Harvesting My First Asparagus
I harvested my first asparagus last week. I have a few asparagus plants in the front foundation border because the ferns add such great texture to the garden. Each spring I harvest a few spears from these plants.
I started a proper asparagus bed last spring so I can’t harvest any of those this year. I can’t wait until my proper asparagus bed is producing, we really love asparagus.
In fact we love asparagus so much I’m considering doubling the size of my asparagus bed. I think it’s one of my favorite spring vegetables and I don’t see it at the farmer’s market very often. We love eating it sauteed or roasted and drizzled with olive oil and some freshly ground pepper.
Do you grow asparagus in your garden? What’s your favorite way to eat it?
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Saved from the Deer
I normally do not cut flowers, I prefer enjoying them in the garden, but I decided to rescue these from the voracious deer. They’re quite lovely on the dining room table and provided some inspiration for some lovely photos.
I don’t get to see many tulips unless they’re in areas where the deer don’t feel comfortable going; right next to the garage, in between the house and the garage and in certain part of the front flowerbed. I have a few patches of tulips growing in the back of our lot and on the front hillside and at least half of each patch was already munched down.
The creamy white blooms with purple petal tips are ‘Shirly’ tulips. The purple one in the background is a ‘Negrita’ Tulip. I got them in a combo pack 4-5 years ago. The big orange tulip was here when we bought the house so I’m not sure of it’s name. It’s a vigorous tulip and gives a beautiful show of giant blooms each year.
Someday I hope to have a dedicated cutting garden, but until then I’ll cut a few flowers here and there to enjoy inside, especially if the deer will eat them anyways.
Do you cut flowers from your garden to enjoy indoors?
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Quote of the Day: Rand B. Lee
Needless to say, a five by five foot plot of sweet corn is not going to feed many people for very long. But that is not why urban backyard gardeners create such things.
They create such things to remind themselves that once the world was a soil world, a bee world, a bird world and a seed world, not the concrete thing it has become.
Rand B. Lee (Pleasures of the Cottage Garden)
We live in a technology saturated society surrounded by flat images. So often we spend our time looking at photos or watching movies instead of getting out and enjoying the real thing. I garden because I like to step away from my computer and get out into the soil, bird, bee and seed world.
Do you garden to help balance out the concrete world we live in?
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Building Hoop Houses out of Electrical Conduit
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our hoop houses that we have over our raised beds here at Chiot’s Run. They show up in a lot of photos. They sure come in handy for covering with frost blankets, netting to keep insects/birds out, supporting peas, as well as for winter garden protection. The first year I overwintered some spinach I didn’t have these hoops over the garden. I simply bent some bamboo poles and floated a row cover over them. This did a fabulous job protecting my spinach crop throughout the winter (we live in a zone 5).
The next spring we decided to build more permanent and sturdier structures for overwintering crops. We didn’t have enough space for a big greenhouse or a big hoop house, so the next best thing was to make small hoop houses over each raised bed. I researched a little and found that a lot of people use irrigation tubing or PVC, which is plastic and pliable. You drive some stakes or rods into the soil leaving 8-12 inches sticking out of the soil or make a base with holes in it to insert the tubing into. I found these photos on Flicker to give you an idea of other options (thanks to oceandesetoiles for these two images)
We decided we’d rather use electrical conduit because of it’s rigidity, we get a lot of heavy wet snows here and didn’t think the tubing would hold up as well. This conduit is very inexpensive as well and we figured it would outlast the irrigation tubing as well. The conduit was $2.19 each length of pipe and we used 4 per raised bed (our beds are 4×10).
Now I’ll have to warn you that pipe bending is not the easiest thing in the world. Mr Chiots and I worked together and our hoops are fairly nice. Not perfect, but not too bad either. I’d recommend buying an extra piece of conduit for a practice piece. The first thing we did to help with even bending was to mark the conduit 21 inches in from each end and then in 2 inch increments in between these two marks.
We used a hand pipe bender and practiced on one or two pieces to learn how much force was needed for a small bend each 2 inch increment along the length of the pipe. We over bent the pipes a bit, so they did not look like a hoop when we were finished. Ours looked more like teardrops since we left the ends straight, then we stretched them back out a bit to put them over the beds.
