Canning starts...NOW!!!

So far green beans have been our most reliable crop here in Texas, so this year we planted a bunch. By a bunch I mean approximately 400 plants on two 40-foot rows. The beans are just starting to come on. We did our first real picking two days ago, and picked just over two pounds. We expected to have to wait a while for more, but yesterday we picked another two pounds, and I only expect the yield to increase as the plants get more into their bearing streak.

So, we will be busy canning. Last night I canned nine pints, with a full load being ten. I find that it takes just about half a pound of beans (before snapping off the ends) per pint, so if we get to the point that we are picking more than five pounds at a time we might be in trouble!

In other garden news, we harvested ten pounds of Reddale potatoes. If the rest of the plants have yielded about the same, then we should be digging up about another fifteen pounds soon, as the plants are really starting to die back now.

Fresh Potatoes for Dinner!

I have two types of potatoes planted in my garden this year, Reddale (a waxy red potato) and Butte (a russet baking potato). Due to my impatience I occasionally dig around under the plants just to see if anything is growing. The Reddales have been easy to find, but I had never been able to locate anything under my Butte plants.

I week or so ago I dug up my sickliest looking Reddale and harvested several potatoes from it (sorry, no pictures). Today I decided just to dig up one of the Butte plants to see what was underneath, and the picture shows what I found. To put it in perspective, this is a salad plate (9"?). The skin is mottled because they are still young and the skin rubs off if you scrub them at all. All in all I pulled out 1lb 11 oz of potatoes from that plant. Given that the portion of potato it grew from was probably no more than 2oz, that is a 13.5::1 ration of harvested potato to seed, not bad!

Like I said, these potatoes are still young. Left in the ground they would have continued to grow into much larger potatoes, for an even better yield. Lets hope the rest of the plants continue to do well and give us a huge pile of potatoes in a month or so.

It lives!

It has been a while since I have updated the current progress of my garden, so here is another photo tour of what is growing in my backyard. The conventional wisdom around here is that it is a waste of time to try to grow things in the existing dirt, and that you should instead grow everything in soil you purchase and install into raised beds. Buying all new soil was way out of my budget, so what you see here is grown in Round Rock Dirt...amended generously with the cheapest compost available at Lowes.

I am using the cheap composted cow manure from Lowes because (1) it is really cheap, and (2) it seems better than a lot of the more expensive stuff. When I was deciding what to buy, the fancy Black Kow manure seemed to be mostly wood, and is about $5.50 for a 50 lb sack. The cheap stuff is $1.35 for a 40 lb sack, and is a whole bag full of fine and dark compost...with no wood chips in sight. Through my various plantings this year I have bought 40 bags of the stuff.

Now on to the pictures!

Blackberries on my new (tiny) bushes. It looks like we will get a couple cups this hear, with hopefully many more next year.

A look at my beans. You can also see a little bit of garlic an an artichoke on the bottom. I suspect the artichoke is just going to end up on the compost pile soon.

A look at the first Juliet tomatoes to appear. Several of my other varieties are starting to fruit too, so we are already doing better than last year!

An overall view of my backyard garden.

Bigger pot == bigger plant

One week ago I posted about moving some of my tomato seedlings into larger pots. Today you can see the difference between the seedlings in the large pots vs. the ones in the original small Jiffy pots. My thought was "how there be this big of a difference in one week." Well, there are a couple obvious solutions for this:

• Small Jiffy Pots are really small


• Really small pots mean really small roots


• Really small roots mean pathetic plants

Ok, so that seemed like a reasonable explanation, but no amount of free space seemed to explain the rapid growth to me...and then I figured it out. You see, I am what I would consider a "pretty much organic" gardener. This means that in general I utilize organic options, but I am not opposed to straying from that when I feel the situation justifies it. Given that my seedlings are growing inside my pantry, I was scared of the potential smells of fish emulsion or seaweed extract, and instead utilized some water-soluble Miracle-Gro fertilizer. Both transplants pictures receive the same single application of fertilizer. My new explanation of why the plants differs so much is:

• I bottom-watered the plants, meaning the water and fertilizer was pulled up through holes in the bottoms of the pots.


