One Month Later...

Howdy, friends and neighbors!

I apologize for my long absence; it's been a crazy month. So much has happened since my last post! For starters, the strawberries and peas are no longer producing, and in fact the peas have started to die. If you have been watching our Facebook page, you may know that we got quite a few raspberries from Anne Marie's canes (the ones I transplanted this spring are not mature enough to produce fruit yet - next year!) and that I harvested the first of the beets and carrots. I made the beets into a pretty darn good dish: Roasted Beets with Balsamic Glaze, and I added the carrots to a very tasty risotto. Many of the peas went into an alfredo sauce I made. :)

The solanaceae (peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant) have continued to flourish. All of them are blossoming and starting to fruit (although I pinch off the blossoms and berries of the potato plants) and we now have two eggplant - about two inches long apiece - and many tomatoes. The peppers have started to fruit as well, after flowering for some time. All of the above have survived several weeks of very hot weather, with the exception of one pepper: the Thai hot pepper. I think it probably really prefers humid climates, and even though we watered it religiously, the Colorado head and aridity got to it. It was a bummer to lose that little guy, but not a huge loss; I'm not sure what we would have done with so many Thai peppers! The only other ailing plant is a little cherry tomato - the one right in the center of its brethren. I planted five cherry tomatoes, and arranged them like the dots on the five side of a die. The one in the middle is alive, but tiny. I'm not sure what happened - maybe the tomatoes around it blocked a lot of sun, or maybe I was skipping over it somehow when I watered - but it's definitely the runt. I'm not really expecting many fruits from that one, if any, but I'll leave it in the bed just to see what happens.

On to the brassicas! The broccoli are nice and big now, but they still aren't flowering! I'm not sure why this is; they were seeded on time and transplanted pretty much on time, they've been adequately watered and have received plenty of sun... Hopefully they'll bloom eventually. The sooner, the better. The cabbages are doing fine. One of the green cabbages was pretty badly damaged by our hail storm, and lost its apical meristem. As a result, apical dominance was overruled and the plant sprouted four heads instead of just one! I removed the two smaller heads recently, and the remaining two are looking pretty good. They won't be as big as the head on the undamaged cabbage, but they will taste good nonetheless. The red cabbage has a main head as well, but it's a little smaller than the one on the whole green cabbage. Still, no complaints about the progress of the cabbage! The kale is doing great; one is huge, and one is kind of medium-sized (thanks again to hail damage). I really ought to harvest some from the larger one, but to be honest, I'm not sure what to do with it. I know it makes a great green, so I should probably stick it in a stirfry or some such dish. If you want a few leaves of kale, come on over!

I'll lump most of the root veggies together. The beets are doing all right, but they don't really like the heat, so they're a little droopy. I should harvest some of the older ones and use them in something. The carrots are doing fine, though I planted two more rows (about 24 seeds) a couple of weeks ago and they have yet to emerge. I don't like to think that they died, but I'm not sure what else could keep them from emerging. Honestly, they probably weren't watered enough. Hopefully they'll still come up somehow. The onions are doing fine; some of them should probably be harvested soon, as well. I allowed four bolting onions (two red, two yellow) to continue bolting so that they might pollinate one another and set seed, and now their flowers are fully open. I'll have to figure out some way to collect their seeds - it'll be pretty interesting to see what grows from them!

Next, the beans. All of them are doing well. As I said in my last post, the pole beans had some germination issues, and there aren't a whole lot of those. The bush beans did well, with about 75% germination for both varieties. The bush beans also have some blossoms on them, and some of the flowers have already grown pods! Can't wait to harvest those. The pole beans have sent out tendrils, and I have provided them with a trellis pilfered from the peas. The tendrils wrapped themselves around the trellis pretty eagerly, and they have grabbed hold. No blossoms on those guys yet.

