Year in Review

Onions were planted way too early, ended up growing in concrete-like soil and didn't get weeded til far too late. There were quite a few nice small ones but nothing worth donating.

Parsley grows like crazy, even when it has to compete with grass.

Hops also did well though they are coming out in the spring. I never harvested them and they're in my way.

Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage and Brussel sprouts did well. They were overwhelmed with weeds and got some mold so I didn't eat much of the late season stuff but the earlier stuff went to the food bank. I'm not very good at harvesting cauliflower and broccoli at exactly the right time. I'm going to blame it on my schedule.

Peppers did well and several crates went to the food bank.

Corn never got fertilized and didn't do much other than adding carbon to the soil when we harrowed it in.

Potatoes did well considering they never got properly hilled - We got probably 1500 or so pounds out of the 300 lbs of seed we put in.

Tomatoes - which I spent most of my time on - got late blight and I pulled them out right as they started ripening. Sad sad story. We're not doing tomatoes next year.

Garlic "map"

Just a for future reference for myself :-)

Order goes from road to trees. Row 1 is furthest south. First variety in row 3 is on the north side.

√ Row 1
√ Inchellium Red - (50' double row)
√ German Fire - (50' double row)
√ German Red - (60' double row)

√ Row 2
√ Kettle River Giant - (10' double row)
√ Killarney Red - (10' double row)
√ Martin's Heirloom - (10' double row)
√ Metechi - (10' double row)
√ Pennsylvania Dutch - (10' double row)
√ Spanish Roja - (10' double row)
√ Temptress - (10' double row)
√ Tzan - (10' double row)
√ White Russian - (10' double row)
√ Marino - (10' double row)
√ Music - (20' double row)
√ Silver White - (20' double row)
√ Phillips - (20' double row)

Row 3
√ Bright - (5' single row) North
√ Continental - (5' single row) South

√ Ajo Rojo - (7' single row) North
√ Bogatyr - (7' single row) South

√ Broadleaf Czech - (7' single row) North
√ Chet's Italian Red - (7' single row) South

√ Georgian Crystal - (7' single row) North
√ Georgian Fire - (7' single row) South

√ Ididared - (7' single row) North
√ Northe #3 - (7' single row) South

√ Pskem River - (7' single row) North
√ Russian Giant - (7' single row) South

√ Russian Red - (7' single row) North
√ Persian Star - (7' single row) South

√ Siberian - (7' single row) North
√ Udabmo - (7' single row) South

√ Marjean - (7' single row) North
√ Udabmo - (7' single row) South

√ Misc - (59' double row)

Lots of progress

I got two rows covered with plastic on Thursday (it rained all day Wednesday).

I planted 3 trays of sweet peppers on Friday and also tied up my hops bines. They are going to need something taller soon. Right now they are just on tomato stake bamboo.

I planted 5 trays of mostly hot peppers today which finished off the peppers. Total is somewhere in the 350-400 plant range.

I put the remaining 190ish bamboo stakes in the ground although most of the tomatoes are not tall enough to need tying yet.

I also planted another 70 something tomato plants to fill up some extra space. I only have room for 8 more. It didn't seem worth the extra trip to finish them off so I'll do it tomorrow.

More updates

Lets start with Sunday since I forgot to post then...

On Sunday I planted 8 six packs of parsley and 2 of cilantro behind the hops. I cut the tops off all of them to make them manageable - hopefully they grow back. Starting at the end of the hops row I planted 2 trays of cole crops - green and red cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. They look rather wilty and water deprived now - hope they come back too :-)

I also planted 2 more six packs and 8 4" pots of tomatoes of various kinds and 9 eggplant. The eggplants look great, the 6 pack tomatoes look the same as when I put them in and the 4" potted tomatoes are wilted a bit. I need to get them staked as they are pretty tall and threatening to fall over. It was hard to bury them very deep because of the plastic.

Today I planted 4 rows of 'Sugar Buns' corn from Johnnys's just above the potatoes. Right as the day was getting done the UPS guy showed up with a 2400 foot roll of IRT plastic for me too so hopefully I can get that in tomorrow and start on the peppers!

