August Garden

It's been a while since I've done a proper garden post here--so much to catch up on.

The front yard beds are flourishing. These are the dry beans we grew as an experiment--Tiger's Eye from Territorial. So beautiful!

We planted Black-eyed Susans along the front walk--they thrive with so little care and attract lots of bees to pollinate the winter squash...

...which is also thriving.

I never tire of cheerful zinnias.

The green beans are about done for the season--we didn't get as many this year. Some of the vines mysteriously dried up and died...not sure what caused it. But we did harvest enough for a few good meals and a couple of bags for the freezer.

The zucchini and summer squash has gone crazy over these last few weeks. Sauteed zucchini, zucchini pasta, zucchini pizza, zucchini quiche, zucchini bread, chocolate zucchini cake, raw zucchini, zucchini dropped on neighbors' doorsteps...

Tomatoes are just beginning to ripen--the cherries and early varieties.

And our adolescent chickies have blossomed into lovely full-grown, productive hens.

Say hello, ladies! From left to right: Ruby the Rhode Island Red, Ethel the Australorp, Gloria the Golden Laced Wyandotte, and Delia the Delaware.

 We discovered our long-awaited first eggs this weekend.

And potatoes! The thick straw mulch worked really well. There aren't any potatoes actually growing in the straw, but they are right on the surface of the soil under the straw, and much more successful than in past years.

Monster leeks.

More blooms and bees.

Cucumbers are happily climbing their trellis.

This time of year is such a lovely one to spend out in the backyard, watching the dragonflies and bees buzz industriously, soaking up the long awaited sunshine, reveling in all the growing things.

We are working this year on quickly clearing out plants that are past their prime in order to make room for new plants. Hopefully this will make a more robust fall and winter harvest possible. We harvested the garlic early in July and planted that bed with carrots which should be ready in a few more weeks. We also cleared out the spring broccoli and kale and have new plants started in that bed. Scallions and salad greens are always hard to keep up with but we've tried to continue planting throughout the summer. Our peppers this year are mostly a bust--I think it has just been too cold. The basil has also been sad, though we planted out another batch of starts earlier this month that seems to be doing better.

So much to be grateful for in this little plot of earth we call home!

weekend garden notes: spring in the air

After a week of the most wintery weather we've had all year, (the snowmen lasted for two whole days!) we finally had a bit of spring warmth this weekend. And how better to celebrate than by bringing home a new little flock of chicks!

 This one is an Australorp, a beautiful black-feathered breed purported by our farm store to be record-setting egg layers.

We also got a Rhode Island Red, a Golden Laced Wyandotte, and a Delaware. All but the Rhody are new breeds to us, and we're looking forward to observing their habits and personalities.  Egg production aside, I think this will be a flock of beautiful birds!

The warm sunshine beckoned us all outdoors for lots of gardening. Dan mowed down the crimson clover cover crop to prep a bed for potato planting.

The greens will go in the compost, and the roots get gently tilled in to the soil by hand with spade and fork to add organic matter and nitrogen. Our little helper was such a champ, staying with us outside contentedly for hours.

We potted up the calendula and cilantro...

...and salvia. They're all happy in new pots with room to grow.

The air is fragrant with freshly mown lawns, daphne, flowering plums, and star magnolias. It's a nice change from the stagnant air of winter fog and woodsmoke.

Other garden notes:
~We planted basil, pepper and tomato seeds indoors.
~Dan dug up last years strawberries that never performed well and prepped the bed for brassicas, which we'll plant out soon. We'll try some new strawberry varieties in a different bed this year in hopes of harvesting a healthy crop. 
~I re-potted the mint for a fresh spring crop. I keep it in pots to prevent it from taking over the whole garden. Each fall and spring I dump out the root-bound plant, pull two or three hearty roots from that plant and re-pot it with new soil. This method has worked great for me.
~Ate more over-wintered leeks and greens with dinner!

Happy Spring gardening!

early spring harbingers

February in these parts always brings a few sweetly sunny days, to trick us into thinking that Spring is just 'round the corner. We've had a few of those days lately.

The daffodils are sending up green shoots.

The ladies have picked up their laying again, having completed their first molt.

We're allowing them a bit of scavenging time in the garden, with the people veggies safely harvested.

And this particular lady...she has made quite a recovery from her illness over the summer.  Recently we were delighted to discover that she had even resumed laying. We're glad we decided to keep her around.

