The Portland Year Round Garden

Listening to the Weeds

2009-04-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

It's a slow, cold spring. Garden fever bit, I planted my brassica starts about a month ago, I think it was. They're sitting out there, growing roots, but not doing much else. I protect them from the slugs with that pet-friendly iron-based bait, Sluggo. The slugs took a hit from the cold, but they're growing fast. My ragged daffodils tell me it's time to watch for slugs in the beds.

I'm holding off on planting more. I have some carrots in, a short row, a couple of rows of cut-and-come greens for early salads. But I plant by the weeds. We have the first, hardy weeds that come up in late February, early March. They're supplanted later by the weed species that like warmer soil. That's when the garden takes off. But right now, those early varieties are just sitting there, growing slowly. Very slowly. Nice for the weeding schedule, but means I'm not rushing stuff into the soil. Now I'm high here, about 700 feet, so lower, sheltered microclimes are probably warmer than I am right now. The pasture is growing, but we need a week or so of warmer temperatures to get the chill out of the soil and wake up the seeds that need higher germination temperatures. Meanwhile, the slugs and I are duking it out.

Winter Survivors

2009-02-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

This is a hard spring after our seriously freezing winter. Plants that came through damaged are fading under a repetitive cycle of nighttime freezes without any stretch of warm weather. I found that my rutabagas mostly came through okay, tough roots that they are. More so than I thought. A bit less than half of my kale plants are budding out new leaves in spite of the tough weather. All of my self-seeded plants are doing fine. Lesson there. Looks as if a few chard will sprout for my spring treat of chard-buds and pasta. But the crocuses are blooming and the pussy willows are showing white, so sping will get here eventually.

Starting the New Year

2009-02-08T19:31:00.000-08:00

Well, this has been the worst winter I've seen, in terms of overwinter gardening, in about ten years...maybe more. The cold in the teens, east wind, and long duration, pretty much wiped out stuff that usually weathers the winter just fine here. Even my kale got clobbered and it's about the toughest stuff out there. But a week of low twenties/teens did too much damage to the cambium layer of the plant stems. Ah well. Weather happens. So I'm not left with a lot and it's lean right now! Chickweed sprouts magically on every warm day. That makes a great salad, mild and tasty as any lettuce. A few kales survived -- mostly my reseeded plants. A few walla wall onion seedlings made it. They got frozen on top, but seem to be doing okay. We'll see. My olive tree has dropped all its leaves and I'll find out later if it sustained killing damage or not.

But today I planted my peas and fava beans. I could have gotten them in a week or two ago, but I've been busy, helping out my neighbor who had open heart surgery right after New Year. So things are getting done when I have time. I filled some big, shallow pots (12 - 24 inches) with soil and I'll seed in lettuce and braising greens tomorrow. On my covered deck, these should yield greens quickly. Time to get my lettuce, cauliflower, and early broccoli seedlings stared. Two weeks ago was the target date, but as I said.... Oh well, you do it when you can.

And the peas are in and I have two lambs down so far, more on the way.

Off to check the lambing pen...

Squashed Garlic

2008-10-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

Well it's garlic planting time. Day before yesterday, I went down to prep my garlic bed, dig it, add some of my organic fertilizer mix below my anticipated rows, clean out the weeds that had sprouted. This was my corn bed, so all the stalks had been pulled and turned into sheep feed. But my Kuri squash vine had overrun the bed (squash is one of corn's lovers, along with beans, after all) so I decided I should bring the Kuri in and feed the vines to the sheep.

So.

Twenty-one three plus pound squashes later... Oh, my aching back! (My garden is on an east facing slope. A SLOPE.) This is from one hill with three seedlings in it. That's Kuri for you! It loves to run, but it pays you back with dense, fine grained, sweet squashes that make great pies, are wonderful as baked squash, and make superior soup. I have tried most of the winter squash out there and this is the one that I keep growing. Now it's prohibitive for a small garden...it covers about a 30 x 40 foot area and can run farther than that (my sheep prune it when it gets through the fence). Next year, I think I'm going to do a strong verticle trellis and try to do it in less space. We'll see.

I'm hoping for more than a drizzle tonight to settle the soil before I plant my garlic, but the soil has had a couple of days to settle so I can plant even if it doesn't rain first. I always wait until the missed cloves from this year's harvest sprout before planting, and they started sprouting last week. It's time!

Fall Transitions

2008-10-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

Well, fall has fallen, as of this weekend and the rain. The season has changed...a bit earlier than many years. No fair, after our late spring and cool summer! Oh well, that's weather. Endless source of conversation and grumbling... I got my quinoa heads cut right before this weekend's rain. They got a bit wet with earlier showers, but seem to be drying without mold or sprouting under the shelter of my covered deck. I'll probably have to bring them inside. I'm going to have to give up and use the woodstove this week, I suspect. My passive solar house is still getting enough sun to keep it in the low sixties, but the next pair of gray days are going to bring on the first fire of the season. And then I'll bring the quinoa in.

I'm watching my cabbages. I planted the small type, mini-heads of a couple of pounds. They hold well without splitting, I've found, but they'll start getting a lot of slug damage in a long, wet fall, and then I'll have to bring them in. I store them in an unheated shed, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. That keeps each head from drying out. Newspaper wraps work very well for apples, too, keeping them good well into early spring if they're good, hard keepers. I also store my kiwi in buckets layered with crumpled newspaper.

My onions have been curing in a wheelbarrow under my covered deck, tops on. I braided most of them today. That is the best way to store onions I've found. Better than bags. Way better than tubs or boxes. I hang them on my front porch and if we're going to get low-20s or less cold, I bring them in and hang 'em in the basement for a couple of days until we get back up above 25 again. On the porch they're right there and they usually keep nicely until late spring. (Copra keep like rocks!) I do the same with garlic when I grow softneck. This year, they were all hardneck, so no braiding, sigh. They make nice decorations on the porch, too, for that matter.

I've been pulling carrots. I have a vole issue. I need more owls. The voles don't bother the beets and rutabaga and turnip but they DO love carrots. I like my carrots crisp, so I mostly eat up my late summer planting rather than store and use beats for fresh sweet roots in the winter. They do nicely in salads, sliced raw. If you don't want pink salads, grow the white or yellow varieties. Try shredding beets coarsely. Toss with a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette made with good olive oil, sprinkle with feta cheese and a few toasted walnuts. Okay, the feta turns pink if you use red beats! It's still a great salad.

My seed corn is drying, with plenty to grind up for some very fresh blue polenta. I really recommend Triple Play although you can dry and grind any corn. For that matter, any string beans that you didn't pick? Save the dry beans from those shriveled and dried pods. They're great in soup.

So far, the squashes (Kuri) aren't ready to harvest yet, but sometime in the next couple of weeks, I suspect they'll be ready. If we're going to get a lot of rain, I'll go slip a piece of shingle or something like that under each squash, to keep them off the wet ground. I think I'll dig a few Jerusalem artichokes tomorrow and stir fry them. Another welcome-to-fall delicacy.

Walla Wallas, Quinoa, and Squash...oh my!

2008-09-07T14:52:00.001-07:00

My fall spinach, mizuna, broccoli raab, and Walla Walla onion seeds are all up and doing nicely. This is your last chance to plant Walla Walla onions to divide and replant next spring for early summer onions. Beats buying those tired clumps of field-grown plants from the nursery next March! You can get them in this week and give them some extra care. This time of year, weeds infiltrate quickly as the rains begin. The baby onions don't get very big this fall and it's easy for the weeds to overrun them. I plant them quite thickly in a short row. Sometime in March, as the weather dictates, I'll dig up the young plants and set them out with plenty of space in my bed.

The fall and winter spinach varieties do very well for salad greens up until the first really hard freeze. Often that can be January. If you use a plastic row cover you can keep them going quite late, even if we do have a hard early frost or two.