Finally, on to the cucurbits! I provided the cucumbers with the peas' other trellis, and they have been climbing that somewhat reluctantly; however, a few cucumber fruits are now developing! A few standard cukes, as well as one lemon cuke. Very exciting! We'll be harvesting those soon. The zucchini and yellow squash, of course, are producing profusely. We have four zucchini, and have harvested from three of them (one is a little smaller, and may never catch up, because it's being shaded by the other three). We have five yellow squash, and two of those are somewhat runty because they were replanted after the original plants died in the hail storm, and now they've been shaded. There are currently three butternut squash (luckily!), which surprises me because I was sure that the ones I replanted wouldn't be coming up - it took them a really long time! None of them are flowering or fruiting yet, because they're so young. The bright side is that they have plenty of room and won't be shaded by other squash. All three types of melons have come up. We have three watermelon, two Tigger, and two cantaloupe (I planted three, but one didn't come up). The watermelon plants are huge, and they are blooming like crazy. One is already producing a melon, and there will be others soon! The Tiggers are also blooming, so it won't be long before they're fruiting as well. The cantaloupe are kinda far behind, so I'm not sure when they'll start blooming, but it shouldn't be too long. The pumpkins...never happened. The two seeds I planted never came up, in spite of my watering efforts, and it just got too late in the season to call Nick about the possibility of buying transplants from him. It is far too late now to think about trying a different variety and starting it from seed, as Frank had suggested.

As it turned out, I actually didn't need to buy more netting. Instead, when I removed netting from the zucchini, I put that same netting over the melons. Later, I removed netting from over the tomatoes, beans, and cucumbers, and now that's just extra. I also added the third layer of tires to the potatoes - again, I got the tires from Alpine Tire Center and painted them off-white using paint from the Larimer County Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Center - and filled the tires with soil and leaves. Ben and I still haven't painted fun designs on the tires, but we probably will at some point...maybe.

I went to ReSource for some floor trim to stake the tomatoes. It was very easy to do, except perhaps for sawing the trim into manageable pieces, but I felt pretty guilty because staking should be done as soon as the tomatoes are transplanted into the garden. Obviously, I didn't do that - and the result was that most, if not all, of the stakes tore through some of the tomatoes' roots. The poor little t'maters look okay still, but it was like I was mauling them! It does make me feel better, though, that there are so many developing tomatoes on the plants.

Well, that's all for now! A whole month's worth of updates. Hopefully it won't take me that long to post again. Until then, my fellow Green Thumbs, fare thee well!

WOG out.

Movin' Right Along

Things are swingin' at Westmore! As you may have seen on our Facebook page, we've been harvesting a pea here and a pea there, along with the occasional strawberry. The peas have been of good size and quite delicious - one challenge they have presented, however, is differentiating between the shelling peas and the sugar snap peas. We had marked each variety, but when the cats got under the netting (repeatedly), they not only disturbed the pea seeds and - I suspect - greatly reduced the number that germinated, but they also took away the markers.  Therefore, I have no idea which plant is a member of which variety, and I have to play a "wait and see" game with the pods. The ones that don't get fat quickly are the ones that I assume belong to the sugar snap variety, and the ones that do puff out are probably the shelling peas. So far, we've just stood in the garden and sampled them. Not that I'm complaining about that!

The strawberries have been sort of tricky - we've discovered that they're difficult to see even when they're nice and ripe, unless you're bending down next to the plants and specifically looking for them. I was a little slow on the uptake for the ones that have ripened so far, and we've either missed them entirely or gotten to them when they're past their prime. The good news is that the one or two perfect ones that we managed to sample have been absolutely delicious - sweet and bursting with strawberryness! Their amazing flavor is also impelling us to keep a closer watch on the strawberry patch for ripening berries - right now, we have about ten on their way.

The beans I planted the day after the hail storm are coming up nicely. The Empress and Golden Wax bush beans are coming up the most reliably - the Kentucky Wonder pole beans have had kind of spotty germination, for some reason. Hopefully, they'll all come up soon.

The first round of beets and carrots are getting big! They are really quite leafy, and I believe we'll be harvesting some soon. The second round are coming up and sending out some true leaves. I'll be planting a third round soon!

I replanted some cucurbits a few days ago, this time using two seeds per desired plant. I'm tired of them refusing to germinate! I replanted one cucumber, two yellow squash, three butternut squash, three cantaloupe, and one Tigger melon, and they should come up within another three or four days. If not, I give up! I also still need to call Nick at CSU to see if he has any leftover pumpkin starts that I could buy - Frank says I waited too long to plant our Howdens; they are too long-season to yield much before the season is over if I plant them this late.

About a week ago, I picked up the next three tires for the potatoes, again from Alpine Tire Center, painted them using free recycled paint from the Larimer County Landfill's Home Hazardous Wastes Department, and stuck them on top of the first layer of tires. I also drove in the rebar stakes I'd gotten - two per tire stack, to hold the upper tires in place against wind, shifting soil, etc. I only put on a base coat of light yellow; Ben and I will be adding some colorful designs pretty soon, to make them a little bit less of an eyesore. After I stacked the second tires on, I filled in their centers with soil from around the first tires, covering most of the potatoes' leaves. Then I stuffed some dead leaves around the inside of the tires (where the tubes would go), as per Louis' suggestion. Actually, Louis had suggested straw, but straw is a lot harder to find than dead leaves, and I think the same principles will apply to the leaves. They will probably break down a lot faster than straw would, but I think they'll be fine for this growing season. The potato plants only took a couple of days to pop right back up through the soil again, and now they're going strong once more.

