Garden 2018

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Weedygarden

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It is January, and where I live, it is recommended that we plant tomatoes and such things after Mother's Day, so it is a little early to even think of starting them now.

I am getting regular reminders from a seed company to start onions and artichokes now. I have never grown artichokes, because they take 180 days to grow. Also, they are not as important to me as peppers, tomatoes, green beans, greens, lettuce, and radishes.

Is anyone doing anything for their 2018 garden now?
 
It is January, and where I live, it is recommended that we plant tomatoes and such things after Mother's Day, so it is a little early to even think of starting them now.

I am getting regular reminders from a seed company to start onions and artichokes now. I have never grown artichokes, because they take 180 days to grow. Also, they are not as important to me as peppers, tomatoes, green beans, greens, lettuce, and radishes.

Is anyone doing anything for their 2018 garden now?
Working on garden layout now.
As I work on layout I pencil in possibly plants.
So I can start my seeds now.
P.S. Got green onions and garlic planted in flower pots now.
 
We are changing the layout of the raised beds this year. We had twelve 3 x 8 beds last year and we will be adding eight more this year. I will be using hardware cloth for protection from the rabbits because we have big feral rabbits that someone let loose attacking the garden. I may also put in a few snares. My wife won't like it but If they eat my food, they become my food.
 
I'm getting really revved up about this coming gardening season.
Being tropical I can't plant a lot of traditional veggies in summer because of the intense heat and pest pressure.
We also get a lot of fungal issues in summer.

I want to get all the heavy lifting done now like spreading wood chip mulches before my next round of surgeries.
It'll also give the mulch time to rot down and enrich the soil.
I find I can shift more mulch if I load up a tarp that has thick soft rope tied at two corners to make a shoulder loop and drag it (like a cart horse)
to where it needs to go.
I can drag up to 3 barrow loads worth of mulch in one "run" then I have a little rest and go and load up the tarp again.

I've been watching Charles Dowding's YT channel and my mouth waters seeing his cabbage, beets and carrots.
If I could half his results I'd be happy!
 
My anxiety is rising about food shortages and I'm taking a hard look at what I can reasonably produce on the small amount of land I have in the climate that live in.

Three big ticket items that I want to add that will be staples are sweet cassava, sunchokes and native tropical raspberry.
These will be summer crops to add with sweet potatoes and black turtle beans.
I'm praying I can master potatoes and turnips and swedes this winter.

It isn't the season to buy sunchoke tubers as starters BUT I did manage to find a ebay seller.
I found many on-line stores selling cassava cuttings but finding one that sells the sweet/ red stemmed cassava was a lot harder.

The trouble is I have to keep my precious plants away from the chickens.
They are still free ranging the back yard and they've levelled my comfrey.
I'm putting a ring of chicken wire over it in the hopes the root stock will reshoot.

I still have to get my ride on mower fixed so I can sheet mulch to entire yard and destroy the wretched lawn.
Ask me how much I HATE mowing useless lawn.
 
Resto sorry about the crop loss. We put out seedlings today and next couple days, not sure if hardening off is all that its cracked up to be. Anyone know?
Everything I have read says to harden off your plants.
I tend to believe the seed companies want us to succeed so they give their best advice.
I will harden off all my plants before I put them in the garden.

I have the garden fever bad.
I want to get going but I know it is way too early.
We had a week of the high 50s and low 60s and I tilled my garden spot.
This week we got snow and temps in the low 30s for a high and low teens at night.
 
Everything I have read says to harden off your plants.
I tend to believe the seed companies want us to succeed so they give their best advice.
I will harden off all my plants before I put them in the garden.

I have the garden fever bad.
I want to get going but I know it is way too early.
We had a week of the high 50s and low 60s and I tilled my garden spot.
This week we got snow and temps in the low 30s for a high and low teens at night.

Don't get in a hurry thats what made us mess up in so many ways. Patience is virtue in this case. Can you do a leanto? Any room on south side of your house that gets full sun at least 5 hours a day? Thats what we had first here and decided to go bigger.
 
