Little Vermont Family Garden

I’m really happy with my garden today.  Yesterday, Alec and I dug potatoes. We’d dug a few already, and eaten some, but yesterday was the day for emptying the garden and putting the potatoes in the basement for storage.  We dug fifty pounds from a garden bed that’s just a little more than thirty square feet.  It will be interesting to see how long fifty pounds lasts us.  We all had potatoes for breakfast today, even Alec (and that’s saying something!).

In the last two days, I’ve picked over twenty pounds of tomatoes, and today I dried some (one 10×15″ cookie tray) and made seven quarts of tomato puree with the rest.  Seven quarts!  I’d already dried a few trays (enough to fill a large yogurt container), made a bunch of paste (frozen in ice cube trays) and made two pints of tomato sauce, and there are a lot of unripe tomatoes still left on the plants.  Even with early blight, I’m having a very good tomato harvest, and I’m pretty thrilled with it.

I am hoping to make more sauce with the remaining tomatoes, and actually try my hand at water-bath canning.  I’m freezing the puree I made, just because I didn’t have time to deal with the learning curve of canning today.  I have always been a little scared of canning, but I think I’m ready to try.

It’s a good feeling, putting this wonderful harvest up for our family to enjoy this winter.

For being covered in dirt that is so deep, it doesn’t wash off.  And I don’t mind one bit.  The garden this year is interesting – there are some problems, surely some weeds, but I go into the garden and it’s so lush and thick I can’t even see out, and the problems don’t really bother me.  I’m disappointed about the cucumbers, which succumbed to the same viral issue I had last year (even though they’re in completely new compost!) and I’m a little concerned about the pumpkins, whose leaves are covered in powdery mildew, but I’m excited about my two corn plants (they survived!!) and I’m happy that I have some tomatoes, despite the blight that showed up once again this year.  (Yes, I do start tomatoes from my own seed, and yes, they’re rotated on a 4 year schedule, and they STILL have blight)

I think the best idea I had this year was to have a bed full of flowers.  It started because when I had the compost delivered, the hydraulic fluid from the delivery guy’s lift pump leaked heavily into the garden.  I could not locate it once the pile was finished, but I knew the general area.  I did not want to plant anything we’d eat in that part of the garden, so I decided to just plant flowers.  Well, next year flowers are going in every garden.  There is a row of sunflowers at the back of the garden, on the northern-most edge.  They are wonderful!  The full bed is one of the southern beds but not on the edge.  At first I didn’t want to give up the real estate for flowers, especially when I have enormous flower beds (that I already can’t keep up with) in other parts of the yard.  But it was a great decision, and I love seeing the flowers in with the vegetables.  I do need to add nasturtiums and marigolds next year to help with some of the insect population, but at the very least, the flowers are bringing a lot more birds to the garden and I think they’re doing some insect control for me!  Sometimes I’ll be working somewhere else and see movement in the garden, but it’s not a boy (though that does happen, too!) and then I’ll see a couple of birds fly out.  Makes me happy.

Another thing that makes me inexplicably happy is to see bean vines climbing up the sunflowers.  I have no explanation for this (the happiness, not the vining!).  It gave me a small pang of regret when I took down the pea plants to get ready to plant more for the fall, because that was a big wall of green.  I don’t mind that the carefully measured paths through the beds are totally invisible – there is green covering virtually every surface, and honestly, most of it is good stuff, not weeds.  Though there are weeds, for sure.  That straw I put down should probably  have been called hay.  There are some awful weeds in it.  But I can’t see them now!  I tried to take some photos from inside the garden, to give you an idea of what it is like to be inside, but they don’t really tell the whole story.  Still, you’ll get some idea.

There was once a path through here

Notice the windchimes?  This was another little project I finally did this year – the chimes are made from the keys of a cute xylophone the boys had when they were smaller.  The base of the xylophone broke, but I just didn’t want to throw away the keys.  I figured I’d never get to it, but thought it would be fun to have windchimes in the garden, and one rainy day, I finally remembered to do it!  I’m trying to add a little character to the garden, little by little, as I go.

Lastly, because this post is getting awfully lengthy, here are a few photos of a couple things I love in the garden right now…

Beauty. Yes, cabbages can be beautiful.

