First cucumber! It was delicious!

I sliced it and mixed it with about a half-cup of sour cream, a few dribs of white balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. It was delicious. I was going to throw a handful of super-sweet 100’s in with it, but … I ate them.

On the other hand, the Cayenne plant that produced those wonderful peppers a few months ago is no more. I came out the front door a few mornings ago to find out that two caterpillars had completely denuded it overnight.

That's a cayenne he's munching on.

Gluttons.

Whoever told me that putting Cayenne pepper on a plant’s leaves would keep the caterpillars off of it? Doesn’t look like that’s true…

There are many famous carrots in this word. There’s classic carrots, there’s hybrid carrots, there’s colored carrots, there’s weird carrots that look more like white radishes. They come in every flavor, size, and shape. One that a fellow farmer goes on and on about is the Flakee. Well, since I seem to have developed my own variety, I’m going to name it, damnit.

Everyone, meet the … *drumroll* … STUBEE!

FEAR THE STUBEE

Yeah, it’s only about an inch long. But it’s the right size around, and it’s ripe, and it’s actually started to go to wood in the very center. Oops.

Guess I need to dig these up and replant them. According to my calendar, I’m supposed to plant now for fall harvest. But god only knows if that’s accurate in my area. Harumph.

I had planned to preserve them and use them when the tomatoes are ready for salsa in another month or two, but it’s not worth it. The onions were too small, some as small as a quarter. On one hand, it’s disappointing that I didn’t get a good crop. On the other hand, this validates my early theory that the reason I haven’t gotten much of anything out of the garden is that there wasn’t enough nutrients present in the soil … which a soil test could have told me if I’d gone and gotten one. But this is my first year with the raised bed, my first year growing onions, and my first year gardening organic, and I was leery of overdoing it.

Since going organic, I’ve learned a lot about what plants need to look like in their different states, and the rest of my tomatoes and other crops look great right now. I’ve also found sources of fertilizer, garden soil, compost, and mulch that are organic in nature and not made from chemicals. Hopefully I’ll be able to harvest some of my ripening tomato and pepper crops soon!

Some kolhrabi plants don’t seem to bulb in the first place. My mom told me about this and I was expecting it. some of them create kind of a ‘vertical’ bulb. They tasted kind of off, a bit more bitter, but still edible.

But this late in the season? It’s just bugfood. Ants, which I’ve been unsuccessful controlling organically to date, have been (literally) farming the aphids. And I don’t need any EXTRA bugs.

Yep, Kohlrabi is a fall crop here in Texas. Just like the packet said!

I’ll come clean and admit that I just mixed a 3 cu ft compressed bale of peat moss into my raised bed as part of my dirt amendments in an effort to break up the very sandy soil in my raised bed. Now that I know more, I wish I hadn’t.

As it’s rained and I’ve watered it and things grow up in the raised bed, the settling is getting to the point where it could be deemed “significant”. In fact, in some places, the rasied bed has settled by over six inches. The structure’s only 20 inches deep, so losing six of twenty inches to either leach, plant absorption, or whatever is giving me a “!!!” reaction.

The top board is a 2x4.

As I rotate crops in the next few weeks (getting rid of the cauliflower that hasn’t headed, for instance) I’ll be pulling the bark dust out for the most part, and working a bit of manure/hummus mix from the garden center and peat moss into the soil, and it’ll be mounded all the way back to the top of the pile!

Last year, I planted my tomatoes in May. Yes, in Texas. Yes, I’m an idiot. I did learn my lesson, and after nursing them through the summer, I got a decent harvest up until the first frost. And this year, I started planning and putting the garden together in January and thought I was really ahead of the curve!

Although — not so much. See, where I am in south-central Texas, despite being in USDA Zone 8 (The same as the Portland climate I moved from), all of the cabbages (brassica olera, including broccoli, cauilflower, and kohlrabi) are winter crops. Yeah, winter. Most people who know what they’re doing will put them in the ground in December or January. I didn’t put mine in the ground until February.

So while the rest of my neighbors and the new garden buddies I’ve met via various forums are enjoying garden-fresh steamed broccoli, I’m watching the teeeeeeny tiny little heads on my broccoli form and hoping that they don’t bolt straight to flower. Two already have, and I’ve ended up pulling them from the garden.

Now if ones next to each other would just go ahead and bolt so that I can amend that part of the garden and plant one of the patiently waiting container plants in it’s place, I’d be very, very happy. *taps foot impatiently*

Shattered Dreams -- and root balls

I should’ve gotten the hint then and gone back to bed, but like the brave trooper I am, I … soldiered on.

While I was removing the blanketing from my flower beds (we got down close to freezing last night — no, I didn’t wake up early enough to see if it had frosted), I noticed that a bunch of broccoli plants had holes chewed in them, and one Kohlrabi plant had been entirely consumed. Grrr. Glad those bugs enjoyed the nice warm, safe weekend under the tent. Off to Lowe’s to grab some Neem Oil Concentrate. I’ll blog about that later, but … let’s just say that for now, those bugs are toast. I just hope that my sweetpeas don’t catch any of the overspray and die from the neem oil.

While I was at Lowe’s, I grabbed some fish emulsion fertilizer, because I was this close to putting (gaak) Miracle Gro on my bed for lack of a better choice. Lowe’s was the first place I saw that had a reasonable organic fertilizer choice. At 5-1-1, it’s not ideal for my needs, but my soil should already have plenty of potassium and phosphorous in it… While watering the garden with it, Eo was definitely interested. Lord, that stuff stinks. I drained the last onto the flowers and lettuce I’d just potted today (Romaine seems to like flowerpots better than it likes my raised bed, and I’m happy to oblige it…) and went around front to throw some on the flowerbeds. While I was around front, Miss Schnozz again attacked the flower pots to get at whatever smelled so interesting. Three lettuce plants and my last surviving Verbena later…

I rushed off to Kroger to do get dinner before dusk so that I can spray the garden with the neem oil, which says not to spray in direct sunlight. While I’m there, in my dirty garden clothes, reeking of fish emulsion and dirt, of course I run into half a dozen friends that I haven’t seen in ages, including some people that I know professionally. I realize it’s the weekend, but this is the bible belt, and while I’m gardening, the rest of them are in their churchgoing clothes.

Yeah.

Shoulda stayed in bed.

Edit: And then Henry just ate an entire pound of raw chicken fresh from the grocery store when I stepped outside to check the grill. He’s now so stuffed he can hardly walk. >.<

On the bright side, I did find out that Neem Oil also repels dogs.

What’s not mentioned in the article is that other dyed brown mulches and “landscaper’s mix” may have the same issue, without the cocoa content on it’s label. I can’t find a web link about this at the moment, unfortunately.

Despite my normal environmentally sound preferences, I use cypress mulch on my front yard. Why? It’s undyed, it contains only cypress, it doesn’t get washed away as easily as pine or cedar, and last but definitely not least, I’m not allergic to it for whatever reasons. Want to see me break out in hives? Let me play in a flower bed full of cedar mulch for an afternoon.

Anyway. If you have dogs, please be aware of what you’re buying at the garden center, and what you let your dog into at home!

I had a few problems and a few “Duhs” with the jiffy pods … and really, planting in general. I should really read directions more, but the basic problems that I had revolved around what order to do things in and how deep to plant the seeds. I put the blame squarely on my Y chromosome. If I had two X chromosomes, I surely would’ve read the directions instead of tearing right into things.

Number one on my list of mistakes was adding the seeds first and expecting the pods to grow up around the seeds. It just doesn’t work that way. Water first, then seeds!

I've added about 2 cups of water to ths tray. Note the lack of seeds: Don't add seeds until later!

Number two on my list of mistakes was not pushing the seeds down into the peat far enough. What I should have done was make a hole with my pinky and push the seeds down into it. What ended up happening as a result (which I unfortunately don’t seem to have a good picture of…) was a profusion of seedlings growing out the sides of the peat pods.

Where the Jiffy pods did indeed shine was the planting process. Once I figured out the right way to start things in them, the planting process went off without a hitch. Just drop and go. Then again, with the right preparation, (letting them dry out a little, ‘massaging’ each cell before pulling up gently on the seedling), planting things that came out of the normal cells was just as easy as long as the plants were of equal maturity.

Frankly, I reuse my seed trays heavily. I don’t want to be tied to one use per pod. The increased price and lack of ability to reuse makes the peat-pods a “no sale” for me, even if I do understand their appeal.

And watching them inflate was just kinda cool, ya know?