August Planting List (and update) – 2009

The driveway bed, with zinnias in front, basil behind, and okra behind that.

OK, I realize this list is coming waaaay late. But for the sake of documentation, I’m doing it anyway. I spent August rushing to make preparations for a month out of the country. So I actually did get my planting done, I just didn’t get a chance to write about it. I’m back now, and planning on catching up with my garden, both real and virtual.

I spent many hours before I left (all first thing in the morning of course, lest I get a heat stroke) cleaning the spring plants out of the beds and preparing for fall. I was very excited to see that, for the first time since we’ve been here, I have too much material for my compost pile. This is an excellent development, because we bring in straw for our compost piles. I would love to close that loop in our garden and create all of our own browns.

Once the spent plants were removed, the bed preparation consisted of adding compost and tilling it in. Because we have heavy clay soil in this area, many people recommend applying expanded shale (once), which breaks up the clay and improves the soil tilthe. I’ve never done it previously, because I’m quite happy with compost. But after talking with a bit of a fanatic at a party next door, I decided to run a little experiment in one bed. So I also applied a 1-inch layer of shale to one of the front beds where the fall crops will go. I’ll report back.

OK, on with the planting list:

There are two references I’m using, in order:
Collin County Master Gardeners
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

DPM

arugula
beans*
broccoli*
brussel sprouts
cabbage*
carrots*
collards
lettuce*
mustard
parsley*
spinach*
watermelon

CCMG
beans
mustard
cauliflower
corn
cucumber*
kale
kohlrabi
peas, southern
potatoes*
rutabaga
squash
turnip

I have to preface this by saying that it was a complete leap of faith for me to do my initial fall planting and then get on a plane. While Jan has the best of intentions, I can’t expect him to look after my garden the way I do, and newly seeded beds generally need to be kept moist for a week or so. Fortunately, we had about a week and a half of rain right after I left, and he was saved!

I planted potatoes left over from the spring harvest into my fabric bags, in straight compost, on 11 August. I still haven’t dialed in the whole potatoes thing, and upon return I see they haven’t sprouted yet (it took about 3 weeks last year). I’m wondering if, even with the rain, they didn’t get enough moisture. That is one problem with the bags, as they are completely above ground.

I also planted cucumbers that day. By the time I got back on 28 September, they had grown to the top of the support and are starting to set cukes.

Finally, the week before I left (late Aug/early Sep), I planted bush beans (Royalty Purple Pod), pole beans (Stringless Blue Lake), carrots (Chantenay), chives, soybeans, marigolds and mammoth clover. Everything but the chives had germinated nicely by my return. I decided not to plant the cool weather crops, like broccoli and cauliflower, until my return. It was still pretty hot, and those things germinate better when it’s a touch cooler. Like now.

The mammoth clover is another experiment. I’m using it as a cover crop/green manure. I’ve seeded the half of the driveway bed that isn’t currently in okra. I’ll leave it until spring, then mow it down and till it under. If I can rotate this type of crop through the beds, then I can pull back on the amount of compost that I bring in from off-site. Another step in closing the loop on our little property.

July Planting List – 2009

I always feel like a slug in this scorching weather. It’s a good thing that there’s more work to be done in the kitchen than in the garden.

There are two references I’m using, in order:
Collin County Master Gardeners
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

DPM
tomatoes (can’t seem to source transplants this time of year)
peppers (have plenty that are still producing like champs)
summer and winter squash
melons (my watermelons are doing great)
pumpkins*

CCMG
eggplant* (thru 15th)
peppers (hot and bell)
potatoes, Irish (after the 15th)*
pumpkins*
tomatoes

We are very busy keeping up with the harvesting. The tomatoes are coming in by the pound. It’s a beautiful thing! We have had 3 canning sessions, and there are more to come. Jan has been pureeing the small tomatoes whole (cherry, yellow pear) before canning. The larger tomatoes, we’ve been blanching the skins off, then coring and stuffing them whole into quart jars. (To blanch, just get a big pot of boiling water, drop the whole tomatoes in, boil until the skin breaks. Use tongs to pull each tomato out and plop it straight into a big pot of ice water. The skin will slide right off, core the tomato, pop it into a jar.)

