As my wife and I are planning to limit our gardening this year, we have decided not to buy any additional seeds and instead put our 2009 remnants to good use. A few days ago I wandered through the seed bins and came up with a large menagerie of ornamentals and edibles to populate the earth with once the soil can be worked.  Flowers, brassica, leaf lettuce, kale, spinach, asparagus, brussels sprouts, peas, peppers, and more will be available to us this year at no extra cost.  Though some will be lost due to decreased germination rates, for our reduced space this year it should be more than enough.

One place we will be getting around the no new seeds is that there will be some new plants.  Tomatoes are hard to get going here in our valley so 4 or 5 plants will be bought from our local garden supply shop.  An additional 25 crowns of day neutral or everbearing strawberries will also be added to our strawberry patch after suffering more than a few losses over the past two seasons.  Keep your fingers crossed that the ones I find this year are as good as our initial purchase.  Those produce these lovely perfectly sweet quarter size strawberries from early June through until the first heavy frost in mid October.  Though not nearly as productive as June bearing, we can harvest a pint a day from our 60 square foot patch every few days while they are in season.

Overall I am looking forward to this season as one of change.  The time saved on shopping, shipping, and sorting will be put to planning.  That planning should lead to a garden that I can look to as productive and enjoyable rather than stressing over where things are going wrong.

My wife and I sat down a few days ago to decide on what direction our garden was going to take.  After spending several years struggling with too much space and not enough time, we started by deciding how much we were going to plant.  Answer?  Not nearly as much as we have tried in the past.  Currently there is gardening space in front yard, side yard, and field, with approximately 220, 400, and 800 sq/ft in each area.  Our desires to grow great are huge, but time requirements elsewhere have proven to be substantially more demanding than we expected when we first started down this road 3 years ago.

That leaves us wanting to do a kitchen garden in the front yard focusing on the essentials: cucumbers, peas, onions, tomatoes and strawberries.  Cucumber, peas, and onions will start from seeds indoor well before the last frost so we can have an extra planting or two as the season progresses.  Tomatoes will come from our local garden supply house.  The variety and quality are hard to beat for not much more than a pack of seeds, without the frustration of getting them to germinate.   Ever-bearing and daylight neutral strawberries adorn the strawberry patch already, but there are a few places that could use a few fresh crowns.  One pack of 25 should be enough.

The side yard are is getting dismantled this year and the cinder blocks that form the perimeter moved back into storage.  It was a nice location but I have learned through experimentation with this area just what a difference a micro-climate can mean to growing conditions.  Moisture would settle in after a heavy dew and never quite evaporate.  When the rest of the yard is comfortable and windy, the air around this section was humid and stale.  So many differences abound on our little acre.

Experiments will go out into the field.  In an effort to not buy any new seeds this year and put the remnants of 2009 to good use, anything left over that doesn’t go in the front will get placed here.  With that unknown multitiude will also go some planned for Halloween pumpkins and birdseed sunflowers.

Last on the list is another test: transplanting brambles.  Six blackberry canes were potted up during dormancy in the very early spring and allowed to set good roots over the summer.  Once the hard frosts break and the ground becomes workable again they will get placed along the periphery of the field.

Planning gets the process started with the first plantings only a few weeks away.  A few short months from now the work can begin in earnest and before too long winter will be a memory and we can harvest the first taste of summer: a ripe, juicy tomato on the forth of July.

I know that I have been writing a lot lately about Celiac disease, living gluten free, cooking gluten free, and reviewing products safe for those with gluten issues, but that has all been because it has been a large part of my life since the diagnosis.  Simply put, it is a huge change that has ramifications over your entire life.  Food is one of the 4 essentials for life.  If you haven’t been exposed to it before, the other requirements are water, shelter, and clothing.

As I get into the swing of things with the diet and life in general as a Celiac patient, it isn’t as all consuming on my consciousness. The rest of life opens up and I can focus on the other large aspect of this blog: gardening and actually growing food.  Stuff you dig up out of the ground, covered in dirt, run under water to wash off, and turn into something fantastic for your family and can then sit down and eat and share camaraderie while nourishing your body.