Hops and Raking

Got another 1.5 rows raked out and nearly ready for plastic. They just need to be trenched which I'll do right before plastic so all the trenches don't wash in.

Also planted 10 hops plants. Starting from the road and going towards the woods:
- Brewers Gold
- Brewers Gold
- Mt. Hood
- Mt. Hood
- Fuggles
- Northern Brewer
- Nugget
- Sterling
- Sterling
- Newport

They're only planted 4-5 feet apart right now and only have about 6' to climb so there's still some work to do and they'll have to be transplanted next year. Still, at least they are in the ground! If I ever grow hops in a greenhouse again I need to remember not to put all the pots next to each other. It took an hour to de-tangle the 10 plants!

Updates

Thursday, June 3 I put in a little over a hundred tomatoes. 108 sounds familiar but don't quote me. I spaced the indeterminates at 2' on center and the determinates at 1.5'.

Friday I put in a little over 50 tomatoes. My lower back was pretty sore from trying to do it two days in a row so that was all I got done that day.

Saturday I got the last 30 in that I had picked out. I was hurrying against some clouds and accidentally planted everything at 1.5' even though there were some Jet Stars (indeterminate). I guess we'll see how they do! There was a big thunderstorm and the other side of town had a tornado right after that so I headed home. There are only room for 8 more which Bruce and I picked out and set aside. It should give me somewhere in the 260-270 range in 3 beds.

I got to work this morning to find 100 bamboo stakes waiting for me. I ordered them from TNFarmSupply for a little over $40 - They are not exactly local but it saved me probably a day worth of labor cutting and trimming saplings. The stakes will get put in every 2-3 plants and then everything will be woven together with twine as the plants grow.

I'm still waiting on another roll of plastic which will let me plant peppers. Tomorrow is going to be all about digging the beds and getting ready.

With my back limitations I've been able to do just about 1 full bed a day previously. When Jess and I were working together, my back never got too tired so I'm hoping that that will continue and I can get a little extra done tomorrow.

Temperatures over the next two nights are going down to the 30s. My fingers are crossed that it's the upper 30s since I have no way to cover the tomatoes.

80 tomatoes are in - 76 in 1 row and 4 overflowed into the next.

There's also a fence around the garden now.

Lots of rain coming tomorrow - finally!

600' of plasic down!

I think my whining last night worked because Craftsbury got a nice rainstorm last night! It made the day today go a lot faster. Jess and I covered the second row with plastic as soon as we got there and with no watering. Then we raked out what was left of the other two rows, watered just the surface and put plastic on those! 600' of plastic in about 3.75 rows, all ready for tomatoes and peppers!

I want to be able to remember how I did this next year so I don't have to reinvent the wheel so ..

1. Place poly posts 3' apart at either end of the garden (3' beds, 3' paths)
   
   
2. Run string (old poly wire this time) between them and pull straight and tight.
   
   
3. Put 5 more poly posts down each side so that each row is split into 6 sections (this number was arbitrary but worked well for having stopping/break points in the heat the other day)
   
   
4. Hang poly wire about 2' off the ground - high enough that you can work under it on the close side and over the closer side to reach the far side.
   
   
5. Reach across bed and pull in dirt with a steel rake all down one side of bed. Repeat on other side.
   
   
6. Smooth out bed - the beds we did so far end up raised about 5-6" off the walkways. Make them slightly wider than the poly-wire.
   
   
7. Use pointy hoe to cut ditches down each side along outside of poly wire.
   
   
8. Pull plastic over bed a few feet at a time, burying edges in trenches.
   
   
9. Stand back and admire completed rows.

The 'pointy hoe' mentioned above is something I found at Kenyon's this morning. It's probably got a cool name but I'm going to stick with 'pointy hoe'. It works absolute wonders for digging the ditches for the sides of the plastic. I'm going to use it for what's left of potatoes too.

Spring Drought

The soil in my garden is dry to 5-6" at this point. I have to close my eyes to keep the dust out of them whenever there's a breeze. Obviously this is less than ideal!

