The Ides of June

It's nearly the Ides of June. Today there was almost two inches of rain from thunderstorms following almost six weeks of drought. And yet in this dusty spring, the gardens haven't fared so badly.

This is the field shown in the post about horse plowing. There are two plots of corn separated by a plot of potatoes. In the foreground those are melon plants just germinating. The corn got one rain just after it was planted but is still waist high after a month and a half of dry weather.

This is a terrible photo, it makes the plants look stepped on. These are the tomatoes shown growing in the egg carton in the previous post.

And these are the peppers that were growing in the pie pan.

Here is the sweet corn that was growing under the soda jugs.

Onions which were grown from seed. The larger ones are about 4" across.

Kohlrabi about big enough to eat peeking out from the edge of the bed.

The first broccoli of the season.

Black Palm Kale two weeks after transplanting and beets behind that.

Lettuce of various kinds and kale growing behind that.

Another bed of lettuce and spinach behind that. You can see that some of the lettuce and the spinach have been harvested and the lettuce plants, cut off 1" above the ground, are growing back. Since this photo was taken, each lettuce stump made and new rosette of lettuce as big as the original, that was harvested, and then it has grown a third. The third growing has begun to bitter so the rabbits will get the last of it.

Snap peas blooming in spite of the very dry conditions. Now that they have had some water, they will grow up another three or four feet and set on more peas along the way.

This was going to be a fallow part of a bed used for composting this year but it grew up with volunteer potatoes so evenly that I left it alone. It looks as if this 4' x 7' bed will yield about 35 pounds of potatoes without even the effort of planting them. That's black peppermint growing in the lower right of the picture.

Cabbages and kale.

A bed of kohlrabi transplants in the foreground and behind that, beets, lettuce, and mizuna. In the bed behind that are collards and broccoli.

Even Though We Ain't Got Money ...

So the refrain of an old Loggins & Messina song goes (later sung by Ann Murray) and it plays through my head this time of the year when I read people's internet accounts of gardening so many of which contain the old harangue of how expensive it is to have a garden. This first came starkly to my attention some years ago when a couple was visiting our small holding in late May and having reviewed the garden commented that they too one day would plant a garden .... when they could afford it!

I was taken aback. We were gardening for economy. We couldn't afford to not have a garden.

Like so many things I suppose you could spend a lot of money on a garden. You could run up a tab in gadgets and tools and such that would keep you in groceries for many a month, not counting seeds, plants, soil amendments, do-dads to keep out predators and insects, etc. But it needn't be.

The first thing people do is buy way too many seeds. The lettuce seeds you could pinch between thumb and forefinger properly germinated and transplanted will keep a big family in lettuce for four months and yet many gardeners I know confess to having bought four ounces of lettuce seed, some even a pound, more seed than 100 gardeners could use in 25 years. Today I planted about 500 feet of hard corn hills and the seed required (Bloody Butcher, by the bye) I could hold in both cupped hands.

Also gardeners seem to fall for every unlikely gadget proffered. This year I started paprika plants in an old egg carton.

Tomatoes were started in egg cartons as well and when the seedlings were about an inch high, the best ones were transplanted to discarded 4 oz. plastic drink cups with a couple of holes punched in the bottom.

Some plants, like these poblano peppers, were started in an old aluminum pie pan.

And yet on three gardening blogs I read about gardeners, after complaining about how much it cost to garden, proudly displaying the soil block makers they bought to make sure they had good seedlings to transplant. There was generally an obsession about the proper formula for potting soil. Me? I scooped up some dirt out of the garden and put in the egg cartons.

Gadgets don't make good seedlings. Understanding the growth of seedlings makes good seedlings, and you can't buy that. You see it is a mistake to grow a seedling in very rich dirt and then transplant it into poorer dirt. It will have developed a root system suited to take in readily available nutrients and when put into poorer soil, it will undergo stress. Organic gardening advocates used to call this the breakfast-lunch-dinner principle. Grow the seedling in poor or even sterile soil, it will develop a root system bent on taking in every bit of nutrient it can. Then transplant it into a larger container or holding bed that is a little richer. Finally put it out in a permanent location that is richer still, just as one would eat a light breakfast, a little more at lunch, and a big dinner.

Almost any problem in the garden can be addressed without spending any money.

Here sweet corn is being grown under 2 ltr soda jugs (Let it be known that you want soda jugs and you will soon be chin deep in them!) The corn was planted early and the jug (with the bottom cut out, and then the bottom used as a cover to germinate spinach) kept the ground warm and kept the frost off the early emerging corn. It also prevented crows from digging up the seedlings. When the weather warmed up, the lids were screwed off to allow for ventilation. The corn (now sans jugs) is 2' tall in early May with prospects of sweet corn in June.

