Yield Report: Soybeans, Part 2

Over the weekend (we were away) the rest of the soybeans ripened and had to be pulled in as soon as we got home. This variety of soybean was quite a bit fuzzier. I'm not sure what variety it was. We just planted the generic organic soy beans we order for our homemade soy milk. The dirt was a bit tenacious, which made them quite a bit harder to clean. I ended up filling up one of our 10-gallon buckets with hot water and stirring 1/3 of the beans at a time and pulling them out, not 100% clean, but good enough. I'm making a note on the freezer bags to give them a really good wash before cooking and eating them. Better to get them into the freezer as quickly as possible. The total yield from these plants? 18 pounds, 7 ounces. That gives a soybean total of about 20 pounds (the distoy soybeans were a little more than I thought) from 28 square feet. I put in a couple of tomato plants, okra, and more peppers in one third of the bean bed. The other two thirds is waiting for cover crop seed. Better get that ordered!
Meanwhile, several of the corn stalks have toppled over because of the weight of the ears. The last measuring showed that they had reached 12 feet, 6 inches (!). Tall! We tried some of the corn three weeks ago, but the kernels weren't fully developed. Not too tasty. Now, the kernels are fully developed but the corn is not particularly sweet. Now I have to research what we could have done to improve the flavor, if anything. Or maybe it needs another week? Stay tuned!

The sakata melons have a few big ones (maybe 8 inches long with a 3 inch diameter). Right now it's green like a zucchini, but I think it will turn a light yellow before it is ready. Supposedly it goes from underripe to overripe in just a day, so you have to really keep on eye on them.

There are a few orange-ish tomatoes coming along. Some have burst already. This is usually caused by uneven watering. We've been watering in between rainstorms, but there have been a few short periods where they've gone a little longer than usual without water. Hoping they all come out okay.

Plenty of cucumbers are coming our way. I really need to make time for pickles and relish. The cucumbers are delicious and my favorites are the Israeli cucumbers.

Salad greens I wasn't too pleased with. They've been superb for feeding the chickens though! I love arugula. The spinach completely failed, probably because it got too warm before it had a chance. The mesclun mix I got wasn't a good balance of sweet and bitter. I prefer sweet lettuce mix with bitter accents. I got some free lettuce seeds (Simpson) - BLEAH! That variety didn't work at all. Romaine was so-so. That will take more experimenting to find the right variety for us.

The carrots and the beets have been pretty good. Tonight I roasted the carrots without peeling them and they were delicious.

The zucchini bed in front is sizzling. I think we must not have gotten all the vine borers. The other squash bed (winter squash) is doing GREAT, so I think we beat it there. I bought a few zucchini seedlings to put in there in the hopes that the vine borer moth is all done laying eggs and these will escape unharmed. We'll see. Hopefully they'll have enough time to mature before the summer sizzle.

That's all for now!

Yield Report: Soybeans

I pulled in the distoy soybeans (Territorial Seed Company). The package of seeds I got was only enough for about maybe 8 square feet. I got an amount in the shell similar to the volume of the shelled pinto beans. Probably around a pound or so. The other ±20 square feet of soy beans is still developing (different variety), so we'll have to see how that did. I just threw these soy bean pods in the freezer for now to be had for snacks later. That bed is getting emptier! We're thinking of just throwing in a cover crop, like buckwheat, to get it ready for fall planting... We'll see!

Food

The food is beginning to roll in now. Tonight, we had zucchini quiche (the eggs were so bright, the quiche was chartreuse!), roasted beets/white carrots, and roasted zucchini/eggplant/jalapeño/onion/garlic/preserved lemon. The only purchased thing was the flour and butter for the crust and the jalapeño (ours aren't there yet). So you could say this meal cost $1.75 and includes lunch for everyone tomorrow. We'll ignore all the startup costs for the garden, of course... :)

Yield Report: Pinto Beans

The nearly-official tally: 1 lb, 9.75 oz of pinto beans from 24 square feet of plants. Nearly-official, because the beans haven't thoroughly dried out yet so our yield will probably be under that. I'll put them on the drier tomorrow. Right now the drier is occupied with some shiso that I am preparing for making a shiso/sesame/salt condiment. I hope it's delicious! I'm very curious to try dried shiso as an herb. I love the fresh with sushi. Fun to try out new ideas.