We’re also harvesting cucumbers at a good rate; peppers are still cranking. We’re drying the hot peppers, and slicing and freezing the sweet peppers. I also sliced and froze the carrots and some of the onions. They’ll be perfect to drop into stews and roasts. The eggplants are tapering off. We planted a Fairytale transplant this year. It’s done really well. I bought seeds to plant and share with a neighbor during this 2nd season.

The basil is just about ready to start processing into pesto. We made it through all of last year with our pesto. We just made 2 or 3 big batches, then froze it into ice cube trays. Once the cubes were frozen solid, we popped them out and into freezer bags. One cube is perfect for one serving of pasta.

I harvested the corn a few weeks ago. I’m still trying to find the right variety. We grew Painted Mountain this year, and it was a little tough. Good flavor, though.

Growing strong: watermelon, okra, leeks, tomatoes, peppers, basil.

Old McGarrah

June Planting List – 2009

It’s official, Make McKinney Weird is one year old. OK, it’s not official. It will actually be on 8 June. But the June planting list is the first month that I’m circling back on information already discussed last year. Pretty cool.

There are two references I’m using, in order:
Collin County Master Gardeners
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

okra*
pumpkin*
squash

If you look at last year’s list, you’ll notice this one is much shorter. That’s because over the course of the last year, I realized that two of the four resources I was using were too general to be very useful in our little corner of the world. The two sources we’re left with (listed above), combined with my experiences and those of my neighbors, leaves me with what you see here. So my planting lists are improving. Go with the most recent one.

And I should note that this month, CCMG actually doesn’t recommending planting anything. They say to get your okra in by 1 June. And wait until July to put your squash and pumpkin. So if you feel like it, relax! You could have a lovely month of harvesting, with no planting chores to attend to. That’s OK, you’ll be busy enough keeping up with the watering. I looked at our electric bill yesterday, and from May to June we go from using almost no a/c to using it every day! So prepare yourself.

I harvested one last big batch of shelling peas a few days ago, then pulled up the plants. I’ll be adding compost and planting my okra in that spot today. I’ve been soaking the okra seeds. They germinate so much better when they’re soaked first. If you don’t soak them, be sure to keep the planting bed moist every single day. Trust me. I had to replant the entire okra bed last year. But that’s OK. They’re so forgiving. And they won’t grow much anyway, until it’s hot, hot, hot.

I also harvested the entire garlic bed this week. 54 heads of garlic, in 7 different varieties! Last year we had only 14 heads, and ran out of garlic early. This year, I intend to get through to the next harvest without purchasing a single head of garlic from the store.

The onions are a different story. I planted most of the onion sets around the garlic this spring. I think they got too much shade from the garlics, so they have weak tops. I’m leaving them in the ground a bit longer to see if they beef up. Fortunately, I also planted some sets in other spots, and I have both Egyptian Walking Onions and Multiplier Onions in the ground from the fall. So we’ll be OK for our fresh onion needs, but I’m concerned about our storage onions. We made it almost all year from last summer’s harvest, so I’ll be bummed if I don’t get enough this year.

And finally – drum roll, please – I got my first tomato! I would love to tell you what it was, but I don’t know. I got half of my tomato transplants from my neighbor, and the other half from the Feed and Seed. Neither of those sources is big on labeling their transplants. So this year’s tomato fest is a total surprise. We’ll get what we get, and we won’t throw a fit (as my daughter’s teacher used to say).

Gardening between the rain clouds

We have had the most lovely, wet spring. After too many years of drought, this is such a relief. With all of the time I’m not spending watering, you’d think I would get around to writing more – but I’m afraid Jan and I spend too much time sipping wine on the porch, which just saps my productive energy right out of me. I’m afraid that’s why he brings me the wine; the Protestant work ethic makes him nervous.

Of course, the rain has not been such a blessing for some of my gardening friends. I have two friends gardening on one particular street, and their gardens both flooded. The weeks of standing water has done them no favors.

The first week of May, I planted sweet potatoes, Beauregard. What a great name. Makes me think of mint julips. I also got ahold of some gorgeous purple and white Dutch irises, due to the street construction that’s been going on since July. Of last year. 2008. Guh. Anyway, the city installed a sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house, right through her tremendous iris garden. We all consoled her for a couple of minutes, then jumped in and swiped the uprooted irises. Next spring you’ll see them blooming all up and down our street. Heh.

sweet potatoes

To make room for the sweet potatoes, I pulled up some underperforming broccoli, broccoli raab, and spinach. All of these did well for me in the fall, but weren’t worth the time and space this spring. Maybe it was the multiple late freezes this year.

