Fava Beans

I have been out of town for a few days and I haven't been able to work in my garden or blog. It is amazing what can happen in just a few days. The fava beans are blooming. They have beautiful white blooms with a deep purple "eye". It will probably only be a week before we have some young beans to harvest.

The sugar snaps are getting close to the top supports and I think I will try to add to a few feet of mesh to the the top. I have looked closely and no blooms are visible yet.

I did harvest a Butter Crunch Lettuce bunch from the garden tonight for my supper and the salad was sweet and delicious.

The risk of frost has now pasted and over the next few weeks I hope to plant several types of beans. The garden by the house is almost full. My goal is to usually get all the areas planted and then as harvest of one crop is completed a new planting will go in. The arugula and broccoli raab have started to go to seed so they will come out in the next two weeks to make room for the next planting.

Fruit

We will have fruit in the near future. One of the types of fruit will be figs. Figs are an interesting plant. The trees often bear fruit twice a year. The first crop comes in the spring on last year's growth. I have not had good luck with this in the past. Often we have a frost and figs are very delicate. If it gets down to freezing even for a few hours the figs will be killed. This year we had a very cool spring and this delayed the fig tree from sprouting out and so I should have a good crop since the figs can stand frost before the bud. Take a look.

I also have blueberry bushes covered with blossoms and now fruit. It is amazing how many berries will be on these small bushes.

The third is strawberries. They are spread all over the yard. Strawberries grow very close to the ground. In the past I have had a lot of problems with slugs. The reason strawberries are named that is that you need to place straw under the branches to hold the berries up off the ground and away from the slugs. The flowers are beautiful.

Week in Review

I had a week hiatus due to a bum knee that made working in the garden and posting difficult. I am doing much better today and it is amazing what a week can mean at this time of year.

This week I now have plants that are mature enough that I can eat some food from my garden every day. The variety is somewhat limited but when you harvest something, bring it in, wash and eat it or cook it within minutes to a few hours the flavors are incredible.

This is a list of current foods: radishes, arugula, broccoli raab, leaf lettuce and Swiss chard.

Butter Head lettuce, spinach and romaine lettuce are about a week away.


I have taken all my potted seedlings outside and planted tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. Sam came over to help me because of my bum leg and you can see that we scattered the plants around to different places in the yard. This helps because some places are better suited and if you get a pest infestation in one tomato or squash plant it is not so easy for it to spread to all of your crops.

I also put down newspaper and a layer of pine straw. The newspaper keeps the weeds down and helps hold in moisture and pine straw is more attractive, protects the paper and keep the wind from blowing it away. This system worked great for me last year reducing the need for weeding and watering. A little bit of effort now saves a lot of time later and allows you to just enjoy your garden for the food it produces for the next 8 months.

Warm Day

Snow a distant memory?



Today it was one of the warmest so far. Predicted to be in the high 70's the temperature was recorded as 82 degrees by my car thermometer on the way home from work. I decided that it was time to put some of the seedlings in the ground. If the nighttime temperature is at least in the 50's then it should be OK for tomatoes and some other tender plants to go in the ground.

Some of my melon and squash seedling looked a little ragged. Most looked great but some had been shaded by the the large leaves of their neighbors and were getting crowded out for light. To big for the crib and so I needed to get some of them out to the garden plot so that I could spread things out a little more.

For my friends who do not have the good fortune to live in the South I wanted to show a picture of my azaleas which just in the last few days have started to bud. By tomorrow you will not see any green anymore and the show will last for 10-14 days. This group of azaleas surrounds the small cherry tree I featured earlier.

I haven't put all of my tomatoes out today. Here is a picture of one of my seedlings with two full sets of true leaves. Over the next week they all will go in the ground.

The other things I would like to show is the fava beans now about 8 inches tall and I have a second small patch planted 2 weeks later that will supply a more extended harvest.

Finally the sugar snaps. They are now nearly a foot tall and growing a couple of inches a day. last year they over topped the four foot high netting. Some day I might test how tall they could climb but I might need a scaffolding twice as high to support them.