Most long time gardeners could go on and on. It is neither necessary nor conducive to spend a lot of money on a garden. This year I spent about $15 on seeds I didn't manage to save from the previous year, that is, until I broke down and bought new seed potatoes for the main crop. I paid $20 for 100 pounds of seed potatoes, but I only do that every five or six years. It is a myth that you can't save your own potatoes and must purchase them every year.

A beginning gardener isn't going to do that well, but needn't spend terribly much more than that. In fact the first and best advice I'd give to aspiring gardeners is the less money you spend, the more likely your success.

Tea for the Tillerman

Well, I suppose it's the nature of a blog about gardening. If there's something to blog about, there's no time to do it and when there's time to blog, there's nothing to blog about.

But I'm tired right now and so I'm going to have some tea and blog about my tiredness, mine and that of my drover and my horse.

Last year was not a good one for the strategic crop of hard corn, nearly a total crop failure. In itself that has been no particular hardship since the crop from the year before was so good, we still have corn for bread, tortillas, tamales, and enough seed corn for this years planting. But when it became apparent last year that the corn crop was a loss, the grain field was abandoned so that time and labor could be applied to better end elsewhere.

For several years running the grain field, about one sixth of an acre, had been tended only with hand tools. Each year hoeing and mulching had kept the weeds and sod down to such a level that the next year the work of preparing it was no great cost of labor. But although widely fluctuating temperatures and a sharp drought at the wrong time did in the corn, it only enhanced and encouraged the weeds and grass.

This year it was apparent that hand tools alone would not prepare the grain field for planting in time. We are very loath to use engines on the farm. Instead we decided to plow the ground with the horse. There are two enormous bottom plows conveniently located at the gardens, but they plow much too deeply and the horse, Mr. Himself, had done no substantial work all winter and couldn't be expected to pull such an enormous load by himself on short notice. There was also a much smaller plow, the Vulcan #13, that had been my grandfather's plow and had spent much of the last 30 years as a lawn ornament in my parents' yard. The handles had rotted away and the depth wheel and coulter were completely missing. A new depth wheel was made by welding a 2" steel pipe to a heavy equipment castor and a coulter, the blade that slices the sod before it is turned, isn't really necessary unless the plowman is tilling very heavy sod.

I'd bought new oak handles at last year's draft horse sale, but the handles on this particular plow come off the iron at different angles and their configuration is not readily apparent. I sent out an inquiry on a draft horse discussion list and got back a wonderful collection of restored Vulcan #13 plows along with advice on how to fit the handles and fabricate the braces and stays needed to make the plow workable.

Here you plant corn when "dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear." The very hard freeze of only a few weeks ago had delayed the deciduous trees and so there is still plenty of time to prepare the corn field. With Mr. Himself in tack and Et Ux serving as dover we were ready make an attempt at providing ourselves with corn at no cash expense and the use of no fossil fuels whatever. Yet more than this, I was reminded of the words in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac:

He who by the plow would thrive
Himself must either lead or drive

Plowing is work for everyone involved. After laying open a furrow down the middle of the field, a furrow is opened on either side of the first one, pitching the dirt toward the middle of plowed area. A couple of passes around the field and the horse is stopped in the shade to blow and the plowman and drover take in the quiet punctuated only by a quiet snort and whiffle and the jingle of the harness. Then another time around the field. There's another one of those numerous couplets for remembering this or that about the common tasks around a farm used as a way of guessing how much ground can be plowed:

Six by nine, straight as a line, eleven miles per acre.
One acre for each horse each day is their full fill of labor.

That is, plowing a furrow six inches deep and nine inches wide, the plow would be pulled eleven miles altogether to plow and acre and that's how much you might expect one horse to do in a day.

OK, none of the three of us was in that good shape so we were content to plow our sixth of an acre in one sunny, unhurried afternoon.

Do you remember the lines from an Elton John song Country Comfort?

Down at the well they've got a new machine
The foreman says it cuts man-power by fifteen
Yeah but that ain't natural well so old Clay would say
You see he's a horse-drawn man until his dying day


The price of corn is increasing dramatically as it is being gobbled up to make ethanol for motor fuel in a mirthless and vicious cycle of more mechanization to raise more crops to support more mechanization. Yet our tired trio plods along at a natural pace, content to amble off to our tea and leave a field well plowed in our wake.

Silver Seed

Last summer the winter squashes and pumpkins were located in a place where watering them was not a feasible option. Many years this is not a problem since the rainfall is adequate for the hills to store up enough water to last to the next rain. But not so this year. At the critical time when most of them were setting blossoms, it was hot and dry and worst of all the night temperatures did not drop below 75 degrees for many nights in a row. The blossoms of most of the pumpkins and squashes expired and fell off the vines under such unrelenting heat and dryness.

