Pickles Etc.

It didn't take long for Kathy to turn cucumbers into dill pickles.

I spent the morning planting seeds for salad cucumber, cilantro (saved from last year's harvest, so we'll see how they do), zucchini, and yellow squash. I added two carloads (about an eighth of a yard) of composted manure to the bed. This is the bed from which the Russets were harvested. It needed a bit of compost, probably more than I gave it.

I also planted Basil with the new bed of tomatoes. I bought some tomato cages so that now all of the new tomatoes has a cage. They were $4 each and it reminded me that growing our own is not necessarily the least expensive. My older friends who are much better at this than I am use wooden stakes. I don't know if they use new stakes every year or how much time they spend tying the stalks up. I've just opted for the wire cages. And I reminded my self that the purpose of this gardening venture does have benefits, just not economic ones. We get fresh food. We are better prepared for hard times should they come to our family. We are learning skills that, being the product of an urban youth, we weren't blessed with naturally. And, the last thing of note is that the other things we spend our money on are more expensive and less sufficing.

Cucumbers

I planted three cucumbers from seed. I didn't know what variety they were, only that Doug Shaw provided some extra seeds. I planted them in the strawberry bed because I had a bit of space and didn't know how they would spread. I should have put them next to a trellis. They have started producing. I picked a bunch today, more than in prior days. I see plenty of small cucumbers on the vine, so this may be a regular harvest for a while. We've got to figure out what to do with them. They are pretty clearly right for pickling although we have also been eating them with a mixture of rice vinegar and a little sugar.

Onions Step 3

Step 3 of processing onions is cutting off the bad stuff, dicing, and freezing. The onions for the most part are either small, which means that it takes a lot of time to get a little bit done, or they have heat spots where they got too warm when I dried the roots and stalks and started to cook in the field. Kathy and I worked through about 20% so far. At least we will have onions to cook with. We are storing them either in Food Saver bags or Ziploc bags.

I ordered new onion seed from the Seed Savers Exchange. More of the long red Florence and Yellow Parma. Last year I thought I would start the seed closely spaced and then transplant. It didn't work. I never transplanted because the pattern was too random. This year I think I will just plant them like I want them to grow and make sure the seeds sprout.

Final Tomato Transplant

Now that the onions are out of the bed, I finally have room to plant the rest of the tomatoes. I organized them the same way the first bed were organized. There are 8 Rutgers, 8 Brandywines, and 2 Marglobe in this bed, bringing my total to 36. (The first bed is all Marglobe.)

The soil in the bed is much more friable than the soil in the first bed. I will need to add more compost at the end of the season to the first bed to loosen things up a little. I figured this out because I needed to replace one of the original Marglobes with a seedling after having planted the second bed and found the soil rather heavy.

Onions Step 2

Last year, I left the onions in the ground too long and then left them out too long in the sun. I may have committed the last error again this year, but not the same extent. The constraint was that I picked on Friday and couldn't get back to them until Monday and Sunday and Monday were very hot days. In the end, you get what you get and I think I will have plenty of onions to process.

My next step (just to keep it for the record) is to bring the onions into the house, chop off the stalks, clean them up a bit, and then stick them in the refrigerator until I can get back to them for Step 3.

One of my unofficial readers, Pat P., suggested that next year, I might want to either plant onion plants (not sets) or plant seeds. I think I am likely to try seeds this fall if I can find some and let them grow over winter. The onions I am holding in this picture were planted that way. I got seeds from Seed Savers Exchange for the long red Florence variety of onion. These were the largest onions in the garden. The problem I had last year with the onion seeds I planted was very spotty germination, but they were planted with poor cover. I think I can do better this year.

Visiting Bees

Doug Shaw and I made the rounds to our hives today. He has 5 active hives; I have 3. My best guess is that the hive at Clarence Brown's never swarmed, so I will be left with 3 for the year. As long as they have sufficient strength, I am happy.

At this time of year, the nectar flow is diminishing, so a primary task was to inspect hives to see how much honey was going to be available for extraction. Of my hives, I have two that may have a modest amount available. The one at Clarence's has less honey than I thought it might have. I have two supers dedicated to honey storage. One will be harvested. (The honey wasn't capped yet.)

The blue hive in my yard also has a super that is partly full. This hive has a brood box that is totally full of honey. I had placed it above the brood box where the queen was released, hoping that they would build out brood comb for her to lay eggs. My hopes were in vain. She just moved up to the honey-bound box. Doug and I switched this arrangement around. The empty, yet to be built out deep is now above the honey-bound deep.

The yellow hive is doing well for what it is. The queen is active laying eggs. This hive has one super that has only been minimally drawn out, but the bees have stored honey along the outer edges of the brood frames.

Both of the hives in my yard need more workers, but they were not as destitute as I had feared, so there is some relief there. If they continue on, they will not need to be combined.

Other Potatoes

I harvested the other potato bed this morning before it got too hot. There were half as many potatoes by weight (about 20 pounds total) from this bed and many of the potatoes were quite small. I thought I had planted Yukon Gold, but it turns out I think I planted Russets. This is the bed where the Yukon Gold I had bought failed to sprout once in the ground and I had grabbed potatoes that had sprouted from the garage.

