I planted everbearing raspberries from Fedco Seeds in one of my raised beds. My thinking was that in a raised bed, the natural sprawl that raspberries do would be easier to control. I have some planted in the yard nearby, and they love to creep into the lawn and everywhere else.
Here is the raised bed while the raspberries are removed
We have more bear problems now, and the bears love raspberries. The past two years the bears have mashed down my raspberry patch, so I decided this year to give them to a neighbor and reclaim the raised bed for tomatoes.
But how do you get raspberries out of a garden bed? I don’t think you can completely, so I decided to solarize the bed. I dug out all the berries I could, and then covered the raised vegetable bed with black plastic.
the raspberry plants, removedI discovered some age damage while removing the raspberries. Fixed it.
I put 6 mil plastic on the raised bed, held down with rocks.
I left the black plastic on for a month, plenty of time to kill off any remaining raspberry plants. I then kept the plastic in place, burned holes in it with a torch for tomatoes.
I torched holes in the plastic after a month for tomatoes.
I love this. It turned out so much better than I thought it would. Jim found this melon crate at one of his stops. As soon as he saw it, he thought small, raised bed. When I saw it, I asked for more to share!
Jim screwed some 8 inch legs from left over lumber on the bottom of the box. I lined the box with a new product I’m trying out. Hydro cloth. I got it from Gardeners.com. Then came the fun. We planted marigolds, lettuces, radishes, basil, and a cherry tomato that I hope cascades down from a clay pipe.
Most importantly, and what makes it a coffee table as opposed to salad table, are five “tiles” made from a broken ceramic pot. Each one big enough for the largest of cups or bowls. I’m hoping that in a few weeks, all the plants will take off and this little table will just be the jewel of our back yard paradise.
Here are some hoop house plans and photos of the small hoop house we use for cold weather greens. We had a really warm weekend last week, so i pulled out the cold frame hoop house that we built in the How to make a hoop house cold frame video here. I put in a mix of salad greens and mesclun mix, place a wireless thermometer in, and left it to grow.
I’ve gotten many requests for plans for the cold frame hoop house, you can get more info on all our hoop house cold frame plans here. Below i’ll post a few key photos to guide you along. This Cold Frame Hoop House plan is perfect for our raised garden beds.
build a frame that will fit in your garden bed with 2×4 lumberuse narrow diameter PVC to arch across the frameuse electrical pipe holders to secure pipe archescut a plywood end that matches the arc of your hoop house cold frame. cut out a hole for the thermatic vent in the plywoodattach the plywood to one end of cold framethe view of the cold frame hoop house from inside.The cold frame hoop house fits just inside the raised bed. nice.
If you want to learn more about growing vegetables year round read Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest book and Nikki Jabour’s Year Round Vegetable Gardener.
The Labradors and us people all love sugar snap peas. Thankfully they are pretty easy to grow. Someone has trained the pups to eat them right off the vine.
My method of planting peas is simple:
As soon as I can get a trowel in the raised bed, I plant peas. They will grow. They love cool weather.
I also throw in some legume inoculant. Some people suggest wetting the seeds and dusting them with the inoculant, but I think spreading a bit on top of the seeds in their hole is just fine.
In the picture below I am planting them where our tomatoes will be, they’ll both use the same trellis-cage. Peas grow, produce pods, and then burn out pretty quickly, so they will be done before the tomatoes need the wire cage.
That’s about it for peas, growing them does not require any rocket science. You can plant them as soon as you can dig the soil. An advantage of using raised beds is the raised beds warm up quicker than the surrounding ground. So go plant peas.
I plant sugar snap peas about an inch deepThe peas will grow up this tomato cage, then the Labradors will eat them
There. I said it. I enjoy it. There’s compost buried in the veg garden. Compost in the rotating container. Compost “aging” over the winter in planter boxes. There’s a lot of compost. I like the musty, sour, earth smell of it.
Eric had mentioned on a GardenFork Radio Show how I use the Lasagna method of composting. My method is based on Patricia Lanza Method, Lasagna Gardening. Five years ago, I started with a clay based lot, and have transformed it into dark, rich, worm filled soil, layer by layer.
In the fall, I empty my compost bins into the gardens. I’m not big on chopping down stuff so it’s not uncommon to find an avocado skin, or citrus peel. I’ve kneeled in one rotten potato and that is a stinky mess. A good poking stick will help break down your compost while in the bin with out a lot of turning or lifting. I’ll cover that with some leaf mulch and let winter do it’s work. Come Spring, I have Black Gold! One beautiful dry spring day, I’ll hit the gardens with a hoe and stir everything up. Inspect areas that didn’t break down and pick out any nasty bits to recompost. Make it all pretty and ready for planting.
Last year I got the Nature Mill Composter. It has an arm that spins and is heated. Well, here’s the thing. It’s marketed as an indoor, fairly odor less machine and we have not found that to be true. One of the good reasons for that is, I throw just about everything in the composter with out chopping it up. I also toss in paper towels. It’s my lazy way of balancing the dry with the wet compost ingredients. This year we have it on the back porch. While it does get below freezing, the porch provides some protection from the wind.
