Garden Expansion work

Over this Christmas break, we have been doing quite a bit of Garden Expansion work. We first filled in all the asparagus trenches that we dug out last Spring. Filling the trenches during the winter gives the asparagus roots more room to grow next year.






Next we increased the size of each of our 6 garden beds while putting in a barrier of concrete blocks. This creates a 3 sided border around each garden bed. The concrete border not only provides more thermal mass for the garden beds during cold spring/autumn nights but also serves as a mount for our future drip irrigation system. As we were setting in the blocks, a fog descended over neighborhood. I found it rather refreshing and more than a little bit mystical.

I'm thinking of holding off on pruning the apple trees. There are still some leaves on them, and pruning is generally not recommended until the absolute dead of winter. This is due to the risk of infecting the living sap wood of the tree's limbs when cutting them in warmer weather.

The harvest that won't end!!!

The recent spate of mild weather has allowed my little garden to continue producing. The tomatoes haven't died yet. The beans, peppers, bitter melons and even onions are still going strong. This extended fall harvest may offset most of the losses due to the hail storm this summer. In any case, in the last 2 weeks, we harvested 80lbs of tomatoes, 11lbs of green peppers, 2 lbs of bitter melon, 1/2 lbs of onions, and 4 lbs of pole beans.

The end of the harvest

The leaves are changing colors and our little garden is nearing it's productive end for this year. We are still getting a great deal of tomatoes. These plants are growing as if winter doesn't exist. The news is reporting a hard frost tonight, so it's likely that the tomato plants will expire tomorrow. The pole beans and bitter melons are still producing, though in reduced quantities now. They will yield a bit longer than the tomatoes, perhaps into early November. The peppers have just begun to yield, which meant that we need to plant them earlier next year.
The Kale failed again this year due to the depredations of rabbits. And the turnips are suffering a bit due to green worms. Still we should have some turnips this year. In total we harvested 70lbs of tomatoes, 15lbs of beans, 13lbs of bitter melon, and 4 lbs of peppers in the last 2 weeks.

Preserving Tomatoes!!!

At this point, we have about 130 lbs of tomatoes in the refrigerator. When in a normal fridge, a ripe tomato will only last 2 to 3 weeks. After this period the entire tomato rots and becomes inedible. One easy way of preserving this food is to freeze it entirely. This is the method that we've choosen. First, we removed all the vines and stubs from each tomato. Then each tomato is thoroughly washed and dried with paper towels. The tomatoes are then sequestered into special zip lock vacuum seal bags, 5 lbs to a bag. The air is then pumped out of each bag, sealing the tomatoes tightly within it. The bags are then stored in the freezer. Using this method, the tomatoes can be stored for up to 6 months. We did this for 50 lbs of tomatoes tonight.

Cool Season Gardening

This weekend has been a whirlwind of activity. The garden's denizens are now adapting to the cooler seasons. The tomatoe plants in Garden bed 5 are still growing as if summer will never end. My job is coax the most out of the plants before the first hard frost. The squash and cucumbers are largely gone due to the cooler weather. The bitter melon and pepper plants have taken their place in Garden Beds 2 and 3. The cool season beets are doing not so well in Garden bed 6, though the beans there are still producing abundantly. The beans this year has been badly damaged by both Hurricane Hannah and 2 species of pest beetles. Both the Japanese and Mexican beetles have ravaged my pole bean crop. Though unlike last year, the Mexican beetles proved to be the greater adversary. Still, the beans have somehow managed to survive and are producing abundantly. The onions and garlic in Garden bed 4 are now making a come back after the squash cover had died down. The asparagus plants are growing like crazy now, everyone of them is a small green bush. The sweet corn has done very badly. The beetles had stunted their growth already, and the hail basically destroyed half of the stalks.

My father and I spent hours harvesting from the garden. We picked 55 lbs of tomatoes, 34 lbs of beans, and 5 lbs of bitter mellon. This is a massive harvest by any standard. So now we have a couple of hundred pounds of vegetables in the refrigerator. We need to figure out a way to preserve all of it.

Last fishing trip of the year!

America seems to be sliding into a second great depression. New York city was in a state of shock on Wednesday, so I decided to take 2 days off to go home to Pennsylvania. The garden in my parents' backyard will need a massive expansion if economic conditions continues to worsen. I also wanted to implement a few other preparations to weather this coming storm. So I got home and had a long chat with my father about what is happening in the markets and around the country. Afterwards, we decided to go fishing. The weather was getting cold and fishing will be nearly impossible in a couple of weeks. We drove to our favorite lake and begain casting the lines.

The first few hours were quite uneventful, nothing seemed to bite. Then, beginning around 5pm, we begain getting catch after catch. The volume was so high that we soon lost count of the all the fish that we were catching. White perch, northern crappies, yellow perch, there seemed to be an infinite supply of those. We caught so many that our container couldn't fit them all. Then, around 7pm, as the temperature sank with the sun, we caught our first giant carp fish. This invasive species had apparently migrated along the waterways down to southern PA. As you may recall, my last encounter with this fish(2 years ago) ended in dismal failure. The carp is a strange looking creature, it's face is so much more expressive than normal North American fish. Up close, it looks almost mammalian in origin. In anycase, after we got home, we spent hours gutting and cleaning the fish. We ended up with 48 pounds of cleaned fish, and another 25 lbs of fish offal. The guts we put directly into our compost bins. After checking the freezer, I noticed that we had at least 65 pounds of fish left at the end of the season. Not a bad haul at all!