Jess and I spent today working on beds for tomatoes and peppers. She had to water one, 150' long, for over 2 hours to get the soil semi moist! Even then there was more dry than wet soil if you turned it over. We got one row covered, a second one raked and trenched and a third one half raked.

I'm going to try to get some old hay and mulch the hell out of everything. Even the corn if I can get enough!

Onions Are Wet!

The onions all got watered today. There's a nicely functional water line running back to the barn and I can hitch my garden hoses to it easily. The soaker hose was hitched up for a while but only did about a 6" wide spot so I gave up on that. It'll work better for peppers or tomatoes, especially if I just put it under some of the plastic.

Tomorrow is supposed to be 87 and Sunny so I'm probably going to go up and water tomorrow night. I may just stay and measure beds til it gets dark. My current goal is to get them all marked this week, rake and do plastic this weekend and plant next week. There should probably be some sort of fencing in there somewhere but I'm not sure where yet.

Irrigation Woes

Today I woke up, stretched and my upper back immediately went out of wack again. I popped a handful of OTC pain killers, got in my car and gritted my teeth through every corner, acceleration and deceleration all the way to the farm. It made for a long day but the worst of it worked its way out by mid-day and it ended up being the least of my problems.

First some background - I'm using some of my old cow watering pipeline for irrigation pipe to get water to my garden. Then the plan is to use soaker hoses or a garden hose as needed. The water is coming from a pond on the edge of the field (down a little hill). A generator will run a sump pump when it's needed. Not ideal but it should work for now. The pump sits in a 70ga water tank that keeps me from sucking up too much pond bottom gunk. A hose connects to the pump to go across a farm road to the pipeline. The hose is just for portability so I can move it off the road at the end of the day. The pipeline goes up the hill to the garden.

I grabbed one length of pipeline today, dragged it all the way back to where my garden is (which was not fun with a sore back), and realized it was about 50 feet too short. It also had a hole in it. Not a huge problem - there is plenty.

I went and got another (a full 400 footer), got it laid where it needed to go, went to hitch it to hoses at either end and realized I didn't know where any of my connectors were. Not a big deal - I wanted a new hose from Willey's anyway so I got the connectors while I was there.

When I got back, I hitched everything up, Bruce and I went to get a generator to power a sump pump, and it wouldn't start.

Plan B was an inverter that Bruce had in his van. I got all the way to the pond with it and found out that my lighter in my car doesn't work very well.

I went back to Willey's, got a bigger inverter (and one with battery clips), got back, hitched it all up and it came on! Unfortunately, the pump is under powered and water just kinda burps out of the end of the hose at a completely useless rate.

That was where I gave up for the day. Tomorrow I'm rerouting some water line back to the barn. Luckily a lot of the old pipeline already goes that way and just needs to be fixed so it shouldn't be too bad. It also means that if the generator fails again (once it's fixed), I'll have a backup!

Better now than in July I suppose.

There's nothing but sun and temps in the high 70s in the forecast. I'll be doing as much as I can to get rows ready and then if the forecast is still promising next week I'm going to start the main planting! I have all but Wednesday off next week so I should be able to get a lot done!

Horse Powered Potato Planting

A couple of weeks ago I agreed to plant 300 pounds of potatoes that were donated by High Mowing Seeds to the Vermont Food Bank. 250 lbs were "All Red" which were exactly what they sound like and 50 lbs were "Katahdin" - a yellow potato. I then proceeded to throw my back out and am still not in great shape. Luckily there's a lot of good people around!

On May 18th, Bruce Urie and I cut up the potatoes. On the 19th, Rick Thomas and a crew from Sterling College came and planted them with their draft horses! Both the potatoes and everyones time were donated and everyone involved deserves some major kudos.

I still need to plant 40 lbs of Yukon Gold's that I purchased because I forgot to take them up in time. They might wait til after tomatoes and peppers at this point.

Photos of the planting may be viewed here!

