Fall Gardening Continues!

Posted on Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 07:15

Fall gardening continues at Little House. This week the weather is going to be nice, but last week's low temperatures got down in the 20s. We have been keeping everything covered with row covers.

The hoops are there to put plastic over when it gets really cold. I still need to cut a piece of greenhouse plastic to go on them.

This is one of the beds that broccoli is growing in.

I did cover the hoops with a small piece of plastic and sheets on the coldest nights, but we have had frost several other nights with just the row cover as protection. The broccoli florettes still look good, but some of the leaves were damaged by the frost.

A few of the broccoli heads are large enough to pick now, but there are others that still need a week or so. Next weekend we will undoubtedly be eating fresh broccoli and broccoli casserole. Hopefully, there will still be plenty left at the end of the month as well for Thanksgiving. Yum!

First Fall Frosts; Gardening Continues!

Posted on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 04:57

Our first Fall frost hit pretty much on schedule, and now three out of the last four nights has produced heavy frost.

For our friends and neighbors who have a vegetable garden, this marks the absolute end of the season as they peer out at their now dead tomato plants.

For us however, vegetable gardening continues. Frost simply marks the beginning of an exciting Fall garden. This weekend my family transplanted the last of our broccoli and cauliflower plants, planted garlic and potato onions and harvested lettuce and other greens. Mary enjoyed planting the garlic.

We have lots of cabbage and broccoli coming on, but full heads won't be ready for another week or so.

Our best Fall garden success so far has been with salad crops. In just a couple 4x4 square foot beds we have been picking all the salad we can eat for the past month, and hope to continue for at least another month.

Lettuce, greens and Brassicas all grow well when it is cool. Many gardeners raise them in the Spring but don't think of growing them in the Fall. Now that it is freezing at night though, the trick is to keep the plants from freezing. This week it is only getting down into the thirties, so covering them with row covers is enough protection.

Soon I will cover the beds with hoops and plastic or cold frames for added protection. The last of the lettuce transplants will be planted inside the insulated greenhouse beds to hopefully extend salad season into December.

Growing vegetables in the Fall and Winter is a little extra work, but we think it is worth it. It was pretty neat being out in the garden in the cool air recently as the Canadian Geese sang above me on their journey south.

The geese are getting ready for Winter, so we must ready the garden for it as well.

How about you? Do you continue growing or harvesting in the Fall and Winter? All tips and pointers are welcome.

Happy Fall Gardening,

-Pa

Our New Greenhouse!!!

Posted on Monday, October 6, 2008 at 12:31

Ma and I worked all weekend to get our new greenhouse built.

It was much more involved than I thought it would be. There is still more work to do but we are very excited to have the plastic completely covering it now. I took off work on Friday and worked from sunrise to sunset. Ma helped after school and then we both worked on it all day Saturday and after Church on Sunday. The girls helped with the final plastic installation.

It is 14 feet by 12 feet. Next year we will expand it to 24 feet long. Instead of explaining the whole process, why don't I just show some pictures from the construction phase? Here goes:

First we had to make a spot to put the green house. Ma had this great idea to build a retaining wall to extend the space by the fence out another 6 feet. We had to move a lot of dirt to back fill the wall, but it worked well. Later we will finish the other half of the wall and fill it.

This wall created the perfect footprint for our new structure.

We had to drive metal stakes in the ground at each corner and every 4 feet in the middle and then cut them to the right height.

Is that straight?

1 and 1/2" PVC pipe, 20 feet long fit perfectly over the pipes and bend in a nice arch to make a 14 foot width.

After it was completely framed, Ma consulted the book again to see what the next step would be. We got this particular style greenhouse idea from a library book. It is a great book by Jeff Ashton, called The 12-Month Gardener: Simple Strategies for Extending Your Growing Season. I plan to buy a copy because it also has  lots of great cold frame and cloche ideas.

After the PVC pipes were secure, we had to frame up the ends with 2x4s and add pipe supports to the wood and the PVC hoops. In the above picture, I am putting tape over the wire used to tie everything together in order to protect the plastic sheeting.

Laura came out to check on the progress and decided to come on in.

After the walls were finished and everything secured, we put the plastic on the end walls.

Here Ma was hammering the staples that secured the plastic.