Mizuna, a frilly, deeply cut Chinese green, has never failed me, even in the worst winters. I harvest it all winter for salads (it's a bit like curly endive in taste -- more mustardy and not as peppery -- and quite tender after some frosting). My broccoli is heading up and I'll pull the plants after I've harvested a first set of side shoots in order to plant my fava beans there in November. If it's too unremittingly miserable in November, I've found that a January planting matures at just about the same time.

My quinoa is looking good. I was afraid that our summer was too cool for it to set good heads, and I'm going to have a lot of shoots still in blossom I'm afraid (they're great, steamed, so they sure won't go to waste!) but the main heads are turning yellow, orange, and vivid red. I have discovered in the past that once the seed is mature any rain will cause extensive sprouting in the head, so as soon as we get a forecast of rain, I'll cut all the heads that are showing color and hang under my covered porch where they can continue to dry and ripen. I recommend that you tie the stems in a row on a long cord (I use bailing twine from my hay bales) rather than bunching them. If the weather is too damp, you can get mold in the bunches. If it looks like a long spell of rainy weather, I'll bring them inside and hang them in my main room, from my exposed beams. That's where my woodstove is and stuff dries there very nicely. They do shed some as they dry, so if you hang them indoors realize that. But they look pretty.

My copra onions are falling over, so I've cut the drip water to that bed. And my corn is ripe. I grow Triple Play...it's an heirloom variety from Seed of Change; white, yellow, and blue. It has great flavor, grows very well in even a cool summer, and if you miss the ears at the fresh corn stage, it's a good cornmeal and hominy corn. I always save a few ears for fresh stone ground cornmeal.

The kuri squash are turning color nicely. Kuri is an old variety, teardrop orange, with the driest, sweetest flesh of any of the many many winter squash varieties I've tried. I like banana squash as well, but dealing with 100 lb squashes is a chore. Kuri are just a few pounds each. The vines are huge, though. One year, my two plants grew all along my fence, through my fence, and well into my neighbor's rhodies. He got all the squashes on his side of the fence, I got all the squashes on my side of the fence. The final tally was something like 40. And they keep well into the new year in an unheated garage or outbuilding...just don't let them freeze. When I finally pick them, I immediately dip the stem into bleach solution to keep bacteria from migrating into the squash and I wipe them all over with a bleach and water solution to kill surface bacteria. This seems to help them keep longer. (I use about a tablespoon of bleach in a pint and a half of water.) But it's too early to pick them now. I wait until the tendrils closest to the squash have shriveled up. An 85 year old lifetime gardener told me that trick and it seems to have improved the keeping quality of the squashes in general. By the way, those young winter squash, the ones that won't mature before frost? They're great! I slice them and saute them with garlic in a bit of olive oil, add a bit of broth and cover to steam them lightly. They're tender and much like summer squash in flavor, although a bit 'meatier'.

Lettuce Fill In

2008-08-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

I pulled some bolting lettuce next to my Copra onions and quick, seeded some more in the same place. The soil was moist from my drip system and ideal for new seeds. I quickly seed any new patch of bare ground this time of year. Pretty soon the days will be too short to stimulate maturity in lettuce, so the planting window is closing folks! This nice bit of cool and rain is perfect. I'll try to get my fall greens in this week along with my Walla Walla seed for transplanting onions next spring. Asian greens: baby bok choi, Tah Tsai, Mizuna, all the mustards, do great here most of the winter, all winter if we don't get a killer east wind and hard freeze. I usually mound leaves and straw up around them or hoop them with plastic 'grow therm' (plastic sheeting with holes that allow cooling) to give them some added protection. The mizuna almost always goes into spring and bolts about March. So does the Tah Tsai, although the flat rosettes of tender leaves are a slug fest unless you keep at it. But they make nice winter and spring salads!

Thinning for Dinner

2008-08-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

Well, after four days out of town, serious weeding is in order. I thinned the rutabaga row this morning. They need lots of space for those huge roots and they need to be hilled up to keep the root buried to just below the crown or they don't do well. I swear every seed germinated. I snapped off the rootlets and brought the tops in. Saute with garlic in a little olive oil, add a little water or chicken stock and steam briefly until tender. A drizzle of balsamic vinegar complements the mild mustardy flavor of the tops and if you want to get really fancy, sprinkle on a few toasted and chopped walnuts. Nice way to reward yourself for thinning!