We’re currently harvesting:
shelling peas
snow peas (I’m not sure how I ended up with those; I don’t care for them.)
green onions
chives
stevia
strawberries (still mostly going to the mockingbirds, but Ella gets a few here and there)
banana peppers
jalapenos
marjoram
oregano
cilantro (the last of it was a week or two ago; the rest has bolted)

Our neighbors came over with new potatoes from their garden, but I haven’t dug into ours yet. A few potatoes go a long way in our house, so I can wait.

Everything else is going gangbusters. Even my corn looks fantastic. Last year it got bugs then blew over. That was Luscious. So this year I planted Painted Mountain. So far, so good.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be making my last harvest of peas, and pulling the plants to make way for the okra. Of the peas I planted, I would do Alaska and Wando again. I’ll stay away from Little Marvel and Oregon Sugar Pod. I’m not in any hurry to get my okra in, because everyone up and down the street seems to have planted some this year. So we’ll have plenty all season long.

Which reminds me, three of my neighbors (within a few blocks) have planted new gardens this year, including my next door neighbor, Rick. Who knows if having my veggie garden in the front yard has helped inspire anyone other than Rick, but it can’t hurt, right? I’d love to see everyone with at least a little patch of food growing. Maybe it’ll go viral in old McKinney. That would be weird. Good weird.

May planting list

Well, it seems the rush is over. The Dallas Planting Manual doesn’t suggest any veggie planting this month, and there are just a few recommended by the Collin County Master Gardeners. You’ve done the heavy lifting, now rest for a bit while your work bears fruit . . . so to speak. Because it’ll start back up again toward the end of summer.

There are two references I’m using, in order:
Collin County Master Gardeners
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

CCMG
okra* (thru 1 Jun.)
peas, southern (thru 20 May)
sweet potato slips* (thru 15 May)

Garden update:

Germinated and growing nicely are: cucumbers, watermelons, edamame (soy beans), leeks, chives, carrots, spinach, broccoli raab, green beans, potatoes.

As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re growing potatoes in fabric pots this year. It’s working well so far. As the leaves grow, you just fill the pot up around the stems with compost or compost/soil:

I thought that the red potatoes that Jan got at the grocery store weren’t going to come up, but they finally did about a month after the seed potatoes we got from our neighbor. Very strange.

Larger plants that are still actively growing: garlic, onions, peas (which are flowering), all kinds of peppers (there’s even one little banana pepper already), tomatoes, eggplant, blueberries. There are actually blueberries this year! I can’t wait. All of the fruit trees are now fully leafed out, but we had a late freeze (or two) and it looks like there won’t be much fruit. But there are three lovely peaches on Jan’s white peach tree. The tree is so small that it seems impossible that it would produce this year, but so far, so good:

We’re currently harvesting: strawberries (coming in slowly), chives (mmm, cheddar and chive bread), green onions, marjoram, cilantro, oregano.

Our Farmer’s Market starts this Saturday. It seems like it’s been ages. I’m very proud this year, because we made the cloth shopping bags for the Market:

This picture was taken before the bags were printed with the Market logo. I’ll post another when I see the final bags.

Harvest season

What a fantastic time of year to be in the garden. The winter garden is almost done, with garlic, broccoli, onions, lettuce, spinach, and cool weather herbs, like chervil, parsley, and cilantro. We’re on the tail end of our okra (the burgundy variety started earlier than the green variety, and is now tapering off), and we’re starting to bring in cucumbers:

The first cucumber off the vine wasn’t as sweet as I like, so I need to tweak something. I braved eating one, even though cucumbers are on my list of oral allergens. Once they start coming in heavy, we’ll just pickle them, and I’ll eat them that way.

The biggest treat of this harvest season has definitely been the watermelons. I may be biased, but these seem like the sweetest, juiciest watermelons I’ve had in a long time. Ella agrees:

They take forever to ripen on the vine. And you have to let them be, because they will not continue to ripen once picked. So you wait for the tendril closest to the stem of a given watermelon to turn brown, then pick. Forget looking for ridges on the melon, or the color of the bottom, or even the sound of the thump. If the tendril is still green, the melon will not be ready (ahem, believe me). The funny thing was that the vine up and decided it was done one week, and ripened up every melon at once. We had all sizes of melons, from about 12 inches down to one little four-inch cutie. We gave it to my neighbor, and she said she got four bites out of it. But that it was wonderful!

