Garden

Last harvest, for real

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:48:00 +0000

I dropped by my garden one last time to pick some last little treasures:

Morning glory seeds	Dried valerian root
Rainbow chard	Random tomatoes

Bye-bye, urban organic garden! You will be missed.

Last harvest

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:30:00 +0000

I'm moving out in two days, so I spent today harvesting whatever was ripe (or almost ripe) before I leave, which included cherry tomatoes, ruffled red tomatoes, and sweet peppers. I hope I have a chance to harvest a few more ruffled reds on Thursday – there are so many big, bulbous unripe ones!

I also harvested all my basil, which I am in the process of putting into freezer bags to preserve over the winter. (Freezing basil seems to be the best way to preserve its flavour, in my experience. Though once freezers become too costly to operate, drying it is!)

I still have to harvest my parsnips, valerian root, lettuce seed and flax seed. My eggplants most likely won't be ready before I leave. They're really tiny things. Maybe I'll drop by at the end of the month (while I still have legal access to the property) to see how they're doing.

Piddling potato harvest

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:19:00 +0000

Here were my two potato stacks this morning:

From these I managed to excavate a mere 550 g of potatoes, which I think was actually less than what I planted:

Go figure. This happened last year at Everdale, too. I think potatoes really need a lot of soil depth to grow productively. I only mounded them once because I wasn't able to find any more tires, but had I mounded them at least three times, as I should have, I probably would have ended up with three times as many potatoes.

In other news, I harvested my onions the other day. They were smaller than pearls. Aww. I also picked all my barley, which I didn't bother hulling yet because I don't have the time, so I just put it all in a paper bag. The corn cobs I saved have finally dried out and I "hulled" the kernels off a couple days ago (what do you call the process of popping off the kernels?). They look great. Corn is so easy to grow, so I think it will be a big part of my future farm. Soon, before I move, I have to harvest my flax, lettuce seed, and parsnips.

Garden in the press

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:22:00 +0000

Have a look at this great article by Tor Sandberg. He interviewed me for this rabble.ca article a couple weeks ago, and in it he writes about the garden! Hooray.

Inspired folks go organic

"I think the emphasis on local is the new organic. What I'm seeing is the local interest in agriculture taking off."

Photo>Paul Hoepfner-Homme

Paul planting with a friend

>by Tor Sandberg
September 4, 2007
Paul Hoepfner-Homme, 26, shows off his ripening cherry tomatoes, chard, zucchinis, and a myriad of other vegetables. It was only earlier this year that Paul converted a gravel parking space into a bio-intensive garden behind his rented apartment in downtown Toronto.
Three years ago, while in the midst of his computer science degree at the University of Waterloo, Paul had an epiphany while reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, a book that criticizes modernity and its unsustainable relationship to the environment.
“I couldn't help but agree [with the book],” says Paul, who a year later would begin volunteering on an organic farm outside Toronto, inspiring the creation of his backyard garden and thoughts of starting his own organic farm.
Continued on rabble.ca...

Melon for the morning

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:16:00 +0000

Pride of Wisconsin muskmelon - harvest yours today!

For some reason the squirrels avoided this little beauty, thus giving it a chance to ripen to maturity. Fruit from the garden - so exciting! If I were going to live here another year, I think I'd grow all melons instead of pumpkins and other squash.

No shortage of tomatoes

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:57:00 +0000

My squash are all suffering from this mildewy thing. It's a little disappointing, but there doesn't look to be anything I can do about it. The cucumbers are still growing, albeit very slowly. I'm hoping to have my first lemon cucumber in maybe a week or so.

Both my pumpkins have been successfully destroyed by the squirrels. Whatever. :P

Tomatoes are doing fine, beans are basically done, peppers seem all right, basil looks good, flowering lettuce are going to seed, flax and barley are getting good and dry, parsley is a little paltry, eggplants are slowly maturing, chard is insane and I'm tired of harvesting it, potatoes are looking really healthy (I just wish I had more tires to stack them higher), valerian is slowly gaining size, and I'm sure I have quite a few other veggies that I've now completely forgotten about.

My beautiful pumpkins...

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:52:00 +0000

What's chomping on my pumpkin??

It's a narsty black squirrel!

And it's left my pumpkin hollow. :(

Moral of the story: Don't grow food in the city?

Real moral of the story: Be vigilant. I wasn't.

Stupidest. Carrots. Ever.

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:40:00 +0000

I harvested my tiny carrot patch this morning. They were all such tiny little things – short and stout. Pathetic. I'm sure they could have benefited from having been grown under true full-sun conditions, but wouldn't lack of sun have just resulted in all-around smaller carrots, both short and thin? These were short and fat. Which makes me think it had something to do with the fact that their growth got stunted when I transplanted them from seedlings. I personally think that was a silly idea. Thanks, HtGMV.

Corn harvest

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 01:43:00 +0000

I harvested most of my Indian Blue corn this evening. A lot of it was very mature and not exactly juicy, but I ate it anyway and it was good. Two ears I'm leaving to dry (apparently for three months) so I can use the kernels from them for next year's crop.

Oh yes, and the other two thumbnails are more recent garden photos. Just thought I'd keep y'all in the loop.

Goodbye, summer squash...

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:03:00 +0000

... you will be missed. My zucchini plant died a couple days ago. How tragic. I have no idea what caused it. It rotted at the stem, but I couldn't tell what was causing the rot. I got some pics.

I got 4 beautiful, perfect zucchinis out of it. So sad.

But the rest of my garden looks really happy. The squash are taking over, as was to be expected. I'm quite happy with all the vinery.

Preserving

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:02:00 +0000

I just packed 3 lb. of rainbow chard into yoghurt containers for freezing. It took most of the morning, but it's pretty easy to do:

Wash the leaves and stems.
Chop them into reasonable sized pieces.
Blanch them by submerging them, batch by batch, into a pot of boiling water for about 2 minutes.
Take it out, drain it, and pack it into a container or airtight bag.
Label and date each container and put it in the freezer.

Looks like I've harvested the equivalent of $82 worth of food so far (see the chart on the right), and my tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, etc. still aren't even ready.

It's a jungle out there

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 04:37:00 +0000

The pumpkins seem really happy climbing up that telephone pole. I can't help thinking that's the coolest thing. We need more of that sort of thing in this city! Think of the potential. Melons at every street corner. Why not?

My cucumbers are taking their time to bloom; not sure why, because they look really happy too, nestled behind that sheltering sunflower.

The leaf miners continue to think they own my chard, but they've got another think coming.

I think my carrots are going to be very short little things - I tried one. That's probably the last time I follow HtGMV's carrot transplanting advice.

I continue to aim all my squash and melons out to the back laneway, and make the melons grow more vertically as well. It's very exciting.

Point-form updates

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:04:00 +0000

I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.

A-trellising we will go

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 04:41:00 +0000

I got back from my trip, and my garden was still intact! Meta was watering every day, apparently, and there were three significant rainfalls. The only casualty was the spinach plant I'd been trying to save for seed, which was a wilted puddle of yellow when I came home. It was already going that direction before I left, and I have no idea why. I actually saved two spinach plants for seed, and they both did the same thing. Too much heat, maybe?

But that also meant that my tomatoes and pumpkins were getting out of control. One tomato plant had grown so big and toppled over, smothering the onions, basil and poppies. I had to do some trellising, which is what I spent today doing.

I posted two stakes at each end of the tomato bed and tied two lines of twine (made of recycled jeans) between them. This propped up the tomato plants pretty well, but I spent some time perfecting the arrangement by gently maneuvering the delicate branches between the lines.

I also got a tip at Everdale about dealing with yellowing lower tomato branches. Apparently it's a form of blight that is contracted through contact with the soil. As long as you remove the lower branches, you'll be fine. But you have to wash your hands thoroughly after touching infected branches before touching the rest of the plant.