Vine Borers

The aliens have descended. Those horrible vine borers. My arch-nemesis from last summer. It decimated all of my zucchini plants before I knew what was happening. This year, I've been ready for them, inspecting plants every time I water. Well, they have arrived! And they have been removed wherever they've been found. I look for little holes along the bases of stems, slice it open (or cut off the occupied stem) and get rid of the horrid creatures. Death by stabbing, or food for the chickens. I feel somewhat triumphant in that I have at least already picked two zucchini from the plants and promptly grated them into a quiche. This pest was never seen on the west coast, so there were always jokes about what to do about all that zucchini! There was always way too much, and one plant was enough for a family of twenty. Well, maybe an exaggeration but not by much! This year I planted about ten zucchini, yellow squash, and lemon squash plants. In the Pacific NW this would have been incredibly ridiculous. Next year? Row covers, my friend. Until the end of May. Nice lovely row covers over my zucchini plants and all of their relations.

Pinto Beans

We have had a lot of rain this week, which really freed me up to do other chores around the garden since I didn't have to water it. I gave the chicken coop a good rake and put out a fresh layer of wood shavings. I cleaned out the condo where they sleep at night. I trellised the cucumbers that were toppling over into the paths. We had posts in the ground already, and had started to trellis them with twine. They had become a bit to unruly for the twine, so I did the next level with bamboo poles (cut from my mother-in-law's yard last year) and used duct tape to attach them to the posts. Worked pretty well. I also pulled out all the peas since they had reached the end of their productive lives.

Then I drained the above-ground pool. Our pump broke and brought our crystal clear water to a screeching halt (AKA green!). Very sad. We don't want to buy a new pump because we're hoping to get a larger pool soon. We already have a pump for that pool. We'll be switching to a saltwater system when we get the new pool. We don't want to buy another pump, but it's so sad not to have the pool up and running since we really use it two times a day this time of year.

My next job was to clear away a big pile of bricks from when we knocked out a low brick wall that divided the back yard from the side yard. We used many of the bricks to outline the crop and tree circles in the front yard, but the rest were just sitting in a great big pile. I moved the great big pile to a place behind the shed so we didn't have to look at them and trip over them any more. I also used a sledgehammer to remove the last bit of brick wall that was sitting at ground level and was also a bit of a tripping hazard.

Then my last job was to remove the pinto beans. They're in their drying stage right now, and with all that rain I was afraid they might rot. Of course, now rain is out of the forecast until Sunday. We uprooted all the beans and threw the plants on top of the chicken coop to dry some more. This weekend we hope to shell them, let them dry out some more indoors, then freeze them to make sure nothing grows inside of them! After that, we can store them in jars.

We also pulled an onion tonight only to discover it was remarkably puny. Not sure what that means. We planted them in late September/early October. They really should be nearly ready I would think. It may need more time or we may have flunked Onions 101. 75% of the foliage is supposed to die back when the onions are ready; I'd say it's at 25% right now. Maybe the onions take much longer here. We'll see!

There's never a dull day here!

Sunday Photos

So sad - the sugar snap and snow peas are all done.

Some creature has been poisoning the parsley...

the kiwis have many new tendrils forming

One tromboncino squash didn't make it, but we don't lack for plants!

amaranth growing quite a bit taller

watermelons spreading out

zucchini coming (and watchful eyes are out looking for vine borers)

winter squash

uh oh - powdery mildew on the zucchini leaves; I'll try some baking soda treatment and hope it's not too late...

eating bolted arugula

melon flowers

lots of edamame

the pinto beans; at first I was afraid that something was going terribly wrong, but I'm pretty sure they just reached their maturity a couple of weeks sooner than expected and are now drying out

the pinto beans getting beautiful red streaks as they dry out

more zucchini flowers

first eggplants are coming

Under the leaves...