The red flowering currant has just begun to send out it's tender leaves...

...and flower buds.

 We finally painted our bedroom, after five years of living with white walls, and oh it feels so much more cozy. 

 

And last week the mailman brought two delightful packages--one filled with seeds for planting and one with spring green yarn for knitting (more on that soon!). 

Happy dreams of spring!

weekend reflections--chicken challenges and lavender lemonade

This was a rough week for Dolly, our Cuckoo Maran hen. I came home from work last Friday to find our Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens open on the kitchen table, and my husband decked in latex gloves, tending to this poor girl.

She had a prolapsed oviduct, and her hen companions had started to peck at her. (For those of you curious about this condition, plenty of information is available online...but for the weak-stomached, I will spare the details here). After some first aid and clean up, we put her in a makeshift hen hospital (our old brooder where the chicks spent the first weeks of their life) in the basement for some convalescence.

We kept her there for a week with food and water, and a few breaks to run outside for fresh air and greens. This weekend, we re-introduced her to the rest of the flock in the main coop. So far she seems to be holding her own...she certainly isn't withering away. But I don't think she's completely out of the woods. We are breathing a sigh of relief, though, and hoping she is through the worst of it.

  

Storey's Guide has a lot of good advice, and I wish I had read this particular sentence prior to our experience with Dolly: "Before any problems occur and while you are unemotional, determine in advance exactly how much time and money you are willing to spend nursing sick chickens." (p. 170)

Keeping chickens in the city is a tricky endeavor. When happy hens are clucking about the yard eating slugs and laying eggs, it seems quite idyllic. But when a chicken gets sick, more challenging issues arise. If we lived on a farm and were raising hens on a large scale, we probably would have culled Dolly by now. But it seems more difficult to make this decision in the city (the mere logistics of killing a chicken in the city are a bit daunting). We try not to think of our hens as pets, yet we value their lives as we value the lives of all creatures, and don't want to end them needlessly. We aren't able or willing to spend large amounts of money on vet bills for these animals, but we want to give them a chance to recover if they do become ill or injured. After talking to vets and researching, mulling and worrying this last week, I still haven't determined our plan for sick chickens exactly. But my understanding of the ethics and practicalities of raising animals for food in the city has certainly deepened. We will watch Dolly and do our best to provide our hens with a healthy environment, and tackle each new challenge as it comes.

After all that, it sure was good to sit down with a refreshing glass of Heather's lavender lemonade. I thought I had missed my chance to make it this summer when the nights got so cold that I found myself pulling out the wool blankets. But then the lavender flowered again, and the sun's warmth returned, and I couldn't resist the opportunity.

 This beverage is amazing...like drinking lavender. The whole house smelled of the stuff as the lavender steeped in the syrup. Heavenly! Heather writes about how lavender lemonade will make you feel like a lady, which is very true (even when you're wearing grubby gardening clothes, and not a calico dress). But my husband will attest that it can be equally enjoyed by a Carhartt-clad man working in his wood shop.  

I believe he called it the best lemonade he's ever tasted. Do give it a try yourself!

Around the garden

Time for our weekly survey of the garden--thanks to Farmama for the tradition!

These poor ladies, all cooped up in their coop. Hopefully we'll be able to let them out to roam the garden soon, when the tender seedlings grow a bit more sturdy. In the mean time they get healthy supplements of weeds and slugs.

First strawberries this week! All gobbled up by the toddler before they make it to the house.

The peppers were the last of the seedlings to get planted out. So late this year, and it's still just cool and wet and dreary.

First nasturtiums. They reseed themselves and spring up every year around our front walkway. A cheerful welcome.

Poppies are about to pop!

And now for this dreadful eyesore. We discovered leaf miner eggs on our beets and chard this week, so decided to try covering them with an insect barrier fabric. I was resistant to allowing such an ugly unnatural abomination into the garden, but after tasting our first delectable beets yesterday, I decided it was worth it. The leaf miners destroyed our beets and chard last year, and nothing we tried to control them worked. So we found this row cover material at Johnny's Seeds--it's called Agribon--you can see it here. It's an experiment, and it's ugly, but if it means we get to eat home grown beets and chart this year, I'll take it! Anyone have experience with row covers in small home gardens?