I realize I am kind of a slacker when it comes to posting here :-)

Last Thursday I planted 1200 onion plants. It turns out 30 bunches was a good size from Johnny's as it gave me slightly more than I needed to fill the top row of the garden. The backs of my legs hurt for 3 days from all that bending over.

It dropped down to 21F last Sunday night so we'll see how the onions look this weekend.

The tilling has begun!

Enough of my garden got both plowed and tilled today that I can start making rows for both onions and potatoes! The soil looks good and there are very few rocks. There's toooons of broken up sod to deal with though. It suddenly looks like a huge, daunting task.

I also picked up the seed potatoes from the food bank and cleaned up enough space in the hay loft that I can cut them and leave them there to cure.

Pepper transplants

Peppers got transplanted last weekend. Jess and I transplanted just over 350 of the little buggers into 50 packs. The bell peppers are ahead of the hot peppers but not by much. The Jimmy Nardello's (big red frying peppers) are somewhere in between.

I had a lot of dead spots in the pepper plug trays. It seemed to have more to do with where in the tray the plants were than what varieties were involved. I'm guessing it was a watering issue since I started them at home without a good way to water plug trays handy. I think next year those trays with 10 open rows in them might work better for starts.

I got an email last week from the VT Foodbank saying that High Mowing Seeds was donating a large amount of seed potatoes to people who would grow them for a food shelf in Vermont. I measured last weekends, rearranged all my plans and agreed to take 300 lbs for myself.

To help make room for potatoes I cut out or cut back on a lot of things that were either low on the food bank's priority list or high maintenance for me. Main crops are now tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, corn, broccoli, and onions. More than half the square footage of my garden is now succeptable to late blight which after last year is a bit terrifying.

I have started my summer work schedule as of 4:30pm and have Tuesday-Thursday off this week to work at the farm. I'm in a work training all of next week but other than that I don't work another 5 day week til the week before classes start in late August.

This week I need to:

• Pick up potatoes from the food bank
• Clean a spot in the hay loft where I can leave cut potatoes to dry
• Mend the water hose that goes from the barn back to my garden
• Prepare beds for onions (if the garden is plowed when I get there)
• Get ready to plant potatoes (hopefully this weekend)
  

Tomatoes

Tomatoes all got transplanted into bigger containers today. The ones I'm keeping are mostly in 50 packs and the extras that are going to be sold are in 6 packs. I screwed up and lost track of where one variety ended and the next began so one of the 50 packs has a mix of Crimson Sprinter and Cosmonaut Volkovs in it. Looks like I'll be planting an extra 50 tomato plants :-)

All of the plants look decent - the amish paste were rather stringy but they're still growing so I'm optimistic.

Note to self: Next year mark mixed rows better in the plug trays ;-)

More onions...

Bruce brought me 2 144 cell trays (the kind that they get flower starts in) today and they are now fully planted with Mustang onion seeds from High Mowing Seeds.

Peppers are coming up!

Both the 50 pack and the first 288 cell plug tray I planted have several pepper plants poking through the soil. The Jimmy Nardello's are the rock stars so far followed closely by the early Jalapeno. There's a few odd ones of other varieties too.

More planting

Things I planted tonight:

• 28 Crimson Sprinter tomatoes (hms)
• 44 Cosmonaut Volkov tomatoes (hms)
• 48 Jetsetter tomatoes (Totally Tomatoes)
• 24 more Jimmy Nardello's frying peppers (hms)
• 12 Black Beauty eggplant (hms)
• 64 Chocolate Beauty sweet peppers (sse)
• 68 King of the North sweet peppers (sse)

hms - High Mowing Seeds
sse - Seed Savers

(Some) Tomatoes planted

I just planted 288 tomatoes! 72 each of:

• Amish Paste
• Rutgers
• Gilbertie Paste
• Medford

I'm not done yet - these are the later season (75-85 days overall) varieties. More coming soon!

I don't plan on planting 288 late season tomato plants. Any I don't plant will get sold at Stillmeadow Gardens where my starts are going to live for a while.

More peppers

Tonight I took out a plug tray and planted all the seeds I had of early jalapeno, hungarian hot wax, red cap mushroom, nepalese bell and alma paprika peppers. It filled most of the 288 cells.

