It's Easy Being Green

As you round out your seed orders for the 2012 vegetable garden, have you considered adding any heirloom vegetables or fruits to your shopping list? This year we are making the push to dive even deeper into heirlooms and I encourage every gardener and homesteader to do the same.

Heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties of plants that are often 60 or more years old. Most date back 100 years or more. Heirlooms are the truest plants, often showcasing eyestopping individuality and some of the finest flavors you can get in a fruit or vegetable. Aside from sticking it to large agri-business based seed companies who deal in hybrid or Genitically Modified seeds, heirloom seed can be saved and replanted year after year. You can read more about it here.

If you’d like to learn more about heirloom gardening, you should pick up a copy of a brand new book on the subject. The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables: The 100 Easiest-to-Grow, Tastiest Vegetables for Your Garden by Marie Iannotti.

If the 250 pages of scintillating photographs of heirlooms don’t have your taste buds watering and your green thumb twitching, I’m not sure what will. Iannotti gracefully shares her 100 favorite heirlooms, treasures that should be kept under lock and key. She also shares the wonderful stories that round out the unique history of each featured heirloom.

Don’t let the title fool you either. This book should also be a prize for any gardener with more advanced skills. I give it two green thumbs up!

Now you can win a copy of the book along with a spectacular heirloom garden prize pack including 35 packets of heirloom seeds and a bareroot tree! Click the link to head to Timber Press and enter The Heirloom Garden Giveaway

What’s your favorite heirloom fruit or vegetable to grow?

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This weekend my wife and I were looking for some free things to do with the baby where perhaps, a little fussiness on her part would be allowed.  We made some stops on our errand list and then headed over to the open house put on by the Southwest Indiana Master Gardeners at their demonstration gardens.

Looking through the historical kitchen garden at the gazebo taking center focus in the Southwest Indiana Master Gardeners Demonstration Gardens. It's located in Evansville, IN at the former site of an old state hospital, now long gone.

The event is an opportunity for the Master Gardeners to showcase their skills and chat with people interested in learning the hobby of gardening.  Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve found the Master Gardeners to be the “go-to” resource for the best information on how to make your garden grow in the particular region you’re at.  They can offer insights into local pests and diseases, what grows best and what you shouldn’t waste your time on and maybe new things to look out for.  Master Gardener programs generally work in partnership with the local agricultural extension office which provides another amazing source of gardening info.

The demonstration gardens feature many All-America Selection Winners, not only in the flower features but also fruits and vegetables. I took notes on the varieties that seemed to be thriving so I can try them out in my own garden next season.

Not only did we get to wander through several different garden styles like a water garden, rain garden, butterfly and bird garden but they also had several different vegetable and fruit demonstration gardens as well.  One of the goals was to showcase two different ways to grow your own food, either organically in raised beds or in normal garden plots.  They also showcase many All-America Selections; plants that are nationally tested and proven locally for the past 75 years.

The berry demonstration garden showcased a plot of strawberries, blueberries and another plot of vining berries. Blackberries and raspberries were trained to climb up the arbor that separated the two plots from each other.

It was great being able to walk through the demonstration gardens and get some ideas for our gardens of the future and the advice dished out by the Master Gardeners was great too.  Now I’m considering taking their classes this fall and becomming a Master Gardener myself.

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It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks as we get into the final days of my wife’s pregnancy.  I can’t believe how quickly times has flown by and how much I’ve had to get done.  Admidst all that, I’m ramping up for the Summer garden season and am getting ready to get our vegetable patch going.

I probably should have started my seedlings a lot sooner but since this is my first season here in the Midwest, I’m a little behind the curve.  We’ve been saving our used cardboard egg cartons and just turned those into a seedling factory a couple of weeks ago.  They work great and don’t drain water all over the place and they save space too.  Eventually, you’re supposed to be able to just clip the individual egg cups apart and plant the whole thing just like a peat pot.

Another egg carton seedling tray with lemon cucumbers and yellow squash reaching for the sky.

I had a few loose seed packets left over from previous years so I started some lemon cucumbers, zuchinni, yellow squash, Trip-L Crop Climbing Tomato, Benchmark Tomato, Jumbo Tomato and some bush beans.  So far, the sprout factory is off to the races with with many of the squash plants winning.  Some are even ready to be potted up because they’re getting a bit leggy now.

My next task is to get the future garden plot prepared for planting.  We’ve been inundated with rain for the past three weeks or so and it seem like we’re finaly going to get a short dry spell.  That will hopefully allow me the chance to actually get out and get some soil turned over and ready to go.  The composter is set up and already on a roll.  We just cleaned out the rabbit hutches and that provided a lot of great compost material, along with our usual kitchen scraps and trimmings from the bushes and flowers around the house.

So, how does your garden grow this time of year?  Are you a Midwestern gardener with some time tested tips?  Let me know what you’re growing and what you can always rely on for a bumper crop harvest!

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Would you believe that it is possible to have a floating greenhouse in New York that actually produces food? Well it is and the full scale greenhouse operation on the Hudson River in New York has once again opened its doors for all to see. The project is called the science barge and is a prototype of a sustainable urban farm. It also serves as an education center. Last year, more than 3,000 school students made their way through the Science Barge.

So what makes the floating greenhouse so special? Inside the greenhouse they grow tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce with zero emissions and no runoff into the Hudson River. The barge is powered by solar, wind and biofuels and harvests irrigation water by filtering from the Hudson River and catching rainwater. The developers say the Science Barge requires 7 times less land and 4 times less water to grow than conventionally grown crops. In a city like New York, land has skyrocketed to the point that it would be nearly impossible to grow food in town. Riverfront barges could be the answer to the dilemma. Some studies have also suggested that there is enough rooftop space in New York to grown enough food for the entire city.

What are the hopes? The non-profit group New York Sun Works wants to demonstrate that it is possible for cities to reduce their global footprint by looking at ways to provide their own food. They say most land in cities is contaminated and shouldn’t be used to grow food anyway. That’s why they think they’re hydroponic growing system is the best, most sustainable way to grow! If you’d like to learn more about the project or how to visit, head over to The Science Barge website.

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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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