This is a bit disappointing, but I suspect I should try to learn from it. Things to remember for next year include making sure I sprout the seed indoors instead of in the greenhouse. This bed also lacked the same friability that the other bed had. The soil was just a bit more compact and needs a fair amount of compost. This bed had more Colorado Potato Beetles and the plants didn't grow as vigorously, suggesting either deficiency in nutrients or poor seed to start with. So, there is a combination of factors.

So, all together, I harvested about 56 pounds of potatoes. That would translate to about a pound per week if Kathy and I tried to live off them. That is not sufficient. Next year, I will double the area devoted to potatoes (at least 4 beds). Assuming I get seed that will grow at the rate of the Pontiac Red's bed, I would expect 144 pounds, which is almost 2 pounds per week, much closer to what the two of us would actually consume. Ultimately, I probably need to double that, assuming I will have more than just the two of us to feed.

Pontiac Reds

Last year, nearly all my Pontiac Reds turned out like the potato pictured first. They had blight splotches all over them. I only saved a handful. My goal this year was to avoid this completely. I planted in a different bed and harvested earlier. There were 6 Pontiac Reds that had severe blight spots.

There were a number that had one or two small spots. I'm not quite sure what to do with these. I have yet to sort out the potatoes; I just washed them and am now letting them dry. I weighed the potatoes I intend to keep. There were about 36 pounds of Pontiac Reds harvested this year.

Most of the potatoes seem to be normsl. Pontiac Reds have very delicate skins. I often see the skin scraped when I pull them out of the dirt. Jenna helped me this evening. She figure out that gently pulling the whole plant out of the soil actually made it easier to keep the skins intact and those that remained behind in the soil were easier to get. Before that I had been digging around the plants trying to find the tubers and only taking the plant out at the end of my search.

One of the oddities this year was that one of the Pontiac Reds produced a few potatoes with pure white skin. I think I will try to save these and see if I can plant them later. Perhaps an interesting mutation that might be worthy cultivating. They are very small though.

Onion Harvest

Last year I harvested the onions a bit too late. Some of them were mushy when they came out of the ground. I have taken the rule that when half of the stalks have bent down, it is time to harvest. I've heard that summer solstice is a second marker where we live. We are less than a week away from the solsitce and half the stalks were pretty much down. It has rained a lot the past few afternoons and evenings, so today, while it was hot and sunny, I harvest. I might be a bit early, but if I had to choose, I would rather have more small onions that onions that were too mushy to use.


My goal this year was to get some big onions. I don't know that I succeeded any better than in previous years. I fertilized and watered better, but I don't think I did any better. I had a lot of onions though. The yellow onions were a bit larger than the red onions. There were more red that went to seed.



My strategy for processing onions is to lay them out on wire grids for a day or so to let the roots dry. I will go back on Saturday (today is Thursday) and twist the stalks on each onion. When the stalks have dried, I will cut the dried leaves off and size them. My plan is to weigh them. My guess is that I will, by weight, have more yellow than red. My hope is to have enough for the next year for Kathy and me. Jenna doesn't eat onions. Jeff has left for the summer but he will eat them (he likes to cook with them) if and when he comes back.

Apple Tree Problems

Not being an arborist or having any training in caring for an orchard, I am not skilled at understanding how to care for my trees. I simply planted them and have assumed that when I needed to know, I would go searching for knowledge and figure things out. (It's a hobbyist attitude, I know.)

So far, I have assumed that the apple trees, now 6 or 7 years old, just needed time to grow. They have produced small fruit each year, but nothing amazing. The trees themselves are still relatively small. I recently noticed that there are branches that have simply died on two of the trees. So now I have my wake up call. I haven't had a chance to really figure things out yet because other things are taking my time. I suspect my first task should just be to prune off the dead branches. I would like to know what is happening though, and so my second task is to figure out what is going on. Right now, I don't understand it.

Small Peaches

In the winter of 2009, I planted 6 freestone peach trees I obtained from a nursery in Tennessee. I got three varieties, Champion, China Pearl, and Contender. They all made it through the winter, but are all still very small. I didn't expect anything and picked off nearly all the fruit that did form. I guess I left a few on one of the trees. They are small, but very delicious. I believe the variety I harvested was Champion.

Rutgers Transplant

Last week I bought 2 four-packs of Rutgers tomatoes at the Farmer's Market. I saw that 6 of the tomato plants that I had transplanted earlier weren't going to make it (2 Marglobe and 4 Brandywine). I wanted an additional variety of heirloom tomatoes and by all accounts Rutgers has been a standard.


This morning, I transplanted each of the 8 seedlings into larger pots using the same method I had used earlier. Pat P. suggested adding a little Epsom salt to the mixture to boost the magnesium level of the soil, but I found none in the house. I may work this in later when transplanting from pot to raised bed. The plants from the Farmer's Market were healthier generally than what I grew. I have the need to learn more about growing from seeds.

