The Garlic harvest begins!

Short post tonight to record the initial garlic harvest.

Total:  414/512.  81%
Grand Total:  479

Rosewood (ARK):  59/65  (harvested 7/20/14)
Conway Russian Red (ARK): 71/75  (harvested 7/20/14)

Misc. Mixed Garlic (ARK):  57/118  (7/21/14)

Phillips (SOS): 14/15 (7/21/14)

Ukrainian Red (SOS): 10/11 (7/21/14)

Italian Purple (SOS):  17/17  (7/21/14)

Buckland Purple 1 (ARK):  40/36  (7/21/14)*

Spanish Roja (GFCG):  72/77 (7/21/14)

Georgia Fire (GFCG):  32/32  (7/21/14)

Buckland Purple (ARK):  34/34  (7/21/14)

Misc softneck (ARK):  8/32  (7/21/14)

Misc. Volunteer Garlic from 2013:  65

Over all the garlic I've harvested this year is significantly smaller than last year, however the yield in numbers is higher.  The one type of garlic that didn't fare well was the mixed bag, with more than 50% lost.  This was no surprise to me as it was planted late and the seed wasn't in the best condition.  Discounting this group and the 30 softneck bulbs, harvest rate would have been in excess of 95%.

It's drying now, we'll see how it looks in a couple of weeks.

* Several cloves planted were actually two cloves stuck together and thus produced multiple heads.

Squash, cukes and corn! And more maps!

Getting close to having everything in the ground that's happening this year.  I'm still debating on carrots.  I've got parts of three beds left and I can't make up my mind on how I want to use them.  Tomorrow is Saturday and Saturday is Farmers' Market day.  Last chance to get stuff not already in the ground.  At this point the only thing I'm looking for some additional herbs (basil, thyme, dill, etc.) and maybe a really interesting tomato variety I haven't tried before (or a favorite I didn't get this year).

Those last few spots in the garden are going to go quickly, I've got a good number of squashes still to go in, as well as a few cukes and melons.  I haven't planted any beans yet, that'll be in the next few weeks.  I've got a number of varieties, both bush and pole.  Hopefully this year we'll actually have a decent bean crop.  Last year we got nothin'.

I really don't know if I'm going to plant carrots this year.  We've had diminishing results every year since the second year.  Last year we got almost nothing.  What we did get was heavily eaten by something.  I am planning on doing some late season crops once the garlic has been pulled.  I'll plant some kale, watermelon radishes, brussels sprouts, beats, kohlrabi, and more peas.

Today I planted seven squash plants:  4 butternut and 3 sugar hubbard.  3 of the 4 butternuts were pretty hardy, one was not much more than a sprout, but there was room in the bed, so I figured I'd give the guy a shot.  The three sugar hubbards, I probably put too close together, but there's limited space so, I did what I had to do.

I transplanted four cucumber starts as well. The cucumber starts were from Natural roots and look way more vigorous than my own.  Next year I'm going to try start mix again, and see if I have any better results.

Last weekend I quickly got some corn in the ground.  Another attempt, most likely another year of failure with corn.  One of these years, I'll actually read up on it and figure out what I need to do to grow corn up here.

Below are three maps, two new (corn and squash) and one update (beds 1- 8).

Beds 1 - 8 are getting crowded.  I've got a little bit of room here and there.  It'll be enough to get in some more herbs, beans and maybe a run at early season carrots.

 The squash bed is also home to some onions (Copra, 45, storage type), a few odd ball garlics, and a lonely potato plant.  So far I've got seven winter squash plants in the bed.  All were started at home.  3 Sugar Hubbard and 4 Butternut.  The butternut seeds are several years old and sprouted surprisingly well.

The 'corn' bed is currently half full of corn.  I think the other half will have squash in it.  Maybe some beans.

More transplants!

So tonight I decided not to be lazy for at least fifteen minutes.  In that span of time I got two tomato plants in the ground (an Old German and a Moskovich), six peppers and five swiss chard starts.  I've previously posted the map image with all the tomatoes listed, but here's a complete list of veggies planted in beds 1 - 6:

Tomatoes:  31 plants; 20 different varities

Atherton Farm:

• MS - Mr. Stripley (1)
• OG - Old German (1)
• YW - Yellow Brandywine (1)

Bear Roots Farm:

• AP - Amish Paste (2)
• SG - Striped German (2)

Crabapple Farm:

• MM - Moneymaker (2)
• PR - Purple Russian (2)
• YB - Yellow Beefsteak (1)

Dancing Bear Farm:

• SC - Sungold Cherry (1)
• LD - Lemon Drop Cherry (1)
• SW - Snow White (1)
• MR - Martin's Roma (2)
• FL - Florentino (2)
• CC - Chocolate Cherry (2)

