Back in the Game!

I am BACK for the 2014 growing season!   WOO HOO!  Last year the garden sat completely empty due to a mixture of factors, but the beds are still in place, and our composters are full of rich black goodness as we speak.   I have many goals this season, but here are a few in the interest of accountability:

1)  Let's get Crazy! 
I have a bunch of ideas for things that might just be complete failures, but I'll never know until I try.  This year I'm going to test them out and hopefully a few will be winners.  The first idea up is to make a mini-greenhouse using a tall raised bed and heated ground coil against the South-East facing part of my bricked front porch.  The area is where I've grown climbing veggies in the past, but it's really the only reasonable location for setting up a winter bed.  I hope to have it planted by early February.  That's only 2 weeks before pea-planting day here in Pittsburgh.

2)  EFFICIENCY!
I really don't have a whole lot of space, so it's time to stop screwing around with things that just don't produce for me, or that are reasonably yummy and cheap from local farms and stores.  Onions, celery, brussel sprouts, cabbage, lettuce, and most winter squash are not going in this year.  Instead that space will be used for more peas, more bush beans, chard, kale, basil and other things that I do well with and that I always wish I had more of.

3)  More Tutorials!
Over the last year I've gotten several messages asking for more posts like Growing Carrots in Containers - A Tutorial.  Happily, the kids loved making that one and are excited to work on a few more.

4)  Long-term Fruit Planning!
We currently grow no fruit on our property, other than apples from our huge old tree.  We need to seriously examine the property and figure out where we want to be in 5 years.

5)  Water Collection and Access Planning!
There are two areas in the back of the house where we have no access to hose water.  We need to fix gutters and set up water collection systems in those areas to make it easier to keep up with those sections of the garden.

6)  Preservation!
I really do prefer frozen veggies over canned for most things, so this year I just need to actually freeze stuff regularly enough that we can make it through the winter.  I also need to expand the types of foods and dishes I preserve.

Here's to an amazing garden and an amazing year!

How to garden on a hillside...

This hillside has been a pain in my butt for 2 seasons now.  There is a flat area at the top and then a sharp slope that is fine for planting things like melons, but gets so quickly overgrown that a raised bed is really the only way to go.  We managed to get some nice salvaged lumber from a friend and built two LARGE raised beds.  We dug the lower one in so that each bed would be level.   Now I have a 10' x 3' bed AND an 8' by 3' bed of beautiful fluffy soil (organic topsoil with rabbit manure, hay, and compost).   

Stage 1:  Cut down grass and loosen sod.

Stage 2:  Level the area where the beds will sit, lay the frames and fill with dirt.

Stage 3:  Bask in the glory of your new garden beds!

They turned out so beautifully that I really think we're going to convert ALL the beds to wooden raised beds as soon as they are empty.  They'll be a heck of a lot easier to weed-whack around, that's for sure.

Planning an Accessible Garden

I had been planning on updating this over the weekend, but we ended up dealing with some unexpected issues that have delayed things a bit.  Even now I haven't really been out in the garden today, so I'm throwing myself into planning one of the really exciting gardening projects I've been offered this season!

My husband works with a non-profit that helps disabled individuals live their lives.  The house he works in has a beautiful yard and the gentlemen in the house tend to eat less-healthily than they otherwise could due to the tight food budget.  I offered to stop over once a week with the kids and maintain a small food garden at the house.  All the current workers would have to do was water it and harvest things that are obviously ripe.  The gentlemen in the house would benefit from the interaction with the kids, the time outside, and the fresh food they grew themselves.

The biggest problem with this plan, is the start-up cost associated with a garden.  The house operates on a pretty tight budget, and garden tools and soil for raised beds aren't exactly things that provide a quantifiable benefit as quickly as most other household expenditures.   I can spare some seeds, and barring that each of the men in the house has a food stamp allotment due to their disability that can be used for plants and seeds, but we're still going to have to get creative with everything else.

I have a much larger post about barriers to gardening that I'll be posting soon as a result of this process.  Tomorrow we have a trip to a local farm with the younger kids so that should be fun.  

Spring Garden Cleaning and Planting

Wow, these last few days have been just beautiful and I've managed to get most of the spring garden totally planted.  A few things might be going in a tad early, but I think I can battle any small frosts with mulch and/or row covers.

This is the first time I've ever tried growing lettuce or chard, so it's a total unknown.  I was extra careful to pull out every inch of invasive root growing through my beds in the hopes that I won't have as bad of a weed problem this year.  It's mind-blowing that those roots were even growing into the clay level about 10 inches down...

Anyway, I'll put up the garden plan soon, but in the mean time here are some pictures of progress from the last few days:

Part of the cleaning was pulling up the remains of last year's brassica bed.

Mr. Smiley in front of the garlic bed.

Baby Nugget just sat around eating crackers while the rest of us worked.

Picking rocks out of beds was a popular task.

At one point we had some music in the garden.

The carrots will again be grown in buckets and were actually the first things we managed to plant.

Digging out weeds.

Watering carrots.

The triangle bed will have lettuce and chard this year.

Cabbage and brussel sprouts (a tad close since we will probably lose a few).

End of the Season Garden Pictures You May Have Missed Since I Didn't Post Them.

Here are the end-of-season harvests and garden pictures taken during my blogger hiatus:

Six types of eggplant!

It's hard to see what happened here, but this is my row of huge bushy tomatoes after it fell over.  The welds on my tomato cages just gave out and collapsed into a mess of metal stakes and hoops.  Clearly I need to use something else next year.

Harvesting in the rain gives everything a nice glossy look.

This was definitely the year of the pepper.

Carrots in buckets were a complete success!