It was a very bad crop of a very important vegetable. Alas, most people only come into contact with members of the Cucurbita genus as Jack-o-lanterns or fall decorations. But the the self-sufficient hardscrabble farmstead they are an important group of plants. Here I should say that the term 'pumpkin' does not identify a species of plant or a particular vegetable. A pumpkin is a squash that is generally roundish, ribbed, and orange (but not always). But what we call pumpkins are several different species of Cucurbita. The very large prize winning pumpkins (such as Atlantic Giant and Big Max) are Cucurbita Maxima. The most typical Jack-o-lantern pumpkin is the Connecticut Field Pumpkin which is C. Pepo. And many of those small dark orange sugar pumpkins used for pies are C. Moschata.

If that were not enough, the C. Pepo species, those Halloween pumpkins, also includes zucchini, yellow crookneck, and patty pan summer squashes. Acorn squashes are also C. Pepo. Many of the small sweet pie pumpkins are C. Pepo but some are C. Moschata and are the same species as butternut squash. And those tiny squashes no bigger than your fist, the 'buttercup' squashes, are C. Maxima just like the monster 500 lb. giant pumpkins. Hubbard squash are also C. Maxima.

There are many other species of edible squash such as C. Mixta and C. Melopepo. Ornamental gourds are of the genus Cucurbita as are the great bewildering number of species of wild gourds from which they were all derived.

One very different but very useful species is the C. Argyrosperma, a very long time heirloom squash in the Appalachians, the Cushaw. Cushaws are large gourd shaped squash with very fine grained flesh ideal for pies. They are long maturing and slow growing. This year, as they most often do in bad years, they soldiered on produced a good crop of fruits in spite of the bad conditions. The vine pictured above was drying up in the heat, but set and matured the green striped squash none the less.

An excellent producer and arguably the best tasting of the squashes, the Cushaw has one serious drawback: They don't keep very long. All winter squash keep best in warm dry conditions. Some of the Queensland Blue squash of the previous years have kept 18 months and were still in good condition. Alas, one is lucky to get the Cushaw to keep two months from their harvest in late October.

Here is the last Cushaw of the season cut open to be cooked for Christmas dessert.

This one was about 22" long and weighed about 12 lbs. Of course such a tenacious specimen of a vegetable deserves to have its genes preserved and passed along and I kept all the largest seeds so that they can grow in many gardens this coming season.

You can perhaps see where this squash gets is specie name Argyrosperma which is Greek for Silver Seed.

The Solstice Garden

Happy Solstice!

There was nothing much to say on this blog from midsummer on because the garden was in such a state of flux and all in all it was one of the least successful years of gardening since this particular garden was established some seventeen years ago.

The climate is changing. The first ten years of gardening this spot the weather was what was to be expected for the temperate rain forest, rains all summer at more or less regular intervals. But progressively for the past seven years the summers have become drier and drier after midsummer. A garden planned for natural rainfall but gets none soon dries up like a potsherd.

About mid August a consultation with the garden made it clear that the amount of garden to be had was equal to the amount of water to be had.

Now the rub is this, about 25 feet beyond the fence shown in the above photo and some 14 feet straight down is a cool creek that runs out of the deep hollows of the forest and has water in it all year long no matter the rainfall. Yet when water is 14 feet at the bottom of a cliff-like bank, for all practical purposes it might as well be on the moon. Through the years here I've had a series of gasoline powered pumps that all worked for a while. Not only are they annoyingly noisy, but they deliver their water all at once which must be used right then or stored in a tank of trough for use later. But mostly internal combustion engines and I hate each other with an honest and soul deep hatred. The damn things self-destruct and I have a row of them I have blown up over the years.

I know what comes to the mind of my fellow Ludites is a ram pump. They are not necessarily what they are cracked up to be. In this particular case by the time the water is needed in the garden, the flow of the creek is too low to effectively operate the pump. At any rate, I'm always surprised at the extent to which the solution to such problems as this must needs end up with us standing to the side and watching things happen (the ram pump pumping water) rather than us materially participating in it. So I came across this very cheap (about $28) pitcher pump. Two cedar posts were set in the very center of the garden and a 1" PVC pipe buried to the edge of the precipice and then run to a pool in the creek. At first it didn't work, then it occurred to me to put a foot valve at the end of the pipe and now with modest effort it delivers six gallons a minute.

