Kale and pumpkin

So, as predicted, I have fallen behind in updating the blog with some of the things that I have planted recently, and so here goes with a couple more.

Kale

Kale is a low-maintenance and flavourful brassica, which is flavourful and highly nutritious.

Starting

Sow in March for summer picking, and this can be continued to mid-July/August for autumn and winter harvesting. For full-size plants Kale should be sown approximately 18" apart, or as little as 4" apart if you want to treat the plant as a cut-and-come-again plant for salad leaves and such like.

Growing

As mentioned these are pretty low maintenance in terms of feeding, and looking after. They are slow to grown and are in peak condition for a long period of time, and so a few sowings should see you through the season nicely. You mainly need to be concerned with pests, especially cabbage moths. last year I suffered horrendous damage by bugs since I was not taking too much care over the plants. Not this year!

Harvesting

Pick leaves from the bottom up (oldest first) and if you are treating the plant as a cut-and-come-again these can be harvested when the leaves are only a couple of inches long and tossed straight into a salad. Expect to harvest 3-4 months from sowing. For example, I will be expecting to harvest my March-April sowings of kale in June/July.

Pumpkins and other squashes

Out of all of the vegetables I have grown in the past my absolute favourite has to be the Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkin. An extremely evocative plant for anyone who has been brought up with the Cinderella story, and makes for a great pie too (if memory serves correctly).

Starting

These generally tend to have a long growing season (the aforementioned Rouge Vif d'Etampes is 105 days) and like warm soil, so it is best to to start pumpkins indoors or undercover between March and May, and then planted out in June. It is recommended that the seed is placed on its edge to prevent rot, but I haven't had this issue (to the best of my knowledge) so far. When the seeds have 4 leaves or so they can be put out in the garden with a good scooping of compost when the soil has warmed up nicely. Summer squash can be planted 18-24" apart, and winter squash and pumpkins can be spaced a minimum of 36"-48". These are big plants.

Growing

As they are big plants they generally need lots of feeding too. As mentioned above, a cup of compost or organic fertilizer when transplanting the seedlings should do the trick.

All squash grow the male flowers first and then the female flowers. These are insect-pollinated, and incomplete pollination can occur at the beginning of the season. If misshapen fruit appear then it is best to discard these so that the energy of the plant can be put to better use. My biggest enemy when growing pumpkins previously was powdery mildew, so avoid wetting the foliage as much as possible (not always easy here on the West Coast), and water at the beginning of the day. You should also try to avoid having the pumpkin sit in damp too, and this can be accomplished using a brick, or a breeze block, for example.

Harvesting

Leave winter squash and pumpkins to to ripen for as long as possible. Apparently, a good test to see if they are ripe is if your thumbnail does not leave a mark, and also if the stem is dry and brown. For summer squash you need to pick when small, otherwise the plant will stop producing. One quick word about saving seeds. If you plant more than one squash variety then chances are the plants will cross-pollinate. The current plant will not be affected, but any seeds gathered from that plant may not produce fruit that resembles its parent. If you wish to save seeds then grow one variety at a time.

The Year-round Vegetable Gardener

I am currently reading a book called The Year-round Vegetable Gardener, which I have borrowed from the library and am finding very enjoyable so far.

Though I am only on chapter 2, I have found it a very good read and lays out some good ideas when it comes to planning a garden that provides bounty for the whole year. The author mentions such handy paraphernalia as cold frames, etc. which i have often thought about, but I live in quite a warm climate (sure it goes below zero over Winter, but not by too much) and so have never really gotten round to looking into building them. Besides, my garden isn't really big enough for permanent structures like that.

One aspect though, which I always get around now, is that the book is causing me anxiety. I always worry that I have missed the optimum time for sowing which, for the beginning of April, is a strange feeling to get (although I am worried that I won't get much bounty from my tomatoes yet as they haven't started to sprout). Anyway, I shall endeavour to invest in more seed starters and lights when I get the chance, so that I can have seeds on the go throughout the year, and not just during the colder Spring months.

