Gardening Floyd: Finally! Summer Veg!

Despite the warm winter and early spring we experienced here in Floyd,  I feel like I've been running behind with the garden this season.  I got tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, melons, and squash in by mid-June but never did get any annual herbs planted.  I got cannellini beans and chickpeas in the ground in the Lower 40 and Michael got tepary beans in the ground in the house garden but we never got our edamame or green beans planted.  Luckily I have lots of quarts of green beans from last year.  We have harvested about a quarter bushel of Yukon Gold potatoes, but would have had a lot more if I had been more diligent.  I think we're going to have a bumper crop of fingerlings.  I'm convinced that the 3 lb./$4 dollar bag of mixed fingerlings from the produce section of the local Walmart grocery is growing better than the $12 per lb. single variety fingerling seed potatoes from a seed supplier ever would have.  Same goes for the sweet potatoes.  They're growing gangbusters from starts from a few grocery store sweets.  Major potato lesson learned there!

See those eggplants on the right?  Those are the first ever eggplants I've been able to bring to maturity since we've lived in Floyd.  Other places we've lived I've been inundated with eggplants but here we have large devastating populations of flea beetles that turn the leaves of young plants to lace, weakening and killing them.  It took spraying the transplants with Surround and pyrethrum as soon as they were in the ground and then immediately covering the bed with floating row cover that allowed the plants to get to a size where they could resist the damage.  To the right of the eggplants is the first Smokey tomato.  It's destiny is sourdough bread slathered with mayo for my lunch.  Next to that is a Carnival bell and two Corno di Toro sweet peppers.  Then a variety of pickling cucumber called Homemade and in the lower left corner, Mini-Belles.  I absolutely love those for appetizer stuffing, pickling, and fresh snacking.

The white powdery substance you see on the veg is Surround.  It's a kaolin clay product that gets mixed with water and sprayed on the fruit and veg.  It was first used mainly on apples and other tree fruits but was found effective for other crops as well.  It's a pretty innocuous substance but bugs don't like it and it also helps protect fruit and veg from sunscald.

The pumpkins and winter squash are in full flower and fruiting, the crookneck summer squash are just beginning to set fruit.  The Moon and Stars watermelons and Pike muskmelons are looking good.  It's just about time to start the fall garden seeds for broccoli, cabbage, greens and other cold weather crops already.

I don't think I'll ever catch up!

Gardening Floyd: 4th Annual Floyd County Seed Swap Scheduled

The fourth annual Floyd County Seed Swap sponsored by Miracle Farm will be held at the Floyd Country Store on Saturday, February 18 from 10 am to 11:30 am.  This is a great way to meet local gardeners of all ages and experience levels and swap gardening stories and advice as well as seeds!  There will also be handouts on composting, vermiculture, germinating tips, seed age viability, and more.

Acceptable seeds for swapping are both left over commercial packets and home-saved seeds of heirloom or open pollinated varieties.  Please label your home-saved seeds with as much info as possible including the name of the variety and the year the seed was saved.  Seed saved from hybrid plants is not encouraged since it has a tendency to revert back to the undesirable traits of the hybrid's parent plants.

See ya there!

Check back in April for scheduling details for the follow-up seedling swap event!

Gardening Floyd: The Lower 40

Floyddate 6-6-11: Last fall we bought the 2.5 acres below us that came with a single wide trailer, a very nice chicken coop, an old shed that needs reclaiming, and a large garden area that had been plowed and grown on once and then let go.  We have a young family we're very fond of renting the trailer, we have our laying flock in the chicken coop, and we've started planting the garden.  I'll reclaim the shed later.

The lower 40 garden and the coop

Gardening Floyd: After the Deluge

It's been about 10 days since the torrential rain that filled every branch, stream, creek, river, and pond to overflowing and completely saturated the ground.  We've had a mix of bright, sunny days and typical April showers since then.  The grass has been growing like crazy and the sound of lawn mowers is back.  Unfortunately the soil hasn't drained and dried enough to do seriously tilling and both the backyard gardeners and farmers of Floyd are falling behind schedule.  If the ground is too damp when tilled it clumps and balls up, damaging the soil structure, instead of leaving behind a nice crumbly bed for seeds and transplants.  It's a little frustrating.  These damp overcast days are perfect for transplanting but only if the beds have already been prepared.

Gardening Floyd: April Showers Bring....

...May Flowers, supposedly.  But not when those showers try to wash the county off the map.

While I was sitting inside the other day whinging on about it raining and needing inspiration, here's what was going on outside.

This is our normally placid and picturesque pond...

...and this is what I saw when I got up from posting...

Gardening Floyd: Inspiration

Sigh.  It's raining again.  I was supposed to be going to the community garden to help with staking out beds so when the tiller arrives he'll know exactly what needs done, but it's pouring.  We could have done it in drizzle or a light rain, but no.  It's windy, whippy raining.  I need some inspiration.  Maybe you do too.  Here's some photos of our garden from last year.

Scarlet Nasturtiums, Alibi Cucumbers, Currant Tomatoes

Gardening Floyd: Mid-April

The garden is beginning to look like a garden again!  We've had lots of rain, hail, and high winds, even some tornadoes which are unusual in the Blue Ridge Mountains but we've also had warmer temperatures.  The plastic is off three of our hoop houses (Mother Nature insisted in the form of wind), the earliest spring and cool weather crops are growing well, and the herbs are coming along nicely.

You may remember this peek inside a tunnel

Here's that tunnel now

Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower

Gardening Floyd: Intimations of Spring

Floyd has been enjoying a prolonged bout of mild weather for this time of year.  So much so, that some of our perennials have begun to make appearances in our garden.  I have mixed emotions.  On the one hand I'm hopping up and down and yelling, "YAY!  C'mon SPRING!"  On the other hand, I'm worried and trying to warn our baby fruit trees to be patient and wait.  The hard, shiny, protective shells on their buds are beginning to give way to velvet.  If at some point the weather turns back to cold seasonal temperatures and the buds are too far along we could lose any fruit we might get from them or even the little trees themselves.

Here's what I saw this morning:

The Garlic Bed

Gardening Floyd: Plant a Seed

It's February first and nearly time to start seeds for crops that have a long growing season, need warmer temps for germination, or are just plain difficult to direct seed or get past the flea beetles.  Last year we started Violetta artichokes in January.  They require a very long growing season.  Hopefully they'll winter over and we can pick artichokes this year!  We amused the neighbors because they thought we had planted a row of bull thistles in our front yard.  Artichokes are members of the thistle family.

After having little luck starting healthy stocky transplants indoors we were about to give up.  We lusted after one of these but at $370 that so wasn't going to happen.

So Michael started researching and looking around and came up with this: