It's Easy Being Green

With some gentle prodding from Homestead Hottie, I finally ordered our seeds for the 2012 gardening season. Yes, it does seem a tad late to be ordering seeds but technically our average last frost date here in southwestern Indiana doesn’t hit until mid April. This year I’m pretty sure the last frost was back in early March!

Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Replacement seeds and of course some fun new ones were ordered through Baker Creek Heirlooms this year. We love all the wild new offerings that appear in the Burpee catalog and the others that stuff our mailbox each year. However, we really want to try and keep as many open-pollinated varieties as possible so we can save seed from year to year. We also want to avoid seed that is genetically modified or tainted with GMO genes. Luckily Baker Creek can fit both those requirements and host one of the largest collections of heirlooms from around the world.

Here is what we ordered for the spring and summer growing seasons (yes, there will be another order in the fall):

Tom Thumb Lettuce
Mignonette Bronze Lettuce
Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce
Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce

Amish Deer Tongue Lettuce. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seed

You can never be too sure what variety of lettuce you’re going to end up liking best so I always think its better to buy more than less in lettuce seed. The flavors and textures are so wide ranging so its better to try several different varieties at the same time. I’m really excited about the Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce. Dating back to the mid 1800’s, this French heirloom lettuce is a good grower in every season except freezing weather. I can’t wait to try the buttery leaves in our first homegrown salad of the year.

Di Firenze Fennel
Purple Podded Pole Bean
Red-Seeded Asparagus Bean
Garden Huckleberry

Purple Podded Pole Bean. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

We have never grown fennel before so we’ll try our green thumbs with this licorice-scented bulb that is a favorite amongst Italian cooks. I can smell it already! The Purple Podded pole bean will replace a pole bean that didn’t do much around the Half-Acre Homestead last year while providing a pop of edible color that will not only look beautiful in the garden but provide some fun on our dinner plates too. While it’s not hard to get Everly to eat her green beans, purple pods should prove to be even more enticing.

Red-Seeded Asparagus Bean is an Asian “yard long” bean that is said to be both highly productive and beautiful. The very long pods grow to a freakish 24″ long but are said to be stringless and have small seeds. They’re said to be very resistant to heat, humidity and insects all while producing a bumper crop of tender and tasty pods. We can never have enough berries around the Half-Acre Homestead so we’re going to try our hand at Huckleberries.

Patisson Golden Marbre Scallop
Bennings Green Tint Scallop Squash
Bowling Red Okra
Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach
Polish Linguisa
Basil – Lime
Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet Corn

Bennings Green Tint Scalloped Squash. Image courtesy Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

We like pattypan or scallop type squash so we’ll finally add a green and yellow version to our garden this year. Bowling Red Okra will replace our current outage of red okra seeds. The burgundy colored stems, okra pods and tinted flowers are stunning in the vegetable garden or flower bed. We are continuously struggling with spinach from year to year. Perhaps its the variety of seeds we have but they never seem to grow right and are often sloooooowwww growing. Bloomsdale Long Standing is supposed to be heat resistant and a large leaf spinach. It sounds better so hopefully it will turn out that way. Polish Linguisa will round out our tomato collection as a sauce tomato. Lime basil just sounds flavorful enough to through on some chicken this summer and Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet Corn will be our protest against GMO corn this year.

Of course we have a whole box filled with seed still but I won’t bore you with all that. Undoubtedly you’ll get to see the results of that over the course of the summer. I was able to keep this seed order around $33, down from a first tally of $69. I slashed and burned my list because if I could spend $500 on a yearly seed order, I really would. Now its time to start saving my own seed and slash the seed bill even more.

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We got a round of thunderstorms rolling through southern Indiana around 4 a.m. and another spout of rain.  The other half of garden bed I’ve been waiting to complete turning and getting ready for planting was primed and ready to go after the rain this morning and it was overcast so I wouldn’t char my skin.

I still have seedlings of cantaloupe, cucumbers, pumpkins, tomatoes, lettuce and a few other random things still waiting to be planted.  I finished weeding out the major chunks of grass and then raked in a layer of Schulz Enriched Gardening Soil for Flowers and Vegetables.  I’m using this as a quick ammendment while my compost gets good and hot and as a holdover until I can put together a raised bed system for next season.

I was a bit surprised though when I dumped out my bag of soil ammendment and found some trash.  Schulz was kind enough to include bits of shredded plastic and even foil cigarette wrappers (menthol to be exact) in my bag of garden soil.  I’m no hort expert but I’m guessing there hasn’t been a new study saying smokes for your garden generate whopping yields!

Free trash included in my bag of garden soil ammendment

I’ve sent Schulz my findings and will see what they have to say about the matter.  In the meantime, it looks like tomorrow will be planting day for Phase 2 of my veggie garden.  Meanwhile my Orange Oxheart Heirloom tomato is under attack by aphids.  It looks pretty piddly right now despite the fact that it’s the tallest tomato plant in the patch.  It had a flush of new blooms at the top but all have turned brown and are dieing.  Since I take an organic approach, I got down on bent knee today and squashed and picked off as much bugs as I could.  We’ll see if the poor thing can recover.  The cherry tomatoes and roma’s have all put on a new flush of growth with all the rain and are looking good.