Yesterday I figured out that the seeds I planted last week didn't have a high enough soil temperature. Hopefully they still come up just a bit more slowly. We'll see. I don't really have a good seed starting area - right now I've just got two trays with transparent covers under a 4' fish tank light, sitting on my floor.

Tonight's efforts will make a good fallback in case of poor germination. Once the sprouts are up and they are transplanted into the greenhouse all should be well for them.

Hot Peppers

I planted a 50 cell tray of hot peppers tonight as follows:

• (sse) Nepalese Bell (5)
• (sse) Red Cap Mushroom (5)
• (sse) Jimmy Nardello's (10)
• (sse) Alma Paprika (10)
• (hms) Early Jalapeno (10)
• (hms) Hungarian Hot Wax (10)

The numbers are how many I planted. I'm not going too crazy with these as they are mostly for my use.

(hms) seeds came from High Mowing Seeds.
(sse) seeds came from Seed Savers.

The first mistake!

I realized this weekend that I should be planting starts by now. Since onions were already 2 weeks late, my soil was frozen and I really didn't want a thousand starts in my living room, I talked myself into buying them from Johnnys. Yes, that's right. My first act of gardening this year will be to let someone else do it!

Note to self: Next year, start onions on Feb 1!

After two days inside, the top few inches of potting soil are thawed out enough that tomorrow I'm going to plant hot peppers.

I are blogger.

I'm creating this blog mostly as a diary of gardening activities. It's meant more for my own use than anything else. There probably won't be much entertainment value here for most people...

In case anyone else is reading, here is a little about this project.

In the fall of 2009 I decided I wanted to try semi-large scale veggie farming. The largest vegetable garden I've ever had has been about 3000 square feet. I wasn't ready to go commercial but I settled on something around a half acre.

A good friend of mine, Bruce Urie, is letting me fence off part of a field for this project. It's part hay field and part pasture so it's flat enough to garden on but also has the benefits of electric fence and water line already run. It's also a nicely isolated back field so that when I make stupid mistakes no one will see them!

Bruce and his wife, Betty also own Stillmeadow Gardens and are also helping out with growing starts, spreading compost, and giving a lot of patient advice. Really if it wasn't for their support I would not be doing this.

Throughout the winter I have been reading up on types of veggies available from different seed suppliers. I settled on buying from High Mowing Seeds for a few reasons. First and foremost, they have a great reputation in the organic seed business. While my garden won't be certified, it's going to be grown organically and I feel better starting with seeds that come from plants that can hold their own without too much chemical help. Secondly, HMS is located within 15 miles of where I'm going to be growing, so a lot of these seeds are already tried and true in the area.

There are a few products that HMS either does not carry or don't have this year due to crop failures. I've been using Seed Savers to fill in these spaces. I also ordered a few odd hot peppers from them that catch my eye year after year. They won't get a lot of garden space but should be interesting to grow.

I use a lot of vegetables each year in canning, freezing and fresh eating but not nearly as many as I'm going to be growing! I knew I needed something to do with my overflow, but I didn't want to sell it. There are too many unknowns as far as what I'll be able to grow well for me to market it effectively ahead of time. Besides, I do enough marketing at work. I decided to give my extra to the Vermont Food Bank instead.

I quickly fell in love with this idea and got much more excited about the whole project as a result. At this point the garden is mostly planned around their demand for various produce.

Though the food bank will normally take what people are willing to give, Theresa Snow has been working with me to identify areas with the strongest demand. There's some stuff that they get a lot of and so I'm only growing enough for my own use. Other things, like tomatoes, are "real gems" as Theresa puts it and I am growing a lot of extra.

Hopefully this project will help feed some people who need it and also gives me a real market with real preferences so that a get a little practice with that side of things too. On the flip side, if I screw it all up and grow the wrong things, it still will be put to good use (other than in my compost pile).

So that's how I got where I am. At this point the garden is mostly planned, the seeds have been ordered and I'm just waiting for Spring to get a little closer!