Garden Fresh Thanksgiving Produce!

I finally reached a goal that I have been striving for - fresh organic vegetables from the garden for Thanksgiving. The stoop houses worked and I picked loads of broccoli and four heads of cabbage a couple days ago. I know those aren't traditional Thanksgiving veggies but fresh coleslaw and broccoli casserole will go nicely with potatoes from the garden, turkey and all the other trimmings.

We have had an unusually cold November this year. It sure was strange picking from the garden the other day when it was only 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside!

Look at the ice buildup on our newly constructed greenhouse:

The greenhouse is not any warmer inside than outside because I never finished building the vents. Right now the bottom 2 feet along the sides are still exposed and there are several opened windows. I need to fix that soon so I can use the greenhouse this winter and early spring.

Luckily the temperature under the small hoop houses is higher than in the greenhouse and the outside. It has stayed warm enough to keep the broccoli and cabbage from freezing.

See the water droplets on top of the broccoli? Those are actually little beads of ice.

The only casualty under the stoop houses was the lettuce. It still looked good, but after picking it and bringing it inside, I could tell that it had been frozen. For lettuce harvesting now, we will have to turn to our indoor lettuce growing under lights.

It is a little extra work keeping the garden going in the Fall and in the cold, but its worth it! I've got cabbage and broccoli ready to be prepared tomorrow along with the other Thanksgiving goodies!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

October Greenhouse Creation!

That's right, I am building a greenhouse!

Many gardeners have put away the tools for the season, content to wait until Spring to ramp it back up. A few of my regular readers and friends have asked me if that is what is going on with me.

It's true that I haven't written much lately, but as for quitting garden activity - NO WAY, NOT ME! I have been extremely busy in the garden, planting many Fall/Winter crops and designing and building my very own Greenhouse.

It has taken about a month to gather all of the materials needed and get it framed in. Tomorrow I am taking a vacation day from my regular job so I can finish building it this weekend. I have always wanted to have a Poly tunnel or greenhouse but I didn't have room for one. My wife had an idea to build an enormous retaining wall and back fill it to create a space for a greenhouse. The digging took quite a bit of work!

Anyway, I will post a full report on it when it is complete. I just wanted to let you all know that I haven't disappeared and I surely haven't lost interest in gardening.

It has been getting cooler now and the Broccoli, Cabbage and Cauliflower that I planted in late Summer are doing really well. The lettuce has been excellent! Here is my wife and daughter harvesting some from one of the little beds:

When the greenhouse is finished, I will plant more lettuce and spinach inside it so we can harvest all winter long. I will tell you more about the greenhouse and my plans in a few days. In the meantime, its back outside with the tool belt. Wish me luck!

Garden Journal: Peas, Potatoes, Lettuce, Tomatoes

I can't believe it has taken me a whole week to post this. Last Saturday, when we got home from vacation I took inventory on the garden happenings and wrote it all in my paper journal like the old days. I really do like paper records better than digital ones, but journaling on the computer allows one to post photos much easier.

So I think I will be journaling here at Garden Desk. These posts will be a bit different than my others because it will just be a list of how things are going. It may be more for me than for my readers, but you are welcome to read along. Maybe you can help me by commenting on how I could fix my problems or improve things.

So here goes, my first 2008 Garden Journal - 4/5/08:

I already wrote about the new potatoes I bought last week. I have been pretty frustrated with my peas. The germination rate is listed as 7 to 14 days but after 18 days there was still nothing. Finally, they are emerging!

In the pea beds, I transplanted the lettuce plants that I grew inside and hardened off in the cold frame.

I was delighted to find that the beds were teeming with worms! I hope that means that the soil here is healthy.

Now the beds look prettier. I hope the lettuce grows bigger quickly.

Also growing well outside are potato onions and garlic. Inside, the early tomato plants were looking great.

Uh oh - upon closer inspection maybe not. What are these tiny spots on the Orange Blossom tomatoes?

I had no idea, but a gardener is only as good as his gardening book library. I hit the books and found out that I had Septoria Leaf Spot.

I found it in my trusty Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals. It has an extremely long title, but it is also extremely helpful! It says that Septoria Leaf Spot is Fungal. The control is simply to remove and destroy infected leaves, so that is what I did. Now, a week later I'm happy to report that there are no new signs of the fungus. I will have to keep a close eye on them. Luckily it was only on three of the four Orange Blossom tomatoes and none of the others. Even if the Septoria leaf spot comes back and damages or destroys the Orange Blossom tomatoes, I have five other early varieties ready and will be raising almost 30 other varieties. I guess I could afford to lose one variety.

A Child's Garden for Green Thumb Sunday!

I haven't been very good at displaying a green thumb this spring, but my 10-year-old daughter has! I am very proud of how well she has done with her cool season garden bed. This year we built two 12x3 garden beds exclusively for her and her sister to work with. She decided that one bed would be for cool season veggies and the other for the warm season crops. Here is her beautiful cool-season bed:

On one end she planted broccoli and several kinds of leaf lettuce.

In the middle, she planted more leaf lettuce, head lettuce, spinach and garlic.

On the other end, she planted onions and more spinach and lettuce.

Also notice the two potato plants on the top right of the above picture. When we built the new raised bed for her, we dug some dirt out of the existing garden. The most fertile soil was from where we planted potatoes last year. While digging, my daughter found two of last year's potatoes, so she decided to stick them in her garden to see if they would grow. Of course with her green thumb, they are growing like crazy! Now we know where Sammy, her Guinea Pig gets her green thumb from!

We have already enjoyed eating salads from her garden. It has been great because she has at least five different types of lettuce and spinach. I am so glad that she planted this cool-season garden, because I didn't plant any spring lettuce or broccoli. I was much too busy working on building our deck. By the way, it is getting closer to being finished. The floor is done, so we were able to put the furniture out.

But this post is NOT about the deck, it is about my 10-year-old Green Thumb Daughter. My other daughter has a pretty good green thumb too. She planted a whole bed of flowers in the main garden but they are all still very small. I'm sure I will have beautiful pictures of it to post in about a month. It's nice having good gardeners for daughters to pick up the slack for ol' dad.

Happy Green Thumb Sunday, and have a great Memorial Day!

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Goodbye Cool Season Veggies!

Appropriately so, now that it is officially summer, our broccoli has bolted! Not surprising since the temperatue has been well over 90 degrees this week.

Pretty ugly huh? We had a great broccoli season. We only planted 6 plants, but from the other 5, we harvested so much that my family got tired of it. My daughter had fun cutting the heads and putting a couple together to make a boquet.

That picture was taken last week. Now the broccoli is finished. The peas and lettuce are finished too. We harvested the last of the peas last night. The ones at the end were a bit smaller with fewer peas to a pod.

The lettuce hasn't bolted yet, but it has gotten bitter. we pulled all of the remaining plants and put them in the compost bin. We ate a lot of lettuce this season. In addition to having their own bed, plants were tucked in beside tomatoes and peppers. my daughter found a plant that we must have never harvested from. It was enormous!

Too bad there isn't a Grow The Biggest Lettuce Plant category at the fair! my kids really seem to like giant vegetables. We have to plant the pumpkins, and in a hurry! Do any of you have suggestions for what giant varieties to try? Now that the cool season is officially over, we can turn our attention to trying to grow a monster pumpkin, and harvest it before the first fall frost!