I will once again warn that this isn’t the easiest thing to do to get these things nicely rounded (read through the comments on this post I wrote about it last year). Mr Chiots and I are adventurous and willing to try to do anything ourselves though, so we were not daunted by the task. We were also OK with less than perfect hoops. We joke that ours have character since they were made by local artisans.
You can now buy a special tool just for bending garden hoop houses from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They came out with it the year after we made ours. It’s a little pricey at $69, but if you want to make a lot of hoops or have someone to share the cost with it would be a worthwhile investment.
We attached the hoops to the raised beds with two pipe clamps, one up top and one at the bottom. They’re very sturdy and will last a long time. I do love these because they come in handy for so many things. We use them to hold up netting over the strawberries to keep the birds out. We throw row covers over them to keep the deer out of the peas. We also throw blankets over them to protect from late spring frosts.
I ordered some greenhouse plastic this week and I’m hoping to use them as mini greenhouses this winter. I’ll be using a floating row cover on short wickets inside these hoops (you can be sure I’ll blog about it this fall). They also have come in handy to steady myself if I lose my balance or when I’m reaching in to the middle of the bed.
What measures do you use in the garden for extending the season and protecting crops?
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Book Review: The Winter Harvest Handbook
I mentioned yesterday that I loved to read and that I was currently reading Eliot Coleman’s newest book The Winter Harvest Handbook. I’ve read his other books Four-Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower which are both great. When I read I keep a small notebook at hand to jot down info, quotes and other interested things. My notebook is organized into sections, one for each book, a section for plant ideas and a section for each month so I can jot down when I need to do specific things related to a time line.
While reading this book I found myself jotting down so many notes, I decided I’d better buy the book (so I did). Since the information in this book is seasonal and time specific, I knew it would be a worthy addition to my reference library. I’ll be referencing it often in my efforts to make the most of my garden throughout the long winters here in my zone 5 NE Ohio garden. I knew if I didn’t buy it I’d be constantly requesting it from the library trying to remember when to plant leeks or lettuce for a mid-winter harvest.
If you’re interesting in winter gardening at all, I’d highly recommend buying this book. Now is the time to start reading about winter gardening so you have a good understanding and can start planning for it. If I had spent a little more time last summer and fall I’d be harvesting a bounty of fresh spinach, leeks and other vegetables right now instead of waiting for my spring planted spinach and lettuce to mature enough to harvest. I’m really hoping to overwinter some carrots this year as well as some leeks.
This book is full of charts and graphs to help you understand what and when you need to plant specific crops for late fall, early and late winter as well as early and late spring harvests. Eliot does a great job explaining why we can grow food in our northern cold climates even though traditionally people don’t think you can. You just have to have an understanding of how the fewer daylight hours affect the maturation rate. The list of of specific cultivars they grow at the Four Season Farm that’s included in this book is a great resource and jumping off point for anyone interested in winter gardening. You can’t just plant any kind of lettuce in the winter garden.
While the book is written by a market gardener, and their techniques are done on a large scale, the ideas are easily translated to the small home garden. I enjoyed his previous winter gardening book (Four-Season Harvest), but it felt a bit more “out of reach” for me as a small grower without room for a greenhouse. In this book he goes into much greater detail about all the experiments they’ve done and what worked and what didn’t. It really makes is seem much more attainable for the small home gardening with things like those hoop houses I built over my raised beds were built with winter gardening in mind.
I really like that he recommends specific products, like lighter floating row cover instead of a heavier grade. Which crops they use soil blocks to start seeds for, when they start leek seeds and how and when they harvest different kinds of greens. I just ordered some more floating row cover and some greenhouse plastic for my hoop houses using his recommendations. You can be sure I’ll keep you posted on my efforts to harvest more from my garden in the winter months.
I’ll keep reading stacks of gardening books and let you know which ones are worthy of your time (an in depth feature that will be on my new blog – yep, blog redesign coming soon). Of course if you end up buying this book, buy through my amazon link above or in the sidebar, they give me a few cents and I certainly appreciate it (helps pay my hosting bills).
Have you ever thought about, or had experience with winter gardening? Any great tips or books you’d recommend?
