The first snow is the truest sign that the growing season is finally over.  Unfortunately, due to the scope of last year’s garden, the growing season was over much, much sooner for me.  Now, the snow signals the end of the Vetch’s growth (although it doesn’t seem to have established itself terribly well.  Next year, I’ll go with a cover crop that establishes itself much more quickly.), and the start of catelog season.

This year’s first catalog came from Fedco Seeds.  They’re a small seed coop in Maine which takes an extremely moral stance on seed origin and variety.  They try to focus on cool weather crops, which would be expected from a company in Maine.  This is really the only downside, as they’re cheap and have a good variety.  I’ll probably be ordering a majority of my seeds this year from Fedco.

Baker Creek is the second company I’m likely to buy from.  While their prices are slightly higher, they cater to a less regional market.  Furthermore, they’re closer, in Missouri.  They send out a beautiful full color catalog every winter.

I’ve been playing around with spreadsheets and possible garden layouts.  For the next year, I’d like to plant Tomatos, Peppers (Hot and sweet),  Onions, Lettuce, Spinach, Green Beans, Dry Beans, Peas, Basil, Corn and Strawberries.  I’ll post more later about garden possibilities.

This past week, I’ve spent most of my time reading various blogs.  Here’s what I’ve gone through so far:

Tiny Farm Blog

This guy is living my dream.  He runs a tiny organic farm in Canada (Zone 4!  I wouldn’t want to be stuck there!), and makes something resembling a living at it.  Lots of inspiration, and lots of beautiful photos.

One Straw Revolution

Rob at One Straw is a little more extreme about the peak oil/survivalist aspect of biodynamic agriculture than I am.  I’m not going to make any claims about his rightness or wrongness, but he has challenged a few of my ideas.  I disagree with him at points, but the blog as a whole is really, really packed with useful information.

Future House Farm

Meg and Kelly are also living my dream, and a life which may be closer to what I end up with than the Tiny Farmer.  Both employed in academia, and uninterested in the market gardening aspect of things, they still manage to post a lot of entertaining and useful stuff for someone in my shoes.

That’s where I am.  Also doing a lot of contemplating Re: Potatoes and Garlic.  Who knows what surprises are in store for the next growing season.

For the past two years, I have waited patiently for Honeycrisp apples to appear in the grocery store. At nearly $3 a pound, this is not an exceptionally affordable habit, but there is absolutely nothing nicer in the world than a nice crisp, sweet Honeycrisp apple. Since I now have a bit of room to stretch out, and an abundance of large buckets, I’m going to try and grow apples in containers next year. After scouring the Kentucky Agricultural Extension, this will be more than possible. For the first few years, I’m going to try and grow 1 HoneyCrisp and 1 as-of-yet unknown tree, plus 2 rootstock trees. I’ll be planting them in 5 gallon buckets at first, fully expecting them to outgrow this pot after a couple years. Since they’ll be planted in a bucket, they’ll need regular irrigation and fertilizer. With only four trees, I’ll be more than able to provide this. How will an apple tree fit in a pot, though? I’ll be planting a dwarf variety, which I will keep pruned to about 6 feet tall.

After reading quite a bit, there are a few important things to remember about apples:

• Apples are not self-fertile. With the exception of a few varieties, all apples will need another type of apple in order to pollinate and bear fruit. These trees need to be within a couple dozen feet of each other. Further, you have to pay attention to the blooming time of the cultivar you’ve selected. Late blooming plants will not pollinate early blooming plants. Further, it’s infuriating to try and figure out what apples are able to pollinate which others. The best guide I’ve found so far is here.
• Apples cannot be grown from seed. Apples do not breed true, and if planted from seed, you’ll end up with bitter crabapples after just a few generations, unless you breed them under laboratory conditions. Each cultivar you find in the grocery store is a clone of every other apple of that cultivar. Furthermore, because breeding has to take place carefully in order to get a tasty apple, it is difficult to breed an apple that is both tasty, and has a robust root system. Since fruit trees take well to grafting, trees bred specifically to become rootstock are created, and used as the root system of a tastier plant. This is what you’re buying when you buy bare root stock: one year old grafted trees.