... are lots of cucumber flowers!

weird fungus, stage 1 - any guesses???

weird fungus - stage 2

an explosion of tomato blossoms, and a few green tomatoes!

first green pepper

first tomatillo

ready for the basil onslaught!

no broccoli yet - I'm not so sure it's going to make it before the really hot weather hits

tassels ready to pollinate the silks

corn claws

the 9-foot-tall corn

the new play yard for rabbits, chickens, humans, and puppy

the corn is peeking over

Transplants

Until this year I didn't really fully appreciate all the advantages of starting seedlings indoors and transplanting them outdoors when the soil is ready for them. I thought the only real advantage was to get a bit of a head start on the season.

Now, however, I realize there are many, many advantages to starting seedlings NOT in the main growing bed. Among these advantages are:

• It takes much less water to water seedlings when they are not surrounded by the many, many square feet of empty soil they will eventually occupy. 

• It is much easier to keep seedlings evenly moist when they take up a small amount of space. Most seedlings don't grow well if they alternate between wet and dry soil.

• You can protect the seedlings from insect and disease damage and from birds and other seed-eating creatures and put them out when they are able to withstand most of these.

• They are protected from sudden plunges in temperature (or from the cover on the hooped bed blowing off on the very night the temperature sinks to 22 degrees).

And of course, starting vegetables from seeds has a huge advantage over purchasing plants, both in terms of cost savings and what varieties you are able to grow. There is such a limited selection of varieties if you don't plant from seed.

Things that I wish I had started from seed indoors before transplanting outside:

• Broccoli and cauliflower, because I fear that by the time they are ready to produce the scorching heat will have arrived and we won't be getting much.

• Basil. I think the alternating wet/dry is slowing it down and causing pretty uneven growth throughout the various basil areas. They would be doing fine, I think, if they got watered daily without fail. Sometimes I fail!

• Melons. I think these would have done great over a heated germination pad. The little sakata melon seedlings are just now finally starting to take off after having sat with nothing but their first set of true leaves (after the cotyledons) for quite some time, probably because our weather is now consistently above 85 during the day. I hope they'll continue to flourish and bring us melons!

• Eggplant. Ditto.

• Peppers. Ditto.

There are also a few things, like the peas, that I wish we had started earlier, but we sure got a much earlier start than we did in 2011, and I suspect we'll be even more prepared to let the cow out of the barn in December/January instead of February. It takes a while to adjust to the rhythms of southern vegetable gardening!

Great Book

I have been rather absorbed in this book, taking many mental notes as I go. So much to learn! And so many wonderful things to glean from reading about life on a farm. His farm is a real one, much larger then my garden, and he lives in Illinois with very different timings for things, but how fun it is to read a week-by-week account of what needs to be done. Everything from marketing the vegetables, to having bees, the best way to cook what they grow (recipes included!), the relative cash value of their crops, the bone-chilling labor during the Illinois winter, and the slaughter of animals.

Already, just 2-1/2 months into our real growing season (post-frost) there are so many, many things I plan to do differently next time. I love that part about gardening, and I know it will take us 3–5 years to really hit our stride. What a marvelous time we're having along the way!

CAVEAT EMPTOR: I was disappointed, upon finishing the book, to see that two of the chapters include rather inappropriate material which really dampened my enthusiasm for this otherwise wonderful book. I don't know if this is the new "style" of writing, but I found the same thing in reading what would have been a very fun around-the-world history of fruit. I find this terribly disappointing and disturbing and plan to write to the publishers and authors.

Composters

 Introducing Master Horatio...

...and Miss Amelia.









Our new composters! Sure is a lot faster to compost this way than to wait for a pile of veggie waste to compost. We can put their waste right into the garden (most other animal fertilizer is too hot and has to be composted first). We can use their waste to feed the tilapia when we get around to raising them. We could also have a worm bin right under their condo to feed worms which in turn could feed our tilapia. Yes, many reasons to keep rabbits. But the real reason? They're just so very cute. :) They don't do well in temperatures over 85, so when it gets that hot outside, we'll move them in to live with us. The kids don't mind, of course. The rabbits shared the same condo for the first time today (neutered male and spayed female), and they got along great. They even snuggled! They also ran around with the chickens for most of the afternoon, and the chickens seemed to think it was quite amusing, but not nearly as amusing as their evening snacks of pasta and cockroaches. Apparently, cockroaches are a premium treat and there is a lot of fighting over who gets to eat them.