We have a very healthy population of flea beetles at WOG. I first noticed them on the tomatoes, and now they are also on the potatoes and a few peppers. The eggplants alone of the solanaceae have been left unscathed. Flea beetles aren't a big deal at all in small numbers, because all they do is chew little holes in the leaves. Of course, this is not ideal, because it makes the plant take energy away from growth and fruit production and put it toward repairs, as well as reducing the number of photosynthetic cells, which is where the energy comes from in the first place. I have been smushing the beetles I've been able to catch (not many), but I'll have to purchase some Pyrethrum to get rid of them if their population explodes. However, Pyrethrum is a broad-target insecticide, so it would also kill any populations of beneficial insects we've built up, and that's the last thing we want to do. Here's hoping the population stays small, and that the beneficials we have will help to control it.

We also have some aphids. So far, I've only noticed them on the kale - Ben and I were sampling a kale leaf the other day, and I turned it over and discovered those darn little green bugs. Not a whole heck of a lot, but they were on the other leaves as well. I smushed them all, and so far they haven't made a comeback. There aren't any on the cabbage or the other kale plant, as far as I can tell, or anywhere else. Yet. Come on, ladybird beetles!

I finished the entire roll of netting yesterday. The roll was enough to cover the beets, carrots, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, yellow and butternut squash, eggplants, and peppers. Ben was a great help stretching the ungainly netting over tricky hoops - it was a lot easier to do with two people! The only things left uncovered that I'd like to cover are the melons. Gotta get more netting!

That's all the updates we have for today! Thanks for reading.

WOG out.

The Tale of the Hail - and Other Stories

Hello, friendly readers! I apologize for my absence of late. It's been pretty hectic around here - I got a job, and they've kept me working almost every day, so it's all I can do to keep up with the garden, let alone write about it! But I have some time on my hands at the moment, so you're in luck.

My last post covered the trellising of the peas, which involved their (and the onions') de-nettification. Not long before that, I had planted all of the cucurbits, with the exception of the pumpkins. Since cucurbits spread so much when they grow, I gave them plenty of room to frolic and vine as they would. This means that they covered an awful lot of ground in the garden - too much, in fact, to cover with netting. We had enough netting to do so, but we lacked the tubing to make enough hoops. So I just left them all uncovered, with the exception of the cucumbers - they were close enough to the rest of the netting that it was no big deal to extend it over them.

Exactly one week after planting the cucurbit seeds, they began to sprout! I was ecstatic, as the zucchini and squashes sent up huge, healthy leaves, and the cucumbers poked their little heads up. The melons came up more slowly, but were still looking swell. The peas were starting to bloom, and the strawberries were flowering, too. Based on what happened soon after, though, I guess Mother Nature was just having a good laugh.

We got hail. Not a few tiny balls of ice, like we sometimes get in the winter when it sleets. We got real hail.  At the apartment, each ball was about the diameter of a quarter. I'm not sure how large it was at the garden, but Anne Marie said it was really bad. This I saw quite clearly when I went over to the garden the following day.

The first thing I checked was the pea patch. Since they're climbers, their stems are a little more fragile, and each hail ball can do a lot of damage as it plummets through the peas' foliage. Most of the peas had been hit pretty hard - broken stems, tattered leaves - and many had been torn from the trellises and plastered to the soggy ground. The blossoms were still there, barely opened, and drooping forlornly. I wondered if they would open at all, now. The good news was that the peas were still early in the flowering stage; they had not been carrying any pods. If they had, it would have been disastrous. It is hard enough to recover from losing flowers and having to take energy from the blossoms and put it into repairing stems and regrowing leaves - it is much worse to redirect energy from seeds to regrowth. I think most of the peas will still recover and bear fruit.

From the peas, I went to the onions. All of the plants had some damage, in the form of broken leaves, and some only had a few undamaged leaves. A few were bolting, though that was probably a result of the recent hot weather.

