Growing Vegetables in the Greenhouse

The great thing about having a greenhouse is that we can grow beautiful plants earlier than possible outside. 

Such as the case with this beautiful Tigerella Tomato. 

We planted a lot of rows of carrots in the tomato bed for companion planting. Buy the book Carrots Love Tomatoes to learn more about what plants grow well together and plants that actually help each other grow. Great resource. We plant by this book.

This is our broccoli bed. We have six huge plants growing in here. We are getting better at broccoli. Last years crop failed big time. But we are learning. If you look closely you can see a couple potato plants coming in between the two plants on the left. Oops.

The leaves are massive!

Hopefully the heads grow pretty quick before the plant decides to go to seed.

This is our cabbage bed, which is also doing quite well.

Minus the little nibble marks from the slug, these plants are doing very well.

They are even starting to form heads!

Bok choy is new to us this year. It is one of my favorite veggies, so we had to plant it. It is doing well.

The plants are huge, although the picture doesn't do a great job of capturing the size.

Unfortunately, the plant grew very tall and appears to be going to seed. The stalks don't seem thick enough yet to eat.

Do you grow bok choy? Any thoughts to share?

This is the massive bok choy leaf.

A bunch of sunflowers anxiously waiting to go out side!

Lettuce bed, We are almost out of lettuce already!

How is your garden and greenhouse doing?

Thanks for reading!

A Beautiful Spring Day Spent in the Garden

This morning the sun was shining and it was decently warm outside. I decided to go work in the garden for an hour or so. Turns out, I spent a few hours instead! I loosened the soil and mixed compost into the beds, setup hoses, and much more!

This fall we tried something new. I believe it's called Green Manure; we cut down the plants when they were finished producing and left them in the beds they grew in.  We then covered the 'green manure' with wheelbarrow loads of compost from the chicken coop. This facilitates the decomposition of all of the green stuff.

This is really an easy way to use up all of your animal waste when cleaning out the coop every spring and fall.

We loaded all 6 beds with compost, right over the plants we had cut down. In the photo below you can see the different beds that I have worked on. On the right: I have already turned the soil over and mixed it all in. Middle: Covered with compost as it has been since the fall. Left: mixed in; just needs to be raked smooth. I usually leave the beds as shown on the left for two or three days. I read that it can help aerate the soil and stimulate all of those wonderful soil microbes to multiply.

I also spent a lot of time getting the drip irrigation hoses set out in the finished beds. We had a lot of issues last year with plants that needed a lot of water not getting enough. We lost half of our tomato plants because of this.

So, we are changing the pattern of the hoses this year to more evenly distribute the water. This is the layout I chose since the land is sloping down as the hoses run the length of the bed.

On another note: I want to talk about our improved soil quality. This will be our 3rd gardening season and each year we dump wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of compost and chicken waste into the garden. I have noticed that the size and the overall number of earthworms has increased dramatically. Our first year the worms were very small and scarce. Last summer there were more worms, but they were still pretty small. This year our worms are huge and plentiful!

The photo below shows how much humus and other organic matter we have mixed with our soil. 

As a benefit: all of this rich organic matter in our soil helps keep the soil in the raised beds from compacting, which is great for the root crops and for planting in general. When I take a handful of soil the soil and look at it, I can see why the worms are growing and and reproducing. There are hundreds of little bits of food for the worms in each handful

Thanks for reading! I hope you had sometime this weekend to enjoy your garden as well. Dirty hands! Dirt under my finger nails! Blister on my palm!

Hippie.

As most of you know, I am in nursing school right now and it keeps me pretty busy. I have a funny story that happened today at clinicals. We have a pretty strict dress code for us while at the hospitals, this code however, happens to not be gender specific. My instructor told me that some of the other instructors had engaged her in a conversation about my hair! This is funny to me because my hair is long, but not that long. I was likened to Justin Biebber(Whom I had to look up) or a hippie from the 60's and 70's. I decided that I didn't mind being likened to a hippie. That's not a bad thing right? 