Small Potatoes

Last year, the Pontiac Reds were almost all blighted. My theory at the time was that I waited too long to harvest, although I'm sure there was more to it than that. However, superstitious behavior does have its purpose and I decided to look early at some of the potatoes in both beds to guard against the possibility that I might postpone harvest too long.

In the Yukon Gold bed, I had one plant that was a volunteer from seed last year. It looked the most ready, but produced only 3 smallish tubers. There were two other plants in that bed that looked ready (flopped over and leaves starting to turn brown). It turns out they must have been Russets that I had plopped in the bed when a seed had failed to sprout. They also had relatively small tubers.

The Pontiac Reds (pictured) look much healthier than the Yukon Golds. The plants are just larger. There was one that was bent over and looked like it might be ready for harvest. I expect Pontiac Reds to be smaller potatoes. (The ones harvested last year that looked blighted were way too big for Pontiac Reds, which is one reason I felt I had left them in the ground too long.) From the one plant I pulled 9 tubers, of which 5 were the expected size.

The total weight of this early harvest was 3 pounds, half to the Pontiac Reds, half to the rest.

Measured Progress

I remember when I was young, perhaps 6 or 7, I wanted to build a model boat out of some wood I had found in our garage. I think some must have been very thin, like the wood used in an old style bushel basket. My brother said he would help me, but, for one reason or another, didn't get to it very quickly. So, I did something on my own. It didn't turn out like he had imagined; not in anyway whatsoever. I remember being chided for being impatient. But then, I was very young and independent minded.

It is interesting how patient I am with projects at this stage of my life. Building the raised beds has spanned months. I am now completing the last of the set of three I have set out to build this year. Jason and Michael Bolen dug the beds back at the end of March. I bought the wood for this bed last weekend. But, the progress has been measured. Jared and I cut the wood and arranged it one day. I clamped it to make it straight and stable for drilling holes that day. I drilled half the holes one evening and the other half the next day. Jenna helped me move them from the garage (where I do the controlled assembly) to the garden another day. I laid out the guideline twine and put the first three layers of wood one day. I put the fourth (top) layer of wood and made sure the holes lined up on three of the corners and clamped it in place yesterday. Today, Jeff and I pounded 1/2" rebar into the three holes in one corner.

I have the patience and persistence to make this kind of measured progress now. In theory, two reasonably strong people should be able to complete one from start to finish in a day, maybe less. It just doesn't work that way for me. However, measured progress is good enough and the garden beds are gradually expanding. It will probably be at least another month before the top soil and mulch are added. (The compost is coming -- slowly.)

Minor Update

I had some time this morning and went out and shoveled one bin of compost into the empty bin next to it. I am seeing a little progress now.


The lack of moisture has been corrected. As I put this bin's contents into its new home, steam seeped out. So there is some heat being generated. The color is better; a dark brown. And some of the content is starting to transform and disappear from its original material; the leaves are breaking down into specks of matter.

Four of my transplanted tomatoes have died. These were the ones I put into containers because I cannot yet transplant them into the garden because the new boxes are not finished. (Jared was here for Jason's wedding and helped me cut and stack wood for the next box but we didn't have time to drill holes yet.) I went to the Farmer's Market and bought 8 Rutgers tomato seedlings. They are in good shape and will give me yet another variety of heirloom for seeds.

Mutual Funds

The last time I felt like this was in October, 2008 when I started asking myself if it was time to move everything from mutual funds into money market funds. That time, I didn't act and have regretted it ever since.

Last month (March 2010), funds lost about 5.5% of value. Sometimes you say to yourself, "It is just a blip; things will come back." But there is nothing to base that kind of optimism on. Europe is a mess. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is unabated. More than anything else, there is a feeling of angst.

So, I pulled the plug and moved everything out of a stock-based mutual fund into either a money market fund or a bond fund. I made my trade at the end of March and, based on how mutual funds operate, the trade occurred on June 1. I was out of town attending a conference this past week, so I haven't really assessed my current status.

Reading Reuters and the NY Times suggests I am not alone in heading for the exits at this point in time.

The only remaining question I have is about the potential for another point of catastrophe like the one that happened back in 2008. I am using my understanding of Catastrophe Theory on this: a sudden, non-linear, irreversible change precipitated by an incremental shift. Last time, the plunge was precipitated by home mortgage defaults. (I've recently read Michael Lewis' The Big Short.) I'm not sure what may precipitate the next slide over the cusp; but there are a host of possibilities, including the fact that the causes underlying the first crash weren't really resolved and an economic equilibrium was never actually achieved. So, in addition to the new economic problems that have emerged in Europe, the older problems persist.

I imagined this past week thinking that I really need to understand how seemingly unrelated events actually work as cascading catastrophes. For example, the problem with the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) economies has nothing directly to do with either the volcano in Iceland or the oil spill in the Gulf. Similarly, the stock market crash apparently had nothing directly to do with the runs on the banks that followed a year later or the dust storms of the years that followed that. But somehow, these unrelated events do add up to instigate catastrophe events.