Happy Spa Chicken and Harvest Time

I'm happy to report that the chicken spa treatments did the job. Voodoo's foot is back to normal and apparently we didn't have to face the dreaded bumblefoot. Now it's just harvest time in the garden, a race to get all the produce in and dealt with, as well as mulching and taking care of our late fall/winter crops. I had hoped to have a space to move my cold frames to, but it was overtaken by rogue pumpkin vines that have set fruit. Since we all love pumpkin here, I'm loathe to move the pumpkins until we've harvested them, which means the cold frames may have to wait.

Every year at this time, this blog takes a significant lull as I try to keep on top of everything going on outside in the few weeks of good weather we have remaining. Happy gardening to all!

Okay, I Take It Back About the Snap Peas!

You might remember I posted awhile back that my attempt to stagger my snap pea plantings looked to be a failure. As it turns out, it wasn't at all! My snap peas that I planted later have continued to produce as the first ones burnt out, with the result that I still have bunches of snap peas every day, and we're eating fresh veggies from the garden like I had hoped. In past years, we've just had a burst of snap peas and then they were gone, but this year the staggered plantings worked like magic and we've got a sustained harvest that so far is not letting up. I love it when things go right!

Since my kids really love raw veggies and aren't so keen on canned or preserved stuff, it's one of my goals to move towards a year-round harvest. This means staggering how I plant things, and using our sun room and cold frames to try and extend the season as much as I can. I'm still learning as I go, but I count this as a victory along the way.

Garden Updates

It's been hard to get much gardening in the last couple of weeks. The rains have been absolutely torrential, in the fullest sense of that word. We got more rain in the first four days of June than we usually get all  month (and June is not particularly dry here). The weather seemed to have a perverse ability to clear up when I had to be someplace away from the house, and just as I was thinking "at last, I can do some gardening when I get home", the dark clouds gathered and began to dump water from the sky.

Many of my plants are not doing well, especially melons, squash, and cucumbers. They're just not liking the combination of cold and wet when they're supposed to be growing. The snap peas on the other hand are ecstatic.

Still, in the couple of nice days we did manage to have, I got the whole front garden weeded out (weeds don't seem to care about less-than-ideal growing conditions) as you can see above, it actually resembles a garden plot now! To the left of the fence, you can barely make out the newly-fenced addition where I've got a double-row of corn planted.

Lucky for me, I didn't transplant out any of the tomatoes from the cold frames, because the tomatoes that are out in the open air look puny and unhappy. The ones in my cold frames look quite good, especially since they were grown from seed! They're having a happy time, and I'm not sure yet when or even if I'm going to transplant them out of there.

Bales of Fun

The straw bales are definitely doing their job, composting away and become another vegetable garden. When I went to plant in them, I dug a hole in each to fill with dirt/compost. Inside the bales it is definitely HOT! So they are composting on the inside, and the plants I've put in them so far are doing very well. I used the double-high bale fence around the garden to plant cucumbers, squash, zucchini, and pumpkins, hoping that they'll just spill over the side into the garden area. In the area with just single bales, I put some more tomatoes, artichokes, and some mystery plants (stuff I started from seed but the labels got too wet, so now I don't know what they are!)

In the front garden, I've got all of my pole beans planted, a week earlier than last year. And Wayne fenced off a new area to transplant all of the tomatoes from our cold frames. It's funny, but they took so long to germinate that I thought it was a bust to try to grow them from seed, so I went out and bought some tomato starts. No sooner did I have those installed in the back garden than my cold frame tomato seeds took off like wildfire. Now the tomatoes in the cold frames are almost as big as the starts I bought! So the bottom line is that I have 12 more tomato plants than I bargained for, which means I guess I'll be canning a lot of salsa this year.

Speaking of bonuses, a friend salvaged a TON of little blueberry plants from the yard waste recycling center, so now I need to find places around the yard to transplant a bunch of baby blueberries. Not that I'm complaining or anything...

Sunroom Starts

Last year, we enclosed our front deck to make a sunny room/covered entry into the house. Although it's not finished off yet, it has already shown to be extremely useful at mitigating climate (providing a warmer entryway than the cold outdoors in the winter, and shading our front door from the hot western sun in the afternoon of the summer). The deciduous tree right outside the windows ensures that it stays cooler in the summer but lets the sunlight in during the winter months. This time of year when the sun can be shining but still chilly outside, it has proved to be about 15 - 20 degrees warmer than the outside air during the daytime hours.