Gai Lan and Corn Salad

As mentioned in the previous post, I went on a bit of a sowing spree last week and so I need to catch up with some of the kinds of vegetables that I planted.

Gai Lan

The literal translation of Gai Lan is "mustard orchid" due to the subtle mustard flavour of the leaves. It is a member of the brassica family, also known as Chinese Broccoli and is a leaf vegetable featuring thick, flat, glossy blue-green leaves with thick stems and a small number of tiny, almost vestigial flower heads similar to those of broccoli.

Starting

These can be sown around mid-March for me, or around 3-4 weeks before the last frost date, or transplant seedlings when they are 3-4 weeks old. The seeds should no more than 1cm deep, and can be grown around 8" apart.

Growing

Gai Lan does not need as much fertilizer as its brassica brethren, broccoli, and it is important to water well in dry periods. For cool season harvest gai lan should be sown in the Summer or early Fall.

Harvesting

Stalks can be harvested with leaves and flower buds intact by cutting them at the ground level. For peak flavour, the plants should be harvested before the tiny flower buds open.

Corn Salad

I sowed this on the advice of one of my friends. Corn Salad is a salad green that comes under a mixture of names, for example Lamb's Lettuce or Mâche.

Starting

Seeds sprout best in cool, moist soil, which sounds exactly like the West Coast in mid-March, though it has been pretty warm here of late. These plants can be thinned to 2" so they are pretty good in terms of the amount of vegetables for the space allotted.

Growing

Corn salad grows in a low rosette with spatulate leaves up to 15.2 cm long.[3] It is a hardy plant that grows to zone 5, and in mild climates it is grown as a winter green. In warm conditions it tends to bolt to seed.

Harvesting

Like all salad greens, you can use scissors to cut everything that is about 1-2" from the ground when the plant is about 4" tall, or you can harvest leaves individually.

Radish

Last week I went on a bit of a sowing spree and sowed a couple of different types of vegetables, which maybe turned out well as this week is getting better and better in terms of the weather. On the other hand, the nights have been chilly with a slight frost making an appearance. Therefore everything that was sown are able to handle a little frost and can be planted a couple of weeks before the last frost date.
Radishes are very ubiquitous when it comes to vegetable gardens as they are very easy to grow and are quick to harvest, making them a very accessible plant to grow. I went with a variety called White Icicle.

Starting

Radishes sprout in about 5-10 days depending upon the outdoors temperature. I sowed the seeds 3" apart, giving me 16 seeds in a square foot area. For a continual harvest it is best to sow every fortnight or so even through the Summer, but please note some problems that may occur below.

Growing

Radishes are fast growing and do not have many issues since they spend suc a short time in the ground, but they may need to be shaded, mulched, or watered carefully in order to avoid the radishes getting dried out, which will lead to splitting or bolting.

Harvesting

Pull up the entire plant and trim the tops when they get marble-sized or so.

Spinach

The second sowing that I have started this year, aside from a couple of flowers, is spinach. I sowed the seeds back on March 3rd and they have started to appear.

Spinach

Starting

Spinach can be continually sown for a couple of months at the beginning of the year, about 4-5 weeks before the final frost date. For me, in Victoria, BC this is about March time with my final frost date being around April 19th.

Spinach takes around 1-2 weeks to germinate, and do not like to be transplanted, and so they should be started directly outside. Spinach seeds should be sown around 3" apart, although if you want larger leaves, then spacing should be around 8".

Growing

Spinach is fast-growing, productive and can grow in small spaces, making it a very attractive vegetable to plant. It is a heavy feeder, and benefits from monthly applications of a fertilizer high in nitrogen, for example fish emulsion.

Spinach is not a fan of hot weather, however, and will bolt to seed, causing the leaves to taste bitter. Regular watering (at least twice weekly in warm weather) )is essential to create steady growth in the plant and minimize bolting. One plant that is not actually a spinach but is very close in taste is New Zealand spinach. This plant does not mind the Summer heat and will not bolt.

Harvesting

Cut outer leaves when they are around 1-2" above ground level. If it looks like the plant is about to bolt then harvest the entire plant for a little extra harvest before the leaves turn bitter.

