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3 weeks after planting, and everything’s going wild

27 Mar

It’s already so warm that everything’s starting to bolt — my spinach leaves are getting unworthy of being eaten raw, I’m seeing the little broccoli-looking florets on some of my greens (like mizuna), and the lettuce is looking similarly bothered by this early, fast spring.

Y’all come by and pick a bag (or ten) of greens — they’re getting out of hand!

Mizuna is now taller than my 3 year old

Garlic coming up

 

 

 

 

All the seeds and sets I planted back on March 7th have come up in full force.  We’ve had ample rain, warmth and sun to coax everything up.

Beets and snow peas are great seeds for kids to help with the planting -- they are big and easy to handle

Snow peas

Garlic and radishes

Yum, shallots

Radishes

And no frosts or freezes to kill everything back — yet.  I just keep waiting for a weather report calling for a late-season blizzard or something (wasn’t Asheville’s Great Blizzard of ’96 at the end of March??)

If that does happen, I can cover 4 of my raised beds, but there is so much in the yard that we’d need to buy truckloads of plastic sheeting to cover all the trees and shrubs that are already flowering.

So while this unseasonably warm weather is unsettling (I keep thinking of flooded islands, melting ice caps) now I’m kind of hoping it stays this way — at least for my garden’s sake!

Raspberry canes

Blueberry blossoms

Jonafree apple blossom

Jonafree apple blossom

Honeycrisp apple blossom

 
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Posted by on March 27, 2012 in front yard farm, Gardening, kids gardening, organic vegetables, parenting, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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Veggies to plant in early spring in WNC

10 Mar

One of my biggest challenges in gardening in raised beds is finding enough room for everything I want to plant.

Right now one of my 6 beds is full of spinach, carrots, cress, mizuna and mache — I planted all from seed back in the fall, and our mild winter and early warm spring days have blessed us with lots of big green salads lately.

The other beds have random plantings like a couple rows of spinach, red russian kale, beets and leeks that overwintered.

I’ve been thinning out the leeks and transplanting them around the end of the bed they’re in.

I have a hard time with thinning out plants.  It’s a gardening angst I’ve realized about myself over the years.

This, of course, adds to my problem of not enough room in the beds, as I’d rather re-plant than chuck them….

Along my fence, I planted a row of snow peas a few weeks ago. They’ve not sprouted yet, but the radish, arugula, and beet seeds I planted are starting to pop through:


And I’ve also recently planted garlic, red onions, and shallots.

Sow True Seed, Reems Creek Nursery, Jesse Israel’s, N. Asheville Ace Hardware all have cool-weather veggie starts too.  I got cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce (buttercrunch and romaine) and dinosaur kale starts for my beds from these places.

The cauliflower starts got a little frostburned one night last week when it got into the mid-20s but I think they’re going to be OK.

Sow True Seed has a great planting guide you can pick up at their downtown store.  It is a nice reference for what -and when — to plant right here in WNC.

Planting red onions

 
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Posted by on March 10, 2012 in corn salad, front yard farm, Gardening, mache, organic vegetables, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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Link
08 Mar

My fast-thinking friend Melissa got it — it’s a soldier fly larvae.  Now Melissa, how do you know about these interesting, and beneficial critters??

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

What kind of critter is this?

08 Mar

I keep finding these in my compost — both the big outside bins and the worm composting bins.  This one turned up when I was planting garlic yesterday in the raised beds.  Image

 

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2012 in Uncategorized

 
Link
16 Feb

http://grist.org/list/sweden-builds-18-story-greenhouse/

 
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Posted by on February 16, 2012 in Uncategorized

 
Aside
09 Feb

Nothing like a weird carrot to get the kids interested in the garden — and to get at least one of my kids excited about eating a carrot:

I’ve never been able to pick a carrot in the middle of February before.  I planted these seeds back in October, I think.  They’ve been growing slowly in one of the raised beds and the tops looked so good I just had to pull up a few.

