We are planting 6 blueberry bushes, since not only are organic blueberries scarce in the stores, they cost a fortune. Blueberries are one of those fruits you really should eat organic or not eat at all, as berries are highly sprayed.
While the initial planting of these takes some effort, the plants can live 15 or more years. Blueberries like a very low PH, between 4 to 5.5. The PH in our backyard is at 5.8, so we amended it with peat and pine fines to bring it down 1/2 to 1 point, and added sulfur to the soil to slowly acidify it. We made raised beds for the blueberries since although they love water, they have different roots than normal plants and can't sit in standing water for long. They have a fairly shallow root system and most of the roots live in the top 10 inches or so, although they can go down 18 inches or more.
We are digging out the soil 9 inches, adding amendments, making raised beds with stone pavers, and then filling the hole and raised bed with the amended soil. The soil ends up being raised about 6 to 8 inches off the ground, leaving a bit of space for mulch.
Varieties we are planting:
2 Rubel
2 Jersey
1 Northland
1 Friendship
We got the plants from Backyard Berry Plants, and we are very pleased with the size and quality of the plants, although some of the plants are leaning severely, as if they were only getting light from one direction while growing.
It's hard work since our soil is so heavy and clay like. We have gotten 3 of the 6 blueberry plants planted so far and still have 3 to go! read more . . .
The swiss chard was slow to start, but after few good rains, it got huge all of a sudden. I've read that rainfall contains natural hydrogen peroxide, which is very good for plants. It also serves to neutralize toxins and chemicals, which is why the air smells so clear after a rainfall. So everything in garden went through a bit of a growth spurt after the rain.
I ended up with a giant bouquet of swiss chard. The leaves were beautiful, and it was a little sad to cut them up and cook 'em. I cooked it my standard favorite way of cooking greens -- sauteed with minced garlic and some carmelized onions. With lots of fat rendered from slow roasting pork belly. It was so delicious that we ate most of it in one meal.
We are up to about 6 lbs of produce from the garden. Mostly greens, so it's a lot more volume than it sounds. Not bad seeing as May isn't over yet and if we had joined a CSA this year, the first pickup wouldn't be for another couple of weeks or so.
Row of Arugula
Row of Carrots
We finally got the two "fruiting" beds ready and planted. Planted in one of the fruiting beds is: lemon cucumbers, Japanese long cucumbers, two heirloom varieties of snow peas, two heirloom varieties of green pole beans, 1 Lebanese white marrow squash plant, 2 yellow straight neck squash plants. The other fruiting bed contains: 3 Amish paste tomato plants, 2 "Mortgage Lifter" beefsteak tomato plants, 1 jalapeno pepper plant, 1 serrano pepper plant, 1 basil plant, 1 green pepper plant, and another Lebanese white marrow squash plant. Basil planted in the same bed as tomatoes is supposed to improve the flavor of the tomatoes so it's sort of an afterthought that is stuck between the tomato cages. Todd thinks I'm crazy for planting two hot pepper plants and 4 squash plants and that we'll have them coming out of our ears. We'll see. More is better than too little, and then we'll have extra to share with our neighbors.
We are down to about 8 radishes out of the 30 or so that survived. So I replanted a few rows with radishes today. I only had a few of the Purple Plum Radish seeds left, so I planted some White Hailstone Radish seeds as well.
Purple Plum Radish
Squash Plants
Snow Pea Plants on the Left, Pole Beans on the Right
We had been taking little nibbles of the pepper cress for a week or so now, but we finally got a full harvest today. When eaten raw, the pepper cress has a real kick, and you can't eat more than a few sprigs without feeling a bit of a sting. It's spicy, but not in the cayenne pepper kind of way, more like the wasabi or horseradish kind of way. With today's harvest, we had enough to cook it finally, so I heated up some minced garlic in sesame oil, then stirred in the pepper cress after I heated up the oil and let the garlic sizzle for a bit. I removed it from the heat in less than a minute, so the cress was a bright, glossy green. It was absolutely delicious and tastes pretty much like what watercress tastes like cooked.
All the green rows are doing pretty well now. Most of them are small cute little plants at this stage. After the pepper cress, I would say the komatsuna and the michihili cabbage are the largest.