My sweet corn has finally emerged and is taking off quick.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it does end up making the “knee high by July” standard.  Lemon cucumbers are sprouting new leaves after about a week or two of transplanting.  Zuchinnis are putting on new growth and new blooms are emerging.  It looks like a fruit or two have already taken hold and are sucking up the free water.  My eggplant is flowering and will hopefully bear soon.  Yellow wax beans and the limas are off to the races along my fence line.  They’re beginning to bush out and my late season pea vines are taking advantage of the overcast days and have reached about 6-8″ tall.

How is your garden doing?  Let me know!

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When it comes to gardening, I’m like a mint plant:  rogue and rambling throughout the landscape, putting down roots wherever I see fit.  I guess that’s just how I roll and I kind of like it.  I’ve learned you can’t really be prim and proper with a vegetable garden anyway because inevitably, the darn things grow in ways you never expected and couldn’t contain even if you tried.  That’s why I go rogue.

I got my first vegetable bed planted earlier this week and two nights of soaking rain have helped to water it in good.  I planted 10 tomato plants all together: 4 roma, 4 cherry, 1 heirloom orange oxheart and 1 unknown plant that already has a tomato.  I also planted two zuchinnis and an eggplant in that tiny plot.

Last night I took advantage of the cool weather and finished my work with the pitchfork, overturning another plot of the backyard to plant in.  It’s supposed to dry out this week which will make it much easier to work the heavy Ohio Valley clay soil that I’m learning to wrestle with.  I’ve never seen soil so thick and claylike in my life, now imagine trying to figure out how to grow stuff in it!  After living in Arizona though, another poor soil condition, I’m just learning to deal with it and hopefully ramp up compost production so I can begin enriching and lightening the clay in our garden beds.

I also ended up coming upon quite the stack of free seeds from a fellow gardener who just had surgery and won’t be planting this year.   Last night I started rampling about the yard, poking seeds in just about every spot imagineable.  My thought is why not use every available inch of space or bare ground to grow some food for us.  So I followed the fence line, scratching a trench in the clay and planting Alaska peas, Henderson lima beans, Cherokee Yellow wax beans and Golden Bantam sweet corn.

The method would probably throughly confuse any “classical” vegetable gardener who likes to have everything in nice little neat rows.  That’s not me though!  I hilled up the sweet corn and planted about 6 plants to a hill and am hoping the line of bush beans and peas will just grow up against the fence at the edge of the lawn.  We’ll see how my rogue method works.  I can’t wait!

Meanwhile, I still have dozens of seed packets waiting for some bare earth and have work to get to.  My seed collection is verging on old, so I think I just need to plant everything that’s old and get it out of rotation.  I know a lot of it is already past prime and won’t germinate.  I’ve had some of these packets for at least 10 years if not more (I know, don’t judge) and most seed has a shelf life of only about 5 years.  It’s time to purge!

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Saturday was Arbor Day in case you missed it.  It is always seems like Arbor Day gets a bit overshadowed by Earth Day earlier in the month so I was even surprised when it popped up on my calendar just a day or two before the weekend.  In celebration of Arbor Day, The Arboretum at Flagstaff opened their doors for free on Saturday.  We trucked out there to see what was springing to life on the garden grounds.  It’s still been very cold at night but a lot of their penstemon plants are sprouting up along with various other native perennials right now.  Obviously nothing is in bloom but it was kind of fun to see the garden in that stage of awakening from spring.  Whenever I go out there I sit in awe of the amount of land they have and imagine what we could do if our garden could stretch that big.  Maybe one of these days, wherever we land, I will start an arboretum of my own to pass on to future generations just like Frances McAllister did here in Flagstaff.

On Sunday, our itch for green-thumb domination continued.  We headed to Home Depot and a local plant nursery to pick up lots of flowers, vegetables and seeds.  Some natives and cool weather perennials are okay to go outside in our cold nighttime temps.  But everything else will move in and out of the house for another month until the threat of a late frost has disappeared.  We expanded our herb collection to include chocolate mint, pineapple mint, apple mint, lemon balm and lavender.  All of them smell amazing when you prick a leaf.  We purchased a couple 1 gallon sized tomato plants to shuffle in and out while all of my tomato seedlings catch up to full-size in the window sill.  We picked up some bare root plants too like a concord grape, another hop rhizome for my home-brewing use, elephant garlic and a horseradish rhizome.

We bought some more seeds to plant too.  I have a large box of seeds, some of which are pretty old.  As I’ve been planting them in my starter trays, I’m keeping track of which ones don’t sprout or have a low germination rate.  Then I just toss them into the composter because they’re not going to grow.  So I picked up some pumpkin, sweet corn, rosemary, cilantro, bush bean and cantaloupe seeds.  It’s challenging in the high-mountains of Arizona because our growing season is so short.  It’s only 103 days long!  So, you have to pick varieties of veggies that are often smaller and mature more quickly.

We’re very ready for the gardening season to kick into full swing but we’re finding plenty to do while waiting.  How is your garden growing?  Let us know about what activity you have going with your green thumbs right now!

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