A blog about our efforts to establish a suburban homestead in our quarter acre back yard where we grow (mostly) organic fruit and veggies while battling grass, clay soil and the various gardening ills of Mid-Atlantic region. Join us as we garden, cook, up-cycle, build, create, and enjoy.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Seeds for Cold Weather
Our seed order is here! It includes a few more things we may be able to squeak out for fall but otherwise it is all for spring. We aren't going to do a CSA share next year since we haven't been super pleased with what we have received. We are going to garden more and visit the farmer's market more instead. However there are several things we were introduced to via the CSA that we do not want to give up, and we are going to try our hand at growing those. Here is what we ordered:
Mizuna - This is spicy asian green we usually get from the CSA)
Tatsoi - This is a spicy asian green we usually get from the CSA that hubby loves to use in pesto
Rainbow Swiss Chard - Hubby loves it and I like the look of it when it is growing so we are going to try it)
Parsnips, Harris Model - We usually do Hollow Crown but we love parsnips a ton (obviously) we are going to plant both kinds next year. We might try and get a sowing of this in for fall so that we have early spring parsnips.
Broccoli, Calabrese Green Sprouting - For some reason growing broccoli has always intimidated us, but we're gonna give it a go next year. Our attitude now is that with the row cover anything is possible!
Onion, Red of Florence- We are already planning to grow onion from seed for the first time next year instead of getting sets. If I am going to do all the work I figured we should try two types of onions and not just one.
Beets, Yellow Cylindrical- We love golden beets and the cylindras we have are so easy to cut so we thought a gold cylindra would be awesome. Turns out these are actually mangels (super big roots grown for animal fodder) but we'll see how they taste. As long as we pick them small they won't have a chance to go behemoth on us.
Beets, Chioggia (striped)- We are in a beet faze and I have always been intrigued by these striped beets. Plust they are supposed to taste less "earthy" than regular beets.
and for our free gift (Baker Creek always includes one) we got American Melon. I'm not a huge melon fan and we don't really have the space for melons, but I'm sure we can find some use for the seed.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Patching the Row Cover
This weekend we realized that the edges of our row cover where we drive in the garden stakes to secure it to the ground had made large holes around the stake entry points. This is caused by a combo of normal wear and tear and the number of wind storms we had this year. My clever hubby found a great way to patch it though. Just like all other row cover care, he used good ol' duct tape. He placed a piece over the stake holes and then drove the stake through. Now the stake still has something to grip and the cover is very secure.
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