Purple Plum Radish
I wanted to make sure the seedlings were well watered to make sure they sprout, so when I first planted the radish seedlings, I watered them faithfully every day even on days when it rained. Well, apparently, I over-watered these since about 2/3 of my seedlings spontaneously died off after they were about an inch or two high. I looked it up online, and it is most likely some sort of fungus or bacteria caused by overly moist conditions. I planted over 100 of these, but probably only about 30 survived. A few days ago, we harvested our first radish, and I sure wish they had all survived. It was very crispy, sweet, and hot! Again, in that wasabi/horseradish sort of way. We gave one to our neighbor, who loves radishes and his comment was that "it was hot." BTW, it's not well known, but the radish greens are edible. They are better cooked than raw, since they are a bit fibrous and somewhat prickly raw. They are delicious sauteed in some oil with garlic.
For curiosity's sake, we purchased a kitchen scale so I can weigh all the vegetables. I wanted to know how much we can harvest in our first season. We probably will get better at this since my only experience with vegetable gardening previously was growing a couple of cucumber plants in the ground, and growing some hot peppers and tomatoes in planters. However, I wanted to know if our first season was at least on par with what I would get from a full CSA share or what I normally buy from Whole Foods in the winter.
We started planting the first seeds after the first three beds were completed in mid to late March. The first three beds included the two "green" bed and one of the two "rooting" beds. We are planning to do a three year rotation of the six beds -- rooting, fruiting, and greens. I plan on growing some cover crops to overwinter and also use copious amounts of compost to replenish the soil. We will also plant pole beans and snow peas in one of the beds each season to replenish some of the nitrogen.
We had decided not to participate in a CSA this year, and the pressure's really on to get the garden producing at least as much as we would get from the CSA. I got a little carried away with my first bed and whipped out the yard stick to get exact measurements to make sure the seeds are spaced out properly.
Thinning Out Pepper Cress
I chose mostly heirloom varieties when purchasing my seeds. In one of the green beds, we planted: swiss chard, spinach chard, pepper cress, escarole, arugula, butter leaf lettuce, spinach, and red leaf lettuce. The other bed consists of mostly cruciferous vegetables and mustard greens: broccoli, komatsuna, cauliflower, baby bok choy, collard greens, michihili cabbage, rapini, and heading cabbage. In the rooting bed, we planted: stuttgarter onions, oxheart carrots, and purple plum radishes.
We now have tiny seedlings emerging in a couple of the rows. Today, we thinned out the pepper cress. Pepper cress is a lot like water cress, except that it is a land cress so you do not need bog conditions to grow it successfully.
We had to replant the bush cherry trees we originally planted since some woodland creature gnawed on all the plants, leaving only a two inch stub on each plant. We got new ones, which came a lot bigger with a lot more branches, so hopefully these survive.
In late February, during one of the warmer days, we went outside and started setting up the raised beds. We purchased incense cedar wood that have been precut into pieces that fit into raised beds from Natural Yards. The wood is sustainably harvested. Although in our wet climate, it should only last a few seasons, it is dipped in a LEED certified product that hardens into silica inside the wood once dried making the wood much more water resistant, so it should last 10 to 15 years.
We had planned the layout of the garden starting in December in a software program so we knew exactly where everything was going. A couple of weeks ago, we started to remove the sod. We originally tried to till the soil with a rototiller, but Todd and I both felt zapped from the rototiller. We stupidly started using it before testing the EMFs and after we tested it, we found that it measured high in magnetic radiation and dirty power. I haven't posted much about it before, but in the gap months of my blogging, we discovered a lot of sensitivities related to EMFs and dirty power.
Anyways, we ended up removing all the sod by hand. We will also be loosening up the first few inches of dirt and amending it with organic soil amendments and compost. We purchased literally one ton of compost from a local nursery and had it delivered. It is now filling up most of my driveway. We had calculated based on the square footage of the vegetable beds and footprint of the fruit trees and bushes how much compost we would need. This will give us 2 inches of compost to incorporate into the soil.
Removing Sod
One Ton of Compost
I had to really look around for a compost that does not contain biosolids/bio wastes. If you read the fine print or look up the information on the manufacturer's site, many of the compost brands that the local nurseries carry contain biosolids which basically are the refuse from sewage treatment plants. While they can contain a lot of nutrients, the state of health of most of people eating conventional foods is not such that I would want the waste in my soil. While the chemicals and pesticides do get digested by soil microbes during the composting process, bio wastes can contain a lot of heavy metals that will never come out of the soil. I finally found a compost that is made from lawn clippings and leaves and twigs from yards that is from Maryland's yard waste recycling program.