Next, I checked the cucurbit seedlings. The cucumbers were fine, having been under the netting. The zucchini looked mostly okay. The four yellow squash seedlings that had emerged were pretty much decimated - it was hard for me to tell where a couple of them were, because they were so ripped up and mud-splattered. The butternut squash were in a similar state. The melons were okay, except for the one cantaloupe that had come up - both of its poor little cotyledon leaves had been ripped off, leaving only the stub of a stem.

The kale was pretty badly damaged. Each plant had only a few leaves before the hail, and some of them had been completely torn off. The cabbage fared somewhat better than the kale, perhaps because it was larger and had sturdier stems. The two broccoli plants didn't look good; one was very badly damaged (and would soon die).

The strawberries did all right. There was damage, yes, and some plants would soon be reduced to only a couple of leaves each. But for the most part, the strawberries looked only slightly the worse for wear.

The heroes of the night were the potatoes. I'm not sure whether the house had somehow protected them, or if their foliage was dense enough that the damage was less stark, but they actually didn't look all that different from the previous day. They would rebound within a couple of days, and would soon be overflowing their trainer tires.

Now, on to the other updates. The day after the hail, I planted the remaining solanaceae, in addition to a few varieties of fabaceae, and two pumpkin seeds. First, I put in the beans. I planned to use a three-legged trellis (similar to the ones we're using for the peas) for the one pole variety we have, so I planted those seeds in three groups of six, each group in a circle around a stick to mark where a leg of the trellis would go. I planted ten seeds of each of the two bush varieties.

Next to the beans, I planted the tomatoes. Although I had plenty of seedlings, I only planted five cherry plants, four slicing plants, and five paste plants. The remainder of the seedlings will go to ReSource - apparently their garden didn't do so well with the hail. Unfortunately, the leftover seedlings aren't doing very well in the coldframe (which is where I put them after transplanting their brethren). I think it must be too hot in there. I shall take them to ReSource soon.

In the middle bed, next to the onions, I planted the eggplant. I put in nine Black Beauty and two Swallow - the Swallow were all that remained of the many eggplant babies Ben and I got from Drew. I have several Black Beauties left over, as well, which are also going to go to ReSource ASAP.

Next, adjacent to the eggplant, I planted the peppers. First, I put in six Gourmet. Next were six Sweet Bullnose, then six Early Jalapeño. Finally, I put in one Sweet Chocolate, one Santa Fe, and one Thai Hot, all three from Drew. I have some leftovers from the first three varieties, which, again, are going to ReSource.

Finally, I put in about twenty broccoli plants, all Di Cicco. There aren't any healthy-looking leftovers of these, so I don't think ReSource will be getting any, unfortunately.

After all that, I sawed off some more tubing for netting hoops, stuck some rebar along the bed where I'd planted the beans and tomatoes, bent the tubing from one rebar to the next, and stretched the netting over it. Then, I staked it down. If it hails again, the tomatoes, beans, and zucchini will be protected, but the peppers, eggplants, and onions won't be - yet.

I went to ReSource a couple of days ago, and got some more tubing for hoops. One of the next things on my To-Do List will be to make hoops for the section of the garden that has in it the onions, eggplants, peppers, and melons, and then to stretch the net over them. Unfortunately, I think the broccoli, potatoes, strawberries, kale, and cabbage will have to go unprotected the whole season - so hopefully, we won't get any more big hails.

Well, that's all for now. As always, thanks for reading!

WOG out.

The Summer Begins in Earnest! ...and in Fort Collins

I hope that title made you at least smile. My dad used to say, "It's raining in earnest! And in Maryland." It would make me and my brother crack up.

Anyway, on to the tasks at hand. There are many! They are plentiful. They can not wait! And yet, they have waited, because I've been busy and then out of town. But now that I've returned from my brief visit home, the garden takes first priority.

It's amazing how many weeds can appear in a mere five days. That's all I was gone for - five days! - but the weeds took advantage of it and were waiting for me when I returned. It's almost as if they knew... So. First garden task is weeding. Ben and I did some of that yesterday, and removed the largest ones, but we mostly just skimmed the garden looking for the big bad guys. Today, I shall expend a greater effort scouring the soil for little weedy menaces. Also, I asked Ben to just leave some pretty darn big dandelions yesterday; I'd rather get them with a trowel to make sure I get the whole dang taproot!

Next, I shall remove the netting from over the peas, which, by the way, grew most vigorously in my absence! One of them is starting to twine its tender tendrils around the netting. This I will not allow, because as the pea grows, it will be forced to either come through the netting or grow up and over the arch that the netting forms as it follows the hoops - this will not only make harvest difficult, but it will also block light from the other peas. the netting must be removed from the peas now or never, because the longer I leave it, the more peas will attach themselves to it.

