Garden Season Over – Killing Frost – October 28, 2010

Oh baby was it cold last night. It ended up dropping down to 28F overnight. So when I got home from work ~6pm, it was a mad rush to pick everything worth picking in the garden before the frost hit. That ended up being about eight tomatoes, ~5 lbs of jalapenos, ~2 lbs of aji limon, and all the rhubarb left in the garden (half a grocery bags worth). And with this mad rush of a harvest, the gardening season is basically over for 2010. The only few surviving items in the garden are the Swiss Chard, the green onions and the sage, but other then that, everything else it dead. Continue reading

Garden – Late-September 2010

I took these late night shots of the aji limo last night, since for a while there I was worried that they weren’t going to turn yellow. But as you can tell in a couple of the pictures, slowing but surely the aji are going from green to yellow. You can even see a couple of the jalapenos going from green to red.

I had a couple of ideas that I might test out this weekend. But seeing how I only have about 2 or 3 weeks before the first frost hits. I better get cracking on these ideas.

Idea #1, is to take all the red jalapenos, and make a red jalapeno hot sauce, using the latest version of the hot sauce recipe.
Idea #2, would be to make some hot sauce from the green aji.
And finally idea #3, would be to try drying out some of the peppers (aji or jalapeno) for homemade hot pepper flakes.

Garden – 07/08/2010

Look at the green garden monster grooooooow. Its been raining on and off for the last couple of weeks. So I really haven’t needed to use the irrigation system that I set-up around the yard. So for now, I’ll call that a bonus. Continue reading

Garden – 06/16/2010 – Setting up the trellis

The tomatoes are starting to get fairly tall and a couple already have blossoms, so I think its about time to setup the trellis system for this year. In years past I’ve left the upper crossbars in place and them tried to space the plants under the crossbars. But at the end of last season I took down all the 1/2″ EMT conduit crossbars, since it really wasn’t the best setup for what I was trying to do. Continue reading

Garden – 06/10/2010

Man oh man, look at all those weeds on the right hand side of the garden. It looks like its finally time to do a little bit of weeding in the garden, even though I haven’t been looking forward to the task. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

Overall, everything seems to be coming in nicely. The sweet corn and rhubarb are growing like gangbusters. The tomatoes finally seem to be growing well. Maybe in another week or so I’ll prune off all the suckers on the tomatoes, and string them up to the trellis. Continue reading

Garden – 05/31/2010

As you can probably tell, this is basically just a random dump of pics from the back garden. It seems like most of the plants are doing well. I finally spent some time during Memorial Day weekend to re-do the fence around the garden. Since each morning as I was leaving for work before the fence was fixed, the rabbits were basically using my garden as their personal buffet line. With the worst of the damage being on the tomatoes and swiss chard.

For some strange reason out of the four different beans/peas that I planted in the front right corner. The only seeds that really didn’t germinate at all were the Snow Snap peas from johnny’s, so go figure. But the Xera and Carson both seem to be coming on nice and strong, which is fine with me. Since the only ones that I really care about are the Carson’s, since they are a yellow wax bean. So if I’m able to harvest anything from the other three beans/peas, I’ll consider it a bonus in my book.

Garden – 05/24/2010

Once again I got myself into another little side project with the garden. This time it has to do with setting up a makeshift irrigation system as cheaply as possible for the garden.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how to run a water line over to the garden area as easily as possible. Since dragging around a 100′ hose in the yard is just too cumbersome. And trenching the yard to put the irrigation line underground is just overkill.

Once again, Menards was having a sale on plumbing/irrigation parts, and while I was looking at the sales flyer the idea hit for running the irrigation piping on the top rail of the fence going around the yard, and just securing it to the fence rail with zip ties. So with a plan in place, it was time to pick up all the parts for this project.

It turns out that this whole project only ran me about $50, and that included the crimping tool which was $9.99. Yeah I could have done this even more cheaply and gone with plastic quick connect fittings which would have been ~$6 total instead of $22 total for all the brass fitting. But for me, the extra $16 was worth the splurge.

I guess we’ll see over time how this set-up hold up to the weather.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 13

Amazing what another five days of growing will do, but it looks like I have a mixed bag of results as far as seeds that ended up germinating.

Success:
Aji Limo
El Jefe
1/2 the Bell Peppers
1/3 the Banana style peppers
1/2 the Sage
1/2 the Basil

Failed:
The other 1/2 or 1/3 of all those listed above
all the parsley
all the cilantro
all the oregeno
all the rosemary

I have to say that I’m not 100% sure that the parsley, cilantro, oregeno, and rosemary have failed. Since all those herbs take anywhere from 14 to 21 days to germinate. So before I toss out all the dirt in those flats, I’ll give them another week or so to do their thing.

Seed Starting – 1st flat – Day 8

It’s been a little bit tricky, figuring out how to get the temperature just right on the heating pad. Since when I wrapped the whole flat in a movers blanket, the temperature inside the flat shot up to 95F. So I’m going to test out simulating the heat and light cycle of the sun in the growing area. So last night I set up a make shift growing station with a grow light on a couple of copier boxes, with the heating pad and the grow light both plugged into a timer.

The basil ended up sprouting this past weekend, which was a lot quicker than expected. And when I checked the flat this morning, I started to see some activity on the El Jefe jalapenos and the sage. As it currently stands, it seems like the heating mat is cutting down the germination time almost in half, which is pretty amazing. That is of course, with me assuming that the seeds that I saved from last year are still viable. Which is the big question mark for the garden this year.