Soon we will have our first blackberries!

Lovely little sugar pumpkin

I love these

That’s all for now!  I really need to write a post about progress in my perennial beds.  Huge progress!  Soon, hopefully.  Thanks for reading.

First, I will share an overview of the garden which I can’t believe hasn’t been done since mid June!  I know I took photos between then and now, intending to post them.  How that never happened is a mystery.  The view today:

The big picture

An update for each vegetable (let’s hope I remember them all!)

• Peas – just about done but I have a lot to pick out there
• Pumpkins – starting to escape their enclosure and almost ready to flower
• Lettuce – flourishing.  I pick about 6 oz a day (and that barely makes a dent in it!)
• Scallions – kind of on the small side
• Cilantro – this round is great.  Can’t believe it hasn’t bolted this week
• Raab – all of it bolted.  Need to plant it earlier next year.  Oh well.
• Peppers – beautiful!
• Cabbage – one good sized head, others taking their time.  They got a dusting of BT today.
• Tomatoes – one word…blight.  Ok more words.  Lots of blossoms, lots of small tomatoes, none ripe yet
• Potatoes – overflowing, mostly done flowering (some just now, some ages ago!)
• Blackberries – we’ll have berries by the end of the month, I’d say.
• Onions – surviving.  Too much shade from peas, too much abuse from kids trampling them to get to the peas.  One day I looked out and Jonas was sitting right in the middle of them, and Alec was standing next to him, picking on the “wrong side”.  Oh well.
• Corn – two plants standing, and one of them has some really gross stuff on the leaves, but I don’t know what it is.  Time will tell.
• Beans – almost all pole beans eaten by deer, the first one we’ve ever had visit the garden.  The middle 90% of the plants were munched.  There are still some flowers, so maybe I’ll have a few.  The deer also ate a good percentage of my favorite Hutterite soup beans.  Frustrating!  More about the deer later.
• Cukes – stricken by some sort of disease, like I had last year.  Still, flowering and I’ll get some, I think.  The second planting (to replace those eaten by the woodchuck) are coming up but already show the same disease symptoms.  More frustration as these are very popular with the kids, and me.
• Carrots – a few were munched by deer and woodchuck, but overall they’re doing well.  I’ve got about 4 plantings of them, 3 of which have mostly survived.  I have hope.
• Chard – munched by deer but making a comeback.  This deer did incredible damage in just one night.
• Spinach – bolted despite being planted under cukes (probably since the critters ate half of them!) but there are a lot of good leaves out there still.
• Raspberries – amazing.  Simply amazing.  We eat handfuls of them a couple times a day, and they’re great!  Not enough to bring in, but that will come someday.  Big plans for next year.
• Blueberries – will be moved to a more productive site pretty soon.  Not a single berry this year.  They’ve been taken over by gout weed and were kind of ignored when they needed some maintenance.

I think that is about it.

Now, about that deer.  I went out and took a bunch of photos (intending to update!) about a week ago.  I came in and downloaded the photos, and this popped up

What the heck?!

I didn’t take that picture!  By then, Scott was at work.  Later, I asked him “when was the deer here?”  He gets up very early, and saw it laying down on our neighbor’s lawn “a few days” before I saw the photo.  He got the camera, but the sound of the lens spooked it and it bolted.  That was the only photo he was able to take of it, as it headed toward the back fence.   Oddly I had not noticed any damage when I had taken pictures.  Unfortunately, he must have returned.  The next day I found the damage – all the beans, a few carrots, most of the chard, a couple of sunflowers.  I was furious.  My neighbor suffered damage too, and had gone and bought Liquid Fence, which she shared with me.  It’s basically liquid putrified eggs.  Nasty, stinky stuff.  I sprayed the perimeter of the garden and crossed my fingers.   No damage since then.  It was really disappointing to lose so many vegetables like that.

On the happy news front, though, I have these, and they make me smile.

Here’s a few closeups from this morning:

Obvious deer damage with a couple lovely sunflowers (Prado)

Cilantro and lettuce

Chard, spinach and cukes

Wall of blackberries

That’s all for now.  Keep your fingers crossed there are no more critters and no more damage.  I can’t take it!