It's time to get fall greens in. Too late and the days won't be long enough to stimulate growth. I usually plant a range of Asian greens, most of which hold well over the winter and even into the spring. I'll also plant spinach and it's time to plant Walla Walla onion seed for next spring. I plant one row thickly and then dig and replant the young onions in the spring, giving them plenty of space to bulb up. They need to be planted between now and September 1 or they'll be too small to handle really nasty weather well. I'll also plant a late row of lettuce. I usually cover this bed with PVC arches and plastic to give my lettuce a longer life in the late fall.

Transplanting Continued

2008-08-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm off to WorldCon, the huge, yearly SF conference where a lot of business gets done. But by the time I get back, get caught up, the best transplanting window for all those fall brassicas will be getting narrow. So of course I do it now. When I'm out of town, I set my drip water to run every day, as opposed to every few days when I'm home to nursemaid seedlings. That will make the new transplants happy. So last night I dug huge holes and filled them full three times since it was supposed to be (and was) in the high 90s today. Worked in my fertilizer mix in the bottom and then 'mudded' in the broccoli seedlings with soil soup (aerated compost tea). In spite of the heat, none of them did more than look a bit tired. No wilting. It's not what's above ground that matters, it's the roots and moisture! This morning, I dug holes for my Brussels sprouts and purple cauliflower (heads in February). Filled them twice with water and then covered the beds with plastic to keep them moist. Tonight, I transplanted. Now I only have my overwintering white cauliflower left...a March heading variety and a May heading variety (Galleon). I got them in late and they're still small, but they can go in later. They take too much winter damage if they're large when we go into the cold months. The survive better if they're a bit small. Unlike the purple which seems to be indestructible. (so far at least).

My peas, planted about a week ago, are happily up. Remay/floating row cover keeps seedlings with an even moisture. It'll be time for fall greens after I get back from Worldcon.

Peas and Cabbage Transplants

2008-07-30T17:02:00.001-07:00

I took advantage of our day of cool and rain to transplant my cabbages. My other brassica starts are overwintering stock, but these cabbages need to fill out before the hard cold of January, so they get to go out first. I planted Gonzales cabbage. These are small, 'personal size' heads of 1 - 2 lb without a huge leaf spread. Perfect for a single person like myself or a small family, they can be planted very closely. I get 12 in a 4 by 10 foot raised bed. They...and all the fall and overwinter brassicas.... are heavy feeders so I tweak my organic fertilize mix, adding some extra blood meal. You get great, very dark green leaves with the extra iron concentration.

I also planted my fall snap peas. Peas do better in this part of Oregon as a fall crop. They don't mind the heat as they germinate if you keep the soil moist (remay or floating row cover works perfectly) and with plenty of water, they thrive in our fall weather. I can pick peas until the first hard freeze. (Last year, that was November). The early frosts don't bother them and by the time the heavy rains start, they're well established and producing. You can plant them the last week of July through the first week of August for best effect. Too late and they won't set pods before the days are too short. I usually get nearly twice the yield I do from the same row length of spring peas. And hey, fresh peas in September and October are a treat. You can plant snaps or regular pod peas.

Transplanting tip: Dig a HUGE hole and fill it to the brim with water. If the bed is pretty dry or your soil drains fast, fill it again or even three times. Then work your fertilizer into the bottom, cover that, and transplant the starts into the damp hole, settling them in with aerated compost tea if you have it (magic for starting transplants). Water them in, finally. They may droop a bit during the hot day, but they'll be fine, even in 100 degree August heat.