After I remove the netting, I'll need to set up trellises for the peas to climb on. Some will be able to climb on the fence, but the fence isn't up yet - maybe Anne Marie and I will spray paint some fence pieces today and then attach them, but she has some other obligations, so that might have to wait another day. Sadly, the swingset is right next to the peas and onions, and of course this is the play area of choice for Louis' children, including the infamous Joseph. We shall have to devise a way to keep him off of that side of the swingset, lest he fall on the unprotected peas and destroy the crop. I'm thinking some kind of gate; maybe I can create a barrier using the netting from the peas, or something.

I also need to transplant some of the seedlings from their containers in the coldframe into the garden. Chief among these are the cabbages, kale, broccoli (the ones in the apartment as well), and fennel. The fennel may go in Ben's herb garden; not sure yet. I'll be referring to my Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner for placement of these crops (see new album on our Facebook page!).

Speaking of transplants, I need to put the eggplant and peppers in some individual containers. They're getting crowded too, and even though it'll soon be time to put them in the garden, I want them to get a little stronger and grow some more roots in individual containers.

The beets, as I have mentioned previously, have sprouted in clusters (this is supposed to happen). This is great, because it means they're healthy, and it looks really cool - however, I'll need to thin each cluster down to one plant so that plant will form a nice-looking root instead of a lumpy conglomeration of the roots of all its siblings. This is a fairly urgent task, because the beet seedlings are getting rather large.

So, our To-Do List this week is as follows:
1. Weed!
2. Thin beet seedlings.
3. Take netting off peas.
4. Put up trellises for peas.
5. Construct anti-child barrier to prevent entry into pea area.
6. Start fence latticework for peas to climb on.
7. Transplant seedlings into garden.
8. Transplant eggplant and peppers into individual containers.
9. Plant most of the cucurbits.
- the following are continued from the previous post -
10. Plant more carrots and beets.
11. Extend hoop-and-netting system.

Now for some updates:
The carrots have finally sent up some true leaves! This is very exciting, because these seedlings have been up for over a week with no tangible sign of true leafage.

The beets and peas, as mentioned above, are looking fabulous.

The remaining onions look pretty darn good. There is one red onion that I need to keep an eye on - the leaves are looking a tad wilty, and it seems to be significantly smaller than most of its buddies. Hopefully it's not another case of mold, but I guess we'll see.

The potatoes have finally sent out some real leaves! The Colorado Rose ones have, anyway. The mystery white ones that we got from the Food Co-op haven't sent any real leaves out from their buds yet, as far as I can tell.

The strawberries are looking dang fine. One that had come back from the dead is dead yet again. But who knows? Maybe it'll come back again! I'm hoping for some fruit out of those guys in the next few weeks.

The raspberries are looking fantastic! I can hardly tell which were the ones I'd transplanted anymore, because they have made such a comeback from their transplanting ordeal. I don't expect fruit from those little guys this season, but they're looking really healthy - and I guess you never know. The plants that Anne Marie already had have bloomed a little, so it looks like we'll definitely get a small harvest from them (not surprising - Ben told me he got a good deal of fruit out of them last July).

That's all for now! More updates later. Thanks for your patience as I've come and gone from the blog these last few weeks, and as always, thanks for reading!

WOG out.

More Updates, and the Sad Tale of Several Onions

I went over to WOG this morning, and made the usual rounds. Watered the babies in the bedroom - it's still too cold to put them out; hopefully it will warm up soon. I also watered the strawberries and raspberries. The raspberries are looking good, and so are most of the strawberries. Sadly, some of the strawberries are severely wilted - possibly because of inadequate or damaged roots - and may die. But on the bright side, their brethren will fill in the gaps within the next couple of seasons, if any do die.

The peas are coming in strong, more every time I look. This is fantastic news - I adore peas. The only problem is figuring out when to remove the anti-cat netting, and how. And when I do, how will we keep the beets and carrots protected? Ah, well. I suppose we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The biggest news of the day is more onion issues. I gently dug out three wilty-looking red onions to see how their bulbs were doing, and discovered blue mold spots on all of them. This is not good! I did some research, and it turns out this is a soil-borne disease, and can exist in the soil on decaying plant matter - I find this unlikely, since we bought fresh soil - but it can also be introduced by infected onion sets. In my humble opinion, this is most likely what happened. I suppose I have only myself to blame - I bought cheap onion sets from a roadside stand, and didn't inspect them all that thoroughly. Well, live and learn, as they say. Next year, maybe we'll be able to start the onions from seed and avoid that whole problem. Or we could save seed from one of these onions, if any of them actually make it that far. I have hope, however! Almost all of the remaining onions are vigorous, with long, bright green leaves.

