Apple Tree update

Awhile back, I planted a stick in the ground that Henry Field's assured me was a Sweet Sixteen apple sapling. I was dubious it would turn into anything, because it was only about 18 inches long and not much bigger in diameter than a #2 pencil. I am pleased to report that it not only survived, but it's done pretty well:

I not inviting any of you over for apple pie this fall or anything, but I'm saying the tree now vaguely resembles a young tree, and I'm not actively embarrassed to have such a beefy support for a tiny twig. Maybe next fall (or more likely Fall of 2012) we'll actually get some fruit...

The Greenhouse is Up

The greenhouse is up and functional. Here's a pictorial description of the process:

The structure with the deer (squirrel) netting still up and row covers on.

A big hunk of greenhouse plastic, donated generously by my horticulturist friend Gwen.

To get the plastic over the ribs, first put a rock on one side...

Then attach a cord around the rock and pull the cord from the far side.

The plastic is up and my 1-meter tall child stands in as a height reference.

At the bottom, roll lath into the plastic and nail down.

The plastic ,after being secured on all sides.

A crisscross of guy rope goes over the top and through screw eyes at the bottom, to help keep the plastic on where it should be and to make the structure a little more stable.

The inside view of the greenhouse after the plastic is on.

I am happy to report that the greenhouse survived the 40-50+ mph winds that arose the following days, without a bit of damage. The ribs are independently flexible and the plastic is tough, so while the shape of the arch was...altered...at times, no problems arose and the plants didn't even notice the storm.

Here's to some later fall/winter produce!

Shifting to Fall

Temperatures are dropping around Chicago, and this is normally the time when I'd been doing a fall clean-up, some final mulching, and putting my garden to bed for the winter.

But not this year!


This is the winter of Eliot Coleman, when Melissa and I are going to try our hand at Fall gardening aiming for a winter harvest. Here's where we are as of the start of October:

Planted right now (clockwise from bottom left) are Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce, endive, yellow globe onions, bunching onions, full-grown endive, carrots in various stages from seedling to mature, tomato plants up against the house (1 box wrapped, 1 unwrapped to see the difference), mache, more lettuce, spinach, and a fallow place for garlic that's just outside the picture in the lower right.

As you can see, I have row covers in place. These let in about 80% of the light and are water-permeable. They have the added benefits of keeping out insects and providing some cover from the wind. I will say that they make my seedlings look beautiful:

Another new experiment for this Fall is the mache bed. These hardy little salad greens can germinate at 35 degrees and can bounce back from -5 if necessary. The adult plants are only about 4 inches across, so it takes a lot of plants for a salad. So, I've planted about 1200 plants in my bed and they're just starting to pop up:

They're a little hard to see in this picture, but they're there.

One of the successes this summer season has been the raspberries. All of the canes in this picture started as tiny 4"-6" transplant cuttings that came from my 5-year old bush on the side of the dog run.

As you can see, they did very well, despite having the fence in front of them completely overwhelmed by cantaloupe vines for much of the summer. Maybe they decided to grow tall to compensate.

I have noticed that the Fall temps do slow down germination and growth, so I'll keep you apprised of our progress every so often. Check back for more later, especially when we install the plastic on our greenhouse...

Yes, I'm back...

The Greenhouse in its summer look.

My blogging attention always flags in July. I start out with the best of intentions, but when summer is in full bloom, I always vanish from the blogosphere for a good month. Perhaps things get too busy, or maybe I can't imagine anyone caring how many heads or broccoli I picked or how many raspberries I harvested or how my carrots are coming along. Whatever the reason for my silence, it happens every year right on schedule.

This is the deer netting.

