Small Garden News

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garlic

First Frost

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Woke up this morning to a light frost in the yard — the first frost of the year for my yard. My mom texted me yesterday that a freeze warning for my area had popped up on her phone, so the frost was not a huge surprise. Also, we are at the end of October, which is a usual time for a first frost in my yard.

When I visited my mom and stepdad in Oklahoma a couple of weeks ago, I carried a lot of her tender potted plants into her sunroom, knowing that cold weather would soon be there, too. Mom used to have a lot more begonias, but now at least half of the potted plants are Bromeliads. All of hers have toothed edges like saw-blades, so the sister who would have had to carry those in was really happy that I was there to help. She had someone to share the scratches and scrapes with!

Leaves coated with a light frost in my garden. PHOTO/Amygwh

In my yard, there are no potted plants for me to carry indoors, and there are few frost-tender plants in the garden to worry about.

The leaves on the bush beans look pretty rough this morning– darkened and wilted — but they already had finished producing beans for the season.

Cool-season crops that had been planted with winter in mind look just fine.  Frost bowed some of the leaves early, but as the day warmed, the leaves all perked back up.

I checked the radish section of the garden closely, looking for signs that the roots are beginning to expand. All the salad radish roots are looking good and will be ready to pull over the next couple of weeks. It may be awhile before the winter radishes are big enough to pull, though. Most of them still have that thickened-stem look, instead of being round roots.

This weather also signals that the time for planting garlic and shallots is at hand. If you are not prepared, with garlic and shallots ready to plant right this second, that is ok, because the window for planting these is large.

Some years, I don’t get the garlic planted until January, and the crop still comes out fine.

Onion-Family is Planted; Cold is on the Way

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On the way home from work one day last week, I stopped at a garden center and picked up a little bag of onion sets — dry, tiny bulbs — and I was able to get about half of them into the ground last weekend.

The bed they were destined for also was planted with garlic, shallots, and multiplier onions. By the time I had all my saved bulbs in the ground, there wasn’t room for all of the little onions in the space that had been set aside. I’m thinking, though, that when I pull out the last of the zombie pepper plants that still are holding onto some darkened, ragged leaves out in the garden, I will be able to plant the remainder of the little white bulbs in the newly emptied space.

An alternative is to plant them around the edges of a bed that will be covered with mulch for the winter, so that spring planting can be done without too much trouble in trying to not disturb their roots. Regardless of which option I choose, planting the rest of those little onions will have to wait for next weekend, which is expected to be quite cold.

All the more tender plants need to be either safely under cover or, if potted, indoors, because it’s supposed to be pretty cold tonight, and a very cold snap is forecast for next week. This weekend we are looking at low temperatures in the mid-20s, but at least one day next week is expected to be down around 22 degrees F. For Georgia, in any month, that’s cold.

I hope all the gardeners out there are keeping warm as they tend to their plants!

When the Garden Gets Slammed By a Very Hard Freeze

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I have a friend who says that gamblers should skip going to Vegas and just plant a garden, instead —  letting those weather dice roll and taking odds on what will yield well, what will do poorly, and what will be a total fail.

In the past bunch of winters, broccoli, cabbages, and nearly all the cool-season greens have produced right through until spring. Gardeners in North Georgia are accustomed to the success of those crops, so, back in October, we all would have said the likelihood of those crops surviving the winter was fairly high. This year, the usual winter crops pretty much ended a few weeks ago when the temperature dropped down near 5 degrees F.

It seemed like it might be useful to have a list of the hardiest crops, for future reference when planning the fall/winter garden, so what follows is such a list:

multiplying onions
shallots
garlic
carrots
winter radishes
green onions
cilantro
spinach
Brussels Sprouts (report from another local gardener)

I’m guessing that parsnips would be ok, too, but I didn’t plant any this year.

The perennial herbs also seem to be struggling with the cold. Most years in winter I can find enough fresh oregano down under the browned stems to use for cooking, but today I could find only a few, tiny leaves. The sage has some good leaves, and I found some usable thyme under the tangle of old stems of that plant, but the rosemary looks pretty rough.

Also, since so many of the weeds that I depend upon for bunny food were bitten back by the hard freeze, I’ve been growing wheat greens indoors to feed to my pet bunnies. Without these greens, my bunny-food bill would be much higher!

We’ve been growing sprouts in the kitchen for ourselves, too, to add some fresh, home-grown greens to our meals. With the loss of many of the outdoor crops, we are lucky to have options for continued “gardening” indoors.

If other gardeners can let me know of additional crops that have done well in the cold, we can add them to the list, to help in planning next winter’s garden. Hope you all are keeping warm!

Crazy Busy Planting Weekend — and I’m Still Not Done

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No pictures yet, but I was able to get most of the rest of the garden planted in summer crops over the long weekend.