The flax was also a little flimsy and falling onto the pathways, so I staked some small bamboo stakes around the flax patch and tied some wool around them to keep the stalks upright.

My pumpkin, melon, and cucumbers were also starting to sprawl, so I found random branches and stuck them around the plants in various configurations until they were sturdy, and gently convinced the squash plants to climb up them.

The corn cobs are ripening!

Photo updates

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:32:00 +0000

Some photos before I leave my garden under the care of my bandmates for a week, while I whoop it up at Everdale.

Bolting over bounty

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:23:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago, virtually all of my spinach was bolting. "Bolting" means going to flower. When a leaf crop, such as spinach or lettuce, goes to flower, that's not a good thing, unless your purpose for growing them is to harvest the seeds rather than the leaves (in which case bolting is obviously imperative). Bolted lettuce and spinach leaves are more bitter and generally not marketable.

Heat is a factor that accelerates the flowering process, and my spinach spent most of its life span during the hottest days of May and June, so in a way it's no surprise that it bolted. I just wished they had grown a little bigger before going to flower. They were very slow-growing. I think part of it has to do with flat soil I sowed them in, which wasn't ideal and possibly retarded their growth. Also, I probably could have sowed them much earlier than I did and given them more of a chance to grow during the cooler weeks.

So for a while I had been picking off the flowering heads from all my spinach plants (which I had to do every day). But it was getting to the point where the leaves simply weren't becoming more abundant no matter what I did, so I harvested it all at once.

Much of my Simpson lettuce has also been bolting (though not quite as much), and I can only assume it's doing so for the same reasons my spinach did. I did the same thing for the lettuce as I did for the spinach, but ate the bolting heads because they seemed to be just leaves anyway (and they weren't noticeably bitter yet).

I sowed more spinach and lettuce seeds a few days ago, which I'll plant where my current lettuce resides after it's been harvested. I tried four different types of potting soil mixes - regular 1:1 mix (soil:compost), a 1:3 mix, a 100% compost mix, and a 1:1 mix that happened to have a bit more soil in it than compost. I'm curious to see what's most effective for germination and seedling growth. So far, the 1:1 mix is winning!

Composting

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 13:21:00 +0000

First poppy to bloom in my garden - a Shirley poppy:

I finally put together a long-overdue compost heap for kitchen scraps, dry brush and the like. Here is how a biointensive compost pile works:

First, you loosen the soil below it a foot deep. This allows for proper drainage. Then, cover the soil with a 3"-thick layer of very fibrous carbonaceous materials, like small branches, corn and sunflower stalks, to ensure airflow below the pile. Then start building up your pile in layers, repeated as follows:

1-2" layer of dry vegetation
1-2" layer of green vegetation
¼-½" layer of soil

Each layer is thoroughly watered after it is added to the pile. After about three weeks, the pile is turned to make the mixture more homogeneous for a complete breakdown. By following this procedure, the final product should have a carbon-nitrogen ratio of about 30 to 1, which is the ideal ratio.

I learned a bit about composting last year and heard about the 30 to 1 ratio, but misunderstood that the "carbon" in that ratio was equivalent to "dry vegetation", and "nitrogen" was equivalent to "green vegetation" - meaning I should be making a pile with 30 times more dry vegetation than green vegetation. This is not so, and I'm glad HtGMV makes it all very clear.

My next-door neighbour kindly donated his black "earth machine" composter to my garden, so I'm using it to keep things tidy. HtGMV, however, says it's not necessary to contain the compost at all, and a free-standing pile is perfectly fine.

Photos

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:57:00 +0000

Check out the latest shots...

D is for dig, T is for transplant

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been doing stuff in the garden, I've just had no time to blog about it. Pictures will come this evening! I can't take photos during the day because the middaylight makes things look crappy on film.