Good Bunch Farm:

• SGA - Striped German (1)
• MO - Moskovich (1)

Natural Roots:

• SR - Speckled Roman (2)
• GP - Garden Peach (2)

Red Fire Farm:

• SRF - Speckled Roman (2)
• HD - Honey Drop (1)
• HB - Hillbilly (1)

Peppers:  11 plants; 4 varieties

Good Bunch Farm:

• PC - Carmen, Sweet (6)

Bear Roots Farm:

• PJ - Jalepeno (2)
• PH - Hidalgo

Red Fire Farm

• PB - Banana

Additionally, Swiss Chard from Good Bunch has been planted, along with some herbs (Bush Basil, Cuban Oregano, and Rosemary.  I still want to get some regular basil, parsley, and need to transplant the sage and thyme.

I've direct seeded some squash (ZR - Zucchini and PP - Patty Pan) and corn.  The corn is several years old, so I'm not terribly optimistic that it'll produce anything.

Still to be transplanted:  lots of squash and some cucumbers.

Another Map!

So far this spring, I've added three beds to the garden plans and eliminated four.  The beds next to the house are slowly being removed from use and even existence.  The only two remaining beds contain strawberries and asparagus.  The strawberries look like they're going to have a really productive year.  The plants are as vigorous as I've ever seen them and they've flowered heavily.  So we'll see how that goes.  The asparagus bed produced a whopping five sprouts this year, which is five more than last year.

In the map above, you'll notice there are lots of leeks planted, 90 to be precise-ish.  45 Alto leeks from Greenfield Community Farm and 45 King Richard leeks.  I believe they were from Shoestring Farm in Colrain, but I'm not certain.  I'll have check the farmer's market this weekend to confirm the source.  In addition to the leeks, I've also transplanted 45 Copra onions (not pictured in this map), also from Shoestring (I think).

The bed on the far left of the map is new for this year.  It has eight of our blueberry bushes transplanted.  I wasn't able to get the last three moved over before they budded/leafed out, so the other three will need to move next spring.

The five red hexagons represent the first of the planted tomatoes.  I believe these are all from Crabapple Farm in Chesterfield, but I'm going to have to double check.  They were purchased from the Tuesday market in Noho, but I failed to record the name of the vendor that sold them.  The varieties planted so far are:

• MM - Moneymaker (2)
• PR - Purple Russian (2)
• YB - Yellow Beefsteak (1)

I've got 21 more still to transplant from four different sources.

4 Purchased from Bear Roots Farm:

• AP - Amish Paste (2)
• SG - Striped German (2)

9 purchased from Dancing Bear Farm:

• SC - Sungold Cherry (1)
• LD - Lemon Drop Cherry (1)
• SW - Snow White (1)
• MR - Martin's Roma (2)
• FL - Florentino (2)
• CC - Chocolate Cherry (2)

4 purchased from Natural Roots:

• SR - Speckled Roman (2)
• GP - Garden Peach (2)

4 purchased from Red Fire Farm:

• SRF - Speckled Roman (2)
• HD - Honey Drop (1)
• HB - Hillbilly (1)

This Saturday I'm going to hit up both the Ashfield and Greenfield Farmers' markets to see if there's anything else that strikes my fancy.  Even with 26 plants, I feel like there's still room for one or two more tomatoes.  That might be because we're pretty heavy on the cherry tomatoes (6) this year.  That's ok, last year we did four, with two of them a 'tiny' variety.  There's some duplication this year, which is due totally to buying plants from a variety of sources.  I bought 'Speckled Roman' from two sources without realizing it; additionally Honeydrop and Lemon Drop are basically the same tomato (again from multiple sources).

Normally all of my tomatoes come from Dancing Bear Farm in Leyden, MA.  However they had some problems this spring, perhaps due to a change in seed start mix and the result was some slowed growth.  I bought a few plants from him and they've put some good growth on the last couple of days, so I'm optimistic that they'll still produce nicely.


Update:  Friday, May 30 -  Transplanted eight  tomato plants this morning: Speckled Roman and Garden Peach from Natural Roots; and Florentino and Chocolate Cherry.  The map has been updated accordingly.

Update:  Wednesday, June 3 - Transplanted another 8 tomatoes, 5 peppers, 3 herbs and direct seeded some summer squash and corn over the weekend.  Transplanted the last 2 tomatoes, another 6 peppers and 5 swiss chard tonight.