We also used it this year to start some veggies for the garden, and it has proved to be a nice little greenhouse growing room. Now that last week's frost, sleet, and pounding hail are (hopefully) all done with, it's time to plant all of these little guys out!

And speaking of veggie starts, these radishes are coming right out of our cold frames and into our salads. Yum! The cold frames did not provide enough heat to germinate the tomatoes I planted, but the basil, cilantro, lettuce, and radishes are all in good form. This radish variety produces a variety of colors, it's the Easter Egg II from Territorial Seed

Extending the Gardening Season

Last year Wayne picked up some windows at a garage sale, and we also replaced our shower door so he had the old glass door to work with. He took those plus some reclaimed lumber and some newer wood and hammered up three lovely cold frames. There's already lettuce, radishes, basil, and some other stuff cropping up in them. I'm excited to be able to extend our growing season into the cooler months of spring and fall with these. It will be a learning process this year, so we'll see how they work out. In the 3rd one, I planted a couple of different types of tomatoes from seed. I've always grown tomatoes from starts before so that's another new gardening adventure!

Whoops

I put the lid up on our new cold frames today because it's been so nice and sunny. But then later I forgot and let the chickens out to forage. Of course they found the cold frame and all of the tasty little teeny plant shoots within. So there goes my veggie starts. Wah!

Chalk that one up to experience, I guess.

Veggies From the Sunroom

We enclosed our little front deck this year, turning it into a much-needed entrance to the house (formerly you had to stand out in the rain trying to get the front door unlocked since our door didn't even have a little roof or awning over it). The side-benefit is that, since it is south-facing, it's a nice little passive solar room. In the winter, it heats up nicely (and will do even better once we get finished putting tile in there), and in the summer it keeps our front door shaded from the blistering afternoon Western sun. All in all, it does a great job of passively heating and cooling the entrance to our house.

A little side-benefit is that it functions as a bit of a greenhouse as well. I brought in the last of the pepper plants from the garden in the fall and just picked the last fresh red peppers this week (that's them in the photo!). The last few were a bit small but still delicious. I think the sunroom will be a great spot to put some garden starts as well, and it's about time to get thinking about that now.

Also on the current docket: hubby is pruning the fruit trees, and just started building our cold frames with some glass doors he picked up at a garage sale last summer. Looking forward to expanding our growing season even more!

Resolve to Do This BEFORE the New Year

Here's one important way you can make a contribution to the safety of our nation's food supply and the health of our people (if you happen to live in the U.S.)

The U.S. Government is asking for comments on how corporate control of our food supply affects you. It's easy to speak against what's going on, it's harder to take action but this is one action that's simple and quick. Let them know how you feel about local farms, regulation of small farmers, letting corporations get away with unsafe, unsanitary, and inhumane practices. This is being undertaken by the Department of Justice anti-trust folks, not the usual USDA people who have been turning a blind eye for decades, so it might just be worthwhile to chip in your two cents.

You can email comments to: agriculturalworkshops@usdoj.gov BY DECEMBER 31st!!!!

or

Find out more details on Slow Food USA's blog post There are links to sample letters and summaries of the issues at stake.

Lying Fallow

This is the time of year where things start to slide - the last few apples I socked away in the cold maybe start going bad before I get around to making them into applesauce, and I forgot to go out and pick the peppers before the first frost so I didn't get the last few good ones in. Now that it's so dang crazy cold, everything even in the winter garden is listless. My time is eaten up with the craziness that seems to hit all at once at this time of the year. I guess it's time to lie fallow and regenerate for spring. Starting next Monday (when the karate tests, Nutcracker performances and robotics competition is all over and done with) that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Summer Garden Lessons Learned

I took advantage of yesterday's warm weather and lack of rain to bring in the rest of the produce from the summer garden. I couldn't believe we got over two pounds of green beans this week, in the last week of October. And tons of tomatoes, too, including all of the green ones to store up in the cool basement. I'm going to do like I did last year and wrap them individually in newspaper. That gave us tomatoes through December and part of January last year, ripened a few at a time.

This week's haul alone was 22.5 pounds of produce. I think I've been averaging at least that for most of the summer. I meant to diligently weigh all of the veggies we brought in from the garden this year and get a good idea of how much we were growing, but of course most of the time we just go out and pluck some lettuce or a cucumber or the kids go grab some snap peas and it never gets weighed.

Lessons learned from this year's summer garden:

The yellow Taxi heirloom tomatoes were not a very good producer. They were supposed to be large, but ended up much smaller than the red ones, they split easily in the moister fall air, and produced about half as many as my romas and bigger red tomatoes.