So, I don't remember where I was at in terms of number of raised beds last time, but I'm up to 5 now. I'm getting into the groove; it doesn't take me quite as long to double-dig a bed anymore. Here is the layout of the raised beds and what I have planted in them:

Yesterday I double-dug the fifth bed – the square-shaped one in the middle – and transplanted lots of things into it. I also transplanted more things into the bed on the right. I've managed to cram a lot of different kinds of plants into a pretty small space. We'll see if they like it!

My method of choosing where to plant what was rather ad-hoc, but I often make use of these three guidelines to help me decide:

Companion planting: Which plants grow well together, and which do worse?
Shading and space: How tall and wide to the plants grow?
Age of seedlings: What needs to be transplanted most urgently?

The second guideline came in handy for the tomatoes, sunflowers, and squash. I know tomatoes and sunflowers can grow quite tall and produce a lot of shade, so they should be planted close to the north-ish edges of beds. Squash tend to take up a lot of horizontal space, so I planted them at the back of the yard so they could sprawl onto the back laneway.

For the curious, here's an exhaustive list of what's now planted in my garden, listed alphabetically:

barley (Arabian blue)
basil (sweet)
carrots (Scarlet Nantes)
chard (rainbow mix)
cilantro
corn (Indian blue)
cucumbers (lemon, Pointsett 76)
edible flower mix:
flax (golden)
lettuce (French heirloom Merveille des Quantres Saisons, black-seeded Simpson)
melon (Pride of Wisconsin)
morning glories
peppers (Frank's sweet)
pole beans (Blue Lake)
poppies (Shirley)
potatoes (white and red, though not sure exactly what varieties)
pumpkin (small sugar)
radishes, now going to seed
spearmint
spinach (Bloomsdale)
tomatoes (Sweetie, Scotch Bonnet, Ruffled Red)
zucchini

I've also been picking off the leaf miner-infected parts of my spinach and chard on a regular basis, and it's definitely helped. The plants seem to be happier, even though they've suffered much defoliating, and the leaf miners aren't making fast progress anymore. I was finally able to harvest my first spinach leaves a few days ago (which is accounted for in the list on the right).

Leaf miners

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:03:00 +0000

Upon closer inspection today, it looks like little white caterpillars are consuming the leaves of my chard and spinach. It still looks like a disease because you never see the worms until they're so big and the leaf is so disintegrated that they're visible through the remnant membrane, so that's why I thought it was mildew before.

I spent about half an hour picking off all my attacked spinach and chard leaves. I probably should have done that when I first noticed the condition. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.

Update: Jon informs me that these are, in fact, leaf miner larvae. I'm investigating it.

Update #2: Okay, these are definitely leaf miners, because this page describes my dilemma very accurately. They suggest picking off the infected leaves as the first method of control (just as I have been doing). Beyond that, there's not much you can do, unless you want to take the pesticide route. I can see how farmers would be tempted by that option if they have a large crop at risk. The sad thing is, by applying pesticides you damage soil life, which is crucial for healthy soil. And as Jon and I have learned, healthy soil = healthy plants.

I can dig the night shift

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:13:00 +0000

I took advantage of my unusually high energy level tonight and double-dug the rest of my fourth raised bed. I can no longer enjoy that kind of work during the day now due to the permasmog conditions of summertime (and it's technically not even summer yet!). It went well. I look forward to planting a lot of flax and oats. Probably peppers, more tomatoes, and more lettuce, too.

Don't deplete my goosefeet

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:54:00 +0000

Something is causing the leaves of my spinach and chard plants to deteriorate (both are members of the goosefoot family, which also includes beets, amaranth, quinoa, lamb's quarters, and purslane, if you're interested). It starts with a beige-yellow streak in the leaf, and then grows until, in some cases, the whole leaf is hanging limply and sometimes puffy. Here are some pictures:

I looked it up, and the best guess I could come up with is downy mildew. Perhaps due to the unusually hot, humid weather we've been having. Anyone care to make a better guess?