On Saturday morning, before working on our own yard, we went out to the farm on Dallas Highway where we usually volunteer, and we weeded (a lot) and planted a couple dozen tomato plants and a couple dozen pepper plants in some of the raised beds.

Then, just when we thought we were leaving for the day, our farmer friend (Charles) said, “when you come back after lunch you can plant the rest of the tomatoes down in the field.” So we went back after lunch, and with the help of one other guy we planted two 150 foot rows of tomato plants. In other words, we started the planting-weekend with a bang.

I didn’t really start on my own yard until the next day, because I was kind of wiped out after that, but  planting in my yard included:

Half of the sweet potatoes (Beauregard, Purple Delight), the parching corn (Supai Red), this year’s round of the melon de-hybridization project (Amy’s Kennesaw Sweet Canary), a few of the “dwarf” butternut squash that I planted last year, watermelon (Luscious Golden), cucumbers (Burpee’s Picklebush, Straight Nine) to replace ones that didn’t come up when they were planted before, one more tomato plant, and some flower seeds. I also started some flower seeds in Jiffy Pellets, because I will need a lot more flowers for our bees.

After the corn is up and  looking good, I plan to plant peanuts in the spaces between. I still have some sweet potato slips to plant (Nancy Hall, Porto Rican Gold), and I’m expecting to harvest the onions and garlic within the next two or three weeks, which means I’ll be planting the Tarahumara Popping Sorghum soon, too. When the shallots come out, I’ll be planting more zucchini in their space.

Joe and I also worked on the “foundation planting” area that had been destroyed last summer when the tree smashed the house. The soil there was VERY compacted clay; breaking that up and mixing in the compost and other amendments required some seriously hard work. At the sunnier end of that bed we planted the bay tree that has been growing in a pot for the past few years, three perennial, purple-flowered Salvia, and a couple of Coronation Gold Yarrow.

The hard work will all be rewarded later in the summer, when the flowers are beautiful and we are enjoying the harvest, but right now I am a mass of sore muscles. Of course, I am also very happy to have accomplished so much.

Hope all the other gardens out there are doing well!

First Frost in Our Yard!

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We heard that there was a frost coming, but very few of the plants currently out there needed protection. However, I was hoping to be able to help the potatoes through the night; they are very tender.

I piled leaves around the stems and draped a flannel sheet over the patch, but the freeze was deeper than just a little dip down to 32 degrees.

In the end, the measures I took weren’t enough. The stems of the potato plants (and the nasturtiums) turned to mush.

The good news is that, even though most of the spuds had only pushed plants up out of the ground a month or so ago, a couple had come up earlier, and there was a little harvest to dig up today.

When I had dug up last spring’s potatoes, I had saved some of the little ones in the fridge to replant in August. I was hoping to trick the little spuds into thinking that their dormancy period was over, but the trick only worked on a couple of them. I’ll have to rethink the plan next summer to figure out a way to get a more abundant autumn harvest. I’m pleased enough that the couple of early-birds produced a few spuds for us, and we are looking forward to eating them.

Along with the spuds, I brought in some broccoli to serve with tonight’s supper and a winter radish to have sliced thin and salted with our pre-dinner snacks. The potatoes will be for another day.

The freeze wasn’t hard enough to harm the cauliflower, which is good, because they are the most tender of the brassicas out in the yard. Broccoli and cabbages can take much lower temperatures without harm.

We had one of the cabbages – the first of the season! – with our Thanksgiving Day meal. There are more that are getting close to harvest-size.

Elsewhere in the garden, the garlic are still all below ground, but the shallots are coming up.

The lettuces are still perking away – but we’ve had a lot less of these than my bunnies have. Moonpie and her babies are pretty big lettuce-eaters.

Overall, I’d have to say that the yard made it through this first very late frost in good shape. The weird part is that it Really Was the First Frost! I think that the official UGA weather station in Dallas, GA, recorded a frost about a week ago, but it was on a night for which the temperatures were patchy – my yard made it through that earlier “frost” without any frost at all. Last night – the night of Nov. 24 – was the first for my yard.

I’m not going to complain (I usually expect a first frost around the end of October), but I will say that it’s weird.

Garlic! Potatoes! Etc.!

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The garlic and potatoes, both in the same bed, have been looking pretty miserable for a while now, so I finally dug them all up. The harvest was a big (emphasis on Big!) surprise. The Rabun County garlic is the pile of big bulbs on the left in the picture:

It’s a little hard to tell from the very busy photo, but a couple of those Rabun County bulbs are almost four inches in diameter. Needless to say, I’m “pleased as Punch.” Most of the rest of the harvest turned out well, too, although the Elephant garlic was disappointingly average.  I haven’t weighed the bulbs yet. I’m going to leave them out on the shady front porch for a couple of days to dry out a little, then finish trimming the bulbs (I already trimmed off the rootlets).