Autumn Hurricanes!!!

The fall came with a bang this weekend. It is very possible that our recent spate of storms and hurricanes is a part of the long term climate change affecting the planet. In any case, our little garden has suffered some structural damage from Hurricane Hannah on Saturday. Several of our bamboo trellis structures were knocked out by the high winds, this has effectively destroyed about 30% of our pole bean crop.

The bio-intensive garden bed has survived, but the tomato bushes have been badly battered with scores of green tomatoes rotting on the ground. I would say that at least 20% of the tomatoes have been lost. My poor calabash bush has been entirely destroyed by this storm, it's main trunk broken in two. The squash plants have fared better due to their larger, lower profile, though 2 large yellow squashes were lost due to Mildew rot. My onions are entirely gone, the earth underneath their shallow roots had given away due to the rains. The garlic with their larger, deeper roots seemed to have survived. The corn, turnips, and beets are all holding on.

All in all, the damage to my garden has been serious but not fatal. I would say that 15% to 20% of this garden's yield potential has been taken away by this storm. We still managed to harvest 13 lbs of beans, and 4 lbs of tomatoes last week.

The good earth!!!

The garden continues to yield abundantly this week. The pole beans have begun to produce in bulk. We harvested 21 lbs of it. 38lbs of tomatoes were harvested as well. The summer squash plants are still going strong, with 23lbs of squash harvested. The summer is coming to an end and the squirrels are now back in force. Last summer they did quite a bit of damage to my tomatoes but this year, they seem to be focusing on the Calabash plant.

Home to PA this Weekend!

In celebration of the Beijing Olympics, I have decided to go home to PA this weekend and watch the opening ceremony with my parents. On Friday, we ate a delicious dinner composing mostly of our own garden's produce along with abundant quantities of fish that we caught from nearby lakes and reservoirs. Right before dinner, I took a quick trip through the garden and picked up 12 lbs of tomatoes, 2 lbs of summer squash, 1 lb of beans, 1 green apple, and a green calabash!!! In the tour of my garden, I noticed a few things worth mentioning. The apple tree has sent out many new branches, these will need to be pruned off early next spring. We must do this so that the tree will put all of it's energy towards the development of 2 to 4 very strong leader branches. The single green apple that I harvested had been too much for it's young branch to take. The weak branch was broken by the heft of it's own fruit!

The bio-intensive tomato bed has reached it's period of peak production. The tiny 16 square feet bed is supporting a huge canopy of tomato vines 6 feet high and spread out far beyond the initial area of the garden bed. The bloom of plant mass hides hundreds of tomatoes in various stages of ripening. My father told me that the DAILY output of this system is around 10 lbs of tomatoes now. Of course, such productivity comes at a cost. That one bed now requires 3 gallons of water a day, triple the amount of water for any other bed.

The process of succession is well underway for the beans. Notice how the European pole beans are growing over the dried vines of the peas? I would expect the succession process to complete itself entirely around early september. I had wanted to plant the pole beans even earlier that we did, so that full succession would happen by mid August. But there were separate factors to consider here. The peas have vastly better biological resistence to Japanese beatles than pole beans. And the point was to allow for the main growth phase of the pole beans to occur AFTER the natural life cycle of the Japanese beatles(ending in early August). Thus, we were able to avoid the worst depredations of those pests at the cost of lower food production from the beans.

The summer squash vines has expanded well beyond it's original bed to take over the neighboring bed that had been reserved for the onions and garlic. The garlic still lives, but the red onions are entirely gone. Our peppers suffered the same fate. The squash plants have an extreme level of genetic diversity. The squashes harvested look vastly different from each other. Some of them are the elongated golden vegetables found in supermarkets. But quite a few of them are in various shades of green, yellow, or streaks of both. The shapes vary from common ellipsoids to round spheres to strangely contorted forms. The skin ranges from smooth to hairy to bumpy to downright spiky. Some squashes are so different from each other that they look like vegetables from different species than offspring from the same plant.

The calabash plants have done extremely well this year. I see 9 small calabash fruits growing on the vine in addition to the large one that I had harvested. This plant's flowers seems to be especially potent at attracting butterflies. The single calabash plant had 4 butterflies perching upon it. Of course I can't say enough good things about this vegetable. Eaten as small green fruits, the calabash is a wonderful source of vitamins and fiber. When allowed to fully mature, the fruit's pulp can be dried and used as a substitute for flour. When allowed to season under the sun, the calabash fruit hardens into a natural container that can be fashioned into bottles, cups, bowls, and plates ( and penis gourds for New Guinean Highlanders :P).

A Massive Harvest!!!

My little suburban garden has exceeded all expectations of late. The Summer squash continues to produce in large quantities. We have been harvesting all sorts of tomatoes(cherry, brandywine, beefsteak, early girl) of late. It is absolutely incredible how many tomatoes we're harvesting given that we only cultivated 16 sq feet of soil with these plants. This week we have harvested 52lbs of summer squash, 58lbs of tomatoes, and 1 lb of pole beans.