Tomatoes:

3 purchased from Atherton Farm:

• MS - Mr. Stripley
• OG - Old German
• YB - Yellow Brandywine

2 purchased from Good Bunch Farm:

• SGA - Striped German
• MO - Moskovich

Harvest 2014

Yeah, so summer isn't even here yet and I'm already tracking harvest information.  This is really just an attempt to begin to quantify cost, labor, and production of the garden.  Since I've decided to do this part way into the growing season, it's really not easy to figure out costs or labor, since I've already sunk quite a bit into the garden.  I'll be happy to have numbers on production for 2014; in 2015 I'll track all three.

May Harvest Report:

• Spring Garlic - 3 heads; sprouted from garlic left in the ground from the year before
• Asparagus - 5 measly stalks; a surprise for us since we thought the garlic had died

April fools

March: In like a lion, out like a lamb.

I almost don't have the energy this today.  Tomorrow I fly for Las Vegas. Tonight was frantic packing, followed by frantic taking down of buckets, followed by frantic household chores (kitty litter, cleaning of some sugaring supplies), and now finally a rare blog post.

The sugaring season was almost a bust. About 2 gallons produced, all said and done.  Not enough to give anything away really, though I did give a small amount to friends that kindly donated some unused buckets that had been cluttering up their garage.

The garlic came to an end tonight, as the last of it was dehydrated over the weekend.  While we lost a lot to rot before harvest, what survived cured well and lasted a long time.  Last year's crop made it to only January before I lost nearly all of it to mold.  I tossed only two heads out of sixty+ due to mold.

The last of the squash is represented by one lone Blue Hubbard that is in need of cooking sooner than later.

There's still a good number of dried tomatoes, but not enough to make it till July when the first fresh ones will be coming out of the garden.  This last year was a bad tomato year for our CSA, hopefully this year will be better, and we'll be able to put up more.

Finally, there's still some precious wild blueberries in the freezer.  One of the unforseen benefits of having River, meeting a couple who has a dozen acres of wild blueberries in their backyard.

The next two months are promising to be very busy.  Hopefully I'll have time to work on the garden between trips and everything else.

Building more beds; tearing down some old ones; working on the driveway; painting the interior of the house; building a shed; getting rid of the satellite dish; painting/fixing the deck and porch; and cleaning up the yard are so on the agenda for this year.

So much to do, so little money to do it with.

Garlic in the ground and other stories from the yard

Finished up garlic planting for this year.  I meant to cut back significantly on how much I planted last year.  The jury is out on how much less I planted because I can't find my records.  I think it was in the neighborhood of 550 cloves, but could be as high as 650. This year's total came in at 512.  We've got a lot of garlic left, I think next year we won't hold back on eating green garlic next year.

In an attempt to not loose the garlic map for change, I've drawn them out in MSPaint.  See, I'm an artist!

The yard as it exists in the fall of 2013.  All of the brown squares represent existing beds ready for 2014.  The bed with the brown stripes needs to be built.  The two beds with no fill is the squash hill from 2013.  The 'hill' will be transformed into two large beds for squash or other space intensive crops.

Garlic Beds 1 - 3 are shown below along with three other beds labeled 'fallow'.  They're not truly fallow, they've just got the winter off.  Next year, I'd like them to be a mix of tomatoes, beans, leeks, herbs, carrots, celeriac, and some pest detering flowers.  The tomatoes this year were planted in beds by themselves and some leeks.  However, they grew so fast that they dramatically overshadowed the leeks to the point that they barely grew.  Next year, the tomatoes will be split between three beds and planted in the back third.  The front two-thirds will be dedicated to shorter crops.

Garlic Beds 1 & 2 were new this year, built in the spring with the help of Ben.

Garlic Bed 3 was the first bed I built on the hill (in either 2011 or 2012).  It is  

need of some maintenance as the posts holding it in place have started to ror.  

Garlic Bed 4 was going to be a bed of tomatoes and squash this year, but my garlic plans spun out of control again.  Ah well, you win some, you plant more garlic some.  Like Garlic Bed 3, this one is also in need of some maintenance.  When I built it, I made it a little too wide, so it's really hard to get to the middle.  I'm contemplating splitting it in half (and maybe narrowing it a little too).

That's it on the garlic.

Another post will be coming soon for seed selection for next year.  I'm going to try to keep purchases at a minimum.  There's two varieties of squash I want to try, otherwise I'm planting what I've already got.  I'm going to try my hand at peppers and tomatoes again, but on a limited basis.  Try with a small number and figure it out, then try to scale up.

Also on the agenda for next year:  low tunnels and row covers.  Being up here in the hills means a late start and an early end to the growing season.  I need to do some kind of season extension, though on a limited scale.

Finally for next season, I'll be working on fruits.  I want to get more blueberries, move the strawberries, add another couple of apple trees (and maybe some pears) and cultivate the raspberries that are already in the yard.

That's it for now.