I had been thinking that the potato harvest would be pathetic, considering the weather this spring, but it wasn’t. I ended up with a little more than eighteen pounds of spuds from my two five-foot rows. The two rows were crammed into a space that is only about two feet wide, and I had thought, at planting time, that maybe I should just be planting one row in that narrow space, but there I was with extra seed potatoes and only a little space.

The White Cobbler was a lot more productive than the Red Pontiac, but that may be a result of the warm spring. I think White Cobbler tolerates the heat a little better.

The basket to the right in the picture above contains the tiny harvest from the multiplier onions. I plant these every year, in spite of the lack of robust productivity, on the chance that, one of these years, I will figure out exactly the right combination of everything to make these work for me. It is possible that our winters are just too warm for them, but the notion of being able to replant onions each year without actually having to buy sets or starts of any kind is appealing enough that I am not giving up yet.

In other news, this is yesterday’s harvest from the garden:

It still seems insanely early to be bringing in zucchini, but here they are!

And in yet other news, a couple of the baby bunnies will be heading off to new homes this week. Einstein (black with a white head) will be going home tomorrow afternoon, and Louie (the brown-with-silvering baby, soon to be called Darwin), will be heading toward his new home on Wednesday.

Since they are only about nine weeks old, this all feels like progress!

We plan to keep a white bunny (Burrito), as a companion for Mama Moonpie, but the other white (Tiny) and the black and white one (Holstein) that is almost like a Dutch breed bunny still need a home.

To get them all together for a group photo, I dropped a handful of alfalfa hay into the middle of their Timothy hay. They love alfalfa hay!

When the crowd has thinned out some, it will probably seem strange to be able to sweep the bunny enclosure without having two or more babies hopping into the dust pan, another one chasing the broom, and one or two others trying to sit on my feet, but I am sure I will get used to it.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

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It’s hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they’ve been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don’t call it quits until the end of June. Everything I’ve read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It’s hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn’t be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I’d like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn’t great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their “bunny salad,” so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I’m pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn’t kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it’s hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year’s weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is “continued craziness.”

Preparing to Plant Garlic

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I work for a weekly newspaper. On Tuesdays, we finish putting the paper together so it can go to the printer, then the post office, and then be in people’s mailboxes on Friday. Yesterday, we had a hole on the food page, and poking through the press releases and emails from all our subscription services didn’t turn up anything that seemed like a good fit for that page.

After a fairly long search for a food-related news item, I decided to just write something about food to go on the page, but I’m a better gardener than chef, so I wrote about growing garlic, which should be planted in October in North Georgia.

Then, at the last minute, an ad came in for that space, and my little piece didn’t get used. Since I have it handy, I am putting it here:

Garlic in the garden

In the Bible (Numbers 11:5), the absence of garlic and other good foods that were easily had in Egypt is lamented: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.”

Although free fish is still hard to come by, many vegetables can be grown at home for fairly low cost. The vegetables mentioned are mostly summer crops, but not garlic.

Garlic in the Atlanta area performs best when planted in mid- to late-October, so now is the time to plan for planting for next year’s low-cost garlic.

Garlic prefers, like nearly every other garden plant, a soil that is well-drained, with plenty of organic matter worked into it. Organic matter includes materials such as compost, soil conditioners or well-rotted manures.

The soil pH should be between 6 and 7.

If a soil test is not done (through a local County Extension office, for example) to get specific fertilizer recommendations for the garden, apply a 10-10-10 fertilizer, using three pounds per 100 square feet of space. Proportionately, that works out to 0.75 pounds of fertilizer for 25 square feet, which is a more likely home-garden space allotment for garlic.

To start planting, the heads of garlic, which can be purchased at the grocery store, need to be pulled apart. The cloves are planted individually, still in their papery wrappers, three to four inches apart. They go in the ground pointy end up, the tip about one inch below the surface. The fat cloves from the outer layers usually result in the biggest bulbs.

After planting, the garlic needs an even amount of moisture.

Sometime in June, when the leaves begin to dry and fall over, no more watering is needed. The bulbs will be ready to harvest when most of the leaves are pretty far along in this process and the bulbs (dig down to find a few) contain nicely differentiated cloves.

The garlic should be mature and ready to dig up in late June or early July.

In my own garden, the work of preparing the soil for my garlic and multiplying onions will begin this week. I’ve set aside my largest bulbs of garlic from this summer’s harvest for planting.

The Rabun County garlic, for which I had only one clove to plant last year, made a nice fat bulb that I will split with my friend who gave me the original clove. Hers didn’t do as well as mine, and we want to increase the chances that we don’t lose the variety. If I remember correctly, it was given to her as one big bulb from a woman in Rabun County, Georgia, whose family had been growing this garlic for several decades.