After the end walls were done, it was time to tackle the top plastic sheeting.

Ma and Laura lifted it up to me. Mary took the pictures.

We got it put in place, used about 1,000 staples connecting it to the framework, and trimmed off the excess.

We finished just before the sun went down. At this point, the outside temperature was about 65 degrees. Inside the greenhouse it rose to 100 degrees! I still need to install an exhaust fan and get vent windows put together to control the inside temperature but I am encouraged by the fast temperature rise. We plan to grow salad crops in there all Fall and Winter and then start many early plants in the Spring.

We have more to learn about how to care for plants inside a greenhouse, so its back to the library for us. We'll keep you updated on our progress. Does anyone reading this post have a greenhouse or poly tunnel? If so, we'd love some advice.

Happy Fall Gardening!

Blessings,

- Pa

Producing Prolific Produce!

Posted on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 11:16

July has gone by way too fast and we have been very busy! We have managed to have some great family times with the girls and we got to spend a wonderful few days visiting my brother and family at Purewater Hollow Homestead. We took lots of pictures and hope to have some ready to share soon.

When we got home, the garden was overflowing with veggies. We have been blessed with great weather and bountiful produce. Our new harvesting containers are these "Peach Baskets", and this time it took three baskets to bring in all that was ripe.

July has been the month of the tomatoes, cabbage, onions, garlic, green beans, potatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and now peppers and okra.

Regardless of what else is in the basket, there are always tomatoes. The extra-early tomato plants have done very well - we are now at 400 ripe tomatoes picked! The main season tomatoes are beginning to come in and Ma says it is time to stop counting the number of tomatoes harvested. I'll probably still try to sneak a count though.

Every time we bring a basket in, our cats Macy and Maggie have to check out what is new.

We can't let them look for long because they soon begin to want to sample the veggies. See Maggie licking her lips?

We quickly put everything away in the kitchen and set the baskets down to be ready for the next harvest day. Sometimes the cats think they can get a head start on us by hanging out IN the baskets!

They are so much fun to have around.

Have a blessed weekend!

- Pa

Surpassing our 100th tomato harvested!

Posted on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 09:24

Laura and Mary were excited to take a picture of this Orange Blossom tomato because it was the 100th tomato picked this season!

After picking the rest of the 4th of July, Early Girl and New Girl tomatoes the count elevated to 136!

Normally here in Northern Kentucky we wouldn't have any ripe tomatoes yet. This success is because we started some plants from seed on Valentine's Day and transplanted them in the garden in early April. We had to put black plastic down the heat up the soil and cover the plants with clear plastic at night. Our first ripe tomato was on June 5th. It worked out pretty well.

We know for sure that the count is 136 because our kitten Maggie counted them again for us!

Happy 4th of July everyone!

- Pa

Gardening, Children and Friends; A Winning Combination!

Posted on Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 10:00

I have always loved seeing my daughters enjoying the garden. Recently they had some friends over and they all joined in the act. They picked and ate all of the ripe strawberries before I could even get the camera. Then they set out to pick the peas.

 These were Maestro Peas and they were magnificent with eight to ten peas per pod!

After the girls filled their bowls with these plump pea pods, they retreated to their treehouse to shell them.

They had so much fun with it that they didn't consider it work.

They were surprised how many peas they had ready for the kitchen by the time they finished.

We cooked them for supper that night and we all thought they were delicious except for one friend, and that was only because she didn't even try them!

It was really fun for me to watch them all enjoying the harvest!

Many Blessings,

- Pa

The Baker Creek Spring Planting & Heritage Festival With ** Lots of Pictures

Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 09:33

It has been a whole week already since we were at the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Spring Festival. We went both days and had a great time. It was fantastic! We took several extra days and made a family vacation out of it. We also visited the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home & Museum, a real treat for we Little House fans! We ate at The home of the "Throwed Rolls", Lambert's restaurant, and spent a wonderful afternoon at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Maybe Laura or Mary will post about these later.

This post is about the Baker Creek Spring Festival, it is pretty hard to explain so I will show it to you instead. Following are many pictures taken at the festival.

There were lots of organic  farms selling plants as well as other great vendors:

In addition to all of the booths, they had great professional garden speakers giving talks all day in the speakers barn. When I was in there, I was too busy listening to take pictures. My favorite speaker was Len Pense. The day after the festival, we visited him at his farm to see his revolutionary vegetable garden system. I will be writing an entire post about him soon.