It is great exercise to boot.  Nothing like wielding a hoe with vengeance in 90 degree summer sun to work up a good sweat and remind you of what it is like to be alive.  Warm moist earth is the smell of life.

This is just a friendly reminder that we are moving into fall and if you live in an area threatened by heavy forsts and snow that you should mulch your strawberry crowns to help them survive the coming cold.  Four inches of clean straw has helped ours survive last winter, which included a few days that dipped down to 0.  ‘08-’09 was a record year for the number of days below freezing.  I lost count at over 40.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the winters here are what I consider mild for a temperate climate: we only experience a couple of days where temperatures dip to 0 or  below over night, with only a month where temps stay at or below freezing.  Usually if we get a couple of inches of snow, it doesn’t stick around for more than a week, except in the shadows cast by the house and trees.

We harvested our Garlic this past weekend and it is now hanging in the garage to cure.  Now that we have been successful, I would like to take you through the process from beginning to end.

Last fall we ordered 7 different varieties of planting bulbs from We Grow Garlic. We chose to  order from them because we could get individual bulbs to try without having to go with a pre-chosen assortment, there was plenty of information to get you through, the prices are very reasonable as you go by the bulb not by weight which can get pricey, and they were one of the only places with garlic left when we realized we wanted to plant some.  We ordered in late September, having heard it was a late fall crop, only to find out that we should have placed the order in the beginning of August, just in time to get it fresh from the curing process.  So, if you are reading this shortly after it goes up and you haven’t ordered, do it soon!

Once it arrived I spent an evening dissecting each bulb and choosing only the largest cloves from each one to go into the ground.  From each bulb I was able to pull about half that were worth planting, for a total of 28 seed cloves.  The rest went into a brown paper bag and a cool dark place to be cooked with later.

I prepared a 3′x4′ bed in our new front yard garden and followed the instructions provided.  To make planting easier I pointed a 6″ long stick 1″ in diameter, marked 2″ from the point, to act as a dibber and planting guide.  I spaced my cloves 6″ apart in staggered rows and was able to comfortably fit my 28 cloves in with a bit of room to spare.

Planting the cloves.

When they were in I marked each section with a wooden stake with the name of the garlic written on in permanent marker.  Though this idea seemed great when I did it, and they survived admirably through the fall and light winter, once the spring rains and summer storms hit, they weathered quickly.  And little did I know that the soft earth caused them to shift, completely destroying my ability to know exactly what was what.  Next time around I will be planting singular rows well separated and clearly marked.

Once everything was done, I covered the garlic with 4 inches of straw and gave it a light watering.  I continued to do so until late October, once the weather turned turned cold and threat of frost appeared.  With the wet spring and coll summer so far, it did not need to be water and grew vigorously.

The general consensus was that as the outer leaves start to brown and die off the garlic is ready to harvest.  With the Scotland like weather so far this year the plants continued to grown vigorously, which has us debating on when they would actually be ready to harvest.   Finally we made the choice to get them out of the ground and realized it might be a little late.  Thankfully it went well and we were happy to find that every clove planted yielded a nice bulb.  There were no elephant varieties in the collection, so they look modest in size compared to the giant white bulbs you find in the grocery store.  The softnecks were dug out gently while the hardnecks came free with only a slight tug.    Three bulbs did show signs of being harvested a little too late, as they had started to split apart, but were debris and bug free so I kept them.

My teenage daughter collected the bulbs as my wife and I dug them up and was responsible for cleaning them up.  After wiping off the heaviest dirt in the field, being careful not to damage the skin, she filled the utility sink with a few inches of water and gave them a quick rinse.  I then sorted, wrapped, and hung them to dry.

Here is a picture of a group up to dry.

A bundle of curing bulbs.

I have four such bundles hanging in our large airy garage.  They will remain there for 4-6 weeks until ready, at which point the stems and roots will be trimmed and they will be moved to our cool dry pantry for long term storage.  Though I could use them to plant for next year’s crop, I am going to support We Grow Garlic by ordering a fresh batch.

Any questions?  Please leave a comment.