First Post of the Season - Lavender

Well, it's that time of year again, and I am determined (ahem) to keep an account of my growing season. This time, though, I will write in detail descriptions of the things I grow, so that I can keep a record for future years, and then also use this information for a mobile app that I want to create, but content creation is the hard part.

Lavender

Starting

According to West Coast Seeds, a good time to start lavender from seeds in this part of the world is about now, which is why I sowed them last week. I have read in a couple of places that it is good to freeze the seeds before putting them on a heat mat (in a light growing medium) as a way of fooling the seeds into thinking that Spring has arrived and that germination can begin.

In any case, lavender seeds are slow to germinate, taking anywhere from between 14 to 28 days to germinate. This last point has me slightly worried in that my seeds are germinating after a little over a week, and so I had to rig up my lighting equipment a little sooner than I had expected.

Growing

The native range extends across the Canary Islands and Madeira, North and East Africa, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, Arabia and India. This essentially tells you that the ideal for lavender is full sun and sandy, fertile soil.

Lavender is an undemanding shrub but will appreciate a good pruning. Some people recommend pruning in the spring before it takes off, and others advise doing it in the fall. Whenever you decide to trim lavender make sure you never cut back into old wood.

Harvesting

Lavender makes for some amazing sensations, be they smells or tastes depending on how you use the flowers and seeds (if at all). We have used them for pot pourri, I know not very imaginative, but also in jam, sugar, and other food products.

Harvesting lavender for drying is best done when the flowers are in full colour, and either before they start to open or the flowers are only 1/3 open. The flowers keep a stronger colour when picked at this bud stage.

For potpourri, both the buds and leaves work well. The leaves also have a nice scent, but the buds are visually more pleasing. I use a mixture of both the leaves and the buds in my potpourri with more buds then leaves. Use the ratio amount that is visually pleasing to you.

Second Sowing of the Season

Tonight I sowed 32 lettuce seeds, and 32 arugula seeds. Not a great deal to report, I guess, but this is pretty early to be sowing these seeds, even indoors.

I calculate that I am currently seven weeks from my last frost date ( around April 15th), so these seeds will be grown indoors until around 4 weeks from that date, when I will then transplant them outdoors and cover them with my polytunnel. When they are planted I will also start sowing lettuce seeds outdoors to get a continuous stream of salad leaves for at least the early part of the season (or at least until it gets too hot). It will also enable me to use up the space around my vegetable bed around areas of slower growing plants like tomatoes and maximize space (I have less than I did back in Port Coquitlam).

Seedling Progress

On Sunday I moved my seeds from the basement to my bedroom in the top floor of my house. Though I had a heating mat, I felt that it was too cold down there for the seeds to germinate. Now I don’t know whether or not it was fortuitous timing or not, but by Monday morning a whole raft of seedlings had appeared, mainly for the chard, but some of the cherry tomatoes were also beginning to appear.

On Wednesday (10 days after the sowing) seedlings have appeared for all three of the vegetables planted, and I rigged up a lighting system so that they won’t get too leggy. Today also saw quite the snowfall in Victoria, so getting sunny windowsill has proven to be a little tricky. I am told that my garlic should survive the onslaught.

Seedy Saturday

The above picture was taken at Seedy Saturday, a gardening event that took place last Saturday. The clue to the type of event it was is in the name, in that there were a lot of local distributors of seeds, vegetables and flowers, as well as a couple of gardening stores, and other related stalls including, oddly enough, a local seafood company.

I picked up quite a few seeds from Seed Savers Exchange which enables you to donate seeds, as well as purchase seeds on the cheap. I will keep an eye on how well they germinate, which will let me know whether or not they were value for money after all.

2011–Starting Place

Whilst the tomato and chard seeds are (hopefully germinating), I thought it’d be almost interesting to show the state of the garden as it is at the start of the growing season, and it can be compared with a previous post with similar imagery.

To start with, this is a close-up of my garlic bed. The cloves of garlic were planted in mid-late November, which is a bit later than I would have liked, but they look like they are progressing well.