I also did some weed scouting today. I refuse to get behind on weeding! It was worth looking, too - I was able to pretty much sweep the weed seedlings (I find it fun to call them "weedlings") out of the soil, since they were pretty much all still at the white thread stage. There were a lot of them! And now we're already ahead of the game, in terms of weedlings. I'll have to make a habit of this, in addition to watering and scouting for diseases.

Well, that's all for today! Thanks for reading.

WOG out.

Updates Galore

Only a few updates this week.

On Tuesday, I went to WOG to water and check up on things (as I usually do) and was watering the pea patch, when I noticed that some seedlings were coming up! We have baby peas!! This was especially exciting because we'd more or less given up on the peas as a lost cause - they had been in the ground for a few weeks, with no sign of life, and peas should be relatively quick to sprout. As mentioned in a previous post, we think the problem was that they weren't getting enough water. Well, we remedied that, and the result was some babies! So now we're trying to do a much better job of watering everything daily, or almost daily.

This strategy seems to have worked well, because either some beets or some carrots are also coming up. I think the leaves are more beetlike than carrotlike, but I suppose we won't really know for sure for a while, because the cats messed up the row markers a while back and I had to guess the exact location of each row. Hopefully the other crop, whichever it is, will come up soon as well. The remaining onions, the ones that didn't have Fusarium, are looking swell - only a few red onions are a little puny, and hopefully they'll catch up.

The raspberries look great. I think all of them have new leaves on them now. Hooray! We'll have plenty of delicious berries in a couple of months :) The strawberries look excellent, too - most of the blossoms have opened, I think, which is great news for yield. Of course, we'll only be getting a few berries out of them, but I bet they'll be scrumptious. And next year we'll have plenty of strawberries to go around.

The babies that are still in the coldframe are looking all right. Some of the eggplants and peppers are clearly stressed, probably because it's been chilly recently. We brought them into the house yesterday, because it was supposed to be cold last night (and it was).

The babies in the apartment are looking spectacular. On Chris' recommendation, I put them in the windowsills of the bedroom (it gets the best light, generally), and have just left them there, watering about every other day. I wrapped the curtains around the other side so that the white fabric would reflect some light back down on the babies, as well as create a little greenhouse-like microclimate in each window. This has helped reduce some of the etiolation that was going on, especially with the tomatoes.

The baby broccoli in the windows desperately need to be transplanted into individual pots. I haven't done so yet because I've been worried about the cold weather. The plan was to do that today, but the high is still only going to be about 47. I could transplant them and put them in the WOG house bedroom, but I'm concerned that the cats might bother them. I will wait it out for a couple more days and hope the weather improves.

I still have yet to contact either local autobody to see if they can donate a few tires to us for potato-growing purposes. I need to get on that and get those babies in the ground soon!

Yesterday, Chris and I went to the Starter Barter in Avogadro's Number restaurant. Most of what people had to offer were tomatoes, and I didn't buy any of them, because I think WOG's neighbor plans to give us some of his starts that he's not going to use - plus, we've sprouted our own, and I want to see how they turn out. We did buy two more hot pepper plants from Drew - one Ancho and one Santa Fe. They are looking good, and hopefully they'll stay that way. We also got two green cabbage plants and one red cabbage plant, as well as five garden huckleberry plants and one wonderberry plant. I do enjoy experimenting with new crops! Hopefully they turn out well. I wonder where we'll put them all - space will be a little tight! But we'll manage, and we can always give some seedlings away.

All in all, this week has been somewhat eventful and vastly encouraging, since the peas and either beets or carrots started to come up. I can't wait to put more plants in the garden! Thanks for reading.

WOG out.

Seedlings!!

The last time I posted, there wasn't any evidence of life from the tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers that I seeded. On Monday the 18th, I brought the three flats that I'd seeded to the apartment so they'd stay warm.

On Monday, there were two tomato seedlings. Now - as you may already know if you read our Facebook page - they're popping up left and right! Every day since then, there have been new sprouts. As of this morning, we are the proud parents of no fewer than eleven cherry tomato seedlings, three paste tomato seedlings, one jalapeño pepper seedling, and one eggplant seedling. Very exciting! I sure hope more come up soon. It would be a bummer to only have one eggplant and one pepper - I want some bell peppers, too! So hopefully they will be along in the near future.