There were at least three areas with fantastic live music and entertainment going on constantly. This was Mary and Laura's favorite part of the festival.

The young man dressed in yellow in the above picture is Jere Gettles, owner of  Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. He started his seed company as a teenager while being homeschooled - what an inspiration!

In addition to running Baker Creek Seeds, he built the "Town of Bakersville" to have a place to host his garden festivals. These buildings were really neat.

They have also begun construction on a grist mill.  

Of course the most important building at Bakersville is the Baker Creek Seed Store where you can get seeds of hundreds (maybe thousands) of common or highly unusual top quality heirloom varieties!

I only bought a dozen or so seed packets because I had already ordered from Baker Creek by mail. Next year maybe I'll go back to the festival and buy all of my seeds there instead of by mail. I strongly recommend any serious gardener to do the same. If you don't want to wait a whole year to visit Baker Creek, they have another big festival in August and smaller ones every month.

I loved our trip to Baker Creek. In my next post I will let you know about some of the cool things I bought at the festival and about some of the people I met. And then I have to give a big update on our gardens here in Kentucky. I have lots of pictures to show. We have been harvesting lettuce and other salad greens. The garlic, potato onions, broccoli, cabbage, potatoes, peas and early tomatoes are doing really well. Tonight Laura and Mary helped me plant peppers and beans and Ma helped with the weeding. We are now in the busy gardening season. Isn't it great?

Many blessings,

Pa

Not much snow, but fun anyway! (pictures)

Posted on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 07:04

We didn't really get 4 to 6 inches of snow here on Tuesday like Ma told you was in the forecast. Instead we got mostly freezing rain and ice.

Since I had planned to take a day off from work already, we decided to still go out and play in the snow / ice like we had planned. So after Ma fixed a wonderful breakfast for us, we all trudged out in the weather, which by now was rain.

The girls discovered that the sledding was really good due to all that ice.

They made it look like so much fun that I had to give it a try.

Then even Ma got into the act. She can really fly on a sled!

She tried pulling Laura to help her gain more speed, but it was a bit too icy to run in.

It was probably best not to get the girls going much faster because our hill isn't that long. Stopping is usually the hard part. If we sled down the back part, we run into the woods. If we sled down the front part of the hill, we have to try to keep from running into the house!

I think all that playing next to the house got our cat Macy a little jealous. We didn't realize until we were ready to go in that she had been watching the whole time.

Macy was much happier after we came in and resumed regular activities, like reading Homestead Blogger blogs.

Macy has learned a lot from all of your blogs!  See how intently she is reading!

Blessings to all - have a great Valentine's Day!!!

- Pa

Thanksgiving Snow on the Cabbages

Posted on Friday, November 23, 2007 at 10:27

Here in Kentucky, we got to enjoy a few Thanksgiving snow flurries. For many, it put them into the Christmas spirit and made them want to go shopping early on "Black Friday". For me, it made me want to go see how the garden is doing. While the masses were up early fighting the crowds at the stores, I was taking these pictures of the snow on our cabbages.

Now that it is getting colder, I wish I would have made the cold frames that Ma has been saying we need. With the aid of cold frames, you can grow keep the garden growing practically all year long. I plan to build many coldframes this winter and be ready to use them for early spring sowing. I will let you know when those are built.

Without the cold frames, we still have broccoli, cabbage and brussels sprouts in the main garden and Laura still has a few carrots in her garden. Of course, our main crop is still compost.

This pile below has cooled off and is ready to be turned. It is easy to tell since the snow that fell on it didn't melt.

.

See how the snow didn't stick to the top of this pile:

That's because the top of this pile is made of used bedding from our Guinea Pigs and what's left of the jack-o-lanterns. Both are decaying rapidly and are still warm.

I hope to make another sizable compost pile soon. I have plenty of brown material available and since it hasn't been very cold here for very long, green grass is also still available. If I bag up some grass and mix it with leaves and dead garden plant material, I will have a really hot compost pile in which no snow will stick.

I doubt I'll get that accomplished this weekend. I plan to spend what's left of Thanksgiving weekend with my family actually being thankful for all we have, but do not deserve. God has been so good to us!  As for Christmas shopping, we'll do our part this weekend by staying out of the way of those frantic shoppers!