We moved recently to a house with a lot more yard space, and it has always been my dream to grow my own fruits and vegetables. This week, we got a lot of snow, so what better activity to do than to plan out my garden? :-) We've already decided on 6 raised vegetable beds, which actually will not be very raised in the beginning as we're going to dig it up, amend it, and then build up the soil slowly. The initial tilling and addition of compost should bring the soil level up at least a few of inches.
I spent a lot of time researching fruit trees and plants in the last couple of weeks. There's already a crab apple and a mulberry tree on our property. We wanted to plant an assortment of fruit plants and trees that will give us the bulk of the fruit we want in the summer. We initially toyed with the idea of a peach tree or a full sized apple tree, but ultimately, I wanted something that most people have success with growing organically and are easy to maintain. Peaches and apples, even the organic varieties in the stores are highly sprayed. The difference being that the organic ones are grown with organic or natural bug repellents and other amendments.
I use Blogger for my blog engine but months ago, they updated their engine. We followed all of the instructions to make the necessary updates with our host, but for the life of us, my husband and I can't figure out why the formatting is all messed up. Because my husband is a perfectionist, he wouldn't update the link on the site to go to the messed up blog and it was pointing to an older version that is not up-datable, so there was no point in posting any new blogs. Finally, with much cajoling, he put up my messed up blog. So. Here I am. I can blog again. But there's a bunch of strange spaces at the top and if you scroll way to the bottom, the page repeats itself in an ugly way. I don't know anyone who can manually mess up a design this badly or program this badly, but I guess when software goes awry...
Oh well. I'm stuck with this for now, and those who know me know that I am not happy with this messed up formatting. But I do think in some cases, content trumps formatting, and so I will blog with this messed up format until my husband has the time to write me a custom engine in Ruby on Rails.
read more . . .
I'm a techie who's been in the software development industry for over 15 years. I'm an enthusiastic traditional and whole foods advocate, volunteer Weston A. Price Foundation co-chapter leader for Reston and Sterling, and organizer for the Northern Virginia Whole Food Nutrition Meetup group. My husband and I are currently working on health through the GAPS/SCD diet. Currently, I spend most of my time outside of work cooking, detoxing, and helping others like me leverage food and nutrition for health and healing.
We are planting 6 blueberry bushes, since not only are organic blueberries scarce in the stores, they cost a fortune. Blueberries are one of those fruits you really should eat organic or not eat at all, as berries are highly sprayed.
While the initial planting of these takes some effort, the plants can live 15 or more years. Blueberries like a very low PH, between 4 to 5.5. The PH in our backyard is at 5.8, so we amended it with peat and pine fines to bring it down 1/2 to 1 point, and added sulfur to the soil to slowly acidify it. We made raised beds for the blueberries since although they love water, they have different roots than normal plants and can't sit in standing water for long. They have a fairly shallow root system and most of the roots live in the top 10 inches or so, although they can go down 18 inches or more.
We are digging out the soil 9 inches, adding amendments, making raised beds with stone pavers, and then filling the hole and raised bed with the amended soil. The soil ends up being raised about 6 to 8 inches off the ground, leaving a bit of space for mulch.
Varieties we are planting:
2 Rubel
2 Jersey
1 Northland
1 Friendship
We got the plants from Backyard Berry Plants, and we are very pleased with the size and quality of the plants, although some of the plants are leaning severely, as if they were only getting light from one direction while growing.
It's hard work since our soil is so heavy and clay like. We have gotten 3 of the 6 blueberry plants planted so far and still have 3 to go! read more . . .
The swiss chard was slow to start, but after few good rains, it got huge all of a sudden. I've read that rainfall contains natural hydrogen peroxide, which is very good for plants. It also serves to neutralize toxins and chemicals, which is why the air smells so clear after a rainfall. So everything in garden went through a bit of a growth spurt after the rain.
I ended up with a giant bouquet of swiss chard. The leaves were beautiful, and it was a little sad to cut them up and cook 'em. I cooked it my standard favorite way of cooking greens -- sauteed with minced garlic and some carmelized onions. With lots of fat rendered from slow roasting pork belly. It was so delicious that we ate most of it in one meal.
We are up to about 6 lbs of produce from the garden. Mostly greens, so it's a lot more volume than it sounds. Not bad seeing as May isn't over yet and if we had joined a CSA this year, the first pickup wouldn't be for another couple of weeks or so.