There are lots of different rootstocks available for different needs. Roots determine characteristics like disease resistance, resiliency, and final tree size. As a result, the rootstock selected is especially important for backyard gardeners. A full size apple tree may top 25 to 30 feet. A semi-dwarf tree is a more manageable 12-20 feet, while dwarf trees are a mere 5-12 feet tall. In my case, obviously, dwarf trees are the only choice.

A quick summary of some different rootstocks:

M27: The smallest of all the dwarf rootstocks.  This tree must absolutely be supported, or it will buckle under its own weight.  This tree is ideal for planting in pots, but is disease prone.  Furthermore, setbacks which may cause a larger tree to give a low yield would kill a tree this small.  As a plus, however, these trees will often begin producing in their first year.

M26: A slightly bigger, but more venerable dwarfing rootstock.  As big as 10 feet tall, this is common in home orchards and market gardens.  Fairly disease resistant, M26 needs well drained soil.  Almost every nursery stocks trees of this type.

Bud-9: Same size as M26 (roughly), but more disease resistant, and cold hardy.  Recommended here in Kentucky, but more difficult to find.

So, the plan as of now is to raise 2 trees on B9 rootstock (if I can find any nurseries selling trees on this rootstock next spring), and two rootstock plants to propagate new plants with.  Right now, it looks like Van Well Nursery has the best selection of the trees I want in B9, but Burnt Ridge has a better selection in M26.  We will see where we are in a few months.

Sources:

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/ho/ho39/ho39.pdf

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/ho/ho82/ho82.pdf

http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/fruits/om100.pdf

And many, many others.

Another year of poor blog updates.

This year, I managed to recieve a harvest of some note from my meager pot-garden on the back deck. We got enough tomatoes for a spaghetti dinnner (although in their small pots, I could never keep them well-watered enough), and enough Jalapenos, Cayenne and Habaneros to freeze and use throughout the winter.

Now that I’m in an actual house, and intend to remain put for a few years, I’m investing in a somewhat larger garden. I have tilled a 12′x12′ patch into the back yard, with an offset 4′x4′ patch which I intend to fill with strawberries (I expect that this experiment will not bear much fruit). The tiller I rented from Home Depot made absolutely short work of sod, and revealed some very nice soil beneath. I was honestly expecting clay.

To that end, I ordered a mix of hairy vetch and winter rye to use as cover crops. This is the recommended cover crop mixture for home gardeners, by the Kentucky Agricultural Extension. The Vetch is a legume, and will thus fix nitrogen into the soil. The rye provides something for the vetch to climb. Both are extremely winter hardy. Although I was supposed to have planted the vetch by late September, I was late, and didn’t get it in the ground until the second week of October. Despite some temperatures in the 30s since then, it has sprouted, and appears to be doing well.

If you look closely, you’ll see some of the Rye coming up, as well. I ordered my mixture from Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply, and it contained 15% rye and 85% vetch. Looking at the distribution of seeds, however, I’ll look into a more balanced mixture in the future. There just isn’t enough rye to provide any significant support to the vetch.

Also of note: if you haven’t planted legumes in your garden before, you’ll want to purchase innoculant with your vetch. This innoculant is made up of symbiotic bacteria which helps the Vetch fix nitrogen.

This cover crop will serve three purposes this season. For my garden, it will provide erosion cover for wet Kentucky winters. It will also fix nitrogen into the soil, which I probably don’t need, but which certainly won’t hurt. Most importantly, the vetch and rye will provide dry organic matter to the soil when it is tilled in come summer. This adds nutrients to the soil, as well as making it more friable. “Green Compost,” in more than one way.

Even though I got a late start on the cover crop, it looks like I lucked out. Lets hope that the rest of this years garden goes so well.

We’ve been about a month without a hard frost now, and the weather has been absolutely spring-like. Every other day brings rain and thunderstorms, and it couldn’t be a more ideal time for growing things.

Unfortunately, I messed up when I planted peppers and tomatoes 8 and 7 weeks before the last “predicted” frost date: My lights weren’t quite powerful enough, and all of my originally indoor-started plants are on death’s doorstep.

These Plants are Dead

These are also dead

 Furthermore, nothing was growing in the garden boxes, principally because my method of dumping water from a cup was completely washing out the seeds every time, and they eventually became burried again.