God Bless!

- Pa

Where Do You Put Your Compost Piles?

Posted on Saturday, November 10, 2007 at 10:16

Our garden currently contains only a few brassicas and greens but the main crop in the Fall garden is always compost!

I know that compost is not a flower or a vegetable but I think of it as a crop because it is sooooo important to the life of all the other plants.

I could write a whole post (and probably should) on why compost is so vital to the organic garden, but this post is about placement of the compost piles. We always used to keep our compost bins and piles hidden out of site behind the garden. This works fine, but one year Ma started a compost pile right in the garden and the soil in that spot the following year was fantastic. Another time, we moved a compost bin and noticed that the grass grew over that spot three times faster and lusher. This obviously means that the ground under a compost pile also benefits from the compost.

With this in mind, we now locate Fall compost piles IN the garden. This year when I re-organized our garden beds, I purposely made the interior beds four foot square so I could easily convert those beds to compost piles in the off season. Those beds are also easier to plant intensively and successively a la Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening.

All I do is drive either metal or wood posts in the corners and wrap chicken wire around the posts.

As we clean up all the garden debris, it goes into these new bins. We also put in shredded leaves and some grass clippings to get the piles heated up.

I will turn the piles a few times and by the Spring The debris will be "black gold", and the beds will be revitalized! I am even considering rotating these compost bins throughout the garden beds during the growing season when the organic matter is so plentiful. In past years we still had the bins off to the side or used our tumbler in the Spring and Summer.

As for right now, I'm very glad that it finally rained enough that the grass turned green and started growing. I now can bag our organic grass clippings to add plenty of nitrogen to the piles. As for the carbons, we can add leaves. This year I am also returning to a practice that I used to do when we gardened in a sub-division. I am driving through the subdivision picking up the bags of leaves that they conveniently left on the curb for me. The only problem with that is that sometimes you get more garbage in the bag than leaves. On my last raid I mistakenly got six bags of pine needles instead of leaves.

I still added a small layer of them to the piles but the rest will become mulch for our blueberries.

Isn't it amazing that people throw stuff like that away? Not me, I'm always looking for more compost ingredients!

Happy Composting!

- Pa

Back at it Outside!

Posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 08:50

I apologize that it has been three long weeks since we have posted an entry here. As some of you already knew, for the past three years my dad had been battling prostate cancer, bone cancer and eventually even brain cancer. We had to take this time off from blogging to be with him in his last days. His body finally gave up the fight last Friday, September 7th.

Although he is now absent from this earth, he is present with the Lord in heaven! I rejoice in that fact but even still it has been a sad time for our family. It has been pretty rough and we haven't done much in the garden except pick more tomatoes. I even let the groundhog have his fill.

We are now ready to start writing regularly again I hope. Yesterday we worked outside all day in the woods at the back of our yard and we are pretty tired. We had to do this because last week when I was going back and forth to the hospice unit, the electric company decided that they needed to upgrade the power lines that go through there. They had some of our trees cut down and many more trees trimmed. Unfortunately they left ALL of the debris for us to deal with. Yesterday was our first attempt at cleaning it up.

I used the chainsaw to cut the big pieces to be split later. Ma and the girls carried out limbs and smaller logs. What made this difficult is that the whole wooded area is a pretty steep hill and the downed trees are at the bottom, next to the creek. We planned to use our chipper/shredder to mulch up all of the branches, but we discovered that we have a lot of branches that are too big for it.

Plan B is that we need to burn much of it. We used to have a small fire ring behind the garden, but that disappeared with the garden expansion this year. We were tired of dragging out wood anyway, so Ma and I decided to carry up rocks from the creek instead - much easier, right?

After a great deal of effort, we had enough rocks to make a bigger new fire ring. We dug out a hole and built the ring. I concreted the rocks together, so this ring is a bit more permanent than our last one.

You can see the garden in the background of the above picture. Here is the final product from the other direction:

Tonight we will have our first official camp fire in it. I can just taste the marshmallows! We still have a lot of work to do with the woods, as well as many other outdoor projects. I need to finish building the deck railings and the pergola. We want to build new compost bins and cold frames for the garden, and fence the garden in.