Row of Arugula
Row of Carrots
We finally got the two "fruiting" beds ready and planted. Planted in one of the fruiting beds is: lemon cucumbers, Japanese long cucumbers, two heirloom varieties of snow peas, two heirloom varieties of green pole beans, 1 Lebanese white marrow squash plant, 2 yellow straight neck squash plants. The other fruiting bed contains: 3 Amish paste tomato plants, 2 "Mortgage Lifter" beefsteak tomato plants, 1 jalapeno pepper plant, 1 serrano pepper plant, 1 basil plant, 1 green pepper plant, and another Lebanese white marrow squash plant. Basil planted in the same bed as tomatoes is supposed to improve the flavor of the tomatoes so it's sort of an afterthought that is stuck between the tomato cages. Todd thinks I'm crazy for planting two hot pepper plants and 4 squash plants and that we'll have them coming out of our ears. We'll see. More is better than too little, and then we'll have extra to share with our neighbors.
We are down to about 8 radishes out of the 30 or so that survived. So I replanted a few rows with radishes today. I only had a few of the Purple Plum Radish seeds left, so I planted some White Hailstone Radish seeds as well.
Purple Plum Radish
Squash Plants
Snow Pea Plants on the Left, Pole Beans on the Right
We had been taking little nibbles of the pepper cress for a week or so now, but we finally got a full harvest today. When eaten raw, the pepper cress has a real kick, and you can't eat more than a few sprigs without feeling a bit of a sting. It's spicy, but not in the cayenne pepper kind of way, more like the wasabi or horseradish kind of way. With today's harvest, we had enough to cook it finally, so I heated up some minced garlic in sesame oil, then stirred in the pepper cress after I heated up the oil and let the garlic sizzle for a bit. I removed it from the heat in less than a minute, so the cress was a bright, glossy green. It was absolutely delicious and tastes pretty much like what watercress tastes like cooked.
All the green rows are doing pretty well now. Most of them are small cute little plants at this stage. After the pepper cress, I would say the komatsuna and the michihili cabbage are the largest.
Purple Plum Radish
I wanted to make sure the seedlings were well watered to make sure they sprout, so when I first planted the radish seedlings, I watered them faithfully every day even on days when it rained. Well, apparently, I over-watered these since about 2/3 of my seedlings spontaneously died off after they were about an inch or two high. I looked it up online, and it is most likely some sort of fungus or bacteria caused by overly moist conditions. I planted over 100 of these, but probably only about 30 survived. A few days ago, we harvested our first radish, and I sure wish they had all survived. It was very crispy, sweet, and hot! Again, in that wasabi/horseradish sort of way. We gave one to our neighbor, who loves radishes and his comment was that "it was hot." BTW, it's not well known, but the radish greens are edible. They are better cooked than raw, since they are a bit fibrous and somewhat prickly raw. They are delicious sauteed in some oil with garlic.
For curiosity's sake, we purchased a kitchen scale so I can weigh all the vegetables. I wanted to know how much we can harvest in our first season. We probably will get better at this since my only experience with vegetable gardening previously was growing a couple of cucumber plants in the ground, and growing some hot peppers and tomatoes in planters. However, I wanted to know if our first season was at least on par with what I would get from a full CSA share or what I normally buy from Whole Foods in the winter.
We started planting the first seeds after the first three beds were completed in mid to late March. The first three beds included the two "green" bed and one of the two "rooting" beds. We are planning to do a three year rotation of the six beds -- rooting, fruiting, and greens. I plan on growing some cover crops to overwinter and also use copious amounts of compost to replenish the soil. We will also plant pole beans and snow peas in one of the beds each season to replenish some of the nitrogen.
We had decided not to participate in a CSA this year, and the pressure's really on to get the garden producing at least as much as we would get from the CSA. I got a little carried away with my first bed and whipped out the yard stick to get exact measurements to make sure the seeds are spaced out properly.
Thinning Out Pepper Cress
I chose mostly heirloom varieties when purchasing my seeds. In one of the green beds, we planted: swiss chard, spinach chard, pepper cress, escarole, arugula, butter leaf lettuce, spinach, and red leaf lettuce. The other bed consists of mostly cruciferous vegetables and mustard greens: broccoli, komatsuna, cauliflower, baby bok choy, collard greens, michihili cabbage, rapini, and heading cabbage. In the rooting bed, we planted: stuttgarter onions, oxheart carrots, and purple plum radishes.