Transplanting Weather

2008-07-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

What a perfect transplanting day, with clouds, cool, all that. I looked over my fall starts and my Napa type Chinese Cabbage is a faster start than my overwintering brassicas that weren't quite ready. So I transplanted the Wong Bok starts, using big holes and lots of water in spite of the cool weather. I also planted my kale bed, four varieties, plus a row of collards. They're the workhorses of winter/spring gardening. Greens all winter and much nicer after a freeze or two, plus lots of nice buds in spring plus new leaves...perfect for stir fries and braised leaves and even salads if you pick the new leaves small. They're useful in that early spare period between the end of the overwintering crop and the start of the spring/early summer crops.

Fall Lettuce and Summer Seeds

2008-07-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

Since I've jumped into the middle of this planting year, I should mention lettuce. I plant lettuce off and on during July through the first week in August for fall. Lettuce loves the fall and will start quite nicely even though it's hot, if you can keep your soil from drying out during the day. Well, this is an issue with all seeds planted this time of year. Even if you water well in the morning, the top inch of soil will dry out in the midday heat. I use a floating row cover over all my seeds. A light fabric, I can water right through it and it preserves that moisture so the sprouting seeds aren't stressed by dry/wet/dry conditions. It allows light through so that seedlings don't start spindly like they do under newspaper or straw mulch. You can buy it from Territorial Seed and mine has lasted six years now.

I've found that lettuces planted later in August won't develop well for fall. Not enough daylight hours, I suspect. But July plantings will carry on nicely through frost with a bit of thermal protection.

Roots and Legumes

2008-07-20T20:13:00.000-07:00

I planted my fall roots today; rutabaga, more carrots (red core chanteney) and beets (Territorial's autumn blend-- yellow, white, and red). With plenty of water, all three of these roots will make nice size. I have found that I can leave rutabaga and beets in the ground all winter, although if we get a really nasty cold -- down into the low 20s or teens -- I need to put straw and a tarp over them during that freeze. But carrots have to come in. I have voles and not enough owls. The voles simply eat carrots. Period.

As for the rest of the roots, if I don't eat them all during the winter, they go to bud and those buds are SO nice in spring stir-fries. I also cleared out my fava and snap pea beds. Sheep feed. I picked, shucked, and froze the last of my fava beans. Great in soup or sauteed with curry spice (or your favorite spice), onions, and served over rice for midwinter protein.

I'll plant peas and fall coles -- collards and kales -- in the next week or so. Peas, I've found, do best if you plant them the week before August 1.

Planting Time: Overwinter and Fall

2008-07-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

Early July is a big planting time for me. Last week I planted my fall cabbage, brussels sprouts, Purple Cape cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, broccoli. It's not too late to plant them now. I actually had to get them in a bit early because I was going to be out of town. These will all be transplanted in early August and will be harvested this fall and well into the winter.

Yesterday I planted overwintering cauliflower: Galleon, which will head up in early May, and Lundy, which should head up in March. Since my Purple Cape cauliflower (Territorial) headed up in February last year, I should have fresh cauli heading up all through the spring, right up the the first picking of my spring cauliflower.

July is the big planting window for the winter and early spring garden, although I keep planting up through the end of October (garlic). Think about what you want to be eating all winter. Leeks? Rutabaga? Beets? Carrots? Kale? Collards? Hardy cabbage? Asian greens? How about Walla Walla onions next year? I'm just pulling my big fat bulbs now and I started them last August. All of these do very well through all but the nastiest winters, even when the temp drops into the low 20s or less for a brief time. And they all need to go in within the next few weeks. So get seed now. Think peas, too. Planted in August, I get a much better crop of peas in the fall than I do in the spring. Not so much rain!

Starting Somewhere!

2008-07-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

I' m a self supporting writer and have been for a long time. The only way I've been able to eat organically and well has been to grow nearly all of my own food. I've been doing that for close to two decades now and these days I can pick several fresh items from my Portland garden even in January and February. So if you're interested in year 'round gardening, we have a nearly perfect climate for it. (Okay, I'd like a bit less freezing east wind and I really wish okra did better here, but other than that...) So here's what I'm planting in the garden on a day by day basis. It's time to plant now for fall and for next spring. You can eat fresh 365 days a year, so why not?