I’m happy to say, it’s working pretty well. When it does get clogged up, I’ll dig it out and toss it in the other compost bin. There are days where it smells pretty strongly, but it’s not bothering us. It will sure help with the amount of compostable materials Jim and I produce in the winter, but it’s not our main composter.
All the stems, roots, leaves, plants, crazy tomato plants that developed legs and walked across the yard, makes up most of our compostable stuff. It’s also caused me to spread tomato seeds through out my yard. At least we don’t have to plant tomatoes. Yard waste pretty much ends up in a pile in a corner of the yard, until the compost bin is emptied in the fall. I fill it with all the yard waste for winter. The freezing and thawing seems to help break stuff down quickly.
Composting is pretty easy. Just like anything worth doing, it just has it’s disgusting bits too.
I got my seed orders this week, and I now know I probably over-ordered. Kinda like going into Costco or BJs and buying the whole case of mayonaise.
I buy seeds from Fedco and Johnny’s . The bulk of my seeds come from Fedco, and then from Johnny’s I get some special stuff, like pelleted carrot seed.
What is pelleted seed? Its is seeds that have been coated with clay, or something like clay, to make the seed larger and easier to handle. You can buy pelleted seeds that use organic or non-organic seed coatings.
Why pelleted carrot seed? Its a lot easier to plant. I’m not getting nearly as many carrot seeds, but the seeds I’m getting will more likely sprout, I think. It also means less thinning, as its a lot easier to see the seed, so I can space it better. I’m thinking about covering my carrot seed with plain sand this year.
Early Nelson carrot seed, pelleted from Johnny's Seeds
Jean Ann Van Krevelen, who appeared on GardenFork Radio, described Fedco Seeds, and the people who work there ( it’s a coop ) as having Seed Integrity . That’s a real good way to describe them.
But that is not to diminish Johnny’s Selected Seeds, which is also independently owned and they also have Seed Integrity, just in a different way.
I’ve decided to focus on growing winter squash this year. I will grow it here in CT, and on the roof of our apartment in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn roof will be a low-tech simple green roof experiment, with vegetables as the plant material.
PMR seeds from Johnny's
Why winter squash? It stores easily, and it stores for a long time. And I love the idea of cooking stuff from my own yard in the middle of winter. Plus squash is super healthy for you.
Here are some highlights:
Carnival Acorn Squash Fedco
Uncle David’s Dakota Squash Fedco
Eastern Rise Winter Squash Fedco
Metro PMR Butternut Squash ( from Johnny’s )
the PMR squash means it is Powdery Mildew Resistant. My yard is a fishbowl surrounded by woods, so we get a lot of Powdery Mildew, and I’d like to see how this squash does. Last year we lost our pumpkin crop because it was so wet all summer.
I’m also growing some PMR pumpkins from Johnny’s as we just like to have pumpkins in the yard. I like it because we let the pumpkin vines crawl thru the yard, so that means less lawn to mow.
When it comes to lettuce and mesclun, I don’t select specific seeds, I go with Fedco’s Lettuce Mixes. They blend one for each of the seasons and that works well for me. For the summer blend they pick lettuces that don’t bolt easily, for the winter mix, its cold hardy ones. You get the picture.
And since Fedco is in Maine, these seed mixes do just as well, if not better in here NW CT.
We like to eat fresh and pickle cucumbers, and I had a good crop of Super Zagross Middle East Cuke from Fedco, so I ordered them once again. I’m betting they will be even better this season if we have a drier summer.
On my to do list is to learn more about propogating mushrooms. I want to learn how to grow mushrooms, and here is a great video by Ashley Terry of the blog Cooking Up A Story. Ashley went to Oregon to learn about inoculating birch logs with oyster mushroom spore. Check out Cooking Up A Story for more cool info.
We just shot a Gardenfork episode about gardening in winter. We shot it on Christmas Day, and I had neglected to pull out my portable cold frame – watch our how to make a cold frame video here – and I did not cover my raised beds with black plastic before the beds froze solid and snow piled on top of them. So I pulled off the snow and put on the plastic.
In the show we talk about Eliot Coleman’s book The Four Season Gardener, and one of the greens you can grow in winter is Tatsoi . I saw some great Tatsoi in the Park Slope Food Coop last week, so I had to take a picture and share it with you all.
The Tatsoi in the Food Coop was huge compared to how it grows in my garden, mine does not get nearly as big. I’m wondering if I’m not growing it right, or buying the seed of a minature version.
Jessica from the Food Mayhem blog suggests that you can use it as a substitute in any recipe that calls for Bok Choy. I use it in salads, and you can treat it like most hardy greens such as kale and other mustards and saute it with olive oil and garlic. I don’t know the nutrional content of Tatsoi, but its green so its good, i think.
