Moving Right Along

Autumn is a busy time of year for Texas gardeners and we are no exception here at Charamon Garden.  It has been uncharacteristically wet this Autumn and here in Abilene we are just a half inch short of breaking the long drought.  The timing of the rain has kept me from getting everything out but we never complain about rain in these parts!

We have been able to get in 25 Broccoli and 21 Kale plants in addition to two long rows of Swiss Chard (Silverbeet).  Two varieties of lettuce are doing well.  I think we left the carrots too long (not germinating) but we’ll see.  We have three varieties of garlic in the ground and growing nicely (needs weeding already).  Still to do: 21 Collard plants–but we’ll have to wait for drier weather.

Next job is harvesting a small crop of sweet potatoes and clearing that bed and another one.  At the moment I’m thinking I’ll sow Hairy Vetch in those and put the tomatoes in them in the Spring.

Another job that inspires procrastination is clearing the long bed where the tomatoes grew this summer.  They are ridden with Bermuda grass…eech!  Lots of work ahead.

In the meantime, eat your veggies.  Nonnie and Pop said so!

Winter Woes

I am not a lover of Winter. Outside the Charamon Garden, it is forty shades of brown. It is not a pretty time of year in West Texas. We had a good color display in Abilene this autumn but those beautiful leaves were soon on the ground.

Usually my garden is a green oasis in the midst of the brown. But the current freeze has been so hard I covered everything I could with floating row covers attempting to minimize damage (not working too well as my last inspection confirmed). So the beds with Carrots, Lettuce, Swiss Chard, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale and Collards are out of sight. The garlic and cover crops offer the only green with their wild winter grass, Austrian Winter Peas and Hairy Vetch. It has been so dry (well over 50 days now) that the places that don’t get water from the well are parched and dead.

I had hoped to supply greens for the folks brave enough to come to the market on Saturdays but the cold has brought everything to a halt. I usually go out for my morning coffee and break the ice in the birdbath for the thirsty avians but this morning it was frozen solid. This global warming is killing me!

It is even too cold to pull weeds. Some hardy souls may venture out to tidy things up but I figure it can wait until my fingers won’t turn blue. So, I stay in the study and write blogs like this.

Gardening in West Texas is a challenge. Eight years ago I began improving our sandy/clay/alkaline soil and it is really looking good and growing most vegetables well. Our water is not ideal as it is full of gypsum and sodium but it sustains things until the next good rain. The weather is unpredictable with a sunny warm day on Monday and bitter cold on Tuesday. We have gentle warm breezes one day and fierce and unrelenting winds the next. Now, now, stop crying…I knew what I was getting into! I don’t think I would know how to garden where it rains regularly upon fertile loam and the seasons are predictable.

In the meantime, eat your veggies. Nonnie and Pop said so!

Garden Report for December 2008

Winter has arrived in West Texas. So far, it is a dry one with no rain for more than 50 days! I am thankful to have a good well even if the water is a bit silty and hard. The vegetables don’t seem to mind.

We are still going strong with lots of Swiss Chard (Silverbeet), Kale, Collards, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Carrots and Lettuce coming right along. We also have begun harvesting Sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes). We have cover crops of Austrian Winter Peas and Hairy Vetch growing well.

Charamon Garden has made its first venture into the market selling our greens and the last of the Eggplants.  We appeared at the market for three Saturdays but now, with the onset of cold weather, production has slowed to the point where there is not enough surplus to sell.

The market is something that has to be planned for…so…I will do better planning as spring approaches.

The State of the Garden – Autumn, 2008

1. The Autumn/Winter garden is planted. Carrots, Lettuce, Garlic, Elephant Garlic, Kale, Cauliflower, Broccoli, Collards, Swiss Chard and peas.
2. Three fallow beds have been planted with cover crops of Hairy Vetch and Austrian Winter Peas. Four more to go.
3. We are harvesting the last of the Okra, Jalapeño and Green Peppers, Eggplant and Tomatoes.
4. We will soon be harvesting Sun chokes (AKA Jerusalem Artichokes).

If you live in the Abilene, Texas area, we will be selling some stuff at the Farmer’s Market from 2-4 Saturday afternoons. In the meantime, eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so!

Update for September

I realize that I haven’t posted for a while but other voices have been calling to me. Right or wrong, the absolutely urgent always trumps the pleasure of writing.