This is the renovated garden shed. Julita and her Dad renovated it last Summer, putting cedar shingles over the walls, and painting the windows and trim. I put the roof on, if that counts for anything. Behind the garlic, where the plastic row cover is now, potatoes will be planted.

This is where the ‘magic’ will happen. It is my first vegetable bed, built by Bryan Stevenson, and provides a square-footage of approx. 63. Oh boy, that’s a whole lot of space to cover. The original plan was to have four of these bad boys, but I was persuaded to try one first to see how it works out. Back in Port Coquitlam I had a total of 96 square foot, so it is a little bit of a come-down, but I like a challenge. Oh wait….

First Sowings of the 2011 Season

Ok, so it is clear by now that my record-keeping skills are not exactly meticulous as I look upon my last entry on February 2010. Anyway, a lot has happened in the interim with the birth of my daughter, Tess, in June 2010. This event brought to home some of the reasons for the home vegetable growing in the first place, so I’m hoping updates will be more regular. Also, I now have a vegetable bed (pictures coming soon), and so I at least have somewhere to put the plants, which helps.

Anyway, today I sowed 24 seeds of Galina, which is a yellow cherry tomato, 16 seeds of Silverbeet, which is a chard, and 24 seeds of a yellow tomato called Yellow Perfection. All seeds are from Seeds of Victoria.

Marmalade Update

It was rather amiss of me not to write an update about the marmalade. According to the instructions I was following there are a couple of ways to know if a preservative has reached its setting point. These include using a thermometer and when a certain temperature has been reached then the setting point has also been achieved, and a second method involves letting a small bit of the preservative lie on a cold plate for a couple of minutes and if it has the consistency you require then it too has reached the setting point.

I went with the first method of setting the marmalade, but I must have done something wrong. The marmalade is very runny, but on the other hand it is absolutely delicious. Anyway, I still have several jars of blueberry jam to get through until we can start on the marmalade and I am hoping that it will have set a little by then. If not, it will make for a delicious orange marmalade sauce.

Orange Marmalade

In the middle of winter there are not many fruits that are in season, but one such useful fruit is the Seville Orange, which is available between January and February. The Seville Orange is also known as bitter orange, and has a very bitter or sour taste, but the reason I am interested in it is its use in making marmalade. Following a recipe from the Preserves book in the River Cottage Handbook series, today I bought a kilo of Seville Oranges and two kilos of demerara sugar.

So far I have cut the oranges up, squeezed the juice out and shredded the peel. Once this was done, I re-added the juice and covered the shredded peel with water. It is currently in my kitchen looking a bit like this:

 

They will remain in the bowl for 24 hours before being turned into about 6 450g jars of marmalade.

The seeds that I planted the other week are coming up well, and only a couple of seeds don't appeared to have come through, but there are plenty to help me start a herb garden once they get a big bigger and it gets a bit warmer outside. This is what it currently looks like on my kitchen window sill:

I think, moving from left-to-right we have sage, basil, chives and oregano but, due to my lousy record-keeping, I will have a much better idea when they grow a bit more.

First Sowing of the Year

Today I started my somewhat smaller gardening year by sowing a couple of different herbs. These consist of basil, garlic chives, sage, and oregano. I am only growing 8 modules of each herb since I am sowing them so early, but I wanted to get a start as the weather here in Victoria is so unseasonably mild due to El Nino. I am using top soil mixed with vermiculite for the sowing material and the root container is currently sitting on a heat mat. Hopefully the first seedlings should start appearing within the week.

My bread adventures continue, as I am currently creating two whole wheat loaves of bread with a mixture of seeds inside the bread. As I grow in confidence it is fun to try different mixtures in order to vary the bread being created.

New Year's Resolution Part 2.

I have come to the realisation that I should really write down some of the things that Iwant to achieve this year, to present myself with some goals otherwise I will probably just let the year slide by. As I continue on the quest of self-reliance, I want to learn new skills around the house that will come in useful and can be built upon over time. Now, the list below is modest to say the least, but this year will be the yardstick against which I will compare my progress.

1. Build my vegetable garden. I am not sure that I will have the time or the money to plant anything, certainly not in time for the Summer (hey, I didn't say that the goals would be aggressive), but I would like to have something in the ground for the Winter crop.

2. Bake my own bread the entire year. So far I have baked bread five times and thoroughly enjoy it, albeit with very mixed results. A picture of the first loaf was posted on to the blog but the second was too salty and failed (I was experimenting by making it with apple juice and including raisins), and the results have been a bit mixed since, though last night's wholewheat bread was a triumph (even if I do say so myself).

3. Carry on with preserves and increase the range this year. Ove the last two years my wife and I have created apricot, plum, and raspberry jams and have been pretty successful at it. Not sure what this years flavour will be, but I want to increase the amount that we preserve and also the types of preserves.

4. Make my own sausages. I was given a meat grinder with sausage-making attachments a couple of years back and my first attempt at making them failed miserably (mainly because I was missing an important piece of the grinder). Since then I haven't gotten round to trying again, but this year I will.

5. Make my own beer. I tried this last year, but it didn't turn out too well. This year I shall attempt it again, and this time to try and actually get it right.

Like I said, there is not a lot to do there, but I want to make sure that I make progress in all of these matters, and maybe go above and beyond.

Bread

As part of this blog, I am going to examine all aspects of self-reliance. Now, obviously bread cannot be made without such ingredients as flour, which is a food stuff that I do not grow, but the making of bread is still an important step in self-reliance for me, so that I do not rely on mass-manufactured bread that contain all sorts of ingredients.

This bread was created following a recipe from a book that was recently bought for me for Christmas. The River Cottage Bread Handbook is a very easy to read, easy to follow recipe book that shows how to make all sorts of bread, e.g. ciabatta, flatbreads, etc. as well as biscuits and so on. I have only so far done the basic bread recipe (two pages long after approximately 30-40 pages of detailed instructions), but as can be seen above it appears to have been very successful and from now on I can start exploring how to create different types of breads, as well as variations on the basic recipe.

Frost Dates

Hmmm...I am very disappointed to learn that Victoria's frost dates mean that the growing season is less than it was over in Port Coquitlam. According to most of the sources I have seen Victoria's dates are April 19 for the last frost date and the first frost date is 5th November. Oh well, it is still a pretty damn decent length.

My New Backyard

This is a picture of my new backyard, or to be precise the back of my yard. the house is to one side of the lot and so there is a bit of garden to one side, but this used to be a driveway to a workshop. we are not going to use the workshop per se, so this driveway is open to be developed for a veg garden. I am currently thinking that I will install two 4ftx20ft beds eventually, but that is a lot of gravel to move so baby steps.

This is to the one side of the driveway. There is a shed and some kind of extension that I think can be used as a greenhouse, especially if I install another window. I may also add some kind of coldhouse at the bottom of the windows. This area gets Sun all year round, so it'll be a good area to develop for crops like tomatoes, I think.

This is to the side of the house. It will receive Sun during the Summer but I do not know when the Sun will be high enough to get over the roof of the house. I won't be developing this area this year, but will keep an eye on the situation over the year so that I can make a plan for next year.

New Year's Resolution

Since I last posted back in the Summer I have moved to a place called Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island in BC. Unfortunately, the area for my vegetable patch is a lot smaller than in my previous house but, on the plus side, the climate is warmer and therefore the growing season is slightly longer.

On a bigger issue, the area that I am considering for my vegetable patch needs a lot of work as it is currently covering in gravel. sounds like fun. I need to work out my plan and see what can be done and grown this year. Pictures coming soon.

Second round of peas

As predicted, I haven't been keeping up with the blog. Since my last post back in June the garden has been growing nicely and I have harvested quite a bit. Radishes and lettuce mostly, with a fair amount of zucchini.

We have harvested all of the peas located in the first raised garden, and today I sowed a second round in the same position. I am hoping that it doesn't exhaust the soil too much, but I did put in some more compost and some fertilizer (organic, naturally). I wonder what the outcome will be.

I will be putting a second round of lettuce and mesclun mix in soon, but I fear that the weather is still a little too warm, as it is in the high twenties.