Archive for the ‘Crops – Vegetables’ Category
April 18, 2010 – Spring Landscapes
This time of year the contrast between the dead corn and bean fields and life of everything is else readily apparent. This is probably as good as the south berry garden will look this season, before the weeds overcome us. This row of plum and cherry trees smells like a roomful of grandmothers who prefer ...Read more.
April 10, 2010 – Getting Garden Started
It’s finally dry enough to start getting some of the early season crops in the ground. Today onions, peas, and lettuce hit the ground. Enough early season crop beds are ready to go, so we swapped the tiller for the potato digger to trench in potatoes in the next few days. Here are a couple ...Read more.
December 1, 2009 – December Lettuce
OK it’s December 1. It sounds like winter, but there are still crops in the garden, unprotected. There was a big lettuce harvest as the weather is supposed to turn colder at the end of this week. But what a treat to get lettuce from the garden in December – that means that this year, ...Read more.
October 23, 2009 – Late October Potatoes
This week we dug up the last of the potatoes. Linda planted these at the end of July after seeing the seed potatoes on closeout for pennies on the dollar. It will certainly extend out potato storage season by taking them out of the ground so late. one year ago…”Thingamajig Thursday #138″
October 21, 2009 – Garlic Planting
When the girls got home from school, I decided it was time to make a rush to get some garlic in the ground. Garlic is a great crop as it doesn’t need to be put in the ground in the spring. The garlic cloves, recently separated from their bulbs. The girls planting a furrow of ...Read more.
October 20, 2009 – October Stir-Fry
It’s nice that on October 20, the garden still supplies an all-farm stir-fry. This dish contains carrots, cabbage, broccoli, fresh from the garden and onions and garlic from recent harvests. The days of eating straight from the garden are quickly coming to an end – about all remaining are lettuce, spinach, kale, beets, and brussels ...Read more.
October 6, 2009 – Squash
This is the week for squash harvest. We’ve had a pesky problem with squash vine borers over the years, so squash has always been hard to get to maturity. For some reason, this year, the vine borers seemed absent – not sure if it was the weather, some other cycle, or having more chickens roaming ...Read more.
September 28, 2009 – Clean Garlic
It’s time to send garlic to market. This is our first time selling to an organic grocery store. After saving back 20 pounds or so for seed, a few pounds for ourselves, we’ll add a 30 pounds to the central Iowa local garlic supply. We’ll do this again and maybe have a bit more next ...Read more.
September 11, 2009 – Carrot Harvest
It’s time, er, maybe too late, in some cases, to harvest carrots. The short, stubby carrots are an example of planting a variety suitable to soil conditions. One of the gardens has very hard, clayey soil and that results in planting a variety that is short and fat to ease getting them out of the ...Read more.
September 7, 2009 – Garlic Cleaning
It’s time to clean the garlic for sale. How best to get it out of the barn? Get the loader bucket… put a couple of girls up in the loft and bring the garlic down… in bushel baskets. My mom and a friend came down for the long weekend and graciously hopped into life on ...Read more.
September 5, 2009 – Tomatoes Finally Arrive in Bulk!
It’s been a lousy year for tomatoes so far. We had the bad combination of getting them in late and a cool summer that delayed their growth a couple of weeks. The Roma tomatoes aren’t ready yet, but these are ready to eat and hit the canner. Martin works on cutting up the tomatoes before ...Read more.
September 1, 2009 – Mandan Bride Corn
We’re probably about the only ones in the state who don’t plant sweet corn in their garden and instead plant old variegated varieties and sorghum instead. Here’s an update on the progress of the Mandan Bride variety. one year ago…”Blackberries”
August 16, 2009 – Bean Trellis
Here’s another use for 16 foot cattle panels. This is the top of a bean trellis – it’s just a cattle panel looped over kept in place with half a steel fence post on each side. It always seems like a pain to get in during the spring rush, but this time of year, I ...Read more.
August 7, 2009 – Tillage Radishes
We’re trying a new cover crop this year – tillage radishes. We planted some just a few days ago, covered them with a layer of fine compost since the ground was too hard and dry to work up and it only took a few days for them to germinate. The idea behind tillage radishes is ...Read more.