But, you might like to know what has been happening in the Charamon Garden. It is also a record for me when I ask myself, “When did I plant those fava beans last year?” So…here is what has been happening in September.

We have begun reclaiming beds that have not been used or cared for appropriately. We have begun this process with the help of my son, Justin. He has his father’s love of gardening and has been a strong and energetic help to his old man who gets tired too easily. He has tirelessly weeded, chopped, dug, hoed and hauled until things are once again in pretty good shape. He has dug out the trash trees, raked and tilled and mulched.

We have prepared the bed that will be used for tomatoes in the spring by planting a cover-crop of hairy vetch and a few broad (fava) beans. These will grow all winter and then be cut and left where they lie. We will cover all this with more mulch and then set out the tomato plants. We had a tomato crop failure this year because we took some wrong-headed advice and planted the tomatoes in the same bed for three years. Don’t do that.

We (Justin mostly) cleaned our largest bed and sowed more hairy vetch in it. At this point I am not sure what will be planted there in the spring/summer garden.

Our sweet corn is tasseling and silking out and we hope to see some nice ears of corn in the next few weeks. We had an infestation of army cut worms which Justin took care of with a dusting of BT. It has a lot of aphids on it but the ladybird beetles have arrived and will hopefully make meals of them.

We have planted the most garlic ever and the harvest will keep us busy around the last of April 2009. We will dry it and braid it and use much more than the recipes call for.

We have planted more swiss chard and it is looking good. This needs thinning pretty soon. We covered the seeds with a mixture of compost and sand and all sorts of things are coming up with the new chard…mostly squash and tomatoes. Their seed have been residing in the compost waiting for their chance.

We have planted carrots and a row of lettuce and we’re waiting for them to germinate. We are hopefully optimistic.

We have set out kale, cauliflower, collards, broccoli and cabbage.

We are harvesting yellow squash, lovely purple eggplant, okra, swiss chard, green peppers (capsicums) and, if Justin had not eaten them right off the tree (he deserved them), quite a few figs.

The butternut squash is looking very good and we should have a good supply over the next few months.

In the meantime eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop said so.

The Big Chill

     Texas weather is, if anything, interesting.  On this 20th day of November it has been 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 26 degrees Celsius.   That’s about 20 degrees F above normal for this time of year.  The first freeze has been late in coming.  Leaves have been reluctant to fall and stuff that should be dead is alive and well.

That is all due to end in the next 24 hours.  All the tropical and subtropical pot plants (eucalyptus, ginger, philodendron, ficus, bougainvillea) have been brought in.  In a few hours we’ll be covering the garden beds planted with broccoli, collards, kale, chard, lettuce, carrots and mustard greens with floating row covers to minimize the freeze damage.  It looks to be a rather light freeze but it will come suddenly and linger a few days.  So, we’ll see what happens.

We’ll cut some of the greens to add to our Thanksgiving feast on Thursday.  Should be yummy!

I have some good news and….

I’ve been away for a week and my son has been in charge of keeping the seedbeds moist. We had just about given up on the hairy vetch but lo and behold…it has germinated! That’s the good news.

As I predicted, two of the mail-order collard plants have gone to their reward. The others look sickly but seem to be on their way to recovery. So…between the survivors, the swiss chard (silverbeet) and mustard greens…we shall have greens. We’ll have a little lettuce as well…very little. I hope to get more going soon.

Never Again

The collard plants finally arrived yesterday and I put them in their bed this morning. They had been back ordered. I had initially ordered them along with 6 Broccoli plants and three Kale plants. All but one of the broccoli plants survived and now seem to be thriving. The Kale looks great.

I would not be surprised, however if two or more of the collards bite the dust. They didn’t look well when they arrived and I’m afraid they’ll die of transplant shock. None of them had well-developed root systems and when I took them out of their little plastic pots, the soil just fell away. Well, they are now in my garden and their fate, for good or ill, awaits them.

My other concern is frost. Will these little delicate, worse-for-the-wear and poorly rooted transplants survive our first frost which cannot be too far away? I have the floating row cover ready to pull over them when the frost comes but it may not be enough. If I had grown my own transplants, they would have been in the soil for a month by now.

If they die, it serves me right. I just didn’t take the time to produce my own transplants and so I had to depend upon a commercial grower way up north. So, as I put the poor little things in the ground, I kept muttering, “Never again…never again.”