Season 8.0 Three Week Update

(Legendary Garden 2.0) I'm so excited to see that I've been telling the truth to everyone that ever asks me about gardening or has attended one of my classes. Weeks 1 and 2 I didn't really see much difference in the year 1 and 2 garden spaces. I was starting to become a little concerned I may have lead people astray in their gardening adventure. But during week 3 I started to see significant differences between the two garden spaces. See for yourself:

Year 2 (Established March 15, 2015) to the right of the worm tower and Year 1 (Established Feb 5th 2016) to the left of the worm tower. It can seem a little difficult to tell from this panoramic shot, so here's some key photos to show the current differences.

Left: Year 2: 3 weeks since planting corn from seed and tomatoes from plants
Right: Year 1 corn from seed and tomatoes from plants
Notice how the year 2 plants are much greener, the corn stalks are thicker and taller and the tomatoes have more abundant foliage and are greener. The year 1 tomatoes are beginning to yellow towards the bottom

Both sections have been treated the exact same, there is no supplemental fertilization. When I fertilized the year two section with poultry litter fertilizer I did so at the same time as the year one section. The only difference is the passage of time.

Left: Year 2 zucchini from seed at 3 weeks. Notice 4 true leaves
Right: Year 1 zucchini. Barely 3 true leaves.

Left: Year 2 green beans from seed at 3 weeks. Most plants now have the second wave of true leaves and are very green
Right: Year 1 green beans. These are much further behind in setting out the second set of true leaves and are not as rich in color

Here's a panoramic from the north side of the garden you can get a better view of the tomatoes and corn and how they differ.

Left of worm tower is year 2 and right of worm tower is year 1.

Spring is Here!!

Ok, so not officially, but we're past the last frost date and that is spring to me! Oh how I love spring! My pocketbook doesn't love it though. I spend the most money on the garden in the spring because I'm just so excited to plant and I wanna buy ALL the plants and make my garden bigger and better!

Back at the beginning of February I expanded my garden plot from 20'x20' to about 35'x20'. I ordered some compost from Living Earth, the same place I got it from last year, Since I had some trees removed last year and I had the company dump their entire truck of tree chippings for me, (it literally took a week to move all the wood chips from the driveway to behind the fence) I had plenty of mulch. I decided to plant my garden in such a way that I could compare growth of the same plants between a first year garden and a second year garden. When I teach a class I always stress that year 1 of your garden is going to mostly be disappointing and possibly a complete failure. Unless you are really rigorous about supplemental fertilizing with chemical fertilizers, just don't expect much. I felt that pain so hard last year, we didn't get much out of the garden all last year, a few sad ears of corn, a handful of green beans, a dozen tomatoes, and a cucumber or two.

April 2015. These plants should be dark green and twice the size

The reason for this is because new compost is almost completely sterile, compost piles get so hot during the decomposition process it kills just about everything living in it. Once the process is finished, you need fungi and worms and nematodes and all forms of microbial life to convert the compost into water soluble nutrients for your plants. It just takes time for that life to make its way to your new garden and get to work, about a year of time here in Houston. Commercial mulches are usually devoid of this life also.

 I hope to take weekly pictures of the garden this year so that the growth differences are more apparent in a single photo. This may be slightly inaccurate because on my garden expansion I put my year old wood chips as mulch instead of commercial mulch and so I likely inoculated my extension with worms and bugs and fungi et al that have been growing in the wood chip pile all year, not to mention all the life already in my existing garden could venture over. But it will still be good documentation because I do expect to still see some difference.

March 6, 2016

The left of the worm tower is the year 1 garden expansion, I have green beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, cantaloupe, and watermelon, sweet onions, zucchini, yellow squash, and garlic. To the right of the worm tower is the year 2 existing garden. Cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, sweet onions, corn, eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, lima beans, green beans, and garlic.

So I have a almost everything on both sides, but a few things only on one side but it should give me a fair comparison of the same plants and how they grow being treated the same but only difference being a year 1 and a year 2 garden. I'm excited for the experiment and I hope everything I've been preaching is true!

Final Winter Harvest

The worst (best?) part of growing a happy garden is that it grows A LOT of food. That's awesome especially when you can put it all away for another day, but putting it up is often quite time consuming. I finally went out a couple weeks ago and harvested the last of the collards and cabbage. I thought i'd post a little tutorial for how to freeze collards since they can be a very prolific vegetable.

I took a large beach towel out into the garden and broke off all the collard leaves and stacked them in the towel so they would be easy to carry into the house,

Fill the sink with cold water and  swish the leaves around in there. I had to drain and refill the sink several times because it had just pollinated a few days before I harvested so all the leaves were covered in yellow tree pollen.

I stacked them all on the towel to drip dry while I cut out the woody core of each leaf.

Fold each leaf over with the rib to the top. It should naturally want to fold up this way some.

With a knife cut the rib away from the leaf

Should look something like this when you open it back up. You don't have to fold the leaf, but I only have to make one cut that way rather than two.

All cut and neatly stacked. The cores went out into the worm towers or compost pile

Now I roll up a portion of the stacks at a time and rough chop the leaves.

Submerge in boiling water for 1-2 minutes until nicely wilted. Strain the leaves and pack in freezer bags.

My final harvest plus what I had already put up amounted to 6 stuffed full quart bags of collard greens. Now you can have braised collards with bacon all year long! Or creamed collards, or if you leave the leaves whole, collard wrapped meat balls. Yummy!

Cabbage keeps a really long time in the refrigerator but I put up two of the heads in the freezer by cutting them in quarters (leave the core intact) and blanching for 1 minute and then bagging them. Collards can take blanching longer but cabbage doesn't take very long to cook so you only want to blanch just long enough to stop the maturing enzymes. Next year I might try canning the greens instead of freezing but I was tired and my feet hurt and I had a cranky baby so the freezer was just faster.