For those of you who have been following my greenhouse series, I have indeed completed the project and I present the pictures to prove it. The hoops were installed and painted and the perlin (ridge pole) lashed in place, and the whole structure is pretty solid. I used deer netting (a thin, black plastic mesh in about 3/4" squares) to wrap around the hoops until October arrives and it's time to put on the plastic. The best part is: the protection is working. Yesterday I watched a squirrel actively looking for a way in, even partially climbing the mesh, then giving up the exercise as fruitless and wandering away.
Malamutes, however, are another matter. Not once, but *twice* has Milady invaded the greenhouse. The first time, she slipped between the hoops and the neighbors chain link fence, pulling open a hole in the mesh. She proceeded to trample through a newly-seeded carrot bed, dig a bit in a lettuce seedling bed, and then apparently tried to exit through the yard side. Judging by the way the netting was ripped and the snap clamps were blown off (the clamps keep the netting attached to the hoops), I think she encountered the net, didn't know what it was, and panicked. Let me tell you, a scared Malamute is *strong*.
I chalked this first transgression up to experimentation and innocence...but the SECOND time it happened, I could see where she had purposefully pulled the metting away from the hoops with her claws, forced her way in (again trampling the carrots) and dug down the lettuce seedlings bed until it could no longer be considered a "raised" bed any longer! My lettuce production then suffered a three-week hiatus because all of my intermediate plants were destroyed utterly. How did I feel about that? Angry wasn't the half of it. Milady earned a quick confinement to her dog run until I figured out how to stop her.
I finally installed a stronger wire fence to prevent her from getting between the greenhouse and the neighbor's chain link fence, and that seems to have done the trick because she hasn't gotten in since. Anyway, the greenhouse is up, just waiting for plastic, and the things inside it like the broccoli and squarshes are going CRAZY. Of course, the greenhouse itself is not responsible for this growth, but soon it will be. I just planted a fall crop of endive, Winter Density Lettuce, and more carrots. Looking forward to adding leeks, mache and other goodness...

The Structure Takes Shape

Work continues on the greenhouse as we can. Summer schedules, especially for interpreters like myself, are supposed to calm down and get much more open, but with the work I have plus choreographing shows plus teaching two classes plus writing two (three?) plays, my days seem to be pretty full. This also explains why I don't blog about my every move in the garden right now.

So, in the last greenhouse post, I mentioned that I had removed the fence around the garden, then dug down and cleared the area just inside the landscape timbers. Next, I took 2' length of 1-1/4" Schedule 40 PVC and drove them down into the ground around the perimeter, then used pipe straps to attach them to the timber:

As you can see, these form the sockets for the ribs to fit into. They are drilled to allow two bolts to go through the pipes and secure them.

Next came the ribs. These are 1" diameter pipes that fit inside the sockets and are bent to form the main structural element of the greenhouse. Many hoophouse builders get very long pipes and simply bend them from one side to the other, giving a rounded arch shape. Melissa and I decided to use 90-degree elbows at the top that poles from each side fit into:

This gives the greenhouse a look more akin to a Gothic arch (a vesica pisces for you sacred geometry types) which we prefer to the Quonset hut look. We also think the steeper pitch will shed the rain and snow better. the next challenge was the shape of our garden. It's straight on one side, but on the yard side we curved the bed and the adjacent path. When we designed the landscaping years ago, we only had a flower bed and a tree where the garden is now, so we thought a curve was more aesthetically pleasing. It means that our poles will be longer on one side than the other, and there will have to be some adjusting to make the peaks of the arches line up on the centerline and at the same height.

After the poles were up, it looks like this:

You can see, especially in the first of these pictures, that we have not yet adjusted the peaks. The next steps will be to add a purlin (a ridgepole of electrical conduit that connects the peaks and adds some stiffening), build the end walls that include a door on one end and a window/vent on the other, and (for now) run deer netting around the thing to keep the squirrels (and the dog) out. The greenhouse plastic won't go on onto late October.

Sort of looks like the Air Force Academy Chapel, doesn't it?

Breaking New Ground

So, we have started work on building a greenhouse to effect our plan of harvesting vegetables during the fall and winter. Thought I'd show some in-process photos.

We are technically making a hoophouse, made of bent PVC arches and then greenhouse-gauge plastic sheeting which will go on in the fall. In the meantime, we'll cover the arches with deer netting to keep out the squirrels.

First, we had to remove the wire fence that encircled the main plot, because we're using the timber edging that's in place as the baseboards for the arches. The garden did look quite different than I was used to after the fencing was gone. Here you can see the broccoli, with the garlic further down. The garlic greens are knocked over to let them cure for a week before we harvest the bulbs.

Here's another view, from the other direction. Our hope for this thing is to follow Eliot Colman's advice and use a greenhouse and row covers to extend our growing season into late fall and our harvesting season throughout the winter. And by selecting the right cold-tolerant variety and vegetables, we should be able to do all that without any artificial heat.

