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!

2009 Garlic Harvest

Garlic does quite well in our West Texas soil, water and climate.  We easily doubled our harvest from last year (2008) and plant to double it yet again in 2010.  This harvest (pictured) took me all day right at the end of April.

Garlic Curing

A bit of curing in a shady place and it’s ready to provide pungent passion and pizzazz for pasta, pizza and a plethora of other provisions.

If you want to grow garlic in zone 7, find a type that does well in your area and plant it in early autumn.  It will grow through the winter and be ready to harvest at the end of April.  Keep it weeded and watered and you will be rewarded for your labor.  In the

One of the big ones

meantime, eat your veggies, Nonnie and Pop said so!

Thanks to daughter-in-law Keely Nikaye Carpenter Whitsett for the pictures.

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!

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.

Garlic Harvest

Well, fellow-gardeners, this is what it’s all about! This is why we work to build the soil. This is why we pull the weeds: harvest!

For some unknown reason, my article, “The Garlic Lesson,” posted back in October has been the most popular of all my garden posts with some 868 on-site readers to date (big numbers for me) and growing in popularity. That lesson has served me well and produced a bountiful crop. This picture shows a small portion of it.

For the last two days, I have been digging up the garlic and man, is it beautiful! Of course there are some scrawny ones, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a healthier bunch of garlic heads. You know garlic is ready to harvest when the outer leaves turn yellow and some of it starts to lean over as you can see in this picture. Here in the wilds of West Texas, we begin harvest around the end of April.

I carefully dug up each bulb and placed it in a bucket of water for cleaning purposes. I have tried curing it both ways: unwashed and washed and I can’t tell any difference in quality or storage length. It just looks better washed and the wife likes it that way too.

Soon we will hang bunches of garlic in the storage shed for drying and curing. I have saved the biggest and best heads for seed. We hope to double our production in 2009.

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

Is the Tomato a Fruit?

One of my sons (Number 2) was touring the Charamon Garden yesterday and I asked him what his favorite vegetable was.  Among those he mentioned was the tomato.  “But,” he added, “I guess tomatoes are technically a fruit.”  So what is a fruit and what is a vegetable?  Well, if you’ve played “20 Questions” on long trips you know that the first question is “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”  So a vegetable really is anything that uses photosynthesis to grow…plants.

When we say, at the end of most posts, “Eat your veggies…Nonnie and Pop say so!” we are talking about plants and fruits that you can eat.  Wickipedia agrees:

Normally, any herbaceous plant or plant part which is regularly eaten as food by humans would be considered to be a vegetable. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom Fungi, are also generally considered vegetables in the retail industry.

Using that definition, all fruits are vegetables, but all vegetables are not necessarily fruits.

The term fruit has many different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and the surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds (Wickipedia).

So, botanically speaking, the tomato is a fruit.  But, continuing to speak botanically, so are peppers, eggplants, okra pods, peas, beans, squash, cucumbers…to name a few we don’t generally consider fruit.  When we eat broccoli, cauliflower, and figs, we are eating the buds of blossoms.  Lettuce, collards, cabbage, spinach and chard are leaves.  Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, sun chokes and sweet potatoes are roots.  Garlic and onions are bulbs.  Asparagus, rhubarb and celery are stems.

So, eat your fruits, leaves, stems, bulbs and roots…Nonnie and Pop said so!

GARLIC GROWING GREEN AND GOOD IN THE GARDEN

Good grief, my garlic is great! Having learned a lesson from past neglect, I have kept the bed well-weeded this winter. I prepared it by tilling it (something I rarely do and try to avoid) with a good dose of cottonseed meal and adding plenty of compost and mulch. Our winter and spring climate seems ideal with cool days, only five or six hard freezes (the garlic seems unfazed) and lots of sunshine. We have to supplement the moisture with well-water but that’s par for the course in our area.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I nearly caused a crop failure last season by not removing competing vegetation. The result of that was a lot of stunted cloves. I saved the best for “seed” and will save even more from this next harvest. Stay tuned for pictures of the harvest in a couple of months.

We have six eaters at Charamon and four of us can’t get enough garlic (the other two are my young grandchildren who are learning to like it). We will inevitably run out of home-grown and resort to store-bought, California-grown garlic before the year is out. My goal, however, is to eventually grow way more than we need and have enough to give away or maybe even sell. In fact, locally-grown winter vegetables are rare around here and I think we can make some good money selling stuff like broccoli, chard, collards, lettuce, etc., at the local farmer’s market.

We use it in salads, baked chicken, turkey and lamb. We roast it and spread it on bread. We mince it into soups and stews. We cook fish and shrimp in butter and minced garlic. We lavish it on quiches, chard pies and milkshakes (just kidding about that last one).

We are thankful to the Lord for garlic. He created the plant and when we are good stewards, we can expect good harvests. The picture was taken today and you can see why I am proud of it.

Until next blog…eat your veggies! Nonnie and Pop said so!

The Garlic Lesson

  Here in Western North Central Texas, it is garlic-growing-time. I began growing four kinds of garlic suggested by a professional grower in the region. A couple of varieties really did well. Over the years I have narrowed down to a variety called China Rose. It loves my soil and grows well. I will probably try some other varieties in years to come.