Good thing we built that fire ring. To get everything done this fall, we will be needing it to stay warm because by the time we finish everything, there will be snow on the ground!

We will keep you up to date on our progress. Ma will post again soon as well. It is still a difficult time for our family, so bear with us. In several past posts, we asked for prayer from you during this time. Thank you so much for praying for us. We have felt those prayers. God is so good!

Have a great Lord's day!

Many blessings,

-Pa

Now its personal; Waging war on the groundhog!

Posted on Friday, August 24, 2007 at 11:05

I was feeling sorry for the groundhog because of the drought and heatwave that we are suffering with. There is very little water or food available in the wild. I had almost even forgiven him for eating all of our bean leaves, all of the cucumber leaves, some tomatoes and zucchini and all of the zucchini leaves. But now he has gone too far. He has crossed the line! He has begun eating my beautiful pumpkin plants!

Come on Mr. Woodchuck, at least let a man grow some big pumpkins for his children to enjoy carving! I haven't even gotten around to putting a post on about the pumpkins.

I purposely started them late so they wouldn't get too big too soon. They are at the end of the garden and I am letting them grow out onto old carpet and tarps.

Things were growing along great and we had a dozen or so baby pumpkins.

Many of them had grown much bigger that this photo, but now Mr. Groundhog has eaten them and some of the leaves! It's time to declare war. We loaned our Have-a-heart trap to my Father-in-law and we are getting it back tomorrow night. At the rate the groundhog is going though, that's too long to wait.

Sometimes a gardener has got to do what a gardener has got to do. I must sit out in the garden all night and all day tomorrow and make sure the groundhog doesn't eat anything else!

Of course I can't really do that, so Mary and Laura and I whipped up a quick likeness of me, set it next to the pumpkins with a 24-hour-a-day talk radio station loudly playing. Ma added soap to the scarecrow to add more "human smell". I hope it works.

Tomorrow night we will set the Have-a-heart trap and hopefully on Sunday, Mr. Woodchuck and I will take a nice long drive to his new home.

 Get ready Chuckie, soon it will be moving day!

Groundhogs and raccoons in the garden! (with pictures)

Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2007 at 09:11

Meet the accused:

And now for the evidence:

As Ma has told you in previous posts, the raccoons have eaten EVERY cantaloupe and watermelon in the garden, even if they aren't ripe yet.  We know the damage is from raccoons because we can see their claw marks on the inside on the melons.

Here is an interesting melon that I found about 100 feet from the garden:

Look how a raccoon broke a hole in the melon and dug out all of the flesh.  This melon must have taken quite a while to eat. One little raccoon probably pulled it from the vine for himself and rolled it away from the others who were feasting right their in the garden!

In addition to the melons, ALL of the green bean leaves, cucumber leaves and sweet potato leaves have been eaten. That's where the groundhog comes in. Laura and I saw one eating the beans last weekend. He was pretty fat! What upsets us the most is that he (or they) destroyed the sweet potatoes. This was our first year for growing  them and we only had a small bed full.

This is what the sweet potato bed looked like before the attack:

And this is what it looked like the day after:

Now, a week later, there are absolutely no leaves left.

I never like to end a post with negatives, so next I want to show pictures of the wonderful salsa we have made:

And we have still had some good harvests even with the critter attacks:

We have had a great time tending and harvesting the garden and have been truly blessed. We were pretty upset about losing so much to the critters, but the weather has been so hot and dry that we also feel sorry for the animals. Next year we will have a fence to keep them out.

As for the rest of this year, we will be planting garlic, broccoli, cabbage, kale, lettuce and spinach in the garden and we will figure out how to build a temporary fence around a bed or two. I will share more of that with you at a later date.

Until then, stay cool and happy gardening!

Blessings,

Pa

My favorite fruit from the garden!

Posted on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 at 07:14

Botanically speaking a fruit is the part of a plant that contains the seed. With this definition in mind we could call something from the garden a fruit if we eat the part with the seed. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and green beans would be examples of fruit. Lettuce, celery, radishes and carrots would then be vegetables.

These are not the definitions we use in cooking or when eating however. Luckily this whole mess was cleared up in 1893 when the United States Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable instead of a fruit. In that case, they wisely gave us our current definitions of fruits and vegetables. They said a vegetable is something we eat with lunch or dinner and a fruit was something sweet that was generally eaten as dessert.