ETA:  I rely on all organic methods to control pests – both BT and Liquid Fence are used out of desperation but both are basically naturally occurring substances that cause no harm to humans (well, unless I actually consumed putrified eggs, which probably would not make me feel good).   BT is a bacteria that gives cabbage worms a stomach ache.  I haven’t gone to the dark side, or anything!!  :)

Also, a note about photos.  If you want to see a larger version of a photo, click on it.  It opens the photo in a new window, but you still have to click once more to get an enlarged version.  If anyone knows how (in WP) to make it so it only takes one click, please let me know!

Really, these photos speak for themselves.  The beauty of peas :)

I’m joining in Renee’s Savoring Summer series, which is going to be great for increasing my posting frequency!

Today, I’m savoring peas!  It’s the first vegetable other than greens that has been available (since the woodchuck ate my cilantro!) and gives a brief but fresh and delicious glimpse into summer bounty.

The boys and I go out daily and eat our fill and don’t manage to bring many into the house for an actual meal.  Their excitement almost matched mine when they discovered the peas were ready for eating.  It was wonderful to hear them yelling from the backyard “MOM!!!  Come see what I found!!  The peas are ready!”

Pests are to be expected in any garden.  I’ve had good success partially because I’m in “the city” (it’s hard for me to call Rutland a city, though technically it is one) and deer aren’t a problem, and I think my organic methods are proving themselves in some ways too.  The woodchuck remains, but seems mostly content to eat my neighbor’s garden.  Because he missed a couple of the lower leaves, my cilantro is bouncing back.  I did notice that someone is picking off cukes again.  I had this problem last year and had to resort to putting wire cages around the plants.  It may come to that this year as well.  So far he’s gotten about 4 plants, I think.

Yesterday I returned from Home Depot to spot a flycatcher of some variety sitting on one of the tomato ladders.  Actually Jonas spotted him first and yelled to alert me to the bird’s presence.  I watched as he swooped down through the middle of the garden on  his way to the neighbor’s trees.  Hmmm.  At first I figured there were bugs I could not see that he was after, but upon closer inspection, I think I may have found the corn-shredding marauder.  6 of the 8 plants were uprooted and lay sadly upon the top of the garden.  I truly do not understand this particular pest behavior – why uproot the plants (and just the corn plants, at that) and leave them?  They don’t eat them, just uproot, shred, and leave.  I put some wire “cages” around the remaining two plants and will hope for the best.

Offender is sitting on the red tomato ladder at the top right of the garden

It’s not like I want a huge corn crop, it’s just popcorn, and just 8 plants, but now we’re down to two and I hope they make it.  I’ve never had corn survive very long and it would be so much fun to pop corn we grew!  The corn colors are really beautiful, also!  I’d like to see them in person.

Here’s an overview of how things are growing out there.  It’s hard to see a lot because many of the seedlings are so tiny at this point.  It won’t be long till they’re up, though.

Overview

Lastly, a “blooming” update…

In other happenings, we’re in the midst of renovations here, and I’m excited.  We have finished putting maple flooring in the boys’ room (after painting the room the most amazing color).  I am working on painting most of their furniture a great green color.  Scott is now putting down maple flooring in our room and I chose a paint color for the walls yesterday.  We had old, gross carpeting in there and I have a serious dust mite allergy (5 on a scale of 1-6) as well as asthma (for which dust mites are apparently a significant trigger) and the pulmonologist told me I should not have rugs in my home.  And we would have just ignored that if we hadn’t found solid hardwood flooring for $3 a square foot.  You just can’t ignore that kind of luck.

I took a break from everything this morning and rode my bike for a couple of hours – it was a perfect, sunny, blue-sky morning and I enjoyed it immensely.  I’ve been riding my mountain bike a lot lately and have only been on the road a few times all spring.  It was great.  Now it’s time to shut off the machine and take the boys on a promised bike ride before getting ready for a father’s day cookout at a friend’s home.

Thanks for reading!

I knew it when I wrote it – when I wrote that the woodchuck hadn’t been in my garden.  He ate my cilantro, all of it.  My neighbor is on the warpath and is borrowing a have-a-heart trap to get him.  He did more damage at her house, making off with not only her cilantro but also peas and cucumbers.

I can hear the chorus of “I told you so”…