Farm Dog

Every farm, even the urban ones, needs its own farm dog. So here is Basil Rathbone (long "a" in this case!) who came home with us from a rescue organization today. He's an English Shepherd mix and just look at those paws!

Irrigation

The northeast quadrant of the garden has its own drip irrigation system now! Bit by bit. This now relieves us of a good 30 minutes of near-daily labor, and I love seeing the small amount of water it takes to water everything now.

Flea Beetles

This Flea Beetle is my new nemesis. They sprang out of the ground with a vicious appetite, destroying several perennials I had in the flower bed in a single afternoon. They seem to attack a single of variety of flower, decimate it, then move on to the next. At first I thought they were Japanese Beetles, but those were supposed to be half and inch long and these were quite a bit smaller. Perhaps they were just a juvenile form? But I researched it further and finally discovered it was a Flea Beetle.

The beetles are black with an irridiscent green color and are only a few millimeters long. They jump just like a flea when you touch them. They are a bigger problem after a very mild winter. Diatamoceous earth added to the soil and on the plants will help get rid of them and prevent them from eating all your plants! I have to do a thorough inspection of the garden to see if they are lurking elsewhere. UGH!

Side Yard in April

The Indian cobra melons are surpassing the much smaller Japanese sakata melons

.

Here are the cobra melons close by, and the sakata melons at the far end of the bed.

Delicate pink soybean flowers

Prolific pinto beans

The nasturtiums have bloomed since I took this picture. Looking forward to pickled buds (a substitute for capers).

The soybean (near) and pinto bean (far) bed

The winter squash is another group of plants that really greened up after the blood meal application.

Cilantro

The big tomato bed! It has 25 heirloom tomatoes (I think!), 3 jalapeños, 12 bell peppers, 3 tomatillos, a long row of basil, a short row of Thai basil, a short row of cilantro. These and the cucumbers all got trellised this evening. In the pot in the middle of the bed is a fig tree just hanging out. We should really get that planted!

Here are the eggplants (Walmart) and little eggplants closer in (my slow-growing seedlings).

Basil

cucumber flowers

Titan sunflower

Our first harvest of beets, three different varieties

The future tilapia pond is returning to duty as a swimming pool until we can save up the money we need to start up the tilapia and get the kids a different pool. They had fun scrubbing out the bottom!

potato bushes

The corn - nearly six feet tall!

cucumbers

I was worried about my still-microscopic eggplant seedlings, so I bought three Japanese eggplants at Walmart for insurance. Couldn't risk not having eggplants, last year's star performer. Meanwhile, my little seedlings are finally coming around.

The miserably failing Bloomsdale spinach. It's a heat-tolerant variety. Maybe it's just not cool-tolerant too!

The bok choy is flowering, but it does not affect the taste.

swiss chard

The purple shiso! I found a recipe for making shiso salt. It's a condiment used like gomashio (a roasted sesame salt) and should be really good on rice and salads. I've added a couple of leaves to a salad and it gives it a great flavor. I can't describe the taste of shiso since it's unlike any other green, but I do love the flavor!

the beet and the carrot bed, some of it ready for harvesting

The mesclun bed. This grew so fast that it went from very tiny to huge just during the two weeks we were away. The kale part of the mesclun (mesclun is a mixture of all kinds of salad greens) is a pretty caterpillar-eaten. I think I'll just pull the kale and give it to the chickens. I've tried, many times, to like kale, but I just can't.

One of the triple crown blackberries that replaced the berry plants we lost when the hooped bed froze.

Either cauliflower or broccoli... I'll have to check my bed map!

the gestalt (north end)

the gestalt (south end)

Our flock, and my favorite thing in the garden!