The raspberries are looking great! I think they've been loving all the rain we've been getting recently, supplemented by my frequent watering. The strawberries look happy as well, although they haven't quite perked up yet. But they will! I have faith.

As far as I can tell, it was just that one onion that was infected with Fusarium, or whatever it was. I'm keeping a close watch on the others, but hopefully the fungus was isolated and will remain so.

The peas still haven't sprouted yet! I spoke with our friend Karen yesterday - Karen co-manages the student organic garden on campus, SusDev (short for sustainable development), so she knows a great deal about growing veggies. I asked her what she thought about our pea predicament, and she said that because some of them have been uncovered, they might have dried out too much to germinate. She said it's very hard for peas to do without water for any period of time, really - so we need to do a better job of keeping them consistently moist. To help our poor little peas, I used a little of the soil that was left over even after the herb garden was piled up, and covered the exposed pea seeds so they wouldn't dry out as quickly. Then I watered them well and left them to it.

That's all the updating to be done for now! All good news, I might add - always a plus :) We're headed in the right direction! As always, thanks for reading.

WOG out.

Mulchberries, Anyone?

Today was a pretty big day in the garden. When I arrived at Westmore this morning, our friend Louis and his family were there. Louis is a PhD candidate at CSU, and he knows a lot about agriculture. We talked about potatoes with him - he suggested growing the potatoes in old tires. Sounds weird, right? But apparently it really works. What you do is lay an old tire down flat in the garden and cover/fill it about halfway with dirt. Then plant four or five seed potatoes in the soil inside the tire. When the potato seedlings are strong, cover them almost entirely with more soil and stack another tire on top of the first one. Repeat once more, so that you wind up with a stack of three tires. This method reportedly produces significantly higher yields than traditional ways of growing potatoes, as well as keeping the tubers in a confined space for a very easy harvest. We have our seed potatoes, but unfortunately, we're fresh out of tires. We would like to call around to local auto bodies and see if we can have any of their old ones - we found two, Hawker Automotive and Alpine Tire Center - but both of them were closed by the time we discovered them this afternoon. So, that will be a project for a different day.

After Louis and company departed, Anne Marie and I drove the pickup to the Fort Collins Recycling Center to shovel some free mulch into the truck. Sadly, they were fresh out of mulch, so we meandered down to Fort Collins' Spring Creek Community Gardens and loaded up some of their free mulch, then lugged it back to Westmore and spread it on the paths in the garden for weed control. We'll have to go back later for more, though, because we didn't quite have enough to cover all the paths.

Meanwhile, Katara and Oatmeal, the younger kitties, continued to find new ways to get under/through the netting that's over the peas, onions, carrots, and beets. I used some of Anne Marie's garden twine (basically a  spool of twisty-tie) to mend the feline-formed rips by "sewing" the edges together, and then I stuck some more of her garden stakes through the net into the soil to (hopefully) secure the netting more effectively. I had to remove some of the onions from the soil and replant them, because the cats have been pushing on the net over the onions and chewing on the leaves, thereby not only damaging the plants, but also dislodging them. The good news is that in replanting the onions, I got a very good look at their roots, which appear to be quite healthy. One onion actually had dead-looking roots, and the leaves looked a little wilty. However, that plant did have some new leaves pushing through, and there appeared to be either new roots or a white fungus pushing their way through the onion's basal plate. According to a CSU Extension Factsheet on Soil-Borne Diseases of Onion, this fungus could very likely be Fusarium Basal Rot. I'll have to keep an eye on that one.

Later, I made my way to Sue-of-the-Raspberries's house for some free strawberry transplants. As with the raspberries, the strawberries were very healthy - the reason Sue was giving us strawberries in the first place was that they had reproduced to the point that she and her husband Steve just had too dang many! I wound up with three small cardboard boxfuls of Small Fruit Sue's gorgeous strawberry plants (many of which had buds already - yay!) and drove them back to Westmore to transplant them. I had several extra, because as I planted them, I was giving them plenty of space to spread. It will only take a year or two for them to put out enough stolons/runners to fill up their entire bed. So, I planted probably twenty-five or so strawberry plants, watered them well, and that was that. Sue also told me about an event called the Starter Barter, coming up next weekend in Fort Collins. Thanks again to Sue and Steve for all their help and willingness to share their plants!

