Blog Archives
Garden Planning: Vertical Garden
One of the more interesting gardens this year will be our Vertical Garden. We are planning to use the cattle panel trellis system for an entire bed (6 trellises) to grow a variety of vining vegetables.
As you can see, we have selected 12 different varieties to try. We have some varieties that might look familiar – Suhyo Cross Cucumber and the Red Noodle Bean were both in the Asian Garden last year. We’ve also added another popular slicing cucumber and a pickling type cucumber.
We have 2 winter squashes and a more vining type straightneck summer squash. We’ve also got two types of cantaloupe on the trellis – one personal size and one larger size. We’re also trying a normal pole bean, partly because I’ve heard from several quarters that pole beans don’t do well here. We’ll find out!
We also have a trailing nasturtium and malabar spinach to add some diversity and color to the garden.
Most of these vining crops don’t naturally climb on a trellis, so I expect we’ll have to use some clips to help them start climbing.
Friday PhotoEssay
I wandered around the garden earlier this week to see what there was to see after the snow and cold. I’m so impressed with the vitality of our plant under the circumstances!
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting the temperatures under the row covers, and that’s for a very good reason. The row covers were frozen to the ground, so I couldn’t get at the thermometers! So the readings right now are the highest and lowest temperatures that have been experienced since the last time I took readings. (I have to be honest – I don’t even remember when that was!)
This is the outdoor thermometer. The max temperature was 75 degrees and the minimum was about -10 degrees. I don’t know if the garden really didn’t get any colder than -10 or if the thermometer was under a blanket of snow which would have insulated it somewhat.
The thermometer under the plastic row cover gave a reading of 100 degrees maximum and 20 degrees minimum. We’ll talk about that more in a minute.
First, let’s look at the plants that were growing outdoors, completely uncovered and unprotected (except by that nice 
blanket of snow). The larkspur is looking great! I think it has been growing, because it is bigger than I remember it being before the snow. We are planning to transplant it to another spot in the garden sometime soon.
The outdoor spinach is looking fine as well, and to my surprise, the lettuce is also still alive! I was kind of expecting most of the lettuce to be dead and gone. A lot of it is, but the beautiful ‘Red Cross’ Butterhead lettuce (that we chose for heat tolerance!!) still has some life to it in the very center of the plants.
It isn’t exactly what you would consider “harvestable,” but the fact that it is still alive is rather impressive. It will probably grow a little bit more before it bolts this spring. Maybe enough to harvest a couple leaves, but probably not. It was just a fun experiment, and it does show how much potential there is for growing lettuces in the winter if they are given more than no protection.
The next thing I looked at was the garden under the plastic row cover. This bed did sustain some damage from the recent winter storm!
As you can see, a couple of the PVC hoops got a bit flattened. I’m not sure if it was the weight of the snow itself or the weight of the melting snow/water that did it. I kind of suspect it was the water in the end that caused the damage. I pulled the plastic up here before I took the picture, but there was a lot of water sitting in the plastic. The plastic wasn’t tight enough for the water to just run off, so it pooled crushed the hoops.
I’ve decided to take the plastic off this garden completely for a couple of different reasons. This is one of them:
I think the conditions under the plastic tunnel have been too humid and too warm for parts of the winter, resulting in the growth of this beautiful fungus seen above on some dead kale leaves. The plants under the plastic don’t look nearly as good as those under the fabric row cover, and most of them are supposed to be more cold hardy!
The leeks and onions aren’t looking terrible, but they have some diseased leaves too.
Meanwhile, under the fabric covered hoops, things are looking pretty good. There are some dead leaves here and there, but I think some of this lettuce and spinach could still be eaten!
The moral of this story is that you should only use plastic for row covers if you are going to be able to vent the plastic on warmer, sunnier days.
New Garden Plans – Peppers
We’re plugging along on our plans for the 2011 Demonstration Garden. If I haven’t posted this week, I blame it on all the planning meetings we have had!
The very first garden that we’ve finalized is the Pepper Garden. The Master Gardeners planning this garden worked really hard to get a good mix of pepper varieties. There’s a great range of colors, sizes, shapes, and heat! In the map below, we’ve allowed space for 18″ rows of peppers with 3 plants per row. The colors are a general indicator of what color the peppers will be at maturity. In parenthesis, it tells if the peppers are bell peppers or hot peppers. Of course, the “hot” designation is a range. The NuMex Sunrise is the mildest hot pepper, and I think the Chocolate Habanero is the hottest. Everything else is in between. The pepper garden will be exciting this year…in more ways than one!
(If you are new to the Demo Garden Blog, all of our raised bed gardens are 25 feet long and 4 feet wide. The plans should be easily adaptable to your own raised bed garden if you want.)
Preparing for Cold Weather
The most recent weather forecast shows that it is supposed to get down to 35 tonight, 29 on Thursday night, and 30 on Friday night. Now, most of the greens we have in the garden will tolerate those temperatures with minimal problems. However, I’m planning to cover two of the beds to keep them over the winter. They will do better if I cover them a day before the cold temperatures set in, because the covers will keep the soil warmer or even warm it up a little bit. On the other hand, it is supposed to be 70 on Saturday/Sunday, with overnight temps in the 40s. That is really a little bit warm to have row covers on, especially the plastic row cover. I might end up putting the fabric row covers on both beds, and then switching one out for plastic in a few weeks. I’ll let you know what I do!
Regardless of what I’m going to do with the row covers, I did harvest some things yesterday, partly so the row covers would fit better!
I hacked back the arugula, since it was over-grown, over-sized, and hadn’t been harvested heavily enough. I probably got about 2 lbs of arugula from that little 4 foot row. I also picked a lot of the larger chard leaves. I sense more Swiss Chard & Sweet Potato Gratin coming! The kale also got a heavy trimming, but I don’t know what I’ll do with it yet. Soup, saute, casserole…so many options.
The other thing I harvested was a bunch of larger daikon radishes – regular daikon, green meat, and Mantanghong varieties. I’m planning to make fresh pickles with the radishes for our Master Gardener class tomorrow. If that happens, I’ll definitely be posting a recipe and some pictures.
Harvesting the radishes prior to cold weather is kind of a strange thing to do… I’m trying to keep them going into the winter, and the larger ones will last longer in cold weather. However, I also needed to thin them out some, which will help the others grow. So…I may not get any more harvestable radishes out of the areas where I pulled these, in which case it wouldn’t have made a difference in volume, just when I had radishes to eat.
Of course, if you still have any tomatoes or peppers languishing in your gardens, now is the time to pick anything that you want to keep, because freezing temperatures will put an end to them!
Friday PhotoEssay
We’re back to having a colorful blog, and we’ve got some great pictures to show off!
The butterfly caterpillars have once again eaten the green fennel down to nubbins, and they have begrudgingly moved on to the bronze fennel. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to like the bronze fennel quite as well.
The ‘Sunbelt’ Grapes are beautifully purple/blue and quite tasty. Unfortunately, the grape berry moth larvae think so too!
This Sweet Annie has turned into a huge shrub! This is an herb that I’m not very familiar with, probably because it’s not really a culinary herb, but more of a fragrance herb. Apparently it is supposed to be good for drying and using in herbal wreaths and other such crafty things.
Although we like to keep the basil flowers trimmed back to keep the culinary quality of the basil high, I really love basil flowers! They are really beautiful, the bees like them, and they are just as edible as the leaves.
Now that’s what I like to see in a tomato! This is one of the Rose tomatoes all sliced up and ready for sandwiches. I haven’t been able to get a really good flavor comparison of the Rose and Brandywine tomatoes, but I think Rose wins the productivity and earliness awards.
Have a great Labor Day Weekend!