In order to solve these problems, I went to Lowes and bought a watering can, and some additional plants:  Two tomato plants, two pepper plants, six basil plants, and a bell pepper plant.  I’ll probably return to a local nursery this weekend and purchase some more tomatoes.  Despite giving in to the horrible, horrible plant companies, I made sure all the varieties I purchased where heirloom, and chauk this up to another lesson learned.  Next year, I’ll be more careful about my seed starting.

New plants:

Store bought, but tasty

Spring may be less than a week old, but it is decidedly arrived here in the Louisville area.  Although we are still expecting a number of frosts, and lots of cold nights yet, the weather is gradually breaking, and it’s almost time to direct sow hardier things, like Lettuce.

I plan on getting the lettuce in the garden boxes by the end of the week, but we’ll see how that goes.  The tomatoes and the peppers are growing inside, but they’re the only things that made it out of the seed box.  I’m starting to doubt the viability of the seeds I purchased a few years ago.  I’m not nearly out of seeds, but the plants just don’t grow vigorously.  I wasn’t thinking a thing about heirloom or organic varieties at that point, so I purchased whatever mass-market Burpee and Monsanto seeds were being offered at the time.  Next year, I plan on purchasing all-heirloom varieties, hopefully mostly from Baker Creek Seeds (http://rareseeds.com/).  Their catalog is by and far the most colorful one I received this year, and it is marked up on almost every page with some variety or another that I’d like to raise.

Today, I tilled up the garden boxes (an easy task with a hand trowel) and moistened soil which has remained dry and frozed for many months.  I also prepared a few 3 gallon containers that I picked up on craiglist for dirt cheap ($0.50 each!) for some flowers that hopefully won’t die.

Next week, I plan on swinging by Brightside Louisville at some point and picking up some compost.  The city of Louisville composts all the yard waste collected around the city each year, and sells it for a very reasonable price.

We’ll see how things go this year.  Here’s how things look outside.  I’ll update later with the way things are looking inside.

This year, I plan on supplementing my pantry with quite a bit of garden grown produce, so I’m getting an early start.  Right now, it looks about like this in Louisville:

Here’s my seed growing setup:

The pods are filled with those expandy peat pod things, which actually work pretty well in this case:

And now, a few weeks later, this is what I’ve got going:

I’ve got Lettuce, Kale, and Peppers started.  They apear a bit leggy at the moment, although I hope this is just my terrible gardening judgement.  The light I’ve got above them is a 15W flourescent, and another 20W flourescent in the clip on lamp.  I’m keeping the light on them for around 14 hours a day.  The seed pod gizmo has a microfiber mat that sucks up water and keeps the pods moist, so I don’t have to worry about drowning the little guys.

And so my 2009 year of gardening begins.  I’d like to have a number of lettuces and tomatoes, and hopefully I’ll yeild some peppers this year.  We’ll see how things go.  With luck, the heat of the summer won’t kill everything like it did last year.

Well, the plants are making pretty good progress. I’ve just now figured out everything that the birds have taken out, so a second round of seeds will be planted this weekend (along with the garden box construction). Not much to update about, but here’s a picture:

I noticed the other day that my bean plants have practically exploded out of the ground. I though I would set up my camera to make a stop-motion film, and maybe capture some interesting growth. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. You can, however, see the plants tracking the sun.

Well, once again, I have seedlings. This time, they’re out on the balcony, so they’re getting plenty of sunlight. The Lettuce and Basil have sprouted up first, and aside from any bird casualties (I’ll know what didn’t survive in a couple more days, I imagine), everything else is close behind. I plan on building garden boxes the weekend after next. The boxes will be a modification of the design I used last year. They will be 4 feet by 4 feet, and tiered so all plants receive roughly equal amounts of sun (so the plants in the front don’t obscure the plants in the back). Everything will also be completely modular, so I can add or remove parts at will, and so (most importantly!) I am able to move the garden boxes in my car. Here is a rough sketch:

Last year, I followed Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening” to the letter.  This year, I won’t be.  I like the advantages provided by the special soil mix, as well as the ease of accessing a 4′x4′ garden “frame.”  I don’t like the limitation of planting only in square numbers, however.

I’ll also have a separate 1′x4′ box for my peppers and a separate 1′x2′ box for my beans, which I’ll allow to climb a trellis of bamboo and twine.

Here are pictures of the lettuce sprouts: