Tag Archive for: Share

Plant Some Garlic!

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Tips for Planting Garlic

by Sandy Swegel

A foot or two of snow on the garden may make it seem like the gardening season is over, but if your ground isn’t frozen yet, there’s still time to plant some garlic.  Fall is the best time to plant garlic (which needs a cooling cycle before growing) and even though it seems like winter already, the garlic will do a lot of root growth before the soil freezes.

Garlic is super easy to grow.  If you have garden soil that’s already in decent condition, you can be finished in less than an hour.

Get your garlic, preferably garlic sold for planting or organic garlic from the grocery.  There’s a chance that non-organic garlic has been treated to prevent sprouting in the supermarket….which would mean no sprouting or growing in the field.

Take your head of garlic and split it into cloves. Big cloves are better….they make bigger plants.

You’re already half done….that’s how easy garlic is.

Plant garlic 6 inches apart. Plant in a grid, not just a single line.  My beds that had lettuce until hard frost are three feet across so I plant in a grid…five cloves the width of the bed and then as long as my row has space.  I just had four feet available….so that’s 40 cloves of garlic that will equal 40 heads of garlic next June.

My soil is wet from two weeks of early snows, so I didn’t do a lot of digging because I didn’t want to ruin the soil texture (i.e. dig up clumps of clay).  I just took my yardstick to make a straight line and poked 40 holes the depth of my index finger.  Then I dropped a clove, pointed side up, in each hole. Press the soil closed around and over the hole. Done.

The two most useful tips that I learned from our local garlic expert Karen Beeman of WeeBee Farms is:

1. Put 2-4 inches of grass or hay (non-pesticide treated of course) as a mulch over the soil. It helps with protection from drying winds and cold.

2. Water very thoroughly, especially if you’re in a dry climate.  I don’t mean just stand there with a hose.  Put a sprinkler on the area and drench it thoroughly.  Or arrange an all-day rainstorm that puts a couple of inches of moisture into the soil.  I didn’t water the garlic in so much thinking winter snow would be enough, but my heads were pretty puny at harvest.  The cloves didn’t get growing soon enough in soil that was parched from a long hot summer.

There, you’re done for this season. You can harvest some scapes in spring and your fully grown garlic next June or July.

Not bad for an hour (or less) work today!

For more tips from Karen: http://weebeefarms.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-plant-garlic.html

Garlic-love Picture: http://lipmag.com/food-2/healthy-bytes-goodness-of-garlic/

Which Foods are GMOs, Anyway?

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Detecting These Foods and How to Avoid Them

by Sandy Swegel

We read a lot about GMO foods, but a recent reader question made me think about how little I know about which foods are genetically modified when I go shopping. I know I can avoid GMOs by eating only organic foods, but once I stray from the organic aisle, I’m going to run into the approximately 30,000 genetically modified products that are on grocery shelves. Where are those GMOs hiding?

Most of the GMO foods in the US are foods that are ingredients in other foods.  The top GMOs are corn, soy, cottonseed, milk, sugar beets and aspartame.

The bottom line is:

If your food is sweet, there’s likely a GMO involved. Sugar beets are common GMO products and the source for most granular sugar in the USA. Liquid sugar like high fructose corn syrup is made from corn and is often GMO.  Even if you go the artificial sweetener route, aspartame is often GMO. If your food is sweetened, whether, soda, juice, cookies or candy, GMOs probably are ingredients.

If your food is a protein, there’s a good chance GMOs are involved. Soy proteins are everywhere boosting protein content and 95% of US soy is GMO.  If you are eating beef or eggs, it’s likely the animals were fed GMO corn.  I paid extra for nice local eggs until I found out that standard chicken feed from the feed store was made of GMO corn.  GMO corn and alfalfa also fatten up your cows and pigs that produce beef and pork. And now that most fish are “farmed,” the most common food they live on is corn.  All those protein drinks and “smoothies” we love are GMO soy based.

If your food has a thick texture, GMOs could be helping.  The ubiquitous lecithin is made from GMO soy. Lecithin and beet sugar are prime ingredients in favorites like yogurt and ice cream.  GMO cottonseed oil and canola oil are common ingredients used in margarine, salad dressing or for frying potato chips and processed food. GM synthetic hormone rBGH is found in milk products unless they are labeled “no rBGH.”

The bottom line?  Eat like your great-grandparents.  Grow your own food when you can.  Buy organic vegetables and fruits when you shop. Get grass fed meats and wild caught fish.  And don’t waste your money on all those processed foods that aren’t real food anyway.

Sources: http://action.greenamerica.org/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=7608&gclid=CPm7q7Giy7oCFU1gMgod0DkArQ

Photo Credit: http://paleodesserts.com/avoiding-gmos-heres-how/

When the Garden Stops Making Free Food!

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Heirloom Vegetable Seeds
by Sandy Swegel

The hard freeze is upon us here in Colorado.  We’re scurrying to save and process the last of the harvest.  Counters are full of green tomatoes. Winter squash line the shelves of the mudroom. But fresh organic food coming in from the garden is dwindling.  The time of buckets of lemon cucumbers in the walkway is over. (How does that plant produce so much fruit?) Despite good intentions of growing most of our own food, it is time to return to regular shopping at the grocery store when the garden stops making free food.

Paying for food after getting all those zucchinis for free all summer can be a little depressing—especially if you end up paying $1.50 for a tiny little zucchini. For a while, I thought I was just getting old and turning into my Depression-baby grandmother who always complained about things being so expensive.  Even though she had money in the bank and a good social security check coming, later in life she took to having just two little chicken wings for dinner. That’s what I felt like going shopping this week as I bought just one onion, one squash and two pears when I went shopping.  Prices seemed so high.

Turns out prices really are high.  It’s not reported much on the news, but the cost of living is increasing and food prices are worse than the general economy. Since 2006, the consumer price index has risen 14% but the price of food has gone up 20% in the past six years.  Ouch.

So what do you do?  Besides planting even more vegetables and fruit next year, you have to watch what you buy. And you need to remember to keep buying organic produce even though it is relatively more expensive.

Prices are higher now than when you bought groceries last winter. But don’t compensate by eating pesticide-contaminated food.  The Environmental Working Group puts out a list every year of the foods that have the most pesticides even after they have been thoroughly washed.  They call the worst ones the “Dirty Dozen.”  Most of our staple foods are on the dirty list:  apples, celery, kale (!), cucumbers, and zucchini.  If you do have to save money this winter and buying non-organic food seems the only way to go, at least choose foods least likely to be full of pesticides…the items on their “Clean Fifteen” list.

And grow more food next summer!

Dirty Dozen: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/ Data on food prices:  http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013-august/price-inflation-for-food-outpacing-many-other-spending-categories.aspx#.Um5XtvmsgWc

Season Extenders

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Season Extenders – Protection for the Garden

 

Here in October in zone 5, we have had a couple of snows now so it’s hard to pretend the garden season isn’t over for most of us.  The daytime temperatures are still well above freezing and downright balmy in the 60s at times.  But nighttime temps dip down to the 30s and can ruin vegetables and fruits still on the vine that otherwise might keep growing in warm daytime weather.  It’s too late to sow late-season crops now but there are ways to stretch the growing season for the fall and the spring.

 

For spring:

 

Mini hoop houses are super easy and there are hundreds of DIY plans available.  These make a pocket of air around the new seedlings and keep the soil and air a bit warmer.  These mini hoop houses or low tunnels can give you an extra month of the growing season.  Your seeds will germinate better, you’ll have fewer pests, and vegetables that require less watering.

 

Here is a simple, inexpensive, easy hoop house plan.

 

6 sections of 2 ft. rebar

6 5 ft. sections of ¾” irrigation hosing

Any kind of large plastic covering. (painter’s plastic, opened-up large trash bags, wrapping from a mattress)

Bricks or rocks to hold the cover down around the edges.

 

Here are some super simple designs to inspire you.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/low-tunnel-construction-mini-hoop-house.aspx

http://growingthehomegarden.com/2014/03/how-to-build-mini-hoop-house-early-start-garden.html

http://www.leereich.com/2012/01/cold-has-yet-to-throw-wrench-into.html

The best part about the popularity of mini hoop houses or low tunnels is that you can now buy pre-made, fold-up tunnels for less than $25 at garden centers, hardware stores, or online

 

For Fall:

Other than hoop houses, here are some ideas of commonly found items to use for protection against frosts and critters.

 

Old worn bed sheets (love the flannel ones with cartoon characters)can be lightly laid over anything that might be hurt by freezing.  This includes vegetables like green beans and squashes and herbs.

 

Plastic bags of leaves.  Just quickly throw the bags over and around root vegetables as temperatures keep dropping to keep the ground from freezing.  If you can still work in the soil, your carrots and turnips and beets are still edible and yummy!  Two bags of leaves snuggled around the basil patch will keep basil alive for a bit longer.

 

Upside down garbage cans.  I can keep a pepper plant going in cold temperatures until they turn red by putting clean garbage cans upside down over them at night.  It doesn’t take much to protect against 29 degrees…just a pocket of warmer air.

 

One of the biggest struggles in the fall is to protect pumpkins and squashes from the nibbling critters hunting for food before the cold sets in.  The squirrels and raccoons love nothing better than to sit down to dinner on my pumpkins and gnaw holes through them to get to the seeds.  A barrier of chicken wire, hooped and secured over the ripening fruit has proven successful in keeping them out.

Plants, at this time in the fall, aren’t growing much, but they are still alive and producing nutrients, which is better than their fate in the back of my refrigerator.

Best of Show for Fall Flowers

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Wildflower Seeds

by Sandy Swegel

And the nominees are:

Asters, Asters and Asters.

I am always entranced by asters. They offer intense color at summer’s end and an alternative to the perfect rounded chrysanthemums you see for sale everywhere.  I don’t have many asters because sometimes they just dry up in late summer heat or they flop all over because I was too busy with the tomatoes to stake them…This year the asters bloomed and bloomed and bloomed.  Even wild asters were beautiful.  The Aster novae-angliae is a wonderful performer that does well even in partial shade.  Included with the nominees this year is the Daisy Aster, not a real aster but an Erigeron, but I have it lined along the edge of the garden where it has formed a mat of little white flowers for months this year.  Next year, I’m trying all of the blue asters.  They are just magnificent this year leaning through the neighbor’s chain link fence.

Yellow Columbine

Always a good performer, yellow columbine is still pumping out flowers this fall. One little plant will probably get the “Most Determined” award by managing to seed itself and then grow up through the juniper. Yellow Columbine and Blue Scabiosa have competed in past years for being both the earliest and latest bloomers.

Red Salvias

The blue salvias were nice enough this year, but the red salvias rule this fall, having tall bright flower heads in full bloom, glorious when highlighted by the gold foliage of nearby trees and shrubs.  The Salvia coccinea in the wildflower garden and the Salvia greggii and Salvia splendens in containers are competing for who can be the most vivid.

Agastache

Hummingbirds and bees love the red salvias, but the agastaches must be very tasty this year.  A couple of weeks ago some wild winds had knocked over the agastache so I went out to try to stake them up a bit.  The bees that were out there happily feeding had a definite opinion. Their hum changed from a happy “I’m just eating and going here and there” to a menacing “Don’t touch my dinner” as I was jostling the plants and I decided the flowers looked just great, leaning over the nearby echninacea.

The judge for the garden awards isn’t very impartial, so the asters will probably win because they haven’t gotten any awards in recent years, but I think all four of these flowers would look fabulous planted together in a wildish meadow type design.

Primping for Winter Interest

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How to Prepare the Garden For Winter

by Sandy Swegel

As Fall proceeds at full speed, our tasks in the garden take a new direction as we start primping for winter interest.  There’s no longer time for flowers to set new buds to bloom before frost.  There won’t be any tomatoes that aren’t already on the vine.  A killing frost will come soon and kill off many of the annual flowers. So it’s time to start getting the garden ready to look good this winter.  Now instead of thinking about colorful flower displays, we turn our thoughts to structure and texture in the garden.  We want to leave tall flower seedheads to dramatically collect snow in winter as well as feed the birds.  There’s no more deadheading roses – now you want to see the rose hips mature and redden as the air gets cooler. Tall ornamental grasses will sway dramatically in winter winds.

In short, here are the things you don’t need to do anymore this year.

Stop deadheading flowers.

You want to see stately stems of echinacea and rudbeckia in the winter garden. Blooms of butterfly bush frozen in place will give a hint of color into the winter.  Small plants you thought were finished like scabiosa or dianthus will throw out a few final blooms that provide some late bee nectar.

Let dying foliage stay in place.

Earlier in the season, I’d pull off dead leaves from daylilies, so things would look their best.  Now, brown and golden foliage against green leaves is part of the vibrancy of Fall.

Let vines wander where they may.

I spend a good part of the summer garden season trying to prevent aggressive Virginia Creeper from pulling down branches of the wild plum and apple trees. Now the crisp red color of the Virginia Creeper delights me and I love seeing its leaves vining all throughout the garden.  Even the weedy self-sowing morning glories have beautiful golden tones as they twine up and down flower stalks.

Let your flowers reseed. 

The easiest way to garden is to let your flowers reseed themselves.  Bachelor Buttons and Mexican Hat and California Poppies are all dispersing their seeds to soak in the winter moisture and cold so they can burst forth again next Spring.  Some seeds I’ll collect for starting in pots next Spring, but it’s nicest when they just seed themselves in place.

Let the annual weeds be.

It’s always time to keep after perennial weeds like thistles and dandelions, but annual weeds that crop up now won’t usually have time to make flowers much less set seed before killing frost.  It’s usually safe to just leave them alone.

Let your vegetable garden reseed itself.

I’ve left the leek flower stalks in place.  Big seed heads of dill and parsley and anise are allowed to stand in the vegetable garden.  Even the lettuce and spinach and chard that bolted in summer heat now remain and drop their seeds to return next Spring.  I usually absentmindedly forget some of the garlic and potatoes….that will all return next year to be vigorous new plants.  Arugula has already multiplied itself a thousandfold in my lettuce bed.

The one task still to do?  WATER if needed.  The dry low humidity days of Fall can desiccate the garden.  If you don’t have rain, be sure to do some supplemental watering so that your perennial plants go into Winter well-watered.  Desiccation from dry air and winds is responsible for more winterkill than mere dry soil.  So give everything a good drink now before all the leaves fall.  You may have to water again in November and throughout the winter if it’s dry, but a well-watered Fall garden has an excellent chance of surviving even brutal winter conditions.

A Pest you Can’t Help but Love

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Love For the Hornworm

by Sandy Swegel

Yesterday was a bright sunny day and pollinators were out gorging on the nectar of asters. It’s been a good year for asters, those vigorous re-seeders.  Besides honey bees and some native bees, there were at least seven hummingbird sphinx moths in a small garden area. Their very long proboscis lets them eat from many kinds of flowers and carry pollen about.  I was watching them while scooping up ten inches of topsoil that flood waters had moved about 15 feet away from the raised tomato bed.  So I was scooping the soil up and putting it back.  Easy enough.  In one shovel there was an enormous mud-covered caterpillar squirming.  Slowly I realized that underneath all that mud there was a bright green tomato hornworm and my gut reaction was to kill it right away so I could save my tomatoes.

Fortunately I also immediately thought about the hummingbird moths I had just been admiring. My brain cells reminded me the hummingbird moth and the tomato hornworm are one and the same creature.  How can I both love and hate one creature?  I also found myself filled with compassion for the hornworm because we had earlier pulled and thrown away all tomato plants. Between the ecoli the flood waters carried, the fungus growing on the leaves from too much water, and the forecast of 34 degrees tonight, there was no good reason to keep tomato plants.  So no more food for the hornworm.  Poor hornworm….flood and famine.  He was really big and fat so I hoped he had enough calories to pupate and I threw him on the pile of mud and dead tomato debris that was going to the landfill and wished him well.

Next year I just have to remind myself to plant enough tomatoes so one or two hornworms can grow up into the beautiful hummingbird sphinx moths that pollinate my flowers.

Photo Credit http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-07/lifestyle/41153436_1_light-tomato-darkhttp://naturallycuriouswithmaryholland.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/

After the Deluge

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How to Help Our Gardens Survive

by Sandy Swegel

I went out into the garden yesterday for the first time since September 10th.  I’m sure you heard of our flooding in Boulder and the Front Range area of Colorado. Back on September 11th, it started to rain here.  That Wednesday started as a welcome rain day…a break in the busy-ness of the harvest season. At the end of a day of a record breaking 1.09 inches of rain, we signed happily, “We needed the moisture.”    But that was the last normal day as one of those freakish “perfect storms” parked right over Boulder  and refused to budge. We got 72% of our annual rainfall over the next few days. No good reason….the storm just wouldn’t move on. It’s normally harvest time and we’re busy trying to get our tomatoes to ripen before killing frost. Winter squash are fattening.  We often have to do a lot of irrigating because irrigation ditches have long since dried up. Newly seeded greens and root crops are developing for Fall harvest.

No regular harvests this year.  Farmers are advised not to sell anything fresh out of the floodwater soaked fields unless it’s bleached first.  Kinda ruins the whole organic thing. But we are harvesting lots of compassion and empathy for other areas that have flooded and a new understanding for people who live in rainy areas.  We’re still full of fear and suffering over losses of home and field and livelihood, but ever so grateful for those who have gardened and farmed in flood before and shared their wisdom.

On the most mundane level, I understand the Pacific Northwest garden in a new way.  Peering into my sodden compost bin with sheets of rain pouring in, I suddenly understood what the lid was for…to keep water out.

I understand my father’s south Louisiana garden a little better.  You have to have really high raised beds to grow in because the water table is right at ground level.

I am so grateful to the the farmers and scientists of North Dakota and the Midwest.  Our ag college is daily emailing info on how to treat soil and crops and trees based on what they learned from the floods of 2011 in North Dakota and 2008 in the Midwest.  Nothing like 10 feet of water and mud in our own basements to really understand those pictures that come across the TV whenever the Mississippi River floods. But now we know how to help our trees and plants survive.

I flashback to images of mudslides in California and understand why we have to plant slopes for erosion.  A few plants don’t stop the entire mountainside from repositioning, but they can really help absorb and slow the water from steady rainfall.  Once our 100-year Creek flood got going, it just took entire trees and the three feet of soil under them, but in other places, plants and grass meadows kept the topsoil from floating to Kansas.  Sorry, Kansas.  Think of this and remember to seed your wildflower meadows and your cover crops;

We’re still in shell shock, but it was hot and sunny yesterday and the forecast is good today.  Any day now, we are going to join the millions of farmers and growers throughout time who finally wipe the mud off their brow, tear open a seed package carefully saved from floods, and plant again.

Watermelon Crop Circles

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Spotting these Unique Looking Viruses

by Sandy Swegel

Nature is so darn weird some days.  My friend Lara found four watermelons with this a design in them growing in her farm field.  Her neighbors are, um, quirky enough that one of them might have spent the night carving the design.  But a quick google for “crop circles and watermelons” turned up more equally cryptic images.