We now have tiny seedlings emerging in a couple of the rows. Today, we thinned out the pepper cress. Pepper cress is a lot like water cress, except that it is a land cress so you do not need bog conditions to grow it successfully.
We had to replant the bush cherry trees we originally planted since some woodland creature gnawed on all the plants, leaving only a two inch stub on each plant. We got new ones, which came a lot bigger with a lot more branches, so hopefully these survive.
In late February, during one of the warmer days, we went outside and started setting up the raised beds. We purchased incense cedar wood that have been precut into pieces that fit into raised beds from Natural Yards. The wood is sustainably harvested. Although in our wet climate, it should only last a few seasons, it is dipped in a LEED certified product that hardens into silica inside the wood once dried making the wood much more water resistant, so it should last 10 to 15 years.
We had planned the layout of the garden starting in December in a software program so we knew exactly where everything was going. A couple of weeks ago, we started to remove the sod. We originally tried to till the soil with a rototiller, but Todd and I both felt zapped from the rototiller. We stupidly started using it before testing the EMFs and after we tested it, we found that it measured high in magnetic radiation and dirty power. I haven't posted much about it before, but in the gap months of my blogging, we discovered a lot of sensitivities related to EMFs and dirty power.
Anyways, we ended up removing all the sod by hand. We will also be loosening up the first few inches of dirt and amending it with organic soil amendments and compost. We purchased literally one ton of compost from a local nursery and had it delivered. It is now filling up most of my driveway. We had calculated based on the square footage of the vegetable beds and footprint of the fruit trees and bushes how much compost we would need. This will give us 2 inches of compost to incorporate into the soil.
Removing Sod
One Ton of Compost
I had to really look around for a compost that does not contain biosolids/bio wastes. If you read the fine print or look up the information on the manufacturer's site, many of the compost brands that the local nurseries carry contain biosolids which basically are the refuse from sewage treatment plants. While they can contain a lot of nutrients, the state of health of most of people eating conventional foods is not such that I would want the waste in my soil. While the chemicals and pesticides do get digested by soil microbes during the composting process, bio wastes can contain a lot of heavy metals that will never come out of the soil. I finally found a compost that is made from lawn clippings and leaves and twigs from yards that is from Maryland's yard waste recycling program.
We moved recently to a house with a lot more yard space, and it has always been my dream to grow my own fruits and vegetables. This week, we got a lot of snow, so what better activity to do than to plan out my garden? :-) We've already decided on 6 raised vegetable beds, which actually will not be very raised in the beginning as we're going to dig it up, amend it, and then build up the soil slowly. The initial tilling and addition of compost should bring the soil level up at least a few of inches.
I spent a lot of time researching fruit trees and plants in the last couple of weeks. There's already a crab apple and a mulberry tree on our property. We wanted to plant an assortment of fruit plants and trees that will give us the bulk of the fruit we want in the summer. We initially toyed with the idea of a peach tree or a full sized apple tree, but ultimately, I wanted something that most people have success with growing organically and are easy to maintain. Peaches and apples, even the organic varieties in the stores are highly sprayed. The difference being that the organic ones are grown with organic or natural bug repellents and other amendments.
I use Blogger for my blog engine but months ago, they updated their engine. We followed all of the instructions to make the necessary updates with our host, but for the life of us, my husband and I can't figure out why the formatting is all messed up. Because my husband is a perfectionist, he wouldn't update the link on the site to go to the messed up blog and it was pointing to an older version that is not up-datable, so there was no point in posting any new blogs. Finally, with much cajoling, he put up my messed up blog. So. Here I am. I can blog again. But there's a bunch of strange spaces at the top and if you scroll way to the bottom, the page repeats itself in an ugly way. I don't know anyone who can manually mess up a design this badly or program this badly, but I guess when software goes awry...
Oh well. I'm stuck with this for now, and those who know me know that I am not happy with this messed up formatting. But I do think in some cases, content trumps formatting, and so I will blog with this messed up format until my husband has the time to write me a custom engine in Ruby on Rails.
read more . . .
I'm a techie who's been in the software development industry for over 15 years. I'm an enthusiastic traditional and whole foods advocate, volunteer Weston A. Price Foundation co-chapter leader for Reston and Sterling, and organizer for the Northern Virginia Whole Food Nutrition Meetup group. My husband and I are currently working on health through the GAPS/SCD diet. Currently, I spend most of my time outside of work cooking, detoxing, and helping others like me leverage food and nutrition for health and healing.