It's rather disappointing, but I'm not going to be too bothered by it. If all my spinach and chard die off, then all the more room for tomatoes, squash, and oats!

Potato planting

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:22:00 +0000

I left a container of 9 organic potatoes I bought from the store to sprout over the last month and a half. HtGMV says to leave place your seed potatoes in a 3-inch high box and to keep them in a place at room temperature with some air flow and indirect light for a few weeks before you plant them. Here are mine today:

I read a while ago about planting potatoes in a stack of tires. I looked it up again and came across this article. The idea is to plant your potatoes in a couple of old tires filled with soil, and as soon as the potato plant grows to about a foot high, pop another tire on the stack and fill it with soil so that only 2 inches of the plant is now showing. Each time you do that, the plant will grow new tubers in the freshly added soil.

I knew I could rely on my neighbourhood railroad corridor to provide me the needed abandoned tires:

For my first mound, I stacked two tires on a section of concrete that lines my backyard gate, filled them with about a foot of soil mixed with compost, and arranged my spuds on the soil, spaced about 9 inches apart:

I filled the rest of the stack with more soil and compost. I did the same for a second stack, and voilà:

First harvest: radishes

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:02:00 +0000

I was away from home for the last few days, performing at a barn-raiser and spending time with family in Cobourg. I got a chance to see my cousin Elizabeth's gardens on my grandma's acreage. It was bliss to be out in the country again. The sights, smells, and sounds (and especially lack of sounds) of the countryside are unequaled here in the city. The notion of escaping smogville became doubly attractive for me. If every inch of unused land in Toronto were to be gardened intensively, however, I think I could find summertime breathing to be infinitely more enjoyable.

I came back from my weekend in the country to a tiny patch of now overcrowded radishes, and it finally looked time to celebrate my first harvest:

I picked the biggest ones and ended up with 450 g of radishes (about 2 bunches). I'm banking on the rest of the radishes to increase in size after this thinning.

Seedlings & sowings

noreply@blogger.com (FarmerPauly) — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:55:00 +0000

I just realized that what I thought were weeds, might actually be the groundcherries! They look like weeds, perhaps because they are, in fact, considered weeds by many. And if I recall correctly, groundcherry was growing rampantly out on Plan B farm when I was visiting last year. Also, groundcherry is closely related to the tomatillo, which I remember at Everdale confusing with pigweed (before closer inspection). So I may have inadvertantly weeded out some of my groundcherries, but I've saved what I think are two tiny seedlings. The only thing that made these seedlings stand out to me from the other weed seedlings were their fuzzy stems, which I know tomatoes have as well.

Yesterday I began double-digging my fourth raised bed. It's the biggest one so far, and I only got about a third of it fully loosened. That was enough for the time being; I really just had to get two large tomato plants (one Sweetie and one Scotch Bonnet) and several oversized Simpson lettuce seedlings into the ground. Between the two I transplanted a bunch of white globe onion seedlings, which are a companion to both tomatoes and lettuce.

Today I sowed cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash, sweet dumpling squash, Pride of Wisconsin melon, and butterfly milkweed. I'm bringing the cucumbers and pumpkins inside during the night since it sounds like they require higher soil temperatures for germination than the other squash (according to the not-so-informative seed packets).

I tried to pick up a rain barrel today from a nearby Freecycler. Unfortunately, it was about 4 inches too wide for my bike trailer, so I had to leave it there. It was big and beautiful – a real functioning rain barrel, not just any old barrel – and it would have worked amazingly. Alas, I just don't have a big enough wagon, and I don't yet know of a local fossil fuel-free wagon producer. ;-)

I was working outside virtually all day today, and that was a mistake. I didn't realize today was a smog day in Toronto. I should have taken a clue from the characteristically orange-tinted sunlight, but I just wasn't thinking. As a result, I've felt a little sick all evening, especially after mowing the front lawn with garden shears. This is the first time I've ever noticed the effects of smog on my health so acutely.