Most likely these watermelons weren’t carved by industrious aliens.  Designs like this can be caused by spot or mosaic viruses   Last year, we saw lots of the Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus that wiped out tomato plants locally.  Vining plants like cucumbers and papayas are also susceptible.

Most of these plant viruses are spread by insects, often aphids or thrips.  An infected insect goes from plant to plant spreading the virus.  Sometimes the effects are inconsequential and sometimes, as happened with the papaya ringspot virus, most of the crop can be wiped out, endangering the economic status of the entire growing area. Insects often overwinter in debris in the field or nearby, so clearing out your garden after harvest can sometimes break the disease cycle.

Not much you can do once you have the virus. Sometimes they don’t spread, and other times they wipe out the field. Lara only has four fruit so far so she’s hopeful it’s an isolated problem.

Why is tidying up always the answer to most problems?

Fall Gardening: Getting Ready

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Preparing Your Garden For Fall

by Sandy Swegel

What a great time of year this is.  And not just because the harvest is upon us and tomatoes are ripening and winter squash are filling out.  It’s a great time because school is starting again and school supplies are in the stores bringing up great memories and nostalgia for the beginning of the school year.  Sure we all hated summer vacation ending, but getting new pencils and notebooks and going back to school and seeing old friends was invigorating. The slight nip in the night air that starts in August in Colorado stimulates a new enthusiasm, much like a new year or a new chance.

Going into the garden in August is a lot like getting ready for school again.  First, you have to get rid of the chaos and clutter of summer.  We’ve been vacationing or sneaking naps in hammocks and somehow, the weeds we were carefully hoeing when they were an inch tall in May, have grown taller than us and have seed heads. So the first step of getting ready for Fall Gardening is taking a deep breath and clearing out the weeds and debris that might have snuck into the garden.

On Your Marks First, you have to be able to see your marks.  Clear out the weeds that are choking things like the bindweed threatening to bring the corn to its knees. Pull out tough stalks of spring lettuce.  They’re done…let them go! Those radishes that have been baking in the summer heat…time to recycle them into compost. Any place with diseased-looking leaves:  clear out every last leaf to reduce the chances of trouble there in the future.

Get Ready. Get ready to meet old friends again…the cold-hardy or cool season crops.  These are all the sturdy plants that don’t mind a morning freeze.  Swiss Chard and Kale or Spinach can be frozen solid on an October morning and be perfect for dinner that night.  The secret to having fresh vegetables in the Fall and long into winter is to plant while the soil is warm so that the plant is full-grown by frost.  After it gets cold, plants don’t grow very quickly, but the garden will keep them ready to eat for months.  Get ready to plant a big garden.  It’s not the end of a garden season, but the beginning of one.

Get Set. Make a plan.  Think about how many salads you’ll want  (or how many pounds of greens you bought last year.)  For greens, you want two general different kinds:  the soft sweet salad greens that will last you until hard frost and the sturdy kales and chards and collards that will be good for cooking. The local farmers call it a “braising mix” that you can pick and stir-fry well into winter. Don’t forget carrots.   This is also time to make a plan if you want a cold frame or want to set up a row cover to extend the season.

Go. It’s just like Spring again…only this time your mind isn’t gaga over a million possible gardens.  So focus on the task at hand—growing enough food for you and your family and friends to eat all Fall and Winter. Prepare the soil. Dig out big weeds. Mix in compost or organic fertilizer. Smooth the surface. Water thoroughly. Let the soil sit for two weeks for soil activity to restore itself. Order the seed you don’t have. Try something a little different like the Asian greens or just something new. They should arrive by the time your soil has rested. Plan a season extender. You can stretch your fall garden into January or February even if you live in a cold place. You can use a cold frame, a hoop house, some row cover or just bags of Fall leaves thrown over plants on extra cold nights.