Some time was spent going over my notes of the past few dry years. I modified the plantings a bit and took my best shot for a late summer garden. I will be going over most of those techniques in detail as the gardening year progresses but the gist is that by using a modification of the intensive planting patterns and judicially watering and hand tending, the garden yielded tomatoes (from rooted suckers broken off the failed main crop of tomatoes), peppers, cabbages, broccoli, radishes, lettuce, snap beans of various types, kale, carrots and quite a list of other things all in the short season left after mid August.

In this mild winter many things are wintering over. There's still chard, kale, carrots, beets, garlic, onions, and such still being harvested here at solstice.

A bed of garlic has survived 0 degrees F with a few leaves bitten by the frost but the whole stalk still good to harvest as green garlic.

A winter turnip amid the green cover crop.

Now its a new solar year and time to reflect on what will happen in the garden this year even here when it is still long before the time when the garden is 'all hope and no weeds.'

Sigewif

Wið ymbe nim eorþan, oferweorp mid þinre swiþran
handa under þinum swiþran fet, and cwet:

Fo ic under fot, funde ic hit.
Hwæt, eorðe mæg wið ealra wihta gehwilce
and wið andan and wið æminde
and wið þa micelan mannes tungan.

And wiððon forweorp ofer greot, þonne hi swirman, and cweð:

Sitte ge, sigewif, sigað to eorþan!
Næfre ge wilde to wuda fleogan.
Beo ge swa gemindige mines godes,
swa bið manna gehwilc metes and eþeles.



The above is an Anglo-Saxon metric charm for a swarm of bees. It is one of a very few bits of Anglo-Saxon thought to originate from Heathen days before all writing was done by Christian clerics so all literature and events were seen through Christian eyes and recorded with Christian bias. The word in the first line of the last stanza, sigewif, means victory women or victorious women and is a kenning for honeybees. All the working bees in a swarm are, of course, female.

Today while coming up at noon from the Freeman's Garden, I heard the unmistakable drone of swarming bees. I had begun to be concerned. Two of the hives were ripe for swarming and June is waning fast. The old saw tells us:

A swarm in May is worth a ton of hay
A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon
A swarm in July ain't worth a fly.

The bees must swarm by the end of June to have a reasonable chance of surviving the first winter. This was a pretty strong swarm which had left the hive not half an hour before I came on it. The bees were circling in a ten foot sphere and had not yet formed a cluster. I got an empty hive ready and donned the bee suit. The suit wasn't entirely necessary; swarming bees very rarely sting. By the time I got back, they had formed the cluster about 20' up in a yellow pine so I went back for a saw.

With Heathen thoughts of tankards of mead to come, I charmed them and coaxed them into the hive.

The charm goes like this:


Take earth, cast it with thy right hand under thy right foot, and say:

I put it under foot; I have found it.
Lo, the earth can prevail over all creatures,
And against injury, and against forgetfulness,
And against the mighty tongue of man.

Cast dust over them when they swarm, and say:

Alight, victorious women, descend to earth!
Never fly wild to the wood.
Be as mindful of my good
As every man is of food and home.

Faith as a Turnip Seed

"If ye have faith as a grain of turnip seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." Luke 17:20

OK, OK, it says mustard not turnip but it's small odds because a turnip seed looks exactly like a mustard seed the two of them being very closely related botanically.

I thought about what the turnips had to say as I was in the garden today gathering things for supper. A lightening storm was brewing so I was keen to get the greens gathered and get out of there. I noticed how vigorous the tops of the turnips were and with the intensive gardner's eye chose the one that would best relieve the crowding in the bed. It was wanted to round out the pot of greens so we cut up the bulb and snacked on it while we were cooking. Here was this sizeable vegetable, not the largest in the patch by far, and it had started out as a tiny speck of a seed planted last March, a seed we'd saved from last years turnips when the remnants went to seed.

The ground in which this turnip grew has been nurtured with organic material for sixteen years now. So when I am in the garden here in early June, I see reminders of where I was and what I was doing in March. Someone once defined luck as when opportunity meets preparedness. I guess that about says it. Or else we might refer back to the Writ where we find "Be not decieved, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." (Gal 6:7)

Ruth Stout, the celebrated proponent of no-till mulch gardening put it a little more earthily: If you plant a good turnip seed properly a turnip is what you will get every single time.

Now, it has been my observation, and I've paid more than passing attention to it, that where we find ourselves in our lives is the sum total of how we have prepared the ground and when and what seeds we have planted. You might not be able today to go down to your garden and pull out half a meal from a turnip hole, but you can plant a tiny turnip seed. Time it for early to late July depending on you latitude and you will get however grand a turnip your soil will yield about the time the first light frosts of fall magically transform the turnip's flavor.

I say you can grow turnips. A more noted authority says nothing shall be impossible unto you. All for the sake of a turnip seed.