I planted two types of green beans, Blue Lakes and Kentucky Wonders. One of them produced nice thin green beans that the kids like to eat, and the other had pods that quickly got fat and woody and not very edible. But I didn't write down which variety I planted where! So now I don't know which ones to order for next year. Anyone knowledgeable about green beans can help me out on this one?

Planting the peppers much earlier (March instead of May) produced a much bigger crop, even though it took them a long time to get going.

You can only eat so many cherry-size tomatoes. Next year I'll only plant one or two instead of three or four bushes!

Now it's on to the fall garden, I've got loads of kale and chard still going strong. Yum!

Thank Heavens For My Freezer

This time of the year is NUTS. In centuries past, I'm sure folks just had the harvest to worry about (and it meant a lot more to them as well without the supermarkets a few blocks away). The original school year was designed so that kids were not going back to classes until after harvest time, but it seems that most school districts around the country keep creeping the back-to-school date ever earlier. It seems like that shouldn't matter to us homeschoolers (hey, I could be cracking the whip over my enslaved children and no one would even know! but shhhhhh... don't tell anyone) but it does because every other thing in the universe is tied to the school schedule - dance classes, robotics challenge, etc. all starts when the schools do. Sigh. What's a harvesting urban farmer to do?

Thank heavens for that big freezer we bought a few years ago. So far I've taken stuff and just thrown it into gallon bags in the freezer to be dealt with later. Wayne already dried an entire batch of our freestone plums in the food dryer, and I think I can pack away the apples in our cool basement until I'm ready to start making applesauce in earnest.

The other day I noticed an entire hazelnut orchard lying fallow with nuts falling everywhere, so now I'm wondering if I can squeeze some hazelnut gleaning time in this week. The photo above is all stuff I picked in one afternoon from the garden. NUTS I tell you! Nuts is what I'll be in another couple of weeks.

The Partying Onions Unmasked

Hey, so remember those funny little flowering "onions" that looked like they were wearing party hats, that I posted about before? I accidentally dug one up the other day and found at the bottome of all of that stem and flower was really a big ol' bulb of extremely tasty garlic! So the "onions" have been unmasked as the marauding garlic that they really are. Which is cool because I love garlic and we have these things all over the place. I just cooked some up with some of the last of our pork chops and a ton of peppers sauteed with some wine and olive oil... yummmmm....

On the docket for this week: making pesto with some fresh basil from a friend.

The Chard That Ate New York and the Onions in Party Hats

It's that time of year, when the garden just explodes with produce. Our rainbow chard plants are approaching four feet tall! As you can see here, just eight gigantic leaves supplied our family's veggie needs for dinner and weighed almost two pounds. I remember when we moved here our neighbors grew these amazing plants like this and I wondered how they did it. The first few years my chards and spinaches were just puny little things, but little by little as I mulched more and composted more and learned about cover crops and all of that stuff, our yields have gotten better and better and now it is I that has The Chard That Ate New York (cue corny B-movie music...)

To celebrate our bounteous harvest, our flowering onions have all decided to put on party hats for the occasion. It just cracked me up to see them all wearing their cute little hats. I have to admit that as proficient as I have become at growing chard, I'm still pretty clueless about the onions. They keep cropping up, and I keep not knowing what to do with them and when to harvest them. One of these days I'll figure that out too. The great thing about gardening is that you can really just keep muddling along and as you gain experience things just fall into place a little at a time. For now, the onions have gone to seed and are just sitting there looking festive. By next year, they may be gracing our hamburgers.

One more thing to celebrate this week is Food Independence Day, where we can show our patriotism by eating locally sourced meats, fruits, grains, and veggies. I know that our 4th of July steaks grew up eating the grass of our own valley, and that the lettuce on our burgers comes from 10 yards away. What better way to remain independent than to support our local farmers, ranchers, butchers, dairy farmers, and markets, eating American food!

Front Yard Gardens Explode All Over Town

Our town is just bursting with gardens, many of them new conversions of yards and previously unused strips of bare land. It's inspiring to see the many ways people have found to grow their veggies in their landscaping. I'm seeing gardens in front of rentals, duplexes, and apartment buildings too. Here's just a few photos to inspire!

