August Garden Update & Honey Harvest

Like every year, I neglect to blog during the busy summer months. This is partially due to our travel schedule this time of year, but also because the condition of the garden deteriorates the deeper we get into summer. I've come to the conclusion that for my purposes, we have two growing seasons, Spring which is mid-March to late June (although that might be pushing it); and Fall, which is early September to early December. The most of what remains are the doldrums for my vegetable crops, with a few noteworthy exceptions: okra, field peas, some peppers, and some eggplants.

The last time I posted I was composing the epitaph for my garden because of the monsoons we had had. Somehow, we were able to recover. For a period of time in late June, we were picking over a pound of tomatoes per day, as well as abundant carrots, cucumbers, muskmelons, an occasional watermelon, peppers, and leeks.




Then we stopped getting rain. And it got hotter. Together, these two whittled away at the garden's vitality. Plus, my summertime travel schedule kept me away from my weeding responsibilities. At this point, amidst the knee high weeds, we have a few strangling plants (tomato, pepper, eggplant, etc.), but it's about time to prepare for fall planting. I've already started kale and collard seeds indoors. I will post about fall planting later.

Overall, it was a tough Spring season, with June being a very difficult month. Monsoon rains in the first week, then record hot temperatures for the remainder of the month. We were able to somewhat bounce back from the rain, but the early heat didn't help.

Other exciting news, we harvested our first honey yesterday with the invaluable assistance of Leverne Newman (who graciously let us borrow his extractor and hot knife for an afternoon). Our hive has two boxes that are filled with honey, but we only harvested one of them. We don't need that much honey, and we figured we leave them some for the winter. Well, I'm glad we made that decision because we ended up with almost 2 gallons of honey. The process went pretty smooth, except that after we had removed the honey-filled frames from the hive, we left them out so that the few strangler bees could return to the hive. Well, the opposite happened. A bunch bees from the hive came over and started reclaiming their honey. We didn't know this was happening until we returned a few hours later and saw that some frames had a third less honey than before. The bees were literally stealing their honey back. Once we realized this, we put the frames on the screened porch and proceeded with extraction.






As you can see, our honey is very dark and strong flavored, almost like molasses.

Too Much Rain

Well of course, after a few months of drought we are dumped on with a week of monsoon rain. In the past week Florence has received almost 5 inches of rain. The average for this time of year is .85 inches a week.

This poses a huge problem because our soil is very heavy and takes a long time to drain. So, we've basically had standing water in the garden at least since Sunday. One of the reason I've made so many raised beds this past year is to try and alleviate some of this problem, however, this remedy has its limitations. Yesterday I was forced to pull up a tomato plant that was dying of disease, and as soon as I did so the hole that was left promptly filled with water from the surrounding soil. The beans are dying from root rot, white mold and southern blight is on some of the tomatoes, there's intense cracking on several of the tomatoes, and water wilt. Not to mention the fact that any leaf from any plant that makes contact with the soil instantly turns yellow and dies, further exposing the plant to soil-borne diseases. Many of the plants are literally rotting in the ground.

Mold at base of tomato plant

Cracking on Cherokee Purples

Oh, and the good news is that there's rain in the forecast for today and tomorrow. If this keeps up we won't have any garden left. Maybe next year I should consider growing rice.

Newly planted corn rows

Garden Nemeses

So far, everything has been growing relatively well. Fortunately, the tomatoes are doing much better than last year, thanks to the raised beds and drier weather. Peppers, eggplant, cukes, squash, melons, field peas, and kale are all doing very well also. So far we've harvested several crops of peas (which have recently been pulled up and their bed planted with corn/squash/beans), a couple pounds of potatoes (though most of them are still in the ground), a ton of basil, some amazing carrots and beets, a number of undersized onions, and some cabbage. We've also got okra seedlings from seeds we saved last year that are doing very well. Overall, a fairly successful spring.



Despite these successes, there have been some failures. Unfortunately the biggest of which has been beans. This is surprising considering how well they did last year. At present they are particularly suffering from two afflictions: 1) root rot, and 2) bean leaf beetles:

These little bastards chew countless holes in the bean leaves, eventually causing the plant to be stunted in growth and diminished in productivity. The only positive is that they don't actually chew on the developing beans. That pleasure is reserved for these asses:

Recent Pictures

Tomatoes and Herbs

Last year our tomatoes did horribly. The weather was incredibly wet which lead to a diseased downfall for nearly all of our twenty-five plants. The only ones that did anything were the San Marzanos and Sungolds.

This year, we're hedging our bets by planting sixty tomato plants. I figure if I can get one tomato per plant I'll be happy. We're also only planting them in raised beds, with 6-10 in containers. Also plan to provide better trellising than I did last year.

Another thing we're doing is starting virtually all our plants from seed. Over the winter we bought a florescent light that hangs in our spare closet under which we have been raising seedlings, initially kale, cabbage, spinach, and broccoli; and lately tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and basil.

I've been hardening off the tomato seedlings for the past few days and hope to put them into the ground later in the week when the high is supposed to be in the 80s.

The varieties we're doing this year:

Small-fruited: Sungold, Prize of the Trials
Paste: Amish Paste
Beefsteak: Italian Heirloom, Rose, Mortgage Lifter, German Pink (purchased 6 seedlings from SSE)
Non-Red Slicing: Green Zebra, Japanese Black Trifele, Cherokee Purple




We've also planted an herb garden in the front of the house which currently includes Greek oregano, Italian oregano, sage, dill, mint, lemon balm, cilantro, Italian parsley, German Thyme, onion chives, and Provence lavender.

Spring Planting

We've started preparing and planting beds for the spring. There's still a lot more to do, but so far we've planted kale, cabbage, carrots, beets, onions, leeks, lettuce, spinach, collards, peas, potatoes, asparagus, and radishes. Plus, we've got garlic growing that was planted in the fall.

Garden overview


Potato beds


Root crop bed. We have such a hard time growing good carrots because our soil is so heavy. To fix this, I've built a extra-tall raised bed filled entirely with light soils. Its planted about 80% with carrots, 20% with beets. Hopefully this works, if not, I might give up on carrots.

Couple of rows planted, from right: leeks, brassicas, onions, brassicas, over-wintered kale.

Garlic that was planted in the fall. Plan to harvest in May or June.

Brassica bed: mostly cabbage, and some broccoli, interplanted with lettuce and spinach.


At this point, there's not a whole lot left to plant until the end of the month/early April when we start planting tomatoes, beans, peppers, etc. In the meantime, we're going to build some more raised beds.

Garden - Year 2

We've started the garden back up for spring, despite the incredibly wet winter we've had, and we're going to try to get back into blogging about it. This is partly inspired by Brock's new blog, Dirty Fingernails.

First, here are various pictures from last year's growing season:

5/10/09

5/10/09

Potato flowers, 5/10/09

Hops. We made a great pale ale with them this past fall. 6/3/09



Harvest, 6/20/09

First cantaloupe, 6/24/09

Chickens, 7/11/09

First egg, 9/1/09

Planting the fall garden, 9/13/09

Fall garden, 11/20/09


Harvest, 11/20/09

Starting seedlings indoors for the spring, 1/24/10


Will post about spring planting shortly.