Unfortunately, they aren’t too flavorful and the texture is a little tough.

That didn’t stop my older boy from taking this one from me when I brought it in the house and immediately washing it in the bathroom sink (the only one he can reach) and asking if he could eat it right then.  I told him we’d have to get some photos first.

Well, everthing comes back to Star Wars in our house.  His first impression of what the funky carrot looked like?  Yoda’s hand.  Here it is with cloak and light saber.

Our interpretations varied:  Yoda hand, creature with a tail (my husband’s first interpretation), one of those wild codpieces worn by remote tribesmen in New Guinea (my first thought) and “I don’t wike cawwots” (my almost-3 year old whose diet mainly consists of air and spinach hummus — I think he thought it was going to end up on his plate).

It didn’t taste as interesting as it looked; he got through about half of it before he decided it wasn’t so great:

 

But there were some really delicious pickin’s from the garden this week:  tons of spinach (we shared with friends and made a huge salad with mizuna and a bit of watercress thrown in), collards, russian red kale, leeks, and tiny little beets and beet greens.

The collards are perfect right now.  The green worms that had been feasting on the leaves are gone!  That’s one of those small things in life that make me really happy — to see a plant come back from near-destruction (especially when those gross worms were the culprits).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Funky carrot

 
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Posted by on February 9, 2012 in front yard farm, Gardening, kids gardening, organic vegetables, parenting, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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Don’t eat those berries!

04 Feb

I cannot remember how many times as a child my parents warned me of the perils of eating “poison berries” off bushes in our yard.  Pretty much every berry in our yard was “poisonous”, according to my mom:  crimson holly berries, shiny red magnolia seeds, waxy nandina berries…and she was mostly right.

I mean, this was in the late 1970s, early 1980s when there was no Google for my mom to instantly find out which of those tempting, jewel-colored berries were safe to touch and/or eat, so my brother and I pretty much steered clear of them.  Well, except to pick them and use them as ammo to throw at each other.

Those gorgeous, enticing purply-blue berries on the mahonia bushes that we thought were deadly are actually edible.   I just instantly and inadvertently found out via a Google search to check my spelling of “mahonia” that you can make a great jelly from those berries.  I’m still skeptical though.  Mom drilled that “poison” thing into our heads.  I do that to my boys too — better safe than sorry (for example:  they love to check out mushrooms, and I know so little about which wild ones are edible I steer them clear except to look at them).

We have several mahonias in our yard.  They are quite invasive and non-native to boot, but they were here before we moved in so I live with them and actually enjoy their punchy fragrant yellow flowers in the early spring.  Turns out that bees LOVE them too, so they further find favor in my gardening eyes.  And, as the daffodils and crocuses (croci??) are popping out of the ground in late January and early February with this unseasonably warm weather,  so follow the mahonia blooms — and a bee too!

 
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Posted by on February 4, 2012 in Gardening, kids gardening, parenting, Uncategorized, Urban beekeeping

 

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Aside
10 Jan

It’s mid-January and I’m still seeing cabbage worms, slugs, and aphids on the greens in the garden.  The collard greens are lacy with holes (despite the boys helping me pick off the green worms), and the aphids completely coated the dinosaur kale so I had to pull them up and pitch them in the compost.

My older boy found a tick on our dog’s ear over the weekend.  I saw a mosquito floating through the kitchen last night.  We need some serious cold, y’all!  ‘Tis the season to be critter-free!

Well, I must admit I’m not totally hating the recent balminess.  It has been nice enough to hang out at the park with the kids and friends, play in the yard and dig around in unfrozen garden soil.  Plus, we’ve been able to make some great salads as a result of this unexpected extended season.

Mizuna is the big feathery green in foreground, spinach behind, carrots on far right

Spinach, arugula, and mizuna are doing great.  And there are even some tiny carrots coming along. I love to add mizuna to a salad — it’s spicy like arugula but crunchier. I like the light green color too.

I’ve found a few wormy critters munching in this raised bed, but not nearly as many as on the big greens.  At a friend’s suggestion, I’ve been soaking the greens in salt water for about 15 minutes before rinsing and putting them in the salad spinner.  That helps loosen any bugs.

Mâche, or corn salad -- notice there are no bug holes -- I'm liking this green!

In late fall, I planted a few rows of mâche seed in the uncovered raised bed next to the arugula.  The plants are slow growing but they’ve turned into small, close-to-the-dirt rosettes.  I’ve been eating the leaves directly from the garden and they are as mild as lettuce with a taste similar to buttercrunch.  I’m going to try making this salad with grapefruit and avocado — a nice antidote to holiday gluttony (although I can eat my weight in avocado, so maybe not!)

Oh, and I’ve been reading that mâche has 3 times more Vitamin C than buttercrunch, and it also packs alot of iron into those little rosettes. Wikipedia has some more interesting facts about mâche — I also find it interesting that such a little plant can have so many different names.  And it’s a member of the valerian family.  Cool little plant!

A couple of nights last week we had some temperatures in the teens, so I pulled the vinyl covers up onto the hoops to protect the plants.  Here are a couple of other raised-bed, front yard gardens I saw in the ‘hood on a run last week after a cold night:

And this one has a different support structure from mine and the ones above —  metal fencing — definitely stronger in wind/snow – it seems like overkill now but I’m sure in the next few weeks it will come in handy, right??  Come on, winter!

Gardening in a lukewarm winter

 
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Posted by on January 10, 2012 in compost, corn salad, front yard farm, Gardening, kids gardening, mache, organic vegetables, raised bed gardening, Uncategorized

 

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I needed a haz-mat suit for that?

29 Nov

Horseradish in the food processor.  Have mercy.  I am still reeling from the fumes.  I thought I could handle it — I mean, I’ve grown and roasted all kinds of peppers from thai to habaneros.  Gotten them in my eyes and under my fingernail beds, resulting in hours of burn, but I survived.

I planted a horseradish root in the corner of one of my raised beds and the plant ended up growing ferny leaves about a foot tall:  Note that my 4-year old could safely handle the plant after I dug it up, so I had no indication that it could turn my kitchen into a fumey chemistry lab.

Well, I should have heeded the warnings I read online about making the stuff.  If my blog had smell-a-vision you’d be running from your screen right now.  Seriously, it was like a tear gas bomb exploded in my kitchen.

The root itself looks like a parsnip.  Unpeeled it actually had less of a smell than a parsnip:

Our garden has had a couple of frosts on it this fall, so it was time to harvest the roots a few days ago.   According to a few gardening websites, unless horseradish has had time to go dormant, it won’t have much flavor or kick.  I was a little worried that since there were still some green shoots sprouting, it hadn’t gone dormant.  I was wrong.

All was fine till I started peeling it then chopping it into small cubes to prepare it for the food processor.

At that point I started to suspect that the websites insisting that processing horseradish outside or “in a well-ventilated area” might be on to something.

But the real chemistry happened about a minute after I got it all ground up.  White vinegar stops the chemical process of ground horseradish morphing into battery acid.  The longer you wait to put the vinegar in, the stronger the horseradish gets.

I think I waited about a minute too long because I could barely get within 2 feet of the food processor.  Not kidding.  It was that sensation of taking a whopper bite of wasabi, yet it was airborne.

Fortunately the vinegar calmed down the horseradish and I was able to get it into a jar.  Now the challenge will be getting somebody to actually try it….

 
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Posted by on November 29, 2011 in Gardening, kids gardening, Uncategorized

 

The bear came back

24 Nov

image

About 9pm I went on our back porch to take out some compost.  I heard something down in the yard and realized it was the bear tearing the hive apart again.

The bear got scared and scrambled up the birch tree next to our porch.  I’ve been in the kitchen cooking and haven’t gone back out to see if he’s left yet.

Oh my poor bees.  It’s 40 degrees and dropping.

 
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Posted by on November 24, 2011 in Uncategorized

 
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