Bare feet

Broccoli Raab with penne pasta

I have several photos to show readers of the progress made in the garden so far this year. Today we had a light shower in the morning after which I went out to do some weeding. I noticed that there were a lot of weeds coming up around the fava beans and in some of the other areas. I thought weeding might be hard but with ground moist I made quick work of it.

I had gone out in my bare feet and I think that this might become a habit. There have been some complaints of me tramping in dirt on my shoes. Therefore no shoes I think would make clean up easier. In any case the damp soil and coolness of garden felt great and although I don't usually go out bare foot that often I think they would toughen up pretty quickly. Then when I am done a splash of water from the tap will clean off the dirt and make for a cleaner home. Many cultures do not wear shoes inside since it is cleaner not to and foot washing before coming in has been part of getting ready to come inside since Biblical times so I think I will try it.

Tasks done today
1) have started the soaking of the mushroom block so that I can try growing a new bloom; it will need to soak for 24 hours in rain water so I will set it up tomorrow.

2) The strawberries are blooming both in the pot and in the bed.

3) Red potatoes coming up in the trench I dug. As they grow I will fill in the trench and this will give move stem for the potato to grow on.

3) I have been eating arugula ( The English call it Rocket and I like the sound of the name) almost every day. The sharp peppery taste with a slight bitter after taste is not to everyone's liking However, splashed with vinegar and topped with some Parmesan cheese it is a great salad. Little bunches of this go for a pretty penny. If you had smell on your blog then you could smell the peppery aroma.


4)Major planting over the next week. Not all fear of frost is over for another ten days yet but I think it is time to start.

Arbors and Seedlings

When Patrick was here recently we started to build an arbor to hold up climbing things like peas, pole beans and maybe cucumbers. We did not get as far along on the project so Marci and I finished off the construction this weekend. There were a number of changes in the plan that we had to make to get the arbor together. If you look closely there are some places that are not square but overall it looks good and will hold up the climbers that we have this year.

I also am planning to visit Florida next month and I will will try to get a cutting from a muscadine vine that had it origin at least a 100 years ago on the Bailey's homestead.


Spring is coming and in the next 2 weeks the risk of a frost is likely to pass. The seedlings seem to be growing well and the tomatoes have a second set of true leaves and it looks like I will need to put the grow lights up higher to accommodate the growth of plants. In the next few weeks the ground will be warm enough for all of these plants to go outside.

Cherry Trees

This post is about two things.
The first thing is that there are faux fruit trees blooming everywhere. The Bradford Pears have been blooming, and the Japanese Cherry trees have just in the last two days opened their flowers. There are Crab Apples and a number of other trees and bushes that once were fruit and are now only ornamental. I suppose the reason for ornamental trees is that you get the beautiful flowers but no fruit. I suppose some think that the fruit is messy and you have to nurture the fruit and eat it. Some people seem to think that this is an inconvenient thing to have to do. I would purpose that if we have fruit trees then we should have the flowers, the trees and ultimately the fruit! I hope to some day have only real fruit trees so that I can fully enjoy them. I have blueberry bushes, a fig tree, strawberries and I have attempted to have raspberries. Some day I will have a full range of fruit bushes and trees.

The next thing is an interesting thing about my faux cherry trees. My house is around 50 years old. I would guess from the size of the Japanese cherries that we used to have that they had been planted around the time the house was built. When we moved here 5 years ago the trees were in very bad shape. They had split and were rotting from the inside. I have had both cut down now. The first was broken up pretty bad when we had to put in new septic lines so we had it cut down. The second one had pretty much broken in two and fallen on the ground. However, we still have two cherry trees. The one closer to the house had a shoot that had come from the root stock and now I have a fifty foot cherry tree but no fruit. The other tree in the front of the house had sent up several suckers from the trunk and I carefully selected one and cut all the others back. I think that this one will be a pretty, low branching Japanese cherry from the size and shape so far, while the other is a wild cherry. Alas though, I still will have no cherry fruit.