Most plans for hoophouse like this call for you to build a big rectangle of 2x10s to attach the bases of the arches to. We decided we would use the timbers that we installed as edging about seven or eight years ago. It's been stable for this long; there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to swap it out for something else. We'll drive 30" long base pipes into the ground next to the timbers where the arch bases will fit, and then go from there. Of course, on the side of the garden near the walk, the soil level is too high to attach anything to the inside of the edging timbers, so it required some digging out:

Got that done all along the edge, and will install the arches soon.

Later note: the dog decided that because the fence was gone she had obviously bee given free rein in the garden, so she trampled by onion and carrot bed pretty severely. We lost the green chive part of 75% of our onions (though the bulbs may still be okay) and the younger carrots may not pull through. [What was the phone number for Animal Control, again?] Milday is now locked in her dog run until a proper fence/barrier is in place once again.

More tomorrow.

My Strange Broccoli

Hey there!

I don't mean to be failblogging two days in a row, but now let's turn our attention to my broccoli. This is my first time trying to grow the stuff, and judging by the height of the plants, it's doing well:

The plants are strong, look healthy, and growing huge. Except for one problem....

There's no broccoli in them.


Again, this is my first time growing them so maybe I don't understand their life cycle correctly, but shouldn't I at least see some nascent broccoli head somewhere in the plant? Here's a shot looking down into the top of the plant:

There's some new leaves growing there at the top of the stalk, but nothing that resembles broccoli. Here's a view from the side:

Nice stout stalk, no broccoli head. I've composted them twice, kept them weeded and watered...any idea what is going on? Am I just being too anxious? Your thoughts/opinions/comments are welcome...

Success and Not So Much

Sorry about the long gap in updating. I've been having a fair amount of garden success so far this year. Above is part of one harvest: onions and cilantro (pictured), along with lettuce and baby spinach. Pretty much, we've stopped buying salad fixin's for the foreseeable future. The lettuce, carrots, onions, spinach, garlic, squash, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and raspberries seem to be growing great, BUT...

Those are my strawberries. Note the scale. They're tiny and not all that sweet. I don't know if the rain gutter system I devised doesn't allow good root expansion, or if they needed more fertilizer/compost because they used up what's was present in the shallow trough. On the plus side, the squirrels haven't bothered them (probably because they weren't worth the trouble!).

You win some, you lose some.

A New Recipe

I've recently become enamored with a new recipe for hamburger/sandwich buns. The taste is great, they are incredibly soft and have a nice open crumb, and they freeze and thaw really well. I've made them twice now, and they've been easy and a success both times. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
15 oz. flour
8 oz. water
1 large egg
4T softened butter
2T honey
1/4 c. dry milk
1/4 c. mashed potato
1-1/2 tsp salt
2-1/4 tsp instant yeast

Directions
Mix everything but flour together, then added the flour gradually--you may use all 15 ounces, and you may not. You want the dough a bit "shaggy" and it should be fairly sticky at this point. Once it's mixed pretty well, cover it with a damp towel and let it rest 25 minutes. Then come back and knead a bit to develop the gluten matrix. Again, it may be more sticky than you're used to, but avoid adding too much flour because that will make the dough more dense and tough. Put back in the bowl and cover.

Let the bulk rise go about 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stretching and folding it once or twice during that time. It should double in size. Then, divide into 3-ounce balls and place on a cookie sheet that is either lightly oiled or covered with baking parchment. Let rise until they are the nearly the size you want them. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Humidify the oven by pouring water into a broiler pan or brownie pan in the bottom of the oven. Bake for 20 minutes or until browned nicely. Remove and brush with softened butter.

Yield: about 10 3-ounce rolls

If you try this recipe, let me know!

Progress and Regress

Well, my cantaloupe seedlings are officially gone. RIP, cantaloupes, we hardly knew ye. I don't know if they got too cold in the last couple of weeks (remember the cool weather we used to have), or if there was some other factor, but they are kaput. On Saturday I direct-sowed some seeds in their place; we'll see if they do any better.

I also planted some more butternut and acorn squash seeds, since those plants looked to be struggling too. Don't know what it is with me and squash/melons.

In the win category, I went to turn my compost pile and found it steaming...in 85 degree weather! I used a probe thermometer and found that the pile was holding a steady 140 degrees. That should make some compost pretty fast, eh? Hot composting, indeed...