they were hanging off one of our dill plants, which had evidently gone to seed.  Wow!

What a truly cool world.

Nature Study Monday: Honeybee

If last year was the year of the garden, and this year is the year of the chickens, next year will most certainly be the year of the honeybee.  We don't have a hive yet (that I know of), but these buzzers are humming all over our flowers (and yours too, I hope).

I have a lot to learn about our endangered friends before they move into our backyard.  I do know that our food crops are dependent on them and that all of us need to everything we can to keep them safe, healthy, and happy.  This documentary helped give me a better understanding of how essential honeybees are to our planet.

Honeybees have fuzzy bodies and shiny abdomens accompanied by thin wings.  They live in colonies of up to 25000.  Females can sting only once, and males cannot sting at all.  They are generally calm and not aggressive.

Around the Farmette

Inspired by Farmama...

There have been some successes, some failures, and some question marks in the garden so far this year:

: what I thought was going to be a small green bean harvest is turning into a huge one.  We could feed our family of five heapfuls every other night.  Yum.

: unbelievably (to me), we have at least one cantaloupe.  Yum.  Yum.

: not sure what is going on with the broccoli again this year.  Last year it didn't come in until September.  It looks like that is when we will be harvesting it again this year (or not at all)

: pickling cucumbers are coming in all over the place and when these plants are done, we have a second and third round at the ready.

: our edamame plants have beans all over them but I am still unclear about when to harvest.  Have you grown edamame before?

: of our nine (albeit young) blueberry bushes, I think we might have harvested ten berries.    I love those catbirds but next year I am not going to share all of my berries with them.

: our lovely lettuce has only just now bolted so we have been eating a fresh salad nearly every night this summer.

: our raspberry bushes did not flower this year.  They are only a year old.  I am hoping this will be different next year.

: carrots are growing strong and coming out about 8-10 inches long tasting of the earth, their green, brown and orangeness is awe-inspiring.

: our cauliflower hasn't come to a head yet.  Hmmmm.


How does your garden grow this summer?

Nature Study Monday: Angelica

I think I might dub 2011 as The Summer of Garden Herbs.  We have so many growing this year and I have so much to learn about them.  Some are very familiar to me, the sites, smells, and feel of them, like chamomile and lavender, for instance.  Others like Jerusalem Artichoke or Angelica are totally new.

Each time I visit a nursery, I go straight to the section on herbs.  It seems that they all have the basics--sage, thyme, basil, etc...  but there might be one or two obscure ones that I happen upon.  This is how I came upon our new Angelica plant.  I had heard of it before, but had no idea why I might want it in my garden.  I did notice that it likes some shade and I had that to offer so we were in business.

Angelica is a biennial.  If the plant is left to flower, it will die in its second year.  I am hoping that mine will drop seeds and then reseed itself.  We will see.  It likes moist soil and "speckled" shade and is native to northeastern North America (another great reason for me to plant it).

For medicinal purposes, the roots, leaves, and seeds (I believe) are used to lower fevers, quell coughs, and soothe colicky babies.  The stalks of the plants are candied and sold as sweets. 

Hmmm... I think I will save that last bit of information from my little ones!

Have you had any experience with Angelica?  Please share!

Nature Study Monday: Angelica

I think I might dub 2011 as The Summer of Garden Herbs.  We have so many growing this year and I have so much to learn about them.  Some are very familiar to me, the sites, smells, and feel of them, like chamomile and lavender, for instance.  Others like Jerusalem Artichoke or Angelica are totally new.

Each time I visit a nursery, I go straight to the section on herbs.  It seems that they all have the basics--sage, thyme, basil, etc...  but there might be one or two obscure ones that I happen upon.  This is how I came upon our new Angelica plant.  I had heard of it before, but had no idea why I might want it in my garden.  I did notice that it likes some shade and I had that to offer so we were in business.

Angelica is a biennial.  If the plant is left to flower, it will die in its second year.  I am hoping that mine will drop seeds and then reseed itself.  We will see.  It likes moist soil and "speckled" shade and is native to northeastern North America (another great reason for me to plant it).

For medicinal purposes, the roots, leaves, and seeds (I believe) are used to lower fevers, quell coughs, and soothe colicky babies.  The stalks of the plants are candied and sold as sweets. 

Hmmm... I think I will save that last bit of information from my little ones!

Have you had any experience with Angelica?  Please share!

Garden Herbs

Our garden this year is filled with herbs of all kinds: some that love sun, some that like shade, some that creep, and one that can get over six feet high!  I am still learning of the culinary and medicinal benefits of each of them.  Here is a sampling of what is growing and how we are using it:

Lemon Balm: makes a lovely addition to chamomile in a tea; I have been adding it to 

salads with a lemon vinaigrette

Oregano: used it tonight to make this

Lemon Verbana:  going to make an oil using this one

Lavender:  drying the flowers for tea and sachets at the moment

Dill:  feeding it to our caterpillars and holding onto it until our cucumbers come in

What herbs are growing in your garden this year and how are you using them?

Nature Study Monday: Roman Chamomile

My most favorite tea in the whole wide world is chamomile.  While it is much too hot right now to enjoy the relaxing effects of it, I am still loving all of the flowers.  

I have never grown chamomile before.  This year I grew most of my plants from seed and bought one for insurance.  It is growing splendidly underneath and next to our blueberry bushes. 

Chamomile is native to Europe and likes full sun.  Ours started flowering a couple of weeks ago and I am looking forward to many more flowers this season!  

On the Farm(ette)

Farmama has gone offline for a while, but I think I will continue the Thursday postings for a while.  It is so much fun...

We have hit a momentary lull in the vegetable harvesting this week.  Our green beans are not producing quite as fast or as much as they did a couple of weeks ago, neither is our lettuce, our strawberries are decidedly done, and the birds are getting to our blueberries faster than we can.

Each year I am learning more about growing our food.  Last year was my first real year in the garden.  I learned spacing, and hilling, and staking, and so much more.  This year I am dabbling with companion planting--I just underplanted carrots by our tomatoes.  Our strawberries, too, are going to have to get friendly with another round of beans due up soon.

Last year I planted all seedlings and this year most of what we are growing was started from seed.  This season I have also done second (and third) plantings of some veggies. Next year? Oh the list of what I want to learn/know/practice goes on and on and on.  Think I'll start with extending the season with a cold frame.

What are you doing differently in your garden this year?

Expanding Our Flock

We have not had great luck in the chickie department this summer.  There was a misstep, a raccoon, and a sickness--so we have gone from seven to four babies.  

Pictured above: a Rhose Island Red and a Buff Orpington

There has been some heart break in our house over the lost little ones (mostly on my part), and we are loving the babies that we do have.  I never thought that owning chickens would come with tears, but here we are, fuddling our way through our first year of owning chickens.  Let's hope it is mostly drama-free from here on out.

Around the Farmette

Farmama is hosting a farm tour each Thursday and we are joining in today...

Slowly the garden grows this year.  The cool weather has kept most of of veggies pretty small, but it looks to be warming up.  The breeze blowing through our kitchen window at the moment though is calling my bluff.

I planted three varieties of cucumbers this year: pickling, slicing and a funny lemon cucumber variety.  They took a while to sprout but are growing happily now alongside some nasturtium transplants.

Our carrot patch is a funny, tangled mess, but they are faring well so far.  I am not sure when to harvest carrots.  I picked one the other day to see how they are faring--it was about three inches.  Any tips?

I planted our buttery garden in a particularly bad patch of dirt in the middle of our yard.  I have been slowly trying to enrich the area with our compost.  Our bee balm seems to be happy about that.

We just added two baby chicks to our growing flock of chickens.  Our Barred Plymouth Rock loves meandering about the garden.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I know where all of our caterpillars are going this year.

What is growing on your spot of land this year?

Returning Home

: from a visit with some of the ones I hold dearest :
: from great Tex-Mex fajitas, margaritas, queso, and hot sauce :
: from my alma mater :
: from bats and caves and much that makes our four year old wide-eyed :
: from the hot, hot, hot :

: to a garden that is overgrown and growing still more each day :
: to sugar snap and shelling peas that saved some very tasty (last) morsels before they are gone for the year :
: to hens that looked more like chicks when we left them :
: to a half-finished quilt and sweater in waiting :
: to friends coming in and leaving out of town :
: and mostly to a sweet (and sick) husband in need of love :

The State of the Garden

Tonight we enjoyed the first fruits of our harvest, and though small in quantity, they were large in taste and a good reminder about what is to come and why it is worth the wait.  Our endive is ready for the picking, the leaves grown long and curly.  I planted too much this year (again) so I am looking for great recipes to use it in, other than your basic salad. I added it to some lemon fusilli in a cream sauce (an Ina Garten recipe), substituting it for arugula, and it was splendid.

Ready for eating was also one solitary radish, which we split five ways, and some young lettuce leaves.  All of our plants have stopped their growing spurt since the sun went away and the rain started.  I can probably count on one hand the amount of hours of sunshine we have had in the past two weeks.

My spinach is struggling this year--the leaves are turning brown and wilting before my eyes.  In an effort to save my plants, I cut those leaves this morning hoping that the new growth will start green and stay that way.  Our cucumbers, just barely sprouting, are being eaten by some sort of insect.  I planted some nasturtium babies all around them--let's hope they do their job well.

What is going on in your garden?

Nature Study Monday: Nasturtium

The perfectly rounded leaves of the nasturtium leave so little that needs to be said.  There are fewer baby seedlings that I find more delightful.  I planted a bed of hummingbird attracting flowers a few weeks ago and these were the first to appear.  I have little experience identifying plants and often have to do some research in order to figure out what is sprouting (even if I planted it!), but I did name these as soon as they came up (and it made me like them even more).