In other news, I checked on the babies (a.k.a.: transplants) and the raspberries, and all are doing well. There's still no sign of life from the eggplant, tomatoes, or peppers that I planted, but the broccoli, fennel, kale, peppers, and eggplant that I transplanted (as well as the broccoli I seeded) are all doing swell. The peas, carrots, and beets have not yet sprouted, but hopefully they will soon.

As I've mentioned previously, I have been researching organic methods of cat repellent, to keep those cute little fluffy nuisances out of the garden. The cheapest one we've seen is sprinkling cayenne pepper around the edge of the garden to form a border, a force field if you will. Or if you won't. So there! Hahaha... Well, Anne Marie said she'd give that a shot, so hopefully the cats will respect the cayenne.

In addition, my search for a quick-release organic fertilizer has come to a close. My academic adviser had told me a couple of weeks ago that he recommends alfalfa meal as a sustainable, organic, quick-release fertilizer - that sounded great, only I couldn't find a locally-owned business that sold it. The other day, though, I remembered that at a conference I attended in February, I had picked up a pamphlet from a business called S T Organics, LLC, up in Hereford, CO. I looked them up online, and lo and behold, they sell alfalfa meal for a pretty dang good price! Problem solved.

Updates on the potato tires to be coming soon! Thanks for reading.

WOG out.

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo! SOIL!

The title of this post, by the way, was supposed to read as though someone was blowing the charge call. Don't know if that worked or not. Anyway...

As you may know, depending on whether or not you've been religiously following Westmore's progress, we picked up half a cubic yard of soil from Weitzel's last weekend and spread it in part of the garden to use as a gauge for how much soil we'd need total. And so we could plant peas and onions (see: Peas and Onions and Cats, Oh My!)

So yesterday, 4 more cubic yards of soil were delivered to Westmore's back driveway. For those of you who don't know, 4 cubic yards is a LOT. My job today was to get the soil from the driveway into the garden beds. By myself. Using only a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Hooooooo boy.

Well, I got to Westmore around 8:30 this morning, and gaped at the daunting pile of soil that faced me. It was so daunting, in fact, that I turned around and left. Just kidding. I didn't work on the soil right away, though. First, I transplanted five baby raspberry plants in among the raspberries that are already at Westmore. It wasn't hard work, but it did take some time. They needed to go in the soil right away, according to our helpful friend Sue, from whom we had gotten the babies. Thus, that was priority #1 for the day. I got them tucked in and well-watered before turning to the soil.

I had learned from unloading the first half of a cubic yard of soil last weekend that good soil is pretty dang heavy. Today, it didn't help that the entire pile was at ground level (as opposed to being in the bed of a pickup, as it was last week), so it was extra work to lift each shovelful up and into the wheelbarrow. Of course, I did it anyway. Chris showed up a couple of hours in and helped a lot with moving the soil around. Many wheelbarrowfuls later, the garden beds were complete, and the soil pile was almost gone. Anne Marie and Ben will be using the leftover soil to make an herb garden tomorrow in the front yard.

In other news, the broccoli that I seeded last week sprouted yesterday! The little seedlings are so cute and delicate. I feel like a proud momma! I can't wait for the eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers that I also seeded last week to sprout - that'll be a few more days though, at least. The onions that we planted last Saturday are looking good; some of them got displaced when they got caught in the deer netting, but I took a look at the bases of their little bulbs, and most of them had roots starting! This is an excellent sign. The peas that I planted next to the onions aren't up yet, but they should be soon. I suspect they're not really enthusiastic about germinating, because the cats have been disturbing that bed. To remedy this issue, we bought some deer netting to stretch over the bed and plastic tubing to support the netting. At first, Katara and Oatmeal, the younger cats, were simply more attracted to the netting as a jungle gym (see: Sad Seedlings and Cat Hammocks). Yesterday, I added another hoop to support the net better and keep the kitties off the bed, and so far that seems to be doing the trick.

Also yesterday, Sue-of-the-Raspberries offered to give us some transplants to replace the ones we lost to the cold weather last weekend. I had contacted Drew to see if he had any more extras to give us, but he'd already given them away to someone else. I got to Sue's house yesterday to find that Drew had given his remaining extra seedlings to her! She offered me whatever I wanted of what was left, so I took twelve eggplant seedlings, six broccoli seedlings, and twelve hot pepper seedlings. They're all in the coldframe and they look great so far - if their good health continues, we'll have plenty of babies to stick in the soil when the time comes. Sue also offered us some strawberries, so hopefully we can go get those soon and plant them in the near future. More updates to come soon. As always, thanks for reading!

WOG out.