It’s not all good news, though. My corn plants blew over yesterday. I’ve tried to prop them up, but it’s clearly not working. I guess I need to hill the dirt around each plant next year. What a bummer. The silks had just started appearing, too.

September planting list

Well, since I was early with the August list, that bought me an out for being late with the September list. Sorry.

There are three references I’m using:
Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening, J. Howard Garrett & C. Malcolm Beck (he’s in Dallas)
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club (Dallas, again)
Collin County Master Gardeners

I’ve put an asterisk by the ones I think I’ll be planting.

DPM
“Cold hardy varieties, both seeds and starts as onions.”

CCMG (I just love how specific they are with the dates.)
cabbage (1st – 15th)
carrot
chard, swiss (1st – 15th)
collards
garlic* (15th – 15 Oct.)
kale
lettuce*
onion*
peas, English*
radish
rutabaga
turnip

TOVG
beans, snap bush
broccoli
brussels sprouts
cabbage
carrots
cauliflower
cucumber
kohlrabi (10 Sep.)
potato
squash, summer (10 Sep.)

It’s interesting to me how much the Collin County Master Gardeners and Howard Garrett differ.

An update on my August plantings and harvesting:

OKRA – We’ve been harvesting okra for weeks now. I made two plantings, and we’re eating from two mature plants from the first round. The burgundy variety (Red Burgundy) fruited much earlier, by weeks, than the green variety (Clemson Spineless). It’s prettier, too. We’ll probably shoot for four plants next year, as it takes a few days to get enough pods for a meal.
WATERMELON – These vines (along with the cantaloupe vines) have completely taken over one third of my front beds. Out of control. We had one early watermelon that exploded when we got our first big rain a few weeks ago (another hurricane, as I recall). We had about 5 more melons set after that. I harvested one, trying to get a feel for when to harvest these darn things. It was totally white throughout. So now I’m sitting, not-so-patiently waiting for them to ripen. Apparently, I’m waiting for the little tendril nearest the stem of the melon to turn brown. Hasn’t happened yet. And with all of the rain currently falling from Hurricane Ike, I’m worried the rest will explode. Watermelons don’t ripen once they’re harvested, so I have no choice but to wait it out and hope.
CANTALOUPE – Crazy, crazy vines with huge leaves reaching for our cars and threatening to engulf them. But until today, I didn’t see any sign of a melon. Finally, I think I see one a’comin’. I’ll keep you posted.
PEPPERS – We have three poor little pepper plants that have been totally engulfed by the melon vines (along with an oregano, three basils, a cool volunteer, a full-size nandina, a pomegranate, and I believe several small dogs that wandered too close to the garden edge). Finally, the peppers got tall enough to rise above, and there are a few little peppers that have set. By this time, I have no idea what they are, though.
TOMATOES – While the plants are technically still producing, they’re petering out and performing poorly. I’m going to pull them all out, as soon as it dries out, and make room for the incoming garlic (LOTS of garlic this year).

I completed the August seeding, and the cucumbers and corn are up and looking pretty good. I lost a few corn seedlings when I left town for four days over labor day and forgot to ask Jan to water. The cauliflowers have just sprouted, and I’m waiting for the carrots, broccoli, beans and edamame to come up. Mmmm, edamame. Ella will love me for that.

Bottling the goodness

Jan gets very, very distressed when food goes to waste. Well, not enough so that he cleans out the refrigerator. But when Ella wastes food, or when garden produce goes bad. So this year, for the first time, he’s made a concerted effort to learn to preserve what I grow. ‘Cause, you know, that’s not my job. I just grow the stuff. What I grow is not nearly as important as my being outside nurturing plants.

His first foray into preserving was the pesto. That was a resounding success. So he bought a pressure cooker/canner, and set about making sauces from all of the tomatoes that I’m bringing in from the fields.

A red sauce for pizza, using herbs and garlic from the garden. A green sauce from the White Currant tomatoes, as a spread and special pizza or pasta sauce. A ranchero sauce using our tomatoes and peppers that we picked up at the Farmer’s Market. We’re in sauce heaven.

For practice, Jan also canned some cherries from Whole Foods.

It all seems to have gone very well. But you don’t really know, do you, until you open the jars several months down the line? And I’m having a heck of a time explaining the whole concept to Ella. She’s really not sure why in the world we would have yummy food in jars, and not crack them open and eat them!