This week brought several tasty additions to our meals--garlic scapes (first time I've ever tried them--yum!) sauted with pasta and scrambled with eggs, rhubarb in sauce and muffins, beets in Luscious Beet Salad from my favorite cookbook Feeding the Whole Family--such a delicious recipe! Not to mention all the fresh herbs--cilantro, sage, basil, parsley, thyme, oregano, rosemary...such a delight to have these plants growing out the back door.

Happy gardening!

Lessons

We've done a lot of experimenting with the garden this year, and we've been rewarded with plenty of lessons. Many of them have been frustrating, disappointing, dare I say heartbreaking?

For instance, we learned that mesh bird netting does not keep chickens out of the broccoli patch. In a few short minutes, our happy hens reduced months of planting, watering, nurturing, transplanting, and hoping to this: 

 

Well, I suppose the chickens enjoyed their feast, and the eggs were a little more nutritious that day I'm sure. After fuming and moping for I while, I did some research to see if there might be time for second-chance broccoli this year--I've always just started one batch early in the spring. I found some information about direct sowing broccoli, and apparently in our area it can be done through July. So I pulled out the devastated plants and tried sowing some seeds directly into the patch. Another experiment! We'll see how it works out. (And the chickens have earned themselves confinement to the coop/fenced run till our seedlings grow up a bit. We hate not letting them out every day, but we haven't come up with a better way to keep the plants safe.)

Lesson 2: Slugs don't mind sharp gravel at all. Our hoop house is sitting on our gravel patio area, and seemed like a fine place for our tender seedlings to hang out till the weather warms. Until these guys found them:

When I am tempted to think of myself too highly as a benevolent, non-violent, forgiving human being, I only need to have a run-in with the slugs (or aphids) to quickly prove my violent and hateful tendencies. I suppose they need to eat too. I just wish they didn't so fancy our lovely young pepper plants.

And this is what happened after we moved them back inside under the lights, thinking we had removed all the slugs. They are sneaky stowaways. We had to throw out a good number of these peppers because the damage was just too severe. Luckily we planted a lot more than we need (though we were hoping to have more to share). Next year we'll try to rig up something to keep the seedlings off the ground, and experiment with less slug-friendly containers and trays. 

Other experiments have led to happier lessons. Our front yard raised beds have been thriving. The peas we planted are going crazy. I've been reading an old organic agriculture classic called The Soil and Health by Sir Albert Howard, and he really likes humus. It is fascinating to see the difference in my own yard between the weak and spindly plants that grow in our depleted clay soil, and then to compare these to the lush abundance of the plants growing in a bed with plentiful organic matter.

And no aphids or slugs yet (knock on wood)!! I planted a few zinnias in the beds, too, and we have winter squash and cucumber seedlings just about ready to plant out this weekend. Hooray for humus!

Manure Connection!

This weekend our garden got a real treat. The ex-lawn site in the backyard was in some need of serious amendment--our native soil is solid hard heavy clay. Nearly impossible to plant into. We didn't love the idea of importing soil, but felt that it was our only option. So Dan got a load of soil mix from a local landscape supplier. When he arrived home, we took a whiff and nearly choked. It smelled of toxic, petroleum, industrial chemicals. We called the supplier, who sent us to their supplier, who assured us their soil is thoroughly tested, comes from reliable sources, nothing to worry about, etc. We went out and hoped to convince ourselves it was fine, took another whiff, and decided to take it back. In the past, we had an even worse experience with imported soil, not realizing that it had been contaminated with shredded asphalt roofing shingles (very toxic!!) until after we had filled our raised beds and planted into them. Needless to say, we had wasted a lot of work, time, and plants before that situation was remedied, and we didn't want to repeat it. 

So..Dan took back the load of smelly soil and I did a little research into other options. This is when I found the Manure Connection! It's a network on the  East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation website to connect people with too much manure and people with too little. I called one of the women advertising free aged manure, had a neighborly conversation, and sent Dan to pick up a load. He did have to drive a bit to get it, but the manure itself was free, beautiful, fluffy, and sweet smelling. And the experience was so positive for everyone involved--we received a much needed organic garden amendment, she got rid of manure needing to go, and we all felt great about it! No mining or contaminants or large industrial systems to muck up the experience. 

Our front beds are coming along nicely, too--the leaves are breaking down and the soil is lighter than when we started. The peas and worms seem to be happy so far!