These curbside veggie boxes are already bursting with salad makings:


Growing your own food is both patriotic AND stylish in this flag-bearing garden with nice block walls:


These duplex-dwellers aren't missing out on the opportunity to grow some veggies on their lawn:


An eclectic garden full of onions, borage, and greens, mulched with straw paths:


And this beauty, nicely landscaped with flowers, paths, and a raised veggie bed in the middle of what was probably once a boring old lawn:

Words of Wisdom

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
- John W. Gardner

I thought of this quote as I biked to work last night. My bike count reached a new all-time high of 64. Basically, in any direction that I looked, I saw cyclists. Some of them parents toting kids on tag-a-longs or trailers, some of them workers returning home with messenger bags and ties, some college students, some kids on BMX bikes, but everywhere bicycles going this way and that.

To my left and right, new front and side-lawn gardens were popping up right and left. I'll try and add some photos soon of all the new creative food-growing landscaping I'm seeing. Clotheslines (or "solar clothes dryers" as right-to-dry activists are now creatively calling them) are flapping in the breeze, and neighbors sit on newly constructed front porches or stand by their garden fence talking. All of these people in ways small and large are taking the insoluble problems we now face and turning them into challenges to be met. Sure, it's a challenge to hang out your clothes when you could just throw them into the dryer in 1/8 of the time (though I would argue that the smell of line-dried laundry more than makes up for that one!) or to get out your helmet and rain jacket and bike off to work. The great thing is that almost everything that benefits the planet really benefits us even more. We get more exercise, more fresh air, we eat better, we know more of our neighbors when we engage in sustainable living. We're not saving the earth, we're saving ourselves.

Our Garden Featured on Local TV News

After the People magazine article came out, our local news station came and did a piece about it. I think they did a really nice job. It's great to see lawns-to-gardens getting so much coverage! Although I don't consider myself any kind of gardening expert in any way, it's nice to think that our experience might somehow inspire others to also give it a try.

I especially love the first line: "A Eugene family is featured in this week's People Magazine, not for red carpet fashion or celebrity scandal, but for their vegetable garden." Here's the link to the story.

Gardening Article Not Online (Yet?)

For those who have asked, I haven't been able to find the gardening article online at People magazine's website. Maybe it's just not up yet, but the site is different from the magazine by a fair bit.

Urban Gardening in People Magazine

Yes, it's officially hit the big mainstream, People magazine has an article on urban gardens, showcasing folks who have turned their lawns into veggie gardens and of course including Michelle Obama's new garden on the Whitehouse lawn. It's very exciting to see this trend not just in the latest issue of Permaculture Magazine but somewhere that it has the potential to be seen by (and influence) millions more mainstream Americans that might not otherwise be thinking about urban gardening.

And of course, I might just be mentioning this because our raised beds and my two cute kiddos are in the article! On newstands everywhere, today... the Blue Skies Urban Farm (no kidding, April Fool's Day is long past). Even one of our chickens, in People magazine, rubbing feathers with the celebs.

Worm Heaven

The weather has been extremely dicey for the last few weeks, making it difficult to get the gardening started. The last two days cleared up enough for me to get out there and start clearing away the leaf mulch. The good news is that mulching deeply with the leaves turned our garden plot into an earthworm factory! Those leaves were full of worms, and what looked to my untrained eye like a ton of earthworm eggs. They look like red wrigglers, the same time of worms used in vermiculture (otherwise known as worm composting).

I have been letting the baby chickens come into the garden plot with me, since it gets them outside and they're still too small to go in with the big chickens yet. They're having a good time learning to scratch, and eating small weeds and bugs. Thankfully they aren't big enough to eat my nice composting worms yet, so I'm fine with them roaming around the garden with me.

A couple of years ago, we removed a pile of gravel from near our current garden plot only to find the biggest earthworms I'd ever seen under there. They were easily a foot long, and though they don't come anywhere near approaching the size of the possibly-extinct Oregon Giant Earthworm, they were huge enough to impress the heck out of the kids and adults alike. I am always happy to have a thriving earthworm population in and near my garden, and though it drives me husband nuts when he goes running with me I have been known to save them from the pavement in rainstorms or when they get dried out and dehydrated in the summer. On a recent jog together, he had to give me a cutoff point of worm saving, since a recent rain had brought up so many of them that my rescue efforts were slowing us to...well... a worm's pace.

Still, it's hard to ignore the value of these lowly creatures. Charles Darwin once measured the quantity of worm castings produced in a year in a field near his home, and found an astonishing eighteen tons per acre. Now don't ask me exactly how he did that (the measuring part), but it's a testament to the productive helpfulness of worms for us gardeners. Darwin studied worms for almost 40 years and helped bring them to light as garden allies instead of the pests they had been assumed to be.

And if you don't think worms can get really cool, check out Australia's Giant Blue Earthworm. Up to six feet long, with luminescent mucin, and very very bright blue, worms just don't get much cooler than this.