Making friends with failure

Gardening can be humbling. It’s such an act of faith. And I would submit that it’s very good for most of us to come to terms with our basic natures, be they obsessive or careless. I’ve often heard that the fastest path to personal growth is mindfully working through a close relationship with another person. But I think that gardening also pushes a lot of hot buttons for many of us, and gives us an opportunity to observe our (sometimes unhealthy) reactions to adversity.

All of this is by way of introduction to my potato harvest. (sigh) Jan loves potatoes. Especially little fingerling potatoes. So I bought Russian fingerling potatoes and put them in the ground. Lots of them. They grew and looked gorgeous. They took up a lot of space. We waited. Some of them bloomed. We waited. Finally, the vines started to die back. So we dug one up. I got half a pound of potatoes from that one vine. Not bad. Not fantastic, but not bad.

So I waited another couple of weeks, then dug up the rest of the vines. The first vine I dug up had very few full-size potatoes. What a bummer. Then the next looked about as bad. Quite a few tiny, marble or date size, potatoes, but few “fingerlings”. So I keep digging and collecting my marbles. And I’m talking to myself, trying to find a positive angle to having devoted so much space to these things for so long (months!). Um, lesson learned? Not positive enough. Hm, blog fodder? Ack. Improving the soil tilth? Lame. I don’t know.

In the end, I got one basket full:

Maybe 2-3 pounds. Jan says it’ll feed us for quite a few meals. And he actually loves sautéing the little marbles in butter, and eating them whole (he’s so feakin’ positive; it kills me).

I have since read that red potatoes do best in our climate. Maybe I’ll blame it on poor variety choice! Yeah, that’s it! Also, I’m going to give these potato bins a go. That way, I can put them in the backyard, and save the space in the front veggie beds for something more reliable and with a shorter season.

On a brighter note, an older woman walked by the house this morning while I was watering and called me the “tomato queen”. It might have been snarky; I can’t tell. But I choose to take it as a complement. A bit later, I met someone from the neighborhood who stopped to chat about the tomatoes. Our conversation wound around and we ended up talking about Austin. He waxed wistful about the Hill Country, then cheered me on, saying that it’s people like me that will bring more personality to this area. Yay! That’s the whole point! But it still doesn’t negate the fact that the primary recreational opportunity in this area is shopping. There’s just not much to be done about living where it’s flat and dry. Drink more, I guess.

‘Maters!

Two new tomatoes came off the vine today, and our first large varieties of the season. Oregon Star is on the left, Oregon Spring on the right. Oops, I guess I should have included a ruler in the pic. The big one is about 3″ across, the other is about 2″:

I harvested them as soon as they were reddish all over, even though they aren’t quite ripe. Otherwise, the mockingbirds will get them. Notice the cracks in the tops. That’s from uneven soil moisture. In our 100 degree heat, it would take much more mulch and a drip irrigation system to keep this from happening. I’ve been dumping compost on this bed like crazy, and it’s been eating it so quickly. I just can’t keep up! For now, hand-watering will have to do, as I have so many projects going that drip irrigation isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. The cracks may be unsightly, but the ‘maters are still delicious.

As for the varieties, I picked them out of my favorite seed catalog, Territorial Seed Company. I started buying from them when I lived in Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t generally have the best varieties for Texas (d’uh). But I buy from them, anyway. I bought seven varieties of tomatoes this year, and all but one are doing just fine, despite being chosen for taste, rather than adaptation to our climate. The one that didn’t cut the mustard is Gill’s All Purpose. They almost immediately showed signs of wilt, and are hardly producing. The others are (in order of tomato production):
White Currant*
Early Cherry*
Beaverlodge Plum
Jolly Elf
Oregon Star
Oregon Spring

The two with stars will be grown again next year. The others we will replace with something that performs better in one way or another. For instance, Beaverlodge Plum is a prolific producer, but the plants are stunted, so the total harvest isn’t as large as it might be in another region.

By the way, even though these guys aren’t adapted to setting in the heat, they have all manged to set pretty well. Maybe we’ve had enough nights dip below 70? I don’t know.

Here’s a pic of a mix of the first four tomatoes on the list:

The yellow ones are the White Current, the ovoid one at the bottom left is a Jolly Elf, the largest one is the Beaverlodge Plum, and the rest are Early Cherry. The nose is Lizzi’s.