-A lot of hippies started communes and were very self sufficient, as we strive to do! Quite well most of the time. We can, dehydrate, and preserve foods to last through the winter and we are slowly learning grow things and we are getting better every year! A married couple named Mr. and Mrs. H have a really nice model of self sufficiency on their blog

-Hippies are naturalist and support the environment! That's a great quality to have! We produce very little trash, we compost yards and yards of otherwise waste, and we buy chemical free cleaners and body care items. We diligently recycle even though there is no recycle service in our area and we have to take it in to a recycle center in the city.

- Hippies are often vegetarian or vegan or simply just healthy eaters. That's us too! We only eat meat we produce here, or from a source we can personally inspect and verify just and moral treatment of animals. 

I know hippies did a lot of other things, such as freelove and partaking in the use of psychedelic drugs that we don't do. However, I think that a lot of the moral values that hippies represented are great and should be carried on, especially in our disposable world we are living in.

On another note. The rooster I talked about last night has passed away. He went peacefully this afternoon in a soft bed of straw. Poor guy. Now Jane's babies are standing at 3 alive out of 7 hatched. Not a very good survival rate.

We also cooked up one of our homegrown meat chickens tonight. Raised here, processed here, and eaten here, just how it should be done. We smothered it in Jerk Sauce that we bought while on our honeymoon in Jamaica. 

Delicious!

Thanks for reading

A long post before we tie the knot and go on vacation!

Hello All! Sorry for the long time without any posts. Last most of you heard Lois was missing, we believe she was eaten by a coyote. We found a lot of feathers but no carcass. RIP Lois, you were a good chicken and thanks for providing us with wholesome and healthy eggs. you will be missed.

As most of you guys know, Kelsi and I are getting married on July 11th. We have been very busy. We have both been putting in lots of extra hours at work to help cover for us taking 3 weeks off together. It has been hard keeping up with all the wedding stuff, the farm, and work. This will be our last post until we get back from our honeymoon in Jamaica. So for that we are sorry. Thanks!

How about some pics?

We have had some naughty layers going where they shouldn't. The top nest is Dori's(She is broody right now and we are letting her sit on some fertile eggs) she was laying behind an above ground pond we have for the waterfowl. The bottom nest belongs to one of our pullets who just reached maturity. She was and still is laying under a utility trailer in the weeds.

Now to the garden....

Kelsi and I have a great lettuce crop this year, which is great because it's our first time growing lettuce.

Holy lettuce patch!

First ever harvest of garlic! Kelsi made a nice braid and hung it in the kitchen to dry.

The greenhouse is doing so well. There is a lot of growing happening in there right now.

First cucumber, as long as my hand

Pickler cucumber plant covered in blooms.

Another cuc, nearly ready to eat

Long season crops that don't do so well in our short growing season are thriving in the greenhouse.

For the wedding Kelsi and I are using mason jars with strawberry plants in them. They are growing so well. Even fruiting!

This Box is bursting with strawberry goodness!

Yumm!

In the end of the greenhouse we built a raised bed for tomatoes and they are doing very well. If you click the picture you can see how tall they are. For reference I am 6'0. 

Our ten tomato plants outside. Not nearly as tall. But they are coming along.

Corn patch. Knee high by the forth of July right? They look pretty darn good!

Our sugar snap peas are just coming into season.

She selects the best pea.

Tasty.

Such amazing growth, all without the use of fertilizers and pesticides! 

Broad beans(Fava Beans) that we got from the USDA

Sun setting on another day in the garden

Pole beans.

How about some Birds? 

Sophie and Willis in for a swim before bed.

The waterfowl have finally let Pierre into their group.

Sophie has become quite the mother for him. She will guide him to her when he is crying with her loud honking noises that she makes

The webbed foot gang, clearly on a mission

Sophie!

Pierre!

We recently acquired a baby wild turkey. Kelsi's sister crystal found him all alone and cold so she called Kelsi and we gladly accepted, Kelsi's sister named him gravy. We may or may not eat him, it hasn't been decided yet. He is pretty darn cute though!

He is very shy.

This was not a fun time for him. He doesn't like being held.

The meaters are growing so fast. We started with 41 and still have 41 as of tonight when we put them to bed. We had lost 20% of our cornish cross in the first two weeks we had them, so these results are welcomed!

Dinner time.

Kelsi and her dinner.

Well, thanks for reading. It was a long one. We will be married in 8 days and then are off to Jamaica for a week. Lots of out of town family coming into town, so we will be very busy. 

Thanks for reading!