• Large Pot == More Dirt


• More Dirt == More wicking capacity


• More wicking capacity == More water


• More water == More Miracle-Gro


• More Miracle-Gro == More Plant

Since the plants were allowed to wick up as much water as they wanted, the moisture level in the big pot was probably about the same as in the little pot. This gave the plant in the larger pot a reservoir of fertilizer which it was able to pull from, while the small plant only had a tiny reservoir. Since I do not fertilize continuously, the small plant quickly consumed the fertilizer and then only had the plain water I gave it, while the large plant was able to work on its collection of fertilizer much longer.

I am amazed at how geeky I was able to make a post about tomato transplants, but there you have it--I am a geek!

Life Creeps Into My Garden

As it gets close to time to plant, life is appearing all over in my garden. The grass is starting to turn green, and plants are springing to life. Rather than talking about it, I thought I would post some pictures of what can be seen around my back yard right now.

This Bradford Pear became a fatality in my yard--it was threatening to shade my garden so it had to go.

Leaves are emerging on the Black Spanish grapes I planted a couple weeks ago. I discovered that it can be very hard to prune a plant after you start seeing the leaves appear.

These are the late emergers of my Butte Potatoes.

Most of my potatoes are getting fairly large. I will be mounding soil around them once the rest emerge.

I just finished shaping my garden yesterday and laid the necessary drip irrigation. My grapes and compost are in the back corner, while my potatoes are visible in the front.

The seedlings that have been tucked away in my pantry are now getting their first tastes of the outdoors.

A look at one of the Arapaho blackberries I put in last week.

Closeup of the blackberry leaves.

I found a head of garlic in the compost bin, and planted them in a nearby row. It looks like I will be growing garlic this year!

These two rows are about 40 feet long, and will be primarily planted with green bush beans. Beans have been one of our must successful garden items here, and are easy to store, so we will be planting lots to try to stock up.

It's almost planting time!

Well it is almost time to start putting transplants out in the garden. The picture shows the current state of my tomato and pepper transplants that have been growing in my pantry for the last two months. I just put some of them into larger pots and moved the grow light up to accommodate their growth. I had the light hanging under the shelf, but the plants were growing up into it. Rather than find somewhere else where I can properly hang the light above the plants, I just set it on top of the wire shelf to let the light shine through. Hopefully the light is still bright enough to keep everything nice and stocky.

I have learned some things from this experience growing my own transplants.

• A two foot grow light fits over lots of small transplants, but not lots of big ones.
• It is painful to have to decide which seedlings to throw out.
• The little Jiffy pots from Lowes are way too small to keep a transplant in.
• I should plant with the expectation that I will repot my seedlings a couple times before putting them out in the garden.

The last of these points is interesting. Why would not not just start my transplants in something big enough to leave them in until they are ready to plant? The answer is that tomatoes have the incredible ability to quickly grow roots anywhere that they are in contact with the soil. By removing all but the top few leaves and replanting the seedling, I am encouraging it to grow a large root system prior to going out in the garden. If I had just left it to grow on its own in a large pot, I would not get this extra boost of converting stem into root.

Earlier I posted a picture of my little spindly seedlings. I was able to save them by replanting them all as deeply as I could, and they are the same seedlings in the picture today.

I have been busy getting the garden ready for spring. Last weekend I tilled under all of my pea plants, freezing the few peas I was able to get off of them. I just figure that they are serving mostly as a green manure to get some organic matter into my soil. I have also planted grapes, blackberries, and a pomegranate tree in the past few weeks, so hopefully they will all get off to a good start this spring. You can see in the next picture the peas I froze. We managed to get a whole three cups of shelled peas, and another 3 cups of young pods.

Goodbye Grass!

As much as I love my garden, I hate grass. This is why I was so happy to see about 60 more square feet go away today. I just don't understand why we work so hard to have nice green lawns that give nothing back but a need for maintenance. Today I put in a new planting bed along our front porch, which will (hopefully) have some dwarf blueberries planted in it soon.

I opted to haul all my supplies back from Lowes in my van. It was feeling a bit heavy on the drive back, because I had it loaded down with 600 pounds of manure/compost, 9 cubic feet of pine bark, and about 12 cubic feet of peat moss. The bed is intended to give the blueberries a more acidic environment than they would normally get here in Central Texas soil.

Not all of the manure and compost was destined for the new bed. Some of it went into my garden so I could prepare for potato planting next week. You can see from the picture the four ridge of soil, which will become two rows once the dirt is all pulled in over the growing potato plants.