Everything I have read says to harden off your plants.
I tend to believe the seed companies want us to succeed so they give their best advice.
I will harden off all my plants before I put them in the garden.

I have the garden fever bad.
I want to get going but I know it is way too early.
We had a week of the high 50s and low 60s and I tilled my garden spot.
This week we got snow and temps in the low 30s for a high and low teens at night.


Pic of leanto,

 
The other night I was going to make fries. Every potato in a 5lb bag had sprouted. So today I planted them… we’ll see how they do. ;)
potatoes (1)_v1.png
 
The other night I was going to make fries. Every potato in a 5lb bag had sprouted. So today I planted them… we’ll see how they do. ;)View attachment 4435

I LOVE your huge garden.
All I can see is how much beautiful food you'll be able to grow in that rich looking soil.

This morning I bit the bullet and brought 3 red stemmed sweet cassava plants on-line.
I hope they grow enough before it gets cool so I can harvest some viable cuttings before it dies back.
 
I LOVE your huge garden.
All I can see is how much beautiful food you'll be able to grow in that rich looking soil.

This morning I bit the bullet and brought 3 red stemmed sweet cassava plants on-line.
I hope they grow enough before it gets cool so I can harvest some viable cuttings before it dies back.


The old garden by the house is about 1.5 acres. It’s my elderly dad’s pet! He loves to grow stuff there. I grow a few things there, usually peppers. I grew sunflowers one year. I used to sell at the farmers market every year and had another 4 acres in another field in veggies. Dad loves to grow string beans. He found these purple ones somewhere. They grow purple but turn green when you cook them. :)

2014 size (1).jpg
2014 size (2).jpg
food (1).jpg
food (2).jpg
 
Pigs aren't a problem here yet. I've learned something about deer. They like peanut butter. Normally they would jump over an electric fence and never touch it. But if I wipe peanut butter on the wire they can't resist trying to lick it. (ouch) Afterwards they stay away for a few months. :D
 
Our plants that wintered over, onions, garlic, strawberries, carrots and sweet potatoes are all greening up and starting to grow. We are getting the last frost of the season now and I am a little concerned about the strawberries but the rest of the plants don't seem to mind the frost at all. The plants we let winter over are for seed (not the strawberries) and that is what we will get from them this year. I am most interested in the carrots because we have not allowed them to go to seed (winter over) before. The garlic and onions we have done before and we have collected the seeds and have them on hand. Carrots are a bit less hardy and I wonder if they are hardy enough to produce seeds after being in the ground (wet) over the winter. We have had potatoes that have rotted in the ground because of the wet conditions and have changed the drainage in those beds to keep that from happening. Last year we planted sweet potatoes from slips from the previous years crops and they produced flowers but no seeds. We still got a bumper crop but no seeds. We can continue to use slips if necessary but I would like to get seeds just because they store longer.
 
I am most interested in the carrots because we have not allowed them to go to seed (winter over) before. Carrots are a bit less hardy and I wonder if they are hardy enough to produce seeds after being in the ground (wet) over the winter.

I curious about what you find too. Please post back about this... :)

Carrots were only domesticated about 6 or 700 years ago and they quickly revert back to their wild nature, in 2 to 3 years. The wild plant is “Queen Ann’s Lace” or Daucus carota. The root of the wild plant can be eaten during the first year of growth but by the second year the root becomes woody and unpalatable. It only produces seed the second year.

Edited to add… Carrots are in the Parsley family of plants. It has a deadly cousin that is amazingly similar - poison hemlock (Conium maculatum). If you search “Queen Ann’s Lace” on the net you’ll find a lot of misinformation. Many people think its poison because of it’s cousin. There is a simple way to tell the difference between them. “Queen Ann has hairy legs”. :D The stems of QAL are covered with fine white hairs. The stems of poison hemlock are smooth, no hairs.
 
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Peanut,
Heirloom produce are stable. There is no reversion when using the seeds as happens when using hybrid seeds and plants. That is why we only grow heirloom plants here.
To qualify as an heirloom plant it has to be proven to produce the same plant from each generation of seed for 50 years. As I said earlier, there is no reversion with heirloom seeds.
 

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