An “Alliums” Harvest

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I harvested most of the regular onions, multiplying onions, and garlic — plants that are all in the Allium genus — over the weekend. The job was an aromatic one! I am lucky that the house has a shaded front porch; I can leave them all outside on trays to dry for a while.

There aren’t as many onions as usual this year, because I had given more room to the garlic. They came out pretty well, though, and we will be eating these for a couple of months.

I had also planted some little bulbs from the multiplying onions (sometimes called “potato onions” though I don’t know why), and these made more little onions. Every year I debate whether to replant these — using the little onions in the kitchen is a bit of a hassle — but every year I plant a few that I have saved from the summer’s harvest. Even though they are a hassle, they are free!

The tray in the center of the photo below holds the harvest from some grocery store garlic that I had planted. Originally, this is all I had planned to plant, and it would be enough to last until about Thanksgiving. The bulbs need to dry for several weeks before use, to let the skins dry enough to easily peel away from the cloves, so it really represents about four month’s worth for my family.

Then, a friend wanted to try some different garlics, but her garden space is even more limited than mine, so we agreed to split a “starter pack” of different garlics.

The tray on the left holds the variety Inchelium Red; the tray on the right holds the Polish White. I didn’t have as many little cloves of the Polish White as the other kinds, so I didn’t expect to have as much of a harvest from that variety, but it is interesting that the bulbs are so much smaller than for the other varieties. This is something to remember for my yard!

The bulbs that I harvested are all soft-neck varieties of garlic. There are also some hard-neck garlics out in the garden, the variety Chesnock Red and the one heirloom bulb from Rabun County, Ga. The leaves on these are still green, rather than the shades of tan and brown that the other garlics had all been turning, so I left them to mature a while longer.

The hard-neck varieties form scapes, which are the parts that usually flower and set seed. In the picture above, they are the curved bits at the top. I have read that these are edible, and I decided to find out for myself just how edible they were. I trimmed off the scapes to saute in olive oil to serve on pasta with peas and grated parmesan cheese. The scapes made the olive oil nicely garlicky, and the bulbous ends of the scapes, the part where the flowers were forming inside, were good to eat, but the long pointy ends were tough.

When you have a garden, every day is an adventure!

Garlic and Fall-Planted Onions

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I plan to get my garlic and multiplier onions into the ground in the next week or so, but other people may want to plant sooner. That would be fine. Here in my yard, I would feel comfortable planting garlic and multiplier onions anytime from early October to mid-November.

A UGA publication called “Garlic Production for the Gardener” points out that garlic prefers, like every other garden plant, a soil that is “well-drained … with organic matter worked into it.” Of course, we all know how close my yard’s soil comes to that well-drained ideal….not even close!

Luckily I have been adding organic matter to the garden for years, but even with those additions, before planting the little cloves, I will add more organic matter in the form of compost from the pile out back and a purchased bag of soil conditioner (the brand I picked up at the local Home Depot is called Nature’s Helper). I will also add a little fertilizer, but more will be put on in Spring when the plants really begin to grow.

To get started with the planting, I will need to pull apart some heads of garlic. The cloves get planted individually, still in their papery wrappers, three to four inches apart. They go in the ground pointy end up, the tip about one inch below the surface. Only the fat cloves from the outer layers get planted, since they seem to result in the biggest bulbs. The littler ones go into a dish on the kitchen counter, to be used in cooking.

The soil requirements of multiplier onions are basically the same as those for garlic, so getting the garden ready for them is essentially the same task. This saves the gardener a load of trouble.

The multiplier onions are much easier to separate than the garlic, so pulling the clumps apart doesn’t seem like such a chore. The individual onions get planted just below the soil surface and ten to twelve inches apart, because they will make big (if all goes well) clumps of onions as they grow.

I also bought, at a grocery store, a couple of organically grown shallots to plant. I chose “organic” so I could be sure that they hadn’t been treated with any anti-sprouting chemicals. Their requirements are similar to those for garlic and multiplier onions, so they should be fine in the same bed. Since they make clumps the way multiplier onions do, they get planted the same way.

In addition, I saved seed from some red onions this summer. The only UGA publication specifically on growing onions that I found is one called “Organic Vidalia Onion Production.” Even though my seeds are not for Vidalia onions, the growing requirements should be the same. The publication mentions that seed for Vidalia onions should be planted in September. The Vidalia area is enough south of here that I know I am very late with my onion seeds, but I am going to put some of these into the ground with the other onion-family plants, anyway. I am hopeful that I will get, at least, some little onions. If I am lucky and we have a warmish Fall, the plants might get far enough along that I get some medium sized onions. That would be great!