Homestead Update!
Posted by: TammyI can’t believe it’s nearly the end of July already! My apologies for no updating before this. We moved Frugal-families to a new server and I’ve been busy with the spring planting season, the baseball season and now the camping and canning season! I’m actually sitting on my frugally redecorated deck, enjoying the cool evening air and eating fresh blueberry pie and thinking that I really HAVE TO update everyone. Maybe I should share the fresh blueberry pie recipe, too?
The garden is growing nicely. The unseasonably warm spring meant a quick end to the cool weather loving sugar snap peas. I was a bit disappointed in the spring harvest but I’ll put my hopes in a cool but long fall to make up for my lack of early harvest. My lettuces suffered the same fate.
I lost raspberry blossoms to the late frost we got. The plants blossomed early because of the warm temps and they suffered serious damage with the freezing temps despite my efforts to cover and protect them. On the flip side, the fall harvest of berries is already coming in almost two months ahead of last year!
I worked really hard at rotating my crops this year based on crop rotation charts I have in seen in two hardening books I have and in an issue of Mother Earth News. I’m sure this is good for the soil and the plants but I’m not really seeing the benefits yet in term of plant growth and development. In some cases, I’m realizing that some plants really hate being where they are. My peppers aren’t flourishing in the front part of the vertical beds and the summer variety squashes aren’t happy in the bed they’re in. Rotating so many beds wasn’t easy, either. I can see rotating specific crops in just half the beds and the other crops in the other half for the sake of my sanity.
The tomato crop is doing considerably better than last year’s plants. We were slammed with the blight last year due to the cool, wet conditions. I also sprayed with a fungicide this year as a bit more insurance. I was careful to pull up any wintered over potatoes from the garden, too. Living tissue (as in wintered over potatoes) will host the blight and recontaminate your garden if you’re not careful. I recently noticed small holes in the lower leaves of many of my tomatoes resembling a shotgun hit. A bit of research lead me to discover that I have flea beetles. They punch a small 1 to 2 mm hole in the leaf and then move onto another fresh bit of leaf. They are literally the size of a pin-head and jump like fleas. The articles I read said that they don’t cause too much stress/damage to mature, healthy plants so I’ll hand-pick them as I see them and make sure I keep the plants healthy. There is no way I’ll use the sprays that were recommended to kill them as they’ll wipe out good, beneficial bugs in the process.
Oh, I experimented with two new methods of potato planting this year. One area got the lazy-bed method and I planted some seed potatoes in a barrel. Voles have done a decent job of decimating the lazy bed method plants along the same lines as the trough planted potatoes last year. The barrel harvest was good but the only issue was keeping the soil wet enough. The soil dried out too quickly in hot weather and the plants died before the harvest was mature. My husband mentioned that the barrel method also allowed us the luxury of utilizing the walkway space between the vertical bed and gave me extra space in the raised beds for other crops. This was a good experiment for us this year.
I’m honestly getting a bit tired now. You’ll have to come back and read up on another day for my fresh blueberry pie recipe. I promise I’ll post it and my no-fail pie crust.
July 28th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
Thanks for the help…my grandpa always said “A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.
July 28th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
My partner and I enjoyed reading this article, I was just wanting to know do you trade featured articles or blog posts? I am continuously trying to find someone to make trades with and simply thought I would ask.
August 15th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
I LOVE that! I”ll have to remember that! Seems the best things I grow here every year are weeds and rocks. Thankfully, I can turn the rocks into stone walls but to the best of my knowledge, most of my weeds aren’t edible. Which leaves me with two very productive but inedible harvest each year. LOL!