So with the Supreme Court's definition in mind, the fruits we are growing this year in our garden are strawberries, watermelon and cantaloupe. We also have apple and peach trees and blueberry bushes but none of these are my favorite garden fruits.

My absolute favorite fruit from the garden, by the Supreme Court's definition, is......

Zucchini!

That's right, zucchini. I know zucchini is a squash which is a vegetable, but my dessert last night was sweet and delicious and made from zucchini.

Ma, Laura and Mary made the best zucchini bread ever! They used a fantastic Amish recipe. Maybe one of them will share the recipe with you in a future post.

For now I will have to tell you how to make it by explaining in great detail what they did and by showing you step by step pictures. Pay close attention now.

First they cut and grated the zucchini:

Then they mixed in some sort of ingredients and put in the zucchini. They proceeded to mix the batter up some more and put it in bread pans:

Then they put the pans in the oven at some temperature for some amount of time.

See? Its easy. If you do it exactly like I have explained it to you, you will have tasty Amish zucchini bread.

When I got home, Ma cut me a big piece and served it on one of our old fashioned Amish plates.

And this is what it looked like after I did my part:

I was happy to pitch in.

So there you have it; my favorite fruit from the garden.

Many Blessings,

- Pa

Pickle Making Time!

Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 12:03

Evidently my family are creatures of habit. Just as festivals and holidays are celebrated at the same time each year, I now declare the first weekend of August as Pickle Days!

Without realizing it we made our garden fresh pickles on the same weekend this year as we did last year. Last year we were beginners and broke a couple of jars adding them to the hot water. This year we felt like pros since we didn't break any jars and unlike last year, we actually had the tools you are supposed to have for canning.

We made Bread and Butter Pickles and processed 9 jars.

I planted the cucumbers a bit late this year, so we don't yet have enough to make a huge amount of pickles. The plants are all doing well and we have brine left over, so I hope to make more bread and butters later this week. The dill pickles will have to wait another week or two.

I guess I'll have to extend the official Pickle Days Holiday to include all of August!

Small Garden Harvest

Posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 12:46

One of the things I love about having a vegetable garden is that for the rest of the summer you can harvest fresh veggies for dinner. 

I'm not talking about the big harvests of beans or tomatoes or zucchini that occur. I'm talking about having the ability to pick just enough for that days meals. Laura enjoyed harvesting all of this but she thought the composition of my picture was all wrong. She rearranged the veggies to look like this: 

She's right, that looks better.

Either way they are arranged, these vegetables will be eaten by our family in two meals. The eggplant is going into spaghetti sauce for a meal. The tomatoes, cucumber and pepper went into last nights salad and the potatoes and onions were cooked with a ham. The only thing that would have been better is if we had our own fresh green beans to go with it. We are growing beans, but they were planted late.

Its probably a good thing that we were late in planting so many things because I wouldn't have time for a big harvest right now. I have still been spending quite a bit of time with my Dad, helping him wherever I can since he is in the latter stages of cancer. When I do have time, the garden is a great place to go to get cheered up. Especially now that Ma weeded it (since I haven't done that enough) and since Laura and Mary enjoy it too. Hopefully they will soon be able to harvest another smiley face!

Where has Pa been? - Veggie Garden Info!

Posted on Friday, July 13, 2007 at 03:30

I just realized that it has been almost a month since I last posted here. Wow, where does the time go? I'm glad that my lovely wife has continued writing here in this blog.

So what have I been doing? I've been creating a new website called Veggie Garden Info. It is a site that covers all aspects of vegetable and fruit gardening. Gardening is something that no matter how long you've been doing it, you still don't know much about. Since for most of us it is a seasonal thing, even if you have put out a vegetable garden for the past 10 years, you still don't have a lot of experience.

That is why Veggie Garden Info pulls together the collective knowledge from garden bloggers from all over the world. It highlights and links to those other blogs that write about their gardening experiences. Check it out if you are interested in veggie gardening.

Also, anyone who blogs here at Homestead Blogger is invited to be a contributor to Veggie Garden Info. I know that many of you write fantastic posts about vegetable gardening. I only use posts from bloggers who have asked to be a part of VGI. It would be neat to get to put on some Homestead Bloggers so let me know if you are interested.