If you do any googling of these plants, you will find that they are the gardener's darlings.  They are easy to grow from seed, do well in sandy soil, deter many garden pests (like aphids and cucumber beetles), and they are edible!  I have so many coming up in and around our butterfly garden that I am considering transplanting some to the veggies.

Nature Study Monday: Yarrow

Yarrow, native to Europe but found widely throughout North America,  is a new addition to our garden this year.  While I have planted many seeds and bulbs, I have not put in nearly any plants.  Yarrow was one of the few that I added, having spied this butterfly friendly plant at the nursery.  It's tiny pinkish blossoms caught my eye and the knowledge that it thrives in poor soil sold me.

Since planting it, I have learned of a whole host of other uses for the plant.  For medicinal purposes, it can help stop bleeding, fight cold and flu symptoms, and break a fever (amongst other uses).  I also learned from A Dyer's Garden that combined with alum, it can be used as a yellow dye plant.

This plant is a perennial so I am hoping that it will live on in our garden for years to come!

A Butterfly Garden

Before we moved into our house, I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to turn our backyard (and potentially our front yard) into a vegetable garden.  And so when we closed on our house, I started with five beds, expecting to add more as time went on (which we have also done).  What I didn't know was how much I would love the visitors that some of these plants brought with them.

When we found a rotund caterpillar (on our dill) then watched it promptly spin a cocoon and transform into an Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly, I found out that dill was indeed a host for these beauties.  The following September, we spied a "flock" of migrating Monarchs on a neighbor's butterfly bush.  Each of these two specimens was so spectacular that I knew we would love to see more in our very own garden.

I started doing some reading on butterflies (namely The Family Butterfly Book by Rick Mikula) in order to get a good idea of the varieties of plants we should have around our garden.  This year I am paying special attention to those plants that are native to Northern New Jersey.  Here are some that have gone into the ground:

Bee Balm

Dianthus

Milkweed

Butterfly Bush

Loads and loads of dill

Yarrow

Coneflower

Blazing Stars

Lavender

With the exception of the dianthus and yarrow, none of them are in blossom yet, but we, err...me, are so so excited to see the wonders of a butterfly garden right in our backyard.

Nature Study Monday: Peony

For Mother's Day, my own sweet Mama brought me a whole bunch of these beautiful flowers which a re in bloom right now. I find it hard to look at them for too long as I can not really wrap my head around the beauty.  It almost confuses me.  

And I knew without even "knowing" it that they had to be native to Asia.  The flora and fauna from that part of the world have such a distinct exoticism.   It turns out that he peony is native to Asia but also to parts of Europe and the Pacific Northwest.  Most peonies grow in bushes but some look more like trees.  They are evidently tolerant of some shade but do need 6 hours of sun each day. 

I made a stop to our local nursery a couple of days ago and found a white peony shrub (which I have a very nice spot for in our front yard), but I thought better of it--the flower is definitely not native our area, and while I do not have a black thumb, I also do not have a lot of tolerance for plants that need to be babied.  It looks like the only peonies I will have will be in a vase, but I'll take them!

On Our [suburban] Homestead

Two front yard apple trees in blossom.

Newly planted strawberry patch.

Shelling peas finally starting to grow

Last year's kale made it through the cold winter

Recently transplanted berry patch likes its sunnier spot much better

Red romaine babies

New planted sunflower house taking hold

It has been a slow start this year but things are finally starting to happen in the garden.   I have lots of projects going on outside (my husband calls it crazy, I call it ambitious), but I simply can not contain my sheer joy at being outside on our little plot of land, laying down more roots.  There is something so soul-satisfying, so good and so right, about digging in the dirt.  After a day of working and playing in the garden, my back hurts, my arms hang nearly limp at my side, more dirt has worked itself into its permanent summer home under my nails, and my heart and my head are at peace and at rest.  Oh the good, good earth.

Garden in Waiting...

This is the first year I am growing anything from seed and I am finding it... challenging.  I have direct sown some seeds right into our beds (in Northern New Jersey, peas can go into the ground on St. Patrick's day, and lettuce can go in shortly thereafter) and I have planted some in flats indoors to be transferred around the middle of April.

My peas have taken a long while to sprout; I just saw the beginnings of the first one today nearly a month after it was planted.  I have word, though, from a local master gardener that I should not worry.  They will come.  The sheer mystery of it confounds me, really.  I know that seeds do this in theory, but I am sure that they will not do it for me, here in my yard, at my hands.  Only for scientists and experts, not for me.  But that first little sprouted seed is proving me wrong as I write this.  I too can bear witness to the mystery of life.  Amazing.

My indoor seeds are faring less well (evidently).  They had a few factors working against them~our house gets relatively little light~what light they did get got dimmed when our baby napped~and, most importantly, I have no idea what I am doing.  I watered them too much, I watered them too little, I left them outdoors too long, and I have no ability to pluck out seedlings that are competing for obviously limited resources.  Hmmmp.  

I am going to give indoor starts another try with tomatoes and peppers in April as they don't go into the ground until May around here. Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower and the rest will have to go directly into the ground.