Have you all grown Tatsoi or used it in cooking? Let us know below:
OK, right now is dumping snow outside. I just helped my friend Bill switch out generators up at the camp ( where the Labs swim ).We had about 5 inches of snow yesterday, and I realize I forgot to cover my raised beds with black plastic before the snow dumped on them.
Can I still put the plastic on top of the snow? or maybe shovel the now off the beds…
Fedco Seeds
All the while, I am thinking of spring. What I will do different, better, what I wont do.
To help this planning, I have the Fedco Seeds catalog. Fedco Seeds is a seed cooperative, a pretty rare entity in this world of corporate consolidation. I was introduced to them when I joined a community garden in Brooklyn, and have stuck with them.
Fedco has a great catalog chock full of great descriptions of neat vegetables and flowers, its not written in catalog-speak, its written by the people who grow the seeds out. Their seeds are untreated, and many are organic and/or heirloom. Many of their seeds have great stories about how a particular seed came to be, what family brought it from Russia, or how it sprouted out of a compost pile.
Moose Tubers has all kinds of potatoes and garlic.
Organic Growers Supply is just that. Stuff I’ve never heard of, plus old standbys. I use their red ball spheres with Tanglefoot and a pheremone trap to keep bugs off my apple trees. And my apples look pretty good. No sprays, nothing more than a few easy solutions from these guys.
Fedco Trees is cool, their big mantra is not big trees, but good root systems, and I can attest to the healthy robust plants they send you. All wrapped in plastic and paper mulch. I’ve bought many raspberries from Fedco Trees. They have a ton of antique or heirloom apple trees, all with great descriptions.
Their website is simple, not full of a ton of pictures, but that’s not their thing. Their catalogs are downloadable, saving trees you know, so check them out.
What are your favorite seed catalogs? tell us below:
I ran across this today, and there has been a lot of talk on our viewer forum about raising chickens.
Handcrafted Coops offers affordable, portable chicken coops for the backyard chicken farmer. All chicken coops are made with sustainable, renewable timber and come flat-packed for easy assembly. Our mission: A chicken coop in every backyard!
I can’t keep chickens because I’m not home every night to take care of them, but I’m hoping some of my neighbors get some, I suggested some heirloom varieties.
I’ve seen all sorts of chicken coops, almost all of them hand made from various found materials. i like this coop because of its simplicity.
What do you chicken experts think? Check out the video and pics
When I was a kid, ( wow, not used to saying that too often ) we would be in the yard or the woods whenever we were home and there was daylight. Now, it seems that kids lives are over-scheduled.
Today’s kids are increasingly disconnected from the natural world, says child advocacy expert Louv (Childhood’s Future; Fatherlove; etc.), even as research shows that “thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can… be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorder and other maladies.” Instead of passing summer months hiking, swimming and telling stories around the campfire, children these days are more likely to attend computer camps or weight-loss camps: as a result, Louv says, they’ve come to think of nature as more of an abstraction than a reality. Indeed, a 2002 British study reported that eight-year-olds could identify Pokémon characters far more easily than they could name “otter, beetle, and oak tree.” Gathering thoughts from parents, teachers, researchers, environmentalists and other concerned parties, Louv argues for a return to an awareness of and appreciation for the natural world. Not only can nature teach kids science and nurture their creativity, he says, nature needs its children: where else will its future stewards come from? Louv’s book is a call to action, full of warnings—but also full of ideas for change. [Publishers Weekly]
One reviewer on Librarything.com summed it up this way: “Leave no child inside”
Learn more about this and other fun stuff at our viewer forum, The Greenhouse. Comments have been turned off here, but you can post your thoughts, pictures and videos at The Greenhouse.
My friend Brian, who helps shoot Gardenfork, is in Madrid for the summer, shooting a documentary about these village painting contests held all over Spain. He sent me some pictures of his tomato plants on his balcony, and they are not doing well. Any suggestions?
Learn more about this and other fun stuff at our viewer forum, The Greenhouse. Comments have been turned off here, but you can post your thoughts, pictures and videos at The Greenhouse.
A really nice article in the Litchfield County Times magazine LCT about Gardenfork. The writer, Rebecca Ransom really ‘got’ what Gardenfork is all about, and the photographer, Robin Gourd, took some great picts.
Learn more about this and other fun stuff at our viewer forum, The Greenhouse. Comments have been turned off here, but you can post your thoughts, pictures and videos at The Greenhouse.
I spent the morning in my neighbor’s field, helping him harvest garlic scapes. We did an episode last year about grilling them [search thru the ‘guide’ in the video player or watch on iTunes ]
So I came home with a huge sack of them, thinking that I could somehow pickle them. I ran across several ideas on the web, making scape pesto is what many people do, and I liked how Vanessa at What Geeks Eat prepares them.
[It ends up Vanessa and her husband and I attended the same university, Southern Illinois University, all at the same time. interesting.]
So, though Henry & Mij are lounging in the yard after attacking each other all morning, I’m going to go to the store and see about pickling some of these, and making pesto.