I will try to post more regularly here again.

Many blessings,

Pa

First Ripe Tomato on June 15th!

Posted on Friday, June 15, 2007 at 01:49

Hooray! We picked our first ripe tomato this morning, June 15th! It was my goal to be able to harvest the first ripe tomato by my birthday on June 24th, so It looks like we made it!  

Laura has been watching it all week. 

She wanted to pick it on Wednesday, and we probably could have, but I wanted it to turn all the way red on the vine. When we picked it this morning, she was happy to hold it. 

As for my goal, I still want to eat garden fresh BLTs on my birthday. I'm pretty sure we will be able to because many other tomatoes are almost ripe. 

I have wanted to write more about my tomatoes and many other things going on in the garden, but I haven't had much time lately. My Dad is in the hospital. He has been battling cancer for some time now, and earlier this week he had a stroke. Please pray for him and our family. I am leaving to go back to the hospital now, but first I wanted to share with you our wonderful early tomato. I feel like a proud parent! 

Isn't it beautiful? Maybe we can eat it for Father's Day!

Many blessings!

- Pa

Laura's Veggie Garden Doing Great!

Posted on Sunday, May 27, 2007 at 08:00

Pa's vegetable garden hasn't been much to look at yet this year, but you should see 10-year-old Laura's garden! I am very proud of how well she has done with her cool season garden bed. This year we built two 12x3 garden beds exclusively for her and Mary to work with. Laura decided that one bed would be for cool season veggies and the other for the warm season crops. Here is her beautiful cool-season bed:

On one end she planted broccoli and several kinds of leaf lettuce.

In the middle, she planted more leaf lettuce, head lettuce, spinach and garlic.

On the other end, she planted onions and more spinach and lettuce.

Also notice the two potato plants on the top right of the above picture. When we built the new raised bed for her, we dug some dirt out of the existing garden. The most fertile soil was from where we planted potatoes last year. While digging, Laura found two of last year's potatoes, so she decided to stick them in her garden to see if they would grow. Of course with her green thumb, they are growing like crazy! Now we know where Sammy, her Guinea Pig gets her green thumb from!

We have already enjoyed eating salads from her garden. It has been great because she has at least five different types of lettuce and spinach. I am so glad that she planted this cool-season garden, because I didn't plant any spring lettuce or broccoli. I was much too busy working on building our deck. By the way, it is getting closer to being finished. The floor is done, so we were able to put the furniture out.

But this post is NOT about the deck, it is about Green Thumb daughters. Mary has a green thumb too. She planted a whole bed of flowers in the main garden but they are all still very small. I'm sure I will have beautiful pictures of it to post in about a month. It's nice having good gardening daughters to pick up the slack for ol' dad.

Have a great Memorial Day holiday. Don't forget to remember those soldiers who have laid down their lives for this country. I thank God for them and all of the soldiers currently serving to protect our freedoms!!!

Extra Early Tomato Update

Posted on Thursday, May 24, 2007 at 11:13

I mentioned in my previous "Weight Loss" post that the only thing planted in the garden when I took the pictures were the extra early tomatoes, but that made me realize that I haven't updated you on their progress. I linked to the post from my "Out In The Garden" blog where I outlined the plan to harvest ripe tomatoes by June 24th.  It was one of my main points on my 2007 Garden To Do list. I haven't done all that I planned to do in order to help that occur, but the tomatoes are doing pretty well.

There are a dozen or so tomatoes coming on, and the bigger ones are about the size of a racket ball. Since the variety is Early Girl, they should only get about the size of a tennis ball before they begin turning red. As Ma mentioned earlier, we have been making sure these plants get enough water since we have been in a mini drought. 

Ripe tomatoes in June may not sound very impressive to you southern gardeners, but it is here in northern Kentucky. To put it in the proper perspective, I picked my first ripe tomato last year on August 5th.

I didn't put down the black plastic that I planned to, so I hope the cool nights of May have not slowed down the tomato growth too much.

We are now less than a month away from June 24th. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I will indeed be able to eat my own organic, home grown, garden fresh tomato on that day - which is my birthday.

And yes Eric (PureWater), I will eat it lazily while sitting on my new deck!

- Pa