Succession Planting, Broccoli

A nice head of broccoli forming in September.


Will a frost sweeten up this Tuscany black kale?


I didn't do near enough succession planting as I should have this year. All season I struggled with what I felt were tough, crappy growing conditions. We had tornadoes in April. It was bitterly cold and rainy or snowing in May. We had a upper 90s heat wave the first week in June. We recorded record rainfall in both June and July and a drought in August.

The first crop of broccoli bolted. Lettuce quickly seeded out, too. I had spring-planted carrots set flower heads! The radicchio just never tasted right. The black kale went from fairly good juvenile leaves to very bitter adult foliage very quickly. Fennel formed seeds without setting bulbs. The peas got buried in the rambunctious growth of grape leaves after waiting an extra six weeks for the buds to unfurl their leaves. The mesclun mix I planted early season was over-run with leafy, fast-growing mustard.

During the small windows of good weather, I planted, transplanted, weeded, attempted to rototil. I couldn't get out to the garden to plant a second planting of sweetcorn, the rain never let up.

I did plant a couple additional seeding of mesclun, a fall crop of peas, and a second round of carrots at both gardens. I replanted cucumbers and honeydew after the first crop did not sprout.

The broccoli continually tried to bolt until the weather started to cool. I had kept cutting back the shoots that seemed to bolt out a foot tall and burst into yellow riotous bloom overnight. The few heads I harvested in August seemed riddled with the worms of cabbage moth, a result of the rainy June and July. Now that the weather has cooled the worms seemed to gone on vacation. Eating broccoli is no longer like walking through a gastronomic mine field.

The mesclun seedlings have been turning out a bowl of greens every couple days in my potager and the family garden. The 'China Rose' radishes I planted also just get longer while maintaining a sweetness that bolted from my grasp in June.

A second planting of dill would have been nice. Planting more carrots would have been nice. Onions have not yielded anything near my expectations.

In small spaces, succession planting is key. I have not made good use of all my space resources. I could have done better.

Freezing and Canning

The last few days I have spent a lot of time coming up with the best ways to preserve the harvest based on how the families' picky eaters eat.

Blanching and freezing many veggies is one. My sister-in-law has a huge nearly empty freezer, which just makes sense to fill to the brim. So days at the family garden are filled with the twins helping me harvest and wash produce. We did a huge mess of gnarly carrots yesterday. Gnarly, because the soil is hard and needs a lot of aeration to produce good carrots. The picture above show nearly perfect carrots harvested from my village potager grown in the sandy loam with lots of organic material of a well-worked garden.

The biggest difference from the potager and the family home garden is, based on veggie plant appearance, nitrogen. The potager grows a lot more leaves on the plants, yet the family garden' plant have set up a lot more veggies.

The 'Siberian' tomatoes, while being among the first for harvest have not impressed me with their size. They are about 1 1/2" inch in size versus the reputed 2"-3". There are lots of tomatoes set on each plant.

Tomatoes are one veggie that even the picky eaters eat so it is important we harvest every one.

I cut open a 'Charentais' melon yesterday only to be disappointed with its lack of ripeness. It is edible, but not with the honey-tinged sweetness I had hoped. The 'Earlichamps' are ripe and we have harvested two. The twins were enchanted with the still hairy, fertilized ovules that may yet mature into honeydew melons.

And I have been canning cucumbers. Pickles. Hamburger dills, Russian dill pickles, sweet pickle relish, and am still working on sweet icicle pickles.

And I have hundreds of pounds of cabbage. Anyone have a good storage method?

Snow! and Carrots: April 16, 2011 Update

Change that rain to trackable snow. One snow day down and two to go, according to the local Snow Witch.

The seedlings in the cold frame outdoors look great, even after brushing an inch of the slushy stuff off the storm window. When I was telling of the construction I failed to mention I laid down a layer of black landscape fabric to serve as a heat sink.

Today, gardening will be indoors tending to the plants in the grow racks and reading garden blogs.

My latest tray of seedlings on the heat mat is looking good. Planted 3 or 4 days ago with cosmos 'Pimk Pop", carrots 'Danvers', and Celeraic 'Brilliant'; the carrots are already up. Carrots are sometimes difficult to germinate here. You can plant them in cool weather and suddenly the weather spikes up to the 80 and 90 degree mark, making it almost impossible to keep them moist for the lengthy germination period.

These carrots I planted to use as transplants following an Australian gardening model. In Australia, carrots are planted almost the way we plant onion sets. I have been looking at pictures of Australian Community Gardens and I have been impressed at the lushness of their plantings. They look better than the Community Gardens of which pictures are posted here in the States. For this part of Wisconsin, planting carrots as "sets" should possibly be recommended as a "Best Practice". I will continue to follow up on this and post my results.

Additionally, I have planted a very early cropping carrots 'Little Fingers' directly into the garden. The growth habbit of this cultivar reminds me a bit growing some sort of radish.

Planting Peas

Tomatoes under my lights!

Although it is supposed to be cold this weekend, if you haven't planted peas, you need to get on this. If you want spring peas, I planted sugar snap peas so I can eat them pod and all in stir fries. I will probably plant another round of peas mid-August to preserve. I soaked them overnight and planted them about two inches apart and one inch deep. I did not use an innoculant. I'll track my yield. My two rows are about nine feet long.

As I mentioned, I planted fifteen hills of Yukon Gold potatoes. I dug holes about eight inches across and deep and 18"-24" inches apart. I have them in an area I can water easily. Potatoes like grapes need plenty of water. I cut whole seed potato into sections, each bearing two to five eyes, about one and a half inches by one and a half inches by a couple inches. I placed one section in each hole. My row is about 24 feet long. I only press about an inch of deep down on top of the potato section so I can hill it up as it grows.

In front of the potatoes, I have a red leaf loose leaf lettuce, 'Little Fingers' Carrots, and French Breakfast radishes. I even planted the carrot is a short day variety, so I will be harvesting this stuff before my potatoes start to take up all the space.

That parsley I though was faking life? It has new growth, as does the oregano. Especially as it reached 80 degrees on Sunday and the parsley got "warm". I have to consider it passed the "warm and dead clause" and has effectively established it's biennal self in my yard. This parsley was the Italian flat-leaved variety (versus the curly type), if any of your are looking to have perennial parsley in Wisconsin.

I also intersowed my garlic with black annual poppies. I think the curly heads of the garlic will be attractive above the blooms of the poppies.

I planted out spinach without hardening them off, with no apparent ill-effects, which is something to remember.

I could also have planted out some of my other cole crops: kales, cabbage, broccoli, and probably will in the next couple days.

I should have my tiny cold frame together and I could have planted fennel and dill already as well.