The kids were very excited about the different colors.

They would BEG to go harvest carrots.

I really don't remember what type these are, but they tasted good and were 4-6 inches long.

I will buy another packet of these rainbow carrots to keep the kids interested, but they honestly didn't taste much different than the orange carrots.

This year's pitiful onion harvest.

The broccoli is actually still sending off shoots that we pick now and then.  The weather here in Pittsburgh has been unseasonably warm.

One of the last harvests.  There were a ton of baby peppers on the vines when the first killing frost hit.

My Turkish Orange eggplant took FOREVER to ripen anything.

The harvest when we pulled most of the pepper and tomato plants.

Heirloom tomatoes in various stages of ripening.

A small, late garden harvest.

This is the final "harvest" from mid-November.  Beet greens, a few peas and carrots (even ball shaped ones) that I missed earlier, a handful of mostly-ripe Turkish Orange Eggplants and some peppers that somehow survived multiple killing frosts.   I'm not sure those broccoli plants will ever die.

I know I missed quite a few harvests, but this is a good overview of those last few months.  The weather that was so uncooperative this past spring really seems to have worked out well in terms of garden production this fall.  We could have planted several things that I just didn't think we'd have time for....oh well.

Pittsburgh Children's Museum Garden: Who knew?

Today we took a largely unplanned trip to the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and I had the pleasure of being able to photograph a really cool little educational veggie garden set up in front of the Museum!  Here's a quick photo tour that highlights some really neat ideas that I just might need to steal next year.

The garden is mostly raised beds and containers made from clay drainage pipes (or something like them).  It is situated in a little outdoor nook between the registration lobby and the gift shop.

I'm not big on fruitless flowers, but these are really pretty.  They were probably planted among the veggies to attract pollinators.

Is this purple broccoli in the front?  Or something else...I just don't know.

This faux (or real) log was planted with several herbs.  The vertical clay pipes were also planted with herbs and small veggies, and surrounded a long raised bed.  Such a cool idea!  

Brussel Sprouts

An Asian eggplant of some type.

Another beautiful and healthy eggplant...much healthier than my own at least.

Rain barrels!  They had a rotating composter too but I think I only snapped it in the background once or twice.  

More clay pipes were used as planters along the wall further in.  There are also some amazing  rough hewn wooden benches to sit on.

I just can't get over what a great idea those pipes are.  I have probably seen a ton of them laying around and never thought twice about using them in the garden.  Being square makes them quite a bit more useful than the round pots as they can be used as a border or lined up against each other for more stability.

A view from the end of one of those wooden benches.  The raised beds were quite high off the ground.  You can see a tiny bit of the city skyline in the background.

This is the best shot I could get of the long bed created with a border of clay pipe containers.  

A beautiful heirloom that I didn't see a tag for.

Tomatoes on the same plant but less ripe.  I MUST grow some like this next year.

Chard  :)

This photo is on the way home.  You can tell how many kids probably feed these squirrels.  This fat little guy didn't even blink when my son walked 2 feet from him.

This one just sat a few feet above us quietly observing.

A view of the beautiful day we had here from the car ride home.  I shot that through my windshield (while my husband drove) if you can believe it.

The Pittsburgh Children's Museum Garden itself actually has a blog, which you can find here if you'd like to take a look.  They host several educational workshops for kids and schools, though I've never been to one since we just discovered this garden today.  I love finding new gardens around town :)  

Fall planting time!

It's a little late for fall planting in Pittsburgh, but I still feel pretty accomplished since this is the first year I managed to get a fall crop in the ground at all.  Getting everything planted meant pulling a lot of what was there, even some things that might have produced more if left in the ground.  Ultimately, I pulled anything past it's prime, diseased, or too crowded to really be worth the space.  Things I removed include:

1)  All bush beans - The yellow Arikara beans CAN be picked young and eaten in the pod, but we found them to be pretty fibrous and unpleasant.  We didn't plant enough to shell though, so I decided to pull them and plant the space with fall broccoli.  The other bush beans were past their prime, though it seems like the purple might have produced again if allowed...I decided to try and get a fall crop from new seeds instead.  We'll see if this gamble pays off.

2) Yellow Squash and one of the Pan Patty plants - The yellow squash were just covered in disease and the last few fruits had rotted on the plant.  The pan patty seemed generally healthy but was HUGE and showed many signs of Squash Vine Borer damage so I pulled it in favor of planting beets.  The area taken up by the plant can double the planting space for beets, plus I have 3 pan patty plants left.

3)  All cucumbers - These were pulled due to the unlikelihood of getting any kind of solid crop.  The leaves on many plants were wilting and several vines were killed by some type of bacteria.  The vines were also all clumped together on one end of a chicken wire trellis because I didn't properly direct them at the beginning.  There are several free buckets in which I will be planting cucumbers to possibly get a fall crop and I'll use the now vacated trellis for peas.  I have seeds but it might be a better idea to swing by Garden Dreams to see if they have any seedlings left.

Anyway, today we planted 3 buckets of carrots, 3 types of bush bean, 3 types of beet and 2 kinds of pea (snap and snow).  I also did a general clean up of the garden, pulled a bunch of weeds, and moved some things around.  I'll have bigger post after the fall planting is done tomorrow, but here are some of today's sights:

A mini watermelon cut from the vine by a bunny...a bunny that should be living in fear of me ever catching it.

The nest over my composter is now empty, but this little birdy was roaming among my hay.  It seemed young so I think it's one of the chicks, but I have no idea if this is normal bird behavior or not.

Okra!  No idea when to pick it, but I don't think it's ready yet.

This little yellow lemon cucumber was left behind after I pulled the plants.  I have to cut it out of the wire.